During the month of February 1853, the lawyer and future politician Émile Ollivier visited the salon of Marie de Flavigny, Comtesse d’Agoult, better known to Parisian circles by the pseudonym Daniel Stern. In attendance at Agoult’s soirée were some of the future luminaries of the republican opposition, of which Ollivier was one. Since the coup of 1851, Agoult’s Maison Rose on the upper Champs-Élysées provided a regular meeting place for ostracized political elites. There they were able to discuss politics and social issues without fear of interference from the imperial police. “The general mood of these meetings,” Ollivier noted, “is full of sadness and boredom for present things, fear rather than optimism for the future.”1 This dark period marked, indeed, the nadir of republican fervor. The Republic had been lost in 1852 with the promulgation of the Second Empire, and the republican cause itself was in a state of disarray, with many of its leaders driven into exile or forced underground by Napoleon III. “The word order,” complained the republican Edgar Quinet from Switzerland in 1860, “has been used to morally extirpate all those who have pledged themselves to liberty, and it is in the name of democracy that we democrats who have shown their true colors are now morally assassinated.”2
Despite the sense of despair and stagnation that characterized the republican movement in the early 1850s, frequent meetings and constant dialogue between republican elites would provide the roots of a republican renaissance in the following decade. Writing from exile in 1869, the philosopher Jules Barni claimed that “the republican idea is accepted today, and the thing itself is awaited. Sooner or later it will arrive, and it will be up to us to make it live.”3 Such optimism was nearly unimaginable a decade earlier when republican ideas remained confined to the small salons hosted by socialites such as the Comtesse d’Agoult. The reawakening of the republican spirit was the product of a new generation of thinkers, self-proclaimed “young republicans” ( jeunes républicains) who worked to distinguished themselves from the older generation of quarante-huitards that had presided over the failure of the Second Republic. By focusing attention on respect for law, the promotion of progress, and the creation of a modern and democratic political state, young republicans would successfully construct a new political identity that at once stood poised between the extremes of both radical Jacobinism on one hand and Bonapartist authoritarianism on the other.
Since the Revolution, French republicanism had been associated with a democratic and nationalist program opposed to the traditions of royal authority and subservience symbolic of the ancien régime. Its ideological outlook stressed a commitment to a vision of man and society that was, by its very nature, “modern.” Radicals hailed the advent of the First Republic in 1791 as the birth of a new era in human history, transforming the drama of the Revolution into a “mythic present” through the manufacture of new rituals, public celebrations, and theatrical speeches.4 During the years of the July Monarchy, revolutionary aspirations for political and social equality found common cause with disenfranchised workers and socialist militants, tying republicanism to the protests and unrest that regularly beset the government throughout the 1840s.5 The dangers of a socialist movement speaking in the name of “the people” became evident in 1848 when workers and radicals took up arms against the state, resurrecting the “traditions” and “borrowed language” of their revolutionary forbearers, as Marx saw it.6
Young republicans desired to shun the troubling legacy of violence and instability left by the Jacobin Terror and June Days. This goal required outlining a vision of republican society that ceased to equate modernity and revolution. Taking their cue from their Bonapartist rivals, they made broad appeals to the heritage of 1789 while expressing disdain for the revolutionary ideology that consistently marginalized support for the republican cause in the country. Young republicanism drew upon a variety of established discourses, combining aspects of liberalism, philosophy and sociology to accommodate a moderate political agenda. Although speaking in the name of the modern society first imagined by revolutionaries in the late eighteenth century, republican moderates during the 1850s and 1860s firmly identified themselves with a new social vision at odds with the extreme egalitarianism and violent methods adhered to by radicals. As the republican and positivist philosopher Émile Littré claimed, the Terror was “the specter that looms over the republic.”7 It would be men like Littré who contributed to outlining a vision of republican modernity that transcended the revolutionary experience and provided a framework through which a moderate brand of French republicanism could be reimagined and articulated.
The desire for a more practical republicanism cleansed of its revolutionary connotations had much to do with the emergence of a new republican elite that, after 1848, endeavored to make the republican idea palatable to a broader segment of the middling classes—which the republican Léon Gambetta would later deem the “the new social stratum” (nouvelle couche sociale)—coming of age under the Second Empire. The Bonapartists had successfully managed to rally support in the early 1850s with their promise of order and prosperity. By the end of the decade, however, ballooning deficits incurred by state spending and the lack of parliamentary controls over the budget provoked demands for greater government accountability and a more liberal polity overall. “People are now less fearful of the idea of liberty in France than they are of growing public expenses,” Clément Duvernois sardonically noted in 1863, summing up the new political ambience.8 Young republicans keenly sought to exploit this growing discontent. By formulating a political program that blended positivist themes of science and progress with democratic values, they aimed to attract influential men in French political and financial circles to their cause. This objective entailed defining a vision of society that not only discouraged political violence, but comported with the interests and intellectual outlooks of the new class of urban elites distinguishing themselves in French society.9
Salons like those hosted by the Comtesse d’Agoult, recreational societies, Masonic lodges and, eventually, even the chambers of the national legislature offered opportunities for republicans to ingratiate themselves with the prominent political figures and entrepreneurs of the day. Sociability and frequent exchanges between elites over the course of the 1850s and 1860s contributed to a growing sense of trust, familiarity, and cooperation between politicians and men of affairs. These settings equally brought together republicans and progressive liberal thinkers who, increasingly disillusioned with the policies of the imperial government, did not conceal their desires of forming an oppositional front capable of forcing liberal concessions from the Bonapartist regime.10 Much like republicans, liberals recognized the need to redefine their own political identity by the early 1860s if they intended to attract new supporters and win seats in the Corps législatif. Whereas republicans were haunted by the specter of the Terror, liberals remained burdened by the legacy of division and illiberal politics left by Guizot and the Doctrinaires. As republicans and liberals mutually began to reassess and reject the “traditions” and conventional tenets of their respective political cultures and ideologies, both camps revealed a willingness to work with former political rivals and foster cooperation through adherence to common principles and a shared language centered on themes of freedom and modern society.11
French political history has typically highlighted the ideological divisions separating republicans and liberals during the nineteenth century. Whereas French republicans drew upon Rousseauian notions of community and the rights of the citizens, liberals characteristically spoke out in defense of particular interests and individual liberties.12 These divisions are easy to uphold if one focuses on extreme examples, whether the conservative liberalism of Guizot or the intolerant republicanism of Robespierre and the Jacobins. Although liberals and republicans certainly had their own distinct political cultures and histories in France, the years spanning the Second Empire testified to the fact that these two cultures were not impenetrable and, in reality, subject to a great deal of cross-pollination.13 Under the Second Empire, republicans became critics “of a liberal type,” as the historian Pierre Rosanvallon has argued, revealing a growing accord between the two political camps that would continue into the years of the Third Republic.14 Classical liberalism was a reaction to the radical democracy and popular politics of the French Revolution and, as such, retained a strong mistrust of the people. Liberals favored parliamentary debate over popular activism and believed that public opinion, when confined to the pages of elite journals and publications, manifested the true voice of reason. They never quite reconciled support for emancipatory values with more immediate concerns of public order and authority.15 While revolutionaries inspired by Rousseau had set out to remake society and invest it with political purpose, liberals contended that politics and society were mutually constitutive elements. Politics reflected social and commercial realities; it could not create them outright.16
This fundamental distinction between the political and social was, however, becoming blurred by the middle of the nineteenth century, especially as republicans came to espouse a more sociological perspective in their outlooks. “The true man, the real man is he who lives in society and by society,” the republican theorist Étienne Vacherot explained in 1859. “Properly speaking, it is not society that is the abstraction and the individual the reality. To the contrary, it is society that is real and the individual the abstraction.”17 That republicans and liberals could find common ground and speak a similar political language was hardly shocking. French liberalism and republicanism did possess common ideological roots in the principles of 1789, and despite the political divergence between the two camps during the postrevolutionary period French liberalism never fully abandoned its republican heritage, retaining a patent concern with political liberty and the moral character of the citizen.18 This variant of “republican liberalism” witnessed a resurgence under Bonapartist rule in France among a rising generation of political thinkers eager to define a “new” liberal platform.
In spite of their abhorrence for the July Monarchy and the exclusionary regime erected by Guizot and his allies, republicans could find some wisdom in the teachings of their Doctrinaire adversaries. The rationalist liberalism of the Orléanists had set out to inaugurate a new art and technology of government capable of subduing the revolutionary tide and bridling popular sovereignty. For Guizot, in a democratic and revolutionary age, authority could no longer be considered independent of society. On the contrary, power had to be built into prevailing conceptions of the social, establishing hierarchies and behavioral norms that were natural and indisputable. “The true methods of government are not in the direct and visible instruments of the action of power,” he wrote in 1821. “They reside in the heart of society itself and cannot be separate from it.”19 Put otherwise, society was a construction shaped by ideology just as much as an object in its own right. If a stable postrevolutionary order was to be established in France, it could only be conditioned by and constituted through a form of discursive power capable of instilling new values in the population and making “society” a living idea.20 Framing their political critiques in terms of “modern society” under the Second Empire, self-proclaimed democrats and partisans of liberty followed in the footsteps of their Bonapartist rivals, promising a vision of a new and dynamic type of society that they alone could deliver.
The ideological divisions that had come to light among French student activists in the early 1860s proved to be a portent of things to come among republican circles in general. As with Longuet and his hope of rallying supporters to the idea of a “new generation,” republican elites speaking for “modern society” looked upon radical fringe groups like the Blanquists with aversion. Even the most militant political thinkers within such circles, such as the passionate Jacques Pyrat, criticized the tactics employed by radicals. “Raoul Rigaul, Germain Casse, both of whom terrify the bourgeoisie,” seethed Peyrat, “[these types] have strayed quite far from our ideas.”21 Having learned from the painful experience of 1848, republican thinkers recognized the need to dissociate themselves from the socialists and Jacobins who had driven the country into the arms of Louis Napoleon and the Party of Moral Order. The threat revolution posed to property owners and financial interests made it anathema, a point strongly emphasized in the criticisms of insurrectionary methods by republicans. Giving a speech in his native Loiret, Adolphe Couchery used the opportunity to remind his audience that “for us all revolution would be ruinous. Our lands would lose value; our capital invested in enterprise would be swallowed up in the tempest. No! Never a revolution.”22
Contrary to the revolutionary materialism touted by radical student activists and militants, young republicans argued that modern society must be considered in light of the certainty that sociological and scientific knowledge offered. “There is only one thing which could serve as the foundation for a truly human society,” declared the lawyer and aspiring politician Léon Gambetta, “and that is science.”23 This strong belief in the value of science and scientific rationality produced, in turn, a new political realism in the writings of republican theorists. No longer could action be guided by strict ideology or idealism; experimentation, analysis, and flexibility—what would become known as “opportunism” under the Third Republic—were perceived to be the new principles needed in bringing forth the republic and promoting social order and progress. “The young republicans . . . possessed a horror of sentimental chimeras,” professed Juliette Adam, a woman of strong republican conviction, “understanding that they could no longer judge each fact according to a formula, but only according to its possible results.”24
Many of these ideas derived from the writings of Auguste Comte and his philosophy of Positivism, which had a strong influence on republican circles during the 1850s and 1860s. Comte himself had initially conceived of his philosophy as a natural corollary to republicanism, stressing Positivism’s revolutionary heritage, the need for rationalism in politics, and a belief in morality as a guide for political action. That republicans and positivists could find common ground was, therefore, not surprising.25 Republican aspirations were in accord with the dictates of positive philosophy, as a young positivist noted. “The republic is the form of government that, by its sheer elasticity, is best adapted to the incessant modifications of modern time.”26 Republican interest in Positivism became so extensive during the Second Empire that Juliette Adam complained discussions at her salon were constantly occupied with the natural “agreement between positive philosophy and republican ideas.”27
An intellectual movement led by the eccentric polytechnician and former Saint-Simonian Auguste Comte, Positivism prescribed a philosophy vested in scientific knowledge and empirically verified data opposed to metaphysical and abstract reasoning.”[We] regard the search after what we call causes, whether first or final, as absolutely inaccessible and unmeaning,” Comte contended in his manifesto, stressing that one can “only try to analyze correctly the circumstances of their production, and to connect them together by normal relations of succession and similarity.” Causality was beyond the realm of human intellect because its existence could not be verified through directly observed phenomena. It was, according to Comte, “insoluble and outside the domain of Positive Philosophy.”28 As one of his most dedicated followers, Émile Littré, explained, Positivism was a “philosophy of science” concerned with “general facts [and] fundamental truths” beyond theological and metaphysical speculation. Its intention was to divide the world and knowledge into two spheres, “one known, the other unknown,” and advance a new philosophy predicated upon scientific law.29
The appeal of a philosophical system grounded in verifiable and scientific knowledge sprang from more general social anxieties pervading postrevolutionary French society and culture. Social critics throughout the mid-nineteenth century frequently gave bleak prognoses of the nation’s future when addressing the troubling disorder and severe skepticism they believed were agitating the country. “Societies are cracking, minds expanding, and among all this the old teachers of the world have ceased to serve, to help,” the political theorist Charles Dupont-White lamented in the mid-1860s.30 The anarchist Pierre-Joseph Proudhon was not alone when suggesting that “the century [awaited] a new light” to replace the “old logic” and mentalities no longer capable of structuring and comprehending a world turned upside down.31 For Comte, the “intellectual anarchy” permeating the postrevolutionary world constituted “the great political and moral crisis” of the age. The only means of assuaging this crisis was to advance new principles anchored in forms of knowledge that were pure, irrefutable, and homogeneous.32
At its most fundamental level, Positivism held out the promise of epistemological uniformity, proposing a single set of values and assumptions propagated by the new priest of the nineteenth century, the savant. In the views of leading positivist philosophers and theorists, pluralism was symptomatic of decadence and disorder, inviting “the confusion of principles [and] the excess of viewpoints.”33 As the positivist Félix Aroux insisted, “the perfection of civilization” required “moral, intellectual, civil, political, and economic homogeneity.”34 This perfection rested upon a denial of subjectivity, prizing unity above a fissiparous individualism that encouraged anomie and skepticism. Once it was generally accepted that scientific knowledge alone offered man access to truth, the precision of science became undeniable. It promised a unitary and verifiable form of knowledge that excluded divergent beliefs or opinions.35 Science and freedom of conscience were incompatible with one another, according to the positivist critic Hippolyte Stupuy. “One allows the play of the imagination while the other subordinates all to observation.”36
The totalizing premise of Positivism rested on the authority of what Littré deemed “the rationalist principle.”37 It refused to recognize religious or metaphysical speculation as just, for “wherever [science] extends its hand, it uproots the supernatural and replaces it with the natural.”38 Such extreme rationalism could appear disenchanting and perfunctory when confined to philosophical debate. Yet once the spirit of Positivism was “rightly understood,” Comte contended, it led to an aspiration far beyond scientific curiosity: “the object, namely, of organizing human life.”39 In proposing what Comte considered a “social physics,” Positivism asked men of science to turn their microscopes onto the social organism and unearth the natural laws governing society.40 “Science in general and the newly constituted social science in particular will become the driving force in the government of human affairs,” predicted the doctor Louis-Adolphe Bertillon in the late 1860s, “just as the mechanical, physical, and chemical sciences are in industrial work.” 41
As the social organism became the object of scientific scrutiny, a conception of society in its totality would be formed that would, in turn, engender new social sentiments; self-seeking individualism and egoism would be replaced by collective concerns and an appreciation for the general social good. “To the Positivist,” Comte wrote, “the object of Morals is to make our sympathetic instincts preponderate as far as possible over the selfish instincts, social feelings over personal feelings.” 42 In outlining the role and mission of the positive “sociologist,” Littré stressed the savant’s desire to make social phenomena intelligible and render service to humanity’s progressive development: “Kings, people, assemblies, bodies [and], parties create events. The sociologist makes them into experiences. He fulfills his office and duty when he illuminates what, step by step, advances that social evolution, which, as spontaneous as it is, needs to be directed if we desire . . . that future development be better than past development and bereft of disasters and travesties.” 43
With their concern for moral and social questions, positivists naturally turned their attention to politics. While Comte himself was attracted to the Bonapartist platform and its promise of order and social harmony after 1852, prior to the coup of Deux-Décembre Comte had openly associated his philosophy with the republican cause. Positivism identified with the ideals of 1789 and saw the Revolution as a profound moment in world history, both central themes within French republican ideology. Comte also believed that a republican form of government was best suited to realize the goals of his positive system. “By concentrating all human forces of whatever kind in the general service of the community,” he claimed, “republicanism recognizes the doctrine of subordinating politics to morals.” Republicanism was an ideology imbued with a moral sentiment, Comte believed, making it compatible with the tenets of Positivism. “The direct tendency, then, of the French Republic is to sanction the fundamental principle of Positivism, the preponderance, namely, of Feeling over Intellect and Activity. Starting from this point, public opinion will soon be convinced that the work of organizing society on republican principles is one which can only be performed by the new philosophy.” 44
Yet if Positivism was conceptualized as a variant of republican thinking, Comte was quick to dissociate his ideas from the more radical strain of Jacobinism. Indeed, the most dangerous obstacle to Comte’s envisioned social regeneration was posed by the intransigence of radicals, men he deemed “professors of the guillotine.” By persistently relying on revolutionary tactics to bring about social and political transformation, Jacobins and other extremists effectively retarded progress and forced order to take a reactionary form. “The only effect really produced by this party of disorder,” he remarked, “is to serve as a bugbear for the benefit of the retrograde party, who thus obtains official support from the middle classes in a way which is quite contrary to all the principles and habits of that class.” 45 His examples were drawn from the struggles of 1848 when the specter of radical socialism after the June Days led to the formation of the conservative Party of Moral Order.
In addition to jeopardizing progress, radicals also stood accused of putting their faith in “metaphysical utopias,” which they sought to create through violent and undemocratic means. By employing principles central to the new sociological outlook of Positivism, it was, Littré maintained, feasible to conceptualize the “sociologically impossible,” replacing utopian and metaphysical schemes with rational and empirical speculation. A practical approach to social issues could be achieved guided by rational means and moderate ends.46 “The legitimate republic, if we understand it to be the better arrangement of social forces, will come forth only through experience,” claimed Littré. “In other words, through a gradual perfecting of what exists with the aid of reflection by political leaders and the suggestions of sociology.” 47 By stressing the relationship between the principles of Positivism and the establishment of a democratic republic in France, Littré presented the germ of a new republican attitude that was moderate and defined by reason. More important, it was not beholden to rigid ideological precepts, in his opinion.
Coming from a Parisian family committed to republicanism both during and after the French Revolution, Littré had been inculcated with a respect for the democratic and enlightened values of republican thought at a young age. A dedicated follower of Comte during the 1840s, he subscribed to his mentor’s beliefs in progress and science’s potential to offer solutions to the pressing social problems of the age. “Among the men of today,” he stated, “we are moving toward the propagation of enlightenment attained by the works of science, and through this propagation, a corresponding improvement in social relations.” 48 While Littré broke with Comte in the early 1850s as his mentor turned to Bonapartism and increasingly espoused a more mystical variant of Positivism that Littré accused of being “subjective” and groundless, the young scholar did not reject the core tenets that had structured his philosophical education.49 From 1852 onward, Littré sought to promote a program that synthesized Positivism and republicanism. In 1867 he founded La Philosophie positive, a journal spotlighting political and intellectual critiques that became a forum for republican and liberal theorists enamored with the potential of a “positive politic.”
“The positive philosophy dictates that the aim of social development is the human ideal in which natural laws constitute salutary rules, humanity a beneficent spirit, and history a means of substantiating belief, ” Littré apprised his readers in the premier issue of La Philosophie positive.50 The political tenor of the journal grappled with issues from French politics to foreign policy and European affairs, consistently accenting the role that scientific education and progress played in the modern world and in the growing political opposition in France. With its focus on sociopolitical debate, the publication firmly inscribed Positivism with a political dimension, transforming it from a philosophical movement into an ideological outlook with a progressive and republican orientation. It offered a comprehensive vision for a new type of democratic and innovative society reflecting modern man’s collective aspirations. As Hippolyte Stupuy instructed readers of La Philosophie positive, the essential task at hand was “to reconstruct the whole” in the wake of traumatic revolutionary upheaval, adding, “if we are to have the Revolution enter a phase of organization and conciliation” it was necessary that “politics become a positive science.”51
True to his positivist beliefs, Stupuy argued that the basis for a “positive politic” meant investing governance with a pronounced sociological orientation. The problem, as he saw it, derived from the revolutionary fallacy of popular sovereignty. Parties consistently spoke in the name of “the people,” giving rise to an “anarchic confusion of opinions and desires.” As an object of postrevolutionary political discourse, “the people” had become an “elastic” term capable of legitimating any political position. If politics was to become stable and consistent, it was essential to replace the abstract man with a “true” and real idea of man derived from scientific and social analysis. Once political actors took account of how man functioned in and engaged with his social world, “the people” would cease to be a discursive figment, Stupuy argued. What politics required was a clear understanding of the socially real and possible.52
The brand of “scientific” republicanism promoted by Littré and his cohorts resonated among republican circles, indicating the growing desire among moderates to impart a spirit of scientific realism to republican thinking. “It is in palpable realities, in science, in industry, in the mathematical rigor of positive truths that [the revolution] has found its force and built its strength,” Daniel Stern claimed in 1862.53 Rather than “vague propositions,” republicans needed to introduce a “scientific spirit” into government, insisted Gambetta, a young admirer of Auguste Comte and his philosophy. “We need a method and a system,” he claimed, and a scientific approach offered both in his opinion.54 “Politics is not, any more than philosophy, an abstract science in which one proceeds a priori,” Émile Ollivier explained when addressing the Corps législatif in 1870. “Politics, just as and even more than philosophy, is an experimental science.”55
The new scientific realism espoused by republicans offered a language and theoretical framework around which a moderate brand of French republicanism could be constructed and conceptualized. It stood in stark contrast to the “blood-drenched fury” exemplified by the Jacobins and republican socialists.56 In their condemnation of the revolutionary adventurism upheld by radical traditionalists, Littré and Comte highlighted the central dilemma republicans faced at midcentury: the revolutionary ideology of republicanism, born from the experiences of 1791 and the National Convention, was an obstacle to creating a mass movement. Until the revolutionary element was purged, the republican cause would remain relegated to a limited group of followers. As Comte stressed, the ideals of 1789 had to be upheld in working toward order and progress and the revolutionary tradition of republican mythology abandoned.
One didn’t necessarily need to be a positivist in order to appreciate the perceptive insights of thinkers like Comte and Littré. By the early 1860s, similar views were evolving among republican theorists and critics, many of whom expressed doubts regarding the practicality of modeling a political movement on rigid philosophical paradigms.57 Charles Dupont-White, a political writer with ambiguous republican leanings, warned against putting unwavering faith in attractive and fashionable ideas, finding them, on the whole, perfunctory and overly dogmatic. In his opinion, philosophy appeared neither “suitable to modern complexities” nor capable of “furnishing the oracles necessary to soothe the spirit.”58 Demands for more calculated and moderate forms of political engagement did not always translate into a full-fledged acceptance of Positivism’s philosophical program, as the remarks of the seasoned republican Edgar Quinet made apparent. Although convinced of the need for a “new generation” of republican leaders to break with the traditions of Jacobin terrorism, Quinet never imagined this new leadership succumbing to the “spiritual tyranny” he found implicit in Comte and his followers.59 Nonetheless, Quinet was one of the most strident advocates of a nonrevolutionary brand of republicanism and an acerbic critic of the violence and force valorized by Jacobin militants.
A quarante-huitard serving out his exile in Switzerland, Edgar Quinet addressed the subject of republican methods head-on in 1865 with his book La Révolution. In it, he argued that the French were consistently obliged to either accept or reject the Revolution tout court, never once considering that the principles of 1789 could be upheld without embracing Jacobinism or the Terror. “It is said that the Revolution is a Great Whole that it is necessary to accept or reject indiscriminately, without deliberation,” Quinet chided. “What! Without criticizing, without discernment, make a single mass of virtues and crimes, of light and darkness, adhering to it without bargaining over it, eyes closed.” Condemning Jacobin terrorism and the evident despotic elements embedded within republican political culture, Quinet accused those harboring radical aspirations of dooming the republic in France to repeated failures. In his assessment, the Republic had been won in February 1848 only to be undermined by the extremism of the June Days. No progress toward a republican form of government could be made in France until republicanism was cleansed of its ideological zealotry and violence. “We will only establish [the Republic] by forming new generations,” Quinet counseled, “who, breaking absolutely with the idolatry of force, carry with them the spirit of humanity that the world calls for without doubt, but is still very far from possessing.” 60
Writing to a friend in late 1865, Quinet confessed that his book was “written from the first to the last line in the spirit and passion of liberty, to which I have sacrificed everything. The value of this work is to awaken the public spirit and conscience!” Much as intended, the publication of La Révolution ignited a controversy within republican circles and stimulated heated debates over the meaning of France’s revolutionary and republican heritage. Radicals spurned Quinet’s attempt to brand patriots upholding the revolutionary tradition as enemies of the republican cause and sharply reminded readers that it was the Jacobins alone who saved the Revolution.61 Even Émile Littré, who concurred with Quinet’s reproach for the revolutionary carnage of the 1790s, flatly rejected the author’s insistence that the acts of terror committed by the revolutionaries were criminal. “I have not called it a crime and I will not call it that,” he reposted in a strong defense of his republican conviction.62
Yet for others, Quinet appeared “a sacerdotal soul” and “a priest” dedicated to reviving the spirit rather than the living memory of the Revolution.63 Defending Quinet’s work before his cohorts in the national legislature, the young lawyer Jules Ferry capitalized on the opportunity to breach the subject of republicanism’s woeful past in a public forum. “Jacobinism is no longer an arm of war but a peril,” he declared, “because it represents among us something sadder than the memories of the scaffold: the prejudice of the dictator.” Jacobinism, much like Bonapartism, symbolized tyranny and dictatorship, and by linking the two, Ferry skillfully attempted to adumbrate the contours of a new republican movement and identity in opposition to both radicals and imperialists. Neither Robespierre nor Bonaparte represented “justice,” he insisted, adding that “democracy can only accept a tradition of justice.” 64 Rather than adhering to a murderous and outdated revolutionary tradition, Ferry called on his fellow republicans to abandon the past and embrace a new platform respectful of law and liberty.65
Quinet’s plea to renounce the errors of the Revolution while celebrating its ideals struck a chord with many republicans. “That doctrine which states that the end justifies the means, if favorable in appearance, is disastrous,” warned Jules Simon. “Its inevitable effect would be to destroy public order and unleash the anarchy of the will.” 66 Émile Ollivier, soon to be the leader of the parliamentary opposition under the Second Empire, saw the need to adopt a more moderate political attitude, envisioning a “conservative” republic more than a decade before Adolphe Theirs would popularize the phrase in his attempt to sell Orléanists and royalists on the Third Republic. “It is necessary,” Ollivier wrote in 1857, “to render the republican principle conservative in that it is progressive and distinguished from its purely revolutionary element.” 67 “What is needed for governance in France is violence in speech and moderation in action,” summed up the fiery Gambetta.68
Reacting against the brutal tactics of republican revolutionaries, young republicans endorsed the use of reason in outlining practical policies. “I am convinced that reason alone must indicate the possibilities of politics, religion, and art,” claimed Ollivier. “I no longer consider sentiment a compass that designates direction . . . like an intermediary through which the facts of reason are communicated to the ignorant and feeble-spirited.” 69 In 1855, the journal L’Avenir, a periodical focused on literary and philosophical topics that attracted a sizable republican audience, proclaimed its dedication to the rationalist spirit, declaring “we believe in the sovereignty of reason and its omnipotence.”70 By emphasizing reason and condemning revolutionary aspirations, moderates were consciously affirming their respect for legal precedent over mob violence, asserting that politics, by necessity, was a rational and scientific enterprise. “Politics is nothing other than philosophy,” Simon offered. “Its condition is to be practical or not be at all.”71
By its very nature, revolution could not constitute a political strategy let alone found a stable and durable society. As Stupuy explained in 1870, revolution was an essentially destructive enterprise. Its purpose was to raze a decayed and defunct society, making it a tragic but necessary phase in the larger scheme of social reconstruction. “No doubt popular sovereignty will prevail,” he wrote. “But—and here is the coming peril—when a majority hostile to the old order overtakes its antagonists, will it be capable of establishing a new order? In a word, is it a solution or only a method?”72 In Stupuy’s assessment, revolution was required to dismantle the old and level the ground for the building of the new. Taken to its logical conclusion, his argument dictated that the work of revolutionaries had already achieved its ends and could not, therefore, serve any purpose other than to obstruct the current rebuilding process. Stupuy consciously transformed the Jacobins into historicized subjects who stubbornly refused to accept the finality of their mission and recognize inconsequence in a postrevolutionary world. While the needs of society had changed and progressed, the revolutionaries sadly remained stationary, appearing little more than specters from a bygone era that continued to haunt the present.
“It is necessary to forget the bloody memories that the times carried off without return and that revealed the dolorous price of universal emancipation,” Jules Simon proclaimed in 1865.73 According to Littré, historicizing the Revolution was vital to purging French politics of its revolutionary fetish. The Jacobins of the 1790s had attempted to create a radically new society, one severed from historical continuity and oriented explicitly toward the future. Such an idea was not only foolish in Littré’s opinion, but fallacious. “No century can turn toward the one preceding it and say ‘you are not my father’, ” he rebuked. The development of any society was an “uninterrupted chain” that could not be disrupted or broken, and the Revolution, like any other social phenomena, possessed deep historical roots extending back beyond 1789 or the founding of the First Republic. It was, Littré argued, essential to break with the idea of that “mythic present” perpetuated by revolutionary ideologues. To understand the Revolution in the longue durée of French national development and social evolution was, in his final analysis, the first step toward “finding a path between the revolutionary spirit and the retrograde spirit.”74
Such reasoning was a far cry from the rhetoric of violent rupture endorsed by radicals and sounded more in line with the appraisals of conservative liberals like Taine who reproached the revolutionaries of 1789 for abandoning history and custom in their zeal to create a new world. The fascination with novelty remained, in Taine’s opinion, one of the most detrimental influences of the nation’s revolutionary experience. “We rarely regard the past, the possible, the practical,” he criticized. “We willing perceive what must be rather than what can be. We don’t think of making a government for the French that we are but for the abstract man that is within us.”75 Scolding the philosophes for their “unjust hatred” of the past and “bizarre desire” to separate themselves from their forefathers, Guizot likewise declared that “our time is not a deviation from our past, an extemporaneous accident, a foreign inconsequence.”76 In their denunciation of revolutionary politics, republicans were beginning to resemble the reactionary liberals who heaped scorn upon the Revolution despite claiming to recognize the validity and wisdom of its principles. In fact, with their emphasis on moderation, political debate, and the “sovereignty of reason”—a term itself popularized by Guizot and the political thinkers of his generation—the camp of young republicans resembled Orléanist Doctrinaires with their motto of “neither revolution nor counter-revolution.”77
If the revolution of 1848 struck a blow to the elitism and limited suffrage sanctioned by July Monarchy liberals, the cause of French liberalism was by no means dead in the country. Much like republicans, liberals were conscious of the need to revamp their image and bring their theories into line with current political circumstances. Doctrinaire notions of capacité and “bourgeois” authority had marked liberalism as antidemocratic and self-serving, and liberals had no illusions that these impressions would have to be corrected if they intended to play an active role in French political life. Mass democracy demanded a “new liberalism” removed from the traditions and theories of Orléanism. “The new liberalism, formed from the most diverse elements, attaches itself, it is true, to the principles of 1789,” wrote Edouard Laboulaye in 1863. “But as a political party it is in no way of the past. It was vanquished neither in 1830 nor in 1848. It has neither regrets nor old memories nor retrograde notions.”78 Laboulaye’s declaration of a “new” liberalism was timely. With elections to the Corps législatif scheduled for late 1863, liberals were hard-pressed to devise a new platform capable of appealing to voters. Between the revolutionary rhetoric of the Bonapartists and the new pragmatism of republicans, liberals found it troublesome to distinguish a clear political identity for themselves. “With revolutionaries for conservatives and moderates for revolutionaries we will have neither the voice of wisdom nor the voice of the mad,” observed Charles de Rémusat.79 A prominent Orléanist during the July Monarchy who had willingly supported the “bourgeois” monarchy, Rémusat was, nonetheless, convinced that electoral gains would come about only if liberalism demonstrated an ability to acclimate to the changing political environment. “The cause of liberty is in a new situation,” he claimed in 1863, “and there would be little wisdom in narrowly engaging it in the links of the past.” 80
Signaling their departure from the past, aspiring politicians and liberal theorists grudgingly paid lip service to the universal suffrage and culture of equality that they had traditionally sought to keep at bay. “The liberal party sincerely accepts universal suffrage as a guarantee of liberty, as a means of government, and as an instrument of political education,” conceded Laboulaye. “Far from seeking to weaken it, it wants to strength and clarify it.” 81 According to Clément Duvernois, an influential journalist in liberal circles who had made a name for himself through his scathing criticisms of the military regime in Algeria during the 1850s, the acceptance of universal suffrage signified a reorientation of liberalism’s basic objectives. While the Doctrinaires had sought to blunt democracy with claims of bourgeois primacy, the new generation, he insisted, was obliged to “reconcile the people and the bourgeoisie, and demonstrate that authority and liberty [were] not, as is believed, antipathetic to one another.” 82 “The day that the government called on the universality of the citizens to go to the polls it delivered to France en masse the recognition of its political capacity,” Duvernois maintained.83 While men like Tocqueville and Guizot had greeted the coming of mass democracy in the wake of the June Days with pessimism and dejection, a decade later, such presentiments appeared old-fashioned. “The cause supported by the liberal party,” declared the political critic Ernest Duvergier de Hauranne in 1869, “is the cause of democracy itself.” 84
In shrugging off the legacy of the July Monarchy, self-proclaimed “new” liberals had to confront the accusations of factionalism and political rivalry that imperial statesmen consistently attributed to the former Orléanist government. The Bonapartists denigrated the partisanship of the “old parties” as an impediment to democratic government in the country. In response, liberal supporters stressed that they were neither a close-knit faction nor a party of the bourgeoisie intent on promoting narrow and self-serving interests.85 Writing in 1868, Agénor Bardoux, a Parisian law student who within a decade would be awarded a ministerial post under the Third Republic, called on all men dedicated to the cause of liberty to abandon party politics in the name of shared principles and aspirations. “We are all for liberal government where the country is master of its own destiny. We are not indifferent to labels, but for us they are secondary.” 86 “We prefer the triumph of an idea to the triumph of a party,” Duvernois proclaimed, “because we love liberty in itself and for the good it can promote, because we prefer progress by reform to progress by revolution.” 87 With the Bonapartists assailing parliamentary politics on the grounds that it was divisive and an Anglo-American import, liberals were forced to assert their commitment to principles over party. The refashioned liberal party was not, Laboulaye insisted, a “small sect narrowly attached to the letter of a symbol,” but rather “a universal church with a place for anyone who believes in liberty and seeks it out.” 88
Unlike legitimists who demanded the return of the monarchy and republicans who saw the republic as the teleological end of man’s progress, liberals spoke for certain principles and practices rather than a specific political form. Despite the fact that Louis Philippe had labeled his government a liberal regime, there remained no fixed model or particular reference point in the past that gave liberals their political identity.89 “Monarchy, assemblies, republic, empire, royalty whether legitimate or quasi-legitimate—all have fallen,” claimed Laboulaye. “Only a single thing has remained: the principles of 1789. Is that not a supreme lesson?”90 Much like the Bonapartists and republicans, liberals laid claim to the inheritance of 1789, insisting that the ideals of the Revolution were not the sole heritage of a particular party or faction.91 Writing in 1863, the editors of the Revue des Deux Mondes frankly affirmed that “the liberal system pursues . . . the complete realization of the noble program of our revolution: liberté, égalité, fraternité.” Yet going further, the authors explained, “on this slogan, we have allowed the word liberty to rust. Fraternity has effaced it, leaving only a fine residue in France that is barely noticeable, cold and impenetrable to the general sentiments that animate societies.”92
For liberals, Liberté constituted the primary tenet of the new opposition. As one journalist remarked, while equality was an “intimate element” of French national life, the “habits of liberty” remained chronically underdeveloped in the country. Liberty was an alien concept to the French, prompting the author to admonish: “It is our illiberal habits that have killed LIBERTY in us.”93 The colonial journalist Arnold Thomson was of the same opinion. “We have abused the word democracy to such an extent over the past twenty years that in reality we no longer know what it means. There was a word that once summed up the opinions of all friends of progress and the emancipation of the people, and this word was LIBERTY.”94 Liberal critics sharply rejected Bonapartist assertions that national sovereignty constituted the firmest guarantee of a people’s freedom. The Bonapartists “confuse liberty with universal suffrage,” reminded one journalist. “The existence of universal suffrage is not liberty. It is only one of its manifestations.”95 According to the editor of Le Temps, Edward Scherer, it was as astonishing as it was embarrassing to think “that liberty, after all our attempts, has still not managed to be successfully established in France. . . . What is missing in France is the very notion of liberty itself, ” he informed readers in an editorial column as elections approached in 1863.96
Declarations emphasizing a commitment to liberty above all and the principles of 1789 echoed the new tenor espoused by republican elites during the 1860s. Eugène Pelletan extolled his fellow republicans as the partisans of “maximum liberty” (liberté à outrance) who demanded “liberty, complete liberty, and nothing less than liberty!”97 In his political tract discussing the opposition in 1868, Jules Simon applauded the growing acceptance among politicians and critics that liberalization was the most pressing concern of the day. “France, enlightened by its latest misfortunes,” he wrote, “finally understands that liberty alone can give it prosperity and repose. Let’s realize that it’s not a question of a small or large sum of liberty, but total liberty.”98 Liberals like Duvernois believed it was imperative to convince the nation that liberty and authority were not “antipathetic to one another,” and the same could be said of moderate republicans. Simon sounded very much like his liberal contemporaries when professing that “politics consists precisely of conciliating authority and liberty in a just measure.”99
As the political historian Mark Hulliung has suggested, the republicans of the 1860s learned to “speak the language of liberalism.”100 Yet if young republicans proved willing to liberalize the republican polity, new liberals equally demonstrated a readiness to espouse a language of republicanism. In distancing themselves from the reactionary theories of Guizot and the Doctrinaires, liberals came to accept popular sovereignty and the political realities of mass democracy. Coming to terms with democracy did not, however, necessarily imply accepting equality, especially the extreme social and political egalitarianism endorsed by socialists and radicals. In spite of the various pronouncements embracing universal suffrage and recognizing the political capicité of the masses, liberals remained partial to elite rule, professing that educated, talented, and industrious individuals were best suited for the responsibilities of competent leadership and, within a free society, would naturally rise to the top. “Liberty has a false air of aristocracy in giving precedence to the human faculties, by encouraging work and the economy,” Laboulaye explained in 1863. “It brings out natural or acquired superiorities. It elevates talent and wealth. It creates characteristics and raises personal nobility.”101 Universal political rights did not translate into natural equality. Power was to remain in the hands of reasonable and capable individuals making up an elite class tolerable to a democratic society.
Antiegalitarian sentiments were not wholly remnants of a reactionary liberal ideology. Reiterating the suggestions of Comte, positivists unabashedly awarded social primacy to savants, insisting as Comte had that a progressive society required enlightened individuals to moralize and edify the populace.102 Drawing upon liberal notions of capicité and Positivism’s support for a technocratic elite, republicans stressed the need to foster what Jules Simon deemed “an aristocracy of probity and talent” capable of occupying positions of leadership in society.103 This “aristocracy” was neither a privileged class invested with political rights à la Guizot nor an intellectual oligarchy à la Comte but rather an open aristocracy composed of men reflecting the values, interests, and sensibilities of a new cultural and political elite. “Universal suffrage only nominates the legislature,” Eugène Pelletan claimed in 1867, “or, to put it another way, it gives the power of public speech to the intellectual elites of the country by virtue of their reputation and experience.”104 If conservatives perpetually harped on the inherent dangers of democracy, republicans sought to assuage such fears, insisting that popular sovereignty did not mean abandoning society to the uneducated and volatile majority. “Sovereignty must only exercise itself through material and sensible instruments,” Ollivier affirmed. “I believe these instruments are not the kings, but all and each, by means of some people, the most capable and charismatic. In this sense, and not otherwise, do I accept the sovereignty of the people.”105
“Politics,” Simon argued in 1868, “consists of reconciling authority and liberty in an exact measure.”106 This resolution between power and freedom culminated in a form of elite democracy that was acceptable to both liberals and moderate republicans, promising a politics that was progressive yet stable, democratic yet conducive to social order. Defining a style of democratic elitism contributed to the rapprochement between liberals and republicans, but it equally demonstrated how transformative the years of the Second Empire were for the two political factions. Following the disasters of the Second Republic and the founding of a popularly approved Napoleonic Empire, both groups comprehended the necessity of redefining their respective political movements and reformulating their core ideological tenets to compete with the Bonapartists. In constructing new political identities, liberals and republicans set out to exorcise the ghosts haunting their pasts, whether these menacing specters were the bourgeois elitism of Guizot or the revolutionary violence of Robespierre. Casting off the slough of past traditions and practices, liberals and republicans came to emphasize the novelty of their movements, describing them as “young,” “new,” and “modern” by comparison.
These descriptive terms also played into the oppositional politics of both groups. Allusions to the youthful and quintessentially “modern” qualities that spokesmen attributed to their respective movements always invited commentary on the allegedly superannuated and obsolete character of the Bonapartist state.107 It was telling when in 1863 Jules Ferry rebuked the martial ethos and dynastic ambitions touted by Persigny, professing that the statesman’s outlooks revealed that he belonged to “a different time than ours.”108 Ferry’s indictment easily extended to the Second Empire itself. A relic of absolutism, the imperial regime would never abandon its desire to preserve the “antique throne,” the liberal Prévost-Paradol contended. He believed, however, that the moment had come for France to “pass from an immemorial despotism to the liberty that agrees with modern time,” and this crossing into the realm of the modern was, he maintained, the mission of the new generation coming of age in the country.109 In 1863, Laboulaye concluded his criticism of the imperial government with a declaration of faith in the country’s desire for change and transition. “Today the time has come to be finished with the errors of another age,” he announced confidently.110
In the diatribes and polemical writings of opponents, Bonapartist modernity was inverted, transforming the self-consciously “modern” imperial regime into a living anachronism. Although mutual discontent with the imperial regime and desires for greater political liberties offered favorable circumstances for a liberal–republican rapprochement during the 1860s, the growing unity among imperial opponents was not simply limited to shared objectives. In dismissing the supposedly “modern” identity promoted by the Bonapartists as mere self-fashioning and calling for reforms in the name of modern society, liberals and republicans developed a common language of opposition that struck at the very foundations of the Second Empire. Developing a shared discourse not only facilitated compromise and conformity of opinion when it came to particular issues; it likewise fostered a common identity with which disparate political groups and factions could readily associate. In bolstering support for the idea of a “new generation” reflecting the aspirations and values of the future, dissident political elites determinedly affirmed themselves as coevals inspired by sentiments and interests that transcended ideological lines. According to liberal and republican opponents, it was they, and not the atavistic Bonapartists, who represented the spirit and ethos of a new society. Appropriating “modern” identities proved effective in challenging the legitimacy of the reviled Bonapartist regime just as much as it did in softening ideological differences. It was the common struggle against Bonapartist atavism and the collective effort of founding a modern French society that provided a consistent measure of ideological unity binding a diverse opposition.
Generational solidarity had a powerful appeal in the mid-nineteenth century and offered the various democratic and oppositional movements growing up in France a means of distinguishing themselves in terms that were attractive to the public. Influential newspaper editors, political spokesmen, and activists consistently emphasized the gap between those who clung to old ideas and those called to action by the “modern spirit,” insisting, as the publicist Edward Scherer did in 1863, that “Another generation is coming of age and old concerns are now replaced by new aspirations.”111 Such declarations were never entirely divorced from a political context, as critics of varying persuasions invoked the ideas of a “new generation” to encourage and strengthen the evolving rapport between disaffected liberals and republican moderates. “Forget your old resentments, hatreds, and dissensions,” the liberal journalist and pamphlet writer Eugène Ténot proclaimed in his appeal to his generational coevals. “Is the flag of liberty not vast enough to shelter all of you under its folds?”112 Calls for collective action and conciliation continued into the coming years, giving substance to claims that a changing of the guard was in the process and the reign of youth would soon replace the senescence of a twilit order. “There is now in France, and everywhere,” the art critic Théophile Thoré observed as early as 1857, “a singular inquietude and irrepressible aspiration toward a life essentially different from the life of the past.”113
Thoré’s remark not only summed up the new ambience emerging in French by the late 1850s. It also indicated the important place the republican revival occupied in shaping perceptions of change, for in that year Émile Ollivier, an emerging leader within the young republican movement, delivered a shock to French political society. Since 1852, inveterate republicans and embittered exiles had committed themselves to a policy of political abstention in demonstrating their opposition to the illegitimate Bonapartist regime. This tactic effectively sequestered republicans from public life and contributed to the movement’s noticeable quiescence throughout much of the decade. Vowing never to be “chained by tradition,” Ollivier broke ranks with the abstentionnistes in 1857 and encouraged a small number of republicans to run for election to the Corps législatif.114 He correctly saw that inaction and silent protest would achieve nothing and that reestablishing republican governance in the country would only come about through sound policies and political participation. Garnering support from opposition journalists, Ollivier and four other republicans successfully defeated the candidates endorsed by the imperial government. Although the victory of Les Cinq drew sharp criticism from abstentionnistes, the entry of the five deputies into the Corps législatif gave moderate republicans a public forum in which to transmit their ideas and political program on a national level. As Ollivier anticipated, the election of 1857 gave a new life to the movement, outlining a course of action that was consistent with the goals of republican centrists and conducive to developing relationships between republicans and liberals over the course of the next decade.
By the early 1860s, it was evident that republican ideology and practices were in a state of transition as young republicans endeavored to carve out a path between revolutionary violence and crippling resignation. Previously, it had been the liberals who supported parliamentary politics with their contention that relegating political action to certain institutional settings offered the best means of combating popular political activism. By the end of the 1850s, however, a growing number of republicans were coming to express an appreciation for the wisdom of their liberal predecessors. As Dupont-White indicated in 1863, liberty could only take the form of a “representative regime” fostering rational public debate and the political integration of citizens. “When political liberty takes this form, when opinion is organized in this manner it produces a precious effect that signifies the acceleration of progress.”115 Such pronouncements ran counter to the logic of Jacobinism and Bonapartism, both of which favored the unanimity of the general will and direct democracy over the plurality of political opinion.116 Yet Jules Ferry revealed the young republicans’ willingness to reconcile parliamentary formalism with Rousseau’s veneration of direct civic activism. “Let’s not forget that fundamentally we can only be a government of opinion,” he claimed before the Corps législatif in 1869. “We represent our citizens and seek to interpret their interests. In order to draw inspiration from their ideas and needs, it is a necessity that becomes more imperious each day for us to associate the entire nation through its interests [and] affairs, in the collectivity as well as the particular.”117
The growing acceptance of parliamentary government among republican elites and their willingness to work within established institutional settings signaled an important change in the political practices of republicans. This change was, however, the product of a broad ideological transformation taking shape during the years of the Second Empire. In a political culture that prized novelty and the modern, republicans were obliged to reformulate their ideological discourse and find a language suitable to describing and constructing a vision of republican modernity acceptable to political and social elites. Purging republican ideology of its fetish for violence and revolutionary action was of primary importance. Positivism provided an intellectual justification for the secular, dynamic, and ultimately totalizing social vision that republican ideologues increasingly championed under the banner of “modern society.”118 Yet Positivism constituted only one variant of republican discourse under the Second Empire, and while its principles and implications could be wed with other strains of republicanism, it did not necessarily furnish republicans with a comprehensive discourse and ideology. One did not need to subscribe to the ideas of Comte and Littré to recognize the threat posed by republican radicalism. The repudiation of Jacobinism spanned a range of republican cultures and became one of the chief hallmarks of a reinvented and nominally “modern” brand of republicanism.
The language of temporality and “tradition” employed by moderates and centrists reinforced the notion of a postrevolutionary republican modernity severed from its revolutionary origins. “We can no longer accept all the traditions imposed by the Revolution with closed eyes, as the Catholics accept, without deliberation, the creed and formula of ecclesiastical authority,” Quinet advised in 1865.119 Construing Jacobinism and revolution in terms of a republican “tradition” allowed moderates to contrast revolutionary adventurism with their own “modern” identity, classifying Jacobinism as passé and alien to modern sensibilities and interests. It was against the dark past of the Revolution that “young” republicans established a sense of self, but these same affirmations of youth and novelty equally played into the rhetorical and ideological attacks on Bonapartist authoritarianism. According to young republicans, Bonapartism and Jacobinism were two sides of the same coin, reflecting a political mentality predicated upon despotic and illiberal principles. Speaking before a crowd of Algerian colonists in Constantine, Jules Favre condemned both radical extremism and Bonapartism as “revolutionary” movements inimical to modern liberty. “The revolutionaries are those who proclaim in their official harangues an absolute respect for the will of the people while refusing them the right of associating and hearing one another, who do not want to protect liberty or the sanctity of the home against the omnipotence of fonctionnaires, who incite factional disputes and who, by consequence, deliver society to the caprices of arbitrary power.”120 As Favre’s denunciation of the Second Empire made evident, for republican opponents Jacobinism and Bonapartism manifested the revolutionary tyranny of the past.
Through opposition to revolutionary politics and authoritarian despotism, republicans successfully appropriated a nonrevolutionary, democratic, and “modern” political identity for themselves. The idea of a postrevolutionary republican modernity acquired coherence and lucidity as “young” republicans distanced themselves from the “old” and retrograde political parties that consistently thwarted the advancement of liberty in France. Divesting modernity of its revolutionary context and connotations did not, however, signify a renunciation of the Revolution and 1789, a fact that moderates were careful to communicate in their writing and speeches. “Our political education is long in coming, but it is nonetheless advancing,” declared the republican historian Léonide Babaud-Laribière in 1866. “[The] excellence of the great principles of 1789 is better appreciated, and everyone understands that these principles are the safeguard of the wealth and happiness we have conquered at the cost of so many efforts.”121 Like Napoleon III and the Bonapartists, republicans pledged to uphold the ideals of the Revolution while relinquishing tactics of violence and terror. Although the revolutionary élan and spirit would continue to inform ideological assumptions and animate French political life, it would not, republicans sternly argued, provide a template for political action and decision making. The objective, according to Ollivier, was “to make the republican principle as conservative as it is progressive and remove from it its purely revolutionary element.”122
Through allusions to modern society and the ideals of 1789, the young republican movement draped a nonrevolutionary and in many ways conservative ideology in revolutionary garb. Republicans recognized the necessity of keeping the revolutionary spirit alive while simultaneously defining a stable postrevolutionary social order. By reconceptualizing modern society, moderates were able to offer what the Revolution had promised—the promise of modernity—while pursuing an elitist program capable of drawing support from liberals and conservatives. With republicans and liberals starting to speak the same language, it was now crucial to consolidate this emergent unity through a program of action addressing specific issues and common points of concern. “If France is to be revived,” Quinet claimed in 1861, “it will be by examples as well as actions.”123 Following Ollivier’s decision to make republicanism an active force once again in French political life, action now implied winning over allies and delineating policies capable of translating an imagined modern French society into a living idea.