What Is French Liberalism?

I

Like other scholars, I rely on an “actor’s category” approach to liberalism (Bell, 2016: 5). I track how liberals “defined themselves and what they meant when they spoke about liberalism” (Rosenblatt, 2018: 2). For the purpose of this essay, it is helpful to distinguish between (1) self-identification as a “liberal” and uses of “liberalism” to designate (2) a political movement, (3) a political doctrine, and (4) a political tradition. In France, political actors started using the adjective “liberal” to define their political stance under the second Bourbon Restoration (1815–1830). These uses coincided with the creation of the parti des Indépendants (1817), which contemporaries sometimes described as the “liberal party.” Rather than being a party in the sense of a political organization defending a distinct political doctrine, this party was a “social network”: a web of political actors that build alliances to serve shifting political agendas (Mélonio, 2004: 40). ⁴ The term liberalism appeared in France in the late 1810s. Ultra-royalists first used it in 1818 to deride left-wing members of the Indépendants. In the wake of the partial elections of October 1818, Constant (2011 [1818]) wrote a newspaper article summarizing the current situation of what he called the “liberal party.” He was elected under that banner in March 1819. Yet Constant “only used the term liberal very rarely, and the term liberalism not at all” (Rosenblatt, 2019: 167–168). Constant summarized his political thought under the title Course of Constitutional Politics, but he never took the step of labeling this theory “liberalism,” as liberals in the 1860s would. In short, it is accurate to speak of a burgeoning liberal stance during the French second Restoration rather than self-consciously built theories of liberalism.

Under the July monarchy (1830–1848), uses of the term “liberal” to describe political movements started multiplying. Former members of the liberal opposition split between the Parti de la résistance, spearheaded by Guizot, who became prime minister in 1847, and the Parti du mouvement. Guizot later described his political stance during this period as “liberal and conservative,” whereas Odilon Barrot, one of the leaders of the Parti du mouvement described his as “liberal and progressive” (Rosenblatt, 2019: 173). The development of electoral committees, as well as the emerging practice of sending electoral proclamations to electors contributed to shape a sense of ideological allegiance, although structured political parties remained non-existent (Broglie, 2011: 127–128). The rise of ideological competitors was also significant. Whereas the term “socialism” first appeared in France in 1831, it is only around the mid-1840s that it started being widely used in reference to a distinct political doctrine (Sauvigny, 1970: 162–164). The February 1848 Revolution acted as a catalyst, first for socialism and, belatedly, for liberalism. In its wake, liberals multiplied interventions pinning “liberal ideas” against “socialism” (Laboulaye, 1888 [1849]).

Although Tocqueville witnessed these changes, he did not frequently use the term liberalism. Tocqueville was close to Barrot and understood himself as standing on the liberal left of the political spectrum. In a letter (24 July 1836), he explained that he was a “liberal of a new kind” (Tocqueville, 2021:296): a liberal that did not see freedom and religion as antithetical, as some anti-clerical liberals like Adolphe Thiers did. If Tocqueville had a liberal self-understanding, he did not see himself as a political theorist whose ambition was to conceptualize and vindicate a theory of liberalism. Tocqueville wrote, not a treatise on liberalism, but Democracy in America. By contrast, as we will see, in the 1860s French liberals started penning dictionary entries elucidating the key tenets of “liberalism.” On 12 September 1848, Tocqueville delivered a resounding speech against “socialism,” but he did not pit some version of liberalism against it. When he (1985: 80, 163) occasionally used the term liberalism in his correspondence, it was to express sympathy or antipathy toward political movements.

To be clear, my argument in this section has not been that Constant or Tocqueville were not liberals, or that there is no such thing as French liberalism. Rather, I have argued that if Constant and Tocqueville identified as liberals, they did not consider themselves as theorists of liberalism. In France, the theorization of liberalism as a political doctrine occurred after political actors like Tocqueville started writing about liberalism in reference to party politics. In the 1860s, French liberals felt the need to systematize what they stood for in reaction to the rise of competing political doctrines, namely socialism and Caesarism. Thus, if we take liberalism in the sense of a self-conscious political doctrine, French liberalism took shape later than is usually thought, namely, in the late 1850s and early 1860s. This should not come as a complete surprise. Historians of political thought have detected a similar inflection point in Britain in the 1850s (Bell, 2014: 693–694; Zevin, 2019: 10–11). It is at that moment that a French liberal tradition was created, and that Constant and Tocqueville were retrospectively portrayed as theorists of liberalism. The fact that they identified with a liberal party made that conversion all the easier. These distinctions between self-labeling, political movements, doctrines, and traditions may seem oversubtle to some. Yet without them we tend to lose sight of the different stages that liberalism went through before it became widely accepted as a distinct political doctrine.

II

To this day, the French liberal tradition has been considered as a multiauthor tradition, as distinct from single-author traditions—traditions that rely on one seminal ancestor, such as Locke or Burke. A critical assessment of any multiauthor tradition raises the questions of (1) the mutual engagement of the thinkers said to be part of the tradition and (2) the points of continuity between these thinkers. My argument in this section is not that these two elements are not detectable among early nineteenth century French liberals. Mme de Staël and Constant’s engagement with each other’s work is well-documented (Winegarten, 2008). So is the Doctrinaires’ interest in Mme de Staël Considerations on the Principal Events of the French Revolution (e.g. Rémusat, 1818) and Tocqueville’s reception of Royer-Collard and Guizot (Craiutu, 1999). Still, neither Constant nor Tocqueville saw themselves as part of a liberal tradition. And despite perceptible convergences, the connections between Montesquieu, Constant, and Tocqueville are not self-evident. Consequently, the French liberal tradition had to be built ex post despite missing connections. As we will see, in the 1860s, French liberals had to garner what they saw as evidence of a French liberal tradition and interpret perceived points of continuity as an indication of an enduring liberal outlook.

To take the measure of their ingenuity, it is well to be reminded that Tocqueville’s engagement with Constant is problematic. Already in the 1980s, Claude Lamberti (1989: 79–80) observed that “Tocqueville left no direct evidence of having read Constant, whom he never cites.” More recent research (Gannett, 2003: 32–35) has revealed that Tocqueville left short notes on three pamphlets Constant wrote under the Directory. It is difficult to infer a line of influence from these notes. Tocqueville took them in the 1850s, by which time he had long reached his intellectual maturity. Furthermore, these notes do not reveal targeted attention to Constant or a special interest in his mature political theory as presented in publications between 1815 and 1830. According to Gannett (2003: 33), Tocqueville read the pamphlets Constant wrote under the Directory (1795–1799) as part of the much wider archival work he did for The Ancien Regime (1856) to get a sense of the state of the debate in the mid-1790s.

There also are clear points of disagreement between Constant and Tocqueville. Constant (2003 [1806–1810]: 6–20, 182–183) never accepted universal suffrage and was skeptical about popular sovereignty. Tocqueville endorsed the principle of popular sovereignty and accepted universal suffrage as a political reality (Tocqueville, 2010 [1835–1840]: 1, 91–97). Constant wrote little about America and was silent about freedom of association, which were both central to Tocqueville’s (2010 [1835–1840]: 1, 110–113) thought. Of course, it is possible to detect similarities between Constant and Tocqueville’s political thinking. Now that they are widely recognized as part of the same liberal family, scholars often portray them as two theorists of French liberalism (e.g. Kelly, 1992: 39–84). But these interpretations did not exist until the 1860s. Initially, the French liberal tradition had to be invented, the missing Constant–Tocqueville connection notwithstanding.

Montesquieu is often branded as a founding figure of liberalism (e.g. Pangle, 1973). Yet, as Céline Spector (2012: 59) pointed out, “the notion of liberalism is obviously foreign to Montesquieu,” since it was only coined in the nineteenth century. It is of course legitimate to ask to what extent Montesquieu’s political thought corresponds to contemporary definitions of liberalism (e.g. Larrère, 2009). For our purpose, however, the other interesting question is when Montesquieu became associated with the liberal tradition. In France, the status of Montesquieu as a liberal hero was long in the making. During the Revolution, he was invoked across the political spectrum. Marat praised him as an enemy of despotism. Meanwhile, Condorcet and the Monarchiens blamed him for his historical relativism (Manin, 2017: 317–320). During the first half of the nineteenth century, in France Montesquieu was not considered as a liberal, but as a counter-revolutionary thinker. Unlike Rousseau, it was commonly argued, Montesquieu did not pave the way toward the Revolution, but sought to preserve existing monarchies (Rosso, 1989: 100–116).

Constant and Tocqueville never considered Montesquieu as a liberal figure. Constant, for one, had conflicting thoughts about Montesquieu. When Constant (2005 [1800–1803]: 406) defended the republic as the best regime form for France around 1800, he derided Montesquieu as an advocate of aristocratic privileges and a “historiographer of chance” that failed to recognize the unfolding of true political principles in history. During the Napoleonic era, Constant (1951 [1804–1816]: 54, 2003 [1806–1810]: 322–323) praised Montesquieu for his comments about the dangers of political uniformity, yet he criticized him for failing to ground individual liberty in inalienable rights. “Montesquieu ... in his definition of liberty misconstrues all the limits of political authority” (Constant, 2003 [1806–1810]: 10). He also blamed him for his poor treatment of political economy, and for misunderstanding that freedom did not depend on regime forms, but on the spirit of the age (Constant, 1988: 105, note 1). ⁵ Under the second Restoration, Constant (1993 [1820–1822]: 232) expressed doubts about the utility of a Chamber of peers while distancing himself from Montesquieu. Tocqueville was more enthusiastic about Montesquieu than Constant. In his correspondence, he (1977: 418) stated that Pascal, Montesquieu, and Rousseau were “three men with whom I live a little every day.” Tocqueville was inspired by Montesquieu’s comparative method, although he preferred the distinction between aristocratic societies and democratic societies to Montesquieu’s typology of regime forms (Richter, 1971). Yet Tocqueville (2010 [1835–1840]: 1, 16–17) was also clear that American democracy required a fresh political science, and (Tocqueville, 2011 [1856]: 127–135) blamed French “men of letters of the eighteenth century” for their failure to grasp the nature of contemporary political changes. To be clear, Constant and Tocqueville’s reception of Montesquieu was not trivial. But it had to be eventually simplified and partly distorted to create the French liberal tradition.

It should also be known that early nineteenth-century French liberals had numerous sources of inspiration, most of which had a more significant impact upon them than Montesquieu. Mme de Staël’s (2008 [1788]) first book was the laudatory Letters on Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and she continuously engaged with the work of her father, Jacques Necker (Craiutu, 2012: 113–157). Constant was exposed to the Scottish Enlightenment when he was a student in Edinburgh (Ghins, 2022: 132–137; Kloocke, 1984: 18–22) and spent several years translating Godwin’s Political Justice (Ghins, 2018: 227–232; Hofmann, 1980: 170–178; Rosenblatt, 2008: 67–70, 127–133). The Doctrinaires’ philosophical outlook was derived from Thomas Reid (Craiutu, 2003: 27), and Tocqueville’s sources for Democracy in America ranged from Pascal to Joseph de Maistre (Jaume, 2013: 72–81). Naturally, the fact that early nineteenth century French liberals had wide-ranging sources does not imply that Montesquieu was not important to them. But at some point in history, a choice was made about which of these sources was the most meaningful. Traditions are not only built on the cooptation’s of earlier figures. They are also the product of exclusions. As we will see, in France in the 1870s, Montesquieu was singled out as the ancestor of the French liberal tradition, while Rousseau was made responsible for the Terror.

In short, despite preexisting connections, liberals of the second half of the nineteenth century had to resort to several mechanisms to make the case for a French liberal tradition. They had to canonize Montesquieu, Constant, and Tocqueville as great philosophers of liberalism. When evidence of mutual engagement was missing, they expressed bewilderment that Tocqueville may have not read Constant. When points of continuity were not straightforward, they emphasized “perceived similarities” (Jones, 2017: 5) while neglecting obvious disagreements. Their bricolage of primary sources is a tribute to their inventiveness. Laboulaye and Rémusat are now forgotten. But their work set in motion a powerful idea—that of a distinct French liberal tradition.

To shed light on mechanisms of tradition-building is not to throw doubt on the usefulness of traditions. Traditions have important explanatory power (Bevir, 2000). What I argue in the rest of this essay is that much can be learned from investigating the founding moment of an intellectual tradition. My point is not to police other scholars into not using the idea of a French liberal tradition. It is to try to identify why we have come to think about Montesquieu, Constant, and Tocqueville as philosophers of liberalism and members of a French liberal tradition in the first place, and what this means for our understanding of the history of liberalism.

III

The 1860s would be a turning point for French liberals. Under the July Monarchy, restricted suffrage alternatingly brought to power center–left and center–right liberals. In the following years, liberals quickly lost their hegemony. The 1848 revolution saw the rise of republicans and socialists and led to the birth of a republic—the Second Republic—a form of government that most liberals still scorned. In June 1848, a worker’s revolt in Paris was brutally repressed by the army. What became known as the June Days spread a fear of socialism among liberals, who denounced it as a leveling, violent, and revolutionary force. Liberals were soon confronted with an additional threat. After becoming president of the Second Republic in 1848, Louis Napoleon dissolved the National Assembly in 1851 and established the Second Empire in 1852. Many liberals, including Tocqueville, resigned from their political offices. Some chose exile. Within a few years, liberals had gone from ruling elite to muted extra-parliamentary opposition (Jardin, 1985: 354–374).

At the beginning of his reign, Napoleon III quashed freedom of the press and increased his power in the state apparatus. In 1859–1860, however, after a series of setbacks, he opted to liberalize the regime in the hope of assuaging political opponents. He granted amnesty to political exiles, eased censorship, and consented to reinforce the Corps législatif. Liberal opposition groups seized the opportunity that these actions created. In 1861, they joined forces to secure parliamentary seats and defeat official Bonapartist candidates. Orleanists (so named because they favored the rule of the House of Orléans)—including Adolphe Tiers, Guizot, Rémusat, Victor de Broglie, and Anatole Prévost-Paradol—cooperated with democrats such as Jules Favre, Emile Ollivier, and Jules Simon. Intermediaries such as Auguste Nefftzer, editor of the liberal newspaper Le Temps (founded in 1861), and Edouard de Laboulaye, professor of comparative law at the Collège de France, maintained connections with both the Orleanist and the democrat camps. Newspapers defending the entente soon called it the Liberal Union (Hazareesingh, 1998: 162–232). In 1863, 15 candidates campaigning under the banner of the Liberal Union were elected.

This political success went hand in hand with the liberals’ ambition to defend liberalism as a distinct, coherent, and robust political doctrine. Liberal publicists disseminated brochures introducing the program of the liberal party and championing liberalism (Rosenblatt, 2018: 160–168). Rémusat (1860) presented the principles of his liberalism in the aptly named Liberal Politics. Meanwhile, Laboulaye (1863a) provided a handbook for the liberal party titled The Liberal Union: Its Program and its Future. In the preface of the General Dictionary of Politics (1863–1864)—a two-volume compilation containing contributions from Orleanist and democratic liberals—the editor, Maurice Block (1863: v–vi), insisted that all contributors to the book concurred on the importance of individual initiative. In the article “Liberalism,” Nefftzer (1864: 185–192) recapitulated what liberals stood for: individual freedom and property, political liberties (parliamentarism, free elections, and press freedom), liberty of association, and separation of church and state. In an addendum to Nefftzer’s article, Block (1864: 192–193) insisted that liberalism was “a body of doctrine whose fundamental principle is LIBERTY, a term that encompasses all liberties.” To draw doctrinal boundaries and name common adversaries, authors of other articles in the Dictionary established favorable connections between liberals and conservatives (de Lavergne, 1863), while Caesarism (Anonymous, 1863) and socialism (Reybaud, 1864) were criticized in separate articles for their hostility to liberty.

Simultaneously, members of the Liberal Union invented the French liberal tradition. Those who had been part of the liberal opposition under the Second Restoration penned their memoirs, in which they emphasized the continuity of their actions, the endurance of a liberal outlook in France, and their (sometimes reserved) admiration for liberals who had passed away, such as Constant, Royer-Collard, and Tocqueville (Rémusat, 1958–1967; Guizot, 1858–1864). Constant’s, Royer-Collard’s and Tocqueville’s works were (re)published, all with laudatory prefaces. In 1861, Laboulaye (1861b) published a new edition of Constant’s Course of Constitutional Politics, complete with his own commentaries. Concomitantly, Prosper de Barante (1861–1863) collected Royer-Collard’s speeches, interspersed with reconstructions of Royer-Collard’s life and political thought. Still that same year, Gustave de Beaumont (1861), who accompanied Tocqueville in America, published the first collected edition of Tocqueville’s works and correspondence. Meanwhile, Laboulaye (1861a) and Rémusat (1861) published articles commenting on the political thought of Constant, Royer-Collard, and Tocqueville.

To create the French liberal tradition, French liberals of the 1860s relied on several tactics (Schwartz, 2011: 300–301). First, they ascribed an overall coherence to the work of earlier liberals. “Constant,” Laboulaye (1861b: vi) acknowledged, “did not build a political system; he wrote day to day, according to the needs of the time, but he had a directional thought, a set philosophy.” Second, they cast earlier liberals as theorists of liberalism whose thought was still relevant to contemporary problems. According to Laboulaye (1861b: xliv), liberals had long considered Constant as “the representative of their ideas” and their instinct was right: “Benjamin Constant will remain for long the most vivid expression of French liberalism.” Royer-Collard and Tocqueville, Rémusat (1861: 779–780) insisted, were worth rereading now that the “liberal spirit” was blowing again in France. Third, they established links between earlier liberals, even where some connections appeared to be lacking. Rémusat (1861: 804), considering how similar Tocqueville’s and Royer-Collard’s critiques of centralization were, found it surprising that no trace could be found of Tocqueville’s awareness of Royer-Collard’s speeches against legislative and administrative centralization. Similarly, Laboulaye was amazed that Tocqueville had apparently not read Constant, given how close their views on individual independence were:

How much toil and weariness this noble spirit would have spared himself if he had read the liberal publicist? In these pamphlets, that he no doubt ignored, would he have not found his own thoughts, expressed with as much finesse as strength? (Laboulaye, 1861b: vii).

For French liberals in the 1860s, the French liberal tradition served as both a source of inspiration and a source of legitimacy (Schwartz, 2011: 301). Rémusat and Laboulaye returned to Royer-Collard, Constant, and Tocqueville to articulate their own political system. These thinkers, when considered as a coherent group, served as a reservoir of ideas. Rémusat, for example, selected and combined elements of Constant’s mature parliamentarism, including his defense of constitutional monarchy and ministerial responsibility, with Royer-Collard’s and Tocqueville’s condemnations of centralization (Rémusat, 1958–1967: 1, 303, 1861). Laboulaye (1863b: 103–201), for his part, drew on Tocqueville to defend freedom of association while recycling Constant’s distinction between ancient and modern liberties. By unifying disparate arguments made by earlier liberals, Rémusat and Laboulaye were creating a liberal canon and designing their own brand of liberalism.

The French liberal tradition also served to buttress the authority of liberalism as a doctrine and the standing of the Liberal Union as a political party. By casting Mme de Staël, Constant, Royer-Collard, and Tocqueville as their ancestors, the later liberals could present liberalism as a timeless doctrine whose main tenets had been passed on and defended by a transgenerational liberal army: “Our doctrine is the doctrine of Benjamin Constant, Daunou, Madame de Staël. ... It is that for which the proud minorities of the restoration and the July government resisted to the point of exhaustion.” ⁶ Furthermore, in electoral competitions, references to great ancestors served as rallying flags and lent credibility to candidates of the Liberal Union. When Laboulaye ran for elections in 1864, the Journal des Débats hailed him as the “heir” to earlier liberals: “He took over the liberal tradition in its purity; he loves liberty for its own sake ...; he loves it first of all as the Royer-Collards, the Tocquevilles, the Benjamin Constants loved it” (Weiss, 1864).

Beyond the joint effort to defend liberalism against doctrinal competitors, disagreements about the best version of liberalism are perceptible among members of the Liberal Union. The Orleanists’ moderate liberalism clashed with Laboulaye’s individualist liberalism. Each conception corresponded to a distinct appropriation of the French liberal tradition; each camp’s selection of authors and themes supported their chosen definition of liberalism as a political doctrine.

Liberalism, for Rémusat, consisted in individual liberty guaranteed by political liberties—a representative system with a powerful elected assembly and a free press. In his view, liberalism faced two dangers in a democratic society: excessive centralization and universal leveling. To counter them, Rémusat (1860: 340) recommended a well-balanced “representative monarchy.” Centralization, he warned, should not obliterate the work of local corporations and voluntary associations. Furthermore, any well-functioning representative system required an independent body animated by an aristocratic spirit. Hereditary peerage being no longer acceptable in France, Rémusat proposed property owners as its functional equivalent in the Second Empire, instead of civil servants, who, in his judgment, were too subservient to the imperial regime (Rémusat 1860: 356–368, 422, 432–447). A representative monarchy sustained by an aristocratic spirit could contain the excesses of democracy: “To constitute democracy is to moderate it” (Rémusat, 1861: 812). Rémusat’s cherry-picking of authors and themes in the French liberal tradition matched his conception of liberalism. Once a friend of Tocqueville and Royer-Collard’s successor at the Académie Française, Rémusat portrayed them as two liberal heroes that shared the project of moderating democracy. Tocqueville (“the blood of a liberal philosopher flowed in his veins”) was Royer’s “continuator”: like him, he predicted how the disappearance of aristocratic bodies paved the way for despotism (Rémusat, 1861: 777, 801, 804).

Laboulaye understood liberalism differently than Rémusat. In The Liberal Union, Laboulaye distinguished between three fundamental liberties: natural liberties, or “individual liberties” (personal freedom, freedom of action, and freedom of exchange), which gave each citizen the ability to develop their faculties; “social liberties” (freedom of religion, freedom of education, freedom of association); and “local liberties.” In his view (1863a: 39–118), the latter two enabled individuals to meet and cooperate, thereby creating intermediary social groups between the individual and the state. Laboulaye saw “political liberties” as guarantees of the three fundamental liberties. Unlike Rémusat, Laboulaye (1863a: 185–288) interpreted universal suffrage and public education as key political liberties, alongside an elected legislature, ministerial responsibility, and freedom of the press. Because he had a different conception of liberalism as a political doctrine, Laboulaye adopted a distinct perspective on the French liberal tradition. His liberal pantheon included Constant and Tocqueville but not Royer-Collard. He reconstructed Constant’s “liberal doctrine” in such a way that it would support his views on individual, political, and social liberties (Laboulaye, 1861b: vi). He also portrayed Tocqueville not as a gloomy prophet of democracy’s decline but as one of those great “individualists” who understood that individual freedom was the first need of modern societies and therefore “unknowingly belong[ed] to the same school as Benjamin Constant” (Laboulaye, 1861b: vii).

By the mid-1860s, the idea of a distinct French liberal tradition had become common sense among supporters of the Liberal Union. In a review of one of Laboulaye’s courses at the Collège de France, Gustave Isambert observed that Laboulaye, more than anyone, “studied and demonstrated the transmission” of “this liberal tradition” that ran from Mme de Staël and Constant to Tocqueville and exposed “all its elements.” “Here is a valuable tradition,” he wrote, that offered a remedy to Caesarism and revolutionary socialism (Isambert, 1864: 535).

IV

Although Montesquieu was sometimes referred to as a liberal thinker in the 1860s, it is only in the 1870s that he was widely portrayed as the founding figure of French liberalism. The early Third Republic encouraged this turn to Montesquieu. From 1870 to 1879, the question of whether France should be a monarchy or a republic was at the forefront of French politics. After Napoleon III’s capitulation at Sedan, Léon Gambetta proclaimed a republic on 4 September 1870. In 1871, Otto von Bismarck obliged the French government to call new elections so that he could pursue peace negotiations with a legitimate government. Conservatives won the elections and managed to hold the reins of power until 1875. Until then, France was thus a de facto republic with pro-monarchy conservatives at its head (Miquel, 1989: 54–90).

In late 1871, former members of the now-defunct Liberal Union split. Most Orleanists (Albert de Broglie, Rémusat, Saint-Marc Girardin) hoped to restore a constitutional monarchy with Louis-Phillipe’s grandson at its head. The center–left (Thiers, Laboulaye), initially indifferent between regime forms, pragmatically recommended a moderate republic as of 1871–1872. Still, Orleanists and liberal republicans had common enemies: on the right, royalist legitimists who rejected the legacy of the French Revolution and wanted to enthrone the Bourbon heir (instead of the liberal Orleanist heir); on the left, radical republicans of the Republican Union (formed in 1871), who fought for a democratic republic. Former members of the Liberal Union, now divided between center–right and center–left camps, were thus caught in a dilemma. On one hand, they disagreed about what regime form France should adopt. On the other, an open conflict between the two groups risked weakening the center against the political extremes.

In this context, Montesquieu’s comparativist perspective on regime forms contained the kind of ambiguity that could satisfy both liberal camps. Center–left and center–right liberals turned to The Spirit of the Laws to find arguments for the respective merits of republics and monarchies. Meanwhile, Montesquieu’s take allowed both camps to rally behind his critique of despotism, which they took to refer to the royalist legitimists’ absolutist monarchy or the radical republicans’ democratic republic. In short, liberals capitalized on Montesquieu’s theory of regime forms to map the contemporary political landscape to their advantage. References to Constant or Tocqueville did not disappear, but their names were now praised alongside Montesquieu’s. At this juncture, Montesquieu became the founding figure of French liberalism. As Paul Janet (1872: 449) observed in his textbook on the history of political science, Montesquieu was both the primary source on the question of regime form and the theorist of liberty par excellence who had first taught France to hate despotism.

To understand the French liberals’ invocations of Montesquieu in the 1870s, it is well to be reminded that The Spirit of the Laws distinguished regime forms based on their nature and principle. The nature of a government has to do with who exercises sovereignty and how (II.1). ⁷ The principle of a government refers to the “passions that set it in motion” (III. 1). A republican government could have either of two natures. A democracy is one in which the people as a body have sovereign power (II.2). The principle of a democratic republic is virtue, or love of equality (III. 3). An aristocracy is a republic in which the sovereign power is exercised by part of the people (II.3). The principle of an aristocratic republic is moderation—or self-control on the part of magistrates (III.4). In a monarchy, the prince has sovereign power but exercises it according to established laws. The principle of a monarchy is honor or ambition—the craving for personal distinctions (III. 5–7). In a despotic government, one person alone governs without checks on their will (II. 5). The principle of this form of government is fear (III. 8). The Spirit of the Laws disparaged despotic regimes. Yet, besides stating that, as a rule, monarchies are fit to large commercial countries and republics to small countries, Montesquieu was equivocal about which one should be preferred. ⁸

To build a common front against royalist legitimists and socialists, center–right and center–left liberals sought to downplay the differences Montesquieu had articulated between monarchies and republics. In the preface to the second edition of the General Dictionary of Politics (1873–1874), Block announced that contributors to the book aimed to study politics as “the science of government.” As a result, their objective was to study “all the forms that power can take, all the constitutions that regulate States” without discriminating between them (Block, 1873: 1). The book’s entries that addressed the question of regime forms acknowledged Montesquieu as the authority on the subject, while suggesting that some aspects of his theory needed to be updated. Still, behind the facade of consensus, center–right and center–left liberals made explicit the kind of regime they believed liberalism was most compatible with.

In the entries on monarchies and republics, the liberal economist Henri Baudrillart articulated a royalist liberalism. There is no straightforward reason, he explained, to prefer a republic over a monarchy. The republican “form of government is no more independent than the monarchical form from historical, geographic, ethnographic, and especially moral conditions, which seem to predestinate a people to one or the other, by leaving to it freedom of choice only within restrained limits” (Baudrillart, 1874b: 822). Montesquieu proved so much, Baudrillart argued, although he had erred in claiming that republics were only fit for small states. Still, he was no pure relativist. He correctly characterized governments with unbridled power as despotic. Yet he mistakenly presented despotism as a distinct type of government. The category of despotism should be applied to both monarchies and republics. The despotism of the many, Baudrillart insisted, is no better than the despotism of one ruler. In each instance, sovereignty is exercised without limits. On that point, he suggested, there is no significant difference between the absolutist monarchy the legitimists envisaged and the democratic republic the radical republicans envisioned. The real dividing line is between regimes in which individual liberty flourishes and those in which it is crushed by arbitrary laws. It did not make much difference whether these laws come from institutions based on a combination of election and heredity or on elections exclusively. In other words, when it comes to regime forms, what matters is not so much who governs as how they govern. “The great question unfolding before our eyes,” Baudrillart (1874a: 336) argued, “is less to know if the future will call itself republic or monarchy, than to know if it will be free.”

While Baudrillart reminded liberal republicans that freedom could obtain under a constitutional monarchy, the liberal republican Paul Janet made a similar case for a moderate republic. His liberalism was a republican liberalism. In a course on the history of philosophy at the Sorbonne devoted to Montesquieu and Rousseau, Janet (1871: 557) started by enunciating what he took to have become a consensual view among center–right liberals: “Montesquieu’s name means liberalism or constitutional monarchy, that of Jean Jacques Rousseau democracy or egalitarian republic.” Yet in his comparison of Montesquieu and Rousseau, Janet insisted that although it was correct to associate the former with liberalism and the latter with socialism, in fine they did not diverge strongly about regime forms. Montesquieu, on his reading, was a critic of absolute monarchies and an admirer of aristocratic republics. Rousseau saw monarchy as a valid form of government and was dismissive of egalitarian republics. In an implicit nod to both center–right and center–left liberals, Janet (1871: 561) explained that revealing these convergences permitted observers to discover the “fraternity of spirits” that exists between seemingly opposite viewpoints.

Irrespective of whether they preferred a constitutional monarchy or a moderate republic, French liberals all believed that Montesquieu’s subdivision of republics into democracies and aristocracies had become inoperative. A widely held view was that Montesquieu’s categories of democracy and aristocracy had to be redefined while some of his core intuitions about the principles of each of these regime forms—virtue and moderation—should be retained. Democracy, Baudrillart explained in Tocquevillian fashion, refers to a social state—a stage of civilization in which equality of conditions prevails. France, in the 1870s, was a democracy in this sense. A democratic society can take a government in the form of either a temperate monarchy or a moderate republic (Baudrillart, 1873b: 633–642). For either of these regime forms to be sustainable, however, an aristocracy is needed. In this view, aristocracy no longer represented a regime form. Rather, it represented a nonhereditary social body composed of the best talents of the nation. This “natural aristocracy” is the result of competition unimpeded by unjust privileges such as birth. The role of this body, in a temperate monarchy or a moderate republic, is to guide the nation, act as an incentive to develop one’s talents, and provide a rampart against despotism. When such an aristocratic body is lacking, Baudrillart (1873a) warned, temperate monarchy becomes absolute, and moderate republics become despotic. Democracy as a social state, irrespective of its regime form, needs an aristocracy.

With Montesquieu’s views on the nature of regimes thus updated, liberals returned to his arguments about the principles each regime needed to thrive. Contributors to Block’s Dictionary argued that in a democratic social state, the principles Montesquieu designated as virtue, moderation, and honor all converge toward a single passion: respect for the law and the responsibility to develop one’s faculty to the benefit of the nation. Montesquieu, they explained, had rightly argued that democracies needed virtue—now redefined as respect for oneself, others, and justice—to survive (Baudrillart, 1874b). Likewise, they insisted that aristocratic bodies need to be moderate to sustain themselves: such bodies had to show self-restraint and act in an exemplary way (Baudrillart, 1873a). In that respect, liberals concluded, virtue and moderation are not so different from honor, which is synonymous with duty (Hervé, 1874; Montégut, 1873). Virtue, moderation, and honor—all three are needed in a democratic social state to keep temperate monarchies or moderate republics from becoming despotic.

In a revised version of his earlier article on liberalism, Nefftzer provided an updated definition of liberalism that summarized the early 1870s’ liberal consensus on regime forms. In the 1860s, as we have seen, Nefftzer, Rémusat, and Laboulaye associated liberalism with fundamental liberties while opposing it to Caesarism and socialism. In the 1870s, Nefftzer still defined liberalism in terms of fundamental liberties, but he now discussed them at length in relation to regime forms. Liberals, he insisted, accept republics and monarchies alike if such governments respect freedom of thought, freedom to work, property rights, political liberties, and liberty of association. They admire English parliamentarism and the American republic while condemning absolutist monarchies and republics without aristocracies (Nefftzer, 1874: 188–191). Instead of choosing between royalist liberalism and republican liberalism, Nefftzer offered a middle-way realist liberalism. To legitimize it, he provided a history of liberalism complete with a new take on the French liberal tradition. Liberalism, he explained, has roots in the mid-eighteenth century, but it really took off with the French Revolution—“an explosion of liberalism.” Rousseau was the architect of the Terror. At that juncture, “The Social Contract took precedence over The Spirit of the Laws. It is mostly the influence of Rousseau ... that derailed the Revolution.” Mme de Staël, Royer-Collard, and Constant subsequently restored liberalism as a weapon to wield against Napoleon (Nefftzer, 1874: 192–194). In the article’s conclusion, Nefftzer weaved together his definition of liberalism and his view on the French liberal tradition by referring to Montesquieu as their common origin:

Liberalism will never admit that ... the republic is the only good form of government. It holds, on the contrary, and will always profess, that forms vary depending on historical data. ... It will ask to the republic the guarantees of freedom, just as it has asked them to the monarchy... It will ask the reduction of the state to its legitimate limits and it will not find the despotism of a convention better than the despotism of one. ... One can consult on liberalism all the school of publicists that goes back to Montesquieu, and notably Benjamin Constant’s writings (Nefftzer, 1874: 194).

In 1875, constitutional laws establishing the Third Republic were passed, and the question of regime form seemed provisionally settled. Laboulaye had been a member of the constitutional commission and was instrumental in getting the constitutional laws passed (Gray, 1994: 116–120). In the new political context, Laboulaye sought to reclaim Montesquieu as the founding figure of republican liberalism by republishing his complete works. Montesquieu’s name, Laboulaye (1875–1879: 1, i–iii) explained in the preface, resurfaced in public debates anytime “liberal politics” reappeared after prolonged periods of despotism. Drawing attention to Montesquieu’s Persian Letters and his correspondence, Laboulaye (1875–1879: 3, x–xii) now suggested that Montesquieu preferred republics over monarchies. In his editorial footnotes, he used extracts from Constant’s works—specifically the Course of Constitutional Politics, of which he published a second edition in 1872—to give his own interpretation of Montesquieu’s political theory (e.g. Laboulaye, 1875–1879: 3, 104, 239). In the 1860s, Laboulaye had spread the idea that Constant and Tocqueville were the two key figures in the French liberal tradition. In the mid-1870s, he helped to disseminate the idea that Montesquieu was its founding figure.

V

What is French liberalism? This essay has answered this question by establishing a distinction between liberal traditions and liberalism as a political doctrine. I have argued that the French liberal tradition is a belated construction first invented in France in the 1860s and 1870s. In the early 1860s, in the context of the liberalization of the Second Empire, members of the Liberal Union cast themselves as the descendants of earlier French liberal icons. They drew connections between Constant and Tocqueville, despite their avowed lack of evidence that Tocqueville engaged with Constant’s work. At the same time, they started offering accounts of liberalism as a political doctrine and presented them as alternatives to Caesarism and revolutionary socialism. From the beginning, versions of the liberal tradition were used to lend intellectual and political credibility to competing definitions of liberalism. Rémusat advocated a moderate liberalism. He cast Royer-Collard and Tocqueville as two liberal minds intent on tempering democracy. Laboulaye defended an individualist liberalism. He portrayed Constant and Tocqueville as two individualist thinkers. In the 1870s, definitions of liberalism were updated, and new versions of the French liberal tradition emerged as a result. Royalist liberalism, republican liberalism, and realist liberalism all claimed Montesquieu as a great liberal ancestor, although each had a slightly different interpretation of his and his followers’ views on regime forms.

Unearthing the moment when the French liberal tradition was invented confirms that the birth of major Western ideologies has gone hand in hand with the practice of claiming great ancestors (Bell, 2014; Bourke, 2018; Jones, 2017; Stanton, 2018; Stedman-Jones, 2016). In addition, coupling tradition-building with moments of theorization of liberalism, as this essay invites us to do, can help us to revisit the history of liberalism as a constant process of reinvention of preferred liberal traditions in light of shifting conceptions of liberalism. In that regard, the history of liberalism can be divided into successive phases during which liberalism and its corresponding tradition have been reinvented to intervene in shifting political debates. In the context of this conclusion, only a succinct sketch of the different phases of French liberalism can be provided.

As we have seen, in the 1860s, French liberals were concerned with the preservation of fundamental liberties against Caesarism and socialism. In the 1870s, they shifted their attention to forms of government. In the following decades, debates about liberalism took different forms. In the 1900s, French university professors debated the kind of political doctrine best suited to a democratic republic. At this juncture, Emile Faguet (1903a) theorized aristocratic liberalism as a counterweight to excessive democratic equality. On his interpretation, Montesquieu, Mme de Staël, Constant, Guizot, and Tocqueville could teach the French how aristocratic bodies take shape in a democratic society (Faguet, 1891: xix, 1902: 280–297, 1903b: 65–114). Simultaneously, other French liberals started writing about socialist liberalism (Bouglé, 1904: 20–36) as a doctrine that reconciled an emphasis on individual rights with the necessity of state intervention. They portrayed Constant as an arch individualist, while pinning him against Tocqueville who had stricken the right balance between the individual and the state (Michel, 1896: 291–316, 318–327). Similar reconstructions occurred over the ensuing decades. In the 1930s, alarmed by the rise of fascism and bolshevism, Albert Thibaudet defined liberalism as a meta-doctrine whose role was to encourage dialogue between complementary yet rival canons. To him, the great theorists of pluralist liberalism had been Mme de Staël, Guizot, Constant, and Tocqueville, who created the conditions under which rival groups could coexist in France (Thibaudet, 1932: 40, 51, 262–263). During the Cold War, in a context of growing concern that liberalism was being reduced to Anglo-American economic liberalism, Raymond Aron tried to rehabilitate political liberalism. On his terms, the “authentic liberal” was aware that “a political art” was required—mores and leadership—for liberalism to prosper (Aron, 1998 [1969]). His version of a political French liberal tradition included Montesquieu, Tocqueville, and Elie Halévy (Aron, 1967: 295; Stewart, 2019: 167–206). As is now better known, in the late 1970s and early 1980s, Pierre Rosanvallon has likewise reinterpreted the French liberal tradition to be congenial to his socialist brand of liberalism (Chabal, 2015: 173–185; Jainchill and Moyn, 2004). In each phase, liberal actors reshuffled the themes and cast of figures of the French liberal tradition in a way that suited the kind of liberalism they wished to uphold in fluctuating political contexts.

Being aware of the origins of the French liberal tradition and its subsequent instantiations can help us to make sense of recent developments in Anglo-American scholarship on French liberalism. Against the background of this essay, the explosion of literature on Mme de Staël, Constant, and Tocqueville mentioned in the introduction can be interpreted as the latest reinvention, in an Anglo-American context and thus beyond French borders, of a tradition that was first invented in France in the 1860s. Like Rémusat’s and Laboulaye’s accounts, contemporary Anglo-American accounts of the French liberal tradition lend legitimacy to specific conceptions of liberalism. Against the dominance of Rawlsian abstract liberalism, Montesquieu, Constant, Mme de Staël, and Tocqueville have been cast as theorists of a sociological liberalism that pays attention to the social and historical conditions of freedom (Craiutu, 2003: 289; Geenens and Rosenblatt, 2012). Concomitantly, scholars accusing neo-republicans of caricaturing liberalism as a pro-market and individualist doctrine have reclaimed Constant, Mme de Staël, and Tocqueville as theorists of a civic-minded liberalism that commended political participation (Jainchill, 2008: 15) and moral values (Garsten, 2010: 5–6; Rosenblatt, 2008: 3, 2018: 6). These interpretations of the French liberal tradition differ from those of Rémusat’s and Laboulaye’s because they uphold different brands of liberalism in different contexts.

Vis-à-vis these recent accounts of French liberalism two attitudes are possible. One is to cast doubt on their historical accuracy, on the ground that they are inflected by prescriptive commitments (Bell, 2014: 685; Bourke, 2018: 455–456). The other is to see them as the latest reinventions of the French liberal tradition in a context of revived debates about liberalism and thus as new chapters in the history of liberalism. By reinterpreting the links between Montesquieu, Constant, and Tocqueville, contemporary political theorists and historians of political thought are not only writing new histories of liberalism. They are also continuing that history in creative ways while perpetuating a practice of reinventing the liberal tradition that, at least in France, started in the second half of the nineteenth century.