R E V O L U T I O N A N D T H E R E P U B L I C
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Revolution and the
Republic
A History of Political Thought in France
since the Eighteenth Century
J E R E M Y J E N N I N G S
1
3
Great Clarendon Street, Oxford OX2 6DP
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# Jeremy Jennings 2011
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In memory of Jack Greenleaf
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Acknowledgements
In the course of the years spent writing this book I have incurred many debts and it
is a pleasure to record my thanks to the friends, colleagues, and institutions that
have provided invaluable support.
Between 1997 and 2000 I was in receipt of a research grant from the Economic
and Social Research Council; in 1998, 2002, 2006, and 2007 I received research
funding from the British Academy; and in 2008–9 received a grant through the
Research Leave programme of the Arts and Humanities Research Council. The
latter enabled me to finish this project.
In 2002–3 I had the extreme good fortune to be a visiting fellow at the Columbia
University Institute for Scholars at Reid Hall in Paris and I gratefully acknowledge
the help and support of the Institute’s Director, Danielle Haase-Dubosc, and of
Michaela Bacou and Brune Biebuyck. In 2006 I had the great honour of holding
the post of Vincent Wright Professor at the Institut d’Études Politiques in Paris and
wish especially to thank Patrick Le Galès and his colleagues at CEVIPOF for
making this such a memorable and productive experience. In 2005–6 I was Visiting
Research Fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study at Indiana University, Blooming-
ton, and express my deepest appreciation for the support I received from its director,
Ivona Hedin. Jeff Isaacs, Russell Hanson, and Elinor Ostrom of the Indiana Univer-
sity Department of Political Science were never less than generous and enthusiastic
hosts.
I would also like to thank the libraries and librarians who provided invaluable
assistance over many years of research. In addition to the staff at the Bibliothèque
Nationale in Paris and of the Rare Books Room of the British Library in London,
my thanks go to the library of the Musée Social in Paris and in particular to the late
Colette Chambelland and to Michel Prat.
On a number of occasions I have been able to discuss ideas developed in this
volume at conferences organized by Liberty Fund. These have always proved to be
immensely rewarding and enriching meetings and through them I have had the
opportunity to converse at length in the most supportive of surroundings with
scholars from across the world. Special thanks go to Liberty Fund Fellows Christine
Dunn Henderson and Mark E. Yellin.
Such has been the length of time I have spent working on this project that during
the course of its writing I have taught at the Universities of Swansea, Birmingham,
and London. In each case it is a pleasure to record my thanks to these institutions
and to my colleagues, both past and present. In London I have benefited greatly
from the friendship, conversation, and advice of Richard Bellamy, Richard Bourke,
Angus Gowland, Simon Green, Colin Jones, Daniel Johnson, Chandran Kukathas,
Cécile Laborde, Ian Malcolm, Niall O’Flaherty, Mark Pennington, Richard Shan-
non, Quentin Skinner, Georgios Varouxakis, Robert Willer, and, as always, Julian
Jackson.
viii
Acknowledgements
It goes without saying that I owe an enormous debt to colleagues and friends in
France. These are too numerous to list. However, I wish in particular to express my
thanks to Patrice Gueniffey, Lucien Jaume, and Farhad Khosrokhavar. Above all,
I take this opportunity to express my warmest thanks to Christophe Prochasson
who, for almost thirty years, has been my friend and guide. Through him I extend
my thanks to the Prochasson and Curé families for their unfailing generosity and
kindness. I similarly thank my good friends Marie-Laurence and Jean Netter.
Much of the best work on French intellectual history comes out of North America
and I have been exceptionally fortunate in having had the opportunity to make the
acquaintance of and learn from many colleagues working there. Among those I would
especially like to thank are: Barbara Allen, Richard Boyd, Henry C. Clark, Bryan
Garsten, Alan Kahan, Herman (Gene) Lebovics, Mark Lilla, Daniel J. Mahoney,
Samuel Moyn, Jennifer Pitts, Helena Rosenblatt, Filippo Sabetti, David Schalk,
James T. Schleifer, Steven Vincent, Charles Walton, Cheryl Welch, Richard
Wolin, and, last but by no means least, my dear friend and collaborator Aurelian
Craiutu.
On another continent, I express my thanks to Eduardo Nolla.
I would also like to thank Stephanie Ireland and Briony Ryles at Oxford
University Press and Jane Robson for excellent copy-editing.
Sadly my first university teacher and head of departme
nt, Jack Greenleaf, died
before this book was completed. It is to his memory that it is dedicated.
Jeremy Jennings
London, May 2010
Contents
Introduction: Revolution and the Republic
1
1. Rights, Liberty, and Equality
29
2. Absolutism, Representation, and the Constitution
66
3. Sovereignty, the Social Contract, and Luxury
108
4. Commerce, Usurpation, and Democracy
147
5. Universalism, the Nation, and Defeat
197
6. History, Revolution, and Terror
237
7. Religion, Enlightenment, and Reaction
298
8. Positivism, Science, and Philosophy
344
9. Insurrection, Utopianism, and Socialism
388
10. France, Intellectuals, and Engagement
440
Conclusion: Citizenship, Multiculturalism, and Republicanism
507
Chronology of Modern French History
531
Index
537
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Introduction
Revolution and the Republic
I
When, in January 1789, Louis XVI summoned the Estates-General to meet in
Versailles he could little have imagined that, less than three years later, the
monarchy itself would be overthrown and that, soon afterwards, he would be
executed in the Place de la Révolution. In that short period of time, the feudal
order had been destroyed, the aristocracy had been abolished, the Catholic
Church had been deprived of both its property and its independence, and, no
less significantly, the Republic had been proclaimed on 22 September 1792.
‘Nobody’, William Doyle has written, ‘could have predicted that things would
work out as they did.’1
What occurred during the French Revolution is central to the argument of
this book.2 Our starting point is that these tumultuous events marked the decisive
moment in the history of modern France, even though, in an often repeated phrase,
the Revolution was something of a mistake. What the revolutionaries of 1789
intended, in other words, was not what came out of the Revolution and this was so
because at its heart was a process of dérapage.3 The Revolution was ‘blown off
course’ by a series of factors, most notably economic mismanagement, divisions
within the revolutionary elite, the flight of the king and his recapture at Varennes in
June 1791, and, most importantly, the declaration of war against France’s neigh-
bours in the following year. The Revolution thus deviated from the path envisaged
by the members of the National Assembly in the summer of 1789. What many of
its leaders appear to have wanted was a modernized monarchy and a reformed
constitution based broadly upon the model of England and the separation of
powers. This was swiftly rejected as the Revolution rushed headlong towards
a fundamental reconstruction of society.
Unless otherwise stated the place of publication is Paris.
1 William Doyle, The Origins of the French Revolution (Oxford, 1988), 213.
2 Gary Kates (ed.), The French Revolution: Recent Debates and New Controversies (London, 1998)
and Robert Alexander, Re-writing the French Revolutionary Tradition (Cambridge, 2003).
3 François Furet and Denis Richet, La Révolution française, 2 vols. (1965–6).
2
Introduction: Revolution and the Republic
Nothing quite like the French Revolution had been seen before.4 It was seen
by its participants and by those who viewed it from afar as a revolution precisely
because it sought to change all aspects of life. This included the calendar and
currency; weights and measures; place and street names; the description of physical
space and time; as well as public and religious festivals. ‘While debating about
clocks and hats’, Lynn Hunt has written, ‘the deputies were developing their
notions about politics, representation and hierarchy.’5 The manner in which a
person spoke or dressed came to be as politically significant as what they wrote or
did. Far from being unimportant, this figured as part of the attempt to create a ‘new
man’.6 The end pursued came to transcend that of mere constitutional reform and
became that of the creation of a virtuous people. To refer again to Lynn Hunt: ‘the
social and economic changes brought about by the Revolution were not revolu-
tionary. . . . In the realm of politics by contrast virtually everything changed.’7
We need not dwell upon the protracted debate about the origins of the Revolu-
tion.8 Recent accounts, far from emphasizing the mounting class conflict between
nobility and bourgeoisie9 or the Revolution’s social and economic causes, have
located these origins in two unrelated phenomena: the bankruptcy of the French
state following the financially ruinous involvement in the American War of
Independence and the economic crisis of 1788 arising from the general harvest
failure of that year. As François Furet explained with something of a rhetorical
flourish:10 ‘From 1787, the kingdom of France had been a society without a State.’
Beyond the façade of monarchical authority, there lay only ‘panic and disorder’.
The Revolution simply took over an ‘empty space’, in the process filling the
enormous vacuum created by the sudden and near-total collapse of the once-
mighty Bourbon monarchy. Yet, and this is at the heart of so much that was to
follow, ‘the revolutionary consciousness, from 1789 on, was informed by the
illusion of defeating a State that had already ceased to exist’. Out of this came
‘the ideology of a radical break with the past’ and with this arose ‘a tremendous
cultural drive for equality’.11
4 For a more nuanced perspective see Michael Sonenscher, Before the Deluge: Public Debt, Inequality,
and the Intellectual Origins of the French Revolution (Princeton, 2007).
5 Lynn Hunt, Politics, Culture and Class in the French Revolution (Berkeley and Los Angeles,
1984), 79.
6 Mona Ozouf, L’Homme régénéré: Essais sur la Révolution française (1989), 116–57.
7 Hunt, Politics, Culture and Class, 221.
8 See Doyle, Origins, 7–40, and Peter R. Campbell (ed.), The Origins of the French Revolution
(London, 2006).
9 See Sarah Maza, The Myth of the French Bourgeoisie: An Essay on the Social Imaginary, 1750–1850
(Cambridge, Mass., 2003). Maza’s bold thesis is that ‘the French bourgeois did not exist’.
10 See Furet, La Révolution française (2007). For a commentary on Furet’s work, see Ran Halévi,
L’Expérience du passé: François Furet dans l’atelier de l’histoire (2007) and Tony Judt, ‘François Furet
(1927–1997)’, New York Review of Books (6 Nov. 2002), 41–2. As Furet expressed it in Le Monde
published on 19 May 1992: ‘What continues to astonish me in retrospect is that in an event that was so
dominantly and so extraordinarily political, people for so long wanted to see either social
transformation or the emergence of capitalism.’
11 Furet, Interpreting the French Revolution (Cambridge, 1981), 24–5.
Introduction: Revolution and the Republic
3
There a
re various dimensions to this account. One, drawing upon the work of
Guy Chaussinand-Nogaret,12 suggests that the nobility were not the reactionary
and closed caste they were so often taken to be. ‘In cultural development and in the
political and social thought of the Enlightenment’, Chaussinand-Nogaret wrote,
‘nobles played a role as important as the representatives of the Third Estate.’
Moreover, from the 1760s onwards, the nobility took on the idea of merit and
showed themselves as eager as, if not more than, the bourgeoisie to take advantage
of the new commercial opportunities afforded by the market.13 Through marriage
the differences between nobility and middle classes were becoming increasingly
blurred, even though this process was not occurring as quickly as the latter might
have wished. This in turn produced a political programme that would be advanced
by the aristocratic representatives of the National Assembly. ‘Despotism, favourit-
ism, intrigue, irresponsibility, waste’, Chaussinand-Nogaret wrote, ‘these were the
governmental vices that the nobility sought to reform’. In broad terms, this meant
constitutional government, an end to privilege and equality before the law.
What went wrong? At a minimum: two things. First, in the summer of 1789 the
nobility jumped both ways. One group, sheltered (in Chaussinand-Nogaret’s
phrase) from ‘the contaminations of the age’, opposed innovation: the other
‘welcomed the boldest reforms’. Second, and more seriously, the nobility ‘became
the victims of their own line of thought’. By questioning the authority of their right
to hereditary power they irretrievably undermined their own legitimacy. This
argument finds support in more recent work by William Doyle. Prior to the
Revolution, Doyle contends, the French nobility were ‘the most open elite in
Europe’; but during the Revolution itself, he suggests, they proved to be their
own ‘most fateful’ enemies.14
A related part of this argument focuses upon the emergence of the ideology and
rhetoric of anti-nobilism. Here we can draw upon the thesis advanced by Patrice
Higonnet.15 Recognizing that ‘the distance between most nobles and most bour-
geois was not great in 1789’, Higonnet nevertheless contends that there existed
differences, if not of substance, then of style, and that these fed powerfully into
perceptions of what existed, thus distorting the ‘supposed realities of the situation’.
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