Jones G.S., Claeys G. The Cambridge History of Nineteenth-Century Political Thought

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Jeremy Jennings

conclusion could, however, be drawn for certain: the liberty of the indi-

vidual was best preserved through the contrived balance of governmental

institutions and competing social interests, each grounded upon the mœurs

engendered by commerce.

Participants in the Revolution of 1789 did not hesitate from citing both

Montesquieu and Rousseau, sometimes almost in the same breath. How-

ever, the rejection of the constitutional proposals of the monarchiens,as

Bernard Manin has observed, marked ‘the defeat of the teachings of Mon-

tesquieu taken in their entirety’ (Manin 1992,p.329). For the next few

years, as the idea of using the state as a moral agent in pursuit of the cre-

ation of a ‘new man’ (Ozouf 1989,pp.116–57) gained in popularity, the

moderation associated with a system of balances and contrived institutional

equilibrium had little purchase upon public debate.

2 Benjamin Constant

It was nevertheless in this decade that a young Benjamin Constant began

the publication of a series of pamphlets that sought to draw lessons from the

experience of revolution. By general agreement Constant’s reﬂections on

politics start to reach their maturity around 1806, the year in which he began

writing his Principes de Politiques Applicables

a tous les Gouvernements.Hisearly

essays deﬁne his pro-republican but anti-Jacobin position and do so often

by making the comparison between the English experience of revolution in

1660 and 1688 and that of France in 1789. ‘Arbitrary power’, he concluded,

‘is the great threat to liberty, the corrupting vice of all institutions, the

deadly germ that one can neither mutate nor moderate but which must

be destroyed’ (Constant 1797,p.94). Constant supported the Directory on

the grounds that it was the regime most likely to ‘terminate’ the Revolution

and he was brieﬂy reconciled to the Consulate, but by 1802 his opposition

to Napoleon Bonaparte was such that he was effectively forced into exile.

It would be both easy and tempting to conclude that the deﬁning expe-

rience for constitutional liberalism in France was that of the descent of the

Revolution into the nightmare of the reign of Terror. Constant’s essay of

1797, Des Effets de la Terreur, might seem proof enough. Such a conclusion

would be unwisely to ignore the impact of the Bonapartist regime upon

the thinking of French liberals. What Constant perceived (arguably before

anyone else) was the sheer novelty of this form of government. It was not

to be confused with either monarchy or the despotism of the past. It was

rather an example of government as usurpation. Here, for example, is his

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comparison between the monarchy of England and the Bonapartist regime.

In the former, ‘we see that there all the rights of citizens are safe from attack,

notwithstanding some abuses, more apparent than real; that popular elec-

tions keep the body politic alive, that freedom of the press is respected, while

talent is assured of its triumph, and that, in individuals of all classes, there

is the proud, calm security of the man protected by the law of his country’

(Constant 1988c[1814], p. 163). This, by contrast, is Constant’s account of

what is to be expected under the regime of a usurper. Usurpation exacts ‘an

immediate abdication in favour of a single individual’. Treachery, violence

and perjury are routinely resorted to. Injustice and illegality become the

norm. The usurper engages in ‘incessant warfare’ and is forced to ‘abase’ all

those around him for fear that ‘they may become his rivals’. More than this,

in one important respect usurpation was even ‘more hateful than absolute

despotism’. Usurpation, in parodying liberty, demanded the assent and the

homage of the enslaved. Despotism, Constant wrote, ‘rules by means of

silence and leaves man the right to be silent; usurpation condemns him to

speak; it pursues him to the intimate sanctuary of his thoughts and, forcing

him to lie to his own conscience, deprives the oppressed of his last remaining

consolation’ (Constant 1988c, pp. 96–7).

Crucially Constant believed that usurpation could not long survive for

the simple reason that, in an age of commerce, it would look increasingly

like an anachronism. As war had lost both its charm and its utility, so ‘[t]he

sole aim of modern nations is repose, and with repose comfort, and, as the

source of comfort, industry’ (Constant 1988c, p . 54). Nevertheless it was to

this condition that France had been reduced and this, Constant believed,

was because ‘[the] liberty which was offered to men at the end of the last

century was borrowed from the ancient republics’ (Constant 1988c, p . 102).

It is for this argument that Constant has become best known.

Although found in many of Constant’s writings, the key text is his essay

De la Libert

e des Anciens Compar

a celle des Modernes,ﬁrstgivenasalecture

in 1819 (Constant 1988b, pp. 307–28). ‘Since we live in modern times’,

Constant proclaimed, ‘I want a liberty suited to modern times’ (Constant

1988b, p. 323). As the ambition of the moderns was ‘the enjoyment of

security in modern pleasures’, it followed that liberty should be deﬁned

in terms of the ‘guarantees accorded by institutions to these pleasures’

(Constant 1988b, pp. 310–11). Accordingly, modern liberty consisted of

the right to be subjected only to the laws, and to be neither arrested, detained, put to

death or maltreated in any way by the arbitrary will of one or more individuals. It is the

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right of everyone to express their opinion, choose a profession and practice it, to dispose

of property, and even to abuse it; to come and go without permission, and without

having to account for their motives or undertakings. It is everyone’s right to associate

with other individuals, either to discuss their interests, or to profess the religion which

they and their associates prefer, or even simply to occupy their days and hours in a way

which is most compatible with their interests or whims. (Constant 1988b, pp. 310–11)

Ancient liberty, by contrast, consisted ‘in exercising collectively, but directly,

several parts of the complete sovereignty; in deliberating in the public

square . . . in voting laws, in pronouncing judgements’ (Constant 1988b,

p. 323). This ‘collective freedom’, Constant argued, countenanced ‘the

complete subjection of the individual to the authority of the community’.

(Constant 1988b, p. 311). All private actions were subject to a ‘severe surveil-

lance’: the individual was constrained, watched over and repressed, ‘a slave

in all his private relations’. Constant’s next point was to suggest that we

could no longer enjoy the liberty of the ancients and, furthermore, that it

could be transposed to the modern age only at our peril. By seeking to

do so Rousseau in particular (Mably is also cited) had ‘furnished deadly

pretexts for more than one kind of tyranny’ (Constant 1988b, p. 318).

Read thus, Constant appears as a defender of a purely negative concep-

tion of liberty (a view conﬁrmed by his statement elsewhere that ‘there is of

necessity a part of human existence which remains individual and indepen-

dent and which is of right beyond social control’). The truth of the matter, as

Stephen Holmes has commented, is that ‘though Constant had no illusions

about modern freedom, he saw no alternative to it . . . Radically communal

alternatives seemed less attractive still’ (Holmes 1984,p.14). His concern

was that, in an age of commerce, we would completely abandon the ‘active

participation in public power’, and that consequently ‘we should surrender

our right to share in political power too easily’ (Holmes 1984,p.14). The

not insubstantial challenge, therefore, was that we should renounce neither

kind of liberty but rather ‘learn to combine the two together’. As Constant

announced in the last paragraph of his speech: ‘Institutions must achieve

the moral education of the citizens’ (Holmes 1984,p.14). Governments, in

short, had both to respect the rights and independence of individuals whilst

at the same time encouraging them to exercise inﬂuence over public affairs.

How best such a state of affairs might be realised became the abiding

preoccupation of the last two decades of Constant’s life. To begin, what

meaning did Constant attach to the idea that individuals possessed rights?

Stephen Holmes (1984,pp.53–4) has correctly observed that Constant

endorsed ‘a contextual theory of individual rights’. Rights were not timeless

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ideals but had arisen within the cultural and institutional environment of

modern society. This did not diminish their importance as mechanisms

capable of affording protection to both individuals and society from oppres-

sive government. This was most clear in Constant’s repeated rejection of

Bentham’s utilitarian critique of the language of natural and inalienable

rights. To subject rights to the principle of utility, he argued, was like sub-

jecting ‘the eternal rules of arithmetic to our daily interests’ (Holmes 1984,

pp. 53–4). Actions became the outcome of selﬁsh calculation rather than

moral duty. And nothing – least of all the appeal to utility – could excuse

a man who assisted a law he believed to be iniquitous, a judge who sat

in a court he knew to be illegal or a henchman who arrested someone

he knew to be innocent. ‘Citizens’, Constant declared, ‘possess individual

rights independently of all social and political authority, and any authority

which violates these rights becomes illegitimate’ (Constant 1988a, p. 180).

Constant further speciﬁed these rights to be those of individual and reli-

gious liberty, freedom of speech, the possession of property and protection

from arbitrary interference.

Next, Constant broke with a conception of power that had informed

both the absolute monarchy of the ancien r

egime and the worst excesses of

the Revolution. In constructing a form of government which would respect

these rights, he believed, limits had to be placed not upon a particular form

of sovereignty but upon sovereignty itself. This was no tr uer than in the case

of the sovereignty of the people. Those who ‘in good faith’ had bestowed it

with ‘boundless power’ had made the mistake of focusing their anger upon

the former holders of power rather than upon the nature of power itself.

Rather than destroying unlimited sovereignty they had simply replaced it

and given it a new (and, in truth) more dangerous form. ‘The universality

of citizens’, Constant wrote, ‘is sovereign in the sense that no individual, no

faction, no partial association can arrogate sovereignty to itself, unless it has

been delegated to it. But it does not follow from this that the universality

of the citizens, or those who are invested with the sovereignty of them,

can dispose sovereignly of the existence of individuals’ (Constant 1988a,

pp. 176–7). In terms of theory, the principal culprits were Hobbes and

Rousseau.

This argument led Constant to an impor tant conclusion. ‘The vice of

almost all constitutions’, he wrote, ‘has been to fail to create a neutral

power, and to place instead the total sum of power with which such a

power ought to be invested in one of the active powers’ (Constant 1988a,

p. 185). The particular strength of a constitutional monarchy, therefore, was

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not that it was separated into three branches, as Montesquieu had believed,

but rather that it was distinguished by the existence of ﬁve powers: royal

power, executive power, hereditar y power, a popularly elected assembly and

an independent judiciary. Royal power was a neutral power in the sense that

the monarch had no other interest than that of the maintenance of order

and liberty. Royal power as such was ‘above the four others, a superior

and at the same time intermediate authority, with no interest in disturbing

the balance’ (Constant 1988a, p. 185). Liberty was preserved because royal

power could ensure that none of the four active powers gained an exclusive

hold over the authority of the state. ‘This reality’, Constant afﬁrmed, could

be found in the English monarchy.

Constant perceived several other distinct advantages from such a system of

constitutional monarchy. Ministers were responsible, not just before the law,

but before the tribunal of public opinion. Openness of parliamentary debate

would engender a spirit of enquiry and ‘a constant par ticipation in public

affairs’ (Constant 1988a, p. 239). The independence of the judiciary, trial by

jury, and ‘a constant and scrupulous respect’ for due procedure would offer

protection to the innocent. Liberty of the press would subject authority to

informed criticism and publicity. The army, reduced to its proper function

of repelling foreign invaders, would no longer pose a threat to individual

liberty. Most importantly, Constant recommended the independence of

municipal and local authorities. Here was a ‘fundamental’ truth: ‘until now

local power has been regarded as a dependent branch of executive power: on

the contrary, although it must never encroach upon the latter, it must by no

means depend upon it’ (Constant 1988a, pp. 251–2). If this truth is ignored

‘general laws’ are badly implemented and ‘partial interests’ poorly protected.

Municipal power, in short, needed to be more than ‘a mere ghost’ thereby

preserving the liberty of ‘the life of groups’, their ‘internal arrangements’

enjoying ‘perfect independence’ for as long as they do not harm ‘the whole

collectivity’. Similarly Constant was emphatic that of all the liberties that

warranted protection amongst the most important was religious liberty.

The prescription of religion, he argued, always caused harm. Even more

controversially, he continued by arguing that the ‘multitude of sects, of

which some are so frightened, is precisely what is most healthy for religion’

and therefore, by implication, for society (Constant 1988a, p. 285).

Such a system of constitutional government, Constant believed, would

provide the ‘positive safeguards’ and ‘bastions’ capable of guaranteeing the

liberty of the individual and of protecting against the arbitrary power that

would destroy morality, security and commerce. ‘What prevents arbitrary

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power’,heconcluded,‘istheobservanceofprocedures...proceduresalone

protect innocence ...Everythingelseisobscure;everythingishandedover

to solitary conscience and vacillating opinion. Procedures alone are fully

in evidence; it is to them alone that the oppressed may appeal’ (Constant

1988a, p. 292).

Yet there clearly had to be more to constitutional government than the

exercise of a neutral power and the existence of constitutional procedures

guaranteeing individual and local freedoms. At the heart of the debates that

had structured the revolutionary decade had been a disagreement about the

politics of representation. Was it the monarch or the people who spoke for

the nation? Constant veered towards an intermediary position, importantly

denying any one person or category this exclusive privilege. He defended

a hereditary chamber possessing ‘constitutional and well-deter mined pre-

rogatives’ as a means of counterbalancing a popularly elected chamber. As

for the latter body, Constant was convinced that if its membership was to

be decided upon by direct election then it should also rest upon a property

qualiﬁcation. ‘It is desirable’, Constant wrote, ‘that representative ofﬁces

should generally be occupied by men, if not from the wealthy classes, at

least in easy circumstances’ (Constant 1988a, p. 212). Leisure alone made

possible the acquisition of understanding and therefore property made men

capable of exercising political rights. Less easy to specify was the precise

nature of the appropriate property qualiﬁcation, especially with regard to

the relative merits of landed and industrial property. Of two things, how-

ever, Constant was certain. Property as such was inviolable and during the

Revolution ‘literary men, mathematicians, chemists’, separated as they were

from the lives of other men, had indulged ‘in the most exaggerated opin-

ions’. The ‘liberal professions’, he concluded, needed to be connected to

property in order to ensure that their impact upon political debate was not

again to prove destructive (Constant 1988a, p. 220).

These views were for mulated by Constant in the years following 1806

and they continued to inform his writings and actions in the years until his

death in 1830. Upon Napoleon’s return to France in 1814 he somewhat

unwisely offered to write a new constitution for the Emperor and then,

with the retur n of the monarchy and the ‘granting’ of the new constitutional

charter, found himself repeatedly seeking to push the political order of the

Restoration in a liberal direction. In 1822 Constant reafﬁrmed many of

his guiding principles in his unduly neglected Commentaire sur l’Ouvrage de

Filangieri. ‘The functions of government’, he wrote, ‘are negative: it should

repress evil and leave the good to operate by itself’ (Constant 2004,p.316).

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The general motto of all governments, he concluded, should be ‘laissez faire

et laissez passer’.

3 The doctrinaires

The most important recent analysis of the character of French liberal-

ism, Lucien Jaume’s L’Individu Effac

e ou le Paradoxe du Lib

eralisme Franc¸ais

(Jaume 1997), seeks to establish a three-fold typology which distinguishes

distinct traditions within liberalism in France. The third, and in our context

least important, tradition is that of Catholic liberalism. Associated with the

names of Lamennais and Montalambert, it sought to reconcile the claims

of the Catholic Church with those of the state. The ﬁrst, and according to

Jaume, minority tradition is one that stressed the constitutional protection

of individual rights, if necessary against the state. Its leading representatives,

according to Jaume, were Germaine de Sta

el, Constant, and later Alexis de

Tocqueville and Anatole Pr

evost-Paradol. It advocated a ‘liberalism of the

subject’. The dominant tradition, according to Jaume, was that associated

with Franc¸ois Guizot, the so-called doctrinaires, and the ‘orleanist galaxy’.

This tradition stressed the importance of governability and the subordina-

tion of the individual to the state. When expressed philosophically, as in the

writings of Victor Cousin, it amounted to a ‘form of anti-individualism’.

It was a liberalism of the notables. Moreover it was this liberalism that

guided the politics of the July Monarchy (1830–48) and which informed

the institutional compromise of 1875 that so effectively established the Third

Republic upon a conservative basis. As a consequence, this account sug-

gests, liberalism became associated in the French mind with the supremacy

of the upper bourgeoisie and it is this which in part explains the failure of

liberalism in France.

There is much to be recommended in Jaume’s detailed reconstruction of

the universe of nineteenth-century French liberalism. It is true that liber-

alism came in different forms and that the voice of liberals like Constant

was often drowned out by those who came to hold power during the July

Monarchy. It is true too that the collapse of that regime in 1848 left liberal-

ism and its representatives with a reputation for corruption, incompetence

and repression. Yet it could be argued that Jaume both underestimates the

achievements of Guizot and his colleagues – especially in the ﬁeld of edu-

cational reform – and that he overemphasises the differences between the

two main traditions. In particular – as recent works by Craiutu and Garnett

illustrate (Craiutu 2003; Garnett 2003) – such a sharp distinction ignores the

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impact that the doctrinaires had upon Tocqueville. Not only did Tocqueville

attend Guizot’s lectures at the Sorbonne between April 1828 and May 1830

but it was from him that he came to realise, amongst many other things,

that society was moving irresistibly towards an equality of conditions. For

this reason alone we ought, if only brieﬂy, to consider the views of this

remarkable and unduly neglected group of men.

The doctrinaires were writers, scholars and men of action, throwing them-

selves into the political fray for three decades or more. They were historians

who realised that there could be no return to the ancien r

egime and that the

France of the Restoration was the product of a long evolution of European

society. As Charles de R

emusat remarked: ‘The French Revolution was in

no way an accident but rather the necessary outcome of the entire past

century’ (R

emusat 2003,p.39). They were, for the most part, Anglophiles,

believing not that English institutions could be transported wholesale to

France but that much could be learned from English history and political

practices. They also saw that a ‘new France’ had emerged, a France divested

of privilege and of absolutism, and moreover that a ‘new means of govern-

ment’ was required for this new order. This, to refer again to R

emusat, was

to be ‘the science of constitutional government’ and at its heart was to be

the ‘representative system’ (R

emusat 2003,p.77: see also R

emusat 1860,

pp. 276–328).

The doctrinaires laboured long and hard to elucidate both the principles

and the practices of such a system of government and representation. They

did so in the face of constant opposition from those who sought to make

a return to the old order. Crucially they also did so from the ﬂoor of

the parliamentary chamber, frequently carrying the argument despite their

insigniﬁcant number. From the outset they opposed the spirit of party,

recognising both that in France the existence of parties had preceded the

advent of representative government and that this had contributed to the

excesses associated with the popular assemblies of the revolutionary era.

Against their opponents, they struggled to impose and to assert their inter-

pretation of the constitutional charter of 1814 as a text which could be read

as the foundation of a constitutional and parliamentary monarchy. Given the

ambiguities of the text and the fact that it had been graciously ‘conceded’

to France by a benign Louis XVIII, this was to prove a far from easy task.

Their most eloquent advocate was Pierre-Paul Royer-Collard (see

Royer-Collard 1861). A philosopher by training, Royer-Collard taught

at the Sorbonne from 1811 to 1814.In1815 he was elected deputy for the

Marne and remained in this ofﬁce until 1839. His parliamentary addresses

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focused upon many themes but he returned repeatedly to the subject of

representation, famously arguing that the word itself was to be understood

at best as a ‘metaphor’. ‘We have had’, Royer-Collard commented, ‘the sad

privilege of having learned what nations gain from being fully and wholly

represented. The Revolution...[was] nothing else than the doctrine of

representation in action’ (Royer-Collard 1861,p.231). In other words, not

only would a ‘truly representative’ system prove to be extremely danger-

ous but in the absence of universal suffrage and a binding mandate upon

those elected it was entirely incorrect – ‘a lie, a chimera’, Royer-Collard

proclaimed – to imagine that an elected deputy could be described as a

representative of the people. As such, the deputy could be said to repre-

sent neither the will of the elector s nor their opinions. The deputy had

a function to perform, namely that of deliberating freely and without the

restraints of party, upon the interests of the country, and to that extent the

function of the elector was to choose a person capable of performing that

role. The right to cast a vote, therefore, had to be based upon the possession

of an appropriate aptitude and independence in the elector. Of necessity

this entailed a limited franchise.

Royer-Collard’s doubts about turning the direction of government over

to the vagaries of popular opinion and the sovereignty of the people were

such that he initially denied the wisdom of leaving the composition of gov-

ernment to the discretion of an elected chamber. On that day, he announced

in 1816, ‘we shall be in a republic’ (Royer-Collard 1861,p.217). With time

he softened his position, acknowledging the principle of ministerial respon-

sibility before the Chamber of Deputies. In 1830 it was Royer-Collard who

presented the so-called Address of the 221 protesting at the abuse of power by

Charles X, thereby precipitating the subsequent revolution. Nevertheless,

what remained unchanged was his central conviction that over and against

the sovereignty of the people had to be posited the sovereignty of rea-

son and that this was best realised through the institutionalisation of stable,

constitutional government.

It was this latter theme that was taken up most persuasively by Franc¸ois

Guizot in a stream of writings from 1816 onwards (see Rosanvallon 1985).

He approached it from at least three angles: the philosophical, the historical

and the sociolog ical. The philosophical aspect of Guizot’s argument was best

expressed in an unpublished and unﬁnished text entitled Philosophie Politique:

De la Souverainet

e, written between 1822 and 1823 (Guizot 1985,pp.305–

89). Contradicting Rousseau, he argued that the will of the individual

should not be the source of a sovereign’s legitimacy and power because if

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this was so the outcome would be the dissolution of society itself. Moreover,

it was palpably absurd to believe that ‘man should be absolute master over

himself, that his will should be his legitimate sovereign, that at no time

and by no right does anyone have power over him if he does not consent’

(Constant 1988a, p. 366). In Guizot’s opinion, it should rather be the case

that the ‘solitary will’ of the individual should be constrained by the eternal

dictates of ‘reason, truth, justice’. Only a government which conformed to

the laws of reason could be legitimate.

The argument from history drew upon several distinct sources. Guizot’s

Histoire de la Civilisation en Europe (Guizot 1985 [1846]), initially given as

a set of lectures and one of his most widely read and inﬂuential texts, set

out the broad framework of interpretation. The advance of European civil-

isation, he argued, had been characterised by two overarching trends: the

emergence of nation states and the emancipation of the individual from

religious tutelage. The evident tension between the two – between the

practice of centralisation and the principle of liberty – was to be resolved

through representative government. By way of example, Guizot explored

in intricate detail the evolution of representative government in medieval

England (Guizot 2002,pp.328–38). Here, he contended, had been an elec-

toral system that had ‘summoned every capable citizen’ to its ranks, thereby

gathering together the ‘scattered and incomplete fragments’ of reason that

were dispersed throughout society. From this experience he drew three

important conclusions. The principle that attached electoral participation

to capacity was ‘universal in nature’. Nevertheless, the deﬁnition of capacity

would change over time. The English electoral system, for example, had

become unjust at the moment when it ceased to embrace all those capa-

ble of exercising political rights. Thus, electoral law should respond to the

emergence of ‘new capabilities’ as they become known within society.

The precise details of the electoral arrangements preferred by Guizot can

be passed over but it followed from the above that the proper object of

election was to bring forth ‘the most capable and best accredited men in

the country’, thereby ‘bringing to light the true, the legitimate aristocracy’.

The explicit assumption was that it would be in this way that ‘public reason

and public morality’ would be realised and brought together to constitute

a government. ‘Power’, Guizot wrote, ‘is only legitimate in so far as it is

conformed to reason’ (Guizot 2002,p.296).

Guizot devoted considerable attention to the exploration of the course

of English history (Guizot 1826–7, 2002). He saw clearly that its medieval

representative system had been overturned by the rise of the despotic Tudor

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