Revolution and the Republic
Page 14
151 Recognition of the right to a free education (as well as the surveillance of all educational
institutions by the State) was accepted through Article 9 of the 1848 Constitution. It was a source
of immediate controversy. The liberal Catholic Comte de Montalembert described it as a form of
‘intellectual communism’: Le Moniteur Universel, 263 (19 Sept. 1848), 2497.
152 Renouvier, Manuel Républicain, 214.
153 Le Moniteur Universel, 257 (13 Sept. 1848), 2418.
154 See Blais, Au principe de la République. See Charles Renouvier and François Pillon, ‘La doctrine
républicaine, ou ce que nous sommes, ce que nous voulons’, La Critique philosophique, politique,
scientifique, littéraire, 1 (1872); repr. in Stéphane Douailler et al., Philosophie, France, XIXe siècle
(1994), 727–53.
155 See Philip Nord, The Republican Moment: Struggles for Democracy in Nineteenth-Century France
(Cambridge, Mass., 1995).
156 On Barni, see Sudhir Hazareesingh, Intellectual Founders of the Republic: Five Studies in
Nineteenth-Century French Political Thought (Oxford, 2001), 227–80.
Rights, Liberty, and Equality
61
Louis Napoleon’s coup d’état in 1851––and then during the following decade in
Switzerland, where he held an academic post. With the fall of the Second Empire
he returned to France, later to secure election as a parliamentary representative for
the Somme in 1872, and again in 1876. He died in 1878 and, despite his major
contribution to republican thinking, was quickly forgotten, even by his fellow
republicans.
The similarity with Renouvier was not limited to their mutual admiration for
Kantian philosophy, however. Like the latter, in 1872 Barni published his own
Manuel Républicain.157 This text built upon Barni’s earlier La Morale dans la
démocratie,158 published in 1868. Barni did not disguise his desire to escape from
the misplaced equation of politics with the pursuit of virtue. This, he announced,
‘had been the error of the republics and the philosophers of antiquity’.159 More-
over, it had been perpetuated by such eminent eighteenth-century philosophers as
Rousseau, Mably, and ‘even Montesquieu’. Each, in Barni’s view, had not em-
braced ‘the modern spirit’ which, he argued, ‘gives greater autonomy and liberty to
the individual conscience, frees it from the intemperate yoke of politics and
encloses the latter within the limits of the law’.160 It followed that the first duty
of the State was to respect and protect the ‘natural rights’ of all citizens and
therefore that liberty should be defined in terms of the absence of arbitrary restraint
and interference upon the actions of individuals.161 ‘Liberty in its essence’, Barni
wrote, ‘consists of the faculty that allows man to direct and to organize himself, in a
word to be his own master, and not to be the property of someone else.’162 He gave
this definition of liberty further description by specifying that it included the ability
of each person ‘to think and to speak freely, to work freely and to make free use of
the fruits of his labour’.163 Displaying the distance separating him from the Jacobin
tradition, he commented that to curtail liberty in order to protect it was just an
excuse for arbitrary power. ‘It is time’, Barni wrote, ‘to finish with these theories
which, in the name of securing liberty in the future, only serve the interests of
tyranny today or of despotism tomorrow.’164 The proper role of government was
not to govern men but to teach them to govern themselves.
There are at least three features of Barni’s account of republican liberty that merit
further comment. Each tells us something about how republicanism was to develop
in the years following the establishment of the Third Republic in 1870. The first is
Barni’s oft-repeated conviction that liberty must not be confused with either
‘licence’ or ‘fanaticism’. ‘There is no republic worthy of its name and that will
last without the proper habits of liberty’, he wrote.165 Liberty, in other words, had
to be informed by a comprehensive set of republican values, values that obliged
every citizen to seek personal moral improvement and to respect the dignity of
others. The conservative, not to say bourgeois, character of this moralized vision of
157 Jules Barni, Manuel Républicain (1872).
158 Jules Barni, La Morale dans la démocratie (1868). See also Jules Barni, Ce que doit être la République
(Amiens, 1872).
159 Barni, La Morale, 13.
160 Ibid. 14–15.
161 Ibid. 143.
162 Barni, Manuel Républicain, 2.
163 Ibid.
164 Barni, La Morale, 166.
165 Barni, Manuel Républicain, 103.
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Rights, Liberty, and Equality
liberty was shown in the central place allotted to hard work, sobriety, chastity,
the sanctity of the family, and respect for the law. Next, rejecting the arguments
of Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, Barni unequivocally included the right to property as
one of the fundamental rights of the individual. ‘Not only has a man the right to
make use of his own physical person’, he wrote, ‘but he also has that of working as he
wishes, as long as he respects the same right in others.’166 The right of the individual
to own property, Barni contended, was the condition and source of the prosperity of
society and it must be respected by government. Charity and self-help, rather than
‘the organization of work by the State’, would provide the best solutions to the misery
of the poor. Recognition of the right to work would only lead society to ‘despotism
and ruin’. Thirdly, Barni extended his definition of liberty of thought to include
‘liberty of conscience’ and from this concluded that a state religion was an affront
to such a liberty. Two things followed from this. Most obviously, Barni endorsed
the call for a complete separation of Church and State. Next, he placed renewed
emphasis on the importance of the provision of primary (and, where appropriate,
secondary) education by the Republic. Taking up the theme announced by
Renouvier, the first obligation of the Republic was to provide instruction for the
people. Without this––as the disastrous experience of the Second Empire of
Napoleon III all-too-vividly demonstrated––the liberty granted the people through
universal suffrage would become an instrument of domination and despotism.167
How did these arguments have an impact upon Barni’s views on equality?
If liberty was ‘the first principle of republican government’, then equality was its
‘necessary corollary’.168 What this entailed, he argued, was equality before the law,
civil equality, and political equality. It meant ‘no more privileges, no more distinc-
tions, no more castes, and no more classes’ but it did not necessitate ‘the strict
levelling of all wealth’, as this would denote the end of liberty.169 The first duty of
the citizen was to respect the law and this was to be accompanied by a willingness to
subordinate personal self-interest before the common good. The good citizen was
to display ‘the virtue of abnegation’. As Barni commented, ‘the love of equality does
not denote a hatred of all superiority’. It was not d
riven by envy.170 Not once in
this analysis, as Barni acknowledged, was the word socialism mentioned, although
‘the social question’ was not forgotten. The aim was to ensure that ‘the workers and
the bosses, the poor and the rich, no longer form two antagonistic classes in society,
as too often occurs today’.171 The solution lay in ‘good will’, ‘individual effort and a
sense of solidarity’. The amelioration of the condition of the workers, in other
words, rested less upon the actions of the State than upon the sentiment of
fraternity, of belonging to the same family and loving each other as brothers.
‘Citizens’, Barni proclaimed, ‘be human towards each other; the observance of
this simple maxim will smooth out many difficulties and, better than the army, will
secure social peace.’172
166 Barni, La Morale, 150.
167 See Barni, Ce que doit être la République.
168 Barni, Manuel Républicain, 3.
169 Ibid. 5.
170 Ibid. 103.
171 Ibid. 112.
172 Ibid. 105.
Rights, Liberty, and Equality
63
Yet the most telling example of Barni’s willingness to accommodate his under-
standing of equality to the forces of social conservatism was shown in his statement
that equal political rights should be denied to women. As he explained: women
were the equal of men ‘as moral beings’ and everything should be done ‘to
emancipate women from all degrading tutelage’. This meant removing the ‘injus-
tices’ of the Napoleonic Civil Code. However, Barni went on, ‘in general the life
appropriate to women is not political life but private life’. ‘Their proper place’, he
explained, ‘is not in the public forum but in the domestic home’, supporting their
husbands and caring for their children. In any case, direct involvement in politics was
unnecessary as women possessed their ‘natural representatives and deputies in the
form of their fathers, their brothers, their husbands and their sons’.173
Here then was a definition of rights, liberty, and equality that would come to
predominate amongst republicans from the 1870s onwards. How can this long
process of evolution be summarized? Republicans like Barni sought to detach the
language of rights and of liberty from the threat of tyranny and dictatorship (in
the shape of Jacobinism and Bonapartism) and thus to ally it to a stable, property-
owning democracy. It provided republicans with a political programme that could
appeal to an emerging new middle class and to a conservative peasantry. Just as
importantly, it sought to delegitimize radical and socialist understandings of liberty
within republicanism. Within this discourse, equality came to mean an equality
of rights and (in theory at least) an equality of opportunity but not an equality of
outcome. It was understood as civil equality (principally equality before the law)
rather than as an equality of wealth. In the key area of schooling, it meant that all
pupils, irrespective of their beliefs, were to be treated in an equal manner and,
increasingly, that education was to be perceived as the primary route to personal
emancipation and autonomy. Having removed all property qualifications from the
franchise, political equality existed in the form of universal male suffrage. Women
were not to enjoy rights equal to those of men. Despite this grave anomaly, the
State was under an obligation to treat all citizens equally. Inequalities of treatment
could only be justified in terms of the general interest.
What followed in the final decades of the nineteenth century were a set of
measures intended to turn this vision into a reality. The republicans, once they had
secured political control of the Republic after 1879, introduced a series of reforms
designed to enhance the liberty of the individual citizen and to extend social justice.
These covered such areas as freedom of speech and of the press, the right to hold
public meetings, as well as the key reforms granting the right to join a trade union
and the right to strike.174 These measures were accompanied by legislation reform-
ing the labour code, regulating hours of work, introducing industrial injuries
insurance, and encouraging arbitration in industrial disputes. Legislation enacted
173 Barni, La Morale, 33–49, 126–38. Philip Nord shows how republicans reacted against the
infamous immorality and corruption associated with the imperial court: ‘To the wiles of the
imperial coquette, republicans counterposed the virtues of the femme de foyer’, Nord, Republican
Moment, 229.
174 See Jean-Marie Mayeur, Les Débuts de la IIIe République 1871–1898 (1973), 108–110.
64
Rights, Liberty, and Equality
in the early 1880s introduced free and compulsory secular education in state
schools. For these reasons this period has sometimes been regarded as the ‘golden
age’ of republican liberties.
A less glowing picture is revealed in Jean-Pierre Machelon’s La République contre
les libertés?175 In his account, the pursuit of stability and order meant that striking
workers, protesting anarchists, religious congregations, and civil servants felt the full
force of state repression as the fundamental liberties of certain categories of
individuals were disregarded in the name of social peace. The result was growing
disillusionment and discontent amongst the working-class movement as well as
renewed hostility towards the Republic from the Catholic Church.
The preoccupation with social peace also produced its quintessential ideological
expression in the shape of the doctrine of solidarité.176 As one of the doctrine’s
supporters, the philosopher Célestin Bouglé, was to comment: solidarisme was, in
effect, to become ‘the official philosophy of the Third Republic’.177 Seeking to steer
a mid-way course between free-market liberalism and collectivist socialism, its
emphasis fell upon encouraging the practices of association, cooperation, and
mutuality. Fiercely secular in orientation, it saw an education freed from the
influence of the Catholic Church as the best means of developing both the moral
and civic conscience of the individual citizen.178
The most famous exponent of the doctrine of solidarité was Léon Bourgeois.179
Bourgeois was no minor figure. Amongst his many public offices, he was minister
for public instruction between 1890 and 1892 and again in 1898. In 1896, the year
in which he published Solidarité, he formed his own short-lived government.
He later went on to be president of both the Chamber of Deputies and the Senate.
Drawing upon the work of philosopher Alfred Fouillée and in particular his
La Science sociale contemporaine,180 Bourgeois’s resolutely scientific argument
was that the concept of solidarité should replace that of fraternité in republican
thinking, for the simple reason that, while the latter was abstract and meta-
physical, the former could be empirically grounded. The ‘law of solidarity’, he
believed, demonstrated the ‘reciprocal dependence’ that existed between human
beings, and as such was ‘universal’. Accordingly, from an observation of situations
of reciprocity it would be possible to establish a ‘theory of right
s and duties’ that
was ‘neither abstract nor subjective but concrete, objective, in line with the
175 Jean-Pierre Machelon, La République contre les libertés? (1976). This is not a view fully shared by
Philip Nord. ‘[T]he Third Republic’, he argues, was ‘a democratic regime that sprang from and then
nurtured a resurrected civil society’: see Nord, Republican Moment, 246–53. See also Pierre
Rosanvallon, La Démocratie inachevée: Histoire de la souveraineté du peuple on France (2000), 313–35.
176 See Jean-Fabian Spitz, Le Moment républicain en France (2005) and Marie-Claude Blais, La
Solidarité: Histoire d’une idée (2007).
177 Le Solidarisme (1907), 1. See also Alfred Croiset (ed.), Essai d’une philosophie de la solidarité:
Conférences et discussions (1902).
178 See Ferdinand Buisson, La Foi laïque: Extraits de discours et d’écrits (1878–1911) (1912).
179 Léon Bourgeois, Solidarité (1896).
180 (1880). See also Fouillée, La Propriété sociale et la démocratie (1884) and Les Éléments
sociologiques de la moralité (1905).
Rights, Liberty, and Equality
65
necessities of nature, and thus definitive’.181 All individuals would come to recog-
nize the mutual debt they owed towards each other and through this it would be
possible to secure an ‘equitable distribution’ of benefits and costs, advantages and
obligations. Thus, Bourgeois concluded, ‘the doctrine of solidarity appears as the
development of the philosophy of the eighteenth century and as the culmination of
the social and political theory of the French Revolution’.182
What this meant, as he subsequently made clear on numerous occasions, would
have greatly pleased all those who in the 1790s had voiced their doubts about the
political wisdom of using the language of rights. The Revolution, Bourgeois argued,
had given men their liberty and had made them equal in rights but it had taken a
further century for people to realize that ‘this liberty would not be assured to all
if everyone, not recognizing a limit to their own liberty and profiting from the
personal strength and advantages given to them by chance, made use of liberty in a
selfish fashion’. It was therefore necessary, Bourgeois declared, ‘to complete the
declaration of the rights of man by adding a declaration of duties’.183