Although French liberalism underwent a period of rapid development in the nineteenth century, it is important to underline
that as a school of thought it was marked by a distinct lack of doctrinal unity. Its various proponents held differing conceptions
of the state, the individual and civil society. One cannot hope to understand the divisions to which these differences led
or, more generally, to establish an accurate overview of liberalism in France without analysing the conditions that shaped
the early years of its three principal variants.
1 These consisted of, first, an elitist form of liberalism, headed by François Guizot, Pierre Paul Royer-Collard and the ‘Doctrinaires’,
which favoured the power of the state; second, a constitutionalist and individualist liberalism, whose most prominent proponents
included Anne Louise Germaine de Staël-Holstein (commonly known as Mme de Staël), Benjamin Constant and the Coppet group;
and, finally, a liberal Catholicism, guided by the likes of Jean-Baptiste Henri-Dominique Lacordaire, Hugues Felicité Robert
de Lamennais and Charles Forbes René de Montalembert, that was both founded on tradition (that of the church) and open to
the modern era introduced by the French Revolution.
The absolutist monarchy and the absence of a parliamentary system, the Revolution and the Terror, and in particular the types
of authority and institutions introduced by Napoleon, all had a considerable impact on the liberal movement’s formative years.
With the return of the Bourbons and the beginning of the constitutional monarchy in 1814, liberals were confronted with one
defining question: given the conditions of the Empire which have shaped France, what can be done? From the first moments of
the Restoration, the liberals were united, above all else, by a will to preserve the principles of 1789. There was no counter-revolutionary
liberalism
in France. And it would even be misleading to claim that the liberal ultracism displayed by figures such as Montlosier, Fiévée,
and on occasion Chateaubriand, sought a return of privilege, absolutist power and the rule of the Catholic Church. These writers
advocated a governing elite and an end to the fragmentation of landed property caused by the Civil Code. But they rejected
the ultra-reactionaries’ violence (‘White Terror’) and dictatorial tendencies.
The liberal world was also united politically by the shared desire of its members to solve a conundrum imposed on them by
history. How, they wondered, might one reconcile the emancipation of society and the individual with the prestige and legitimacy
of the state? Ever since the kings had progressively constructed the nation through a series of measures directed against
feudalism, the state was almost unanimously perceived as
the guardian of the general interest, and therefore as the entity that could best appreciate, define, apply and control it.
2 This thesis is the key to understanding the distinctive path followed by liberalism in France, and its often poorly recognized
links, which still exist today, with the republican ethos. The state, therefore, represented the nation and stood up to local
and private interests, which were long held to be the prerogative of privilege and feudalism. The expression ‘private interests’
was in itself derogatory in the French political vocabulary of the time.
From this vision of the state, one can deduce a number of traits of French political culture: the praise of unity (from the
monarchy to the Republic, ‘one and indivisible’), the spirit of centralization, the rejection of ‘federalism’ (a spectre that
regularly threatened French unity, and specifically the country’s national and moral identity), and a reluctance to embrace
intermediary bodies (political parties, in particular) and, therefore, pluralism.
3 It is primarily for these reasons that the current of liberalism led by Guizot (the
Doctrinaires first, the Orléanistes, later), upon taking the reins of power, chose to consolidate rather than limit or
overhaul the state. In contrast, the Coppet group, which was opposed to Napoleon’s legacy (and, as early as 1800, to Napoleon
himself), wanted a constitutional order that would curtail the state’s powers over society, and favoured both decentralization
and the rights of the individual. The ideas developed by Tocqueville, who, between 1835 and 1840, compared France under Louis-Philippe
and Guizot to American democracy, bear witness to the ideological conflict between these two forms of liberalism, and betray
a preference for the vision defended by the Coppet group.
4An analysis of French liberalism, which offers a faithful account of the different positions and visions that defined the
period, cannot, therefore, take as a starting point the theoretical or philosophical body of work that runs from Montesquieu
to Hegel, Locke to Kant, and Smith to Hayek. It is far more appropriate to examine the
institutional issues on which the liberal figures (as they defined themselves) were forced to take positions in order to acquire legitimacy
and credibility in the eyes of the French public, and on which specific and opposing variants of liberalism were mobilized.
5 If French liberals often defined their theoretical positions by citing Montesquieu, it was in reference to the questions
and issues that the situation in France forced upon them.
6 To proceed in another manner would run the risk of underestimating the divergences between the groups led by Guizot and Constant,
or of overlooking liberal Catholicism, as though it were ideologically and politically non-existent.
In France, the monarchy was allied to and supported the rise of the bourgeoisie against the nobility, through, amongst other
things, the sale of administrative jobs (the
vénalité des offices). The situation was different in England, where the aristocracy joined forces with the people in resisting royal power, thus
creating a common panoply of ‘liberties’ in
opposition to the crown.
7 According to a tradition that spans the medieval legists through to Durkheim’s sociology, the state in France – but not in
England – was regarded as ‘emancipatory’.
8I shall therefore begin by retracing the conditions that led to the formation of the three principal variants of liberalism
in France, before focusing on the essential theoretical elements on which they were founded. I will then illustrate this typology
using the example of the freedom of the press, and specifically the press laws that were passed by the Doctrinaires in 1819 (concerning the cautionnement des journaux), and to which Benjamin Constant expressly objected.
Should French liberalism be understood above all in its relationship to the Revolution and a fear of a return to the Terror
– a Revolution, which, according to its principal actors, ‘did not end’ during the nineteenth century? Absolutely. After all,
the fathers of Victor de Broglie and Guizot were guillotined, Tocqueville’s parents were imprisoned (their lives spared thanks
only to Robespierre’s downfall), while his great-grandfather and the entire Malesherbes family were executed. Mme de Staël,
for her part, narrowly escaped the street violence of September 1792 and was forced into exile.
9 She subsequently helped many of her liberal noble friends to emigrate, only to help them return to France after the Terror.
It is also important to note, as Tocqueville did in
L’Ancien Régime et la Révolution, that the Revolution and Bonaparte appropriated certain traits of the
ancien régime (centralization, administrative justice, etc.), which, rather than weakening the state, strengthened it. Of course, the
Revolution created a representation of the collective actor, the nation. This was something that
ancien régime absolutism had been unable and unwilling to do since, unlike in England where the Parliament emerged as early as the thirteenth
century, only the king could represent ‘his people’. But the conception of this representation, which was significantly shaped
by Sieyès, entrusted the task of defining the ‘general will’ to a minority, namely, the elected representatives, whom Sieyès
hoped would become the professionals of politics.
10 The general will was reputedly not present in the electoral assemblies (including those based on census suffrage), but in
the elected Assembly that embodied the nation. Sieyès thus distinguished ‘democracy’ from ‘representative government’, which
was conceived such that the nation could exist as a political unit and express the general will only through its representatives.
11 Intermediary bodies and the direct consultation of the people were unacceptable in political affairs. The unity of will took
shape in the Assembly alone.
During the successive debates in the Constituent Assembly on two important legislative proposals, Le Chapelier explained that
to create deliberative bodies (professional trade unions or political clubs) would be to reconstitute the corporations abolished
by the Revolution.
12 He accused the Jacobins of recreating a both archaic and dangerously innovative form of the corporation in order to prolong
the unrest, even though, he insisted, ‘the Revolution is over’ and ‘public opinion is known’.
13 Finally, it is worth noting that freedom of association did not figure among the rights enunciated in the Declaration of
1789, nor those listed at the beginning of the Constitution of 1791.
The Revolution, therefore, did nothing to diminish the prestige of the state (nor did the various groups that governed it
between 1789 and 1799). On the contrary, the Revolution reinforced it through the dual legitimization provided by elections
and, as Marcel Gauchet has demonstrated, the rights of man.
14 The state’s prestige consisted principally in the idea that it held a monopoly on the general interest, its definition and
elaboration. In this, the administration was seen simply as the arm of the state and its executive branch. A distinguished
jurist of the Restoration, Henrion de Pansey, justified the French administration’s privilege of jurisdiction with a now famous
phrase: ‘To judge the administration is still to administer’ (‘Juger l’administration, c’est encore administrer’), whence
Bonaparte’s decision to create a specific administrative court, the Conseil d’État, which the Orléanistes defended while in
power during the July Monarchy, including against the criticism directed at it by the group led first by Constant and later
by Tocqueville. It was similar reasoning that justified the extraordinary protection granted to state officials, who, ever
since the Constitution of the Year VIII (that of Bonaparte), could not be tried before an ordinary judge, unless specifically
authorized by the Conseil d’État.
15 In disputes between a citizen and the administration, the ruling was not issued before an ordinary judge but before the
conseil de préfecture, in the first instance, or by the Conseil d’État in Paris, which was ‘the judge of the administration’ (at the time, often
composed of officials and administrators). Certain liberal figures, including Tocqueville, therefore accused the state of
breaching the rule against bias.
Not only was the administrative state the bearer of the general interest, which it alone could comprehend, but it also protected
individuals in civil society against the threat of monopolies, private interests and the interests of a whole range of bodies.
This conception, according to which nothing and no one was better placed than the state to protect the individual against
invasive social and religious interests, was appropriated by prominent republicans such as Alfred Fouillée, one of the key
figures of the République enseignante, early in the twentieth century. Fouillée wrote:
If the individual is left unarmed in the face of all manner of associations, trade unions, cooperatives … anonymous companies,
financial associations, trusts and cartels, and so on, how will he defend his rights or even his legitimate interests …? The
poor soul will be powerless against these coalitions. He must therefore receive the support of a central authority with a
universal perspective of things … In short, if individuals are to become increasingly free, then the state, in areas where
it is competent, must become increasingly strong.
16
This is the reasoning that led to the French idea (born during the Revolution) of ‘public services’ as administrative services
devoted to the general interest and free from the criteria and laws of the market
(competition, profitability, etc.). When Benjamin Constant explained that the general interest was distinct from private interests
but ‘not opposed to them’, and that the general interest emerged from the representation of diverse local interests, he was
opposing a strong current of thought in French political culture: that of the supremacy of the general interest over private
interests, and of the qualitative difference between the two (administration versus civil society).
17According to French constitutional doctrine, which still holds today, a Member of Parliament ‘represents the entire nation’
and not his or her electoral constituency (the département, for example), nor the interests that support his or her candidature. Every elected Member of Parliament is a bearer of the
general will, in union with his equals in the National Assembly.
The criteria that separated the Coppet group from Guizot’s variant of liberalism (that of the
Doctrinaires, then the Orléanistes) was
individualism, understood as the right to judge and control laws and power. Whereas the Coppet group analysed power and its necessary limits
from the point of view of society and the individual, the
Doctrinaires favoured the state, society’s notables and the administrative support that served these notables at the local level. As Rudolf
Von Thadden has shown, these issues came to the fore when decentralization was discussed early during the Restoration period.
18 Napoleon protected against the aftershocks of the Revolution by laying ‘masses of granite’, as he expressed it: that is,
the institutions not of the modern ‘constitutional’ state, but of the administrative state. The executive authority prevailed
in all areas (economy, universities, newspapers, freedom of assembly, the Council of State, prefects, etc.). Louis XVIII and
his advisers were confronted with a crucial question: should the edifice built by Napoleon be maintained or something
else erected in its place? Guizot, who was still very young but already occupied key positions within the administration,
believed that there was a high risk of civil war (a ‘White Terror’ launched, in the provinces, by the ultras and other factions).
Moreover, allied forces still occupied France, and a burdensome war tax remained.
19 Thus the
Doctrinaires, and, during the July Monarchy, the Orléanistes, decided to preserve the ‘masses of granite’, while liberalizing the institutions.
As Guizot later explained in a parliamentary speech of 1846: ‘freedom can enter these great machines created by the Empire
for the defence and restoration of power. You have seen it; you have experienced it.’
20 Thus, the state should limit itself rather than have local or centralized measures hold it back. Pierre Rosanvallon has shown
that Guizot’s considerations were far more sociological than legal, since his objective was to strengthen the ties between
the middle classes and the administration. ‘It is important’, Guizot told the Members of Parliament, ‘that your local administration,
your officials, and your laws help to rally and organize these conservative classes.’ In the same speech before the elected
Chamber, he called for ‘the intimate union of the majority and the administration, and of the administration and the majority’,
which – although Guizot denied it – led to the trading of favours.
21 With unparalleled clarity, Guizot also expressed the guiding principle, which in fact maintained the Napoleonic spirit but
sought to place the administration at the service of the ‘new aristocracy’ of the middle classes: ‘The local administration
must be one, homogeneous, animated by the same spirit, and led in the same direction, whereas the influences must control
the government here, and the administration at the local level.’
22 Liberty as interpreted by the
Doctrinaire group is, I would argue, a
liberalism by the state and not against the state. Such a conception
follows in the French statist tradition from the absolutist era and has thrived until very recently.
In contrast, the Coppet group’s ‘individualist’ variant of liberalism promoted individual autonomy supported by constitutional
freedoms. Indeed, Mme de Staël in 1795 and Constant in 1814–15 made significant contributions to constitutional thought.
23 Constant also formulated a thesis of
legitimate resistance to unjust laws, something derided by Guizot and Royer-Collard as the very type of ‘intellectual anarchy’ characteristic of
the 1820s.
24 In these same texts, Guizot called for a ‘government that leads society’ (‘gouvernement chef de la société’). Both phrases
can be found in the work of August Comte.
25 It is worth noting that Constant accepted census suffrage. However, unlike Guizot, he did not believe it to be an unalterable
and everlasting political principle. In his famous response to Garnier-Pagès concerning universal suffrage, Guizot expressed
his irreversible position: ‘The day of universal suffrage will never come. There will never be a day when all human creatures,
whatever they may be, will be called upon to exercise political rights.’
26Liberal Catholicism, the third variant of liberalism, appeared in 1828 in response to the debate on the freedom of religious
education. Although it remained a fringe movement, liberal Catholicism gave voice to many tensions of the time, and therefore
encountered a degree of resonance in public opinion. Liberal Catholics demanded the liberties promised in 1789 but which the
governments of the July Monarchy restricted or abolished: freedom of the press, freedom of association (a crucial point for
the church and the religious orders), a far-reaching decentralization, and freedom of education (the right to recruit teachers,
the right – shared with the state – to award the baccalaureate, etc.). But liberal Catholicism
also held views that necessarily conflicted with modern conceptions, because of the so-called ‘rights of Truth’ doctrine,
which held that only the Catholic truth was entitled to rights, since error can have no rights. This was the reasoning that
pushed the church to favour censure. In theory, Lacordaire explained, it was correct that the church should control publications
(books and newspapers). But this was no longer possible in modern democratic societies, and it was thus necessary to agree
to the freedom of expression. ‘Freedom does not kill God’, he concluded in a noteworthy article in the newspaper
L’Avenir, the principal mouthpiece of the liberal Catholic movement in 1830.
27Despite sitting uncomfortably between the old and the new (as displayed, for example, by its love of freedom and its fear
of sceptical individualism), liberal Catholicism acted as a spur to other political parties. Its intermediary position meant
that it hindered attempts by liberal Orléanistes such as Victor Cousin to replace the authority of the church in universities
with a new ‘spiritual power’. At the Notre Dame Lectures that took place during the July Monarchy, Lacordaire, who restored
the Dominican order, managed to assemble all of the country’s elite, believers and non-believers, who came in their thousands
to listen to him.
28 Of course, the liberal Catholics viewed the struggle for freedom as having a distinctly moral and
spiritual as well as political dimension. This is what inspired Lacordaire to commit himself to the Republic; in 1848 he was elected
a Member of Parliament wearing the Dominican habit. This view also led Montalembert to defend parliamentary freedoms against
Napoleon III.
In 1838, Lacordaire summed up the meaning of their shared commitment to people’s rights in a letter to his friend:
What is it that we value in this modern era that began with the American Revolution of 1776? We value the passing of three
elements that were destructive to the Catholic Church, our eternal home, namely: absolutism, Gallicanism, and rationalism.
We love the present era because it saps the absolutist power of the princes and raises the spirit that, over the past three
centuries, has been violently
crushed. Without playing an active part in any particular revolutionary episode, we witness each of them as great acts of
God, a tragedy in which the freedom of the Church is at stake, and, through it, the liberation of humanity.
29
It is noteworthy that Lacordaire’s position, which saw the hand of God at work in revolutionary history, and criticized traditional
sovereignty, absolute monarchy and the intolerance of the church, was exactly the reverse of the views held by someone like
Joseph de Maistre.
By a mixture of audacity and tradition, liberal Catholicism combined democratic references with ultramontain calls for the
Pope to lead the people’s liberation. It was first Lamennais, a convert from far-right royalism to liberalism, who ventured
this eclectic conception, which was both authoritarian and democratic in spirit. In the
Avenir newspaper, which he helped found in 1830, Lamennais advocated the advent of the Republic and the clear separation of state
and church, a proposal that flew in the face of traditional opinion (the right-wing ultramontain Catholics, republicans, Orléanistes,
conservative liberals, individualists and Voltairians, etc.). Although Montalembert was initially far less convinced than
Lacordaire by the merits of democracy, he accepted the modern freedoms before a congress of 3,000 people in Mechelen in 1863,
and declared democracy, as analysed by Tocqueville, the inevitable fact of modern times: ‘The more democratic one is, the
more Christian one has to be.’
30However, there were two occasions when liberal Catholicism suffered significant public defeats at the hands of the Holy See.
First, in 1832, despite the pilgrimage to Rome that Montalembert, Lacordaire and the Abbé Lamennais had earlier undertaken
to explain the views they were propagating, the Vatican condemned the theses expounded in
L’Avenir, and subsequently those of Lamennais (the movement’s principal representative).
31 The second occasion was when accusations were directed against Montalembert, whose close ties to the Vatican did not spare
him
severe criticism in the
Syllabus (1866), a litany of all the errors of modernity according to the Holy See. Open hostilities broke out between Montalembert
and Rome’s theologians as the proclamation, during the Vatican Council, of the Pope’s dogmatic infallibility neared (1870).
Shortly before his death, Montalembert announced publicly that Rome had created a veritable ‘idol’. In response, the Holy
See launched a stinging and damaging attack against liberal Catholicism, which lasted until the Second Vatican Council (opened
in 1962) retracted its ‘rights of Truth’ doctrine and accepted some of the movement’s demands.
If we compare the three variants that we have looked at here – individualist, elitist and Catholic – it becomes apparent that
the pivotal question is the role given to the individual as a subject of judgement in politics and on institutional matters.
In essence, what is at stake is ‘the right to judge one’s right’ that expresses a faith in the freedom of the citizen- individual,
or, when this right is refused, the attempt to ‘erase’ it, as indicated in the title of the book
L’individu effacé (
The Erased Individual).
32 It is, in truth, out of respect for
authority that the groups led by Guizot and Montalembert expressed only limited faith in individual liberty. But whereas Guizot’s concerns
had their roots in society (and more specifically, his distrust of the masses), Montalembert was concerned with spiritual
authority (as endorsed by the church), and mistrustful of Protestantism, as a possible support for liberalism. Nonetheless,
Guizot’s Protestantism does not help to clarify matters, because, on several occasions, Guizot openly expressed his admiration
for the Catholic Church as a ‘school of authority’. Furthermore, his was a pessimistic vision of man – one which, he conceded,
was of direct inspiration to his politics: modern pride, he claimed, led to a teratological occurrence, namely, a democracy
of equal individuals.
33Most probably due to its Swiss and Protestant heritage, the Coppet group, for its part, promoted the individual’s spirit of
initiative and critique. On this specific point, one can draw comparisons between Constant’s considerations in
On Religion or in his manuscript
The Principles of Politics (of 1806) and those of a minister such as Alexandre Vinet, who, through the
newspaper
Le Semeur, gained considerable influence in Switzerland and in France. Constant argued, for example, that the freedom of intellectuals
and men of thought had no need to seek or accept the protection offered by state power. Furthermore, he contended that ‘if
one had to choose between persecution and protection, persecution would be more valuable to intellectual life’.
34 Analogous views can be found in his compatriot Vinet’s
Essai sur la manifestation des convictions religieuses.
35 Religion, Vinet argued, was an individual affair, between the soul and God, rather than a collective concern. If society
and the state were declared religious, then conscience would no longer be free. Therefore, ‘is it surprising that I prefer
persecution to protection?’
36 This intransigence vis-à-vis what both authors named ‘individuality’, which they differentiated from ‘individualism’, picked
up on the attitude of Pierre Bayle and a form of Protestant intransigence with regard to the freedom of judgement.
37 It gave rise to a series of different social and institutional options, leading, in the French case, to choices that characterized,
in particular, the variant founded by Mme de Staël, and which posited both the subject of judgement and the personal appraisal
of political and moral legitimacy.
The question of the freedom of the press (including both books and newspapers) was one of the hardest-fought battles of the
nineteenth century, and an issue on which the liberals, in particular, took both firm stands and conflicting positions. Between
1814 and 1880 (when the last and current French law on newspapers was adopted), no fewer than thirty-six ‘freedom of the press’
laws (primarily concerning newspapers) were voted
on. Including the four decrees promulgated under Napoleon III, a total of forty legislative and regulatory measures were approved
on the issue during this period. Matters could hardly have been more different in the United States, where, as demonstrated
by Tocqueville in
Democracy in America, the few newspapers that did exist were cheap, rather badly written, and not very well regarded by the reading public. In
France, however, journalists were in direct contact with (and therefore had influence over) political power, and their work,
considered a form of literary art, was met with a level of esteem – even consecration – that has persisted until today. Journalism
in France was widely expected to act as the rival of government, and at times even as a form of opposition to it. The liberals
claimed they were taking journalism down a peg. But in reality, and like all other political parties, they contributed to
its rising importance. The role journalism played in the events of 1789, 1830 and 1848 was fundamental: it gave life to public
opinion as a force of dissent.
The first liberal press laws, which put an end to the censorship system (whereby
prior authorization was required to publish an article), were devised by the
Doctrinaire group. The three legislative proposals, presented in March and adopted in May and June 1819, were an occasion for Royer-Collard,
Victor de Broglie, Hercule de Serre and Guizot to expound their remarkable views on the matter in a series of particularly
insightful and revealing speeches.
38 Guizot was still too young to be a Member of Parliament, but, as commissioner to the king, he spoke to the Assembly in support
of the government’s proposal on the principle of guarantee (‘cautionnement’) applied to the daily press. According to this
principle, the founder of a newspaper had to provide ‘guarantees to society’, i.e. a capital deposit, a procedure, which,
by selecting the protagonists entitled to take part in public debate, was based on similar principles to those that underpinned
census suffrage. The historical and sociological analysis on which he embarked was telling.
39 The Revolution, Guizot explained, introduced ‘the principle of equality’ across society, which generated an irreversible
atomization: ‘today, in France, nothing remains besides the government, citizens and individuals. Public authority is the
only real and strong power. There is barely anything left of those intermediary or local powers, which, elsewhere, are created
under
the patronage of the aristocracy, by the ties between corporations, or by private privilege.’
40It is, of course, to England that Guizot was referring here. In his lessons, he pushed the comparison further still: in France,
he argued, the nobility had become a discredited class of limited significance, whereas in Great Britain, of all the intermediary
bodies, it was the aristocracy that constituted a source of service, patronage, emulation and social promotion. The functions
carried out by these intermediary bodies in Britain ought to be taken over, in France, by a communication channel between
society and the state, which was guaranteed under the watchful eye of power; this, therefore, was the role of the administration
(described above), on the one hand, and of the press, on the other.
Guizot believed that the
aristocratic liberalism for which certain figures clamoured (Fiévée at the time, Tocqueville, later) was not a viable alternative. And
yet
democratic liberalism, as defended by Constant, was far more dangerous. For within the middle class – i.e. the bourgeoisie – called
upon to support the regime, individuals had to be protected and restrained. They needed protection from the radical views
(Bonapartism, republicanism, socialist utopias, etc.) to which they might easily succumb, according to the progressive vision
of history inherited from the Enlightenment.
41 They also needed to be restrained from directing their criticism at the local administration, which would have weakened the
powers recently provided for by the Charter of Louis XVIII: ‘On the contrary, here in France [unlike in England] the government
and the entire administration are intimately linked, or, rather, are one and the same thing … The government is no longer
fallible only at its heart, but is now present everywhere and vulnerable everywhere
via a multitude of agents.’
42Guizot was evidently expressing his fears based on his analysis of France in 1819. The press, he believed, was a formidable
weapon (with which Napoleon had so successfully governed), and it was crucial to prevent right- and left-wing opponents from
seizing it.
43 He was quite certain that hostile individuals would attempt to use the multiplicity of newspapers, which were published throughout
the country, to ‘engage
the administration in a small continual war, over the course of which an offensive approach bears so many advantages’.
44This point was disputed by Constant on the very same day.
45 The press, he claimed, was not a ‘means of government’, as Guizot would put it two years later in a manifesto brochure.
46 It was, above all, a means of control that society seizes in order to oversee authority. Preparing the ground that Tocqueville
would later tread, he went on to argue that newspapers were not durable creations belonging to the intellectual elite, but
the ephemeral product of the present. They served to:
denounce abuses, host complaints, and draw attention to arbitrary acts and excesses of power. Newspapers are not collections
of philosophy: they are, and must be, a means of recourse with which oppressed individuals can make their cases heard; they
may be denied access to ordinary means of appeal, but the effects of publicity can ensure that these cases are brought to
the ears of the government.
47
The disagreement between the two was complete, as indeed it would later be between Guizot and Tocqueville under the July Monarchy.
To simplify, we could say that Constant defended the individuals’ freedom of action (and even that of the ‘oppressed’) in
opposition to power, while Guizot’s main concern was to make power vigilant and purposeful, including in support of, or as
a mentor to, its clumsy allies in the middle class.
The respective visions of France’s most accomplished liberal figures were not merely conditioned by the circumstances of the
Restoration, they also expressed a philosophy of power and a specific interpretation of history. For Guizot, history had drawn
to a close with the rise of the middle class; and thanks to the constitutional system of the Charter, he claimed – in a similar
vein to Le Chapelier in 1791 – that the Revolution was ‘over’. Constant, however, believed that there was still much work
to be done on the path to perfectibility and equality, a theme that Tocqueville would eventually champion.
48The political ‘parties’, representing the principal options available at the time, were also a constituent part of this debate.
Both Royer-Collard and the
Doctrinaires insisted that there should be not more than three or four families of newspapers, isomorphic to the existing ‘parties’.
49 Constant hoped that an extensive range of newspapers would be established across the country – throughout the provinces,
not just in Paris. This debate would regularly resurface during the years that followed, with the principle of guarantee abolished
only in 1881, once the issue of universal suffrage had been resolved.
We can conclude that liberalism in France displayed many facets. In truth, one can distinguish
several liberalisms, which competed against one another after the fall of the Empire. Rather than advocate a fundamental overhaul or a rupture
with the past (an approach that would have embraced Constant’s theses), the governing liberal variant (principally Orléanism)
adopted a strategy of appeasement (although not towards the church) and sought to practise what Guizot termed a ‘conservative
politics’.
50 But this policy was a marked failure, particularly given its inability to deal with the working classes, which saw the regime
harden its stance in the face of repeated uprisings and subversive plots. Despite the failure of Guizot and the July Monarchy,
liberalism would subsequently have a considerable influence on republican thought during the Third Republic. The ‘government
of minds’, which Victor Cousin and Guizot both claimed was the defining issue in modern societies, consisted in ensuring
hierarchical promotion, thereby reconciling elitism and egalitarianism.
51 Herein resides the crux of the current controversy surrounding the training and formation of France’s ruling elite.
The problem of the groups capable of governing, imprudently referred to by many as ‘the new aristocracy’, captivated Guizot
and the Orléanistes; the tremendous rifts caused by the Revolution had left Napoleon with the same problem. In fact, we know
today that it was the administrative personnel, far more than the bourgeoisie, that was called upon to lead a state that many
believed could emancipate society by guiding, enlightening and managing it. Thereafter, the republican project, in seeking
solutions to the political involvement and adequate representation of the rural population, picked up on ideas Guizot had
tentatively started to formulate. For example, in 1833, a law introducing primary schools in every commune was passed.
52 Civic education, love of the fatherland, and the importance of respect and morality filled the teaching manuals of the Third
Republic. Later, in 1902, Durkheim appealed for nothing less in the pedagogy lectures he gave at the Sorbonne: liberty, he
claimed, has its roots in rules devised collectively, while individualism is acceptable only if disciplined. This was the
meaning of the ‘government of minds’ (by then a famous expression), at least until the beginning of the First World War, when
gloomier reflections started to take hold. The philosopher and master pedagogue Alfred Fouillée expressed a debt of gratitude
to Guizot for his critique of universal suffrage and the idea of a necessarily hierarchical society structured according to
merit and status.
53Today’s transformations, a result of European integration and globalization, are far-reaching. The Coppet group’s long-forgotten
words are being rediscovered in light of the new trends confronting French political culture: the autonomy of civil society,
the unprecedented prevalence of pluralism and multiple identities, the questioning of the prestige of the
state (morality or efficiency) and not only of its occupants, the instrumentalization by individuals or citizens of a judiciary
emancipated from the executive authority, etc. Now, as before, it is obvious that the idea of liberalism in France involves
a revision and a reappropriation of individualism. This need is not uncommon in times of crisis, and was also apparent during
the era of Le Chapelier, or during the Dreyfus affair, which pushed Durkheim to reconsider the theory of the social bond,
solidarity and individualism. The current French Republic wants to be liberal, but it can no longer be the tutelary, all-knowing
and distant state that was constructed at a specific moment in history. The cards have been reshuffled, as witnessed by the
notions of ‘left-wing liberalism’ and ‘liberal socialism’, the latter an expression that was already prevalent among a number
of Durkheim’s students, including Célestin Bouglé. The
paradoxes of liberalism in France, far from being a matter of purely historical debate, are, on the contrary, taking on a new life.
Translated from French by Michael Breslin