Revolution and the Republic
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their decline into ‘a savage state’, a war made more destructive by the fact that men
were not born, as philosophy proclaimed, equal in rights but unequal in strength.
‘The necessary effect’, Bonald wrote, ‘of the increase of the human race is to bring
men closer together; the necessary effect of the unleashing of their wills and their
strength is to destroy them’.
How, then, could these conflicting and opposed wills be brought into harmony
so as to ensure the predominance of what Bonald termed ‘the general will of
society’? That general will, he insisted, could not be interpreted as either the
36 Louis de Bonald, ‘Théorie du pouvoir politique et religieux dans la société civile, démontrée par
le raisonnement et par l’histoire’, in Œuvres complètes de M. de Bonald (1864), i. 121–954.
37 Ibid. 121.
38 Ibid. 142.
Sovereignty, Social Contract, and Luxury
119
particular will of one man, or indeed as ‘the will of all men taken together’. Nor
should the general will be mistaken for ‘the will of the people’. ‘The will of a people
in their entirety, even if it is unanimous’, Bonald continued, ‘is only the sum of
its particular wills’, each of which was necessarily selfish and destructive. The truth
of this distinction between ‘the will of all’ and ‘the general will’, Bonald twice
contended, had even been recognized, if only to be ignored, by Rousseau himself. It
represented ‘the most complete refutation of his work’.
Rousseau was thus charged with deploying a rhetoric of constant self-contradic-
tion. But it was precisely this rhetoric that had been deployed by the revolutionaries
as they set out to create a republic. Under such a regime, Bonald argued, society
became nothing more than a collection of individuals and accordingly the general
will was dissolved into the sum of individual and particular wills, with individual
pleasure and happiness, not general well-being, becoming its goal. In these circum-
stances, society progressively disintegrated, reverting back to its ‘primitive state’
where men sought only to secure their own dominance. To such a state had France
been reduced during the Revolution, with ‘hunger, misery, and death’ everywhere
made visible.
Indeed, in Bonald’s eyes, France had become the very ‘negation’ of a properly
constituted society. ‘There arose’, he proclaimed,
a single power and a constitution came into existence. But, by God, what a power and
what a constitution! It has its fundamental laws and its public religion: it is the cult of
Marat. It has its single and general power: it is death. It has its social superiors: they are
the Jacobins, the priests of this cult and the agents of this power. This power has a
representative: it is the instrument of torture. This monarch has its ministers: they are
its executioners. It has its subjects: they are its victims. Nothing like it has ever been
seen on the earth before.39
Here, then, was the result of the philosophical confusion sown by Rousseau’s
theory of the general will. But the sting in the tale of Bonald’s case against Rousseau
was that if the popular will could not be said to constitute the general will, then the
will of the monarch certainly could. ‘It is clear’, Bonald wrote, ‘that, in a constituted
society, the monarch is the law, since the law is the expression of the general will
which he in turn dispenses and represents: in his capacity as monarch therefore he
could not wish to violate the law, that is to say, to wish to destroy what the general
will of society wishes to preserve’. Rousseauian logic was thus turned on its head,
with the monarch, rather than the people, embodying a general will which
seemingly could not err.
Thus, Bonald’s overall assessment of Rousseau’s achievements was disarmingly
straightforward. He had, Bonald declared, ‘sacrificed society for man, history for his
own opinions, and the universe for Geneva’.40 Was it, however, as simple as that?
Bonald began his Théorie du pouvoir politique et religieux dans la société civile by
stating unapologetically that his text frequently cited the works of both Montes-
quieu and Rousseau. How, he asked, could one write about politics without
39 Ibid. 304.
40 Ibid. 129.
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referring to De l’Esprit des lois and Du Contrat social, when, even if both were full of
errors, they presented ‘a synthesis of all past and present politics’? For all Bonald’s
desire to see an atheistic revolution brought to an end and a hereditary monarchy
restored, in other words, he nevertheless reluctantly had to acknowledge the scale of
Rousseau’s achievement.
As might be clear, Bonald associated philosophy in general with the desire to
destroy religion. The doctrine of the sovereignty of the people, on this view, by
‘dethroning God’, led inevitably to atheism. Writing after the Restoration of the
monarchy, and thus after the tide of revolutionary change appeared to have turned,
the young Félicité de Lamennais was to adopt a strikingly similar attitude. To those
unfamiliar with the details of Lamennais’s religious and political itinerary this might
seem surprising because, if Lamennais is now remembered, it is almost always as the
disciple of democracy and the defender of the oppressed, as the excommunicated
priest whose radicalism was voiced under the banner of ‘Dieu et la liberté’. Yet for
the royalist Lamennais of the Essai sur l’indifférence en matière de la religion, published
in 1817,41 everything was clear: the Reformation had given birth to Descartes,
who himself had engendered the philosophy of the eighteenth century, which in
turn had produced 1789, 1793, and the Revolution’s catalogue of crimes. In this
woeful sequence, the atheistic doctrines of Rousseau––described by Lamennais as the
‘Genevan sophist’––had played a very significant role.
The opening sentence of Lamennais’s text made the message plain. The unhappiest
of centuries was not one that was attracted by error but one which neglected and
scorned the truth. The real enemy was indifference because this ultimately was
‘incompatible with order and the very existence of society’. Locke, Kant, and Descartes
were in turn taken to task for their contribution to our scepticism whilst our salvation
was deemed to lie in a divinely inspired sensus communis embodying our collective
certitudes. Philosophy, by denying the mysteries of Christianity, destroyed morality
and undermined the bases of religious and political authority in society. Rousseau,
Lamennais conceded, was not an atheist but the force of his argument was that all
religions were equally good and equally true, thus relegating faith to a matter of climate
and degrees of latitude. The way was then open for an acceptance of all vices and all
crimes and what Lamennais described as ‘a vast shipwreck of all truths and all virtues’.
It is here that we again see the near-obligatory recognition of Rousseau’s literary
talents––‘Never’, Lamennais wrote, ‘did anyone make such skilful use of words’––but
the result nevertheless was ‘
a shapeless assemblage of incoherencies, absurdities, and
contradictions’.42
Rousseau the deist, in other words, had led us unerringly towards uncertainty and
indifference and thence to the destruction of society itself. But the same disastrous
results were also obtained by another dimension of Rousseau’s philosophy: contract
theory. ‘Never’, Lamennais commented, ‘was there a doctrine so absurd, so deadly
and so degrading as this.’43 What were the grounds of Lamennais’s dissent?
41 Félicité de Lamennais, Essai sur l’indifférence en matière de la religion (1817).
42 Ibid. 95.
43 Ibid. 328.
Sovereignty, Social Contract, and Luxury
121
In the first instance, no society had been seen to originate in this way and it was a
ridiculous idea to imagine that society owed its existence to a random collection of
individuals meeting by chance ‘in the woods’! Second, every pact implied sanctions
to ensure that it was observed but where in Rousseau’s writings was a convincing
description of these sanctions to be found? There was nothing, Lamennais argued,
to stop people from reclaiming their sovereignty. Far from creating the ‘tranquillity
of order’ the contract would only establish a conflict between particular wills and
between sovereign and subject, with force alone as the final arbiter. ‘When the force
of the sovereign prevails,’ Lamennais wrote, ‘one has despotism; when the force of
the people carries the day, one has anarchy.’44 Nor was Lamennais convinced that
anything changed with the signing of the social contract. Each individual remained
as he was before, sovereign of himself and independent of all wills but his own,
and therefore subject to nothing else but the will of the strongest. Moreover,
Rousseau could come up with no better reason for adhering to the contract than
self-interest. On this fragile basis, Lamennais contended, did philosophy seek to
ground society.
The criticism did not stop there. Once the doctrine of the social contract had
been accepted by the people it had turned society into one vast arena where only
private interests dominated. What Rousseau understood by liberty was in reality
only a form of servitude, characterized by a hatred of ‘all institutions, all laws, and
all social distinctions’. Governments acted solely upon the basis of self-preservation
and self-aggrandizement and much the same was true of the masses. ‘If ’, Lamennais
wrote, the latter ‘are allowed for one minute to sense their power they will abuse it
in order to destroy everything and will run headlong towards anarchy believing all
the time that they are marching towards liberty’. Armed with the theory of the
general will and the belief that it was always right, ‘the people had no need to justify
their acts; they could legitimately do whatever they wished, even destroy or
annihilate themselves’.45 In short, the same doctrine which had dethroned God
and had dethroned kings, had in turn dethroned man and reduced him to the level
of an animal. Turmoil followed turmoil, revolution followed revolution, and a
country which had been the ‘ornament’ and the ‘queen’ of Europe had been
reduced to providing the human race with ‘a great and terrible lesson’.
Lamennais’s conclusion was unambiguous and placed Rousseau at the heart of
the century’s ills. Once philosophy had told man that his reason was the source
of truth and that his will was the source of power, truth became nothing more than
what appealed to his inclinations and power was reduced to naked force. The
members of society, with their equal rights and their contrary interests, would
destroy themselves down to the last man were it not for the fact that the strongest
would enslave the weakest and would make his will the sole law and the sole
standard of justice. ‘Such’, Lamennais wrote, ‘is the necessary result of the absurd
social contract thought up by philosophy, and which is in reality only a blasphemy
declaring war against society and against God.’46 Upon the ruins of religion, society
44 Ibid. 330.
45 Ibid. 354.
46 Ibid. 345.
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would be consumed by divorce, adultery, selfishness, corruption, barbarism, luxury,
and cupidity, descending into nothingness.
The sadness in all of this is that, as the papacy remained true to its conception
of the unity of throne and altar and as it allied itself increasingly with Europe’s
temporal powers, Lamennais found himself ever more drawn to the sufferings
of Europe’s Catholic peoples and from this onwards to a defence of liberty of
conscience, liberty of the press, and liberty of education. He supported the Revolu-
tion of 1830, only then (as we shall see later) to be quickly disillusioned by the July
Monarchy’s failure to support similar uprisings across Europe. He was then to find
himself in the liberal and republican camp. This should not lead us to forget the
sustained ferocity of his assault upon Rousseau.
The response of those who most forcefully articulated the counter-revolutionary
rejoinder to Rousseau’s writings was therefore not without ambivalence. They too
felt the power and persuasiveness of his ideas, even though they had no doubts
about what had been their profoundly destabilizing consequences for France. If
they thought that the idea of a social contract was a ridiculous invention, they could
most of all not forgive Rousseau for stealing sovereignty from God and giving it to
the people. Like Rousseau, however, they believed that sovereignty should be
neither limited nor divided. Was the response of the writers of French liberalism
any less ambivalent?
Liberalism in France was a multifaceted affair.47 Stated simply, with the out-
break of the Revolution there were those who were prepared to clothe their calls for
reform within the doctrine of natural rights and with this came a willingness to
speak of a pact or contract as the origin of civil society. One example of this was
Pierre Daunou’s Essai sur la constitution,48 published in 1793. Another was Pierre-
Louis Roederer’s imposing Cours d’organisation sociale, published in the same
year.49 If anything the prevailing influence in both cases was Lockean rather than
Rousseauian, the emphasis falling upon the contract as a means of protecting pre-
existing rights (and especially the right to property). Roederer, for example, stated
that: ‘When the needs of men have made known their natural rights to them and
led them to unite together, they enter a contract of union and this is the social pact;
they subsequently draw up the conditions of their union and from this civil law is
born. The social pact and civil law are therefore only guarantees . . . of the natural
rights of man.’50 Moreover, with time––and specifically with the radicalization of
the language of rights which accompanied the rise of the Jacobins––the enthusiasm
for such a style of argument waned considerably. Writers such as Daunou and
Roederer, as we saw earlier, became associated with the group known as the
Idéologues, and with this, along with their colleagues Cabanis and Destutt de
Tracy, became increasingly preoccupied with the need to establish and preserve
47 See Lucien Jaume, L’Individu effacé: Ou le paradoxe du libéralisme français (1997).
48 Pierre Daunou, Essai sur la constitution (1793).
49 Pierre-Louis Roederer, ‘Cours d’organisation sociale’, in Œuvres complètes (1859), viii. 129–305.
50 Ibid. 137.
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123
social peace and order. For men such as these it was to be the maxim of utility,
rather than anything to be found in the writings of Rousseau, that was to act as their
guide.
This is not to say that Rousseau now ceased to trouble the consciences of those
who sought, against the odds, to keep alive the flame of French liberal opinion.
Rousseau continued to do so and this was primarily because of the principal
theoretical presupposition upon which the social contract was thought to rest:
popular sovereignty. Here we can again turn to the arguments provided by
Rousseau’s fellow Swiss Protestant, Benjamin Constant. Writing in De l’esprit de
conquête et de l’usurpation, published in 1814, Constant commented: ‘It will be
apparent, I believe, that the subtle metaphysics of Du Contrat social can only serve
today to supply weapons and pretexts to all kinds of tyranny, that of one man,
that of several or that of all, to oppression either organized under legal forms
or exercised through popular violence.’51 In the later Commentaire sur l’ouvrage
de Filangieri he spoke of the ‘terrible consequences and incalculable dangers’ of
Rousseau’s theories.52 The unpublished text, written between 1806 and 1810 and
which like Constant’s famous work of 1815 carried the title Principes de politique,
was even more specific, attributing ‘all the misfortunes of the French Revolution’
to ‘his eloquent and absurd theory’. ‘It would be only too easy to show’, Constant
wrote, ‘that the most erroneous sophisms of the most ardent apostles of the Terror
were nothing else than perfectly legitimate conclusions drawn from the principles
of Rousseau.’53 Nevertheless, he was quick to add: ‘I do not wish to join Rousseau’s
detractors. At present they are numerous enough . . . He was the first to make a
sense of our rights popular; his voice has awakened generous hearts and indepen-