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

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Jeremy Jennings

monarchs and that it had taken ﬁfty years of political revolution – from 1640

to 1688 – to re-establish the ascendancy of the Commons. This in turn had

led to the rise to political prominence of a new, commercial class and to the

dominance of a reformed religion which recognised liberty of conscience.

Out of this had ﬂowed ‘free government’ and ‘abundant prosperity’.

Guizot, like nearly all his fellow French liberals, was always alive to the

contrasts and comparisons with France afforded by the English experience.

‘It is’, he wrote, ‘the examination of the causes that in England have deter-

mined the success of the representative system which seems to me to be the

shortest and safest way of explaining their failure in our land’ (Guizot 1823,

p. 371). From the thir teenth century to the present, everything in Eng-

land had tended towards the triumph of parliamentary government whilst

in France everything had tended towards the triumph of ‘pure monarchy’

(Guizot 1823,pp.511–17). This in turn provided fer tile terrain for com-

parisons between 1688 and 1789,withthedoctrinaires in general believing

that the French Revolution would only come to an end when, as in Eng-

land, liberty had been given a secure and durable institutional framework.

In Guizot’s eyes, 1789 had marked the culmination of a war between what

had amounted to two distinct peoples within French society, and as such it

denoted the triumph of equality over privilege and of the Third Estate over

the nobility. The Revolution, of cour se, had been derailed by the theorists

of popular sovereignty but in these two achievements lay its legacy.

Here was the clue to the sociological dimension of Guizot’s argument.

For all his admiration of the achievements of England, Guizot saw grounds

for optimism with regard to France and he did so because the account of

French history he offered was premised upon the ultimate triumph of the

middle classes. It was this group that had emerged out of the process of

revolution as that which represented the ‘new interests’ in French society.

Unlike the aristocracy, it was not a closed caste but an open and expanding

class capable of absorbing all those with the talent and determination to

enrich France both materially and spiritually. Its interests thus coincided

with the broad interests of France as a whole. It embodied public reason.

The intention of a representative system of government, therefore, was to

grant power to ‘new superiorities who will prove that they merit it and

who will exercise it in the interest of those people who have come to

accept them’ (Guizot 1821,p.165).

The argument ran along the following lines. It was not a question

of deciding what was the best form of government in the abstract but

rather of deciding what form of government was most appropriate in the

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circumstances. For the new France, according to Guizot and his fellow

doctrinaires, this was representative government. How did this feed into

the argument for constitutional government? If representative government

embodied the sovereignty of reason, it also gave form to another vital prin-

ciple: ‘the radical illegitimacy of all absolute power’ (Guizot 2002,p.226).

The ‘art of politics’ and the ‘secret of liberty’, according to Guizot, lay in the

provision of ‘equals for every power for which it cannot provide superiors’

as all power without equals would soon become absolute. This end was to

be attained by a variety of means. First came a recognition of the ‘individual

rights of citizens’. These would allow individuals ‘to superintend, control,

and limit’ the activities of the ‘central supreme power’. Amongst these rights

Guizot gave priority to freedom of the press and what he described as ‘pub-

licity of all kinds’. Next came the ‘distinct and independent’ existence of

such secondary powers as municipal and judicial authorities. Finally, and

most importantly, Guizot recommended the organisation of ‘the central

power itself in such a manner as to make it very difﬁcult for it to usurp

rightful omnipotence’. Here Guizot principally had in mind the division

of legislative power into two chambers and the separation of legislative and

executive power (Guizot 2002,pp.371–6). Guizot, in short, appended a

theory of representative government as the sovereignty of reason to what

amounted to a modiﬁed version of a balance and separation of powers

argument.

In broad political terms, during the period of the Restoration Guizot

and his fellow doctrinaires sought to ensure that the constitutional charter

of 1814 was implemented along these lines. Their ambition was to steer a

course between monarchical reaction and revolutionary republicanism, to

establish a juste milieu based upon ‘order, legality, and constitutional liber ty’.

In this they were ﬁghting against the odds, especially after the arrival on the

throne of Charles X in 1824.However,in1830 the old order was to come

crashing to the ground. Louis-Philippe was crowned ‘king of the French’;

the constitutional charter was revised so as to reduce royal prerogatives

and extend the electorate; and the Revolution again appeared to be over.

More than this, Guizot and his colleagues were now effectively to dominate

French politics for the next eighteen years (Rosanvallon 1994).

4 Alexis de Tocqueville

Before we consider the important contribution made by Alexis de Toc-

queville to constitutional liberalism in France one ﬁnal aspect of the

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thinking of the doctrinaires needs to be highlighted. We have already seen

that, according to Guizot, the course of European civilisation had been

characterised by the rise of the nation state. This had meant the centrali-

sation of government, especially in France. Pierre Rosanvallon has argued

that the doctrinaires were not against centralisation per se but rather that they

wished to establish ‘a new type of centralisation’ appropriate to a society

where it was no longer possible ‘to dissociate the centre from the periphery,

civil society from the State, local power from central power’ (Rosanvallon

1985,pp.59–60). Nevertheless, they were alive to the damaging and detri-

mental impact of the administrative centralisation associated with the ancien

egime. If this is evident in the work of Guizot, so it is clearly visible in the

parliamentary speeches of Royer-Collard and the writings of R

emusat and

of Prosper de Barante. The latter’s DesCommunesetdel’Aristocratiedescribed

not only the crushing of the communes by centralised, monarchical power

but praised local government on the grounds that it provided the oppor-

tunity to deliberate and decide upon issues of immediate and particular

concern, gave citizens ‘strength’ and ‘wisdom’, freed them from ‘isolation’

and ‘apathy’ and taught people ‘to know and to love public order’ (Barante

1821,pp.18–19). Moreover, it provided an indispensable schooling for the

affairs of life in a free society. This defence of local government, it should be

noted, preceded that offered more famously by Tocqueville by more than a

decade.

It was when the likes of Barante came to consider the practicalities

entailed in reinvigorating local institutions that the scale of the problem

they faced became most evident. On this account, the monarchy of the

ancien r

egime had progressively and successfully deprived the aristocracy of its

historic functions, producing the intellectual, moral and spiritual impover-

ishment of France. Hope, however, lay in rekindling practices of association

and, in line with the general position of the doctrinaires, in the emergence of

a ‘new aristocracy’ of ‘social superiors’. Some continued to look (longingly)

towards English traditions of self-government. Tocqueville, on the other hand,

found another model in America.

Tocqueville visited America for ten months between April 1831 and

February 1832 (see Pierson 1996; Schleiffer 1980). The ﬁrst volume of De

la D

emocratie en Am

erique appeared in 1835; the second in 1840. There has for

long been a debate about the level of continuity and discontinuity between

the two texts, with some critics going as far as to suggest that there occured

a radical change in perspective (Drescher 1964;Lamberti1989). Of late

doubt has been cast about how much Tocqueville actually saw and knew of

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the country with which his name is now irredeemably associated. He knew

little of American industrial life and probably even less about the South

(Wills 2004). Nor, indeed, can De la D

emocratie en Am

erique be properly

regarded as a major work of political theory in the conventional sense. It

lacks terminological clarity and is frequently ambiguous in its conclusions.

Nevertheless, the hyperbolic praise has continued. Two of its recent editors

felt able to announce that ‘Democracy in America is at once the best book

ever written on democracy and the best book ever written on America’

(Mansﬁeld and Winthrop 2000,p.xvii).

In Tocqueville’s words, De la D

emocratie en Am

erique was written ‘under

the pressure of a sort of religious terror in the author’s soul’. That terror

was produced by the sight of ‘an irresistible revolution that for so many

centuries has marched over all obstacles and that one still sees advancing

today amid the ruins it has made’. In short, a ‘great democratic revolu-

tion’ characterised by ‘the gradual development of equality of conditions’

was taking place. This fundamental transformation of society, Tocqueville

insisted, was a ‘providential fact’; ‘it is universal, it is enduring, each day

it escapes human power’. The grave danger, however, was that through

ignorance of the nature of this process democracy had been ‘abandoned to

its savage instincts’. We have democracy, Tocqueville announced, ‘without

anything to attenuate its vices’. With this in mind Tocqueville arrived in

America, not only to satisfy his curiosity, but also ‘to ﬁnd lessons there

from which we could proﬁt’. Once there he ‘saw more than America’

(Tocqueville 2000,pp.3–15).

Here, in brief, are the essential elements of Tocqueville’s argument. In

America men are more equal in wealth and in intelligence than anywhere

else in the world. The aristocratic element has been destroyed to the point

of extinction and thus it could be said that ‘the people govern in the United

States’. The principle of the sovereignty of the people dominated all aspects

of American society. By dint of circumstance, this had produced ‘concilia-

tory’ government, founded upon the ‘enlightened will of the people’ and

the moderate and responsible behaviour of individual citizens. Yet, ‘although

the form of government is representative, it is evident that the opinions, the

prejudices, the interests and even the passions of the people can ﬁnd no

lasting obstacles that prevent them from taking effect in the daily direction

of social life’ (Tocqueville 2000,p.165). Herein lay a potential problem of

enormous magnitude: the tyranny of the majority.

In America this could take a variety of forms. ‘It is of the very essence

of democratic governments’, Tocqueville wrote, ‘that the empire of the

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majority is absolute’ (Tocqueville 2000,p.235). The interests of the many

were to be preferred to the interests of the few and the people had a right

to do anything they wished. The ‘dire and dangerous’ consequences of

this were as follows: it increased legislative instability, because the majority

insisted its desires be indulged ‘rapidly and irresistibly’ in the form of law. It

likewise favoured the arbitrariness of the magistrate, because the ‘majority,

being an absolute master in making the law and in overseeing its execu-

tion, having equal control over those who govern and over those who are

governed, regards public ofﬁcials as its passive agents’ (Tocqueville 2000,

p. 243). Most importantly, the tyranny of the majority existed as a ‘moral

force’ exercised over opinion. ‘I do not know of any country’, Tocqueville

wrote, ‘where less independence of mind and genuine freedom of discus-

sion reign than in America.’ The majority drew ‘a formidable circle around

thought’ (Tocqueville 2000,p.243).

If then freedom was ever to be lost in America, the fault would lie

with the omnipotence of the majority. Yet to date, Tocqueville argued,

the effect of the tyranny of the majority had had little inﬂuence upon

political society, the distressing effects being limited to its impact upon

‘the national character of Americans’. This was so because the threat of

democratic despotism was curtailed by the existence of a series of all-

important constitutional limitations upon majoritarian power. First amongst

these was the federal system of government, the division of the legislative

body into two branches, and the existence of an independent, if weak,

executive. Next came the absence of administrative centralisation, and with

that the inability of central government ‘to regulate secondary things in

society’. Even if it had the desire to do so, government could not ‘make

all citizens in all places, in the same manner, at the same moment, bend

to its desires’ (Tocqueville 2000,p.250). The third counterbalance came in

the form of judicial power and the character of the legal profession. In a

democratic society lawyers, possessing ‘the tastes and habits of aristocracy’,

formed ‘the sole enlightened class that the people do not distrust’. If they

prized freedom, they placed legality before it, fearing arbitrariness more

than they feared tyranny. They were the natural friends of order and the

opponents of innovation and thus had a tendency ‘to neutralise the vices

inherent in popular government’. More than this, they had the right to

declare laws to be unconstitutional. The judge, Tocqueville wrote, ‘cannot

force people to make laws, but at least he constrains them not to be unfaithful

to their own laws and to remain in accord with themselves’ (Tocqueville

2000,p.257).

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Constitutional liberalism in France

There was, however, an important non-constitutional element to the

protection of freedom. America was in part preserved from the tyranny of

the majority by ‘the manners and customs of the people’. This had several

dimensions. For example, Tocqueville commented upon the ‘public spirit’

of Americans and their respect for the law; but he focused in particular upon

the impact of religion upon American life (Antoine 2003). Religion acted

to elevate the aspirations of the majority whilst at the same time dimin-

ishing the element of caprice in their actions. Religion among Americans,

Tocqueville concluded, ‘should therefore be considered as the ﬁrst of their

political institutions; for if it does not give them the taste for freedom, it

singularly facilitates their use of it’ (Tocqueville 2000,p.280).

What lessons could be drawn from this American experience for Europe

and for France in particular? On this Tocqueville was unambiguous. Amer-

ica proved that one should not despair over democracy and that it could be

regulated for the better by laws and by social customs. However, Tocqueville

did not contend that France should simply copy America but he did believe

that, unless France could succeed in gradually introducing democratic insti-

tutions and in securing ‘the peaceful empire of the greatest number’, then

sooner or later a people with no experience of freedom would fall under

‘the unlimited power of one alone’. The stark choice, in other words, was

between ‘democratic freedom or the tyranny of the Caesars’ (Tocqueville

2000,pp.298–302).

All of the above appeared in Volume One. Five years later the second

volume received less critical acclaim. There was undoubtedly a subtle change

in tone. Increasingly alert to the enthusiasm of Americans for physical well-

being, Tocqueville now provided a more sombre appraisal of the character

of democratic man. Individualism – the ‘reﬂective and peaceable sentiment

that disposes each citizen to isolate himself from the mass of those like

him and to withdraw to one side with his family and friends’ – was his

chief characteristic and vice (Tocqueville 2000,p.482). At ﬁr st it sapped

the source of ‘public virtues’ but in time it produced outright ‘selﬁshness’.

Gone were the ‘common bonds’ that held society together. However, the

Americans, according to Tocqueville, had combated individualism and had

defeated it. They had done this through the practice of association in civil

life. ‘Americans of all ages, all conditions, and all persuasions,’ Tocqueville

wrote, ‘constantly unite.’ Through this they acquired the habit of pursuing

activities in common and became aware of the interests they shared with

others. The art of association, therefore, taught people the all-important

principle of ‘self-interest well understood’. This did not call forth heroic

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virtues or great acts of public virtue, but ‘suggests little sacriﬁces each day’

and ‘forms a multitude of citizens who are regulated, temperate, moderate,

farsighted, masters of themselves’ (Tocqueville 2000,p.502). Underlying

this, however, was an awareness that despotism prospered in a situation

characterised by the isolation of men and, therefore, that its emergence was

particularly to be feared in democratic societies. Speciﬁcally, Tocqueville

noticed that democratic societies were capable of producing a new form

of despotism that was milder but more extensive than its predecessors,

which ‘would degrade men rather than torment them’. Our leaders would

resemble schoolmasters and we would console ourselves with the thought

that we had at least chosen them ourselves. State control would become

ever more intrusive and all initiative would be taken away from the private

individual. The ‘great cause’ of this growth of government activity was ‘the

development of industry’.

In 1839 Tocqueville entered Parliament, where for the most part he

focused his attention upon foreign affairs and the French Empire, combin-

ing a commitment to the abolition of slavery with a defence of colonial

expansion. From his private correspondence we know that he continued

to follow developments in America and that his admiration for American

institutions was largely undiminished (Tocqueville 1990; Craiutu and Jen-

nings 2004). He became increasingly dissatisﬁed with the political affairs of

the July Monarchy and then, in 1848, found himself not only re-elected to

serve in the Second Republic but also at the very centre of the constitutional

debates which followed.

Here we might brieﬂy contrast the response of Guizot and Tocqueville

to these events. Exiled in England, Guizot poured forth his venom in

De la D

emocratie en France (Guizot 1849). France’s ‘greatest weakness’, he

argued, was that of ‘democratic idolatry’. Everywhere the individual liberty

of citizens faced the ‘single will’ embodied by the numerical majority

of the nation: the result would be ‘revolutionary despotism’. ‘It is this

idea’, Guizot wrote, ‘that has to be eradicated’ and this could be done

by rallying ‘all the conservative forces of social order’ to hold back the

advancing tide. Tocqueville, on the other hand, defended a constitutional

project that bore a striking resemblance to that of his monarchien forebears

of 1789. His emphasis fell upon seeking to ensure, through a two-chamber

system, that legislation was subject to scrutiny by different groups of people

who would moderate the potentially impetuous and ill-advised actions of

a single chamber possessed of the belief that it alone spoke in the name of

the national will. Moreover, he persisted in arguing that France still had

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something to learn from American constitutional arrangements (Craiutu

and Jennings 2009,pp.382–4). Here, as with much else, he was to be

disillusioned. The election to the presidency of Louis-Napoleon led almost

inevitably to the coup d’

etat of 1851. With this came Tocqueville’s brief

imprisonment and also the emergence of the precise species of despotic

regime which he had for so long feared could be the product of democracy.

‘[T]he outward forms of popular election’, he wrote to one of his American

correspondents, ‘had served only to establish a more absolute despotism than

any other that has ever appeared in France’ (Craiutu and Jennings 2009,

p. 133).

The 1850s were bleak years for Tocqueville. In 1850 the ﬁrst symptoms

of the tuberculosis which killed him nine years later were diagnosed. There

remained only the task of writing his Souvenirs and his ﬁnal masterpiece:

L’Ancien R

egime et la R

evolution (Tocqueville 1952 [1856]). The basic argu-

ment of this famous text is well known: the centralised administration of

France was not the creation of the Revolution of 1789, as many had believed,

but the product of the old monarchical order. That regime had eliminated

all intermediate authorities and stripped the provinces of local autonomy.

Paris became the ‘master of France’. France was not only reduced to being

the country in which ‘men were most like each other’ but also where people

had been split up into ‘small, independent, self-regarding groups’. There

was, Tocqueville wrote, ‘a kind of collective individualism which prepared

people for the real individualism with which we are familiar’ (Tocqueville

1998,p.163). This was not to say that the French were prone to servil-

ity and subser vience. The French were attached to freedom but it was an

ill-adjusted, intermittent, ill-assimilated and unwholesome liberty to which

they adhered. Necessary for the vital task of overthrowing despotism, such a

mind-set ‘perhaps made them less capable than any other people of found-

ing in its place the free and peaceable empire of the law’ (Tocqueville 1998,

p. 179). Crucially, the desire for reform took precedence over the desire for

freedom whilst the absolute power of the state was seen as something to

be used rather than destroyed. The French, Tocqueville continued, came

to see ‘the ideal society [as] a people without any aristocracy other than

government ofﬁcials, a single and all-powerful administration, director of

the state, guardian of individuals’ (Tocqueville 1998,p.216). Hostility to

religion also became a ﬁerce and intolerant passion.

It was this argument that allowed Tocqueville to provide his clearest

deﬁnition of liberty. Liberty, he wrote, ‘is the pleasure of being able to

speak, act, and breathe without constraint, under the government of God

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and the laws alone’ (Tocqueville 1998,p.217). Second, liberty was to be

valued as an end in itself. Whoever sought private gain from freedom was

made for slavery. Third, therefore, liberty was not to be confused with ‘a

narrow individualism where all public virtues are smothered’. Liberty alone

could free men from ‘a love of material well-being’.

The second part of the argument explored the impact of the failure

properly to understand the nature of liberty upon the course and outcome of

the Revolution itself. In short, if the outbreak of Revolution was inevitable,

so too it was doomed to failure. Two passions, Tocqueville insisted, drove on

the Revolution: an intense hatred of inequality and the less powerful desire

to live as free men. When the ﬁrst ‘virile generation’ of the Revolution’s

leaders faded away the ideal of freedom lost much of its appeal and then

the scene was set for the ‘return of absolute government’. ‘We returned to

centralisation in its ruins’, Tocqueville wrote, ‘and restored it’ and hence

‘from the very bowels of a nation the monarchy suddenly surged forth a

power more extensive, more detailed, more absolute than that which any

of our kings had exercised’ (Tocqueville 1998,p.245).

Here then was a work of history written for deeply political purposes.

Tocqueville’s intention was to explain to his readers why it was that France

had not been able to establish an enduring political regime characterised by

the liberty of the individual. His short answer was that the French had come

to prefer governments which ﬂattered their desire for equality rather than

those which gave them freedom, and thus they were ripe for despotism.

Napoleon had fallen but successive attempts to destroy absolutism had only

succeeding in ‘placing liberty’s head upon a servile body’ (Tocqueville 1998,

p. 245).

5 Conclusion

Tocqueville concluded L’Ancien R

egime et la R

evolution with a statement to

the effect that it was his intention next to study the Revolution itself. We also

know that he had plans to examine the Empire and the manner in which

Napoleon’s project had been incorporated into French political culture.

Neither was to see the light of day. Having brieﬂy occupied the position of

posthumous leader of the liberal party, after 1870 Tocqueville was quickly

forgotten (M

elonio 1993). In the difﬁcult political climate of the 1860sthe

voice of liberalism could, however, still be heard. A work such as Odilon

Barrot’s De la Centralisation et de ses Effets, published in 1861, continued to

voice traditional liberal concerns about an over-mighty state and did so by

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making explicit reference to the ideas of Montesquieu. Pr

evost-Paradol’s

1868 text, La France Nouvelle, located his demands for the administrative

and political reform of France within an undisguised admiration for English

parliamentary and municipal practices. Most impressive of all was the work

Edouard Laboulaye. Long an advocate of the merits of the American

constitution (see Laboulaye 1848, 1850), not only did he edit Constant’s

major political writings, but in L’

Etat et ses Limites and Le Parti Lib

eral, son

Programme et son Avenir, both published in 1863, he reworked the latter’s

distinction between ancient and modern liberty as part of a self-conscious

liberal tradition that ran from the monarchiens to Tocqueville. In so doing

Laboulaye set out a liberal agenda for a ‘new generation’ freed from the

illusions and disappointments of the past and one, he announced, that was

a ‘programme for modern democracy’.

Nevertheless, it has been argued that the project of liberalism was ‘inad-

equately attuned to the imperatives of the time’ (Hazareesingh 1998,p.

229) and that it failed to capture the public imagination in a period when

public opinion was increasingly polarised. It is thus somewhat ironic that

the constitutional compromise that came to mark the institutions of the

Third Republic after 1875 was broadly in line with long-established liberal

demands for a balance of power.

It is only in the last twenty-ﬁve years or so that in France renewed atten-

tion has been devoted to the major ﬁgures of liberalism discussed in this

chapter. Why this has been so in itself merits investigation. However, a cen-

tury of neglect cannot diminish their astonishing originality and intellectual

brilliance. It is easy to point out the na

ıvety of their faith in bourgeois rule,

their tendency towards aristocratic nostalgia for a society resting upon social

hierarchy, as well as the political insensitivity of their criticisms of univer-

sal suffrage but, by the same token, their great achievement was to realise,

probably before anyone else, that democracy and equality of conditions

could spawn an entirely novel type of despotism. In its mild form, it could

take the shape of the tyranny of the majority described by Tocqueville.

Less benignly, it could take the character of the Bonapartist usurpation

described by Constant. Given France’s post-1789 political turmoil, French

liberals were best placed to discern the danger and ideally situated to reﬂect

upon the constitutional mechanisms that might alleviate it. In so doing they

provided invaluable insights into the nature of modern politics.

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