For the past twenty years or more, interest in the political thought of the French liberals has been on the increase. Long forgotten and ignored, French liberalism is now seen to have been a far more vibrant entity than was thought by those prepared to consign it to the long list of historical losers. The revival began with work on Alexis de Tocqueville and has since spread to Benjamin Constant (soon to be honoured with a Cambridge Companion volume), François Guizot, the Doctrinaires, the Idéologues, and others. Montesquieu has reclaimed his rightful position as one of the great writers in the history of political thought. There is still much that remains to be explored. Major writers such as Madame de Staël and lesser ones such as Edouard Laboulaye and Charles de Montalembert remain clouded in undeserved obscurity.
To that extent, the volume by Annelien de Dijn builds on an already substantial body of scholarship and, in doing so, turns its gaze to parts of the story of French liberalism that have not previously been explored. Her subject is what she calls “aristocratic liberalism” (p. 5). By this she means “a very particular set of ideas, developed by a number of thinkers … who drew their inspiration mainly from Montesquieu's Esprit des lois” (p. 5). She further specifies that aristocratic liberals believed that “a levelled, atomized society, which lacked … intermediary bodies offered no protection against despotism” (p. 5). This provides the central question of her study: “[H]ow was the discourse of aristocratic liberalism, originally formulated in the political and intellectual context of the mid eighteenth century, adopted in and adapted to the new political and intellectual needs of the post-revolutionary period?” (p. 9) At least two substantive claims follow from this. The first is that this tradition of thinking in France was at least as important as the Jacobin tradition (p. 8). The second is that until the 1870s, politicians and political thinkers found in Montesquieu's Esprit des lois a convincing analysis of and answer to the problems facing France.
Why was this so? Dijn's answer is that, in post-1789 France, aristocratic liberalism was revived as a response to revolutionary republicanism and the demands made for a more egalitarian society. More interesting and original is her claim that the revival of aristocratic liberalism was started among the royalist heirs of the counter-revolutionary movement. As implausible as this sounds, it provides one of the most stimulating sections of the book as, to prove her point, Dijn works her way through the writings of the likes of Charles Cottu, Nicolas Bergasse, Vincent de Vaublanc and other equally forgotten Restoration pamphleteers and publicists. These men, she affirms, were not “mindless reactionaries” but were committed to “a very specific, Montesquieuian conception of how liberty was to be preserved in a post-revolutionary world” (p. 67). In brief, they believed that only a stable and vibrant landowning nobility could provide a foundation for liberty.
The remainder of the book largely concentrates on exploring the parameters and character of the debate between royalists and liberals that followed from this claim. Here Dijn takes the reader into more familiar territory but again she seeks to develop an unfamiliar argument. Despite their initial enthusiasm for the English, aristocratic model of government and society, French liberals, Dijn argues, became increasingly critical of aristocratic liberalism and came to entertain grave doubts about both the viability and desirability of effecting an aristocratic restoration. The irreversible social and economic changes since 1789 rendered such a class obsolete and thus incapable of acting as a barrier to despotic government. An alternative therefore had to be found.
Dijn explores this part of her argument at some length and draws her evidence from a wide variety of sources. If she writes of Constant and Guizot, she also examines the opinions of lesser figures such as Charles Dunoyer and Charles Ganilh. She looks at debates about the bicameral system, decentralization, press freedom, and, most importantly, inheritance laws. Her conclusion is that liberal responses came in a variety of forms, but ultimately (and especially after 1830) they concurred in believing that the bourgeoisie and a bourgeois political order provided the most likely safeguard of liberty and order. Nevertheless, they continued to agree with their royalist opponents—and presumably with Montesquieu—about the dangers of a levelled and atomistic society.
Probably the least convincing part of Dijn's account is her discussion of Alexis de Tocqueville and, specifically, of Democracy in America. Tocqueville's new political science, she writes, was “an attempt to formulate an alternative to the doctrine of aristocratic liberalism” (p. 137). His “highly critical analysis of the rise of democracy,” she continues, “was in many ways inspired by the royalist discourse” (p. 148). As Dijn herself acknowledges, the difficulty here is that we do not know the extent to which Tocqueville was familiar with this literature. She might, however, have consulted the Eduardo Nolla edition of Democracy in America (soon to appear in English) for guidance. Either way, it commits Dijn to the position that Tocqueville's visit to America had little or no impact on what he thought. Somewhat remarkably, Tocqueville's Old Regime and the Revolution is passed over in less than a page. Remarkably, Tocqueville's text was received at the time as a work of great originality (Tocqueville himself certainly thought that it was original) but, if Dijn's overall thesis is right, he was saying little that had not been said countless times before and was at most a commonplace.
Where does this lead? To the conclusion that aristocratic liberalism endured into the Third Republic and to a questioning of the distinction and contrast between Anglo-American and French political thought. Montesquieu's lessons about the need for intermediary powers were not ignored. Indeed, Dijn suggests by way of conclusion that they cast a shadow that reached as far as François Furet and the revisionist historians of the French Revolution.
This, then, is a spirited and ambitious book. It is not always convincing and it frequently asserts more than it proves. At times, the argument is straightforwardly perplexing. It does, however, have the important merit of delving into corners of nineteenth-century French political debate long hidden in darkness and of recovering a political vocabulary rendered marginal by the dominant discourses of the age. As such, it is a welcome contribution to the growing literature on French liberalism.
