organic structure of the Ancien Régime state’. The people, he continues,
discovered the existence of a ‘void’ at the heart of the ‘principal royal functions’.
Ultimately, Roche contends, the ‘divine right monarchy acknowledged its
helplessness’, paving the way for a series of crises crystallized around two main
areas of conflict: the need to solve the kingdom’s financial problems and the
question of whether representation in the recalled Estates-General should take a
traditional or new form. In the end, the decision was made to double the number
of representatives from the Third Estate but to preserve voting by order. The
polarizing consequences of this decision and of the elections that were to follow had
a dramatic impact upon the course of events in the summer of 1789.
If attention has fallen upon the manner in which the Bourbon monarchy
was stripped of its sacred aura, so too it has focused upon the producers of ideas
themselves and, more broadly, the structural dimensions of intellectual life in
France. Moreover, what these inquiries serve to reveal and to emphasize are the
significant levels of continuity between the intellectual practices of pre- and post-
revolutionary France. This also constitutes an important backdrop to the political
ideas to be discussed in this volume.
As is well known, Jürgen Habermas has argued that intellectuals were the repre-
sentatives of an emergent public sphere.59 As the eighteenth century evolved, French
philosophes in the salons, German philosophers in reading societies, and English
writers in coffee houses came together in a social space in order to participate, as
independent thinkers, in the open discussion of matters of cultural and political
interest. The French case is especially intriguing. In the seventeenth century every-
thing was done to bring a rising republic of letters under royal patronage, principally
through such institutions as the Académie Française and the Académie des Sciences.
Similar, if less powerful and prestigious, institutions were created in the provinces.
57 See Robert Darnton, ‘The High Enlightenment and Low-Life Literature in Pre-Revolutionary
France’, Past and Present, 51 (1971), 81–115. See also Simon Burrows, A King’s Ransom: The Life of
Charles Théveneau de Morande, Blackmailer, Scandalmonger and Master-Spy (London, 2010).
58 See Roger Chartier, Les Origines culturelles de la Révolution française (Paris, 1991). Chartier’s
argument is that the 18th cent. saw the emergence of a new way of reading texts, less based on authority
and religion, and more ‘free, casual and critical’ in character.
59 Jürgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category
of Bourgeois Society (Cambridge, Mass., 1989). See also Didier Masseau, L’Invention de l’intellectuel dans
l’Europe du XVIIIe siècle (1994).
14
Introduction: Revolution and the Republic
Freed from the vagaries of aristocratic benefaction, men of letters nevertheless
found themselves compromised, implicated in the broader project of absolutist
state-building and the greater glory of the monarchy.60 In 1662 a report presented
to Louis XIV on the use of the arts ‘for preserving the splendour of the king’s
enterprises’ listed ninety men of letters and their aptitudes to serve the monarch.
This advice was duly followed and from 1663 onwards sizeable pensions were
awarded to writers and scholars. Particular attention was given to historians, with
the appointment of historiographers royal. Over a century later, in 1774, the Baron
de Breuteuil, future first minister of Louis XVI, wrote a memorandum exploring the
question of ‘how to make use of men of letters’, a text that, according to Munro Price,
‘argued that the monarchy should stop treating writers as enemies, as Louis XV had
done in his last years, and instead make friends of them through patronage’.61
As both Daniel Roche and Dena Goodman have observed,62 the salons of
eighteenth-century Paris played a key role in reducing this degree of dependency
upon the State. Here conversation and discussion reigned supreme, and did so in
an atmosphere that became ever less frivolous and ever more preoccupied with
the advance of knowledge. Under the governance of their often-competing female
hosts, the salons brought together people of diverse social backgrounds and nation-
alities, but at their heart were the philosophes.
‘Without being fully conscious of it’, writes Pierre Lepape, the philosophes ‘formed
a new social group characterized by their unfettered use of knowledge and by their
demand for complete liberty of expression, a dispersed community united at the level of
ideas by the same creed of the search for truth by means of reason and experimenta-
tion.’63 It was Voltaire––in the three entries in his Dictionnaire philosophique (1764)
devoted to ‘Philosophes’, ‘Gens de Lettres’ and ‘Lettres, Gens de lettres, ou lettrés’––
who first provided their collective self-portrait and who, in his famous defence of Calas,
gave form to a new type of political engagement. Having no power but in his words and
pen, he attacked arbitrary power and the miscarriage of justice in the name of humanity
and praised what he termed ‘independence of mind’.64 The transformation that
occurred over the century was accurately summarized (and criticized) in 1805 by
Louis de Bonald, one of the most articulate voices of Catholic reaction. Asked to
comment on the influence of gens de lettres, he replied: ‘If, in the century of Louis XIV,
the Académie Française had proposed a similar subject for discussion, it would have
spoken of the duties of gens de lettres. Today it is a question of their independence.’65
60 See Daniel Roche, Les Républicains des lettres: Gens de culture et Lumières au XVIII siècle (1988),
151–71 and Peter Burke, The Fabrication of Louis XIV (New Haven, Conn., 1992), 49–59.
61 The Fall of the French Monarchy (London, 2003), 50.
62 Roche, France in the Enlightenment, 443; Dena Goodman, The Republic of Letters: A Cultural
History of the French Enlightenment (Ithaca, NY, 1994), 12–52. See also Antoine Lilti, Le Monde des
salons: Sociabilité et mondanité à Paris au XVIII siècle (2005). Lilti’s account emphasizes the aristocratic
practices of sociability typical of the salons and downplays the role of radical ideas.
63 Pierre Lepape, Voltaire Le Conquérant: Naissance des intellectuels au siècle des Lumières (1994), 269.
64 Opponents were far less charitable: see Joseph de Maistre, Œuvres (2007), 557.
65 Louis de Bonald, ‘Réflexions sur les questions de l’indépendance des gens de lettres, et de
l’influence du théatre sur les murs et le gout, proposées pour le sujet de prix par l’institut national,
à sa séance de 29 juin 1805’, in Œuvres complètes, x (1838; repr. Geneva, 1982), 58.
Introduction: Revolution and the Republic
15
Here was a model that was to be replicated endlessly in future years, the man of letters
raised to the status of what Paul Bénichou referred to as ‘a secular spiritual power’.66
Ironically, the enemies of the philosophes were obliged to adopt similar strategies and
techniques.67
Central to the appearance of thi
s new social category was the influence of a
market economy that undermined traditional commercial and social relations. It
was in this context that the great nineteenth-century critic Sainte-Beuve could
speak of ‘la littérature industrielle’.68 Extending this argument, Christophe Charle
has shown how the growth of the book trade––built upon an expansion of the
reading public––and an expanding free press in the nineteenth century further
served to enhance the autonomy of the writer. These factors, when combined with
the gradual expansion of higher education, led to a significant increase in the
numbers employed within the university and literary sectors of the economy, a
development which itself gave rise to the concept of a literary bohemia existing in
penury at the margins of conventional society. Moreover, as the power and
authority of the Catholic Church continued to wane, men of letters came more
and more to replace the priest as both society’s guide and its repository of values. To
refer to Christophe Charle again, he has shown how, as the nineteenth century
progressed, the figures of the poet, the artist, the prophet, and, finally, the scientist
were in turn accorded the status of being the voice of humanity. In summary,
writers and intellectuals more generally were able over time to reduce their depen-
dence upon both Church and State.
However, it would be a mistake to over-emphasize the innovatory aspects of
the public sphere in the post-revolutionary period. The salons continued to play a
key role as institutions of intellectual and political sociability until well into the
nineteenth century.69 If they were eclipsed during the Revolution, they were to an
extent reconstituted by aristocratic émigrés forced into exile and were then revived
in France under the Directory and, even more so, with the advent of the First
Empire in 1804. According to Stephen Kale, between 1815 and 1848 the salons
‘became the principal centres of elite political networking and discussion’ and
remained relatively free from repressive interference by the State. For example,
the dominant political figure of the July Monarchy, François Guizot, arranged his
social life around the salon of his mistress, the Princess Lieven. Likewise, Alexis de
Tocqueville attended the salons of the Duchesse de Rauzannot, Madame de
Castellane, and the Duchesse de Dino, the latter presided over by the illustrious
Charles-Maurice de Talleyrand, Prince of Benevento. Under the July Monarchy
66 Paul Bénichou, Le Sacre de l’écrivain 1750–1830: Essai sur l’avènement d’un pouvoir spirituel
laïque dans la France moderne (1996). See also Priscilla Parkhurst Clark, Literary France: The Making of
a Culture (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1987), 126–58.
67 Didier Masseau, Les Ennemis des philosophes: L’Antiphilosophie au temps des Lumières (2000), 273–320.
See also Darrin M. McMahon, Enemies of the Enlightenment: The French Counter-Enlightenment and the
Making of Modernity (Oxford, 2001).
68 ‘Quelques Vérités sur la situation en littérature’, in C. A. Sainte-Beuve, Portraits Contemporains
(1846), 327–46.
69 Steven Kale, French Salons: High Society and Political Sociability from the Old Regime to the
Revolution of 1848 (Baltimore, 2004).
16
Introduction: Revolution and the Republic
Tocqueville was a regular attendee at the salon of the Princess Belgiojoso and at
several other foreign salons in Paris.70
The decline of the salons was a gradual, rather than a precipitate, one and they
continued to flourish until their near-extinction in the late nineteenth century,
receiving their last and possibly greatest literary invocation in the novels of Marcel
Proust. Kale himself suggests several factors to explain their decline, not the least of
which were the rise of parliamentary politics and a collapse of the aristocratic
conception of the role of women, but the point is that the salons were replaced
by new forms of intellectual sociability. Amongst these new sites were to be the
newspaper editor’s office, the publishing house, and the offices of the many literary
and political reviews that flourished in the Paris of the Belle Époque and beyond.
The weekly discussions that took place in the tiny Latin Quarter office of Charles
Péguy’s Cahiers de la quinzaine were fairly typical of the latter, as were later to be
those at La Nouvelle Revue Française (under André Gide) and Les Temps modernes
(under Jean-Paul Sartre). The Parisian café––of which there were an estimated
40,000 in the 1880s––also came to occupy a central place in intellectual life, with
those of Saint-Germain-des-Prés becoming synonymous with French intellectual
life.71 These varied institutions, with their discrete practices, have served to give a
distinctive character to the manner in which political ideas have been expressed and
articulated in France.
Nor should we ignore the restraints upon intellectual production in the periods
both before and after 1789. Despite the growing importance of the Republic of
Letters during the eighteenth century, writers for the most part continued to be
drawn from the traditional elites of the ancien régime and few were those who were
able to live by their pen alone. The reality for most was the garret, the café, and ‘the
columns of third-rate reviews’.72 The Revolution, in overthrowing monarchical and
feudal power, largely put an end to royal and aristocratic patronage, leaving men of
letters at the mercy of a commercial market that offered only limited economic
support. Not surprisingly, therefore, the numbers involved still remained small, as
was the readership of books, journals, and the popular press. The most prestigious
review of the age, the Revue des Deux Mondes, had only 350 subscribers in 1831 and
still as few as 2,500 in 1846 (compared with the 13,500 subscribers to the
Edinburgh Review in 1818). Despite a significant increase in the number of titles,
the average circulation of provincial newspapers in this period was in the region of
700–1,500 copies. It is estimated that the number of new book titles rose from 800
in 1789 to 7,600 in 1850 and to 12,000 in the decade of the 1890s, but those like
Victor Hugo and Émile Zola who earned a living from writing alone remained
the exception.73
70 André Jardin, Tocqueville: A Biography (Baltimore, 1998), 398–9.
71 See Antony Beever and Artemis Cooper, Paris After the Liberation 1944–1949 (London, 1995).
72 Robert Darnton, ‘The Facts of Literary Life in Eighteenth-Century France’, in Keith M. Baker (ed.),
The Political Culture of the Old Regime (Oxford, 1987), 261–92.
73 See Clark, Literary France, 37–60.
Introduction: Revolution and the Republic
17
Censorship during the eighteenth century was generally agreed to be largely
inefficient and ineffective––many books and newspapers banned in France
were simply imported from the Netherlands and Britain––but it did exist and
continued to make life difficult for those not prepared to toe the official line.
There was, according to Charles Walton, ‘a widespread consensus that the State
should maintain and reinforce moral values, customs, and manners’.
74 As Benjamin
Constant was later to remind his readers, in 1767 edicts were passed which
condemned to death authors of writings calculated to stir up people’s minds.75 In
1789 the ‘free communication of ideas and opinions’ was recognized through
Article 11 of the Déclaration des Droits de l’Homme et du Citoyen, but, to refer
again to Walton, the ‘surveillance, repression and manipulation’ of expressions of
political opinions by the State continued to exist. Building upon a law on sedition
passed in July 1791, the legislation of the Terror made the publication and
expression of anti-patriotic and defamatory opinion a crime punishable by death.
Napoleon I quickly re-established the censorship of books and the press, frequently
subjecting journalists and writers to prosecution. For example, Destutt de Tracy’s
important Commentaire sur l’Esprit des lois de Montesquieu was first published
anonymously in Philadelphia in 1811,76 whilst the liberal periodical Le Censeur,
edited by Charles Comte and Charles Dunoyer, was closed down altogether. Press
freedom (within limits) was reaffirmed in the constitutional charter of 1814 and
further strengthened through a series of laws in 1819 (thereby enabling the press to
play an important role in the downfall of Charles X in 1830) but the Villèle
government ended jury trial for press offences so as to increase the likelihood of
guilty verdicts. Restrictions continued under the July Monarchy after 1830. The
September laws of 1835 increased the amount of caution money required by the
government before a newspaper could be started and such was the general penury of
the press that journalists were frequently compared to prostitutes. ‘The Restora-
tion’, wrote Tocqueville in 1843, ‘was one long and imprudent battle by the
government against the press. The years which have followed the July Revolution
have presented the same spectacle with the difference, however, that under the
Restoration it was the press that finished by defeating the government whilst in our
day it is the government that has triumphed over the press.’77 Controls over
publishing media were augmented under the Second Republic (when newspapers
were banned from saying anything insulting about the President) and again in the
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