Table of Contents

• A. COMTE AND DUNOYER AS POLITICAL JOURNALISTS - THE FOUNDATION OF LE CENSEUR
• B. THE PROBLEM OF SLAVERY IN LE CENSEUR
• C. THE DISCOVERY OF CLASS THEORIES OF HISTORY AND POLITICAL ECONOMY DURING THE SUSPENSION OF LE CENSEUR
• D. THE RETURN TO JOURNALISM: THE CREATION OF LE CENSEUR EUROPéEN

Before turning to the careers of Comte and Dunoyer as liberal journalists and arch-critics of the newly restored Bourbon monarchy it is necessary to briefly discuss their lives prior to the events of 1814-15 which thrust them into the public arena. It seems appropriate to begin with Charles Comte since he was born some four years before Dunoyer, but unfortunately the details of his early life are more obscure than for his colleague. It is not until their paths cross, first at law school in Paris (most likely in about 1807) and then as joint editors of Le Censeur and Le Censeur européen during the Restoration, that information about Comte's activities becomes more abundant. As is so often the case with early nineteenth century liberals, one learns most about Comte's life from the eulogies given at his funeral by friends and colleagues who had known him well. One of these was Mignet, that indefatigable eulogiser of departed liberals, who delivered a speech before the Academy of Moral and Political Sciences on the occasion of the tenth anniversary of the death of Charles Comte.[77] In this speech Mignet pointed out that Comte's significance to nineteenth century French liberalism lay in his key role in linking the political liberalism of the Enlightenment and the liberal constitutional phase of the Revolution with the new economic liberalism of Jean-Baptiste Say to form a richer and more complex form of liberalism.

...M. Charles Comte, whose generosity of thought and energy of activity approaches that of the thinkers of the previous century and the participants in the Revolution, ... from 1804 onwards, with the ardour of youth, followed a course of action which would have tired or mislead others but which he pursued with strength of purpose and resolution for as long as he lived. He was an outspoken adversary of military power under the Empire, a courageous defender of popular institutions under the Restoration. He proved himself to be an indomitable polemicist in the press whose independence he, perhaps more than any one else, helped re-establish. He was an unyielding theorist in his publications where the philosophy of the 18th century was combined the science of the 19th and he linked in some way the generation which engineered the revolutionary conquest of the social rights of our country to the generation which brought about the establishment of its liberties under the law (libertés légales).[78]

As will be shown in the following chapters Comte's work confirms Mignet's assertion. His work on the economic and social consequences of slavery and other forms of class exploitation pushed his liberalism far beyond the traditional liberal defence of limited government, constitutionalism and civic rights such as free speech.

François-Charles-Louis Comte was born on 25 August 1782 in Sainte-Énimie, a small village in the department of Lozère, into a bourgeois family which owned a modest amount of land. During the turmoil of the early 1790s Comte was privately educated by a priest, much like Stendhal's character Julien Sorel in the novel Rouge et Noir, before attending one of the new central schools at Mende. Not much is known of Comte's activities during the Directory and early Empire. However, Mignet does note that Comte, at the age of 22, refused to vote in favour of the establishment of Napoleon's Empire in the referendum of 1804, thus indicating his opposition to arbitrary state power which was to be the hallmark of his intellectual and political career. According to Mignet, Comte believed that the Consulate was stable politically and that the power of Napoleon as Consul was more than sufficient. Any vote for Napoleon as Emperor, Comte thought, only indicated the political immaturity of the French people and their willingness to enslave themselves to a tyrant. Although Comte's anti-Napoleonic protest was without effect at the time, it shows how early in Napoleon's reign Comte had reservations about his use of state power. He was to give voice to similar reservations ten years later in a quite different context when the liberal Charter was prepared and Napoleon's reign appeared to be at an end.[79]

Two years after the referendum Comte went to Paris in order to study law. He graduated as an advocate but did not go to the bar, preferring instead to take part in editing the collection of decrees being published by M. Sirey on the jurisprudence and regulatory powers of the supreme court. In addition to his legal studies and the editing of dry legal documents, Comte tried composing poetry and even a drama on the expulsion of the Roman tyrant King Tarquinius. It is not surprising that Comte was attracted to the story of the expulsion of King Tarqinius and his family. Tarquinius had been a bloody and violent ruler, attributes which were shared by his son Sextus who raped Lucretia. The rape of Lucretia was the excuse for Tarquinius' opponents to expel the entire family from Rome. Given Comte's political views, it would not have been out of character for him to liken Emperor Napoleon to King Tarquinius and to imagine the people rising up to expel the dictator.[80] More important for Comte's future career than his unsuccessful literary activities was the fact that during his law studies (most probably in 1807) he met Charles Dunoyer, who was also a student at the law school, thus beginning a partnership which was to last until their forced separation in the early 1820s when the censors forced their journal to close for good.

Much more is known about the early life of Dunoyer, who has attracted more scholarly attention than his older friend and colleague. This attention is due to the fact that Dunoyer lived long enough to pursue a political and scholarly career during the July Monarchy and even well into the Second Empire.[81] Barthélemy-Charles-Pierre-Joseph Dunoyer was born at Carennac in the old vicomté of Turenne on 20 May 1786 and died in Paris on 4 December 1862.[82] Like Comte, Dunoyer had a comfortable family background but, unlike Comte, his family had noble pretensions.[83] Dunoyer at first followed family tradition by using the more aristocratic-sounding name of "Dunoyer de Segonzac" until 1803, after which he took the untitled name of Dunoyer, perhaps an indication of his growing liberal sentiments which spurned such pretensions. Also like Comte, Dunoyer was privately educated by priests until he too went to one of the new central schools in Cahors. Dunoyer was nominated by the prefect of his department to attend the University of Jurisprudence in 1803, which had just recently been founded in Paris, and then the School of Law in Paris, where he met Charles Comte in 1807.

As young law students who had absorbed the liberal principles of 1789, Charles Dunoyer and Charles Comte reacted strongly to the creation of the Empire under Napoleon. In words reminiscent of Benjamin Constant's attack on Napoleon's "usurpation" and "domination" Dunoyer described the feelings of the two young liberals in the early years of the Empire as one of total aversion and disgust for the militarism and bureaucracy which enabled ambition, vested interest and nepotism to run rampant.

We both felt a strong and powerfully motivated aversion for military power which seemed to us to be animated by no grand principle (idée) but only a concern for advancement in the public service. From top to bottom it appeared only to be the putting into practice of all the self-seeking and ambitious passions which the revolution had awakened. In our eyes this quite material domination was worthy of the utmost contempt. We were especially irritated by the state of suffocation into which all individual existence had fallen. Whatever value one might have it was impossible to count for anything outside of the established domination, a domination which had absorbed everything, that each day got worse and more widespread, a domination which was incessantly victorious abroad and which came back to impose on the country all the burdens which it had imposed on the conquered nations of Europe.[84]

After having completed his law studies Dunoyer pursued a brief career as a translator of Byzantine legal documents and, under family pressure, unsuccessfully sought a position as an auditor at the Conseil d'État. However, in 1809 his family was able to arrange a position for him as a private secretary to a family friend, Julien Bessière, who was the intendant général in Navarre (1810-11) and then intendant in Holland. It was thus in the service of the Empire that Dunoyer observed at first hand the disastrous consequences of Napoleon's domination of Europe and the eventual occupation and humiliation of France.[85] He also witnessed the brutal police methods of the Imperial government in repressing dissent in Holland, one of the factors which led him, like many other liberals, to turn against the Empire as a travesty of the principles of 1789. When Napoleon's Empire collapsed in 1814 Dunoyer was twenty seven years old. If his family connections should have inclined him towards welcoming the return of the Bourbon monarchy, his legal and political views strongly inclined him towards the opposite of what his family stood for, that is for liberalism and the rights of man. During the first days of the Restoration Dunoyer dutifully joined a group of young aristocrats who had joined a National Guard cavalry unit which served as a guard of honour for the Comte d'Artois, Lieutenant General of the Kingdom, when he entered Paris ahead of his brother, the restored King Louis XVIII. Unlike his colleagues in the honour guard, who no doubt had been led to expect a political reaction to accompany the Restoration of the monarchy, Dunoyer initially welcomed the new régime with the quite opposite hope that it would introduce a truly liberal constitutional monarchy. Perhaps he dreamed that Louis was really William of Orange and 1814 was in fact 1688. Dunoyer's hopes for the liberal nature of the new régime, based as he and others had hoped on the liberal Charter drawn up by Benjamin Constant, were shattered by Louis' declaration preceding the promulgation of the Charter of 1814. Dunoyer found Louis' declaration insufficiently liberal and responded with a public attack on the weakness of the royal promises and a defence of liberal constitutionalism in a pamphlet which he had the temerity to distribute even in the Tuileries Palace itself.[86]

A. COMTE AND DUNOYER AS POLITICAL JOURNALISTS - THE FOUNDATION OF LE CENSEUR

Comte and Dunoyer first came to public attention when they joined the ranks of the opposition liberal press and began publishing critiques of the arbitrary actions of the restored Bourbon monarchy in a weekly magazine they called Le Censeur. Comte founded the weekly journal alone on 12 June 1814 during the first Restoration, only three days after the promulgation of the Charter.[87] After the appearance of the second issue he welcomed as joint editor his old friend from his law student days, Charles Dunoyer. Comte had two stated purposes in starting a new magazine. The first was to oppose the expected reactionary politics of the Bourbons. The second reason was his disillusionment with the existing newspapers because they refused to treat the important issues of the Restoration with the seriousness he believed they merited. The purpose of Le Censeur was to fill this void and to provide the proper, critical and searching analysis of events which Frenchmen needed in these difficult times. Comte summed up his intentions in founding the new journal in the following passage:

Newspapers could be of great utility, but the great importance which they attach to simple literary discussions, the indifference they have for anything which smacks of legislation, and the habit they have acquired of adulation (of the government), prevents one from hoping that they will busy themselves in enlightening citizens of their true interests. What they do not do, I propose to undertake.[88]

Like many liberals Comte had little reason to expect that the restored monarchy would abide by the liberal guarantees of the Charter. Human nature and political experience led him to believe that the King and his aristocratic advisers would attempt to undo the Charter and to return as soon as possible to the practices of the ancien régime. Thus he thought the government needed a "censor" of its own which would expose and condemn any attempt to weaken the provisions of the Charter.[89] The name Le Censeur has other meanings which Comte may have been trying to express. It could be a play on words mocking the illiberal censorship laws of the Restoration[90] or perhaps it could be a reference to Jeremy Bentham's "rational censor" of the laws. Comte much admired the work of Bentham whose works[91] he had closely studied whilst a law student in Paris and whom he probably met when he was mixing in Benthamite circles when he was in exile in England in the early 1820s. In his Traité de législation (1827) Comte acknowledged his debt to Bentham's contribution to analysing and reforming the laws and wished to model his own critique of moral philosophy and legislation on the example provided by Bentham in the area of legal theory and the political economists in the area of the economy. Comte began work on his magnum opus in the last years of the Empire but he set it aside to take up a full-time career as a political journalist during the Restoration. It was not until his exile first in England and then in Switzerland that he was able to finish it and have it published in 1826-7. Comte readily accepted Bentham's method of analysis and rather excitedly compared it to an Archimedean lever which magnified the power of a weak man to shift heavy stones.

If I had had to count only on my own power I would not have had the courage to undertake such an enterprise. Although (the science of) legislation is far from being as advanced as other sciences, much has already been done. Some branches of this science have already made such great progress that there remains little to add and the method which has served to bring enlightenment to it can readily enlighten those areas which are less advanced. We owe to two scholars (savants), Bentham and Dumont (whose names are impossible to separate), the fact that we have at the same time both a better method of reasoning and many examples of its successful application. On the other hand, the progress of political economy and the research done on the causes of the increase and decrease of populations in all countries has given us the means to resolve a number of important questions. Finally, a good method (of analysis) gives the mind such a power that it can to some degree replace (intellectual) talent. It is a lever which gives a weak man who uses it a power greater than the strongest man who has no similar tool.[92]

Since Comte had been working on his treatise on legislation for a couple of years before he launched the magazine Le Censeur, it may not be too much to expect him to have been familiar with Bentham's distinction between "the censor" and "the anarchist" and to have had this in mind when he named his magazine. Bentham used the distinction in an amusing and scathing attack on natural rights called "Anarchical Fallacies: Being an Examination of the Declaration of Rights issued during the French Revolution."[93] According to Bentham the "rational censor," wishing to reform the laws, does so only after an exhaustive study and codification of the existing laws, whereas the "anarchist," the "man of violence," like the French revolutionaries, denies the validity and justice of the law in question and calls upon mankind to rise up and to resist or overturn it.[94] How far Comte agreed with Bentham is hard to say. He would certainly have wished to use the magazine to analyse unjust laws rationally and carefully and to urge their repeal. However, the readiness of both Comte and Dunoyer to challenge the true censors in court and to interpret the law in such a way as to avoid the intention of the law makers suggests that they behaved much more like Bentham's "anarchist" than his "censor." Nevertheless, Comte's interest in Bentham's writings on legislation suggests that he might have intended to imply their role as a "rational censor" in the uncertain political climate of the Restoration.

In the first issue of Le Censeur Comte challenged two acts of the new government he believed were undermining the liberal intention of the Charter. One concerned some ordinances requiring all citizens to observe certain aspects of the Catholic religion and to respect the Sabbath and religious holidays, a measure which Comte believed contradicted the freedom of religion guaranteed by the Charter. The second concerned freedom of the press. Censorship had been reestablished by a royal ordinance in 1814 following a technical interpretation of the provisions of the Charter dealing with freedom of the press. Comte argued that this ordinance was illegal and refused to obey it, preferring instead to challenge the state to close his journal down and make a test case of the legality of his actions. He successfully snubbed the authorities until such time as they closed the loophole in the law.[95] Only after a further ordinance had confirmed the legality of the royal ordinance was Le Censeur finally censored. The editors were again able to evade this new development by changing the format of their magazine to a hard bound volume of more than 320 pages and the frequency of its appearance. They were thus able to continue to publish their criticism of the régime uncensored.[96]

Comte's manoeuvring with the censor was interrupted when Napoleon returned to power. Without hesitation he wrote a scathing attack on Napoleon the dictator who, for fifteen years, had trampled on French liberties. In De l'impossibilité d'établir une monarchie consitutionnelle sous un chef militaire, et particulièrement sous Napoléon[97] Comte reminded the public of the overweening ambition of Napoleon and reminded the army of its legal responsibilities under the Charter, in particular its duty to defend constitutional liberties and "la patrie," rather than to swear allegiance to any individual general. In a particularly sharp aside he remarked on the absurdity of Napoleon's aspirations to establish a constitutional régime at the point of a gun. Given the speed with which Napoleon was able to return to the throne in 1815 suspicions were naturally aroused that he must have had an organised conspiracy working on his behalf. Legitimists of course assumed that the most outspoken critics of Louis XVIII and defenders of the unreformed army, which included Comte and Dunoyer, must have been part of this conspiracy. In addition, Comte's successful defence of one of Napoleon's generals Excelmans in the court of Lille[98] and his ironic remarks about the state of the army and the possibility of a return by Napoleon in his pamphlet fed legitimist fears of a such a conspiracy. Thus a legitimist newspaper, La Quotidienne, accused Dunoyer and Comte of collaborating in Napoleon's landing at Cannes (1 March 1815). This assumption was utterly absurd given the tradition of hostility and opposition to Napoleon both Comte and Dunoyer showed throughout the Empire from an early age. Their liberal and constitutional views make it even more unlikely that they would place any faith in a return of Napoleon to the throne. In order to clear their names of any suspicion of having assisted in Napoleon's return from Elba, Comte and Dunoyer attempted to sue the legitimist paper for libel. They instigated proceedings on 19 March 1815 on the eve of Napoleon's entry into Paris, but their suit was interrupted by the unexpected course of events. The rather timid judges were not willing to accept the case because, in the uncertain situation where it was not clear whether Napoleon or Louis XVIII would win power, they did not want to offend either contender for the throne. They therefore took the traditional bureaucratic solution to a difficult problem and simply postponed the suit until matters had settled down.

After Napoleon's entry into Paris on 20 March 1815 and the start of the Hundred Days of his "restoration," one of Napoleon's ministers, the duc d'Otrante, attempted to persuade Dunoyer and Comte to support openly the new régime with the rather spurious argument that it had been "transformed by liberty."[99] Not surprisingly Comte and Dunoyer did not believe that Napoleon had been suddenly transformed into a supporter of liberal freedoms, given Napoleon's previous conduct towards the limited constitutional freedoms of the Empire. Dunoyer and Comte declined the Duke's offer, saying in their provocative style that if the régime were truly liberal they would be free to pursue their independent course as they had done under the Bourbons. The duc d'Otrante then attempted to intimidate Dunoyer and Comte by seizing the next edition of Le Censeur. Dunoyer and Comte were able to use the laws to their own advantage by demanding that the government pay them restitution for their confiscated property as required under the Charter. The next step in the government's attempt to tame the liberal opposition was to force Dunoyer and Comte to revive their libel suit against the Quotidienne, which accused them of being accomplices in the revolution of 20 March, in an effort to embarrass them by discrediting their credentials as liberal opponents of Napoleon. However Dunoyer and Comte were still adamant in their wish to continue the libel suit but for reasons quite different to that of the government. They argued before the politically sensitive judges that Napoleon's latest revolution had not changed their opinion of his dictatorial régime and that they still wished to sue those who had falsely accused them of supporting Napoleon's return to power.[100]

Comte's and Dunoyer's political opposition to Napoleon's monarchical style of rule led to the suppression, on the orders of Fouché, of the fifth issue of Le Censeur, which had appeared during the Hundred Days.[101] The reason why Napoleon and his censors might find their journal offensive can be found in the strong defence, not so much of the restored Bourbon monarchy per se, but of the possibilities for liberal constitutionalism offered by the Charter (or "la véritable liberté" as they put it) which they supported soon after Napoleon returned to power. Comte and Dunoyer believed that an acceptable constitution recognised by the crown was preferable to a less acceptable constitution imposed by the return of a military dictator, even if the dictator was a popular one. They expressed this opinion in no uncertain terms, thus again incurring the wrath of the censors:

We believe that a tyrant elected by the people would be much less respectable than a good king placed on the throne by the grace of god. We believe that an acceptable constitution, which had been conceded and decreed (octroyée) by the prince, would be quite preferable to a less good constitution, which had been considered and accepted on the champ de mai. In a word, we would like to attempt to prevent the people from being deceived by the attraction of certain appearances, by the charlatanism of certain words and finally to make the people understand, if that is possible, what true liberty is.[102]

When the fifth volume of Le Censeur was seized Comte went immediately to the office of the prefect of police to demand the return of the confiscated edition. He stated with some youthful liberal swagger that

If we have reasoned badly it is necessary for you to refute us. If we are guilty of any crime it is necessary for you to punish us. The minister seems to think that his threats will have a greater effect on us than his offer (to cooperate). He is deceiving himself. Under the previous regime we laughed at their swords. Today I swear to you that I will equally mock the bayonets of Bonaparte. "So, you want to be a martyr," replied the prefect. I am not seeking it, but I do not fear it.[103]

The distribution of the fifth volume was interrupted briefly by this suspension but it proved to be only temporary because Constant, with his courage in facing government officials, and Carnot, with his influence in government circles, were able to persuade Baron Legoux, the procureur général, to withdraw the order banning the issue. Comte's audacity resulted in the return of the seized volume and a renewed determination to continue the criticism of Napoleon's régime in future volumes of Le Censeur.[104]

The magazine did not reappear until the return of Louis XVIII,[105] at which time Dunoyer and Comte were placed on a list of those opponents of the régime who were to be banished. They were saved at the last minute by the intervention of Prince Talleyrand, who was to be a colleague of theirs in the Academy of Moral and Political Sciences some seventeen years later. Although Talleyrand was able to save the two liberal journalists this time, their continued criticism of the régime led to another confrontation with the monarchy. The seventh issue was once again censored by Fouché (this time acting on behalf of the restored Bourbon monarchy) in September 1815.[106] The reason for the censorship of the seventh volume was that it contained a report of the debates in the Chamber of Deputies, including the protest at the closure of the Chamber by the occupying Prussian troops and another report on the excesses of the royalist reaction in the south of France. The arbitrary nature of the confiscation led Comte and Dunoyer to conclude that they had exhausted the patience of the régime and should cease their regular publication of Le Censeur for a while.[107]

B. THE PROBLEM OF SLAVERY IN LE CENSEUR

In addition to the interest in political and constitutional matters which had taken up most of the pages of Le Censeur, Comte and Dunoyer did address other issues before the suspension of the journal. One of the more important of these was the question of slavery, which was to become a major interest to both Comte and Dunoyer in their latter writings after their discovery of political economy and class theories of history. For the moment, their interest in slavery was essentially moral and political in keeping with the overall tone of their liberalism at this time. They rejected slavery as evil because it violated the natural right to liberty which all individuals had and was a political problem in the early years of the Restoration because of the pressure being placed on Britain to suppress the slave trade to the French colonies. Dunoyer in particular wrote on slavery in Le Censeur in connection with the issue of British foreign policy.[108] His interest in the issue of slavery and the slave trade came about from the reviews he did of French translations of pamphlets published by the British abolitionists and reports of debates in the House of Commons. At the time the negotiations for the Treaty of Paris in May 1814 were taking place, the House of Commons was debating the suppression of the slave trade and the handing back of French colonies taken in the war against Napoleon. Like the French abolitionists of the 1820s who were to be active in the Society for Christian Morality, Dunoyer was puzzled by the lack of interest shown by the French public in the question of slavery.[109] The answer lay partly in the activity of the British government. Since the suppression of the slave trade was official British policy, French patriots felt obliged to oppose whatever was in the interests of the British Empire. French cynics might argue the British supported or at best tolerated the trade in slaves for centuries while it was in their interests and now that they perceived their interests in a different way the British wanted to impose a similar view on the French. Dunoyer was critical of the oscillations in the French attitude towards the British which made a considered reaction to the slave trade difficult. From an attitude which Dunoyer described as "the ridiculous infatuation which we had for them (the British) before the revolution" the French public now went to the opposite extreme of opposing a particular policy merely because their recent enemy supported it. Another reason for the French public to doubt the motives and humanitarianism of the British in wanting to end the slave trade was their memory of the behaviour of the British army in the treatment of French prisoners of war. Dunoyer believed that the poor treatment given to French prisoners in the frightful conditions of the convict ships led many to question the humanitarian credentials of the British with respect to the blacks.[110]

One of the more important British abolitionist pamphlets to be reviewed by Dunoyer in Le Censeur was Thomas Clarkson's Essay on the Impolicy of the Slave Trade.[111] According to Leonard Liggio, Clarkson had some contact with French liberals and Dunoyer was influenced by him only indirectly through their friendship with the leading French abolitionist, the Abbé Grégoire. Clarkson had come to Paris in the summer of 1789 to assist the Société des Amis des Noirs in their work on behalf of the abolitionist cause, whose French supporters included Lafayette and Condorcet. Clarkson's major works on the slave trade had been translated into French and he had spent some time speaking with sympathetic Deputies. He was so successful that he was able to convert Grégoire to a more radical abolitionist position. He later returned to Paris in August 1814 to attempt to help remedy the lack of interest expressed by the French public in the issue of slavery. Clarkson met with Grégoire again in order to arrange for the translation of more British abolitionist pamphlets and Liggio suggests that this is when Dunoyer may have met Clarkson.[112] In his long review of Clarkson's book Dunoyer expressed horror that anyone professing to be rational could defend the existence of slavery and then proceeded to attack some of the common arguments put forward by defenders of slavery. In an emotional passage he exclaimed:

What! You see men violently torn away from their country, from their family, from their habits, from their affections; packed like animals, chained together in irons, in horrible prisons; in this state, and nearly deprived of air and of food, they are forced to undertake a voyage of several months; sold to colonists sometimes more barbarous than their ravishers; condemned to work all their lives harder than our galley-slaves, without any wages but whip blows, without consolation except contempt, without hope (other) than of a quick death, and you ask if humanity suffers from this kind of unhappiness! What! the laws divine and human proscribe slavery in metropolitan France, and you doubt if it ought to be allowed in the colonies! Our laws punish the Frenchman who voluntarily alienates his liberty, and you do not know if it ought to support the burden of ending it among Africans.[113]

Following this characteristic outburst, Dunoyer attacked some of the most common arguments put forward by defenders of slavery. It should be remembered that at this time Comte and Dunoyer had not yet fully digested the significance of Say's political economy. Their liberalism was still primarily moral and political rather than economic (or industrial as they liked to term it) as it was to become increasingly after 1817. Thus Dunoyer's arguments against slavery do not yet include any discussion of the relative profitability of slave and free labour which was to dominate their later work, although he is certainly aware of some economic arguments against slavery. To those who argued that the Europeans were doing the blacks a favour by removing them from a worse form of servitude in Africa, Dunoyer dismissively responded with the question "Why does not one see in Europe nor in any colonies anyone who voluntarily left Africa?"[114] To those who argued that slavery was the normal result of internal African wars and that the Europeans merely purchased the tragic results of these conflicts, Dunoyer responded by saying that the reverse was the case: the African princes engaged in wars precisely in order to acquire slaves for the European traders. "Truly do you purchase only the men destined to death or condemned to slavery? How many free men do you not receive from the hands of violence or of avarice?"[115] Those who argued that the Europeans exercised a civilising function on barbaric savages, Dunoyer also summarily dismissed as hypocrites. The very process of acquiring slaves brutalised the Europeans and was certainly no example to set "uncivilised" Africans. To those who drew upon the precedent of the ancient Greek and Roman slave societies, what Dunoyer called disparagingly the so-called "civilisation" of the Romans, he reminded his readers that the ancestors of the ancient Greeks had at one time been more barbarous than the blacks of Senegal, yet they had been able to develop a wonderfully developed and civilised culture in spite of being conquered and enslaved by the Romans. What might the blacks in West Africa have achieved, Dunoyer asked, if they had been left in peace in their own homeland by the Europeans, whom he compared with "ravaging wolves" and "Ferocious beasts."?[116]

Although Dunoyer admired some aspects of the British concern for the welfare of black slaves he also shared some of the Anglophobia of late Imperial and early Restoration France, even if his version of Anglophobia was limited to attacking the activity of the British state and navy rather than its people.[117] Dunoyer concluded his review of Clarkson with the observation that the British change of heart on the slave trade was a combination of the influence of abolitionist humanitarianism and imperial self-interest. He thought that England "gives the world without it costing it anything" and that its greater imperial interests would be served by forcing France and the other European nations to abandon the slave trade, irrespective of the morality of doing so. It was a mistake, Dunoyer believed, for the defenders of slavery to advocate the continued transportation of expensive slaves across the Atlantic. With the British able to seize easily the French colonies at any time, it was foolish to continue to "invest" in them in this manner. If France wished to retain the colonies Dunoyer's solution was to free the slaves so as to give them a personal stake in defending the islands from the British Navy.[118]

Dunoyer's next opportunity to discuss the problem of slavery enabled him to respond to some of the economic issues of coerced labour, whether of serfs or black slaves. In a review of Grégoire's book De la traite et de l'esclavage des noirs et des blancs; par un ami des hommes de toutes les couleurs,[119] Dunoyer noted that one of the key arguments of the defenders of slavery was that Europeans could not physically cope with labouring in the tropics and that therefore blacks from Africa were needed if the colonies were to have a labour force at all. Dunoyer rejected this argument for a variety of reasons which reveal an interesting divergence from the views of his future mentor Jean-Baptiste Say who, although he rejected slavery, subscribed to this particular argument.[120] Dunoyer began by reminding his readers that the slaves' physical condition was actually very poor because of the trauma of the "Middle Passage" and the bad food and conditions to which they were subjected on the plantations. They could not compare, he thought, in physical stamina to the healthy and vigorous European farmers. He cited the evidence of a planter who argued that the enthusiasm of the white farmers caused them to exhaust themselves in the heat of the tropics, whereas the blacks only worked as little as possible thus conserving their strength. This a curious defence for a planter to use since it was one of the main arguments of the abolitionists that slave labour was less productive than free labour for this very same reason - the greater capacity for work of free labourers, whether white or black, who spur themselves on in the expectation of reaping the financial rewards of their hard work. However, at this stage of the argument the question has more to do with racial characteristics than with the relative efficiency of free or slave labour. Dunoyer easily was able to find reports, such as Drouin de Bercy's, which dealt with the use of European labour in Santo Domingo and suggested the opposite, that a white farmer with motivation and the correct tools could outperform a black forced to labour for the plantation owner. Bercy discussed the capacity of the whites to work in the tropics where it was claimed that settlers

indentured for thirty-six months, who were whites, did, in the origin of the establishment of Saint-Domingue, what today the Blacks do; even in our days, nearly all the inhabitants of the dependency of Grand-Anse, who in general are soldiers, workers or poor Basques, cultivate their farms with their own hands. Yes, I sustain it, and I had the experience: the whites are able to labour in the plains from six in the morning until nine, and from four in the afternoon until the sun set(s). A white with his plough will do more work in one day than fifty Blacks with the hoe, and the earth will be better worked.[121]

Dunoyer was also keen to point out that it was not just Europeans who had the capacity for industrious labour. Not only did all mankind have this capacity for work if only they were free to exercise it, but socially useful free labour was in fact the basis for social relations per se. Slavery had two serious negative effects in Dunoyer's view: it had the damaging social consequence of inhibiting much useful industrious activity and secondly, on a personal level it prevented the slave from being truly human. Slavery turned autonomous and potentially useful men and women into machines directed by the hand of another. Freedom was vital if men and women were to be completely human.

Forbid a man this premier quality (the right to labour freely), he is forbidden the principle which constitutes man, and which is so necessary to his existence that, when he is deprived of it, he declines, he is effaced; he is no more than a machine moved by an impulsion which is not his own.[122]

Even if slavery continued for centuries it could not totally expunge "the sacred fire which sparks all the active faculties of the soul," but it would have the effect of making all those enslaved hate their masters and act in such a way as to minimise the burden placed upon them. Slaves would quite naturally behave in a deceitful, treacherous, spiteful, vindictive, lazy and slothful manner partly out of hatred for their oppressors and partly to try to alleviate some aspect of their dreadful lives. The tragedy of slavery, Dunoyer thought, was that the slaves came to adopt the "vices" which the Europeans used to justify their enslavement, namely by arguing that only a period of enslavement would equip the blacks with the correct morals and work habits for them to become "civilised." The example of the free blacks in Haiti was instructive for Dunoyer. Once freed from the burden of coerced labour yet still threatened with internal divisions and invasion,

these former slaves, metamorphosed by liberty, into energetic men, vigorous and disciplined, have presented at the present time the aspect of a flourishing people who had known how to defend its liberty against the efforts of Bonaparte...[123]

Many of the characteristics which Europeans attributed to blacks were also exhibited by enslaved whites, thus supporting Dunoyer's view that it was the institution of slavery and not the inherent characteristics of blacks themselves which gave rise to them. One example he used (which was in keeping with his general Anglophobia) was that of the Irish peasants under the yoke of English government. This was another reason to doubt the sincerity of the British government in their crusade to force the other European powers to give up the slave trade. The British were now keen to end black slavery but they maintained a system of white slavery in Ireland at the same time.[124] A more general example was the attitude of the government towards the soil and the peasants who worked it. Much like the plantation owners in the Caribbean who claimed exclusive control over the soil and the product of the slave's labour, the European governments claimed similar rights over the supposedly "free" land owners and labourers by means of taxes and other claims on their labour and property. Napoleon especially was compared to the plantation owners in his propensity to judge his wealth in terms of how many soldiers-slaves he controlled. Dunoyer believed that at times Napoleon, "this extravagant colonist" as he dismissively called him, went so far as to consider all citizens of France and even all of Europe as soldiers at his disposal, with their lives, liberty and property also at the complete disposal of the government, thereby behaving much like a typical slave owner in the colonies.

He (Napoleon) wished in France that there be only soldiers, and he sought that all the work of the nation have for its ulterior end, war. He wished them to ravish from man his faculty to act wholly and entirely by his own will in order to make him the instrument of his will. He wished then to reduce the French and Europe to the last degree of servitude. Also he scorned fundamentally the human species; man was in his eyes only a vile cattle destined to be devoured in order to enslave new victims. But this extravagant colonist ended by ruining and losing his plantation in his wish to extend the number of the slaves that worked for him.[125]

What is intriguing about this passage is the way in which Dunoyer used a discussion about slavery in the Caribbean (launched as a review of a book by Grégoire on the slave trade) to make more general points about the nature of freedom and the power of the state in both Europe and the New World. This is just one example of many which could be produced to show how the debate about slavery raised issues which were central to the development of Comte's and Dunoyer's liberalism during the Restoration.

Another general political conclusion which Dunoyer drew from the problem of slavery was that to some extent the people must accept some of the blame for their enslavement.[126] By "the people" Dunoyer is referring more to the European "slaves" than to the black slaves in the Caribbean. He thought that the Europeans were enslaved because they had not resisted sufficiently the tendency of governments to expand their power and authority. In only a few countries have the people been able to erect some institutional restrictions to government power in the form of representative bodies and constitutions and these successful cases of popular resistance to the power of the states were often a result of violent revolution, as the English and French experience demonstrated. Despotism was made possible, Dunoyer argued, by the existence of slavery and the absence of opposition to government power. Despotism was in fact a system based upon a hierarchy of slaves, with those at the top exercising power over a system of subordinate slaves who in turn exercised power of the next level of slaves, until the bottom level of farm labourer, conscripted soldier, and ordinary taxpayer was reached.[127] In the absence of any resistance to government power, as was the case in feudal Europe and in the colonies, the entire society was "in a state of servility, immobility and torpor." Historical experience (especially recent experience) had given reason for optimism, as Dunoyer believed that the natural impulse of those enslaved was to resist those who governed and enslaved them.[128]

As the above discussion shows quite clearly, Dunoyer's interest in the issue of slavery[129] at this time was primarily moral and political. His reviews and articles are filled with thinly disguised comparisons of the relationship between slave owners and their black slavery with that of Napoleon and the French people. As the question of slavery will show, after Dunoyer and Comte discover political economy and class theories of history between 1815 and 1817 their view of slavery will change quite dramatically. Combined with the continued liberal anger at the moral evil of slavery will be a new understanding of slavery as an economic system of exploitation of labour and as a stage of production on the way to a more perfect and liberal industrial stage of society. Since Comte and Dunoyer were involved in so many issues of political and economic liberty during the early years of the Restoration their discussion of slavery was not long nor was it fully worked out and incorporated into their social theory. However, the brief reviews of abolitionist literature done by Dunoyer reveal some of the concerns which both authors were to return to later in Le Censeur européen and again during the 1820s.

C. THE DISCOVERY OF CLASS THEORIES OF HISTORY AND POLITICAL ECONOMY DURING THE SUSPENSION OF LE CENSEUR

Thus ended the first phase of Comte's and Dunoyer's career. The main issues which had concerned them had been the traditional, liberal political issues of the proper limits to be placed on arbitrary state power and the struggle for freedom of the press, both of which could be summed up as an attempt to get the state to abide by the provisions of the Charter, and a growing interest in the moral and political problem of slavery. The next phase of their careers began during the nearly eighteen months of enforced inactivity following the suspension of their journal. The impact of the sudden discovery of the ideas of the political economist Jean-Baptiste Say, the journalist and political philosopher Benjamin Constant, and the historian François Montlosier and their incorporation into Comte's and Dunoyer's social theory can be traced primarily in the pages of their new journal Le Censeur européen which appeared in 1817 and in their subsequent writings.

The catalyst which brought these disparate elements together was the discovery of Say's economic thought during the period from September 1815 to February 1817 when journalistic activity was denied them. The censors had forced the closure of Le Censeur and, in the interval before they were able to reopen their magazine under the new title of Le Censeur européen, Comte and Dunoyer closely read the third revised edition of Say's Traité d'économie politique which appeared in 1817. It was subsequently reviewed there in a lengthy article by Comte. The insights they found in Say's book on the nature of market society, property, the evolution of the institutions of the free market, as well as Say's numerous historical and sociological asides, provided the theoretical framework for a new social theory with a theory of class, a theory of history, and a vision of the future industrial society in which the state would virtually disappear and the free market would predominate. In other words, Say provided them with a social and economic dimension to their hitherto primarily political liberalism which they had expressed in their political pamphlets and Le Censeur.

In addition to the evidence provided by the essays and book reviews in Le Censeur européen on the sources which influenced the development of their social theory, there is also an important and revealing article by Dunoyer written some ten years after his initial discovery of Say in which he discussed the evolution of his ideas. In this article he acknowledged some intellectual debts, in particular he referred explicitly to Jean-Baptiste Say, Benjamin Constant and François Montlosier.[130] In this essay published in 1827, Dunoyer describes how his reading of Say, Constant, and Montlosier opened up new patterns of thought and analysis, which ultimately resulted in the development of the social theory of "industrialism" which will be discussed in more detail below. However, he avoided any mention of the contribution of Augustin Thierry, which is surprising because Thierry had been an editor and major contributor to Le censeur européen after his split with Saint-Simon and had written path-breaking essays on an "industrialist" interpretation of history for Comte's and Dunoyer's magazine. Dunoyer must have been aware of Thierry's important essay "Des nations et de leurs rapports mutuels," one of the first explicit liberal accounts of an industrial interpretation of history.[131] Thus, any assessment of the origin of Comte's and Dunoyer's social theory must take into account the explicitly acknowledged intellectual debts, as well as others, who influenced Comte and Dunoyer but, for whatever reason, did not receive due recognition by them.[132]

The most important influence on Comte's and Dunoyer's social theory was undoubtedly the work of Jean-Baptiste Say, especially his Traité d'économie politique which Comte was to review enthusiastically in Le Censeur européen in 1817.[133] A thorough analysis of Say's life and work is urgently needed if his contribution to Restoration social theory, French political economy and French liberalism is to be fully appreciated. Say had been active during the Directory as one of the principle editors of the Idéologue journal, La Décade philosophique from 1794 to 1800, in which he developed many of his economic and social ideas. Say used the journal as a forum for the introduction of Adam Smith's ideas to France during the 1790s, thus providing a counterweight to the influence of the Physiocratic school of political economy. Having read Smith Say combined many of his economic insights with the French philosophe and revolutionary liberal traditions as well as his own experience as a cotton manufacturer. He established his reputation as the leading French political economist of the early nineteenth century with the publication of the first edition of his influential Traité d'économie politique (1803). Later Say was sent by the French government in 1814 to assess the strength of the British economy and his report discussed the terrible impact of the war on the standard of living of the average Englishmen.[134] He continued to exert an influence on French liberalism throughout the Restoration by means of his teaching at the Collège de France in the mid-1820s and his many writings including, interestingly a number of items published in the Saint-Simonian journal Le Producteur during the 1820s.[135]

Comte in particular turned to the study of political economy with such enthusiasm that he sought out Say, the leading liberal political economist of the time, as his personal instructor. Mignet states that Comte's knowledge of political economy before this period of enforced leisure was rather "vague" since his training had been primarily in the classics, the philosophy of the Enlightenment, and the law. It was only after Comte had read closely the latest 1817 edition of the Traité d'économie politique that he developed his passion for political economy. In fact, he was so taken by the new discipline that he approached Say for personal advice and guidance in his reading of the Traité, advice and guidance which Say was very willing to give. It was by frequenting the Say household that Comte became familiar with both liberal political economy and Say's daughter, Andrienne, whom he married sometime in 1818. One could not imagine a closer relationship than this. Not only did Comte adopt as his own the economic ideas of the leading laissez-faire liberal economist in France in the early nineteenth century but he also married into his family, thus cementing on a personal level a deep commitment which had already been made on the intellectual level.

Two of Say's ideas particularly struck Comte and Dunoyer as significant and original. The first was the perception that a new sector of the economy, the service sector, also created economic value and thus contributed to industrial growth. "Immaterial" goods, as Say called them, were goods provided by the provision of services or the transmission of information such as legal, medical, or even religious services.[136] By their very nature they were not of a physical kind, but they were equally the product of human "industry" and equally useful and productive as the material goods traditionally discussed by the political economists. Dunoyer took up Say's interest in "immaterial" goods and incorporated it into his theory of class, based upon the distinction between productive and non-productive activities. The tertiary sector activities which Dunoyer thought were essential to an industrial society included lawyers, judges, researchers and so on. This led to the discussion of what was productive and what was unproductive labour, and ultimately to a theory of class in which an "unproductive class" which lived off the productive efforts of others.

The second idea of Say which appealed to Comte and Dunoyer was the idea of the "entrepreneur" as an economic actor who is as productive as any other in the manufacturing process. Perhaps because of his own experience as a cotton manufacturer Say was able to go beyond the narrower outlook of the Physiocrats and their hostility towards commercial and industrial middlemen with their one-sided view of the importance of agriculture. A consequence of Say's view is that there were many productive contributors to the new industrialism, including factory owners, entrepreneurs, engineers and other technologists as well as those in the knowledge industry such as teachers, scientists and other "savants" or intellectuals. At the heart of Restoration liberal class analysis lies the idea that the exploiting class was that group of people who did not engage in mutually beneficial exchanges.[137] The conclusions drawn from this by Comte and Dunoyer (and Thierry) is that there existed an expanded class of "industrials" (which included manual labourers and the above mentioned entrepreneurs and savants) who struggled against others who wished to hinder their activity or live unproductively off it. The theorists of industrialism concluded from their theory of production that it was the state and the privileged classes allied to or making up the state, rather than all non-agricultural activity, which were essentially non productive. They also believed that throughout history there had been conflict between these two antagonistic classes which could only be brought to end with the radical separation of peaceful and productive civil society from the inefficiencies and privileges of the state and its favourites.

But Dunoyer did not believe that Say's view of industrialism, however innovative and stimulating it might be, was a complete one. The major weaknesses was that Say acknowledged the role of "industrial" activity which created immaterial value, but did not draw the necessary political and sociological conclusions from this. Say did not use this distinction between the productive "industrial" class (which produced both material and immaterial value) and the unproductive, parasitic classes (such as the nobility, state employed bureaucrats, the military) to develop a theory of class and history as Comte, Dunoyer and the other theorists of industrialism were in the process of doing. As long as Say was content to deal only with the traditional topics of political economy, "the production, distribution and consumption of wealth" and not with "industry in the broadest definition" (including the industry of the non material tertiary sector) the broader political and social implications of the industrial perspective would escape him. Dunoyer blamed Say for not seeing the radical political implications of his own economic work. Say, he thought, could have risen above the prevailing "superficial" political debate in the new edition of his Treatise but instead he preferred to argue, following Smith, that politics was the science of the organisation of society and that wealth-creation was independent of this organisation. Dunoyer therefore challenged Say's view that politics was

quite simply the science of the organisation of society, without any concern for the kind of life for which society ought to be organised, or for what ultimate purpose (but) it is organised, or even if this organisation ought to have such a purpose... (Such matters have) no influence on public prosperity and wealth (creation) is essentially independent of the organisation of society [138]

On the other hand, Dunoyer was convinced that Say's own work showed the very opposite. Say's efforts, along with most of the liberal political economists of the nineteenth century, to make economics a "science" independent of the political structure of society was entirely in vain according to Dunoyer. The science of political economy was "value laden" as we might say and implied quite specific policies on property, government intervention in the economy and individual liberty, something Say did not appreciate but which Dunoyer and Comte incorporated into their work. Nevertheless, in spite of these reservations, Dunoyer still acknowledged his enormous debt to Say for contributing to his development of the theory of industrialism and claimed him as one of the three pioneers of the new "economic" or "industrial" interpretation of politics. After all, it was Say who led Dunoyer to the important conclusion that: "industry, seen in its broadest terms, namely as human activity considered in all its useful applications, is the fundamental object of society"[139] - a view which was to underpin all Dunoyer's later work.

Alongside Say, the next most important influence on Come and Dunoyer in this period was Benjamin Constant. Constant's contribution to the development of Dunoyer's theory of industrialism was the historical perception that the post-revolutionary world had left the "era of war" and had entered a new "era of commerce." Constant developed this idea in a polemical work on "conquest and usurpation," which was a scathing attack on Napoleon Bonaparte's militarism as well as a pioneering attempt at "industrial" class analysis, according to Dunoyer. He considered Constant to have been the first writer to appreciate the true end of social activity in the post-revolutionary world and the first published statement of this view was the pamphlet De l'esprit de conquête et de l'usurpation dans leurs rapports avec la civilisation européenne (1814).[140] What caught Dunoyer's imagination was Constant's claim that "modern" European societies were fundamentally different from "ancient" societies. What distinguished ancient from modern society was their different concept of liberty and their different concept of what was the purpose of society. Constant believed ancient society was warlike with a political system which granted individuals the freedom to participate as citizens in choosing their leaders and in making major decisions. Modern nations, in contrast, were peaceful and commercial and had a political system which corresponded to these needs. Liberty was not seen as being just the right to choose one's rulers and participate in decision-making, but to be free from rulers per se, free to participate unmolested in one's private commercial or industrial activities. Constant rather optimistically believed that the defeat of Napoleon had marked the dividing line between ancient and modern societies. Europe, he thought, had left the "epoch of war" and had now entered a new epoch, "the epoch of commerce" or industry as Dunoyer would have put it. In particular, Dunoyer was interested in the sentence "(t)he unique end of modern nations is peace (repos), and with peace comes comfort (aisance), and the source of comfort is industry,"[141] which nicely summed up his own thoughts on the true aim of social organisation.

Dunoyer did not agree entirely with Constant's claim that the modern era had already become the age of commerce rather than war. It would be an exaggeration, Dunoyer thought, to claim this much. Rather it should be the end towards which society should aspire. In the immediate post-1815 period, France was far from being a society in which the peaceful and non-violent pursuit of commerce was the rule. Too many "passions for domination" (passions dominatrices) still ruled the nobility, the church and even the merchant classes. Dunoyer believed that Constant was completely wrong to assert that people had yet realised the new possibilities made possible by the pursuit of industry rather than war. Dunoyer preferred to view industry as the principle around which society ought to be organised, rather than the prevailing reality, which was still "pre-industrial".[142] As we will argued below, Dunoyer was of the opinion that France in the Napoleonic Empire and the Restoration was at a transition stage (which he called "political place-seeking") which obliged French society to go back either towards the traditional privileges of the ancien régime or to go forward to the new age of industry. Dunoyer was certain that France had not yet reached the stage of industry as Constant apparently did. The great insight which Constant had developed was the recognition that industry was the guiding principle around which modern society ought to be organised.

An interesting consequence of Comte's and Dunoyer 's reading of the political economy of Say (along with other British political economists such as Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus and David Ricardo) and Constant's Spirit of Conquest was that they both came to view the contribution to western civilisation of the ancient Greeks and Romans, upon which they had been brought up as a youths, in a completely new light. Whereas before, as a result of their classical education and legal studies, they had revered all aspects of ancient language, culture and politics, they now saw considerable social and economic weaknesses in classical civilisation. The disdain both Comte and Dunoyer later expressed on numerous occasions for a civilisation based on slavery and conquest was formed as a result of this encounter with Say and Constant. Knowledge of economic science and the practice of industrial values became the hallmark of a civilised society for Comte and Dunoyer, and the Romans were found sadly wanting in these important values. Their rejection of the ancient world did not take the path of many during the late eighteenth century which had been to reject the values of warlike "Sparta" for those of commercial "Athens."[143] Rather it was more like Benjamin Constant's complete rejection of "ancient" forms of liberty as a fraudulent form of liberty based upon political participation instead of independence from government control, as the "modern" form of liberty defined it. In Comte's view any society which depended upon slave labour for the surpluses which made their culture possible was a criminal and unworthy one.[144] Comte concluded it was only in the modern world, in which private property, free trade and industry created surpluses, that a truly vibrant and libertarian culture could take root.[145] Dunoyer found it odd that ancient Greek and Roman philosophers continued to be so highly regarded in the modern world. They may have been writers of good prose but to him they were no better than the most reactionary feudal lords or the aristocracy of the absolute monarchies in their disdain and hatred for "des classes laborieuses."

There is nothing so strange as the favour enjoyed by these proud republicans of antiquity, whose first political principle was that they had to keep in slavery everyone active in industry, among the industrious classes of our modern societies. Wouldn't these classes be better off getting enthusiastic over the feudal lords of the middle ages? The error would be less glaring, in my opinion. These lords (seigneurs), it is true, were not as beautiful talkers as the noble citizens of Athens at the time of Pericles, or of Rome at the end of the Republic, but perhaps they did not consider themselves to be so much the enemy of the labouring classes (des classes laborieuses), they did not consider them to be quite so lowly and did not disdain their labour quite as much. I do not believe that they had to the same degree the prejudices of barbarism. There are in the Politics of the citizen Aristotle and in the Republic of the philosopher Plato a number of principles which the most determined aristocracy of our most absolute monarchies would not dare express.[146]

As he did with Say, Dunoyer concluded that Constant's contribution to industrialism was only a partial one, as he did not return to the important economic questions raised in Esprit de conqête in any of his later writings. He claimed that the most serious failing was that Constant did not try to incorporate his insights into industry into his broader political philosophy, preferring instead to stick with the "metaphysical" side of politics (as Dunoyer disparagingly put it). In other words, Constant retained a concern for the traditional preoccupation of the problem of the external form of a political system, which Dunoyer had criticised his the first part of his "Sketch".[147] These criticisms of Constant are somewhat unfair since Constant did discuss "industrial" matters, admittedly briefly, in four other places after his essay on the "Spirit of Conquest" appeared in 1814. References to industry and class occur in a short essay on "De la liberté d'industrie" which appeared in the Principes de Politique; in a review of Dunoyer's book of 1825 De l'Industrie et la morale in the Revue encyclopédique in 1826; in the scattered but nevertheless extremely radical laissez-faire observations in the Commentaire sur l'ouvrage de Filangieri (1822) and in the polemical Mémoires sur les Cent Jours (1829).[148] One could say that Constant's observations on the class structure, political privileges and influence of the new nobility created under Napoleon are very similar to those on political "place-seeking" which Dunoyer was to put forward in 1825. These works by Constant show that he continued his interest in liberal political economy and ably defended deregulation of the economy and legal protection of property rights. However, as Dunoyer pointed out, Constant did not develop a comprehensive theory of "industrialism" which encompassed class analysis, the historical evolution of economic modes of production and prophecies of the coming radical depoliticisation of society, as Dunoyer and Comte did.[149]

François Montlosier's history of the French monarchy was the next step in the development of Dunoyer's discovery of industrialism. Along with Constant's theory of the "age of commerce", Montlosier provided the important historical framework in which Dunoyer's industrialist theory could develop.[150] Montlosier was a strange choice for a founding-father of Dunoyer's theory of industrialism because of his aristocratic inclinations. In his history of the French monarchy which was reviewed in Le Censeur européen, he demonstrated a strong prejudice against the rise of the "Third Estate," an historical event which he disliked as it challenged the authority of the crown and upset the traditional balance of power between the classes.[151] In spite of Montlosier's political views, Dunoyer was impressed with his class interpretation of French history, in which "the industrious classes liberated themselves and developed" often in opposition to the crown and the nobility.[152] Montlosier argued with some regret that the industrious classes developed as a virtual state within a state. He believed, in a quite Marxian fashion, that the industrious class existed as a social group living in parallel with the traditional noble landed elite, until a point was reached when it was strong enough to challenge the traditional feudal élites for the dominant position within French society. The passages on class analysis which caught Dunoyer's eye and which he quoted so approvingly in his review included the following:

We will see in the middle of the ancient state a new state arise, in the middle of the ancient people a new people will arise. We are going to see a double state, a double people, a double social order which will continue (marcher) for a long time in parallel to each other, then they will attack each other and fight bitterly... Movable property will be in balance with immovable property, money will be in balance with land, the towns with the chateaux. Science will rise up to challenge courage, spirit against honour, commerce and industry against arms. The new people, rising up more and more, will prove themselves to be triumphant everywhere. It will unmake (défait) the ancient forms where they are seized, break all the ancient ranks (rangs) where they occupy them, dominate the towns in the name of the municipalities, the chateaux in the name of the baillages, the spirit in the name of the universities. Soon it will chase the ancient people out of all their places, all their functions, all their posts. It will finish by sitting in the council of the monarch and will from there impose on everything its new spirit, its laws and new institutions.[153]

Dunoyer, of course, rejected Montlosier's aristocratic disdain for the occupations of the industrious classes. There was nothing "vile" about the sciences, commerce and industry in Dunoyer's view and he saw nothing sacred in the traditional rights of birth. What prevented Montlosier from seeing the implications of his "industrial" theory of class and his interpretation of French history was his regret at the decline of the aristocratic class and his corresponding bitterness at the rise of the industrial classes. Had he been able to, as Dunoyer rather naively believed he should, he would have realised that industry was the "natural end" of society and thus used his insights to work towards advancing the cause of the rising industrial classes, something which Comte and Dunoyer now dedicated themselves to doing in their new journalist undertaking Le Censeur européen, and their academic work during the 1820s.[154]

D. THE RETURN TO JOURNALISM: THE CREATION OF LE CENSEUR EUROPéEN

The successor to Le Censeur first appeared in February 1817 sporting the more cosmopolitan-sounding title of Le censeur européen and a new motto - "peace and liberty."[155] Comte and Dunoyer thought the time was propitious to renew their liberal critique of the régime and the stimulus to their return to journalism was provided in 1817 by the ministry of Decazes whom they thought was more attracted to constitutional government than previous prime ministers had been. The content of the new journal reflected their new-found interests which they had cultivated during the nearly eighteen months they had spent away from the hurly-burly of political journalism.[156] The new economic and sociological liberalism forged from the combination of their earlier political liberalism with the new political economy of Say and the class theories of history of Constant and Montlosier provided the ideological framework for their new magazine. Although some of their ideas were similar to the philosophy of "industrialism" being expounded by Saint-Simon, unlike Saint-Simon and his followers Dunoyer and Comte combined the theory of industrialism with their former political liberalism into a new synthesis of economic and political liberalism which Dunoyer came later to call "la liberté du travail." Unfortunately Comte and Dunoyer did not have much time to develop their new form of liberal theory in a comprehensive fashion as they continued to be hounded by the censors, faced two lengthy court cases, and even spent some time in prison. The new magazine only lasted until April 1819 before it finally succumbed to the censors. They would have to wait until a more tranquil period in the late 1820s and early 1830s before they could discuss their ideas in more detail.

In 1817 Comte and Dunoyer came to the attention of the censors twice more, the first for having printed John Murray's edition of Napoleon's (possibly spurious) memoirs[157] transcribed on Saint-Hélène, which resulted in their conviction and imprisonment, and the second for criticism of the behaviour of an army officer who shot a young man in Vitré which resulted in a trial at Rennes and the imprisonment of Dunoyer.[158] As happened with the legal action against La Quotidienne in 1815, Comte and Dunoyer were accused by the censors for having appeared to support Napoleon. In the former case they were falsely accused of having prepared the way for Napoleon's return from Elba by Comte's legal defence of General Excelmans and comments about the state of the army. In this case they were condemned for having printed a translation of Napoleon's Saint-Hélène memoirs. This was an unfortunate action on the part of the police and one which resulted in some irony, since they had published alongside the offending Napoleonist tract a lengthy refutation of Napoleon's militarism and dictatorship.

All the copies of the third volume of Le Censeur européen were seized by the police on 6 June 1817 and Comte and Dunoyer were later brought before judge Reverdin and sent to La Force prison.[159] Bail was refused in spite of the fact that a large number of admittedly liberal guarantors came forward in their defence. The guarantors included such leading liberals as the Duke de Broglie, La Fayette, Destutt de Tracy, Auguste de Staël, Benjamin Constant and Jean-Baptiste Say but, since the censorship was obviously politically motivated, having such guarantors from the liberal opposition would have only proved to the police the wisdom and necessity of their actions in censoring Comte and Dunoyer in the first place.[160] On 19 August Comte and Dunoyer were convicted and each sentenced to twelve months imprisonment, a fine of F3,000, the loss of all civic rights for five years, and they were obliged to be under police supervision for the same period. The trial lasted six months and provoked a storm of controversy over the press laws. Many saw Comte's and Dunoyer's case as a test case against the hated censorship regulations. Their council Vatimesnil offered his services free of charge (a generous offer declined by the very independent-minded Comte and Dunoyer) and a lobby group the "Société des Amis de la Liberté de la Presse" was formed to support them and to carry the debate to a wider public. Not only were legal arguments presented in the court but numerous pamphlets and the transcriptions of the case proceedings were published to highlight what the defendants considered to be a violation of their rights under the Charter. By November 1817, after a lengthy appeal, the sentence was a reduced to three months in prison, a fine of F1,000, and no loss of civic rights. Although the lobbying and press campaign had reduced their sentence they had not been able to change the law and the press restrictions remained in force.

The next legal conflict concerned the sixth volume of Le Censeur européen, in which was published a report of the shooting and beating of a sixteen year old youth by an officer in the French army, Deberrue, which had taken place in Vitré on 29 August 1816. The case had caused a stir at the time as the youth had been wearing a red carnation in his lapel, from which many drew the obvious conclusion that the attack had been politically motivated. Furthermore, the incident had been hushed up and the officer had not been tried by the local prosecutor. After the report of the incident had been discussed in Le Censeur européen, a local procureur de roi, Béchu, perhaps acting on behalf of parties which wanted to see Comte and Dunoyer finally silenced for their opposition to the régime,[161] sued the journal for libel and was able to have the case heard, not in Paris where the alleged crime had occurred, but in the more sympathetic local court at Rennes. The procureur general at the court of Rennes issued warrants for Dunoyer's and Comte's arrest in June 1818 and ordered that they appear in his local court. Comte was able to escape with the assistance of his young wife, the daughter of Jean-Baptiste Say. When the police surprised them at home one morning, Andrienne Comte had the presence of mind and audacity to lock the gendarmes in a room so Comte could escape down some hidden stairs. Although Comte escaped, unfortunately the fate of his courageous wife is not known. One could imagine the fury of the embarrassed gendarmes at being locked in a room by a woman, especially a woman with liberal political views.[162] Dunoyer was not as fortunate as his colleague and had to face the charges.

Under the provisions of the Charter dealing with censorship of the press, laws which Comte and Dunoyer knew intimately as practicing journalists who had run afoul of the law before and as trained lawyers, Dunoyer should have been tried in Paris where the article had been published. Instead he was to be taken by force to Rennes. To add insult to injury he was ordered by the procureur to pay the fare of a public carriage from Paris to Rennes, for himself as well as for a police escort, or face the prospect of being taken under armed guard and forced to walk to Rennes like a common criminal. A good feeling for Dunoyer's political and legal liberalism can be had from his arrogant and imperious reply to one of the judges:

Taken by naked force to appear before the incorrect judges, will I now agree to pay the costs of this violent act and to be paid to be prosecuted? No, monsieur. You will order whatever appears to you to be the most convenient in this matter. Articles 4 and 12 of the decree of 18 June 1811, relating to the movement of prisoners allows you to have them conducted on foot, by horse, in a public carriage, or in a private carriage (charrette). You choose which method, monsieur. As for me, I prefer none of them. I reject them all equally. By whatever means you take me to Rennes I am taken there by a horrible abuse of power against which I protest with all my might. After that I am in your hands. Dispose of me as you will. You can consider me as a body without a will, materia circa quam. May it please god that I reject none of the rigours you will impose on me. The greater they are, the more instructive they will be. We will see by how much you make me suffer how far our criminal laws can be used for private persecutions. Perhaps the excess of evil will be the cause of its own remedy.[163]

In spite of (or perhaps because of) his protestation at the manner of his arrest and the competency of the court to try him, Dunoyer was taken forcibly to Rennes to face trial. Not surprisingly he was found guilty and was sentenced to one year imprisonment. Upon his return to Paris, Dunoyer immediately went to the supreme court to denounce the actions of the Rennes court. Unlike their legal struggle the previous year, this time Comte and Dunoyer were able to have the law changed to protect at least one aspect of the freedom of speech, namely that one could only be tried for a press offence in the place where the offending item was published, not anywhere in France where an offended reader or police official resided. On 8 September 1818 the supreme court overturned the Rennes decision and declared in a binding decision that, in future, writers would be tried by a judge in a court in the locality where the alleged crime occurred. Dunoyer defended his actions in this complicated legal matter by claiming the obligation of all citizens to struggle for the rule of law against arbitrary state power:

I have protested with all the energy which I could muster. I did it because all honest men are obliged to prevent, by all the means which the law puts at their disposal, any criminal act against the guarantees on which depend public security, because those who do not do so appear to me to be a bad citizen whose laxity weakens the common good, finally because it is by doing so that one can put a brake on the licence of power and maintain some order in civil society.[164]

In spite of these considerable interruptions, Le Censeur européen continued to appear from 15 June 1819 until 23 June 1820, but now as a daily newspaper instead of a bulky periodical. It survived with the support of some influential liberal backers such as the Duke de Broglie, the son of Madame de Staël, Auguste de Staël, and the Marquis d'Argenson.[165] What prompted them to turn their journal into a daily newspaper was the coming to power of prime minister Dessolles-Decazes. Decazes won the support of the centre left and moderate centre deputies in the Chamber on condition that he break with the extreme right wing. He was thus able to introduce a certain liberalisation of government policy, in particular a weakening of the illiberal press laws. In the spring of 1819 Comte and Dunoyer seized the opportunity presented by the Decazes ministry to have their journal appear on a daily basis.

Unfortunately the liberalisation of the Decazes ministry did not last long. The final straw which ultimately ended their careers as political journalists was the reaction which followed the assassination of the duc de Berry in February 1820, in particular the reintroduction of strict censorship in March which made their activity impossible even with their connections amongst liberal-leaning aristocrats. In the political climate after 1820, with changes to the laws governing elections, the reestablishment of censorship, and the suspension of individual security from arbitrary arrest, some concerned citizens set up a fund to help those penalised by the new draconian laws to fight their cases in the courts. Comte's career came to an abrupt end when he was arrested for publicising this fund in Le Censeur européen, sentenced to two months imprisonment and fined F2,000. Rather than go to prison Comte chose voluntary exile for the five years it would take to prescribe his conviction.

After nearly six years of critical journalism and relentless persecution by the police and too much time spent in court and in prison, Dunoyer and Comte retired from public activity and Le Censeur européen was merged with another liberal paper, the Courrier français, to which Dunoyer sometimes contributed. At the time of the suspension of Le Censeur européen Comte's and Dunoyer's reputation as a liberal political publicists was at a very high level. Hatin described their reputation some forty years after the event as follows:

We have seen what reproaches had been made against the authors of Le Censeur, and which as to basics and which as to form; but they have the incontestable merit of having dared first, since the Restoration, to profess with freedom the constitutional principles in all their integrity, and of having constantly sustained them, without ever making any concession to the military spirit or to bonapartism; they have yet the rare merit of having devoted themselves to proving by experience the vices of the legislation which then regulated the press... Le Censeur... was the banner of the Stoic school, which wished the complete and immediate application of the principle of political perfectibility, of nearly absolute liberty, without taking enough account of the political difficulties that the Restoration encountered. It was, to tell the truth, a renaissance of the movement of 1789, with that theoretical optimism which took its source in the best intentions, but which did not create in the least any grave perils.[166]

A few years later, with the publication of his first major theoretical work, the Traité de législation (1826-7), Comte reflected on the years between 1814 and the final closure of their journal. No doubt he also spoke for Dunoyer in seeing their period of journalism and active opposition to the increasingly reactionary régime of the restored Bourbon monarchy as an integral part of their intellectual evolution. As Comte expressed it, this period had been the "applied" or "practical" part of their study which had enabled him and Dunoyer to apply the legal theory they had studied to questions of practical importance such as constitutional freedoms, electoral representation, opposition to arbitrary state power, and especially the censorship of ideas. Interspersed with these journalistic essays of immediate and practical legal concerns were of course a handful of speculative essays in which Comte and Dunoyer continued to pursue their theoretical interests. Comte and Dunoyer entered the thorny field of journalism attracted by the temporary new freedom of publishing in the early years of the Restoration, probably thereby forsaking an academic or legal career which both of them might have pursued had circumstances been different. Apparently for Comte, the fall of Napoleon and the new liberty of the press promised by the Charter provided him with an opportunity to espouse publicly his liberalism which was too good to turn down. As he put it some six years after the final closure of his journal:

The revolution which brought about in France the fall of the Imperial government, without changing at all the direction of my ideas, forced me to choose a means of publication different from that which I had at first proposed. It seemed to me that in treating in succession questions of politics or legislation which circumstances threw up I would achieve my aim most surely and promptly. Observations applied to those events which one witnesses have greater impact than those observations made from a distance. The freedom to publicly present one's opinions, which the previous government had completely destroyed, was eventually proclaimed and it was imperative to take advantage of it. Because it is the same of liberty and power, one runs the great risk of losing it if one does not seize it the very instant when it appears.[167]

But in retrospect Comte concluded that he had been mistaken in believing that by being involved solely in current political controversies he could push forward the frontiers of legislation or the "science of laws." The tumult of journalistic debate, censorship, court trials and imprisonment left little opportunity for the calm and considered reflection needed to see what was theoretically significant from what was of only daily interest. Overall Comte was unhappy with the six years he spent as a journalist from 1814 to 1820 because of the delays to the great project on legislation and property he had set himself to write and which he had begun in the last years of the Empire. He compared his articles in Le Censeur, perhaps unfairly to himself, to preliminary sketches an artist makes before embarking on a major picture and his concentration on political and constitutional matters as misplaced.

Thus, after having dealt with a multitude of diverse questions over a period of 6 years and having had them published in the periodical press, I found I had not advanced very far towards the goal I had set myself at the beginning. It would have been just as easy to use these published works in writing a Treatise on Legislation as it would be for an artist to use the anatomical sketches done as a student in the preparation of a picture. Not only would there have been no connection between the ideas, there would have been no proportion between the parts. But what is even worse, it would have required the reproduction of inexact theories and often superficial points of view... If some people still consult what I wrote in Le Censeur they are generally the sections concerning the organisation or the distribution of political power, sections which ought to be consulted with the least confidence.[168]

What he came to value most highly were the new vistas for social analysis opened up by political economy and history, subjects he had discovered with Dunoyer in 1817 but which he had not been able to pursue properly because of the continuing battle with the censors. Thus ironically, in one way, Comte actually welcomed the opportunity provided by the political crackdown in 1820 to retire from public life and work on his academic interests.