Abstract
Aurelian Craiutu , A Virtue for Courageous Minds: Moderation in French Political Thought. Princeton University Press: Princeton, 2012; 548 pp. $49.50 (hbk).
Jeremy Jennings , Revolution and the Republic: French Political Thought Since the Eighteenth Century. Oxford University Press: Oxford, 2011; 338 pp. £105 (hbk).
Few books are published within a year more similar in subject matter than Aurelian Craiutu’s A Virtue for Courageous Minds and Jeremy Jennings’ Revolution and the Republic. Both study French political theory since the eighteenth century—sharing themes and thinkers in common—and both provoke reflection on the ways in which political upheaval conditions the character and development of political thought. Simultaneously, though, few books on French political theory are more divergent in approach. Craiutu focuses on a historical stream of political thought in order to construct a transcendental ideal with practical applications; Jennings presents French political thought in all its richness and diversity, evoking the debates and circumstances that determined and produced ideas, but leaving judgment, political and otherwise, largely to the reader.
A tenuous moderation
Arguing for moderation’s importance as a political virtue and category, Craiutu approaches his subject in a careful and considered manner that opens up multiple perspectives. He also chooses a period—1750–1830—marked by political radicalism and two major revolutions, that is especially well suited to highlighting what was mostly a minority of moderate positions. Yet moderation itself is not straightforward to define. Craiutu’s Prologue and Chapter 1 provide quite diverse definitions of it: a superior form of civility; an antithesis to monist politics; a virtue related to free regimes and opposed to conservatism; the principled pursuit of balances; a means of opposing absolute power, conflict, and tension that is irreducible to fear of or antagonism to extremes; an attitude compatible with various political identities; and a capacity to change one’s mind that is sometimes taken for weakness or opportunism. Moderation thus appears alternately as a form of politeness; as a political ideology negatively defined by antithesis to other ideologies, notably monism, conservatism and absolutism; as a moral virtue; as an ethical quality; as a means of pacification; as a social attitude; and as a psychological faculty. Moderation, Craiutu tells us, has “many faces”; yet these faces do not meld in his account to form a model sufficiently uniform to define a single tradition across time and place—an absence that is related, as we shall see, to moderation’s dependence on context.
The resulting lack of uniformity is evident in Chapter 1’s varied accounts of ancient, medieval, and early modern forms of moderation. For the ancients, we read, moderation was a civilized virtue opposed to barbarian extremism. Aristotle advocated complex forms of government as antidotes to corruption and recommended a middle class to mitigate the extremism that led to revolution, while Cicero insisted that blending class interests was a political necessity. Centuries later, Christianity produced its own version of moderation: prudence. Aquinas followed Aristotle in equating prudence with practical wisdom, but innovated in denying that it could operate without first principles. Prudence, in his view, could be complete only if it tended toward the final good of human life. As I see it, this teleological orientation of all action toward the ultimate good fundamentally distinguishes prudence from moderation, and medieval from ancient accounts: it suggests why prudence retains connotations of foresight that moderation lacks. The counter-argument is that prudence shares with moderation an aspect of caution. In fact its devising of multiple resources is probably the one thread that connects it to the early modern political thinkers, also discussed in Chapter 1, who Craiutu tells us ascribed moderation to mixed constitutions.
The greatest of early modern moderates, Montesquieu agreed with Aristotle that proper equality was a mean between extreme equality and extreme inequality, that liberty could flourish only in moderate states, but that not all moderate states harbored liberty (Chapter 2). Excessive liberty, for its part, was harmful: the English love of liberty was so great as to be unnatural, and extreme liberty had caused the decline of the Roman republic. Montesquieu also believed that democracy was corrupted by extreme equality, that aristocratic governments were generally moderate, and that the principles of moderate government could not be universally applied.
Montesquieu’s moderate maxims deeply influenced the monarchiens (Chapter 3), the short-lived party that advocated a constitutional monarchy and that rose to prominence during the early days of the French Revolution (Mounier, a monarchien, was president of the Assembly). Unfortunately, in A Virtue for Courageous Minds all references are missing to the excellent book by Jacques de Saint-Victor, La première contre-révolution (1789–1791). This text not only makes abundant use of archival materials to offer what is to date the most detailed and original study of monarchien political thought, but it also provides multiple insights into the monarchiens’ dependence on Montesquieu—a subject that Craiutu mentions only in passing and that could have provided a major link between his book’s first and second chapters. In this connection, one regrets that the moderate Robert de Lézardière—“the author who … did the most to demonstrate the existence of an old French constitution” (pp. 82–83)—appears only briefly, since her advocacy of constitutional monarchy and her enthusiasm for Montesquieu make of her a sort of proto-monarchien, while her ill-studied status offers much room for original discussion.
Craiutu nonetheless provides a useful account of the monarchiens’ political thought, presenting them as eclectic and occasional political thinkers---Burkean reformists and rivals of Sieyès who critiqued nobiliarism, defended the executive power, opposed the suspensive veto, supported the absolute one, and advocated bicameralism and a third power. Yet it is not always clear how these themes relate to moderation: Montesquieu, for instance, would have disagreed that an anti-aristocratic government with a strong executive was particularly moderate. What seems undeniable is that monarchien discourse became unsustainably unpopular during the Revolution. Indeed, revolutionary anti-moderation was so radical that it formed moderation not only as a “rhetorical and political tool” as Craiutu observes (p. 76) but also as a full-fledged ideological contestant, an enemy of Revolution—even a “crime against humanity” (p. 77).
Revolutionary circumstances again conspired to defeat moderation in the case of Jacques Necker, whom Craiutu presents as a public man of great ability (Chapter 4). Necker opposed Mirabeau’s “proud enthusiasm,” the Assembly’s abstractions, its confiscations and the assignats—the last two objections drawing him, in my view, close to Aristotle, who had observed that theft and envy admit of no mean (p. 21). Also, reserving his constitutional sympathies for the English model, Necker criticized the Constitutions of 1791 and 1795— for the excessive equality they posited between chiefs and inferiors of government, for their rigid separation of legislative and executive powers, and for their failure to understand the importance of the executive. Crucially, Necker supported religion as a guarantor of liberty---indeed as the center of life and politics---and distrusted the parlements’ capacity to check royal power. These opinions recall Montesquieu, and suggest that insofar as a stream of late eighteenth-century French moderate political thought developed, it was characterized by the Bordelais' political relativism, by his insistence on intermediary powers, and by his idea of checks and balances flexibly applied. The precision is important, as pace Craiutu moderation seems more readily definable vis-à-vis specific historical situations than as a general political category. Indeed it seems more exactly definable as a stream of ideas that evolved over time and adopted different characters in different contexts than as a tradition consistently developed and imparted by individual thinkers. Necker, for one, does not seem to have been an unwavering moderate: his belief that the “real” public opinion was that of educated elites was a radically enlightened position, while his insistence that the nobility and clergy give up their tax privileges seems unlinked to the moderate positions of his time. So does his opinion that only property owners should govern, a stance then common among radical revolutionaries and reactionaries alike and that he shared with his daughter, Germaine de Staël.
Staël also followed her father in objecting to the Assembly’s “philosophical enthusiasm.” But she was original in advocating boldness and assertiveness as the marks of a “good” moderation distinct from the kind derived from fear, timidity, powerlessness and indifference, and in considering that the pursuit of liberty through hypocrisy was more repellent than its denial (Chapter 5). Given Staël’s status as an early Romantic, these last remarks broach the subject (unfortunately unexamined in A Virtue for Courageous Minds) of moderation’s relationship to Romanticism. They suggest that the Romantic ethic may have had the dual effect of shifting attention to the psychology of political moderation while highlighting the importance of political transparence in a manner reminiscent of Rousseau, himself one of Romanticism's major forerunners.
Staël’s interests in psychology also distinguish her moderation from that of a fellow member of the Coppet circle, Benjamin Constant, whose strong partisanship and unflagging willingness to support the Directory at all costs lead Craiutu to portray him as an “intriguing” example of moderation (Chapter 6). An ambiguity is indeed suggested by the Swiss man’s dual inheritance from his compatriots, the “moderate” Necker and the “monist” (and thus “immoderate”) Rousseau. The inheritance, however, was a critical one: Constant differed from Necker in liberally insisting on individual rights and he objected to Rousseau’s insistence on equality, preferring to emphasize constitutional guarantees and the importance of protecting every individual from arbitrariness. Also (and to my mind), Constant’s willingness to further revolutionary virtues through non-virtuous means separates him from Staël and suggests that if his case is paradoxical, it is perhaps because he defended moderation as a principle but not necessarily as a political practice.
Craiutu, by contrast, intends his conclusions to be practically applied. His book’s epilogue is actually a “decalogue” of moderation that includes moral prescriptions like “one must honor those who try to keep the government stable,” “try to understand why some people are temperamentally inclined to moderation while others are not,” and “remember that moderation is not a virtue for everyone or for all seasons.” The objection might be raised, however, that the decalogue’s prescriptive powers would be better served if they were preceded by a model, extensible to the history of political thought writ large, that synthesized moderation’s moral, emotional, psychological, and political aspects. Craiutu offers a wide variety of attitudes, habits, and ideas that can be associated with moderation, but he never specifies how moderation’s triple status as a moral virtue, as a psychological and emotional habit, and as a middling politics untouched by extremes can acquire transcendence as a consistent set of political positions or as a particular kind of political thought. He writes, cogently, about the “paradox of moderation,” intimating that as a concept at once broad and context-specific, moderation does not submit easily to modeling. Indeed it is paradoxical to write a history of moderate political thought, as he has done, which suggests that certain moral and psychological features result in specific political principles and practices. Of course certain habits of mind may yield certain political attitudes more consistently than others, but aside from very general outlooks---not ideas---like a sympathy for liberty, a dislike for violence, and a preference for complex government, it seems risky to ascribe to moderation greater specificity across the centuries. The relativism and anti-universalism Craiutu celebrates as moderate, for instance, conform to Montesquieu but fit ill with Aristotle.
This said, a model of moderation in late eighteenth and early nineteenth-century France might have been derived by defining Montesquieu’s moderate legacies, by describing the Romanticism–moderation relationship, and by reflecting on how the political upheavals of the age conditioned moderation’s character and development other than by arranging for its demise. Monarchien political thought, for instance, is likely an assortment of very concrete reflections on constitutional issues because it developed in installments in response to conditions where multiple rival political positions centrally concerned with the form of government were being generated with extreme rapidity. Similar conditions probably also explain Constant’s changing opinions regarding the moral integrity, or lack thereof, that the Directory needed to implement its policies—a flexibility that Craiutu associates with moderation, and one suggesting that Revolution paradoxically furthered moderate psychology (although perhaps not of the “good” kind that occupies Craiutu, and rather akin to the unjust and arbitrary type that worried Condorcet).
Lastly, Craiutu’s decaloguic prescription “do not assume that moderation is only in essence a conservative virtue” (p. 247) has resulted in a complete neglect of conservative moderates. With the very centrist monarchiens as its most rightward-leaning figures—and although its very title is a quotation from Edmund Burke—A Virtue for Courageous Minds reads as much as a work on liberalism as one on moderation. Chateaubriand is not once mentioned, although his mind-changing ways, his project to effect a synthesis between pre- and post-revolutionary thought, his final Montesquieuian tendencies and his unmatched fervor for liberty all allow him—unlike Constant—to fit Craiutu’s categories perfectly. The Restoration’s Montesquieuian monarchists studied by Annelien DeDijn are likewise missing from the text as is Joseph de Maistre, despite his final anti-absolutism and Cara Camcastle’s book on his moderation.
Revolution as genesis of political thought
Revolution continues conditioning French political thought in Jeremy Jennings’ Revolution and the Republic, an immensely helpful, impressively erudite and agreeably written overview of French political thought since the French Revolution. Aspiring to arrive at “no resounding and forthright conclusions” (p. 28), this book argues that the Revolution of 1789 was the crux around which modern French political thought developed. It explores the spectrum of this thought in depth, breadth and variety, from communism to reaction and from the Revolution to the present. The result is an easily flowing narrative that provides an extremely informative and thematically pertinent reference on French theoretical politics since the late eighteenth century.
The Declaration of the Rights of Man was the major piece of political theory the French Revolution produced, but if the document came to exist at all—especially in an age when universalist political concepts were discredited—it was thanks to the prestige of the American precedent and the wide currency of political arguments from nature (Chapter 1). Indeed when the Declaration was composed, the very idea of a declaration of rights inspired skepticism and fear, with many arguing that a declaration of duties should accompany it, and thinkers from Catholic reactionaries to idéologues critiquing its abstract nature. Dovetailing with the Revolution’s conditioning of moderate thought, the Declaration’s final form may have been determined by the political theoretical competition on the Assembly floor: a relatively short list of abstract principles is ideal as the conciliatory conclusion of intense and urgent philosophical debate.
Abstract thinking also thrives in absolutist regimes, and the question of absolutism was central to revolutionary constitutional discussions. In a manner unusual in scholarship on the subject, though, Jennings suggests that old regime absolutism was less a reality than the projection of the crown’s propaganda as most notably articulated in Bodin’s writings and the Bossuet–Jurieu debate (Chapter 2). In fact, even before the Revolution, Turgot had attempted to give France a constitution (while Robert de Lézardière, unfortunately unmentioned here, had argued for its immemorial existence). But the Revolution perhaps conditioned constitutional thought most enduringly through the new emphasis on national unity—a theme that recurs throughout Revolution and the Republic, aptly highlighting how pressing the issue of la patrie’s identity became in a new republic and former monarchy where the king had until then always embodied the nation. Nor did the failure of the Constitutions of 1791 and 1793 spell the end of revolutionary constitutional debates: the Second, Third, and Fourth Republics continued them, with Hugo, Lamartine, and Blanc contributing to them along with the forgotten republican Jules Barni.
The political philosophy that most influenced the Revolution was probably Rousseau’s, but its political originality was not so great in Jennings’ opinion, and lay principally in its insistence that sovereignty is the people’s permanent possession (Chapter 3). On this subject, the revolutionaries could generally agree, as they could on the anti-luxury ideas that Rousseau picked up from his contemporaries (Melon, Montesquieu, Saint-Lambert) and lent to the idéologues (Say, Destutt de Tracy). On every other subject, however, Rousseau seems to have inspired more censure than approval: theocrats, liberals, and anarchists all refuted his philosophy. Indeed, the Genevan’s popularity during the Revolution and centrality during the Terror ensured that in the decades that followed his fiercest critics were his most faithful preservers.
Montesquieu, the eighteenth century’s other great political thinker, launched Britain’s career as a constitutional model with his anti-despotic reflections, and the influence he exercised on the Revolution was inextricable from the question of Anglophilia. This subject became disputed during the Revolution, when the moderate Necker became an Anglophile and the radical Robespierre an Anglophobe (Chapter 4). The early nineteenth century was predictably less polarized: liberal economists criticized Britain’s industrial regime while upholding it as a wealth-creating model, and France’s cross-Channel neighbor remained a reference during Restoration debates on the Charte. Montesquieu’s constitutional ideas were likewise in vogue: Constant remembered them when writing on the Napoleonic “innovation” of usurpation and Guizot built upon them when pleading for a new aristocracy of talent. His liberalism in turn prefaced Tocqueville’s reflections on democracy, which famously abandoned the British reference for the new, American one. Yet the traditional liberalism infused with Montesquieu’s British musings lived on among late-century liberals, notably Prévost-Paradol, Barrot and Laboulaye.
France’s self-modeling on Britain was part and parcel of its construction of a national identity and place in the world (Chapter 5). In the eighteenth century, the monarchy fostered national sentiment and the parlements generated patriotic politics before Sieyès responded to revolutionary events by formulating a new, sovereignty-centered definition of the nation as “a self-conscious political construct” (p. 202). War then mingled xenophobia with revolutionary universalism as Napoleon’s victories added départements beyond French territory, while further on in the nineteenth century the concepts of “natural frontiers” and “linguistic frontiers” emerged. The twenty-first century reader may be startled by Jennings’ account of the ease with which nationalism and liberalism melded in nineteenth-century France (Carrel) to inspire the left-wing belief that “revolution and war went hand in hand” and that liberal principles should be exported to the whole universe, by violence if necessary (Michelet). I wonder whether these convictions either influenced or were inspired by the Marxist concept of permanent revolution: what is certain is that they provide a particularly tragic background to France’s imminent defeat by Prussia, and that they lend to the unknown Barni, a rare liberal anti-militarist, the status of a nineteenth-century political Cassandra.
After 1789, the practice and idea of history impacted French political thought profoundly (Chapter 6). Counter-revolutionaries mostly told the Revolution’s story as that of society disintegrated by Enlightenment philosophy (Burke, Rivarol, Barruel, Maistre, Chateaubriand, Montlosier), a theme that Taine would reproduce famously late in the century. Meanwhile, liberal historiography interpreted the Revolution as the culmination of a centuries-long struggle for freedom (Staël, Thierry, Mignet, Thiers, Michelet, Quinet) where men of letters played a pivotal role (Tocqueville). The socialist tradition, for its part, was represented in historical writing by Buchez and Roux’s ill-known compendium on the Revolution’s parliamentary history—a monumental work that viewed the Revolution, daringly and astoundingly, as a milestone on the road of Christianity’s social deployment—and by Sorel’s thesis that the Revolution’s essentially peaceable principles had been violently pursued—and thus betrayed—both within and outside France.
Post-revolutionary political thought, however, could not be fully explained without reference to the “fire of anti-Christian sentiment” that was lit during the old regime’s persecution of Protestants and Jansenists and by the Jansenist–Jesuit controversy, events that led the Jansenists to pave the way for Revolution and the French Enlightenment to become virulently anti-religious (Chapter 7). During the Revolution, Protestants benefited from emancipatory policies but fell foul of Jacobin repression and ended up writing to defend religion’s essential role in politics and society (Staël, Constant, Necker)—a role that would be confirmed during the July Monarchy by the wild enthusiasm that Cousin’s eclecticism unleashed. As for Catholicism, its nineteenth-century story is that of the post-revolutionary revival that Chateaubriand began and Maistre and Lamennais represented, with mid-century Christian thinkers largely occupied to reconcile Church and Revolution—an aspect of the subject rarely if ever discussed by scholars. Likewise inclusive is Jennings’ mention of popular religious phenomena like Lourdes as relevant to the history of political thought—although further research is needed to uncover their full political significance.
If some pegged their hopes for France’s post-revolutionary reintegration on traditional religion, others did so on science and scientific religion. Saint-Simon’s philosophy was particularly fruitful in this regard, begetting both Comtean positivism and the Saint-Simonian religion (Chapter 8). Jennings recounts the positivist schisms as fundamentally political: the republican Littré left over his disagreement with Comte’s politics, and the orthodox Laffitte, for whom it was not the form of government but its concordance with circumstance that mattered, could not enforce unity either. It seems that Comte was not a favorite among liberals: his politics and history instead inspired Maurras’ monarchism and Durkheim’s sociology. Nor did Comte have a monopoly over late nineteenth-century scientism. Renan’s study of the historical Jesus evinced another, non-positivist and even anti-positivist variety with German Protestant origins. Together with positivism, it would become the butt of the criticisms of science that gained prominence in the 1870s and that accompanied Modernist attempts to reconcile science and biblical criticism. The move away from positivism continued in academic circles, with Bergson’s mystical philosophy constituting its most influential expression and Sorel setting out to transpose Bergson’s ideas to social contexts.
The Revolution—especially in its Jacobin phase—also cradled the socialist and communist traditions (Babeuf, Blanqui, Cabet, Buonarroti), which had exceedingly diverse nineteenth-century posterities. Thus 1840s socialism turned Christian, Blanc condemned competition and advocated fraternity, Jaurès and Andler tried to reinvigorate democratic socialism, Fourier vaguely defended it, Proudhon clamored for a revolution from below, and the revolutionary syndicalists—the targets of Durkheim’s criticisms—not only questioned democratic liberties but even rejected the Revolution’s rhetoric, imagery, and symbolism (Chapter 9). The French communist party, for its part, quickly became Bolshevized as it rose, while the French intellectual left (with Sorel’s notable exception) at first idealized and then concealed Soviet developments. Jennings’ deep knowledge of syndicalism is evident in this chapter, which is replete with details on the movement’s institutional development. It would have been interesting to see this last type of information used to retrieve the political outlook of the rank and file—and more generally, as in the case of Lourdes, to craft a non-elite understanding of the history of political thought. In this connection, a political theoretical discussion of the eminently un-intellectual and non-elite phenomenon of compagnonnage would have been enlightening.
It is symbolically appropriate that a history of political thought centered on intellectual sources should end by recounting the twentieth century from the perspective of intellectuals (Chapter 10). As a social category, intellectuals date back to the Dreyfus Affair, when Jaurès reworked the socialist sense of civic engagement and broadened it to encompass non-socialists. The national crisis that followed the surrender of Alsace and Lorraine also encouraged les gens de lettres to exercise civic consciousness: Michelet evoked amputation, Drumont and Lazare voiced anti-Semitism, and Renan identified France’s “spiritual principle.” Jennings is unusually---and refreshingly---inclusive in that he investigates the role of spirituality in political thought: his treatment of the “reactionary intellectuals” comprises Brunetière’s notion of the “French soul” and Barrès’ dream of living with France’s dead. We likewise find Bergson providing a way out of the Benda-Nizan quarrel through his mystical notion of an open morality based on awareness and personal decision, and Weil viewing France mystically as an uprooted country. Their musings offer a stark contrast to Sartre and Beauvoir’s wartime existentialist insouciance, an indifference whose transformation into Sartre’s later Marxist declaration of public commitment perfectly illustrates the final establishment of the intellectual in the French academic consciousness.
Jennings’ focus on the role of intellectual elites in the history of political thought is of course conventional in the field, and also well-suited to the republican story at the heart of his narrative: as advocates of meritocracy, the republican and liberal traditions that emerged after Thermidor were particularly prone to prizing the political roles of the intellectually inclined. Yet even in the case of these ideologies, the views of non-intellectuals would seem to be historically and theoretically relevant, if only as context; and in the case of movements like Jacobinism, socialism, and aristocratic forms of monarchism that were either less intellectually minded or simply more insistent on the constitutional roles or political leadership of ordinary people, attentiveness to non-intellectual sources would seem to be crucial. But one cannot of course fault Jennings for not adopting methods as yet largely undevised and unattempted.
Instead, one can praise him for crafting a narrative where points and arguments often emerge indirectly from the concatenation of themes, and where a generally sympathetic distance ensures understanding without imposing the author’s views. Such an approach has the advantage of serving both breadth and depth: rather than marshal evidence to prove a point, Jennings presents an abundance of related themes that suggest the point and leaves final conclusions to the reader. He thus encourages independence of mind while serving historical truth by making room for multiple interpretive outlooks. Anchored on the themes of Revolution and republic, in turn, his narrative composes a fairly thorough account of eighteenth through twentieth-century French political theory that avoids encyclopedic description by returning to the issues that stimulated debate consistently along the centuries. The only complaint is that within chapters, themes could sometimes have been juxtaposed more seamlessly so as to flow together more smoothly—thematic sections seem on occasion abruptly fragmented—and that punctuation errors, and especially spelling mistakes in French, were not corrected. But these are obviously quibbles. ***