The Humane Comedy: Constant, Tocqueville, and French Liberalism

This book is the last completed work of one of the most distinguished political theorists and intellectual historians of our time. Focusing on the political ideas and activities of leading French liberals from approximately 1805 into the Second Empire, Professor Kelly presents a distinctive blending of ideological and intellectual history, biography, analysis of French regimes and their changes, and his own reflections concerning the wide and still highly pertinent range of issues and themes considered. Beginning with a subtle analysis of the complex patterns of agreement and disagreement between the liberalisms of Benjamin Constant and Alexis de Tocqueville, the work offers a sophisticated examination of the attempts of a sequence of liberal thinkers to harmonize their commitments to political and civil liberty with one another, and with their profound desire for a legitimate and stable political order. Giving close but never reductive attention to the intellectual, political, and more closely personal biographies of the figures he considers, Professor Kelly provides nuanced accounts and appreciations of de Stael and Guizot, Royer-Collard and Remusat, Cousin and Lamartine, Laboulaye, Ollivier, and Baudelaire. A major theme, of great relevance to the current debates about liberalism, is the contrast between the vigor and brilliance of these thinkers as political critics, their inefrlcacy as political actors, and their ultimate retreat from political life.

THE HUMANE COMEDY: CONSTANT, TOCQUEVILLE AND FRENCH LIBERALISM

THE HUMANE COMEDY CONSTANT, TOCQUEVILLE AND FRENCH LIBERALISM GEORGE ARMSTRONG KELLY Late Visiting Professor of Humanities and Political Science, Johns Hopkins University WITH A FOREWORD BY STEPHEN R. GRAUBARD

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CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS Cambridge, New York, Melbourne, Madrid, Cape Town, Singapore, Sao Paulo Cambridge University Press The Edinburgh Building, Cambridge CB2 2RU, UK Published in the United States of America by Cambridge University Press, New York www.cambridge.org Information on this title: www.cambridge.org/9780521412278 © Cambridge University Press 1992 This publication is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to the provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements, no reproduction of any part may take place without the written permission of Cambridge University Press. First published 1992 This digitally printed first paperback version 2006 A catalogue record for this publication is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloguing in Publication data Kelly, George Armstrong The humane comedy: Constant, Tocqueville, and French liberalism / George Armstrong Kelly; with a foreword by Stephen R. Graubard. p. cm. Includes index. ISBN 0 521 41227 7 1. Liberalism-France-History-19th century. 2. France-Politics and government-19th century. 3. Constant, Benjamin, 1767-1830Contributions in political science. 4. Tocqueville, Alexis de, 1805-1859-Contributions in political science. I. Title. JA84.F8K45 1992 91-10120 320.5'12'0944-DC20 CIP ISBN-13 978-0-521-41227-8 hardback ISBN-10 0-521-41227-7 hardback ISBN-13 978-0-521-03072-4 paperback ISBN-10 0-521-03072-2 paperback

Contents

Foreword: Stephen R. Graubard Acknowledgements 1

i II in iv 2

page ix xiv

PORTS IN THE STORM

Liberty: last port of call Benjamin Constant afloat: hospital or pantheon Royer-Collard: steering by the Charter Tocqueville: sailing the open sea CONSTANT VERSUS TOCQJJEVILLE

1 Social settings of the political self 11 Ages of the spirit in Ancestral voices 3

i 6 17 27

39 55 69

IN PARTIBUS FIDELIUM

1 Faith in freedom 85 11 Protestant protocols: Necker, Madame de Stael, Vinet, Guizot 93 in Catholic submissions: Lacordaire, Montalembert 115 4

PHILOSOPHY AS CIVIL RELIGION

1 How dogmas begin: Jouffroy, Cousin, Damiron 11 How dogmas develop: Cousin in How dogmas dissolve: the "affaire Pascal"

Vll

134 155 168

viii 5

Contents LAMARTINE, LIBERALISM'S FALLEN ANGEL

i II in D

Ut poesis politica ? Another kind of liberty Liberalism against liberals

181 196 209

PARNASSIAN LIBERALISM

1 11 in iv Index

Steps to Parnassus The sadness of Tocqueville The airs of Renan The disgust of Flaubert

221 227 236 245 256

Foreword by Stephen R. Graubard

The premature and untimely death of an active and engaged scholar is always tragic. In the case of the late Professor George Armstrong Kelly, the tragedy is compounded by his not having witnessed what so few imagined even possible at the time of his death in December 1987 - the sudden and complete collapse of many of the principal Communist regimes of Central and Eastern Europe, and the growth of a new interest in liberal institutions and values. How one wishes that the author of this work had lived to see these events, to comment on them, to place them in a historical frame, to explain why Tocqueville and any number of other nineteenth-century French liberals are again in fashion, not so much with the politicians of our day as with those who are scholars, committed to seeing how the past lives on in the present. George Kelly had many distinctions - not the least being his capacity to "trespass" intellectually on many fields, ignoring many of the conventional disciplinary boundaries, making each of the ones he entered his own, without ever appearing to be aggressive or aggrandizing. His interests were legion, his capacities for empathy and understanding so wide-ranging that it seemed as natural for him to be concerned with Hegel as with the French twentieth-century colonial imbroglio in Algeria, with the problems of the American university as with the more cosmic issues raised by the French Revolution, with religious and political consciousness in the United States as with what he chose to call "mortal politics" in eighteenthcentury France. The titles of his books are invariably arresting; they suggest a feeling for language, a concern with those qualities that another age called "belletristic," rarely encountered in many who today see themselves as political theorists when they are not aspiring to the even more grandiose claim of being recognized as political scientists.

x

Foreword

George Kelly, who occupied academic posts with various highly descriptive titles, held at least one that came close to defining at least some of his major interests. He was, for a time, Professor at Brandeis University of Politics, Philosophy, and the History of Ideas. When, at a later date, at Johns Hopkins University, he became for the last years of his life Visiting Professor of Humanities and Political Science, his attributes and interests were even more precisely stated. Had he also borne the title of Professor of History - perhaps even of Intellectual History - and had that title suggested his capacity to place the subjects covered by that amorphous (and very American) discipline in a political and social frame, which was always his prime intention, his scholarship might have been seen for what it was, a continuing exploration of subjects that belonged to no single academic discipline, that took their unity mostly from the fact that they all engaged him. The last of his books, incomplete at the time of his death, was sufficiently advanced to be more than a collection of discrete chapters or essays. Though they may lack the final polish that he would have insisted on, they are in no sense a fragment of a larger work whose major contours are undiscernable by the tragedy of the book being unfinished. The Humane Comedy: Constant, Tocqueville and

French Liberalism emerges at a time when the interest in liberalism has never been higher. 1989, the year that George Kelly did not live to see, was an annus mirabilis as important in its own way as any of the others that he reflected on and wrote about. It is, in every respect, a year as unpredictable in its long-range consequences, in its mysterious and obscure beginnings, as any of those others that generated the liberal nineteenth-century intellectual systems which, in George Kelly's memorable phrase, chose to "put liberty first." The fact that liberalism is today a subject of world-wide interest, that it comes almost as a political gift - with all of its obvious ambiguities and hazards - to a number of European societies politically and intellectually submerged for decades, makes for the new and very substantial scholarly interest in the eighteenth- and nineteenthcentury origins of a movement that at many times in our century seemed relegated to that "ash heap of history," that Marxists were so fond of describing. For many of our contemporaries, preoccupied, by choice or necessity, with political and social doctrines that boasted very different intellectual origins, whose mythic structures embraced

Foreword

xi

quite distinctive and unique concepts of freedom, though in forms massively uncongenial and unwelcome to those who continued to believe in other kinds of liberty, 1989 can never simply be 1848 redux. On the contrary, despite all the talk of "free markets" and the like, with the suggestion that there is a new European capitalism in the making, there are many, and not only among the more prominent of the Central, Eastern European, and Soviet intelligentsia, who are focusing today on quite other questions, those insistently and imaginatively posed over many decades in the wake of Napoleon's own failed imperial ambitions. To ask those questions, in whatever form, is to have affinity with those who lived in the long shadow cast by Napoleon and the French Revolution. George Kelly would have found preposterious the idea that we are witnessing today circumstances fundamentally like those that followed on Waterloo. Yet, the conditions in early nineteenthcentury France, that led whole generations, with or without personal experiences and memories of revolution, to reflect anew on the meaning of liberty has contemporary meaning and significance in ways that would not have been nearly so obvious even a few years ago. On one level, The Humane Comedy may be read as a work of history, even of French history; on another, it needs to be seen as a more analytic work, which deals with politics and religion - with belief more generally - which seeks to restore not only intellectual reputations that had all but disintegrated, but to revive memories of political debates and conflicts that were ignored precisely because they were so recently thought to be inconsequential, irrelevant. In a time when intellectual fashions change rapidly, it may be useful to be reminded that the restoration of interest in someone even as important as Alexis de Tocqueville is largely a matter of the new European and American scholarship of recent decades. The same, in a much less conspicuous way, may be said of Benjamin Constant. Not the least of the many accomplishments of George Kelly is to be able to give the minds, ambitions, and accomplishments of these men a wholly new dimension. With that, he does something which may be no less important, to give new life to intellectual figures like Royer-Collard, Lamartine, Lamennais, Laboulaye, and even Renan, nineteenth-century giants who had been thrown from their oncelofty French pedestals. Few, in recent decades, have seen them as European pilgrims on an unmarked and largely untravelled road, which bore the name Liberty, compelling them to engage in

xii

Foreword

constant combat with forces ranged under banners as different as those of Authority, History, and Anarchy. Kelly's capacity to make these and many others seem very contemporary - it is best to avoid the somewhat shopworn phrase "relevant" - i s achieved not by taking them out of their historical periods but precisely by insisting that they must be seen in the context of the politics and intellectual life of their day. They are not "disembodied theorists," part of a twentieth-century "canon"; rather, even as we understand their relevance today, they are individuals engaged in deliberate and desperate attempts to understand the age they are living in, the society that is at that very moment being formed. Almost none of them, in recent years, during the period when Marx and Marxism were regnant in so many intellectual quarters, had been able to gain very much of a hearing. One need not be accused of engaging in what is today a new and rather vulgar intellectual sport - conducting yet another requiem for Marx and Marxism - when one suggests that liberalism has revived today in a way that few expected it to do even as recently as the time of George Kelly's death. The revival of Tocqueville had of course started much earlier; it owed a great deal to French scholars, including, most obviously, Raymond Aron, and, more recently, Francois Furet, but also a number of other distinguished French, American, and British researchers. Not the least of George Kelly's achievements, however, is that he makes Tocqueville's conceptual principles come alive in ways that makes his nineteenth-century concern with the "stabilization of modern liberty" meaningful, recognizing how integral his religious views were to a system that called for a "new political science," suited to a new age. He does much the same with Benjamin Constant, giving his views on war and commerce, on the destructiveness of the "spirit of conquest," a meaning that few others had thought to consider. Indeed, in the very comparison of the two men, Kelly achieves an understanding of the multiple spiritual sources of the liberal experiment. Again, this was a subject that few scholars were inclined to reflect on in a more secular age, so superficially self-confident and assertive. Kelly writes about both in ways that would have been almost unthinkable in the nineteenth century, inconceivable in the 1960s and 1970s. The measure of Kelly's achievement with all of those whom he treats so imaginatively is precisely that what he says about them is

Foreword

xiii

novel, intended to be provocative. More than any number of others who have surveyed many of the same liberal traditions, Kelly has established links and affiliations, unperceived by others, that help to explain why intellectual families are as complex and convoluted as they seem to be. To have written a new kind of late-twentiethcentury history of nineteenth-century liberalism without simply extolling those whom he correctly and selectively admires for lucidity and insight is to show the passion appropriate to the committed scholar. His purpose was neither to write "puffs" for deceased great minds nor to prepare a new defense of liberalism. Knowing the intellectual strengths and weaknesses of his characters, recognizing them not least in what he in one instance calls their " complacency and social blindness," his is a tale of failure even more than of success. 1848, though only briefly treated, is given a new meaning as Kelly considers how it went off its tracks, why it generated the "mediocrity" that soon became the hallmark of the age. This work, brilliantly descriptive of the politics and intellectual life of the age of Louis XVIII, Charles X, Louis Philippe, and Napoleon III, is in fact an extended essay on the Enlightenment, but even more, on the ways in which the twentieth century has chosen to interpret the period. But beyond all this, Kelly raises questions about whether all his subjects were not essentially "men of letters," and whether the arts of statesmanship are within the compass of individuals formed by such training, having those ambitions. That issue may be even more alive in the 1990s than it was when he was preparing his manuscript in the 1980s. Indeed, George Kelly's The Humane Comedy raises the question of whether the preparation for politics, for a political career in the largest sense, does not have to be reconsidered again. This time, however, even a fundamental revision of twentiethcentury history may be at hand.

Acknowledgements

George Armstrong Kelly's too-early death left me his literary executor. My first task has been to see that his final masterwork, The Humane Comedy. Constant, Tocqueville and French Liberalism, be pub-

lished. To this end, Richard Fisher of Cambridge University Press has been unfailingly generous with his time and effort. There are three people who deserve especial thanks for their help and understanding. Stephen R. Graubard, the editor of Daedalus, was central to the editing suggestions that shaped the final manuscript. His introduction is invaluable in providing the context in which this book should be placed. Richard Flathman, the George Armstrong Kelly Memorial Professor of Political Science at the Johns Hopkins University, gave a careful reading and editing of the galleys. He has been a stalwart friend. There is no way I can properly express the full measure of my gratitude to Joanne Lyman, Professor Kelly's widow, whose loving encouragement and understanding has brought my task to a joyful conclusion. James Chace

CHAPTER I

Ports in the storm

i.

LIBERTY: LAST PORT OF GALL

To be liberal, Aristotle wrote, is "to give the right people the right amount, at the right time." 1 While that pre-modern definition could be stretched tofitearly-nineteenth-century French liberalism — and the Aristotelian mean invoked in support of its juste milieu — the immortal soul of this doctrine is elsewhere. It is best described as "putting liberty first." The liberals were not entirely agreed on the sources or forms of liberty, or on its errand; but they were persuaded that it was sacred air - especially for connoisseurs with fine lungs. For some, this liberty was "natural," for others it was "useful"; for still others, "it is a privilege of noble minds which God has fitted to receive it, and it inspires them with a generous fervor."2 Above all, it was defined, to a large degree, by what menaced it, by alternative priorities of value, notably Throne and Altar and the populist Republic (hyperbolically labelled "tyranny" and "anarchy" on occasion by liberal publicists). Most can agree that liberalism - sometimes audacious under Bonaparte (at least from the distance of Coppet), pert and challenging under Charles X - failed in the July Monarchy, with lasting effects on the French body politic. Whether this was the great failure of an inspired political theory or the unlamentable and petty failure of social closure and social greed remains arguable. The propaganda of the last century has done much to make the second thesis carry weight. Yet much of this liberal spirit of long ago is neither insufferably "bourgeois" nor untimely today. Perhaps it is true that French liberalism was too narrow; perhaps also it was too 1 2

Aristotle, Nicomachaean Ethics, 1120a. Alexis de Tocqueville, The Old Regime and the French Revolution (trans. S. Gilbert, New York, 1955). P- l 6 9 -

2

Ports in the storm

smugly comfortable. What seems obvious is that its brilliance in opposition was matched by a mediocrity in power. For, in opposition, "putting liberty first" could not fail to mean using to best advantage those tools of voice and pen by which liberals excelled. When one thinks of Madame de Stael, Constant, Royer-Collard, Guizot, Remusat, Montalembert, and Tocqueville, it is not too much to say that opposition exalts the critical talents of the liberal and nourishes his glory. Power seems to rob him of his element. There were several strains of liberty that nineteenth-century liberalism inherited from the past: liberty of conscience and free examination; the utilitarian liberty of Helvetius and sensationalist philosophy; the regulated civil liberty of Montesquieu; the heroic liberty of the "rights of man " that dominated the earlier phase of the Revolution. Each of these, disproportionately and at different times, played a role in emerging doctrine. But most characteristic of the new liberalism was a respiritualization of its philosophical base — a movement away from the "Ideologie" of Destutt de Tracy toward a more idealized and voluntaristic version of human freedom.3 The greatest oracles of that version were Benjamin Constant and Alexis de Tocqueville. Regarding his commitment to liberty, Constant wrote in 1829: "For forty years I have defended the same principle, liberty in everything, in religion, in philosophy, in literature, in industry, in politics: and by liberty I mean the triumph of individuality, over both the authority wishing to rule despotically and the masses demanding the right to subject the minority to the majority."4 As for Tocqueville, describing his sentiments after the July Revolution from the vantage of 1848: " I had spent the best days of my youth amid a society which seemed to increase in greatness and prosperity as it increased in liberty; I had conceived the idea of a balanced, regulated liberty, held in check by religion, custom, and law; the attractions of this liberty had touched me; it had become the passion of my life; I felt that I could never be consoled for its loss."5 Already we perceive some impending friction 3

4

5

For " Ideologie," its sources and progeny, see Cheryl B. Welch, The French Ideologues and the Transformation of Liberalism (New York, 1984). Benjamin Constant, preface to Melanges de litte'rature et de politique (1829), m Marcel Gauchet, ed., Constant, De la liberte chez les modernes (Paris, 1980), p. 519. Tocqueville, Recollections (trans. A. Teixeira de Mattos, Cleveland, 1959), p. 68. Tocqueville signifies here the period 1815-1824; for elsewhere he says of Louis XVIII: "He was the only sovereign of France who had the good sense, or the patience, to rule constitutionally." M . C. M . Simpson, ed., Correspondence and Conversations of Alexis de Tocqueville with Nassau

William Senior (2 vols., London, 1872), 1, 243.

Liberty: last port of call

3

between the two thinkers: what has the "triumph of individuality " to do exactly with "balanced, regulated liberty"? But for now we need only notice the intellectual and spiritual properties of liberty in both accounts. Any serious anatomy of French liberalism requires particular attention to the Constant-Tocqueville relationship. Such an inquiry could be pursued as a dialogue of existential voices, as a comparison of structures of belief and argument, a crossreferencing of allied visions. That should be our goal and result. But the result also needs a contextual milieu. It needs it all the more because, aside from their shared determination to "put liberty first," the connection between the two thinkers is complex, even impalpable. When Edouard de Laboulaye republished (with significant additions) Benjamin Constant's Cours depolitique constitutionnelle in the midst of the Second Empire, just after Tocqueville's death, he expressed astonishment that the author of Democracy in America had never mentioned the elder liberal in his writings and had conceivably not even read him.6 All subsequent work in Tocqueville's letters and archives (so far as I know) has confirmed and compounded this puzzle. And, recently, Jean-Claude Lamberti has carefully reviewed the question, both as a detective and as an historian of ideas.7 Why is it important whether or not Tocqueville read Constant and was influenced by him? Perhaps the more pregnant question is: why, as seems likely, did Tocqueville not read Constant, or read him seriously? An answer to both (for the first must be answered with the second) will involve archaeology in the social and cultural texture of French liberalism, contributing to its definition. Writing his Memoires at about the same time that Laboulaye published the Cours, Charles de Remusat commented, with regret, that the theoretical works of Constant were "peu lus." 8 According to the same author (who knew Tocqueville well and became his warm friend after the coup (FEtat of 1851), Tocqueville was an original and profound thinker, who "lisait peu": he drew almost everything from within himself, he got little from others, and went to the trouble of finding out for himself what others had found before him... The political literature of the Restoration, rich and fruitful, 6

7

8

E d o u a r d de Laboulaye, ed., Cours de politique constitutionnelle de Benjamin Constant (2 vols.,

Paris, 1861), 1, vii. Jean-Claude Lamberti, "De Benjamin Constant a Alexis de Tocqueville," France-Forum, May-June 1984, 19-26. Charles de Remusat, Memoires de ma vie (5 vols., Paris, 1958-1967), 1, 303.

4

Ports in the storm

might as well not have been (est comme non avenue pour lux), so that he came upon well-known things as brand new; and this gave his least original ideas a proprietary stamp and a tone of conviction they would not otherwise have had.9 Curious as it seems to us, it is possible that Tocqueville (as a manner of ascesis) paid no attention to Constant's writings, especially those that bore on his own project. About that project, as Remusat comments, Tocqueville was singularly clear-headed: "Instead of studying society in books, he wanted to observe it in its most recent form on distant shores. His travels in the United States were not just a visit to New York, a chance to talk to someone overseas, but a direct and active exploration of the whole field of reality."10 Like many persons of strong design but mediocre physical constitution, Tocqueville was a relentless explorer, fortunately endowed with both a meditative gift and a superior capacity for organizing his impressions. But Tocqueville, pace Remusat, was also a consummately literate man, deeply read in the ancient and French classics and in the works appropriate to his legal training. He possessed a great store of information about the previous century, down to its petits faits of manners and morals. Had he not been such a sharp observer of his own culture, his book on America would have lacked much of its penetrating originality and cautionary force. It must also be said, however, that Tocqueville was little inclined to make attributions in his published works; in themselves, they are no clue to what he failed to read. That he was scarcely immune to the political ideas of the Restoration is shown by his interest in Guizot's lectures and his dislike of the papalism of Lamennais. 11 It is not unlikely that he read the Globe and was affected by writers like Jouffroy, as well as Guizot.12 His voluminous note-taking from the parliamentary speeches of Royer-Collard (coming in the 1830s and betraying, if anything, a previous lack of acquaintance) proves nothing about his earlier habits; but it does show that he was not inclined to shut out the politics of the past.13 9

10 11 12 13

Remusat, " De l'esprit de reaction: Royer-Collard et Tocqueville," Revue des deux mondes, 35 (15 October 1861), 804; cf. Me'moires, iv, 44-45. Remusat, "De l'esprit," pp. 801-802. Andre Jardin, Alexis de Tocqueville, 1805-1839 (Paris, 1984), p. 63-64, 81. See below, p. 34. For Tocqueville on Royer-Collard, see Oeuvres completes (15 vols. to date, Paris, 1951— ), xi, 97-104. Henceforth OC.

Liberty: last port of call

5

Thus, "il lisait peu" will not exactly solve the Constant problem. Tocqueville's reading was surely guided by pre-established taste and purpose. It is hardly conceivable that Constant was nothing but a distant name. It is possible that he read Constant and dismissed him; but it is far more probable that, in dismissing Constant, he failed to read him seriously. Lamberti finds it credible on internal evidence that Tocqueville read the Melanges of 1829. If he did, he would have been struck by some of its formulas (such as the inevitable growth of equality), but, at that moment especially, he could well have been unsympathetic to the author. Tocqueville wanted the dynasty not to blunder; blunder it did, to his heart's regret. In the circumstances, Constant must have seemed an arch-Orleanist of unsavory reputation. Perhaps - although this must remain pure conjecture - the conspicuous public funeral given Constant on 12 December 1830 quickened Tocqueville's dynastic feelings and his resolve to ignore the works of the author ofAdolphe. If, upon returning from his travels in America, Tocqueville still left Constant unexamined, there should be little surprise in that. What is more astonishing is that many Orleanists practiced a similar abstinence, perhaps in part because they did not wish to be too much reminded of their own annals of opposition. Remusat is an evident exception. But his observations were confided to memoirs and not written down until much later: [Constant's] reflections on guarantees [i.e. in De FEsprit de conquete et de Vusurpation], published in 1814, and the Principes depolitique, printed during the Cent-Jours, were my texts of constitutional science. These writings and all those included in his Cours de politique are, I fear, nowadays little read. But they are still of great value [i.e. under the Second Empire]. Elsewhere one can find more power and depth. He does not begin with the most elevated principles. But rarely will one find sounder ideas, more ingenious reasoning, or more of that precision of mind that counsels moderation and illuminates practice... I learned from him to place effective liberty above the particular forms of government, to prefer having more of it with the monarchy than less with the Republic, and especially to hold legal rights above absolute principles. I was delivered forever from those despotic or revolutionary doctrines that sacrifice what one owns to the State... Benjamin Constant had much to do with shaping my ideas.14 14

Remusat, Memoires, i, 303-304. Cf. also Victor de Broglie, Souvenirs (4 vols., Paris, 1886), 1, 281: " I t is Benjamin Constant who taught the nation the principles of representative government... The nation's debt to him will never be sufficiently recognized." Broglie also wrote this under the Second Empire.

6

Ports in the storm

This generous estimation was provided by a man (like Benjamin) tugged in 1815 between Bonaparte (his father had served the Emperor as chamberlain), the legitimate dynasty, and the principles of 1789. Tocqueville, of course, came to liberalism from a quite different direction. I have suggested here a kind of fissure in the culture of liberalism that seems worthwhile to explore. As social actors Constant and Tocqueville illustrate a sort of disquiet that stalks in the liberal pantheon, while all the same remaining partners in "putting liberty first." Only, it seems, in the travails of liberalism under the Second Empire will Constant be revived and linked in respect and energy with a now deceased Tocqueville, as a champion against personal power and centralized corruption. II.

BENJAMIN CONSTANT AFLOAT! HOSPITAL OR PANTHEON?

"C'est une catin qui a ete jolie et qui finit ses jours a l'hopital" was the cruel barb launched against Benjamin Constant by Prosper de Barante, his erstwhile intellectual playfellow and amorous rival at Coppet, later peer of France and author of the Histoire des dues de Bourgogne.15 But in December 1830, a portion of the massive crowd that followed Constant's casket to the cemetery of Pere-Lachaise cried: "Au Pantheon!" 16 Both judgments were excessive: Constant had died with far more dignity than ajille publique; but, on the other hand, he was not "voue a Pimmortalite," even by the monarchy of July, a regime which at first appeared to embody his constitutional principles. In 1834, Michelet, while taking a stroll through PereLachaise, paused before Constant's simple grave, bare of any token of remembrance. "Quoi!" he demanded. "N'a-t-il laisse ni ami, ni famille?" 17 Constant was a vulnerable man who scattered his extraordinary gifts like bread on the water. Contrary to the proverb, that bread did not, on the whole, return to him, but sank. Only years later would his intellectual and political genius be given its due; and it would still lie under a cloud. For long after that, recurrent exposures of Benjamin's moral eccentricity would trouble otherwise true be15 16 17

Remusat, Memoires, i, 422. Paul Bastid, Benjamin Constant et sa doctrine (2 vols., Paris, 1966), 1, 481. Jules Michelet, Journal (4 vols., ed. P. Viallaneix, Paris, 1959-1976), 1, 120.

Benjamin Constant afloat: hospital or pantheon lievers, liberals who could not find a hero to their heart's content in the mechanical + that Constant committed to his all too decipherable journals. 18 To such critics Constant's vagrant sensuality and excursions on the fringe of private nihilism seemed to indict his serieux. In particular, his dalliance with Napoleon in 1815 (often imputed to his pursuit of Juliette Recamier) seemed to clinch the matter: evidently he sought political power in the same unprincipled way that he indulged his physical appetites. From the "liberated" perspective of our "new morality," we should not simply tax Constant's earlier critics with hypocrisy, although it is beyond question that good faith was not a property of some of those attacks. Even today, Constant requires a certain structure of apologetics, despite the historical distancing that naturally privileges his achievements while mutating the sense of scandal felt by persons closer to his living reputation. 19 Earlier, during his lifetime and while he was directly remembered, there was a tacit consensus that Constant had imprudently transgressed the flexible, often casuistic, rules of his own society. Despite her pliant morality, Madame de Stael was not similarly impugned: we shall see why. It was not so much that Constant's contemporaries and their progeny thought him a moral shambles, as that they considered him to be an irresponsible moral strategist. For reasons bearing profoundly on that society, so unlike our own, Constant, even though his writ could run to high places, was never considered a part of "our crowd." In fact, the damning judgment was that he had never grown up (down to this day, academics, captive to a convention that began long ago, write of "Jean-Jacques" and of "Benjamin," when they would never dream of saying "FrancoisMarie" or "Alphonse," and only say " R e n e " because it was the title of a work). In the "Groupe de Coppet," this is what appears to separate Constant most strikingly from Prosper (de Barante) and Mathieu (de Montmorency). In the eyes of their society, they "grew up." If Constant's ideas are now, more than ever, quarantined from his life, that is because they have been reclaimed by a history not excessively burdened by petits faits. But it was not always so. The Constants were Protestant nobles who had emigrated from Artois to the Helvetic cantons in the sixteenth century, long before 18 19

± signified sexual intercourse in Constant's journals. E.g. O. Pozzo di Borgo, ed., B. Constant, Memoires sur Us Cent-Jours (Paris, 1961), p. xxxvi.

7

8

Ports in the storm

the infamous Revocation. By the time of Benjamin Constant's birth (in Lausanne, in 1767) it could hardly be said that they were impatient exiles. Rather, they were gentrified and comfortable cosmopolitans. But Benjamin Constant, because of the vagaries of his own childhood and education and the world he swiftly became exposed to, was destined for a wider horizon. He would find that nexus of ancestral connection stifling, a barrier rather than a support for his temperament and ambition. The Lausanne of his birth had seemed tolerable to Voltaire and pleasant to Gibbon; but it was always constraining to Benjamin. Well before he met Madame de Stael, already infected by his travels and adventures and by the French Revolution, he yearned to play a role. He had been passed from place to place by his widowed father, a colonel in the Dutch army with eccentricities that easily matched his own. In the family-extensive society of his day, he had many connections but had never been able to sink roots. His precosity was enormous. It is often said that Benjamin Constant brought intellectual traits of the eighteenth century into the nineteenth; but the one probably most in view is the propensity of the Siecle des Lumieres for bizarre plans of education. Constant's Bildung may be thus summarized: "He had never had a family life; he had no home, no country. He had been brought up and had learned to think in three languages. He had known every vice and corruption [first thanks to his tutors, and then in spite of them], had learned to respect no one, to distrust everyone."20 That is not a promising beginning, even for a young man with the steadiest of purposes. Today it would, more than likely (because of factors that Tocqueville saw more clearly than Constant), crush an adolescent into gibberish or doom him to recurrent psychotherapy. That Benjamin achieved his greatness, at the cost of what he suffered, might be considered a redemptive miracle, even a vote for "the good old days." His resiliency and fortitude are far more impressive than his malignancy. Deprived of the normal sources of courage, he managed to show great courage amid a life pointed toward tribulation and decomposition. Even by the loose cosmopolitan standards of the eighteenth century, Benjamin Constant was not French. His social privileges 20

J. Christopher Herold, Mistress to an Age: A Life of Madame de Stael (Indianapolis, 1958), p. 141.

Benjamin Constant afloat: hospital or pantheon

9

belonged to the porous territory now called Switzerland (the canton of Bern, the "pays de Vaud"). As such, if a genius, he might repeat Rousseau. He might aspire to a place in French political life if fortified by conditions like the large fortune of Jacques Necker or even the more modest endowments of the Genevan Etienne Claviere. But, more likely, he would find one through a certain train de vie and partisan journalism, opportunities provided by Necker's daughter; and the cards would have to fall just right. Constant believed himself to be integrally French, by descent and by intellectual destination. It is clear that he had none of that Heimatsehnen for Switzerland which caused Necker, in his forced retirement at Coppet, to declare: " Unhappy cantons... stay faithful to your moeurs and your ways; do not change your just and simple ideas for the political novelties forced upon you by men of vanity in their improvising spirit. May your character, with its moral greatness, continue to distinguish you from the other nations of Europe, just as nature has separated you by your location and your mountains." 21 The best that Constant could say was: "The name of Switzerland recalls five centuries of happiness and public loyalty." 22 At most, for Constant - as for the other Francophones of the Romande that frequented Coppet - the "caractere suisse" was simply another ingredient to be added to the melting pot of Europe, arid Switzerland was a convenient crossroads of Europe's national spirits.23 But his subjective Frenchness did not guarantee Constant a French acceptance. Although it seemed that the Constitution of 1791 had restored his citizenship (as a victim of religious persecution), he did not rush to claim it - as his father Juste had nor was it clear that the dispensation included his case, since Artois had not been French territory when his family emigrated. Following Madame de Stael to Paris in 1795, he benefitted from the influence of her connections, made a deserved reputation as a publicist, invested profitably in national property, and reached public office in 21

22

23

Jacques Necker, Cours de morale religieuse (3 vols., Paris, 1800), 11, 188-189. Necker's pure patriotism is, however, cast in doubt: he was worried lest the invading French divest him of his seigneurial title to Coppet. B e n j a m i n C o n s t a n t , Principes de politique (1815), in G a u c h e t , e d . , Liberte chez les modernes, p. 163. Cf. Simone Balaye, "Le groupe de Coppet: conscience d'une mission commune," in S. Balaye and J.-D. Candaux, eds., Actes et documents du deuxieme colloque de Coppet, 10-13 juillet 19J4 (Geneva and Paris, 1977), p. 32.

io

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the Tribunat of the Directoire. There could be little doubt then that he was, de facto, French. Yet he chose to represent the department of Leman (Geneva), now incorporated to the French Republic, without, for that matter, having any solid claim to Genevan citizenship.24 As a consequence, Benjamin's status of nationality remained under a cloud. These were no longer the times when the Republic was profligate with its naturalizing favors, when Schiller, Klopstock, and George Washington could be declared citizens and a Cloots or a Tom Paine could sit in French assemblies. A faint shadow of bdtardise followed him, as an alien and a subversive, as late as the ministry of Villele.25 And even Madame de Stael (in 1815, admittedly when they were involved in serious quarrels) had occasion to charge: "You aren't French, Benjamin, you haven't any memories of your childhood here. That's the difference between you and me." 26 Sometimes Constant claimed advantage from his detachment: " In order to be judged, the Revolution demands minds that are not so burdened by embarrassing memories, those who, not being enemies of the good that has been done or accomplices in the evil mingled with that good, are not blinded by rancor or forced to apologize."27 But he himself was often judged by French minds which were thus burdened, like Tocqueville's own. Neither was Constant's noble ancestry of much benefit to him. After a cloying period of service at the court of Brunswick in 1792-1793, he had come to regard noble privilege as a sham and never again defended aristocracy of birth except as a matter of cold political utility.28 He played the transcendent commoner in France. 29 He wished, above all, to be a notable, a security that seemed within his reach before 18 Brumaire. Beneath the formulas of genteel behavior that came as a birthright and the incomparable wit and penetration that ennobled him in literary company (Chateaubriand 24

25

See Madame de Stael to Henri Meister, 28 July 1800: "[Benjamin] has carefully avoided all contacts with that region [i.e. Vaud], for he wishes to have his rights as a Genevan and a Frenchman recognized." Beatrice Jasinski, ed., Correspondance generate de Madame de Stael (5 vols. to date, Paris, i960- ), I V / I , 295. See E p h r a i m H a r p a z , ed., Benjamin Constant: recueil d3articles, 1820-1824 ( G e n e v a , 1981), p p .

,„338f27 28

29

Georges Solovieff, ed., Madame de Stael: choix de lettres, 1J7&-1817 (Paris, 1970), p . 4 7 5 . Harpaz, ed., Recueil, p. 136. See G. A. Kelly, "Liberalism and Aristocracy in the French Restoration," Journal oj the History oj Ideas, October-December 1965, 522-528, for discussion. Here, I think, Pierre Deguise goes astray in comparing Benjamin Constant to Lamartine: Benjamin Constant me'connu: le livre de la religion (Geneva, 1966), p. 29.

Benjamin Constant afloat: hospital or pantheon

11

described him as "Phomme qui a eu le plus d'esprit apres Voltaire"), 30 there were the clues of his disorderly low-life, the gambling and the prostitutes. He created discomfort in the polite liberal salons of the Restoration, and his new political associations did little to reassure these "guardians of the Charter." Where other liberals saw a difficult problem in the recreation of a noblesse cTEtat, given France's social attitudes in the wake of Revolution and Empire, Constant perceived in nobility a "vanite ombrageuse et inquiete." 31 Certain passages in the Principes de politique to the contrary,32 he did not quite endorse the beauty of that "English" solution for which the left-center was grasping; as Barante put it: "understanding and accepting a community of interest with frankly aristocratic citizens (une aristocratie avoue'e des citoyens)... a system [on

which] the prosperity of England is based." 33 He was not as enraptured as Madame de Stael by the prospect that the institutions of the new France would ripen in a mellow mixing of talent and distinguished birth. 34 For him, the "spirit of conquest" had ceded to the rising force of the "spirit of commerce": its agents were making out of "the diverse European stocks a great family hardly distinguishable in its manners and completely alike in its interests."35 Both Constant's views and his reputation, in mutual reinforcement, clashed with the tastes of the new "service aristocracy," whose coolness in turn pushed him toward the society of capitalists like Laffitte and Goyet de la Sarthe. As Barante wrote of him: "He has chosen another society... with men of his own party." 36 The Due de Broglie commented in his Souvenirs that Benjamin paid court to "an opposition society of the second rank." 37 And even in the salon of Albertine de Broglie (Madame de StaeTs daughter, presumably sired by Constant), where the liberals of Europe gathered, Benjamin Constant was received with a singular mixture of familiarity and withdrawal. Everyone in the family felt it necessary to complain about 30 31 32 33

34

36

F r a n c o i s - R e n e d e C h a t e a u b r i a n d , Memoires cTOutre-tombe (2 vols., Paris, 1951), 11, 159. C o n s t a n t , Cent-Jours, p . 188. F o r e x a m p l e , in G a u c h e t , ed., Liberte chez les modernes, p p . 4 4 6 - 4 5 1 . A m a b l e G u i l l a u m e Prosper Brugiere d e B a r a n t e , Des communes et de raristocratie (Paris, 1821), p. 72. Germaine de Stael-Holstein, Considerations sur les principaux evenements de la Revolution frangaise 35 (3 vols., Paris, 1862), 11, 265. Constant, Cent-Jours, p. 65. Quoted by Pierre Deguise, " Constant et Barante," in Benjamin Constant, Madame de Stael et 37 le groupe de Coppet (Oxford and Lausanne, 1982), p. 57. Ibid., p. 61, n67.

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him... Madame de Broglie must never have forgiven the man who had forced her to blush for her mother; yet, trying to believe that he was the only one blameworthy in her sight, she made efforts to be kind to him; afraid of seeming to disapprove her mother's choice if she treated him too badly, she showed him a benevolence mixed with a little disdain.38 That was a remarkably defensive reaction by the Duchesse de Broglie, everywhere praised as affectionate, piously Protestant, and good, toward the man people thought to be her father. It was conditioned by the young woman's new - brilliant and nervous situation, and by the situation of Constant. No more playful carriage rides across Europe with Benjamin! There were two other things: the Cent-Jours and the cult of Madame de Stael. In the Cent-Jours, Constant had carried the notion of "principes applicables a tous les gouvernements" to what liberal society considered offensive, not merely paradoxical, conclusions. After the return of Napoleon from Elba, he had written of the Emperor (on the day before Louis XVIII fled Paris): "He is Attila, he is Genghis Khan... I have wished for liberty under various forms; I saw that it was possible under the [restored] monarchy... I shall not, like a wretched turncoat, drag myself from one power to the other, covering infamy with sophism and mumbling profaned words to redeem a life of shame." 39 Within the month, Napoleon had set him to writing a liberal constitution, the Acte additionnel to the Charter of 1814, and had made him a Conseiller d'Etat. Constant had some plausibly principled reasons for his volte-face (and has not lacked defenders in recent times), but ambition and power were surely among his motives. The anger of most liberals toward him was almost as great as their shock - he had gone slumming with the Fouches and the peasants on an adventure that could not even have tempted Talleyrand. Some of those liberals had themselves served the Emperor with quiet distinction, "citoyens zeles et integres qui ont rempli dans son regne des fonctions eminentes et utiles," in Constant's words.40 Nonetheless, with Bonaparte gone for good, they soon could accuse Benjamin of "covering infamy with sophism." His conduct could perhaps only be explained by his lack of true Frenchness. Back from exile and pardoned by Louis XVIII, Constant vigorously defended his action as best he could in the Memoires sur les Cent-Jours.*1 However, this tract was not published 38 40

Remusat, Memoires, 1, 451. Constant, Cent-Jours, p. 68.

39

Journal des debats, 19 March 1815. 41 Ibid., pp. 227-228.

Benjamin Constant afloat: hospital or pantheon

13

until three years later, and, by its nature, it did little to heal the rifts that had occurred. Chateaubriand's verdict aptly summarizes what la bonne societe thought of Benjamin's greatest fugue: "De la une reputation de mobilite politique funeste aux hommes d'Etate." 42 Hereafter, Constant might become, as some thought, the finest orator of the Chamber; but he would never be an homme (FEtat. While Constant's ox was being gored by moderate opinion, Madame de Stael had died a figure of legend. Posed beside her as he frequently was, Constant seemed the lesser creature, even the protege}* Although Anne-Louise-Germaine Necker had been born a bourgeoise and Constant a noble, these presumptions were inverted in the "aristocracy of merit." We have noted Constant's vagrant, disorienting childhood. Madame de StaePs early years, on the other hand, had been passed in the bosom of a family intensely engaged in the upbringing of an only child, who was, besides, a prodigy. This is not to ignore the peculiarities of the Neckers nor to discount perversities of camouflage and ambivalence that helped to inflame and depress their daughter's life: from this her inexhaustible energy and ambition, her unrivalled talent for organization and manipulation, and her morbid fear of death and loss. That much acknowledged, Madame de Stael was "well brought up." She was trained to be a great mover, an intellectual, and an incomparable political salonniere. Her body was content to be a woman's; but her mind was thoroughly masculine, regretful of its sex, avid for the power that male coding bestowed on reputation and glory. She believed her father to be the greatest man in the world; what was a little Corsican compared to Monsieur Necker? What, for that matter, was Benjamin compared to her? He was her indispensable intellectual, even spiritual, consort; but, despite the fame of their liaison, simply one among a number of highly reputable, though ultimately disposable love-partners. She could dominate him with rage and tears; but this was only because she had first riveted his mind with the power of her own mind and his habits with a society that she had created and dominated. As a male, Benjamin had the direct privilege of politics and assemblies. But the 42 43

C h a t e a u b r i a n d , Memoires tfOutre-tombe, n , 210. Sainte-Beuve, however, belabors this point to distraction, for he got his information from the Recamier salon and other hostile sources. His treatment of Constant is well exposed by Deguise, Constant meconnu, pp. 3-37. Nevertheless, this was the prevailing impression of the

14

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best of women, through the institutions of the salon and the bedchamber, knew how to get around that restraint. As Tocqueville commented, years later: "The influence of women was then omnipotent: they gave reputation, they gave fashion, they even gave political power."44 Besides, for a dozen years the male privilege of politics was foreclosed to Constant, while the pen of the woman continued to thunder. Before 1815, Constant had published only a few political works of note, none of which, given their occasional circumstances, seemed enduring. As yet there was no Adolphe, no Wallstein, no great treatise on politics quite matching the original inspiration we find in the Lausanne and Paris manuscripts,45 no compendious study of the history of religions. But Madame de Stael had already given the world Delphine, Corinne, De r influence des passions, De la litterature, De

rAllemagne...She had carried forward Montesquieu's ideas on the "spirit of nations"; together with Chateaubriand she had launched Romanticism; she had "discovered" Germany. The prodigious novelty of these works no doubt owed much to Benjamin, A. W. Schlegel, and other Coppetians. But they were received as the triumph of Necker's daughter. Madame de Stael directly challenged the Emperor both with her train of life and with her literary and social influences. Foreigners called her "the greatest power in the Coalition." These heroic properties were set in even bolder relief when, in 1812, events caused her to flee across Austria and across Russia into Sweden, a vivid and hazardous journey in the midst of war that she did not fail to record in some of her best writing.46 Then, for a short while, the best society of England was at her feet. She did not make the error of wishing calamity on France; she only preached the overthrow of the despot - and, for making this distinction so clearly, most of Madame de Stael's adopted nation took her to its heart. By comparison, Constant's feats were pale and reflected light. Only his De Vesprit de conquete et de Vusurpation of 1814 won him comparable glory. But he nullified that work by his behavior in the Cent-Jours. Thus Madame de Stael re-entered Paris in triumph in 1815 - not just as a famous writer reprieved from exile, but a political force in 44

45

46

Tocqueville, q u o t e d in Conversations with Senior, i, 138. Cf. E d m o n d a n d J u l e s G o n c o u r t , La femme au dix-huitieme siecle (Paris, 1982), pp. 8 7 - 8 8 . Magistrally edited by Etienne Hofmann, Les 'principes de politique' de Benjamin Constant, 2 vols.: 1. La genese d'une oeuvre et revolution de la pense'e de leur auteur (1789-1806); 11. Texte e'tabli... (Geneva, 1980). See G e r m a i n e d e Stael-Holstein, Dix annees ctexil (ed. S i m o n e Balaye, Paris, 1966).

Benjamin Constant afloat: hospital or pantheon

15

her own right. Although her costume and headdress were bizarre, her failing health all too visible in her mottled complexion and sunken features (she had, in petto, borne a child to her second husband Rocca at the age of forty-five), and her liberalism offensive to many of the other returning French, she was a great lady and hero. The last, brief portion of her life was devoted to arranging a worthy marriage for Albertine and to having a final fling at politics. To both these ends she resumed the brilliant life of salonniere, and she also attempted to reclaim from Constant a considerable sum of borrowed money, intending it for Albertine's dowry, since the Due de Broglie, though eminently well-born, was not rich.47 Constant, now married to Charlotte von Hardenberg, mired in his gambling expenses and bad management, had little to spare and no disposition to repay what he had understood to be a debt for life. Madame de Stael had earlier made scenes with Benjamin in front of her children. But now they quarrelled ever more furiously. These events probably hardened Madame de Broglie's heart toward Constant. It would also seem that this rift between the two great liberals placed most of "good society" on the side of Madame de Stael. She crowned her life by writing the Considerations sur la Revolution frangaise, intended as a vindication of Necker's politics. Though Necker had ceased to be important to most of Madame de StaePs admirers, the book had further significance as a rallying point for liberal opinion, and it inspired the more erudite revolutionary history of Mignet and Thierry. Much later, Sainte-Beuve praised its "influence conciliante, expansive, irresistible" and wished that its author had been better hearkened to by her acolytes.48 On 14 July 1817, before her book on the Revolution was published, Madame de Stael died, her spirit alert but her body in gangrenous collapse. Constant had tried to see her in her last hours, only to be rebuffed by Albertine. However, decency mandated that he be allowed to spend the first night in the presence of her corpse, together with the Due de Broglie.49 One wonders what they thought, and if they shared their thoughts. Constant was shaken: later he acclaimed her Considerations to the public in the Minerve. The extraordinary power Madame de Stael possessed was, it seems, concentrated in her profound and flashing eyes and in the mouth, indelicate and labial, from which a miracle of conversation 47 48 49

Bastid, Benjamin Constant, i, 267. C.-A. d e Sainte-Beuve, " M a d a m e d e S t a e l , " in Portraits desfemmes Bastid, Constant, 1, 312.

(Paris, 1876), p . 162.

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gushed forth. Remusat, who spoke with her only once, found the experience unforgettable.50 In his long and admiring study, SainteBeuve wrote of her "conversation...which she poured out, as if divine, from the perpetual spring of her soul: that is what life was for her." "All her contemporaries," he said, "are unanimous about this." 51 The cult of Madame de Stael, assiduously tended by her daughter, eclipsed the fragile and contested reputation of Benjamin Constant. The year after Constant died, Chateaubriand, legitimist but co-founder of Romanticism, made a much-remarked pilgrimage to Coppet to abide by her tomb.52 Constant had other difficulties near the end of his life. Already twice rebuffed, but now armed with new writings and, once more, the post of Conseiller d'Etat, he sought election to the Academie Franchise. Despite favorable prognostications, old antagonisms surfaced and he once again failed. Among certain liberals, it seems that Royer-Collard voted against him. The victor was Jean-PonsGuillaume Viennet, peer of France, a military figure and writer of little consequence. Viennet's diary entries on this subject do not make pleasant reading: Tuesday, 18 November. Today, which is my birthday, the dearest and strongest of my wishes has been granted... The Academie Franchise has named me to the chair of M. de Segur... I wrote to the perpetual secretary to announce my candidacy, then rushed to speak of this to M. Etienne. "Step down," he replied. "We are going to elect Benjamin Constant. He is about to die. He won't even have time to deliver his [reception] speech, and you will follow him to give the eulogy both for him and for M. de Segur." "The eulogy of Benjamin Constant!" I exclaimed. " I wouldn't have either the will or the courage; shame would strike me dumb "... Several days later, I happened to meet M. Benjamin Constant in one of the corridors of the Chamber. I told him that his candidacy displeased me greatly, and I reminded him of the wish of M. de Segur [that I should replace him]... "The Academy," he replied, "does not recognize bequests..." I grew red with anger; I looked him right in the face; and I saw that it was practically a cadaver that had just addressed me with the impertinence. I smiled with pity and, after having delivered a glare of contempt, I turned my back on him without a word... Monday, IJ December. Yesterday we celebrated the funeral of Benjamin Constant. The procession was enormous; but I would not record all this if it were not necessary to repeat a stupidity of Alexandre Dumas. "Benjamin 50 52

Remusat, Memoires, i, 358. Ibid., p. 125.

51

Sainte-Beuve, Portraits desfemmes, p. 85.

Royer-Collard \ steering by the Charter

17

Constant," he said, "took noble revenge on Viennet; he died"... That idiotic saying of Dumas will be repeated all over town. But let there be fools in this most spiritual of all nations, and fools who fool around at writing {ecrivaillent) ! 53

The crowds did turn out to mourn Benjamin Constant, and among them were not the least of the literary estate: not just Dumas, but also Victor Hugo, who felt moved to write to Constant's widow: "Your private grief is also a public calamity. The loss that strikes you strikes us all. Allow me to tell you that tomorrow, in the midst of that tearful public that will join the procession for this distinguished man, there will be a sorely afflicted heart. It will be mine, Madam...He has left two widows, you and France." 54 But the majority verdict of the mandarins was not in favor of Constant. He quickly ceased to be a matter of controversy, and was little mentioned in the years to follow. In the mid-1840s, when interest in him was revived by new biographical revelations, SainteBeuve was there to tax him with his moral failings, to dub him "un pauvre pigeon blesse et trainant l'aile" and "une ruine intime et profonde."55 The preceding autopsy may help to suggest why it is possible, and indeed likely, that Alexis de Tocqueville distanced himself from the writings of Benjamin Constant.

in.

R O Y E R - C O L L A R D : STEERING BY THE C H A R T E R

Tocqueville may not have received any direct theoretical impulse from the liberalism of Benjamin Constant. But he drew on another proximate inspiration: Pierre-Paul Royer-Collard, the central oracle of the Doctrinaires. Tocqueville's first exposure to Royer-Collard did not come until after he had written the first volume of Democracy in America. Nonetheless, they were kindred spirits who saw the problems of modern politics in much the same fashion. As Nassau Senior informs us: "Royer Collard was a man of superior mind: he had a great deal to relate. De Tocqueville used to pump him whenever an opportunity occurred." 56 Who were the Doctrinaires? In general, it can be said that they 53

D u e d e la Force, ed., Journal de Viennet, pair de France: te'moin de trois regnes (Paris, 1955), p p .

54

Victor H u g o , Oeuvres completes, vol. ix. Lettres a la fiancee: correspondance, I (Paris, 1947), p p . 55 483-484. Sainte-Beuve, Portraits litteraires (Paris, 1864), 111, 188, 281.

56

Simpson, ed., Tocqueville's Conversations with Senior, 11, 56.

116-119.

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were the left-center political theorists of the Restoration, men willing on occasion to support moderate ministries, such as those of Decazes, Serre, and Martignac; resolute defenders of the Charter against royalist infringement; progeny of Madame de StaeTs Anglophilic constitutionalism and her desire to mix talent and breeding. It is not true, as is often said, that the Doctrinaires had no doctrine: they favored a balanced constitutional, but not parliamentary, system; they fought for freedom of expression and equality under the law; and they promoted " the organized sovereignty of free governments," distinguished, as Royer-Collard pointed out, from "the sovereignty of the people" by its attachment to "rights and interests," rather than to "persons and wills," by its more faithful representation of real society.57 As such, the Doctrinaires claimed to be one of the two true "parties" (the other being the "royalist" or right-center) as against the "factions" ("ancien regime" and "revolutionary"). Like the royalists, they were devoted to the principles of Bourbon legitimacy and to the presence of hereditary aristocracy (the Chamber of Peers) in the mixed constitution; but they were devoted to them conditionally, within the specifications of the Charter and so long as there was no backsliding toward "ancien regime." Unlike the Independants, the loosely defined group to their left that included Constant, they did not see themselves as perennial opposition. However, when the Charter and the public liberties it defined seemed threatened (as under Villele and, most radically, Polignac), they rallied to the left.58 On Royer-Collard's own admission, it was perhaps absurd to call the Doctrinaires a "party": more precisely, they were the animating spirits of a political tendency. The true-blue "doctrinaires" were Serre, Camille Jordan and himself.59 But to that triumvirate it would be appropriate to add others, especially Guizot, whose academic and theoretical writings help us to specify this conservative liberalism and whose journalism and political strategy trace its most unambiguous path to the July Monarchy. However, Royer-Collard himself was cool toward Guizot, who, he thought, arrogated too 57

58

59

Prosper d e B a r a n t e , La viepolitique de M. Royer-Collard: ses discours et ses ecrits (2 vols., Paris, 1861), 11, 18. See Georges Weill, La France sous la monarchie constitutionnelle, 1814-1848 (Paris, 1912), p p . 1 6 - 1 8 ; P a u l T h u r e a u - D a n g i n , Le parti liberal sous la Restauration (Paris, 1888), p p . 226—231, 399-4O7, 483-487T h u r e a u - D a n g i n , Parti liberal, p . 79. Also, Sainte-Beuve, Portraits litteraires, 111, 329.

Royer-Collard \ steering by the Charter

19

much of the privilege of speaking for others.60 Guizot, like Madame de Broglie a Protestant, and the most vociferously middle-class theorist of the Doctrinaires, invented the fruitful dichotomy of "pays legal" and "pays reel" to justify the universalism of bourgeois sovereignty, a "sovereignty of reason" as he called it.61 Despite the prominence of Guizot in the articulation of doctrinaire liberalism, he cannot be taken as perfectly representing this " mixed " party of activist professors and liberal nobles, the latter firmly attached to the Broglie salon, the former to Le Globe. Earlier, we described Benjamin Constant's alienation from the bonne societe o{ the Restoration. In counterpart, it is important to understand the dense texture of connubial relations among the liberal aristocrats. Madame de Stael, as we have seen, had married her daughter to Victor de Broglie, whose step-father was a d'Argenson. By the time he wrote his memoirs, Remusat was connected to the Lafayettes, the Tracys, the d'Houdetots, the Barantes, General Lamoriciere, the Corcelles, the Beaumonts. Francisque de Corcelle and Gustave de Beaumont were, of course, bosom friends of Alexis de Tocqueville, who was himself the grandson of Lamoignon de Malesherbes, the cousin of Chateaubriand, and the more distant relative of Comte Mathieu Mole and other progeny of the former robe nobility. Remusat's fascinating portrait of his age alerts us to the natural importance of this extended family network. Then there were the professors and writers: Guizot, Victor Cousin, Theodore Jouffroy, Villemain, Damiron — and RoyerCollard himself. Together with these, the nobility — in the persons of Barante, Remusat, Montalembert, and Tocqueville - provided notable men of letters. This distinguished mixture of minds and pens stocked the academies of the Institut de France, the Parnassus that had rejected Benjamin Constant. Royer-Collard was far more than just a bourgeois intellectual. At a distance it is hard to grasp his impact on his contemporaries, for he left virtually no published writing despite being a philosophy professor, a brilliant parliamentary orator, and a man with ample 60 61

R e m u s a t , Memories, 1, 386. I have neglected Guizot here, in part, because there is little to add to Pierre Rosanvallon's splendid treatment: Le moment Guizot (Paris, 1985). Guizot's theory is most fully expressed in his article "De la souverainete," in Le Globe, 25 November 1826; see, on this, Rosanvallon, Moment Guizot, pp. 87-94. While scarcely eliciting the approval of RoyerCollard, Guizot's conservative group of the July parliaments was commonly referred to as the Doctrinaires.

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opportunity to reflect on his long and full life. Even Charles X admired Royer-Collard.62 In 1828, when Royer was elected president of the Chamber of Deputies, Hegel expressed his joy to Victor Cousin that France had so honored a philosopher.63 Indeed, among his other accomplishments, Royer-Collard had given philosophy a new orientation in post-Revolutionary France. Notwithstanding his humble but solid Jansenist origins in the Champenois village of Sompuis, this future philosopher and friend of liberty was every inch an aristocrat. A noble marriage had brought him a modest fortune and an agreeable country property in the Loiret-Cher, where he held court. "Royer-Collard kept up the Old Regime ways. Grands seigneurs pleased him without overwhelming him; he liked high style (grandes manures), but he liked still better a superiority of mind." 64 Though he had no wish to be ennobled himself, except in the minds of others, no one considered him a social inferior.65 Royer was an eloquent realist, ardent but without illusions, disciplined but caustic, imposing and opinionated but basically unambitious, a charming Cassandra; above all, independent: "he liked neither to command, nor to obey."66 He had undoubtedly gotten this steady perspective from a combination of experiences: his severe Jansenist education, his brief initiation to the liberal tidal wave that produced 1789, his exposure to the hazards of the Terror, his turn to Reid's Scottish "common-sense" philosophy, his collaboration with the exiled Louis XVIII, not, however, as an emigre, but as a secret advisor within France. Active as an intellectual and political force from the beginning of the Restoration (although he had had no part in negotiating the return of the dynasty), he had kept a sense of that world now lost, the pre-Revolutionary age, "which had appealed to him without winning him over, whose memories he was always fond of, while judging it without pity, and on whose tomb he spent his life writing brilliant epitaphs once he was certain that it was really dead." 67 That outlook found expression in his disabused idea of human nature and his unwavering demand for political rectitude. Of 62 63

64 66 67

B a r a n t e , Vie de Royer-Collard, n , 368. Hegel to Cousin, 3 March 1828, in C.Butler and C. Seiler, eds., Hegel: The Letters (Bloomington, 1984), p. 665. Regarding the political affinity of Hegel and Royer-Collard, see G. A. Kelly, Hegel's Retreat from Eleusis (Princeton, 1978), pp. 145-148. 65 R e m u s a t , Memoires, 1, 88. Ibid., p . 2 5 . B a r a n t e , Vie de Royer-Collard, 1, 2. Remusat, "De l'esprit de reaction," p. 786.

Rqyer-Collard: steering by the Charter

21

Royer's childhood upbringing, Barante later wrote: "One would have called it a community of the primitive Church... This was Jansenism in all its rigor and conscientious morality." 68 Though he practiced Catholicism fitfully until his years grew short, his (Gallican) defense of the Church dated from 1797, when he had declared in the Conseil des Cinq-Cents: " T h e Catholic religion is today a need for the great majority of the people you represent. One may think it expedient to deny this truth, but there will be no escaping its inevitable, unyielding consequences."69 Thus, Jansenism was a potent, though not inflexible guide: " [Royer-Collard] felt rather than thought like Port-Royal." 70 Much in the vein of his PortRoyal ancestors, he wrote to Tocqueville: " Politics without morality is only a game of knaves and fools, or the oppression of the weak by the strong." 71 Royer-Collard was one of the first French philosophers to inhabit the "Napoleonic" Sorbonne (from 1811 till 1814, when he took on other state offices).72 He weaned the academic spirit away from the sensationalist theories of La Romiguiere and the Ideologues toward the doctrines of Reid, which admirably suited his own creed as a moralist and a statesman. As Remusat explains: "the Scottish philosophy is a solid and sensible rationalism... that strengthens belief without sacrifice to prejudice." 73 Paradoxically, this also had the effect of opening the French mind to Kant, although Royer himself did not take that step. However, he trained Cousin as his successor, thus smoothing the path for "eclecticism" as well as for the more distinctive doctrines of Maine de Biron.74 He sat in French assemblies from 1815 until his retirement in 1842. Despite his affection for the legitimate dynasty, he had sworn allegiance to Louis-Philippe in 1830. The great blunders of Charles X in overstepping the Charter to curtail political liberty had, 68 69 70 71 72

73 74

B a r a n t e , Vie de Royer-Collard, i, 5 . "Discours sur la libertedes cultes," in ibid., 1, 31. R e m u s a t , Passe et present (2 vols., Paris, 1970), 11, 3 2 5 ; cf. Me'moires, 11, 2 7 . T o c q u e v i l l e , OC, x i , 2 7 . At the Restoration, Royer-Collard entered the Conseil d'Etat and undertook the direction of the Librairie (censorship). See Remusat, Memoires, 11, 25. Remusat, "De l'esprit de reaction," p. 793. One of Royer's pupils was the powerful Victor Cousin, who, during his tenure at the Sorbonne and later, during the July Monarchy, as generalissimo of French higher education, gave the nation's lyce'es and universities their ideological stamp. His "eclecticism" reserved an ample, albeit distorted, place for modern German thought. On Cousin and his acolytes see Joseph Ferrari, Les philosophes salaries (Paris, 1849); Jules Simon,

Victor Cousin (Paris, 1891); and Paul-Frangois Dubois, Cousin, Jouffroy, Damiron: Souvenirs (Paris, 1902).

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"despite consequences that he feared and hated," prompted him, together with most of the intellectuals, to prefer revolution to counter-revolution.75 Later, Chateaubriand would explain to the Dauphine: "We were the three men in France who should never have taken the oath to Philippe: myself, M. Laine, and RoyerCollard. Outside of government, in different positions, we would have formed a potent triumvirate. M. Laine took his oath out of weakness, M. Royer-Collard took it out of pride: the former will die of it; the second will live, for he lives by everything he does, and there is nothing he does that isn't admirable." 76 The July Monarchy ended Royer-Collard's political ascendancy and turned him toward a kind of inner migration. His fond constituents returned him as an independent to the new Chamber. He watched its political evolution with a growing distaste that influenced the mood of his new friend Alexis de Tocqueville. Finally, when he had had enough, he told his electors: Politics is now stripped of its greatness; material interests dominate it. I do not look down on those interests: they have their worth and deserve the favorable notice of governments. But in my esteem they only come after other, far higher, interests where nations ought to seek their true prosperity and their solid glory.77 A few months later, Royer-Collard wrote to Tocqueville: " I did not come into the world to change its face; the small part I have played in the affairs of my time satisfied the scope of my activity or, if you will, my ambition. My calling was not to do more than that." 78 Here one senses not just Jansenism, but a touch of immodest frustration. The Charter of 1814 had been his great trial and test; its aftermath of 1830 had underscored his failure. The aging Royer-Collard had no appetite for a new role of opposition, which he directly bequeathed to Tocqueville in this same letter. He had become isolated by his delicacy and his scruples. Unlike Constant, he would be remembered with warmth by the politicians of better breeding. Remusat was called to fill his chair in 75

76 77 78

See R e m u s a t , Memoires, i, 3 9 3 ; B a r a n t e , Vie de Royer-Collard, 11, 115. J u s t before t h e J u l y revolution, Royer-Collard had told his electors that "my whole life belongs... to the cause of the legitimate monarchy and to the defense of the public rights and liberties of our country" - neatly balancing his obligations. Vie de Royer-Collard, 11, 302. Chateaubriand, Memoires cTOutre-tombe, 11, 722-723. "Discours a ses electeurs," quoted in Tocqueville, OC, xi, 53. Royer-Collard to Tocqueville, 21 July 1838, ibid., p. 65.

Royer-Collard: steering by the Charter

23

the Academie Franchise; Barante wrote his life in two volumes as commentary woven around his public acts and speeches. Royer-Collard had been the Socrates of his generation: a philosopher much heard and recorded, but mute with his own pen. Admirers had found his conversation enrapturing. He also resembles Gladstone: while never the leader of a great party or a great nation, he, too, was a Grand Old Man who had spoken eloquently for freedom, for democracy as he understood it, and for propriety and loyalty in politics. As Thureau-Dangin has written: M. Royer-Collard had an imposing mind. His speech was as serious as his thought, a little lofty and dogmatic, but cast in bronze. At the tribune, and especially in conversation, he sometimes mixed with the dignity of his language a sententious and effective irony which, in a single turn of phrase, could win the contest. With absolutely upright motives and a disinterest from all common ambitions, but without the kind of elevated egoism that would make him privilege his political image (le soin de sa personnalite politique) and his unity of doctrine, he went at his own speed, not caring if he followed the others or if they followed him.79 Remusat confirms: His parliamentary speeches deserve to be studied by statesmen; even in practical politics they are very valuable. What I admire the most is a dominating love of justice; yet experience of revolutions and knowledge of the human heart are everywhere evident. The special quality of M. RoyerCollard is to have been both speculative and philosophical in politics, without ever losing his feel for reality. He deeply understood la miserable perfection des choses humaines.80

Above all, said Remusat, " I have never known a man so mobile and so unshakeable at the same time." 81 We see to what extent this was still a culture of the spoken word, in public or in private, where the character of the soul was read out of the vivacity of speech, with its appropriate accompaniments of gesture and significant reference. (It was also a culture that believed in physiognomy.) Madame de Stael might bend her morals; but her divine sense of la parole won her an acclaim that severe moralists could envy. And when Constant - according to the critics - went about saying "the same old things," that was certain disaster, even if some things might need to have been said again and again. By this kind ofjudgment Royer-Collard was especially privileged, being one 79 81

Thureau-Dangin, Parti liberal, p. 81. Remusat, "De l'esprit de reaction," p. 785.

80

Remusat, Me'moires, n, 29.

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who, without offending, could go on talking, it seems, endlessly: "Every thought he gathered possessed him, and then he had to express it, the feeling that inspired him had to come out (il fallait...qu>il se produisit au dehors) ...And since human thought has never been expressed with equal verve, piquancy, and vigor, or in a more compelling variety of original phrases and unexpected images, since improvised speech has never combined more energy and finesse, more elevation and warmth, more exactness of reason and colors of the imagination, one would have been very foolhardy to interrupt [Royer's] incomparable monologue."82 That setting was important to the brilliance of the liberal stone. Tocqueville himself admired, and was noted for, a becoming mixture of gravity and charm in conversation. It probably could not be said of him, however, that he "appears entirely in what he says or writes."83 In Tocqueville's composition, as splendid as it is, there is some subterfuge of the personality. Perhaps this is why Tocqueville could write to Royer-Collard: "Monsieur, you represent a time different from our own, loftier feelings, ideas, and a society more vast."84 Royer-Collard was not only beloved as a man of intellectual skill and independence, but as a friend of liberty and a politician of principle. He believed - like Constant - that " a legitimate monarchy, better than a government born out of the disorders of the Revolution,could guarantee the rule of law and respect for the rights of the nation." 85 He also, here more aggressively than Constant, believed that the king could play a role as "neutral power": " a moderator raised above all passions... who would hasten to summon all the interests of the grande famille to a solemn and lasting reconciliation."86 Monarchy, he felt, was "not only [i.e. for France] a truth of politics, but also a truth of feeling... and experience."87 He did not think, as did the far left, that France required governments beholden to the confidence of the Chamber or that legislation should be initiated by the Chamber: "ce jour-la nous sommes en republique." 88 For Royer-Collard, the Charter was a bargain between times past and time present, an alliance between phases of French social history, not an eternal expression of abstract right.89 It was, he thought, an offense to the dignity of the monarchy and the 82 84 85 88

83 Remusat, Memoires, n, 18. B a r a n t e , Vie de Royer-Collard, i, 2. Tocqueville to Royer-Collard, 8 September 1842, OC, xi, i n . 86 87 B a r a n t e , Vie de Royer-Collard, 1, 4 5 . Ibid., p. 193. Ibid., p. 221. 89 I b i d . , p . 2 1 7 ; cf. p . 2 9 6 . I b i d . , 11, 16.

Royer-Collard: steering by the Charter

25

nation to allow the regicides of Louis XVI to return from exile indemnified (this was a direct reply to Constant). 90 But he also upheld a wide range of civil liberties and national rights. Regarding the press, it was better "that arbitraire should be everywhere than in the hands of the government... better everywhere... and hence nowhere... rarefied to infinity ...imperceptible." 91 Regarding the armed forces, the king should command them (though never in battle), but only a force appropriately drawn from the nation. 92 Regarding the Church, its rights ("le commerce de la terre avec le ciel") should neither weigh on politics nor be determined by politics. Royer-Collard's liberties were in the plural, rarely abstract. Kings, peers, and commons all had liberties - but the greatest liberty of all was for government to conform to the evolving needs of society. In this respect, especially, he anticipated Tocqueville while, from a different perspective, relaying Constant. The major difference with Constant is that Royer believed the French to be devoted to monarchy and neutral toward the "service aristocracy." The major difference with Tocqueville is that he believed democracy to be consummated with its part in mixed government and its protection under the law, while Tocqueville saw an inevitable expansion attached to its "passion for equality." Still, on a famous occasion when Royer-Collard broke with his friend Serre in the Chamber, he taxed him thus: taking as I should democracy in its purely political meaning, as opposed to or compared with aristocracy, I agree with you that it flows mightily (a pleins bords) in France just as the centuries and [recent] events have made it do... The middle classes are so close to the upper classes that, if they wish to see those above them, they would have to step down quite a bit... Yes, [democracy] flows mightily in la belle France^ more than ever favored by the heavens.93 Let others wail or gnash their teeth; I give thanks to Providence for summoning to the benefits of civilization a greater number of its creatures. What Royer-Collard meant by democracy was a supremacy of the educated middle class in public affairs and a society in which all citizens enjoyed the equal protection of the laws. When he told Serre — on a fundamental point — that government must follow and 90 93 94

91 92 Ibid., 1, 495. Ibid., p . 349. Ibid., p . 387. Ibid., 11, 99; cf. pp. 247-248. Cited in Remusat, "De l'esprit de reaction," p. 787. Democracy was to be qualified by Guizot, much later, as a "fleuve fecond et impur." De la democratic en France (Paris, 1849), p. 124.

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replicate the interests of society, he had in mind a social order that was already being bypassed by events and would be buffeted in his lifetime. Tocqueville sensed this, as well as the "gentle despotism" to which the new society was susceptible. Constant had felt that people, released from the shackles of government, as it constrained both their moral and economic life, would find their own way and not be tempted to either effervescence or servility. Royer-Collard believed that the "rights" of democracy could be founded on a semiaristocratic compromise. Serre thought that even a constitutional government needed to discipline and limit the desires of society. But Tocqueville believed that only a well-regulated society could do this for itself, using the traditional armatures of family, village, and religion: the power of moeurs. Royer-Collard's regressive ideal came out of the caution of putting France back together in 1814. His major political axiom was to use the king to limit counter-revolution, and to limit revolution by the Charter. 95 But, as opposed to Constant, he raised the issue of democracy by its name, inspiring Tocqueville to treat it in precision. What Royer-Collard, here following Sieves, recognized was: The social order is not the political order, because the society is not the government; but the social order acts on the political order: if society is not power, it is influence. And what the French Revolution sought to achieve... was to change the social order... [From what emerged] we can say that democracy [is inscribed] in the social order. That is the most clear and striking result of the revolution. There is the irresistible fact, independent of the will of men and governments. We can still affect the constitution of the state. But the constitution of society is beyond our grasp: it is determined by blind forces, or, if one prefers, it is the work of Providence.96 As we shall see, this was one of the two main points of departure for Tocqueville. The other was the creeping action of centralization (more a political than a social phenomenon, though "influenced" by social trends toward uniformity). Tocqueville shared RoyerCollard's problematic of democracy, while transcending it both in theory and by sociological investigation. His sociology enabled him to raise sober doubts about Constant's vision of progress and the benign effects of commercial civilization. When he entered the Chamber in 1838, Tocqueville struck the pose of an independent liberal in the style of his mentor, Royer95

Remusat, "De l'esprit de reaction," p. 794.

96

Ibid., p. 795.

Tocqueville: sailing the open sea

27

Collard. He sat where Royer had sat, on the left-center. He copied him in other ways; as he wrote to him in 1839: " I am not joined in any binding way to anyone. That is what I wanted, and I think I have it.5397 When Royer-Collard died in 1845, Tocqueville wrote to his widow: " H e had almost accustomed me to look on him as a father." 98 Tocqueville's own father, Herve de Clerel, Restoration peer of France, was still alive and revered by his son. But it seems that Royer-Collard's political fatherhood may have been more important to the public man. iv.

T O C Q U E V I L L E : S A I L I N G T H E O P E N SEA

"Vain is the hope of escaping from the calamities of one's century..." wrote Chateaubriand in 1797: We navigate along an unknown coast, amid shadows and tempest. Thus, it is in everyone's interest to reflect on these questions with me [he was writing the first treatise ever on comparative revolutions], because his interest is at stake. Here is a map for each to study in his peril, so that, like a wise pilot, he may recognize his point of departure, his present location, and his destination, and in case of shipwreck rescue himself on some isle where the tempest cannot reach. That island is an irreproachable conscience."

This image of voyage, peril, and possible shipwreck - a perhaps interminable adventure - is commonplace among sensitive aristocrats in the wake of the Revolution. They have descended from Lucretius' lofty and safe crag100 to the desperate affairs of sailors buffeted by the storm. Alexis de Tocqueville shares his cousin's alarm at the wave-tossed cruise along uncharted coasts by voyagers who, it seems, are "blind instruments in the hands of God... [we who] obstinately fix our eyes on the ruins that may still be described upon the shore we have left, while the current hurries us away and drags us backward towards the abyss." 101 These men have read the Odyssey and Aeneid.

But, in travelling across an ocean and across a new commonwealth (a country peopled by men with " a decided taste for the sea... [who weigh] anchor before the tempest is over... [and] are often 97

Tocqueville to Royer-Collard, 7 March 1839, OC, xi, 76.

99

C h a t e a u b r i a n d , Essai kistorique, politique et moral sur les revolutions anciennes et modernes

101

98

Ibid., p. 121.

10 (London, 1820), pp. 4-5. ° Lucretius, De Rerum Natura, bk. 11, lines 1-4. Tocqueville, Democracy in America (trans. Henry Reeve, 2 vols., New York, 1945), 1, 7. Henceforth DA.

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shipwrecked"),102 Tocqueville is determined to construct a map more serviceable than Chateaubriand's unavailing catalog of ancient and modern insurrection. If Providence carries us fatally through the storms to unknown coasts, wise men need not doubt their destination; for "it is not necessary that God himself should speak in order that we may discover the unquestionable signs of his will." Providence steers us toward democracy; and we have, upon arrival, the duty "to educate [it], to reawaken, if possible, its religious beliefs; to purify its morals; to mold its actions." That will be the task of a "new science of politics."103 Tocqueville's mission to "educate democracy" had, even then, somewhat the air of a Pascalian wager. But in years to follow, when he reflected on the unrelieved hazards of revolution at more and more cost to liberty, he feared that all might end in "intermittent anarchy": " I do not know when this long voyage will be ended; I am weary of seeing the shore in each successive mirage, and I often ask myself whether the terra Jirma we are seeking does really exist, and whether we are not doomed to rove upon the seas forever:"104 Unlike Chateaubriand (who died at just this time), Tocqueville faced the full consternation of what seemed like permanent revolution, a tempest in which rescue on the island of "irreproachable conscience" would be of little value. And unlike Benjamin Constant, Tocqueville could no longer be sanguine about peace and progress. Constant, in a somewhat Panglossian mood, had written in the Mercure de France in 1817: "our present governments have today many fewer dangers to fear than ever before. No longer are there in our political societies classes interested in upheavals, as before, there are only vicious individuals, and police authority [la force publique) has always been able to handle individuals."105 Thirty years later, Tocqueville was witness to "the most extensive and the most singular [insurrection] that has ever occurred in our history, and perhaps in any other," one that sought to change the "constitution of society," believed impossible by the Doctrinaires. And unlike Royer-Collard, Tocqueville could no longer steer by the Charter. He found himself on the open sea, where the only navigational instrument was his "new political science."106 102 104 105 106

103 Ibid., p p . 440, 442. Ibid., p . 7. Tocqueville, Recollections, p . 69. Constant, "Pieces d e t a c h e e s , " Melanges, in G a u c h e t , ed., Liberte chez les modernes, p . 510. Tocqueville, Recollections, p . 150.

Tocqueville: sailing the open sea

29

Tocqueville had gained Royer-Collard's friendship (perhaps through Chateaubriand) shortly after his return from America. Royer had been helpful in pushing his and Beaumont's Systeme penitentiaire for the Monthyon Prize of the Academie Franchise, an honor that Tocqueville himself would shortly receive for the first volume of his Democracy in America.107 Besides, a common appreciation of the French political climate after the July revolution bonded the young historian to the older philosopher. Tocqueville had himself had a Jansenist (and Gallican) education that easily put him in touch with Royer's temperament and public ideals.108 Royer, on his part, while defending the prerogatives of the middle classes, had preferred the manners of the aristocracy. Neither man had (like Chateaubriand) refused the oath to Louis-Philippe, but both (like Lamartine) had sworn it grudgingly, without attempting to disguise a lack of enthusiasm. Both could agree - in different accents — that the great problem of the future was "democracy." Both sensed the uncharted peril of that experiment; neither was content to leave the work entirely to Providence, if one could assist by reading its oracles for the sake of a principled liberty. When Royer-Collard obtained the first book of Democracy in America, he read it five times and hailed it as a masterpiece. Not only did it come from a scion of the Old Regime who had chosen liberty as his new faith, but it brilliantly analyzed and confirmed the worst fears the elder statesman had of the politics to come. Royer is supposed to have copied down more than fifty pages of notes, now lost; and he defended the work before the Academie Franchise.109 It was "an inexhaustible source of instruction and pleasure." In an unpublished letter to Mole, he expressed his fear of " a new kind of tyranny without soldiers, tribunals, or laws of September [i.e. the September 1793 "law of suspects"], in a word, the democratic tyranny, as M. de Tocqueville has so well described it." 110 Tocqueville was flattered by these attentions. When, in 1841, Royer-Collard made him the gift of a collection of his parliamentary speeches, Tocqueville seems to have contemplated writing a long article about his friend, anticipating the encomiums of Remusat and Barante. However, this work remained in sketches in the Tocqueville archives; the notes fill eight pages in the contemporary critical 107 109 110

108 J a r d i n , Tocqueville, p p . 218-219. Ibid., p p . 4 4 - 4 5 . Ibid., p. 218; and see Royer-Collard's letter to Becquey, cited in Tocqueville, OC, xi, v. Tocqueville, OC, xi, vi.

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edition. While admiring, these notes are also judiciously critical. Of Royer-Collard, the philosopher, Tocqueville records tersely: "Destruction of materialist philosophy."111 Other excerpts include: "The union of liberty and legitimacy raised to the rank ofprovidential necessity, absolute condition of government"; "excellent against the excessive champions of the division of powers"; "it is time to teach the century that, the more the clergy is weak in the state, the more it should be strong in religion [an eminently Montesquieuvian sentiment] ;112 and to teach the clergy that, if it demands the religious liberty to which it is entitled [the goal of liberal Catholics like Montalembert], it retires from the outer world, it ceases to have influence over civil life and the manners of society."113 Of RoyerCollard himself, Tocqueville states: "A great soul. No more of them left"; "by his taste leaning toward aristocracy, by his traditions and his reason toward equality"; "His speeches will last and always be read as long as there exists a French language and as long as our great social problems bother us"; " a powerful personality, unconquerable, and yet a personality to be forgotten... Say this without denigration; explain it..." "Deep but exaggerated contempt of M. Royer for these times. The main thing that escapes him is that we live in an age of transition"; "Metaphysical mind, but not imaginary (chimerique); no one is more rooted in the facts."114 Tocqueville's notes on Royer-Collard would merit a much longer analysis. However, enough has been given to suggest not only agenda for comparison, but insights into the creation of Tocqueville's own agenda. Before Royer-Collard retired from the Chamber, he literally placed his cloak on Tocqueville's shoulders: "You, Monsieur, are called on to fulfil your time on earth and plow your furrow in another way than I have. You have already begun; and you will follow [your destiny] without ever achieving it: for no man has ever finished anything." 115 With a divergence of horizons that cannot be denied, Tocqueville accepted this charge and its human limitations faithfully, lamenting, as had Royer, the loss of "the feeling of greatness" and the death of "the imagination of greatness."116 If the readings that Royer-Collard and Tocqueville gave to 111 114 115

112 113 Ibid., p. 97. Ibid., pp. 98-99, 101. Ibid., p. 101. Ibid., p. 102. Royer-Collard to Tocqueville, 21 July 1838, in ibid., p. 65; cf. Barante, Vie de Royer116 Collard^ 11, 535. Tocqueville to Royer-Collard, 6 April 1838, in OC, xi, 61.

Tocqueville: sailing the open sea

31

democracy disclosed fundamental differences of appreciation, it must be remembered that forty years of age separated them. The problem of Royer's maturity had been to find a middle way between the arbitraire of paternalistic royalism and the rule by self-appointed demagogues speaking for the people with the language of volonte generate', Tocqueville would see the organization and morale of society, not the constitutional distribution of powers or even the primacy of individual rights, as the key to a regulated liberty. Experience had made Royer-Collard a confirmed pessimist. As Remusat justly writes: "he hailed the principle of the equality of rights with respect, he was too fond of justice to fail to greet with joy the victory of that principle in the laws and in social conduct (moeurs); but, by the same token, he was almost frightened by its political dangers and consequences for government. And so, having little confidence in the compromises he himself endorsed for joining order to liberty, the old and the new factors of stability, he constantly prophesied the collapse of what he was building... [He] condemned any return to the past as a chimera, and any faith in the future as a Utopia."117 Tocqueville would trace a similar trajectory; but in the 1830s he had a firmer faith than Royer in the remedial possibilities of political understanding. Tocqueville hoped that, under democracy, "the majority of the citizens will enjoy a greater degree of prosperity, and the people will remain peaceable, not because they despair of a change for the better, but because they are conscious that they are well off already." 118 At almost this same time, RoyerCollard was writing to Barante: " I do not know the future unless it is that the face of our earth will be remade, that he who has commanded will obey, that he who has ruled will more or less serve." He went on to declare that even if he were much younger, he would not have enlisted on such a mission.119 Tocqueville, less upset by role reversals of master and servant, but deeply concerned by the "mediocrity" of coming times, passed judgment on the "noble et imposante figure" in the last year of his life. He wrote that, amid apparent contradictions in Royer's public positions, two major ideas had always stood out. The first was that a clear distinction had to be drawn between the "esprit liberal" and the "esprit revolutionnaire," that rights, liberty, and dignity had to be separated from the "esprit d'aventure, de violence, de tyrannie, 117 119

Remusat, "De l'esprit de reaction," p. 803. Remusat, "De l'esprit de reaction," p. 803.

118

Tocqueville, DA, 1, 10.

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de demagogic" Secondly, Royer-Collard believed that France needed the institution of royalty: "The dream of his whole life was to make the new spirit and the old family live together and support each other." 120 According to Tocqueville, the liberal idea (where he was at one with Royer-Collard) was foremost and the monarchical idea did not necessarily flow from it. By that time, Tocqueville, while not completely a political agnostic - for he had recognized the benefits of monarchy and legitimacy - was inclined to favor any regime that left a comfortable space for liberty. Tocqueville was not intrinsically afraid of democracy, which he regarded as inevitable; but he grew progressively more fearful of democratic passions, whether bovine ("doux") or exalted ("revolutionnaires"). As the balanced optimism of the first part of Democracy in America receded, he seemed more and more a Royer-Collard of the next revolution, albeit a Royer-Collard recontextualized. Part of this is in his later movement away from sociology and back to politics. For, in exploring the history of his own country, he tilted his emphasis from the social "passion for equality" to the political problem of centralized power. This was not, to be sure, RoyerCollard's obsession of monarchy and liberty; but it was a painful acknowledgement of the fact that France did not seem able to operate by "the slow and quiet action of society upon itself."121 France was mired in a traditional slough, sometimes now vaguely referred to as "Jacobinism." Not only was the problematic of political centralism obviously political, both as a condition and as a milieu of research; it was also parochial. Tocqueville had, after all, had a thrilling, if potentially tragic, world-wide vision of conquests of democracy that was comparative and sociological; it became muted in his later concern for a France caught in the toils of a particular destiny. In the specific sense that I am using the word, Tocqueville was never so parochial as the Francocentric Royer-Collard. RoyerCollard could recognize the achievement of Democracy in America; but he had no wish to call in the new world to redress the balance of the old. Still, he never descended to the esprit de clocher of Chateaubriand: It has been said [by Tocqueville, preface to the second volume of Democracy in America] that a city where goods and education are equally distributed will present a finer spectacle to the eyes of the Divinity than the city of our 120 121

Tocqueville to Freslon, re Royer-Collard, 8 July 1858, in OC, xi, x-xi. Tocqueville, DA, 1, 433.

Tocqueville: sailing the open sea

33

forefathers... Farewell the pleasures of the hearth; farewell the charms of the family: in the midst of all these white, yellow, and black people who are claimed to be your compatriots, you will never be able to throw your arms around a brother. Was there, then, nothing of value in that earlier way of life, nothing in that narrow space seen from that window framed by ivy?122 Tocqueville, deeply devoted to the small world of his Normandy estate, nonetheless created a global, albeit Europocentric, vision of the march of equality - to be compared in later times with the worldly theodicies of Comte and Marx 123 — and he deepened it with a supple dialectic of "aristocratic" and "democratic" ages. But, as Tocqueville's courage in the face of Providence began to waver and as he began to find the seeds of despotism in regimes where "each man is haunted by a fear of sinking to a lower social level and by a restless urge to better his condition,"124 he became more historical — that is to say, more past-oriented — and more political (or parochial). The thrust of his inquiry had shifted from "whether the principle of equality is to lead [men] to servitude or freedom"125 to the anatomy of the causes of the French Revolution: "What was its true significance, its real nature, and what were the permanent effects of this strange and terrifying revolution?" 126 The questions are compatible, but not co-equal. Carried back to more local perspectives, Tocqueville lamented with Royer-Collard: "La politique est maintenant depouillee de sa grandeur..." 127 The idiom of this great thinker is not, of course, totally clarified by his connection with the Doctrinaire chief. His thoughts really departed from Montesquieu.128 And as has been frequently pointed out, Tocqueville learned his zest for historical globalism (for "la civilisation") from Guizot, whose lectures he attended between April 1829 a n d May 1830 — that grave year of political decision. It was in July 1829 t n a t n e wrote: "The history of civilization... wants and should want to embrace everything at the same time. Man must be examined in all aspects of his social existence." Tocqueville engorged history in those last days of Charles X - Barante, Guizot, Thiers.129 122 123

125 127 128

C h a t e a u b r i a n d , Memoires d'Outre-tombe, 1, 923. Notably Raymond Aron's volume of lectures, translated by R. Howard and H. Weaver as Main Currents in Sociological Thought, I. Montesquieu, Comte, Marx, Tocqueville (New York, 124 1968). Tocqueville, Old Regime, p . xiii. 126 Tocqueville, DA, n , 352. Tocqueville, Old Regime, p . 4. B a r a n t e , Vie de Royer-Collard, 11, 522. Tocqueville to L. de Kergorlay, 15 December 1850, re Montesquieu's fundamental impact 129 on Old Regime, OC, xm/2, 233. Jardin, Tocqueville, pp. 80 — 81.

34

Ports in the storm

Another influence may have come from the philosopher Theodore Jouffroy, the university colleague of Cousin and a contributor to the liberal Globe. Whether or not Tocqueville was familiar with Jouffroy before his trip to America or came upon his writings through the Melanges philosophiques of 1833 is unclear. There is a reference to Jouffroy in a letter Tocqueville wrote to Corcelle in April 1835, where, in apparent allusion to Jouffroy's lesson "Du scepticisme actuel" from his Cours du droit naturel, he takes issue with that philosopher's pessimistic interpretation of the inevitability of democracy.130 Tocqueville could also have been influenced by Jouffroy's "Du scepticisme" (1830) or by his once-famous essay "Comment les dogmes finissent," first published in the Globe on 24 May 1825. He would have found there an analysis of present times couched in terms of high moral elevation, ardent in castigation of "the terrible spectacle of a community without faith, abandoned entirely to selfishness."131 Certainly most of the essays later collected in the Melanges would have engaged Tocqueville's curiosity. This is especially true of "Reflexions sur la philosophic de l'histoire" (1825), where Jouffroy draws a distinction between ancient and modern historians along much the same lines that Tocqueville will later pursue in the second volume of Democracy in America: "The ancient historians explained everything by the passions and interests, the genius or capacity of individuals; the modern historians attempt to reduce everything to the law of ideas, not excepting those events which are most clearly dependent on the chance of individuals and the caprice of circumstances. Between these two extremes, which render ancient history so dramatic and modern history so logical, we meet with the truth." 132 The connection seems palpable. While lacking Cousin's flamboyance, Jouffroy was an important figure in the Paris where Tocqueville matriculated. He taught a moralistic form of eclecticism bordering on personalism; and he animated the Globe circle from his modest apartment in the rue du Four. One senses a singular contact between his mind and that of the young aristocrat, not least because of Jouffroy's anguished apostasy from the ardent Catholic faith of his childhood. Jouffroy did not simply have a gradual change of rational disposition like Renan 130 131

132

Tocqueville to Corcelle, 12 April 1835, OC, x v , 54. T h e o d o r e Jouffroy, " H o w D o g m a s C o m e to a n E n d , " in George Ripley, ed., Specimens of Foreign Standard Literature (Boston, 1838), 11, 140. Ibid., p. 177. Cf. Tocqueville, DA, n, 90-93.

Tocqueville: sailing the open sea

35

thirty years later. He suffered acutely from incredulity, as if it were a disease, and made a kind of career of his bereavement. His very moving account of his crisis, though only appearing in Nouveaux melanges after his death (1842), surprised no one. It has been called "Tun des sanglots les plus vrais et les plus eloquents de la litterature contemporaine. Tocqueville, too, was disguising a falling away of faith, a wrenching episode that had happened to him when he was sixteen and with whose consequences he wrestled throughout his life, divulging this only to the confidante of his last years, Madame Swetchine.134 His revelation survives only because Madame de Beaumont saw fit to make a copy of this letter, which her husband had excluded from the canonical correspondence on grounds of delicacy. Madame de Tocqueville knew nothing of this: indeed, her sufficiently worldly husband had, with the manners of a seigneur, regularly attended mass and vespers in his family chapel, perhaps uneasy with doubt, hoping perhaps, like Jouffroy, for the grace of conversion.135 Tocqueville's religious background was, as noted, not so different from Royer's: although with far less discipline, conducted less in a cenacle and more as a part of normal aristocratic Bildung. Catholicism is grasped both as a severe moral discipline and as the national religion of France. This is, of course, quite different from the intermittent Protestant, mystical, and liberating surges of faith experienced by Constant and Madame de Stael. Indeed, I shall argue below, at considerable length, that religion is a major and much-neglected path toward understanding French liberalism and its discriminations. Eventually we shall discover that Tocqueville was affected not only by the Globe, but more substantially by the Avenir of Gerbet and Lamennais, in the wake of the July revolution. Tocqueville was, of course, anything but an ultramontane; and it was not that feature of Lamennais's doctrine that attracted him. As a worldly, Gallican, and national Catholic, Tocqueville was clearly repulsed by that "degradation de la vieille religion."136 But he just as firmly believed the anti-religious temper of the previous century, 133 134

T h u r e a u - D a n g i n , Parti liberal, p . 239. Born A n n a Sophia Solmonova in Moscow in 1782, M a d a m e Swetchine died in Paris in 1857. H e r life is studied in Alfred-Pierre-Frederic, C o m t e d e Falloux, Madame Swetchine, sa vie et ses oeuvres (2 vols., Paris, i 8 6 0 ) ; Ernest Seillere, La grace du romantisme sage: Armand de

135

Melun et Sophie Swetchine, 1782-1857 (Paris, 1929). For the famous letter, see below, note 142. 136 Jardin, Tocqueville, p. 366. Ibid., pp. 63-64.

36

Ports in the storm

carried over into the liberalism of his day, to have been an abusive error. Having lost the hard core of his faith, Tocqueville clung to the outer shell of religious culture and a religious view of the cosmos. He treated religion, as had Montesquieu before him, as an "ecrivain politique." But let us return briefly to the loss of faith. Toward the end of his life, Tocqueville entered into a serious friendship and correspondence with Sophie Swetchine, the widow of a Russian general. Madame Swetchine, herself Russian but as French by adoption as Madame de Stael, captivated the author of Democracy in America. She had been instructed by Joseph de Maistre in Moscow, reading Pascal, Descartes, Leibniz, Kant, Fichte, and Hegel with him, and had gone to live in France, where she became the principal salonniere of liberal Catholicism and the political and moral educator of the Comte de Falloux, Tocqueville's friend and colleague in the second ministry of Odilon Barrot under the Second Republic. Falloux would later write her biography.137 Madame Swetchine had also supported the woes of Lacordaire, who would succeed to Tocqueville's chair in the Academie Francaise. Converted to Roman Catholicism and deeply pious, she was not a foolish or unliberated woman. She had numerous crossings with the Protestant clairvoyant Madame de Krlidener (who had so influenced Tsar Alexander I); although frightened of her, she had always managed to hold her own.138 She was a liberal of sorts: she wept for the fate of the Greeks.139 Eventually she gathered around her the distinguished Catholic staff of Le Correspondant: her power reached to complicated problems of Vatican policy.140 Albert de Broglie (son of Victor, previously mentioned), who had ardently embraced Catholicism, described her style as "tres elegant, tres fin, et parfois meme eloquent, n'evitant pas toujours l'affeterie et la mignardise." 141 This was the older woman to whom Tocqueville bared his soul in a series of letters in his last years (just as he had sought a "father" in an older man, Royer-Collard). And this is what he told her: Looking at the problem of human existence ceaselessly preoccupies me and 137

138 140

Alfred de Falloux, important legitimist politician and Minister of Public Instruction under the Second Republic, is best known for the lot Falloux of 1850, a compromise between lay and clerical education under which France would operate until the fall of the Third Republic. See his Discours et melanges politiques (2 vols., Paris, 1882). 139 Falloux, Madame Swetchine, 1, 12if. Ibid., p. 277. M. Prelot and F. Galloudec Genuys, eds., Le liberalisme catholique (Paris, 1969), pp. 141 197-199. Ibid., p. 198.

Tocqueville: sailing the open sea

37

perturbs me. I can neither penetrate that mystery nor look away from it... In this world I find human life inexplicable and in the world to come full of fear. I firmly believe in a next life, since God, who is a just sovereign, has given us an idea of it; in that other life we will be rewarded for good and evil, because God has let us distinguish them and has given us the freedom of choice; but beyond these clear notions, everything beyond this world seems to me wrapped in fearful shadows. I do not know if I have ever told you a story about my youth which left a deep trace... [Here Tocqueville repeats how, in the midst of a large library - while he was a student at Metz, aged sixteen - he experienced universal doubt: "allors de doute y entra, ou plutot s'y precipita avec une violence inouie, non seulement le doute de ceci ou de cela, mais le doute universel."] I was gripped by the blackest melancholy, seized by an extreme disgust for life even without knowing it, and burdened with trouble and terror as I glimpsed the way I had to make in the world.142

He revealed that he had been restored from his despair by sexual longings ("des passions violentes"), but that he remained distanced from the source of his earliest beliefs and actions, always subject to a "triste et effrayante m a l a d i e " - religious doubt. Such was the attitude and profound regret that lay beneath the morose works of a master whose "gout de la liberte" had complex connections with his ancestral faith. This much he disclosed to an extraordinary woman "without prejudice in either her religious or her political convictions."143 And so, as Andre Jardin puts it, "Tocqueville's anxiety is at the same time a religious disquiet and a social anguish."144 Framed by the great moral guides of the seventeenth century, it breaks new seas, its source of turbulence scarcely appearing beneath polished wistfulness. When Tocqueville died, apparently without religious satisfaction, he was received as a hero in the salons of liberty tolerated by the Second Empire. But Prosper de Barante mistook his man when he wrote: "He needed no fear of death to raise his heart to the thoughts and duties of religion. For him no need of a tardy conversion, brought on by the terrors of eternity. His end was edifying, just as his life had been." 145 Thus, Tocqueville was driven from safe harbor, forced to steer on the rough and enigmatic waters of world history. We should not 142 143 145

Tocqueville to Madame Swetchine, 0C, xv/2, 315. 144 Falloux, Madame Swetchine, 1, 309. J a r d i n , Tocqueville, p . 366. Prosper d e Barante, "Discours d u 3 m a i 1859: notice biographique sur Alexis d e T o c q u e v i l l e " (Paris, 1859), p . 11.

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dramatize his life exceptionally, however, when we compare him to Benjamin Constant: the question before us is one of how their social milieux and intellectual equipment fail to connect. In earlier tempests Constant, too, had been enamored, like Tocqueville, like Chateaubriand, by "the so frequent metaphor... of the port, the peaceful harbor, where one can drop anchor after uncertain and perilous navigation."146 His feelings came out of a far more agitated life than Tocqueville's. However, Constant had framed this image around his private sensibility before the storms of politics closed in. In September 1787 he sent Madame de Charriere the following poem: Au sein meme du port j'avais prevu Forage; Mais entraine loin du rivage A la fureur des vents je n'ai pu resister; J'ai predit Pinstant du naufrage, Je l'ai predit sans pouvoir l'ecarter.147 This theme followed him: he survived in his pitching vessel even if he could not very well hold the wheel. Twenty years later he wrote to Madame de Nassau: "chances for the future... are stormy for everyone and for me more than most. But I have learned to sleep in a wave-beaten bark, and seasickness has become so common that it doesn't keep me from thinking of other things."148 And twelve years after that, to his cousin Rosalie: " I am so used to the rolling of the ship that I sleep just as soundly when the sea is raging." 149 For Tocqueville it is the voyage that seems endless and uncharted; for Constant it is the blessed sleep or mental repose that one can snatch from the storm. That is suggestive of what we shall have to say further about their social and political orientations and ideals. 146 147

148 149

E . H o f m a n n , ed., Constant's 'Principes de politique^ i, 117. Constant's poem (framed as an epitaph for himself) was published by Gustave Rudler in his study Lajeunesse de Benjamin Constant, 1767-1797 (Paris, 1908), p. 250. "Still safe in port I had foreseen the storm; / But, carried far from shore / by the wind's fury, I could not resist; / The moment of my shipwreck I foretold, / Foretold but lacked the power to prevail." J . - H . M e n o s , ed., Lettres de Benjamin Constant a safamille, 1775-1830 (Paris, 1888), p . 238. A. a n d S. Roulin, eds., Benjamin et Rosalie de Constant: Correspondance, 1786-1830 (Paris, 1955), p. 231. Cf. Hofmann, ed., "Principes de politique" 11, 487-488: " Conclura-t-on de ce que les volontes individuelles ont peu d'influence sur les causes des revolutions qu'au milieu de ces convulsions sociales, chacun battu par la tempete peut s'abandonner sans resistance a l'impetuosite des vagues, vivre au jour le jour, suivant les evenements dont la rapide succession l'entraine et prendre conseil du hasard ? Je ne le pense pas. Dans les circonstances les plus orageuses, il y a toujours une route indiquee par la morale. II y a done toujours un devoir a remplir."

CHAPTER 2

Constant versus Tocqueville

I. SOCIAL SETTINGS OF THE POLITICAL SELF

As the conclusion to the last chapter suggests, the relation of the individual and private citizen to the opinions of society and the powers of government is one of the chief modes by which the political theories of Constant and Tocqueville are to be distinguished. An expanded domain of the self combined with a normative supremacy of public opinion had, for the most part, characterized the philosophical project of the eighteenth century. Constant, while greatly sobered by revolution and reaction, is obedient to this idea. For him, these goals are in harmony. Liberal politics is fundamentally a safeguard of the educable inner capacities of the human being and their outward projection as expressive rights. Tocqueville is disabused of that simplicity. He does not deny Constant's priority of "liberty against" (for he, too, has a "garantist" view of political authority), 1 but he fears the unstable context of uniformity that democratic self-disclosure has helped to create, a liberation leading to softer but stronger servitudes. " I n democratic times," he writes, "what is most unstable, in the midst of the instability of everything, is the heart of man." 2 This is an instability predicated both as sameness and as separateness. Tocqueville deplores, and probably exaggerates in his aristocrat's heart, the atomization of modern, and especially post-Revolutionary, French society. Insofar as Constant acknowledges that danger, he tends to interpret it as a consequence of "despotic" 1

2

Jean-Claude Lamberti is correct in saying that Tocqueville makes no special case for constitutional guarantees (Tocqueville et les deux de'mocraties, Paris, 1983, p. 84); but his "garantisme" is implicit in statements such as: "The nature of him I am to obey signifies less to me than the fact of extorted obedience." Democracy in America (trans. Henry Reeve, 2 vols., New York, 1934), n, 338; cf. ibid., p. 151. Henceforth DA. Tocqueville, DA, 11, 198.

39

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Constant versus Tocqueville

residues, seeing uniformity "as the immediate and inevitable consequence of the spirit of conquest [of Napoleon]." 3 Terms appropriate to our inquiry such as "self" or "individual" or "individualism" have long had contested resonances. "Self" (moi), at times virtually identical with "soul" (dme), had a famous career in the lexicon of French moralism, beginning with Montaigne and proceeding through Rousseau to the Romantics: for Rousseau, "renoncer a son moi" is slavery.4 But it is not a privileged term in the political theory under discussion here. Rejecting social-contract theory, these writers do not conceive of political society as a moi commun. Constant, frequently using a publicist's rhetoric, prefers a language of "nous," "vous," "eux," "chacun," "l'homme," "les hommes" to designate human agency; while Tocqueville, more lofty and detached, is usually satisfied with "l'homme," "les hommes," and their pronouns. When it is a question of something internal to the person, Constant is apt to convey this by the adjective "interieur" (or occasionally "intime"); Tocqueville by the expression "le coeur de l'homme," Constant writes "l'individu" more than Tocqueville: sometimes in the neutral sense of "chacun," but also in the originary sense of "Les droits des individus." 5 On the character of those same rights, Tocqueville takes a more Montesquieuvian (and Doctrinaire) position: "The rights of every people are... confined within the limits of what is [universally] just." 6 Indeed, for him " a majority taken collectively is only [my italics] an individual whose opinions, and frequently whose interests, are opposed to those of another individual, who is styled a minority." 7 As for "individualism" (i.e. a "willingness to leave society at large"), 8 a word which, according to Tocqueville, "we have coined for our own requirements," 9 it was "unknown to our ancestors, [for] in their days every individual necessarily belonged to a group." 10 It was similarly unknown to Constant, for the very good reason that he 3

4 5

6 7 9

10

Benjamin Constant, De /'esprit de conquete et de V usurpation (hereafter, Conquete /Usurpation), in Marcel Gauchet, ed., Constant, De la liberte chez les modernes (Paris, 1980), p. 148. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Emile, ou de reducation (ed. Richard, Paris, i960), bk. v, p. 587. E.g. Benjamin Constant, Principes de politique applicables a tous les gouvernements (1806), in Etienne Hofmann, ed., Les "principes de politique" de Benjamin Constant (2 vols., Geneva, 1980), 11, 276. Tocqueville, DA, 1, 369. See the remarks by J.-C. Lamberti, Tocqueville, p. 112. 8 Tocqueville, DA, 1, 369. Ibid., 11, 104. Dictionaries record a first coinage of " individualisme " by Balzac in Le medecin de campagne (1833). The novelist uses it as a synonym for "egoisme," which is precisely the idea disputed by Tocqueville in DA, 11 (1840). Tocqueville, The Old Regime and the French Revolution (trans. S. Gilbert, New York, 1955), p. 96.

Social settings of the political self

41

did not see the "rights of individuals" as producing a semipathological condition of privatization called "individualism." For him, "opinion" and "individuals" were healthy collaborators. Constant's positive word was "individuality": "by liberty I mean the triumph of individuality."11 The "calme" and "repos" of the private satisfactions12 encouraged by "commerce" and "industrie" did not, for Constant, lead to isolation, but were the preconditions of an enlightened sociability, a natural and free mode of association protected from political control, though guaranteed by a sufficient practice of preventive politics. The ideals of eighteenth-century Edinburgh (where Constant had been as a young student) are very close to this conception of "doux commerce" - one of social as well as economic exchange. This did not seem to him to require learned proof: "Man is sociable because he is a man. Just as the wolf is unsociable because it is a wolf."13 Obstacles to this condition were abnormal in the proper course of human development. Not only were they being overcome by commerce and the "softening of manners," but by a widening of lumieres}* Placed beside Tocqueville's later premonitions, this might seem shallowly optimistic. At least it is clear that Constant's unproblematic picture of independent but socialized individuals foresees no systemic defects in the milieu where it is carried out, no radical deceptions in its self-image, Paradoxically, these optimistic conclusions are conditioned by a certain mood of exhaustion, by a recuperative pause ("repos"); while Tocqueville's darker vision is always keyed to the complementary dangers of ennui and unrest. For Constant the revolution is over;15 for Tocqueville it reappears, with no end in sight. Constant's vigilance is directed against the past; Tocqueville posts his sentinels for time to come. Regarding the public and private responsibilities of the individual whom Constant exalts as the repository of rights, there can be room for some variance of interpretation. 16 The position taken here is that 11

12 13 14 15

16

Constant, preface to Melanges de litterature et de politique, in Gauchet, ed., Liberte chez les modernes, p. 519. Where possible, "jouissances" is translated by "satisfactions," otherwise by "enjoyment." Constant, Commentaire sur Vouvrage de Filangieri (2 vols., Paris, 1822-1824), 1, 47. See Constant, Conquete/ Usurpation, pp. 134, 184, 231, 238. See Constant, "Pieces detachees," Melanges, p. 510. The July revolution was, of course, a riposte against "counter-revolution." Stephen Holmes, in his Benjamin Constant and the Making of Modern Liberalism (New Haven, 1984), takes Constant too far as an advocate of political liberty. I have responded to some of Holmes's excessive interpretations (in his generally informed and sensitive study) in my "Constant and His Interpreters: A Second Visit," Annales Benjamin Constant, 6 (1986), 83-86.

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Constant versus Tocqueville

Constant's view of "modern liberty" (proposed less as a virtue than as an inescapable fact) denies that contemporaries reap much pleasure from public activity; what makes them happy is "to be left in a perfect independence in everything relating to their occupations, private activities, and fantasies."17 Those most attached to these satisfactions will be most attached to freedom. And, as Constant comments ironically: "The partisans of ancient liberty [i.e. the Jacobins] grew furious when they saw that the moderns didn't want to be free according to their method." 18 Since "political liberty offers less enjoyment than before and can bring about the most intolerable disorders, only what is absolutely necessary should be preserved of it." 19 That can be defined as the amount needed to secure limited constitutional government, with the end of protecting not only "satisfactions" but also the play of opinion that increases the intellectual goods of society. Political authority should be responsive to specific cases of injustice and also to social needs (as expressed by petition), never irresponsibly thwarting public expectation, never going beyond it with radical audacity, never imposing on it arbitrary or contestable standards of virtue. In this sense, the individual, as a receptor and communicator of opinion, is in his social element and shares the general goals of "repos," "aisance," and "lumieres." But society itself is divided into those who hold political office and the many others who do not. Thus, in a different sense, politics and society are seamless — political power is "autorite sociale" —and the non-governing individual remains critically on the qui-vive, having different and conflicting ends from those in power.20 In the last analysis, his rights are guarded only by constitutional protection: for any power-holder, no matter how honorable, will find reason to transgress the rights of ordinary persons.21 If it seems curious that Constant should wish to define government as "social authority," the reason is that society has no rights other than those which can be legitimately exercised by governments.22 The "people" are actively sovereign only through their officials. It is sometimes too hastily argued that Constant's individual liberty is of a hedonistic or at least narrowly egoistic sort, where the 17 19 20 21

18 Conquete/ Usurpation, p. 184. Ibid., p. 191. H o f m a n n , ed., " Principes de politique" 11, 4 3 5 . Ibid., p . 4 9 0 ; cf. Principes depolitique (1815), in G a u c h e t , ed., Liberte chez les modernes, p . 337. 22 Ouvrage de Filangieri, 1, 66. H o f m a n n , ed., "Principes de politique,''' 11, 59.

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essential thing is that separate persons be privileged to advance their interests and, within the limits of public order, indulge in their chosen satisfactions, be they noble, trivial, or contemptible. But this is not the thrust of Constant's argument, despite the latitude he appears to leave to private discretion. Constant consistently rejects the language and moral implications of utility, not because utility is itself false but because it seems degrading,23 especially when applied to matters of the spirit: "The word utiliser has very properly been kept out of the French language." 24 " I could be mistaken, but it seems to me that in everything connected to the soul's affections and to noble ideas, one ought to reject the thing, just as our speech rejects the word.25 The principle of utility is inferior to that of right, "because it awakens in man's mind the hope of profit and not the feeling of duty." 26 Finally, not being "susceptible to precise demonstration," it becomes a matter of subjective argument. 27 If "modern liberty" were to aim after purely physical pleasures, that would indeed bring the goals of rulers and the governed together, for it is in the interest of rulers that ordinary persons be content with such satisfactions. But if the aim is to provide a higher happiness — the development of intellectual faculties — this right and duty will not be to the taste of most governments.28 Thus, beyond physical satisfactions, Constant always summons as his goal the advancement of the mind: "Man is not simply in need of relaxation, application, domestic happiness, and private virtues. Nature has also given him faculties which, if not nobler, are at least more brilliant. More than all the others, these faculties are threatened by arbitrary government." 29 For Constant, the exercise of intellectual liberty serves as a bridge between the individual and the social, somewhat in the way that voluntary associations do for Tocqueville.30 That is, to be sure, a rather eighteenth-century, even non-sociological, account of how individuals combine and operate as social wholes, giving immense privilege to education and to literary and verbal skills. Yet it, too, is based on a kind of sociology in which 23 24

25 26 27 29 30

Ibid., p. 171. The coinage "utiliser" appears to have first been criticised by Jacques Necker in his Du pouvoir executif dans les grands Etats ( 1 7 9 2 ) . H o f m a n n , e d . , " Principes de politique," 11, 1 7 1 . Constant, "De M. Dunoyer et de quelques-uns de ses ouvrages," Melanges, p. 552. 28 Ouvrage de Filangieri, 1, 6 5 . H o f m a n n , e d . , "Principes de politique," 11, 4 6 7 . Conquete/ Usurpation, p . 2 0 6 . This is not to say that Constant, like John Dewey, has any "social conception of intelligence." See his Liberalism and Social Action (New York, 1963).

44

Constant versus Tocqueville

public opinion, commerce, conversation, and a common morale of enlightenment collaborate to improve the human condition. "Thought," Constant writes, "is the principle of everything." 31 Ideas propel history in a progressive direction, for they guarantee that "the intelligence of man cannot remain stationary." And ideas, although having their source in individuals, are a common and social property under the right of free expression in the form of "opinion," which, no matter how persecuted by despotism, always "returns to the fray, and triumphs." 32 Ideas also raise individuals above their interests and create in them a sense of duty, including duties toward government.33 Yet ideas are radically individual: "everything having its source in thought and opinion is individual. It is never as a government that a government persuades." 34 For the proper role of a government is not opinion, not persuasion; it is specifically "the use of public force against individuals."35 Constant's portrait of liberty is not, then, all things considered, a summons of the individual to political participation, except insofar as he must do this to insure his full exercise of rights in the private sphere. There is no surplus exhilaration to be gained from a public role. But this is an invitation to the social through a participation in the moral and intellectual realms of human improvement. And that is precisely the assumption that Tocqueville finds problematic in "democratic ages." The most casual comparison of Tocqueville's scheme of analysis with that of Constant will suggest both analogies and far-reaching differences. That question will be taken up in detail in the next section. Suffice it for now to say that while, for Tocqueville, "aristocratic ages" promote what in our parlance would be called "striking individuals" with a style of liberty to match, "democratic ages" are, in effect, manufacturers of the routine, of "individualism." According to him, this condition had been prefigured in France "for six generations."36 The type of society he calls democratic is basically the same one that Constant's "modern liberty" is calling into being. "If," Tocqueville writes in the second volume of Democracy in America, 31 32 33 35

Conquete/Usurpation, p . 210. Ibid., p . 2 3 1 ; cf. H o f m a n n , ed., "Principes de politique," 11, 486. 34 H o f m a n n , ed., "Principes de politique," 11, 4 7 5 - 4 7 6 . Ibid., p . 77. 36 Ibid., p . 24. Tocqueville, Old Regime, p . 20.

Social settings of the political self

45

everyone undertook to form his own opinions and to seek for truth by isolated paths struck out by himself alone, it would follow that no considerable number of men would ever unite in any common belief. But obviously without such common belief no society can prosper; say, rather, no society can exist; for without ideas held in common there may still be men, but there is no social body.37 Such is Tocqueville's dystopia, his fallen "state of nature," presented as an unlikely thought-experiment but still as an incisive comment on the destiny of rampant individualism. Constant, as we have seen, believed in the effectiveness of the social transmission of ideas, a morale that united men, rather than an interest that drove them apart. Intelligence revokes arbitraire: "As the lumieres make progress, reason casts the legitimacy of chance in doubt." 38 But for Tocqueville this is not axiomatic. Opinions formed in this manner do not converge on the truth, but on a conventional simulacrum that passes for the truth." In democratic ages," Tocqueville argues, the tandem progress of the ideas of individuality and equality produces a result of sameness in which even individuals are effaced39 and where "opinion," far from fulfilling the liberating role assigned to it by Constant, becomes a "mistress of the world" that mobilizes its minions in a shared ignorance.40 Indeed, in democratic societies, when the passion for equality is vented in revolution, there is the paradoxical outcome of "intellectual anarchy" and "the instability of everything." 41 American democracy has held the paradox in check; the French version has not. France was, according to Tocqueville, a nation whose social practices and political institutions had been confused and dangerously out of phase. The Revolution had been " a violent and rapid process by which the political conditions were adapted to the social ones, facts to ideas, the laws to moeurs."*2 But, indeed, moeurs themselves had come close to being effaced.43 In France, neither government nor society, nor the two together, had reached an equilibrium.44 This was not so in the United States, where a system of laws structured on moeurs had been developing since earliest times and where stability had been favored by a "slow and quiet action of 37 39 42

43 44

38 Tocqueville, DA, n , 9. C o n s t a n t , Conquete/ Usurpation, p p . 124, 176. 40 41 Tocqueville, DA, 11, 32. Ibid., p . n . Ibid., p p . 198, 272. Tocqueville, "L'etat social et politique de la France avant et depuis 1789," in Oeuvres completes (ed. G. de Beaumont, 9 vols., Paris, 1866), vm, 21, 29, 44. Henceforth, OF (B). Reception speech, Academie Franchise (1842), in ibid., ix, 17-18. Old Regime, p . 208.

46

Constant versus Tocqueville 45

society upon itself." The Americans were (in 1831) little exposed to the traumas of centralization, and they had vigorous local liberties inherited from colonial times and prolonged through the vigor of voluntary associations.46 Most importantly, "they [had] arrived at the state of democracy without having to endure a democratic revolution."47 Though Tocqueville sought evidence in the United States for his bittersweet hope that liberty could be sustained by equality in "democratic ages," he did not whitewash the manners of the new nation. America shared in all the mediocrity of democratic life and was perhaps its cardinal example.48 But its mutability and restlessness were controlled by "the singular stability of certain principles."49 In France, on the other hand, all was in flux, "brought together but not yet mingled." 50 In France, the very principle of popular government was a deceit, for it was generated not by the people, but by "those who know what is good for the people." 51 Constant hardly saw or projected the problems of modern liberty in democratic ages, even though he certainly understood many of the features of democratic despotism.52 America versus France is therefore not a matrix of this essay. But Tocqueville's resources of method bear importantly on our examination of the two styles of liberalism, suggesting that we require a deeper probing of them in respect to the relationship of ethos (moeurs) and opinion. The recognition of an independent power of opinion (sometimes described as a "public tribunal") 53 had been a great revelation for French social thought in the latter half of the eighteenth century. This was an opinion inhering in "civil society," held by a vaguely determined class of educated persons and indebted to enlightenment and philosophy. Such opinion, the philosophes believed, could contest, counterbalance, and eventually prevail over the traditional ideologies of church, state, and hereditary privilege (in England, as J. G. A. Pocock has admirably shown, there was little or no "enlightenment" of this kind). 54 But the property or powers of this 45 48 51 52

53

54

46 47 DA, 1, 433. Ibid., 11, n o , 112. Ibid., pp. 108, 270. 49 50 Ibid., pp. 260-261; 1, 273-274. Ibid., n, 271. Ibid., p. 252. Ibid., 1, 433.

On the connection Constant makes between Jacobinism and Bonapartism under this r u b r i c , see Conquete/Usurpation, p . 219. Especially so used by Lamoignon de Malesherbes in his reception speech "Discours prononce dans l'Academie franchise le 16 fevrier 1775" (Paris, 1775), where he flatteringly dates "public opinion" and its "tribunal" from the foundation of the Academie itself. See J. G. A. Pocock, "Clergy and Commerce: The Conservative Enlightenment in E n g l a n d , " in Ueta dei lumi: studi storici sul settecento europeo in onore di Franco Venturi (Naples, IO .85)> PP- 528-529.

Social settings of the political self

47

transmission were arguable — arguable specifically in the sense of how opinion related to moeurs. Was opinion essentially reason giving battle to moeurs, breaking, as it were, their " cake of custom " ? Or was it a kind of refined codification of moeurs, asserting the natural (and the national) against the artificial values of hierarchies, feodalite, and "superstition"? D'Alembert spoke for most of the philosophes: "Sooner or later the men who think and write govern opinion, and opinion governs the world."55 But there was also Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who declared from a more democratic perspective: "[There is also a fourth kind of law], the most important of all... engraved neither in marble nor in bronze, but in the hearts of the citizens... I speak of habitual conduct, of customs, and especially of opinion; a part of the laws unknown to our political thinkers, but on which the success of everything else depends." 56 Rousseau's notion of opinion (understood as a self-coercion that had superseded necessities of legal coercion), "engraved in the hearts of the citizens," was a populist riposte to the more widespread idea of enlightenment descending from the literary opinion-makers. To be sure, Rousseau himself conceded that the common people need initially to have their inarticulate opinion shaped by "legislators," demiurgoi of semi-divine intelligence. But what is more important for subsequent social thought is that opinion and moeurs correspond very much in Rousseau's perspective: if one is corrupt, so will the other be. As such, the clash aroused by Rousseau in his Lettre a M. cTAlembert sur les spectacles is one between Genevan opinion and moeurs

and Parisian opinion and moeurs. For d'Alembert it is different: Geneva would soften and improve its moeurs by a judicious injection of "opinion" (admitting a theatre). For opinion is not moeurs: moeurs are congealed opinions to be overturned by new discoveries, truths, and amenities owing to philosophy and the advance of civility. Not only does opinion challenge moeurs at their unexamined roots; it is a part of mankind's practical education, its liberation from servility and esprit de clocher. It was the great and theoretically ambiguous Montesquieu who had held these perspectives in balance. Just as Montesquieu appreciated the prescriptiveness of the law of nature and its authorizations for the exercise of an autonomous self, just as he applauded "doux commerce," he was also deeply impressed by the 55

56

J e a n L e R o n d d ' A l e m b e r t , " D e s c a r t e s et Christine d e S u e d e , " in Dialogues des morts de Fe'nelon, suivis de quelques dialogues de Boileau, de Fontenelle et de d'Alembert (Paris, 1862), p . 336. J . - J . R o u s s e a u , Du contrat social, 11, xii.

48

Constant versus Tocqueville

formative power of society with its own kinds of laws and the multiple elements and relationships out of which were fashioned the "esprit general d'un peuple." His project of investigating those relationships — the "spirit" of the laws — has been appropriately called "sociological." For him, moeurs and manures (the "causes morales") were a well of opinion, not inert matter on which ideas might work. The importance of these theoretical positions to Constant and Tocqueville can scarcely be underestimated. From the Esprit des lois, Constant gained his idea of what a political treatise should look like: it should be relational in perspective and should deal with historical and systemic interactions. But it could also be both normative and comparative in ways that the Esprit des lois had not been: normative because the new doctrine of (negative) liberty made it possible to judge regimes by their fruits and not just within the closed circuit of their "principe," thus making it possible to have " principes... applicables a tous les gouvernements "; comparative not only for this same reason, but also because a teleological notion of progress (influenced by Condorcet and Godwin, and perhaps Kant) ventured to close the historical - though not the conceptual - gap between "ancient" and "modern." This aspect of Constant's achievement is most striking in the manuscript text of his Principes (1806, Lausanne; 1810, Paris), now available in E. Hofmann's indispensable edition.57 Nonetheless, it is intimated in his other writings and in his general view of politics. Although Constant, like others, felt that Montesquieu had been too "feudal" in his functional defense of certain Old Regime institutions, and indeed not libertarian enough,58 he judged his analysis to be incomparably better than those of rationalist competitors.59 The reason for this was that Montesquieu had not wished the moeurs of society to be forced by invasions of liberty. The compulsion of enlightenment was often an unwarranted interference. "Nothing is more absurd," Constant wrote, "than to claim [the right] to do violence to habits on the pretext of guiding men more faithfully toward their interests."60 And again: "When governments offer their peoples legislative improvements, peoples should reply by asking for constitutional institutions."61 57 59 60 61

58 See note 3, above. H o f m a n n , ed., "Principes de politique" 11, 27. Ouvrage de Filangieri, i, 2. Hofmann, ed., "Principes de politique" 11, 388; cf. Conquete/ Usurpation, p. 150. Ouvrage de Filangieri, 1, 34.

Social settings of the political self

49

Despite a certain literary and moral filiation with Rousseau (especially his Profession defoi du vicaire Savoyard), Constant held the political theory of Rousseau to be either self-defeating or dangerous, or both. The opening chapters of his 1806 Principles de politique include a devastating critique of both Hobbes's and Rousseau's doctrines of sovereignty.62 In less extended form, these arguments, made elsewhere in Constant's writings, are well known and do not demand our attention here.63 But we should notice Constant's departure from Rousseau on the matter of moeurs and opinion. Despite his "positive" view of opinion in Contrat social, 11, xii, Rousseau, ever in awe of its power, felt that since most societies were incorrigibly corrupt (that of the philosophes included), one should greatly fear their opinion and their moeurs. Constant rejected this position in the large. He did not think that opinion and moeurs were the same thing, or that opinion could, or should, "ascend." He shared the view of the gens de lettres that opinion was, grosso modo, "enlightenment," cosmopolitan in character, a kind of educated tribunal, a state of knowledge and civility diffused by the best minds: "To opinions alone has the governance of the world been given." 64 But (and this is indicative of a quarrel with the philosophes that he shared with Tocqueville) he did not feel that the unremitting pressure of government reform on society could possibly be favorable to liberty in the long run. "Allow me six years of despotism, and I will give you liberty," Turgot is alleged to have declared.65 But Constant had no truck with this notion; for him, opinion exercised by government ceased to be opinion and became merely public power. It is significant also that moeurs do not really play a decisive conceptual role in Constant's writings: their resistance to official lumieres carried no real sociological imprimatur, and is essentially seen in the optic of individual liberty. Tocqueville's inheritance of the problematics of Montesquieu and Rousseau is rather different from this. Like Montesquieu, Tocqueville has a sociological respect for moeurs, that is, he endows the concept with generative power: "political societies are not what their laws make them, but what feelings, ideas, habits of the heart, 62 63

65

H o f m a n n , ed., " Principes de politique,''' n, 2 0 - 4 6 . Well s u m m a r i z e d in J e a n Roussel, Jean-Jacques Rousseau en France apres la Revolution, 64 1795-1830 (Paris, 1972), pp. 495-506. Melanges, p. 604. One of the numerous sources for this is Marc-Antoine Baudot, Notes historiques sur la Convention nationale, le Directoire, I''Empire et Fexil des votants (reprint, Geneva, 1974), p. 157.

5<3

Constant versus Tocqueville

and the spirit of the men who form them, prepare them to be." 66 It is the moeurs of aristocratic ages that make aristocrats valid, if often vainglorious, individuals.67 And it is the moeurs of democratic ages that, under the illusion of individuality, produce a "Cartesian" uniformity.68 The power of a single individual, Bonaparte, was decisive at a certain moment in time because France was "almost as bereft of laws, customs, and moeurs as if it had just been created.; 69 Moeurs are not just a residue of unreflective customary behavior; they are an alert substrate of social character and, as such, can be independently advantageous to liberty. " I n America," Tocqueville noted shortly after his arrival in 1831, "free moeurs have made free political institutions; in France it is up to free political institutions to create moeurs."70 In the natural order of things, moeurs have priority over government: this is because they follow "ideas" and not "facts." While the principle of aristocracy still prevailed in the politics of the French Old Regime, moeurs had already become democratized. This made the arbitration of the gens de lettres even more potent, creating a volatility of opinion that helped inflame the revolutionary crisis.71 For Constant, "ideas," lumieres, and opinion were all attached to the progressive guidance of the literary class: a "community of individuals." Although the basic continuity of society was governed by "principes" (which might be defined as Constant's analogue to the rational givens of human existence; compare Tocqueville's "laws of society"), "ideas" assured man's "access to perfection."72 While Constant did not doubt that writers could, and during the Revolution and Empire did, peddle ideas mendaciously, his confidence in the liberated intellect was quite boundless;73 as we have seen, it tempered the hedonism of "modern liberty." Tocqueville neither shares this confidence nor is he persuaded that the ideas of individuals (especially intellectuals) can play such a critical role in the formation of a social ethos. If they had once done this (in the last years of the Old Regime), it had been owing to frictions within the ruling parts of society and the unbalanced state 66

69 70 71 72

Tocqueville to Corcelle, 17 September 1853, in Oeuvres completes (18 vols. to date, Paris, 67 68 1951- ), xv/2, 81. Old Regime, pp. 110-111. DA, 11, 5-6. Reception speech, Academie francaise (1842), OC (B), rx, 17-18. "Carnet de voyages, i e r octobre 1831," OC, v / i , 179. "Etat social et politique," p. 21. Constant, "De la perfectibilite de l'espece humaine," Melanges, in Gauchet, ed., Liberte chez 73 les modernes, p . 583. Conquete / Usurpation, ibid., p p . 158, 228.

Social settings of the political self

51

of moeurs and institutions.74 Its result had been baneful, for it permitted educated society to "indulge, almost without restriction, in learned discussions on the origins of society, the nature of government, and the essential rights of man" in an absolutist and abstract way.75 But, one may inquire, was Tocqueville himself not an intellectual man writing on political issues with a certain axe to grind? For him to belittle his own calling might bear certain resemblances to Rousseau's predicament in attacking polite letters while publishing them and profiting by them. Tocqueville would doubtless reply to this that, unlike the literati of the previous century (but like the English), he was a man engaged also in practical politics. And he would counter the imputation of a sociological determinism of moeurs by responding that within a wide circle of agency men are free: "If I had entertained the conviction [that they were not], I should not have written this book [Democracy in America, part 11], but I should have confined myself to deploring in secret the destiny of mankind." 76 More importantly, "as it is with men, so with communities."77 Communities are also free to produce their moeurs and to respond to ideas which, although thought by individual minds, are part of a common treasury of opinion and shaped by it.78 That is why in democratic times the voluntary association - where ideas circulate in view of practical goals - is their freest and best purveyor. The relationship between moeurs and ideas, moeurs and opinion, in Tocqueville is always proximate, never construed adversarily as the meeting between something active and something relatively inert, as it tends to be in Constant. For a similar reason, Tocqueville's comparative method contains no immanent teleological predisposition toward universal felicity, either in the self or the species. This returns us to the problematic of Rousseau, whose work was also of consequence in the development of Tocqueville's thought, not so much for what it added to his method, but for its caution against too ready an endorsement of Enlightenment fantasies. Like Tocqueville (and like Montesquieu), Rousseau had tended to join moeurs and opinion. And, like Tocqueville especially, he saw a closeness between bonnes moeurs and citizenship, with public laxity as 74 77 78

75 76 Old Regime, pp. 74-75. Ibid., p. 141. DA, 11, 348. Ibid., p. 352. F o r d e v e l o p m e n t of this idea, see Charles T a y l o r , Philosophy and the Human Philosophical Papers, II (Cambridge, 1985).

Sciences:

52

Constant versus Tocqueville

the measure of a corrupt ethos.79 Again like Tocqueville, Rousseau firmly believed that "great individuals" were mostly a thing of the past (although Tocqueville sociologized this insight and, as we shall see, pace Rousseau, combined the feudal aristocracy with the ancients). Rousseau, however, believed in sameness and unity; Tocqueville foresaw sameness and separation. Clearly, Tocqueville, like Constant, repugned the abstract and tyrannical formulas of the "general will" and the political notion of lepeuple in general, not to mention all but a spectral version (remarkable when it appears) of the "natural rights" legal argument. Tocqueville was ostensibly more concerned with the public law of nations, as reflected from moeurS) than with natural law per se, though he, like Montesquieu, believed in a natural standard of justice. The logical and disembodied shape of "social contract" or legal-consensualist discourse had, for Tocqueville, placed the Revolution of 1789 (despite its magnanimous appeals to concrete liberty - achieving moeurs with a politics to match) in the rhetorical grip of fanatic and politically naive pedants, and had encouraged the worst features of democratic society to appear. 80 These abstractions had been destructive to moeurs. The ambiance in which moeurs were fortified was, for Tocqueville, first of all, local and, second, voluntary. Rousseau's ambivalence was to see and deny this all at once: the anteriority of ethos to politics, once there has been a political institution or foundation, is clear; yet he reserves a special privilege, a sovereign pomp, to "the people assembled (en corps) " and a special contempt for sub-political groups and interests.81 We must finally see how the powers of government or political authority are to be related to the individual and the social in the theories of Constant and Tocqueville. The contours of our study preclude an extensive treatment of this; even in brief it is not easy to draw comparisons because of distances of time and differing perspectives on specific regimes. Let us start with the simplest area of agreement. For both men, government - understood as political authority and its office - is more than a necessary evil: it is a worthy activity for those who pursue it well — and it is the self-governing expression of the "social." On the other hand, for both theorists it is a kind of instrumental enterprise (and this immediately identifies both as 79

80

A m o n g his m a n y observations, Contrat social, in, x v : " A s soon as a n y m a n says of the affairs of state, 'what does it matter to me?' the State may be given up for lost." 81 Tocqueville, Old Regime, p p . 1 4 0 - 1 4 1 . Rousseau, Contrat social, 11, iii; m , xii.

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liberals undistracted by the teleology of human self-fulfillment in politics): it is not an end in itself, or a specifically heroic occupation - although Tocqueville stresses a "greatness" that is totally absent from Constant. Government guarantees the freedom of the social order, its needs and its morale, and, as such, it acquires functions. If - as Tocqueville so cogently argues about eighteenth-century France - its functions become socially dysfunctional, its forms are in jeopardy. And if, as Constant writes, it harbors tendencies toward despotism or anarchy, then these two specific "generally illegitimate" forms of rule will not endure in the face of resistances by the social order and its capacity for lumieres. In an as yet inspecific sense, then, for both, political rule is the servant of social forces. But we notice at this point some cleavages of vision. If, for Constant, government is essentially to be regarded as a protective agency, committed to preserving the orderly and just conduct of private affairs and to the common defense, prevented from impeding the normal advance of civilization by having its powers limited and checked, for Tocqueville government is somewhat more a projective or expressive affair, translating the moeurs of society into congenial laws and practices, inhibited not so much by the adversarial notion of "rights" as by a positive notion of "liberty" (a feeling of selfcontrol and self-determination that communities retain). For Tocqueville expressly, this idea is conveyed in the form of local and spatial liberties (an inheritance of the nobility's resistance against centralizing power, and, paradoxically, recreated in America by commoners "because there was no nobility)." 82 Constant is not insensitive to the claims of "variety" against "uniformity" ("life" against "death," as he hyperbolically puts it): 83 there are elegant words on the subject in both the Principes manuscript of 1806 and the Esprit de conquete adapted from it in 1814. However, their accents are not the same; for Constant cannot possibly share a legitimist's feeling about villages, provinces, and practices - he writes substantially from the psychology of a notable. In the later manuscript of 1814, however horror-stricken he may feel about the single and indivisible nation of the Jacobins and Napoleon, he raises the tone of what earlier was a "Girondin" decentralizing perspective to the newly expressed needs of local liberty in post-imperial conditions of dynastic restoration. Tocqueville was wistful about historic liberties in France, although 82

Tocqueville, DA. n, 316.

83

Constant, Conquete/Usurpation, p. 151.

54

Constant versus Tocqueville

his was no idyllic tableau of seigneurs in friendly commerce with gardeners and milkmaids, being constructed out of bourgeois materials as well. His point was not about deference, but about liberty. Constant regarded localism as a barrier against uniformity and despotism, but scarcely as a blessing in itself or a natural reservoir of public service (he himself represented districts as disparate as Le Mans, Strasbourg, and Paris, while Tocqueville was ever the deputy of his ancestral Valognes). Factors such as these influence two versions of the relationship of government and society. Both Constant and Tocqueville well knew that power was in Paris, and that local electors had to be served as well. But the state, then having to be re theorized if not totally rebuilt, is more prominent in the political theory of Constant; and the activity of citizens is correspondingly more muted. In Tocqueville, we see citizens, but they are not exactly Aristotelian figures, ruling and ruled: they are gliding without such abruptness between societal and public affairs, and basically self-ruled through moeurs. Tocqueville, with his public doctrine of "interest bien entendu" (seeming here more utilitarian than Constant), appears to be striking a bargain between what Michael Oakeshott characterizes as a "morality of communal ties" and a "morality of individuality." 84 Tocqueville's vision of a modern (i.e. democratic) state proceeds somehow from a fruitful transaction of routine and initiative, creating a civic impulse which, "if it be connected with the thoughts, the passions, and the daily habits of life, may be consolidated into a durable and rational sentiment." 85 And on such a foundation political activity and appropriate political powers and offices can be constructed. The task of Constant's generation was to settle and balance prerogatives in a dampening of ideology - to rebuild society from the redoubt of institutional security and the encouragement of private resources. And Constant far outdistanced others in expressing this. For Tocqueville, there was a different task: that of probing social complexity itself so as to grasp how it might or might not be responsive to free institutions. If Constant was not so intimately aware of the relationships of individuals in larger social wholes, and 84

See, on this, Michael Oakeshott, "The Moral Life in the Philosophy of Thomas Hobbes," in Hobbes on Civil Association (Oxford, 1975), pp. 76-77. Cf. Tocqueville, DA, 11, 112: "Men attend to the interests of the public, first by necessity, afterwards by choice... by dint of working for the good of one's fellow citizens, the habit and taste for serving them are at 85 length acquired." Tocqueville, DA, 1, 97.

Ages of the spirit

55

if he was not as alert to anti-social dangers of the satisfied self, he was incomparably more familiar with the formal properties of a "free government" along European constitutional lines. Yet this was achieved with a certain deficit of historical pathos and foresight. II. AGES OF THE SPIRIT

While Locke and earlier contractualists had constructed liberty from a radically originary "state of nature," nineteenth-century theorists, following Madame de Stael, made the historical claim that liberty was "ancient." But political theory is only a semi-historical enterprise (otherwise it would imply that fact makes right); and, in the wake of the Revolution, it was not so clear how liberty a priori and historical liberty could be made commensurate. Constant and Tocqueville both descend from Montesquieu: that is, their liberal analyses depend, for their strength, on quasi-historical, comparative constructs. In Constant's case, the key operative terms are "ancient and modern liberty" and "the spirits of conquest and commerce." Tocqueville's view of liberty is also dichotomous (though rather different and not so succinctly named), and he introduces further comparative richness through his extensive juxtaposing of "aristocratic and democratic ages (men, nations)." In both writers these conceptual devices are so thoroughly imbricated that they become parts of a single rationale. In both, history (and philosophy of history) play a prominent, but not exclusive, role. In the Esprit des lois Montesquieu had proposed to two legitimate regime-types: the polis-republic depending on public virtue and the tempered modern monarchy supported by varieties of honor. While Montesquieu had planted other clues - "moderate aristocracy;" the "commercial republic disguised as a monarchy" (England); the "Gothic" constitutionalism of France; and the limiting case of "oriental despotism"-Constant and Tocqueville required some historical refinement of Montesquieu's materials if they were to display the etiology and features of the contemporary situation. In Constant's case, a soberer version of Condorcet's "history of the progress of the human mind" supplied the deep background. For Tocqueville, an inevitable ("providential") advance toward "equality of condition" — a democratization of moeurs and politics with no necessary relation to "the progress of the mind "-served an equivalent purpose. In neither instance was history so dominant as

56

Constant versus Tocqueville

to efface presuppositions of freedom or the normative properties of comparative judgment. While the social texture of Tocqueville's presentation is deeper and richer, the two methods are not dissimilar and may thus be compared in structure as well as content. Although the observation is partly illuminating, it is going too far to say that "Constant's [method] still bears the mark of the eighteenth century — deductive and philosophical — whereas Tocqueville, here a nineteenth-century man, is working as a sociologist and an historian."86 Our strategy here will be to interpret the historical-comparative frameworks of Constant and Tocqueville in succession, picking up in the discussion of Tocqueville certain criteria of dissonance in respect to Constant's account. While Constant's famous comparison of ancient and modern liberty is most familiarly drawn from the essay of 1819 bearing that name, the theme had already been dealt with in his "reservoir" manuscript of 1806 and further utilized in other writings, notably the "Esprit de conquete" of 1814. The distinction Constant draws is well known. "Ancient liberty," the preponderate ethos of the small republics of antiquity, consisted of the collective exercise of political sovereignty (deliberation, lawmaking, treaties, making war and peace, supervision of magistrates, criminal justice, etc.). However, it incurred "the complete subjection of the individual to the authority of the whole," with "nothing granted to individual independence, neither with respect to opinion, nor occupation, nor religion. " 87 The man was engulfed by the citizen and the citizen by the city. Nevertheless, this exercise of common political rights merited the name of liberty, for it was experienced as the supreme satisfaction by those engaged in it. In contrast, "modern liberty" consists "of the peaceful enjoyment of private independence." 88 Its "positive" features are individual choice, expression, conscience, unhindered locomotion, and inviolable property rights. Its "negative" ones are the rights held against political authority: "to be subject only to the law, and not to be arrested, or detained, or put to death, or mistreated in any way as the result of the arbitrary will of one or several individuals."89 86

87

89

Jean-Claude Lamberti, "De Benjamin Constant a Alexis de Tocqueville," France-Forum, May-June 1984, 19. Constant, "De la liberte des anciens comparee a celle des modernes," in Gauchet, ed., 88 Liberte chez les modernes, p. 495. Ibid., p. 501. Ibid., pp. 495-496.

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Modern liberty further requires a representative legislature whose major task is to procure the individual rights inherent in society by just laws. The root meaning of modern liberty is private liberty; but since power is, always and everywhere, self-corrupting, private satisfactions centred on "liberte civile" need to be defended by a sufficient exercise of "liberte politique." 90 The historical weight of caste prejudice, religious tyranny, ignorance, and the warlike spirit had, of course, been a major obstacle to the realization of modern liberty. But a more tragic though reparable - misfortune had been the misreading of liberty itself. Reformers throughout the eighteenth century felt that desirable goals of civilization could be imposed from above, despairing that they would ever be freely attained: even Jacques Necker was not exempt from this authoritarian conviction.91 Beyond that, thinkers like Rousseau and Mably, mistaking the ancients' practice of collective sovereignty for liberty's eternal form, had wished to stifle individuality in the name of the indivisible commonwealth.92 Their propensity encouraged the Jacobins to invent their "virtuous" institutions - revolutionary government, the revolutionary tribunal, and the law of suspects. Bonaparte's "despotic" practices were no different in kind from those of Robespierre.93 Both owed their justifications to anachronistic or opportunistic perversions of the ancient idea of popular sovereignty. Constant's "two kinds of liberty" are explicitly normative and sociological at once: that is, they disclose a preference scheme derived from an evaluation of social satisfactions. They are historical in the sense that one has succeeded the other in time; but they are typological in the same manner as Montesquieu's "republic" and "monarchy," to which Constant favorably compares his own models.94 They might be seen as more broadly historical when set in the perspective of Constant's theory of human progress (in one text described as "Madame de StaeFs system of perfectibility").95 Here, Constant postulates an advance toward human equality consisting in the progressive destruction of " theocratic slavery, civil slavery, feudalism, and noble privileges.96 However, according to such a scheme (and considering the emphasis on slavery), it would be 90 91 92 94 96

Ibid., p. 510. Conquete/Usurpation, ibid., p. 192; Hofmann, ed., " Principes de politique," 11, 66. 93 "Liberte des anciens," pp. 503-504. Conquete/Usurpation, p p . 2 1 8 - 2 1 9 . 95 "Liberte des anciens," pp. 504-505. Ouvrage de Filangieri, 11, 35. "De la perfectibilite," p. 591.

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difficult to see how Constant could call "ancient liberty" liberty at all. One clue to all this is found in his somewhat embarrassed treatment of Athens, where, as he remarks, "subjection of the individual existence to the collective body is not as complete as what I have just been describing."97 Aside from the instinctive fondness that French liberals felt for the cultural eclat of Athens (and neglecting that it was a slave society par excellence), the feature that most struck Constant's attention was that "of all the Greek republics Athens was the most commercial."98 The conjunction between commerce and modern liberty places a proviso on Athens, even though it stands condemned by another of its institutions, ostracism.99 Constant is not, then, writing history as "the story of liberty" (even in the mode of equality); more specifically, he is comparing two kinds of liberty "felt" at different times — or perhaps misfelt. For his purposes it is unimportant to show other strains of liberty manifested in the intervening centuries. He does not ignore a certain long development of modern liberty (see his remarks at the beginning of "De l'usurpation" and in various places with reference to England: e.g. Ouvrage de Filangieri, 1, 90-104); but he scarcely introduces the word to describe this. The subject of "the spirits of war and commerce" is dealt with even more widely by Constant: in the 1806 Principes, in Esprit de conquete, in Cent-Jours, in "Ancient and Modern Liberty," in Ouvrage de Filangieri, and elsewhere. We need first to recognize that war and commerce have a common goal, "to possess what one desires." However, war is comparatively primitive: "the one is the inexperienced impulse of a desire; the other is the calculation of an enlightened desire."100 The temporal continuity of these two conditions is more explicit than that of the two kinds of liberty, and they are also in a zero-sum situation: the more war recedes, the more commerce flourishes, and vice-versa.101 In Constant's age, the attraction of war can no longer be in the booty it procures, but only in the increased power it allows governments to muster. In simpler ages, war was rational and even uplifting. In antiquity and the Middle Ages it "promoted the development of man's finest and highest faculties... greatness of soul, presence, sang-froid, 97

98 " L i b e r t e des a n c i e n s , " p . 496. Ibid., p . 500. Ibid., p . 507. Constant, of course, felt that h e and M a d a m e d e Stael h a d been "ostracized " from French political life b y t h e E m p e r o r . 100 Ouvrage de Filangieri, i, 2 2 ; cf. Conquete/ Usurpation, p . 118. 101 Ouvrage de Filangieri, 1, 10.

99

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courage... heroic devotion, sublime friendship."102 Even wars of conquest could have compensating moral features. But these advantages could only be "the natural result of the national spirit." Such is not the case in the modern age, where civilization begets societies whose "uniform inclination is for peace."103 Modern nations have but one goal: repose, and the easiness of life, made possible through diligence, that comes with it. The expansion of commerce has accounted for this change. Although there were, to be sure, commercial nations in antiquity, like Carthage, they were conquered by the warlike ones. But today a Carthage (namely England) would rouse support and have the spirit of the age for its ally (Constant neglects to raise the case of commercial Athens here). Beyond this, advances in military technology and tactics have robbed war of its "satisfaction" and its "charm." 104 By commerce, Constant means free mobility of goods, capital, and credit unencumbered by a Colbertian or Napoleonic "manie reglementaire," and reinforced by "free and peaceful international relations" (a vision shared by Bentham, Kant, and other liberals). Commerce is connected with peace in at least three ways: (1) it logically displaces war as a means of gaining wealth; (2) it brings to the fore those in civil society with peaceful dispositions in replacement of the "guerrier" mentality and the power-seeking drives of the illiberal state; and (3) it resists war as an incompatible opposite which disrupts communications, confiscates goods, and blockades traffic.105 As such, its spirit, oppressed by imperialism but now succoured by war-weary and comfort-seeking populations, is invincible: for this is nothing but public opinion itself. The triumph of commerce satisfies human utilities; and it is a signifler of independence and the lumieres as well. It lays the material foundation for the society of modern liberty. The spirit of commerce makes Europeans into cosmopolitans, whereas the spirit of conquest had tribalized them. Thus, it is not without its "spirit of sameness" as well, giving nations moeurs and habits almost alike, but "softer," "more humane." 106 Commerce and industry encouraged civil homogeneity and concord also, for "all parties mutually support and help one another, because all, in the different classes of society, have something to defend; and the 102 105 106

103 104 Conquete/Usurpation, p. 115. Ibid., p. 117. Ibid., pp. 118-119. C o n s t a n t , Memoires sur Us Cent-Jours (ed. O . Pozzo di Borgo, Paris, 1961), p p . 6 4 - 6 6 . H o f m a n n , ed., "Principes de politique" 11, 4 2 7 - 4 2 9 .

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fortune of the humblest merchants would be in danger if that of the opulent banker, acquired in the same way, were to be shaken."107 However, sameness is here seen as contributing to a social order that keeps peace and spreads individual "bonheur"; it bears none of the stigma of Tocqueville's obliteration of the individual. For Constant, it is, rather, the spirit of conquest, in its extreme and untimely Napoleonic form, that breeds "uniformity" - " a unified surface... [with] the same code, the same measures, the same regulations, and... gradually the same language." 108 The connection between warlike spirit and ancient liberty is as follows. The ancient cities enjoying collective public liberty were, by nature, bellicose: "flung upon each other by necessity, they fought or threatened each other without pause. Those not wishing to be conquered could not lay their arms aside for fear that they would be." 109 While Constant does not propose an immediate connection between ancient liberty and belligerency, he sees both arising from a particular form of "social organization."110 Modern liberty, on the other hand, invested in its private pursuits and with a great latitude for inventing them, consummates a march of civilization in which the commercial spirit has played a determining role. As Constant writes: "The progress of civilization, the commercial tendency of the age, and the [increased] communication among peoples have multiplied and infinitely diversified the means of [obtaining] private happiness."111 The one evidently prepared the other: for Constant judges that " the effects of conquest had become very mild for several centuries and remained so up to the end of the eighteenth century... The spirit of conquest had ceased... But [it] burst forth again from the storms of the French Revolution more impetuously than ever."112 The conclusion is, then, that a stable condition of modern liberty (peace, repose, lumieres, widened wealth and private satisfactions) follows upon the spirit of commerce; that its disruption was due to a resurgence of warlike spirit (which can be suppressed but never conquered in human nature), here driven by a mistaken nostalgia for ancient liberty that ran amok; and that the disruption, however grave, was anomalous and is unlikely to recur, provided that autorite sociale can be made to serve the liberal goals of life. For while harboring a propensity for war, man loves better his comfort, security, and cherished independence. He can now see that the 107 109 111

Ouvrage de Filangieri, n, 66. "Liberte des anciens," p. 497. Conquete/Usurpation, p. 184.

108

Conquete/ Usurpation, p. 146. uo Ibid., p. 494. 112 Ibid., p. 145.

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peaceful production of wealth and exchange of material and intellectual commodities are the source of his happiness and expectations. Liberty remains his weapon: but it is more a shield than a sword.113 Tocqueville's conceptual categories are sometimes difficult to recuperate from his writings. But we are fortunate to have two important and concentrated texts for our purpose, the one bearing on "kinds of liberty" and the other on "aristocratic and democratic ages." The treatment of liberty is found in Tocqueville's essay of 1836, "L'etat social et politique de la France avant et depuis 1789." His diverse uses of the concept of liberty should be referred, in the first instance, to this analysis. "Liberty," Tocqueville writes, "can in fact be a product of the human mind in two different forms. It can be construed either as the employment of a common right or as the enjoyment of a privilege."114 In the latter sense, the notion of liberty is "aristocratic." It proceeds from a will to act freely, not by a general right that men hold in common from nature, but from the individual possession of a right to independence. Liberty was thus conceived and asserted in the Middle Ages, and indeed in all times when social conditions were stamped by inequality. Aristocratic liberty, Tocqueville explains, is the faculty of an individual or class, and may flourish even where general guarantees of freedom are lacking. Psychologically, it produces in men "an exalted feeling of individual worth and a passionate taste for independence." 115 From it, egoism receives incomparable "energy and power." It can impel men and nations to extraordinary greatness. This is, in fact, the liberty that Madame de Stael called " ancient." But it does not correspond to Constant's definition of ancient liberty - via Rousseau. It is, rather, an amalgam of that liberty (the "greatness" of individual peoples and their citizens - treated by Montesquieu in his Greatness and Decline of the Romans) and the

greatness of individuals, which is a legacy of feudal and Germanic inspiration (as such, little appetizing to either Rousseau or Constant, but not unappealing to Montesquieu). The working out of this contretemps can be deferred for the time being. In contrast to the above, the "modern, democratic, and, I dare say, just notion of liberty" proceeds from modern natural right: 113 115

Hofmann, ed., " Principes de politique," n, 461. Ibid., p. 47.

114

OC (B), vm, 46.

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"Each, whose claim is to have received from nature the intelligence necessary to his conduct, derives from his birth an equal and imprescriptible right to live in independence from his fellows in all that concerns him alone, and to shape his own fate as he pleases."116 As soon as the consciousness of this modern liberty affects the spirit of a nation, Tocqueville says, there is no longer any room for an arbitrary will to command obedience. The sovereign will can emerge only from the wills (Tocqueville writes "wills" where Rousseau would write "will") of all. The "will to equality" and the "will to liberty" are reciprocally defining: the more status is equalized, the more there is democratic or modern liberty; the more liberty rejects social obedience, the more the virile virtues of the civic actor vanish. Although Tocqueville concedes that the second vision of liberty is more "just," he suggests that it is just by the standards of a Christian providence that is in conflict with his own feelings.117 His reason accepts it; his heart rejects it: "My head inclines me to democratic institutions, but I am aristocratic by instinct, that is, I have contempt and fear of the crowd." 118 Tocqueville's work would not be so profoundly interesting to his own age and ours if he had simply bailed out of this dilemma. But the problem, so naturally his own by reason of birth and intelligence, was one he pursued with his scholarship. While best known as the discoverer of how the new world might provide values for the stabilization of modern liberty, Tocqueville remained transfixed by the French case. In the perspective of liberty, it was not just a simple matter of how aristocratic independence had been overwhelmed, France had - for a very long time - "modified its ideas and moeurs in a democratic direction " - even in the fifteenth century: that change had not really taken hold before the siecle des lumieres. For, up to that point, "the feudal and aristocratic notion of liberty was still universally accepted."119 Whereas we had in Constant a pristine methodological separation of two kinds of liberty that could be breached only by willful intellectual confusion, Tocqueville saw them explosively mixed in French history. On the surface, aristocratic liberty succumbed to a servile centralization; in subtler ways, "independence" measured and joined itself to the general notion of natural rights in the abstract arena of public opinion. One did not need to invoke the Greeks and Romans: "the 116 118 119

117 Ibid., p. 48. DA, 11, 351. Cited in Andre Redier, Comme disait M. de Tocqueville (Paris, 1925), p. 46. "Etat social et politique," p. 48.

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taste that the French had always had for independence turned into a systematic, rationalized opinion which... finally drew the royal power...into tacitly recognizing that public sentiment was the greatest of powers."120 Ancient versus modern was not precisely the issue in this annal of continuity: the historian's great-grandfather Malesherbes stood, at the watershed of the transaction in the 1770s, where the passion for equality collided with the passion for independence. Our account will be enriched if we turn, without further discussion, to Tocqueville's description of " aristocratic and democratic ages." This contrast motivates virtually all the commentary in the second volume of Democracy in America; and it is most succinctly expressed in a footnote occurring late in that work: When members of a community are divided into castes and classes, they not only differ from one another, but have no taste and no desire to be alike; on the contrary, everyone endeavors, more and more, to keep his own opinions undisturbed, to retain his own peculiar habits, and to remain himself. The characteristics of individuals are very strongly marked. When the state of society among a people is democratic - that is to say, when there are no longer any castes or classes in the community, and all its members are nearly equal in education and in property - the human mind follows the opposite direction. Men are much alike, and they are annoyed, as it were, by any deviation from that likeness; far from seeking to preserve their own distinguishing singularities, they endeavor to shake them off in order to identify themselves with the general mass of the people, which is the sole representative of right and of might to their eyes. The characteristics of individuals are nearly obliterated. In the ages of aristocracy even those who are naturally alike strive to create imaginary differences between themselves; in the ages of democracy even those who are not alike seek nothing more than to become so and to copy each other, so strongly is the mind of every man always carried away by the general impulse of mankind.121 Already, we have noted a number of specific texts that bear out this general charge, especially with regard to "democratic ages," where the passion for sameness or equality of condition leads not only to an isolation from one's "self" but to an all-consuming mediocrity that stifles the pride of the individual.122 This is a darker view of the "general standard of liberty according to nature" 120 121

Ibid., p. 49. On the difference with Constant, see Lamberti's remarks, Tocqueville, p. 82. 122 DA, 11, 298, 112. Ibid., pp. 260-261.

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presented earlier. Yet Tocqueville is not completely pellucid here. For he seemed to argue in "Etat politique et social" that a fruitful combination of the old sense of liberty and the "new, more powerful impulse" might have produced a climate favorable to free institutions. Here he appears to privilege the notion that democratic ages stifle true "individuality" with their soporific of "individualism." To be sure, this is a presentation of ideal — typical limits, not a counterfactual vision of history. And despite the fact that "these are like two distinct humanities," each is conceded to have its "advantages and disadvantages, its own good and ill." Tocqueville clearly suggests that aristocratic ages belong to the past, while democratic ones are the concern of the present and of "new political science"; for he writes explicitly of "the age of aristocracy which preceded our own." 123 However, as we saw with Constant, Tocqueville's models serve both a historical and a comparative - normative function: one can find democratic impulses in societies beholden to aristocratic liberties and virtues existing amid a "free taste for obedience"; 124 or even, imaginably, the formation of new aristocracies in the bosom of democracy.125 Privately, Tocqueville regretted the passing of the nobler features of aristocratic individuality,126 yet he also criticized it as " a curiously ill-adjusted, intermittent freedom always restricted by class distinctions and tied up with immunities and privileges."127 Its virtue was in being a political freedom par excellence:12* one could not have said of these aristocrats that " they want to be led and they wish to remain free."129 Aristocratic ages, while captured best for Tocqueville by the spirit of the European noblesse cCe'pe'e ("There never was a prouder and more independent nobility in its opinions and its acts than the French nobility of feudal times"), 130 are not exclusively confined to that image: this is of great importance. For the ancient Greeks and Romans are also inspired by the aristocratic ethos: "Athens... with her universal suffrage was, after all, merely an aristocratic republic, in which all the nobles had an equal right to the government." 131 An exception made to this judgement (which establishes it all the more) is that "the armies of antiquity were democratic, although they 123 125 128 129

124 Ibid., p. 346. "Etat social et politique," p. 45. 126 127 DA, 11, 170-171. See note 118, above. Old Regime, p . 119. On political liberty as a "bien en soi," see Lamberti, Tocqueville, pp. 310-311. 130 131 DA, 11, 337. "Etat social et politique," p. 44. DA, 11, 65.

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came out of the bosom of aristocracy."132 Tocqueville, one could say, inherits some of Rousseau's reverence for the sublime Plutarchian figure with his patriotic moeurs: writing to Royer-Collard in 1838 on Plutarch, he said: "What strikes me most about our times is not all our pettiness, but that we cannot better conceive the theory of great deeds." 133 But Tocqueville engrafts his classicism to a feudal model that Jean-Jacques despised. Even segments of the French roture fall within the boundaries of aristocratic ethos, that middle class "which had its own traditions, its code of honor, and its proper pride... the aristocracy of the new and thriving social order." 134 It is greatly owing to their contribution "that [by 1775] the idea of freedom had found its way into the minds of Frenchmen," shocking, among others, the aged Voltaire.135 In summary, Tocqueville's concept of an "aristocratic age" is of one where individuality dictates the quality of liberty - where it is "active" and "virile," unwilling to compromise with the "cowardly love of present enjoyment."136 It is, so to speak, contemptuous of the spirit of Constantine modern liberty. Yet it is important to understand that arisocrats are, for Tocqueville, elites, not nobles in the narrow caste sense. Tocqueville — like Montesquieu — makes much of national character. Can it be then (referring back to the previous long quotation) that aristocratic ages produce a collective character only in the sense that there is "no taste and no desire to be alike"? Had Tocqueville not also written that society would be impossible "if everyone undertook to form his own opinions and to seek for truth by isolated paths struck out by himself alone"? For purposes of contrast and identity Tocqueville seems here to be placing exaggerated stress on aristocratic particularity. The moeurs of the aristocrat are not his own; it is his personality. The true aristocrat "remains himself," while democratic man seeks psychological security by borrowing a uniform standard of conduct that he has not made and that is not his own. It is a version of Rousseau's problem of etre and paraitre, with the tables turned. In literal fact, dwellers in aristocratic ages "derive their beliefs from the opinions of the class to which they belong." 137 The democrats cannot do this: they are social Cartesians, selfreferenced, but as such, driven to "the common standard of intelligence."138 132 134 137

Ibid., p. 296. Old Regime, p. 63. Ibid., p. 4.

133

Tocqueville to Royer-Collard, 6 April 1838, OC, xi, 61. 135 136 Ibid., p. 165. DA, 11, 277. 138 Ibid., pp. 5-6.

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Up to 1789, France had been a complex mixture of aristocratic and democratic traits, with the latter gaining the ascendant. They had reacted on each other disastrously, dissynchronously; for the French had ''desired to combine freedom with the [institutions of the] servile state." In his remarkable sketch of the French national character that concludes the ancien regime, Tocqueville attempts to explain how these conflicting tendencies, faithful to a deeply implanted and paradoxical coding, created the most powerful and destructive of all revolutions — yet without real novelty. Still, there could be no denying that revolution generated its own tabula rasa: " Every revolution has more or less the effect of releasing men to their own conduct and of opening before the mind of each one of them an almost limitless perspective."139 Such might be called "radical freedom," were it not that all freedom must be grounded in social arrangement and social possibility. The aftermath of 1789 (despite its generous first motions) was, by 1800, a horror vacui in which France "was almost as bereft of laws, customs, and moeurs as if it had just been created." 140 That was the worst fulfillment of the democratic ethos, because it was fundamentally "ethosless," mired in "little time for thinking," 141 mobility,142 and also " forgetfulness" (see the Revolutionary calendar). 143 The forgetfulness was less benign than that in America with its moeurs libres; yet both nations shared a tendency "to accept tradition only as a means of information."144 Although the reactionaries of the Restoration had often been accused of "learning nothing and forgetting nothing," Tocqueville, the liberal, placed no high premium on forgetfulness: his mission was to remind his countrymen of things too easily forgotten, to bring to the surface of consciousness indwelling social truths too easily expunged by political Cartesianism. One of his indictments of democratic ages was that democrats "do not resemble their fathers... The mind of each is therefore unattached to that of his fellows by tradition or common habits; and they never have the power, the inclination, or the time to act together."145 Tocqueville did not recommend living in the past, but he strongly urged living with it, drawing it within one's identity as pride and warning. Constant (like many others at 139 141 143 145

140 Ibid., p. 7. Reception speech, Academie franchise (1842), p. 17. 142 DA, 11, 274. Ibid., pp. 61, 145, 198, 235. 144 Ibid., pp. 105, 204, 234-235. Ibid., p. 4; cf. 1, 219. Ibid., 11, 61.

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the watershed of 1800) noted and lamented a spasm of generational conflict.146 But he mentioned the subject en passant and not as a central theme. One might then conclude that Tocqueville's models of the two ages and their temperaments tilt toward an aristocratic preference. And this would not be incorrect, if we took the issue merely to be one of animus. But it was not mainly that: it was one of clairvoyance. For Tocqueville, "the question is not how to reconstruct aristocratic society, but how to make liberty proceed out of that democratic state of society in which God has placed us." 147 This pathos is armed by his own decision to enlighten his contemporaries and to bring whatever lucidity he can to the practice of democratic politics. Otherwise, he writes, " I should have confined myself to deploring in secret the destiny of mankind." 148 "If," he writes, in a second critical passage, I inquire what state of society is most favorable to the great revolutions of the mind, I find that it occurs somewhere between the complete equality of the whole community and the absolute separation of ranks... Between these two extremes of the history of nations is an intermediate period, a period of glory as well as of ferment, when the conditions of men are not sufficiently settled for the mind to be lulled to torpor, when they are sufficiently unequal for men to exercise a vast power on the minds of one another, and when some few may modify the convictions of all. It is at such times that great reformers arise and new ideas suddenly change the face of the world.149 What Tocqueville envisions here is not called an " a g e " but a "period" — perhaps one that, at moments, he imagined himself as inhabiting, although he never cultivated the expectations of a Victor Hugo or a Saint-Simon. The "torpor" of the July Monarchy was, for him, as trying as the ferment of revolution. Yet the Weberian cadence of "great reformers" is cut by the sense of "intermediate period" - a phrase calling "middleness" to mind. Tocqueville does not want to equate middleness with "mediocrity"; but neither does he wish to witness a social and egalitarian parousia that breaks the bonds and traditions of society: his message is not, therefore, apostolic, and the "power on the minds of one another" means the rational mental communication of the liberal faith. 146 148

Constant, Ouvrage de Filangieri, n, 82. Ibid., p. 348.

149

147 Tocqueville, DA, 11, 340. Ibid., p. 274n.

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For society, according to Tocqueville, has its own "unalterable" or "ancient" laws.150 Among these is the right of private property, described as "the last remnant of an overthrown aristocratic world." 151 To challenge this law is an affront to social creation. The fanatics of 1848 were thus purveyors of "mad schemes," responding to that same modern "taste for comfort" by overthrowing LouisPhilippe, who had regarded it as a political safety valve. Against his prejudice, Tocqueville proposed to "protect the ancient laws of society against the innovators with the help of the new force which the republican principle might lend to the government."152 But, as he confided in the same work, " I did not believe then, any more than I do now, that the republican form of government is the best suited to the needs of France." 153 Finally, there is Tocqueville's version of the spirits of conquest and commerce. He believed, like Constant, that war would become "more rare and less intense" in democratic times.154 But the "esprit de commerce " was simply one of a number of reasons why this might be so.155 Like Constant, Tocqueville did not think that belligerence had always been an unremitting curse; but he gave another explanation: "war almost always enlarges the mind of a people and raises their character. In some cases it is the only check to the excessive growth of certain propensities that naturally spring out of the equality of conditions, and it must be considered as a necessary corrective to certain inveterate diseases to which democratic communities are liable." 156 This does not resemble Constant's point about advancing civilization; it sounds a great deal like Hegel's argument that the incidence of war rouses the bourgeois spirit from "housekeeping" to the defense of the common good.157 Indeed, war and commerce have a "secret connection." 158 There is no zero-sum situation here; and there is no exaltation of commerce as a source of liberty.159 While it is true that democratic peoples are less warlike, "much less afraid of being conquered and much more afraid of war than an aristocratic people,"160 this makes them more servile. Tocqueville is far from concluding that war and commerce are 150 151 154 156 157

160

T o c q u e v i l l e , Recollections (trans. A . T e i x e i r a d e M a t t o s , C l e v e l a n d , 1959), p . 79. 152 153 Ibid., p. 10. Ibid., p. 116. Ibid., p. 233. 155 DA, 11, 279. Ibid. "Equality of conditions" is the principal reason given. Ibid, p. 283. G. W. F. Hegel, Philosophy of Right (trans. T. M. Knox, Oxford, 1967), para. 324A, pp. 158 159 209-210. Tocqueville, DA, n, 293. Ibid, pp. 165-167. Ibid, p. 300.

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opposites. He has no confidence that supplanting the one by the other is a critical step toward freedom. "In democratic times enjoyments (jouissances) are more intense than in ages of aristocracy," Tocqueville writes, here agreeing with Constant. But, in such ages, he adds, "man's hopes and desires are oftener blasted." 161 Constant, bent on exorcising the demons of arbitraire, had portrayed the consequences of "modern liberty" as a happy or fulfilled society, without inkling of its darker inclinations. Tocqueville dared to generalize it as a "democratic age," tofindits anchorages deep in the ancien regime, and to predict the perils of its future. Thus, their structures of argument, while analogous, deviate in significant ways. III.

ANCESTRAL VOICES

Religion is intimately connected with liberty in both Constant and Tocqueville. They unwaveringly reject Bayle's supposition of a "commonwealth of atheists"-made plausible by evidence that " the inclination to do evil does not come from the ignorance of God's existence and that it is not corrected by acquiring the knowledge of a God who punishes and rewards." 162 Bayle of course concedes that since history provides no case of his commonwealth, it is logically impossible to refute the charge "that atheists... are ferocious beasts more to be feared than lions and tigers."163 Montesquieu, in answering Bayle, will not leave this image alone: he insists that "he who has no religion is that terrible animal who senses his freedom only when he is tearing and devouring [his prey]." 164 Constant and Tocqueville are pupils of Montesquieu. But they go beyond Montesquieu in one respect — or at least displace his argument. They are not so struck by any perceived rapport between atheism and animal freedom as by the one between religion and political liberty. Thus, Constant: " Religious peoples can be slaves, but no irreligious people has ever been free."165 And as Tocqueville reported of the Americans: "They profess to think that a people ought to be moral, religious, and temperate in proportion as it is free."166 Religion is indispensable to the private man as well. For 161 162

164 165

Ibid., p. 147. Pierre Bayle, "Miscellaneous Thoughts on the Comet of 1680," in K. C. Sandberg, ed., 163 The Great Contest of Faith and Reason (New York, 1963), p . 15. Ibid. Charles-Louis d e Secondat, Baron d e Montesquieu, De I'esprit des Ms, x x i v , ii. Constant, Du polythe'isme romain, conside're dans ses rapports avec la philosophie grecque et la religion 166 chretienne (2 vols., Paris, 1833), 11, 91-92. Tocqueville, DA, 1, 433.

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Constant, it is our faithful and consoling companion in the face of distress; and it is "the most natural of all our emotions."167 Tocqueville acquiesces: " Religion is... simply another form of hope, and it is no less natural to the human heart than hope itself... Unbelief is an accident, and faith is the only permanent state of mankind." 168 Neither Constant nor Tocqueville accepts the narrow view of certain eighteenth-century thinkers that religion (in its doctrine of rewards and punishments) is fundamentally important as a means of social control: the point that Bayle had specifically addressed and Montesquieu had replied to. "That is not my opinion," Constant declares, I do not consider religion as the supplement to the thumbscrews and the wheel. There is a common morality {morale commune) based on calculation, interests, and security which can, I think, in the strict sense, do without religion... But woe to the nation having only that common morality! It is because it creates a loftier morality that religion seems to be desirable [Constant has in mind here a morality of duty, akin to Kant's].169 For Tocqueville, it is the unbeliever who considers religion to be "useful," and, if he is sincere, he regrets that it can be no more than this for him. But for those who continue to believe, "the mass of mankind," the "instinctive desire of a future life brings the crowd about the altar and opens the hearts of men to the precepts and consolations of religion."170 The fires of hell have lost their potency for men of the nineteenth century, but the felicity of eternal life remains a tower of faith. Constant and Tocqueville are agreed that morality and religion, though not indifferent to each other, are separable. A society need not be unanimous in its embodiment of religious sentiment, so long as its tone and practices are religious: indeed, given the voluntary nature of commitment and belief, such a case would be remarkable. There is more than a hint in both writers that it is more natural and more necessary for the masses to believe than the educated elites. As Constant puts it: " I would not form a bad opinion of an enlightened man [i.e. 'given to profound meditations and preserved from most of the corrupting temptations by the pleasures of study and the habit 167 169 170

H o f m a n n , ed., " Principes de politique" H o f m a n n , ed., "Principes depolitique" Tocqueville, DA, 1, 324-325.

n, 158. 11, 170-171.

168

Tocqueville, DA, 1, 321.

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of thinking'] if he was presented to me as having no religious feeling. But a people without this feeling would seem to me robbed of a precious faculty and disinherited by nature." 171 Tocqueville exposes in considerable - and, one suspects, personal - detail an ideal situation in which "those who do not believe conceal their incredulity, [while] those who believe display their faith... [and] public opinion pronounces itself in favor of religion," bestowing on it "love, support, and honor." 172 Beyond this, each thinker firmly argues for the separation of religion and politics in the whole area of conscience and worship and in denominational detachment from all but the routine forms of associational control by the state: i.e. the "American solution" of total disestablishment. This is not to imply that politics and religion have nothing to do with each other; after all, these matters are being raised in works dealing with political principles and written, in the manner of Montesquieu, by "ecrivains politiques." But it does mean, in the context of Catholic France, the abolition of all special church privileges, all clerical Gallicanism of any sort, all residues of politically forced belief. Both Constant and Tocqueville regard this as good for the state, but they especially stress that it is also for the sake of religion itself, in the expectation that its central human importance will be enhanced if it is free. As Constant writes: "So long as [political] authority leaves religion perfectly independent, no one will have any interest in attacking it. The question won't even arise. But if authority claims its defense, especially through wanting to make it an ally, then the independent mind will waste no time in attacking it." 173 And Tocqueville, in similar words: "when religion clings to the interests of the world, it becomes almost as fragile a thing as the powers of earth. It is the only one of them all which can hope for immortality; but if it be connected with their ephemeral power, it shares their fortunes [and, he says, 'a portion of that animosity which the latter excites'] and may fall with those transient passions which alone supported them." 174 As regards the sectarianism which disestablishment and total freedom of conscience encourage, both Constant and Tocqueville are persuaded (as indeed was Pascal) that no true religious feeling or belief can be forced. Constant (in arguments very much like Jefferson's) sees positive benefit in the multiplication of sects: each 171 173

Hofmann, ed., "Principes de politique" n, 160. Hofmann, ed., "Principes depolitique," 11, 163.

172 174

Tocqueville, DA, i, 324. Tocqueville, DA, 1, 322.

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will compete with the others in goodness and purity, and they will mutually monitor one another without the state's having to interfere.175 Tocqueville, from a somewhat different perspective, observes that in America the existence of sects, far from creating islands of moral distinctiveness, tends toward a single ethos consonant with rules of the other national institutions. This is true even of the Roman Catholics, for here they are not bonded to politics: "The clergy of all the different sects there hold the same language; their opinions are in agreement with the laws, and the human mind flows onwards, so to speak, in one undivided current." 176 Up to this point in our analysis, the doctrines of Constant and Tocqueville appear to be in perfect liberal accord. There are probably other matters of substance where comparisons would support this finding. One might therefore speciously think that further examination was not needed. But there are two important details that as yet have not been brought forward. The first is that we have up to now been speaking of religion or religious feeling, not the specific forms or feelings of Christianity as a cultural substrate. The second is this: Constant is a thinker of Protestant descent and culture, examining, for the most part, politico-religious conditions in Catholic France; whereas Tocqueville is a scion of the Catholic (and Jansenizing) nobility, meditating deeply on the moeurs of a country that was the ultimate illustration of the "Protestant paradigm." 177 We shall now see how the religious world views of Constant and Tocqueville subscribe to and reinforce other distinctions; how, indeed, this is central to their political positions. That in itself might not be of uppermost theoretical concern. But what is also at stake is an identification of the spiritual sources of the French liberal experiment, as well as an attempt to explore that complex spirituality as a way of locating virtues and failures in liberal thought. Since most critical writing on French liberalism treats this issue as a kind of externality, we shall obtain new insights from this approach. I have designated Constant's vision as "Protestant"; and this will require some justification. Virtually nowhere in his religious or confessional analysis will Constant be found aligned with any 175 176 177

H o f m a n n , ed., " Principes de politique" n , 166-167. Tocqueville, DA, 1, 313. I explain a n d employ this term, following Peter Berger, in m y Politics and Religious Consciousness in America (New Brunswick, 1984), p . 32.

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semblance of Reformed orthodoxy, particularly as developed in the Suisse romande. In this sense, he goes even beyond the Savoyard vicar, who recommended community worship and formal compliance with the faith of one's country and ancestors.178 There is no central doctrine of theology, no ecclesiology whatever, that Constant is anxious to defend. If it cannot be doubted that he recognizes monotheism as the highest form of religious apprehension and the Christian ethic as its fullest expression, there is little to identify him with positive Christian faith. He mentions Jesus only as "the divine author of our belief... [who] demanded charity, light [lumiere], and liberty for all." 179 Although eulogized by a Protestant pastor at his funeral, Constant never subscribed to any form of public worship. In Switzerland, he was "Protestant" by tradition and descent; in France, he was "Protestant" by opposition and exclusion. During the Restoration, he was an inactive member of the Societe de la Morale Chretienne, which simply meant that he was a theistic antiCatholic. 180 But here is what Constant himself has to say: " I t is in the bosom of the Protestant church that Christianity, restored at once to its ancient purity and progressive perfectibility, is today shown to be a doctrine contemporary with all ages, because it keeps pace with them; open to all knowledge [lumieres] because it welcomes and adopts all knowledge; enriching itself with all discoveries because it fights against none of them; placing itself in each time at the level of that time, and thus casting out all the notions that have fallen behind the daily progress of the human spirit."181 This is scarcely the Protestantism of Calvin or Reinhold Niebuhr, but it resembles the Protestantism of William Ellery Channing and Harry Emerson Fosdick and, in general, what has often in America been called the "Protestant Left." Indeed, the tradition of American liberal, antitheological, non-denomination, and individualistic religion is a matrix in which Constant's position can be well understood.182 In the mode of William James, Constant describes religion as "that need of the soul, which leads or compels it to seek beyond the visible 178

Rousseau, Emile, bk. iv. A l t h o u g h " l e culte essential est celui d u c o e u r " (p. 381), the vicar advises: " R e t o u r n e z dans votre patrie, reprenez la religion d e vos p e r e s " (p. 384). 179 Constant, " D u developpement progressif des idees religieuses," in Melanges, G a u c h e t , ed., Liberte chez les modernes, p. 542. 180 See Daniel Robert, Les e'glises reformers en France, 1800-1830 (Paris, 1961), p. 438. 181 « j ) u developpement," p. 531. 182 See, o n this, William A. Clebsch, American Religious Thought (Chicago, 1973).

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world for beings with which it can establish communication."183 Again, like James, Constant has a fundamental respect for what he calls "non-sacerdotal polytheism."184 And, in another text, much in the vein of the later writing ofJohn Dewey, Constant declares: "All that is beautiful, deep, and profound is religious."185 He seems to anticipate this affiliation: " Look at America... the power of religious feeling is so strong there that often, when a single family is divided in forms of worship, that difference causes no trouble to the peace or fondness of the hearth because all members of the family are joined in the worship of a just and beneficent providence."186 Religion is not, for Constant, a prescribed set of dogmas or any common form of worship: "Religion considered as a positive institution is a very different thing from religion considered as an individual sentiment."187 It is, rather, a "sentiment intime," universal in character, and the "result of the needs of the soul and the efforts of the intelligence."188 This feeling and this need are so strong that only their subjugation and manipulation by unscrupulous priestly and political authority can suffice to explain the widespread phenomenon of unbelief. If left in peace, the atheists would soon cast a horrified glance at the dedivinized world they had created, and would deplore their hollow victory when they viewed man as "standing alone upon an earth that will soon swallow him." 189 The "intimate feeling," "strongest of all our emotions," is the enduring feature of religion for Benjamin Constant. Its inner and outer expressions are, as we shall see, modes of adaptation to the advance of the human spirit in historical time. Yet, despite this entire privileging of individual emotion, it seems that Constant was willing, in his later years, to concede that religion required organized forms of worship.190 As is well known, Constant was - at intervals - doggedly engaged, for over forty years, in composing a monumental treatise on the comparative history of religions. The five volumes of his De la religion, considered dans sa source, ses formes et ses developpements were finally 183 184

186 187

188 189

E p h r a i m H a r p a z , ed., C o n s t a n t , Recueil ctarticles, 1820-1824 ( G e n e v a , 1981), p . 342. O n J a m e s ' s " m e t h o d o l o g i c a l p o l y t h e i s m , " see Kelly, Politics and Religious Consciousness, p p . 185 H o f m a n n , ed., "Principes de politique" 11, 160. 115—116. "Du developpement," pp. 541-542. Cited from C o n s t a n t ' s Journal intime b y Pierre Deguise, Benjamin Constant meconnu: le livre de la religion (Geneva, 1966), p . 54. Cf. I m m a n u e l K a n t , The Metaphysical Elements of Justice (trans. J. Ladd, Indianapolis, 1964), p. 94. "Du developpement," pp. 527-528. 190 H o f m a n n , ed., "Principes depolitique," n , 162. Harpaz, ed., Recueil, p. 345.

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published between 1824 and 1831, the year of his death. Two further volumes, Du polytheisme romaine, considere dans ses rapports avec la philosophie grecque et la religion chre'tienne, appeared posthumously in

1833. In this long span of time, Constant's perspective altered drastically. Weaned on the materialist philosophy of the eighteenth century (especially Helvetius), he had at first been determined "to make my contribution to the destruction of what I called prejudices... to support the assertion... that the pagan religion was by far preferable to Christianity." 191 But through an interlacing of personal experience with an ever-expansive program of research, a road with many bends, barriers, and detours, he came to quite other conclusions. The following summary puts it well: "he went through some complex intermediate stages including a period of nihilism, a desire for faith which still eluded fulfillment, and a handling of skepticism in such a way that it was finally and paradoxically transformed into an instrument of belief."192 Thanks to painstaking recent research,193 this aspect of Constant's work and thought is now far better understood: his prodigious commitment, his many revisions, his steadiness of purpose. On two fronts, the spiritual and the intellectual, Benjamin Constant pressed forward to the embrace of religion. There were serious exposures to Kant's ethics of duty, Schleiermacher's personal theology of faith, nature mysticism (at first hand in the exaggerated form of the poet Zacharias Werner, an habitue of Coppet), quietism a la Madame Guyon (in 1807), and the redoubtable spell of the clairvoyant Baroness von Krlidener (in 1815). As can be seen, some of these encounters were more existential than erudite. It is not necessary to dwell on them further to make the following points: (1) the appeal of the "sentiment intime" for Constant was, as he puts it, a matter of need and emotion, a rebuff to both rationalism and skepticism; (2) in no precise way can it be argued that Constant had any sudden religious illumination or conversion, although there is a distinct watershed of religiosity around 1806-1807; and (3) we can call his religious rapprochement "Protestant," for such were its 191 192 193

Le cahier rouge, in Oeuvres de Benjamin Constant (ed. A. Roulin, Paris, 1957), p. 129. J o h n Cruikshank, Benjamin Constant (New York, 1984), p . 89. See P. Deguise, Constant me'connu; Helen H. S. Hogue, On Changes in Benjamin Constant's Books on Religion (Geneva, 1964); Patrice Thompson, La religion de Benjamin Constant: lespouvoirs de I'image (Pisa, 1978). For controversy and reception, see Brian Juden, "La pensee de Benjamin Constant sur la religion," in Benjamin Constant^ Madame de Stael et le Groupe de Coppet (ed. E. Hofmann, Oxford and Lausanne, 1982), pp. 151-166.

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major sources and such was its quality of self-exploration, its litre examen.

While Constant regarded religious feeling as foundational and separable from reason, he saw religion's manifestation in history as a question eminently subject to reasoned analysis. His problem, as it eventually came to be framed, was this: how to leave the "sentiment" intact and fundamental (as in the Profession de foi of Rousseau), while at the same time tracing its development (like Condorcet's Esquisse without that author's hostility to religious faith). In 1806, according to Prosper de Barante - and this accords with texts found in Constant's Lausanne manuscript of the Principes of the same year - he declared, after composing a chapter on religious sentiment, that "mon livre est a refaire" (meaning the book on religion).194 Thus, it is likely that revisions in his own thought preceded his engagement with the Lausanne quietists in 1807. Whatever the case, it seems clear that over the next few years, until the decisive imperial battles renewed Constant's concern with politics, he gave deep ponderation to the historical question of religious evolution. In 1811 he wrote to Barante: My work will agree with your position. I was led to it by a multitude of facts which I have especially viewed with impartiality because I gathered them for an opposite purpose... [My earlier] proofs rebounded on me, the human heart was revealed for what it is when drained of religious feeling; and religious feeling by itself could not long satisfy me, since it is vague and powerless in its own right... I saw reason in all its splendor and all its weakness, the result of four centuries of reflection turning first into chaos, then into a fantastic and arbitrary construction, with man successful in destroying everything and incapable of putting anything in its place. Finally yielding to so much irresistible evidence, I saw God granting to man not only religion, but reason itself.195 At about this same time, he wrote to Claude Hochet: " a little knowledge {science) leads to atheism, but more of it to religion. I have recomposed the whole plan and more than three quarters of the chapters." 196 The grand outline was now in place for De la religion as we have it, although, amid the frantic activity of the next two decades, its execution would require a long time. We cannot comment here on 194 195

P r o s p e r d e B a r a n t e , Souvenirs (Paris, 1890), p . 163. " L e t t r e s d e B e n j a m i n C o n s t a n t a P r o s p e r d e B a r a n t e , 1 8 0 5 - 1 8 3 0 , " Revue des deux mondes,

34 (1906), 548. Letter dated 2 December 1811. 196

L e t t e r of 11 O c t o b e r 1 8 1 1 , q u o t e d in Deguise, Constant me'connu, p . 4 1 .

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this immense work; but it will be useful to make some observations on Constant's essay of 1826, "du developpement progressif des idees religieuses" (a brisk exposition of his theory and an answer to some of the critics of the earlier volumes of De la religion). In this essay, Constant is concerned, first of all, to establish "the universality of the religious sentiment, the tendency of that sentiment to perfect the form in which it is cast (perfectionner la forme qu'il revet), and the resistance of the priestly class to the perfecting of that form."197 We have already taken up the matter of universality. As regards the resistance of priesthoods to purifications and changes in religious forms, Constant deals with the question in regard to both polytheism and monotheism: ancient Greek non-sacerdotalism is purer and more genuinely expressive than the priestly polytheisms of Africa and Asia; radical Protestant monotheism far surpasses Catholic sacerdotalism. The highest religion is, properly speaking, intimate, not corporative, not hierarchical, and solafide.The absence or presence of priestcraft, in fact, defines "two kinds of religion" and "two kinds of societies"- independent, progressive ones and ones that are "soumises."198 This distinction can introduce the question of perfectibility itself. After asserting the durability of religious feeling in history, Constant's more difficult task was that of temporalizing it, linking it to and synchronizing it with the secular theory of progress: "Should religion alone be exempt form [this law of progression] ?... Surely not." For the doctrine of religious perfectibility alone "reconciles the ideas religious men entertain about [the goodness and justice of providence] with the nature of the human spirit."199 Divinity is therefore not fixity, nor is it tradition; quite the opposite: it is the creative appearance of the divine in conjunction with the progressive advance of human reason and improved society. This is, as we saw, what Constant takes to be the true gospel of Protestantism. He might seem to be in the dilemma of asserting that religion naturally constitutes what is deepest in man, while at the same time man "makes" forms of religion that adjust to his personal, technical, and social needs. As such, a demonstration of religious progress underwrites the reality of all progress. Since there are "two kinds of religion"-free and "soumise"the problem of total progress requires delicate handling. In this 197

"Du developpement," p. 533.

198

Ibid., p. 535.

199

Ibid., p. 537.

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respect, the kinds of religion are distinguished in two dimensions: time and mode. As to time, sacerdotal religions resist the lumieres with determined countermeasures, but cannot finally hold out against them: their resistance is, however, favorable to unbelief.200 As to mode, priestly religions admit inevitable change in secrecy; but this change is publicly concealed in frozen ritual. When the ritual is alienated from the live consciousness of the worshipers, the cult's destruction is at hand. 201 Carrying the day in the march of history, "progressive religion, as such, "ne peut faire que du bien." 202 Religious freedom is, therefore, for Constant one of the mobiles of his broader concept of modern liberty, while at the same time being a kind of ground or evidence of liberty's conquests. It is both highly personal and sweepingly providential as it moves toward the ultimate unity or truth. It is not, at bottom, a matter ofmoeurs, but an aggregation of diverse beliefs that are tested by their independence and authenticity. These beliefs form opinion and shape lumieres. In moments of trial - both personal and public - religion is a rampart; in conspicuous periods of progress and clear sailing, it runs with the wind. At such moments it is exactly what it needs to be. It calls the human mind to a creator, and to higher duty; if it avenges, this is mainly against its own priestly abusers. Religion is feeling, then opinion, then form. The liaison between religion and politics is not simply a matter of freedom for each in its sphere. For, in the first place, the commonwealth, if it is to partake in progress, appears to require a religion — one which it cannot extort. In the second place, it seems that those who endorse Constant's version of liberal religion will also champion his version of liberal politics: it will be a "civil" but not a "civic" religion. Finally, Constant writes, " I prefer the religious yoke to political despotism. In the first case, the slaves at least have a belief, and only the tyrants are corrupted; but when oppression is separated from any religious idea, the slaves are just as depraved and abject as their masters." 203 This is pure Montesquieu; and it subscribes Constant to a belief that religious feeling is stauncher than the taste for political freedom. Let us now make some preliminary comparisons with Tocqueville. Constant's religious awakening was founded on an incredulous beginning, nourished by scholarly reinterpretation and, as it were, 200

Ibid., pp. 536-537.

203

Conquete/Usurpation, p. 216.

201

Ibid., pp. 537-538.

202

Ibid., p. 538.

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by a steady, though often distraught, recollection of the abyss. Yet, while in 1811 Constant accused the shallowness of his Enlightenment forebears, he found mainly that these esprits forts needed amendment and correction, not reproof. There was no guilt in them, or in him, for their atheism was the logical result of sacerdotal intolerance. On the other hand, Tocqueville, raised as a believer in a sacerdotal creed not only interwoven with his universal sense of the cosmos, but also with family and nation, experienced a profound sorrow, approaching guilt or sin, from his apostasy of emotion. As he produced his works of mature intellect, this separation between feeling and intellect critically challenged God's design, which appealed to the brain and not to the heart. Yet, as we shall now see, he advanced the healing power of faith as a prescription for a society he could not wholesomely re-enter. For the "Protestant" Constant religion was an abiding form of solace, while the "Catholic" Tocqueville experienced it as a medium of contrition. " I am not a believer," Tocqueville wrote to Gobineau in 1843. "But I am far from bragging about this." 204 Indeed, it made him miserable. Tocqueville's problem was doubly compounded: emotionally he could not approve of God's predictable providence (an equalization of conditions and minds, an "individualism" which one might represent as a caricature of that system of " perfectibility " which Constant so much applauded); but his political reason obliged him to accept this outline of the future. On the other hand, while emotionally disengaged from religious faith (as Constant was not), Tocqueville continued intellectually to acknowledge the shape of the Christian cosmos: "belief in a first cause...in fixed laws revealed by the physical world and which must be supposed also in the moral world; in the Providence of God, and consequently in his justice; and in man's responsibility for his actions, since he is permitted to know good and evil; and thus in a future life (une autre vie)."205 This combat of aristocratic animus with democratic inevitability, of Pascalian anxiety with Rousseauian theism lurked behind the "new political science" and threatened it with Manichaeanism. Tocqueville could not see the Cross; but he felt the invisible hand of the Dieu cache on his shoulder.206 204

205 206

Letter of 2 O c t o b e r 1843, m 0C> IX> 57- Tocqueville goes o n to instruct G o b i n e a u t h a t 'Me christianisme est le g r a n d fonds d e la loi m o r a l e . " Tocqueville to Bouchitte, 8 January 1858, in OC (B), vn, 476. See A n d r e J a r d i n , Alexis de Tocqueville, i8oj-i8jg (Paris, 1984), p . 6 3 .

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As we have seen, a number of ide'es-forces underlie Tocqueville's political investigations. But one of the most constant of them is the rapprochement of the old faith with the new politics, so that neither governments nor peoples can arrogate the privilege of the divine order.207 It is striking that, much as Tocqueville belittled political Catholicism in France and the cenacles that inspired it, his own point of departure at the onset of the July Monarchy betrays an indebtedness. This is not so strange, once we ask the question: what position might a wavering legitimist ardent for liberty, but vexed by the consequences of Enlightenment freethinking, be expected to adopt? The neo-Catholic agenda of liberty, certainly not the same as those of the Globe or of the Doctrinaires, but making contact with them as the political crisis deepened, were the following, as promoted by FAvenir: (i) liberty of conscience or religion; (2) liberty of education; (3) liberty of the press; (4) liberty of association; (5) liberty of the vote; (6) local liberty (i.e. decentralization). As for the first, FAvenir demanded an end to the Concordat, a " total separation of Church and State." 208 In the second case, "freedom of instruction is a natural right... the primary freedom of the family... expressly granted by the Charter." 209 On the third issue, "the press is for us only an extension of speech {parole), like it a divine benefit, a powerful universal means of communication among men, and their most active instrument for hastening the progress of general intelligence."210 On the fourth, "liberty of association... is also a natural right, because nothing can be done without it, so weak, poor, and wretched is man when he is alone... Where only individuals exist, they have no defense if the law keeps them isolated and will not permit them to unite for common action." 211 On freedom of suffrage, PAvenir comments pointedly that "universal suffrage is the Church opening its arms to all men." It goes on to distinguish between ancient and modern liberty, between choosing "an animating principle that is responsible for all the power of today's United States of America" or going backwards toward Athens, "where no one thought about the free life of his neighbor, or the independence of his conscience."212 As for local liberty, PAvenir demanded the "abolition of the evil system of centralization, a deplorable and shameful 207 208 209 212

E.g. Old Regime, p . 6 9 ; DA, 1, 5 9 - 6 0 . M a r c e l Prelot a n d F . Gallouec Genuys, eds., Le liberalisme catholique (Paris, 1969), p . 85. 210 211 Ibid., p. 87. Ibid., p. 88. Ibid., p. 89. Ibid., p. 90.

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remnant of imperial despotism."213 It added: "What is the nation? Its first element is the family... All the families, gathered in the same local territory, make up the cities, boroughs, and villages. [They, like the family,] surely have the right to administer their particular interests, the right to create communes" etc.214 It takes no very subtle intelligence to see that the agenda oiTAvenir correspond, to a very large extent, to the core of Tocqueville's discoveries about democracy in America. Whatever its social faults, America very well fulfilled all of these conditions. Especially where the questions of religion, association, and decentralization were concerned, Tocqueville made them themes of his life's research and basic doctrine. Without going meticulously into the matter (for the texts are well known and unambiguous), Tocqueville found in America vindications of each of these aspects of liberty: religion (see Democracy in America i, 310-325, 436); education (ibid., 1, 54, 327; 11, 323); press (ibid., 1, 188-197); association (ibid., 1, 198-205; 11, 123-128); suffrage (ibid., 1, 204, 206-214); local liberty (ibid., 1, 61-101). It is important to notice that he found evidence of these liberties of Catholic inspiration in a culturally Protestant nation. He did not belabor this fact (he made a point of stressing how Catholicism had adapted to the social climate) ;215 but he made instead a potent argument about the contribution of religion to the public ethos, so long as it could remain free of political partisanship.216 As regards association, Tocqueville carried the insights oiVAvenir and Catholic doctrine further: this right was not only to defend the compagnonnage of the weak but to be the carrier of liberty in democratic ages.217 Finally, Tocqueville was intensely interested in America's decentralization and local liberties, factors planted in the earliest settlement. Like FAvenir, he emphasized the mediating and educating levels of family, parish, and township.218 That question, alive both for certain liberals and legitimists in postNapoleonic France, as well as for socialists like Proudhon in a later generation, would occupy the center of Tocqueville's study of Old Regime and Revolution: "Anyone who reads letters passed between the intendants and their superiors or subordinates cannot fail to be struck by the family likeness between the government officials of the past and those of modern France. They seem to join hands across the abyss made by the Revolution." 219 213 216 218

214 Ibid., p. 91. Ibid., p. 93. Ibid., pp. 312-313; cf. 11, 30. Ibid., 1, 69; 11, 206-207; cf. Old Regime, p. 48.

217

215 DA, i, 311-312. Ibid., 11, 115. 219 Old Regime, p . 6 1 .

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But the most telling connection, by far, between neo-Catholic argument and Tocqueville's project lies in the question: why, in Europe, does religion seem the enemy of liberty; and why do the proponents of liberty seem to hate religion? In VAvenir, the Abbe Gerbet had written: "On the one hand, sincerely religious people have either not accepted, or accept grudgingly, the doctrines of liberty. On the other hand, fervent friends of liberty take an attitude of sombre defiance toward the religion professed by twenty-five million French. That condition is indicative of a deep disorder going back to earlier times."220 Tocqueville, in introducing Democracy in America, said in almost identical language: "The religionists are the enemies of liberty, and the friends of liberty attack religion; the highminded and the noble advocate bondage, and the meanest and most servile preach independence; honest and enlightened citizens are opposed to all progress, while men without patriotism and without principle put themselves forward as the apostles of civilization and intelligence."221 In Old Regime, Tocqueville repeated: "Even in our own time we find men who seek to compensate for their grovelling servility to the meanest jack-in-office by declaiming against God and who, while going back on all that was freest, noblest, most inspiring in the revolutionary ideal, pride themselves on keeping faith with its true spirit by remaining hostile to religion."222 Tocqueville was scarcely inclined to choose the path of Lacordaire (his successor in the Academie Fran9aise) or Montalembert (whom he once scathingly described as "the greatest enemy of Catholicism since Voltaire"). 223 Neither did he have an inordinate admiration for the doctrine of "perfectibility," whose fashionableness, toward 1780, had dazzled the French with a false sense of felicity.224 Although this idea was "as old as the world," the rise of equality had given it a new character: while aristocratic ages tended to limit it too narrowly, democratic peoples "expand it beyond reason."225 Tocqueville's, then, would be a third way of seeking to anchor faith in the new conditions of society. Tocqueville did not think the democratic version of religion to be particularly exalted,226 but he believed it to be quite seaworthy. He had witnessed this social strength in America (where the connection between religion and liberty was undoubted) and again, briefly, in the February 1848 effervescence in France. He concluded that "the 220 223 225

221 222 Liberalisme catholique, p. 80. DA, 1, 123. Old Regime, p. 5. 224 Cited by Jardin, Tocqueville, p. 366. Old Regime, p. 177. 226 DA, 11, 34-35. Ibid., 1, 323.

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notion that democratic regimes are necessarily hostile to religion is based on a total misconception of the facts; nothing in the Christian faith or even in Roman Catholicism is incompatible with democracy and, on the contrary, it would seem that a democratic climate is highly favorable to Christianity."227 Religion was, and could be, a free stimulant in the life of democratic man and at the same time a powerful barrier against his worst tendencies. This would not be the high faith of old; but neither would it essentially be Constant's "sentiment intime." To be sure, "it may be foreseen that a democratic people will seek to discover the chief arbiter of their belief within, and not beyond, the limits of their kind." 228 But this should be interpreted within moeurs, not within the vertigo of individual exaltation. Needless to say, Tocqueville raises no objection to organized forms of worship; his inclination is to favor them, since they appear to unify society. The democratic religion will appropriately commingle the things of this world with those of the next: it will legitimately employ "the principle of interest rightly understood" to animate the faith of men.229 The head, as much as the heart, will bring these worshipers to the altar. Self-interest implies prudence and predictability, and helps to inspire a confidence in the future. In an age of waning faith (here Tocqueville thinks of France), " I do not doubt that by training the members of a community to think of their future condition in this world, they would be gradually and unconsciously brought nearer to religious convictions." This, he insists, with some alarm and despair, is "the only means we still possess for bringing mankind back, by a long and roundabout path, to a state of faith" 230 - elsewhere described as "the only permanent state of mankind." 231 Yet Tocqueville's aesthetic and his love for a liberty of " greatness " rebel more than once at this strategy. While conceding that "the special taste that the men of democratic times entertain for physical enjoyments... may even be frequently combined with a species of religious morality," he laments immediately that "men lose sight of those more precious possessions which constitute the glory and the greatness of mankind " amid this "virtuous materialism."232 Once again, the value-cluster of "modern liberty" is cast in doubt by a loss of "the imagination of greatness."233 In Democracy in America, vol. 11, Tocqueville inserts a curious brief 227 230 233

228 229 Old Regime, p . 7. DA, n, 10. Ibid., p. 134. 231 232 Ibid., p. 160. Ibid., 1, 321. Ibid., 11, 140-141. Tocqueville to Royer-Collard, 6 April 1838, OC, xi, 61.

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chapter called "The Progress of Roman Catholicism in the United States." Here he observes: "The men of our days are naturally little disposed to believe; but as soon as they have any religion, they immediately find in themselves a latent instinct that urges them unconsciously toward Catholicism. Many of the doctrines and practices of the Roman Catholic Church astonish them, but they feel a secret admiration for its discipline, and its great unity attracts them." 234 Catholicism's main deficit in Europe is its stubborn connection with politics. However, in a democratic future, Tocqueville professes to foresee a situation where people will become more decisively divided between unbelief and the Roman faith, with Protestantism presumably drained of its proselytizing vigor.235 Again, this seems a question more ofmoeurs than of individual values. It is, to say the least, a totally un-Constantine position to take, and it perhaps echoes earlier themes from FAvenir - a universal religion innoculated with liberty. The proper gloss on this chapter is the next one, "What Causes Democratic Nations to Incline Towards Pantheism." There Tocqueville writes: "Most of the works of the imagination published in France contain some opinions or some tinge caught from pantheistic doctrines."236 This tendency, he goes on, "although it destroy the individuality of man, or rather because it destroys that individuality, will have secret charms for men living in democracies."237 "Pantheism," then, will be the democratic form of non-belief; and its causes appear to be very much rooted in certain Protestant susceptibilities - indeed, in the dark side of "modern liberty." That is why, his traditional formation aside, one can discern in Tocqueville Catholic stirrings of a sort very different from Constant's "Protestant" views, even while liberty remains the supreme value for each and is manifested often in similar ways. In both cases, it is the health and strength - indeed, the vindication of free society that is at stake. But there are profound differences between Constant's "individuality" and Tocqueville's; between Constant's opinion and Tocqueville's moeurs; between Constant's "perfectibility" and Tocqueville's disquieting providence; between the cargoes of each man's voyage. 234 237

DA, 11, 30. Ibid., p. 33.

235

Ibid., p. 3 1 .

236

Ibid., p. 32.

CHAPTER 3

In partibus jidelium

I. FAITH IN FREEDOM

Beyond the liberal religious disputations of Constant and Tocqueville, a wider matter solicits our attention: how may faith be said to support political authority, participate in liberty, and establish relations with the new post-Revolutionary society? It might at first seem that liberalism had made men and nations free of faith, thus serving as midwife for the secularist dreams of the Enlightenment. But, like the seventeenth, the nineteenth century in France is justly called "religious" — especially in the sense of a rebuilding, a "reveil" in which politics has its part. What is the part of liberal thought in this project? As regards the relationship of practical truth, religious belief, and the liberty and dignity of man, the surface position of liberalism is clear. Liberty of faith or, more generally, of conscience is one of a number of guarantees without which a regime suited to liberty and dignity cannot exist. But is this merely a permission to have a faith or not to have it — an indifference of politics to the question of faith — or does it enjoin some new sort of faith? The moral objective of many liberalisms (though not all) is to define an ideal order toward which human beings will strive through education and by shedding their bondage to the grosser appetites. This "logic of transcendence," as Benichou puts it, must be "created outside the pathways of Christian [or presumably any other] dogmatism." 1 But can there be a transcendent logic of liberty operating as an ideal without the guidance of a cohesive cult? If liberty of conscience is taken to be the right that transcendently grounds all the others, defining the possibility of a truly human 1

Paul Benichou, Le temps des prophetes: doctrines de Vdge romantique (Paris, 1977), p. 19.

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vocation, a notion of just relationships, and intersubjective meaning itself, how might this mission achieve concrete form? Such a faith cannot be constructed from a myriad of mere attitudes or opinions varying among individuals and from one moment of life to the next, a system in which all things except the minimal laws of society are "indifferent." And it is not immanent in the familiar world, where liberty is more plausibly anchored in the essential but homely principle of self-preservation.2 In that world, the rain falls upon the just and the unjust alike; and the problem of justice is to find remedial solutions discouraging to the unjust. Perhaps it might be said that here the aggrieved gain solace through a faith in meaning, a faith in invisible spiritual compensations, a faith in the future or in what man might be like. But the more obvious recourse of the aggrieved is to gain redress by means of public power, by state action. This troubles the liberal because the state, being power, is not supposed to articulate faith. More specifically, it troubles the liberal who has experienced state power in both its divine and paternal justifications. And even if the state were to receive powers sufficient to redirect the rainfall or to prescribe useful truths and virtuous actions, this would mean a deficit of liberty. Liberty is, first of all, one's own, whether or not within the state; and, secondly, the state is a corruptible power with purposes of its own. That is the political, as distinct from the moral, liberal predicament. In consequence, certain liberals (perhaps the most "liberal" ones) have believed that "public opinion" informed by "philosophy" is the best means for the progressive attainment of truth, justice, and honorable civility — the "rule of law." The ancient contest between "opinion" and "truth" becomes, in the dynamic of enlightenment, a partnership. Opinion musters and aggregates recognition for truth, gathering proxies which, though they should be based on informed consent, are technically no less valid for being ignorant or tacit. Indeed, the hope is that a respect freely given to the authority of evidence will prevail over caprice, superstition, coercion, or fear. Man's dignity should consist in his being ruled by rational appetites shared among members of society and thus legitimately framed as opinion. But have men this capacity? Is raw opinion no less perilous to the social experiment than the sovereignty of the wise, the noble, or the rich ? How can opinion be refined ? Men must be educated; 2

Cf. Montesquieu, "Pensees," Oeuvres completes (2 vols., ed. R. Caillois, Paris, 1949), 1, 1431: "The only advantage a free people has over another is its security that the caprice of un seul will not take away goods or life."

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and, as Marx comments appositely: "Who will educate these educators?" Moreover, can the multiple faiths that freedom begets and opinion classifies, and the "truths" from which they seek their support, undergird a coherent society? Finally, how can it be imagined that those fervently in possession of their "truth" will not pity or despise the others, or, alternatively, suffer at their hands? What can the power of opinion say to the truths that men believe decisive to their salvation? How much ought it to say? Liberals will be inclined to bracket these problems outside of politics (indeed this is the modern inclination since the seventeenth century), in full awareness of the damage that they do within it. They will arrive at a foundational theory that is reciprocal and "negative" and "thin," though it will usually have to be buttressed by other postulates. From do ut des (the positive maxim of promise or contract), there will be a withdrawal to the maxim of generalized non-performance or toleration: do not do unto others, lest they should do the same unto you. This negative, Hobbesian version has the benefit of emphasizing the wide area of personal freedom that reciprocal non-performance leaves to individuals. Both in this version and in the more affirmative noli tangere formulation of Kant, where freedom is licit up to the point where it disturbs the freedom of others, the rule of law is paramount. There are also residues here of a Christian disposition that counsels prudence in an evil world. For while Christianity is declaratively a religion of love and salvation, it has little illusion about man's amor sui and his propensity to injustice, given the chance. Liberalism is scarcely more inclined than Christianity to make natural goodness its cardinal practical assumption. But it does not dwell on sin. Since it is so heartily Pelagian, it advances the "educability of mankind" as its substitute for innocent optimism. "Opinion" and the "progress of the lumieres" brighten the darkness of prudential and reciprocal suspicion; overlaid on the static laws of action and reaction, pain and pleasure, they might be considered elements of a kind of faith, in some instances remarkably lasting and deep. I have touched here only on some of the theoretical armory of liberalism. To what degree liberalism shaped modern politics in a world-historical situation of transformed, democratizing, and secularizing societies, by inevitability or accident, with advantage or deficit, is a question running far beyond the boundaries of this study. However, in 1814 - despite all the theory and despite the drama of the preceding twenty-five years - liberalism seemed far from

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inevitable in France, as its fragility would further show. It was by no means clear how the state should be organized or what should be its relations with society (Guizot's "pays legal" and "pays reel" was but one notion, memorable for its pith). In practice, French liberalism had scarcely been floated: and when it was tried (1789-1792; 1795-1799)? it had generated bad results. The experience of theorists like Constant, Guizot, or Royer-Collard was therefore built on a resounding set of negatives: the total shipwreck of the Old Regime and "estate society"; the chilling memory of a "Republic of Virtue"; the glories of Napoleon, structured on a police state at home; curious and transient constitutional adventures; and, most seriously, a failure of "philosophy" or "opinion" to produce moderately liberating results. After these travesties and ideological cleavages, how would it be possible to represent society politically or even teach it to practice the negative version of do ut des? Assuming the good behavior of society (in need of "repos," as Constant noted), what principles and institutions could project its "live forces" to the state and yet dampen internal warfare? What transaction would be possible between the "habit of the state" bequeathed for centuries and a lately experienced wave of popular sovereignty? Could an effective trusteeship be exercised by any responsible political class ? Finally, what sort of collective or at least inclusive faith would be needed to give this enterprise new legitimacy ? Elegant theory carries little weight here. "Divine right," "general will," and "the cunning of history" that installed Napoleon have all done their damage. There can be no speculating about "rights issuing from the state of nature" or "contracts of association" or "the will of God" or "paternal power" or "self-evident truths" in Restoration France. It becomes imperative not to dwell on such volatile constructions and to deal with more modest objectives. When it is said that the liberal thinkers who did most to frame the rationale of the constitutional regimes of 1814-1848 have not carried political philosophy to its most exciting and daring reaches of splendor, that claim is true. How can they? The character of the Charter (negotiated between a dispossessed dynast and the Napoleonic Senate), the precise forms of representative government, the socalled "sovereignty of reason," the meanings placed on such concepts as "society," "liberty," "patrie" "opinion," "legitimacy," and the like - all these are matters for diplomacy and finesse, not axioms of metaphysical wisdom. These affairs are fought out in the

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two chambers, the press, the salons, the university, and sometimes in the streets as a matter of course, though less lethally than the "truths" and "rights" of 1789. Nothing, as Tocqueville so well knew, is being "founded", something, instead, must be "found": an effort is being made to bring laws and moeurs together in a narrow and nervous space of maneuver. And this is not just because "history" has replaced " n a t u r e " or "will" or "reason" as the fundamental category within which politics must be thought; it is because literal encumbrances of history defy all attempts to reach loftier goals of conceptualization. "Society" and "opinion" have never been so mobile, yet so tangible. These complications bring us directly back to the liberal problem of faith. Liberalism purports to design a system of political authority that casts aside the crutch of faith in a milieu where faiths have been greatly shaken or set at odds. Yet, as we saw, freedom of belief (so long as it is not non-belief) can be taken as the necessary condition for a kind of transcendent dignity of man in at least some liberalisms (e.g. those of Constant and Tocqueville). Here the liberal worldview presents a paradox. Either liberty itself (with uncertain or unstable content) becomes the holiest of values and demands its own cult, or else it entails a trivialization of truth - of human guidance - into " truths " negotiable on a do ut des and evolutionary basis, with conflicts of belief resolved by making their truths civilly transactional, as if they were a strange kind of property or commodity that persons had agreed not to occupy or possess in the fullest sense, like "futures" on a trading market. It is not that liberals like Constant and John Stuart Mill denied the ultimate unity of truth: only in the twentieth century has this position deeply colored liberal doctrine. However, liberals of our period of study tended to believe that truth for human beings was: (1) partial and discursive, except in certain areas of mathematics and science; (2) progressively revealed and discovered, privileging the future; and (3) revocable and always subject to new tests and evidence, to the extent that this did not make a chaos out of "progress." According to this view, the human being who was most intellectually and spiritually aware and "free" needed to reserve enough skepticism to avoid falling into credulous error and maintain enough faith to shun nihilism or solipsism. His equilibrium point - as defined by the state of Western European culture - was the ideal of "informed opinion." In his latitude between skepticism and faith, the liberal had to imagine and create a society in which the members could talk to one

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another, without an interpreter, in a common language of beliefs, desires, values, and evidence. This also had to be a society where the transformational rules for shifting values and refining or revising truths were equally unproblematic. Politics, whether of a state or a church, was too dangerous an interpreter: a transparent society needed only the refinement and persuasion that the educated could, and should in good faith, furnish to the uninstructed. But where did this faith that was not unstinting conviction or this skepticism that was not real doubt leave truth? It left it in captivity to opinion - the opinion of a "literate" public. As Jouffroy declared: We hear a lot about the unity of truth: we concede that, but we find the truth so complicated and so vast that everyone who makes his niche in it heaps insults on those who have found other niches. God alone embraces the entire truth; we make so much ado over a unity that is really his business. Men take their truth bit by bit, and our thousands of opinions can each stand for it from a certain position, without confusion and even without resemblance.3

But, as his colleague Dubois wrote, somewhat petulantly, less than a year later: "[Liberty] is the only dogma that allows everyone to follow the notion that pleases him today and to reject it tomorrow... To heal this is not within our power." 4 The liberals need not have blamed themselves for mutability or {or fashion: but they attempted the stern task of devising a practical philosophy and political institutions out of the variability of freedom. And they then faced the problem of imagining some faith to bind what freedom had put asunder in conditions very far removed from moral unanimity. This was felt both as an ontological and a social problem. To transcend the selfish impulses of the natural order, to civilize man, to make him at once more responsible, more enlightened, and freer invokes a teleological principle which, if imposed, is despotic and which, if preached, might be thought either ideological or naive. The last thing the liberals desired was despotism or naivety. What then was the true character of a rational faith ? Philosophers like Spinoza and Kant had attempted to settle this issue. But for the Constants and Royer-Collards of this world, philosophy was imbedded in matters less than eternal, although they, too, struggled on their level with conflicts between destiny and eternity. On that level, the deity was society. Here, questions regarding God were 3 4

Theodore Jouffroy, in Le Globe, 27 November 1824. Francois Dubois, in Le Globe, 26 July 1825.

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displaced: God is known to work ex definitione; the deep challenge to the human mind has been to prove his existence. With society, the inquiry is reversed: it is visibly, empirically known to exist; but how is it possible-how can it work? What force holds it together, inclining its members to obey the laws and strive for its continuance ? The French Revolution had contributed the invention of "the nation." It had furnished society with new symbols, a new morale, and a special kind of public faith, which, replacing the regal, hierarchical, and biblical ideology of the Old Regime, gave an impacted power and purpose to the "many" that rebounded all over the world.5 The importance of this faith, in competition and also in tandem with others, is inestimable. If this study appears to neglect Jacobin republicanism and nationalism, that is merely because we are considering liberal thought more in its purity than in its pragmatic alliances with the faith of la patrie. The liberal fatherland is basically of a different sort; as Montesquieu puts it: "friendship, love of country, pity are particular relationships. But justice is a general one. All the virtues that destroy this general relationship are not virtues at all." 6 When the liberals (many of whom, as we have seen, were cosmopolitans by culture and experience) attempted to re-theorize the French state with due regard for its historical traumas, they necessarily had to appeal to the unity of the French, but not up to the point of making Frenchness a kind of faith appropriate to "ancient liberty." Except for a few gestures by Louis-Philippe (such as the erection of the Bastille column, the indulgence to aged regicides, and the translation of the remains of Napoleon to the Invalides), liberalism kept its distances from Marianne. Jacobin fundamentalism was an enemy, a builder of barricades, repugnant to the "spirit of commerce" and to the barristers, bankers, and literati who ran the July Monarchy. But even less could a civic faith be rebuilt on the ruins of royal Gallicanism, as returning emigres hoped: no liberal could wish this. Liberals applauded the Revolution's achievements in freeing society from servitudes to a royal religion. In this regard, much of the Napoleonic settlement suited liberalism well, especially in the almost complete control it gave the secular university over higher and secondary education, now seized from the grasp of the Church. 5

6

See, especially, Maurice Agulhon, Marianne Into Battle: Republican Imagery and Symbolism in France, iy8g—i88o (trans. Janet Lloyd, Cambridge and Paris, 1984). Montesquieu, "Pensees," 1, 1304.

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Yet liberals had a nagging feeling that they lacked a faith powerful enough to underwrite political legitimacy. They remembered that even the despised Robespierre had found it expedient to halt "deChristianization" and to become the high priest of the "Etre Supreme" in 1794; and that Napoleon had gained immense popularity from his sacre. Despite every imaginable turbulence in religion and ecclesiology, Royer-Collard had bluntly reminded the Cinq-Cents in 1797: "The Catholic religion is today a need for the great majority of the people you represent."7 But how could faith that is, by its nature, something dogmatic — be a partner of "regulated liberty"? The liberal mind of the early nineteenth century was divided over the relationship of faith to politics. In the wake of their immediate ancestors, the Ideologues continued to regard religion as a superannuated, at best temporary and cautionary, instrument of social control, and they felt obliged to reduce it to a few simple ethical principles. Radical individualists, like Constant, saw faith as inner feeling, a personal rampart against discouragement and an access to ineffable communication, not an affair of state. Yet Catholics like Royer-Collard and Jean-Denis Lanjuinais were quite aware of the slumbering power that France's principal religion, while damaged on the shoals of the Revolution, still possessed. What all liberals unanimously attacked was the "scholastic" turpitude of Rousseau's chapter on civil religion in the Contrat social. For example, this was how Lanjuinais regarded the matter in a pamphlet of 1825: Since [Rousseau] wrote, notions ofjustice and social order have been better analyzed and understood; policy toward religion, more closely following the gospel, has changed its language and its maxims... When a wise legislator says that there are different religions compatible with the social order, he no longer imagines tolerating them or persecuting them: he establishes and supports the legal liberty of the denominations (cultes). Today we know that civil society is not made for choosing a religion or designing and putting into law an eclectic religion of its own, or finally for punishing atheism, heresy, or indifFerency, so long as they do not directly perturb the peace of the state.8 Lanjuinais, the peer of France, hesitated between the American 7

Prosper de Barante, La viepolitique de M. Royer-Collard: ses discours et ses e'crits (2 vols., Paris,

8

Jean-Denis Lanjuinais, Examen du huitieme chapitre du Contrat social de J.-J. Rousseau (Paris, 1825), cited in Bernard Plongeron, Theologie et politique au siecle des lumieres, 1760-1820

1861), 11, 18.

(Geneva, 1973), p. 363.

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solution of "liberte de conscience entiere" and the French theory (of the 1814 Charter), where " there is a religion very improperly named religion (TEtat... but [where] other established forms of worship are freely practiced." 9 Indeed, in 1825, t n e French were more liberal than the English (who did not abolish the Test Act until 1829 a n ^ still severely persecuted the Catholics in Ireland). Behind the writings of Lanjuinais and others there is a double preoccupation: (1) to ask how a "better understanding" of the social order can now promote a religious freedom formerly unmanageable; and (2) to ask how a religious solution thus obtained could strengthen the stability of the political order. The first affair had been prima facie rooted in the liberal project since the wars of religion; but the second, reflecting the far more ancient concern (it was the grammarian Varro who first invented the term "political theology") that the political and social order require some ulterior legitimation, was the more elusive and important element. Liberalism made this question more complex: for its basic doctrine was that society chooses and legitimates the kind of state it will have (a state friendly to liberty), while the problem of how society is possible or what legitimates it remains open. It is to this feature — in its dimensions of liberty, opinion, and order — that I turn in the following two chapters.

II. PROTESTANT PROTOCOLS: NEGKER, MADAME DE STAEL, VINET, GUIZOT

Any attempt to classify French liberalism's resources of spirituality as they bore on civil-religious relations is bound to be lacking in nuance. The categories "Protestant," "Catholic," and "spiritualisteclectic" have the disadvantage of being crude, but the benefit of being obvious. So long as it is understood that the categories are scarcely fixed, that the forces contained in them are disproportionate, and that the spiritual movements which seem to me to fall outside of liberalism are avoided, the method can be of value. I shall treat the religions in this chapter; philosophy in the next. We begin with Protestantism, the least potent of these forces, a tiny part of the French social body, never exceeding 2 or 3 percent of the population after 1685. For reasons which I hope will become 9

Ibid.

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clear, Protestantism played a role well beyond its numbers in the liberal quest for a civil-religious settlement. The Huguenot exodus from France at the time of the Revocation not only, in the opinion of many, falsified French political development; it also served as a bold illustration of a political wrong of the Old Regime that liberal theory was called on to redress. The Protestants who contributed to French political thought from the Revolution up till 1848 are few — and mainly not French by birth - but they are distinguished. With support from other politicians, bankers, and industrialists, they personify an aspect of the "juste milieu." Ultimately, they will become indigestible to predominating French mentalities on all sides, up to the point where, from the Second Republic on, an antiliberal France will frequently regard them, like the Jews, as subversive, cosmopolitan, and un-national. Even today, the fundamental French perceptions of Protestantism are "Anglo-Saxon" and "d'un caractere quasi-ethnique." 10 We must recall a few facts. After the Revocation, the major centers of Protestant France were in the Cevennes and the adjacent cities of Nimes and Uzes (where a large army of Louis XIV had fought a difficult civil war - the so-called guerre des Camisards - against them in 1702-1704) n and in the East, where the Lutheran Church retained special privileges from the treaties of 1648. Outside the ex-imperial territory Protestants enjoyed no civil rights until 1787. Taken according to the letter, this meant that they could not worship publicly, be married by their own clergy, or be buried in their own cemeteries. Since the Revolution affirmed full civil liberty, it is hardly astonishing that they welcomed 1789 and even 1792, displaying exemplary civic loyalty throughout. However, their political disposition was distinctly more "Girondin" than "Montagnard." They were not ardent supporters of Napoleon (with his Concordat), even though he allowed the Reformed Church certain rights of assembly; and they furnished none of the high personnel of the imperial administration.12 After 1814, Protestants were granted full religious liberty by the Charter, although that document recognized Roman Catholicism as the religion cTEtat. Only eight 10

11

12

See Nancy Roelker, "A Tale of Two Cities: London, Paris, and the Tricentennial of the Edict of Nantes," French Politics and Society, 14, June 1986. See Jean Cavalier, Memoires sur la guerre des Camisards (trans, from English by Frank Puaux, Paris, 1979). It is worth observing that Cavalier, the guerrilla leader, wrote his reflections in English, probably in 1708, and that they were not published in French until more than two and a half centuries later. Daniel Robert, Les Eglises reformers en France, 1800-1830 (Paris, 1961), p. 256.

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members of the Reformed Church sat in the Chamber of Peers. In restored Bourbon France, Protestants experienced a modest religious re'veil, in parallel with the Catholics; they prospered still more in the July Monarchy, especially when the Due d'Orleans, heir to the throne (he died in 1842), married Helen of Mecklenburg, a German Lutheran princess, who continued to practice her religion as a member of the French royal family and was promoted, unsuccessfully, as provisional regent. Among his many, often paradoxical, observations about the public or legitimizing role of religion, Jean-Jacques Rousseau wrote in the Emile: "Our modern governments are incontestably indebted to Christianity for their firmer authority and their less frequent revolutions."13 Rousseau did not always think this;14 but the sentence captures a certain rapport with the convictions of his fellow Genevan Jacques Necker. As the situation in France worsened during the last years of the Old Regime, Necker (who was out of office between 1784 and 1788) became obsessed with the notion that political society badly needed religious sinew, which meant at the same time moral stabilization and firmer bonds of allegiance. Although his own religion was Protestant and latitudinarian in the extreme - tolerant and scarcely defined by any dogma - he nevertheless attempted to fit his views to the matter of saving a Gallican Catholic monarchy, not least because this was his stage of statesmanship. He therefore passed many months writing an extremely long and windy work called De rimportance des opinions religieuses, which was published just as he

prepared to return to power to organize the summoning of the Estates-General. The tedious book is of remarkable interest. The condition Necker inveighs against in De ['importance is cognate to Bayle's hypothetical "commonwealth of atheists." The France of his time, as Necker knows, is becoming despiritualized from the top down: manners are immoral; high society is irreligious; the last wave of philosophes (Diderot, Raynal, d'Holbach, Naigeon) is atheist and naturalist, no longer deist. Religious ideas are "so weakened day by day that it seems public substitutes for them are already being prepared" —in the form of civic catechisms that will replace the 13 14

Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Emile, ou de reducation (ed. Richard, Paris, i960), p. 38811. E.g. Premiere version du Contrat social, i, ii, in C. E. Vaughan,ed., The Political Writings of JeanJacques Rousseau New York, 1962), 1, 451: "The multitude is always given gods as stupid as itself... and honors them by lending itself to a thousand horrible and destructive passions."

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religious ones.15 Though these will fail, because they touch the mind but miss the heart, their result, Necker foresees, will be the most abysmal anarchy. When a rich banker, not unfriendly to "the philosophy of the century," writes a long, impassioned tract on behalf of the social utility of religious values, especially for those in society who feel beset by injustice and have little learning, the suspicion is bound to arise that he is transparently defending the comforts of bourgeois order behind his veil of piety. Indeed, there is much in Necker's work to suggest that the function of religion as a social precaution is much on his mind and is seen in the manner of Voltaire. Religion, property, and order are closely linked in his exegesis.16 And yet there is more. Necker does not simply propose a revival of "opinions religieuses" for the security of the state and its beati possedentes; he devotes a large portion of his work to explaining their capacity to enlarge and purify the moral inclinations of individuals throughout society, those who have much or little, those who command or follow. He does not assert, a la Montesquieu, that a false religion is better than none at all. What he does especially argue is that "it was particularly reserved to our century to attack religion even unto its usefulness [my italics], and to seek to replace its active influence with the inanimate instructions of a political philosophy."17 To emphasize that religion is a "useful" social bond or even that it is instrumental in the definition and acceptance of political rights and duties is not, prima facie, a Polybian conspiracy to chain ordinary men in blindness to their rulers (we have found Tocqueville saying more or less the same thing). To be sure, when Necker deals directly with the public dimension of faith and allegiance, his argument takes on instrumentalist tones, reminiscent of the last pages of Rousseau's Profession defoi. There is an externality to "opinions religieuses" (surely something thinner than "foi") that can be understood only syntagmatically, as linked to the adversary idea "opinions philosophiques" in a combat for the soul of "opinion publique": the other side of Necker's coin is the "sentiment religieux," which he expresses in the Genevan spirit of Rousseau and, later, his daughter, Madame de Stael. 15 16

17

Jacques Necker, De Vimportance des opinions religieuses (Paris and London, 1788), p. 465. This interpretation is interestingly, though fatiguingly and extravagantly, developed in Henri Grange, Les idees de Necker (Paris, 1974), pp. 517ft0. Necker, De F importance, p. 31.

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Let us follow his argument for a certain stretch. While desirable, enlightenment presents a paradox: born from pagan philosophy, and now carried to rationalist extremes, it saps the social and civic order with demands that the state cannot fulfill and deficiencies of meaning and solace that this world cannot provide. According to Necker, "religious opinions" had always, through the symbol of the sworn oath, created loyalty, reciprocity, and understanding between peoples and their rulers, and tied the rulers to their promises.18 Religious trust is broadly social. This is not true of the new claimant, "political philosophy," whose maxims profess to teach rights and duties, but are the work of subtle intellectuals, or, as we would now say, "ideologists." "Already," Necker writes, "it is very hard to gain influence for political morality, since its necessary basis is love of order, which is an abstract and complicated idea." But political philosophy only worsens the situation by agitating the minds of the ignorant with its vision of a "scientific harmony of the whole," which can only tempt them to overreact on all the numerous occasions when they suffer an injustice.19 Government is the "only natural defender of the civil order," of the "whole." It reposes on trust. The morality of public trust cannot be founded on some mere theory of how particular interests could combine in a general interest, nor can the effectiveness of laws dispense with the support of religious legitimation (Necker is here stressing the mercy of religion, not its threat of eternal punishments).20 The public is not best instructed by some political catechism of rights and duties (Necker may be referring here to Saige's Catechisme du citoyen, just republished); religious morality operates more swiftly and surely to this end in the "situation singuliere du plus grand nombre d'hommes." 21 Irreligion debases persons in both their private and public settings.22 Religious opinions make the task of governments less onerous; a political morality deprived of religion would "open up a whole new scene."23 The ascendancy of "public opinion" cannot compensate for a loss of "the general influence of religious morality." 24 There are some four hundred more pages to this work, most of them having to do with the private virtues that a liberal, charitable religion procures. At the end, Necker declares that "the Christian 18 21 24

Ibid., p. 30. Ibid., p. 54. Ibid., p. n o .

19

Ibid., p. 34. Ibid., p. 71.

22

20

Ibid., pp. 39-40. 23 Ibid., p. 94.

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religion alone has, by dispensing with superstitious ceremonies and opinions, constantly kept us close to nature." 25 This last remark suggests without much doubt that while Necker is defending French Erastianism and the sustenance of "opinions religieuses" in a Catholic state, the ideal closest to his wishes is the Protestant civil religion of the Swiss cantons, simple and "natural" but effectively binding. Necker did not change his views about a political morality fortified by religion amid the fluctuating circumstances of the Revolution. He sat and wrote about this in his exile at Coppet, absorbed, apparently, in very little else after his wife's death - to the occasional ennui of his daughter and certainly of Constant.26 His last work, the Cours de morale religieuse - which appeared in three volumes in 1800 - has passages addressed to political loyalty, love of fatherland, and social tranquillity, especially in countries where "Religion unites men by a strong bond, where it presents them with a common fate in the broad experience of their origin and destination... where, always honored, it brings men together in beneficent virtues and charitable thoughts." 27 Of this work, Madame de Stael was later to write: "the finest of thoughts, the most original expressions and the poetics of Holy Scripture give these chapters an interest that simple exposition could not have. What beauties of style, ideas, and feelings are contained in this work!"28 Hers is scarcely an impartial eulogy; one may fail to share her enthusiasm for these homilies. But Necker had at least identified and analyzed an important feature of the modern political dilemma: if God and religion are banished from the public realm, and replaced by a citizen's catechism, how can Society reasonably be the judge in its own case? While its "opinions" may be legitimate, can they also be legitimizing? Madame de StaeTs own attitude toward religion is complex, and not easy to capture in formulas. Basically, it might be said that she evolves from a more Kant-like view of religion as external agency to a view of religion as feeling and aesthetic power which combines themes of Rousseau with nascent Romanticism. German literature and philosophy affect this development. As regards the public qualities of religion, her father's influence can be sensed. 25 26 27 28

Ibid., p. 516. See Pierre Deguise, Benjamin Constant meconnu: le livre de la religion ( G e n e v a , 1966), p . 4 9 . J a c q u e s Necker, Cours de morale religieuse (3 vols., Paris, 1800), 11, 2 2 1 . A n n e - L o u i s e - G e r m a i n e d e Stael, Du caractere de M. Necker et de sa vie privee, in Oeuvres (17 vols., Brussels, 1830), xvn, 50.

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In her first major work, De rinfluence des passions, she exhibits a respectful, indeed high, regard for the power of religious feeling over personality. The religious effect on imagination "opens up a vista of hope and traces a straight road for the will: in these two aspects it is comforting to thought." 29 It can also inspire extraordinary conduct-e.g. Louis XVI, of whom Madame de Stael writes: "the heroism of philosophy was obliged to bow down before his simple resignation."30 However (admittedly in a work about "happiness," not "virtue"), she denies religion a principal role in the shaping of the moral person, "because it is absolutely independent of our will, subjugating us to our own imagination and to that of those whose sacred authority is recognized." As such, it cannot be the mainstay of a "system that regards the absolute liberty of the moral being as his greatest good." 31 Faith cannot be a faculty that we acquire for ourselves.32 Still, she describes religion as a "code" that can guide us "in all circumstances," a "law" telling us what we ought to do. 33 In her political tract of 1798 Des circonstances actuelles, the author had more precisely examined her notion of code: "Morality, and morality bound by religious opinions [we notice Necker's phrase], alone provides a complete code for all life's actions, a code that unites men by a kind of compact of souls, an indispensable preliminary to any social contract." 34 It appears, then, that the code is more critical for political and social harmony than it is for individual selfdevelopment. Madame de Stael had intended to write a second part of De Vinfluence des passions dealing with the connection between the passions and "social happiness," but she abandoned the project. She did, however, mention religion's " utility... for the stability and happiness of the social condition" in the portion she published.35 It is therefore likely that religion seemed crucial for her in many of the ways it seemed so for Necker. Our further examination of Des circonstances actuelles will confirm this.

Later, in De la litte'rature, Madame de Stael quite fully elaborated her theory of "the perfectibility of the human race," which, she maintained, "cannot be contrary to religious ideas... [for] en29

31

33 34

35

M a d a m e de Stael, De ['influence des passions sur le bonheur des individus et des nations, in Oeuvres 30 completes (Paris, 1820), m , 213. Ibid., p . 219. Ibid., p . 225. If one substitutes the idea of " g r a c e " for " r e l i g i o n " in this sentence, one has 32 the impression of residual Calvinism. Ibid., p . 212. Ibid., p . 214. M a d a m e d e Stael, Des circonstances actuelles qui peuvent terminer la Revolution, et des principes qui doivent fonder la Republique en France (ed. S i m o n e Balaye, G e n e v a , 1979), p . 2 2 3 . De rinfluence des passions, p. 219.

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lightened preachers have always portrayed religious morality as a way of bettering humanity." 36 It cannot be disputed that she and Constant developed and debated their notions of perfectibility together; but I am inclined to think that Madame de Stael's view outdistanced that of her companion at this time by "trying to prove that the precepts of Christianity had contributed effectively to [human improvement]." 37 " I believe," she wrote, " that the religious mediations of Christianity, wherever they were applied, developed the mind's capacity for the sciences, metaphysics, and ethics."38 As yet, Madame de Stael pressed her thesis with partisan Protestant vigor: "The Protestant religion contains no active germ of superstition, yet gives virtue every support that it can draw from sensitive opinions. In the countries professing it, it places no obstacle in the way of philosophical research, and it effectively sustains the purity of moeurs."39 But in her novel Corinne, she conceived an aesthetic appreciation for Catholic piety and worship.40 In fact, Madame de Stael's theory of civilization (and the kind of establishment she kept at Coppet) depended on the elaboration of a Montesquieuvian dialectic between the nations of the North and those of the South, the blending or clashing of their temperaments and cultures. Thus, in De VAllemagne, comparing nations with individuals, she declared that "Protestantism and Catholicism both exist in the human heart." "If in religion, as in other human affections, one can unite what is wished for by both imagination [namely Catholicism] and reason [namely Protestantism], man will have peace." But, unfortunately, "la foi et l'examen se succedent et se combattent." 41 Madame de Stael's cultural syncretism of the two major branches of Christianity is, however, frequently belied when her thoughts turn to politics and liberty: here Catholicism is seen as a constraining submission. Her last declaration on this issue is found in the posthumous Considerations sur la Revolution frangaise, where she -

politely - rebukes dogma and passive obedience, and concludes broaching the problem that so vexed Tocqueville and the staff of the Avenir - that, though often seen as hostile, religion and the style of liberty manifested in 1789 are true friends: the Revolution "deviated 36

39 40 41

De la litte'rature, considere'e dans ses rapports avec les institutions sociales (Paris, 1872), preface to 37 38 2nd edn, p. 7. Ibid., p. 8. Ibid., pt. 1, ch. 8, pp. 117-118. Ibid., pt. 1, ch. 11, p. 172. Corinne, ou Ultalie (Paris, 1876), bk. x , ch. 5, p p . 2 2 5 - 2 2 7 . De VAllemagne (2 vols., ed. S. Ballaye, Paris, 1968), pt. iv, ch. 4, 11, 257.

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from its primitive direction because the French could not join religion and liberty."42 Her conclusion: "From one end of the world to the other, the friends of liberty communicate by lumieres, just as religious persons do by feelings; or, rather, lumieres and feelings are gathered together in the love of liberty and in the love of the Supreme Being."43 Necker, of course, spoke of oaths and trusts, not liberty, in 1788 - and for good reason. To recover the connection between the views of Madame de Stael and her father we need to go back to her political work of 1798, submitting it to closer inspection. Whatever we may conclude from this text about distinctions between Constant's "individualistic" vision and Madame de StaeTs greater propensity to analyze religion through the lens of political culture, it is relevant to know that Constant worked with her on Des circonstances actuelles and annotated her manuscript. Madame de Stael (in 1798) believed it is proven (with a few exceptions where either a philosophical education or a desire for public approval softens manners) that morality needs the support of religious ideas. These are even more necessary in the French republic, where "political equality destroys the sort of imaginary subordination that holds each man in his place." 44 "The more influence you give to the individual wills of the nation," she writes, "the more you need a way of moralizing the greater number... The less power of constraint you give the government... the more you have to fall back on a guidance that is both particular and uniform."45 She denies that religious ideas should be used to hold the common people in ignorance: that is a "detestable" notion unworthy of an "aristocrate des lumieres." All people of all levels of knowledge benefit from religious ideas.46 Atheism is a purely negative idea,47 and the hope of immortality is the warrant of the integrity of man. 48 "But," says Madame de Stael, "nothing differs more from most religions than religious ideas" (a "Protestant" theme we are accustomed to).49 And, in particular, "republics cannot take the place of monarchies without a change of religion."50 Catholic France will not be dissuaded from its old faith by persecution: persecution 42

45 48

Considerations sur les principaux evenements de la Revolution frangaise (3 vols., London, 1818), 111, 43 44 422. Ibid., p . 427. Des circonstances actuelles, p . 222. 46 47 Ibid., p. 223. Ibid., p. 224. Ibid., p. 225. 49 50 Ibid., p. 226. Ibid. Ibid., p. 227.

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inspires resistance, while at the same time injuring faith, morality, and social ties in general. The Catholics must be educated by degrees to see the absurdity of their dogmas through exposure to a simpler and purer faith.51 There are, the author believes, two candidates for this role in France: the newly founded sect of Theophilanthropy (a "natural religion" or deism sparse and refined enough to meet her specifications)52 or Protestantism. Weighing these two cases, as Madame de Stael playfully puts it, "en bonne calviniste," the judge admits that the decision will be delicate, especially since, in the nondogmatic Unitarian mode, the differences are slight.53 However, Protestantism has several advantages: it has an old and firm foundation; its "simple ceremonies" carry a conviction that ones of new creation cannot; and it has traditionally had a network of ministers deeply engaged in and inseparable from the business of civil society, but exempted from political offices and therefore trusted as private mediators (this is an obviously Swiss model). Protestantism is also not so evidently the creature of political factionalism: "its ministers... have always been noted for their morality, whereas certain men, sullied by blood, have drifted into the ranks of Theophilanthropy." 54 Whichever choice is made, the purpose will be "to destroy the influence of the Catholic religion."55 To do this, the preferred religion will have to be a state religion, one's fondness for toleration notwithstanding. For its ministers will have to implant themselves in the villages, bringing hope and help to the people, and these "interpreters of religious ideas will be the support of the republican government."56 Madame de Stael's republican Erastianism is not so different from her father's royalist Erastianism of 1788 as might appear at first glance. The times have vastly changed (Napoleon is in the wings with his own solutions); but the burning issue is to give spiritual support to a regime that is staggering - to bring into play a "code" that unites men spiritually so that their social bond will be more secure. In both cases, we see a variation on the theme with which this chapter began. 51 52

53 56

I b i d , P . 228. T h e s t a n d a r d word o n this subject remains Albert M a t h i e z , La theophilanthropie et le culte de'cadaire, Ijg6-i8oi: essai sur I'histoire religieuse de la Revolution (Paris, 1904). 54 55 Des circonstances actuelles, p . 2 3 1 . Ibid, p. 234. Ibid, p. 232. Ibid, p. 233.

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If we now leap ahead to the conditions of 1814-1815 and beyond, it is not difficult to see - in a perspective of restoration and conditional royalism or theoretical political agnosticism - why Madame de Stael (or Constant) would wish to put the "Swiss republican " solution behind them or even to regret its " illiberalism." The burden of history could no longer bear the simple solution of a civilly innoculated faith, much less the destruction of " the influence of the Catholic religion." But the wider problem of faith and politics was not, for all that, made to vanish. Far from vanishing, it was cast into even sharper relief— though in microcosm and reverse image — in republican Switzerland, the model for Madame de StaeTs republican France, and most acutely of all in Benjamin Constant's native jfoytf de Vaud. Although problems of political theology and ecclesiology in Lausanne are peripheral to French political thought, they cast light on our discussion - as does the central figure around whom we frame our account. Alexandre Vinet was born in 1797, thirty years after Constant, at a time when the latter was sitting in the Tribunal in Paris. It would be hard to find two Vaudois more distinct in temperament and behavior - except that both were eloquent defenders of liberty. Vinet, child of a French Protestant father, was brought up with severe correctness and destined for the ministry. He combined his religious training with such a precocious sensitivity for belles-lettres that he was appointed to teach French literature at the University of Basel when he was only twenty. Just two years later, he was ordained minister (of the Calvinist "state church" of Vaud) in Lausanne; he returned there to teach in 1837. His life, shared between the two callings, carried him into literature, journalism, controversy, and civic action. Of Vinet's personality Sainte-Beuve was later to write: This most modest and humble of men displayed, in such a rare unity, clearsighted and precise experience and a naivete of impressions, a sort of miraculously preserved childhood: this gave his personality and his conversation a great charm that his written words failed to convey. As a public speaker and a professor he also had a power, a spontaneous movement, a natural thrust that the writer in him censored.57 Nonetheless, the writings earned respect. Although Vinet never set foot in Paris, he was known and appreciated by select literary circles. He commented acutely on current literature without ever 57

C.-A. de Sainte-Beuve, "Mort de M. Vinet," in Portraits litteraires (3 vols., Paris, 1864), m, 503-504.

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meeting Chateaubriand, Lamartine, Hugo, or any of the other writers. His three-volume anthology of French literature, accompanied by commentary, which appeared in Basel at the time of the July revolution, called attention to his purity of style.58 As early as 1823, n e na cl won a prize offered by the Societe de la Morale Chretienne for an essay on the liberty of worship: Guizot, the president of the jury on that occasion, became an admirer. He was often in the company of the Due and Duchesse de Broglie during their sojourns at Coppet.59 And, most significantly, Vinet, who himself had an abiding interest in Pascal, forged a strong friendship with Sainte-Beuve, when in 1837, t n e latter was invited to Lausanne to deliver the lectures on which his masterpiece Port-Royal would be based. Vinet's reputation in preaching, religious psychology, ethics, and political theology reached to all Protestant Europe, as well as attracting notice among liberal Catholics like Montalembert and his collaborators of Le Correspondant. He was personally involved in several politico-religious quarrels in his small but effervescent bailiwick of Vaud. The early 1820s witnessed an outbreak in Protestant Switzerland of what was termed the re'veil - a spontaneous pietistic swell of fervor, akin of Methodism, outside the official church. In 1831, the canon faced the issue of a new constitution. Then, in 1838, Vaud underwent a heated debate over the organization of the official church and its relations with the state. Vinet had been in the center of all these events; when, in 1838, he and others found the new ecclesiastical settlement unacceptable, they formed an independent church. Finally, in 1845, there was a radical political revolution in Vaud, leading to violence and religious intolerance. Vinet, as ever the partisan of liberty, challenged the victors with his pen, and was rewarded for this by dismissal from his professorship in 1846. Broken in health, he died only a few months later. Although developed in the heat of strife, Vinet's observations on religious liberty and church-state relations are of theoretical interest, especially when placed in the wider context of the Western European debate. These views are presented in another prize-winning work for the Societe de la Morale Chretienne, which, published in Paris in 58

59

A l e x a n d r e Vinet, Ckrestomatie frangaise, ou choix de morceaux tires des meilleurs e'erivains frangais (3 vols., Basel, 1 8 2 9 - 1 8 3 0 ; 2 n d edn, 1833-1836). Sainte-Beuve, " Mort de M. Vinet," p. 504.

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1842, had immediate reverberations in Switzerland.60 However, the flavor of his writing is best captured in the posthumous Liberte religieuse et questions ecclesiastiques (Paris, 1854), a compilation of essays

and shorter notices that trace two decades of Vinet's thought. As we follow his ideas, connecting them with the concrete disputes that inspired them, we encounter a thinker who, neither retrograde nor radical, is attempting to mediate religion and political thought without sacrifice of faith or liberty. The matter of ultramontane obedience aside, Vinet comes across as a kind of Protestant Montalembert, a chevalier of the liberal Calvinist cc internationale." We shall explore that affinity below. In 1831, in the essay "Quelques idees sur la liberte religieuse," Vinet, starting from the premise that the chief object of political society is "the consecration and guarantee of individual rights," arrives swiftly at the Constantian position according to which "society has not so much been formed to assure each person a satisfactory portion of social power as to guarantee to each the free use of individual faculties."61 Any constitution — republican or monarchical - that provides this guarantee is a good one. But the most precious freedom of all is religious, for "it is not only a right, but an important law of human nature: a law that is there before being legislated."62 Vaud had, like France, had a revolution in 1830: Vinet wished to see religious liberty inscribed in the new constitution as a matter of right. As he pointed out, dissident sects had already multiplied and found it unnecessary to hide their presence: thus, religious constraint was not only wrong, it was self-defeating.63 Vinet is under no illusion that social existence can be totally free: it demands reciprocal obligations of all sorts. But, of the several possessions that we cannot be obliged to alienate, the most important is our conscience. It is, in fact, not properly our own; it is God's, the portion of divinity within us. Society cannot demand it; we cannot give it. Our moral self is also the vehicle of our education and perfectibility. As such, we express it in organized acts of conviction, rites of preaching and worship. These, too, share in its sacred inalienability, so long as they do not infringe on the liberty of others. The right of association is therefore corollary to the right of 60

61 63

Vinet, Essai sur la manifestation des convictions religieuses et sur la separation de UEglise et de VEtat^ envisages comme consequence necessaire et comme garantie de principe (Paris, 1842; 2 n d e d n , 1858). 62 Vinet, Liberte religieuse et questions ecclesiastiques (Paris, 1854), p. 2. Ibid., p. 3. Ibid., p. 6.

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conscience. While society is not empowered to require religious practice or to prohibit public displays of incredulity, it has the duty to protect religion wherever it exists. If religious liberty were denied, all other liberties would be jeopardized: "This liberty is the cornerstone; if it collapses, all else collapses with it. In all constitutions it is the mark and seal of true liberalism."64 So powerful are the arguments for religious freedom, Vinet believes, that it is rarely attacked head on. Rather, claims are made that the state has the duty to protect the national church from the contamination of sects. But the protection given that church has been, as it were, an unwholesome stewardship which has undermined its spirituality, liberty, and dignity. The Eglise vaudoise has lost all the character of a free association; it has fallen prey to nepotism and bureaucracy, and has become politicized. By all means, Vinet argues, keep the national church; but liberate it, in spiritual matters, from control by the civil power.65 If it competes with other sects, it, too, will have a rebirth of energy and piety. Moreover, as Vinet insists, the Church of Vaud is a Protestant church. Protestantism is the faith of "civilisation," of "libre examen."66 The Reformation's demand that each individual have the right to read Holy Scripture and base his faith and style of worship on his findings is, according to Vinet, "the only manifest and universally recognized difference between Protestantism and Papism."67 Although the exercise of that liberty produced a great number of sects, most of them proved to be in "admirable accord" on the main points of doctrine and in their "profession of faith," including the church of Vaud. In the long run, the clarity of Scripture and the clarity of liberty can produce unconstrained agreement and fidelity. Vaud cannot, of course, start again from an absolute point of religious freedom. But Vaud can cleanse its own church and allow others to operate unhindered. In 1838, in his "Discours sur l'union de l'Eglise et de PEtat," Vinet concedes that the union of church and state is consecrated, but he insists on "relations supposing a duality." 68 Of the church he says: " It has a life of its own that can develop only in liberty. To give it a life not its own is to kill it. If the State wished to direct that spiritual life toward its own political interests, it would proceed 64 67

Ibid., pp. 8-9. Ibid., p. 18.

65

Ibid., pp. 12-14. 68 Ibid., p. 176.

66

Ibid., p. 17.

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contrary to its own goal: religion serves the state well, but only when it is free; as a slave, it is worth nothing." 69 He invokes the image of a wedded couple: "just as the good husband respects the conscience of his wife, the State respects the conscience of the Church; but through respect for that conscience it safeguards the source of its inspiration."70 In 1846, just a year before his death, Vinet is moved to clarify his position in response to criticisms by a professor from Zurich.71 Here he defines the state as "the collective natural man." Natural man is not, for Vinet, identical with sinful man, although (in individual or collective form) he is "deprived of the supernatural inspiration (lumieres) of the Gospel."72 The state is his appropriate habitat; but it is also the domicile of "spiritual man" because they share "common interests, affections, and even thoughts" with natural man, and are "fully citizens."73 This mixed condition of citizens in the state makes the state something other than a mere organization of pagans, even though its principle is natural. Yet the state is not something evolving into a church, for "it is not around a Christian interest that its elements are assembled."74 At most, "the formation of political society is a moral, not a spiritual fact."75 As a consequence of this, the state prosecutes crimes, but not sins. It is, in fact, an illustration of the divine division of labor, "the condition... of all we are, but not the principle and the source."76 As representing the natural man, the state will properly not attempt to interfere with or inculcate spirituality. Man is only fully man, the "new" or the " t r u e " man, when he has been spiritualized by the Gospel; but this is not the state's business or doing - the Gospel has no need of it. The church, while not to be confused with the kingdom of God, is nevertheless "an institution directly related to the kingdom of God" through its interest in producing "the new man." 77 There is no other reason why the church should exist. In its principle, the church is the collective spiritual man. If it were not that, it would be something like the state. The family is like the state in being " a natural fact," but it is not the state or the source of the state's principle, however the latter may 69 71

72

75

70 Ibid., p. 177. Ibid., p. 178. Vinet, "L'Eglise et PEtat: lettre a un ami, en repose a M. le professeur Ebrard," ibid., P- 555fIbid., p. 556. Vinet's "natural man" is evidently modelled on the "natural man" of 73 74 Montaigne. Ibid., p. 557. Ibid., p. 558. 76 77 Ibid., p. 559. Ibid. Ibid., p. 563.

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have come into historical existence.78 States are rigorously sovereign and separate from each other even though all of them may have descended from a single couple. The bonds and duties of the family have their distinctive character (patriarchal), for which there are no substitutes (Vinet here inserts a note attacking "all socialist systems"). It is, in fact, by claiming some such family fiction for the state that the English have held the Catholics of Ireland in abject submission, burdening them with taxes to pay a superfluous Anglican clergy.79 At the conclusion of this essay there is a profession of the author's faith in Christian revelation, where he says notably that "there is a permanent hostility between Christianity... and natural man... so that as long as natural man holds power in this world, spiritual Christians will be in a state of proscription and, in some respects, disinheritance... [joined in] a dialogue between two speakers who do not understand the other's language... [in] an association between two individuals divided by thought and interest."80 As we see from the foregoing, Vinet rejects any notion that Christian spirituality should provide other than passively for political legitimation and civic faith. "Spiritual man" has no commerce in values with "natural man," although he is obliged by the qualities and interests of his humanity to share a common citizenship with the latter. Thus, Vinet concludes quite differently from Necker and Madame de Stael: he is an Augustinian; they are Pelagian and semiRousseauist. Yet he is quite as liberal as they are: he concedes that secular life can organize morality, if not spirituality; he believes that state interference contaminates belief and worship, even in a "state church"; he defends the absolute right of conscience and the other rights flowing from it; he upholds libre examen and the toleration of non-belief; he wants freedom of worship for all sects, including the Catholics. With regard to defining a general liberal position, Vinet raises an issue that troubles liberal thought. Is he a "perfectionist," as defined by some recent scholars - and therefore not a liberal? On this account, a perfectionist is one who adopts liberal principles as instrumental to some higher monistic condition of faith or understanding, not as ends in themselves, in the belief that free expression and inquiry will lead men to the desired result.81 78 81

79 80 Ibid., pp. 564-565. Ibid., p. 567. Ibid., pp. 569-570. See Richard E. Flathman, The Philosophy and Politics of Freedom (Chicago, 1987), pp. 247-249.

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Perfectionist Christians, for example, would regard the reception of the truth of the Gospel or the purification of the Visible Church as goals that might require the atmosphere and the institutions of liberty for their achievement, but could be said to value that liberty chiefly for a missionary purpose. In the case of Vinet, we might say that the Christian religion has the value of truth, but the status of an opinion.

Would perfectionists (who need not specifically be proponents of a religion of salvation) renounce liberal principles of free agency and become persecutors once they were in sight of their goals? This has always been a liberal fear; while the others have had their own reasons for fearing liberalism. Can liberals put anything but individual liberty first or fail to organize their cult around that goddess? Where does this leave the question of spirituality as a part of the weave of the liberal political order? Answers to these questions, such as they can be treated historically, must await some further investigation of this tradition, particularly the parallel situation of Montalembert, where the matter arises with even greater clarity. In anticipation of that, however, we should note that, unlike many liberals of the late twentieth century, most of our subjects believed religion to be a necessary and durable feature of the human social landscape, not an archaic institution of dubious value, useful mainly in illustrating the benign patience of liberal tolerance. While Alexandre Vinet was occupied with tensions between religion and politics in a small Protestant city-state, Francois Guizot faced the same issue in a large, preponderately Catholic constitutional monarchy. This meant that Guizot, while a Protestant, needed to play the role of " politique " and reconciler. He could not be a politique in the manner of Necker or Madame de Stael, for the situation and forces in play had shifted greatly. It was abundantly clear to this statesman that, despite the advances of the reveil and the climate of opinion that now promised him the highest posts in the July Monarchy, Protestantism would always remain overwhelmingly minoritarian in France. Its mission as a faith was, therefore, a kind of qualitative perseverance and usefulness as a catalyst for spiritual harmony in the nation.82 The real task was to encourage the liberalization of Catholic opinion, enlisting its considerable strength toward stabilizing the new society and legitimizing the new regime.83 82

83

Francis Guizot, "Du catholicisme, du protestantisme et de la philosophic en France" (July 1838), in Meditations et etudes morales (Paris, 1864), pp. 73-74. See Pierre Rosanvallon, Le moment Guizot (Paris, 1985), p . 239.

no

In partibusfideHum

That was obviously quite a different problem from Necker's, which had been to rally the flagging forces of "morale religieuse" against the inroads of "philosophie politique" in defense of the ancient dynasty. For the younger branch of the Bourbons was not yet a dynasty and was considered by many a "usurpation" or, as Lamartine put it more charitably, a "dictatorship"; 84 and the spiritual resources pitted against total secularization were, as Guizot saw them, now threefold: "Catholicism, Protestantism, and philosophy." His strategy would be to seal the spiritual alliance by minimizing all differences between its legions, thereby also "reducing differences amongst Frenchmen." 85 In 1838, in the same year that Vinet was heatedly embroiled in the ecclesiastical quarrels of Vaud, Guizot composed some remarkable essays on faith and politics. In the first of these he dealt with the likely areas of collision and collaboration between the older spirituality and the newly established gospel of civil society. Once upon a time, Guizot observes, society thought and explained itself in religious language: it counselled justice and charity to the fortunate, and obedience and hope to the needy; to all it preached the fraternity of the heavenly kingdom. In those days, religion possessed virtually all the means of distributing and rallying opinion. But the contemporary world presents a very changed picture. Today, the expectations of secular progress, serviced by "all the media {portevoix) of modern civilization," are all-powerful. Pity and hardship have been forgotten. "Never have so many fallen prey to such a thirst for all goods and all pleasures... Everything seems possible, and desirable, and accessible to everyone."86 It is not to God, writes Guizot, that these voices of desiring are raised. And the reply given them by "docteurs populaires" is that "all are placed in this world for happiness; all have the same right to happiness; the world is happiness for all." 87 Guizot professes surprise that envy is not more extreme, that social violence is not more widespread and abrupt under these conditions. Most certainly, Guizot adds, our institutions should be made progressively more just and more discerning about human needs. 84 85

86 87

See below, p p . 2 0 0 - 1 . Douglas J o h n s o n , Guizot: Aspects of French History, iy8y-i8y4 ( L o n d o n a n d T o r o n t o , 1963), P- 396. Guizot, "De la religion dans les societes modernes," in Meditations, pp. 26-28. Ibid., p. 29.

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But there is more to man than mere material desire and a penchant for disorder, for he is a composite of "greatness and wretchedness": "Human liberty is stronger than the institutions of society. The soul of man is greater than the goods of the world." 88 Man's deepest instinct and resource is religion: Religion, religion! That is the cry of humanity in all times and places, except on those few occasions of terrible crisis or shameful decadence... Let politics, even the justest and strongest politics, not flatter itself that it can achieve [the improvement of the human condition] without religion. For the more the social movement grows in scope and intensity, the less politics will suffice to guide turbulent humanity.89 Therefore, entente and harmony between religion and politics is necessary, for "there is an intimate connection between man's earthly ideas and his heavenly ones, between his temporal and his eternal desires." The problem in achieving entente is that, on the one hand, Clever men have seen religion as a means of order and social discipline... which humiliates religion if it acquiesces, or irritates and estranges it if it refuses to agree. And, on the other hand, that Great religious spirits, on their part, have regarded the world and the life of the world - whether at all times or just in certain ages - as incarnate evil (mat en soi).90

Both these positions, according to Guizot, are radically wrong and dangerous. Politics is futile if it refuses to recognize the nobility of man's striving for the eternal. But religion is doctrinaire and narrow if it regards this world, "la premiere patrie de rhomme," as a place of proscription and exile.91 True Christianity came to reform the world, not to renounce it; to cultivate a generous spirit in regard to earthly institutions.92 The task is, therefore, "to draw together the Christian spirit and the spirit of the age, the old religion and the new society."93 This is a rather different formulation from that of Constant, who saw religion as a major collaborator in "per88 91

Ibid., p. 31. Ibid., p. 33.

89 92

Ibid., pp. 31-32. Ibid., pp. 35-36.

90 93

Ibid., pp. 32-33. Ibid., pp. 38-39.

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fectibility."94 But it is not so far from the way that Tocqueville described the spiritual supports of democratic society in America. Guizot concludes his essay, in keeping with his strategy, with some passages of complimentary reference to the objectives of liberal Catholicism, where he senses a disposition to reach the desired entente.95 As Minister of Public Instruction he had seen the importance of giving the clergy a major role in primary education. His policy was, as we have noted, to encourage the participation of Catholics in the structuring of a new political legitimation (eased by papal acceptance of the July regime), while at the same time interfering with their efforts to recapture a portion of higher education. Guizot's final words in this article are balanced. To the secularists he declares: "Religious spirit has returned to the world to conquer without usurping." 96 But he reminds the Catholics to "honor the society within which such a performance {spectacle) is possible."97 In a second essay, Guizot proposes to explore the relationship between the forces of thought and faith in the new society so as to show that they can live in peace, "not only materially, but morally... and voluntarily." 98 Catholicism was born in the same cradle with modern Europe; it has been its partner in civilization and has survived all its transformations. Protestantism, despite severe persecutions in France from all sides, remains unbowed. Philosophy has had many triumphs, but has errors to atone for: yet it has nothing to fear from the future.99 Will fanaticisms, too well remembered, be reborn? "That is not likely... No doubt the old hatreds... remain; but they will no longer rally society. Customs as well as laws repudiate them." 100 The gravest problem lies in the nature of Catholicism and its conditions of harmony with society. Here the state has had a major role to play, since, by insuring the liberty of the Church through its neutrality, it affirms its incompetence to interfere in spiritual affairs. The Catholic Church has therefore no cause to be alarmed by civil authority. However, the Church itself has a government that dictates the conditions of faith and salvation, and it regards this power as its cornerstone: before such a power all dissent or resistance is illegitimate. That principle confronts the principle of constitutional France, which states that "all human power is fallible, and should 94 95 98

F o r Guizot's conception of progress, see Rosanvallon, Moment Guizot, p . 253. 96 97 Guizot, "De la religion," p. 41. Ibid., p. 51. Ibid., p. 52. 99 10 Guizot, "Du catholicisme" p. 56. Ibid., p. 57. ° Ibid., p. 59.

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be controlled and limited."101 The conflict appears unresolvable. Yet, "the obstacle is much more historical than rational... Let both powers... refrain from the old confusion, fully accepting, in right and in fact, their mutual incompetence... Let the Catholic Church... profess its infallibility in the religious order and the state its liberty of thought in the social order." 102 The greatest evil in civil society is "the enfeeblement of authority... an authority recognized in advance... accepted and felt as a right that does not need to resort to force." Catholicism is the quintessential spirit of authority, "systematically conceived and organized."103 If society were to accept such guidance, a counterweight would be needed. But since that is not where the real danger lies, the Catholic sense of discipline with its "spirit of internal submission " can be of great value to French society. For Catholicism, by ceasing to be a government, has remained a "popular faith." It can fructify this faith, not by the "reves insenses" of M. de Lamennais, but by "remaining faithful to itself in loyal acceptance of its new situation."104 As for Protestantism, it has been accused of revolutionary sympathies. But history denies this charge: "never has a religious society been more disposed to show deference and respect toward the civil power."105 And where Protestantism has been in power it has never been inclined toward civil despotism because it has encouraged litre examen and diversity within its own congregations.106 Confessing himself little enraptured by sectarian spirit, Guizot argues rather blithely that where Protestantism has formed national churches, it "never treats dissidents with rigor or contempt," but sustains "progress of the liberty of conscience."107 Protestants and Catholics together are enjoined to "revive religious life... an immense work, for the evil is immense."108 And in this reveil they should always keep society in view, for that is the field of action that each faith must address in its own way.109 "Harmony in liberty," says Guizot, "is the Christian spirit; it is charity combined with fervor." He makes the same claim for philosophy, for it is " the moral sense of the principle of tolerance and of equal protection for the forms of worship."110 Guizot, like other liberals, has some chiding words for the philosophie des lumieres: it was 101 104 107 110

ibid., pp. 63-66. Ibid., pp. 72-73. Ibid., p. 78. Ibid., p. 83.

102

ibid., P. 69. Ibid., pp. 74-75. Ibid., p. 79.

103

105 108

ibid., P. 70. Ibid., p. 76. Ibid., pp. 81-82. 106

109

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arrogant and Utopian. But the new philosophy (Cousin's "eclecticism") is not Utopian and has been able, "without embarrassment," to recognize and correct its errors. It could do this because, "politically speaking, it has been victorious."111 According to Guizot, philosophy now knows that it must share the moral stewardship of society with religion. "And still more to the point, philosophy is itself ready to become once again seriously and sincerely religious."112 With solidarity forged, Guizot urges, "let the spiritual order recover... its activity and its brilliance!"113 Guizot's dream or strategy - both terms apply - for the spiritual reunification of France under the aegis of the Orleans monarchy was frustrated within a decade. Both philosophical and religious distrust contributed to this: the signs of entente had never been as promising as Guizot seems to have wished them. A civil society much to Guizot's liking had small use for the gifts of the spirit. The philosophical imperialism of Victor Cousin could appreciate the religious impulse, but wanted religion in its place. And a very different flurry of spiritual energy would manifest itself in 1848, driving the Protestant statesman out of office and his monarch from the throne. In the powerful interpretation of the Romantic historian Edgard Quinet, the interests of Reformation and Revolution would be rejoined.114 In the remaining twenty-six years of his long life, Guizot incarnated the "'moment reactionnaire' de la pensee liberale."115 His thoughts were increasingly occupied with theology and spiritual matters; and he died in distrust of his century and of the "civilization" he had once so much vaunted. " I believe in God and worship him without trying to understand him," he wrote in his will.116 III.

CATHOLIC SUBMISSIONS! LACORDAIRE, MONTALEMBERT

Writing to Charles de Montalembert in 1854, Pere Lacordaire observes: It is true that I only relatively, not absolutely, chastise the word "revolution," while I am unrestrained in chastising the word "Protestant111 114

116

112 113 Ibid., P . 84. Ibid., p. 85. Ibid., P . 86. See Edgar Quinet, Le Christianisme et la Revolution frangaise (a famous sequence of lectures mv given at the College de France and published in 1845), ' ° l - I n otOeuvres completes (Paris, 115 1895), see especially pp. 1766°. Rosanvallon, Moment Guizot, p. 310. Ibid., p. 325.

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ism." For the difference is great. Protestantism never declared any just and abiding principle, anything a Catholic could accept: for the word "reformation" is not a principle. Yet the Revolution, though sullied by its excesses, upheld a few genuinely Christian ideals which, despite crimes and mistakes, were at last generally accepted in Europe.117 He adds: "one must be cautious in regarding [the Revolution] as only a monster. It is the most astonishing collection of things ever seen in history; one can only speak of it with all sorts of modifiers (avec desgrandes reserves dans tous les sens)."118 This announces a certain

gap between liberalisms as conceived by Protestants and Catholics. Montalembert, both more pliant and more conservative, had drawn parallels between religious freedom in Lutheranism and religious freedom in modern society.119 But Lacordaire had been instinctively more democratic since his youth, before his vocation with Lamennais. For him it was not the Revolution per se, but the impious "heavenly city of the eighteenth-century philosophers," working in concert with royal absolutism and Gallicanism, that had caused France such rude trials for the past hundred years. The eighteenth century was " a vast Protestantism that didn't even have the Bible."120 It had ravished "religion, power, and liberty." 121 While excesses of the Revolution had no doubt been directly imputable to the atheism and unbrotherliness of some of its leaders, its core had been Christian-"civil equality, religious liberty, political liberty" — not bourgeois. "What, in effect, for the proletarians, is a bourgeois? He is the legatee of the bishops, the abbes, the seigneurs. He is a miserly seigneur."122 The bourgeois world, according to Lacordaire, is the essential problem confronting the Church in the nineteenth century; this is the instinct that led him to preach his powerful sermons from the pulpit of Notre-Dame in 1835-1836 a n d to persuade papal authority to allow him to revive the Dominican order in France. 123 A century later, this impulse would be called "Christian democracy." But here it is several things at once, somewhat confusingly. It is "ultramontanism," because its appeal is to Catholic universality and a reformist papacy, not to narrow political Gallicanism. It is also 117

118 120

123

Letter of 29 August 1854, in Charles de Montalembert, Catholicisme et liberte: correspondences inedites avec le P. Lacordaire, Mgr de Me'rode et A. de Falloux, 1852-1870 (Paris, 1970), p. 46. 119 Ibid., p. 47. See B. Plongeron, Theologie et politique, p. 364. R. P. Henri-Dominique Lacordaire, Oeuvres philosophiques et politiques, in Oeuvres (Paris, m 122 1872), VII, 24. Ibid., p. 10. Ibid., p. 17. See M. Prelot and F. Gallouedec Genuys, eds., Le liberalisme catholique (Paris, 1969), pp. 160-164.

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"social Catholicism," because it stresses humility, works of charity, and duties of society. Finally, it is "liberal," for a host of reasons that we shall explore, but most especially because Lacordaire describes himself as " a passionate friend of this century, born in its very entrails," and makes his appeal to opinion publique, "even against itself if needed."124 The Comte de Montalembert, born to wealth and rank, cosmopolitan by birth (his mother was Scottish) and by education, a peer of France, and as powerful and energetic an orator in the Upper Chamber as Lacordaire was in the pulpit, might seem the antithesis of the Dominican priest. And in many ways he was. He accepted the July Monarchy with far more sang-froid, even with a kind of enthusiasm: it was, in retrospect, " a government which, despite its wrongs (especially toward us), was essentially honest and moderate, never violating a single law or furnishing the least pretext for an armed insurrection."125 Although he attempted to come to terms with liberal democracy in his last writings and in his important speeches to the Congress of Malines (Mechelen) in 1863, most of the time Montalembert shows an open contempt for the effects of popular government: "Basically, democracy is incompatible with liberty, because it is founded on envy passing under the name of equality, whereas liberty, by its very nature, protests unceasingly against the tyrannical and brutal levelling of equality." 126 He thus emphasizes the aristocratic side of liberal thought and, like RoyerCollard earlier, a preference for "mixed government." Lacordaire shows an undisguised contempt for bourgeois Orleanism, where "only literature, expressing our madness, speaks to us of a world we would want to live in." 127 But Montalembert reaches out to Guizot and to other "hommes d'Etat du premier merite." "Those thirtyfour years [i.e. 1814-1848] were," he declares, "if not the most brilliant, at least the freest, the happiest, and the most peaceful in [our] history." 128 However, the greatest felicity of representative government has been, as we shall see, in its role of providing an atmosphere for Catholic renewal. Montalembert is thus the liberal 124

125

126 127 128

Lacordaire, Vie de Saint-Dominique, precedee du me'moire pour le re'tablissement des Freres precheux (Paris, 1827), P- 6Charles d e M o n t a l e m b e r t , " P i e I X et la F r a n c e en 1849 et en 1859," in Oeuvrespole'miques et diverses: 1. Oeuvres de Montalembert (Paris, i860), iv, 629. M o n t a l e m b e r t , Des interets catholiques au XIXe siecle (Paris, 1852), p . 79. Lacordaire, Oeuvres philosophiques et politiques, p. 20. M o n t a l e m b e r t , Des intents catholiques, p p . 122-123.

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Catholic "politique"; Lacordaire acts more as a consciencealthough those roles will be somewhat reversed in 1848. Montalembert's conservative preference for the parliaments of 1814-1848, his aristocratic bent, and his " Englishness" (he is the French complement to Lord Acton) carry through in his ecclesiology. He is unswervingly ultramontane in his appreciation of Roman authority, but he regards this in a conciliar, not an absolute, mode of interpretation: "according to the ultramontane doctrine... the pope is the monarch of the Church; but he is not an absolute monarch: he can do nothing, and he undertakes nothing, outside of the Church's divine constitution, which he did not make, and of which he is only the interpreter and guardian. He does not govern unassisted, but with the help of a numerous body of bishops, whose authority he himself scrupulously upholds."129 This doctrine of Montalembert would receive a peculiar and ironic twist when, in 1864, * n e P°P e w a s compelled to abjure his own errors — those of liberalism — in the Syllabus. It is perhaps Montalembert's strict, even overfastidious, passion for separating liberty from equality, and his appreciation of the collaboration of religion and liberty in the political upheavals of "Holland in the sixteenth century, England in the seventeenth [i.e. 1688], America in the eighteenth, and... Belgium in the nineteenth" 130 that gave him a more positive taste for the Protestant religion of his mother than Lacordaire could ever muster. Lacordaire most certainly did not share Montalembert's enthusiasm for the English gentry, those " gentilshommes campagnards... the real aristocratic element in England." 131 In fact, Lacordaire and Montalembert tended to split Tocqueville's delicate theory of liberty down the middle. Montalembert was affected by Tocqueville's "coeur d'aristocrate"; he cites approvingly the famous passage about "gentle despotism" and suggests that the true title of the last part of the work on America should be: De la democratic en France et en

Europe.132 But Lacordaire, with a certain yearning for the formula God and the people, was attracted by Tocqueville's positive view of American popular sovereignty, indeed quite won over, as we shall later document in more detail. Long before Lacordaire had ever heard of Tocqueville, and before he had joined the Mennaisian movement, he had contemplated going to the United States to 129

Ibid., p. 93.

131

Montalembert, Oeuvres polemiques, p. 93.

130

Ibid., pp. 117, 133. 132

Des intents catholiques, p. 191.

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pursue his spiritual calling: " I determined to seek in the United States of America a field of action closer to where my feelings called me." 133 It was not Protestant America that impressed him, but the gains of Catholicism under French missionary direction.134 After a conversation with an American bishop in 1837, Lacordaire wrote to Madame Swetchine ecstatically: "What a different race of men, and how one senses Jesus Christ alive in their bowels."135 This same fervor thrust Lacordaire instinctively into the revolution of February 1848 (Tocqueville, who little knew that Lacordaire would be called to take his chair in the Academie Franchise, commented cruelly in his Souvenirs on the deputy-priest's resemblance to a vulture) ;136 while Montalembert hung back in shock and disapproval. Differences between Montalembert and Lacordaire are now manifest. Less important ones than these easily drove secular liberals into antagonism. We are thus bound to inquire what sort of glue it was that bonded these men in intimate respect and in fraternal relations unabridged up to the death of Lacordaire in 1861. It was Montalembert who wrote the biography of his friend, who had died, as he desired, " a penitent Christian but an impenitent liberal." 137 As Montalembert freely acknowledged, Lacordaire had been "born with this century...a democrat nourished by republican ideas." 138 But, despite differences of opinion, they had united in a common goal,139 even when events like 1848 aroused very distinct political appreciations.140 To describe what united the priest and the peer, as well as other members of this cause, is to attempt an explanation of the traits peculiar to, and perhaps ephemeral with, the movement called "liberal Catholicism." By focusing on differences, I have hoped to be able to portray the nature of this political cohesion with greater clarity. First of all, we must notice that when Montalembert speaks of the common goal that he and Lacordaire have shared, he means the 133

M . d e L a n g l e d e C a r y a n d J . - G . M o n n e r e t , Prophete en son pays: Lacordaire, 1802-1861 (Paris, 1961), p. 46. 134 For Lacordaire, American Protestantism gave rise to "the most extravagant and superstitious mysticism." Conferences de Notre-Dame (2 vols., Paris, 1912), 11, 149. 135 L e t t e r of 17 J a n u a r y 1837, cited i n G e o r g e s Weill, Histoire du Catholicisme liberal en France, i828-igo8 (Paris, 1909), p. 69. 136 A. de Tocqueville, Recollections (trans. A. Teixiera de Mattos, Cleveland, 1959), p. 129. 137 138 Montalembert, "Le Pere Lacordaire," in Oeuvres, ix, 544. Ibid., p. 3 9 5 . 139 Ibid., pp. 396-397140 QJ- " F r a g m e n t du journal intime de Montalembert," published by Andre Trannov in Revue historique, 192 (1941), 258: " [Lacordaire] me parait ravi de la revolution qui detruit ma vie presente et me replonge a 37 ans dans le non-etre."

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Christianization or, more accurately, the Catholicization of France and other lapsed countries - the reveil of Roman Catholicism all over the world. If Lacordaire often sounds more belligerent in this design, preaching from the pulpit that "all other doctrines necessarily lead... to the catastrophe of superstition or the catastrophe of incredulity," 141 he is being less discreet than Montalembert, the layman. But Montalembert is also anxious for the Church to become "la force unique des temps actuels;" 142 albeit soberly, he exalts its gains in Belgium, Ireland, and France. That faith raises the two men above political squabbling (they can have only one faction - their own); so does their sense of being underdogs whose conviction will triumph. It may be recalled that, in the euphoria following the victory of 1945, the Communist poet Paul Eluard wrote some powerful and touching lines about "ceux qui croyent au ciel et ceux qui n'y croyent pas" - a paean to Resistance unity. The solidarity of Montalembert and Lacordaire was disposed toward the values of "ceux qui croyent" uniquely, although, in a liberal frame of vision, it did not exclude honorable compromises with the secular world and the "spirit of the century" - especially in the context of political and confessional liberty. In a negative sense, there is a temper of exclusivism - under Lamennais one might even have called it conspiratorial design - that infects the "Catholic party" of France (the party that had forsworn legitimism for the advantage of religion), as it seeks to marshal strength under the July Monarchy. Yet, in a positive sense, the Aristotelian notion of philia could be invoked, a dedication not only to a common spiritual standard but also to a disciplined fraternity going far beyond anything liberal individualism could provide (Coppet?). This was the discipline that Guizot so much envied among the Catholics in 1838. And so we start from this double-edged integrity of interest. Then we are obliged to see that not only are devout Catholics of this sort a distinct minority in the France of Louis-Philippe, but that these Catholics are a minority among the larger group — not only in their disposition to play an active political role, but in their intention to appeal to the "droit commun," the Charter of 1830, in defense of their political program. They are indeed a very small handful of the French - a few men of letters, a few aristocrats, a few bishops, and the indefatigable Madame Swetchine; and they are highbrows, in no 141 142

L a c o r d a i r e , Conferences de Notre-Dame, n , 1 3 1 - 1 3 2 . M o n t a l e m b e r t , Des inte'rets catholiques, p . 5 5 .

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way able to reach down to the ordinary Catholic laity (despite Pere Lacordaire's populist emotions, he is also a highbrow). Their monthly organ, Le Correspondant, is excellent; but it cannot begin to touch the public in the way that the reactionary demagogue Louis Veuillot, with encouragement from inside the Vatican, will be able to do with his VUnivers (a daily). Moreover, as we have noted, these liberal Catholics have disparate political allegiance outside their greater bond of brotherhood: Montalembert and Albert de Broglie are Orleanists; Lenormant and Falloux are legitimists; Lacordaire is a closet republican; bishops like Dupanloup (Orleans) and Parisis (Langres) are mute by necessity. Finally, the work of the liberal Catholics is bounded within a very deliberate time span, created by their own Church: 1830 (when VAvenir — two years later to be condemned in the encyclical Mirari vos — appears) to 1864 (the year of the Quanta cura and the Syllabus of Errors, which were partly provoked by Montalembert's speeches at Malines). The liberal Catholics, however, do believe. They believe especially in the miraculous. Montalembert's major literary achievements are a life of St. Elizabeth of Hungary and an even longer work Les moines dOccident (from St. Benedict up to St. Bernard of Clairvaux: "he was a monk and he was a saint; he lived in a cloister and he performed miracles"). 143 Lacordaire wrote a life of St. Dominic, the founder of his order. These men love the Middle Ages for a number of reasons: it is an epoch when freedom stirs (almost, on Montalembert's account, a la Guizot); it is an epoch of piety, par excellence; but it is also, and above all, an age of feeling, of the mystery of faith: not a "rational" age, not an age of Cartesianism in thought or politics. This response is Romantic, but it is not utopianized; it is quasihistoricist (this from Eckstein and Lamennais): the Middle Ages are to be revered, though never to be recovered. This sense of the miraculous (abiding together with some very sober judgments about political reality); a simple style of life among the lay liberal Catholics that sets them apart from the typical habits of the July regime; an internationalism that sometimes makes common cause with French nationalist feelings (Ireland, Belgium, Poland); and, especially, a social world where clergy and laity easily and naturally mingle: all these features tended to set Tocqueville's teeth on edge, to inspire a non-theoretical animus against the liberal 143

Montalembert, Les moines (TOccident (7 vols., Paris, 1878), 1, vii.

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Catholics. " I would be happy," he wrote to Madame Swetchine, "if [the priests]... while being Christians, belonged to one of those great associations God has no doubt established to make more visible and tangible the connections binding individuals together, associations called peoples, whose territory is la patrie."1^ He found these exclusive Catholic cenacles distasteful to his broad Gallican and worldly preferences. Montalembert's chateau at La Roche-en-Brenil was one of those places. There, on one occasion, while expecting word of Vatican censure in 1862, the staff of Le Correspondant received communion from Monseigneur Dupanloup and commemorated the event with a Latin inscription composed by one of their number, Theophile Foisset: "In this chapel, Felix [Dupanloup], bishop of Orleans, bestowed the bread of the Word and the bread of Christian life on the little flock of friends who, resolved to fight together from this day forward for a free Church in a free fatherland, conclude devotedly a pact to God and to liberty, to last the remaining years of their life."145 For, though privileged in respect and resources, these Catholics were, as they now knew, at the mercy of both the Church and the world. This was not the first time that devoted French Catholics had suffered papal reproof in the nineteenth century; There was the prior experience ofTAvenir in 1832. The political program ofTAvenir, its "liberties" (described earlier in connection with Tocqueville),146 had been taken over, almost unedited - except for universal suffrage - into the doctrine of the liberal Catholics: had not Monseigneur Dupanloup listed them precisely in a work of 1845?147 Similarly, there was the wish to construct a " Catholic party." 148 But there were also differences in these two situations: the direction of VAvenir had been more clerical (as had been its subscribers); and, less a fraternal enterprise than Le Correspondant, it had fallen fatally under the sweeping and authoritarian spell of "Monsieur Feli," the abbe de Lamennais, who had brought his little legion out of Brittany to give battle in Paris. Lamannais, indeed, makes the difference. It was not 144

Letter of 20 O c t o b e r 1856, in A. de Tocqueville, Oeuvres completes (Paris, 1 9 5 3 - ), x v , 296. 145 < t j n j l o c s a c e u O ) Felix, Aurelianensis episcopus, p a n e m verbi tribuit et p a n e m vitae christianae amicorum pusillo gregi, qui, pro Ecclesia libera in patria libera commilitare jamdudum soliti, annos vitae reliquos ibidem Deo et libertati devovendi pactum instaurare. Die Octob. xn, A.D. MDCCCLXII." Text given in Prelot and Gallouedec Genuys, 146 eds., Liberalisme catholique, p. 200. See above, p p . 8 0 - 1 . 147 Felix D u p a n l o u p , De la pacification religieuse (Paris, 1845), P- 2 ^ 3 148 See Alfred d e Falloux, " Le parti c a t h o l i q u e , " in Discours et melangespolitiques (2 vols., Paris, 1882), 11, 23-25.

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only, one suspects, the incendiary political doctrines (the "unregulated and unbridled passion for a liberty that dares all") 149 that called down the anathema of Gregory XVI on I'Avenir: it was also the way that the newspaper, its prophet, and the whole Mennaisian movement were seen as subversive to the obedient habits of the clergy and to their pedagogical duties. Gregory XVI had not hesitated to recognize the Orleans regime in the interest of order; Lamennais breathed disorder in the spirit of Lucifer. Some observations about Lamennais - although he is outside the scope of this study - will be helpful in further depicting liberal Catholicism. Lamennais made his reputation as a political theologian in the strong sense. As is well known, he evolved dramatically during the 1820s from a theocratic to a liberal position in politics, always in shrill opposition to the prevailing " moderate Gallicanism " of the restored French episcopate. The battered Church of the Restoration was fair quarry for Lamennais's intransigence and intellectual superiority. He railed against a "society...governed by a systematic atheism... [where] religion is no more than something one administers."150 Thus, even while remaining "reactionary," Lamennais was hospitable to a "freedom of the church," agreed on this single point with liberals like Serre and Royer-Collard. However, it was his ultramontanism that was leading him to liberalism. The gathering crisis of 1828-1829 brought matters to a head. Moderate "neo-Catholics" (gathered around the first version of Le Correspondant) were discovering that, while hostile to the secularism of the Globe (Dufour, Jouffroy, Remusat, etc.), they could conduct a friendly dialogue on the matter of civil and constitutional liberties.151 It was into these rather tepid encounters that Lamennais plunged with his Des progres de la Revolution et de la guerre contre VEglise (1829).

Lamennais saw two political forces in being, both equally distasteful: a Gallicanism bereft of spirituality that enslaved the Catholic religion with the state's shackles; and a liberalism, like that of the Globe, individualistic and destructive of primary social ties, an anarchy of minds and ideas. He called, then, for a third force of "Christian liberty," which, swiftly fleshed out after the July 149

150

151

F r o m t h e encyclical Mirari vos (1832), cited in Prelot a n d G a l l o u e d e c G e n u y s , eds., Liberalisme catholique^ p . 137. Felicite d e L a m e n n a i s , De la religion considered dans ses rapports avec fordre politique et social, in

Oeuvres completes (2 vols., Brussels, 1839), 11, ch. 4, 30-33. Louis de Carne, Souvenirs de majeunesse au temps de la Restauration (Paris, 1872), pp. 179-180.

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revolution in F Avenir, would have the mission of uniting religion and liberty, a "third party" which, as the prospectus of August 1830 put it, would, as the other parties decomposed, "march toward the conquest of the future."152 That very choice of a standard - Avenir - was fraught with apocalyptic significance. A moment of truth seemed at hand. Lamennais's overexcited imagination had been fed by the revolution in Belgium, made by collaborating Catholics and liberals and producing an "Eglise libre dans l'Etat libre." Of course, that revolution suggested an entente between the same two forces in France: and this is recognized by the Avenir prospectus, where a "salutary change in French liberalism" is attributed to the emergence of a "jeune liberalisme... demanding the separation of Church and State... many [of whose adherents] are truly Christians, and many others, of unstable belief, are at least not enemies of Catholicism" (i.e. the very liberals of Le Globe).153 These words were not, however, written by Lamennais, but by Gerbet. Lamennais himself seems to have vacillated between the entente strategy (which would become the later position of the liberal Catholics) and the organization of a zealous movement which would set religion against the state, not on behalf of a defunct dynasty, but in fulfillment of the prophetic ways of Providence. After the frustration of Mirari vos, that second way - Lamennais's real temper - would prevail and grow, finally setting the Gospel and the people of Christ against both Church and State (Les paroles d!un croyant, 1834). His conviction had propelled him swiftly. As Sainte-Beuve, a sympathetic critic, later wrote: "The word future is magic for him and is his mirage. Never was a man so anxious to be done with it. He despises the little by little, the bit by bit."1™

Swept up in Lamennais's passion and righteous anger, Montalembert and Lacordaire, his collaborators, who had made the ungrateful journey with him to Rome to plead before the Pope, nevertheless had startling reservations. While faithful to that mission, Montalembert had instinctively disapproved of its aura of pilgrimage, and would have preferred the more modern and dignified gesture of letting the dust settle: "Forcing Rome to give an explanation on 152 153 154

Prelot a n d Gallouedec Genuys, eds., Liberalisme catholique, p . 8 3 . Ibid., pp. 81-82. C.-A. d e Sainte-Beuve, "Affaires d e R o m e " (1836), in Portraits contemporains (5 vols., Paris, 1881-1882), 1, 260-261.

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questions on which it had allowed free debate for more than a year was at least a singular pretension."155 Of Lamennais's apostasy he wrote: "If I am not mistaken, he is the only example in the history of Christianity of a man who, having in himself the stuff of the most redoubtable heretic, could not carry along with him the least of his acolytes."156 Lacordaire - who had suggested the appeal to Rome in the first place-was harsher: "his absolutist politics had always repelled me; his theology gave me cause to fear that his orthodoxy was uncertain." 157 Not only did "Monsieur Feli" seem absolutist to Lacordaire in retrospect; he also seemed prideful: "[his] philosophical system... by establishing an infallible authority other than the Church, delivers rebellious spirits from their solitude, and yet opens the door to a new Protestantism."158 That new authority was the human race: Lacordaire wished it honored, not infallible, certainly not Protestant. The meteoric passage of Lamennais from the scene, repugned and excommunicated, forced the liberal Catholics to make a new start. It seems clear that Lamennais, great heretic as he may have been, was only a "liberal de conjoncture," while transiting, however artfully, from theocratic to social democratic positions: this is why he is not taken up more thoroughly here. Yet he was undeniably the animating force of PAvenir, out of whose spectacular pages come all the theory later contained in liberal Catholicism, sparing it the need to make its new start a fresh one. We are now able to make some precisions about the structure of liberal Catholicism, calling to our aid a number of texts that have dealt with this problem of definition.159 Obviously, what we have in mind is a political definition. It does not mean, for Montalembert and others, that they were liberal in theology, and it could only mean that they were mildly liberal in ecclesiology. If one accepts that men like Montalembert and Lacordaire were anxious to create relationships between modern society and Catholic practice that would be far more than charades of a veiled hostility, that becomes a point of departure. It is necessary to raise this question, not because Catholics generally regard this world as a "veil of tears" or that they have not flourished in public life, but 155 157 158 159

156 Montalembert, "Le Pere Lacordaire," p. 424. Ibid., p. 438. Langle d e G a r y a n d M o n n e r e t , Lacordaire, p . 47. Lacordaire, Oeuvres, v n , 150. The most thorough treatment, by far, is C. Constantin's article "Liberalisme catholique," Dictionnaire de theologie catholique (19 vols., Paris, 1903-1972), ix, 506-628.

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because Catholicism is here presumed to be unsympathetic to the increasingly individualistic society that emerged under the etiquette of liberalism from a questioning of traditional authority. Time and again, the Church managed to "marry its time"; but was this time not a moment for resistance and retrenchment? Quite surely, amid frequent conciliations of their age, Lacordaire and Montalembert shared these reservations. Flailing his favorite cat, Lacordaire can thunder: "Are we anything but degenerate sons of Protestantism, victims of an exalted reason, enfeebled by the absence of all authority." 160 And in milder tones Montalembert can accuse "that individualism which will soon make all government impossible, and that materialism which tends to transform this world into a steam engine." 161 Numerous other passages like this could be found. But what emerges generally from these writings is a desire for accommodation without disgrace and a wish, like Tocqueville's, to bring the "friends of liberty" and the "friends of religion" together, not in some ill-conceived Gallican synthesis based on coercion but in a perspicuous division of labor. This theme reaches its highest pitch in Montalembert's speech at Malines in 1863: " I even claim to establish that Catholicism has nothing to fear from liberal democracy and that it has everything to hope from the development of the liberties contained in it." 162 There can be no doubt that Montalembert here shares a faith in the future inspired not just by his religion, but by the historical - in that specific sense anti-rationalist tendencies of secular thought. To reach that position was in some way to return to the original program of PAvenir, but in a soberer and more tested mood, deepened by political experience and probably influenced by the writings of Tocqueville. Still, a striking ambiguity remained for the Catholic in politics - not evidently so harshly borne by other citizens. This was not the generalized problem of favoring what was thought healthy in modern society and repudiating what was not; for few thinkers of any caliber were completely in love with their century. Rather, it was the supremacy of Christian belief and redemption over all other goals. Montalembert always called himself "un catholique avant tout," and we cannot doubt that, in his case, 160 161

162

L a c o r d a i r e , " D i s c o u r s sur la loi d e l'histoire," Oeuvres, v n , 2 7 1 . Montalembert, "Des rapports de PEglise catholique et du gouvernement de Juillet," Oeuvres, iv, 281-282. Q u o t e d in Prelot a n d Gallouedec Genuys, eds., Liberalisme catholique, p . 232.

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and those of his friends, the matter was to fit liberalism into a Catholic frame of reference, not the opposite.163 How could this be done? It could, I will argue, be done sincerely and perhaps effectively, but with the bias stated above. We will not find Montalembert declaring with Constant: " For forty years I have defended the same principle, liberty in everything, in philosophy, in literature, in industry, in politics: and by liberty I mean the triumph of individuality."164 What Montalembert says is: " I claim only that, among most Christian peoples, and in the present state of the world, liberty is a good, a relative and not an absolute good. For except in what regards the laws directly established and revealed by God, I hold that in everything the absolute is the enemy of truth as it is adapted to human infirmity."165 Montalembert goes on to argue that any absolute not divine, even absolute liberty, is the enemy of truth, but that liberty, properly understood, is, "wherever it exists," the enemy of arbitrary power. We can see thus how his principles agree and disagree with Constant's more spacious manifesto. Montalembert's view (here closer to Tocqueville) is also very different from Constant's thesis that religious perfectibility accompanies and is inseparable from social perfectibility. While "the constitution of the Church" is undoubtedly shaped by the slow accretion of tradition, its central revealed dogmas are not subject to being "perfected": hence, what one has is a "rapprochement between the unchanging truths of the ancient religion and all that is best in the tendencies of the new society."166 Fixity and tendencies. Finally, as regards the separation of Church and State - establishing their reciprocal independence - Montalembert has the powerful feeling that the state is in the stronger position to bargain, and always with the same disposition to put the Church at a disadvantage.167 This is in part because, unlike secular liberals, he continues to see regnum and sacerdotium as two poles of society - and does not really conceive of the Catholic religion as something privatized and "civil," even though it gains much by being "free." 168 163 164

165 166 167 168

See J a m e s C. Finley, The Liberal Who Failed ( W a s h i n g t o n a n d Cleveland, 1968), p . 116. Benjamin Constant, preface to Melanges de litterature et de politique (1829), m M a r c e l G a u c h e t , ed., Constant, De la liberte chez les modernes (Paris, 1980), p . 519. M o n t a l e m b e r t , Des intents catholiques, p . 71. M o n t a l e m b e r t , " A v a n t - P r o p o s , " Oeuvres, 1, xxvii. "Du devoir des catholiques dans les elections," ibid., iv, 411. The point is forcefully made by Falloux, "Parti catholique," p. 41: "L'eglise n'est point une secte, c'est une famille et une patrie. Quant on veut la servir a son exemple et selon ses vues, c'est l'expansion qu'on ambitionne pour elle."

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The problem of "perfectionism," raised earlier in the case of Vinet, comes into focus even more sharply with Montalembert's liberalism. He is not unaware of this issue, and tries to address it frankly in Des intents catholiques, which, written in the wake of the collapse of the Second Republic, is scarcely charitable toward an "old and false liberalism that ruled over intelligences for sixty years, so often invoking and flattering the noblest and most legitimate interests of the human heart so as to exploit them for envy, jealousy, and untruth." 169 Montalembert exults bitterly: " I t harbored the insolent pretension of overthrowing Catholicism and then replacing it; but now it is itself overthrown, replaced, buried." 170 What has been the triumph of 1789? Louis-Napoleon.171 Yet Catholicism, seemingly once in the grave, has risen in the nineteenth century, in Ireland, in Belgium, in Holland, and in Germany; and to what is this due? To liberty: "political liberty has been the safeguard and instrument of Catholic regeneration in Europe... the more easy and complete where liberty has been the more serious and sincere."172 What liberty does Montalembert have in mind? It is a somewhat stiffer version of what Tocqueville means by "balanced, regulated liberty": a liberty regulated, contained, ordered, tempered, a liberty honest and moderate) liberty as it has been proclaimed, sought after, conquered, or dreamed of by great hearts and great nations in all times, in antiquity and since the redemption; a liberty which, far from hostile to authority, cannot exist without it, but which, if it were to vanish, would instantly cause authority to lapse into despotism.173

There follows a warning to the Church not to neglect liberty, to which it owes so much; 174 and not to ignore rights, which are mentioned at least thirty times in the Bible.175 Catholics have been historically wrong to embrace absolutism:176 for all the greatness of Bossuet, Fenelon is to be preferred.177 While Catholics were fighting for the liberty of the Church (i.e. education, charitable institutions, orders, meetings in council) according to a right established by the Charter of 1830, what accusation was thrown at them by the July politicians? "You demand this only because you are the weaker party; the day you become the stronger one, the masters, you will renounce it and refuse 169 171 174 177

M o n t a l e m b e r t , Des intents catholiques, p . 60. 172 Ibid., p. 61. Ibid., p. 69. 175 Ibid., p. 97. Ibid., p. 89. Ibid., p . 72.

173 176

17 ° Ibid. Ibid., p. 70. Ibid., p. 93.

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it to those who gave it to you!" 178 This charge Montalembert denies: "As far as it is within me, I want to preserve the Catholic cause from such shame; I protest against the scandal of such a defection, for myself and for all those who, like me, as humble defenders of the Church, have been resolute and devoted friends of liberty, and remain so." 179 Such is Montalembert's reply to the forfeits of "perfectionism." Beneath his judgment of the issue we cannot go — either for him or for other liberal Catholics — except to comment that he appears to have believed, albeit conservatively, in both the specific and general utility of freedom; that this conviction was redoubled in the speeches at Malines; and that the Church of 1870 took this weapon out of his hands. In the final analysis, liberal Catholicism was far too weak (far weaker than Montalembert thought) to be put to this test; and it should not be judged by other Catholic positions or by the Church—State antagonisms of the Third Republic. Other " perfectionisms " of class, party, and nation were not lacking in French society. We should not, however, fail to see that liberal Catholicism, despite the full panoply of "liberties" that it inherited from the platform of FAvenir, was largely involved with the issue of a "free Church," and that when an organized "parti catholique" arose in 1848 to contest, under universal male suffrage, the elections to the republican Constituent Assembly, it was a single-issue party. Montalembert had anticipated the strategy in advising Catholic censitarian voters in 1846 "to research and find out about each candidate as a man, not so much the party he is connected to." 180 For all that, Montalembert was not enthusiastic about mass electoral politics, accustomed as he was to a more elite way of persuasion. Not so Alfred de Falloux, the legitimist, who was perfectly blunt about the reason for the "parti catholique" of 1848: "it was born from the refusal of liberty of education." 181 Those elections produced, according to Falloux, only about 200 out of 900 deputies in the Constituent who were prepared to vote for " enseignement libre."182 Presumably some of these men felt as Tocqueville had, at times, during the preceding years: " I think that the faults of the clergy are infinitely less dangerous to liberty than its enslavement."183 178 180 181 183

179 ibid., P . 105. ibid., P . 108. " D u devoir des catholiques," Oeuvres, iv, 413. 182 Falloux, "Parti catholique," p. 12. Ibid., p. 33. Tocqueville to Corcelle, 15 November 1843, OC, xv, 74.

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However, it was not any intimate connection between religion and liberty that swayed many of the deputies and their leaders toward granting greater privileges in education for the Church; it was the matter of society and property that afflicted them. Thiers is supposed to have implored Falloux to take the portfolio of Public Instruction in the first Barrot government. "Cousin! Cousin!" he is quoted as saying, "have you understood the lesson we have been taught? The abbe [Dupanloup] is right; yes, yes, we were fighting against justice and virtue, and we owe them [the Catholics] reparation." 184 Victor Cousin, for his part, declared in 1850: "Yes, that is true, I no longer have, with respect to the clergy, the jealousies and suspicions that I had two years ago." 185 Secular Orleanists who were far more indifferent to religious liberty than Guizot or Salvandy were now pleading for that "discipline" in the education of the young that might forestall the terrors of social revolution in years to come. Liberal Catholics were just as willing defenders of property as Tocqueville, Thiers, Barrot, and the like. The Catholic view of property was not unblushingly bourgeois (it was more about land and patrimony), but it was solid. As Lacordaire put it: "patrie, family, liberty, religion, all the great human interests have their first and surest foundation in property. Whoever attacks it attacks the whole human edifice; and whoever defends it defends with it everything that sustains our nature, elevates, consoles, and saves it."186 In revolutionary times, persons holding such views were valuable, and the teachings of their priests were not to be despised — or so Thiers and others were inclined to think. On his part, Montalembert told the Assembly, with a swipe at Cousin: " I know of only one way to make people who are not property owners believe in private property. You have to make them believe in God, not the vague God of eclecticism but the God of the catechism."187 The old adversaries understood each other perfectly. Catholic educational policy did not get inscribed in the Constitution of 1848; but a compromise hammered out between laics and Christians passed into law in 1850. It was called the loi Falloux, after the minister - ornament of the salon of Madame Swetchine who presided over its construction. Among the heroes of the enterprise were MM. Montalembert and Thiers. Thiers not only 184 186 187

185 G. Weill, Liberalisme catholique, p. 481. Ibid., p . 4 8 3 . L a c o r d a i r e , " D i s c o u r s sur le droit et le devoir d e la p r o p r i e t e , " Oeuvres, v n , 217. Montalembert, "De la liberte d'enseignement dans la constitution," Oeuvres, m, 88.

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guided the bill deftly through committee, but intervened decisively in the legislative debate: "Messieurs, I believe in this conciliation; I believe in it because, after living a whole year with the representatives of diverse interests, reading their hearts and minds, I saw that it was possible to get along, to plan together, to put an end to deplorable wars between common friends of society... My hand is in theirs, it will stay there, I hope, for the common defense of this society."188 For the Catholics, the "loi Falloux" was half a loaf; it gave them no privilege in the university.189 Veuillot's VUnivers attempted to estrange Catholics from the measure. But the odd coalition prevailed; and France received a law that would remain in vigor until 1940. When Falloux travelled to Malines to address the Congress in 1867 (a fateful time), he recalled these moments to his listeners, and held up three names for praise, two familiar, and one not, in such gatherings: Montalembert, Bishop Dupanloup - and Thiers, " a man who took a courageous and profound look at all the scars of society." There was prolonged applause.190 The "loi Falloux" was the greatest victory and high-water mark of liberal Catholic policy; but it had been enacted under a republic where many Catholics felt less than at home, and only with the opportunistic aid of former opponents. After this, the "parti catholique" tended to disaggregate, or, better, retreat to its barracks. It was not particularly well suited for plebiscitary politics. It had, however, fought strenuously, and with some success, to have its own cherished "liberties" recognized and enshrined in the common law of France, putting politics on notice that Catholics were willing to play by the rules of a liberal constitution. Montalembert expressed this clearly when he argued that to oppose liberalism meant "to make war on the life's breath of the nineteenth century... the only political form possible in contemporary society."191 There remained, in the realm of political theology, that other vague, but imposing, goal of " a free Church in a free State," seen by Montalembert in 1863 through the Tocquevillian optic of inevitable democracy. "The more one is a democrat," he declared, "the more he ought to be a Christian: for the fervent and practical worship of God made man is the indispensable counterweight to that perpetual 188

Falloux, "Parti catholique," pp. 62-63. 189 p o r t j i e t e x t Q£ t j i e « j Q - F a l l o u x , " s e e p r e l o t a n d G a l l o u e d e c G e n u y s , e d s . , catholique, p p . 1 7 9 - 1 8 3 . 190 F a l l o u x , " C o n g r e s d e M a l i n e s , 1 8 6 7 , " i n Discours et melanges, 1, 4 0 5 - 4 0 6 . 191 Montalembert, "La presse catholique en Italie," Oeuvres, vi, 87.

Liberalisme

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tendency of democracy to install the worship of man believing himself to be God."192 This was not so much Montalembert's solution to the riddle of political legitimation in modern society after two monarchies, a republic, and an imperial dictatorship, who could solve that riddle?-as it was his attempt to balance two immense forces, one old and one new, in a political psychology. But as he spoke these words, he still smarted from Cavour's appropriation of his slogan in unifying Italy against the Church. "No, no," he had written him in October i860, "you are not liberty, you are only violence!" 193 A year later, under the incessant attacks of Veuillot and his enemies in the papacy, his very notion would seem like a baroud (Fhonneur.

In truth, except in those confused moments of the Second Republic, Catholicism had it scarcely in its power either to counterbalance the state in France or to furnish it with legitimacy and morale: the papacy itself was in such disorderly flux. And it was precisely then that another contender or, as Guizot had hoped, collaborator, Cousin's eclectic philosophy with its educational substructure, was fatally wounded.194 A liberal civil religion seemed ungraspable. If Catholicism per se was politically implausible, that was certainly true of liberal Catholicism, which had mostly been a polite intellectual movement, genuinely absorbed by and in dialogue with the contemporary ferment of ideas and international in connection, but, the "loi Falloux" notwithstanding, totally unable to compete with myths of society and nation in the education of the French and the underpinning of their loyalty.195 " 0 altitudoV Madame Swetchine could declare when Lacordaire preached in Notre-Dame; 196 and " 0 altitudoV Lacordaire could respond to her when, in 1844, he perceived that the Church was accepting "le temps present."197 But these were limited effusions. Falloux discloses the fact of the matter when he writes: "Society is returning to religion, it is true; but where is the beginning of the return ? From the heights: and thus it should begin, if it is to remain effective and durable. Yes, the minds of the elite incline toward faith."198 They 192

194 195

196 198

Speech at Malines, 1864. Text cited in Prelot and Gallouedec Genuys, eds., Liberalisme 193 cathotique, p. 231. M o n t a l e m b e r t , Oeuvres, iv, 657. See t h e following chapter. See Michel Despland, "A Case of Christians Shifting Their Moral Allegiance: France, 1790— 1914," in Journal of the American Academy of Religion^ 52, 4, 683—685. 197 Cited in G. Weill, Liberalisme catholique, p. 11. Ibid., p. 217. Falloux, "Parti catholique," p. 128.

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may have been superior minds, but they would not become missionaries to the nation. Thus, like so many other liberal intellectual elements whose voices had sounded in 1814—1848, addressing the gravest public issues, the Catholics also commenced their retreat to more fortified positions. Some noble moments remained to them. One of these was Lacordaire's reception at the Academie Franchise to occupy the chair of the deceased Tocqueville. It is not hard to guess what portrait of Tocqueville the Dominican father presented in his speech: a liberal Catholic Tocqueville - a man who regretted the great destructions of time with many sighs, but pressed onward to seed new furrows;199 a man who, Montesquieu's equal in genius, had never been a skeptic, never had to repent for writing the Persian Letters'™ a man who loved god as a Christian and as an eminent man of letters. Unlike some liberals, Tocqueville knew his duties to common humanity and had never set himself above the people: "he did not see in the smashing victory of the French bourgeoisie the last word of the future." 201 And if M. de Tocqueville loved the common people, he was loved by them in return; for "on his estate [he] practiced to the letter the words of the Gospel: ' Let him among you who wishes to be first be the servant of all 5 ." 202 America was for Tocqueville "the prophecy and advance-guard of the future state of Christian nations," based on an equality of sacred origin, accepted by all.203 But he saw equality and liberty as inseparable, and he feared that, in Europe, license and demagogy would destroy their connection.204 He had died with his predictions justified, while leaving his "new political science" to instruct others.205 The lessons that Europeans needed to learn from Tocqueville were to believe in God and the Gospel, and not in " a fictitious humanity created in a dream," 206 to be like the Americans, "who cannot understand a man without personal religion or a citizen without public religion."207 Tocqueville's love of liberty (moral, religious, national, ancestral, humble) and his hatred of servitude were his outstanding features.208 After recalling and praising Tocqueville's later writing and public career, Lacordaire concluded: "Death brought him the gift of love. 199

200 203 206

Lacordaire, "Discours d e reception a PAcademie franchise," Oeuvres, v m , 325.

Ibid., p. 327. Ibid., pp. 332-333. Ibid., p. 338.

201

Ibid., p. 328. Ibid., p. 334. Ibid., p. 339. 204

207

202

Ibid., p. 329. Ibid., p. 335. Ibid., p. 343.

205 208

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He received the God who visited him as an old friend, and, touched to tears by his presence, at last free of the world, he forgot what he had been, his name, his services, his regrets and his desires... keeping only the virtues he had gained from his passage on earth." 209 Tocqueville would probably have found some of this moving, some of it mildly droll, the last part in error. But he would have found the symbolism of the occasion intriguingly vulgar. For it had been stage-managed that Guizot, the Protestant, would receive Dom Lacordaire, the priest, to fill the chair of the greatest political writer of the age. Miraculously, there was no Cousinite to complete the ballet. These were the kinds of affairs that Guizot adored: he had also given the welcoming speech for Montalembert. The galleries were full of knowing spectators; Empress Eugenie and members of the court were there. Although society outside the walls remained troubled, the noblest part of the Republic of Letters declared its unity, dignity, and morale.210 209 210

Ibid., P . 349. The harmony of the Republic of Letters was fragile: shortly after this, Felix Dupanloup, the liberal bishop of Orleans, declared that he would refuse to attend sessions of the Academy if Littre, an atheist, were elected (as he later was).

CHAPTER 4

Philosophy as civil religion

I. HOW DOGMAS BEGIN! JOUFFROY, COUSIN, DAMIRON

In 1824, the eclectic philosopher Theodore Jouffroy published his memorable essay on the anatomy and pathology of dogmatism ("Comment les dogmes finissent"). First, Jouffroy argues, dogmas take shape because they are believed true for plausible and, within the age's mandated intelligence, verifiable reason.1 Later, the foundations of convictiqn change: faith cedes to authority, and is transformed into habit. The dogma rules only in appearance, however, for no one can exactly say why it should be observed. At this point, a spirit of critical inquiry arises. It is not at first hostile to the dogma, but merely searches for some living spark of justification in it. When it finds only corruptions of the truth, indolence of regard, and the play of ignorance and interest, it loses respect for the dogma, judging it worthy of contempt. A new faith will now be preparing to rise on the ruins of the old one, "lively because it is the awakening of human intelligence after ages of slumber... lively, in fine, because it is felt that it contains the seeds of a revolution."2 "The people who slumbered in indifference" are thus alerted to doubt; but "while reason draws them away from the dogma, and the love of novelty inclines them to skepticism, a still stronger influence holds them back, the power of custom and veneration for the past." 3 Now, "the men who govern in the name of the ancient faith," but have lost their zeal for it, threaten physical force and even capital punishment against the innovators. The spirit of inquiry clashes with blind authority: the blood of the first martyrs is shed.4 This involves the people in the cause of the persecuted; a "power of public opinion" is created that first becomes indignant and later 1

3

Theodore Jouffroy, "How Dogmas Come to an End," in George Ripley, ed., Specimens of 2 Foreign Standard Literature (2 vols., Boston, 1838), 11, 121. Ibid., p. 123. 4 Ibid., p. 124. Ibid., p. 125.

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belligerent.5 The old dogma is forced to defend its credentials with a species of reason before the tribunal of opinion, but its arguments amount to sophistry and insult. It loses all power to persuade, either by eminence or reasoned debate, and becomes ridiculous.6 "Then commences the epoch of pleasantries," multiplying the rage of the defenders of the old order. Since the threatened "revolution of ideas will introduce a complete revolution of interest," all whose authority is in jeopardy combine from fear, certain that they must prevail or perish. Their force is strengthened because, as yet, their adversaries have chiefly confronted them with criticism and mockery, not the power of a new faith. Although they will be beaten in the long run, they gain a false sense of superiority, for " the mind... deprived of one belief and now [clinging] to none, feels a void in this perfect independence": its feeble nature "cannot support the burden of doubt." 7 "Faith," Jouffroy declares, "is a desire of our souls, because we know that there is such a thing as truth. Doubt is a state which can never be agreeable, except as a negation of false belief, from which we feel that we are emancipated... [But], error being destroyed, we wish for truth." 8 It is not easy to see what this new truth might be: "A thousand systems spring up... The party of truth becomes the prey of faction, while the opposite party gains a compactness and strength by the unity of interest to which a common fear has given birth." In the midst of this contretemps, the ordinary people feel buffeted. Truth is their "essential want." It is no longer to be found in the old dogma; but no higher truth is to be learned from their new friends, who "have evidently become no less selfish and ambitious than their adversaries."9 Where is there any fixed point of belief to rally to? This misery of doubt hands weapons to the hypocritical defenders of the old dogma who, making their last stand, appeal to interest and demoralize a society "which they can no longer retain by the authority of truth and duty." 10 The people become desperate and indifferent: without truth and faith there is "indifference for all dogmas and all parties."11 Only selfishness remains intact. The tenants of the old order are now complacent. Since it seems that all faith has fled, indifference bolsters their power, even if they are unable to regain their earlier "empire over opinion." At length 5 8 11

Ibid., pp. 125-126. Ibid., pp. 128-129. Ibid., p. 131.

6

Ibid., pp. 126-127. Ibid., p. 129.

9

7 10

Ibid., p. 128. Ibid., p. 130.

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they prepare to take revenge on the new spirit and to plot a despotism "as jealous and exclusive as terror itself."12 Now, "there is nothing consoling, nothing which recalls the dignity of human nature, either in the dominant party or in society." "The observer trembles," Jouffroy writes, "...and despairs of the people and the truth, which the people alone by the support of their power can reinstate in authority." 13 And if the same observer turns his gaze toward the rulers of this corrupt community, he finds "terrible masters " and " no hope of seeing so many chains broken, or any limit to such a fearful progression of despotism, degradation, and enormous abuse." 14 Yet this situation is paradoxically described by Jouffroy as " a salutary and final crisis, which precedes the recovery of the social body." For Providence has its ways: "Take courage, you, whom Providence raises up in these wretched days. A germ of future life is fermenting in the bosom of this corruption, and that which you regard as death is only a transformation."15 This plaintive figure of crisis and cure is a commonplace of the turn of the nineteenth century. Jouffroy's formula is especially reminiscent of Fichte's concept of "the age of completed sinfulness," whose particular property was to harbor both absolute corruption and rebirth; 16 as Fichte wrote to F. H.Jacobi in 1804: " I am of good cheer; for I know that new life can come only from complete decay." 17 The generation whose battle against the ancient dogma had taken the form of destructiveness had now passed away. Its skepticism had corroded the chains of oppression and superstition; but it had promoted "imbecility" and "factionalism" as well as "noble services."18 It had not fought in vain; now it was to be followed by offspring who, totally disabused of the old dogma, were also persuaded that it could not be exorcised by mere scorn, that a new city of faith has to be built "with enthusiasm, with conviction, with resolution."19 These men are the "elect apostles [of an age of renewal], and in their hands is placed the salvation of the world." They are the agents of Providence: " They... recognize the call... to investigate the truth, to discover the new doctrine... which will fill 12 15 16

13 14 Ibid., p. 132. Ibid., pp. 132-133. Ibid., p. 133. Ibid. See Johann Gottlieb Fichte, Characteristics of the Present Age (Grundsiige des gegenwdrtigen £eitalters), William Smith trans., The Popular Writings ofJ. G. Fichte (2 cols., London, 1889),

11, 28-30. 17

Fichte to Jacobi, 31 march 1804, in H. Schulz, ed., Fichtes Briefwechsel (2 vols., Leipzig, 18 19 1925), 11 381-382. Jouffroy, "Dogmas," p. 135. Ibid., p. 135.

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the void left by the removal of the ancient faith, and terminate the lawless interregnum of force."20 That will be their "holy work." This providential errand belongs to a small number of souls, "in seclusion from the world," but only withdrawn so as better to march forth again. For them, the "secret voice, which speaks of liberty, of truth, of virtue... will produce, when the time arrives... rapid conversions, by which an unlooked for multitude of proselytes will be made to throng around the standard of the holy cause." 21 The great moral, political, and religious truths, "freshly manifested to a small number," will create the indispensable conditions for a "new faith... that should take possession of society." Its propagators, whose souls are ablaze with enthusiasm and love, are no longer mere men; no longer even just philosophers (although it is clear that they are not the moines d* Occident of M. de Montalembert, they have a keen sense of faith). They are, in fact, prophets, replicas of the truth, "truth personified."22 In time, "all will be apostles or proselytes, soldiers or chiefs of the new faith." ^ht force des choses brings the new gospel ever closer to fulfillment. The ruin of the old dogma is complete; the implanting of a successor faith, by a collaboration of man's free will and the design of Providence, is irrevocably launched. "How Dogmas Come to an End" might just as well have been titled "How Dogmas Start"; for it is both a pathology of faithJouffroy's own - and a summons to the inspiration of a new dogma - liberty - in powerful but programmatically vague terms. Even less precisely, it is a social dogma to rescue the breakdown of authority in modern France. For Jouffroy's evangelism, his formula for the young liberals of the Restoration, is hazy when compared to the punctilious rites of Fourierist phalansteries or Saint-Simonian cenacles. It has no striking originality as a philosophy of history, for it reproduces broad themes found in writers as diverse as Chateaubriand, Saint-Simon, Novalis, Hegel (notably his "Enlightenment and Faith" section of the Phenomenology of Spirit), and, as pointed out, Fichte, to mention but a few. And clearly, despite the title, Jouffroy is not really proposing a theory about the origin and career of dogmas, wherever and whenever. He is writing a poetic case-study about the dogma, the Western European spiritual experience, cast in a version of Romantic Zeitgeist and Whig historiography- "history as the story of liberty." Like other, more or less contemporary writers, Jouffroy believed that (1) history was 20

Ibid., P . 137.

21

ibid., P . 139.

22

Ibid., P . 140.

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progressive, Europecentric, and non-reproducible; (2) historical impulsion was the work of "civilizations," fundamentally defined by their religious (i.e. dogmatic) ethos; and (3) the Christian civilization - based on the (also Saint-Simonian) triad of France, England, and Germany - was alone productive and destined to prevail in the saecula saeclorum.

Distinguished not so much by novelty or erudition as by passion, Jouffroy's essay is a classic precis of the dogma and agenda of liberal spiritualism, floating between reason and history, between filial attachments to the Enlightenment and complaints about its lack of depth. That declaration of dogma by the "new generation" can be classified under six major heads: (1) a sense of providential history ordered by a supreme intelligence (historicized deism) but enacted by human striving; (2) a dialectic of "critical" and "organic" (or constructive) periods through which providential design is made manifest; (3) a conviction that the age of the French Revolution is an epochal turning point in the entire sequence; as Fichte put it: "Alte Zeit" and "Neue Zeit." 23 (4) the approval of a liberalized, diversified society, requiring a new and difficult legitimation consonant with the new-won liberties; (5) the idea of a new calling of intellectually and morally superior persons (compare Coleridge's "clerisy") who, by their action of withdrawal and return, speculation and action, will be the evangelists of the new age; and (6) a general acknowledgment that such persons will be philosophers, but not like the philosophes or honnetes hommes of the eighteenth century, for they will be, at the same time, artistically and religiously inclined "prophets," bearers of a new moral culture neither despotic nor vulgar, not simply "clever," and neither divorced from society nor in flight from "progress." Although, in the sense described here, "culture" is certainly wider than mere "politics" (prophets are not statesmen, nor do they wish to be), Jouffroy and kindred writers of the Restoration constantly raise the issue of how culture legitimates politics via opinion, and what the authoritative shape of opinion should look like. While that problem is surely not confined to liberal political thought, it receives specially delicate treatment there because the dogma of liberty is more than a simple faith in "open society," more than a trivialization of politics. It is a new field of action for "apostles and proselytes." 23

Cf. J. G. Fichte, Staatslehre of 1813, in I. H. Fichte, ed., Fichtes Sdmmtliche Werke (8 vols., Berlin, 1845-1846), iv, 4976°.

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The path-breaking labor of the eighteenth century (its Voltaires, Montesquieus and Turgots) is endorsed as a legacy; so, too, is the clear message of the Enlightenment — though not of Rousseau — that the wise must guide the masses toward felicity (as we saw in the second chapter). The Revolution of 1789, insofar as it could be grasped as the outcome of enlightenment, is similarly applauded, though, where possible, with "faith" discreetly added. Still, these positions are now nuanced by reservations, some indebted to counter-revolutionary thinkers like Burke, Bonald, and Ballanche. One would not want to argue that Jouffroy — or Guizot or Remusat - conceived a "dialectic of the Enlightenment" as that term would be used more than a century later; but they are no longer the pupils of Condorcet or Godwin. The protest against the eighteenth century is less politically explicit than the endorsement. But when Jouffroy argues that that century was too "clever," too "dry," too critical, he means that it was "unapostolic." The true balancing act of history requires enough dogma to create order, and the spiritual impulse is not unlike Lacordaire's revived Dominicanism (even though Cousin had words of scorn about "Dominicans in the nineteenth century"). 24 A society sunk in self-interest needed to be respiritualized, just as the sanguinary, though idealistic, appetites of Jacobins and carbonari needed to be put down. To establish a "juste milieu" of faith, a flourishing of prophets neither serving discredited oracles nor coming from cafe and populist politics, meant having an adequate myth for a world at the same time liberated and left bereft. That myth and its prophets would, in effect, come from the Napoleonic university, now unshackled from its religious servitudes. Their mission would not simply be to propagate 1789, but also to neutralize the part of modernity that had been founded on destructiveness - on materialism, sensationalism, and "encyclopedism." The new dogma therefore attacked some of its own ancestry, the brittle, agnostic part. Its myth could not be Christian -for Christianity was deeply implicated in the failure of the old dogma - but it would have to be built with an appreciation of "Christian civilization": prudentially, because the Revolution had injured, but scarcely killed, Christian impulses in France; intellectually, because the new culture needed a common faith to be reborn. Some intellectuals, like Jouffroy, Cousin, Madame de Stael, 24

Victor Cousin, Defense de Vuniversiteet de la philosophie (Paris, 1844), p . 317.

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and later Tocqueville — in their different ways — were hospitable to a religious entente, even if they no longer accepted church dogmas and were embarrassed to come too close to the providential lessons of sacred history. Others, like Royer-Collard and Lanjuinais, remained on the margin of the traditional faith, but aspolitiques. And they were, in turn, surrounded by more radical quasi-Christian prophets like Leroux, Buchez, and the later Lamennais. Above all, there was the swivelling beacon of Chateaubriand's Genie du christianisme. In university circles the myth, at the same time a manifesto and a compromise, was framed around a metaphysics drawn from a broad but selective ingurgitation of previous philosophies. First experimentally, and then more belligerently, it was called "eclecticism." Its political significance, to which we shall return, was, first of all, to destroy the lingering complicity of Throne and Altar; and, second, to stop social upheaval by mixing the sedative of historicism with a conservative interpretation of the content of the "moral law." Through teaching the philosophy of history and the history of philosophy, eclecticism aspired to communicate the best that had been thought. Its technical failure, perhaps, was that it did not consistently lend the best of thought to that best of thoughts. We shall presently scrutinize the premises of eclecticism. But before proceeding to the specific ways by which it proposed a dogma to replace the old one, it is important to grasp how, while preserving the liberationist impulses of the eighteenth century, it fought that century's mainstream of English and French philosophy as a prelude to its own work of liberal moral edification. This is well depicted in a lengthy account by Jean-Philibert Damiron, who also taught at the Sorbonne. Damiron's account of the "siecle des lumieres," written after the heroic period of eclecticism, declares that eighteenth-century philosophy "began with skepticism and ended with materialism; skepticism against spiritualism worked to the advantage of materialism; and materialism in turn begat fatalism, egoism, and atheism." 25 Damiron attributes these woes to the "philosophy of sensation," while courteously sparing Voltaire from responsibility, and exonerating Rousseau, Montesquieu, and Turgot.26 Deploring the lack of religion in that impious age, Damiron 25

J.-P. Damiron, Memoires pour servir a Vhistoirc de la philosophic au XVIIF siecle (2 vols., Paris, 26 1858), 1, ii. Ibid., p. v.

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nevertheless praises its spirit of self-governing liberty and " a remaining portion of Christianity," finding these at the base of the most generous impulses of the Revolution. 27 For, beyond the materialism of the Enlightenment, there was " a belief, a faith, among the reasons for acting that God, in his wisdom, places in men so as better to guide them... The principle of liberty, which, despite causing blind passions and thoroughly detestable crimes, has not come into the world for the perdition, but for the salvation... of a renovated society."28 Despite the fact that the eighteenth century was "religious in its way," having endorsed human liberty and given mankind the message of "homo homini res sacra" instead of "homo homini lupus," it had not paid sufficient heed to "les plus facheux de ses caracteres" and "les plus grossieres de ses consequences."29 Unfortunately, these errors can be reborn: Damiron's mission is to warn against them and to expose those "false and dangerous teachings."30 It is the teachings, not the men, of the eighteenth century that deserve censure: Damiron's history will serve philosophy by disclosing the undoubted truths of "God, the soul, and liberty; duty and immortality." 31 History as portico to philosophy, incisively demonstrating the conscious content of metaphysical truths, was part of the method of eclecticism. There was a more practical, but still metaphysically connected, corollary. In itself that corollary was not strikingly native to eclecticism - we find variants of it in Chateaubriand and SaintSimon; in Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel; in Coleridge; in Emerson and Channing: that religion and philosophy, properly understood, are partners, having a common evolution and destiny, their difference being that they express different modes of the truth, for different needs, situations, and classes of society; that their alliance, however construed, underwrites moral and political stability in modern life. In France alone, it seems (unless we include Hegel's important decade in Berlin), this idea had some chance of programmatic fruition - in the July Monarchy. For, with the Orleans regime and the circumstances that installed it, it seemed that eclectic philosophy, too, had triumphed politically. Its founder and generalissimo, Victor Cousin — arguably, together with Guizot and the monarch, one of the three most powerful figures of the time - controlled, as it were, the spiritual propaganda of what many took 27 31

Ibid., p. vi. Ibid., p. xxi.

28

Ibid., p. vii.

29

Ibid., p. x.

30

Ibid.

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to be a less than spiritual political system. But before returning specifically to Cousin, we need some further briefing on the relation of philosophy and religion in post-Revolutionary French society. In the preceding chapter, we explored the perplexities of floating a common faith and morale, a legitimizing agency for the liberal state, on the deceptive buoyancy of traditional religion. Not only was there a deep argument over whether politics needed any ulterior support; there were technical difficulties, ideological rancors, and logical puzzles. Pace Madame de Stael, the libre examen of Protestantism was inadequate to the task: this would have been so even if Protestantism had been abundant, rather than exotic, in France; for it had troubles in republican Switzerland. With Catholicism, the situation was quite different. That majoritarian religion, since time out of mind the arbiter of morals and politics, had been discredited in the new society. Even if a doughty band of conservative liberals, led by Montalembert, had stepped forth to preach conciliation with the new age, they were a small minority with no mass appeal. They were, besides, quite unilaterally concerned with "liberties" that would nourish the Church, not the nation. And if certain Romantics (e.g. Buchez, Quinet) were able to bond revolution and Christianity as partners in an "epoque evangelique," such a Christianity rejected the goals of the "juste milieu," especially its worldliness and "jouissances prives," even its liberal "logic of transcendence," since that seemed, while freeing man from his traditional duties toward his creator, to bind him no more securely than before to those toward his neighbor. Christian politics had, at base, a theocratic logic that jarred against the oligarchic principle of middle-class liberalism. Despite circumstantial bargains, there was no easy entente between the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob and the God of society and opinion. Christianity was not a declared enemy of pluralism; but it was not a pluralism of the marketplace of ideas or of restless social and economic displacement that it favored. As St. Paul had written: "now there are diversities of gifts, but the same Spirit. And there are diversities of administration, but the same Lord." 32 Such diversities presumably did not pass in and out of style, or provide fodder for the rise and fall of political ministries. On the other hand, the spirit of liberalism would seem to have advanced the gospel by freeing the 32

1 Corinthians 12:4.

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human community from all kinds of unjust and immoral servitudes. Liberalism claimed to make men truly "free," gathering up the burden of their earthly redemption from a worn-out and compromised Church. Yet, where its faith was concerned, liberalism was "dry," even skeptical. Romanticism, with not altogether healthy posturings, attempted to join the self-interested individual to the gospel, beauty to truth, the world to eternity. New "churches" appeared, each believing in its mission of reconciling the self to the social order and politics to historical destiny. But, from Theophilanthropy through the Saint-Simonian cults of Bazare and Enfantin to later spiritualistic barriers against positivism and Darwinism, none produced a new messiah or a new civilization. They produced exaltations and despairs of ideology. Amid these currents, liberalism, which was never in France the political or spiritual option of large numbers, appealed to philosophy, a "broad-church" philosophy, a French Athenianism worshipping an unknown god of the few, in tacit control over the revealed God of the many. Of Guizot's "three forces" — Catholicism, Protestantism, and philosophy — the third was nominated to animate the spirituality of liberals; and it found its explicit expression in the language of the Charters of 1814 and 1830. It is tempting, with hindsight, to discredit eclecticism as a hypocritical attempt to invent a power of faith to fit the material interests of the bourgeoisie conquerante.33 It might seem that its spiritualism had been a political soporific. But, even if the world of Guizot, Victor Cousin, and Louis-Philippe is not one's favorite world, it deserves a hearing in terms of its own understanding. The passion of Jouffroy's "Comment les dogmes finissent" - done, it is said, in a single night of blazing effort - can hardly be explained by the excuse that it was to be read by speculators of the Bourse the following day. Rather, it was meant to inspire an emergent intellectual class with a dogma, a passion for ideas, non-material things. And if, like Jouffroy, young liberals could not accept the traditional faith, it is important to grasp the quality of faith they had left. Charles de Remusat has left a detailed account of his credenda, which is of special interest because he was a young collaborator of Le Globe. Remusat, the reader will recall, was the son of an important 33

See Charles Moraze, Les bourgeois conquerantes (Paris, 1957).

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Napoleonic official, later a minister and leading politician in the July Monarchy. He was also an academician and amateur philosopher who wrote works on Anselm, Abelard, Bacon, and the history of British philosophy. He was not precisely an "eclectic," but he was infused by much of that spirit. He writes in his memoirs concerning his religious upbringing: The prints in the [child's] Bible gave me the idea [of God] as a large, imposing old man walking around in Paradise; and when I think of [the book of] Genesis, I still can't help imagining him that way. Perhaps there is a little idolatry at the beginning of all religions. Like all children, I was especially made to see God as the creator of all things. Obviously he had to be obeyed, and the first story told about him left no doubt that he was to be feared. That is practically all that I understood about religion... The name of Jesus Christ had no real meaning for me. A bit by chance I had found out something about his work and life, which I accepted without trying to understand it. I remained for quite a time ignorant about this... The earliest Christian education of those times was a de facto deism.34 Remusat acknowledged that natural religion will always seem more logical to children than Catholic dogma. And it is not, Remusat relates, that his mother and grandmother were indifferent to religion, or proponents of the "parti philosophique." But their religion was one of unexamined faith, without any theological anchorages: "La foi la plus simple, la plus denuee d'examen..." 35 Remusat learned from his early training to "want to be a Christian as cheaply as possible."36 As a result, he says, "without the least lack of faith, I never from my earliest years took religion very seriously in regard to my soul or my thoughts." 37 Later, when he reached his maturity, his moral impulses were centered on the power of reason, "la pensee souveraine maitresse." He reached " a kind of facile Stoicism" that, nevertheless, "helped [him] a lot in life's trials and allowed [him], without great effort, to place himself above a horde of temptations, weaknesses, and sorrows."38 And, as he relates, it propelled him more toward politics than philosophy... specifically toward a politics "in which I wanted to attach liberty to all my activity, my talent, and my ambition." 39 Jouffroy had been the victim of a true religious crisis; nothing in Cousin's life seems to have troubled his totally practical estimation 34 35 38

Charles d e R e m u s a t , Memoires de ma vie (5 vols., e d . C . P o u t h a s , 1958-1967), 1, 2 4 - 2 5 . 36 37 Ibid., p. 25. Ibid., p. 26. Ibid., pp. 36-37. 39 Ibid., p. 302. Ibid.

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of religion; others had different experiences. But this is quite far from the bourgeois cynicism and opportunism that textbooks invite us to discover. O n the other hand, it all leads toward a strategy for the remaking of a philosophy of politics and education suited to rebuffing superstition and closing revolution. Not astonishingly, these new philosophers were casually recruited in France, especially when one compares them to the Germans. For the Church's eviction from the Sorbonne was still recent; and the Ideologues, those survivors of eighteenth-century materialism, still clutched to their salons. While the Revolution had wreaked havoc on all the old institutions of thought, the Empire recomposed them in conditions of severe scrutiny and censorship. In these interstices, eclecticism stirred. The supremacy of sensationalism was vulnerable from a number of angles, not least the spirit of the times. A new cosmopolitanism was replacing the old. Royer-Collard, it is said, became a professor of philosophy after meditating on a treatise by Reid purchased along one of the quais; Cousin, his successor at the Napoleonic Sorbonne, was attracted by a lecture of Laromiguiere that he had attended at the Ecole Normale; the classes of Cousin drew in Jouffroy. Romanticism and historicism furnished a wider milieu: suddenly the French mind was exposed to Reid and Stewart, to Kant, Schelling, and Hegel. Intellectuals of the Restoration, distancing themselves from their ancestors, tried to renew both philosophical and religious thought in the light of immense seachanges that had transpired in the politics of France and Europe. Preserving the Revolution's benefits, while rebuking its asperities, they would make nothing that was entirely new, but they would not be disposed to leave things remotely as they had once been. The mentality of the Old Regime was dead. But a revived faith in the power of ideas, now historically arrayed in a kind of psychological sequence of consciousness, replaced fibers, secretions, nerves, and glands as the stuff of first philosophy. As I have suggested, one feature was a heightened sensitivity to the history of thought in distant centuries and beyond French borders, especially Germany. M a d a m e de StaeTs De VAllemagne was only the most heralded text of this outreach: war and emigration, exile and conquest, all contributed to the new fashion. In his comprehensive essay on " T h e Philosophy of History" (1825), Jouffroy chided "those Germans, who labor with such ardor to decorate the infancy of humanity [i.e. the Orientalists and the folk-

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tale experts] with the concepts of its maturity... [who] carry more genius than good sense into all that they undertake." 40 But was this not also true of a whole French generation that shared the ardor of Chateaubriand's Atala? While on national grounds claiming to surpass the Germans in maturity and clarity, Cousin's eclectic band still owed immense debts to winds of the past, to winds blowing from the North. It was Cousin's powerful presence that launched eclecticism as a kind of philosophical vacuum-cleaner, proposing it as a third way between the dogmas of revelation and revolution, and making it, so to speak, the official doctrine of the "juste mileu." Beginning as a teacher of philosophy at the Ecole Normale in 1813, Cousin succeeded to the chair in the Faculty of Letters just vacated by Royer-Collard in 1815, at the age of twenty-three. From here he would rise, after 1830, to become member of the Academie Franchise (1832), peer of France, founding member of the Academie des Sciences Morales et Politiques, commander of the Legion d'Honneur, director of the Ecole Normale Superiere, member - and dominating figure - of the Conseil Superieur de l'lnstruction Publique, Conseiller d'Etat. Even this brief mention of some of his offices and honors scarcely conveys his power and influence for over a quarter of a century in France. If it was Thiers who said that "the king reigns but does not govern," it was Cousin who truly ruled all French higher education and secondary schools, from the university on down to appointments in the most recessive departments, during the eighteen years of the Orleans monarchy and even beyond, since his policies installed and formed much of the next generation. This dictatorial aristocrat - who, unlike his counterpart Guizot, was flamboyant and mildly bohemian — came from humble Parisian origins: his father was a button-maker and his mother took in washing. His ascent is remarkably similar to that of the German philosopher Fichte, whose father was a rural ribbon-weaver. Like Fichte, Cousin captured the attention of a rich family - he had defended their child against bullies - who paid for his education at the Lycee Charlemagne. There he won most of the prizes, and was rapidly promoted to the Ecole Normale, which had just opened its doors. Within two years he was assisting Villemain with his courses in Greek. While Cousin (the editor of Proclus) never, it seems had a 40

Jouffroy, "The Philosophy of History," in Ripley, ed., Specimens, n, 184.

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sturdy mastery of Greek (or later of German, for that matter), 41 he had, more importantly, in the words of Sainte-Beuve, an "esprit... empresse par nature a s'etendre," a devouring intellectual aspiration that could communicate " a principle of ardor and zeal... immediately electrifying."42 Cousin knew how to combine raw energy with self-directed purpose. Not only did his lectures provoke enthusiasm in his earliest listeners, but he was acknowledged by his contemporaries to be a master of French prose. That is perhaps enough introduction to Cousin's personality. Still, one cannot forbear citing the description given of him by his pupil Jules Simon, later an important liberal politician and writer: He looked very tall because he was so skinny, and in winter he wore the most extraordinary costume imaginable: a long frock-coat of blue bouracan with three double collars of red plush, a gray hat, and a cane. His eyes flashed beneath the gray hat, and, passing by, he darted looks at us as if he were an ogre seeking to eat us up. We knew he wasn't wicked, but he was odd and loved to look unrelenting.43 Cousin, a perennial bachelor, connoisseur of books and learning, and bear for work, had a number of famous affairs with women (notably Louise Colet), and he obviously enjoyed the kind of roleplaying cited by Simon. But his sense of, and devotion to, the regalia of academic power, overbore any serious commitment to outside-ofwork dramatics. By his origin, his development, and his tastes, he was an extremely complicated and talented man, powerful in his age, today too easily forgotten. In 1815, and during the intervals of the Restoration when reactionary ministries did not silence his pulpit, he captured the younger generation and continued to hold confident sway over many of them when his own goals and theirs had been more or less satisfied. But one can appreciate the contempt and bitterness of some of the early disciples, republicans or Saint-Simonians, who had sat at his feet, expecting him to march them into the promised land. From having been a prophet, he became a pasha. During the Restoration, his post at the Sorbonne - like those of Guizot and Villemain — had been precarious. Dismissed by Villele, recalled by Martignac, he suffered a new suspension at the hands of Polignac, before 1830 bore him to triumph. But those intervals had 41 42

See J u l e s Simon, Victor Cousin (Paris, 1887), p . 16. G.-A. d e Sainte-Beuve, " M . V i c t o r C o u s i n , " Portraits litteraires (3 vols., Paris, 1864), 111 43 470-471. Simon, Cousin, p. 83.

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not been professionally wasted. In 1817, Cousin travelled to Germany to learn the latest developments in Kantian philosophy from its most renowned oracle, Schelling. Failing to locate Schelling, he discovered Hegel in Heidelberg, and became the friend and correspondent of that formidable thinker. Later, in 1824, when Cousin - after a certain dalliance with the Italian Carbonari revisited Prussia, the police, labelling him as dangerous, jailed him unceremoniously for six months. He was, it seems, released only through the intervention of his friend, the "Prussian state philosopher."44 In 1828, Hegel visited Cousin briefly in Paris, where he had trouble getting used to French customs and dining habits.45 Hegel and Cousin buried certain political disagreements beneath their breadth of philosophical fraternity. Exactly what, and in what proportion, Cousin borrowed or incorporated from Hegel (and from Kant, Schelling, and others) is an intricate matter that need not detain us except as it bears on the method and political implications of eclecticism. First of all, like Hegel, Cousin tended (and Jouffroy also) to construct from a base of psychology (akin to what Hegel called "phenomenology") 46 to ontology. "Ontology," Cousin wrote,"is no less legitimate than psychology, since it is psychology, which, by enlightening us as to the nature of reason, conducts us itself to ontology."47 Cousin sensed that this type of philosophical move needed special advocacy in France against both the traditional a priori and psychologistic sensationalism. He would trace this path through a concentration on the history of philosophy, with emphasis on the Platonic, neo-Platonic, and Cartesian idealism. Somewhat troubled by "patriotic scruples," he nevertheless maintained that "in philosophy there is no native land but truth — the French spirit is not condemned to remain ignorant of everything else, in order to be faithful to itself.48 After paying homage to certain predecessors - Royer-Collard, Laromiguiere, Maine de Biran49 - Cousin proclaimed his indebtedness to the Germans - Kant, Fichte, Jacobi, Schelling, Hegel. Of Hegel he wrote: " I proclaimed him. I prophesied him, as it were; and upon my return to France, I said to my friends: gentlemen, I have seen a 44 45

47 49

Ibid., p . 21. See, o n this, Hegel: The Letters (trans. Clark Butler a n d Christiane Seiler, Bloomington, 46 1984), pp. 654-658. Cousin, in Ripley, ed., Specimens, 1, 173. 48 Ibid., p. 66. Ibid., pp. 79-80. Cf. Simon, Cousin, p. 31: "La Romiguiere lui a appris la sensation, Royer-Collard l'intelligence, Maine de Biron la volonte."

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man of genius."50 And he concluded: "Europe owes [the system of philosophical idealism] to Germany, and Germany to Schelling. This system is the truth... Hegel, coming after Schelling [this is technically true, although Schelling was younger], belongs to his school [not really accurate after 1807]. He is entitled to a special place in it, not only for developing and enriching the system, but for giving it in many respects a new aspect. The admirers of Hegel consider him the Aristotle of a second Plato [this notion would often be repeated in subsequent accounts of German idealism, but with Kant more often substituted for Schelling]."51 Cousin's grasp of the finer points of German philosophy was rather raw - although well beyond the intuitive capacities of Madame de Stael. Yet technical accuracy and subtlety are peripheral to our perspective. When Cousin was repeatedly attacked for " pantheism " in his own country, by both traditionalists and sensationalists, it was the same kind of attack that German disputants made against Hegel. Hegel would never have chosen such an ambiguous and compromising title as "eclecticism" to describe his own philosophy. According to Simon, the name was borrowed from the Alexandrians and Leibniz.52 Cousin himself introduced the term early on in the Restoration; 53 thus, it is a bit misleading to call it the "doctrine of the July Monarchy," since its original practical mission was to defend liberties enshrined in the Charter of 1814 and the Napoleonic educational settlement. Sainte-Beuve later described the doctrine as " a reasonable conciliation between Descartes, Reid, and Kant," but that does not properly allow for some of its other expansions.54 Eclecticism really arises out of a metaphysical and practical need caused by the shipwrecks of eighteenth-century materialism and political problems felt in the wake of Revolution and Empire. It is a resolution of contending systems and opposites. Cousin claimed that an examination of all major philosophies (which are, Hegel would claim, "idealisms"), and a sorting out of their differences, can produce "philosophy itself in its essence and unity." "This procedure," he declared, "to reject no system and to accept none entirely, to neglect this element and to take that, to select in all what appears to be true and good, and consequently everlasting, - this, in 50 51

54

Cousin, in Ripley, ed., Specimens, 1, p . 86. Ibid., p. 89. Cousin attributed this insight to the Hegelian Friedrich Wilhelm Carove, ibid., 52 53 p. 55. Simon, Cousin, p. 18. In his Sorbonne lectures of 1816. Sainte-Beuve, " M . de Remusat," in Portraits litteraires, in, 353.

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a single word, is ECLECTICISM."55 AS we shortly discover, eclecticism has its analogy in politics: "Exclusive doctrines are in philosophy what parties are in the State. Eclecticism tends to substitute for their violent and irregular action a firm and moderate direction, but shall sacrifice to none the interests of order, or the public good." 56 SainteBeuve was properly skeptical of" that general thesis, highly doubtful, of the alliance of philosophy and politics."57 Jouffroy, more the moralist and - despite his essay - less the dogmatist, put it this way: A reasonable man... would not attach himself to any school, to any sect, to any party; but yet he would not fall into indifference or into scepticism. This mode of regarding human opinions is what we call ECLECTICISM.58

Here he added: The characteristic principle of Eclecticism, the principle, in fact, which gives it its birth, is the profound conviction that the world of opinions is only the image of the world of realities, and that accordingly opinions must be judged by their conformity to reality; so that to examine an opinion, without a previous knowledge of the reality which it undertakes to represent, is to wish for the end without making use of the means.

More than Cousin, Jouffroy was typically concerned with the relationship between opinion and truth, in the form of a moral settlement, which became, for him, a religiously tinctured Stoicism. This Catholic apostate could write: "thanks to this [new] spirit, the new philosophers perceive that there is philosophy in Christianity, and the new Christians that there is religion in philosophy."59 He imagined " a treaty of peace between all systems, which France is perhaps destined to see one day signed at Paris."60 He felt the need for a kind of common faith, laic in form, but he did not, like Cousin, aspire to educative dictatorship. He seemed to trust "opinion" and "common sense" to sort out the difficulties. "There is nothing to burn," he announced; " nobody even to hate... Nothing remains but to become tolerant or to continue to be absurd." 61 55 57 58 59 61

56 Cousin, in Ripley, ed., Specimens, 1, 50. Ibid., pp. 50-51. S a i n t e - B e u v e , Portraits litte'raires, H I , 362. Jouffroy, " O n Eclecticism in M o r a l s , " in Ripley, ed., Specimens, 11, 98. 60 Ibid., p. 100. Ibid. Jouffroy, "The Sorbonne and the Philosophers," ibid., p. 159.

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Cousin was always a bit more strident. In making "Eclecticism serve as a guide to the French philosophy of the nineteenth century," he wanted a philosophy "having its foundation in a profound knowledge of all the systems, of which it professes to combine the true and essential elements." 62 "The whole history of philosophy" was also "the perpetual lesson of Eclecticism."63 But what is most remarkable is that eclecticism, as so described, became the practical philosophy of French constitutional monarchy. "My political faith," Cousin wrote, "...is in entire accordance with my philosophical faith, and both the one and the other are above the outrages of party." 64 Thus, as he adds, " I behold in the Charter all contrarieties ... Thank God, everything promises that the irresistible march of time will by degrees unite the hearts and minds of all in the intelligence and in the love of this constitution, which contains at once the throne and the country, monarchy and democracy, order and liberty, aristocracy and equality, all the elements of history, of thought, and of things."65 Hegel, who had a vision of political conciliation in Prussia, and who wished to bring together philosophy, authority, and the needs of the new citizen, was a Cousin without banality and with the qualities that Cousin himself recognized as genius. On the other hand, Cousin's eclecticism was a sort of vulgar Hegelianism tailored for the French. Cousin had other, more palpable similarities to Hegel and, in general, German thought. In the first place, he conceived of philosophy as "the self-understanding of human thought... determined by a series of oppositions and their successive resolutions, in which the antithesis of finite and infinite is fundamental, while the weakness of individual reason he would overcome by his concept of an 'impersonal reason.'" 66 He proposed an immanent logic by which reason, rather than debating and demolishing its previous forms, would shape them into a dynamic and self-fulfilling whole. That was, of course, anathema to Catholic critics, for it reduced the supernatural to a process of historical creation, and truth to a matter of consummated opinion achieved through the wanderings of a spiritualized and "impersonal" human reason. In the mid-1820s, Cousin conducted a correspondence with Lamennais regarding an 62 65 66

63 64 Cousin, in ibid., i, 5 3 . Ibid. Ibid., p . 106. Ibid., p. 254. Bernard Reardon, Liberalism and Tradition: Aspects of Catholic Thought in Nineteenth-Century France (Cambridge, 1975), p. 184.

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entente between the providentialisms of individual and eternal reason.67 Their common historicism seemed to provide some latitude for dialogue, as did Cousin's willingness, as a non-Christian, to entertain a trinitarian (rather like Hegel's) conception of God. But in the end, they broke off in rancor. Cousin's Leibnizian notion that philosophical systems are true in affirmation, but false in denial, was hardly Menaissian. In the last analysis, it was not so much Cousin's moderate historicism that was disconcerting to religious thought (for historicism infected everything at this time) as his suspect immanentism, whether it was called "pantheism" or "neo-Platonism." But second, Cousin very much wanted an understanding or alliance with religion on a social and practical level: in other words, with Catholicism, the practical religion of the French. Like the Lutheran Hegel in Prussia, he believed that for the vast majority of people religious faith was a necessity and an image of truth itself. This was the form in which most people understood themselves, their social duties, and their personal and historical destiny. Religion sustained the social experiment and the relations between individuals and authority. It would probably always be a human need, although Cousin, like most liberals, had hopes for its refinement and dedogmatization. Even if, for the few, philosophy was superior to religion in apprehending truth, even if it forged a more permanent bond for elites of the intellect, religion and philosophy remained "deux soeurs immortelles."68 It is too crude to say that Cousin mainly wanted to yoke religion to philosophical surveillance for the preservation of the "juste milieu "-although, like Necker, Guizot, and others, he was not insensitive to that practicality. But he saw himself rather as a kind of Platonist - a symposiast - of the nineteenth century, and the Orleanist cite not merely as a paradise of bankers and merchants, but as a redoubt of mandarins and academicians. Always careful never to launch a frontal attack on the old sources of faith (except when they stormed his cherished university), he was ever on his guard to keep Catholicism from exercising any dominion in the affairs of mature men and citizens, from interfering in what Hegel called Sittlichkeit, an intellectual climate he partly shaped by his examination, inspections, appointments, and dispatches. See B. Saint-Hilaire, Victor Cousin, sa vie et sa correspondance (Paris, 1895), 11, 4—27. Cited in Reardon, Liberalism and Tradition, p. 184.

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As against Hegel, Cousin had the disadvantage of working in a Catholic country, where the politics of faith and reason had been in resolute, and often bloody, opposition. But it was a country in confusion and effervescence; and it provided eighteen years — compared with Hegel's twelve — for the implantation of Cousin's civil—religious armature. When death came prematurely to Hegel in 1831, he had not really laid out the pedagogical future of Prussia, despite his vaunted control over the professoriat; but when, in 1848, Cousin's design collapsed, he had, aided by French centralism, gone far toward teaching a state philosophy with reverberations lasting into the Third Republic. He had not, however, contributed to the harmony Guizot had sought. The design of Cousin and his disciples was to make eclecticism the senior partner of religion as the legitimizing force of the bourgeois monarchy of 1830. That strength would descend from enlightened elites, trained in the university, the grandes e'coles, and the preferred lycees; through this descent, it would set its stamp on all that was influential in France. Cousin well knew that religion would not regard eclecticism as its friend and would charge it with impiety. But, as he put it: " I t is not in any specific place that my philosophy is impious. Its impiety lies far deeper; for it is in its very existence. Its whole crime is that it is a philosophy, and not merely, as in the twelfth century, a simple commentary on the Church and on the Holy Scriptures." 69 Yet it was in the interest of an old nation, reforged and redivided in the crucible of revolution, to strive toward a common faith - not a partnership, but the consolidation of " a spiritual laic power." As Rosanvallon so well expresses this: We may speak... of a double dimension of the idea of laicite, of the spiritual laic power, during this period in the doctrinaire and liberal circles. Cousin and Thiers represent the two structuring poles. Unquestionably Victor Cousin had the idea of founding with eclecticism a kind of religion lai'que. His tendency was to replicate in the sphere of philosophy the clerical model, and he claimed the same rights that ultramontanes claimed for the Church.70 As for the pragmatic strategy of Thiers, we have already shown him in one of his postures, and there will be more to say, below. We have 69 70

Cousin, in Ripley, ed., Specimens, i, 92. Pierre R o s a n v a l l o n , Le moment Guizot (Paris, 1984), p p . 2 3 6 - 2 3 7 .

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seen him as a compromiser on enseignement libre in 1850, while Cousin provided a more sullen, and perhaps more principled, resistance. Guizot, as Rosanvallon writes, was "in the very heart of this ambiguity." Eclecticism was inscribed in the loyal opposition of the Restoration. If not exactly playing lion beneath the throne of Louis XVIII, it was at least not a calculating harbinger of the revolution of 1830. Despite the occasional wayward Carbonarism of Cousin and some of his disciples, eclecticism was basically grafted to monarchy, law, and order. All these principles it enjoyed and endorsed under Louis-Philippe. In power, its liberalism would seem very different than it had been in opposition; for Cousin now gave himself the sterner task of governing French education and providing the regime with spiritual support. In the interest of the academies, advanced "public opinion," and the commercial values that went with them, eclecticism sought to rally moods of the spirit for the benefit of moderate and middle-class civilization. Thus, it is not surprising that Cousin was increasingly attacked from the left, by those Young Turks of the democratic revival, Quinet and Michelet. As Quinet put it in 1843, even while Cousin was baring his fangs at the "Jesuits": I know that today philosophy is in solemn reconciliation with Christianity, in wanting to absorb it, convert it into its own substance, or rather invade it as a legitimate possession. It no longer denies it, or wages war on it; worst of all, it protects it: it captures each of its dogmas in order to make a theory.71

Dogmas, then, ended in theory: theories of the same dogmas. What is necessary, Quinet told auditors just as enwrapped as had been those of Cousin in 1816, is "to have a God for the people."72 That God, whatever his political advantages or deficits, was the God of Mazzini and of February 1848, not the God of the Academie Franchise, the university, or some putative God of the civil religion of the July Monarchy. Had that God failed utterly? 71 72

E d g a r Q u i n e t , Le Christianisme et la Revolution frangaise (Paris, 1895), p . 344. Ibid., pp. 56-57.

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II. HOW DOGMAS DEVELOP! COUSIN

"Every real religion," Jouffroy wrote, "involves not only a certain mode of worship, but a certain political organization, a certain policy and certain manners. In a word, every religion brings forth a complete system of civilization."73 There had been only three real religion-systems: the Brahman, the Mohammedan, and the Christian. Of these, only "the Christian system is making progress and rapid progress, while the other two are decaying." 74 "The future condition of the world" therefore belongs to Christian culture, with its polyvalent diversity of talents, especially in France, England, Germany, and the United States, to whom "Providence seems to have entrusted the destinies of the world." " T h e civil wars of Europe," JoufTroy declared, "are ended." 75 Of course, Christian civilization did not mean for Jouffroy and his eclectic comrades the triumph of a cult, a rite, or the fossilization of pious devotion. It meant the highest intellectual and moral achievements of Christian nations, often in spite of theology and positive prescriptions of worship. In the spirit of both conciliation and criticism, Christianity was to be accomplished by philosophy; and, as we have seen, consummated by a treaty (not the "Holy Alliance"), hopefully to be signed one day in Paris.76 That philosophy was one of comprehension, reserving an honorable place for religion; the religion envisaged was neither the religion of Rome nor the "natural religion" of the eighteenth century, but something resembling the Unitarian spiritualism of the American W. E. Channing, whose impact was important in French liberal circles.77 Sometimes the relation between religion and philosophy verged on partnership: "the religion of the people is older than philosophy; philosophy has not altered it; it has survived all systems, and this religion is common sense... Philosophy... if it perceives clearly whatever it seizes, perceives only certain points; but common sense, which perceives nothing clearly, perceives everything."78 However, "philosophy does not exist for the generality of men." 79 For them, it 73 74 76 77

78 79

Jouffroy, " O n the Present State of Humanity," in Ripley, ed., Specimens, n, 198. 75 Ibid., pp. 214, 215, 218. Ibid., p. 224. " O n Eclecticism in Morals," ibid., p. 100. The liberal law professor and Americanist Edouard de Laboulaye (himself a Catholic) wrote extensively on Channing. Jouffroy, " P h i l o s o p h y a n d C o m m o n Sense," in Ripley, ed., Specimens, 1, 309, 319. Ibid., p. 337.

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requires translation into common sense, as Cousin has been doing: we might say from ontology back to the rhythm of consciousness (phenomenology) in an historical or narrative form.80 Yet it is precisely in history, or the unfolding of providence, that the philosopher's priority is clear, as opposed to basic "common sense": "The philosophers who seek for truth must find it sooner than the masses which [sic] do not seek for it...The philosophers hasten [revolutions] on, and, therefore, appear to produce them. They may justly be called perpetual revolutionists."81 Yet that is not strictly the case, for "the masses are intelligent, and it is the law of intelligence to advance and consequently to change." 82 But, unaided, they would do so only at a snail's pace. Indeed - and here we see how radical Jouffroy is with regard to orthodox theological distinctions between eternity and time, fixity and change - the Creator himself, being "intelligent," is also "revolutionary." 83 Change is not only within God's design; it appears to be a quality of nature. In any case, God is invoked here only so as to legitimize the mission of the philosopher-prophet and to clinch the compatibility of his inspiration with that of the sluggish masses. Cousin is even more explicit about the character of this connection: "Truth is for all; science is for few. All truth exists in the human race; but the human race is not made up of philosophers. In fact, philosophy is the aristocracy of the human species."84 From their vantage point of attack — the Restoration — the eclectic philosophers theorized a complicity between God, philosophers, and people to be set against the particularistic willfulness of clergy and false aristocracies. "Ideas," Jouffroy thought (compare here Constant), the stock-in-trade of intellectuals (and, one supposes, of God), act far more on nations and collectives, while "passions" act on individuals. The real revolution in the world is one of ideas, not of passions. It therefore seemed to Jouffroy, in defending the gains of 1789 and the liberties of the Charter, that democratic ages would be more orderly, predictable, and rational than the aristocratic ones that had gone before. But we must notice that his vision of democracy was like Royer-Collard's, the one happily flowing " a pleins bords," not like the later and darker view of Tocqueville. By the mid-1830s, in an altered perspective, after liberals like Jouffroy have acquiesced, without appetite but in anticipation of a moderate 80 84

81 Ibid., p. 347. Ibid., 11, 173. Cousin, in ibid., 1, 150-151.

82

Ibid.

83

Ibid.

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stabilization, in the overthrow of Polignac's "counter-revolution," the shoe is on the other foot. With the July Monarchy now seeking to root legitimacy and assert authority over a democracy that still threatens to overflow its banks, there is a likening of providence to the closure of revolution. This is reflected in the tones of Jouffroy's Cours de droit naturel, delivered at the Sorbonne and published in 1835, a text which Tocqueville found too gloomy.85 It was one thing to be a challenger, an opposant', another to shoulder responsibility as a philosophe officieux.

Cousin's ideas were also essentially monarchical.86 It was not the fact of 1830, but its way of unfolding and its portent of social disorders to come — with legitimacy at stake — that cooled off the doctrine of the eclectics. The dikes had to be held against the "pleins bords" of radical and Utopian exuberance. And for this, the best ally was a manageable Christian discipline stolen from the priests. Cousin had blithely declared, with some Schadenfreude: "Am I... an enemy of Christianity and the Church?... Let a single light or doubtful expression be pointed out, and I will retract it; I will disclaim it as unworthy of a philosopher."87 For he was well aware of the political necessities: "The wish of philosophy to destroy religion would be senseless and criminal; for it could not hope to supply its place with the masses, who are unable to attend courses of metaphysical instruction."88 Correspondingly, he reminded religion that it could not destroy philosophy, which "speaks... to the select portion and vanguard of the human race." 89 In his famous report On the State of Public Instruction in Prussia, Cousin wrote: Christianity ought to be the basis of the instruction of the people; we must not flinch from the open profession of this maxim; it is no less politic than it is honest. We baptize our children, and bring them up in the Christian faith and in the bosom of the Church; in after-life [i.e. "later life"], age, reflection, the breadth of human opinions modify their earlier impressions, but it is good that these impressions should have been made by Christianity. Popular education ought therefore to be religious, that is to say, Christian; for, I repeat it, there is no such thing as religion in general; in Europe, and in our own days, religion means Christianity. Let our popular schools then be Christian; let them be so entirely and earnestly.90 85 86 88

See Tocqueville to Corcelle, 12 April 1835, in Oeuvres completes, x v 1 , 54. 87 Simon, Cousin, p . 153. Cousin, in Ripley, ed., Specimens, 1, 92. 89 90 Ibid., p . 98. Ibid. Ibid., p . 236.

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Jules Simon writes, with some ambiguity, that " [Cousin's] own metaphysical beliefs did not differ from Christian metaphysics; or at least he thought so and hoped so." 91 Whatever valid reservations Catholics might harbor, Vincent, the Protestant pastor of Nimes, declared: "The popularity no less general than unforeseen of the philosophy taught by M. Royer-Collard and M. Cousin is of immense advantage to religion. It has opened the path for it." 92 Despite Cousin's alleged Christian metaphysics and Jouffroy's famous lament over his loss of faith and incapacity to recover it (analogous perspectives can be found in other writers - Michelet, Hugo, Lamartine, Tocqueville, Renan, Renouvier), the eclectic school basically regarded itself as the legatee, not the servant, of Christian civilization. In that mood, they were not alone. Chateaubriand himself felt that Christianity was entering its philosophical age; 93 Hegel sponsored the idea of a philosophical Aufhebung in which the graphic and emotional aspects of Christian belief were surpassed and absorbed - yet validated - in speculative thought.94 But in politics there are some very complex entanglements. Perverse relationships between religion understood as a kind of pious, ancestral, and even patriotic faith; philosophy understood as a breach beyond such things to higher truth or even truth-in-itself (to paraphrase Cousin: "le bon, le beau et le vrai"); and politics understood as the life-and-death affairs of the earthly city had a history of interpretation and controversy going back to Plato. In Plato it seemed that the death of Socrates had blasted an unbridgeable chasm between the needs of the spirit and those of the political community (the ancillary need of labor, economy, and consumption being still held in contempt). With Christianity — especially as interpreted by St. Augustine — even harsher lines were drawn: between the city of the faithful and the temporal empires of man, with pagan philosophy placed in limbo. By the end of the eighteenth century, revolution and the attendant difficulty of recharging an utterly changed, individualistic belief system with elements of societal trust and interdependence confronted all serious moral and political thinkers. "Opinion" seemed to carry all before 91 92

93 94

S i m o n , Cousin, p . 55. Jacques-Louis-Samuel Vincent was a prominent pastor of Nimes; Ripley quotes him in Specimens, 1, 244. C h a t e a u b r i a n d , Etudes historiques, in Oeuvres completes (28 vols., Paris, 1826-1831), i v cxviii. Hegel's difficult notion is most c o m p a c t l y c o n t a i n e d in his Enzyklopddie der philosophischen Wissenschqften of 1830, paras. 573-574 (ed. F. Nicolin and O. Poggeler, Hamburg, 1959), pp. 451-462.

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it; it was the oracle of a being called "society," which, in turn, was less indebted to God or to nature for its being than to opinion itself. Philosophy could easily look like the refinement of sorts of contentious opinion, while religion was regarded as a superstitious hindrance to the expression of correct thought. Diplomats of "Christian civilization" had the task of settling these quarrels, not just to defend vested interests, but to ground a state based on "society" and "opinion," to protect what they perceived as civilization - the peace of the hearth, the peace of authority, and the peace of the mind. In his 1818 inaugural speech at the University of Berlin, Hegel, while acknowledging that "religion is the way in which men generally achieve the consciousness of their being," declared that "the time has come, within the state and under the regimen of the actual world, for the free realm of thought to blossom forth independently.95 A profitable collaboration between philosophy and politics had seemingly been unavailable since the death of Socrates. But it was now imagined that thought and will, science, faith, and statecraft could achieve a partnership with coherency. Cousin and his cohorts were proposing a similar treaty in France. If philosophy had not quite made its peace with the world, or "old-world" residues, it appeared that this pact was within its reach. One problem, as we saw, was that eclecticism in power could not be the same as eclecticism in opposition or in prospect of power. Another was that the social resistances to the July Monarchy, most of them intellectually well supported, were very strong. The new dynasty required assent and legitimation. That was a more modest but more trying task than that of prophesying for the future of "Christian civilization." The quality of liberty appropriate to these enterprises was not the same; as Chateaubriand put it: "the first is the province of moeurs, the second of lumieres"9* The eclectic vision of the new constitutional order was also marked by a kind of intellectual Bonapartism, a tutelary disposition to shape and lead opinion from the heights of the university and the Conseil Superieur, and the Academie des Science Morales et Politiques - a centralizing urge out of sorts not only with the wishes of rural France and the Catholic idea of " enseignement libre," but with the preference of liberals like Tocqueville. As Simon writes: 95

See G. W. F. Hegel, "Rede zum Antritt...," in J. Hoffmeister, ed., Berliner Schriften 96 (Hamburg, 1956), pp. 13, 3. Chateaubriand, "Polemique," OC, xxvi, 486.

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"The [metaphysical] fever abated in 1830, when [Cousin] got his hands on the government of society. To that properly metaphysical fever of finding the secret of things succeeded the fever of governing and guiding souls, a political fever in its finest form."97 Leibniz had somewhere said: "Let me control education for a century, and I shall be master of the state." Napoleon had thought along these lines; Cousin attempted to carry it out. "He demanded for the State all the rights that ultramontanes demanded for the Church." 98 All the teaching of philosophy in secondary and higher education was within his grasp: all appointments, transfers, promotions, and favours. This, of course, included the teaching of what would later be called "civic values." Moral catechisms now superseded eclecticism's creative work in metaphysics. " M . Cousin," Simon relates, "said that the philosophy professors composed his regiment; but it was a regiment having as its colonel a marshal of France." 99 In the political diptych of the July Monarchy, this was the practical or operational side of the affair, the not very liberal instrument by which liberal ideology was to be secured. We shall analyze the content of that ideology below, but we may say in advance that it consisted of two major themes: (1) the Cousinian version of the French Revolution; and (2) the Cousinian closure of revolution. No doubt Cousin's remarkable skill and doggedness of personality, combined with talent and souplesse, counts for most in forging the civil religion of the July Monarchy. Cousin's "regiment" took care of the rest. But we have also seen Jouffroy demanding prophets and later lamenting that "the solution of the political problem is in a moral and religious faith, one now lacking."100 The atmosphere of the age was a mixture of anticipation and disappointment, of pangs of spiritual rebirth and growing pains and jealousies of the new society. Jouffroy's colleague Damiron disclosed the ambitions of liberal philosophy unambiguously: The people have wanted spiritual chiefs. They have these chiefs; they have philosophers who, agreeing with them and drawing from the same well, think on their behalf and analyze for their benefit [reflechissent a son profit et analysent dans son sens]. Those philosophers explain their impressions and illuminate their feelings; their theory is nothing but the people's consciousness cast in scientific expression. Thus, the philosophers are 97 100

98 99 Simon, Cousin, p. 69. Ibid., p. 148. Ibid., p. 81. Jouffroy, Cours de droit naturel, 10th lesson (2 vols., Paris, 1843), 1, 315.

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inseparable [ne font qviun\ from the people... It is just like the unity that reigns in politics between the electors and the elected: their souls are the same, their ideas are the same; they differ only in their degree of intelligence. Thus, the philosophers have the character of deputies: they are representatives of an opinion shared with everyone, but which they understand better than anyone else.101 That was but one of a number of elitist flagrancies, not confined to the proponents of the July government alone, described by Tocqueville as doctrines of "those who know what is good for the people."102 While it could scarcely be doubted that the new French society needed a harmonizing faith (or even, as Tocqueville wrote in his American diary, "laws to establish its moeurs"),103 and that this faith needed propagators, the Napoleonic image of colonels marching regiments was not more appropriate to liberalism than that of bishops leading crusades. And so the political praxis of eclecticism fell between two stools: on the one hand, it transgressed on liberty with its dogma; on the other, its leadership was too timid to satisfy the wider populistic faith of a Michelet or a Quinet. We must now turn our attention to the substance of what Cousin, and his legions behind him, were professing in politics. "At a time," Cousin writes, "when the parties of industry and theocracy were both endeavoring to seduce the mind from the broad and impartial paths of science, it was almost a duty for me to raise an independent flag." That flag was undoubtedly the tricolor; but how independent was it? Here I shall restrict my interpretation to texts of Cousin (his disagreements with Jouffroy are not important for these purposes), and the texts will be mainly retrospective ones - Cousin's "apology" — but in no way deviant from his earlier writings. Cousin's moral philosophy can be most succinctly captured in his brief work Justice et charite\ published at the time of the 1848 uprising. Here, Cousin begins by attacking simple remedies and monocausal solutions. Most systems are guilty of false elegance, he claims. As against them, he will propose distinct spheres of justice and charity, both foundational to society.104 One has rights only as regards things; toward oneself there are only duties; rights and duties are shared reciprocally among human 101 102 103 104

J.-P. Damiron, Essai sur Vhistoire de la philosophie en France au XIXe siecle (Paris, 1828), p. iii. Tocqueville, Democracy in America (trans. H . Reeve, 2 vols., N e w York, 1945), 1, 433. Tocqueville, "Carnet de Voyages," OC, V 1 , 179. Cousin, Justice et charite (Paris, 1848), p p . 17-18.

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beings.105 The common ground of rights and duties, which are "brothers... developing together and perishing together," is liberty.106 Liberty, generating equal respect for the rights of persons, is the true equality.107 Religions, which like philosophies harbor truth, are entitled to equal rights of practice, even though one of these religions [the Christian] surpasses the others "incomparably." 108 Property is a sacred right, inherent in personality. It is not founded on work and production, but they confirm and develop it as a right.109 Justice, defined as "the respect for liberty," allows each to do as he wishes so long as his right does not infringe on the rights of others.110 Society is the regular process by which liberties are exercised under the protection of reciprocal rights. Society is not created by man, but is a legitimate product of nature: existing societies are more or less imperfect copies of that natural model.111 The principle and object of all human governments worthy of the name is the protection of these natural rights. England and France have thus far carried this principle to its highest reach of perfection.112 Government owes to its citizens, under proper restraints, the duty to provide for their welfare, to increase their intelligence, and to give them moral instruction.113 It is precisely here that Cousin departs from the liberalism of, say, a Constant, by announcing a positive role for the state in moral and educational formation. But this is still comprehended under the rubric of justice. And justice, without charity, "degenerates into an unbearable dryness," for "justice is not the only moral law." 114 There is, besides, a form of assistance called "civil charity," which takes four forms: (i) the protection of health and " physical life "; (2) assistance in the development of the intellect (3) assistance, especially, in promoting the moral life of each citizen; and (4) the punishment of crime and the correction of criminals.115 Yet justice is placed above charity: it is "the immortal basis of all society."116 There is an "ideal society" indicated by the progress of 105 108 111 114

Ibid, Ibid, Ibid, Ibid,

p. 21. p. 26. p. 37. pp. 43, 45.

106

Ibid, p. 22. Ibid, pp. 27, 33. 112 Ibid, p. 38. 115 Ibid, pp. 47-48.

109

107

Ibid, p. 25. Ibid, p. 33. 113 Ibid, p. 43. 116 Ibid, p. 51. no

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history, a sacred goal, perhaps never attainable, yet a moral task for humanity.117 It cannot, however, be approached except through the dual access of justice and charity. Antiquity taught justice; the Christian Middle Ages introduced charity. The challenge of the modern age is to harvest both legacies for the bounty of humanity. 118 So much for Cousin's moral theory, which is unoriginal and differs little from most other liberal versions, except insofar as it stresses the state's responsibility to teach the proper principles of civil and moral existence. His notion of politics is more interesting. It can be fully gleaned from the introduction he wrote to his Discours politiques after the fall of the monarchy. " I was born," he tells us, "with the French Revolution" (i.e. in 1792).119 Its flag, its songs, its festivals, its heroic battles (meaning, for Cousin, those of the Directory and Consulate) were the fare of his childhood. He learned to cherish liberty: of what sort we shall presently see; for he regarded February 1848 as a "tragic experience," a "night that has encompassed us." 120 He prized himself for being liberty's "moderate but unshakable interpreter." 121 In that perspective, Cousin claimed that his political instincts and maxims and his philosophy were inseparable. There is no need here to repeat what has already been said about Cousin's judgment of the relationship of religion and philosophy: however, he ringingly describes faith as "reason triumphing over doubt... [for] the dignity and happiness of man." 122 Enemies of the French Revolution have suppressed or ignored this basic fact about its character. Though, like most monumental events in human progress (including the "Christian revolution"), it was bloody, it prepared the way for "biens immenses qui s'accroissaient chaque jour par leurs effets memes."123 "If I wanted to paint with a single brushstroke what the French Revolution undertook," Cousin writes, " I would say that it had the aim of drawing morality from the books of the philosophers and translating it from the government of individuals to that of societies."124 This is the liberty of justice and charity which Cousin discussed in the earlier work, here encapsulated in a few pages.125 " I n resume," says Cousin, "the three great principles that for me 117

Ibid., p. 52.

119

Cousin, " I n t r o d u c t i o n " to Discours politiques: Desprincipes de la Revolution frangaise (Paris,

123

1864), p. ii. Ibid, p. viii.

118

120

Ibid, p. 58.

m 122 Ibid. Ibid, p. iii. Ibid, p. vi. 125 Ibid, p. xiii. Ibid, pp. xiv-xxiii.

124

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represent the genius of the French Revolution are national sovereignty, justice or the emancipation of the individual, and civil charity or the gradual lessening of ignorance, poverty, and vice."126 That is not precisely the way that Tocqueville, no less impressed by the ardor of 1789, was putting it. Tocqueville had serious doubts that the effect of the Revolution had been to channel religion and "moeurs privees" into a fraternal and national spirit. And, like Mirabeau before him, he precisely accused the work of the Revolutionary legislators of being "bookish" and impractical. Moreover, Cousin's sweeping dismissal of all decentralizing and local liberties of the hereditary aristocracy clashed with Tocqueville's own view of the logical bases of a liberal society. Cousin's version of the Revolution was sprawled in two directions. It had a philosopher's side - an intellectual side - according to which the principles of justice and natural right, affirmed in 1789 and renewed by the declarations of the Directory and Consulate, had been theoretically brought to fruition in the Charter of 1830 and in the implantation of a centralized, censitarian representative government — all this consistent with the maxims of eclecticism. "In 1828," he wrote, " I gave a theory of Representative Government and of the Charter, in which I still persist... The Revolution of July is merely the English Revolution of 1688, but in France; that is to say, with far less aristocracy and a little more democracy and monarchy." 127 His view was fundamentally monarchical, and it passed more than a little credit to persons of his own ilk. But side by side with this, there was a Romantic and Bonapartist streak in Cousin, a more athletic and populist view of the situation. Its hero was not the Emperor, but the First Consul of 1798, "that great pale and melancholy visage,"128 that "great captain [to whom revolutionary destiny had given] the task of rebuilding France on new ideas,"129 who carried that message to the rest of Europe. For, according to Cousin, "the principles of the French Revolution imperiously demand a strong and durable authority if they are to extend their gracious influence."130 Cousin describes the Consulate as "that grand epoch when a victorious, united, peaceful France gathered around a government that highly esteemed the principles of 1789, applying them with firmness and wisdom in its laws and 126 128

127 Ibid., pp. xxii-xxiii. Cousin, in Ripley, ed., Specimens, i, 105-106. 129 130 Cousin, Discours politiques, p. iii. Ibid., p. ix. Ibid., p. xxvii.

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administration." 131 Nothing would ever erase this beautiful time from his memory; he even idolized the advent of the Empire when "France seemed to want to eternalize such a strong and moderate, liberal and wise, government."132 The moment of disillusion comes for Cousin at about the year 181 o, when, according to his account, the spirit of war and tyranny overtook the better traits of the Empire. 133 Things did not, of course, seem like this to Madame de Stael and Constant, or in retrospect to Tocqueville, who believed that French moeurs had been demolished in 1800. The assessment of Bonaparte thus creates a gap between these liberals. But lest it be thought that Cousin was trying to insinuate himself into the graces of the founder of the Second Empire, we should recall that he was now an oppositionist and private citizen, having resigned his offices in 1851. Instead, he was expressing his own passion for French superiority and French glory - achievements of "la souverainete nationale." Bitter against the Second Republic, Cousin was only comparatively more lenient toward the Second Empire: he retreated from politics and began writing his stylish and vivid portraits of aristocratic women of the past, works which are perhaps today more zestily read than anything from his philosophical corpus. Cousin's desire for strong and regular government, combined with an exaggerated estimation of what his philosophical solutions could contribute to it, produced his unalloyed penchant for constitutional monarchy: "France and all the great European nations need today a limited but concentrated government that is not just in doubt every day, which can last and be continued... which should be hereditary and, if possible, immortal, so that no competition for supreme power remains possible or can be presented to the imagination of the most ambitious." 134 This, Cousin felt, was necessary if the state was to be durably conducted, if the citizens of the state were able to plan their futures, and if the state was to receive respect from foreign powers.135 Under the heading of souverainete nationale, it was in keeping with the principles of the Revolution. France needed a monarchy, not one of divine right, but a functional executive suited to the exercise of power in modern conditions: "Constitutional monarchy is the true government of France and of Europe in the nineteenth century." 136 It is the only one that truly achieves the sovereignty of the people without 131 134

Ibid., p. xxxviii. Ibid., p. xxvii.

132 135

Ibid. Ibid.

133 136

Ibid., p. xxxix. Ibid., p. xxviii.

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shocks, with the aid of a king who never dies and is never wrong,137 and responsible ministers who change with the will of a majority representing the majority of electors, who in their turn represent the majority of the nation, so that, in the last analysis, it is the nation that governs - by which I mean the real nation, intelligent and enlightened, not the ignorant mass, sometimes uncaring, often turbulent.138 National variations might be admitted; but this is the model of government that most nearly expressed the "unity of European civilization" in Cousin's view. Thus, the republic is rejected as an aberration, especially when it tends to "pure democracy"; for, although it may successfully incarnate "national sovereignty," it is always an uncertain guarantee of order. In France, according to Cousin, "la republique n'a jamais pu vivre, ou plutot... elle n'ajamais ete." 139 Here, he goes on to describe the problems of the republic of 1848, concluding: "Revolution organized is constitutional monarchy; revolution in the state of crisis is the republic. The republic is the evil (sinistre) side of the revolution." 140 How did Cousin describe the causes of the revolution of 1848, which had brought in a republic he hated and had destroyed his life's work, which had been to formulate an ideology for the Orleans dynasty and to bring it to fruition through a rigorous educational system? In the first place, he confessed to the realistic principle: "If you govern well, you last; if you govern badly, you fall."141 France, he thought, had been "easy to govern" in the nineteenth century; regimes only fell by their own errors. What France wanted was " a victory of the principles of the Revolution and a moderation in applying that triumph: that is, both liberty and order." 142 What, then, happened in 1848? Cousin — and it cannot be said that his diagnostics reached the depths of those of Tocqueville or Remusat - cited, in the first instance, the disposition of the king to overreach his appropriate mandate of governing, as had both Napoleon I and Charles X. While in his loyalty Cousin laments: " I would rather break my pen than turn against you," he adds: "But how could I sacrifice to you the principles of my whole life, the revolution, and the honor of my country?" 143 Kings had, he lamented, "the age-old 137

138 140 143

For background on the king never dying in France, see Ernst Kantorowicz, The King's Two Bodies: A Study in Medieval Political Theology (Princeton, 1957), p . 409. 139 Cousin, Discours politiques, p p . xxviii-xxix. Ibid., p . xxx. 141 142 Ibid., p . xxxii. Ibid., p . xxxvi. Ibid. Ibid., p . xlvi.

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and unshakable principle... not to change the system at any price" (referring here to the enlargement of the electorate), when, on the contrary, what was needed was to call men to the ministry "who were recommended by opinion." 144 The king had always aspired to run the government: but then he should not have enjoyed inviolability, but should rather have shared the responsibility of his ministers if he had wished to do this. 145 For Cousin, Louis-Philippe was neither a First Consul nor did he have the proper makings of a constitutional king: " h e was too great to be a very good constitutional king." 146 If, Cousin adds, the nation had been assured of the succession of the liberal Due d'Orleans (who died in 1842), the revolution of February 1848 might never have happened. 147 Thus, he had a contingent and " t h i n " theory of revolution in France, as opposed to Tocqueville, who regarded the revolution as ongoing and unstoppable. Cousin's deep loyalty to Orleanism in fact stops at the gates of his own city - the refined city of the academies and professoriat, the city of bien-pensant Paris, the city of lights from whose beacons provincial professors are moved around. He was no Jacobin; but an authoritarian mixing some of their rhetoric with liberal principles so as to create a sort of halfway dogma. He resented the " e a s y " overthrow of Louis-Philippe, whose regime had given him unmatched latitude for civic experimentation. While he shivered in social horror at the 1848 menace of the "red republic" and especially at the ways of thought that burst through its crust, what most dismayed him was his sudden lack of importance. For, as Simon puts it, "everything escaped him in 1848." 148 He sat moodily on the Falloux commission, releasing his barbs against Montalembert and Dupanloup, resenting Thiers's accommodationism; then he took his leave after the coup (TEtat of December 1851. In the debates of the Chamber of Peers in 1844, he had had ringing exchanges with Montalembert over the dignity of reason and its monopoly by the university; he had retraced and defended his role in the historical life of France; he had told the peers about the differences and resemblances of religion and philosophy; and he had proudly defended his curriculum — Descartes, Leibniz, Malebranche, Fenelon, Bossuet - against "d'outrageantes calomnies." 149 He rapidly published these speeches as Defense de rUniversite et de la philosophie. 144 148

145 Ibid. Ibid. Simon, Cousin, p . 28.

149

146 147 Ibid., li. Ibid., li. Cousin, Universite et philosophie, p. 339.

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But less than four years later, all this was blighted: Cousin retreated to researching Mademoiselle de Scudery and Madame de Longueville, abandoning politics as he had once abandoned the serious pursuit of "la connaissance de ce qui est." For all his will, intelligence, and influence, Cousin had not managed to create and propagate a "French ideology." He left as a legacy part of this same problem: the problem of uniting diverse opinions with an active faith, the problem of how one provides spiritual succor for the strong and for the weak. When Jules Favre succeeded Cousin in the Academie Franchise, he made a ringing positivist speech that politely deplored eclecticism. But Remusat, in reply, commented that "perhaps it is better to understand less about things, so that we will less easily resign our responsibility to them." 150 III.

HOW DOGMAS DISSOLVE! THE

AFFAIRE PASCAL

At times, in the life of culture and nations, an episode arises that rivets attention but soon passes into the forgetfulness of historical archaeology. Often such incidents have had a restricted audience to begin with. They were not earth-shattering events. Yet, in retrospect, they satisfy a symbolic equivalence with situations of wider-reaching importance. For example, it has been claimed that the raucous dispute over the relative merits of the French and Italian opera was more indicative of French political unease in the 1750s than were either the cabals of the Seven Years War or the struggles between the Throne and the "parlements" that were going on at the same time.151 Pace the social historians who would not prize this evidence, I have long thought that the "affaire Pascal" of the 1840s captured much of the symbolic quality of the problems I have been trying to address in these last two chapters, notably the problem of faith and legitimation in post-Revolutionary society. The incident I shall sketch (for it deserves fuller treatment) combines some of the actors we have already witnessed. While it touches only a small number of literati, and while my account deals only with those within the liberal spectrum, the positions are of great interest. No more than in the controversy surrounding the opera in the previous century are 150

151

Discours de reception de M. Jules Favre; reponse de M. de Remusat: Academie frangaise, le 23 avril

1868 (Paris, 1868), p. 63. Robert Wokler has an excellent essay forthcoming on the querelle de ropera.

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these the views of France. But they are the contentious views of persons who, as Guizot had hoped in 1838, would collaborate in defining the new French dogma of the juste milieu. Most of France speculators, railroad and canal-builders, prefects, members of secret societies or chambre'es, peasants and artisans — was oblivious to this dispute, which was fought out in highbrow literary reviews, such as the Revue des Deux Mondes, the Journal des Savants, the Journal des

De'bats, and Le Correspondant, as well as in the Academie Franchise. It was not even a fight waged with the proxies of the peuple. No matter: the destiny of legitimacy in the French liberal state was obliquely implicated. The Pensees of Blaise Pascal had long been regarded as a French literary masterpiece. Many of the French gens de lettres, and not the least - Voltaire, Condorcet, Chateaubriand - had felt a need to respond. Pascal's text had been available to these writers and thinkers in the so-called authorized manuscript, published by PortRoyal in 1670, and further propagated in editions by Condorcet and Bossuet in 1776-1779 and, most recently, by Frantin in 1835. What had this jewel of French letters, this coin of the national literary patrimony, to do with politics in the bourgeois monarchy? Simply that Pascal, whom Voltaire had called a "sublime misanthrope" and Chateaubriand had presented as a precursor of Romanticism, was, in terms of politics a slippery eel.152 I do not mean that Pascal had been a literal subject of politics in the way Bossuet had often been in the eighteenth century: merely that his unorthodox, Jansenist, personal vision, though seemingly grafted to the genius of Catholicism, could also be used in ways to unsettle any orthodoxy - to add or subtract from the designs of any of the parties that Guizot had designated as the spirit of the pays legal. Amid the forces that Guizot had hoped to soothe into harmony, Pascal emerged as an irritant and a symbol of mesentente. The episode should ideally be reconstructed in both personal and structural dimensions. That would require a far longer and more detailed account than can be given here. But I shall try to give a meaningful, if highlighted, outline that bears on our principal concerns. When Theodore Jouffroy died in 1842, he left behind manuscript references that were uncomplimentary to his master Cousin. He had 152

Voltaire's famous comments on Pascal occur in the twenty-fifth of his Lettres philosophiques; Chateaubriand's in chapter 6 of the third book of his Genie du Christianisme.

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Philosophy as civil religion

accused him of directing all his attention to the origin of ideas and little to "the problem of human destiny."153 Cousin, ever eager for his reputation, apparently succeeded in persuading Jouffroy's widow to suppress the offending passages in the text of the posthumous JVouveaux melanges. But the news was soon all over Paris; and it was used by enemies to impugn Cousin's fidelity and intellectual integrity. The "scandal" of the Jouffroy papers, in which Cousin's amour propre was both exposed and wounded, furnishes part of the background to the Pascal affair. Jouffroy's own moral intensity recalled traits of Pascal, or perhaps an and-Pascal, since Jouffroy, to his regret, was denied any mystical recovery of his ancient faith. If Jouffroy's private criticism of Cousin accused the latter of shallowness in his search for human meaning, it is not implausible that Cousin, armed with erudition, was tempted to parry that charge by rehabilitating his scholarly credentials and his reputation through a frontal attack on Pascal's own project of faith. Cousin was not only the major-domo of French philosophy and pedagogy; he was a connoisseur of books and he knew his way around in libraries. Whether aided or not, he had found in the Bibliotheque Nationale the original sheets of the Pensees; and he made this discovery a cause ceTebre in 1842. It is not important to our inquiry to validate Cousin's claim: in fact, the brilliance of his detective work was widely accepted and applauded, even by most of those who would indulge in the polemics to follow. What is certain is that no editor of Pascal (including Frantin in 1835) seems to have been aware of this major resource. Manifestly, in the wake of Cousin's revelation, a new edition of the Pensees was imperative: Faugere would fulfil this need in 1844. Cousin expounded his views on Pascal and the meaning of these texts - including some extremely important new ones on the " p a r i " and the remarkable "Mystere de Jesus" —in a series of reports delivered to the Academie Fran^aise between May and August of 1842. Almost simultaneously, they were published in the Journal des Savants and shortly after made into a book, itself augmented in successive editions by new writings of Cousin. Cousin's findings not only rocked French erudition with the suggestion that Pascal and other French writers should be studied like the classics of antiquity; they quickly raised the boil of long153

Simon, Cousin, pp. 163-164.

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simmering controversies on the relationship of religion and philosophy, which, as we have seen, permeated the intellectual circles of France from the time of the Restoration on. For, while technically Cousin's report and the ensuing book entitled Des Pensees de Pascal were concerned with the significance and rapport of the new texts and, beyond that, with a revaluation of Pascal's thought, Cousin used Pascal to strike at his enemies. In a sour debate that carried right up to the portals of the February 1848 revolution, the interpretation of the Pensees became inseparable from the quarrel of religion and philosophy and from its political dimensions. As to the text of the Pensees, Cousin staunchly maintained that Pascal's earliest Port-Royal editors had rearranged, suppressed, and falsified his views. The new manuscripts appeared to prove that, far from being devout and orthodox in his faith and balanced in his appreciation of the natural world, Pascal was a radical Pyrrhonist, destructively anti-philosophical by design, believing - as the " p a r i " seemed to show - in a ccheads-or-tails God." He was a man who had said of religion itself u cela vous abetira" on one of his scraps of paper. Cousin found immediate support from liberal reviewers. But his position might be expected to enrage a wide spectrum of Pascalians, and Cousin took full advantage of his command of the new materials - as distinct from claims of editorship - to bait them. While it is true that the Jansenism of Port-Royal - and most especially in Pascal's radical version - roused little sympathy among nineteenth-century French Catholics, the defense of a sublime Catholic writer and mystic was suddenly at stake. Cousin's charge against Pascal was already two-pronged: on the one hand, he used Pascal to illustrate what he took to be the least redeeming features of the everlasting Catholic faith (the credo quia impossibile, later, as he thought, propagated in Lamennais's Essai sur ['indifference, where it had been charged that all consequent philosophy must end in absolute skepticism); on the other hand, he reaffirmed his solidarity with French Catholic culture, its rationalism, its "natural theology," as best represented by appropriations of Cartesianism by thinkers as varied as Bossuet, Fenelon, and Malebranche — all of them, as Cousin noted in 1844, when he defended the university against the Church, taught in his philosophical curriculum.154 By attempting to 154

See Cousin, Universite et philosophie, p. 339.

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tar Catholicism with the errant and corrosive skepticism of one of its two or three greatest French writers, Cousin waged war on everything he thought obscure and reprehensible in religion; by courting Catholic rationalism with his own staunch denial of skepticism and his Cartesian treaty with the finest philosophical minds of that tradition, he attempted to occupy the highest ground with his eclecticism. Armed with what he took to be the facts - facts important enough to be "announced" but not "disputed", as one Catholic critic bitterly put it155 - Cousin, while nowhere denying Pascal's glory in French letters, emphasized his spiritual fickleness, his philosophical incompetence, his vertiginous unhealthiness - in short, his unfitness for modern French citizenship. Above all, Pascal was Lamennais; or, rather, Lamennais was "Pascal reduced to a system."156 Cousin's reference was to the reactionary Lamennais, but the later radical one suited him no better: for both had been equally irrational. The one had attacked philosophy with his credo quia absurdum; the other had similarly attacked monarchy. Lamennais, together with his apostate disciples of FAvenir, represented for Cousin the assault against the university — his university. By this rather tortured associative logic, Pascal, unhappy and alone as he was in his "thoughts," was held guilty of founding a school and inspiring the modern Jesuits. Pascal was, of course, not only, on the Cousinian interpretation, an anti-rationalist and a perverse skeptic, but also a Jansenist. Skepticism is the major, Jansenism the minor key — or second theme - of Cousin's brilliantly composed sonata-form movement. Jansenism, as I have mentioned, was virtually indefensible in nineteenthcentury French Catholic circles. On aesthetic grounds (and with what power!), Saint-Beuve would champion Port-Royal as a kind of Atratide tragedy (the house of Atreus = the house of Arnaud), and with a special feeling of destiny for Pascal. But in theological or pastoral terms, Jansenism, surviving as a kind of vestigial political morality in men like Lanjuinais and Royer-Collard, had passed from the scene as a great spiritual force.157 The modulations and rhythmic variations between Pascal's alleged Pyrrhonism and his Jansenism 155 156

157

T h e o p h i l e Foisset, in Le Correspondant, ix (1845), p . 412. Cousin, Des pensees de Pascal; rapport a f Academie frangaise sur la necessite tfune nouvelle edition de cet ouvrage (Paris, 1843), P- x^See Cheryl Welch, "Jansenism and Liberalism: The Making of Citizens in PostRevolutionary France," forthcoming in History of Political Thought.

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thus seemed a profitable melody in Cousin's sonata: Jansenism was religion carried beyond moderation; and skepticism, a doctrine despising and challenging "impersonal reason," was distinctly a companion of that immoderation, that contempt for philosophical evidence. Pascal's skepticism was at issue in the debate; his Jansenism could be scarcely in doubt: but if the one could be shown to lead to the other, there were philosophical points to be won. Pascal's rigorous Jansenism indeed embarrassed some of his Catholic defenders; but they had little difficulty in showing that no trace of skepticism clouds the works of Arnaud and Nicole, Pascal's coreligionaries, and they made bold to assert that as skeptical as he might seem in philosophy, Pascal was a rock of faith in religion. We are now sufficiently acquainted with Cousin's argument (although we have grossly compressed it), and we have some insight into his motives. We are obliged to end with some of his own words: the goal [of religion and philosophy] is the same: to rehabilitate the dignity of the soul, faith in divine Providence, and service to the fatherland... It was Pascal, in the book discussed here, who first declared war on Cartesianism and all philosophy. That war has been resumed in our own time, and has now reached a pitch of ultimate violence... Here is my final word: Though the government should remain indecisive and tongue-tied; though an exhausted public spirit should become ever more remote from those noble interests that quickened the heart of our ancestors and for so long made France the soul and intelligence of the world; though immoderate attacks should frighten those of feeble conviction who have no experience of life's troubles — there remains a man... who will never bend beneath that coalition of all the wicked factions, who, with God's help, will never let himself be led astray or intimated by anyone.158 T h a t man was of course V . C . , and this missile was signed in December 1842.

The belligerency went on for several more years, in ever escalating leaps, encompassing — let us not forget — Cousin's famous "defense of the University" in the Chamber of Peers in 1844 and the shipwreck of the revised law of public instruction that Guizot's minister of education Salvandy tried vainly to guide into port, after his predecessor Villemain had lost his wits in the same undertaking. Mentioning just the cast of characters with whom we have become familiar, we might first examine the response in the liberal Catholic Correspondant. For dramatic purposes, it is a pity that Cousin did not 158

Cousin, Des pensees, pp. liv-lv.

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have as his opponent the Comte de Montalembert, his adversary in the upper Chamber. However, a series of replies, soon continued in reviews of the 1844 Faugere edition of the Pensees, by Theophile Foisset, adequately express that publication's attitude toward Cousin's Pascal studies. We have already encountered Foisset as the scribe who commemorated Dupanloup's eucharist at La Roche-enBrenil in Latin.159 He played a significant role on Le Correspondant, although he lived in Dijon, and not Paris (Albert de Broglie later described him as "le plus consulte et le plus respecte de nos conseillers").160 He was an "austere magistrate," untouched by the skepticism of his time, admirable in his rectitude, a family man advanced in age, with an almost Old Regime, almost Jansenist piety that had been moderated by Lacordaire. He was frequently given seventeenth-century topics to write about by Le Correspondant. Foisset wrote articles, first on Cousin's Des Pensees in 1843; then, in 1844 and 1845, a l° n g review of Prosper Faugere's new edition of the Pensees. From the outset, his reaction to Cousin was "engaged" and hostile. Pascal's whole life - on the testimony of his family and those close to him - had been a life of faith, and not radical doubt, or at least no more than the doubt which, when overcome, sustains true faith. Even the texts of Cousin failed to cast any shadow over this state of affairs. Clearly Cousin was ill-suited to render nice theological judgements. In any case, others had known of the Pascal manuscripts (what Frantin's edition of 1835 had sought to present was the integrity of Pascal's thought, not its demolition by hasty scraps of paper now resurrected for partisan purposes) ;161 Cousin had sought his "greater glory" through fidgeting with Jouffroy's posthumous papers; Cousin was scarcely equipped to deal with a thinker like Pascal, when, unable himself to create an original philosophy, he had claimed one only by pasting bits and pieces of other philosophers together and dignifying this with the name of "eclecticism."162 When Faugere's edition of the Pensees appeared, there was some expectation that it might, or even should, fortify Cousin's position; for, in an Eloge de Pascal written for the Academie in 1840, Faugere had shown some favor toward the "skeptical" view. However, Faugere's text and comment took some distance from Cousin's exegesis, and he was careful to avoid ideological partiality. Since 159 161

160 See above, ch. 3. Albert de Broglie, Memoires (Paris, 1938), 1, 272. 162 Foisset, Le Correspondant, n, 47-48. Ibid., 1, 369.

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many of the texts included in the new Pensees appeared to be sketches and not final conclusions, he chose, while leaving nothing out of his edition, to treat provocative issues gingerly. If Cousin had wished to stress Pascal's radical skepticism, Faugere, agreeing that this strain was present, rebalanced things by reminding his readers of Pascal the mathematician and Pascal the Christian believer. Faugere's discretion was sufficient to allow Foisset to praise his work, while yet grumbling that Faugere had " allowed an imposition from the authority of M. Cousin." 1 6 3 However, in the words of Foisset, "from now on, the skepticism of Pascal is dispelled [e'en est fait]; M. Faugere has delivered the coup de grace to that phantom, and that is the major finding [le resultat capital] of his edition." 1 6 4 " I deny that Pascal was ever a skeptic," Foisset declared boldly. 165 Pascal had had his period of worldly pleasures - but that had nothing to do with the Pensees. Here Foisset summoned to his aid material from SaintBeuve's vast work in progress on Port-Royal. While Cousin fought his battles in the realm of abstract argument and refused any real debate over Pascal's life and faith, he was vulnerable to more serious evidence. But he simply went around proclaiming: " I am Philosophy; I am Reason." 1 6 6 In Foisset and other Catholic critics, the old charges surface: Cousin was a pantheist, an Hegelian, a philosopher who wanted to gobble religion up. Yet it is to be noted that the rigorous Foisset himself was not totally easy with Pascal's existential and Jansenist leanings, for he wrote discreetly: " I n the end Bossuet seems to us a more serious intelligence, more harmonized, more complete. Despite his geometrical exactness, Pascal, transported by the fever of his imagination, more than once stretches the truth [outre la verite]; Bossuet never." 1 6 7 It is clear that the strategies of eclecticism and liberal Catholicism were totally hostile and at odds in the Pascal case, which became for both camps a simulacrum of the war over secondary education and the relations of religion and the state. Obviously they were not collaborating in the moral foundation of Orleanist legitimacy as Guizot had hoped. Indeed, it would take the pragmatic Thiers to extend the olive branch to Dupanloup for the salvation of the social order, and that two years after the dynasty had been dispossessed. There is also a Protestant view of this question, remarkable and well worth mentioning because of its intimate connection with 163 166

Ibid., ix, 395. Ibid., VII, 362-363.

164

Ibid., VIII, 782. 167

165 Ibid., p. 321. Ibid., v m , 793.

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Sainte-Beuve's masterpiece, which had been in gestation since the Lausanne lectures of 1838 and whose six volumes would appear slowly between 1840 and 1859.168 Sainte-Beuve, it will be recalled, had been invited to address the academy in Lausanne by the literary pastor-professor Alexandre Vinet, whom we discussed in another context. Although not a Protestant himself, Sainte-Beuve was, at the beginning of his Jansenist research, teetering on the brink of Christian faith, no doubt encouraged by his admired and saintly friend. Sainte-Beuve's Lausanne audience was also Protestant; whatever give-and-take he experienced in those early and foundational attempts to structure his magnificent portrait of an age, an institution, and a faith came from conversations with the Reformed. Both that social milieu and Sainte-Beuve's professed psychological and literary m e t h o d - " I try to disappear in the character I am reproducing" 169 - suggest Protestant attitudes. Sainte-Beuve individualized, and he also stood outside of the religion of Port-Royal with something resembling a dispassionate Christian sympathy. But let us first consider Vinet's response to the Pascal controversy before returning to the composition of Port-Royal. Vinet's view of the question was distinctively Protestant: without exactly trying to claim Pascal and Jansenism for the Reformation, he felt obliged to stress the "individuality" of Pascal as his unifying theme of interpretation. In Vinet's Pascal - conspicuously as compared to Cousin's - the style is not the man, the man is the style. Pascal's is a creative, voluntary, and unifying personality that leads to coherence amid contradictions; centrifugal moral wholeness is stressed above intellectual and logical cohesion. Both the geometer and the mystic in Pascal are made to give way to the man and his ethical energy. Needless to say, this admiring view was quite at odds with Cousin's anathematizing of Pascal's skepticism and his extraordinary charge that Pascal had somehow inspired the "attack on the University." For if Pascal's progeny, with their "Jesuit" friends, were storming the Sorbonne, this did not appear to be the case in Lausanne. Prodded by Sainte-Beuve, who owed Cousin a few debts and was reluctant to enter the fray directly, Vinet devoted three articles to the Pascal imbroglio in 1843 ^n his journal Le Semeur. Together with 168

169

See t h e magistral introduction b y M a x i m e Leroy to t h e Pleiade edition of Port-Royal (3 vols., Paris, 1953), 1, 1-73; also, for a briefer b u t informed a n d reliable survey, R i c h a r d M . C h a d b o u r n e , Charles-Augustin Sainte-Beuve (Boston, 1977), p p . 106-123. Sainte-Beuve, Pensees et maximes (ed. M . C h a p e l a n , Paris, 1955), p . 104.

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Sainte-Beuve (who responded in the Revue des Deux Mondes of July 1844), Vinet hailed the Faugere edition of the Pensees for its confirmation of Pascal's sanity, faith, and balance. Three more articles now appeared in Le Semeur, which came as close as anything Vinet had written to claiming Pascal for Protestantism, as a servant of "the Holy Spirit," not of "the Church." 170 The essays were collected and posthumously published in 1848, as the Etudes sur Blaise Pascal, quickly recognized as a landmark of commentary. It was not, of course, Alexandre Vinet's intention to engage in a French political dispute; but his opinions could hardly avoid weighing on it. By the very position that he took as regards both the integrity of Pascal and Cousin's reconstruction of his thought (perhaps, wrote Vinet, before the Cousin discovery "nous n'avions pas les Pensees de Pascal, mais nous avions certainement sa pensee"), 171 he favored the Christians against the eclectics. There was, he argued "an infinite distance between Pyrrhonism and faith": by abruptly transferring Pascal's position from one of supreme faith to supreme doubt, had Cousin not rudely neglected all intervening calibrations; had he not been "insolent"? 172 Moreover - and here we glimpse certain political implications - had not "modern Pyrrhonists" reserved to themselves one element of absolute dogma, "universal consent"? Despite their (namely Cousin's) claims that this was in the interest of Christianity, was that true? Was it not rather "the most murderous, though indirect, attack on the dignity of man, the holiness of God, and morality itself?"173 If Pascal was a Pyrrhonist, it was at least not according to this new style - unreligious because conditioned by place and time - a "prejudice raised to a dogma, brute force put in the place of the law." 174 According to Vinet, " M . Cousin will not allow that we should be skeptics, and yet I recall that all the world was skeptical before receiving the Gospel... because it is the Gospel that is true." 175 That is what Pascal had understood, but not Cousin. "There is something outrageously paradoxical in saying that a man like M. Cousin has not understood Pascal," Vinet continues. "We would willingly refrain from saying this if we could. But, in the end, it must be said: there is something more here than a book, there is a man; there is 170 171

A l e x a n d r e Vinet, Etudes sur Pascal (Paris, 1904), p p . 212-214. 172 173 Ibid., p . 332. Ibid., p . 334. Ibid., p p . 3 3 4 - 3 3 5 . 175 Ibid., p. 335. Ibid., p. 358.

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something more than philosophy, there is Christianity. As it has been said, there is a tragedy that one must not simply witness as a metaphysician." 176 Sainte-Beuve understood and constructed Port-Royal as a kind of prose tragedy, as we previously remarked. When Cousin delivered his findings in 1842, this author, though launched on his twenty-year venture, was nowhere in sight of port and had not yet produced his famous third book on Pascal, which, so to speak, is the pinnacle of the work. In keeping with the intention of Port-Royal', Sainte-Beuve felt close to Vinet's conception of the Pascalian person, the tragic hero, the creature of exception and bearer of a special accumulation of particularity, faith, and life, albeit set within specific and complex cultural parameters. Nothing could have been further from SainteBeuve's vision than to see Port-Royal as the prefiguration of some "Jesuit" plot against modern philosophy or to regard Pascal as some ominous precursor of the pre-1829 Lamennais - especially since Pascal and Lamennais were separated by the gulf of Lamennais's "traditionalism." 177 For such reasons, it must have been more than disconcerting to Sainte-Beuve to see the Pascal issue raised at that moment and in the form it took. Cousin had virtually questioned Pascal's sanity; he had certainly questioned his lucidity; and he had found his doctrines destructive to the social order. Sainte-Beuve, agreeing here with most of the Catholic voices, spoke of "Pascal's lucidity in regard to the social order."178 Jansenism had deep attractions for Sainte-Beuve - Plutarchian and heroic ones - although he evaluated the doctrine and practice of these severe moralists from a position of sympathetic understanding, not assimilation. Cousin, on the other hand, in his assault on Pascal's skepticism, took the imputation of Jansenism to be an axiomatic reinforcement of his other charges. Cousin dismissed, or else little understood, the resonances of Jansenism, just as he little understood the "Christian heroism" which Sainte-Beuve had declared to be a 176 177

178

Ibid., p. 383. Like most thinkers of his time, L a m e n n a i s h a d a profound sense of historical m o t i o n : together with Eckstein a n d Bonald, h e construed theological questions in this way. Pascal, on the other h a n d , h a d virtually n o sense of it and, unlike Bossuet, took little or n o interest in " s a c r e d history," being almost a n existentialist o n this score. Sainte-Beuve here is quoted from A n d r e M o n c h o u x , " L a Polemique des annees 1840 autour de V. Cousin et de Pascal," in Romantisme et religion: the'ologiens et theologie des ecrivains: actes du collogue a Metz, octobre igj8 (Paris, 1980), p. 38. This essay is an excellent brief guide to the major outlines of the controversy.

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major motto of Port-Royal.119 For Sainte-Beuve, Pascal was "a great philosopher and the last of the great saints."180 But for Cousin, Pascal was an opportunity to attack disruptive and transgressive tendencies in French thought. One senses how there is no possible dialogue between these positions. Sainte-Beuve, like Vinet, and other commentators, took Pascal's intellectual struggle with Montaigne - the combat of the "spiritual man" with the "natural man " - a s a central issue. For Cousin's eclecticism (even if it was not, as critics charged, pantheism) there was little consequence to such a distinction: neither Montaigne nor Pascal achieved the standpoint of " impersonal reason," the via sacra of Descartes. It is out of such sources, materials, and views — here only briefly clarified - that the Pascal controversy of the 1840s (coincident with the span of the Guizot government) took shape. Our purpose has not been to defend any special reading of Pascal (disputes still rage about this); nor, even less, has it been to indict Cousin's position. Rather, we have tried to show in this closing section an illustration of the anomalies of faith, politics, and opinion in the July Monarchy. Since the Pascal controversy pitted representative liberal intellects against one another, and abated only when the more serious affair of revolution arose, it may be studied as a symbol of liberal mesentente. Pascal, the man and is works, are not essential here, except as they reveal wider fissures in nineteenth-century culture. For mainly at issue were the structure of regime and society and the conditions of their legitimation. As it has been accurately observed, "at bottom in the debate on Pascal one detects at every moment religious, philosophical, and almost political stakes in the game." 181 We have shown how the religious and philosophical stakes were political. Within the contentious liberal disposition we have described that is, the disposition of survivors of the Revolution and Empire who wished neither to regress nor to jettison their new freedoms in fanciful and dangerous social experiments - the conditions for agreement simply did not exist. They failed to exist for numerous reasons, and we have been able to identify a few of these: (1) these "reasoners" were a minority, and could not enlist the enthusiasm of wide sectors of society, even of the middle class; (2) despite the fact 179 180

C.-A. d e Sainte-Beuve, Port-Royal (ed. M . Leroy, 3 vols., Paris, 1953), 1, 88. 181 Ibid., 11, 312. A. M o n c h o u x , ' P o l e m i q u e , " p . 383.

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that these liberals rubbed shoulders with each other and, grosso modo, shared a similar way of life, they constantly vied with each other over the rules of the game; (3) they prized intellectual authority and the benefits of power and prestige that it brought, but that authority was itself divisive; (4) mostly all of them wished to "lead" the people; (5) all feared another revolution, yet their immobilizing quarrels did much to bring one about; (6) their pleas, or offers, of conciliation were often pro forma, or deceptive, or too late; (7) when they reflected on the national past, they saw different values, different benchmarks of inspiration; (8) they imagined themselves at, or close to, the consummation of political, constitutional time. Of course, there are honorable exceptions to all this. Few of the figures thus far canvassed were stupid or incompetent or unscrupulous, although it must be at once added that some failed to live up to their self-set standards. While not always genial, the liberals were at least more interesting than most present politicians and their "idea men." But their grave transgression - and the main reason why liberalism withered in France for more than a century - is that their intelligence, which illuminated the academies and the reviews, lacked any common touch, indeed subscribed to a distaste for the new vision of man that their theories had so vigorously propagated in the abstract. Both hands of the liberal were velveted; neither was calloused. Yet liberals fought like cats and dogs in those gauntlets over the definition of society, never managing to implant their definitions in the hearts of the socie'taires. A peculiar mixture of Jacobinism, Bonapartism, and social conservatism would prove better able to thrill the obstreperous nation.

CHAPTER 5

Lamartine: liberalism's fallen angel

I. UT POESIS POLITIGA?

It was not so much the cravenness or stupidity of the liberals as their wishful historical forgetfulness that confused them when the Orleans dynasty, believed solid, melted into air. Their plight was, of course, aggravated by complacency and social blindness. And they scarcely honored their oath to Louis-Philippe, at the point of crisis or in its wake. They had gained effective power in France at "one of those blessed moments in history when everything is simple" (i.e. 1830).1 Now all was bewilderment. " M . Thiers and M. Barrot," Tocqueville comments mordantly, "were almost demented." 2 But he, too, was very sorely perplexed. One of the vehicles of this dementia was the powerful rhetoric of Alphonse de Lamartine, who should have known how to remain a gentleman. M. de Lamartine, who, by liberal standards of taste and propriety, should not have let a revolution be made was, nevertheless, himself a liberal by most of our available criteria. He was also a poet; Plato had warned against poets. Lamartine not only helped to make (or, better, channel) the February 1848 revolution; he was widely accused of causing it as well, notably by publishing his Histoire des Girondins, "whose crude colors," in Tocqueville's uncharitable language, "besmeared every imagination." 3 Petty noble of the Old Regime, member (since 1830) of the Academie Franchise, deputy (since 1834) of the Chamber, former diplomat under Charles X and friend of Polignac,4 arrant 1 2 4

Charles de Remusat, Memoires de ma vie (5 vols., Paris, 1958-1967), 11, 302. 3 Alexis de Tocqueville, Recollections (New York, 1959), p. 60. Ibid., p. 54. Lamartine to Virieu, 25 March 1830: "je passe ma vie chez le prince de Polignac tete a tete," Maurice Levaillant, ed., Lamartine: Correspondance ge'nerale de 1830 a 1848 (Paris, 1943-1948), 1, 18. Henceforth CG.

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Legitimist and heterodox Catholic, precocious libertine, poet and orator of renown, Lamartine was, in the words of Charles de Remusat, "un homme dangereux." 5 His epic of the Great Revolution, conceived in 1841 and begun in 1843,6 occupied much of the prolific writer's time in the last years of the constitutional monarchy. It came cascading on the public between March and June of 1847. Together with almost simultaneous works by Michelet and Louis Blanc,7 the Girondins focused the mind wonderfully on one of the forms that the gathering political crisis might take - dethronement - and on the possible course that a subsequent revolution might follow. Liberals did not, generally, want to be reminded of their own origin in armed politics. In his powerful style, both heroic and pathetic, often cinematographic, Lamartine managed to rehabilitate Mirabeau, wring tears from the surviving mourners of Louis XVI, beautify Vergniaud and his circle of idealists, and even bestow national grace on the abhorrent Robespierre. Lamartine intended a conciliatory work for men of good will: but this was conciliatory only for the non-Bonapartist opposition. As SainteBeuve wrote: "...something for all tastes... The papers of all persuasions have each got their appropriate fragment."8 Lamartine saw himself as a militant herald of harmony, the harmony of a "politique rationnelle" as yet unrealized. Earlier, he had imagined renovation in " a small number of intelligences belonging by accident to all the shades of political opinion." 9 He was not so much trying to cover all bets as to commence a rather mystical process of reunion which, not altogether humbly, he had sought to shape as a "parti social" since his earliest venture into electoral politics. Those ideas of fraternity and regeneration, common to dissident legitimists, radicals, and Romantics of the 1840s but unseemly to the men of the juste milieu (those who were, or hoped to become, the government), were based on a firm faith in popular religion and education. After his crashing downfall in June 1848 and to the end of his life, Lamartine would stave off his debts (for he practiced an aristocratic style of life) by writing homilies and 5 6

7

8 9

Remusat, Memoires, iv, 31. When Lamartine decisively joined the "opposition de gauche." See on this William Fortescue, Alphonse de Lamartine: A Political Biography (London, 1983), pp. H2f. Jules Michelet's Histoire de la Revolution franqaise appeared in 1847, as did the first volumes of Louis Blanc's work of the same title. Charles-Augustin de Sainte-Beuve, Causeries du lundi (15 vols., Paris, 1869-1876), xi, 462. Lamartine, Destine'es de la Poe'sie, in Oeuvres completes (Paris, 1834), 1, 70.

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biographies in this vein.10 As for the Girondins, "do not read it," he cautioned his former political ally Comte Mathieu Mole. " I t is written for the people... My duty is to prepare the people and myself, for I will be the leader in a new society."11 It may be doubted that the Girondins was savored by large numbers of the working class, who read other things. It was, however, favorably mentioned in many of the papers that they did read, where Lamartine's prowess as an opposition deputy was also gingerly praised.12 But many literate radical artisans undoubtedly read parts of the history in its serialized form; and it had a clearly dynamic effect on all those honnetes gens who felt angered and stifled by the political immobilism of July parliaments. The notion that literature might cause history to happen, instead of merely reshaping it for moral reflection and sentimental delectation, did not occur to the men of the juste milieu, who had once themselves "used history" but by now tended to think that historical writing settled history.13 Wasn't that old canard that Voltaire, Rousseau & Co. had caused the Great Revolution's excesses safely laid to rest? Had literature caused Bonaparte? Had it brought back the Bourbons? Had a book of Beranger's songs toppled them? The rulers of July did not harbor any nagging Platonic fears of what George Steiner has called " a radical irresponsibility in the imaginings of writers, a radical moral-technical falsehood." They could appreciate the new colors and potencies of Romanticism without realizing that "where language is under the utmost pressure of fresh meaning, where it wrestles its way toward becoming literature, images of the state will well up." 14 Surrounded by an extravagant burst of literature, they could soberly believe that politics and poetics each had their role to play in mankind's profit and pleasure, but in separate compartments. They did not see their connivance — from on high or from below — for politics was in the Bourse and the Chamber, while serious literature was in the academies and the libraries. There was, to be sure, one major 10

11 13

14

Lamartine published two such collections: Le Civilisateur, between 1852 and 1854; and the Cours familier de litterature from 1856 to 1869. On this, see Charles M. Lombard, Lamartine (New York, 1973), pp. 72-94. 12 Cited in Fortescue, Alphonse de Lamartine, p. 127. See ibid., p. 126. On " using" history, see Stanley Mellon, The Political Uses of History: A Study of the Historians of the French Restoration (Stanford, 1958), passim; on "settling" it, Maurice Agulhon, L' apprentissage de la Republique, 1848-1852 (Paris, 1973), p. 7. George Steiner, "Language Under Surveillance: The Writer and the State," New York Times Book Review, 12 January 1986, p. 1.

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exception: the press - and this was tended with some care and alarm. But the bourgeoisie stacked its shelves indifferently with Encyclopedists, Jean-Jacques, Bernardin de Saint-Pierre, Chateaubriand... Utpictura poesis, perhaps. Utpoesispolitica, never. It was not seen that poetry might redramatize politics with the refracting mirror of a history of heightened emotion, exalting it or satanizing it, rather than merely keeping its distance. Even the astute SainteBeuve, himself a Romantic and a liberal of sorts, fell into this trap with Lamartine, whose poetry he had much admired. Sainte-Beuve could "have wished that, while developing his poetic talent as widely, and even outrageously, as the nature of his genius carried him, he had remained in accord with himself in politics, faithful to his origins, his precedents, and to the order of opinions, doctrines, and decorum which, cultivated in his youth, were his natural climate." 15 The trouble, indeed, did not start with some song of Beranger suddenly heard everywhere or even with a play like Beaumarchais's Figaro. It started, as we have seen, with religion, in the first blushes of the Restoration. Eventually the religious impulse would turn poetics into a mighty political juggernaut, adversarial and vatic at the same time. It was really a threefold operation. First of all, in attempting to restore their monarchy in an appropriate antediluvian style, the ultras politicized religion past the brink of sanity in a country that hoped, at bottom, for a fragile measure of concord. Crude Gallican and subtle ultramontane controversialists crossed swords with each other and with liberals and freethinkers in an often vengeful spirit. They fought over faith, its propagation, its uses, and its powers of censorship; while civic Catholics, like Royer-Collard, could only deplore these spasms of immoderation.16 Second (although it comes last in time), infusions of political capacity and mobilization animated unorthodox but deeply rooted populist religious expression in the countryside (the "people" whom Lamennais eventually addressed) and among the urban craftsmen (the clientele of Cabet). 17 Finally, the poets and prose poets, beginning with that master of the new style Chateaubriand, were 15 16

17

Sainte-Beuve, Portraits contemporains (5 vols., Paris, 1870), 1, 306. See Michel Despland, "Christian Religion under the conditions of Modernity," Sciences religieuses/Studies in Religion, 13, 2 (1984), 156. See Agulhon, Apprentissage, pp. 13-14; and Edward Berenson, Populist Religion and Left- Wing Politics in France, 1830-1832 (Princeton, 1984), pp. 37-38.

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making religion beautiful, mysterious, and sentimental: political and national as well, with their mood capturing an ever greater part of the hungry imagination. Soon the Utopians, too, produced their religions, their oases of bizarre bliss in the deserts of labor and industry. Politicized, beautified, reinvented, mobilized, the religious impulse seemed supple and inexhaustible. But was it well under control, caught between the toils of poetry and politics, between prophecy and propriety? Jacques Maritain has written: "by showing us where moral truth and the genuine supernatural are situated, religion saves poetry from the absurdity of believing itself destined to transform ethics and life: it saves it from overweaning arrogance." 18 Much of Romantic vatic poetry exceeded that restraint, taking on the appearance of a new religion (or of a Catholicism painted with the brushstrokes of a William Blake). As for the old religion, it was sterilized as a living force by its archaic political complicities. The rising religious impulse eventually became something like the Revolution itself (which all agreed had been, at bottom, an anti-religious experience). It became - in its hetero-Catholic, eclectic, or anti-bourgeois expressions - a "religion of humanity," something that could unite imaginative opponents of the juste milieu. A new politics arose to transmit this religion, whether in the Nazarene simplicity of Lamennais's Paroles, the novel rituals of Enfantin, or the epic bursts of Lamartine, Hugo, and Vigny. Finally, history (not the history of Mignet and Thiers, but that of Lamartine, Michelet, and Edgar Quinet) grafted this impulse to an interpretation of French reality — a reality which, if it had needed to, might have invented the slogan " l'imagination au pouvoir": Odilon Barrot would indeed write, "affaire d'imagination et non de raison."19 The radical difference between 1789 and 1848 is not just, as Marx and many others noted, that the latter immediately disclosed a copied theatricality. It is also that in 1848 a powerful religious current associated the symbol of the risen Christ with the messianic aptitude of the French people to redeem mankind in history - a kind of " liberation theology" avant la lettre.20 This poetry of liberation, at least for a short while, left only the losers, or the very prosaic, 18

19 20

Jacques Maritain, "The Frontiers of Poetry," in Art and Scholasticism (trans. J. F. Scanlan, London, 1930), p. 109. Odilon Barrot, Memoires posthumes (4 vols., Paris, 1875-1876), 11, 73. See F r a n k B o w m a n , Le Christ romantique (Geneva, 1973), p p . 8 7 - 1 3 9 .

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unaffected. As Timothy Clark writes: " I n the first few weeks of March, there was a period of ecstasy, lyrical illusion, a comedy of high ideas. There was infinite hope in a future of union and brotherhood, a rhetoric which mixed religion and politics, a trust in science and industry." 21 That is a brief account of how poetics and politics, the vatic and the all-too-human converged on a work like the Histoire des Girondins and, beyond it, on Lamartine's own republican dramatics. His role in this extravaganza was certainly conditioned by his serendipitous availability; as Lorenz von Stein puts it: "he was a good orator; his naivety with regard to the social question was well known; he had a brilliant name; and he was ambitious." 22 But if he absorbed the theatricality of the occasion, he also helped to write part of the script and he summoned Paris to imitation. "Ordinarily," Sainte-Beuve wrote, "literature and theatre have seized upon great historical events to express and celebrate them; here history has undertaken to copy literature. In brief, one gets the feeling that a lot of things happened just because the people saw Dumas's Le Chevalier de Maison-Rouge at the boulevard theatre and read Les Girondins by M. de Lamartine." 23 Thus, in capturing his mood, we must not fail to capture Lamartine, the poet—politician, as well. For he spoke with a voice and thoughts of his own, not, as detractors often suggest, in vacuous tones of opportunism or as the babbling oracle of historical forces he could not grasp. Lamartine merits attention because he is one of the few examples we have of the poet not just engaged in political business, but in power (Leopold Sedar Senghor and, in a marginal way, Gabriele d'Annunzio also come to mind). At an incandescent moment when poetry, politics, and religion fused briefly, he stood at the juncture of those overlapping imaginations. More should not be made of this point than it can bear; for it can easily be shown that the vocations of poet and homme cTEtat were distinct in Lamartine. Even in the period when his poetic powers were strongest (1820-1839), he reserved a large, perhaps even privileged, place for his careers of diplomacy and politics: in the year leading up to the July revolution and long after, his letters to his bosom friend Aymon de Virieu are 21

T.J.Clark, The Absolute Bourgeois: Artists and Politics in France, 1848-1851 (Princeton, 1982), p.

22

11.

L o r e n z v o n Stein, History of the Social Movement in France, 1J89-1850 (trans. K . M e n g e l b e r g , 23 Totowa, NJ, 1964), pp. 373-374. Sainte-Beuve, Portraits, 1, 376.

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obsessed with political questions, and in his part-reverie Voyage en Orient (1835), where he sought poetic and religious renewal, he simply cannot lay the subject aside. Lamartine informed himself on a wide range of issues, including railroad construction, that have little enough to do with his lyric talent. Yet neither can the politician be isolated summarily from the poet, for the logic of the times permitted their consolidation in a single personality without distortion of the separate vocations. Hostile witnesses like Odilon Barrot dismissed Lamartine as a poet who had come barging naively and destructively into politics: "he was exclusively a poet; his misfortune and ours was that he also believed himself to be a statesman." 24 But it would be fairer to say that the two missions had been developed in problematic tandem, a relationship requiring delicate explanation. In 1830, Lamartine had written to Antoine de Latour: " Poetry can be exalted or can lower itself to politics, but rarely as far as dayto-day politics {la politique des ci?'Constances)."25 Four years later, after his trip to the Middle East, he wrote a long essay "Des Destinees de la Poesie," which further elaborates his thoughts. The new poetry — inspired for him by Chateaubriand and Madame de Stael26 — will become "the music of reason (la raison chante'e)"': "it will be philosophical, religious, political, social, just like the ages that the human race is about to traverse; but especially it will be intimate." 27 This poetry, described as the voice of God implanted in "certain men more fully human than the vulgar, mens divinior,"28 will have two missions. It will point out, for the edification and shaming of society, " Utopias, imaginary republics, cities of God, and will inspire the courage to try them and the hope to gain them." More modestly, it will also "follow the tendency of institutions and the press; it should conform to the people and become popular in the form of religion, reason, and philosophy."29 Then, Larmartine goes on to say: "Poetry is the idea, while politics is the fact. Just as the idea is above the fact, so poetry is above politics. But man does not live by ideals alone; the ideal must be embodied and translated into social institutions." At certain points in time institutions are vigorous and self-nourishing: then thought can go its own way. At other moments, 24

26 29

Barrot, Me'moires, n, 34. For Lamartine's indignant rebuttal of such imputations, see his Memoires politiques, Oeuvres completes (41 vols., Paris, 1860-1866), XL, 422-424. Henceforth 25 OC. Letter of 19 November 1830, CG, 1, 81. 27 28 Lamartine, Destinees, p. 12. Ibid., p. 58. Ibid., p. 18. Ibid., p. 60.

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social practices are in desperate need of renewal. "My conviction," Lamartine declares, "is that we are in one of those great periods of reconstruction and social renewal."30 He thus concludes that poetry has a divine and historic calling to guide a politics that has entered "the age of liberty," elsewhere described as the "epoque evangelique." 31 One can well understand why such language might make the legal mind of Odilon Barrot bristle; but it is not yet demonstrated that Lamartine was nothing but an ethereal, lyric politician. Lamartine knew well how not to confuse "idea" and "fact," even though the priority was clear. His political vision might be understood as teleologically informed by his poetic ideals, as in his poem "Les Revolutions" (which is not an invitation to make them), where he addresses humanity: Vos siecles page a page epellent l'Evangile; Vous n'y lisiez qu'un mot, et vous en lirez mille; Vos enfants plus hardis y liront plus avant! Ce livre est comme ceux des sibylles antiques, Dont l'augure trouvait les feuillets prophetiques Siecle a siecle arraches au vent.32 These lines, written in 1835, strongly recall a turn of phrase used in the prose essay of 1831 "Sur la politique rationnelle": "humanity will write its book day by day, hour by hour, page by page; thought will go forth in the world with the speed of light." 33 But beneath the purple passages of that brochure there is some very strict and sound political analysis, at the level of "facts." 34 Even in the verses suggestively titled "Utopie," where the poet can thunder: L'homme inventa la tyrannie Pour qu'un seul exprimat ses droits, Mais au jour de Dieu qui se leve Le sceptre tombe sous le glaive, Nul n'est esclave, et tous sont rois!35 30 32

33 35

31 Ibid., p. 68. Sur la politique rationnelle, in OC, x x x v n , 362. L a m a r t i n e , Oeuvres poetiques (Paris, 1963), p p . 5 1 7 - 5 1 8 . " P a g e b y p a g e y o u r centuries spell out the Gospel; / You have hardly read a word, but thousands will be read; / And your doughtier children will read them! / This book is like those of the ancient sibyls / Whose auguries disclosed leaves of prophecy / Age after age snatched from the wind." 34 Politique rationnelle, p . 357. See below, pp. 196-6. Oeuvres poetiques, p. 1154. " Mankind invented tyranny / So that one alone might declare his rights, / But in God's new day dawning / The sceptre falls beneath the sword; / None is a slave, and all are kings."

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he can also counsel patience: N'etendons pas le Temps sur le lit de Procuste! La resignation est la force du juste! La patience est sa vertu !36 to conclude, in a balanced fashion: II faut se separer, pour penser, de la foule, Et s'y confondre pour agir!37 Thus, poetic ideals establish the boundary of the imaginable, expressing Lamartine's "maximum program" for human regeneration, while themselves remaining bound to certain gradualistic, quasi-Christian restraints. Much more serious restraints are asserted with total clarity in the poet's politics - his innumerable acts, speeches, and judgments (his "minimum program," which is also conceived as a conservative program). Here, Lamartine's defense of what might otherwise be called "bourgeois values"-property, religion, constitutionalism, a restricted suffrage, an educated ruling elite — and of ideals of the family and rural life is constant. In 1831, Lamartine saw his world hazardously entering the age of liberty. He did not foresee any arrival at "the age of virtue and pure religion" for another five or six centuries.38 There is no reason to think that the vertiginous republicanism of 1848 caused him to change this view. And it is certain that his "utopianism" (if it can be called that) is far more a moral idealism combining optimism and duty than it is an eschatological leap toward social perfection. If, in connection with the poetics of politics, one thinks of Lamartine (the same Lamartine whose worldly connections and strategies guided his ordinary politics) as a seer or as a bit of a messiah, this would be correct only insofar as it placed him, a man of excessive self-esteem, in a large company of prophets. But this was not explicitly the consequence of his poetry. Rimbaud has written: "The poet makes himself a seer by a long, prodigious, and rational disordering of all the senses. Every form of love, of suffering, of madness. He searches himself; he consumes all the poisons in him, and keeps only their quintessence."39 That is not the kind of seer Lamartine was, nor does it express his aesthetic 36

37 38 39

Ibid., p. 1156. "Do not stretch time on a Procrustean bed! / Resignation is the just man's strength / And patience is his virtue!" Ibid., p. 1157. "We have to think outside the crowd, / And mix with it to act!" Politique rationnelle, p . 364. I n Oliver B e r n a r d , trans., Selected Verse of Rimbaud ( H a r m o n d s w o r t h , 1962), p . 10.

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method. His vision, always distinct from his immediate political judgments, was created by a heightening, not a disordering, of the senses and by severe (one almost wants to say "classical") poetical exercise. There is a touch of William Wordsworth in Lamartine; of Rimbaud there is none. We should also remember that the poetic gifts of Lamartine (and their accompanying social vision of a purified and liberated humanity achieving the work of God) would not have sufficed to bring him to center-stage prominence in 1848 had it not been for his still more relevant endowments of public presence and oratorical power. The first of these was, if anything, an aristocratic inheritance; the second was acquired and fine-tuned in election meetings, in the Chamber, in the Academy, and in other vehicles of society that the quarante-huitards rose against. Lamartine's popular rhetoric was more than offensive to most of his parliamentary colleagues, even the most liberal. But those critics tended to forget that it was politics, perforce the politics of the July Monarchy, that had taught him facility in public address. Lamartine had always wanted to "parler par la fenetre." But, as Royer-Collard aptly reminded him: "Pour parler par la fenetre, il faut d'abord etre dans la Chambre." 40 His elocutionary power was no doubt considerable. As Richard Sennett writes,he knew how to make himself the hieratic conductor of a raging mob, so artfully as to tame it: "The hidden power of a speaker like Lamartine is that he harnesses mystification. He has no text, and so escapes being measured by any outside standard of truth or reality."41 The traditional politicians (in whose midst Lamartine had sat for fourteen years) were not only vexed and awed, but probably made jealous, by these results. When confined to verbal duelling with practiced parliamentary artists like Guizot, Berryer, or Thiers, Lamartine's skill could be appreciated. But not when he used his golden throat to affect the dispositions of a popular uprising. He had once claimed that his "ideas did his thinking for him." 42 That 40

41

42

L a m a r t i n e , Memoires politiques, in OC, x x x v n , 326. I n a letter of 15 M a r c h 1835, t h e poet claims to have achieved his skill: " J e possede m o n instrument, l'improvisation la plus spontanee et la replique la plus nette, la plus abondante et souvent la plus foudroyante." Cited by Paul Quentin-Bauchart, Lamartine, homme politique (Paris, 1903), p. 25. Richard Sennett, The Fall of Public Man (Cambridge, 1974), p. 237; cf. pp. 228, 234. As Elias Regnault, Histoire du gouvernement provisoire (Paris, 1850), puts it: "En l'absence de toute autorite, il gouverne par l'autorite de la parole; a la foule mugissante, il jette les effusions de son coeur; aux passions dechainees, il impose des lecons de morale." E r n e s t L e g o u v e , Lamartine (Paris, 1876), p . 36.

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was how he husbanded all his energy for effect. It was embarrassing to the decorum of liberal politics that, as by a conjuror's trick, those ideas could still or stir crowds, march and countermarch them. Lamartine's adventures of February obviously transported his ego and made him unattractively vain in his hour of glory. When he published his account of the February revolution, it had only one hero (and that hero's pupil, "the people"). Moreover, it was provocatively written in the third person (a literary strategy in which, it seems, only General de Gaulle has succeeded). Lamartine later suggested that this new personification was appropriate to describing an overwhelmingly public event.43 But it was seen, probably with reason, by his detractors as a gesture of false majesty. There were other aspects of swollen self-appreciation in this work (which, from other angles, is of great interest) that could not have soothed the helpless apostles of moderation. Lamartine was believed to be sentimental and chivalric; and it was hoped by some that his oratory could promote the Duchesse d'Orleans to the regency and save the dynasty.44 Sainte-Beuve, for example, imagined that Lamartine's ambition, insofar as it had any precise goal, would be sated if he were prime minister to the Regente.45 More realistic commentators have generally agreed that Lamartine would have failed if he had tried this, for already a large and angry crowd had broken into the Palais-Bourbon, demanding the Republic. But Lamartine himself believed that he had the power within his hands to declare Regency or Republic: "Lamartine had only to say to the princess and her sons: 'Arise! You are the widow of that Due d'Orleans whose death and memory the people revere in you! You are the children deprived of that father and adopted by the nation!... The ministers of your ancestor [Louis-Philippe] have soiled your heritage. The people now return it to you. They adopt you, they will be your ancestor."46 Lamartine claims to have had these words on his lips, these thoughts in his heart, tears in his eyes. But he stopped short. His reason prevailed over his imagination; his politics above his poetry. He could not substitute a "politique de sentiment" for stern responsibility. The future would have had to 43 44

45 46

L a m a r t i n e , Memories politiques, OC, x x x v n , 3 1 . He had vigorously supported the claim of the Duchesse to the provisional regency in 1842; see Fortescue, Lamartine, p. 97. Sainte-Beuve, Portraits, 1, 377. S o d i d O d i l o n Barrot, Memories, 1, 5 5 1 . Memories politiques, OC, xxxvn, 201.

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pay dearly.47 And so he made the speech that one knows, proclaiming the Provisional Government and, by implication, the Republic. Conceivably, this was a high-minded act ofraison cTEtat, avoiding a worse revolution, perhaps on the spot. But some felt that Lamartine had already conspired with the editors of Le National or others for a place in the new government.48 Some also found it preposterous that he could claim to have been able to change the outcome. He was not the only speaker of note on this occasion, as he implies (he does not mention Barrot or Ledru-Rollin); although no one doubted that he was the star.49 Finally, his narrative is positively cloying. Let us take another example. When the salle de deliberations of the Provisional Government at the Hotel de Ville was later penetrated by an armed and resolute crowd, Lamartine alone was able to save the day by confronting their spokesman, " a young mechanic, the Spartacus of that army of intelligent proletarians," whose words were "of an impossible obstinacy" and who all the while held a carbine by the barrel with his right hand, banging the stock of the weapon on the floor to punctuate his phrases.50 All Lamartine's colleagues - even Louis Blanc - had tried desperately to calm this son of the people. But only Lamartine could prevail: "You speak very well," he [Lamartine] told him, pushing back his arm. "You speak better than I do. The people were well advised to choose you. But speaking well is not enough: you have to understand the language of reason which God gave to men of good faith and good will to make their points with each other and to help rather than destroy each other. Sincere speech is peace among men; stubborn silence is war. Do you want war and bloodshed? We will accept it; we vowed our lives; but when the war and bloodshed start, innocents will suffer!" - "Yes, yes! Lamartine is right! Listen to Lamartine!" shouted his comrades... As Lamartine was talking, there was a visible struggle on the wild face of the proletarian orator between a shining intelligence that could not be concealed and the obstinacy of a brutal will that seemed to cast shadows... Finally, intelligence and gentleness prevailed. He let his carbine fall to the floor and he began to weep.51 Such was Lamartine's style of insinuating his exemplary courage, his powers of persuasion, his rectitude, and his control over events. 47 49 50

48 Ibid., p p . 2 0 2 - 2 0 3 . E.g. Barrot, Me'moires, 11, 36. See Tocqueville, Recollections, p p . 50—53. 51 Me'moires politiques, OC, x x x v n , 3 5 6 - 3 5 7 . Ibid., pp. 363-364.

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Indeed, he could not be accused of lacking any of these qualities — for which many middle-class Parisians were duly grateful - but he would have been better advised to let his actions speak for themselves, as Cavaignac was later able to do. It should be added that, when not exalted, Lamartine was generous, hardly stooping to belittle his colleagues, whom he instead tried to convert to his spiritual conceptions of harmony. But his writing did not inspire gratitude or admiration. The older politicians of July scarcely respected him by this time: they feared him; they conspired to reduce him to insignificance; and their memoirs would treat him severely, making his political ideas sound puerile. Much of this animus relates to Lamartine's cultivation of the radical Ledru-Rollin and his various intermittent overtures to men even further to the left - Cabet, Raspail, Barbes.52 But there was a more fundamental hatred of his style and personality, anchored in the experience of the July parliaments, that needed only to bubble over the surface in 1848. If there was one thing Lamartine was not (despite some of his policies), it was bourgeois: his whole life's education, way of life, and temperamental response were of another order of training. As Agulhon has put it, he was the exact antithesis of Adolphe Thiers, "bourgeois orleaniste chimiquement pur." 53 This, of course, makes it particularly difficult for Lamartine to seem a liberal. Indeed, sociologically and religiously speaking, the label is precarious. Yet his politics must be so described, for want of a better term. I shall try to demonstrate this. But first I would like to illustrate the kind of judgment that intelligent liberals passed on him. Charles de Remusat is one such liberal. His testimony is particularly interesting, because his Memoires are perhaps the richest and most reflectively satisfying document we have about French political life from the Restoration to the end of the Second Empire. Remusat (who belonged to the "centre gauche" of Thiers, was married to a Lafayette, and, after 1848, became a good friend of Tocqueville) drew his many biographical portraits with skill, ponderation, and a normal lack of vindictiveness. But this is not so when he presents Lamartine. First of all, Remusat, whose tastes ran more to the siecle des lumieres, did not like Lamartine's poetry. He and others of his circle scoffed 52 53

See Quentin-Bauchart, Lamartine, pp. 258-269. A g u l h o n , Apprentissage, p . 4 2 .

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at the Meditations when they first appeared, only to be chastened by the spiritual Albertine de Broglie, who was beloved by all (Lamartine wrote an affecting poem on her death). 54 But the dislike went deeper, and grew as Remusat confronted Lamartine in the Chamber. It is presumed that the hostility was aggravated in 1842 (when Lamartine unsuccessfully defended the conditional appointment of the Duchesse d'Orleans as Regent), for it is here that Remusat's portrait is inserted.55 It reads in part: "He thinks constantly of himself and only of himself. Wake him suddenly from the deepest sleep, give him the most surprising news, or the most tragic news, and only one thought will strike him - the role he might be called upon to play and he will reply speaking only in terms of himself... Lamartine has more elevation than morality, more dignity than rectitude, more honor than conscience, more intelligence than wisdom, more genius than reason. He is a dangerous man." Remusat did not merely think of Lamartine as a flighty poet; he considered him an irresponsible egotist. Barrot, the leader of the "dynastic opposition" and first prime minister of the Second Republic, did, as we have seen, regard Lamartine as a man who played politics on the lyre: "he began by serving the Legitimists, he ended by being the main actor in a demagogical social revolution; he began by touching the most sensitive heartstrings, the most conservative feelings, and he ended by somehow sounding the trumpet of civil war. From his Harmonies to his praise of Robespierre in Les Girondins, there is a world of difference: only the flight of a poet could cross such spaces."56 Finally, there is the well-known judgment of Tocqueville, who was - as part of the ancienne noblesse - familiar with Lamartine and whose wife, English like Marianne de Lamartine, created a bond between the families. Tocqueville, writing, of course, in the immediacy of 1848, is the most severe of all. After conceding that "the transcendental favour which was shown [to Lamartine as a saviour] at this time was not to be compared with anything except, perhaps, the excessive injustice which he shortly afterward received," the author of the Recollections delivers this cannonade: " I do not know that I have ever, in this world of selfishness and ambition in which I have lived, met a mind so void of any thought of the public welfare as his. I have seen a crowd of men disturbing the country in order 54 55

R e m u s a t , Me'moires, I, 4 5 3 - 4 5 4 . T h e p o e m is f o u n d in Oeuvres poe'tiques, p p . 1 0 8 5 - 1 0 9 2 . 56 Remusat, Memoires, iv, 31. Barrot, Me'moires, 11, 36.

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to raise themselves: that is an everyday perversity; but he is the only one who seemed to me always ready to turn the world upside down in order to divert himself. Neither have I known a mind less sincere, nor one that had a more thorough contempt for the truth. When I say he despised it, I am wrong: he did not honour it enough to heed it in any way whatever." 57 (Consider also Victor Cousin's remark, recorded from a conversation where Tocqueville was present: " I have known only two men who were really ambitious; they were Lamartine and Guizot; the rest have been only vain. Lamartine, however, is both.") 58 To those who took more impersonal and structural views of the happenings of 1848, Lamartine was either insignificant or fortuitous. He plays no role whatever in Marx's Class Struggles in France, 1848-1850: Ledru-Rollin is the symbol of petty-bourgeois republicanism. Lorenz von Stein has much more to say about Lamartine than Marx, and is generous about his character, but he treats Lamartine as the epiphenomenal incarnation of the mistaken opinion that political democracy can be made independent of the decisive play of interested forces in "civil society." "Lamartine," Stein writes, "understood the Republic as a poet, understood public order as a citizen; but the social antagonism he did not understand at all... As long as he remained in charge, hope prevailed that the February Revolution would not go beyond the limits set by political freedom... Never did the social movement have a more suitable exponent as did the young Republic of France at this time; there was never a man, who like Lamartine achieved prominence not so much because of his personal qualifications as because of the particular [i.e. highly unstable] constellation of the existing social conditions."59 Lamartine is at least a citizen as well as a poet on Stein's reading. He is also naive about "the science of society" and, as it were, a "representative man" in that regard. He did not see that the age of merely political revolution had been made obsolete by the contours of the "social question." But, if this is so, was he unique in his blindness? Were Thiers or Ledru-Rollin or, for that matter, Tocqueville any more amply informed? It is conceivable that Lamartine understood more about economics (except for his own) 57 58

59

Tocqueville, Recollections, p p . 117-118. Correspondence and Conversations of Alexis de Tocqueville with Nassau William Senior (ed. M . C. M . Simpson, 2 vols., L o n d o n , 1872), 1, 4 5 . Stein, Social Movement in France, p. 374.

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than Remusat, more about diplomacy than Guizot, and more about the plight of the laboring classes than Barrot. Allowance made for a certain self-intoxication from which Lamartine cannot be redeemed, there is a consistent pattern to his political ideas, and this pattern is liberal. But it is not the liberalism of a "club" or one economically arrived at. It is in some ways a liberalism of principle, but it is also a liberalism of conjuncture. And it is not (perhaps to the detriment of French political evolution) a liberalism with progeny. If it is not a liberalism comfortable with class struggle, this does not distinguish it sharply from most other variants of the doctrine. II.

ANOTHER KIND OF LIBERTY

The hallmark of a liberal is, prima facie, his dedication to liberty. It is the repetitive sounding of that word in the texts of Constant and Tocqueville that confirms their political kinship. In the case of Lamartine, the appeal to liberty seems no less real, but it is not so luminous. It is a way, more than it is a station. It is troubled by a relationship with God, fortune, destiny, and frustration which, as part of the equipment of the Romantic artist, contributes to an occlusion of political wholeness or objectivity. We see this especially when Lamartine the poet defines liberty as " a mysterious phenomenon whose secret belongs to God alone, but whose witness is the conscience, and whose evidence is virtue." 60 Politics emanates from this "mysterious" moral liberty granted by God to man, and is its most visible result, being itself neither a mystery nor a skill, but "in the true and divine meaning of the word... morality, reason, and virtue!" 61 Yet that is not a politics or a liberty of the sort that is the daily fare for practical statesmen, Lamartine included. This liberty is something that wells from within, furnishing a metaphysical justification for the descent to public affairs; the politics it threatens to produce is one of the imaginative movement or of the imaginary future. Since this liberty is predicated from within (where God has planted it) and not as a more objectified relationship of men and things, its flow can be controlled from within, released in a gush or reduced to a trickle. It becomes a matter of upright feelings that can be frustrated. It may not be entirely an accident that one of 60 61

L a m a r t i n e , " A v e r t i s s e m e n t " to La chute (Tun ange (Paris, 1913), p . viii. Politique rationnelle, p. 361.

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Lamartine's earliest expressions on the subject is this: " Liberty is not in our nature... The rights of man are the rights of a chimera called man...The only good of society is might (la force), and the only source of might is courage and God." 62 Lamartine will quickly discard this Maistrian ideology. Yet the value of liberty continues to have a problematic dimension for the poet, partly because of his awareness that most men are not free, although they are endowed with virtues of piety, loyalty, and domesticity and appear to be equally part of God's purpose. This struck Lamartine particularly during his travels in the Middle East,where he was driven to reflect on the "servitudes" of his own culture and on the relationship of external freedom and moral worth: "Take at random a hundred men of these enslaved peoples and a hundred from among our socalled free peoples, and consider. - In which group will you find more or less morality and virtue? I know the answer, but I shudder to say it." 63 The turn is Rousseauian, but not purely rhetorical. Perhaps it is significant that Tocqueville travelled in America, Chateaubriand in both America and the Middle East, and Lamartine in the Middle East, but not America. Lamartine's last public words, and ones which, after a reiterated apologia for his actions, close the final volume of his Oeuvres completes, are these: " I am a man of government more than I am a man of liberty. I confess that liberty honors everyone; but it has never saved anyone. That is my profession of faith."64 One can sense the embittered old man in this Timonian declaration, and can deplore that the spellbinder of 1848 had nothing more uplifting to say: but one might also take it as a tragic, and liberal, confession of failure, as if to mean " my liberty saved no one from Louis Napoleon; perhaps my politics might have done some good." There was, obviously, something of the apostle of order in Lamartine. His one confessed "great fault" was a sin against order; and I purposely use the theological word because Lamartine was obsessed by it and interpreted it as " a challenge to Providence."65 As Lamartine explains, he had consistently shunned the "banquet campaign" of 1847 ( w ith the exception of a tumultuous personal banquet offered him by his electors of Macon). 66 He had done this 62

64 66

Letter of 11 May 1818, quoted by Eva Sachs, Les idees societies de Lamartine jusqtf a 184.8 (Paris, 63 1915), p. 28. Lamartine, Voyage en Orient (4 vols., Paris, 1835), 11, 216. 65 Memoires politiques, OC, XL, 462. Ibid., in OC, xxxvm, 76; cf. OC, XL, 462. Ibid., in OC, xxxvm, 56.

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both out of contempt for the maneuverings of the dynastic opposition and out of concern as to where the banquets might lead. However, in February 1848, when plans for the famous banquet of the twelfth arrondissement of Paris floundered under repressive threats by Guizot and Duchatel, he and a handful of others (the followers of Thiers and Barrot having deserted) spoke against cancelling the banquet. He extenuated this action by invoking his honor; but he could not forgive his complicity in encouraging a leap into the unknown. This is his account: Lamartine left something to chance. Virtue leaves nothing except to prudence when it is a matter of the peace of states and the life of men. He made a trial [tentait] of God and the people. Ever since then, Lamartine has reproached himself severely for this fault. During his whole political career it is the only one that weighed on his conscience... It is a grave wrong to remit to God what God has left to the statesman — responsibility. That was a challenge to Providence. The wise man ought never to defy fortune, but should anticipate and come to terms with it.67 Lamartine is not exactly blaming himself here for causing the February revolution. For his true belief was that the Republic had been caused, albeit involuntarily, by the actions of " M . Guizot and M. Thiers... MM. Duvergier de Haurenne and Barrot and their friends" in 1840 and 1848.68 And on a speculative level he believed that 1848 was part of an ongoing "French Revolution" that had never ceased.69 But he is saying that, in this one moment of selfexaltation, he abandoned his critical capacity to be an "homme de gouvernement" and became an "homme de liberte" in the imprudent sense, an error which he claims not to have repeated when refusing to speak for the regency of the Duchesse d'Orleans. A test of Lamartine's liberalism is found in his attitude toward regimes and revolutions. Prior to the July 1830 revolution his position can best be described as that of a moderate royalist (like Chateaubriand), respectful of the Charter and committed by ancestral bonds to reverence for the monarch. 70 But this entailed also an acceptance of the spirit of 1789, a position that would be strongly articulated after the fall of Charles X. As the fatal clash with the majority of the Chamber approached, Lamartine described politics 67 69

68 Ibid, P . 76. ibid, P . 55. See, e.g., "Resume politique du Voyage en Orient," Souvenirs, impressions,pensees et paysages pendant un voyage en Orient, 1832-1833 (Paris, 1856), p. 496; Memoires politiques, OC, XXXVIII, 70 34. See Fortescue, Lamartine, pp. 44-45.

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as "la route des abimes," 71 and at the end of June wrote to Virieu: " I am filled with grief and fright and yet with courage, ready to give battle on both right and left, to madmen on the right, to fanatics and scoundrels on the left."72 Lamartine believed that the king and Polignac were embarked on an insane course that could lead only to brutal popular violence, more to be feared even than tyranny, for, as he wrote on the same day to Sainte-Beuve, "tyrants at least blush, but the mobs {populaces) don't." 73 Two weeks later Lamartine insisted: " I will not let myself be captured by any party." 74 Anarchy, as we have seen, is what he dreaded the most, but he also dreaded the consequences of his obligation to the dynasty. When the Trois Glorieuses broke upon Paris, Lamartine was away; but he quickly wrote to Virieu: "didn't I always tell you that only a counter-revolutionary system could restore life to the revolution?" He was determined " to fight... for the principles [that can be] saved from the ruin of a throne." 75 What were these principles? Apparently, they were principles of honor and national concern. They would guide Lamartine's political conduct in the next few years and influence his political identity far into the future. Honor meant that he would resign from the Foreign Ministry and accept no office or privilege granted by the Orleanist regime.76 National concern meant that, from fear of political disorder, he would not hold himself aloof from taking an active public role, like so many of his legitimist friends. Two theoretical points should be extracted from this position. The first of these identifies Lamartine with the liberals and not the legitimists. This is the conviction that the July uprising was motivated by a "counter-revolution" and could therefore, once gratifyingly brought under control by Lafayette, Casimir-Perier, and the former Due d'Orleans, be regarded, de facto, as a kind of rightful, though indeed not legitimate, response. "Allegiance" and "legitimacy" were thereby dissociated in Lamartine's choice of conduct: and this was connected both to his liberal system of values and his fear of disorder, which the liberals also shared. He would similarly interpret February 1848 as being, in part, a response to " counter-revolution."77 71 72 74 75 76

Lamartine to Virieu, beginning of June 1830, CG, 1, 31. 73 Letter of 27 June 1830, ibid., p. 35. Letter of 27 June 1830, ibid., p. 36. Lamartine to Virieu, 8 July 1830, ibid., p. 42. Letter of 5-6 August 1830, ibid., p. 55. 77 See Lamartine to Mole, 16 September 1830, ibid., p. 62. See above, n.68.

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The second point follows from the first: if the July Monarchy was to be granted "allegiance" (and Lamartine was later to insist on just how allegiant he had been to the Crown), 78 but not "legitimacy," from what perspective could it be described ? Lamartine, to be sure, was not a legal philosopher. Rather, he projected a vaster historical portrait of human advance under divine providence, together with an aching sense that "all is rubble, all ahead of us is empty... the earth is levelled as if for a great social reconstruction prepared by the divine Architect."79 First of all, Lamartine will dismiss legitimacy as " a social convention, a salutary legal fiction."80 This does not absolve him from his "fidelite" toward the fallen dynasty, but, since that is his personal affair, he has given himself a new political horizon in which to think - a horizon in which, it seems, there can be only transient or fictitious legitimacies. The question of the July Monarchy is still in abeyance; for it cannot be legitimate either, as the men who hastily installed it were daring to hope. "Le pouvoir actuel" is therefore best seen as a dictatorship (in the Roman sense), for it arose "like a necessary dictature aimed more against the insurrection than with it, an improvised fortress between the republic and despotism, between civil war and anarchy." 81 It seems that it will be a "long dictatorship," and that its proper function, as such, should be "at every moment of each day to call itself generously into question."82 If it proves a dictatorship that is rational and in keeping with the march of events, it may not found a dynasty, but it will have achieved something far more precious: it will have organized justice and liberty and "given its name to the institutions of the modern era." By the mid-i84os it will seem to Lamartine that the July Monarchy has failed resoundingly as a dictatorship; and, in 1848, citing "le moment ou nous sommes," he will speak forcefully in favor of a single legislative chamber elected by universal suffrage, " la dictature sous son beau nom... la dictature de la Nation." 83 Lamartine's theory of dictatorship not only goes far toward explaining the context of the curious political agnosticism in which his parliamentary career was launched, but also defines his distance from both legitimists and July liberals. The central aim of the latter was to stabilize Orleanism through the acquisition of legitimacy (often by claiming the historical parallel of 1688 in England); the 78 79 82

Memories politiques, OC, x x x v n , 3 3 8 - 3 3 9 ; cf. Conseiller du Peuple (Paris, 1850), p . 5. 80 81 Politique rationnelle, p. 365. Ibid., p. 368. Ibid., p. 375. 83 Ibid., p. 376. Quentin-Bauchart, Lamartine, p. 380.

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goal of the former was to prevent this at all cost. Lamartine's position sequesters the new monarchy as a tool for purposes beyond it, granting it a conditional acceptance. Thus, if his policies, friendly to "liberty," mostly reflect liberal values, his way of deriving them from a base of order does not, for it cannot promise the kind of sanctuary from abrupt political change that even liberals of the dynastic opposition desire. The idea of dictatorship is contextualized by Lamartine's view of revolution. He had no a priori incentives — except for an early grounding in the literature of the Enlightenment from his mother84 - to become a partisan of the new order. The Revolution had threatened his family and abased its fortune; Bonaparte was, if anything, worse; and a restabilization of prosperity and honor was to be hoped from the Bourbon Restoration. Indeed, Lamartine composed a brittle and rather fulsome ode for the sacre of Charles X in 1824 ( as did Hugo). 85 Yet both elan and experience taught the young poet to admire the work of 1789, which had, after all, been in part the work of enlightened nobles. Scarcely had the July regime been installed when Lamartine entered into passionate debate on the merits of the Revolution with his friend Virieu: "You say that the revolution of'89 is unmitigated evil (mal sans melange). I say it is only its execution that was frightful, iniquitous, infamous, and disgusting. If'89 was so bad, then what it destroyed must have been fine; and I find '88 hideous."86 The principles, as we shall see, are fundamentally the rights of man; and the rottenness of 1788 has much to do with the obsolescence and injustice of the privileged orders of society. Lamartine would specify, within a year, his indictment of the hereditary aristocracy to which he belonged. The nobility was "triply impossible" to defend, for it had, so to speak, disappeared in the debris of time, was unacceptable to the egalitarian yearnings of the age, and was irrational, being "in contempt of nature and of the divine right of humanity." 87 If the renewal of the social framework (forme) is necessary or inevitable by reason of events or the necessity of facts, how could you then claim that every revolution is necessarily bad, fatal, and diabolical? How can you hold that everything that has followed from the [revolutionary] principle for the 84

85 86

See Fortescue, Lamartine, p p . 11-12. L a m a r t i n e ' s m o t h e r (ne'e Franchise-Alix des Roys) h a d been with her mother in the household of the Due d'Orleans (Philippe-Egalite) and had known the Comtesse de Genlis, governess of (!) Louis-Philippe. " C h a n t d u S a c r e , " Oeuvrespoe'tiques, p p . 2 4 7 - 2 7 1 . 87 Letter of 24 October 1830, CG, 1, 74. Politique rationnelle, p. 371.

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past forty years or for thousands of years (for every century is revolutionary) is immoral, impious, infamous, etc.? Your reasoning founders on your failure to make a distinction. For revolution can be good, useful, rich in fortunate and moral results for humanity and for true religion, yet detestable in some of its phases, in its leading actors, and in the savage and ignorant masses it instantly rouses. That is the truth about our own revolutions and many others... No one is ever going to make a brand-new humanity that we can see carrying out its affairs with angelic virtue; that is not to be expected. For men, especially men who prosper or suffer from a revolution, will always be influenced by the fiercest and lowest passions! One has to live in a time dominated by the passions, when all ideas and all accepted habits are shaken and must violently give way to others. It is our misfortune to have fallen into such a world; but that should not blur our reason (fausser la justice de nos idees), even if it bothers and often breaks our hearts. While groaning over the present, I am very far from despairing of the future.88

Here, Lamartine continues to make a radical separation between the good principles and the malevolent acts that accompany virtually every revolution. That is also the liberal standpoint after the experience of the Terror: the optimism of Condorcet has been tarnished by the acknowledgment that the most lofty ideals carry their freight of fanaticism and bloodshed. The Jacobins had thought otherwise, and had tended to glory in the blood of tyrants and traitors and in the ominous instruments of "just punishment." Lamartine is no Jacobin, either in 1831 or in 1848; but he departs from the mainstream of liberalism in imputing a higher moral quality and providential purpose to revolution, a purpose sealed in God's intention for created humanity which will not be fully transparent until the end of time. This is very far from the anchorage of both liberty and revolution in the bourgeois stirrings of the Middle Ages by liberal historians like Thierry and Guizot. Thus, like the Jacobins, Lamartine tends to moralize revolution in the form of disembodied virtue, while, unlike them, repudiating as "base" and "vile" its accompanying violence. Consequently, he does not, like the liberals, make an unambiguous separation between 1789 and 1793 (although it is clear where his preferences lie); like Clemenceau he is willing to regard the Revolution "en bloc," because, in his theodicy, the Revolution itself is "en bloc" with revolutions since time out of mind, conspicuously the revolution of Christianity. Elements of this vision later contribute to the scope of pardon he 88

Letter of 7 February 1831, CG, 1, 112.

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granted in the Girondins, which many liberals found unwholesome. "Whoever says revolution," Lamartine writes to Virieu, "says change, forward progress (marche) of ideas and things, ideas and principles of the new sociality."89 This soaring vision of revolutions imbedded in the dynamic course of creation is naturally most powerfully expressed in the poetry: L'oeuvre toujours finie et toujours commencee Manifeste a jamais l'eternelle pensee: Chaque halte pour Dieu n'est qu'un point de depart.90 Quoi done, 6 mortels, vous annonce L'immuable que vous cherchez? Je ne vois que poussiere et lutte, Je n'entends que l'immense chute Du temps qui tombe et dit: " Marchez! " 91 Lamartine's vast epic La chute cPun ange properly represents an angel symbolic of the "chute du temps" described here, and is the mythical rendering of the philosophy of history sketched out in the opening sections of the essay on Politique rationnelle.92 In La chute d'un

ange the theme of the "march" of creation (which is also a "fall") is sounded ("Tousjours quelqu'un regoit le saint manteau d'Eli, / Car Dieu ne permet pas que sa langue s'oublie!"). But that march is finally confined in an eternity of creation within a time that is identical with the timeless thought of God: Et la creation, force intime de Dieu, N'a ni commencement, ni terme, ni milieu; Ce que nous appelons le temps, n'est que figure, Ce qui n'a point de fin n'a rien qui le mesure.93 Here we have obviously passed beyond any useful understanding of earthly political revolution, to which we will now return by stages. 89 90

91

92

93

Letter of 24 M a r c h 1831, CG, 1, 134. " L e s Revolutions," Oeuvrespoetiques, p . 5 1 2 : " E v e r finished a n d ever newly started / O u r work reveals eternal t h o u g h t : / God sees each pause as a beginning." Ibid., p. 516: "What makes you think to find, O mortals, / The unchanging you have sought? / For I see only dust and struggle, / I hear only the vast descent / Of time falling, which says: 'March o n ! ' " Politique rationnelle, p . 362. L a m a r t i n e ' s " e p o c h s " a r e : (1) t h e o c r a t i c ; (2) t y r a n n i c a l ; (3) monarchical; and (4) the democratic "epoque evangelique." " R e c i t , " La chute (Tun ange, Oeuvres poetiques, p . 8 1 7 : " T h e p r o p h e t ' s m a n t e l is ever h a n d e d on, / For God forbids his words to be forgotten." Also, "Fragment d'un livre primitif," Chute, ibid., p. 945: "Thus the creation, God's internal might, / Has no beginning, midst, or end; / What we call time is just a way of speech, / For what is endless must be measureless."

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The essay Sur la politique rationnelle of 1831, as indicated, treats the question of revolution at a lofty, teleological level, measuring the achievements of man in terms of his "oeuvre sociale" carried out according to what may be alternately called "la raison humaine, ou le Verbe divin, ou la verite evangelique." 94 No man can reckon the time needed for the "oeuvre sociale"; as an individual, he accomplishes his own "oeuvre complete et independante" in the process of "living, suffering, hoping, complaining, and dying," while humanity advances toward unknown destinies amid extensive, often violent change. 95 In his "Resume politique du Voyage en Orient" (1835), Lamartine is more specific regarding the events of his age: Humane ideas have led Europe to one of those great organic crises of which only one or two other examples survive in the historical memory: epochs when a worn-out civilization cedes to another... The French Revolution has been the tocsin of the world. Several of its phases are accomplished, but it is not over; nothing is ever over in these slow, inward, eternal motions of the moral life of mankind... As societies and ideas advance, the goal is always only a new point of departure. The French Revolution, which will later be called the European Revolution — for its ideas seek their level like water - is not just a political revolution, a transformation of power, a substitution of one dynasty for another, or of a republic for a monarchy... What thoughtful man among us, what man of heart and mind, religion and hope...will not say to himself: "Je suis revolutionnaire?"96 Lamartine's further claim is that "we now begin to understand the providential plan of this great transaction between ideas and men... we understand our century; we glimpse a small part of the future."97 France (and, in second place, England) are appointed to make the breach into the future; it is a "glorious and fateful mission," for France must go first and test all the perils of the undertaking. 98 These perils are evident to Lamartine: they result from a distortion of the just and proper boundaries of rights. The right of equality before the law has led to an "equality of pretensions and ambitions," rivalry, jealousy, and vengefulness. The right of free discussion in print has found its excess in confrontation and cynicism. The spread of education to the masses has fomented a kind of "vertigo of the mind" among persons ill-equipped to ponder ideas. Industrialization has begun to destroy the values of the family and of rural life. Selfish individualism, without scruple or charity, has 94 96

Politique rationnelle, p. 363. "Resume politique," p. 496.

97

95 Ibid., p. 364. 98 Ibid., p. 497. Ibid., p. 498.

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produced a bitter class of proletarians determined to attack the foundations of property, "jusqu' a ce jour la condition sine qua non de toute societe."99 This rendition alerts us to a descent from revolution at a very high level of sacred abstraction toward a conservative, if compassionate, anxiety about its literal results. Freedom has its surfeits and revolution its dark side. Lamartine has no plausible worldly answer to this dilemma except commerce and Lebensraum: for "these perils are such that, if remedies cannot be found by the foresight of the governments of Europe, it is inevitable that in a given time the social world as we know it will be destroyed."100 The tones of Tocqueville and Lamartine are not strikingly different with regard to imperialism and colonization.101 Since the Ottoman Empire has fallen into scandalous decadence, the Great Powers should seize parts of it as protectorates, for colonization, industry, profit, education of the natives, and - not least - draining off excessive and dangerous energies of working-class Europe.102 "Small states (petites diplomaties)" Lamartine remarks, "will mutter, intrigue, and write dispatches; but the deed will be done, and the strength of Europe recovered."103 What are we to make of such a bold preventive politics, such realism, in the light of the revolutionary rhapsodies? There is, of course, the excuse of la grande mission civilisatrice. But, beyond that, there is a downright fear of revolution out of hand and of class struggle and anarchy (as we saw in 1830). If there is a commitment to the theme of revolution in Lamartine, there is a deep abhorrence of revolutionary action. It is at the profoundest level a fear of fratricide. The abhorrence aligns Lamartine perfectly with the liberals of the July opposition; the fear of fratricide does not, for it presupposes a high valuation of fraternity, which they did not share. Thus could Madame de Girardin write in 1847: " M . de Lamartine speaks [in the Girondins] of revolutionary ideas like a man who thinks he has found the secret of applying them without crimes, violence, or tempests."104 That was precisely Lamartine's dream - a dangerous dream for any statesman to harbor in a volatile world fraught with the 99 101 102 104

10 Ibid., p p . 499-500. ° Ibid., p . 5 0 1 . See A n d r e J a r d i n , Tocqueville, i8oj-i8^g (Paris, 1984), p p . 320—321. 103 Lamartine, "Resume politique," pp. 50iff. Ibid., p. 513. Delphine Gay de Girardin (Pseud. Vicomte de Launay), Lettres parisiennes (Paris, 1856), letter iv, 4 April 1847.

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unpredictable, whatever answers might be provided at the end of time. In Lamartine's defense it can be said that the dream began to be embodied only when he determined to write the Girondins, convinced that revolution was afoot and that he had a designated mission to control it and limit its damage. For in December 1839, he had declared: "France is a country that has made its revolution and does not want to make another." 105 " I am not... the partisan of revolutions," he told the Chamber on 18 August 1842.106 But by 1843 n e had joined the left opposition as a very independent voice. When revolution came in 1848, Lamartine had much to do with inflecting it in a theatrical and fraternal direction. He filled his lungs with whatever words seemed appropriate. His situation and his continuous manufacture of rhetoric combined to fortify his obstinate vision of himself as an indispensable and prophetic conciliator, a posture which in turn accounts for his confusing range of conduct while in the Provisional Executive: ordering the mobilization of regular troops, yet holding secret conversations with Cabet and Barbes. In the force of his own person, he tried to impose the contradictions of his thought upon the nation. Lamartine attempted to guide a revolution without being the chief of a revolutionary party, by trying to be a "ministry of all the talents" unto himself. June shattered his hopes and his policy, igniting the reprobation of both the "insenses" and the "coquins." We have commented on the "political agnosticism" that tended to inhere in the liberal promotion of "negative liberty" (e.g. Constant's " principes... applicables a tous les gouvernements"). Lamartine also reached an indifference with regard to republic or monarchy; but the substance of his agnosticism was not quite the same. While public liberties were always in the forefront of his program, the absolute value of limited government was not: " M y political motto has always been: extremely liberal policies carried out by extremely strong governments, so as to serve the interests and not the passions of the people."107 Lamartine could have abided an aggressive "social monarchy" backed by legislative force as easily as "la dictature de la Nation." That is why - especially after the accidental death of the talented Due d'Orleans in 1842 - he became revulsed by the Crown's sterile contredanse with the factions of the Chamber. Within a year of Lamartine's death, it was perhaps 105 106

L a m a r t i n e , La France parlementaire (6 vols., P a r i s h , 1864—1865), 11, 290. 10? Ibid., in, 258. Quentin-Bauchart, Lamartine, p. 403.

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Emile Ollivier's ill-starred "liberal empire" ministry of January 1870 that came as close as anything to his ideal. From his cosmic vision of revolutions (in which the French Revolution was, above all, "social and religious... marking the age of reason in ideas, laws, governments, and future forms of worship"), 108 Lamartine drew his conclusions about the paltriness of political labels. "How laughable it is," he wrote to Virieu, "for a man, be he royalist or republican, doctrinaire or Saint-Simonian, to claim anything definite in this totally provisional creation. Things roll along with the centuries: everything rises and crumbles, everything is formed and transformed and reformed and deformed."109 In this perspective, the nomenclature and quarrels of transient factions, "royalistes ou republicains, juste milieu meme," were always "fabulous" consequences of "voluntary blindness."110 Revolutionary factions fell under the same indictment: no thinker of the period was less "Blanquist" than Lamartine, who believed that the future forces itself at its own pace. And Lamartine saw himself as the political replication of this rhythm: "neither a man of 1815, nor a man of 1830, but a man of all progressive dates and of all systems useful to my country." 111 From his theory of regime, Lamartine could deduce the contours of the present "dictatorship" or, put more conventionally, "republique mixte... republique a sa base, monarchic a son sommet," with its need for a strong executive: " Little difference whether he is called president or king; he is no longer the monarch, the unique concentration of power, personal power: far better than that, he incorporates the social power, and is its organ and agent; no longer is he nor can he be the source and principle of authority." 112 Lightly altered, this would still be Lamartine's position in 1845. For, if advancing democracy seemed to require the republican regime, " theories... are counterbalanced by prudence... Let us keep a national chief called king...who will be, at bottom, the people crowned and who will only move, think, act, and reign for the ideals and interest of the people. That will be the best of republics, for it will reconcile traditions and reforms, habits and innovations." 113 A 108

110 111 113

Conseiller du peuple (Paris, 1850), "Considerations sur le caractere de la France et de ses 109 revolutions," p. 268. Letter of 30 January 1831, CG, 1, 107. Lamartine to Virieu, 15 February 1832, ibid., p. 248. 112 "Aux electeurs de Macon," in ibid., 11, 55. Politique rationnelle, p . 370. La France parlementaire, iv, 19 (November 1845).

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similar understanding seems to be latent in Lamartine's famous "Manifeste a l'Europe," the document that he, as Foreign Minister, addressed to the powers of Europe in the wake of the founding of the Provisional Republic: "Monarchy and Republic are not, in the eyes of seasoned statesmen, absolute principles engaged in a fight to the death." 114 But what was the specific political content of these wider frames of interpretation? It was, as Quentin-Bauchart rightly stresses, liberal.115 In his first (unsuccessful) attempt to gain election to the Chamber in 1831, Lamartine, describing his views as "wide and moderate royalist opinions," hoped to attract "the honest liberal party" to his candidacy.116 Disappointed by government opposition which caused him two narrow defeats (at Bergues and Toulon, where his chief support was legitimist), he could still write to Virieu: "it is less a matter of winning than of guiding in a system of liberty." 117 After Lamartine won election in 1834 (in both Bergues and Macon: he chose Bergues for this one parliament), he created enmities in the Chamber not so much because of his policies, but because he affected an aloof distance from all the factions (as " unclubbable" as Tocqueville had been when he first entered the Chamber). 118 At this time, his own doctrines were (ultramontanism aside) probably closest to the principles of FAvenir.119 By 1839, Lamartine was declaring: " I will found a new liberal and social right-center."120 And in 1842 he wrote: " I t is only on liberal and very liberal ground that one can rally the great new living forces."121 What Lamartine was proclaiming, then, was a "new liberalism" of social awareness. Its roots in Christian charity (responding to the "industrial fact," particularly as Lamartine witnessed it in England in the 1830s), its advanced content, and the hauteur of its propagator made it unpalatable to many old liberals. Their hostility, particularly as manifested in a new conciliation between Thiers and Barrot, 114

Quentin-Bauchart, Lamartine, p. 294. For the complete text, see, by the same author, Lamartine et la politique e'trangere de la Revolution de fevrier (Paris, 1913). L a m a r t i n e expands

115 116 117 118 119 120

on the point: "There are differences between forms of government which are as legitimate as the different sorts of character, of geographical situation, and of intellectual, moral, and material development seen in various nations." See Quentin-Bauchart, Lamartine, pp. 5f. Letters of 10 May 1831 and 29 May 1831, in CG, 1, pp. 139, 148. Letter of 26 July 1831, ibid., p. 183. Letter to Lamartine's father, 6 February 1834, ibid., 11, 19. See the letter to Montalembert, January 1834, ibid., p. 16. 121 Q u o t e d in Q u e n t i n - B a u c h a r t , Lamartine, p . 56. Q u o t e d in ibid., p . 97.

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forced Lamartine into the cure (Fopposition of 1843, which proved a point of no return as long as monarchy endured.

III.

LIBERALISM AGAINST LIBERALS

Quite shortly after the July revolution Lamartine's political thought is coherently in place. The main questions are: to whom shall it be addressed; and after Lamartine has, as an independent, won a seat in the Chamber, what strategies shall be employed in its propagation ? If the content of the politics is confused with the two other issues, it can be made to seem nebulous, which it is not. In respect to addressees, there was always some latitude. Lamartine was associated with a sociocultural past, both royalist and Catholic, and his earliest electors (at both Bergues and Toulon) were mainly of this sort. On the other hand, the Macon seat, so to speak, ancestral, which Lamartine soon opted for and held until 1848, was the focus of a far more radical and anti-clerical clientele.122 Rebuffed by official ("doctrinaire") liberalism and afterwards so well implanted as to do without it and scorn it, Lamartine cultivated the progressive sentiments of his wine-growing neighbors and indulged heavily - and expensively - in local politics and local journalism. At the same time, while thoroughly distanced from the legitimists of western France, he managed, through his ambiguous oppositionism, to keep a hold on conservative audiences. That "independency" was both fortunate and fatal: fortunate because it might have made Lamartine, and whatever disciples he could collect, a new force in the censitarian politics of France; fatal because there was not enough room for maneuver in the parliament, where, at his high watermark, Lamartine could not even rally a hundred votes around his candidacy for speaker. If one peels away the purple leaves of Lamartine's Politique rationnelle of 1831 and gets to the core of that vegetable, one discovers a durable political program. 123 This includes: (1) the denial of any future role in politics for an organized hereditary peerage; (2) the endorsement of a totally free press; (3) a policy of widespread education, uncensored except for a nominal inspectorate, and free 122

On the politics of the Maconnais, see Fortescue, Lamartine, pp. 65, 80, 97. For example, in 1834 Lamartine was elected with 170 votes in Macon-Ville against a republican, who 123 received 121. Politique rationnelle, section ix, pp. 370—380.

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for the poor; (4) a demand for the total separation of Church and State; (5) a plan for universal but "proportional" suffrage, i.e. carried out through several tiers or stages of election according to criteria of property and taxation; (6) a treatment of power as the appropriate organization of social forces (cognate to the theory of "dictatorship"); (7) a critique of the three earliest ministries of the new regime; (8) a plea for a prudent and peaceful foreign policy; (9) a demand for legislative reform, "sur une base evangelique," especially the abolition of capital punishment and a reconciliation of laws and "moeurs"; (10) an endorsement of "political decentralization" (i.e. the tyranny of a part of the nation over the whole), but an equivalent approval of "administrative centralization" (so that France may be a single and indivisible nation). The principles were far from original, for, with certain significant exceptions (e.g. foreign policy), they closely resembled the program that FAvenir had published. However, they remained the constant principles of Lamartine's political life with remarkably little variation. They were also distillations from the election platforms on which he had stood in his first try for public office.124 For example, at Bergues, where he added: " I am of that party which fears and deplores revolutions and regards the fall of dynasties with terror": 125 1. Liberty of the press. 2. Freedom of religion, "which I love and venerate as the highest thought of humanity." 3. "Legal and progressive emancipation of education." 4. Enlarged communal and municipal liberties. 5. Wide and proportional suffrage, for the defense of all interests. 6. Order: which "is to liberty as organization is to life." 7. Peace and honor: for war is " a tithing with human blood." 8. Legality, "the visible form of liberty." 9. Progress, "the destiny of humanity," but one "that will not compromise the stability of the present for the uncertainties of the future." And at Macon-Ville (where the program receives a slightly 124

Lamartine was furious that his pamphlet had been overshadowed by the simultaneous publication of Chateaubriand's De la nouvelle proposition relative au bannissement de Charles X et de safamille: "My brochure is worth a hundred and one times that." Letter to Virieu, 125 25 December 1831, CG, 1, 234. Ibid., pp. 155-156.

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different slant, no doubt because of the temper of that constituency) :126 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6.

A power that is above social differences, but recognizes them all. A power based on the liberty of interests and opinions. A liberty regulated against anarchy. Equality of rights against all hint of privilege. Avoidance of unjust war, that "dime du sang humain." Liberty of the press, of religion, of education (here attached to the family), of municipal and departmental action, of an "election large et proportionnelle." 7. A stimulus to credit and commerce, and the preparation for a "national reunion."

Evidently Lamartine was sensitive to the political complexions of his two quite different constituencies (and also Toulon), but he felt able to campaign in both on the basis of a common set of declared principles. Already he visualized his program as a comprehensive bridge across deep abysses of French opinion and a model of ralliement.

The categories of Lamartine's thought are not easily extricable from each other; and, as such, they do compose a coherency of political design. Matters of suffrage and sovereignty are closely related to questions of education and national solidarity, which are in turn referred to moral values, such as those of the family and religion. These likewise affect doctrines of property and of the implication of the state in "the social question." Finally, churchstate relations are bound up in the preceding, as is the relation between Lamartinian democracy, economic liberalism, and the various systems of socialism. In brief, Lamartine, the Romantic poet, refuses to privilege materialism or individualism, preferring a kind of enlightened "personalism" (to use a term not his own). Such a view places emphasis on expanded and reformed education. Lamartine believed in an education that would be "free" (meaning released both from dogmas and from their combat), open insofar as possible to the masses, and morally responsible. In this respect he was the legatee of Condorcet, but with the striking difference that he believed liberal Christianity and science to be in 126

ibid., P . 158.

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harmony. In the Politique rationnelle, he expressed the orthodox Enlightenment notion that "civilization is nothing but enlightenment descending from the heights to the valleys... If you want to make mankind capable of liberty, teach it, not as you want... but as it wants and needs to be!" 127 But here Lamartine immediately invokes Christian antecedents: "The divine Word, the Christian truth, the most social of all truths, was taught in spite of men, in the catacombs, upon crosses and in bonfires."128 And in the "Resume politique" of 1835, Lamartine warns that a program of mass education will, for a time, produce a grave systemic incapacity for the society to absorb the newly enlightened.129 In the days just before the 1848 revolution Lamartine exults in "the moral force which will bend the government beneath the national will... the sovereignty of ideas... the republic of intellects!... in a word, opinion! " 130 Opinion, it is here claimed, "holds the balance between ideas and institutions, the balance of the human mind!" But this enthusiasm is tempered in the aftermath, when Lamartine no longer describes democracy as "opinion," but as "the elevation of the nation's intelligence to the level of the highest thoughts of genius and the wisdom of superior human beings (de la sagesse des hommes superieurs du genre humain)."131

Like other liberal activists, Lamartine became disenchanted by the gap between process and advent — especially in his views of education and the press.132 Education and independence are related to the issue of devolution. In a free society, such as conceived by Lamartine, persons are the best judges of their own close interests, as Aristotle had long before declared. Lamartine does not seem, like J. S. Mill, to have felt that political participation in itself refines the individual; but he strongly believed that individuals have the right to express their political interests in a local setting, protected from the powers of dominant cliques or classes at the center. Thus, he attacked the prefectoral weight upon French local and regional affairs, inaugurated in the Old Regime, advanced by the Jacobins, consolidated in the Empire, and retained by the restored monarchy, that "monopole de la liberte; le despotisme enfin."133 He swiftly captured the majority and presidency of the departmental council of Saone-et-Loire, and used 127 130 132 133

128 Politique rationnelle, p . 372. Ibid., p . 373. Me'moires politiques, OC, x x x v m , 27. See especially " R e s u m e , " p . 4 9 9 ; Me'moirespolitiques, Politique rationnelle, p. 379.

129 " R e s u m e , " p . 500. Ibid., p . 217. OC, xxxvm, 217-218.

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this authority to launch political barbs at the central government.134 On the other hand, Lamartine favored a firm and centralized power of administration: "the only monument built by the Revolution amid all the rubble it created." 135 Lamartine insisted on the separation of Church and State. He had little confidence in the rectitude of either the papalist or the Gallican church. His own religion came closer to the libre examen of Protestantism; yet his whole tendential mythology of religion, its aesthetics and manner of representational truth, were thoroughly bound up with Catholic Christianity. Although Lamartine endorsed a wider universalism of the religious sentiment in his Voyage en Orient (which was promptly placed on the Index), he remained a cryptoCatholic all his life, and received last rites and burial in the faith of his ancestors. Purity of faith, for Lamartine, demanded a total release from the servitudes of politics; his notion of a Christian social morality could strike no bargains with the state. " Religion," he wrote, "has no force or virtue except in the conscience." Otherwise it is "the sacred fire of an altar vilified by courts and the profanities of public usage... the living word in a dead mouth." 136 In an article called "Des devoirs du cure," published in 1832, he insisted that the village priest should remain neutral in political and factional causes, and that true Christianity should lead men toward charity and an equality of purpose and striving.137 Years later, Lamartine combined his views on religion and education by advocating that Church and State, for their mutual benefit, should disengage, so that the pupil will not be totally disoriented by having to learn one lesson in the family, another in the Catholic college, and yet a third in higher education. For if, after these experiences, the student has any conviction left, it will be made of contradictions leading to cynicism: " Perdition a la fois pour la religion et pour la raison... pour Dieu et pour le siecle."138 Instead, Lamartine suggests, it is better for the Church not to try to control enlightenment. Lamartine's view of a normal or normative human situation was based on the Romantic conviction that an idealized practice of local, family, and rural values could be restored to the French. The pull was, of course, in an opposite direction — from province to city, from routine to innovation, from foyer to uprootedness: beginning in the 134 136 138

135 See Fortescue, Lamartine, pp. 81, 83, 97-98. Politique rationnelle, p. 379. 137 Politique rationnelle, p. 373. See Fortescue, Lamartine, pp. 70-71. Conseiller du Peuple ( 1 8 5 1 ) , p . 1 4 3 .

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July Monarchy, these unsettled conditions would peak during the Second Empire. 139 However, while Lamartine led the crowds of Paris to the conquest of a second republic, he was also the temporary hope of the rural regions of France during that episode, the hero of the constituent elections. This included not only areas dominated by vestiges of the old society, but others, more radical, that had their own forms of estrangement from the capital. Lamartine received his own images of sound rural life from the Maconnais of his birth. He never renounced his social origin as a noble or, more properly, as a grand notable.1*0 A touching piece written for his Conseiller dupeuple

in 1850 illustrates his attitude. "Man," he writes, "takes pleasure in returning to his source, which is impossible for a river. That is because man has an intelligence, while the river is only a natural element." 141 The gist of the story concerns an experience Lamartine had at the age of ten, when, as an impressionable and well-read lad, he was taken hunting by his father and they paused at a farmer's cottage. The host refreshed them and then regaled them with bad verses of his own composition, obviously wanting to make an impression on the seigneur of Milly. His pride was elsewhere evident in his well-tilled land and his gardens. Lamartine pere made this point quite clear to his son by telling him that the lines "were verses and that their host was a poet."142 It was a lesson that the future poet never forgot. In his own verse he often sang the praises of the countryside and its intimate stability: Oh! quand cette humble cloche a la lente volee Epand comme un soupir sa voix sur la vallee, Voix qu'arrete si pres le bois ou le ravin, Quand la main d'un enfant qui balance cette urne En verse a sons pieux dans la bris nocturne Ce que la terre a de divin !143 These pious and simple values of family and village are at the origin of liberty and order in Lamartine's thought. In Voyage en 139

140 142 143

O n uprootedness a n d d e m o g r a p h i c pressures in Paris, see R o g e r L . Williams, The French Revolution 0/1870-1871 (New York, 1969), p p . 3 2 - 3 3 , 4 0 - 4 1 . 141 Memoirespolitiques, OC, XL, 422. Conseiller du Peuple (1850), p. 27. Ibid., p. 32. " L a cloche d u village," in Oeuvrespoe'tiques, p . 1160: " O h ! W h e n t h a t h u m b l e bell with its slow peel / Reaches like a sigh across the valley, / I t s voice stops short in the woods and gulleys; / When the hand of a child that swings this urn / Pours all that is divine on earth / With pious sounds into the evening breeze."

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Orient he declared: "la famille est la seconde ame de l'humanite." 144 The devastation of this integrity was what was most to be feared from "le mouvement industriel."145 In a later writing he attacked Fourierism: "Betisel Your dream is against nature and against human feelings, for you suppress the family in suppressing or emancipating all the love it inspires, and you suppress virtue by suppressing the struggle between duty and passion!" 146 The family is not a bovine or unreflective enterprise. It is like the farm family of Milly, whose head writes bad verses, but might write better ones and yet remain uncorrupted, if he had a wider education. Lamartine even hoped that, gradually, rural life could reabsorb the shipwrecks and hazards of city life. His doctrine of private property - resistant to all schools of socialism - came from the same source. Property was not a "natural right," but a necessary social convention, intimately connected with hearth and heritage: "When a man has seen the birth of the sons of his sons, and his family, stretching toward the infinite, has shown the indefinite multiplication of his heritage, his instinct for property is multiplied in the same proportion." 147 Thus, property, for Lamartine, has a biblical, rather than commercial, resonance, and is conceived chiefly as land. "Property is the organization of the principle of life in the world."148 It is also validated by the charitable intentions and acts toward the needy by those who possess it. This is not an especially liberal interpretation of property. It is a nostalgic, parsimonious view deeply imbedded in the French rural mentality and in Church teaching, thereby allying Lamartine with rather similar views expressed by Pere Lacordaire. In France, the schools of socialism, with their ardent sectarians, arose to the rhythm of "the social question." Critics of Lamartine accused him of blindness on this issue. That charge is perfectly just if it means that Lamartine favored traditional ways for dealing with the social dilemma (charity, education, etc.), refused "social science," and rebuffed any structural transformation of the economic order. It does not, of course, imply any insouciance on his part toward the sufferings of workers and peasants or a lack of disposition to improve their lot. Laissez-faire entirely distressed Lamartine as a 144 146 147 148

145 Voyage en Orient, i, 35. " R e s u m e , " p . 500. Memoires politiques, OC, XL, 214. Cours familier de litterature (28 vols., Paris, 1856-1869), x i v , 275. La France parlementaire, v , 107 (17 D e c e m b e r 1847).

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social principle.149 However, it should not be forgotten that Lamartine's politics were partly affected by a sharp fear of anarchy, "vile, hideuse, retrograde, demagogique, sanglante..." 150 That foreboding clashed with his humanitarian distaste for industrial conditions in his reaction to the repressed agitation in Lyons in 1834. He accepted the view that the state's force had to be used against the silkworkers, but warned the Chamber that there was also an obligation to better their conditions of life and work.151 And he warned in 1835 that the "proletarians [are] ...in a worse condition than ever before, [enjoy] rights that are sterile since they lack the necessities of life, and will shake society until socialism has replaced odious individualism."152 In short, Lamartine believed in a politics of social conciliation whose minimum would be the measures needed to avoid irreparable damage to the life and unity of the nation. He regarded the February revolution as a vehicle for achieving such a result: for him the illstarred ateliers nationaux were a simple measure of prudence, not a cherished philosophical realization.153 When the new constitution was being debated, and it was a question of the "droit au travail," which the committee had inserted in its draft, Lamartine argued that this should mean "the right to work in cases of demonstrable necessity" (so that no one need go in ignoble want or starve) and that the language should read: "le droit a l'existence par le travail." 154 This specification was conservative in narrowing a previously vague promise and radical in focusing it on dire need. On the whole, Lamartine grew more optimistic about the social crisis than he had been in the mid-1830s. The reason for this was a trip to England in September 1850. There, where thirty years earlier Lamartine had discovered every sign of social vice, human degradation, scandalous high life, and revolutionary premonition, he now saw renewed responsibility, reform, urban beautification, moderation of manners, and social peace. This, he thought, was attributable to mild and almost republican government and to the voluntary remedial actions of society itself.155 France, too, could move in this direction, especially if she produced such enlightened figures as Sir Robert Peel.156 149 151 153 155

Conseiller du Peuple (1851), p p . 2 2 9 - 2 3 0 . See Quentin-Bauchart, Lamartine, pp. 30-32. Quentin-Bauchart, Lamartine, pp. 190-191. Conseiller du Peuple (1850), p p . 3 2 9 - 3 3 7 .

150

Politique rationnelle, p. 382. 152 "Resume," p. 500. 154 Ibid., p. 377. 156 Ibid., p . 336.

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Socialism in all its forms - Fourierism, Saint-Simonianism, Communism, the doctrine of Louis Blanc — was for Lamartine a composition of fanatic misjudgments, "suppressive of the family, property, trade, industry, laws, arts, civilization, morality, labor, virtue." 157 It was a parody of democracy, "la republique ivre." 158 " Let me open my heart once and for all," Lamartine wrote. " I have studied socialism for twenty years and know what I'm talking about. I blush for my country that, in a nation like France, once thought to be spiritual... young people trained in state schools [i.e. the grandes e'coles]... could descend to that degree of foolishness and poverty of spirit!" 159 He wagered his "intelligence murie" and "bon sens" against these ineptitudes of "betise" and "demagogic" 160 Where then do we situate Lamartine's center of gravity? It will be useful, in conclusion, to review his opinions on the suffrage and then proceed to his doctrines of democracy and sovereignty. On the suffrage issue, he is quite consistent in his demand that it be "large et proportionnel." When he professed this in 1831, it was a quasilegitimist idea with a radical bite: the July regime had just increased the total number of electors in France to about 167,000 males (out of a national population of 33,000,000).161 An enlarged suffrage was the main item of the banquet campaign of 1847; but Barrot would probably have not gone beyond doubling the electorate (which then stood at somewhat less than 300,000). Lamartine's notion went far beyond this. But he did not want universal suffrage in the ordinary sense: he wanted the results refined by "elections a plusieurs degres" (as had the journalists of VAvenir). In this manner, all adult male citizens would participate in choosing a legislature, but only the most capable and endowed would exercise power: all would be theoretically sovereign but each "m a certain proportion"1*2 If the suffrage were direct (as it was to be in 1848), Lamartine foresaw a "radicalism" amounting to " a sort of orgy of political rights," where all talents and qualities would succumb to "the brutal right of individualism."163 Lamartine continued to hold this view until overtaken by the events of 1848. And, in the light of the revolutionary experience (and perhaps because it cost him his seat in 1849), he 157 160 161 162

158 159 Memories politiques, OC, XL, 216. Ibid., p . 217. Ibid., p . 2 1 1 . Ibid., pp. 422-423. See J e a n Lhomme, La grande bourgeoisie au pouvoir, 1830-1880 (Paris, i960), p. 53. Lamartine to the Chamber, 15 February 1842, quoted in Quentin-Bauchart, Lamartine, 163 p. 105. Le bien public, 4 December 1845, quoted in ibid., pp. 106-107.

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soon repudiated direct universal suffrage and returned to his earlier position.164 Lamartine's attitude toward suffrage suggests his theory of democracy, first tentatively expressed in the Politique rationnelle as an idea "soiled and bloodied by the French Revolution," but, in purified form in the coming epoch of liberty, equivalent to "la forme rationnelle ou le droit de tous."165 That "right of all" was not, however, to be a merely formal reflection of number. Lamartine desired conditions by which democracy could constitute itself progressively, while assuring the production of political talent and responsibility: we are reminded of J. S. Mill's Representative Government, written almost thirty years later. In Lamartine's perspective it was perfectly acceptable if this democracy was politically organized in a single chamber.166 It is in that sense that he and his fellow banqueteers of Macon toasted to "l'accomplissement regulier et pacifique des destinees de la democratic" on 4 June 1843.167 As one knows, post-1815 liberals undividedly attacked Rousseau's presentation of popular sovereignty in Social Contract, 1, vi—vii. Either they rendered that notion as benign as possible (Constant, Destutt de Tracy) or they repudiated it (Royer-Collard, Guizot). Yet sovereignty was a concept which, it seemed, the French legal and political mind could scarcely abandon. Given what has just been discussed, we will not expect Lamartine's democracy to repose on Rousseau's logic, and it does not: he is perfectly liberal on the point. In 1850, Lamartine writes: "what Louis-Philippe said of that pincee of political France that he had in his hand (i.e. "la France est le juste milieu!') is still true, but in the more national, liberal, and democratic sense of being all of France: la France entiere est une democratic moderee

par ses lumieres et par ses intents... a conservative and progressive Republic!" 168 The moderation Lamartine hopes to achieve within the vehicle of democracy is variously expressed as "sovereignty of ideas," 169 or as " the sovereignty of organized society."170 It is neither "the sovereignty of divine right in families... nor the sovereignty of number, nor the sovereignty of reason."171 Strangely enough, this does recall Rousseau, if Lamartine and others had read him more carefully. But in the course of an odd and 164 166 167 169 170 171

165 See Sachs, Idees sociales de Lamartine, p . 145. Politique rationnelle, p . 363. Ibid., p . 3 7 4 ; a n d cf. Q u e n t i n - B a u c h a r t , Lamartine, p p . 379-380. 168 See Fortescue, Lamartine, p . 115. Conseiller du Peuple (1850), p p . 2 4 - 2 5 . Memoires politiques, OC, x x x v m , 27. To the Chamber, 15 February 1842, quoted in Quentin-Bauchart, Lamartine, p. 106. Ibid.

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mercilessly harsh critique of Rousseau written later,172 Lamartine pillories the doctrine of the Social Contract: "The sovereign people of Rousseau vanish like the God of the theologians: one doesn't know who to believe or who to adore in their theology; one doesn't know who to obey in Rousseau's sovereignty."173 In the "true social contract," according to Lamartine, "sovereignty is nature... which alone can reveal the laws of society... and make humanity obey that harsh natural condition of sociability called sovereignty. But, since nature is the oracle of the Creator, through the instincts of each of his creatures, sovereignty is therefore God!... The real social authority is thus divine, divine because natural." 174 Here Lamartine threatens to return to realms of neo-Maistrianism, where his earliest thought began. His theory of natural-divine sovereignty is then used to found individual property as "one of the decrees of divine right," to assert that "the family is eternal like the State," and to praise "ties of respect, tradition, and deference between rich and poor in the rural regions."175 When Lamartine goes on, in his "social contract of spiritualism," to defend Confucian mixed government, consisting of paternal hereditary monarchy, intellectual and moral aristocracy of the counsellors, and democracy among the mandarins, against the "egoistic materialism of [Rousseau's] Social Contract" we perceive that his earlier faith in moderate democracy has come unhinged.176 But this bizarre and late aberration, no doubt welling out of certain censored images and loyalties, should not blind us to the liberalism of Lamartine's public career — a liberalism sui generis more often than not waged against liberals. Lamartine's liberal politics was, in the short run, impractical, for he neither sufficiently accounted for its lack of appeal to the beati possedentes nor, on the other hand, conceded anything to "the social movement." Both camps rejected Lamartine's idea of ralliement, his sort of republic, his vision of common citizenship. If he had any heirs, they are Emile Ollivier and, after his disgrace, the post-1871 Adolphe Thiers, his "chemical opposite." But we must not push that point too far. Nuanced by inherited and acquired disguises, Lamartine's political program also had resemblances to those of his last hero, Sir Robert Peel, who left Toryism to help found a modern and moderate 172 173 174 176

See Cours familier, xi, entretien 65, p p . 4 1 0 - 4 1 1 . Ibid., entretien 66, "Son faux Contrat et le vrai Contrat social," p. 432. 175 Ibid., pp. 448-449. Ibid., pp. 461, 477, 478. Cours familier, x n , p p . 26-29.

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liberal party, and ofJohn Stuart Mill, minus, of course, Lamartine's religious eschatology and pull of ruralism. Its failure was mainly due to personality and conjuncture. But it was also anchored in the sensibility that generated his poetry. In much of his verse, as Georges Poulet brilliantly documents, one finds " a final vaporization of all forms... and the absolute centrifugalization of an horizon, beyond which it seems that the universe has taken flight."177 Was Lamartine, the "poet of pure space," also the "poet of empty space?" 178 After serried analysis, Poulet thinks not: for the repercussions of this distancing, this muting of all sounds, this paling of all colors, is balanced by a countervailing return toward the center. Yet the poet has trouble in defending the center as a source of order against that overpowering pull toward diffusion. There is a parallel between this and the politics: Lamartinian society, too, becomes particles; it takes flight and loses concrete bearing in a gospel never quite made flesh, in a moderation always immoderately presented as the effusion of a soul, not the weary will of a majority. 177 178

Georges Poulet, Les metamorphoses du cercle (Paris, 1961), p . 186. Ibid., p. 189.

CHAPTER 6

Parnassian liberalism

I. STEPS TO PARNASSUS

The 1848 revolution was bewildering because it seems to have been made both for and against liberalism. It sent nominal liberals, like Guizot, packing into exile or, like Mole and Thiers, into temporary silence. Other liberals, of the "dynastic opposition," could not begrudge the Republic or weep bitter tears over the fortunes of the Orleans family; yet they could regard this situation only as an unstablejto aller, possibly unfriendly to "liberty" and to themselves, and prone to sectarianism or tyranny once the unnatural fraternization had subsided. One could say that February 1848 displaced "doctrinaire" liberals and installed "democratic" ones. Yet the revolution in June united all these liberals with reactionaries against the desperate and Utopian struggle of the anonymous/az/fozzrgj, while even more convincing the "parti de la liberte" of its impotence in the face of violence, anti-parliamentarism, and " the social question." Finally, in 1852, the liberals confronted, and some capitulated to, a plebiscitary second empire. Although immediately ridiculed by the best minds, it turned out to be even more durable than the first imperial experience. Up to almost its end, the empire of Napoleon III accelerated an inward turning of French liberalism, a retrenchment from politics to a cultural redoubt already prepared by the habits and practices of the Republic of Letters in the previous century. Subsequent happenings - the Franco-Prussian War, the Commune, and the ambiguous birth of the Third Republic - did little to change this stance. The agnostic irony about regimes intensified. When unbuttoned, persons of impeccable liberal feelings were even willing to extend that irony to the organization of society itself. Events had made French liberals "critical" oppositionists, rarely engaged ones. 221

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Yet they remained exponents of the juste milieu, not advocates of salvationary heroism or populist mediocrity. Genuinely desiring the bonheur of society and willing to endure some distress in obtaining it, they came to regard themselves as an influence, not as a power. Natural political allies of the middle class were crude in spirit and had drifted elsewhere. It is sometimes too readily assumed (and not only by Marxists) that liberalism is the ideology of bourgeois capitalists and that France is the clearest proof of this, based on the eighteen-year experience of the July Monarchy. 1 But much could be said in rebuttal of this sociological truism. It might be argued that, having bent liberal practices to their self-interest, the bourgeoisie d'affaires abandoned them altogether in the Second Empire. It might then be added that an obvious constituency for liberalism (property-owners barred from active citizenship by the cens) found other, less elitist political options more commendable. It could also be argued that liberally disposed voices were often acutely critical of bourgeois greed and its political consequences. Finally, it should be pointed out that these peculiarities helped to create a situation in France where, notoriously, the spheres of art, ideas, and culture remained "free," but where society seemed cramped and politics individualistic, sometimes repressive, sometimes radical, but rarely "liberal" as compared with England.2 "Parnassian liberalism" is the resort of a doctrine in retreat from political competition to spheres of culture and criticism, where it stands its ground. It is a fairly unbudging doctrine insofar as it consents or contrives to make this sacrifice honorably, rather than striking bargains with the political forces that would control and denature it. On the other hand, it is this obstinacy that makes it suspect and even reprehensible to the democratic mentality. It is suspect not only because it questions the wisdom of popular government, but because it is "critical," ironical, and elitist — holding at the extreme that, in a world of perverse or prolific 1

2

For example: Karl Marx, Class Struggles in France^ 184.8-18^0 (New York, 1964), pp. 33-37; Harold J. Laski, The Rise of Liberalism The Philosophy of a Business Civilization (London, 1936), pp. 253-280; Jean Lhomme, La grande bourgeoisie au pouvoir, 1830-1880 (Paris, i960), pp. 45-58; Charles Moraze, Les bourgeois conquerants (Paris, 1957), pp. 150-154. An exemplary statement of the breadth of English liberalism can be found in L. T. Hobhouse, Liberalism (publ. 1909; New York, 1964), p. 66: "Liberalism is the belief that society can be safely founded on [the] self-directing power of personality, and that it is only on this foundation that a true community can be built, and that as established its foundations are so deep and so wide that there is no limit that we can place on the extent of the building."

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"truths," a world of opinion, faith must be constructed from intelligence, if there is to be faith at all, and that faith must be nimble enough to shift with intelligence. Not only this: intelligence is opaque and indeterminate enough to require the exhaustion of the best minds to obtain it; and even then it will be subject to searching examination by other minds, not just accepted by coalescing majorities. To the extent that this doctrine is democratic, it is so either in conceding that democracy is the least pejorative of the regimes or that liberal education might one day salvage brutish democracy. Because of its roots, which grow from an initial optimism in cosmopolitan enlightenment into a far more leery redoubt of criticism, Parnassian liberalism can never be confused with the theocratic or Erastian authoritarianism of conservative ideology. It continues to preach the gospel of human freedom. Consequently, despite its agnosticism about regimes (though it usually has a disguised preference for an aristocracy based on culture and enterprise), it continues to endorse the liberties of public expression, conscience, judicial independence, legal equality, and the limitation of the state. However, it is inclined to denounce the folly of the human race in its darker moments. While, by the nature of the case, the Enlightenment's assault on the Old Regime had to be critical, this "higher criticism" is more ambiguous, for it is criticizing its own origins, yet at no point suggesting that they should be effaced. Thus, Parnassian liberalism may seem unappetizing to democrats. But it is not my purpose here to make judgments about what is liberal and what is democratic. Rather, I want to show, without prejudice, how the French esprit liberal reacted to its partly voluntary exclusion from politics after 1851. I shall concentrate on three major writers who seem to me to chart the development of the Parnassian liberal temper that I have been suggesting. Their interests move from politics into history and finally into art. Their general mode of attack could be called (following Hayden White) "ironic." 3 They were born into an age of Romantic expressivism; but each drew back from it, perhaps out of a kind of political propriety. Alexis de Tocqueville has already received our attention. In Tocqueville the functions of prophet and critic, believer and agnostic, maintained a still vital tension. Tocqueville never ceded to complete political disillusion and apathy (having committed himself Hayden White, Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Europe (Baltimore, i973)> PP- 37-38, 215-219.

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to politics), although he gave ample reasons for others to withdraw (as the shrewd Royal-Collard had once suggested to him). 4 The star of Ernest Renan was rising just at the time when Tocqueville was in his final years of fragile health. Destiny turned Renan from a religious vocation which had all appearances of being brilliant to a secular one that never totally lost its religious birthmark and was also accounted brilliant. Amid the currents of his time Renan refused to be politicized. That, however, does not mean that he was without political views: he attempted to guide culture in a liberal direction through his understanding of the roots and goals of history. Gustave Flaubert was a master artist of both the historically vivid and the realistically actual. He had, strictly speaking, no politics, but his sympathies were liberal in the context of this study. He represents the exhaustion of political liberalism in a mood of disgust and ennui. Flaubert spat at politics in a way that Tocqueville would never have condoned and that Renan, with his early discipline and polite sense of rebellion, could not endorse. Yet Flaubert turned the paradoxes of liberal politics into art. By processes I describe, true political liberalism was more or less lost to the French as a way of conceiving and carrying out public business for more than a century. Many explanations have, of course, been given for this. France, it is said, retained centralist, essentially monarchical institutions and attitudes that were unwholesome to the growth of a liberal mentality. French law and political theory developed a doctrine of indivisible sovereignty (whether vested in king, people, or "representatives of the nation") that made liberal initiatives fragile. France stifled its spiritual development in 1685, closing the option of liberal religion and hence of liberal politics, for neither could thrive amid the combat between Gallican Catholicism and Gallican secular nationalism. France had an uneven and muted Industrial Revolution, remaining, until fairly recently, a "peasant country." French liberalism was destroyed by the self-serving activities of the grande bourgeoisie of the July Monarchy. French chauvinism (of left and right) squelched liberal cosmopolitanism at every turn, except in the world of ideas. None of these conditions and processes can be denied; and it seems as if, aggregatively, they might provide a satisfactory explanation of 4

See Royer-Gollard to Tocqueville, 21 July 1838, in Oeuvres completes (18 vols. to date, Paris, 1951-1983), xi, 65. Henceforth OC.

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liberalism's dismal showing in the institutions, practices, and mentality of the French. But I have wanted here to add another dimension which I believe to have been ignored or understated. Despite crippling disadvantages, liberalism had had one of its great historical moments in 1789, and behind that there had been a reservoir of French constitutional doctrine from which to draw. After the first Napoleon, the liberal mind was as fertile in France as anywhere; and it seemed as if France might evolve in this direction, especially given the winds blowing from England. But liberalism was split and made incoherent by its reaction to 1848, not just because it could not decide between republic and monarchy, not just because it could not conclude any lasting alliance with major forces of society, but because its better minds were progressively determined not to suffer "mediocrite." Having, by 1852, lost their tenuous grip over the state, liberals opted for the pockets of freedom they could find in civil society that fulfilled their pride and passion — mainly in the world of history, letters, and art. From these enclaves they could remain true to themselves in a world of "mediocrite," stay pure from the contaminations of reaction and revolution, and keep a license to criticize that would have been futile in the political arena. Thus, over time, they tended to withdraw from the dominant political class, although of course as intellectuals, journalists, professors, and academicians, they retained many links with that class and continued to feed it ideas. They remind us somewhat of a fortress garrison, which, having just surrendered the place conditionally, marches out with full honors to a new employment. Liberals adrift at mid-century felt that a certain greatness of spirit had evaporated. The days of their salons and parliaments were over and, in their intellectual bastions, they struck a nostalgic tone. Less than two years before his death, Tocqueville recounts his attendance at the traditional joint meeting of the five academies which, since the July Monarchy, had composed the Institut de France. 5 On this occasion, Montalembert, newly elected director of the Academie Franchise, was privileged by his office to deliver an address to Parnassus, "that Republic of Letters, which is, of all republics, the oldest and most lasting." 6 5

Ibid., XVIII, 407 and n.

6

Montalembert, Oeuvres (Paris, i860), m, 645: "Discours aux cinq academies, 17 aout 1857"

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He opened by complimenting his colleagues for their innumerable scholarly achievements in the arts and sciences and, most especially, for their guardianship of sound theory in morals, politics, economics, and the advancement of education. From here, as was the tradition, he passed to brief and stylish eulogies of members who had died within the past year: Salvandy, the former Minister of Education; Thonoard, a scientist; Cauchy, a geometer; Paul Delaroche, a painter; and, finally, Augustin Thierry, the great historian of bourgeois civilization. Death, Montalembert declared, recalls us to our duties. But we seem to lack "the passion for exalted things." And this seems "more and more to be lacking in contemporary society, exclusively absorbed by the pursuit and preservation of wealth," guided by "an invasive empiricism that teaches lax (defaillantes) generations to abandon taste, morality, reason, conscience, and faith" under the rubric of realism.1 Could our productions of today claim equivalence with "that renaissance of philosophy and history, of eloquence and poetry, whose glorious pathfinders were M. Royer-Collard, M. de Chatteaubriand, and Madame de Stael?" 8 No, Montalembert insists; and if we put so much store in progress, we must halt this "rniserable decline," its materialism and its vulgarity. If the device of the oldest of the academies is " a Pimmortalite," it should once again be recognized that what is immortal in man is his striving toward something greater than himself.9 Let our hopes for this outcome guide the young, and "let us not in any way be accomplices in the moral and intellectual flatulence of our time." 10 Montalembert's mood of entrenchment (his own worst days would lie ahead, in 1864) designate a motion. The beginnings of that motion are found in Tocqueville's "sadness," not so much a noble as a liberal one, as witnessed here. Tocqueville had to go into retirement personally, but he is indicative of the way that events took liberalism into retirement, and, it might be added, into historical reflection. Renan, whose major feature is not that he abandoned Catholic piety, but that he had to recreate, in place of his abandoned faith, an almost mythic and liberalizing Protestant revolution, is at the apex of this reflectiveness. He carries it backward to the origins of Western spirituality and forward to a future of science - historical science — all this seen through an elitist prism. Flaubert completes 7 10

Ibid., p. 649. Ibid., p. 652.

8

Ibid., p. 650.

9

Ibid., pp. 650-651.

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our journey because, although belligerently anti-political, he is profoundly interested in the fatal "mediocrite" of politics. He writes this contempt into his work, thereby making a political (and liberal) statement about taste and truth. It is one where the vulgar will be simultaneously sublimated and exalted in the beautiful and where the artist himself finally melts into the sensibility of all that would destroy art. Once history and its explanations have thus been frozen, liberalism has become truly " Parnassian." II. THE SADNESS OF TOCQUEVILLE

"Tocqueville," wrote Sainte-Beuve, " a le style triste." 11 It is not easy to say how this tristesse arises; but it is certainly there, often framed in the mood of irony, in a series of perspectives where the political passions of man are measured in what we might call evaporating aristocratic time and expanding democratic space. Tocqueville is both a scientist with a problem - historical explanation - and a writer with a yearning - liberty; and his sadness, as we have seen, is Christian at its source. Secular explanation is challenging, but joyless, for it can only be had within a system of liberty fixed by Providence that moves man away from privileged personations of excellence toward a compensatory mediocrity: "We may naturally believe that it is not the singular prosperity of the few, but the greater well-being of all that is most pleasing in the sight of the Creator and Preserver of men. What appears to us to be man's decline is, to His eye, advancement; what afflicts me is acceptable to Him." 12 Tocqueville had two views of human evolution, the one mythic, the other methodical. Something about his delicate tristesse is inexplicable if only the second of these is stressed. His first, primordial vision obviously owes much to Rousseau: we start from a condition of youth and solitude, expounded by self-consciousness, but as yet undespoiled by man the social developer. Consider, for example, this passage from Tocqueville's notes describing travels he made in upstate New York: "these wild places, this silent and unmoving lake, these islands bathed in green did not strike our sight 11 12

C.-A. de Sainte-Beuve, Causeries du lundi (15 vols., Paris, 1868), xi, 480. Tocqueville, Democracy in America (trans. Henry Reeve, 2 vols., New York, 1945), n, 351. Henceforth, DA. Tocqueville's problems with faith are discussed in chapters 1 and 2. See also, on this, Frangois Furet, "The Passions of Tocqueville," New York Review of Books, 27 July 1985, p. 26.

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as novelties; instead we seemed once again to be visiting a place where we had passed a part of our youth." 13 Upon further investigation, the explorer found that Nature had not been left to herself and that the infancy of the world vanished in his discovery of a canoe and of a desolate, overgrown settler's cabin: "when I was obliged to leave that enchanting solitude, I exclaimed with sadness: "Are ruins, then, already here?'" 1 4 Tocqueville was penetrated by a sadness about purity and pollution that took in both what Emerson was later to call "the city of God... [with] no citizen" 15 and the visual poignancy of man's unexplained goings and leavings. In a letter of 1827 t o Kergorlay he chided the Romans "for having modernized... some of their ruins; it makes you think of an old man who rouges his face."16 We embark on voyages toward the new (the triple force of inevitability, curiosity, and truth-seeking impels us there); but we depart from ruins and we return to them. Their visual appropriation, their intimacy and belongingness, give us the fixed point of our intellectual Odyssey. Our possessing them bestows the mark of being wise and proud, for it means that we have not merely been dropped into the world like Martians, but are equipped to generate cartography and meaning from prior and tangible assumptions. Tocqueville's chateau on the Cotentin peninsula was a ruin of this sort. "Here I am finally at Tocqueville," he wrote to his friend Beaumont in 1828, "in my family's old broken-down shack. At a league's distance I can see the harbor where William set sail to conquer England. I am surrounded by Normans whose names figure among the conquerors. All that, I have to confess, tickles my heart with a prideful weakness and sometimes engenders in me a boyish enthusiasm of which I am afterwards ashamed."17 By his own account, Tocqueville could have written thus only to another noble like Beaumont; for members of that class shared these meanings and "continued to recognize one another through certain visible signs."18 The bourgeoisie, however intelligent, would not have quite understood. Tocqueville looked to England wistfully not just because he had (or thought the Clerels had) a birthright to go in that 13 15 16 17 18

14 "Voyage au lac Oneida," OC, v, 338. DA, 1, 306. Ralph Waldo Emerson, Essays: Second Series (Boston, 1857), p. 173. Tocqueville, OC, xin, 96. Ibid., VIII, 49. This quotation introduces an important discussion on English history. Recollections (trans. Alexander Teixiera de Mattos, Cleveland and New York, 1959), p. 242. Henceforth 77?. Tocqueville is explaining the basis for his friendship with the legitimist Falloux in 1849.

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direction, but because he was already amalgamating that first conquest with the new intellectual victories that he would win. Influenced by his studies in Paris and especially by the Anglophile theories of Guizot, he had not yet concluded that the future must be studied in America.19 Amid the shock of 1848, when Tocqueville returned to Normandy to stand for the Constituent Assembly of the Second Republic, his thoughts were no longer pointed outward - toward England or beyond - but inward, toward the tender melancholy of ruins: I was seized on my arrival with so great and uncommon a feeling of sadness that it has left in my memory traces which have remained marked and visible to this day amid all the vestiges of the events of that time... This little isolated corner of the earth, lost, as it were, amid the fields and hedges of our Norman coppices, which has so often seemed to me the most charming of solitudes, now appeared to me, in the actual state of my thoughts, as a desolate desert; but across the desolation of its present aspect I discovered, as though from the depths of a tomb, the sweetest and most attractive episodes of my life. {Recollections, p. 103; compare Democracy in America, 1, 250-251)

The property of Tocqueville was somehow the point of departure for a world that had begun in 1066 and come to an end in 1848, at least in the emotions of this historical explorer and gentilhomme campagnard. History was not innocence for Tocqueville, any more than it was for Rousseau; but for him there was sweet ancestral pride mixed with the puzzlement of impermanence, as well as the experienced recovery of songs of innocence by an observant traveller. In Sicily, for example, Tocqueville imagined himself very close to " the earliest ages of the world, those ages of simplicity and innocence when men were not yet saddened by the memory of the past or frightened by the wave of the future" but "satisfied with present happiness and confident that it would last."20 Only two pages later in this same text there is the complaint that "civil life is now so busy that it would take the confinement of prison to get all one's studies done." 21 Could he have been thinking of his father Herve de Clerel, imprisoned under the Terror (and luckily escaping the fate of the blade that had fallen to his Malesherbes relatives), whose hair had turned white from the experience?22 If so, it is a chilling balancing 19

21 22

See Fran$ois Furet, "Naissance d'un paradigme: Tocqueville et le voyage en Amerique 20 (1825-1831)," Annales ESC, 39 (1984), 225-239. Tocqueville, OC, v, 47. Ibid., p. 49. On Tocqueville and his father, see R. R. Palmer, ed. and trans., The Two Tocquevilles: Herve and Alexis de Tocqueville on the Coming of the French Revolution (Princeton, 1987).

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of times of innocence and times of stress, joined with a Rousseauian lament that the intellect is a prison, a disciplinary confinement for sad and fearful thinkers, though perhaps a relative liberation for downgraded aristocrats who have retired to their chateaux of memory and will never again set out to conquer with ships and soldiers. Alexis de Tocqueville's oath of allegiance to the Orleans dynasty was an ambiguous and anti-ancestral act. These were, however, not the times when young aristocrats were thrown in prison; they were encouraged to retreat to the provinces, hunt, and become obscure. Neither option would be Tocqueville's; he would travel; and he would thereby conquer the problem that had caused his choice: thus, he would redeem himself by a deliberate act of freedom in the world of letters. In the midst of American solitude, he and Beaumont one evening realized that it was the first anniversary of the July revolution. " I cannot express," he wrote," how vividly the memories of 29 July gripped our minds." But, he continued, "this was only a sudden illumination, a passing fancy... for never had the silence of the forest seemed to me more fixed, its shadows more sombre, or its solitude so total." 23 In the still and soundless woods of America, Tocqueville reinforced a mood that would distantly inspire Parnassian liberalism. We would call this aloof sadness merely touching and escapist if it were not guided by purposeful irony. It is that dominant quality that makes Tocqueville so ardent not to recoil from his thirst for exploration and explanation, so agile in flashing his mind from the forest to the barricades, in quitting the ruin for the Assembly, expecting to change little in the prejudices of men but still wanting to confirm them at close quarters. Irony needs other sustaining qualities - courage, foresight, self-control - to be effective; but it should be included in any taxonomy of liberal virtues: for, as Jean Baechler has recently pointed out: "Irony excludes both credulity and incredulity."24 I do not, like Hayden White, take this mode of irony to be a "vision of puzzled defeat and despair.25 It is, rather, an aspect of liberal skepticism that holds the Romantic Prometheus at bay. Within the very grace of his own prose, in his descriptions and maxims alike, Tocqueville takes up his station as the eiron: the 23 25

Tocqueville, OC, v, 387. White, Metahistory, p. 196.

24

Jean Baechler, Democraties (Paris, 1985), p. 214.

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enlightened aristocrat, preaching to stupid, nostalgic, and rancorous peers; the reluctant democrat, chiding the fondest appetites of the mob; the historian who is an anti-Michelet in the sense that his interest lies in candor not fervor, in "societies," not "nations." Liberty is the non-ironic value that moves the rest and keeps Tocqueville's public writing from seeming belittling (although he indulges that temptation in his correspondence and in his Souvenirs). We capture that ironic movement best in the way the models of the two societies are laid side by side and exposed by endless comparison: not exactly yin and yang, for we quickly perceive that aristocracy prevails on the moral plane, while democracy has the last, best answer - the right of history. As a liberal, Tocqueville is too involved to be quite "Parnassian." But he sets up, and in the darker, later passages of the Ancien Regime anticipates the refoulement of liberal thought. It is the lifeboat drill of the liberal voyage to Parnassus. If Montesquieu's Esprit des lois was "born without a mother," it might be claimed that Tocqueville's De la democratie en Amerique was either stillborn or immaculate, because, as he puts it, "when I entered life, aristocracy was dead and democracy was as yet unborn... I could without handicap see both sides of the question impartially." 26 That claim of detachment excessively disguised a passion in the swaddling of impartiality. It suggested an arbitration between emotion and logic, setting up, as such, one of the major paradoxes of the French liberal tradition. For if liberalism staked out its ground in the middle - between revolution and reaction - this meant that it was obliged to defend "moderation" of even "moderantisme," while at the same time abhorring "mediocrite." 27 Tocqueville's fine achievement was to have produced a new political and historical sensibility, at the same time judicious and passionate, and thereby baffling to the ideological idees regues of more than a few contemporaries. But liberalism could not be sustained politically as a passion without either sacrificing its discretion to the revolution or its honor to the reaction, or becoming truly "mediocre" in the sense that Lionel Trilling, a century later, indicted liberal literature: " O u r dominant literature is profitable to the degree that it is earnest, sincere, solemn. At its best it has the charm of a literature of piety. It has neither imagination nor mind." 28 Tocqueville's problem suggests why later liberals could not put politics 'd'abord,' 26 28

27 Tocqueville, OC, vi, 38. On "mediocrite," see especially DA, 11, 260-261. Lionel Trilling, The Liberal Imagination (New York, 1950), p. 98.

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but had to treat it "critically" so as to sustain passion without mediocrite or chantage.

There are various ways - some of which we have seen - in which the irony generated between aristocratic finesse and democratic geometry operates in Tocqueville's historical understanding. One of these is in the kind of distinction (especially pertinent in cases of a revolution or change of regime) that he frequently makes between general historical causation and specific or punctual intervention. The analysis is, in origin, Polybian, then Machiavellian. But the more proximate influence is Montesquieu: It is not chance that rules the world... There are general causes, moral and physical, which act in every monarchy, elevating it, maintaining it, or hurling it to the ground. All accidents are controlled by these causes. And if the change of one battle - that is, a particular cause - has brought a state to ruin, some general cause made it necessary for that state to perish from a single battle.29 As a "founder of sociology," Tocqueville searched soberly for such "causes," especially as defined by what Montesquieu had called the "esprit general," and was inclined to concede their priority in the patterning of history. However, in the thick of revolution, Tocqueville was too much an apostle of common sense to deny a discrimination between things distant and things sous les yeux. Machiavelli had stressed human fortitude or virtu as a counteragent to both fortune and necessity; Tocqueville was more inclined to pinpoint human ineptitude or moral failure — and he states the point most clearly in his Souvenirs: " I am not prepared to say that accidents played no part in the Revolution of February: on the contrary, they played a great one; but they were not the only thing" [Recollections, p. 63). He goes on to theorize that men of letters, removed from the hurly-burly of political life, are congenitally inclined to ascribe events to general causes, while public actors feel that everything that happens is the result of particular, imputable choices. " I t is to be presumed," he concludes, "that both are equally deceived" (p. 64). "The Revolution of February, in common with all other great events of this class, sprang from general causes, impregnated, if I am permitted the expression, by accidents." In the former order Tocqueville cites, for example, "the industrial revolution" and "the democratic disease of envy"; in the latter, "the vacillation of the 29

Charles de Secondat, Baron de Montesquieu, Considerations on the Greatness of the Romans and their Decline (trans. David Lowenthal, New York, 1965), p. 169.

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generals" and "the senile imbecility of King Louis-Philippe" (pp. 64-65). Because Montesquieu was an homme de lettres by mature conviction and, after having retired from public life, had not had to witness a revolution at first hand, he had not particularly had to face an epistemological tension between the making and the recording of history. Thus, he had shown little interest in the distinction between men of letters and public actors. However, Tocqueville, while Montesquieu's disciple, found himself a participant and the confidant of participants in 1848, a person with political sentiments and yet an austere historian. He was not so Parnassian that he could avoid expressing (in his private writing) his disgust at both the ruling class and the prophets of fraternity, as well as his own dread of the impasse they had mutually created: neither was he so partisan that he could not plead with his parliamentary colleagues: "Keep the laws as they are, if you wish... Keep the men, too, if it gives you any pleasure... But, in God's name, change the spirit of the government; for, I repeat, that spirit will lead you to the abyss" (Response to the Speech from the Throne, January 1848, in Recollections, p. 14). Feeling himself radically a sojourner in an intimate historical world stretching back to 1066, Tocqueville had made himself the scribe of a new history in which he had fatally become a participant. Tocqueville's categories of the "men of letters" seeking for general historical causes and the "politicians" impressed with the power of day-to-day choice correspond suggestively with what he had said in the second part of Democracy in America about how history is perceived and written in aristocratic and democratic ages: The historians who live in democratic ages not only are prone to assign a great cause to every incident, but are also given to connect incidents together so as to deduce a system from them. In aristocratic ages, as the attention of historians is constantly drawn to individuals, the connection of events escapes them; or rather they do not believe in any such connection. To them, the thread of history seems constantly to be broken by the course of one man's life... In reading the historians of aristocratic ages, anoV especially those of antiquity [this move co-opts Plutarch, et al., from possessive modern democrats], it would seem that, to be master of his lot and to govern his fellow creatures, man requires only to be master of himself. In perusing the historical volumes which our age has produced, it would seem that man is utterly powerless over himself and over all around him.30 30

Tocqueville, DA, n, 92-93.

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This passage is not only a forewarning of modern impersonality and "disenchantment," but an expression of the perplexity of the modern man of letters engaged in historical study. Though he might wish to people his work with human beings and proper nouns like Balzac, he cannot: for the spirit of the age and the requirements of historical self-intelligibility thwart the personal, both in the name of populism and the name of science. It is no longer important to know which Normans sailed with William the Conqueror. While cleverly preserving an illocutionary self so distinct that its presence never escapes us, Tocqueville cannot doubt that he - no less than Thiers - is an historian of the democratic age and committed to its methods. Here is a list of proper names cited (except in notes) in the second volume of Democracy in America: Alexander, Francis Bacon, Cicero, Hernando Cortes, Jacques-Louis David, Descartes, Lafayette, Luther, Mohammed, Pascal, Plato, Jean Racine, Raphael, Madame de Sevigne, Socrates. An economy that beggars description and, nota bene, includes no Americans. The Old Regime and the French Revolution,

unabashedly a historical work, yields a parsimonious fifty-nine names (fourteen of them monarchs), if the notes are excluded. The curious juxtaposition that occurs to us is that between gens de lettres and public actors and between historians of democratic ages and those of aristocratic ones. In each case, the tendency of the first is toward general causes, impersonality, and scientific pretense; the tendency of the second is toward accidents, naming, and local disconnection. Curiously enough, the browbeaten and inferior politicians are here assimilated to the ancient historians and the explanatory expectations of people in democratic ages to historical pioneers like Tocqueville himself. This seems to be irony in its most exquisite vein; and it is no wonder that the whole matter teeters on an edge of sadness unfathomed by a Guizot or even a Michelet. The answer to this conundrum, I think, underlies the inspiration of Parnassian liberalism, and is to be found in the motivation for writing the Souvenirs, which were polished enough, public enough, and in some ways scholarly enough for us to doubt that Tocqueville undertook them as a purely private pastime, although he represented them as " a mirror in which I will amuse myself in contemplating my contemporaries and myself; not a picture painted for the public" {Recollections, p. i). Either Tocqueville was persuaded that, at a decorous interval from the persons and events described, the Souvenirs would be read as a contribution to the history of his times; or he was

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a more foolish historian than the persistent quality of his intelligence suggests.31 The problem lies in Tocqueville's reading of his age and its project. That the Souvenirs, if prematurely circulated, might have wounded vanities is true; but these revelations would scarcely have been scandalous. More importantly, they violated Tocqueville's own view of historia rerum gestarum in the age that the world was entering. They not only impute personal and, broadly put, "accidental" causes to the gravest series of events, but are continually interspersed with personal - i.e. historically questionable - portraiture (LouisPhilippe, Lamartine, Blanqui, Lamoriciere, Napoleon II, George Sand, and numerous others), which, if the second book of Democracy in America is right, has no business being in democratic history at all. The Souvenirs are a document to be worked over by future historians, but they are not a specimen of proper history as Tocqueville conceived it. It is not just that they are intimate; it is that they are, in manner and design, subversive to the serious writing of modern history, history of the kind that later found its consummation in many of the works of the " Annales school." Beyond that, and most importantly, we have here a prelude to Parnassian liberalism which is not merely passional or ideological in design. In his gesture of writing the Souvenirs, Tocqueville showed that one could (and ought to) write privately what one could not declare as a public person, or at least as a democratic public person, in the vein of persons and accidents. To be sure, public writing itself by intellectuals did not seem so much to matter in the time of Louis Bonaparte: "Montalembert, or Guizot, or Falloux or I may publish what we like. We are not read by the soldier or the proletarian." 32 But the Souvenirs are explicitly "sincere" because they "remain entirely secret" {Recollections, p. 1). Parnassian liberalism will reattach "sincerity" and "publicity" by sacrificing politics. Modern judgment is inclined to think that our three most valuable treatments of a Paris divided and ablaze in the events of 1848 are Marx's Class Struggles in France, Flaubert's descriptions in The Sentimental Education (see below), and the text discussed here (no doubt Hugo's Choses vues is also a candidate). It is surely no accident 31

32

Andre Jardin speculates on this in his Alexis de Tocqueville, 1805-1859 (Paris, 1984), pp. 429-430. M . G. M . Simpson, ed., Correspondence and Conversations of Alexis de Tocqueville with William Nassau Senior (2 vols., London, 1872), 11, 160.

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that the first is drawn from the uncanny scorn of a foreign writer, the second from the translation of reality to fiction, and the third from a private reservoir of recollection containing candid and often selfinterested things that the public man would have censored. Both inspiring and mortifying the liberal understanding of politics, 1848 was, as Timothy Clark has put it, "revolution from above, and from below, the two forms curiously distinct." 33 Marx had - as yet - no trouble with this: his cause depended on showing contradictions. But the liberal psyche was divided. As an elite psyche wanting "moderation" but not "mediocrite," it began to retrench from politics toward culture, where it could compete and sound its values unbesmirched by the powers that be or the people beneath. The privacy of Tocqueville's 1848 book, with his "sadness" concretized in the particular and in disobedience to "the history of democratic ages," was a first step toward the independency of "la critique et la morale" and the freedom of "true fiction." III.

THE AIRS OF RENAN

Ernest Renan was eighteen years younger than Tocqueville, and he lived until 1892, thus being able to experience, with mixed feelings, the centenary of the Great Revolution. He was neither a Norman nor a noble, but a Breton from a pinched family. Uncommonly bright and diligent, he was vowed to the priesthood by a piously affectionate mother, but stimulated to doubt by a cherished sister. In the end, his non serviam was all his own; and it had not come without painful self-examination and philosophical reflection.34 But it was neither a bitter nor a disfiguring liberation. It was rather a sort of conversion to what Renan frequently called "liberalism," the doctrine bequeathed by the Protestant Reformation, the rise of science and free inquiry, and the French Revolution, " a revolution made by philosophers."35 Apostasy left Renan cheerful, disciplined, and cultured, immediately prepared to serve in the higher ranks of the religion of man. Renan did not care much for the hereditary nobility: he placed his hopes in a true aristocracy of the intellect, an "eglise de l'elite," "religious" and obliged to "the teaching of the masses." (Avenir de 33

T . J . C l a r k , The Absolute Bourgeois: p. 10.

34

E r n e s t R e n a n , Souvenirs cfenfance et de jeunesse ( P a r i s , 1 8 9 3 ) , p p . 3 1 4 - 3 4 3 . R e n a n , U Avenir de la science ( P a r i s , 1 8 9 1 ) , p . 2 5 . H e n c e f o r t h , AS.

35

Artists and Politics in France, 1848-1851

(Princeton, 1982),

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la science, p. 337). Neither did he like Normans, for he was irritated by their vacuous bonhomie. In an essay written in later life, he contrasted "their vulgarity... egoistical like all those who make a habit of enjoyment (jouissance)" with his own "timid, reserved, introspective" Celtic race, of "irresistible delicacy in its religious instincts" and "resolved to resist time and to defend hopeless causes."36 It does not seem, though, that he was castigating people like the Comte de Tocqueville; more likely he had in mind the uncouth bourgeoisie of Madame Bovary. Indeed, in a manner that reminds us of Tocqueville — minus the feudal fantasy — Renan's northern ancestry helped to form his sensibility, his feel of " a cold wind, full of uncertainty and sadness," his sight of " a sea always sombre and forming on the horizon its circle of eternal groanings." 37 Province and race provided counterweights to Renan's vast visions of the historical construction of knowledge, his attraction to the systematique, and his vocation of a critique universelle, in which a

fragile synthesis of the slippery windings of the human spirit in the nineteenth century would be undertaken (see the remarkable evocation of visiting an old Breton church with his mother, in Avenir de la science, pp. 220-221). Writing about Lamennais (whose teachings he judged to be of no further use and whose public stations of heresy he had not imitated, but whose person he admired), 38 Renan commented: "All Bretons of our age whose voices have been heard have the common trait of a distinct bad humor toward their time" and " a supreme law of faithfulness."39 Renan, as a member of the "imperceptible aristocratie," could not have written the Paroles (Tun croyant, nor easily have abandoned "science's future" to the people's needs, except as a pedagogue who could admonish: "Let us make men out of these animals" {Avenir de la science, p. 338). Yet he could abridge his celebrated Vie de Jesus in 1864 "in a form suitably prepared for the poor and the bereft of this world, those whom Jesus loved the most." 40 And he could show both bad humor and fidelity. In his multivariate works he comes through as a prophet mollified, a spiritualist whose message is endlessly complicated by eclecticism. Many have taken the mobility of his ideas to be symptomatic either of the breakdown of Catholic culture in a single brain or of an unrooted meandering that shifts from the ways of 36 37 39

" P o e s i e des races celtiques," in Essais de morale et de critique (Paris, 1859), p p . 3 7 6 - 3 8 3 . 38 Ibid., pp. 375-376. "Poesie des races celtiques," pp. 143-145. 40 Ibid., pp. 147-149. Jesus (Paris, 1864), p. i.

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Comte to those of Cousin according to the weather. Renan seems to be divided by a suppressed desire to propagate a pure faith and an overt pride in being erudite; divided by the particularity of race and the universality of science; divided, finally, by a contempt for the political, described in one passage as "the way of governing humanity like a machine" {Avenir de la science, p. 36), and an intellectual investment in liberalism with its undeniable political attachment to 1789, praised as "humanity's first attempt to seize the bridle and govern itself... the dawning of reflection in human government" (p. 25). Tocqueville and Renan shared a sincere identification with the Revolution, while maintaining, for somewhat different reasons, that it had gone off the track (Tocqueville accused equality, envy, and abstraction; Renan accused an ultimate failure of spirituality). But there were other convictions that they had no aptitude for sharing. As he neared the end of his life, Tocqueville knew Renan as a rising literary figure in Paris: he wrote to Beaumont in 1858 applauding an article that Renan had written on Cousin, describing it as "un chef d'oeuvre de louanges impertinantes." 41 Tocqueville had little use for the flamboyance of Cousin and the thinness of his "eclectic" doctrine, which seemed the intellectual sheet-anchor of the July Monarchy. He read in Renan what he wanted to find: but Renan had considerable respect for Cousin's powers of combination (see Avenir de la science, pp. 145—154). Then, in early 1859, Tocqueville's irrepressible correspondent Gobineau implored the sick man to intervene with Renan ("si vous pouvez indirectement ou directement echauffer le zele de M. Renan") for a consideration of his project by the Academie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres.42 Evidently Renan was seen as a coming power. But where did Renan get his power? A preliminary answer is that he got it from his "purity" of erudition, his "liberal" unweddedness to politics. Renan's vein was very different from Tocqueville's. If we may use Montesquieu's dichotomy, Tocqueville, as a nominal Catholic and certainly as a believer in the Christian framework of maker and design, had devoted himself exclusively to writing as an "ecrivian politique," while a great deal of the "theologien" remained in the apostate Renan. Renan devoted his most serious labor to Semitic philology and his histories of Christianity and Judaism. Already in 41

Tocqueville, OC, vm 3 (21 May 1858), 571.

42

OC, ix, 305.

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the Avenir of 1849 he had sensed what his life's work would be: "the most important book of the nineteenth century ought to have for its title: Critical History of the Origins of Christianity" {Avenir de la science,

(p. 279). Renan not only vented his best energies on religious subjects in the mode of "higher criticism": he conceived the advent of a new religion, which can only be described as a cult of learning, where, reverently, " we... imagine the possibility of an intellectual life for everyone, (p. 398). "The true way to worship God," Renan declared, "is to know and to love phenomenal existence (ce qui est)" (p. 126). Renan's religious project went entirely outside of Tocqueville's sphere in heralding a triumph of morals over politics, indicating a closeness to Comte in this regard. 43 "Politics," he wrote, "has given us all that it could supply; from now on, it is an arid and exhausted field, a struggle of passions and intrigues... It has spent its resources for solving the problems of humanity" {Avenir de la science, pp. 450-552, passim). The new faith's first task would be " T O ORGANIZE HUMANITY SGIENTIFIGALLY [for Renan "science" always carries the meaning of systematic knowledge, or savoir, not "law-like propositions"]." Then, he continues, "humanity WILL ORGANIZE GOD" (p. 37). this religious obsession is ascribable not only to Renan's early calling, but also to the mood of his generation: "Je suis ne romantique." 44 "Religieux," for Renan, had come to mean "serious" and "deeply applied to intellectual work"; it is opposed to "frivole": the July Monarchy was " a frivolous age because it lacked faith, and superstitious because it was frivolous."45 Besides this, Renan's reaction to 1848 had been quite different from Tocqueville's. Tocqueville had been a sober, almost bourgeois, realist in the face of those events, wishing to pull the chestnuts from the fire. He had, for example, pejoratively described socialism as " a thousand strange systems... issuing pell-mell from the minds of innovators" {Recollections, p. 78). Renan, on the other hand, had tended to see 1848 as pregnant with a future that Tocqueville disowned. Socialism, Renan agreed, was destructive to "individual liberty." But it had correctly posed the problem of social evil, and would probably some day reap the gratitude of humanity {Avenir de 43

See especially Auguste Comte, "Considerations on the Spiritual P o w e r " (published in Le Producteur, March 1826), in Ronald Fletcher, ed., The Crisis of Industrial Civilization: The

44 45

Early Essays of Auguste Comte ( L o n d o n , 1974), p p . 214-237. R e n a n , Cahiers dejeunesse, 1845-1846 (Paris, 1906), p . 326. " L ' e t a t des esprits e n 1849," Questions contemporaines (Paris, 1868), p . 335.

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la science, p. 370). Its doctrines had inspired Renan to write his lengthy reflections in the first place (p. i). Later on in his career, Renan asserted that socialism, concerned with justice, had Hebraic origins, while liberalism, concerned with individual excellence, went back to the Greeks.46 These ancestries would not have occurred to Tocqueville. By Renan's own admission, his intellectual style oscillated between critique (a wide field, but always distinguished by its independence from tradition) and morale (conservative by nature), 47 and between "absolute" and "eclectic" ways ofjudging. 48 Tocqueville could not have accepted these distinctions. For him "critique" and "morale" were inseparable. He knew nothing of the specific quality of the "absolute" (the attitudes of Renan and Tocqueville toward German philosophy are here revealing), studying rather "the ideas and passions of men"; and he found eclecticism a sloppy habit of mind. Then, too, Tocqueville was by conviction a practicing homme cPEtat until fortune retired him to the wings. Renan had always thought politics unsavory.49 He was not simply discouraged from it, like Tocqueville; he felt, or at least hoped, that civilization would work toward its suppression. One may conclude that this judgment was disingenuous or even blase, for there was at least one task of politics that Renan resolutely endorsed: the protection and subsidy of the work of scholars (Avenir de la science, pp. 249-251). In the historical sweep of his mind, Renan could even condone the Machiavellian practices of past governments: properly moderated, their trickery and corruption had been for the good of humanity (p. 351). A complete liberty of expression, he thought, would be feasible only when there is no longer " a society ignorant in its great majority and open to every seduction" (p. 358). Thus, Renan did not see "the problem of humanity" in at all the same way as Tocqueville. For Tocqueville it was to inject habits and institutions of freedom into the inevitable triumph of democracy: "The first of the duties that are at this time imposed on those who direct our affairs is to educate democracy... A new science of politics is needed for a new world."50 If this mood deepened to ironic nostalgia in The Old Regime ("I have tried not merely to diagnose the 46 47 48 49

50

Histoire du peuple a" Israel, preface, in Oeuvres completes cPErnest Renan (Paris, 1953), vi, 12-13. " M . d e Sacy et l'ecole liberate," in Essais de morale et de critique, p p . 3 0 - 3 1 . Ibid., p . 415. Although R e n a n did present himself twice unsuccessfully as a candidate for the C h a m b e r of Deputies in the post-imperial regime. Tocqueville, DA, 1, introduction, p. 7.

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malady of which the sick man died but also to discover how he might have been saved"), 51 the project remained unambiguous. Renan also wanted the democracy to be taught: for "stupidity has no right to rule the world" (Avenir de la science, p. 340). But the curriculum was not the same. For Renan, the ideal government would be entirely rational and scientific (p. 350). More grandiose than Tocqueville, he was also less precise. He was a seer who felt old and wise when his career was just beginning: "J'ai beaucoup vecu" (p. 16). He was dissatisfied with every regime and every "system" he had known; in the Avenir de la science he provided quicksilvery challenges that stated a mood, but hardly advanced the question. "The ideal human life," Renan declares, "would be a state where man had conquered nature up to the point where material need was no longer important... where all human activity was spiritually oriented and man had no longer but to lead a vie celeste" (p. 402). On the basis of this book, whose publication Renan prepared forty-one years after it was written, we discover not a conservative of the "Republique des Dues" but a kind of French Fichte bent on teaching the human race what it ought to know and absolving himself from political responsibility through the purity of his engagement. After all, "rien de grand... ne se fait sans chimeres" (p. 409). If Renan had not believed in the divine calling of humanity, he would have tried to live like an Epicurean or, failing that, ended his life like a Stoic (p. 411). But he stands out finally as an eclectic, still able to call himself a Christian in the sense that Cousin could present himself as a Platonist or a Cartesian (p. 483). Avenir is both strangely moving and suffocating. Renan concludes: I was formed by the Church, I owe it my being, and I shall never forget it. The Church removed me from the profane, and I am thankful for that. A person whom God has touched will always be a special person... Farewell, then, O God of my youth! Perhaps you will be the same God at my deathbed. Farewell: although you played me false, I still love you. (P- 492) Renan published this in 1890 as nothing that he was either exalted by or ashamed of. Perhaps it had always been his intention to present this work, for it predicted his career and made a grandfatherly contact with "the youth [of our time], who speak with a hesitant voice." He proposed to show them "how a young man [a 'little 51

Tocqueville, The Old Regime and the French Revolution (trans. Stuart Gilbert, Garden City, I955)> P- xii -

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Breton who, one day, fled frightened from Saint-Sulpice'], who was very straightforward and sincere, thought his own thoughts forty years ago" (p. v). He wanted to donate his own youth to posterity. He did make some reservations in his introduction, conceding earlier elements of confusion. For example, "Germany [i.e. Herder, Kant, Fichte, Hegel, and the historical philologists], which had for several years been my schoolmaster, formed me too much in its image" (p. ii); "the idea of an egalitarian civilization, which appears in several pages of this text...is a dream" (AS, p. vii); "inequality is written in the book of nature; it is the consequence of liberty, and without liberty there is no human progress" (p. ix); "human destiny has become more than ever obscure" (p. xviii). Renan had been chastened by events, but not so much as to prevent him from insisting: "my religion has always been the progress of reason or, in other words, science" (p. vii). However, as he put it in the preface to the Vie de Jesus, " the idea of art and science [is] to find the true and achieve the good, aside from all politics."52 Could culture be thus divorced from politics, given the fact that Renan modelled his notion of science on historical philology and declared that "history is the necessary form of the science of everything that is in the process of becoming" (Avenir de la science, p. 174) ? The French Revolution, central to Renan, had also been a monumental political event. As he put it: "The real history of France begins in 1789; everything preceding it is the slow preparation of'89 and interesting only as such" (p. 25). However, especially as his animus against politics became more fixed, Renan wanted to see 1789 not as a political revolution but as a revolution of mind on behalf of what he called "religionification." Close on the heels of 1848, he wrote about this to his friend the chemist PierreEugene Berthelot: Isn't the [French] Revolution already the personification of a whole order of ideas that are holy for us and that we venerate?... But I would not define modern religion simply by faith in the French Revolution. Certainly in modern ideas there are many views to which we necessarily subscribe and whose juncture forms our religion. These views, gradually acquired over four centuries, are wonderfully linked although produced in an almost isolated fashion, always as a reaction to the past. The Reformation, popular liberation, the liberation of science, the liberation of philosophy, the advent of criticism, the reform of public morality, etc., all form a whole that is the 52

Renan, Vie de Jesus (Paris, 1864), p. Hi.

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spirit of the modern age... Not a single element that I have mentioned, nor their first exponents, has failed to come under attack from the men of the past... Ideas that the men of the past repress by force, which remain unchanging and always in our view... are destined to rule.53 Renan was convinced that religions, like all else human, were produced historically, and that a "science of human origins... conceived as a consciousness forming and developing itself" (Hegel is cited as a precursor) should be revived (Avenir de la science, pp. 163, 174). For example, "Christianity began in the seventh century B.C., when the great prophets took the people of Israel and changed them into the people of God, with the mission of establishing pure worship in the world."54 Renan's new "religion of learning" had similar deep roots in the first stirrings of the passion to know "ce qui est." That religion could be called "liberalism." It was not so much liberalism in politics or the economy. In the former sphere, Renan recognized that "it is of the essence of any party to try to dominate, even the one claiming to have no other banner than liberty." 55 In the latter, Renan especially despised "mate'rialisme vulgaire which would transform individual members of society into... a huge field of grass whose tops bend in unison before each blast of wind" (Avenir de la science, p. 86). Liberalism was instead the core of the new religion of seriousness: " Rationalism, criticism, liberalism... founded at the same time as philology" (p. 141). It was the outcome of "Protestantism, philosophy, revolution" (p. 62). It owed nothing to Christianity, being based on reason and knowledge of nature. 56 Yet it had its " banqueroutes " which might conceivably bring back the older Judaic and Christian faiths, in which case history, "the most aristocratic of tastes," would have to rush to explain the past before partisanship engulfed it.57 That was indeed Parnassian condescension. Renan described himself as "un simple liberal ...not republican a priori... and quite willing to accept constitutional monarchy... [but] more loyal to the [Third] Republic than republicans de la veille."5S But he never considered politics as principled or valuable in itself. 53 54 55 57 58

Correspondan.ee entre MM. Renan et Berthelot (Paris, 1898), p p . 2 2 - 2 3 . Marc-Aurele et la Jin du monde antique (Paris, 1882), p . v. 56 Cahiers dejeunesse, p . 360. Marc-Aurele, p . 594. Histoire du peuple a" Israel, OC, v i , 14. " D i s c o u r s a l'association des e t u d i a n t s , " Discours et conferences (Paris, 1887), p . 2 8 .

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This is clear if we compare him once more to Tocqueville. Like Tocqueville, Renan sometimes criticized France by way of England and the United States. But his conclusion was always that France had learned too much from the Anglo-Saxons, not too little. Britain had been the source of materialism, commercial spirit, and mental lassitude: "It's prosperity shames it and gives evidence of its insignificance" (Avenir de la science, p. 372). On the other hand, the United States was an intellectual travesty; "The principle that society exists only for the well-being and liberty of its members does not seem to conform to nature's plans." 59 Instead, Renan thought: " I t is neither well-being nor even liberty that contributes much to the originality and development of intellectual energy... the setting of great events... of passion trained through combat" {Avenir de la science, p. 422).

In this spirit Renan castigated mediocrity: "Our century tends neither toward good nor evil; it tends toward mediocrity. Everything that succeeds in our time is mediocre."60 Mediocrity had condemned the July Monarchy, which, as Renan somewhat nostalgically admits, had been led by a monarch "of rare qualities and admirable good sense."61 Yet, although "people never lived more comfortably than from 1830 and 1848, and we may wait a long time for a regime so permissive of liberty," "the whole secret of the intellectual situation of [that] time is this fatal truth: intellectual work had been debased to the level of a pleasant pastime (jouissances). When serious struggles came along, that pastime seemed trivial and bland. So don't blame the events... Present society is inferior because no one understands that intellectual culture is a religious matter.62 Renan attacked "the generation ... which has conceived of life as a relaxation and art as a pleasure" (Avenir de la science, p. 421). His own liberalism treated politics in this same way. Rambunctious enough to sour both the Church and the radicals, Renan withdrew the title of freedom to the sanctified heights of "le beau" and "le bon." In one of three provocative and playful Dialogues philosophiques, published in 1876, two of Renan's characters, Theophraste and Euthyphron, debate their visions of the future. Theophraste sees a geometrically expanding world, marked by great waste but also by 59 60 61 62

Dialogues et fragments philosophiques (Paris, 1876), p. 99. Essais de morale et de critique, p. 3 7 3 ; cf. Cahiers dejeunesse, p. 387. " P h i l o s o p h i c d e l'histoire c o n t e m p o r a i n e , " Questions contemporaines, p . 36. "Etat des esprits en 1849," p. 313.

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ever greater spiritual surpluses. When Euthyphron protests that life is far more likely to disappear in a wash of democratic mediocrity and a failure of fuel supplies,63 Theophraste replies that democracy will be replaced by a hierarchical and scientific elite who will employ thinking machines, eugenic breeding practices, and a whole repertory of technological controls on behalf of wealth and progress. The beauties of art and literature may, however, have to be sacrificed.64 The Theophrastic vision reads a bit like H. G. Wells, and it may be that Renan was parodying parts of his own Avenir de la science. What we should notice here is Zeitgeist: at precisely this same time Flaubert was laboring on his Bouvard et Pecuchet. IV. THE DISGUST OF FLAUBERT

I shall come presently to the bearing of Bouvard et Pecuchet on our subject. Flaubert's unfinished masterpiece, the "entreprise ecrasante et e'pouvantable"65 that cost him so much pain in the last decade of his life,66 renders the revolutions of 1848 from the bemused perspective of a village in Calvados, where the two heroes have gone to live. The Education sentimentale shows these same events up close in Paris, mockheroically, though the part played in them by Frederic Moreau is scarcely more prescient than that of Fabrice on the battlefield of Waterloo. Turning first to the Education sentimentale will bring out some of the manifest tendencies of its author's view of politics and society. Let us bear in mind that, like Moreau, Flaubert is a Norman, and marked like Tocqueville and Renan by his "Northernness" : " I have deep in my soul the fog of the North that I breathed at my birth." 67 Flaubert was the son of an eminent physician of Rouen and a mother descended from the Norman gentry. Trouville, where Flaubert first glimpsed the passion of his life, Elisa Schlesinger, always invoked for him a golden youth that he had lost. Although his tirades against rural bourgeois idiocy (in Bovary and Bouvard et Pecuchet) are famous, his displacements between his Norman property of Croisset and Paris, punctuated by numerous trips of "research," established the rhythm of his work. Flaubert had no temptation toward politics, was gifted in history at school, and, from an early age, had determined to become a 63 65 66 67

64 Dialogues et fragments, p p . 6 4 - 6 6 . Ibid., pp. 80-86. T o C a r o l i n e , 22 A u g u s t 1872. Correspondance de Flaubert (9 vols., Paris, 1 9 2 6 - 1 9 3 3 ) , vi, 404. R e n e D e s c h a r m e s , Autour de Bouvard et Pecuchet (Paris, 1921), p . 14. To Louise Golet, 6 August 1847. Corr., 1, 217.

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writer. Born, like Renan, a "Romantic" ("How we admired Victor Hugo!"), 68 Flaubert indulged that side of his genius in works like He'rodias, La Tentation de Saint-Antoine, and Salammbo, while developing

a style and mood commonly described as "realism" in his other fiction, threading his way, as he put it, between "the double abyss of lyricism and vulgarity." 69 This second and more original prompting won him a considerable following among younger writers and guaranteed him a living reputation: he was willing " [to go] to breathe the odor of unknown dung heaps." 70 The Education sentimentale explores the perimeter of this "double abyss" in terms of politics, art, and the social order of the July regime. The panoply of characters encountered in that novel are truly inhabitants of a "dung heap," though some are graced by Flaubert with tiny touches of compassion or lucidity, and others (especially women) are revealed through a lyricism that can be fragile or tawdry. Arnoux, the art dealer, "with his passion for gratifying existing tastes... [has] deflected able artists from their true paths, corrupted the strong, exhausted the weak, and made the mediocre famous."71 Yet Frederic would have risked his life for him (p. 62); and it is Arnoux whom Flaubert charges with the ironic expostulation: "What can you do in a decadent time like ours?" (p. 108). Pellerin, the young artist, believes that he can paint masterpieces by discovering the true theory of beauty in books; later he imagines that he can find the same secret in nature (pp. 41, 116). Senecal has deeply meditated "the entire cartload of socialist writers"-Rousseau, Mably, Morelly, Fourier, Saint-Simon, Comte, Cabet, Louis Blanc —"those who wanted to entertain [mankind] in a brothel or chain it to a workbench" (p. 134). "Confusing his own grievances against society with those of the people against the monarchy... [he awakes] every morning hoping for a revolution which would transform the world in the space of two weeks or a month" (p. 227). Deslauriers is convinced that "the time has come to treat politics scientifically" (p. 174), while Dussardier "naively attribute[s] all the evil in the world to Authority and hate[s] it with an undying hatred" (p. 228). 68 69 70 71

Ibid.: " Preface aux derniers chansons de Louis Bouilhet," vi, 475. To Louise Colet, 20-21 March 1852, ibid., 11, 372. To Louise Colet, 24 April 1852, ibid., 11, 396. Flaubert, The Sentimental Education (trans. Perdita Burlingame, New York, 1984), p. 43. Hereafter, SE.

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Petty, scheming, and full of illusion, the have-nots of Flaubert's novel are still never as vile as the members of the bourgeois establishment whose paths they cross. Dambreuse, the financier and deputy, lives and receives friends in squalid magnificence, with " a choice often varieties of mustard" (p. 50) and "footmen in gold lace everywhere" (p. 154), surrounded by guests who "would have betrayed France, or the human race, in order to protect their property, to avoid any discomfort or difficulty, or simply out of pure baseness, and instinctive worship of power" (p. 234). After February 1848, he shouts lustily "Long live the Republic" and votes for the banishment of the Orleans family (p. 312). His death is sordid, "his face... as yellow as straw and - a little bloody foam at the corners of his mouth"; and the grief of his widow unfeigned, because a lastminute will has cheated her out of her inheritance (pp. 371, 377). The Norman hobereau Roque is simply a beast, hideously murdering a prisoner of the June revolution who has cried out for some bread

(P-330Frederic Moreau is himself a moral chameleon, a sentimental popinjay. Early in the novel, he thinks of "becoming a trapper in America, taking service with a pasha in the East, signing on as a sailor." (p. 94). By the time of the revolution, after a number of personal ups and downs involving status and sloth, he is seized with "an immense love... a supreme and universal tenderness, as if the heart of all humanity were beating within his chest" (p. 286). But in short order he feels like " a new man," for he has "finally entered the superior world of patrician adultery and high intrigue" with Madame Dambreuse (p. 360). His "education" leads to nullity years later. Obviously, the novel is, among other things, a scathing indictment of the bourgeoisie of the July Monarchy. But it is also less than tender to the revolutionary activists who can only yell "Atheist! Aristocrat! Scum!" (p. 298) or the crowds set loose in disorder. After the flight of Louis-Philippe, the mob storms the Tuileries, and the royal throne is hurled from a palace window: At this there was a frenzied outburst of joy, as if a future of boundless happiness had appeared in place of the throne; and the mob, less from a desire for vengeance than from a wish to assert the fact that they were in possession, broke and tore mirrors and curtains, chandeliers, sconces, tables, chairs, stools, all the furniture, even sketchbooks and embroidery baskets. Since they had gained the victory, they had the right to amuse

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themselves, hadn't they?... In the queen's bedroom, a woman was greasing her hair with pomade; behind a screen, two gamblers were playing cards... In the hall, a streetwalker was standing on a pile of clothes, posed as a statue of Liberty - immobile, wide-eyed, horrifying, (pp. 283-284).72 The irony of this scene (its scorn magnified, but resembling that of Tocqueville in the Souvenirs) is made complete when the enthusiast Dussardier appears, exclaiming: " Oh, if you only knew all I've seen! What wonderful people! How glorious it all is!" (p. 285). Flaubert's invincible contempt for the bourgeoisie led not to any sympathy for its natural adversary, but to a Parnassian disgust with both that placed him firmly in the stream of liberalism I have been describing. As he wrote: "Between the crowd and us, no bond. So much the worse for the crowd, so much the worse for us, above all." 73 " Irony," he asserted, "seems to me to dominate life."74 Yet, as Flaubert the artist acknowledged: "Je suis Bovary"; and he was also Moreau, and even Bouvard and Pecuchet. When called up for military service during the "phony war" of the autumn of 1939, Jean-Paul Sartre diverted himself with the Education sentimentale and found it "clumsy and disagreeable... a pitiful story engraved in marble." 75 His grounds of criticism are of much interest here. He writes: "the industrial civilization of LouisPhilippe and the social movement of'48 made people want to speak about things (machines, tools, etc.) while the style Flaubert found at his disposal had slowly been formed for describing customs and men. Flaubert attempts to translate ...The truth is that Flaubert, enemy of all Louis-Philippe-style bourgeois, is himself a bourgeois, and his art is a product of the industry of '48." 76 Sartre in fact describes Flaubert's writing as " a cumbersome Parnassian style" which "takes care over the show, but neglects the event.11 The particular objection Sartre makes is that Flaubert is "meticulous about his nouns and slapdash about his verbs." Sartre finds this style archaic, 72

73 74 75

Contrast this with Flaubert's description of Fontainebleau (SE, pp. 316-317): "There is a peculiar melancholy about royal residences, probably stemming from their size too great for their few inhabitants, their silence which is surprising after so many fanfares, and their unchanging luxury, whose age underlines the transience of dynasties, the eternal vanity of all things; and this exhalation of the centuries, numbing and funereal like the scent of a mummy, has its effect on even the most ingenuous mind." To Louise Golet, 24 April 1852. Con., 11, 396. To Louise Colet, 8-9 May 1852, ibid., 11, 407. Jean-Paul Sartre, The War Diaries: November igjg-March ig^o (trans. Quintin Hoare, New 76 77 Ibid., pp. 101-102. Ibid., pp. 100-101. York, 1984), p. 100.

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disjointed, and claustrophobic. But what he so readily castigates as "bourgeois" strikes one as being the case with Parnassian liberal writing in general, especially Tocqueville, the aristocrat, who defined his own and the future's task as one of describing customs and men."78 However, it is in the novelist's craft that the emphasis on the noun stands out most boldly, and here it would seem to indicate a further ascent toward Parnassus. By this I mean the freezing of man in society, of society in history, and ultimately history in art: the process by which we pass from Tocqueville to Renan to Flaubert. Flaubert's artistic doctrines are well known: they have a Platonic side and a modern side. The Platonism is achieved by extracting the essence of persons or objects through repetitive observations, thereby assigning them a moral quality: "From the moment that a thing is true, it is good."79 This is also the genesis of beauty ("I strive above all for beauty"). 80 Moreover, "where form is lacking, the idea no longer exists. To seek one is to seek the other. They are as inseparable as substance and color and that is why Art is Truth itself."81 And, to return to the matter of nouns, "the word is never lacking, when one is in possession of the idea." 82 The modern side of Flaubert's aesthetics was equally reprehensible to Sartre. Sartre had also been reading Jean Cassou's Quarante-huit in November 1939, and had pinpointed the inadequacy of the social doctrines he saw leading to the 1848 revolutions: distantly inspired by conservatives like Ballanche, they had created "the religion of man conceived as a natural species."83 He did not share a naturalistic view of humanism (as we know from the philosophy of UEtre et le JVe'ant, which was being worked out in this period), for he regarded that as a reactionary "spirit of synthesis" (akin to what he later called the "practico-inerte"). This notion of species had been "furnished by biology."84 But, as Sartre might have added, Flaubert did accept such a doctrine, which he found essential to his artistic practice — a practice based on refining the noun, polishing it like a 78

79

81

82 84

Tocqueville, DA, n, 77: " I am persuaded that in the end democracy diverts the imagination from all that is external to man and fixes it on man alone." To George Sand, 6 February 1876. Con., vn, 285. See Flaubert's denial of his "realism" 80 in this letter. To George Sand, ca. 20 December 1875, ibid., vn, 281. To Louise Colet, 15-16 May 1852, ibid., 11, 416. And specifically on politics, p. 415: " Republic or monarchy, we won't get out of it so fast... What is Equality if not the negation of all liberty, all superiority, and nature itself? Equality is slavery. That is why I love Art." 83 To George Sand, 14 March 1876, ibid., vn, 290. Sartre, War Diaries, p. 21. Ibid., pp. 25-26.

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gem, until it could stand as a universal. Species were, for Flaubert, unions of form and idea, to be created by the artist through an observation so sensitive and incessant that the accidents fall away. Art required " a pitiless method, the precision of the physical sciences."85 The artist stood outside of nature (compare Tocqueville's societal models and Renan's "critique universelle") to achieve these results. Flaubert wished to study human beings "like mastadons or crocodiles."86 What Flaubert had in mind was something quite similar to Renan's philological method proclaimed in the Avenir de la science, to wit: "History, history and natural history. These are the two muses of the modern age. With them, we shall enter new, new worlds."87 Aided by this view, Flaubert created a Parnassian style where noun leaps to noun across the abysses of lyricism and vulgarity; to achieve that style he practiced a severity of observation like that of the herbalist or lepidopterist, travelling, reading, watching, recording. In preparation for Bouvard et Pecuchet he read more than a thousand volumes which would not otherwise have claimed his attention, and he made extensive field trips to places that would figure in the work.88 In order to create his autodidactic and doltish heroes he had to be as encyclopedic as they were: after all, they had spent eighteen months of investigation before buying a property (1, 283). Renan once wrote that travelling through the Holy Land had been to him like " a fifth gospel."89 Flaubert researched his fiction (Salammbo is a prime example) with just as great a rigor, Bouvard et Pecuchet is not, of course, ostensibly an exercise in pure art or an examination of ce qui est: it is a bitter diatribe against the folly of the human race, in the manner of Swift or Voltaire. Flaubert had had this subject on his mind for a very long time, for he had written in 1852 to Louise Colet: " I sometimes get the awful itch to heap abuse on humans and I will do it some day, within the next ten years, in some long novel with a wide sweep."90 Earlier on, he had confided to

his friend Maxime du Camp: " I want to produce such an impression of lassitude and boredom that a reader of the book might think it had 85 86 87 88

90

To Mademoiselle Leroyer de Chantepie, 18 March 1857, Corr., iv, 164. To Louise Colet, 31 March 1853, ibid., m, 154. To Mademoiselle Leroyer de Chantepie, 20 October 1863, ibid., v, i n . See t h e critical edition of Flaubert's Bouvard et Pecuchet (ed. Alberto C e n t o , 2 vols., Naples 89 and Paris, 1963), 1, xli. Hereafter, BP. Renan, Vie de Jesus, p. 78. To Louise Colet, 17 December 1852, Corr., in, 66. In the meantime, Flaubert adds, his Dictionnaire des idees revues will have to suffice.

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been written by a cretin." 91 Naturally, the demands of "writing like a cretin" and producing a masterpiece of serio-comic art were not easy to reconcile, even for a genius like Flaubert. The vehicle he eventually chose was a very sparse and objective sort of style which abbreviates descriptions of action to the strictly essential and deals with largely preformed characters who play out their assigned roles but do not develop (the economy of style distinctly prefigures Georges Simenon). When Flaubert finally took up the challenge of writing this novel in 1872, he was in an especially dark mood because of the FrancoPrussian war defeat and the events of the Commune. " I had illusions," he wrote, "and I didn't think I would see the end of the world come. For that's what it is; we are present at the end of the Latin world. Farewell to everything we love!" 92 Throughout 1872, his letters reflected this ferocity: " I am pondering something in which I will breathe out my anger... I will vomit on my contemporaries the disgust they inspire in me, even if I should burst my chest doing it." 93 As he labored on in the "infernal bouquin," he complained of Bouvard and Pecuchet: "Their stupidity is mine, and it is killing me." 94 Although critical interpretations, as well as critical judgments, of Bouvard et Pecuchet vary widely, we can, I believe, summarize Flaubert's intention thus: (1) to revile the bourgeois mentality (here the focus is "petty bourgeois"); (2) to satirize the unguided, fanatic, autodidactic, polymathic urge of the protagonists, or at least show a contempt for those who seek to gain practical knowledge through unselective reading; (3) to universalize the foibles of Bouvard and Pecuchet into the folly of mankind — or at least the folly of "progress"; (4) to show that even the greatest writers and thinkers have been guilty of similar betises, making the intellectual landscape seem very bleak indeed; and finally (5) - a master stroke - to join the destinies of Bouvard and Pecuchet with his own, and with that of art itself ("Their stupidity is mine, and it is killing me"), making the revelation of knowledge into a revelation of stupidity and concluding, with the preacher, that "all is vanity." To carry out this dismal experiment, Flaubert - true to his artistic formulas - had to 91 92 93 94

Maxime du Camp, Souvenirs litteraires (2 vols., Paris, 1882-1883), 11, 540-541. To Madame Regnier, 11 March 1871. Corr., vi, 201. To Madame Roger des Genettes, 5 October 1872, ibid., vi, 425. To Madame Roger des Genettes, April 1875, ibid., vn, 237.

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force himself through the same patterns of knowledge - scavenging as those of his copy-clerks. "// is my testament," he concluded, "the resume of my experiences and my judgment on man and his works."95

This format for the exposure of human stupidity did not dawn on Flaubert all at once, but required many years of fermentation and decanting. The basic project, as I have said, was framed as early as 1852 (in other words, at the time of the crash of the Second Republic). But Flaubert did not occupy himself with the actual plotting of the novel until after the Franco-Prussian war. His meticulously evolving sketches for Bouvard et Pecuchet are revealed in the valuable Rouen dossiers preserved after his death (1, 3-267). Bouvard and Pecuchet (Flaubert formed these names like his other nouns, by refinement) are two nondescript copy-clerks, one employed by a private firm and the other by the Ministry of the Navy. One is a widower, the other a bachelor. They meet accidentally, become friendly, and discover many interests in common, especially a naive urge to become totally enlightened and a desire to leave their tedious jobs and live in the country. A financial windfall makes this dream possible. Thus, after the most painstaking inquiries, the clerks settle on buying a large agricultural property at Chavignolles, near Caen, where they move toward the end of 1840. They are by no means despicable creatures, even though their mania for knowledge and improvement ruins their property, runs them through their fortune, imprisons them in all kinds of village intrigues, and leads them into constant comic misadventure. They are, in fact, touching in their unspoken friendship for each other despite intellectual disagreements - and in their innocent desire to better themselves and the world. Flaubert manages to enliven his novel with charm and buffoonery, while not neglecting "venom" and "vomit" - producing a kind of nineteenth-century Candide. Around the two copy-clerks are gathered all the rural personalities - the scheming widow, the clever housekeeper, the cure\ the squire, various bourgeois, the revolutionary ruffian - necessary for the general raise en scene.

The spiralling fall of Bouvard and Pecuchet - which is also finally a beginning of wisdom - is measured by their comic gradus ad Parnassum in encyclopedic connaissances. Nothing human is alien to them, but everything translates badly in human terms. They undertake agriculture; sciences (chemistry, medicine, astronomy, 95

Afuguste] Sfabatier], "L'oeuvre postume de Gustave Flaubert," Journal de Geneve, 3 April 1881, quoted by Cento, ed., BP, 1, lvi.

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253

geology); archaeology and history; literature, fine art, and aesthetics; politics, law, and socialism; love; philosophy; religion; and, finally, universal education. They are buffeted by every method, opinion, and way of life imaginable. Everything leads to some form of catastrophe. Their research in politics is conveniently inspired by the events of 1848. The February revolution contents both of them: Bouvard feels patriotic and plants a liberty tree; Pecuchet is smugly satisfied because he had anticipated grave trouble for the monarchy (1, 416). They study the question of universal suffrage: according to Bouvard, the stupidity of the crowd is to be feared (1, 425). With the failure of the June uprising in Paris, bourgeois materialism triumphs and the countryside returns to normal (1, 434). But Bouvard and Pecuchet have now plunged into political theory. In short order they read and debate Filmer, Locke, Helvetius, Vattel, Aquinas, Jurieu, and Rousseau (1, 437). This leads them on to socialism: Fourier, Blanc, Comte, and so on (1, 438). A passage from this interlude will give the flavor of the novel: That evening at dinner [Pecuchet] commented: " I agree that the Utopians sometimes write ridiculous things. Yet they deserve our affection. They were appalled by the ugliness of the world, and to make it finer, they suffered greatly..." Bouvard replied: "Do you really think the world is going to change because of some fellow's theories?" "Who cares?" said Pecuchet. "But it's time to get rid of selfishness! We should search for the best system!" "You think you can find it?" "Of course." (1,440)

Bonaparte's coup sours the two friends on this line of inquiry. Bouvard concludes that progress is a joke and politics a filthy business. Pecuchet agrees: "It's not a science. Military science {Fart militaire) is worth more." (1, 442). As their concerns evolve and deepen, Bouvard and Pecuchet seem to reach a mood of "universal criticism": "A disturbing faculty grew within their minds: they recognized stupidity and resolved not to tolerate it" (1, 492). Vain hope: they have still to pass through the turmoils of religious dogma and belief, and, in an access of Rousseauian fervor, to become the mentors of two orphaned children, a boy and girl, who turn out to be little fiends. Finally, in a last chapter which Flaubert left briefly sketched at

254

Parnassian liberalism

the time of his death, Bouvard and Pecuchet debate the future of the planet (compare Theophraste and Euthyphron in Renan's Dialogues philosophiques). Pecuchet sees the bleakest of outcomes: man becomes a machine, falls into anarchy, and knows no peace. Barbarism triumphs through the excess of individualism and the fanaticism of science. Either pantheism destroys tradition and implants despotism, or dogmatic theism abolishes liberalism, or there is a constant oscillation between the two. In any case, ideals, religion, and morals vanish. America conquers the world. Literature is vanquished by mediocrity. The world ends with the exhaustion of its fuel supply. Bouvard disagrees: he is an optimist. Europe will be revived by Asia, especially China. Humanity will be reunited. Future inventions, especially those of transportation, will change the face of the globe. The bottom of the sea will be farmed. Literature will thrive. Science will bring forth prodigious discoveries. Cities will be beautiful, and all homes will be lighted, for it will be possible to see phosphorescent substances. The disappearance of need will end all wrongdoing. All peoples will be joyously harmonious.Man will go to the stars and will settle there once the earth has been used up (i, 592-594)At this point, the gendarmes enter to charge the copy-clerks with dereliction in bringing up the two children. The children will have to be taken away. This interruption to futuristic reveries does not presumably dissolve its impact: Bouvard and Pecuchet have been Flaubert's vehicle for facing off the dark and bright sides of nineteenth-century liberalism in a more drastic way than Tocqueville or Renan contemplated. And that antagonism has been absorbed into art. At the end of the novel, Bouvard and Pecuchet are bereft. Their attempt to gain and apply universal knowledge has brought them to disaster. But there is a way out: the same as the way in. Though they have no more interest in life, a secret idea wells up inside them; they smile at each other coyly, and finally share the secret. They will return to copying. They purchase the necessary equipment, and "they set to work" (1, 596). Bouvard and Pecuchet are now self-employed, deeply marked by the world's knowledge, and totally disillusioned. What will they copy? Here, critical opinions diverge. Standard practice, since the first posthumous publication of the novel, has been to attach to the narrative portion Flaubert's Dictionnaire des idees refues, a com-

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255

pendium of vacuous sayings or definitions that he compiled in his attempt to quintessentialize the conversation of the bourgeoisie. It can be shown that this reservoir of trivia and malapropisms furnished Flaubert with much material for his earlier fiction, especially Madame Bovary and UEducation sentimentale.96 T h e Dictionnaire had been a conscious project from early on: Flaubert described it as "completementfait" in a letter of 1850 written from Damascus to Bouilhet.97 There is no doubt that both the Dictionnaire and the novel are inspired by the same contempt for vulgarity. But would the copy-clerks, after their sobering adventures, have settled for "received ideas" along these lines? We can doubt that it was their destiny simply to copy out bourgeois banalities of the style of Monsieur Homais. At least there is an alternative. According to the Rouen dossier vn, it was Flaubert's plan for the copyists to begin with trivia at hand (like posters and calling cards), next to pass to notes taken from a variety of authors indiscriminately, and then to "classify" the stupidities of these authors - including the best, be they Descartes, Chateaubriand, or Cousin. Finally, their classification would weave together all the follies of high and low literature, of art and life, in a total indictment of human motives and capacities, spelled by certain passages of narrative relief. Unfortunately, this devastating enterprise survives only as a hypothesis in the last sketches Flaubert wrote before his death on 8 May 1880, which he intended to take with him to Paris two days later (Bouvard et Pe'cucket, 1, lviii).

Thus, the vitriol of disgust is not, as is sometimes assumed, contained in or vented on the characters of Bouvard and Pecuchet. Rather they become Flaubert's agents for his tirade against mankind, and are made sympathetic and heroic as such. At this juncture the fragile but exquisite crust of Parnassian liberalism explodes — both in the debate about the future of the race and in the universal sottisier, destructive of all illusion, that the author conceived but failed to carry out. Humanity becomes its own critique — beyond regimes, beyond history, and even beyond art. The confusion of 1848 is methodically captured in an art that annihilates accident and devenir by raising them to pure form and reality. 96 97

See D e s c h a r m e s , Autour de Bouvard et Pecuchet, p p . 2 4 0 - 2 5 0 . To Louis Bouilhet, 4 September 1850. Corr., 11, 237.

Index

absolutism, 128 Alembert, Jean Le Rond d', 47 America, see United States ancient liberty, 61 Constant on, 55, 56, 58, 60—1 aristocracy and Parnassian liberalism, 223, 231 aristocratic ages, 50, 55, 63-7, 156 and history, 233-4 aristocratic notion of liberty, 61, 62 Aristotle, 1, 212 armed forces Royer-Collard on, 25 Arnaud, F., 173 association liberty of, 80, 81 right of, 106 Athens, ancient Constant on, 58 authority and Catholicism, 113 Avenir de la science (Renan), 236-7, 238, 239-40, 241-2, 243, 244, 250

Bonald, L., 139 Bonaparte, see Napoleon Bonaparte Bossuet, Jacques, 167, 169, 171, 175 Bouvard et Pecuchet (Flaubert), 245, 250-5 Broglie, Albert de, 36, 120, 174 Broglie, Albertine, Duchesse de, 11-12, 15, 19, 104, 194 Broglie, Victor, Due de, 11, 15, 19, 104 Buchez, Philippe, 142 Burke, Edmund, 139

Baechler, Jean, 230 Ballanche, Pierre Simon, 139, 249 Balzac, Honore de, 234 "banquet campaign" (1847), 197-8, 217 Barante, Prosper de, 6, 11, 21, 23, 29, 31, 33, 37, 76 Barrot, Odilon, 36, 181, 185, 187, 188, 194, 196, 198, 208-9, 2 I 7 Bayle, Pierre, 69, 70 Beaumont, Gustave de, 19, 228, 230, 238 Beaumont, Madame de, 35 Belgium, 117, 119, 121, 127 Benichou, Paul, 85 Bentham, Jeremy, 59 Beranger, Pierre Jean de, 183, 184 Berthelot, Pierre-Eugene, 242 Blake, William, 185 Blanc, Louis, 182, 192, 217 256

Cabet, Etienne, 193, 206 Calvin, John, 73 Camp, Maxime du, 250 Casimir-Perier, Jean Paul Pierre, 199 Cassou, Jean, 249 Catholicism, 92, 115-33, *42 and Cousin, 152 and Guizot, 112-13 and Lamartine, 213 liberal, 112, 119-33, X75 and Madame de Stael, 102 and the Pascal affair, 171-2 and Royer-Collard, 21 and the state, 71, 72 and Tocqueville, 84 Cavaignac, Louis, 193 Cavour, Count, 131 Channing, W. E., 73, 155 charity, Cousin on, 162-3 Charles X, King of France, 1, 20, 21-2, 33, 164, 181, 198, 201 Charriere, Madame de, 38 Chateaubriand, Franc,ois-Rene de, 10-11, 14, 16, 22, 27, 28, 29, 32-3, 38, 137, 140, 141, 146, 159 on Christianity, 158 and Lamartine, 197, 198 poetry, 184, 187 Christianity, 87, 108 Cousin on, 157-8 Guizot on, 111-14

Index Christianity cont. Jouffroy on, 138, 155 Lamartine on, 211-12 and the Pascal affair, 177-9 Perfectionist Christians, 109 and philosophy, 139-45 see also Catholicism; Protestantism civil liberties and Protestantism, 94 civil society and religion, 110-14 civilization Madam de Stael's theory of, 100 Clark, Timothy, 186, 236 Class Struggles in France ( M a r x ) , 195, 235

Claviere, Etienne, 9 Clemenceau, G., 202 Clerel, Herve de, 27, 229 Colet, Louise, 147, 250 colonization, Lamartine on, 205 commerce Constant on, 58, 59-60 Tocqueville on, 68—9 Comte, A., 33 Condorcet, M., 48, 55, 76, 139, 202 conscience, liberty of, 85-6 Constant, Benjamin, 6-17, 88, 165, 196 and the Cent-Jours, 12-13 childhood, 8 death, 6, 16-17 family background, 7-8 in French society, 10-12, 19 on the individual and society, 39-44, 45, 52-5 on liberty, 2-3, 55, 56—61, 66-7, 68 and Madame de Stael, 13-14, 101 on the moeurs of society, 48-9, 50, 51 nationality status, 9-10 and religion, 35, 69-79, 92> IOI > IO3> 112, 126

and Royer —Collard, 23, 24, 25, 26 on sovereignty, 218 and Tocqueville, 3, 4, 5-6, 17, 28, 38 and truth, 89 constitutional monarchy Cousin on, 165-7 Corcelle, Francisque de, 19, 34 Cousin, Victor, 19, 20, 21, 34, 139, 143, 159, 161-9 appearance, 147 on the clergy, 129 and eclecticism, 114, 131, 141-2, 146-54 and Hegel, 148-53 on Lamartine, 195 moral philosophy, 161-3 and the Pascal affair, 169-75, 177-9

257

Cousin, Victor cont. personality, 146-7 on philosophy, 156 politics, 161, 163-8 and religion, 144-5, and Renan, 238, 241 culture, Jouffroy on, 138 Damiron, Jean-Philibert, 140—1, 160-1 d'Annunzio, Gabriele, 186 De la religion (Constant), 74-5, 76-7 Delaroche, Paul, 226 democracy Jouffroy on, 156-7 Lamartine on, 218-19 Montalembert on, 116 and Parnassian liberalism, 223, 231 and religion, 82-4 Renan on, 240-1, 245 Royer-Collard on, 25-6 Tocqueville on, 29, 31-3, 156, 157 in the United States, 45-6 Democracy in America (Tocqueville), 17, 29, 32-3, 34, 44-5, 51, 63, 231, 233-4, 235 on religion, 83-4 democratic ages, 44, 50, 55, 63-7, 156 and history, 233-4 democratic despotism, 46 Descartes, Rene, 149, 167, 179 Destutt de Tracy, Comte, 2, 218 Dewey, John, 74 Dialogues philosophiques (Renan), 244-5, 2 54 dictatorship, Lamartine's theory of, 200-1, 207 Doctrinaires, the, 17-18, 28, 80 dogmas beginnings, 134-54 development, 155-68 dissolution, 168-80 Dubois, Francois, 90 Dufour, G., 122 Dumas, Alexandre, 16-17, 186 Dupanloup, Monseigneur F., 120, 121, 130, 167, 174, 175 duties, Cousin on, 161-2 eclecticism, 114, 131, 140—1, 143, 145-6, 146-54, 159, 161, 164, 168, 172 and the Pascal affair, 174, 175, 179 education Catholic policy, 130 Lamartine on, 209-10, 211-12, 213 liberty of, 80, 81 Education sentimentale (Flaubert), 235, 245,

246-9, 255 Eluard, Paul, 119

258

Index

equality, and liberty, 132 Erastianism, 102 faith, and liberalism, 85-93 Falloux, Alfred, Gomte de, 36, 120, 128-9, 132 family, the and Lamartine, 214-15 and the state, 108 Faugere, Prosper, 174-5 Favre, Jules, 168 February revolution, see revolution of 1848 Fenelon, Francois, 128 Fichte, Johann Gottlieb, 136, 137, 138, 141, 146, 148 Flaubert, Gustave, 224, 226-7, 235, 245-55 Foisset, Theophile, 121, 174, 175 forgetfulness, Tocqueville on, 66 Fosdick, Harry Emerson, 73 French Revolution, 33, 45, 52, 91 Cousin on, 163-4 Jouffroy on, 138, 139 Lacordaire on, 115 and Lamartine, 204, 207 and religion, 101 and Renan, 242-3 Gerbet, 35, 123 German philosophy and French liberalism, 145-9 and Renan, 242 Gibbon, Edward, 8 Girardin, Delphine Gay de, 205 Gobineau, Joseph Arthur, Comte de, 79 Godwin, William, 48, 139 government Cousin on, 162, 165 Lamartine on, 210, 212-13 Tocqueville and Constant on, 52-5 Gregory XVI, Pope, 122 Guizot, F., 2, 4, 18-19, 19, 33, 88, 104, 116, 119, 131, 133, 139, 141, 143, 146, 147, 152, 169, 175, 195, 198, 202 and the 1848 revolution, 198, 221 on religion, 109-14 on sovereignty, 218 and Tocqueville, 229 Hardenberg, Charlotte von, 15 Hegel, G., 20, 68, 137, 141, 145, 152, 158, 159, 243 and Cousin, 148-53 Helvetius, Claude Adrien, 2, 75 Histoire des Girondins (Lamartine), 181, 182, 183, 186, 194, 203, 206

historicism, 145, 152 history in aristocratic and democratic ages, 233-4 and religion, 185-6 Hobbes, Thomas, 49 Hochet, Claude, 76 Hofmann, E., 48 Hugo, Victor, 17, 158, 201, 235, 246 imperialism Lamartine on, 205 individual, the and society, 39-55 individual liberty in Constant, 42-3 individualism, 40-1, 44-5, 64 Lamartine on, 204-5 individuality, triumph of, 2, 3 Ireland, 108, 119, 121, 127 Italy, 131 Jacobi, F., 136, 148 Jacobinism, 32, 202 James, William, 73-4 Jansenism and the Pascal affair, 171, 172-3, 178 and Royer-Collard, 20, 21

Jardin, Andre, 37 Jouffroy, Theodore, 4, 19, 34-5, 90, 122, 134, 135-8, i39, H3> H4> i45> 148, 155. i5^-7> : 74 on eclecticism, 150 and the Pascal affair, 169-70 "The Philosophy of History," 145-6 July Monarchy (1830-48), 67, 80, 91, 109, 154, 157. l6°> 179 and Catholicism, 119 and eclecticism, 141 Flaubert on, 247 and Lamartine, 190, 200 and liberalism, 222 and Montalembert, 116 and religion, 95 and Renan, 239, 244 social resistances to, 159 July revolution (1830), 2, 29, 35 Lamartine on, 198—200 justice Cousin on, 162-3 and liberty, 86 Kant, I., 48, 59, 70, 75, 87, 90, 145,148, 149 Kriidener, Baroness von, 75 Kriidener, Madame de, 36

Index la Sarthe, Goyet de, 11 Laboulaye, Edouard de, 3 Lacordaire, Jean Baptiste Henri, 82, 115-16, 117-20, 123-4, I25> I29> *32> 133. J39> 174, 215 Laffitte, Jacques, 11 Lamartine, Alphonse de, 29, n o , 158, 181-3, 184, 185, 186-220 childhood, 214 and liberty, 196—200 as poet, 186-90, 214, 220 and politics, 189, 190-6, 209-20 and revolutions, 198-204 Lamberti, Jean-Claude, 3, 5 Lamennais, F. de, 4, 35, 113, 115, 119, 120, 122-4, l4:°> I 5 I ~ 2 > X78, 184, 185 and the Pascal affair, 171, 172, 178 Renan on, 237 Lanjuinais, Jean-Denis, 92-3, 140, 172 Laromiguiere, Pierre, 145 Latour, Antoine de, 187 Ledru-Rollin, Alexandre Auguste, 193, 195 Leibniz, G., 149, 160, 167 Lenormant, Henri, 120 Leroux, Pierre, 140 liberalism and religion, 142-3 liberty of association, 80, 81 literature and history, 183-4, 185-6 liberal, 231-2 and politics, 183-4 and religion, 185-6 local liberty, 80-1 Locke, John, 55 Louis XIV, King of France, 94 Louis XVI, King of France, 99, 182 Louis XVIII, King of France, 12, 20, 154 Louis-Philippe, King of France, 21, 29, 68, 91, 143, 154, 166-7, I ^ I » I9I> 2I&> 2 33 Lucretius, 27 Mably, Gabriel Bonnot de, 57 Madame Bovary (Flaubert), 237, 255 Maistre, Joseph de, 36 Malesherbes, Lamoignon de, 19, 63 Maritain, Jacques, 185 Marx, Karl, 33, 87, 185, 195, 235, 236 Michelet, Jules, 6, 154, 158, 182, 185 Middle Ages, 61, 120, 202 Mignet, F., 15 Mill, J. S., 89, 212, 218, 220 modern liberty Constant on, 42, 44, 46, 55, 56-7

259

moeurs

of the aristocrat, 65 laws related to, 45 Montesquieu on, 48 and opinion, 46-7, 51 and religion, 83, 84 Rousseau on, 49, 51-2 Tocqueville on, 49-51, 53 Mole, Comte Mathieu, 19, 29, 183, 221 monarchy Cousin on, 165-7 and eclecticism, 151 and Lamartine, 206 Royer-Collard on, 24-5, 32 Montaigne, M., 40, 179 Montalembert, Charles, Comte de, 2, 19, 82, 104, 105, 109, 115, 116-20, 137, 142, 167, 174 and liberal Catholicism, 123-31 and Parnassian liberalism, 225-6 Montesquieu, C , 2, 14, 33, 36, 47-8, 49, 51, 55, 57, 61, 65, 91, 132, 140, 238 on religion, 69, 71, 78, 96 and Tocqueville, 231, 232, 233 morality and religion, 70-1, 97, 99 Napoleon Bonaparte, Emperor, 1, 6, 7, 12, 57, 88, 92, 94, 102, 160, 166 Cousin on, 164-5 Napoleon III, Empire of, 221 Nassau, Madame de, 38 national character, French, 65-6 natural man and religion, 108 Necker, Jacques, 9, 57, 108, 109, 152 on religion, 95-8, 99, 101, n o Nicole, Pierre, 173 Niebuhr, Reinhold, 73 Novalis, 137 Oakeshott, Michael, 54 Ollivier, Emile, 207, 219 opinion, 46—7, 49, 158—9 ideal of "informed", 89 Lamartine on, 212 and moeurs, 46-7, 51 and truth, 86-7, 89, 90, 150 Orleanism, Cousin's loyalty to, 166-7 Parnassian liberalism, 221-55 Pascal, Blaise, 104 'affaire Pascal', 168-80 Paul, Saint, 142 Peel, Sir Robert, 216, 219-20

Index

260

perfectibility, doctrine of, 82, 100 perfectionism, 108-9, I 2 7 philosophy and religion, 114, 139-45, 150-4, 155-9 Plato, 158, 181 Pocock, J. G. A., 46 poetry of Lamartine, 186-90, 203 and politics, 183-4 and religion, 184-5 Poland, 121 Polignac, Prince de, 18, 147, 157, 181, 199 political theology, 93 politics in Lamartine, 189, 190-6 and liberalism, 87-9 and literature, 183-4 and philosophy, 159 and poetry, 183-4 and religion, 71-2, 78, 92-3, i n , 142 Port-Royal (Sainte-Beuve), 104, 178-9 Poulet, Georges, 220 press, the liberty of, 80, 209, 210, 211 Royer-Collard on, 25 property Catholic view of, 129-30 Cousin on, 162 Lamartine on, 215 right of private property, 68 Protestantism, 72-9, 84, 93-114, 142 Proudhon, Pierre Joseph, 81 Quinet, Edgar, 114, 142, 154, 185 Raspail, Frangois Vincent, 193 Recamier, Juliette, 7 Reid, Thomas, 21, 145, 149 religion, 69-84 Constant on, 35, 69-79 and democracy, 82-4 faith and liberty, 85-93 Guizot on, 109-14 and history, 185-6 and Jouffroy, 34-5 Lamartine on, 210, 211-12, 213 and liberty, 80-4 and literature, 185—6 Madame de Stael on, 35, 96, 98-103, 108, 109 and morality, 70-1, 97, 99 and philosphy, 114, 139-45, 150-4, 'JJ

if

and poetry, 184-5 and politics, 71-2, 78, 92-3, i n , 142

religion cont. Renan on, 238-9, 241-2, 243 Rousseau on, 92, 95, 98 and Royer-Collard, 20-1 Tocqueville on, 35-8, 69-72, 78-80, 81-4, 96 Vinet on, 103-9 see also Catholicism; Christianity; Protestantism Remusat, Charles de, 2, 16, 19, 21, 22-3, 23, 29, 31, 122, 139, 168 on Constant, 5 and Lamartine, 182, 193-4 and religion, 143-4 on Tocqueville, 3-4 Renan, Ernest, 34-5, 224, 226, 236-45, 250 revolution Lamartine's attitude to, 198-204 Royer-Collard on, 26 revolution of 1848, 171, 181, 221 Cousin on, 166-7 Flaubert on, 245, 247-8, 253 Lamartine on, 191-3, 198, 206, 217-18 and Parnassian liberalism, 225 Tocqueville on, 232-3 see also July revolution (1830) rights of association, 106 of conscience, 106, 108 Cousin on, 161-2 of individuals, 40, 41 Lamartine on, 204 natural, and liberty, 61-2 and religion, 105-6 Royer-Collard on, 31-2 Rimbaud, Arthur, 189-90 Robespierre, M., 57, 92, 182, 194 Romanticism, 143, 145, 183 Rosanvallon, Pierre, 153, 154 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 9, 76, 139, 140 and Constant, 49 on the individual and society, 40, 41,51-2 and Lamartine's theory of democracy, 218-19 on liberty, 57, 62, 65 on opinion, 47 on religion, 92, 95, 98 and Tocqueville, 227, 229 Royer-Collard, Pierre-Paul, 2, 4, 17-27, 65, 88, 92, 116, 122, 140, 145, 146, 156, 158, 172, 184 character, 20-1 and Lamartine, 190 on sovereignty, 218 and Tocqueville, 29-33, 3^

Index Saint-Simon, C , 137, 141 Sainte-Beuve, Charles Augustin, 15, 16, 17 on Cousin, 147 on eclecticism, 149, 150 on Lamartine, 182, 184, 186, 191, 199 on Lamennais, 123 and the Pascal affair, 172, 175, 176-9 on Tocqueville, 227 on Vinet, 103, 104 Sartre, Jean-Paul, 248-9 Schelling, F., 141, 145, 148, 149 Schlegel, A. W., 14 Schleiermacher, F., 75 sects, religious, 71-2, 105, 143 Senghor, Leopold Sedar, 186 Sennett, Richard, 190 Serre, 25, 122 Simon, Jules, 147, 149, 158, 159-60, 167 skepticism, 134, 136, 140, 171, 172, 173, 175 socialism Lamartine on, 215-17 Renan on, 239-40 Tocqueville on, 239 Societe de la Morale Chretienne, 104, 105 society Cousin on, 162 Constant and Tocqueville on, 52-5 Socrates, 158, 159 sovereignty Lamartine's theory of, 218-19 Spinoza, B., 90 Stael, Madame de, 2, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13-16, 18, 19, 23, 36, 145, 165 character, 13 childhood, 13 death, 15 and German philosophy, 145, 149 and Lamartine, 187 on liberty, 55, 57, 61 and religion, 35, 96, 98-103, 108, 109, 139-40, 142 works, 14 state, the and the family, 108 see also government Stein, Lorenz von, 186, 195 Steiner, George, 183 Stewart, Dugald, 145 Sur la politique rationelle (Lamartine), 204 Swetchine, Sophie, 35, 36-7, 118, 120, 121, 130, 132 Switzerland, 9

261

Talleyrand, C , 12 Theophilanthropy, 102, 143 Thierry, Augustin, 15, 202, 226 Thiers, Louis Adolphe, 33, 129, 130, 146, I53> l67> i75> l S l and the 1848 revolution, 221 and Lamartine, 190, 193, 198, 208-9, 219 Thureau-Dangin, 23 Tocqueville, Alexis de, 27-38, 193 background, 19 and Constant, 3, 4, 5-6, 17, 28 death, 37 on democracy, 29, 31-3, 156, 157 and freedom of belief, 89 and the French Revolution, 164 on the individual and society, 40, 41, 43, 44-6, 48, 52-5, 60 and Lamartine, 194-5, 196, 197, 205, 208 on liberty, 2-4, 39, 55, 56, 61-9 on democracy, 29, 31-3 and liberal Catholicism, 125, 126, 127, 129, 132-3 on the moeurs of society, 49-51, 53, 112 and Montalembert, 117-18 and Parnassian liberalism, 223-4, 225, 226, 227-36, 249 and religion, 35-8, 69-72, 78-80, 81-4, 96, 140 and Renan, 237, 238, 239, 240-1, 244, 250 and Royer-Collard, 21, 22, 24, 25, 26-7, 29-33 in the United States, 4 on women, 14 Trilling, Lionel, 231 truth and opinion, 86-7, 89, 90, 150 Turgot, A., 140 United States, 4, 132 democracy in, 45-6 local liberties, 81 and religion, 71, 72, 84 universal suffrage Lamartine on, 210, 217-18 utility Constant on, 43 Varro, Marcus Terentius, 93 Vaud, church of, 104, 105, 106 Vergniaud, Pierre, 182 Veuillot, Louis Franc.ois, 120, 130, 131 Viennet, Jean-Pons-Guillaume, 16-17

262

Index

Villemain, Abel Francois, 146, 147, 173 Vinet, Alexandre, 103-9, I 2 7 and the Pascal affair, 176-8, 179 Virieu, Aymon de, 186, 199, 201, 203, 207, 208 Voltaire, F., 8, 11, 65, 82, 96, 140

war Constant on, 58—9 Tocqueville on, 68-9 Wells, H. G., 245 Werner, Zacharias, 75 White, Hayden, 223, 230 Wordsworth, William, 190