The French Republic

History, Values, Debates

Edward G. Berenson, Vincent Duclert, Christophe Prochasson, Edward G. Berenson, Vincent Duclert, Christophe Prochasson

• Publisher: Cornell University Press
• Year: 2011
• Print ISBN: 9780801449017
• eBook ISBN: 9780801461125
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: French History
• Index: History

In this invaluable reference work, the world's foremost authorities on France's political, social, cultural, and intellectual history explore the history and meaning of the French Republic and the challenges it has faced. Founded in 1792, the French Republic has been defined and redefined by a succession of regimes and institutions, a multiplicity of symbols, and a plurality of meanings, ideas, and values. Although constantly in flux, the Republic has nonetheless produced a set of core ideals and practices fundamental to modern France's political culture and democratic life.

Based on the influential Dictionnaire critique de la république, published in France in 2002, The French Republic provides an encyclopedic survey of French republicanism since the Enlightenment. Divided into three sections—"Time and History," "Principles and Values," and "Dilemmas and Debates"—The French Republic begins by examining each of France's five Republics and its two authoritarian interludes, the Second Empire and Vichy. It then offers thematic essays on such topics as Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity; laicity; citizenship; the press; immigration; decolonization; anti-Semitism; gender; the family; cultural policy; and the Muslim headscarf debates. Each essay includes a brief guide to further reading.

This volume features updated translations of some of the most important essays from the French edition, as well as twenty-two newly commissioned English-language essays, for a total of forty entries. Taken together, they provide a state-of-the art appraisal of French republicanism and its role in shaping contemporary France's public and private life.

Contributors: Anne-Claude Ambroise-Rendu, Université de Paris X; Stéphane Audoin-Rouzeau, École des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales (EHESS); Jean Baubérot, EHESS; Edward Berenson, New York University; John R. Bowen, Washington University in St. Louis; Herrick Chapman, New York University; Alice L. Conklin, The Ohio State University, Vincent Duclert, EHESS; Steven Englund, The American University of Paris; Éric Fassin, École Normale Supérieure, Paris; Stéphane Gerson, New York University; Nancy L. Green, EHESS; Patrice Gueniffey, EHESS; Sudhir Hazareesingh, University of Oxford; Ivan Jablonka, Université du Maine, Le Mans, and Collège de France; Julian Jackson, Queen Mary University of London; Paul Jankowski, Brandeis University; Jeremy Jennings, Queen Mary University of London; Dominique Kalifa, University of Paris 1 Panthéon–Sorbonne; Lloyd Kramer, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill; Cécile Laborde, University College London and Institute for Advanced Study; Herman Lebovics, Stony Brook University; Mary Dewhurst Lewis, Harvard University; Philip Nord, Princeton University; Karen M. Offen, Stanford University; Christophe Prochasson, EHESS; Emmanuelle Saada, Columbia University and EHESS; Martin Schain, New York University; Joan Wallach Scott, Institute for Advanced Study; Jerrold Seigel, New York University; Todd Shepard, The Johns Hopkins University; Daniel J. Sherman, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill; Bonnie G. Smith, Rutgers University; Frédéric Viguier, New York University; Rosemary Wakeman, Fordham University; François Weil, EHESS; Johnson Kent Wright, Arizona State University.

Translations from the French by Arthur Goldhammer.

Part I

TIME AND HISTORY

1

THE ENLIGHTENMENT

Johnson Kent Wright

Alphonse Aulard once claimed that the French Revolution could not be said to have had intellectual origins at all, for an obvious reason: prior to 1791, there were simply no republicans in France. Rhetorical exaggeration aside, this captures what is still perhaps the conventional wisdom about the fate of republicanism and republican ideas during the Enlightenment. On this view, the leading French philosophes—Montesquieu, Voltaire, the Encyclopédistes, Holbach, the Physiocrats alike—agreed that republican government was a thing of the past, rendered obsolete by both the sheer size of modern states and the complexity of their functions. Far from any kind of republic, the ideal modern regime, for the Enlightenment, was one form or another of “enlightened despotism”—which, in practice, amounted to a pragmatic compromise with absolute monarchy, whose immanent demise in France none of the philosophes foresaw. The one possible exception, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, proves the rule. For it was precisely Rousseau’s nostalgic republicanism, nurtured by his Genevan background, that led to his ostracism from the Enlightenment; nor did Rousseau himself ever dream that the Bourbon Monarchy might one day give way to a republic. For all these reasons, Aulard maintained that the advent of the First Republic thus owed nothing to the Enlightenment, for which it would have been anathema. Instead, the Republic’s arrival resulted from the abject failure in 1789 of the constitutional monarchy, a form of government far closer to what the philosophes might have approved.

If such remains the conventional view of the Enlightenment attitude toward republics and republicanism, recent scholarship has made it look increasingly inaccurate. Close inspection of the real record of eighteenth-century political thought suggests that the notion of a consensual royalism on the part of the philosophes—much less advocacy of “enlightened despotism”—is largely a myth, and that opinion about republicanism was far more various, and sympathetic, that the above account suggests. Moreover, what is at stake in considering eighteenth-century ideas about republicanism is not merely the issue of political legitimacy or advocacy—how many or few “republicans” there were in France before Varennes—but also the very definition of the term. For it now seems clear that the Enlightenment represented the great transitional epoch in the long history of republicanism in the West—the moment when an old and august tradition of political thought underwent a fascinating process of modernization, with dramatic historical consequences. Indeed, contrary to what is suggested by Aulard’s formula, a grasp of both the variety and the development of republican ideas in the Enlightenment seems crucial for understanding the fate of the great experiments in constitution making during the Revolution.

A century earlier, when the Bourbon Monarchy was at the peak of its international power and prestige, republicanism naturally had a negligible presence in France. In fact, this was likely the moment of lowest ebb for the entire early modern tradition of European republicanism. As a political ideology rooted in Greco-Roman political writing and history, republicanism first emerged in late medieval and Renaissance Italy, where it served to legitimate the resistance of the northern Italian city-states to emperors and popes alike. The sixteenth century saw its diffusion around much of the rest of Europe, as part of the ideological arsenal deployed against absolute monarchy in the epoch of its ascendancy. By the end of the seventeenth, the upheavals that had overthrown Spanish and English absolutism had generated particularly radical versions of republicanism in the United Provinces and England—which, with the older Italian tradition, became the major sources for the revival of republicanism in the eighteenth century. At the same time, the Dutch Revolt (1568–1648) and the English Revolution (1640–60) failed to create stable republics—the latter, spectacularly so. English republicanism, in particular, remained essentially an ideology of protest in the face of restoration, typically utopian or nostalgic in character. Much the same could be said of the far fainter echoes of republican ideas heard in France late in the reign of Louis XIV (1638–1715). Not surprisingly, the earliest premonitions of a republican revival in France were to be found among the Sun King’s aristocratic critics intent on defending the lost “liberty” of the French nobility. These dissidents included Fénelon, whose enormously influential Telemachus used the device of a “virtuous” kingship from classical antiquity to criticize the regime of Versailles. Equally striking was the comte de Boulainvilliers, whose historical writings made the scandalous case that the “feudal government” established by the Frankish nobility in their original conquest of Gaul was the realm’s only legitimate form of rule—“feudal government” understood as a kind of aristocratic republic, expressly assimilated to the “mixed governments,” monarchical and noble, of classical antiquity and the English Commonwealth tradition.

If he was a kind of classical republican, Boulainvilliers was manifestly not an Enlightenment thinker. There is no doubt as to who was responsible for launching the Enlightenment debate about republics. As his most authoritative American commentator, Judith Shklar, has argued, “Montesquieu did for the latter half of the eighteenth century what Machiavelli had done for his century: he defined the terms in which republicanism was to be discussed.” The centerpiece of On the Spirit of the Laws (1748) was a universal taxonomy of three forms of government: republican, monarchical, and despotic; there were, in turn, two forms of republic, determined by the location of sovereign power: aristocratic or democratic. Both forms were animated by the same affective “principle,” virtue or “love of the republic” (specified as “love of equality” in democracies, and a “spirit of moderation” in aristocracies). Indeed, it was Montesquieu who did more than anyone else in the eighteenth century to establish the equation between republicanism and civic “virtue.” This is not to say that Montesquieu was in any sense an advocate of republicanism. On the contrary, while On the Spirit of the Laws offered no theory of historical development as such, there were numerous hints in the book that Montesquieu regarded republican government as having been superseded by the rise of large, commercially oriented monarchies in modern Europe, which were governed by a different “principle” altogether—that of “honor.”

This was not, however, quite the last word on republicanism in On the Spirit of the Laws. There were two other occasions in the text in which one of the central tokens of early-modern republican thought—the idea of a “mixed government”—made very memorable appearances. One was the famous analysis in Book 11 of what Montesquieu regarded as the uniquely libertarian constitution of England, which superimposed a novel doctrine of the “separation of powers” on a more traditional conception of “mixed government.” Elsewhere in the book, Montesquieu described England as a “republic disguised as a monarchy.” But even more striking was the philosopher’s account of modern monarchy itself, whose “nature” was founded on a set of “intermediary, subordinate, and dependent powers” firmly rooted in institutional structures (the clergy and parlements), and a powerful noble class completely missing in despotic governments. As Montesquieu wrote, “the most natural intermediate and subordinate power is that of the nobility. It enters, in a sense, into the essence of monarchy, whose fundamental maxim is, no monarchy, no nobility; no nobility, no monarchy.” Montesquieu stopped short of assimilating modern monarchy to “mixed government” altogether. But there is no doubt that a republican-style “mixture” was central to his conception of the idealized monarchy of his age.

On the Spirit of the Laws thus bestowed a rich but ambiguous publicity on thinking about republics. Montesquieu offered a vivid portrait of republican government proper, even as he cast doubt on its contemporary relevance. Meanwhile, the shadow of a republican-style “mixture” of governmental forms fell across both his analysis of the English constitution and modern monarchy itself. These themes then set the agenda for a second phase in the development of republican ideas, as the early Enlightenment passed into its maturity. Here it is possible to discern a sharp divergence of opinion, not so much over the legitimacy or even the definition of republican government—Montesquieu’s analysis remained authoritative throughout this period—as over the contemporary relevance of each. In other words, the High Enlightenment saw something like a reenactment of the decisive intellectual contest of half a century earlier, the famous “Quarrel of the Ancients and the Moderns.” The “moderns,” in this instance, were those thinkers inclined to render explicit the historical analysis largely buried in Montesquieu’s work. In doing so, they came close to rejecting Montesquieu’s own contemporary appropriations of republican ideas. Voltaire, the Physiocrats, and those who wrote on republics and republicanism for the Encyclopedia were all “modernists,” in this sense. The Encyclopedia articles—Jaucourt’s “République,” in particular—were probably the most influential statements of the case for the historical obsolescence of republican government, above all on the grounds of the sheer size of modern states. Similar arguments could be found in writings of Voltaire, Quesnay, and Mercier de la Rivière, each of whom, meanwhile, wrote scathing critiques of the sort of governmental “mixtures” associated with On the Spirit of the Laws. At the same time, it is important not to exaggerate the antirepublicanism, as it were, of these or any other “modernist” thinkers of the High Enlightenment. Neither Voltaire, the Encyclopédistes, nor the Physiocrats were anything like conventional apologists for absolute monarchy. Indeed, the normative basis for the political thought of all three turned on conceptions of popular sovereignty derived from contemporary social contract theory—very explicitly so in the case of Diderot’s own articles on politics in the Encyclopedia, and even the Physiocratic theory of “legal despotism.” Moreover, none of these was immune to at least some of the attractions of republicanism. Voltaire could, on occasion, give it the warmest appreciation, as in his famous “Republican Ideas” of 1765, written as the result of immersion in Genevan affairs. Diderot may well have ended his intellectual career fully convinced of the possibility of creating a French republic. And in the late 1770s and 1780s, Physiocratic political economy, in a classic illustration of unintended intellectual consequences, provided the seedbed for the emergence of the first fully modern conceptions of republicanism in France.

In the meantime, however, these “modernists” had long since been answered by a formidable set of “ancients” no less indebted to Montesquieu, thinkers profoundly convinced of the contemporary relevance of his analysis of republicanism. Among these, Rousseau might be thought to need no introduction. In fact, it is only recently that scholars have begun fully to explore his relation to the wider traditions of early-modern republicanism. This delay, otherwise inexplicable, doubtless has something to do with the position of Rousseau’s thought at the crossroads of both of the major progressive political traditions of his time, traditions whose concepts and values he blended in a unique and unprecedented way. On the one hand, Rousseau was perhaps the most original eighteenth-century theorist of “natural rights,” a modernist preoccupation little indebted to ancient republicanism. His first major work, the Discourse on the Origins of Inequality proceeded via a stringent critique of earlier contract theorists—Pufendorf, Locke, and Hobbes above all. Later, his influential On the Social Contract offered what was in effect the first genuinely democratic contract theory, equating political legitimacy with high levels of egalitarian participation in public decision-making. On the other hand, there is no doubt about Rousseau’s republican credentials, born of a nostalgic attachment to his native Geneva and a profound admiration for the city-state civilization of classical antiquity. He had made his debut as a thinker with a passionate attack on the corrosive effects of the modern arts and sciences on public virtue and private morality, doing so in the name of “Spartan,” republican simplicity; the Discourse on the Origins of Inequality depicted human history as a Polybian nightmare, chronicling the inexorable decline of forms of government into the embrace of “despotism”; the democratic republic outlined in On the Social Contract was inspired by classical example from top to bottom. The theoretical linchpin of the whole system, which made possible this unique blend of natural-rights theory and classical republicanism, was the conceptual innovation of the “general will,” which required not just that laws be “general” in their application—a principle of equality before the law—but also in their source, which amounted to one of popular, participatory sovereignty.

Rousseau was without question the most original republican thinker of the High Enlightenment, but he was far from alone. The same years saw the mature work of the abbé Gabriel Bonnot de Mably, whose thought reflected a far more traditional version of republicanism than that of Rousseau. The elder brother of the philosopher Condillac, Mably had begun as a royalist, but then reversed course, producing philosophical histories of ancient Greece and Rome, holding up the “mixed governments” of an egalitarian Sparta and republican Rome as the acme of political achievement. In 1758, at the height of clashes between the court and the parlements in France, Mably’s republicanism found a particularly radical expression. On the Rights and Duties of the Citizen, a text prudently left unpublished for thirty years, imagines a whispered conversation between an English Commonwealth man—a composite of Harrington and Sidney—and a French proselyte, in which the former first expounds a theory of popular sovereignty and resistance to monarchy, and then presents a scenario for a gentle revolution (révolution ménagée) in France: parliamentary resistance would be used as a lever to secure a convocation of the Estates General, which would then preside over a transition from absolute to constitutional monarchy, conceived of as a species of “mixed government.” In other work of the same period, Mably advanced a neo-Stoic theory of political “virtues” and schemes for the redistribution of property that would later earn him a reputation as a proto-communist. His optimism, however, about the prospects for the successful overthrow of absolute monarchy in France did not last. By the time he completed his mature masterpiece, Observations on the History of France, in 1771, Mably had decided that the trajectory of French history revealed the impossibility of any escape from the era’s decadent despotism. But the event that sealed Mably’s ultimate pessimism—Chancellor Maupeou’s “coup,” which temporarily stripped French parlements of their power—seemed altogether different to other thinkers of similar political temper. Among these was the young Bordeaux lawyer Guillaume-Josephe Saige, who produced one of the most radical pamphlets to emerge from the Maupeou controversy. Saige’s Catechism of the Citizen joined Rousseau’s theory of the “general will” to Mably’s notion of a de facto French constitution that made the French king and people mutually dependent. This mélange yielded a hybrid form of republicanism destined to a play a crucial role during the “pre-Revolution,” some fourteen years later.

These developments, important as they were, did not constitute the Enlightenment’s final word on republicanism. The last two decades before the Revolution saw a third phase in the development of republican ideas, unexpectedly producing a synthesis of the “modernist” and “ancient” positions described above. Two changes in the wider historical context made this synthesis possible. One was the rapidly declining fortunes of the Bourbon Monarchy in the last third of the centu...

Table of contents

• Introduction: Transatlantic Histories of France
• Part I Time and History
• 2 The First Republic
• 3 The Second Republic
• 4 The Republicans of the Second Empire
• 5 The Third Republic
• 6 War and the Republic
• 7 The Republic and Vichy
• 8 The Fourth Republic
• 9 The Fifth Republic
• Part II Principles and Values
• 11 Equality
• 12 Fraternity
• 13 Democracy
• 14 Laicity
• 15 Citizenship
• 16 Universalism
• 17 The Republic and Justice
• 18 The State
• 19 The Civilizing Mission
• 20 Parité
• 21 The Press
• 22 Times of Exile and Immigration
• 23 The USA Sister Republic
• 24 The Local
• Part III Dilemmas and Debates
• 26 Immigration
• 27 The Immigration History Museum
• 28 Decolonization and the Republic
• 29 The Suburbs
• 30 The Republic and the Veil
• 31 Antisemitism, Judeophobia, and the Republic
• 32 Feminism and the Republic
• 33 Gender and the Republic
• 34 Order and Disorder in the Family
• 35 Children and the State
• 36 Commemoration
• 37 Intellectuals and the Republic
• 38 Cultural Policy
• Conclusions
• Beyond the “Republican Model”
• Contributors