Revolution and the Republic
Page 45
statue was placed on the top of the column in the place Vendôme and three years later
the building of the Arc de Triomphe was completed. This was followed by the return
of the Emperor’s ashes in 1840.
It would be wrong to believe that this reappraisal of Napoleon received a
universal welcome. There were many legitimists and republicans in particular
who felt deep unease at what was occurring and who were (rightly) troubled by
the possible future political consequences. Nevertheless, as Quinet’s account re-
vealed, this reworking of the Napoleonic myth was integral to the manner in which
his generation came to terms with the defeat and national humiliation that
accompanied the return of the Bourbon monarchy. More intriguing still was the
facility with which this generation believed that the aspirations embodied in both
liberalism and nationalism could be combined.
No one better expressed these sentiments than Armand Carrel. Through both
his writings and his actions he provided a vivid, not to say romantic, illustration of
the hopes and ideals of his age.56 Born in Rouen in 1800, Carrel was educated at
the military academy of Saint-Cyr before entering the army in 1821. His political
sympathies were quickly disclosed through membership of the most notorious of
the secret societies of the Restoration period: the Carbonari. Inspired by the original
Neapolitan model, the French version attracted as many as 30,000 adherents,
organized on military lines but with no recognizable programme beyond that of
the desire to remove the Bourbon monarchy.57 The movement’s not unexpected
54 See Œuvres complètes de Edgar Quinet, 213.
55 Ibid.
56 See James S. Allen, ‘Y-a-t-il eu en France une “génération romantique de 1830”?’, Romantisme,
28–9 (1980), 103–8.
57 Alan B. Spitzer, Old Hatreds and Young Hopes (Cambridge, Mass., 1971).
Universalism, the Nation, and Defeat
211
failure led Carrel to resign from the army in 1823, only for him soon afterwards to
depart for Spain in order to take up arms in support of the liberal cause and against
the French army sent to defend Ferdinand VII. His regiment of volunteers was
named after Napoleon II and fought in the uniform of the Imperial army. Captured
and imprisoned, upon his release Carrel secured employment as secretary to the
historian Augustin Thierry. There followed, in rapid succession, the publication (as
part of a series of national histories) of his Résumé de l’histoire de l’Ecosse58 and his
Résumé de l’histoire des Grecs modernes,59 the creation of La Revue Américaine (which
ran from July 1826 to June 1827), participation in some of the most distinguished
journals of the epoch—Le Constitutionnel, Le Globe, La Revue Française as well as
the Saint-Simonian Le Producteur—and, in 1827, the appearance of his Histoire de
la Contre-Révolution en Angleterre.60 January 1830 saw the publication of the first
issue of Le National, of which Carrel remained the editor until his death in a duel in
1836.
Carrel’s preoccupation with the nation and the oppression of nationalities was
evident from the outset. His history of Scotland, for example, provided him not
only with ample evidence of the intolerable injustices inflicted upon a subject
population but also with series of events which could be genuinely portrayed as a
national uprising against foreign domination. The ‘audacious expedition’ of
Charles Edward Stuart was not an attempt to reclaim the monarchy for Catholic
absolutism but rather ‘the last effort of a population armed for independence and
implacable in its hatred of England’. Likewise, his outline of Greek history revealed
both a people struggling to free itself from slavery and a nation whose hopes for
independence had been sacrificed to the principles of stability proclaimed by the
Holy Alliance. ‘The Greek revolution’, Carrel proclaimed, was ‘a new and sad proof
of the relative strength of governments and nations’.
Equally visible was an attachment to liberal principles of constitutional govern-
ment designed to limit the absolute power of monarchs. Reflecting upon the civil
war in Spain and what he saw as ‘a hatred of French domination’, he concluded that
if, in the first instance, Spain’s liberal constitution of 1812 had been perceived by
the people only as ‘an instrument of resistance against foreign usurpation’, they had
later come to understand that ‘the constitution and Ferdinand could not coexist’.61
In far greater detail, he argued that the experience of ‘counter-revolution’, the
attempt by James II to impose his will upon the nation, ‘had taught the English
people that its liberties were at variance with a royalty lacking consent and that in
order to preserve royalty to any advantage it was necessary to regenerate it, to
separate it from the principle of legitimacy’.62 The ‘enlightened’ section of the
English population, Carrel believed, had come to accept that, if monarchy was
necessary in a country divided into classes, it should not be in a position to
58 Résumé de l’histoire de l’Ecosse (1825).
59 Résumé de l’histoire des Grecs modernes (1825).
60 Histoire de la Contre-Révolution en Angleterre (1827).
61 ‘De l’Espagne et de sa Révolution’ in Œuvres littéraires et économiques d’Armand Carrel (1854),
113–37. First publ. in La Revue Française (Mar. 1828).
62 Carrel, Histoire de la Contre-Révolution, 4.
212
Universalism, the Nation, and Defeat
withdraw ‘national liberties’ at will. Carrel also felt that a reformed monarchy
resting upon the consent of the nation was in accord with the ‘new interests’ that
had emerged within English society. It was this characteristically liberal theme that
he deployed elsewhere in his writings in the 1820s to demonstrate what he took to
be the connection between trade and national renaissance.
The title and content of one article, ‘Du commerce de la grèce moderne,
consideré dans son influence sur la régénération politique de cette nation’, is
sufficient to illustrate this point.63 The recent struggle for national independence
in Greece, Carrel argued, had its source in the commercial expansion of the Greek
economy. ‘A certain degree of prosperity’ had in turn produced a desire for a ‘liberal
education’, confirming the ‘intellectual superiority’ of the Greeks over their Turk-
ish masters. ‘It is certain’, Carrel wrote, that the ‘enlightened, well-off, industrious
class created by business within the Greek nation has constantly tended . . . to upset
the balance that, since the conquest, existed between the means of oppression of the
conquerors and the means of resistance of the subjugated’.64 It was but a short step
from ‘affluence’ to ‘emancipation’. However, as befitted a government driven by ‘a
superstitious and ferocious egoism’, the Turks had taken the alternative of extermi-
nation and terror rather than that of liberation.
The specifically domestic implications of this argument were spelt out in Carrel’s
response to Stendhal’s charge, in D’un nouveau complot contre les industriels, that
Saint-Simoniani
sm was nothing else but a glorification of businessmen and of vulgar
materialism.65 ‘The workers are for us’, Carrel wrote in Le Producteur, ‘not a class
within society but society itself ’ and it was through their useful work that ‘old
Europe’ was to be reformed. The future, he acknowledged, would in all probability
be less prolific in ‘transcendental virtues’ but so too it would be less characterized
by vice and corruption. The enlightenment and well-being that would arise out
of ‘the application of the skills that each one of us has received’ would ensure that
‘public virtues’ would flourish where now only ‘private’ ones existed. The sciences,
arts, and industry, would become a new ‘Panthéon national’: it was in this sense, and
not in Stendhal’s deprecating sense, that society would be ‘materialized’.
As we saw in the previous chapter, the stress upon the relationship between
commerce or ‘industrie’ and the emergence of new and advanced political forms
was a theme commonly to be found in the writings of French liberals at this time.
On this account, constitutional and limited government was appropriate to all
modern peoples intent upon the pursuit of material ease through industry. By the
same token, the activity of war had become a deadly anachronism. Carrel, for all
his immense admiration for Constant and their shared assumptions about the
beneficial influence of commerce,66 disagreed both with the interpretation of
recent French history that this implied and with the view that the uniform tendency
63 Œuvres littéraires et économiques, 67–96. First publ. in Le Producteur (Oct.–Nov. 1825).
64 Ibid. 92.
65 Carrel, ‘A Propos d’une brochure’, in Œuvres littéraires et économiques, 93–6. First publ. in Le
Producteur (Dec. 1825).
66 See the obituary notice written by Carrel for Le National, in Œuvres politiques et littéraires
d’Armand Carrel (1857), i. 424–6. Constant was described as ‘a great defender of liberty’.
Universalism, the Nation, and Defeat
213
of modern society was or should be towards peace. When this is understood, we
move closer to understanding what made Carrel, unlike Constant, a liberal and a
nationalist.
For liberals of Constant’s generation the tumultuous events of 1789–1815 were
not only ones that had had to be personally lived through but they had also vividly
demonstrated how legitimate demands for political equality could be subverted first
into a reign of terror and then into an authoritarian military regime. From this
experience derived a general reluctance to draw any positive lessons from the
experience of these twenty-six years. The mood in liberal circles was to start to
change in the 1820s when a new generation of historians began to produce the first
full-length, relatively unpolemical accounts of the revolutionary period.67 First
Adolphe Thiers (born 1797) with his ten-volume Histoire de la Révolution française
(published 1823–7) and then Auguste Mignet (born 1798) with his more modest
two-volume Histoire de la Révolution française depuis 1789 jusqu’en 1814 (published
in 1824) described in detail, and despite their obvious mutual detestation of
Robespierrre and the Jacobins, a process of revolution that, taken as a whole and
regardless of its inevitable excesses, had nevertheless transformed France from top
to bottom and brought it to the dawn of a new era.68 It was this innovative
assessment of the Revolution and its outcome that made its mark upon Carrel.
The work of Thiers, he wrote, ‘is the first where this magnificent and terrible epoch
is described with an appropriate breadth and impartiality’,69 whilst that of Mignet
invited people ‘to return to the truth of the Revolution, to recall the eternal justice
of its claims, to admire its invincible perseverance in its struggles, to understand it
in each of the necessities imposed by the alternative of conquering or being
destroyed’.70 Of Napoleon Bonaparte, Carrel accepted that the consequence of
his rise to power had been to extinguish liberty ‘as if the word had never been
pronounced and the Bastille never taken’, but here he was prepared to accept that
‘the man of war does not appear to merit the reproaches directed at the man of
politics’. In the same article Carrel commented that a society in ‘perpetual peace’
would fall into ‘decay’. ‘Look’, he remarked by way of justification, ‘at the state of
France at the end of the eighteenth century. Without doubt a war should be just
but grounded in justice and following a long interval of peace it can reinvigorate the
morals and character of nations.’71 Carrel, then, was prepared to locate his liberal-
ism within the traditions of the Revolution and to embrace its glorious military
achievements.
67 See Olivier Bétourné and Aglaia I. Hartog, Penser l’histoire de la Révolution: Deux siècles de passion
française (1989), 35–56.
68 See Yvonne Knibiehler, ‘Une révolution “nécessaire”: Thiers, Mignet et l’école fataliste’,
Romantisme, 28–9 (1980), 279–88.
69 ‘Histoire de la Révolution française de M. A. Thiers’, Œuvres littéraires et économiques, 104. First
publ. in Le Constitutionel (Jan. 1826).
70 Ibid. 108–9.
71 ‘Mémoires sur les campagnes des armées de Rhin et de Rhin et Moselle’, Œuvres littéraires et
économiques, 174–207.
214
Universalism, the Nation, and Defeat
All of this figured by way of preparation for Carrel’s greatest and most
significant undertaking: the editing, at first with Adolphe Thiers and François
Mignet and then alone, of Le National. Financed by the banker Jacques Laffitte
with Talleyrand’s moral support, the first issue appeared on 3 January 1830. Its
audience, we are told, was largely composed of middle-class patriots, students,
soldiers, and the occasional artisan. Whilst never attaining anything like a mass
circulation—estimates put its circulation at between 2,000 and 4,000—Le
National was, in a sense, the paper of the July Revolution. Not only did its
young editors help to launch the protests that led ultimately to the downfall of
the Bourbon monarchy but, as events unfolded, the offices of Le National
became the unofficial headquarters of the opposition.72
Thiers immediately made clear his and the journal’s position. The Charte of
1814, daily flouted by Charles X, had to be fully respected and if implemented
would produce a system of constitutional and representative government broadly
similar to the English model. As the months proceeded, to this was added fierce
criticism of the Polignac ministry, support for the 221 deputies who in March 1830
voted against the government, and finally, with what were seen as the efforts of the
forces of counter-revolution to shackle the press, the call for Louis-Philippe to
occupy the throne.
Carrel played a part in each of these campaigns, producing a series of brilliant
articles attacking ‘le parti prétendu monarchique’ and ‘le parti royaliste’. From the
outset he was a supporter of the July Monarchy but he, unlike Thiers, remained
outside government, proclaiming that Le National would ‘nev
er become a ministe-
rial broadsheet’. What followed, therefore, were hectic years of journalistic activity,
court appearances, and vigorous campaigning in defence of the principles of 1830.
For Carrel, the July Revolution had been, above all, the work of the people and it
was to them that the victory was due. Moreover, Carrel was convinced that the July
Revolution could not possibly degenerate in the same manner as the great revolu-
tion of 1789. This was because the people were ‘much less ignorant and much more
moral’ than had previously been the case and, more significantly, because 1789 and
1830 were different events with different scenarios. If both had been victories over
the same principle—divine or absolute monarchy—then the scale of opposition
that had been faced bore no comparison. The first had confronted not just the
monarchy, but also a powerful nobility and the clergy, as well as the armies of
Europe, and it was for this reason that the ‘power and the passions of the multitude’
had needed to be unleashed. In 1830, by contrast, ‘the monarchy, through a change
of dynasty, became the accomplice of the revolution, whilst as a result of the
principle of equality before the law the interests of the privileged classes were at
one with the interests of the nation’. Thus there would be no emigration, no new
Coblenz, ‘no absolutist crusade against France’.73
Nevertheless, the mistake, in Carrel’s view, was to imagine that all that had
occurred was that one government had replaced another. It was the whole system of
72 See J. P. T. Bury and Robert Tombs, Thiers (London, 1986), 18–39.
73 Œuvres politiques et littéraires d’Armand Carrel, i. 227–33.
Universalism, the Nation, and Defeat
215
Charles X that had been removed and with that came the realization that France
could no longer ‘be governed by the sword’. The restored Bourbon monarchs had
never been able to accept that the liberties and rights contained in the Charte had
not been granted to France by the monarchy but had been gained by ‘our arms and
our civilization’. 1830 made it indisputably clear that the monarchy owed its
existence to an act of ‘the national will’. ‘It is the people’, Carrel wrote, ‘who are
in possession of the original sovereignty and royalty which exists by virtue of a