Jones G.S., Claeys G. The Cambridge History of Nineteenth-Century Political Thought
Подождите немного. Документ загружается.
Lucy Delap
whole, and the other has nothing to hope from the middle-class as a whole’
(Aveling and Marx 1886,pp.210–11). This seemed to imply a certain
autonomy for the women’s movement that was highly controversial for
Marxist organisations, and this question of the autonomy of women’s strug-
gle continued to be among the most contentious of the ‘woman questions’
for socialists.
Seeking to transcend the damaging possibility of division between women
of different classes, in Germany, Lily Braun, a leader of the bourgeois
women’s movement, had joined the SPD in 1895 and sought an alliance
with socialist women. However, the implacable opposition of Clara Zetkin
(1857–1933) meant that there was no sense of unity between working and
bourgeois women. Zetkin, editor of Die Gleichheit (the SPD women’s news-
paper) was extremely influential in shaping the German woman question as
needing to be differentiated by class status. Zetkin was interested in women
as socialist agents, organised in semi-autonomous party structures. She was
frustrated by the views of reactionary socialists influenced by Proudhon and
Lassalle who wanted to abolish women’s work, but she made few concessions
to the ‘women’s rights’ agenda, and repulsed attempts at collaboration. She
conceded that for bourgeois women, men were the primary enemy, while
for proletarian women, their economic interests were genuinely united
with men of the same class. Cross-class sisterhood therefore could not be
productive. Zetkin and the other late nineteenth-century socialist writ-
ers on the ‘woman question’ did not publicly call for any change in the
division of labour between the sexes, and preferred to demand women’s
economic independence, without fundamentally changing their status as
wives and mothers alongside their role as workers. Seeing women workers
as having different needs from male workers, Zetkin supported protective
labour measures, also intended to prevent their cheap labour from under-
cutting men. But in contrast to Marx and Aveling’s concession to the valid-
ity of women’s str uggle, Zetkin argued ‘We recognise no special woman
question...Weexpectourfullemancipationneitherfromwomen’s admis-
sion to what are known as free trades, nor from equal education with men –
although the demand for both these rights is natural and just – nor from
the granting of political rights . . . The emancipation of women, together
with that of all humanity, will take place only with the emancipation of
labour from capital’ (Zetkin 1983,p.90; Coole 1993,pp.167–9). Despite
the recognition given by Bebel, Eleanor Marx and Zetkin to women’s dis-
tinctive oppression, none of these thinkers managed to resolve the tensions
344
The ‘woman question’ and the origins of feminism
within the ‘Marxist solution’ to the woman question, and all tended to stress
monogamy and traditional families within their version of liberation.
4 Character and individualism
The nineteenth-century woman question developed in a troubled dialogue
with the activism that periodically arose around women’s status and free-
doms. Should we regard the ‘woman question’ as the discourse that made
possible the invention of ‘feminism’ in the twentieth century? Was it the
‘woman question’ which prepared the ground that allowed women to gain
full citizenship rights and to claim reproductive and economic freedoms?
Historians have frequently tried to trace one ongoing conversation that
links the ‘two waves’ of twentieth-century feminism to their nineteenth-
century forebears. There were indications of shared intellectual concerns
between ‘woman question’ writers and feminists. There was a persistent
idea, for example, that women must struggle not against men, but against
their own social construction as ‘silly’ or dependent creatures. Mary Woll-
stonecraft described most women as doll-like, formed like courtiers to
love pleasure and trifles: women’s ‘senses are inflamed, and their under-
standings neglected, consequently they become the prey of their senses,
delicately termed sensibility, and are blown about by every momentary
gust of feeling’ (Wollstonecraft 1993,p.130). Louise Otto (1819–95), an
activist and writer based in Saxony, accused women of ‘characterlessness’.
The London-based and women-run Victoria Magazine argued in 1865 that
women should look within themselves for their emancipation: ‘Woman
can be what she makes herself; her power lies within her own grasp...’
(cited in Palmegiano 1976, p. xliii). Frances Power Cobbe (1822–1904) also
described women as dolls, and saw ‘idle women’ as the biggest obstacle
to women’s emancipation (Cobbe 1870). Emily Pfeiffer, a British poet and
writer on women’s rights, argued in 1881 in the Contemporary Review that
character was the key concern of the ‘woman question’ (cited in Lewis 1987,
p. 381).
A stress on the development of feminine character – and the self-
emancipation this process could entail – persisted in discussion of the
‘woman question’ into the twentieth century. While the nineteenth-century
women’s movement has often been characterised as liberal, their rights-
claims were often motivated by a sense of the emancipation of character.
Liberal political thought tended to define freedom as absence of accidental
345
Lucy Delap
obstruction or external coercion; women’s movement activists, however,
identified individual freedom as entailing the absence of both external and
internal constraints, and also included psychological factors as potential bars
to freedom. A contributor argued in the British journal Blackwood’s in
1897 that ‘the psychology of the feminist’ involved ‘dissecting [her soul],
analysing and probing into the innermost crannies of her nature. She is for
ever examining her mental self in the looking glass’ (Stutfield 1897,pp.105,
104). Those writing at the fin de si
`
ecle, who had tentatively begun to identify
themselves as feminists – writers such as the American Charlotte Perkins
Gilman (1860–1935), or the South African Olive Schreiner (1855–1920),
spoke of women’s parasitism as the most powerful object keeping them
enslaved. It became characteristic of Edwardian/Progressive Era feminism
to fix the feminist gaze firmly on women’s own character or ‘personality’,
rather than on external institutions and the habits of men. This grew out
of the insights of earlier writers on the woman question, who had long
debated the social and psychic construction of femininity.
In discussing woman’s ‘character’, most nineteenth-century writers
deployed a language of political duty and service, stressing the contribution
women might make and comfortable with the distinct qualities women were
believed to offer the state. One British suffragist, Ray Strachey, for example,
acknowledged the influence of ‘individualism and love of liberty’, but saw
the nineteenth-century heritage as one of the moral character of women’s
emancipation: ‘it was not primarily a fight between men and women, hardly
even a matter of “rights” at all. What they saw in [the cause], and what they
wanted from it, was an extended power to do good in the world’ (Strachey
1928,p.305). Where a rights-discourse was prominent, as in the work of
Mary Wollstonecraft, a g reat deal of attention was devoted to the duties and
political virtues that were consequent on the rights of women (Halldenius
2007;Sapiro1992). Towards the end of the nineteenth century, when the
discourse of idealism became prominent in Anglo-American political phi-
losophy, the idealist stress on social organicism and character carried strong
resonances with the women’s movement.
14
Self-generated desires and lusts
might impinge on an individual’s freedom, and idealists advocated strong
moral control over the individual psyche (Stears 2002, 101–6). Many in the
women’s movement found this appealing, and were critical of the abstract,
self-oriented versions of liberal freedom.
14 The work of the British feminist wr iter May Sinclair made this resonance explicit (Sinclair 1912,
1922). See Den Otter 1996 on idealism more generally.
346
The ‘woman question’ and the origins of feminism
Idealists continued to frame their arguments using older languages of
ethics and character; their contribution can be seen as a transitional one
in political argument, opening the door to the development of ideas of
personality that became so influential for later feminists and political argu-
ment more generally. Newer generations of feminists used the new idea
of personality to articulate a distinct vision, neither of service, nor of lib-
eral individualism. The ‘new woman’ or
´
eclaireuse of fiction and political
argument of the 1890s and the iconoclastic feminists of the early twentieth
century preferred a political vision that stressed personality over character,
individual development over service and duty, and psychological introspec-
tion over external activism. While stressing individualism, their focus is
better read as a contribution to the politics of early modernism than a
renewal of nineteenth-century liberalism. Their values were the egoist val-
ues of self-development and uniqueness, rather than the individualist values
of privacy and laisser-faire (Francis 2002). Influenced by the frank acknowl-
edgement of women’s dissatisfaction with domesticity by the Norwegian
playwright Henrik Ibsen, and his embrace of ‘natural aristocracy’, femi-
nists came to share with modernists an interest in elites – in Nietzschean
terms, in the superwoman – rather than the egalitarianism feminism is com-
monly associated with (Delap 2004). The writings of Friedrich Nietzsche
and Max Stirner began to circulate in European and American intellectual
and feminist circles in the early years of the twentieth century. Stirner’s
neo-Hegelian account of the master–slave relationship became a resource
to understand the confrontation between the genders. For Stirner, the slave
was oppressed through his own attitude of servility towards the master, and
emancipation lay in simply refusing to recognise the power of the master.
While Stir ner used this idea to reject state power over individuals, feminists
such as Dora Marsden (1882–1960, editor of the British Freewoman peri-
odical), Russian-American anarchist Emma Goldman (1869–1940)andin
Austria, Rosa Mayreder (1858–1938), understood women’s subjectivity in
terms of ‘slave morality’, and spoke of an egoistic transcendence of male
oppression (Mayreder 1913; Delap 2007). Nietzsche’s Thus Spake Zarathus-
tra had been translated into English in 1896, and its influence can be seen
on a minority of Anglo-American feminists of the early twentieth century
who came to understand themselves as ‘disciples of Nietzsche’, and to look
for the social renewal of a ‘revaluation of all values’ (Current Opinion,Jan.
1913;Farr1910). It became possible for Emma Goldman to argue that
for women: ‘true emancipation begins neither at the poll nor in courts.
It begins in woman’s soul...[Woman’s] freedom will reach as far as her
347
Lucy Delap
power to achieve her freedom reaches. It is therefore, far more important
for her to begin with inner regeneration . . . ’ (Goldman 1969a, p. 230).
This, however, was a controversial position; writers such as the Swede Ellen
Key wrote critically of ‘the feminism which has driven individualism to the
point where the individual asserts her personality in opposition to, instead
of within, the race; the individualism which becomes self-concentration,
anti-socialegoism...’(Key1912,pp.222–3).
The early twentieth-century feminist focus became highly introverted,
sceptical of state power, and occasionally racially informed by anti-Semitism
(Stone 2002). Feminist interest in the psychological dimension of the
‘woman question’ reflects a broad intellectual change in late nineteenth- and
early twentieth-century culture, where psychological introspection became
validated not only by idealist thought, but by the relatively new fields of psy-
chology and psychiatry (Soffer 1978; Susman 1996,pp.271–85). This shift
caused a great deal of controversy amongst feminists as to what their focus
could be, and even the suffrage struggle could not unite women around
a single vision. The more ‘avant-garde’ feminists tried hard to distinguish
their position from suffragism, and this led to bitterness and conflict amongst
women activists. While gender remained a source of fascination and con-
troversy in the twentieth century, and while pacifism, human trafficking
and employment remained key feminist issues, all were controversial and
divisive. There were few concerns that could be constructed in monolithic
terms as the ‘woman question’ after the First World War. ‘Woman’ fell
out of f avour as a term of political argument, and until the 1970s, feminist
writers became wary of offering sweeping analyses and solutions to gender
controversies.
348
11
Constitutional liberalism in France
From Benjamin Constant to Alexis de Tocqueville
jeremy jennings
1 Introduction
When Madame de Sta
¨
el wrote her Consid
´
erations sur la R
´
evolution Franc¸aise
one of the central questions she raised was the following: ‘Did France possess
a Constitution before the Revolution?’ (de Sta
¨
el 2008,pp.96–111). Her
answer was that France had been ‘governed by custom, by caprice but never
by laws’ and that of all modern monarchies France had undoubtedly been
the one ‘whose political institutions had been the most arbitrary’. This is
a por trayal that France’s monarchs might have challenged – they certainly
felt themselves to be constrained in their actions by a set of fundamental
laws that they might not transgress – but the fact remained that by 1789
there existed a widespread demand for a written constitution that would
set out clear limits to the actions of government and that would define the
rights of all citizens. It was in this context that the meaning attributed to the
idea of a constitution changed irrevocably, and with radical implications.
Henceforth it was to be understood as the set of arrangements that were
to determine the manner in which institutions of the state and of public
authority operated. Moreover, given the descent of the monarchy into what
was widely perceived to be despotism, the demand was increasingly made
that these arrangements should correspond to the deliberate choice of the
nation.
What form this constitution was to take and how the views of the
nation were to be expressed were questions that were to preoccupy France’s
legislators for much of the next decade. These passionate (and immensely
sophisticated) debates were to be decisive in shaping much of France’s future
political history, in part for the simple reason that they were premised upon
an outright rejection of the claim that the monarch alone embodied the
sovereign public will. That doctrine, widely propagated by the Crown itself
in its struggles with the parlements, had made sense in the context of a society
which was both divided and parcellised and where therefore it appeared
349
Jeremy Jennings
that not only was a strong state necessary in order to secure civil peace but
where also that state could claim to embody the generality, as opposed to
the particularity, of society’s interests. The preoccupation, as witnessed in
the writings of Bossuet and many others, had been at one and the same
time that of denying that sovereignty had its origins in the people and of
seeking to render royal power more truly public. Seen thus, la monarchie
absolue positioned itself as an instrument calculated to enhance, rather than
to diminish, the liberty and security of the individual. From this followed
a suspicion of all those intermediary powers and voluntary associations that
later French liberals were to consider as one of the all-important guarantees
of liberty. Even when defended by Montesquieu such institutions came to
be conflated with aristocratic power and what became known as the th
`
ese
nobiliaire.
In the summer of 1789 a dramatic transfer of power took place, with
the new-found political and ideological ascendancy of the Third Estate
receiving its clearest articulation in the writings and speeches of the Abb
´
e
Siey
`
es. For Siey
`
es, the only legitimate source of power was located in the
nation: all other forms were contrary to the common interest. The problem
remained, however, of providing institutional expression for that power.
Initially, the intellectual leadership of the Revolution fell to those who
became known as the monarchiens. They showed themselves to possess a
perceptive awareness of the dangers of arbitrary government, be it in the
form of the despotism of either a single individual or of the multitude. They
recommended representative as opposed to direct democracy, advocating
the establishment of a two-chamber parliamentary system so constructed as
to give voice to the diverse interests of the whole country and to secure
sound and responsible legislation. Similarly, the monarchiens proposed the
separation of executive and legislative power. ‘In order to avoid tyranny’,
Jean-Joseph Mounier argued, ‘it is absolutely indispensable to ensure that
the power to make laws is not in the hands of those who implement them.’
1
In short, they argued that the preservation of individual liberty demanded
the division of sovereignty and that this could best be achieved by a system
of representative and constitutional government. Seeking to draw upon the
experience of the past, rather than to reason from first principles, their
constant point of reference was the English constitution. The institutions
of government, Mounier further opined, had to take into account ‘the
weakness and the passions of men’.
1 Archives parlementaires 8 (1875), Paris, p. 560.
350
Constitutional liberalism in France
By the late summer of 1789 the proposals of the monarchiens – in particular,
the call for a two-chamber parliamentary system – had been overwhelmingly
rejected. The prevailing view was that as France had now been divested of
privilege and of the aristocratic prejudices of the past there was no need for
a system designed to accommodate diverse and conflicting interests. What,
Siey
`
es asked rhetorically, had the nation, possessed of a unitary will, to
fear from itself? Rabaut Saint-
´
Etienne set out the institutional logic which
applied to such a situation. Given that the power to govern itself belonged
to the nation in its entirety, ‘[t]he sovereign is a single, simple thing, since it
is made up of the collective whole without exception; therefore legislative
power is single and simple; and if the sovereign cannot be divided, nor can
legislative power’.
2
The same logic informed the conviction that leg islation was not to be
subject to judicial review. The framers of the new political order deliberately
set out to weaken the capacity of the judiciary to curtail the legislative
and executive branches largely on the grounds that sovereignty, one and
indivisible, could be located in the will of the citizens alone as articulated
through the single-chamber National Assembly.
How might these important developments be summarised? First, break-
ing with the traditions and practices of the ancien r
´
egime,itwasquickly
established that a constitution should have a clearly written and coherent
form. Its authors were to be the nation acting as sovereign through its
representatives. Next, although in form a monarchy, the constitution that
came to be promulgated in September 1791 effectively transferred power to
an assembly in the name of the people. Crucially, it was assumed that, if a
people were sovereign, then this was a sufficient condition to ensure that it
was free and therefore that the rights of the individual would be protected.
Accordingly, those framing the constitution paid scant attention to the need
for a separation or balance of powers.
The die was now cast for what was to follow. The constitution of 1791
retaining the monarchy died stillborn. The (Jacobin) constitution of 1793
reaffirmed the sovereignty of the people and did so by granting them
the rights to both insurrection and legislative veto. Distrustful of the very
process of representation, Robespierre’s ambition was to fashion a new
assembly which would be ‘pure, incorruptible’, peopled by ‘virtuous men’.
Private, local or sectional interest was equated with faction and opposition
to the Revolution. The English constitutional model was deemed fit only
2 Ibid., p. 569.
351
Jeremy Jennings
for a nation of slaves. With the constitution suspended until ‘the return of
peace’, France then experienced revolutionary government and with that
came the rapid descent into the reign of Terror, an experiment which only
came to an end with the execution of the Jacobin leadership.
After Thermidor there followed a further attempt to establish the Repub-
lic upon a secure foundation, largely through the introduction of a complex
set of executive and legislative arrangements designed to limit the exercise of
popular sovereignty. A much-reduced suffrage giving power to the proper-
tied classes was combined with two legislative chambers, for example. The
constitution of 1795 proved only slightly more enduring than its two pre-
decessors. Assailed from all sides, the Directory of five members it spawned
was reduced to increasingly desperate (and unconstitutional) measures in its
determination to keep hold of power. No sooner was he elected to its mem-
bership than Siey
`
es began, with typical calculation, to plot its overthrow. His
prot
´
eg
´
e, the young Napoleon Bonaparte, duly performed the necessary act
with the coup d’
´
etat of the 18 Brumaire. Technically the Republic still existed,
although in 1802 Bonaparte had himself proclaimed Consul for life, further
extending his already-considerable powers and reducing the power of the
legislative branch. At this point, as Jacques Godechot remarked, ‘Napoleon
was already more powerful than Louis XIV’ (Godechot 1995,p.166). Two
years later Napoleon crowned himself Emperor. In this way did the expe-
rience of the First Republic reach its sorry conclusion, the doctrine of
popular sovereignty not only having eluded embodiment in a stable consti-
tutional form but now associated as a consequence with Jacobin Terror and
Bonapartist dictatorship.
It was against this depressing backdrop that writer after writer sought
to draw lessons for France’s future. If those like Joseph de Maistre and
Louis de Bonald concluded that the whole experience had been an almost
satanic enterprise and that there was no alternative but to return to the
dual (and unchallengeable) authority of throne and altar, there were others
such as Destutt de Tracy and his fellow Id
´
eologues who sought to reduce the
radical potential of the language of rights by developing a more consistently
utilitarian conception of liberty. Still others endeavoured (against the odds)
to formulate an understanding of liberty and of constitutional government
that would be appropriate to a modern, commercial age. In the nineteenth
century such people were to be characterised as liberals.
Properly to understand this frame of mind, we need first to retur n to
the eighteenth century and in particular to Montesquieu. Much has been
written about Montesquieu’s discussion of the English constitution, and in
352
Constitutional liberalism in France
particular about the vexed question of whether he was providing a descrip-
tion of how the English constitution actually worked or an ideal type of
the ‘constitution of liberty’ (Montesquieu 1989,pp.156–66). Whatever the
answer, it is beyond dispute that Montesquieu sketched out what he took
to be a tripartite division of the executive, legislative and judicial branches
of government and that he saw England as a system of mixed government
in which power was shared between monarch, Lords and Commons. From
this he concluded that a system of division and balance was indispensable
for the preservation of liberty and that the essence of good government was
not only moderation but also a system which recognised that ‘power must
check power by the arrangement of things’ (Montesquieu 1989,p.155).
The worst of all situations, as evidenced by the Ottoman Empire, was one
where the enjoyment of liberty depended ‘upon the caprice of the legisla-
tor’ (Montesquieu 1989,p.155) and upon the arbitrary power of the despot.
Just as importantly, Montesquieu recognised (like Voltaire and others before
him) that the governing principle of societal relations was in the process
of fundamental transition. The pursuit of glory was being replaced by the
spirit of commerce. ‘Commerce’, Montesquieu wrote, ‘cures destructive
prejudices, and it is an almost general rule that everywhere there are mild
customs, there is commerce and that everywhere there is commerce, there
are gentle mores’ (Montesquieu 1989,p.338). The natural effect of com-
merce, in short, was to lead to peace. Moreover, ‘commerce is related to
the constitution’. Under a ‘government by one’ its aim is the provision of
luxury; under a ‘government by many’ it aims modestly, and by dint of
continuous effort, to produce a level of wealth that will permeate across
society. ‘In short’, Montesquieu wrote, ‘one’s belief that one’s prosperity is
more certain in these states makes one undertake everything, and because
one believes that what one has acquired is secure, one dares to expose it in
order to acquire more; only the means for acquisition are at risk; now men
expect more of their fortune’ (Montesquieu 1989,p.341). It is here that
England again figured positively in Montesquieu’s argument. England, he
wrote, ‘has always made its political interests give way to the interests of its
commerce’ (Montesquieu 1989,p.343).
This in turn begged the question of whether France should seek to
emulate the English experience and example. Such was the extent of Mon-
tesquieu’s conviction that laws should be in tune with the ‘spirit of the
nation’ that this seemed no more than a hypothetical question incapable
of resolution but it was nevertheless a question that would be repeatedly
posed in the century following the publication of De l’Esprit des Lois.One
353