Abstract
This chapter asserts that Quinet and Tocqueville sustained the anglophile dimension of Considerations in the Second Empire. First, they inherited the question that Staël asked: “why is France, unlike Britain, unsuccessful in institutionalizing liberty in the form of a representative system?” Second, I claim that the way Tocqueville and Quinet answered the question was equally inspired by the discussion in Considerations. While Tocqueville’s argument owed much to Staël’s pre-revolutionary institutional history of liberty and her discussions of aristocracy, Quinet was strongly influenced by her stance on religion. I conclude that Britain, rather than America, was an exemplary political model to be emulated in the eyes of the two representative liberal historians of the Second Empire. Tocqueville maintained the idea that aristocracy should lead democracy to institutionalize the representative system, whereas Quinet was keen on using religious feelings of a Calvinist inspiration to sustain liberty among the Moderns. However, for these historians, nineteenth-century France eventually failed in following the British example.
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Notes
- 1.
On the subject of Guizot and Britain, Philippe Raynaud, “Guizot et la Révolution anglaise,” Trois Révolutions de la liberté: Angleterre, Amérique, France, 325–338.
- 2.
Guizot, Des moyens de gouvernement, 1821a, 266;
Craiutu, “Tocqueville and the political thought of the doctrinaires,” 480.
- 3.
François Mélonio, “Tocqueville: aux origines de la démocratie française,” The French Révolution and the Creation of Modern Political Culture, vol. 3, 595–611; François Furet, “Edgar Quinet,” The French Révolution and the Creation of Modern Political Culture, vol. 3, 613–623.
- 4.
Ceri Crossley, Edgar Quinet: A Study in Romantic Thought 1803–1875, (Kentucky: French Forum Publishers Incorporated, 1983).
- 5.
Edgar Quinet, Lettres à sa mère 1808–1820, ed. Simone Bernard-Griffiths and Gérard Peylet, (Paris: Honoré Champion, 1995)b, 151.
- 6.
Ian Allan Henning, L’Allemagne de Madame de Staël and la polémique romantique, (Paris: Honoré Champion, 1925), 351. The “spiritual” influence of Staël on the young Quinet is testifiable by his numerous letters to his mother during the 1820s: “especially the chapters on the enthusiasm that make me a pleasure always new.”; Edgar Quinet, “lettre à sa mère du 13 février, 1820,” Correspondance de Edgar Quinet. Lettres à sa mère, (Paris: Germer-Baillière et cie, 1877)a, vol. 1, 64; Quinet, “Letter à sa mère du 4 décembre, 1827,” Ibid., vol. II, 61.
- 7.
François Furet, La gauche et la révolution au milieu du XIX siècle, (Paris: Hachettes littéraires, 1986), 44.
- 8.
de Dijn, “The Intellectual Origins,” 4–6.
- 9.
Zeldin, The Politial System, 128.
- 10.
Ibid., 120–129.
- 11.
Ibid., 122.
- 12.
Hazareesingh, The Second Empire, 13.
- 13.
Edgar Quinet, La Révolution, (Paris: A. Lacrois Verboeckboven et cie, 1867), vol. 1, 50. This led to the following sentence: “As a result of the earlier centralization, the parent company of Jacobins (clubs) spread to all places.”; Ibid., 112.
- 14.
“Dismantle each part of the central power piece by piece, thereby empowering local authorities, (and) there, you have the political work of the constituent assembly.” Quinet, La Révolution, vol. 1, 1867, 197.
- 15.
Tocqueville did so in the first volume of D.A., among others.
- 16.
In reference to the Tocquevillian definition of virtue, which, Kraynak asserts, consists in “a synthesis of civic and heroic virtue.” It is in line with Rousseau’s and Montesquieu’s civic traditions, on one hand, and aristocratic heritage as well as romantic definitions of virtue, on the other hand; R. P. Kraynak, “Tocqueville’s Constitutionalism,” The American Political Science Review, vol. 81, no. 4 (Dec. 1987), 1182. We find the same definition in D. Winthrop, “Tocqueville’s Old Regime: Political History,” Review of Politics, vol. 43–1, January 1981, 88–111.
- 17.
Tocqueville accepts universal suffrage for parliament in order to counterbalance radical Parisian workers with reactionary provincial peasants. Antonio Garia-Trevijano, A Pure Theory of Democracy, trans Rodriguez de Penaranda, (Maryland: U.P. of America, 2009), 52; Jennings and Craiutu, “The Third Democracy,” 391–404 and Tocqueville on America after 1840.
- 18.
Garia-Trevijano, A Pure Theory, 52.
- 19.
Tocqueville defines democracy by combining a social state, various features of social mores, and collective beliefs rather than political institutions. It is from this perspective that he perceives a parallel between French monarchy and democracy. By contrast, Quinet perceives democracy primarily as a political institution, “a government of the people, governed by themselves…. I call democracy the government in which the people are raging; that is the meaning which all those who have made the French language give to this word.” Tocqueville and Quinet also accept the other definition of democracy simultaneously; Furet, La gauche, 47.
- 20.
Ibid., 63–69.
- 21.
Furet, La gauche, 86. Quinet writes, “Neither the death of Louis XVI, nor that of the Girondins, nor the bloodshed resulting from the law of Prairial, will remedy this powerlessness. The idea of the Jacobins on the fundamental point of humanity, religion, is the emptiness: the whole universe in ruins could not have filled it.”; Quinet, La révolution, vol. I, 77, 139.
- 22.
Quinet, La révolution, vol. 1, 201.
- 23.
Tocqueville, “Social State of the Anglo-Americans,” D.A., I-3, 52–61.
- 24.
Mélonio, Tocqueville and the French, 91. See also notes 24–26, 235.
- 25.
Ibid., 91.
- 26.
Staël, Considerations, I–XI, 99–106.
- 27.
Ibid., I-XI, 103.
- 28.
For example, thanks to the taille that was levied as a permanent direct tax throughout France, French kings were able to function without Estates General. Ibid., I-XI, 99–100.
- 29.
Ibid., I-IX, 86–87 and I-XI, 100.
- 30.
Ibid., I-XI, 104–105.
- 31.
Ibid., I-XI, 105.
- 32.
Ibid., I-XI,104.
- 33.
Ibid., I-XI, 104.
- 34.
Tocqueville, O.R., vol. 1, I–IV, 103.
- 35.
In O.R., Tocqueville assumes that feudal Europe comprised France, Germany, and Russia. Furet and Mélonio, “Introduction,” O.R., vol. 1, 69–70; Mélonio, Tocqueville and the French, 92–93.
- 36.
Tocqueville, O.R., vol. 1, “appendix,” 261.
- 37.
Mélonio, Tocqueville and the French, 92–93.
- 38.
Ibid., 93.
- 39.
Quotation from Mélonio note 26, 235. Mélonio refers to unpublished notes of 1854 on August Ludwig von Reyscher, Das gesamte wurtembergische Privatrecht, 33 vols (1837–1848), in Tocqueville archives.
- 40.
Tocqueville, “Why feudalism was hated by the people in France more than anywhere else,” O.R., vol. 1, II-II, 111–118.
- 41.
Ibid., vol. 1, “appendix,” 254.
- 42.
Ibid., vol. 1, III-I, 185, and 366, 416.
- 43.
Ibid., vol. 1, II-II, 120.
- 44.
Ibid., vol. 1, III-I, 199–200.
- 45.
Ibid., vol. 1, II-III, 131.
- 46.
Ibid., vol. 1, III-VI, 231.
- 47.
Ibid., vol. 1, III-III, 213.
- 48.
Ibid., vol. 1, III-III, 214.
- 49.
Mélonio’s view completely ignores this dimension, devaluing the role of aristocracy in Tocqueville’s thought. Mélonio, Tocqueville and the French, 92–94.
- 50.
Tocqueville, O.R., vol. 1, II-XII, 190–191.
- 51.
Ibid., vol. 1, II-VIII, 149.
- 52.
Letter to Mrs. Grote, December 8, 1851. “the majority of that Assembly did not conspire against Louis Napoleon and sought nothing so much as to avoid a quarrel with him.”; Tocqueville, Mémoir, vol. 2, 180.
- 53.
Staël, Considerations, VI-V, 671–672.
- 54.
Ibid., VI-III, 653–654.
- 55.
Ibid., VI-V, 671–672.
- 56.
Ibid., VI-III, 653–654.
- 57.
Higgs, Nobles in nineteenth-century, 13–16.
- 58.
Guizot , Des moyens de gouvernement 1821a, 266; Craiutu, “Tocqueville and the Political,” 480.
- 59.
Quotation from Lucien Jaume , “Tocqueville face au thème de la Nouvelle aristocratie,” Revue française de science politique, 2006: 6, vol. 56, 971–975.
- 60.
Tocqueville, D.A., II-V-II, 660; “Tocqueville’s notes,” II-1-XIX, 645, 862.
- 61.
Ibid., 862.
- 62.
This was “an exceptional and transitory circumstance” between aristocracy and democracy and British aristocracy would disappear in due course. Ibid., 862.
- 63.
Ibid., 122, 153.
- 64.
Ibid., 105.
- 65.
Tocqueville, “letter to Nassau Senior,” July 2, 1853, O.C., vol. VI-II. See also Tocqueville, O.C., vol. VII, 37 and O.C., vol. II, 147–149; Thomas Maccaulay, History of England, vol. 1, (London: Longman, Brown, Green, and Longmans, 1857), 37–39; Tocqueville met Macaulay met in London in 1857.
- 66.
Rachel Hammersley, The English Republican tradition and Eighteenth-Century France between the Ancients and the Moderns, (Manchester: Manchester U.P., 2010), 159.
- 67.
Tocqueville, O.R., vol. 1, II–IX, 158.
- 68.
Ibid., vol. 1, I–V, 104.
- 69.
If “the English, like us, had entirely lost their political liberty and all the local freedoms which cannot long exist without it, it is very probable that the different classes which composed their aristocracy would have separated from each other; as happened in France and more or less on the rest of the continent, and that all of them together would have been separated from the people. But freedom always forced them all to stay in touch with one another, in order to be able to reach an understanding when necessary.” Ibid., vol. 1, II-X, 163.
- 70.
“But what is striking above all, is to see how the nobility and the Third Estate found it easier then to run things together or to resist together than they have since.” Ibid., II–IX, 125.
- 71.
Mélonio, Tocqueville and the French, 94; Tocqueville, Appendix “on the pays d’état, and in particular on Languedoc”; Ibid., vol. 1, “appendix,” 249–256.
- 72.
Quinet, La Révolution, 228.
- 73.
NAF 20764n fol. 130; Quotation from François Furet, La gauche, 53.
- 74.
Ibid., 41–58.
- 75.
Staël, Considerations, VI-XII, 752–753.
- 76.
Ibid., VI-XII, 752–753.
- 77.
Furet, la gauche, 51.
- 78.
Ibid., 51.
- 79.
Edgar Quinet, Le christianisme et la révolution française, (Bruxelles: Wouter, 1846), 338.
- 80.
Quinet, La Révolution, 568–569.
- 81.
Staël, Considerations, VI-II, 639.
- 82.
Ibid., 1-III, 32–33.
- 83.
Quinet, Christianisme, 403.
- 84.
Quinet, La Révolution, vol. 1, 126.
- 85.
Quinet, Christianisme, 290.
- 86.
Staël, Considerations, I-I, 24–25.
- 87.
Quinet, La Révolution, vol. 1, 156.
- 88.
Quinet, le Christianisme, 339–340.
- 89.
Quinet, La Révolution, vol. 1, 125–127.
- 90.
Ibid., vol. 1, 290.
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Takeda, C. (2018). Britain in the Liberal Historiography of the French Revolution: Tocqueville and Quinet in Regard to Considerations. In: Mme de Staël and Political Liberalism in France. Palgrave Macmillan, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-10-8087-6_15
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