The French Republic: History, Values, Debates

By Edward G. Berenson and Christophe Prochasson

In this invaluable reference work, the world’s foremost authorities on France’s political, social, cultural, and intellectual history explore the history and meaning of the French Republic and the challenges it has faced. Founded in 1792, the French Republic has been defined and redefined by a succession of regimes and institutions, a multiplicity of symbols, and a plurality of meanings, ideas, and values. Although constantly in flux, the Republic has nonetheless produced a set of core ideals and practices fundamental to modern France's political culture and democratic life.

Based on the influential Dictionnaire critique de la république, published in France in 2002, The French Republic provides an encyclopedic survey of French republicanism since the Enlightenment. Divided into three sections—Time and History, Principles and Values, and Dilemmas and Debates—The French Republic begins by examining each of France’s five Republics and its two authoritarian interludes, the Second Empire and Vichy. It then offers thematic essays on such topics as Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity; laicity; citizenship; the press; immigration; decolonization; anti-Semitism; gender; the family; cultural policy; and the Muslim headscarf debates. Each essay includes a brief guide to further reading.

This volume features updated translations of some of the most important essays from the French edition, as well as twenty-two newly commissioned English-language essays, for a total of forty entries. Taken together, they provide a state-of-the art appraisal of French republicanism and its role in shaping contemporary France’s public and private life.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Cornell University Press
• Release date: Oct 15, 2011
• ISBN: 9780801461125

Book preview

THE FRENCH REPUBLIC

History, Values, Debates

EDITED BY

Edward Berenson, Vincent Duclert,

and Christophe Prochasson

Cornell University Press

Ithaca and London

Contents

INTRODUCTION: TRANSATLANTIC HISTORIES OF FRANCE

Edward Berenson and Vincent Duclert, translated by Arthur Goldhammer

PART I. TIME AND HISTORY

1. THE ENLIGHTENMENT

Johnson Kent Wright

2. THE FIRST REPUBLIC

Patrice Gueniffey, translated by Arthur Goldhammer

3. THE SECOND REPUBLIC

Edward Berenson

4. THE REPUBLICANS OF THE SECOND EMPIRE

Sudhir Hazareesingh, translated by Arthur Goldhammer

5. THE THIRD REPUBLIC

Philip Nord

6. WAR AND THE REPUBLIC

Stéphane Audoin-Rouzeau, translated by Arthur Goldhammer

7. THE REPUBLIC AND VICHY

Julian Jackson, translated by Arthur Goldhammer

8. THE FOURTH REPUBLIC

Rosemary Wakeman

9. THE FIFTH REPUBLIC

Martin Schain

PART II. PRINCIPLES AND VALUES

10. LIBERTY

Jeremy Jennings

11. EQUALITY

Jeremy Jennings

12. FRATERNITY

Anne-Claude Ambroise-Rendu, translated by Arthur Goldhammer

13. DEMOCRACY

Patrice Gueniffey, translated by Arthur Goldhammer

14. LAICITY

Jean Baubérot, translated by Arthur Goldhammer

15. CITIZENSHIP

Cécile Laborde, translated by Arthur Goldhammer

16. UNIVERSALISM

Jeremy Jennings

17. THE REPUBLIC AND JUSTICE

Paul Jankowski

18. THE STATE

Herrick Chapman

19. THE CIVILIZING MISSION

Alice L. Conklin

20. PARITÉ

Joan Wallach Scott

21. THE PRESS

Dominique Kalifa, translated by Renée Champion and Edward Berenson

22. TIMES OF EXILE AND IMMIGRATION

Lloyd Kramer

23. THE USA, SISTER REPUBLIC

François Weil, translated by Arthur Goldhammer

24. THE LOCAL

Stéphane Gerson

PART III. DILEMMAS AND DEBATES

25. THE REPUBLIC AND THE INDIGÈNES

Emmanuelle Saada, translated by Renée Champion and Edward Berenson

26. IMMIGRATION

Mary Dewhurst Lewis

27. THE IMMIGRATION HISTORY MUSEUM

Nancy L. Green

28. DECOLONIZATION AND THE REPUBLIC

Todd Shepard

29. THE SUBURBS

Frédéric Viguier

30. THE REPUBLIC AND THE VEIL

John R. Bowen

31. ANTISEMITISM, JUDEOPHOBIA, AND THE REPUBLIC

Steven Englund

32. FEMINISM AND THE REPUBLIC

Karen Offen

33. GENDER AND THE REPUBLIC

Bonnie G. Smith

34. ORDER AND DISORDER IN THE FAMILY

Éric Fassin

35. CHILDREN AND THE STATE

Ivan Jablonka

36. COMMEMORATION

Daniel J. Sherman

37. INTELLECTUALS AND THE REPUBLIC

Jerrold Seigel

38. CULTURAL POLICY

Herman Lebovics

CONCLUSIONS

AMERICAN PERSPECTIVES ON THE FRENCH REPUBLIC

Edward Berenson

BEYOND THE REPUBLICAN MODEL

Vincent Duclert, translated by Arthur Goldhammer

CONTRIBUTORS

Introduction

TRANSATLANTIC HISTORIES OF FRANCE

Edward Berenson and Vincent Duclert

Translated by Arthur Goldhammer

The Republic first appeared in France as a system of government and model of sovereignty on September 25, 1792, and subsequently developed into nothing less than a comprehensive worldview and way of organizing and understanding history. Two centuries of political controversy have turned the Republic into an all-encompassing structure, a totality, which makes the work of historians who seek to make sense of it as difficult as it is exciting. How can one write the history of something so vast, so comprehensive, and so desired—desired particularly by historians themselves, many of whom took part in the republican project? How can one restore the historical dimension and recover the critical perspective needed to study a world at once so close to us and so distant, so immediate and yet opaque—a world that is past as well as present, individual as well as collective, private as well as public, and consensual as well as controversial?

It was in these terms that Vincent Duclert and Christophe Prochasson described the ambition of the Dictionnaire critique de la République, which they edited for Éditions Flammarion in Paris and published in 2002.

Reprinted in 2007, this multiauthor volume, part encyclopedia, part critical history, forms the basis of the present work. The Dictionnaire was intended primarily as a historiographical survey, because there has always been a special relationship between the Republic and history. Indeed, the Third Republic defined itself as a historical project, or at any rate a historical discourse, whose purpose was to define both the French nation and French society. To study the Republic, we had to analyze this historical frame in order to move beyond it and define an object of study independent of republican politics and ideology. Historical as well as historiographical analysis seemed to us the best way to understand the Republic, which is in principle simply a form of executive power, with a head of state who enjoys neither life tenure nor hereditary status, but which has become, in the words of the historian Maurice Agulhon, a political form defined by a specific political content of liberty and laicity. Having developed in history, the Republic was constructed by history, constituting itself as a universal language for describing a past that transformed facts into ideas, men into symbols, and practices into experiences. The Republic can be seen not only as a set of values, institutions, heroes, images, symbols, and realities but also as a set of contradictions, repudiations, and episodes of violence, which the Dictionnaire critique of 2002 attempted to describe and understand.

To that end, the editors enlisted the help of a hundred or so historians, including seven British and American scholars (who contributed ten articles) for whom the French Republic was inevitably a more fluid structure, less constrained by political and intellectual habits, than it was for their French colleagues. For these British and American historians, implicit and explicit comparisons with their own national histories, the claims of French universalism, issues of democracy, and the recurrent contradictions between humanist republican discourse and authoritarian republican practice were central to their contributions to the 2002 volume. Their articles, most originally written in English, revealed a certain convergence of themes and touched on many topical issues not only of historiography but also of public discussion and controversy. The commonalities among them, and a distinctiveness in relation to many of the French-language contributions, led one of the original editors to join with Edward Berenson in conceiving the idea of a new volume on the subject in English, to be published in the United States.

The purpose of this new project was not simply to make these texts by British and American historians available to Anglophone readers but rather to develop a novel approach to the history of the Republic. We decided to do so by structuring the new book around the ten original British and American chapters paired with a nearly equal number of French pieces selected from the Dictionnaire. We then commissioned twenty new articles designed to highlight the interests and perspectives of U.S. historians of France while including three pieces by French scholars, two of them sociologists, not appearing in the volume of 2002.* Our intention was to begin by constructing the object itself through an examination of republican values (drawing mostly on articles from the Dictionnaire critique and published here in English translation) and then to offer a critique, even a deconstruction, of that object through an examination of the flaws, blind spots, and omissions in the republican model. The result is a distinctive new work, inspired to be sure by the Dictionnaire critique de la République but developing its own historiographical perspective and demonstrating the richness of Anglo-American research on the French Republic.

As this research makes clear, the history of France has exploded its national, hexagonal bounds. French history has become an international history, an object of study especially important to British and U.S. historians. In 2004, when Nancy L. Green and Edward Berenson organized the annual meeting of the American Society for French Historical Studies at the Bibliothèque Nationale de France, they found themselves overwhelmed with proposals for papers and panels. Immediately, the British Society for French History sought to join in, and ultimately a conference program representing historians of France from sixteen different countries was created.

This multinational collection of scholars defined French history differently from the way it had been defined—until very recently—in France. Our international group understood France in an international way—not, that is, as a nation-state outlined by its hexagonal boundaries, but as a former empire deeply implicated in the history of Africa, Asia, and the Americas. As for the Hexagon itself, many of the 550 people who spoke at the conference saw it as having been refigured by the descendants of its former colonial subjects, who now reside there in very large numbers. And just as these once-immigrant peoples have altered French society, so have they moved historians to reformulate the subjects of their research. The hottest topics at the conference, as in much recent historiography—especially Anglophone historiography—were immigration, Islam, colonialism, empire, and, as this volume attests, the ways these new subjects of research have redefined the nature and meaning of the Republics and republicanism in France. Articles newly commissioned for this volume reflect these historiographical trends, including those, for example, by Herrick Chapman (The State), Alice L. Conklin (The Civilizing Mission), Joan Wallach Scott (Parité), Mary Dewhurst Lewis (Immigration), and John R. Bowen (The Republic and the Veil).

Together, these articles, plus some of those reprinted from the original Dictionnaire (e.g., Emmanuelle Saada’s "The Republic and the Indigènes and Cécile Laborde’s Citizenship), depart significantly from the ways the French Republics and republicanism had long been portrayed. According to what became an orthodox view, French republicanism produced a form of government and society in which each individual enjoyed full equality in the eyes of a democratic state uninterested in its citizens’ particularistic distinctions—their religion, ethnicity, gender, and social class. If in practice, the French Republics sometimes treated their citizens unequally, favoring employers over workers, Catholics over Jews, men over women, whites over nonwhites, the reasons—so the Republic’s advocates and historians long maintained—had to do with the flawed human beings in charge at a particular moment, not with the institutions of the Republics themselves. If leaders had consistently lived up to the Republic’s ideals, such problems would have been rare. Solutions, then, turned on better education, better leadership, better media, and the like. The republican model" needed to be intelligently and consistently applied; it required no major overhaul.

This perspective is less persuasive to the current generation of historians in France than it was to its elders. To historians trained in the United States, its persuasive force is virtually nil. Which is not to say American scholars think the French Republics have done more harm than good or that their ideals should not be taken seriously. When compared to other kinds of regimes, the French Republics look good to most U.S.-trained historians. But Americans have grown up in a society whose republic accepted slavery and racial discrimination, gave religion—especially Protestantism—a prominent role in public discourse, and recognized group identities as much as individual ones. The current generation of U.S. historians seldom idealizes its republic—though many of them doubtless idealize other aspects of the American experience—so it is unsurprising that they do not overestimate the qualities of the French Republic. For that reason, many of the articles in this book cast a critical eye on the French Republic’s attitudes toward and treatment of women, immigrants, people of color, Muslims, and others. But our authors do not sing a one-note samba of criticism—far from it. Steven Englund (Antisemitism, Judeophobia, and the Republic), for example, finds Third Republic–era anti-Semitism mild in comparison with its counterpart in Austria and Germany. Philip Nord judges the Third Republic relatively open and egalitarian in relation to other contemporary Western governments, though he is fully aware of the French regime’s flaws. Lloyd Kramer (Times of Exile and Immigration) examines the qualities that enabled republican France to attract generations of political and intellectual refugees unwelcome in their own countries. Stéphane Gerson (The Local) depicts the vitality of local life, while Jerrold Seigel (Intellectuals and the Republic) pays homage, not uncritically, to the French Republic’s engaged men of letters.

If U.S. historians of France have beamed their scholarly spotlight on French republicanism, the interest is mainly intellectual and professional. It is what they study, not what they live. Americans are for the most part uninvolved personally and directly in the raging debates of present-day France, debates over whether and how to integrate Muslims into French society and a republican political order supposedly blind to religious, ethnic, and racial particularities. Nor are they directly involved in discussions about whether Islamic girls and women should be allowed to don headscarves in school, wear the burqa in public, refuse treatment by male doctors, and swim in pools segregated by sex. They do not, in general, weigh in about how to remember and acknowledge the legacy of slavery and the claims of French citizens whose ancestors had been enslaved. Nor do they engage in arguments over how to talk about race and racism in a society whose official ideology denies the salience of racial distinctions and even forbids the publication of statistics that classify people and phenomena according to race. Americans’ distance—geographical, emotional, electoral, and economic—from these controversies makes dispassionate reflection somewhat easier for them than for their French colleagues. But it also deprives them of the immediacy of understanding and passionate engagement that can nurture scholarship at its best. French historians who specialize in contemporary history (1789 to the present) or present-day history (histoire du temps présent, 1945 to 2011) do so from the perspective of citizens of a republic whose values, practices, histories, and memories are the subject of rancorous debate. Sometimes such debate can narrow scholarship by reinforcing political correctness, ideological partiality, and an inclination to read present-day concerns onto the past. But occasionally it can launch historical inquiry into once-invisible realms.

If U.S. historians of France are shielded from French society’s intense questioning of republicanism, the better to engage with it intellectually, they are also distanced from any consideration of republicanism at home. Although in the 1980s and 1990s, specialists in U.S. history debated the meaning and nature of republicanism in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century America, this debate—and even the concept itself—had a limited career, as Daniel T. Rogers put it in an influential article in the Journal of American History in 1992. That is, both the debate and the concept of republicanism as a frame for historical analysis experienced a rise, a period of maturity, and, like any individual’s career, ended in retirement. It is not that U.S. historians have abandoned the concept of republicanism, but rather that term’s ubiquity in 1980s scholarship made its use so promiscuous that its apparent utility ultimately disappeared. Republicanism, as Rogers writes, had been applied to so many historical phenomena, used to tie neatly together so many analytical loose ends, that it finally resembled a concept like modernization: it came to mean too much and hence too little.

If historians of the United States no longer turn to the concept of republicanism in framing their work, for U.S. historians of other countries, as for ordinary citizens, republicanism as a political philosophy, set of practices, and collection of ideals has never—at least in recent memory—possessed much relevance, or even meaning. There is no contemporary public debate about republicanism, and the term is mentioned only in relation to the ideology of one of the country’s two dominant political parties. But the ideas and ideals of present-day members of the Republican Party or GOP bear little relation to the eighteenth-century notions of virtue, disinterestedness, and commercial corruption that scholars of American republicanism—J.G.A. Pocock, Gordon Wood, John Murrin—had in mind. The contemporary GOP resembles even less the leftish workingmen’s republicanism that once figured prominently in the books of U.S. social historians who came of age in the 1980s (e.g., Sean Wilenz, Daniel Walkowitz, and Jonathan Prude).

Republicanism in the United States is so much taken for granted that there is little need to mention it. Americans have, after all, never known any other kind of regime, and only rarely have they felt the need to call it into question. Instead, different political formations and ideologies have appropriated republicanism for their own purposes—Populists to laud the general interest as opposed to the selfish machinations’ of corporate titans; Southerners to defend their agrarian and pastoral landscape against the corruption and extravagance" of the industrial world of the North.

The French situation could not be more different. There, republicanism has had to fight a great many uphill battles, battles against Jacobin and Bonapartist dictatorship, monarchical restorations, Catholic reaction, and the proto-fascism of the Vichy regime. Each of France’s first four Republics (1792–99, 1848–52, 1870–1940, 1945–58) found itself menaced and ultimately overthrown by antirepublican forces.* And even the Fifth Republic (1958 to the present) has faced two existential threats, the first early on when rebellious French military leaders in Algiers threatened a coup d’état against Paris, and later, in May 1968, when a loose coalition of workers and students brought the country to a halt. The radicals of ’68 rejected both Charles de Gaulle’s muscular Republic and François Mitterrand’s proposed restoration of a more traditional parliamentary-style regime. The irony of France’s current situation, as Martin Schain suggests below (The Fifth Republic), is that never before has a French Republic appeared so institutionally stable while facing so many challenges to its commanding ideologies and practices: challenges from xenophobes opposed to republican France’s relatively open borders; from populists antagonistic to European integration and U.S.-led globalization; and from multiculturalists eager to press the claims of group identity against the abstract individualism of the republican state.

For U.S.-trained historians and others in the English-speaking world, this is heady stuff and a welcome, if often disturbing, respite from the stale American debate between liberals and conservatives, between advocates of an activist state and those who want government off our backs. If our ingrained cultural liberalism can make it difficult to understand the French state and society’s limited tolerance for religious individualism, group rights, and hyphenated identities, U.S.- and British-informed experiences can give us insight into those very things—especially as we thicken and deepen a transatlantic and cross-Channel discussion with French colleagues like those represented in this book. Distinctive as the Anglo-American viewpoints often are, they are not necessarily opposed to those of our French counterparts. As readers will see, the American Philip Nord (The Third Republic) is closer in perspective to the Frenchman Stéphane Audoin-Rouzeau (War and the Republic) than to U.S. colleagues like John R. Bowen (The Republic and the Veil) and Bonnie G. Smith (Gender and the Republic). The latter two are more skeptical of the accomplishments of the French Republics than is either Nord or Audoin-Rouzeau. Likewise, the French sociologist Éric Fassin (Order and Disorder in the Family) agrees more with Smith than either do with the British historian Jeremy Jennings (Liberty, Equality, Universalism) or with the American Steven Englund. Complicating our mix is the geographical dispersal of our contributors. The French scholars Emmanuelle Saada and Frédéric Viguier live and work in the United States, while the Americans Green and Englund teach in Paris, and the French political theorist Cécile Laborde in London. The Frenchmen Fassin and François Weil are specialists on U.S. society and history, while Berenson has taken to British and American history, in addition to French.

These complexities of ideas, method, and location mean, among other things, that there is no single way to read this book. Some will want to approach it in order, proceeding in part 1 from the Enlightenment through the five French Republics (and their twentieth-century wartime interludes) before delving into the more pointed matters of Principles and Values in part 2 and Dilemmas and Debates in part 3. Others will want to read the book thematically, following, for example, the question of universalism through the chapters by Jennings, Saada, Bowen, Conklin, and Scott. Still others will know the work of some of the scholars represented here and want to zero in on them. Whatever order they choose, readers will find an innovative blend of Anglophone and Francophone scholarship and an international history of the French Republics and republicanism with implications that transcend the geographical and intellectual boundaries of France.

---

* The following articles appeared in French in either the original Dictionnaire of 2002 or the revised version of 2007: The First Republic, The Republicans of the Second Empire, War and the Republic, The Republic and Vichy, Fraternity, Democracy, Laicity, Citizenship, The Press, The USA, Sister Republic, and "The Republic and the Indigènes." The following were written in English and translated into French for the original Dictionnaire: The Enlightenment, The Second Republic, The Third Republic, Liberty, Equality, Universalism, Times of Exile and Immigration, and American Perspectives on the French Republic. The rest of the chapters are new to this volume.

* Even though the Fourth Republic was immediately succeeded by the Fifth, the former had collapsed in the wake of a threatened military putsch, and though the ascension of Charles de Gaulle in 1958 assumed a veneer of republican legality, it was only a veneer.

Part I

TIME AND HISTORY

1

THE ENLIGHTENMENT

Johnson Kent Wright

Alphonse Aulard once claimed that the French Revolution could not be said to have had intellectual origins at all, for an obvious reason: prior to 1791, there were simply no republicans in France. Rhetorical exaggeration aside, this captures what is still perhaps the conventional wisdom about the fate of republicanism and republican ideas during the Enlightenment. On this view, the leading French philosophes—Montesquieu, Voltaire, the Encyclopédistes, Holbach, the Physiocrats alike—agreed that republican government was a thing of the past, rendered obsolete by both the sheer size of modern states and the complexity of their functions. Far from any kind of republic, the ideal modern regime, for the Enlightenment, was one form or another of enlightened despotism—which, in practice, amounted to a pragmatic compromise with absolute monarchy, whose immanent demise in France none of the philosophes foresaw. The one possible exception, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, proves the rule. For it was precisely Rousseau’s nostalgic republicanism, nurtured by his Genevan background, that led to his ostracism from the Enlightenment; nor did Rousseau himself ever dream that the Bourbon Monarchy might one day give way to a republic. For all these reasons, Aulard maintained that the advent of the First Republic thus owed nothing to the Enlightenment, for which it would have been anathema. Instead, the Republic’s arrival resulted from the abject failure in 1789 of the constitutional monarchy, a form of government far closer to what the philosophes might have approved.

If such remains the conventional view of the Enlightenment attitude toward republics and republicanism, recent scholarship has made it look increasingly inaccurate. Close inspection of the real record of eighteenth-century political thought suggests that the notion of a consensual royalism on the part of the philosophes—much less advocacy of enlightened despotism—is largely a myth, and that opinion about republicanism was far more various, and sympathetic, that the above account suggests. Moreover, what is at stake in considering eighteenth-century ideas about republicanism is not merely the issue of political legitimacy or advocacy—how many or few republicans there were in France before Varennes—but also the very definition of the term. For it now seems clear that the Enlightenment represented the great transitional epoch in the long history of republicanism in the West—the moment when an old and august tradition of political thought underwent a fascinating process of modernization, with dramatic historical consequences. Indeed, contrary to what is suggested by Aulard’s formula, a grasp of both the variety and the development of republican ideas in the Enlightenment seems crucial for understanding the fate of the great experiments in constitution making during the Revolution.

A century earlier, when the Bourbon Monarchy was at the peak of its international power and prestige, republicanism naturally had a negligible presence in France. In fact, this was likely the moment of lowest ebb for the entire early modern tradition of European republicanism. As a political ideology rooted in Greco-Roman political writing and history, republicanism first emerged in late medieval and Renaissance Italy, where it served to legitimate the resistance of the northern Italian city-states to emperors and popes alike. The sixteenth century saw its diffusion around much of the rest of Europe, as part of the ideological arsenal deployed against absolute monarchy in the epoch of its ascendancy. By the end of the seventeenth, the upheavals that had overthrown Spanish and English absolutism had generated particularly radical versions of republicanism in the United Provinces and England—which, with the older Italian tradition, became the major sources for the revival of republicanism in the eighteenth century. At the same time, the Dutch Revolt (1568–1648) and the English Revolution (1640–60) failed to create stable republics—the latter, spectacularly so. English republicanism, in particular, remained essentially an ideology of protest in the face of restoration, typically utopian or nostalgic in character. Much the same could be said of the far fainter echoes of republican ideas heard in France late in the reign of Louis XIV (1638–1715). Not surprisingly, the earliest premonitions of a republican revival in France were to be found among the Sun King’s aristocratic critics intent on defending the lost liberty of the French nobility. These dissidents included Fénelon, whose enormously influential Telemachus used the device of a virtuous kingship from classical antiquity to criticize the regime of Versailles. Equally striking was the comte de Boulainvilliers, whose historical writings made the scandalous case that the feudal government established by the Frankish nobility in their original conquest of Gaul was the realm’s only legitimate form of rule—feudal government understood as a kind of aristocratic republic, expressly assimilated to the mixed governments, monarchical and noble, of classical antiquity and the English Commonwealth tradition.

If he was a kind of classical republican, Boulainvilliers was manifestly not an Enlightenment thinker. There is no doubt as to who was responsible for launching the Enlightenment debate about republics. As his most authoritative American commentator, Judith Shklar, has argued, Montesquieu did for the latter half of the eighteenth century what Machiavelli had done for his century: he defined the terms in which republicanism was to be discussed. The centerpiece of On the Spirit of the Laws (1748) was a universal taxonomy of three forms of government: republican, monarchical, and despotic; there were, in turn, two forms of republic, determined by the location of sovereign power: aristocratic or democratic. Both forms were animated by the same affective principle, virtue or love of the republic (specified as love of equality in democracies, and a spirit of moderation in aristocracies). Indeed, it was Montesquieu who did more than anyone else in the eighteenth century to establish the equation between republicanism and civic virtue. This is not to say that Montesquieu was in any sense an advocate of republicanism. On the contrary, while On the Spirit of the Laws offered no theory of historical development as such, there were numerous hints in the book that Montesquieu regarded republican government as having been superseded by the rise of large, commercially oriented monarchies in modern Europe, which were governed by a different principle altogether—that of honor.

This was not, however, quite the last word on republicanism in On the Spirit of the Laws. There were two other occasions in the text in which one of the central tokens of early-modern republican thought—the idea of a mixed government—made very memorable appearances. One was the famous analysis in Book 11 of what Montesquieu regarded as the uniquely libertarian constitution of England, which superimposed a novel doctrine of the separation of powers on a more traditional conception of mixed government. Elsewhere in the book, Montesquieu described England as a republic disguised as a monarchy. But even more striking was the philosopher’s account of modern monarchy itself, whose nature was founded on a set of intermediary, subordinate, and dependent powers firmly rooted in institutional structures (the clergy and parlements), and a powerful noble class completely missing in despotic governments. As Montesquieu wrote, "the most natural intermediate and subordinate power is that of the nobility. It enters, in a sense, into the essence of monarchy, whose fundamental maxim is, no monarchy, no nobility; no nobility, no monarchy. Montesquieu stopped short of assimilating modern monarchy to mixed government altogether. But there is no doubt that a republican-style mixture" was central to his conception of the idealized monarchy of his age.

On the Spirit of the Laws thus bestowed a rich but ambiguous publicity on thinking about republics. Montesquieu offered a vivid portrait of republican government proper, even as he cast doubt on its contemporary relevance. Meanwhile, the shadow of a republican-style mixture of governmental forms fell across both his analysis of the English constitution and modern monarchy itself. These themes then set the agenda for a second phase in the development of republican ideas, as the early Enlightenment passed into its maturity. Here it is possible to discern a sharp divergence of opinion, not so much over the legitimacy or even the definition of republican government—Montesquieu’s analysis remained authoritative throughout this period—as over the contemporary relevance of each. In other words, the High Enlightenment saw something like a reenactment of the decisive intellectual contest of half a century earlier, the famous Quarrel of the Ancients and the Moderns. The moderns, in this instance, were those thinkers inclined to render explicit the historical analysis largely buried in Montesquieu’s work. In doing so, they came close to rejecting Montesquieu’s own contemporary appropriations of republican ideas. Voltaire, the Physiocrats, and those who wrote on republics and republicanism for the Encyclopedia were all modernists, in this sense. The Encyclopedia articles—Jaucourt’s République, in particular—were probably the most influential statements of the case for the historical obsolescence of republican government, above all on the grounds of the sheer size of modern states. Similar arguments could be found in writings of Voltaire, Quesnay, and Mercier de la Rivière, each of whom, meanwhile, wrote scathing critiques of the sort of governmental mixtures associated with On the Spirit of the Laws. At the same time, it is important not to exaggerate the antirepublicanism, as it were, of these or any other modernist thinkers of the High Enlightenment. Neither Voltaire, the Encyclopédistes, nor the Physiocrats were anything like conventional apologists for absolute monarchy. Indeed, the normative basis for the political thought of all three turned on conceptions of popular sovereignty derived from contemporary social contract theory—very explicitly so in the case of Diderot’s own articles on politics in the Encyclopedia, and even the Physiocratic theory of legal despotism. Moreover, none of these was immune to at least some of the attractions of republicanism. Voltaire could, on occasion, give it the warmest appreciation, as in his famous Republican Ideas of 1765, written as the result of immersion in Genevan affairs. Diderot may well have ended his intellectual career fully convinced of the possibility of creating a French republic. And in the late 1770s and 1780s, Physiocratic political economy, in a classic illustration of unintended intellectual consequences, provided the seedbed for the emergence of the first fully modern conceptions of republicanism in France.

In the meantime, however, these modernists had long since been answered by a formidable set of ancients no less indebted to Montesquieu, thinkers profoundly convinced of the contemporary relevance of his analysis of republicanism. Among these, Rousseau might be thought to need no introduction. In fact, it is only recently that scholars have begun fully to explore his relation to the wider traditions of early-modern republicanism. This delay, otherwise inexplicable, doubtless has something to do with the position of Rousseau’s thought at the crossroads of both of the major progressive political traditions of his time, traditions whose concepts and values he blended in a unique and unprecedented way. On the one hand, Rousseau was perhaps the most original eighteenth-century theorist of natural rights, a modernist preoccupation little indebted to ancient republicanism. His first major work, the Discourse on the Origins of Inequality proceeded via a stringent critique of earlier contract theorists—Pufendorf, Locke, and Hobbes above all. Later, his influential On the Social Contract offered what was in effect the first genuinely democratic contract theory, equating political legitimacy with high levels of egalitarian participation in public decision-making. On the other hand, there is no doubt about Rousseau’s republican credentials, born of a nostalgic attachment to his native Geneva and a profound admiration for the city-state civilization of classical antiquity. He had made his debut as a thinker with a passionate attack on the corrosive effects of the modern arts and sciences on public virtue and private morality, doing so in the name of Spartan, republican simplicity; the Discourse on the Origins of Inequality depicted human history as a Polybian nightmare, chronicling the inexorable decline of forms of government into the embrace of despotism; the democratic republic outlined in On the Social Contract was inspired by classical example from top to bottom. The theoretical linchpin of the whole system, which made possible this unique blend of natural-rights theory and classical republicanism, was the conceptual innovation of the general will, which required not just that laws be general in their application—a principle of equality before the law—but also in their source, which amounted to one of popular, participatory sovereignty.

Rousseau was without question the most original republican thinker of the High Enlightenment, but he was far from alone. The same years saw the mature work of the abbé Gabriel Bonnot de Mably, whose thought reflected a far more traditional version of republicanism than that of Rousseau. The elder brother of the philosopher Condillac, Mably had begun as a royalist, but then reversed course, producing philosophical histories of ancient Greece and Rome, holding up the mixed governments of an egalitarian Sparta and republican Rome as the acme of political achievement. In 1758, at the height of clashes between the court and the parlements in France, Mably’s republicanism found a particularly radical expression. On the Rights and Duties of the Citizen, a text prudently left unpublished for thirty years, imagines a whispered conversation between an English Commonwealth man—a composite of Harrington and Sidney—and a French proselyte, in which the former first expounds a theory of popular sovereignty and resistance to monarchy, and then presents a scenario for a gentle revolution (révolution ménagée) in France: parliamentary resistance would be used as a lever to secure a convocation of the Estates General, which would then preside over a transition from absolute to constitutional monarchy, conceived of as a species of mixed government. In other work of the same period, Mably advanced a neo-Stoic theory of political virtues and schemes for the redistribution of property that would later earn him a reputation as a proto-communist. His optimism, however, about the prospects for the successful overthrow of absolute monarchy in France did not last. By the time he completed his mature masterpiece, Observations on the History of France, in 1771, Mably had decided that the trajectory of French history revealed the impossibility of any escape from the era’s decadent despotism. But the event that sealed Mably’s ultimate pessimism—Chancellor Maupeou’s coup, which temporarily stripped French parlements of their power—seemed altogether different to other thinkers of similar political temper. Among these was the young Bordeaux lawyer Guillaume-Josephe Saige, who produced one of the most radical pamphlets to emerge from the Maupeou controversy. Saige’s Catechism of the Citizen joined Rousseau’s theory of the general will to Mably’s notion of a de facto French constitution that made the French king and people mutually dependent. This mélange yielded a hybrid form of republicanism destined to a play a crucial role during the pre-Revolution, some fourteen years later.

These developments, important as they were, did not constitute the Enlightenment’s final word on republicanism. The last two decades before the Revolution saw a third phase in the development of republican ideas, unexpectedly producing a synthesis of the modernist and ancient positions described above. Two changes in the wider historical context made this synthesis possible. One was the rapidly declining fortunes of the Bourbon Monarchy in the last third of the century. Defeat in the Seven Years’ War (1756–63) led to the fiscal crisis that eventually proved fatal to the absolutist state; the Maupeou coup of 1770–71 proved a public relations disaster, conjuring up the silhouette of an oppositional patriot party; and efforts at fiscal and administrative reform from above all ended in failure—most strikingly, those proposed by the king’s controller-general A. R. J Turgot in the mid-seventies. Growing disaffection with the Bourbon Monarchy was then complemented by an external event, the success of the American Revolution, which of course provided a sudden and convincing demonstration of the relevance of republicanism to the modern European world. The famous French debate over the American state constitutions amounted to a political education in the realities of what might be termed actually existing republicanism.

The result of this altered context was that the late Enlightenment in France saw the emergence of what can properly be called modern republicanism, as opposed to the classical versions sponsored by Rousseau or Mably. Premonitions of modern republicanism, in this sense, can be found in the later political thought of major Enlightenment figures such as Diderot and Holbach, both deeply impressed by the American Revolution, which to them demonstrated the feasibility of creating large-scale republics. But modern republicanism found its fullest expression in writings of the 1780s by a younger generation of philosophes, most of whom were destined to play leading roles in the Revolution: Roederer, Clavière, Sieyès, and Condorcet. For all the differences among these figures, their thought now tended to converge on two fundamental assumptions, both of which upended earlier views about republics. First, the argument against republics based on the size of modern states now disappeared once and for all: these new writings abounded with theories of political representation, which became a central token of all modern understandings of republicanism. Second, the belief in the incompatibility of the ideals of republican government and the realities of modern economic life, still a key feature of the classical outlook of Rousseau or Mably, vanished as well. On the contrary, for Roederer, Clavière, Sieyès, and eventually Condorcet—all students of modern (liberal) political economy—a republican regime guaranteeing high levels of participatory self-rule, and buttressed by a Rousseauian politics of civic virtue, was the perfect and necessary complement to a market economy. A coherent, cumulative tradition of modern republicanism—much less its reality—was still a long way off, of course. But its shape could already be glimpsed by the start of the prerevolutionary turmoil in 1786.

Contrary to an old legend, then, there was no lack of republicans or republican ideas in France before 1791 or even 1789. On the eve of the Enlightenment, republicanism of the standard early-modern kind was indeed virtually missing in France, its echoes confined to the outer reaches of the disaffected nobility. The early Enlightenment, and especially Montesquieu’s On the Spirit of the Laws, considerably amplified these echoes, placing republicanism at the center of political debate. The High Enlightenment that followed saw a striking divergence of opinion in which one current of thought expressed doubts about the relevance of republican government to the vast, commercial polities of the modern world, while another presented a French variant of classical republicanism, linked to the radical natural-rights tradition and offering a revolutionary understanding of French history. Finally, as the Bourbon Monarchy began to stumble toward revolution, the late Enlightenment produced the first programs of modern republicanism, uniting a thoroughly Rousseauian theory of political legitimacy with a fully modern understanding of political economy. The traditional assumption that France was lacking in models of republican government in 1791 can thus be set aside, or even reversed. If anything, the Enlightenment bequeathed too many such models. Each conception of republicanism considered above—aristocratic, classical, modern—was destined to a play major role on the revolutionary stage. Together, they produced a drama that was itself only the prologue to the long and tumultuous history of republican government in modern France.

References

Baker, Keith Michael. Transformations of Classical Republicanism in Eighteenth-Century France. Journal of Modern History 73 (2001): 32–53.

Belissa, Marc, Yannick Bosc, and Florence Gauthier, eds. Républicanismes et droit naturel: Des humanistes aux Révolutions des droits de l’homme et du citoyen. Paris: Editions Kimé, 2009.

Furet, François, and Mona Ozouf, eds. Le siècle de l’avènement républicain. Paris: Gallimard, 1992.

Linton, Marisa. The Politics of Virtue in Eighteenth-Century France. Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave, 2001.

Mossé, Claude. L’antiquité et la Révolution française. Paris: Albin Michel, 1989.

Nelson, Eric. The Greek Tradition in Republican Thought. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2004.

Rosenblatt, Helena. Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Geneva: From the First Discourse to the Social Contract, 1749–62. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1997.

Shklar, Judith N. Montesquieu and the New Republicanism. In Gisela Bok, Quentin Skinner, and Maurizio Viroli, eds., Machiavelli and Republicanism, 265–79. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1990.

Sonenscher, Michael. Sans-Culottes: An Eighteenth-Century Emblem in the French Revolution. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2009.

Whatmore, Richard. Republicanism and the French Revolution: An Intellectual History of Jean-Baptiste Say’s Political Economy. New York: Oxford University Press, 2000.

2

THE FIRST REPUBLIC

Patrice Gueniffey

Translated by Arthur Goldhammer

The four Republics that France has known since 1848 have one thing in common: each devised a constitution at the outset and abided by that constitution for the duration of the regime. In this respect the First Republic stands out. Even if we discount the many discontinuities that marked its history, it encompassed at least three distinct political forms: a parliamentary dictatorship (1792–95); a limited-suffrage republic (1795–99); and a plebiscitary regime, inaugurated after Napoleon Bonaparte’s coup d’état of 18 Brumaire (November 9, 1799). This coup led to the installation of Bonaparte as life consul in 1802 and thus laid the groundwork for another form of government, a new hereditary monarchy. Still, the imperial regime (1804–14) should perhaps be included in the history of the First Republic, because Napoleon never denied that his Empire was rooted in the Revolution. So we have at least three regimes and four constitutions: 1793, 1795, 1799, 1802, and perhaps 1804 (First Empire) and 1815 (the Hundred Days).

The First Republic was not a distinct, coherent system of government but a historical process whose chronological beginning and end are not well defined. Indeed, the Republic was never proclaimed and never abolished. When the National Convention met for the first time on September 21, 1792, it formally abolished the monarchy but said nothing about the nature of the regime that was to succeed it. Although the Republic already existed in fact, it made its formal entrance quietly a few days later when public laws began to be promulgated in the name of the French Republic. Much the same was true of the First Republic’s close. Long after it had become a ghost of its former self, it still existed officially: the sénatus-consulte of 14 Thermidor, Year X (August 2, 1802), stipulated that Bonaparte was appointed for life to the position of First Consul of the Republic, and the following sénatus-consulte of 28 Floréal, Year XII (May 18, 1804), entrusted the Government of the Republic to an emperor. In reality, the history of the First Republic did not end until 1814, with the return of the Bourbons. The fall of Louis XVI began the history of the Republic, and the accession to the throne of Louis XVIII ended it.

If it is difficult to define the precise limits of the First Republic, it is no doubt because of the uncertainty that surrounded concepts such as republic and republicanism at the time. Claude Nicolet rightly referred to these terms as wandering words. According to sixteenth-century theorists, the term republic could be applied to any organized state, regardless of its form, republican or monarchical, elective or hereditary. The philosophers of the eighteenth century introduced nothing fundamentally new. To be sure, Rousseau had limited the use of the word to regimes guided by the general will (in which the people themselves vote on the laws), but this condition implied nothing about the form of the government responsible for enforcing the law: officials could be either elected or hereditary, and Rousseau wrote that if the general will reigned, then monarchy itself is republican. Montesquieu did not move much beyond this classical definition, using the word republic to refer to any state in which leaders govern not as they please but in keeping with fixed and settled laws.

Historically, republicanism belonged to the past. It lived on in memory only, in the heroic examples of Greece and Rome as well as that of the leveling and regicide English Revolution of the seventeenth century. Sometimes this memory was magnificent but remote, while at other times it could be harshly critical; in both cases, it remained a dead letter except for a few scattered places such as Italy and Switzerland, whose constricted oligarchies were hardly likely to set imaginations on fire.

In 1776, American independence rescued the republican idea from the recesses of memory and the pages of philosophical treatises. History seemed to rise from its ashes. Americanophilia became the passion of the age, proof of the rebirth of republicanism. The European elites of the late eighteenth century were fascinated by this new nation, apparently delivered from the burden of history and prejudice, untainted by privilege, and relatively egalitarian. Americans, it seemed, had applied to a vast virgin territory theories about the rational foundation of societies. It was as if one had traveled back in time to witness the birth of Athens or Sparta. As imagined through visions of America, however, the essence of the republic lay not so much in its institutions as in its manners: austere, rustic, and egalitarian. The political system, too obviously based on that of England, was not particularly attractive to continental Europeans, especially after the adoption of the federal constitution of 1787, whose representative system, bicameral legislature, and strong executive seemed to threaten precisely that which had aroused such admiration and enthusiasm: a society that governed itself through its manners.

Although many people admired the rebirth of the republican model in America, no one seriously imagined that this exceptional experiment could be duplicated in Europe. The New World was also another world, as remote as antiquity. It was not just an ocean that separated the Europe of privileges and kings from democratic America; it was the depth of history. An abyss opened up between the two continents.

That abyss was nevertheless overcome; the monarchy itself helped fill it in. Had the royal family not attempted to flee on June 21, 1791, the Revolution would have remained what it had been since 1789: republican by reason and royalist by sentiment.

The advent of the Republic does not in fact date from August 10, 1792. The French Revolution was republican from the first: the proclamation of equal rights, the collective appropriation of sovereignty, and the establishment of representative powers signaled the birth of a new order in which, in the words of one contemporary, the constitution was no longer in the monarchy, but the monarchy in the constitution. To be sure, the king remained in place, and most people remained attached to him, but there was a vast difference between the old system, in which all power was vested in the will of a single individual, and the new regime, in which the law made by all was enforced by a king subject to the national will. Could the word king still be applied to an official who was in fact nothing more than a sort of hereditary president of the Republic?

The crisis that erupted in June 1791 did not bring forth legions of republicans. The majority still wanted to maintain the monarchy after the flight of the royal family, but this was now a choice dictated by reason rather than affection. The spell had been broken. The profound trauma inflicted by the flight to Varennes is a good indicator of this: republicanism appeared first as a passion, fed by bitter feelings of abandonment and treason. The hatred of the monarchy was obsessive, but there was as yet no alternative political model. No more king! screamed the republicans of 1792. Yes, but what was to be put in his place? No one was in a position to answer this question, since everyone had taken to heart the lesson of the century: a republic was impossible to establish in a large country.

The Republic began as a passion, not a project—all the more so because the insurrection of August 10, 1792, which overthrew the monarchy, also toppled the institutions that had been in place for the past three years. The work of the Constituent Assembly—Enlightenment philosophy translated into law—vanished into the black hole of the ancien régime. This sealed the fate of the two sources of legitimacy that the Constituents had contrived to yoke together in spite of themselves: the old, monarchical legitimacy and the new, republican one. True, the king of 1789 was no longer the absolute monarch of the Old Regime, but the change had been carried out with a flesh-and-blood king inherited from the past, who remained the sacred incarnation of sovereignty. It was easier to reduce his prerogatives than to destroy his symbolic authority. The Revolution