Abstract
The political culture of the post-Terror phase of the French Revolution was dominated by the problem of establishing an anti-Jacobin republic. In the years spanning 1794 to 1799, no political question was more pressing than how to preserve the republic while divorcing it from the legacy of the Terror. As a result, the moment was one of intense and fertile reflection on politics and the nature of the republic. Two of the most intellectually interesting efforts on this front were those of Charles-Guillaume Théremin and Germaine de Staël. Théremin, a little-known writer, sketched in a series of writings an original and distinctive version of the ‘modern’, pluralist republic. Staël, one of the great figures of French political philosophy, set about drafting a comprehensive version of a liberal republic in her 1798 text, Des circonstances actuelles qui peuvent terminer la Révolution et des principes qui doivent fonder la République en France. Taken together, their writings delineated a liberal republican political philosophy that offered a possible avenue to a pluralist republic.
This chapter draws on material previously published in my Reimagining Politics after the Terror: The Republican Origins of French Liberalism (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2008).
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Notes
Benjamin Constant, ‘De la liberté des anciens comparée à celle des modernes’ [1819], in Écrits politiques, ed. Marcel Gauchet, 2d edn (Paris: Gallimard, 1997), p. 603.
See Claude Lefort, Democracy and Political Theory, trans. David Macey (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988);
Pierre Rosanvallon, Pour une histoire conceptuelle du politique (Paris: Le Seuil, 2003).
Claude Lefort, Le travail de l’oeuvre Machiavel (Paris: Gallimard, 1972);
J. G. A. Pocock, The Machiavellian Moment: Florentine Political Thought and the Atlantic Republican Tradition (Princeton, N. J.: Princeton University Press, 1975).
Alain Ruiz, ‘Une famille huguenote du Brandebourg au XVIIIe siècle: Les Thérémin’, Revue d’Allemagne 14 (1982), 225–6.
See Geneviève Fraisse, Muse de la raison: La démocratie exclusive et la différence des sexes (Aix-en-Provence: Alinéa, 1989).
See Anne Verjus, Le cens de la famille: Les femmes et le vote, 1789–1848 (Paris: Belin, 2002).
On its composition and publication, see the introduction to the superb critical edition prepared by Lucia Omacini. Germaine de Staël, Des circonstances actuelles qui peuvent terminer la révolution et des principes qui doivent fonder la république en France, ed. Omacini (Geneva and Paris: Droz, 1979). Citations below are to the Omacini edition, within the text and by page number.
François Furet, Revolutionary France, 1770–1880, trans. Antonia Nevill (Oxford: Blackwell, 1992), pp. 203–4.
Pierre Rosanvallon describes the difference between substitution and replacement: ‘In one case, the representative system is understood as a simple technical artifice resulting from a purely practical constraint (organizing power in a society of large size)’; in the second, it is ‘a positive philosophical vision with its own virtues. In this case, representative government is considered an original and specific political form. … These two approaches are contradictory insofar as representative government is understood, in the first case, as an equivalent to democracy, while it constitutes, in the second, a surpassing of democracy’ (Pierre Rosanvallon, La démocratie inachevée: Histoire de la souveraineté du peuple en France (Paris: Gallimard, 2000), p. 12).
See also, Bernard Manin, The Principles of Representative Government (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997).
Staël had made a similar argument in De l’influence des passions in 1796, calling for government by an ‘aristocracy of the best’ (quoted in Lucien Jaume, L’individu effacé, ou Le paradoxe du libéralisme français [Paris: Fayard, 1997], p. 62).
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Jainchill, A. (2012). Liberal Republicanism after the Terror: Charles-Guillaume Théremin and Germaine de Staël. In: Wright, J., Jones, H.S. (eds) Pluralism and the Idea of the Republic in France. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137028310_2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137028310_2
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