Democratizing Communal Liberalism Under the Second Empire

Takeda, Chinatsu

doi:10.1007/978-981-10-8087-6_11

Chinatsu Takeda²

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Abstract

It was under the Second Empire that communal liberalism was eventually democratized. First, Napoleon III turned the central strategy of Staël’s political liberalism into reality by promoting the organic link between local civil society and national political representation, ensured by deputies at the National Assembly who served simultaneously as members of a local council known as the Conseil général. The emperor thus contributed to consolidating a solid centrist political force legitimized by universal manhood suffrage. Second, this centrist political force ultimately came to represent the soul of liberal opposition in the 1860s and praised three elements constitutive of Staëlian political liberalism: hereditary peerage, local self-rule, and political centrism. In this context, libéraux of a democratic bent started to embrace the aristocratic principle in the 1860s, leading to the institutionalization of the conservative senate, to be elected indirectly by local representatives under the Third Republic.

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Notes

1.
Sainte-Beuve , Madame de Staël, 104–107.
2.
Godechot , “Introduction,” Considérations, 41.
3.
Ibid., 41.
4.
Sudhir Hazareesingh, From Subject to Citizen: The Second Empire and the Emergence of Modern French Democracy, (Princeton: Legacy Library, 2014), 31; Frédéric Bluche, Le bonapartisme: Aux origins de la droite autoritaire, (Paris: Editions Latines, 1980), 336. On the bibliography of the Second Empire, Theodore Zeldin, The Political System of Napoleon III, (New York: The Norton Library, 1971). Roger Price, People and Politics in France: 1848–1870, (Cambridge: Cambridge U.P., 2004) and The French Second Empire: An Anatomy of Political Power, (Cambridge: Cambridge U.P., 2007); Eric Anseau, Napoleon III (Paris: Tallandier, 2012) and La France de 1848 à 1870, (Paris: Livre de poche, 2002).
5.
Hazareesingh, From Subject, 31.
6.
Liberal values include “freedom of expression, civil and political rights, and a law-based and procedurally impartial state.” Ibid., 25.
7.
Ibid., 25–26.
8.
Ibid., 25.
9.
Ibid., 25–26.
10.
Ibid., 26.
11.
Adolphe Thiers , Histoire de la France, vol. II, (Bruxelles: Adolphe Wahlen, 1836)b, 582.
12.
“Discours sur les principes politiques de l’Empire on August 26, 1863,” Le duc de Persigny et les doctrines de l’Empire, ed. Joseph Deloroa, (Paris: H-Plon, 1865), 44. Quotation from Hazareesingh, From Subject, 163.
13.
Ibid., 42.
14.
Ibid., 42.
15.
Ibid., 42.
16.
Ibid., 42.
17.
Napoleon III appointed eighty supporters to life tenure in the senate, serving without salary, although he bestowed on them handsome donations of 30,000 francs each. David Higgs, Nobles in Nineteenth-Century France: The Practice of Inegalitarianism, (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins U.P., 1987), 135.
18.
Zeldin, The Political, 34.
19.
Alain Plessis, The Rise and Fall of the Second Empire, 1852–1871, (Cambridge: Cambridge U.P., 1988), 30–31.
20.
Jean-Mrc Guislin, “La participation des représentants nobles aux débats décentralisateurs à l’Assemblée nationale (1871–1875)” and Olivier Conrad, “Noblesse et adminisration locale au XIX siècle: L’exemple du Conseil général du Haut-Rhin (1800–1870),” ed. Marie-Laure Levag and Roger Baury, L’invention de la décentralisation: Noblesse et pouvoirs intermédiaires en France et en Europe XVII-XIX siècle (Lille: Presses universitaires du Septentrion, 2009), 343–360, 361 and 380.
21.
The importance of landed interests in the social composition of the members of the general councils depended upon the region. Zeldin insists that landed interests were the most important in “Normandy and the large-farm regions around Paris.” Zeldin, “France,” 134.
22.
Plessis, The Rise, 50–53.
23.
In 1870, a vast majority of the members of general councils were politically indifferent. Alain Plesis, De la fête impériale au mur des fédérés, 1852–1871 (Paris: Seuil, 1979), 72; Pamela Pilbeam, Republicanism in Nineteenth-Century France; 1814–1871, (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 1995), 245.
24.
Plessis, The Rise, 51.
25.
Zeldin, The Political, 14–15.
26.
Plessis, The Rise, 41–42. Zeldin, “Where Napoleon found the recruits for his parliament?” The Political, 28–45.
27.
The baron Philippe de Bourgoing emphasizes an increased link between general councillors and deputies: “The mandate of General Councils is, in my opinion, complementary to that of deputies.” Eric Anceau, Les députés du Second Empire: Prosopographie d’une élite du XIX siècle, (Paris: Honoré Champion, 1997), 738.
28.
Ellis Geoffrey, “Napoleonic elites and Social Order,” Beyond the Terror: Essays in French Region and Social History: 1794–1815, ed., Lewis Gwynne, Vzynne Lezis, and Lucas Colin, (Cambridge: Cambridge U.P., 1983), 232–268.
29.
Peter Mcphee, A Social History of France 1780–1914 Second Edition, (London: Palgrave, 2003), 86.
30.
Zeldin, The Political, 22.
31.
Napoleon’s emphasis on militaries is reflected by the fact that almost 60 percent of his imperial nobility derived from militaries whereas only one-fifth came from the Old Regime nobles. Mcphee, A Social History, 86.
32.
Ibid., 36–37.
33.
Anceau, Les députés, 788.
34.
Zeldin, The Political, 58–59, 738–739.
35.
Guislin, “La participation,” 364. The overrepresentation of the nobles was an element of continuity throughout nineteenth-century France. Higgs, Nobles, 137.
36.
Guislin, “La participation,” 364.
37.
Higgs, Nobles, 141; André-Jean Tudesq, Les Grands Notables en France (1840–1848), Etude historique d’une psychologie sociale, (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 1964), vol. 1, 130–184.
38.
Higgs, Nobles, 24.
39.
Anceau, Les députés, 738–739.
40.
Ibid., 739–740.
41.
Odilon Barrot, De la centralisation et de ses effets, (Paris: D. Dumineray, 1860), 82–83.
42.
Jaume , l’individu, 119–169. Jennings summarizes the gist of this liberal current as follows: in nineteenth-century France, “the dominant tradition … was that associated with François Guizot, the so-called doctrinaires, and the ‘orleanist galaxy’.” Philosophically, “it amounted to a form of anti-individualism. It was a liberalism of the notables.” Jeremy Jennings, “Constitutional liberalism in France,” The Cambridge History of Nineteenth-Century Political Thought, ed. Stedman John Gareth and Gregory Claeys, (Cambridge: Cambridge U.P., 2011), 360.
43.
Robert Hervé, L’Orléanisme, (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 1992), 56–67.
44.
Ibid., 434.
45.
Ibid., 439.
46.
Ibid., 434.
47.
Broglie, Vues sur le gouvernement. Ouvrage inédit du duc de Broglie publié par son fils, (Paris: Michel Lévy frères, 1870), 197.
48.
The Duc de Broglie writes, “In all truthfulness, only two forms of government are possible at the same time and in the same country.” Victor de Broglie, “introduction,” Vues sur le gouvernement de la France. Ouvrage inédit du duc de Broglie publié par son fils, (Paris: Michel Lévy frères, 1872), LVVII, 85; Rober, L’Orléanisme, 36.
49.
Robert, l’Orleanisme, 37.
50.
Hazareesingh, From Subject, 307.
51.
Mélonio, Tocqueville and the French, 142.
52.
Hazareesingh, From Subject, 160–232; Mélonio, Tocqueville and the French, 141–148.
53.
Lucien-Anatole, Prévost-Paradol , “Des assemblées communales, départementales et régionales,” La France nouvelle, (Paris: Lévy frères, 1868), 77–84.
54.
Charles de Rémusat , Politique libérale, ou Fragments pour servir à la défense de la Révolution française, (Paris: Michel-Lévy frères, 1860), 439–442.
55.
Edouard Laboulaye , “le parti libéral et son avenir,” Revue nationale et étranègre, politique, scientifique, no. 14, (Paris: Gervais Charpentier, 1863/08), 20.
56.
Barrot, De la centralisation et ses effets, 243.
57.
Ibid., 440–442.
58.
Ibid., 59–60.
59.
Ibid., 59–60.
60.
Ibid., 161.
61.
Ibid., 24.
62.
Ibid., 24–25.
63.
Ibid., 207.
64.
Ibid., 208.
65.
Ibid., 211.
66.
Robert, L’Orléanisme, 63.
67.
Plessis, The Rise, 51.
68.
Roger Price, Concice History of France, (Cambridge: Cambridge U.P., 2005), 214.
69.
Casimir-Perier, Prévost-Paradol , and Rémusat were defeated in the legislative elections in 1863.
70.
Burdeau, Liberté, 174–183.
71.
Quotation from Hazareesingh, From Subject, 193.
72.
Ibid., 193.
73.
The law of 1883 on municipal decentralization mandated that the mayor be nominated by municipal councils as well as become the executive power in the commune. Jacques Godechot and Hervé Faupin, Les constitutions de la France depuis 1789, (Paris: Flammarion, 2006).
74.
This is the case of “the republican laws of March 1882 and April 1884 on communal administration.” Hazareesingh. From Subject, 314.
75.
Schmidt, Democratizing, 41.
76.
Departmental decentralization was never popular among moderate republicans. They tended to consider it “aristocratic principle” or oligarchy and prioritized “municipal or communal liberty,” among other things. Schmidt, Democratizing, 300–301.
77.
On the senate of the Third Republic, Paul Smith, A History of the French Senate, vol. I: The Third Republic (1870–1940), (Lewiston and New York: Edwin Mellen Press, 2005).
78.
The nomination of deputies was abolished later on.
79.
The proportion of local notables involved in agriculture was 27 percent, the same as for jurists and doctors. Jean Garrigues, Le Sénat de la Troisième République (1875–1914). Réflexions sur une chambre méconnue, http://www.parlements.org/publications/congres_CIHAE_2006_Jean_Garrigues.pdf, 1171.
80.
Edouard Herriot, “Preface,” Staël, Germaine de, Un ouvrage inédit de madame de Staël: Les fragments d’écrits politiques, (Paris: Plon-Nourrit et Cie, 1904), 2.
81.
Thibaudet, Les idées politiques, 40–41. After Thibaudet, André Jardin, and Lucien Jaume call Staël the mother of French liberalism. André Jardin, Histoire du libéralisme politique, (Paris: Hachette, 1985), 210; Lucien Jaume, L’individu, 25.
82.
Rosanvallon , Le moment Guizot, 373, André Jardin, Histoire, 408.

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Faculty of Comparative Culture, Otsuma Women’s University, Tokyo, Japan
Chinatsu Takeda

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Takeda, C. (2018). Democratizing Communal Liberalism Under the Second Empire. In: Mme de Staël and Political Liberalism in France. Palgrave Macmillan, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-10-8087-6_11

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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-10-8087-6_11
Published: 01 August 2018
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, Singapore
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