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THE
CLASSICAL LIBERAL TRADITION dmhart@mac.com © 2003 |
THE RADICAL LIBERALISM OF CHARLES COMTE AND CHARLES DUNOYER 1. THE DEVELOPMENT OF LIBERALISM IN THE RESTORATION, 1814-1830 |
Updated:
October 28, 2003 |
The Restoration has a curious and fitting neatness about it. At one end it is bounded by a political stutter - the double overthrow of the king-like Emperor Napoleon Bonaparte and the double restoration of the legitimate king Louis XVIII after an absence of a Bourbon king of France of some 22 years. At the other end the Restoration is bounded by yet another overthrow - the "political suicide" of the ultra-royalist Bourbon monarchy and the creation of the conservative liberal July Monarchy of Louis-Philippe.[11] To misquote Oscar Wilde, one could say that for the French to lose one Bourbon monarch was a mistake; to lose two was carelessness. However, the second failure of the Bourbon monarchy to retain power was a consequence of the same political mistakes which had resulted in the pushing aside and then overthrow of the Bourbons in 1789-92. In both cases the monarchy refused to allow wider political representation to challenge the monopoly of the aristocratic elites, refused to permit any constitutional limits on the exercise of arbitrary power, and was unable to address the pressing economic and fiscal needs of a rapidly changing society. Once again, the rigidity of the Bourbon monarchy forced France to endure another interlude in the cycle of revolution and reaction which plagues modern French history.
Not surpisingly, just as there is a certain parallel or continuity in the behaviour and attitudes of the Bourbons in 1789 and 1830 there is also a certain parallel or continuity in the demands of the political opposition to Bourbon rule. In both instances the demands for limited government constrained by a written constitution, representative government with ministers responsible to parliament, the protection of civic rights such as freedom of speech, and fiscal and economic "rationalism" (to use an anachronistic but highly appropriate term which would have been appreciated by the Physiocrats, Idéologues and French classical political economists) were voiced by individuals and groups which can be identified as "liberal" by modern historians, even if contemporaries did not use the term "liberal" explicitly. The counterpart of the constitutional monarchists, the Girondin group, and Condorcet of the early phase of the French Revolution from 1789-93 is the broad and eclectic group which made up the "liberal opposition" which sprang up in reaction to the policies of both Emperor Napoleon and the Bourbon Restoration in the first three decades of the nineteenth century. It is the aim of this dissertation to explore the "peculiar" liberalism of one segment of this liberal opposition, namely the radical liberalism of Charles Comte and Charles Dunoyer. I have selected them for examination because I believe their interesting combination of political, economic, and social theory helps us better understand both the nature of early nineteenth century liberalism and the stresses and strains of French society during the Restoration.
The historians Jardin and Tudesq divide the history of the Restoration into three periods based upon the degree to which the monarchy was willing to accede to the liberal demands for constitutional, responsible and limited government: the monarchy of "limited suffrage" (April 1814 - September 1816); the government of constitutional monarchists (September 1816 - February 1820); and the rule of royalist reaction (1820 - 1830). The first period was that of the monarchy of "limited suffrage" (the "monarchie sensitaire") which lasted from about April 1814 when the Senate appealed for the return of the Bourbons to the dissolution of the Incredible Chamber in September 1816. Louis reluctantly accepted the constitution or Charter as a condition of his return but he was able to circumvent it to a considerable decree. His claims to legitimacy were given some credence with references in the Charter to the "nineteenth" year of his reign and the creation of pseudo-liberal institutions by royal fiat. The political controversies which were to echo throughout the Restoration were already evident from the first moments of the régime: the relationship between Church and State; the issue of the freedom of the press; the relative powers of the House of Peers, Chamber of Deputies and the Crown; the extent of the voting electorate; the vexed question of nationalised property and compensation to the émigré nobles. The ambivalent or even contradictory nature of the government of the restored monarchy was clearly revealed in the way in which the "liberties" of the French were articulated in the Charter. One the one hand, the rights to liberty, property and equality were proclaimed, along with religious and press freedom. However on the other hand, there were clear constitutional provisions to curb press freedom to avoid "abuses" and Catholicism was declared to be the state religion. As long as the king and his hand-picked ministers were not responsible to the Chamber for their actions the liberties enumerated in the Charter could be gradually whittled away. In addition, article 14 authorised the king to issue royal ordinances in times of crisis to ensure "the enforcement of the law and the security of the State." This power meant the Crown could at times dispense entirely with the need to consult the Chambers, thus hindering the development of a true constitutional monarchy.
The chaotic return to power of Napoleon for the Hundred Days (March - June 1815) made it even more difficult to create such a constitutional regime in France. The first elections following the second Restoration took place in August 1815 and returned an overwhelmingly royalist Chamber - the "Incredible Chamber" as Louis XVIII called it.[12] The "ultra-royalists" in this newly elected Chamber organised themselves into the first formal political party of the Restoration and one of their first actions was to support the Crown in passing a series of laws to purge the state and administration of those who had supported Napoelon during the Hundred Days as well as prominent liberal critics of the régime such as Charles Comte and Charles Dunoyer. The "legalised White Terror" comprised a series of laws passed between November 1815 and January 1816 defending public security, banning seditious speeches and writings, and creating special courts to try opponents. Although Louis had hoped and expected to be able to control the ultras in the Chamber he underestimated the powerful independent and vested interest the ultras were becoming. The issues over which the Chamber and the government split were increased taxes and the sale of government land (once mostly owned by the clergy) designed to reduce the massive state debt. The ultras in the Chamber opposed these measures since they stood to lose most. Ironically, in order to oppose the crown and its government the ultras used a liberal interpretation of the Charter and liberal arguments in favour of responsible ministerial government, limited monarchical power, and the need to gain the consent of the majority in the Chamber in its pamphlet war against Decazes' scheme to dissolve the Incredible Chamber by decree in September 1816. As Jardin and Tudesq observe
The government's victory was to open a new chapter in the history of the Restoration... (T)he Incredible Chamber... had come to interpret the Charter against the king himself, in the sense of increased independence for the legislative branch: unaccountability of the king, accountability of the minsters, the necessity to obtain the consent of the majority, the Chamber's right to introduce or amend legislation - all of these ideas were being treated in its debates and discussed in a wide variety of pamphlets at the very time when the Chamber was dissolved. The most famous of these pamphlets was Chateaubriand's De la monarchie selon la Charte. Thus the ultra-royalist party itself contributed to an evolution that moved the regime issued from the Charter toward a parliamentary regime.[13]
The second period of Restoration government was that of the constitutional monarchists which lasted from the dissolution of the Incredible Chamber in September 1816 to the assassination of the duc de Berry in February 1820. New elections resulted in an increase in the number of liberal deputies from a paltry 10 in 1816, to 20 in 1818, to 35 in 1819. The election of October 1818 was particularly noteworthy as La Fayette and Benjamin Constant were elected and took their place amongst the so-called "independent party" of liberal-minded deputies. The liberals in the Chamber comprised a diverse group ranging from constitutional monarchists, Bonapartist sympathisers, to liberal conspirators who wished to overthrow the monarchy. To the right of the independent liberals was the group of constitutionalists known as the "Doctrinaires" who wished to tie the monarch as closely as possible to the provisions of the Charter and to steer a middle course between the threat of a return to Jacobin-style democracy and ultra-royalist autocracy. The issues which occupied the attention of the Chambers were the military law and a number of press laws. The military law proposed a lottery system to enlist a proportion of all 20-year old French males and a scheme for appointment of officers in an army still containing a large proportion of veterans of the Napoleonic Empire. The press laws were highly controversial as the French press had suffered severe censorship during the Terror, the Empire and the early years of the Restoration. The more liberal Chamber of 1817 and 1818 lessened the severity of press censorship as it was agreed that a well informed public was vital to the functioning of a constitutional monarchy however limited in scope. To oppose the already established great conservative newspapers and journals such as the Quotidienne, the Gazette de France, and the Journal des débats, a number of important liberal papers were established - the Constitutionnel, Comte's and Dunoyer's Le Censeur and Censeur européen, Constant's Le Mercure, La Minerve, and La Renommée. To these one should add the organs of the Doctrinaire group - the Journal général and Guizot's formidable sounding Archives philosophique, politiques et littéraires. Harsh critics of the regime like Comte and Dunoyer had their journal suspended by the authorities on a number of occasions and also were treated arbitrarily in the courts, prompting the formation of the Society for the Friends of Freedom of the Press in 1818 whose task it was to raise both money and public awareness for Dunoyer's campaign against the censorship laws in the courts. The result of the bitter struggle for press freedom was the passing of the de Serre press laws by the Chamber in May and June 1818. The minster of Justice de Serre took advice from the duc de Broglie and Guizot in formulating the new press laws which established a firmer basis of press freedom in France than had existed hitherto.
The third period of Restoration government was that of the rule of the royalist reaction following the assassination of the duc de Berry in 1820. The assassination of the duke provided the government with the opportunity to further distance itself from the liberal provisions of the Charter. This move should be seen in the general European context of anti-liberal reaction by conservatives like Prince Metternich, who introduced the repressive Carlsbad Decrees for the German states following episodes of student unrest and the assassination of Kotzebue, and unrest in Spain, Portugal and Piedmont. The assassination of de Berry enabled Decazes to propose a number of emergency measures in the Chambers which resulted in a sharp polarisation between the ultras and the liberals, who protested the suspension of individual liberty, the tightening of press censorship, and the restricting of the already limited democracy through the "law of the double vote." In the next election to the Chambers the conservatives benefited from these measures as the liberals had a paltry 80 deputies in an expanded Chamber of 480 and later lost key deputies like La Fayette and Voyer d'Argenson in the election of 1822.[14] By 1824 the liberal deputies had been reduced to a mere 19 members. The repression of liberalism continued under the governments of Richelieu with some liberals like Comte and Dunoyer closing down their journal and going into exile while others went underground to participate in secret conspiratorial societies like the Carbonari.[15]
The longest lived government of the Restoration was that of the ultra-royalist Villèle government which lasted from 1821 to 1828. Villèle earned the resentment of the liberal opposition with his purges of the civil service, by his tampering with the electoral lists by the prefects, and by deliberately ignoring the slightly more liberal press laws of de Serre. New, stricter press laws in March 1822 required journals to have a preliminary permit, allowed the government to investigate critical publications for a "tendency" critical of the regime which might lead to their suppression, and began the quite daring policy of buying up critical newspapers in order to control them better. Although a few conservatives like Chateaubriand came to believe that some reconciliation between the restored monarchy and liberalism was possible the political climate after the death of Louis XVIII and the accession of Charles X in 1824 continued to be hostile to liberalism.
The traditional coronation of Charles X at Reims in May 1825 gave a clear indication of the tenor of his reign. Rossini's opera "Il Viaggio a Reims" was written to celebrate the occasion of the coronation and concludes with a number of the guests, who cannot proceed to Rheims to participate in the actual coronation but who take shelter in an inn aptly named "The Golden Lily," taking turns to sing the praises of Charles X. In the aria sung by Corinna (based on the fictional figure of Madame de Staël's Corinne) Charles is depicted as "the majestic author" of everlasting joy to the French people and as the legitimate monarch protected by "immortal divine favour." Sadly for Charles, this "immortal divine favour" was to last a mere five years:
In the pleasant shade of the Golden Lily a serene breeze intoxicates the heart. France has never yet seen arise a fairer dawn of joyful days, and gratefully applauds, admires and adores the majestic author of so many boons. The prop and honour of the crown, Charles bestows on it new splendour. The nobility of his heart appears in his majestic royal countenance. Contentment is the harbinger of joy, a sweet pledge of divine goodness. Beside the throne which has no equal, everyone will enjoy sweet enchantment. Ever protected by immortal divine favour, may dearest Charles, delight and love the French, live happily for hundreds of years![16]
During "dearest Charles'" reign liberals felt that the promised "joyful days" were as far away as ever because the Church was granted a greater say in the formation of government policy, eldest sons of the wealthiest families were favoured under new inheritance laws designed to foster the rural aristocracy, the dissolution of the Paris National Guard (April 1827), and the attempted stacking of the House of Peers with the creation of 76 new peers. The latter, along with Villèle's clumsy attempt to dissolve the Chamber of Deputies in November 1827, provoked the creation of a new liberal opposition group, the "Aide-toi et le ciel t'aidera" Society whose secretary was Guizot, which formed a successful alliance with a number of disaffected conservatives to defeat Villèle and force his resignation in January 1828. Charles X continued his campaign to restore the power of the monarchy under the governments of first Martignac (January 1828 - August 1829) and then Polignac (August 1829 - July 1830). The end of the regime came about because of a dispute over the power of the king under the Charter to dismiss his ministers. Charles decided to deflect the criticism which might arise from a high-handed sacking by dissolving the Chamber in the hope of getting a more compliant new set of deputies. Unfortunately for Charles X the elections of June and July 1830 were an electoral disaster with the opposition group increasing its share of the Chamber from 221 to 274. Once again the crown resorted to the emergency powers granted in article 14 of the Charter this time to tamper with the way in which candidates for the Chamber were recruited. Charles X introduced four ordinances on 25 July in order to carry out his plan. Freedom of the press was suspended, the newly elected Chamber was dissolved, the number of deputies in the new Chamber was reduced from 430 to 258 by altering the type of taxes which qualified one for the franchise, and only departmental electoral colleges were entitled to elect deputies. The electoral colleges were called for the 6 and 13 September, but before they could meet opposition to the king's ordinances culminated in the July Days which other threw the last Bourbon king. The day after the ordinances were issued journalists and typesetters of the journals to be effected by the harsh censorship laws protested at a meeting at the offices of the National. Disaffected electors threatened a tax strike, a tactic called for by Dunoyer in an inflammatory article he wrote, and 44 journalists signed a statement of protest defending the Charter and condemning the dissolution of the Chamber of Deputies. Over the next few days simple resistance to the illiberal ordinances of the Charles X escalated into open rebellion and then revolution. The liberals who were to benefit most from the coming to power of Louis-Philippe interpreted the 1830 Revolution as a reaction to an attempted coup d'état on the part of Charles X to subvert the Charter and destroy the limited constitutional monarchy of the Restoration, and as an opportunity to implement the policies of the independent liberals. The purges and dismissals of the civil service by Louis-Philippe's government enabled liberals like Comte and Dunoyer to take official posts in the July Monarchy. However, gradually many of them became disillusioned with the naked place-seeking and increasing authoritarianism of the new regime. La Fayette was one of the first liberals to voice his protest against the new regime when he resigned from the command of the National Guard in December 1830. Comte and Dunoyer did likewise by resigning from their respective government positions somewhat later (1834 for Comte and 1837 for Dunoyer).
As the above sketch of the major political events of the Restoration indicate, liberals played an important role in the opposition to the restored monarchy and classical liberal issues such as constitutionalism, freedom of speech and the rule of law were the subjects of continued debate throughout the period from 1814 to 1830. Fortunately, after a period of some neglect, the period of the restoration of the Bourbon monarchy in France is beginning to receive the attention it deserves from historians of political and economic thought, especially those interested in the history of classical liberalism. Too often in the past the years from 1814 to 1830 were dismissed as a hiatus between two more productive and more interesting periods in the development of political and economic thought, namely the late eighteenth century which saw the emergence of the Physiocrats and the Jacobins, and the 1830s and 1840s when Tocquevillian liberalism appeared and the "social question" was discovered. This neglect of the Restoration by historians is surprising, given the fact that it was a period of remarkable intellectual agitation when the achievements and failures of the French Revolution were beginning to be assessed and the modern forms of conservative, liberal and socialist thought emerged. Indeed Paul Johnson is not wrong to describe this period as "the birth of the modern" and this epithet seems to be very appropriate when discussing the modern or classical liberal tradition.[17]
An indication of the importance of the Restoration in the history of thought can be got by surveying some of the issues which sparked often heated debate among conservatives, liberals and socialists. As we have seen above, of primary concern was the power of the restored monarch and his relationship to the Charter. The clash between the monarch and his supporters (for example de Bonald and de Maistre) and liberal advocates of individual liberty and constitutionalism (like Constant) resulted in discussions about the source of political power, the nature of liberty, the proper relationship between the individual and the State, and the role of religion and the Church in society. One of the most persistent problems, as indicated above, was the issue of freedom of speech. The restrored monarch correctly saw in the free press a serious challenge to his absolute power and thus attempted on several occasions to place limits on what could be said and who could say it. All critics of the regime, especially Constant and Comte and Dunoyer, campaigned tirelessly for an end to censorship and policies designed to harass or otherwise hamper the free discussion of political matters.
The turmoil of the previous 25 years of revolution prompted an intense interest in the study of history, especially the history of previous revolutions such as the Glorious Revolution of 1689 (Augustin Thierry) and the history of their own revolution. Beginning with Madame de Staël's early account, Restoration historians grappled with the reasons for the failure of the French Revolution to achieve political stability. The answers they gave, as Stanley Mellon has shown, were determined by their party political position in the ongoing debates about the constitution and the crown which preoccupied the Restoration.[18] Studies of the revolution also raised the question of social class, most notably why did some classes support and others oppose the revolution (Montlosier treated this issue with some insight), which classes were in decline and which were coming to dominate society (for example, Guizot's work on European civilisation), and how the clash of one class against another could be seen to be a characteristic of European history as a whole and not just the period of the French Revolution itself (Thierry). In addition to the historical interest in revolution the issue of revolution was kept alive because of the continued repression of dissent by Restoration governments in France as well as other European countries. Following the assassination of the duc de Berry the political clampdown pushed a number of liberal and other opponents of the regime to join conspiratorial, quasi-revolutionary associations such as the Carbonari as Alan Spitzer has shown.[19]
The issue of property was a serious one given the fact that émigrés were demanding compensation or even restoration for the land and property (including slaves in the French colonies) which had been confiscated (or liberated in the case of slaves) during the revolution. As industrialisation took place in France (particularly during the 1840s which is outside of the scope of this dissertation) ownership of property and the economic contribution of different forms of property ownership to economic well-being became a concern especially for French political economists and their socialist opponents like Proudhon. Even before the onset of industrialisation proper in France, the possibilities of the future industrial society were becoming evident. Constant based his distinction between "ancient" and "modern" forms of society on the underlying economic structures of each type of society, with the emerging "modern" society essentially a free market and "industrial" one. The problems and possibilities of the transition to an "industrial" society were taken up by socialists (Auguste Comte and the Saint-Simonians) and liberals (Thierry, Charles Comte, and Dunoyer) alike. As property qualifications determined who could and could not vote in the Restoration the issue of property had a political and legal as well as an economic dimension.
Until quite recently if attention were given to Restoration political thought it was directed either to the conservative defenders of the restored monarchy like de Bonald and Chateaubriand or to the "Utopian" socialists like Saint-Simon and Auguste Comte. The latter in particular were studied as important precursors to the "scientific" socialism of Marx which emerged after the 1848 revolutions. Not surprisingly therefore Marxist historians have always been interested in the Restoration as a vital and rich period in the development of political, social and economic thought.[20] Historians interested in other schools of thought have, until recently, devoted less attention to this period. This is particularly true for those who have studied French liberalism. As Laurence Jacobs has correctly observed in a useful review article "(h)istories of European liberalism have tended to ignore the restoration liberals, passing straight from the period of the French revolution to de Tocqueville." But as Jacobs' review indicates there has been a considerable revival of interest in Restoration liberalism over the past decade. After surveying the large number of works which appeared during the 1980s he goes so far as to depict the Restoration as "le moment libéral" - a period crucial to the emergence of liberalism as a modern political theory in France.[21] This view is shared by one of the key figures in this scholarly reassessment, the Guizot scholar Pierre Rosanvallon, who has claimed, correctly in my view, that "(t)he Restoration constitutes a veritable golden age of political reflexion."[22] One of the purposes of this dissertation is to continue the process of rediscovery and reevaluation of French liberal thought which has been in progress for some time. The focus here is on two radical liberals, Charles Comte and Charles Dunoyer, who were well-known and highly regarded at the time but who unfortunately have not shared in the recent renewed interest in Restoration liberal thought.
I think the revival of interest in Restoration liberalism has occurred for a number of reasons. Firstly, there has been the rediscovery of the significance of Madame de Staël[23] and Benjamin Constant in the period of Napoleon's Empire. But recent research has shown that the impact of their activity extends well into the early years of the Restoration.[24] Although most of Constant's and Staël's work was completed during the Napoleonic Empire and away from the Weltstadt of Paris historians have pursued their intellectual prey well into the Restoration. This is especially the case with Constant whose important career as a leading liberal journalist in the early Restoration is now well documented most notably by Éphraïm Harpaz.[25] Constant, unlike many of his liberal contemporaries, had always been remembered by scholars. Older biographers liked to stress his reputation as the infamous lover of the voracious Madame de Staël, whilst literary critics justly refer to his classic novel Adolphe (1816). In more recent decades, scholars have drawn attention to Constant as a political theorist and political journalist. His considerable output of political journalism and occasional but important economic writings has remained in obscurity until only quite recently. The efforts of people such as Éphraïm Harpaz, Étienne Hoffman, Guy Dodge, Stephen Holmes and most recently Biancamaria Fontana are beginning to show how important Constant was to both the political and intellectual developments of Restoration France. However, in spite of the growing attention being given to Benjamin Constant, an important aspect of his thought is still being neglected. His writings on economic matters, in particular his commentaries on Filangieri, in which Constant defends a laissez-faire economic policy, are still to be properly assessed. Among the more recent commentators only Holmes has discussed the Commentaire even if only too briefly. Constant concluded his commentary on Filangieri with the call for total laissez-faire which might surprise some modern historians who have tended to see Constant primarily as a theorist of constitutionalism. A good example of Constant's concern for the economic side of liberal thought is the following statement from his Commentaire sur l'ouvrage de Filangieri (1822):
For all those who want no connection with positive crimes, let us expunge from the vocabulary of power the words "restrict", "destroy" and even "direct". For thought, for education, for industry the motto of governments ought to be: laisser faire et laisser passer.[26]
What is less well known is that Constant's economic and sociological ideas had an impact on a younger generation of liberals who rose to prominence in the first years of the Restoration, in particular Charles Comte and Charles Dunoyer. What Comte and Dunoyer seized upon in Constant's work is not that for which Constant is now best remembered. They were less concerned with Constant's theory of constitutionalism or his work on religion than with a few passing but acute observations he made in the polemical anti-Napoleonic pamphlet De l'esprit de conquête et de l'usurpation (1814) on the differences between "ancient" society (the model of Jacobin economic interventionism) and "modern" society (based upon liberal non-interventionism) and the social and economic structures which underpinned them. Out of these brief remarks Dunoyer was to evolve his elaborate and detailed theory of "industrialism" which will be discussed below.
Secondly, a similar process of discovery has been occurring from the other end of our time frame. In this case scholarly interest in the careers of François Guizot and Alexis de Tocqueville during the July Monarchy has led inevitably to research on their early careers in the 1820s. Guizot's early political and journalistic career, the influence of his inspired teaching and the popular success of his published histories is well documented and has prompted his modern intellectual biographer, in a fit of Gallic excess, to describe the Restoration and Guizot-dominated July Monarchy as "le moment Guizot."[27] According to Rosanvallon
One can speak in this sense of a "moment Guizot" in order to mark out the originality of the liberal political culture of the years 1814-1848. The peculiarity of Guizot is to have been the determined interpreter, sometimes to the point of caricature, of the aspirations of an entire intellectual generation and at the same time the expression of an extreme manifestation ("singularité") of it. He was both completely at home with and radically foreign to French political culture of this period. He was at home with French culture in that he expressed perfectly the sense of early 19th century liberalism's complete rupture with the tradition of the 18th century. But he was also radically foreign in that he precipitated this sharp break to the point that French political culture was detached from its essential connections to a national tradition and was made culturally and practically unsustainable. One could say that Guizot pushed the singularity of liberal political culture of the period 1814-1848 to its limit. It is for this reason that Guizot merits his privileged position as observer of this period.[28]
Pierre Rosanvallon is correct to identify the importance of Restoration liberal thought but I think he exaggerates the extent to which it marked a rupture with both the traditional French manner of doing political and economic theory and with French culture in general.[29] One might dispute Rosanvallon's claim on two grounds: firstly, that extreme liberalism alienated French politics from its cultural traditions and secondly, that Guizot was the key figure in this intellectual break with the past. One can reject the notion of alienation from the past as all the liberal historians were keen to show the continuity of French history across the divide of the revolution. Thierry after all saw the one unifying feature of French history in the never-ending struggle of the "Third Estate" to protect its property and to expand its trading and industrial opportunities. The Restoration for Thierry, Comte and Dunoyer was only the best opportunity for decades to complete this revolution which had begun in the thirteenth century. Furthermore, Alexis de Tocqueville identified another important continuity which weakens Rosanvallon's argument. Tocqueville provocatively argued that the process of political centralisation was continuous in spite of the disruptions of the revolution. One can also question Guizot's rôle in the reassessment of liberalism during the Restoration. For Comte and Dunoyer the break with their more traditional political and constitutional liberalism came about from reading Say's Traité d'économie politique, which might suggest that a better expression than Rosanvallon's "le moment Guizot" would be "le moment Say." The general lack of interest in economic liberalism has led to the unjustified neglect of one of the most important theorists of the Restoration, the economist Jean-Baptiste Say. His contribution to both economic liberalism and social theory in the broader meaning of the term has still not yet been appreciated. A comprehensive analysis of his life and thought is urgently needed because of the enormous influence he had on the development of French liberalism in particular and European classical economic thought in general.[30]
The reason for the renewed interest taken in the political philosophy of Guizot might lie in the attraction of French scholars writing in the 1980s to that most English of French liberals who warned of the double danger of Ultra conservatism from the right and popular revolution from the left. Where once Guizot's policy of "middlingless" was a matter of contempt it is now seen as one of his great strengths and the policy best suited to achieve political stability in the post-revolutionary era.[31] Although Tocqueville has not had the honour of having an historical period named after him like Rosanvallon's Guizot, the constant interest American historians, political scientists and sociologists have taken in him since the appearance of De la Démocratie en Amérique (1830, 1835) might lead one to note the existence of "l'Amérique Tocqueville." Now it appears that French scholars, following the footsteps of François Furet, have adopted the American enthusiasm for all things Tocquevillian, as the number of recent writings on his work would attest.[32] They now like to see French society, history and politics through Tocqueville's eyes in order to uncover what they might like to call "la France Tocqueville."
And thirdly, what links both these two sources of interest in Restoration liberalism is the general collapse of both intellectual and political Marxism, especially in France in the 1980s. The loss of faith in Marxism has led scholars to investigate the other schools of thought which were developing at this time, most notably liberalism. As regard for Marxism has waned so too has the concentration on the Utopian socialists, Saint-Simonians and Positivists as the sole important or interesting political theorists of the time. Where once one might have smiled at the "Utopians'" extravagant personal behaviour, the tendency to individual cultism, the messianic fervour, the theories of free love, support for rule by a technocratic elite, the misogyny, and the factional infighting of the Saint-Simonians (tolerating these peccadilloes because of the influence of a number of the school's ideas on Marxism) one now is much more circumspect and even suspicious. Perhaps, one could argue, there is a disturbing continuity between the authoritarian idiosyncrasies of the Saint-Simonians and the experience of Marxism in the twentieth century with its cult of the leader, rule by a party and technocratic elite, and utter disdain for the individual in the face of the forces of history.[33] It is no wonder then that historians would want to reassess the period when the foundations of modern conservatism, socialism and liberalism were laid in an effort to more fully delineate the tangled threads of modern political and economic thought.
The period following the upheavals of the French Revolution and the Napoleonic Empire was one of flux both for French society and institutions and for French political thought. At a time when there was no liberal political party organised along clear ideological lines and no acknowledged source of liberal orthodoxy it is more accurate to speak of "liberalisms" rather than liberalism per se. The conservatives had a newly restored Bourbon monarch around whom to gather both physically and metaphorically. Bonapartists likewise had the figure and then the powerful myth (after his death in 1821) of Napoleon to give them inspiration.[34] Opponents of Napoleon and later the monarchy were fractured into a multiplicity of groups - liberal, Jacobin, socialist and so on - which were defined more by affiliation to a particular magazine, salon, or charismatic individual, or by support or opposition to particular pieces of legislation than by clear party political membership. Raymond Williams has described the transformation of "liberal" from an adjective expressing the "unorthodox" at the turn of the eighteenth century to a noun defining an "orthodox" political opinion by the mid-nineteenth century. In 1820, in the period covered in this dissertation, the word still had its meaning of "unorthodox", and to English ears it had even a slightly foreign and exotic flavour.
The adjective is very clear in a political sense in an example from 1801: `the extinction of every vestige of freedom, and of every liberal idea with which they are associated". This led to the formation of the noun as a political term, proudly and even defiantly announced in the periodical title, The Liberal (1822). But, as often since, this term for unorthodox political opinion was given, by its enemies, a foreign flavour. There was talk of the "Ultras" and "Liberals" of Paris in 1820, and some early uses were in a foreign form: Liberales (Southey, 1816); Libéraux (Scott, 1826). The term was applied to advanced Whigs and Radicals by their opponents; it was then consciously adopted and within a generation was powerful and in its turn orthodox.[35]
Although Williams' remarks are directed more to the British context much of what he says can also be applied to the French. In the absence, even by the mid-century, of a specifically "Liberal Party" in France to provide a definition of the "orthodox" liberal position there was instead a number of "liberalisms" or liberal "families" which can be identified by historians of liberal thought.[36] It is useful to establish a working definition of early nineteenth century liberalism in order to categorise the multiplicity of "liberal" groups and their corresponding "liberalisms" which emerged in the intellectual hothouse of the immediate post-Revolutionary and post-Napoleonic period. I would define early nineteenth century liberalism as a set of beliefs which include the following: a government limited in its scope of action by means of a written constitution; a preference for the voluntary economic activity of the free market over government regulation and control; the rule of law administered by independent judges and juries; private ownership of property; a policy of low taxes, sound money and a small government bureaucracy; civil rights especially freedom of speech and religious observance; and a general preference for the rights of the individual over the claims of the broader community, the church or the state.
With a suitably broad definition such as this and one which includes economic, legal, and political aspects, one is then in a position to categorise the various branches of Restoration liberalism according to the emphasis placed on one of more of the above beliefs (for example those who emphasised constitutionalism and those who emphasised economic matters) or the degree to which one or more of them are pushed (those moderate liberals who defended the free market in general but allowed some government regulation and those radical liberals who advocated total laissez-faire). One also could talk of a liberal "mansion" with many rooms occupied by the different groups. Their shared liberal values justify their presence in the same mansion. However, their different emphases and temperaments require that they take up residence in separate rooms so that some semblance of order be maintained within the mansion. Alternatively one could talk of a spectrum of Restoration liberal thought. François Guizot and the Doctrinaires take up a place on the "conservative" end with their suspicion of democracy and their support for a strictly limited franchise. Benjamin Constant assumes a position in the middle of the liberal spectrum with his strong support for constitutionalism and freedom of speech. As a Deputy in the Chamber Constant was loosely grouped with the left of centre "Independents" as he could not join the Doctrinaires for reasons of both temperament and ideology, thus meriting a separate position in the spectrum of liberal thought.[37]
At the "radical" end of the liberal spectrum we find the journalists and scholars Charles Comte and Charles Dunoyer. In calling them "radical" liberals I wish to highlight three aspects of their liberalism. Firstly, that they had an interest in social and economic matters such as social class, conflict, and exploitation which distinguished them from the other groups of liberals in the Restoration period. It also suggests some affinity to other "radical" groups such as the Saint-Simonians and other early socialists who had similar concerns. Secondly, that they pushed their faith in the free market to the logical extreme of the purest laissez-faire. Their defence of the individual was such that they viewed any act of the state as coercive and a violation of individual rights. Hence, they wished to abolish the state, or at least see it wither away to virtually nothing - to "municipalise" the state as Dunoyer put it. Thirdly, as Cheryl Welch has argued the term "radical" in France had much the same meaning as "liberal" did in England in 1819-20 when another wave of liberal and nationalist revolutions broke out in Germany, Italy, Spain and France. According to Welch
The term radical was in fact used in France in 1819 and 1820 by the conservative press to designate the "extreme" liberalism that was sweeping Germany, Italy, and Spain, as well as France... The term, explicitly borrowed from the English, was one of vague abuse. For example, the Conservateur (October 1819) ... lumped together "visionaries, idéologues, reformers, radicals, fanatics." Radical failed to catch on in France until the early years of the July monarchy when it was adopted by republicans as a way of suggesting the need for complete reform of the system without using the prescribed term republic.[38]
To call the views of Comte and Dunoyer "liberal" is not inappropriate given the fact that they shared so many aspects of mainstream Restoration liberal thought, especially in the early phase of their journalistic activity from 1814-1817 when their defence of constitutionalism, the rule of law, trial by jury and most importantly freedom of speech, placed them squarely in the Constant camp of "independent" left liberals. The fact that they pushed their liberal views to the extreme of pure laissez-faire and the ultra-minimal state surely warrants the label of "radical" in this context. Further support for describing Comte's and Dunoyer's liberalism as "radical" comes from the fact that they were active in liberal circles frequented by Idéologues, Carbonari, and other assorted "radicals" as defined by Welch. She goes on to call the radical wing of the liberal movement "militant economic liberalism."[39] I believe the expression "radical liberal" is a more suitable one to describe the amalgam of political, economic, and social beliefs held by Charles Comte and Charles Dunoyer during the Restoration and I will use this expression in this way through this dissertation.
There have been a number of attempts to define the nature of French liberal thought in the Restoration and all of them have been incomplete and therefore unsuccessful. Historians have traditionally viewed Restoration liberals as preoccupied with political matters such as freedom of speech and constitutional limits on state power. This was considered understandable in the light of the post-revolutionary desire to achieve a stable and well-ordered political system on the one hand, and to avoid the complete restoration of Bourbon absolutism on the other hand. Recent work on Guizot and Constant for example has highlighted the liberal concern about representative government, the role of the press in a free society and other primarily political issues. The older as well as the more recent accounts of early nineteenth century French liberal thought are beset by a number of severe weaknesses, most notably concerning those who are regarded as belonging to the liberal movement, and the range of liberal issues discussed. Most previous histories of French liberal thought ignore the diversity of the spectrum of liberal thought mentioned above. The Doctrinaires, Benjamin Constant and Tocqueville are usually covered but the "radical" liberals like Say, Tracy, Thierry, Comte and Dunoyer are usually omitted or only briefly mentioned in passing. The neglect of the radical group within Restoration liberalism leads to the next major weakness in the historical accounts - the absence of discussion of the important social and economic dimension of liberal thought. By focusing on the "right" and the "independent" middle group of liberals Restoration liberalism, with a few notable exceptions, is seen primarily as a struggle for constitutional government and civil rights. However, when the radical wing is admitted to the discussion one is forced to confront the issues which concerned them - economic liberalism, class analysis, and theories of history.
For example, the classic account by Guido de Ruggiero, The History of European Liberalism (1927) contains only the briefest of discussions of Restoration liberalism from the almost exclusive perspective of constitutionalism and Constant's contribution to its development. Three pages only are devoted to other aspects of liberal thought - Thierry, Say, and even Dunoyer are mentioned for their contributions to historical analysis and economic liberalism but little discussion is offered. Since Ruggiero largely ignores the radical liberal wing he is able to falsely conclude that "(a)s is clear from this short account, French Liberalism was definitely conservative in tendency."[40] To support his case he even quotes a passage from Dunoyer's De la liberté du travail (1845) (hardly appropriate for a discussion of Restoration liberalism as it is a vastly expanded version of an early work which deals with the quite different debates of the mid-1840s with the focus now on the "social question" and the challenge to liberalism posed by socialism) on the harmful effects of trade unions and the Malthusian trap on the well-being of ordinary workers, thus ignoring all of Dunoyer's radical analysis of class exploitation, class conflict, and the withering away of the state. Roger Soltau in French Political Thought in the Nineteenth Century (1931) devotes only a short chapter to "Liberalism and the Monarchy" and criticises the liberals for being "narrow and limited", excessively "legalistic" and unable to rise above their fear of popular democracy.[41] Soltau's list of Restoration liberals is itself a narrow one, limited to de Staël and Constant, Guizot and the Doctrinaires, and Tocqueville. No mention is made of Jean-Baptiste Say, de Tracy, Thierry, or Comte and Dunoyer. René Rémond in The Right Wing in France (1954) scarcely mentions liberals during the Restoration at all. He discusses them only in the context of "Orleanist liberalism" and the coming to power of the Doctrinaires in the July Monarchy.[42] Even more recent surveys continue to present a one-sided view of Restoration liberal thought as primarily a political ideology. The collection of documents edited by Bramsted and Melhuish on Western Liberalism (1978) is weak on the Restoration liberals and the editors virtually ignore economic liberalism outside of Great Britain.[43] Much the same can be said for Louis Girard's and André Jardin's works from the mid-1980s.[44] In his review article on Restoration liberalism Laurence Jacobs properly chastises Girard and Jardin for this continuing vital oversight, reminding the reader with a restrained understatement that this is "particularly inappropriate for a period in which economic and political theory was so closely intertwined."[45] I hope that the truth of Jacobs' remark will be demonstrated in the very clear example of Comte's and Dunoyer's liberal thought in the Restoration period.
There have been very few exceptions to this unfortunate habit of neglecting the social and economic dimension of Restoration liberal thought. Éphraïm Harpaz is one of the few historians to have devoted considerable attention to the economic views of liberals like Comte and Dunoyer and the way in which their theory of industrialism influenced their theory of class structure, historical development and even aesthetic theory.[46] Harpaz has also written on the liberalism of the Mercure and Minerve journals between 1817-1820 and has justly devoted considerable space to the ideas of Constant and the other liberals who published in these magazines on foreign policy, theory of history, liberal aesthetics, literature, and art.[47] A handful of other historians have noted the fascinating connection between art, literature, and economic liberalism which existed in the Restoration. The best example of this is Fernand Rudé who has provided a comprehensive analysis of the connection between Stendhal's novels and travel stories and "la querrelle des industriels" between the socialist-inclined Saint-Simonians and the radical liberal Dunoyer in the mid-1820s.[48]
Stanley Mellon is another historian who has recognised the social dimension of Restoration liberal thought, in his case through a study of the considerable interest in historical studies and what we would now call sociology during the Restoration by liberals and non-liberals alike. In The Political Uses of History (1958) Mellon discusses the impact the Revolution and the Bourbon Restoration had on French historiography and the way in which the changed balance of social power after 1815 was reflected in the sociological and economic history written by Thierry, Comte, Dunoyer, and the sociological approach to economic theory taken by Jean-Baptiste Say.[49] For representatives of all political persuasions, the French Revolution was an event, whether a "rupture" or not, which had to be explained and which needed new concepts to do so. Two new concepts which Comte and Dunoyer used to great effect were "class" and "industry," both of which were to have an unimagined importance in nineteenth and twentieth century history. Behind the interest in class and industry, which modern social theorists now take for granted, was a new concern for the political and the social questions thrown up by the failure of the French Revolution to achieve its liberal ends. All the liberals were impressed with the dramatic politicisation of all aspects of life which took place during the revolution. Guizot particularly strove to redefine the boundaries between the political and the social spheres, thereby to take into account the new "pouvoir social."[50] Other liberals such as Comte and Dunoyer tried to eliminate the political altogether by expanding the economic and social realm in such a way as to do without "politics" or the "civitas" as such, thus pushing to an extreme the hostility to the state which has always existed within some versions of classical liberalism.
One of the more intriguing and stimulating attempts to draw attention to the long ignored social dimension to Restoration liberal thought has been by the Oxford political philosopher and historian, Larry Siedentop. His approach is to claim that French liberalism constitutes a "second tradition" within European liberalism.[51] Siedentop argues that the best known tradition of liberalism is that of the British, for whom social questions of class and exploitation were of little importance. The "second tradition," which coexisted somewhat uneasily with the British tradition, was French and very socially minded. Because liberalism emerged first in Britain and was more successful there than elsewhere in seeing its political and economic agenda achieved, liberalism came to be associated with its British form alone. However, the form of liberalism which emerged in France in the years immediately after the fall of Napoleon was very different from the liberalism which emerged from Britain, in his view. In a provocative essay, "The Two Liberal Traditions," Larry Siedentop argues that French liberalism developed into a different "tradition" of liberalism with quite different "modes of argument and themes" from what became known as the British mainstream of liberal thought. The very different concerns of French liberals from the late eighteenth to early nineteenth centuries, such as the source of political legitimacy and the nature of class structure and exploitation, which are more commonly associated with the development of socialist thought, meant that historians who went looking for a French version of British liberal thought never found it. In fact, Siedentop argues, important concepts such as political equality, the development of systematic theories of social change, the central rôle given to changing modes of production in influencing and changing social relations and ideas, and the critical concept of class in historical analysis "were introduced by French liberal thinkers, and only later adapted by socialist writers."[52]
It was the different historical experience of French liberals, Siedentop argues, which led them to ask different questions about political and economic power, thus making their form of liberalism different from their British colleagues. The economic crises of the ancien régime, the class conflict of the revolution, the rise of a military dictatorship, the return of the conservative and authoritarian monarchy and the slowness of industrialisation compared with Britain, naturally led French liberals to strike out in a different direction. Siedentop has another reason for the comparative neglect of French liberal contributions to social theory. This is due, in Siedentop's view, to the excessive attention given to the English liberal tradition - a tradition which tends to emphasise philosophy of mind and the sensationalist theory of knowledge. On the other hand, the French liberals of the early nineteenth century tended not to be philosophers of mind but rather historians, jurists, or political economists and journalists. The occupational background and intellectual interests of the French liberals was much closer to their eighteenth century counterparts, the Philosophes in France and the members of the Scottish Enlightenment. The liberals whom Siedentop identifies as the "originators of a sociological approach to political theory" included Madame de Staël, Benjamin Constant, the group known as the "Doctrinaires" which included Royer-Collard, Barante, and Guizot, and, most importantly, Alexis de Tocqueville.[53] However, as important as these liberals are in the development of a sociological and historical approach to political theory, there is another group of lesser-known liberal theorists of which Siedentop appears not to be aware, and yet which seems to be just as important, if not more so, in the development of such a sociological approach to political theory. This lesser-known group includes Jean-Baptiste Say, Charles Comte and Charles Dunoyer, the early, more liberal Henri Saint-Simon, and Augustin Thierry.
Larry Siedentop is not alone in seeing a different, more "sociological" form of liberalism emerge in France in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Shirley Gruner discusses the contribution of Comte and Dunoyer in their Restoration journals Le Censeur and Le Censeur européen to the development of this peculiarly French form of liberalism. Whereas Siedentop includes more conservative French liberals such as François Guizot and the other "Doctrinaires" in this new group, Gruner argues that Comte and Dunoyer should be placed in a political category of their own, due primarily to their view of class and the rôle of the mode of production in influencing political structures and behaviour. She even goes so far as to argue that the different theories of class analysis presented by Comte, Dunoyer and Thierry, on the one hand, and Guizot and the Doctrinaires on the other, are so radically different that the two groups logically cannot both claim to be "liberal." Gruner prefers to call the "Thierry-Le Censeur européen group" radical liberal and the Guizot group constitutional conservative.[54] Although I cannot go as far as Gruner in rejecting the title of "liberal" for Guizot and the Doctrinaires, she is correct in identifying the uniqueness of the radical liberalism of Comte and Dunoyer. However, I believe Gruner is at least partly correct and that the "Thierry-Le Censeur européen group" has a far stronger claim to being the originators of the kind of radical liberal social theory which Siedentop identifies with Guizot and the Doctrinaires and which he believes makes up the "second tradition" of nineteenth century liberalism.
Yet, in spite of the considerable contributions these recent works have made to our understanding of French liberalism during the Restoration, a proper appreciation of the "social dimension" is still lacking. An interesting assessment of how pervasive the social dimension was to writers in the Restoration is given by Donald Kelley, who has described it as "this apotheosis of the 'social'." Although Kelly is primarily interested in tracing what he calls the "endless fascination with the 'social'" in French legal theory and history, his assessment can be extended to include other disciplines such as history and economics.
There is one characteristic that not only binds together ideological extremes but also seems essential to the 'new history' that emerged in Restoration France. This was the endless fascination with the 'social' - with social questions and above all the Social Question. Before the Revolution, the focus was on political authority and political liberty; a generation later, interest had shifted markedly from such abstractions to more practical problems of society, especially property relations. Revolutionary legislation and the Napoleonic Code were reversed or modified; the social engineering of Jacobins and Bonapartists alike were looked on with suspicion as a means of controlling or directing social change; and publicists in many ways turned their attentions from constitutions to institutions, from rulers to 'the people.' In this apotheosis of the 'social,' historical scholarship tended to follow suit, and sometimes to take the lead.[55]
As this dissertation will endeavour to show, it is even more appropriate to describe the efforts of Charles Comte and Charles Dunoyer to formulate a liberal theory of class and industry as a similar preoccupation with the "social." It was by means of class theory and the concept of industrialism that the radical liberals Charles Comte and Charles Dunoyer, building upon the work of Benjamin Constant and Jean-Baptiste Say, were able to expand and enrich liberalism in the Restoration period by taking it beyond its traditional concern with constitutional and political matters.
One might conclude from the above discussion that it would be better for analytical purposes to divide up or compartmentalise liberalism into distinct varieties based upon whether or not the individual or group under discussion sees the world through political, economic or social "ideological lenses." This has been the practice in the past but it is a practice which I believe gives only a partial and misleading account of Restoration liberal thought for the reasons given above. To take André Jardin's Histoire du libéralisme politique (1985) as the most recent example, not only does his emphasis on "political liberalism" miss the richness of early nineteenth century thought with its combination of interest in economics, history, social structures, and literature, it also is misleading. Even with Guizot, perhaps the most "political" of French liberals, to concentrate on his political activity alone and to ignore his historical writing with its strong social and economic threads would be to fracture the integrity of Guizot's thought. Guizot the liberal historian of "civilisation" during the Restoration is just as important to our understanding of French liberal political thought as Guizot the conservative liberal statesman of the July Monarchy.
The same holds true for the study of French "economic liberalism". This has been a sadly neglected area with the main attention of scholars of the history of economic thought directed to the study of British political economy and the bulk of historians of French liberalism ignoring it completely. Outside of a few very much older works such as Raymund de Waha's Die Nationalökonomie in Frankreich (1910) and Albert Schatz's L'individualisme économique et sociale (1907) liberal economic thought in the Restoration has not been much studied.[56] Again the problem seems to be that the Restoration period is jumped over with scholars preferring to study the periods immediately before 1815 (the Physiocrats and the Ideologues[57]) and after 1830 (early French socialist thought, the debate about the social question and free trade in the 1840s). This neglect is surprising since no Restoration liberal who advocated "political" liberal policies such as constitutionalism or freedom of speech did not also favour to some extent "economic" liberal policies such as free trade, an end to government subsidies and monopolies and low taxes. Nor can one ignore the continuing influence of the economist Jean-Baptiste Say whose lectures at the Athénée were almost as popular as Guizot's history lectures in the mid-1820s. One need only look at the impact of economic liberalism on the writer Stendhal to see the pervasive impact of economic liberalism in the Restoration - if only to ridicule what he perceived to be the excesses of Dunoyer's theory of industrialism. Equally with the law-trained liberal journalists, Comte and Dunoyer, who reacted to the re-issue of Say's Treatise on Political Economy in 1817 with an expansion of their liberal Weltanschauung into a rich, radical and coherent liberalism which combined their previous constitutionalism along with an appreciation of the laissez-faire free market, and an economic interpretation of history and social structures which was to dominate their thinking for the rest of their lives. The best example of how Say's laissez-faire economics influenced Comte's and Dunoyer's liberalism is their attitude towards slavery in the late 1810s and early 1820s, which is the subject of a separate chapter in this dissertation.
Finally, one might want to refer to one of the strains of Restoration liberalism as "social" liberalism and the version of economic liberalism which evolved from it as "social economy" or "economic romanticism" as opposed to the more orthodox "political economy" of Adam Smith and Say.[58] This term is believed to have originated with the Idéologue Destutt de Tracy who preferred to use the term "social" rather than "political" to describe his economic views in volume four of his multi volume Éléments d'Idéologie (1817).[59] From Tracy the idea passed to Simonde de Sismondi who found it convenient to use at a time when he was experiencing a gradual disillusionment with laissez-faire liberalism in the immediate post-1815 period of economic dislocation following the defeat of Napoleon. Sismondi and the advocates of social economy differed from the orthodox political economists in arguing that economic theory should be more than merely the science of the creation of wealth (i.e. of production) but should also have a theory of just distribution so that all citizens might share in an improvement in "the pleasures of life which the wealth represents."[60] In the dire economic climate of the transition from the Napoleonic war economy to a peace-time economy, and the disruptions caused to artisan employment by the first wave of the industrial revolution Sismondi was concerned that the political economists had forgotten about human "happiness," especially that of ordinary working people, in their desire to see the wealth of nations increased.
Yet it would be a mistake to see in Sismondi's concern for the "poor" a complete rejection of economic liberalism or a precursor of mid-nineteenth century socialism, however much Marx may have been indebted to Sismondi for some of his insights. He was no Ricardian or even "Smithian" Socialist to use Noel Thompson's unfortunate terminology.[61] Sismondi questioned the classical political economists' definition of individual happiness, rejecting the narrow utilitarian conception because of doubts sown in his mind by Kantian notions of individual fulfilment.[62] This was something Mill was to do later in the century (inspired in part by another German liberal Wilhelm von Humboldt) but no one would question Mill's liberal credentials as they have done Sismondi's. He also worried about the unsolved problem of the business cycle, having read Say's essay on the plight of the English economy in 1814 and seen for himself the economic dislocations of continental Europe in the early years of the Concert of Vienna. However, for all his doubts about the free market economy, Sismondi was to remain very much within the liberal camp. His interest in social history and literature illustrate again Siedentop's important insight that French liberalism at this time was different from the English version. Sismondi was able to combine his interest in constitutional history and the need for laws to ensure freedom from all forms of constraint on individual action, with a broad understanding of European history as a struggle for liberty (typified by his interest in the history of the Italian city states). Even when he doubted the benefits of the early impact of the industrial revolution on the peasants of Tuscany, for example, he retained his very liberal belief that state enforced or guaranteed happiness was impossible and that much of the problem in England in the late 1810s was the result of state-enforced or subsidised industrialisation to favour the interests of organised producers at the expense of ordinary consumers. He believed the temporary dislocations of the transition to peace-time would soon pass and that the future dislocations to the peasant and artisans caused by the industrial revolution should not be made worse by government subsidies to industry as the following quote from an essay in 1834 attests:
Even before having recourse to such direct means of restraining industrialism, instead of continually exciting it, the aspect of society would change, if the government were persuaded that it was not advantageous, either to itself or to the nation it governs, to direct its efforts towards extending manufactures, to favour great manufactories at the expense of small trades, or the agglomeration of fortunes preferably to their division. The cessation of the indirect but daily encouragement which society gives to that system, whose dangers it is now experiencing, would perhaps suffice to restore the equilibrium, especially if, whenever a crisis occurred, an enlightened government should labour to diminish the glut instead of increasing it.[63]
The hostility of many more orthodox liberals like Say to the publication of Sismondi's Nouveaux principes d'économie politique (1819) should not distort the fact that Sismondi's basic liberal temperament and his interest in the structure of social orders, class analysis in history, the problems of agriculture, the history of literature in southern Europe, and the sociology of law and free constitutions places him very much in the liberal camp during the Restoration.[64]
Charles Dunoyer is sometimes linked to the Sismondian school of "social economy" partly because he used the term "social economy" in the title of a slightly expanded version of his 1825 work which appeared in 1830,[65] and partly because of his interest in class analysis, economic exploitation both by the state and other private vested interest groups, and other "social" concerns which are normally regarded as "socialist" (or proto-socialist) rather than "liberal." But like his radical liberal counterpart and contemporary in England, Thomas Hodgskin, the commitment to individual liberty, private property rights, voluntary market activity, minimal (or even no) government, and hostility to all state planning of the economy make the claim that they are "Ricardian" or "Smithian" socialists a nonsense. If the term "social economy" means anything in relation to the radical liberals of the Restoration it would suggest a total divorce of the political (i.e. the state) from the economic. Whereas some of the classical political economists favoured some admittedly minimal government intervention in the economy, radical liberals like Dunoyer and Hodgskin were hard-core advocates of pure laissez-faire. "Social" to them meant private, individual, voluntary economic exchange undertaken in the absence of government intervention, in contrast to "political" which meant state coercion, monopoly, regulation, taxation, conscription, war and other obligations of the citizen to obey the civitas. In this sense then "social economy" has some meaning - a theory of laissez-faire economics so devoid of politics that it borders on anarchism.
Before turning to a more detailed analysis of Comte's and Dunoyer's life and work before the 1830 Revolution brief mention should be made of the intellectual origins of Restoration liberal thought in general and the variety of intellectual currents which contributed to the formation of the radical liberalism of Comte and Dunoyer in particular. Further discussion of the intellectual influences on Comte and Dunoyer in the important year of 1817, when their liberalism changed from a mainstream constitutional and political liberalism to a more radical social and economic liberalism, will be discussed in more detail below. In general terms, when Comte and Dunoyer studied law together in the early years of the new century the heritage of liberal thought they could draw upon for inspiration was varied and somewhat fragmentary. It was varied because early nineteenth century French liberalism had roots in the rival traditions of eighteenth century English constitutional monarchism (as interpreted by Montesquieu), American republicanism (supported by Condorcet and La Fayette), Scottish economic and social theory (via Constant who studied in Scotland briefly), and domestic political and economic thought spanning the sixty odd years of the Enlightenment, the Revolution and the Napoleonic Empire. It was fragmentary for both political and ideological reasons. French liberalism had been unable to evolve gradually and continuously like its British or American counterparts because it had suffered at least three and perhaps four serious political defeats which necessitated the periodic dispersal of key figures and its ideological reformulation, including the defeat of Turgot's programme of deregulation of the French economy in the 1770s, the defeat of the Girondin faction by the Jacobins in 1793, and the purge and crackdown on the Idéologues by Napoleon in 1803. The Restoration of the Bourbon monarchy and the creation of the constitutional Charter in 1814-15 offered one more opportunity for liberalism to regather its forces and introduce some measure of liberal reform to France. However, Metternich's Carlsbad Decrees of 1819 and the assassination of the Duc de Berry in 1820 resulted in yet another political crackdown on liberalism, driving a number of liberals into exile (such as Comte and Dunoyer) or underground (the Carbonari movement). Only after the removal of the Bourbon monarchy in the 1830 Revolution and the creation of a regime more sympathetic and accessible to liberal ideas (the July Monarchy) did liberalism in France have the opportunity to become influential and to evolve into an orthodoxy.
In addition to the political setbacks which French liberalism had to endure it also was fragmented by differences in ideological composition, some of which were common to Western European liberalism as a whole; some of which were unique to French liberalism, all of which differences hindered the formation of unified body of liberal thought. The common ideological differences included such things as the debate over a natural rights vs a utilitarian defence of individual liberty; and support for democracy vs a restricted franchise. Peculiar French controversies within liberalism included the debate about the virtues of republicanism vs constitutional monarchism; the necessity of a religious-based liberalism vs anti-clericalism; and the historical and political significance of the French Revolution and Napoleon and the social classes which struggled to control the state. For liberals active after 1815 the particular historical tradition they favoured, the issues they took up, and the very language they adopted determined the type of "liberal" they became and located them on the liberal political spectrum.
In the case of Comte and Dunoyer, the main intellectual influences on them were both generational and the result of reading specific texts. Perhaps most important and immediate was the general political climate of the late-1790s and early 1800s (when they were teenagers at school and university) which was generally supportive of the so-called liberal "principles of 1789" and hostile to the Jacobin excesses of the Terror. They absorbed the liberalism of the moderate philosophes and their revolutionary heirs (Condorcet and the Girondins) and rejected Rousseauianism and Jacobinism, a not surprising combination in the more conservative period of the Directory. During the Consulate and early Napoleonic Empire they benefited from the Idéologue reforms of the French education system which entrenched liberal ideals in spite of Napoleon's eventual rejection of "ideology." As law students in Paris they absorbed the natural law tradition of Pufendorf and Grotius and ancient Roman republicanism, adapting both to fit the needs of early nineteenth century liberal constitutionalism at a time when Napoleon was undermining it through the weakening of parliament and the centralisation of political power in his own hands.
The threads linking the liberalism of the Montesquieu, the moderate philosophes, the Physiocrats, Condorcet, the Girondins, and the Idéologues with the liberals of the late Napoleonic Empire and early Restoration are yet to be fully delineated. A recent historian of French liberalism, Louis Girard, sees a continuity in French liberal thought across the revolutionary divide in terms of "generations."[66] The post-revolutionary generation of liberals are linked by temperament, ideology and personal contacts with the generations of liberals who went before. Girard calls the Idéologues the "first generation" who paved the way for the work of Constant and Staël, who in turn paved the way for the "aristocratic" liberals, the "constitutionals," the doctrinaires, and the "independents of the left" who were active during the late 1810s and 1820s. An interesting example of the linkages which tied revolutionary or Napoleonic liberalism with Restoration liberalism is that of the Idéologues Destutt de Tracy and Jean-Baptiste Say. Say was a disciple of Ideology who taught political economy at the Athénée. Charles Comte later became his son-in-law after seeking out Say for personal tuition in the intricacies of the new political economy.[67] The full impact of Say's work on Comte and Dunoyer will be discussed in more detail below. Tracy's salon was another important mechanism by which Napoleonic liberalism was transmitted to the post-revolutionary generation. As Cheryl Welch has shown, young liberals who were to play an important part in Restoration intellectual and political life (like Comte, Dunoyer, Thierry, and Stendhal) attended Tracy's salon and absorbed the liberal principles of the Idéologues.[68] Stendhal gives an amusing though harsh picture of the impact Tracy's salon had on "ultra liberals" like Dunoyer.
M. de La Fayette is extremely polite and quite affectionate towards the whole world, but he is "as polite as a King." That is what I said one day to Madame de Tracy who became angry, at least as angry as grace incarnate could become angry, but she understood perhaps from that very day onwards that the energetic simplicity of my remarks were not at all like the stupidities (bêtise) of M. Dunoyer for example. He was a courageous and honest (brave) liberal, today the morally upright prefect of Moulins, the best intentioned, perhaps the most heroic and the most stupid of the liberal writers... What I think of all this, I who am of their party, much could be said. The naive (gobe-mouche) admiration of M. Dunoyer, the editor of Le Censeur, and of 2 or 3 others of the same kind constantly envelops the arm chair of the general who has positioned his chair so that he can admire most easily at close range and with a twinkle in his eye the pretty shoulders of some young woman who has just entered the room, to the great scandal of his intellectual admirers. These poor "virtuous" men try to keep a straight face in the midst of their disgust and for this I mock them, thus scandalising my new friend.[69]
Although one should take Stendhal's cynicism, self-irony and mocking tone with a pinch of salt his picture of Dunoyer at the Idéologues salon is proof of the links which bound two different generations of liberal writers and activists.
A number of historians have interpreted the differences in political ideology and political interest separating the Restoration from the revolutionary period in terms of generational change. Jardin and Tudesq write in terms of three generations which they define as follows:
The oldest generation, 45 years old in 1815 and 60 in 1830, remained steeped in the classical tradition. It furnished the last, hairless rearguard at the battle of Hernani fought in the pit of the Théâtre français. These were the men at whom Préault shouted from the gallery: `To the guillotine, baldheads!' The next generation (20 to 45 years old in 1815) had been moulded chiefly by the events in which it had participated and still hankered after the glories of the Empire. The `children of this century', finally scarred by defeat and faced with faced with the prospect of limited opportunity, were a generation that questioned all received ideas as well as their elders, a generation that had its aggressive elements in the art students of `Jeune-France', but it was fundamentally a serious generation, eager to form its own judgement.[70]
Thus according to Jardin and Tudesq one should count Comte (33 in 1815 and 48 in 1830) and Dunoyer (29 in 1815 and 44 in 1830) as part of the second generation. However, this seems unreasonable as they could hardly be said, as radical liberals, to have "hankered after the glories of the Empire." Rather, they seem more at home with the "children of this century' with their questioning of all received ideas and their seriousness (as the above quote by Stendhal indicates). Another historian has described the small group of young men who burst onto the scene in the early years of the Restoration as the "generation of 1820."[71] They were a new generation who had been born just before the outbreak of the French Revolution. They came of age at a time when the gains of the Revolution were under threat, first of all by Napoleon and then by the return of the Bourbon monarchy. Robert Brown argues that the "first wave" of this generation, consisting "principally of Charles Comte, Charles Dunoyer, Augustin Thierry, Charles-Arnold Scheffer, and the others associated with them,"[72] were journalistically active in the period between 1814 and 1824 and were very self-conscious of themselves as being part of a transition period between the illiberalism of the Empire and the Restoration, and the introduction of a new, truly liberal age. Alan Spitzer, on the other hand, does not include Comte and Dunoyer in the "generation of 1820" which he defines as the cohort which was born between 1792-1803.[73] Comte and Dunoyer were born in 1782 and 1786 respectively. Spitzer prefers to link them to what he calls the "generation of Stendhal." In my view it seems nitpicking to exclude Comte and Dunoyer from Brown's "generation of 1820", as they rose to public prominence and produced their most important work in the period between 1815 and 1825. This surely gives them the right to included in the "generation of 1820."
According to the Warren Brown, the "generation of 1820" (Comte and Dunoyer included) endeavoured in their numerous writings to achieve a number of tasks: firstly, to understand the upheaval which the Revolution had caused in French society; secondly, to formulate a way in which this upheaval could finally be ended without losing the considerable gains which the Revolution had ushered in; thirdly, to map out a path which France might follow for the future. The first task led to the discovery of the need for history, that the only way to make sense of the Revolution was to study it historically by collecting documents, reading the memoirs of participants, and writing historical interpretations of the major stages through which the revolution passed. One need only mention the pioneeering work of François Guizot and Augustin Thierry, as well as the numerous historical review essays in Comte's and Dunoyer's journal to be aware of the enormous importance of history to "the generation of 1820."[74]
The second task led to the development of liberal constitutionalism of which Benjamin Constant is perhaps the leading figure. Comte and Dunoyer early in their careers contributed to the push for liberal constitutionalism by actively campaigning for freedom of speech, trial by jury and the rule of law in general and they became, in fact, quite notorious for their aggressive court cases in which they legally challenged the abuses by the new régime of these recently created freedoms. The hope of the liberal reformers was that the only way to temper the power of political authority, whether it be the military dictatorship of Napoleon or the attempt to restore the arbitrary authority of the crown and the privileges of the church and the nobility under the Restoration, was to follow the English and American model of a constitution. Thierry in particular wrote essays for Le Censeur in which the virtues (imaginary and real) and lessons for France of the Constitutions and Bills of Right of 1688-89 and 1787/1791 were discussed at length. But Brown is incorrect to argue that, even after the political crack-down in 1820 following the assassination of the Duke de Berry and the dispersal of the "first wave" of the 1820 generation, these events did not lessen their faith in the benefits of constitutionalism. Some may have been confident enough in their faith in constitutions and the balance of power to wait for someone like Louis Philippe to see their plans fulfilled, but Comte and Dunoyer were not. Under the influence of the political economy of Jean-Baptiste Say and the philosophical history of Benjamin Constant and François Montlosier, Comte and Dunoyer abandoned their faith in pure political and constitutional liberalism and sought answers to the problems facing Restoration France in a new social theory known as "industrialism."
The third task for the "generation of 1820" according to Robert Brown, was to map out a path which France could follow for the future and for many it was an "industrial" future. Brown and others have discussed the theory of "industrialism" which appeared at this time and which is best known in the formulation of Saint-Simon (under the influence of Augustin Thierry). However, the liberal version of "industrialism" which Comte and particularly Dunoyer formulated has not received the attention it merits. It emerged after Comte and Dunoyer came to the conclusion that there were more fundamental forces at work than the liberal constitutionalists acknowledged and which needed to be understood before a truly liberal society could be created. These forces included the nature of economic exploitation, the structure of class power, the influence of the economy and the mode of production on the development of political culture, and the evolution of society from one economic stage of development to another. Much of their theoretical work in the late 1810s and mid-1820s was devoted to an examination of these underlying forces at work in history and which still governed the fate of France in the post-revolutionary world. After discussing at considerable length how different classes had maintained their rule over the centuries, they turned to an examination of the future path they predicted France would take. For Dunoyer in particular, it was one of increasing depoliticisation of French society, a complete withering away of the state in fact, where all aspects of social and economic life would be regulated by the interplay of the forces of supply and demand through the free market. In such a radical market society there would be no need for state officials, regulatory bureaucrats, and the horde of privilege-seeking farmers, manufacturers, and monopolists who sought state protection for their inefficient concerns. Comte and Dunoyer in moments of liberal rapture even went so far as to suggest the possibility of a stateless society in which even the limited functions of police services and military defence would either be unnecessary or would be taken over by the market - a theme which the editor and economic theorist Gustave de Molinari developed with some sophistication some years after Comte and Dunoyer suggested it.[75]
It is the aim of this dissertation to show how two important members of this "generation of 1820", Charles Comte and Charles Dunoyer, developed a sophisticated and coherent sociological and historical approach to liberal political theory, which Siedentop has identified as the "second liberal tradition." This "peculiar" liberalism which Comte and Dunoyer developed during the Restoration, with its interesting blend of political constitutionalism, laissez-faire economics, historically and socially focused interest in class and economic development, will be explored in more detail in the following chapters. The methodology adopted in the pursuit of this goal is part biography of Comte and Dunoyer and part history of ideas. It is my conviction that the two approaches are mutually supporting and add to our understanding rather than detract from it. Some purists, as Frank E. Manuel has aptly put it, may not recognise the importance of studying the individuals behind the ideas expressed on the page of a book or a newspaper. My defence is the one he gave in the preface to The Prophets of Paris:
Since the book belongs to the genre known as the history of ideas, purists may bridle at the intrusion of flesh-and-blood personages and occasional reflections on economic and social reality. The tracing of disembodied moral and philosophical traditions, an art which has many eminent practitioners, is not my method. I still feel the need to introduce the bearer of the idea even when he disturbs the flow of abstractions. Thus the attempt has been made to combine portraiture with historical commentary.[76]
I think this approach works well in the case of Comte and Dunoyer. As will be shown in the chapters to follow, their political activity in opposing the restrictions placed on free activity during the Restoration, even with Comte his marriage to the daughter of his intellectual mentor Jean-Baptiste Say, and the implications of their thinking on the nature of individual liberty and the free market which they pursued in their journal and their books, are all intimately related.