Revolution and the Republic
Page 41
It is thus interesting to note that L’Ancien Régime et la Révolution, first published in
1856, can be read as a sustained comparison between England and France and one
where England was consistently regarded as the preferred example. In stark contrast
to the relentless growth and centralization of the French state, Tocqueville argued,
England was a country where judicial guarantees and local independence had been
preserved. After the rise of Louis Napoleon and the advent of the Second Empire, in
other words, England again appeared to be the location of political liberty.
Nor was Tocqueville to be the only liberal to share in this rekindling of enthusiasm
for England and the wisdom of its constitutional principles. Michel Chevalier, in a
review of Walter Bagehot’s The English Constitution, praised the English constitution
as being ‘among the most beautiful products of our civilization’ and then proceeded
to offer the standard panegyric in praise of English self-government and liberty.209
More enthusiastic still was the account provided by Charles de Montalembert, one
of the leading proponents of liberal Catholicism, in his De l’Avenir politique de
l’Angleterre,210 a work greatly admired by Tocqueville. Montalembert’s central claim
was that England, almost alone, seemed able to hold back the twin perils of autocracy
and anarchy. England, he remarked, had ‘the sole durable, intelligent aristocracy that
exists in Europe’.211 These comments were all the more remarkable given that at
this moment England was the subject of sustained criticism from all sides. As a result of
the military and administrative disasters of the Crimean War, Montalembert acknow-
ledged, a growing number of people were predicting the collapse of England.212
Yet the most extended and detailed recommendation of the English model can
be found in Anatole Prévost-Paradol’s La France nouvelle, first published in 1868.
The title alone gave some indication of Prévost-Paradol’s purpose. His subject was
‘the political and administrative reform of France’. To secure that end he sketched
out a system of government that, in its adumbration of all the essential elements
of the English constitution, represented the culmination of liberal admiration of
England. Recommended to his French readers were the separation of powers,
freedom of the press, the jury system, religious toleration, the preservation of
local liberties and self-government, a two-chamber system (one hereditary, one
popular), a system of election that would protect minorities as well as recognize
208 See Aurelian Craiutu and Jeremy Jennings (eds.), Tocqueville on America after 1840: Letters and
Other Writings (Cambridge, 2009), 183.
209 ‘La Constitution de l’Angleterre’, Revue des Deux Mondes, 72 (1867), 529–55.
210 Charles de Montalembert, De l’Avenir politique de l’Angleterre (1860).
211 Ibid. 97.
212 See Charles de Rémusat, ‘La Réforme administrative en Angleterre’, Revue des Deux Mondes,
12 (1855), 241–84.
Commerce, Usurpation, and Democracy
191
talent and ability, ministerial responsibility and cabinet government, and finally a
constitutional monarch or head of state armed with the power of dissolution. All of
these were wheeled out one after the other by way of example and contrasted with
France’s ‘inexperience of parliamentary practices and lack of familiarity with free
institutions’. But why did Prévost-Paradol imagine that it was necessary to con-
template such extensive borrowing?
The answer was contained in the opening discussion of the nature of democracy.
If it was true, Prévost-Paradol argued, that all societies were moving towards
democracy, sooner or later they would aspire to have a democratic political system.
The natural tendency of all such democratic government was to become corrupt
and to dissolve into anarchy. The disorder within the State would then become
such that, out of this intolerable situation, would arise ‘democratic despotism’.
This, in turn, would justify its existence on the grounds that it could ‘assure the
maintenance of public order and the salvation of society’. Its goal would become
that of satisfying the demands of the ‘multitude’ for ‘well-being’ and this would be
attained by sacrificing individual liberties. ‘Thus charged’, Prévost-Paradol wrote,
with an unlimited mandate and invested, through the laws, with an immense power over
men and by the popular imagination with an immense power over things, with the aim
of ensuring the general happiness democratic despotism advances with an irresistible
force and an insolent pomp, until the inevitable day when, stunned by its own success
and seized by a form of drunkenness, it comes up against some pathetic obstacle and
collapses into a form of anarchy worse than that which served as its cradle.213
With such unremitting pessimism did one of France’s leading liberals contemplate
the advent of democracy over thirty years after the publication of the first volume of
De la Démocratie en Amérique.
Even in the difficult political climate of the 1860s the voice of liberalism could
still be heard (and often with great vigour). 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 overmighty state and did so by making explicit reference
to the ideas of Montesquieu. Similar claims against administrative centralization
were made by Jules Simon, through an immensely sophisticated argument ground-
ed upon philosophical first principles and a close analysis of French history. Simon’s
ambition was to restate the conditions and guarantees of political liberty. Intrigu-
ingly, Simon contended that the Revolution of 1789 had ‘slipped’ rapidly down the
slope from ‘wise liberty to excessive liberty’, leading to anarchy and despotism.214
Most impressive of all was Édouard Laboulaye.215 Not only did he edit and
republish Constant’s major political writings,216 but he reworked the latter’s
213 Prévost-Paradol, La France nouvelle (1869), 35–6.
214 Jules Simon, La Liberté (1859). Simon’s criticisms of centralization drew upon a reading
of Tocqueville.
215 See Walter D. Gray, Interpreting American Democracy in France: The Career of Edouard
Laboulaye, 1811–1883 (Newark, NJ, 1994).
216 Cours de politique constitutionnelle ou collection des ouvrages publiés sur le gouvernement représentatif
par Benjamin Constant avec une introduction et note par M. Edouard Laboulaye, 2 vols. (1861).
192
Commerce, Usurpation, and Democracy
distinction between ancient and modern liberty as part of a self-conscious liberal
tradition that ran from the monarchiens to Tocqueville.217 In the same year that he
published L’Etat et ses limites, he also published Le Parti liberal, son programme, son
avenir, and in so doing set out a liberal agenda for a ‘new generation’ freed from the
‘illusions and disappointments’ of the past. His text, he announced, was a
‘programme for modern democracy’. Accordingly, Laboulaye defended an exten-
sive array of what he termed ‘social liberties’, beginning with religious liberty (he
; advocated the separation of Church and State), liberty of education, and liberty of
association, combined with the traditional liberal advocacy of municipal liberty.
With regard to political liberties, Laboulaye recommended not only freedom of the
press and an independent judiciary but also ‘national representation’ and ‘an
extended electoral suffrage’. In the aftermath of the elections of 1863, in which
liberal opinion appeared to be making advances, it seemed to Laboulaye that it was
in this direction that France was moving.
V
If Prévost-Paradol’s La France nouvelle remains known today it is for two reasons.
The first is that its author, having thrown in his lot with the liberal Empire of Émile
Ollivier, committed suicide upon his arrival in New York when he heard of the
imminent outbreak of the Franco-Prussian war. The second is because the book
contained the following memorable phrase: ‘The French Revolution established
a society: it still seeks a government.’218 This, in a very real sense, had been the
refrain of all liberals throughout the nineteenth century. They had sought to bring
the political turmoil of the Revolution to an end and to build a regime based upon
order, property, and the recognition of individual liberties. They were repeatedly
thwarted in these ends, in part due to their own political ineptitude, but also by the
combined forces of Bonapartism, republicanism, and monarchical reaction. As
Pierre Rosanvallon has commented, ‘[t]he central question in France has always
been that of knowing who is the holder of power rather than that of specifying what
form this power should take’.219 If this is true, then the liberals were arguably
asking the wrong questions and providing answers that few people wished to hear.
Rosanvallon similarly speaks of ‘the want of moderation which characterizes
a culture in which the sense of compromise and of concession is weak’.220 Again,
the liberal enthusiasm for a juste milieu, for constructing a political balance that
would embrace all the social forces that made up the new France, held little appeal
in such an environment. A harsher response is to suggest, as Sudhir Hazareesingh
has done, that the political project of liberalism was ‘inadequately attuned to the
217 Edouard Laboulaye, ‘La Liberté antique et la Liberté moderne’ and ‘Alexis de Tocqueville’ in
L’Etat et ses limites (1863), 103–201.
218 Prévost-Paradol, La France nouvelle, 296.
219 Rosanvallon, La Monarchie impossible (1994), 170.
220 Ibid. 179.
Commerce, Usurpation, and Democracy
193
imperatives of its time’. On this account, the rising democratic demands associated
with radical republicanism ‘triggered a number of recurring tensions among differ-
ent liberal goals and principles’. Appeals to consensus failed to convince a public
opinion that was increasingly polarized.221 More tellingly still, Hazareesingh’s
contention is that the liberal conception of citizenship was ‘riddled with contra-
dictions’. The advocacy of communal liberties and autonomous citizens looked
flimsy and insubstantial when placed by the side of ‘an entrenched suspicion of
universal suffrage, a sense of confidence in the natural superiority of bourgeois rule,
and a defence of traditional social institutions’.222
This analysis undoubtedly contains a grain of truth. As we have seen, in the
nineteenth century liberalism was not democratic. But nor, for that matter, was
democracy liberal. And this should not be forgotten. To their immense credit, the
French liberals, probably before anyone else, realized that democracy could spawn
an entirely new type of despotism. In its mild form, it could take the shape of
Tocqueville’s tyranny of the majority; less benignly, it could appear as the Bona-
partist usurpation described by Constant or the ‘democratic despotism’ of the
Second Empire described by Prévost-Paradol. In either shape, the liberals were
surely right to discern the danger, and right too to seek to find ways to alleviate it.
The irony is that, for all their political failure to carry the electorate with them, it
can plausibly be argued that liberal opinion had a deep impact upon the formation
of the Third Republic in its early years. This claim would not receive universal
assent. However, it can be given substance in two ways. The first is to follow Pierre
Rosanvallon and to acknowledge that the pères fondateurs of the Third Republic
were deeply imbued with the liberal suspicion of a wayward universal suffrage.
A ‘democratic elitism’, Rosanvallon claims, was ‘one of the central elements of
their political vision’. He quotes Jules Grévy, for example, to the effect that the
purpose of representative government was ‘to substitute the ignorance of the
greatest number by the enlightenment of the elite of our citizens’. The castigation
of ‘parliamentary anarchy’ by Grévy and many others, Rosanvallon argues, reflected
the ‘secret’ desire to see a parliamentary assembly peopled with only ‘wise men’.
Most tellingly of all, Rosanvallon cites Jules Ferry in order to show that his goal was
‘to place the Republic above universal suffrage’, to protect it from the passions of
society.223
Second, there was little in the actual institutional arrangements of the Third
Republic that the liberals would have found uncongenial. Certainly this would have
been the view of many radical republicans, who (as we have seen) felt deeply
betrayed by the compromises entailed in the outcome. But we can surmise that a
good few liberals saw the positive benefits of the new constitutional arrangements.
For example, this would be the conclusion reached from reading Vues sur le
gouvernement de la France, by Alfred, Duc de Broglie. Broglie’s analysis reworked
221 Hazareesingh, From Subject to Citizen: The Second Empire and the Emergence of Modern French
Democracy (Princeton, NJ, 1998), 229.
222 Ibid. 230.
223 Rosanvallon, La Démocratie inachévée (2000), 235–41.
194
Commerce, Usurpation, and Democracy
the standard account of how the destructive tendencies of republican democracy
had led to Bonapartist dictatorship and the loss of liberty, but it concluded with the
argument that only two types of government were now possible for France: a
republic informed by constitutional monarchy or a constitutional monarchy in-
formed by the republic. ‘Every other Republic’, he wrote, ‘is the Convention; every
other monarchy is the Empire.’224 A similar argument was advanced by the young
liberal Ernest Duvergier de Hauranne in his call for the acceptance of ‘a conserva-
tive republic’. Accepting that a republic was inevitable, he argued that the ‘moder-
ate republicans’ and ‘conservative liberals’ wanted practically the same thing and
that, in the institutions of the Third Republic, France now had a system of
representative government that combined liberty with order.225
Yet, all was clearly not well in the liberal garden. This chapter began with an
invocation of the praise lavished upon England as the country of commerce and
liberty. The liberals, most notably Constant, developed this theme in order t
o
suggest that a new type of liberty was appropriate to the modern age. Whatever
their complexion, all liberals in France accepted some version of this argument. To
a greater or lesser degree, they were all prone to Anglophilia. But, with few
exceptions, they seemed particularly blind to the fact that it was the changes
wrought upon society by the advance of commerce that were to be deeply
problematic and that in these circumstances the constitutional palliatives which
they were recommending were likely to have little effect or appeal. If, to the evident
dismay of the liberals, the workers and the peasantry persisted in wanting ‘well-
being’ rather than ‘liberty’, this had much to do with the fact that they were hungry
and poorly housed and felt themselves to be exploited. Faced with these demands,
as was revealed by their response to the labour unrest of 1848, the liberals showed
no desire to give up their free-market assumptions. Adolphe Blanqui, for example,
insisted that the government should not supply the workers with work, should not
help them when they were ill, nor provide for their security in old age. Regulations
on minimum wages and maximum hours were deemed to be excessive interference
in the workings of the market and thus detrimental to the interests of the
workers themselves.226 The same message received its most forceful and articulate
expression in the writings of Frédéric Bastiat.227
By way of conclusion, therefore, we might return our attention to those writers
who were prepared to challenge not just the virtues of commerce but also the
paradigmatic status of English society and government. As we saw in our earlier
discussion of Eugène Buret and Flora Tristan, there were many cases of this but
undoubtedly one of the most sustained examples was De la décadence de l’Angleterre,
224 (1870), p. lxxii.
225 Ernest Duvergier de Hauranne, La République conservatrice (1873). Duvergier de Hauranne had
clearly been influenced (like Tocqueville before him) by his visit to America: see Huit Mois en Amérique
(1866).
226 Adolphe Blanqui, Des Classes ouvrières en France pendant l’année 1848 (1849). See also Michel
Chevalier, Question des travailleurs (1848).
227 In addition to the Œuvres complètes de Frédéric Bastiat, 6 vols. (1862), see two republications of