The two books under review address a moment in the development of French political thought that has come in for intense scrutiny in recent years. In the wake of the French Revolution, a diverse array of political thinkers pondered such themes as the restoration of order, the legitimation of political authority, the proper limits of such authority, and the creation of institutions through which sovereignty—whether of the people or the monarch—might be restrained as well as exercised. It is common to classify these thinkers as “liberals,” although it is one of Andrew Jainchill's central themes that the term itself may be an obstacle to a clear understanding of their ideas.
This terminological problem arises out of a long-running historical debate launched by John Pocock's Machiavellian Moment (1975) and Bernard Bailyn's work on the origins of the American Revolution. It became commonplace for a time to oppose the “republican” thinkers and pamphleteers who were the focus of Pocock's and Bailyn's work to a distinct tradition of “liberal” thought, descended from John Locke. As the debate wore on, some scholars concluded that perhaps distinctions introduced originally for analytic clarity had led to a heightening of the contrast between the two schools, whose actual manifestations had been less sharply delineated in reality than in the pages of scholarly monographs. Liberals and republicans did not form hostile camps. Although their emphases were different, many of their more fundamental concerns about the nature of the state and the relation of polity to society were shared.
In France, a similar debate grew out of the revolutionary historiography of the French Revolution, associated most notably with the late François Furet. Furet placed the liberal-republican dichotomy at the heart of the revolution itself and conceptualized the subsequent century's history as a series of efforts to tame disruptive republicanism and bring the revolution home to “safe harbor.” Jainchill persuasively links the “explosion in interest” in this theme of taming revolutionary passions to “a very specific historical context, the French ‘antitotalitarian’ moment of the 1970s and 1980s, which has decisively shaped the scholarship on French liberalism” (p. 15). In short, Furet and his followers were reacting against the idea that the French Revolution, by establishing popular sovereignty, had simultaneously established liberty. Following Tocqueville, Furet instead saw the substitution of one type of power for another. On this view, French liberalism exhibited a congenital “distrust of popular democracy” (p. 17).
Against this Furetian revisionism, Jainchill argues that French liberalism was in fact a hybrid of liberalism with republicanism. It was elaborated, moreover, “in revulsion [not] to Jacobinism” but “more to the experience with Bonaparte's authoritarianism” (p. 17). Jainchill thus defends a view of French liberalism as more a product of the revolution than a reaction against it, the work of men steeped in republican ideas and ideals but educated by experience with revolutionary government to seek “a stable, constitutional republic” (p. 17).
There is a certain fluctuation in Jainchill's various characterizations of the group of thinkers on whom he focuses. At times, he calls them “centrist republicans” (p. 17). Elsewhere drawing on the work of James Livesey, he insists on a distinction between “classical” and “modern” republicanism, only to dissolve it quickly in “classical-republican concerns stemming from post-Terror political culture and … best described as ‘liberal republicanism’” (p. 11). There is a somewhat artificial feel to the kaleidoscope of fine distinctions drawn throughout the Introduction, where Jainchill seems to feel that he must distinguish his position from that of writers as diverse as Furet, Keith Baker, Bronislaw Baczko, Marcel Gauchet, Pierre Rosanvallon, Livesey, Bernard Gainot, Pierre Serna, and Howard Brown. The result is a vivid portrait of the richness of recent scholarship in this area, but Jainchill's own distinctive stance emerges only in brief and somewhat confusing glimpses.
He fares a good deal better once he launches into his substantive investigations. His analysis of the Constitution of Year III, for example, makes the case that it “signaled an important shift” from “the democratic ideals of the Year II” to “classical republicanism” (p. 31). He links debates about mixed government, spurred by memories of the Terror and the need to check executive power, to “the early modern classical-republican tradition” (p. 35). He discerns in post-Terror politics a new concern with mores and with the “primacy of the political” in shaping mores: “It is laws that make moeurs” (p. 69). (In passing, I note that Jainchill rather fastidiously eschews translation of the French word moeurs as “mores”: the word, he argues, has “no adequate English equivalent” [p. 65, n. 7]. But the dictionary definition he cites, “natural or acquired habits … in everything that concerns the conduct of life” (p. 63, n. 7) may be compared with the Oxford English Dictionary Online definition: “The shared habits, manners, and customs of a community or social group; spec. the normative conventions and attitudes embodying the fundamental moral values of a particular society, the contravention or rejection of which by individuals or subgroups is liable to be perceived as a threat to stability.” The English definition seems quite adequate to me and coincides more or less exactly with the use of the term by Tocqueville and other writers in the French liberal tradition.)
Chapter 3, which examines the genealogy of “modern liberty,” is careful and thorough. Constant was not the first to make the distinction between the liberty of the moderns and that of the ancients. The discussion of Charles-Guillaume Théremin's contribution is especially valuable, as is the dissection of liberal ideas about empire in Chapter 4.
Jainchill's book intersects most directly with Helena Rosenblatt's in its discussion of “theophilanthropy,” which Rosenblatt describes as “a moral doctrine in religious trappings directed toward political ends” (pp. 85–86). Rosenblatt's book is much more narrowly focused than Jainchill's, but it shines a powerful light on a neglected aspect of Benjamin Constant's thought. The work is a pleasure to read but difficult to characterize: Part intellectual biography, part contextualization of Constant's theoretical and political writings, it is a judicious blend of the personal with the historical.
If Constant has emerged, since his revival by Gauchet, as the quintessential French liberal thinker of the period between the revolution and Tocqueville's libéralisant history of the Ancien Régime it overthrew, Rosenblatt's distinctive and valuable contribution is to show that Constant's liberal identity underwent a lengthy gestation. At first, his liberalism was at best “embryonic” (p. 49), and when it did at last develop, it had a “religious dimension” that has been neglected, Rosenblatt argues, largely because of “Marxism, and its grip on twentieth-century scholarship” (p. 2). Yet the distortion of his views began much earlier, “on both the left and the right,” where he had detractors who “belittled or ignored his writings on religion” (p. 3). Though nurtured on Helvétius, who had taught him to think of religion as “prejudices” (p. 13), he early on conceived what would become his life's work, a history of polytheism. His writing on religion figured in his relationship with Mme de Staël, to whom he showed a draft during their first meeting (p. 34). It was de Staël who introduced him into Thermidorian circles, where he encountered “a moral dirigisme, a confidence in the state's ability to train people's minds and mold their morals” (p. 45). Appointed president of the canton of Luzarches in 1796, he discovered a need for what he called “the moral force of institutions” (p. 60), and saw “combating resurgent Catholicism” as one of his chief duties (p. 62).
Rosenblatt sees this period in Luzarches as “a crucial moment” in his political evolution (p. 63). “Forced to impose ‘republican institutions’ on an apathetic and increasingly hostile population,” he found himself forced to reconsider the relation of religion to social and political life. Thus began the evolution in his thinking that allowed his “embryonic” liberalism to grow and flourish. He had discovered limits on the state's capacity to shape consciences. By 1799, even before the rise of Napoleon that Jainchill singles out as the crucial turning point in the history of “modern” French liberalism, Constant's “most pressing concern had become the dangers of state authority” (p. 73). What may initially have been perceived as a pragmatic limitation of state power would evolve into a moral limitation on the legitimacy of state action. By 1806, he was introducing the notion of “private judgment into his political writing” (p. 133). For Rosenblatt, his development of this theme demonstrates the shortcoming of the Marxist characterization of Constant as “a mouthpiece of the bourgeoisie”: “What Constant wishes to encourage is not so much the acquisition of wealth or the accumulation of capital, and assuredly not the selfish enjoyment of these, but rather the moral consequences of a certain type of work” (p. 134).
Rosenblatt successfully excavates an unduly neglected stratum of Constant's thought. One might quibble with the absence of any extended discussion of his writings about religion as such. There is, for example, almost nothing about the history of polytheism to which he devoted so many years. But the way in which battles over religious ideas and moral instruction served as focal points in the political disputes of his time is brilliantly described, and our understanding of Constant's progress as a political thinker is greatly enhanced.
Both books are valuable and important contributions to the growing literature on French liberalism. It is encouraging that publishers are willing to support these essential monographs, although the ninety-nine-dollar price of Rosenblatt's 275-page book may raise a few eyebrows. It would be a pity, however, if the high price tag kept this distinguished work out of libraries, where it should take its place alongside Jainchill's as a welcome addition to our knowledge of French liberal thought.
