Nineteenth-century France was faced with the task of coming to terms with the Revolution and its consequences. The present essay aims to describe some of the ways in which the turn to history which characterised French intellectual life between the 1820s and the 1840s represented an attempt to establish the legitimacy of the post-revolutionary nation-state. My focus is on the liberal historians, especially Augustin Thierry (1795–1856) and François Guizot (1787– 1874). By grounding political authority on a new interpretation of history the intellectuals of the 1820s and 1830s validated the bourgeois nation-state. They confirmed the nation as the prime site of belonging, as the location of the sense of identity. Henceforward, they hoped, Frenchmen would be united in their awareness of a past which moved in accordance with historical laws and actualised the intentions of divine providence. Their argument suggested that the sense of belonging which history provided might constitute an alternative to participatory politics on the one hand and to authoritarian Catholicism on the other. However, the liberal historical project was always potentially unstable since it valorised a rediscovered national past — whose content was conflict and struggle—in order to offer validation to the bourgeois state conceived as a homogeneous space within which individual enterprise could peacefully flourish. In other words the liberal historians celebrated the heroism of the collective past but sought in the present to contain the passionate and potentially destructive energies of the masses. They self-consciously wrote a form of history which was informed by the painful gain in knowledge which the experience of the Revolution had brought. Their texts justified 1789 but repudiated 1793. The underlying issue with which I am concerned is the way in which the liberals’ use of history in support of the bourgeois nation represented an attempt to reconcile post-revolutionary individualism with a redefined sense of social belonging.
After 1815 liberals in France sought to develop a politics of compromise which expanded the centre ground. Their aim was to lay to rest the conflicts generated by the Revolution and thus ensure stability and preserve national
unity. They turned to history because out of the national past they were able to fashion an ideology which supported both individual rights and a sense of communal belonging. In his seminal study, The Political Uses of History, Stanley Mellon described how, during the Restoration, the French national past was reinterpreted in order to endorse the ascension of the middle classes.1
Looking back on the 1820s from the vantage point of the 1840s, Augustin Thierry’s elder brother Amédée (1797–1873) summed up what had been at stake during the Restoration. In his view the liberal history of those years represented an exploration of the national psyche, a necessary redefinition of identity: ‘At that time we were at the centre of the crusade which founded and popularised the reform of history in France. […] It was as if the patrie itself was actively interested in the research which was being undertaken into [national life]’.2 In the writings of François Guizot and Augustin Thierry the
past was reinterpreted as a grand narrative of national purpose and the Revolution was defended as the legitimate culmination of a long process of struggle. The new liberal history was both a ground of meaning and a foundation for action since, while it validated the politics of compromise, the conditions of its fulfilment only appeared to be fully present after the July Revolution of 1830. Indeed the liberal historians who came to prominence during the Restoration generally viewed the July regime as the concluding moment in French history. Henceforward, in their view, essential individual rights would be protected while the constitutional monarchy would act as a necessary unifying power. Social oneness appeared finally to have been achieved. In their histories liberals described the development of the forces which bound the nation together. They celebrated the rise of the communes and traced the development of an individualistic, entrepreneurial spirit which was often in conflict with the forces of privilege and arbitrary rule. In their view the July Monarchy was the logical outcome of the general movement of French history.
In the 1820s and 1830s the challenge for the supporters of the bourgeois nation-state was to find a way of disentangling post-Enlightenment liberalism from aspects of pre-Revolutionary liberalism. In its initial period the French Revolution had sought to actualise the prog ramme of the liberal Enlightenment: the replacement of a regime whose legitimacy rested upon divine right by a new form of social organisation which drew its authority from the people and which acted in accordance with the dictates of reason. Liberal discourse affirmed the primacy of the individual and asserted the capacity of individuals to come together and create a new social world, free of the legal inequalities, prejudices and injustices of the old order. The Revolution in its early phase can legitimately be viewed as the opening up of a secular space. The Universal Declaration of the Rights of Man and the abrogation of feudal privileges on the night of 4 August 1789 signalled the dismantling of religiously-founded social and political power. This process in turn enabled the emergence of centres of individual power which served private desires and projects. The rational consent of individuals expressed
through the voice of their representatives became the new legitimating pr inciple, albeit linked, until 1792, with the fading prestige of royal sovereignty. However, the course followed by the Revolution, its descent into repression and violence in the name of virtue profoundly compromised the ideals of the liberal Enlightenment.
Critics on the right damned all individualism on the grounds that it bore the seeds of authoritarian Jacobinism. Counter-revolutionary thinkers held that the spirit of unrestrained freedom of enquiry advocated by the philosophers of liberalism was co-extensive with an arrogant individualism and this, they believed, was responsible for dissolving social ties and plunging French society into chaos. The Catholic reaction rejected the notion that humans could construct a social world, draw up constitutions, possess natural rights. Their prescription was clear: a return to religion, order and hierarchy. This meant that henceforward society would have priority over the individual, that submission to authority would replace the free activity of the critical intellect. Liberal individualism was viewed as a sinful misuse of the divine power which rightfully resided within social reality. Society, divinely instituted, was held to be prior to the constitution of its members. Society had the status of a given, a primitive fact of nature which defined social obligations and relationships. The true aim which power sought to achieve was the conservation of social order. The revolutionaries were castigated for distributing power among atomised autonomous selves. According to Félicité de Lamennais (1782–1854) this dispersal of power, this shredding of authority possessed its own momentum of destruction. The unrestrained exercise of individual reason produced tyranny, sexual violence and ultimately cannibalism. In the final analysis, wrote Lamennais, ‘love of self produces love of murder’.3 According to critics such as
Lamennais the revolutionary struggle to overcome historical determinations did not so much actualise freedom as establish a tragic distance between separated egos. The contending individual wills then sought domination over one another in an unrelenting effort to overcome their own corrupting isolation.
What immediately strikes the modern reader is the uncompromising nature of this critique. Counter-revolutionary thinkers such as Joseph de Maistre (1753–1821), Louis de Bonald (1754–1840) and the young Lamennais made no attempt to discriminate between the spirit of 1789 and that of militant Jacobinism. To them it was self-evident that revolutionary individualism was a consequence of Enlightenment liberalism which was itself an extension of the Protestant notion of freedom of conscience. Such counter-revolutionary critics felt under no obligation to achieve balance or fairness. Indeed, anti-liberals were blatantly unfair in the way in which they attacked Locke and Hume whom they held to be responsible for formulating a philosophical individualism which denied value to society.4 In their polemics they chose to ignore the degree to
which the eighteenth-century liberalism which they branded as antisocial in fact accepted that humans by their very nature aspired to forms of communal life. They elected to leave on one side the extent to which the eighteenth century developed notions of sympathy, benevolence and self-sacrifice. And yet,
while there can be no doubt that the counter-revolutionaries produced a car icature of their opponents’ position, their arguments proved highly influential.
The fact that the counter-revolutionary onslaught on individualism was taken so seriously can largely be explained by the temper of the times. The Terror had made plain to all that the Revolution had failed to integrate emancipated selves into community. The Republic had used coercion to force citizens to be free, to choose between liberty or death. Post-revolutionary liberals had to come to terms with the savage reality of Jacobin authoritarianism and explain its emergence. Nineteenth-century liberals were not democrats. They feared the unruly passions of the mob and needed no persuasion that it was the emergence of self-enclosed individuals which had produced an atomised society which in turn had allowed the dictatorship of the Terror to take hold. They recognised the threat that the seemingly purposeless character of subjective freedom posed to collective life. Did subjective autonomy and the pursuit of private interest inevitably conflict with the aim of constructing a cohesive community of moral subjects? Was it possible for the individual ego to acknowledge an identity of essence with the social understood as the site within which ethical freedom was actualised? However, while nineteenth-century liberals distrusted the excesses of democratic populism and were willing to look afresh at aspects of Enlightenment thought they held fast to the notion that reason was the power which legitimated the modern world of representative government, religious toleration, freedom of the press and individual rights. In their view human reason, unaided, was able to discover truths concerning society and nature. Nineteenth-century liberals recognised the threat which extreme forms of individualism constituted for the well-being of society but they rejected the aggressive anti-individualism which was the hallmark of the counter-revolutionary agenda.
Liberals were conscious of how seductive reactionary theories of human belonging could be. Their aim was to demonstrate that individualism was compatible with cohesive models of human association. They argued that parliamentary forms of government were admirable because they gave space to individual freedom but nonetheless preserved social cohesion. The ideal state imagined by liberals did more than endorse pr ivate relations between individuals. It presupposed a national community united around certain core values. Guizot, for example, held that the aim of politics was to represent reason, not the will of the people. He viewed representative government as a unifying force which organised ideas of truth and justice which were distributed unequally throughout the population: ‘it is a question of […] concentrating, of realising public reason and public morality and summoning them to occupy power’.5 On the one hand popular sovereignty was repudiated but on the other
it was evident that there could be no return to traditional hierarchies and anti- individual theocratic models. However, political theory alone was deemed insufficient to provide legitimation for the post-revolutionary liberal order. Liberals were suspicious of political theory. They blamed the errors of the
Revolution on the Enlightenment’s preoccupation with abstract political thought at the expense of histor ical knowledge. They cr iticised the revolutionaries for paying inadequate attention to the complex interplay of forces which sustained social life. Guizot summed up the liberal position when he observed that political reality could never fully be grasped without reference to history: ‘The institutions of a people cannot properly be understood without knowledge of its history’.6 Henceforward a reassessment of the collective past
was held to be a prerequisite for the construction of a stable and cohesive nation.
Instead of proclaiming universal abstract rights, nineteenth-century liberals turned to the study of history which in their view progressively disclosed a series of truths. They attempted to reconcile the individual with society by rewriting national history as a progressive narrative which both legitimated subjective autonomy and guaranteed collective cohesion. Liberal romanticism forged new myths of collective identity which endeavoured to lend meaning, purpose and direction to individual lives, to restore a sense of belonging to isolated selves which had been severed from their ontological moorings within the political and social order of the ancien régime. Indeed the phenomenon of romanticism itself, often associated with the idea of individualism, can perhaps more accurately be approached in relation to the struggle made by the post- revolutionary world to reassemble community, to reconstruct the social bond. The turn to history meant in effect that the new public space of the liberal state was founded on a new hermeneutics, on the reading and interpretation of the text of history. Liberal historians such as Guizot and Thierry did more than reforge links with the national past. History was called upon to fulfil an integrative function, demonstrating to individuals that they belonged to a community which somehow remained the same despite being embroiled within the dynamic processes of historical change over the centuries. History validated society or, more accurately, history confirmed the bourgeois nation as the site of the promised reconciliation between individual will and collective purpose. Counter-revolutionary models of belonging ascribed primacy to the social over the individual. Liberal nationalism provided a different model of community according to which individuals were bound together by their awareness of a shared past. History held up a mirror within which individuals recognised themselves and had confirmed their sense of a common national identity.
The turn to history thus provided the liberal nation with an alternative to the theocratic ideal according to which society was held together by submission to an unchanging, divinely instituted authority. However, it would be erroneous to suppose that liberals excluded God from their work or presented history in exclusively human terms. Much of their work was built upon a bedrock of metaphysical idealism. In the 1820s the philosopher Victor Cousin (1792–1867) and his disciples understood history in terms of the outworking within time of Absolute Spirit which had initially externalised itself in the form of material nature. History had meaning for Cousin because it corresponded to the Absolute’s journey to self-knowledge. Liberal historians were generally of a
philosophical bent and tended to view history in terms of the progressive actualisation of reason, justice and freedom, ideas which were identified with the manifestation of the divine. God was not banished but his active presence was reinterpreted and described in new ways. For liberals this had the great advantage of allowing them both to endorse individualism and implicitly sacralise collective life—a combination quite inconceivable to those who believed in the counter-revolutionary model of social cohesion. In the eyes of liberals humans made history in collaboration with a God who was at one with the progressive unfolding of freedom, reason and justice. Through the mediation of history individualism was reconciled with collective purpose. At the heart of history liberals placed the development of consciousness and the growth of moral autonomy: world history told of the progressive victory of self over non- self, the increasing mastery of matter by mind. Western bourgeois values were held to be superior and to have a universal relevance. At the same time, however, history was understood in relation to the development of collective entities. World history took the form of a spatial movement from the Orient to Europe. European history told of the formation of nations whose dynamic drew its force from the ascension of the Third Estate whose role in the grand scheme of things was to advance individual and collective freedoms. The Third Estate was the agent for the realisation of national oneness.
Liberal history validated bourgeois freedoms while at the same time drawing attention to the central role played by France. Guizot asserted that only in France had the Third Estate truly become the nation. Liberal historians grasped the nettle of justifying 1789 but took care to insert the Revolution within a broader history of struggle going back to the Middle Ages. In this way, while the Revolution stood as the culmination of a providentially authorised process, it lost something of its unsettlingly unique significance. Liberals concluded that the actualisation of the rational nation-state had effectively been postponed until 1830. In their view the constitutional arrangements of the July Monarchy marked the re-establishment of the essential alliance between the French people who built the nation and the monarch which acted as a power preserving unity. In their writings the liberal historians furnished citizens with a coherent narrative of national development according to which struggle and pain found their resolution in the balanced politics of the bourgeois nation. History described the slow emergence of a stable, unified and homogeneous national community. When Augustin Thierry looked back over the preceding seven centuries he felt able to discern within French history a reassuring spirit of unity and continuity: ‘one nation and one monarchy, bound to one another, modified together’.7
Liberal history reappropriated the past as a weapon to be used against the counter-revolutionaries. However, with the advent of the July Monarchy it seemed as if the desired reconciliation between freedom and order had been achieved. The liberal historians confirmed the legitimacy of the new regime by providing explanations and justifications which combined the pseudo-scientific with the pseudo-religious: according to Augustin Thierry the mysterious but
continuous elevation of the Third Estate was nothing less than the providential law which governed French history. After July 1830 the task for liberal history became the endorsement of the ruling order. Guizot’s lectures delivered during the Restoration were reprinted. Augustin Thierry worked on his study of the rise of the Third Estate. Liberal history articulated the difficult reconciliation of change and continuity within the public presentation of national memory. Political rights were restricted but liberal history offered to its readers a surrogate form of participation, a different sense of belonging: French unity was preserved and French identity was affirmed because citizens appeared to give assent to the general truths which were disclosed by history and actualised by the nation. The government of Louis Philippe took steps to organise research into the national past and to provide official support for the publication of texts and documents. At the same time leading Restoration liberals such as Cousin and Guizot moved from teaching positions to ministerial posts.
However, the liberals ser iously underestimated the power of the