When the French Tried to be British: Party, Opposition, and the Quest for Civil Disagreement, 1814-1848 9780773577183

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W H E N T H E F R E N C H TR I E D T O BE B R I T I S H

McGill-Queen’s Studies in the History of Ideas Series Editor: Philip J. Cercone 1 Problems of Cartesianism Edited by Thomas M. Lennon, John M. Nicholas, and John W. Davis 2 The Development of the Idea of History in Antiquity Gerald A. Press 3 Claude Buffier and Thomas Reid: Two Common-Sense Philosophers Louise Marcil-Lacoste 4 Schiller, Hegel, and Marx: State, Society, and the Aesthetic Ideal of Ancient Greece Philip J. Kain 5 John Case and Aristotelianism in Renaissance England Charles B. Schmitt 6 Beyond Liberty and Property: The Process of SelfRecognition in EighteenthCentury Political Thought J.A.W. Gunn 7 John Toland: His Methods, Manners, and Mind Stephen H. Daniel 8 Coleridge and the Inspired Word Anthony John Harding

9 The Jena System, 1804–5: Logic and Metaphysics G.W.F. Hegel Translation edited by John W. Burbidge and George di Giovanni Introduction and notes by H.S. Harris 10 Consent, Coercion, and Limit: The Medieval Origins of Parliamentary Democracy Arthur P. Monahan 11 Scottish Common Sense in Germany, 1768–1800: A Contribution to the History of Critical Philosophy Manfred Kuehn 12 Paine and Cobbett: The Transatlantic Connection David A. Wilson 13 Descartes and the Enlightenment Peter A. Schouls 14 Greek Scepticism: Anti-Realist Trends in Ancient Thought Leo Groarke 15 The Irony of Theology and the Nature of Religious Thought Donald Wiebe

16 Form and Transformation: A Study in the Philosophy of Plotinus Frederic M. Schroeder 17 From Personal Duties towards Personal Rights: Late Medieval and Early Modern Political Thought, c.1300–c.1650 Arthur P. Monahan 18 The Main Philosophical Writings and the Novel Allwill Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi Translated and edited by George di Giovanni 19 Kierkegaard as Humanist: Discovering My Self Arnold B. Come 20 Durkheim, Morals and Modernity W. Watts Miller 21 The Career of Toleration: John Locke, Jonas Proast, and After Richard Vernon 22 Dialectic of Love: Platonism in Schiller’s Aesthetics David Pugh 23 History and Memory in Ancient Greece Gordon Shrimpton 24 Kierkegaard as Theologian: Recovering My Self Arnold B. Come

25 Enlightenment and Conservatism in Victorian Scotland: The Career of Sir Archibald Alison Michael Michie 26 The Road to Egdon Heath: The Aesthetics of the Great in Nature Richard Bevis 27 Jena Romanticism and Its Appropriation of Jakob Böhme: Theosophy – Hagiography – Literature Paolo Mayer 28 Enlightenment and Community: Lessing, Abbt, Herder, and the Quest for a German Public Benjamin W. Redekop 29 Jacob Burckhardt and the Crisis of Modernity John R. Hinde 30 The Distant Relation: Time and Identity in SpanishAmerican Fiction Eoin S. Thomson 31 Mr Simson’s Knotty Case: Divinity, Politics, and Due Process in Early EighteenthCentury Scotland Anne Skoczylas

32 Orthodoxy and Enlightenment: George Campbell in the Eighteenth Century Jeffrey M. Suderman 33 Contemplation and Incarnation: The Theology of Marie-Dominique Chenu Christophe F. Potworowski 34 Democratic Legitimacy: Plural Values and Political Power F.M. Barnard 35 Herder on Nationality, Humanity, and History F.M. Barnard 36 Labeling People: French Scholars on Society, Race, and Empire, 1815–1848 Martin S. Staum 37 The Subaltern Appeal to Experience: Self-Identity, Late Modernity, and the Politics of Immediacy Craig Ireland 38 The Invention of Journalism Ethics: The Path to Objectivity and Beyond Stephen J.A. Ward 39 The Recovery of Wonder: The New Freedom and the Asceticism of Power Kenneth L. Schmitz

40 Reason and Self-Enactment in History and Politics: Themes and Voices of Modernity F.M. Barnard 41 The More Moderate Side of Joseph de Maistre: Views on Political Liberty and Political Economy Cara Camcastle 42 Democratic Society and Human Needs Jeff Noonan 43 The Circle of Rights Expands: Modern Political Thought after the Reformation, 1521 (Luther) to 1762 (Rousseau) Arthur P. Monahan 44 The Canadian Founding: John Locke and Parliament Janet Ajzenstat 45 Finding Freedom: Hegel’s Philosophy and the Emancipation of Women Sara MacDonald 46 When the French Tried to Be British: Party, Opposition, and the Quest for Civil Disagreement, 1814–1848 J.A.W. Gunn

WHEN THE FRENCH TRIED TO BE BRITISH Party, Opposition, and the Quest for Civil Disagreement, 1814–1848

J.A.W. Gunn

McGill-Queen’s University Press Montreal & Kingston • London • Ithaca

© McGill-Queen’s University Press 2009 isbn 978-0-7735-3512-1 Legal deposit second quarter 2009 Bibliothèque nationale du Québec Printed in Canada on acid-free paper that is 100% ancient forest free (100% post-consumer recycled), processed chlorine free. This book has been published with the help of a grant from the Canadian Federation for the Humanities and Social Sciences, through the Aid to Scholarly Publications Programme, using funds provided by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. McGill-Queen’s University Press acknowledges the support of the Canada Council for the Arts for our publishing program. We also acknowledge the financial support of the Government of Canada through the Book Publishing Industry Development Program (bpidp) for our publishing activities.

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication Gunn, J. A. W. (John Alexander Wilson), 1937– When the French tried to be British: party, opposition, and the quest for civil disagreement, 1814–1848/J.A.W. Gunn. (McGill-Queen's studies in the history of ideas; 46) Includes bibliographical references and index. isbn 978-0-7735-3512-1 1. France -- Politics and government -- 1814–1830. 2. France -- Politics and government -- 1830–1848. I. Title. II. Series: McGill-Queen's studies in the history of ideas; 46 ja84.f8g85 2009

320.944'09034

c2008-907812-8

This book was typeset by Interscript in 10/12 Baskerville.

For Mary Jane

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Contents

Acknowledgments Introduction

xi 3

1 Conflict and Its Management in the French Tradition: Pre-revolutionary Perspectives 11 2 Against Party: The Burden of the Past 3 Honourable Connections: Ultra-Royalism and Party Government 4 Fiévée: Paradoxes by Instalment

62

130 193

5 Constant and Company: An Almost-Loyal Opposition

257

6 Chateaubriand: The Literary Lion as Political Theorist

328

7 Doctrinaires: Politics of the Chair Conclusion

463

Select Bibliography Index

479

471

397

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Acknowledgments

i have never been inclined to impose much on other scholars to pore over my work prior to publication. Accordingly, my intellectual debts, though heavy, are concentrated on only a few people. Dr Nadia Khalaf and Dr Mary Jane Edwards were generous with their time in procuring copies of documents from Paris and London respectively. At McGill-Queen’s University Press, Joan Harcourt, Dr Roger Martin, and Joan McGilvray were all helpful to me. Judith Turnbull was a model copy editor in teaching me to be more concerned with accuracy and consistency. Senior editor Dr Don Akenson encouraged me to submit the manuscript at a time when others had assured me that intellectual history was out of favour. It was also he who suggested the book’s title, an improvement over my more tentative version. My thanks, too, for the generous judgments by the anonymous readers for the press. A series of research grants from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada provided resources essential for the work. Kingston, Ontario 3 November 2008

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W H E N T H E F R E N C H TR I E D T O BE B R I T I S H

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Introduction

the very basis of political life, in the liberal-democratic tradition, consists in learning to differ in public with others, firmly but peaceably. More than just a code for the citizen, this suggests the presence of both constitutional structures and other, less formal practices that encourage conflict that is both real and limited to non-violent activity. The business of taming natural dispositions into the approved pattern is necessarily, in part, the result of circumstances, such as there being some sort of balance of power among contending parties. If our opponents are very deficient in resources, it may be all too tempting just to destroy them. A rough equipoise has never, however, sufficed, and the rules of the game must also accommodate organizations such as political parties and the procedural refinements that encourage constitutional opposition. Because the attainment of this sort of stable freedom is not a routine accomplishment and because there is as yet no agreed-upon formula for making such an ambition work, the lessons of the past remain our best guide. More than three decades ago, I published a study on political theory and the history of political ideas about the process whereby eighteenth-century Britain began to come to terms with competing political parties. There is not, to my knowledge, any comparable work on the experience of France, the home of so much of the political thought in the Western tradition and of a revolution that ensured that the French route to a tolerant pluralism would be one of quite remarkable difficulty. There has, to be sure, been work on the development of political parties, viewed in terms of political and institutional history, but with the recent exception of Robert Alexander’s important study of local political organization in the Restoration, there has been little inclination to invest effort in tracing such anticipations of later political processes. Familiar criteria as to what constituted a political party had ruled that in terms of structural complexity, longevity, and the presence of a mass electorate, the structures that had existed prior to those examined in Raymond

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Huard’s work on the Third Republic did not qualify. Whether or not that is true will not detain us here, for the realm of ideas offers a very different and more promising field of endeavour. There the principle of routine competition among elites was more important than the absolute numbers involved. It was here that the French enjoyed what seems to be a comparative advantage. This is not say, however, that the documents conveying the arguments have had their due, for they too have gone largely ignored. It was the idea of limited competition that needed to gain some roots before masses of people could be expected to do politics in a civil fashion. A related notion was the one that spelled out the sort of ties that should unite those of similar political views. Until such understanding was spelled out, opposition might look like treason and party like a sort of conspiracy. As recently as 1981, with the alternance that witnessed a peaceful transfer of power from the Right to the Left, it was widely observed that France had not generally absorbed in full the notion of a loyal opposition. This startling revelation helps to account for the apparent impression that there were no lessons to discover in a national tradition so punctuated by revolution and marked both by strong ideological polarization and by weak associational bonds. This combination of factors helped to form a political culture where antipathies were deeply rooted in history, yet the means of uniting with one’s political friends was denied by an individualism that seemed inimical to accepting the sort of leadership that political organization requires. What political hatreds and individualism might have left undone the centralization sustained by a jealous state seemed to secure. This final consideration did much to ensure that people in power relied on the state to lend coherence to their activity, while that same state severely discouraged the very sort of legitimate organization that groups in opposition absolutely required. France thus came to figure as a textbook example of failed parliamentary institutions, weak and undisciplined political parties, unstable ministries, and an undeveloped civil society. From such experiences, conspiracy, demagogy, and Paris-bred revolution might well have seemed more promising than did constitutional opposition within the conventions first tested in Britain. Because the missing ingredients have come, gradually, to supplant many of the bad old ways, one certainly might be forgiven for thinking that the more distant past could have nothing of interest to relate. That, nevertheless, would be far from the truth, and it is the purpose of this study to support this conclusion. The period of the Restoration was remarkably rich in just that sort of political thought that has to do with the practicalities of day-to-day political life. This book’s focus on ideas does not then desert the subject of what people did and the constitutional practices within which they did it, but combines these with the stuff of political theory that sought to offer justification for political

Introduction

5

structures and behaviour. Labouring to fashion new institutions under the great shadow cast by the Revolution, the public men of the time thought and talked and wrote of the conditions of peaceful political competition with an intensity that the comparative calm of Britain rendered unnecessary. What had apparently come easily and over a long stretch of time across the Channel was sought in France as the task at hand, to be executed, if possible, right away. Nothing more tellingly reminds us what a blessing it may be not to know where one is going, for that had been the situation of Britain in the centuries required to wed freedom and stability. Because the French could see what a seemingly effective parliamentary system looked like – and because so many of the articulates examined here wanted at least some elements of what they saw – they were constantly striving to create in a moment the model that had taken centuries to develop. Compared to French experience, British government in the nineteenth century looks easy, and its explanation too readily lends itself to Whiggish history, geographical determinism, or the mythology of national character. A world where people still need to learn how to do business with their enemies may well derive more benefit from familiarity with the more tortuous path followed by France. Different from the British creation of institutions, behind their own backs as it were, the French experience with parties ever had in view the end products of their neighbour’s process of evolution. Whether these served as accomplishments towards which the French must aspire or as a fate to be avoided depended, of course, on individual sentiment, and opinion about such issues cut right across the familiar divisions of post-revolutionary society. Royalists rejoicing at the return of the monarchy did not thereby gain an instant appreciation for the parliamentary forms that Czar Nicholas of Russia sought for France but not for his own people. There was always the possibility of their seeking to recreate that inefficient absolutism that had preceded the Revolution. Those who had learned to admire revolutionary politics or the populistic dictatorship favoured by Napoleon were yet less likely to dote upon the political traditions of the enemy both of the Revolution and of the Bonapartist empire. Unlike the royalist émigrés who had fled to Britain, people brought up on propaganda about British decadence and reaction had little to which they could look forward in the presence of that Westminster model that formed the basis of the Charte of 1814. What the abrupt and incomplete borrowing of a British version of representative government did was to force informed opinion to frame certain questions and to reach some conclusions that could never have been part of a slow and smooth transition. The result was that many issues, not much discussed in the home of representative government, had to be considered in formal, and in some measure even theoretical, terms. Although the issues had less to do with the glittering abstractions of political philosophy than with the

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conventions that would secure fair treatment of opposition in the legislature and in the country, the French addressed these issues with that intellectual flair that they brought to most subjects. It is all too easy, no doubt, to overdo the stereotype of the intensely intellectual rationalism of French thought contrasted with some more empirical and down-to-earth alternative. Still, it cannot easily be denied that the very circumstances of the momentous changes in France generated a rich vein of thought about comparative political institutions without parallel at that time. Perhaps, indeed, for the first time students and practitioners of politics were required to ask with what sort of accommodation alien ways of doing things could be fitted to an existing society. Did the acquisition of a monarchy, apparently limited, and a legislature that was in some measure linked to the preferences of an electorate that never, in the Restoration, reached 100,000 voters – and reached only 240,000 at the end of the July Monarchy – necessarily bring with them the Whigs and the Tories? Could there be free elections without electoral corruption or healthy competition within the chambers without the curse of faction? Sorting out the relations among the great organs of state was a major undertaking in itself, as an inherited respect for the separation of powers seemed lost within the assumptions of an emerging parliamentary system that, properly understood, had no use for such a separation. Little was to be heard of that notion that had linked the thought of Montesquieu to the revolutionary assemblies, although its lingering presence was responsible for more than one source of confusion. Ministers appointed by the sovereign had a puzzling double relation to their royal master and especially to that lower chamber that supplied the revenue for government. It would take more than an elementary command of the assumptions behind the Charte to divine when the king should contemplate a dissolution of the lower house and when he should accept ministers whom he would rather not have. The relations that should obtain between ministers and a legislative majority had still to be worked out. The answer, even in the British context, was not entirely unambiguous after more than a century of constitutional and parliamentary monarchy. More difficult by far to master were the relations between persons that were to sustain the engine of state. Here it was not just a matter of the different paths of development of two nations, but also of the still primitive state of political science. Small wonder that the forms of adhesive that created legislative majorities were the subject of no traditional literature and of little by way even of practical understanding. It followed that the modes of behaviour to be followed on the part of individuals – the sort of codes denied legal standing and not yet subject even to established etiquette – had still to be explored. There rapidly developed, then, a considerable body of writings intended to direct deputies in the performance of their duties, and, not surprisingly, expectations varied depending on

Introduction

7

whether the writer were committed to government or to opposition. Of two mythologies, both promoted by the minions of men in power, one depicted the ideal French representative as confronting issues with but an individual agenda, with honour and conscience as his only guides. A complementary mythology saw the members of Parliament in Britain as leagued together under leaders who enforced on the individual a party line, and this invited the perception that the activity of parties was foreign and un-French. It would be some time before the experience of the new regime would lead people to conclusions about the nature of political allegiances that came closer to the facts. It was, of course, the interests that sought to discourage organized opposition that purveyed the impression that any bond of union among members of the legislature was somehow illegitimate. Such a position simultaneously left no room for any structured opposition and thus dissolved the very perspective from which to criticize these claims. Consequently, it was the government’s case that was confidently and firmly stated, whereas those not partial to the men in office had more difficulty in framing a principled dissent. Only political activity itself would lead, over time, to the conclusions that connections in politics were themselves a natural aspect of the struggle and that organized opposition was compatible with virtue and patriotism. Starting from this initial disadvantage, opinion about opposition and its conduct through political parties developed without the natural attractions that had belonged to the slogans of the revolutionary era. After all, liberty sounded good on first acquaintance, and equality too might be so understood as to exert a wide appeal even for the classes that came to suffer under its weight. Similarly, the case for order or for honour – the vocabulary of the Counter-revolution – was in need of no introduction. Such notions lent themselves to innocuous platitudes, at least among believers, as the notions of interest here did not. Contrasted with the clichés meant to foster support for revolution or its rejection, opposition was not an institution that even sounded French, and never had it enjoyed a recognized place in the political order. The résistance known to an aristocratic age had been something both comparatively short-lived and more robust in nature than parliamentary opposition was meant to be. Educated opinion had doubtless already formed some impression of parties in politics, although the wisdom of the ages offered scant reason to applaud their presence and less incentive to explore their real nature. So, unless the public were neutral about opposition and party and ignorant of what they entailed, it was likely to harbour negative feelings. Such attitudes, paradoxically, were entirely compatible with possessing strong partisan commitments derived from recent history. It may even be true that the firmest friends to structured political conflict have often been people whose loyalties were less intense than those of the most ardent partisans. All of the figures examined here did

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take sides in the struggles of the day, but most of them tempered their enthusiasms with some analytical dimension whereby they sought, not just political success, but also understanding. The comparative rarity of this combination of qualities adds yet another reason why insight into the problem of limiting conflict without destroying freedom has been one of the more elusive quests in both political thought and political action. To the long list of factors that beset this great experiment in cultural borrowing must be added the faith, even of Frenchmen otherwise well informed about British government, that the manual for assembling their institutions had already been written and that it needed but refinement into French. Little did their sometimes flattering regard for Albion prepare them for the discovery that standard accounts of British politics had not generally absorbed even the lessons to be learned from the crisis of 1784 that saw Pitt the Younger and Charles James Fox change places. Current wisdom was thus inadequate as to the existing system in Britain, yet only what might be expected to work in France. Moreover, the French could never have been prepared for the unsettling intelligence that the vaunted constitution that guided their labours was itself in the throes of significant change in some of its more sensitive parts. Eighteenth-century precedents, whether from Sir William Blackstone and Edmund Burke, the tomes of John Hatsell on procedure, or the high-minded sentiments of Fox, were less helpful than those who cited them seemed to think. It is tempting here to contemplate the rationalistic mind wrestling uneasily with a collection of odds and ends that, for reasons never explained, served the purposes of others in circumstances not their own. Frenchmen sometimes comforted themselves with the thought that between 1689 and the Restoration the islanders had enjoyed a century and a quarter to get it right. Too rarely had the beneficiaries written down the fruits of their labours, and they might well not agree on what their accomplishments had been. Observers of the Westminster system were far from agreed about the value of political parties, and a scanning of English periodicals, even as late as the Victorian period, yields numerous thoughts on the evil and imminent death of the parties. The nineteenth century was not noticeably better equipped than the eighteenth to explain why government and opposition by parties was useful. Benjamin Disraeli would make speeches on the theme that parliamentary government without parties was hardly imaginable, and did so, not because he was fond of truisms, but because he feared that his countrymen had not grasped the point. Decades before, France had embarked on what would increasingly be known as parliamentary government. Unfortunately, the nation lacked those traditions that sustained the British parties, and all too often the French suffered from the inaccurate impression that the relevant mores were well understood in

Introduction

9

the land of their birth and universally accepted. The French elite was ready for schooling in the arts of constitutional government in a monarchy only to discover that there was no such course. The ever-present influence of British practice on French thought does not demand a chapter to itself, since it suffused all particular debates and touched all of the major figures. At a time when invoking the French past as a benchmark was politically sensitive, it had become correspondingly more natural to appeal, in admiration or derision, to what went on in the land of the Whigs and the Tories. The result was what was arguably the first great debate on the means of transplanting political institutions and the wisdom of the attempt. The study of comparative government and the unending quest for a stable political freedom have both been the better for it. The account here is one about political discourse of a sort that is connected in the closest way with the politics of the time. There is no single concept or idea to epitomize what this is about; rather, one must confront a problem – that of making France both free and governable – that entails various strands of thought and action. For purposes of laying down some foundation, the narrative begins with two thematic chapters, the first of which offers a survey of what political commentators had to say about pluralism and conflict in the ancien régime and the Revolution. The themes of interest here had, more or less, a beginning, but that beginning was before 1814. By that time, most of the central figures had already staked out claims in public life, for only François Guizot was too young to have left an earlier record. Attitudes and concepts that are crucial to our understanding also had their rise before the Revolution or during its course. The second chapter is intended as an overview of relevant categories as they figured in the years 1814–48. Close attention to issues and texts is confined to the years 1814–30, the Restoration. There is good reason, however, to pursue persons and arguments into the July Monarchy, if only because both Chateaubriand and Vaublanc published their most important thoughts in that period, as did a number of others less central to the narrative. For other purposes as well, the year 1848 affords an appropriate terminus ad quem to the experiment of French parliamentary monarchy. Some of the political debate of the Restoration was conducted with a sense of déjà vu, but it is also true that some awareness of the future of certain causes adds meaning to the tale. The two initial chapters serve to introduce the relevant issues and the tides of argument that surrounded them and thus avoid the repetition that might otherwise mark five chapters that cover roughly the same span of time. The reader should then be aware, perhaps for the first time, just how salient the quandaries as to the nature of proper conduct in government and in opposition had become. Numerous speeches in the legislature and the columns of more than one hundred

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newspapers attest to the fact. Some of us were writing about discourse long before the pursuit became a fashion. With the main lines established, both for words and deeds, attention turns to five separate studies of how important individuals – all of them at once writers and political actors – responded to the challenges of the times. The sequence of these chapters reflects a rough sort of chronology, for all of these people were contemporaries through at least a portion of the period and only Mme de Staël did not live to see the end of it. Vaublanc, who had played a significant role in the early Revolution, comes first as the central figure of chapter 3, whereas Guizot, who enjoyed far more prominence after the Restoration than during it, is relegated to chapter 7 with the Doctrinaires. Since ideas need not be disembodied entities, they are best presented, where possible, with a human face. The individuals chosen for this office will be known to specialists in the period and two of them – Constant (chapter 5) and Chateaubriand (chapter 6) – have inspired enormous literatures. While neither Vaublanc or Fiévée (chapters 3 and 4) commands a large public today, even they were relative giants in their time, the one a colourful minister of the interior whose views, however misunderstood, still figure in the literature of constitutional law, and the other the best-known journalist of the age. It is noteworthy, however, that just as the richness of the general controversial writing on political mores has escaped notice, so too have the particular contributions of Chateaubriand, of Germaine de Staël, and, in good measure, of Guizot. Known as thinkers they may be, but not for the thoughts that are of concern here. What has commended these thoughts for a place in this study is, of course, that they reflect a superior understanding of the relevant issues, said rather a lot about them, and said it well. Never is it assumed that such formulations dominated the age, for a comparatively inarticulate distrust of parties was almost certainly more common. In point of fact, the same may very well be true, in certain jurisdictions, today. Dealing with political ideas necessarily entails focusing on what is new and arresting; it does not aspire to taking a census. In the quality of its thinkers and in their relevance to the next century and a half of French government, the period under examination makes strong claims on our attention.

1

Conflict and Its Management in the French Tradition: Pre-revolutionary Perspectives when we fix the epithet of absolutism on France prior to the Revolution, we pass over many foci of debate and, occasionally, of genuine political conflict. These were sometimes the result of simple inefficiency in the machinery of repression; at times they had deeper roots in the political culture, as with the provincial parlements and many other sites of selfgovernment. In the main, however, society was organized in terms of orders that took into account differences in interests, privileges, and expectations. Because these orders were separated vertically, they were not expected to clash with one another. Two idées maîtresses of the regime helped to make the point clear. Owing to the hierarchy of estates, orders, and corps in which each, in principle, might find his place, there was, in principle, no “public” such as existed in Britain at the time. There, said Frenchmen, the orders of society were so confused that the nation seemed to form but a single corps. France, they said, was different, and rightly so.1 This was precisely the judgment that Englishmen would eventually pass upon Restoration France, when the levelling work of the Revolution and the Empire was held to have destroyed degree.2 French society, prior to these great changes, was intended to minimize the interpenetration of the various orders that was typical of a commercial society. Interests that might otherwise collide were thus kept separate, and thereby the nation gained, 1 See [abbé Barthouil], Lettre à l’auteur de la noblesse commerçante (n.p., 1756), 3; [Ange Goudar], L’Espion chinois, ou l’envoyé secret de la cour de Pékin … (Cologne, 1764), 4:244; and Jérémie Richard, Histoire naturelle de l’air et des météores (Paris, 1770), 4:426–7. The alleged connection between climate and society accounts for the presence of political ideas in a work largely technical. 2 [? John Cam Hobhouse, Baron Broughton], Memorandums of a Residence in France in the Winter of 1815–16, Including Remarks on French Manners and Society … (London, 1816), 320–1.

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at least for a time, some protection from the tides of modern politics. Conflict could hardly be banished by such an understanding, but in the practice of the ancien régime, it lacked the legitimacy that it had gained, for instance, in British public life. The obverse of this assumption of hierarchy – and the second key assumption – entailed a notion of unity that allowed subjects still to enjoy loyalties to their region, social stratum, or profession. It is not easy for a student of the Revolution to realize that the pejorative connotations of esprit de corps were relatively new, part of that process whereby the nation discarded privilege and embraced a vision of unity that created but a single public. Through the four decades before 1789, one can see the development of the anti-social understanding of a spirit that united portions of the nation even as it divided the whole. Rejection of an esprit de corps first served to discredit the Jesuits and other religious bodies, only to be turned against the rising parlements.3 Finally, there came a wholesale assault on the spirit that gave solidarity to the church, the nobility, and all other privileged bodies. The cunning of reason eventually undermined all of the competing causes of the pre-revolutionary order. For those who like their explanations phrased in terms of contradictions, the process was one where social harmony had required subordinating all pretensions to the common loyalty to the throne. Weakness at the centre – and the presumption of various interests that this encouraged – set the various orders against one another and brought down the whole edifice. Replacing those orders whose hierarchical separation was intended to prevent conflict was an insistence that there must be no separate parts that might, in theory, clash one with another. In order to implement this highly unlikely form of monism, the emphasis upon a common loyalty to the centre came to be stated in terms far more demanding than had been true under the monarchy. This meant that the nation came far to outstrip the throne in the jealousy with which it sought to discredit all competing attachments. The complex mosaic of monarchical France had possessed a measure of diversity, even a modest measure of pluralism, that was intolerable to the newly articulate nation. Hence came the excesses of what a later century has been pleased to call “totalitarian democracy.” Neither before the Revolution nor during it was France the natural home of institutionalized conflict. In that respect, the kingdom of orders and the allegedly democratic forms of republic did not differ in principle, although the latter took to new heights its efforts to banish legitimate disagreement in 3 On religious bodies, see [J.-H. Maubert de Gouvest], Trop est trop, capitulation de la France avec les moines et religieux … (La Haye, 1767), vi; on parlements, see Anon., Remonstrances d’un citoyen aux parlemens de France (n.p., 1771), 20.

Conflict and Its Management in the French Tradition

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politics. This is not to suggest that France was, in reality, a land without serious divisions. It was not difficult to contrast the history of Britain, long united as a nation, with that of France, repeatedly wracked by civil wars along one axis or another. When the perception of the English as king-killers faded – as necessarily it did after the Revolution in France – it was the French who seemed to reflect a tradition of disorder.4 However manifest that fact, it was equally evident that the culture had not embraced any antidote for the condition. It remains true, however, that before the crash, and after it as well, there had been efforts to visualize a place for limited conflict within political systems – either the old order or the various successor regimes – all officially hostile to dissent. For this purpose there were, in European culture, various sources of inspiration, some of great antiquity. From the ancient Mediterranean came that cosmological notion of a universe rendered harmonious through the blending, perhaps even the clashing, of the opposites that were among its component parts. Known variously as the discors concordia or more commonly, to moderns, as the concordia discors, it was an image very familiar to France in the Renaissance. For writers such as Pierre Viret, Guillaume Postel, Louis Leroy, and J.-P. Camus, to name but a few, it was a notion about the world that was quite central to their thought. Even Jean Bodin, known to the history of political ideas as a proponent of royal absolutism, entertained some quite different models of the political process, such as when he recorded one speaker in a discussion who allowed that the harmony of a state might be founded upon the hostilities between groups of citizens. As an example of this, he instanced the alleged benefits arising from the tensions within the Roman republic. In the same discussion, another speaker offered the thought that a political division into two hostile factions was not, in fact, other than dangerous to stability, whereas one with many factions was much more conducive to civil peace.5 It had been this model that later appealed to those in Britain who argued that the multiplicity of religious sects, assuming that all would unite against any pretender to intolerance, might secure a peaceful polity without needing unanimity in religion.6 Another significant text that found political wisdom in what might otherwise seem to be a law of nature or the work of divine Providence was by Virgilio Malvezzi. More than one of his musings on the

4 See Charles Menche de Loisne, France et Angleterre: Étude sociale et politique (Paris, 1859), 113, 122, 223–4. 5 Bodin, Colloquies of the Seven about Secrets of the Sublime, ed. and trans. M.L.D. Kuntz (Princeton, 1975), 145–51. 6 Gunn, Politics and the Public Interest in the Seventeenth Century (London and Toronto, 1969), 182–3.

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thoughts of Tacitus invoked Galen’s version of a concordia discors, originally intended as medical prescription, to supply the wants of the body politic.7 There seem to have been no events or processes, native to France, that could supply the model, for no one invoked the wars of religion or the Fronde as worthy of emulation. Use of the Roman experience to document the benefits of political conflict dates, of course, from Machiavelli’s well-known bow to the struggles between the nobles and the commons as recorded by Titus Livy. As the story went, the spirited defence of the constitutional prerogatives of the two orders lent vigour, and even supplied liberty, to the life of the republic. This was a potent myth, and the British had sought to assimilate the experience of their own Whigs and Tories to the balance of orders in the mixed governments of antiquity. Of this sort was Swift’s famous treatment of politics in 1701, using the analogy of class struggle in Athens and Rome. Convincing enough in the circumstances of a brief period, this effort had the effect of confusing two quite different forms of political competition. The resultant blurring of categories invited observers of British politics to seek to find either Whig or Tory as the defender of plebeian claims, no mean feat in either case. It was still haunting efforts to make sense of British parties in the decade after Waterloo.8 The French had no mixed government to muddle the account, but it had no equivalent to the Whigs and Tories either. One finds, however, echoes of Machiavelli’s thoughts, although he is not named, in Montesquieu’s treatment of the Roman republic where the sage of Bordeaux endorsed the opinion that the divisions of ancient Rome had been wholesome. Agreeing with the general sentiment, an essayist insisted still that good would come of it only if the two parties were both committed to honourable and patriotic principles. Rousseau – in the Social Contract, book 2, chapter 3) – equally went to Machiavelli to support his views on party. His use of the History of Florence to support his proscription of competing parties failed, however, to grasp the complexity of Machiavelli’s position and seemed not to benefit from the truer reading of sentiment that had come in the Discourses.9 More 7 Malvezzi, 8th discourse, “What Discords Conserve States,” and 9th discourse, “Of Concordent Discord,” in Discourses upon Cornelius Tacitus, trans. Sir Richard Baker (London, 1642). 8 I have discussed this distortion in the British context. See Gunn, Factions No More: Attitudes to Party in Government and Opposition in Eighteenth-Century England (London, 1972), 11–15. 9 These views are usefully summarized in Yves Lévy, “Les partis et la démocratie: I, Le problème au xviiie siècle,” Contrat social 3 (March 1959): 79–86. An example of Montesquieu’s influence in encouraging a positive view of party is to be found in a review in Journal encyclopédique 4, bk 5, pt 2 (July 1757): 91–2.

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complex than Montesquieu’s hesitant endorsement and Rousseau’s confused resolve was the position of Gabriel Bonnet de Mably, an austere republican before Rousseau played that role. Mably had some good things to say about divisions in a polity with regard to their work in preserving freedom and a sturdy civisme, but these comments remained coloured by the tradition of mixed government and the clash of orders of the population. In commenting on British politics, he expressed admiration for the Opposition10 but not for the parties. It has always, of course, been an easier matter to find something admirable in the opposing of power than in those knots of ambitious men who were responsible for the outcome. Mably’s views attracted some interest, but in his distaste for the conflict between two more or less permanent parties, he belonged to a school of thought that included still most British commentators and almost all Frenchmen.11 The activity that won his endorsement might include popular resistance to oppression, but it did nothing to dispel the impression of British decline that, in the era of the Seven Years’ War, increasingly mingled in France with an admiration of things British. In any event, given the presuppositions of French government, one almost had to treat legitimate conflict as belonging only to a republic. It was not, then, surprising that such appreciation of conflict as did appear came more readily to those with republican sympathies than to other subjects of the Bourbons. This would not always be so. It was not easy, even in Britain, to perceive the existing political divisions for what they were, and the cognitive distance that separated the French from Georgian Britain was of no help in bringing matters into focus. Bolingbroke’s political vision often set the bounds of perception. It influenced Montesquieu in various ways and also, no doubt, Mably’s approval of opposition without party, for it was Bolingbroke’s understanding, not that of the ministerial Whigs, that gained a hearing in France. Even Voltaire, no republican, associated a long-standing balance of parties with republics and commended the arrangement. He avoided confusion, however, by treating the parties of Britain separately from those of republics and by offering a different rationale in each case. Republican parties, which he probably took to be the equivalent of Roman orders, were justified because 10 I have capitalized this term when it refers to the British institution of the Opposition; when it refers merely to legislative practices and not to the body sanctioned by constitutional convention, it is in lower case. 11 Mably, Des droits et des devoirs du citoyen [1758], ed. Jean-Louis Lecercle (Paris, 1972), 59–61, 189; and Mably, “De la législation, ou principes des loix” [1755], in Oeuvres (Paris, 1789), 9:234–5. Comment on Mably’s views is to be found in Journal étranger (London) 1 (June 1777): 96–7.

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one could not trust any set of men to rule unopposed. He did not present the British factions as embodying any discrete virtue, but depicted their struggle as innocuous if only because suffused by loyalty to the state. They were prepared to unite in the cause of liberty, said Voltaire, and so acted like jealous lovers who devotedly served the same mistress.12 Echoes of this judgment ran for decades through documents that were friendly to British institutions. By making the union of parties the means to preserving liberty, Voltaire would have found it awkward to describe liberty as the result of their conflict and he did not try. His comments thus belonged to the category of that faint praise that a number of intelligent Europeans offered for British political mores. The marquis d’Argens, who was as anglophile as Voltaire, expressed great admiration for the political sophistication of the British. Of the parties themselves, he said that they did no serious harm and suggested that Italian volatility would do more to destroy the British system were those institutions transplanted to Italy. Samuel Formey, of the Academy of Berlin, expressed similar indulgence for the disorder of British elections.13 A good number of thoughtful observers, Rousseau always excepted, saw reason to admire aspects of Britain’s rowdy public life, if not in any way that encouraged emulation in France. In the larger world of French opinion, there was little occasion to consult the basis of freedom in republican Rome, and greater familiarity with Whigs and Tories brought, in most quarters, only disapproval. Awareness of the oddity represented by the parties had been conveyed to a French reading public by the historian Rapin-Thoyras. Subtle and effective in explaining the various factors that kept the cleavage alive and the several shades of conviction that found room in party ranks, he offered no clear judgment about the desirability of the whole business.14 Nor did other students of the subject – such as the Swiss traveller Muralt in the 1720s, the abbé Le Blanc in the 1740s, or Marie-Anne Du Bocage in 1750 – supply any positive orientation. The last of these typified French attitudes when she identified the parties of Britain as those required by mixed government, but condemned their doings nonetheless. As she understood the problem, those parties that seemed necessary to the functioning of mixed government had the effect of encouraging a contentious spirit that was 12 Voltaire, “Idées républicaines” [1762], in Oeuvres, ed. Louis Moland (Paris, 1877–85), 24:419, 426; and “La princesse de Babylone” [1768], in ibid., 21:411. 13 [J.-B. de Boyer d’Argens], Lettres juives (La Haye, 1738), 5:361–2; and Formey, Le Philosophe payen (Leide, 1759), 1:115. 14 Readers may now consult texts of Rapin and of Emmanuel de Cize, both published in 1717, in B. Cottret and M.-.M. Martinet, eds, Partis et factions dans l’Angleterre du premier xviiie siècle (Paris, 1987).

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then reflected in the ways of members of Parliament.15 The relation between the familiar Whigs and Tories and the formal elements that made up the limited monarchy was a complication that Madame Du Bocage spared her readers. The great age of Anglomania ran from about 1748 until 1760,16 but it was not a good time for the reputation of the parties even in Britain, with the contest an unprincipled struggle for office among Whigs. EdmeJacques Genet, the bulk of whose writings consisted in translating British political literature for French consumption, noted the basis of partisan politics when he observed that both Whigs and Tories had changed their principles and that the two were not then very different. In addition, he announced that the Tories had come to call themselves Whigs.17 It was an apt insight and one not always given to British observers. There were, to be sure, isolated writers who, for their own purposes, found explicitly good things to say about the parties. Most remarkable of these was, in fact, a Frenchman, the economist Plumard de Dangeul. Writing in the character of an Englishman, he invited the French to understand that Britain’s form of government gave it a marked advantage for purposes of economic growth and the power that went with it. His hymn to public spirit was singularly devoid of references to the faction and instability that shocked others. He simply accepted the British system as it was, hailed the freedom afforded by elections and the debates in Parliament, and, apart from a glance at court influence, was silent about any costs associated with these arrangements. The action of parties found a place in references to emulation and the ambition to advance to honours. These he treated indulgently as signs of public spirit.18 French awareness of the unique features of British government entered as well into the literature celebrating one of the French victories in the Seven Years’ War. Interestingly, the French success at Minorca in 1756 put one obscure pamphleteer in mind of the similarities between the governments of the two nations and also of their different strengths. In this connection, he commented, without further elaboration, that “les différens 15 Du Bocage, “Lettres sur l’Angleterre, la Hollande et l’Italie,” in Recueil des oeuvres de Madame Du Bocage (Lyon, 1762), 3:54, from a letter of 12 May 1750. 16 See Joseph Dedieu, Montesquieu et la tradition politique anglaise en France [1907] (repr. Genève, 1971), 381; and Frances Acomb, Anglophobia in France, 1763–1789 (Durham, NC, 1950), esp. 31–8. 17 Genet, État politique actuel de l’Angleterre (n.p., 1757), 1:35. 18 John Nickolls [J.-J.Plumard de Dangeul], “Avantages de la Grande-Bretagne par la constitution de son Gouvernement,” in Remarques sur les avantages et des désavantages de la France et de la Gr. Bretagne … (Leyde, 1754), 159–202, esp. 157–63.

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partis qui divisent l’Angleterre, constituent sa force.” The unexpected praise, coming from within a nation with which Britain was at war, was not long in making an impression on a British student of political economy who, in the next year, repeated the comment and elaborated upon it.19 Jacob Moreau, patriot and firm friend of absolutism, did his countrymen one better by asking, in 1760 and later, why the government in France could not have, as in Britain, a party to defend it, especially since it seemed to have to weather organized obstruction, as from the parlements.20 Despite this sentiment, Moreau was obviously thinking less of the process of opposing the king’s ministers as of attracting private persons to their cause in place of the very passive obedience known to France under Louis XV. All of these writers were responding to particular circumstances in the two countries, and none sought to frame a general endorsement of political conflict. Plumard drew his evidence from a time of subdued if unedifying struggle within the British ministry, while Moreau used the end of the Seven Years’ War to reflect on the merits of a form of patriotism that was more robust than that favoured in his own nation. With the general repute of British institutions falling as the European war passed into the American Revolution, understanding of the British parties actually seemed to be growing. A lengthy survey of party life that captured the scene as it stood in 1763 faithfully reflected the ethos prevailing at the outset of a new reign. The writer saw the apparent readmission of the Tories into public life as putting an end to the unpleasant squabbles of the past.21 This was, of course, a tendentious reading, as it might have been more reasonable to assume that the end of proscription favoured more competition. Still, in seeing the parties as alliances among politicians seeking office, this rendering made it difficult to view Whigs or Tories through the eyes of Swift, Du Bocage, or anyone else anxious to turn them into the political arms of estates of the realm. This distortion did, however, remain a problem for some, and erudition often got in the way of understanding what one actually saw. Arguments about the utility of parties thus still got caught up in negative comment on the vaunted balance of the British constitution. Talk of equilibrium amongst

19 [Ignace Hagary de Lamarche-Courmont], Essai politique sur les avantages que la France peut retirer de la conqûete de l’isle Minorque (Citadella, 1757), 133; and William Temple of Trowbridge, A Vindication of Commerce and the Arts … Source of the Greatness, Power, Riches and Populousness of a State (London, 1758), 133 and n. It is a mere coincidence that the relevant comments in both works occur, respectively, on the same page. 20 Moreau, Le moniteur françois (Avignon, 1760), 1:16–7. 21 Anon., Mémoires touchant le gouvernement d’Angleterre (Amsterdam, 1764), 1:xxii, 48–51; 2:22–31.

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three powers was taxing enough; making sense, within this scheme, of two parties only added to the confusion. Contant d’Orville, a specialist in chronicling the behaviour of the British people, was typical in rejecting the constitutional balance and with it the parties. When he wrote of Whiggs and Torys, he fell into the commonplace confusion of presenting the Whigs as both the party of the people and the one that dominated the House of Commons. This left the Tories as the king’s party and master of the House of Lords. Confusion was confounded when this writer took a source written about the politics of the 1740s – Nathaniel Smith of Leicester, The Political Touchstone, a work cited by abbé Le Blanc as early as 1745 and not readily to be found in its English original – and tried to use it to illuminate events of some three decades later. A claim that the Tories were in opposition to the court seemed to fit neither their general reputation nor the circumstances of George III’s reign. Contant d’Orville then had to settle for another inherited stereotype that depicted Whigs as pale creatures with insinuating voices and Tories as bluff, ruddy squires and all John Bullish.22 The mobs bawling about Wilkes and liberty would have been puzzled by this. The superimposing of images drawn from different periods of British politics must have made a retreat to talk of the dead Romans all the more inviting. Certainly, some otherwise well-informed members of the French elite remained tied to the Roman categories. One of these was the monarchien theorist Jean-Joseph Mounier, who never seemed to disengage himself from an expectation that the chief axis of political conflict should be between an upper and a lower chamber of the legislature.23 Mounier was both a student of Roman history and an anglophile, but his case for bicameralism and political pluralism was bedevilled by irrelevant assumptions. Although Frenchmen in the 1770s found more reasons than before to pursue Montesquieu’s intimations about British corruption and decline, they also seemed to find the British ever more interesting in political terms. The fullest treatment of British parties to greet the French reader appeared in a periodical written between 1768 and 1772 by Auguste-Pierre Damiens de Gomicourt. The volumes of his Observateur, the most elaborate account of British life available in French, showed the author to be interested in the parties largely as a fund of anecdote about the oddities in British mores. He explicitly denied that such organizations had any place in 22 A.-G. Contant d’Orville, Les Fastes de la Grande-Bretagne (Paris, 1769), 1:xxxiv; and Contant d’Orville, Les Nuits angloises … (Paris, 1770), 1:5–12. 23 J.-J. Mounier, Nouvelles observations sur les États-généraux (Paris, 1789), 246–8; and Mounier, Recherches sur les causes qui ont empêché les François de devenir libres (Genève, 1792), 1:192–7; 2:35, 261.

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French government. Less inclined to insist upon the sinister work of corruption than were many French observers, Damiens was more sympathetic to a court perspective that others called Tory. This was responsible for his emphasis – one that grew more prominent in French opinion – on the impotence of a British Opposition. He presented the Opposition as that sort of noisy group reduced to public demonstrations because its members were excluded from those circles where influence could be usefully exercised. Where some saw danger in seditious publications, he purported to find only a plaintive weakness. Another indication that he had fallen among the King’s Friends came in his mocking of the gloomy demeanour of all pretenders to a Whiggish patriotism.24 The observation that the members of the Opposition made dreary companions at dinner was well suited to rendering their cause unpopular in Paris. The portrait suggested that political parties inhabited the realm of fashion and foible rather than that of high politics. Absent were the more self-righteous assaults on the perfidy of all British parties, and it was left for more earnest souls, such as the abbé Dubois de Launay, to condemn every facet of the supposed liberty enjoyed by Britons. This latter critic even complained that parties in Britain rendered all policy and administration unstable as each successive administration set out to undo the accomplishments of its predecessor.25 He neglected the fact that the physiocrats were then saying exactly the same about the effects of the ministerial cabals in France. Damiens de Gomicourt was, on the whole, fairer in his comment though careful to give his countrymen no reason to prefer British practices to their own. Not the least of the merits of this last writer was that he favoured the categories of government and opposition rather than the almost meaningless labels of Tory and Whig. This avoided numerous conceptual problems and made the business of rendering British politics more readily comprehensible. Naturally enough, given their own experience, Frenchmen had a tendency to wish to identify the British parties with permanent positions in the state and so might refer to them as corps. Such a view then made it very difficult to understand how the two might come to exchange places, a manoeuvre that invited expression in metaphysical language.26 That practice would persist into the Restoration. Any tendency to replace the familiar proper names by functional terms was helpful if only because it encouraged one’s 24 For representative passages see L’Observateur français à Londres 1, no. 5 (1770): 226–31; and letter 26, “Sur l’étât actuel du parti de l’opposition,” in ibid., 2, no. 6 (1771): 379–87. 25 [Henri, abbé Dubois de Launay], Coup d’oeil sur le gouvernement anglais (n.p., 1786), 35, 169. 26 See Ange Goudar, L’Espion français à Londres (Londres, 1780), 1:90–1.

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asking where precisely the conflict in British politics was to be found. A case in point appeared in the popular account of London life by Pierre-Jean Grosley, a man of letters best known for his witty parodies of academic pomposity. Grosley’s book offered two sections that were devoted to party strife in Britain. The first recounted the familiar view, coloured still by Bolingbroke’s account, of a contest between patriots and the party of corruption. Not a few Frenchmen had learned to identify the contestants as, on the one side, opposition and, on the other, corruption. Later, Grosley would do much better; in a further volume of the same work, he relied on Hume as his authority, and the result was a clear upgrade in accuracy and insight. Here Grosley undertook to weigh the influence of the notorious conflict and managed, in its specificity, to improve on Hume’s analysis: “The party spirit that reigns equally in the Lords and in the Commons is, for the Constitution, a reliable preservative against the shattering clashes between orders which, having brought civil wars to Rome … entailed the republic’s ruin.”27 This appreciation that party functioned within both houses of Parliament, and not between them, was the crucial insight, seemingly absent in casual references to the tensions occasioned within mixed government, and it was an essential one in order to get straight the nature of British political strife. Since this understanding was also slow in penetrating British categories, it was a long time in informing the views of foreigners. The claim that the business of the parties was an antidote to class warfare had its sober side, but it was surely an improvement on the traditional French argument that the British used foreign adventures to mitigate domestic tensions. All in all, Grosley’s interpretation helped to refurbish the shabby reputation of party by finding virtue in the struggle, if only in the form of seeing it as precluding an outcome much more to be feared. An echo of the same argument was later offered by Simon Linguet, the radical conservative of French political journalism; it emerged from a very conventional understanding of the meaning of British parties. In one of his passing observations, Linguet noted, dismissively, that an English Opposition was made up of disgraced ministers and of those who had yet to have that opportunity. There was more to it, he said, than had been the case with the Blues and Greens of Byzantine fame, but it had less substance as a cause than the struggle of patricians and plebeians, real parties with roots in real communities. This criterion left the factions of Britain with less than top marks, but it did make clear that they were not, in fact, the instruments of class warfare. Later that same year, his judgment was more approving, for Linguet found a means by which to congratulate British partisanship as a way of pointing to the less obvious and less attractive aspects of French public life. 27 [P.-J. Grosley ], Londres … (Lausanne, 1774), 4:115. All translations are mine.

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Writing to a British correspondent, he noted that one must mark in the British situation a telling consideration that dwarfed all others. This was the capacity for individuals to join together for the purpose of responding to pressing public issues; it served to turn what would otherwise be petty and private rivalries to some larger purpose.28 Here was that fusion of self-seeking and public service that many observers would single out as noteworthy in explaining Britain’s flourishing condition. So the British factions resembled neither the ancient orders nor the ambitions of the hated parlements, the embodiment of what Linguet called esprit de corps. Never one to let facts interrupt a good argument, Linguet neglected the transparent truth that this struggle had a lot to do with jobs and concentrated upon how the parties contributed to public confrontation of national issues. Rather than seeing the parties through Roman eyes, he employed his own agenda in French politics and thus gave warrant for language that seems excessively positive. Linguet had been noted as a scoffer at British liberty, and only a stay in the Bastille would convince him of its relative attractiveness. But, like most French exiles, he wrote of foreigners with France in mind, and this lent a new lustre to British politics. In one respect, Linguet was less innovative than his reputation for fathering neologisms warrants. He has been cited as the source for the assimilation of the expression “parti de l’opposition” into the French language. But as early as 1745, the abbé Le Blanc had reported that in Britain “le Party de l’opposition commence a triompher,” his way of referring to the formation of what the British called the Broadbottom administration.29 Of course, at the time, there was no referent in French experience for the expression, for organized opposition had no forum, such as Parliament, around which to collect. Jansenist disobedience to authority over Unigenitus and protest by the clerical estate about new taxes were instances of complaint, but did not represent opposition in the British sense. By 1753, the parlements were prone to oppose royal edicts, but respectful remonstrances in the name of the nation did not receive the name of opposition. Those who disapproved of such activity called it un esprit d’indépendance, words that carried a hint of aristocratic disloyalty; more neutrally, this was known to the eighteenth century as résistance. The king of France had not accused the recalcitrant courts of trying to form a party, but of 28 Linguet, Annales politiques, civiles, et littéraires du dix-huitième siècle (Londres, 1777), 2:526–7; 3:268. 29 Ferdinand Gohin, Les Transformations de la langue française pendant la deuxième moitié du xviiie siècle [1903] (repr. Genève, 1970), 292. Cf. J.-B. Le Blanc, Lettres d’un français (La Haye, 1745), 3:271. A useful source of other instances of usage, though none as early as 1745, is G. von Proschewitz, “Opposition,” in Idées et mots du siècle des lumières: Mélanges en l’honneur de Gunnar von Proschewitz (Göteborg and Paris, 1988), 105–9.

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claiming to elevate the magistracy into a corps or ordre contrary to the practice of the land.30 He was understandably put out by the boldest of the parliamentary strategies, which was to make public their quarrel with royal edicts. This did smack of organized opposition on the British model and was not countenanced by the conventions of absolutism that only recognized complaint that was discreet. To be sure, the language knew about parties of many sorts, including the party that favoured French music and the one supporting Italian. But usage gave no essentially political meaning to the term. A document of 1760 referred to the discontents of the “parti” opposed to the registering of royal decrees, the business of the magistrates.31 Yet even this political application stopped short of depicting the parlement in question as forming a party against the ministers. In fact, the allusion was to a division within the parlement of Brittany, with one faction favouring compliance and the other supporting resistance. Neither was this internal division, little known to the world beyond the magistracy, comparable to party struggles within Parliament. It is true, of course, that some prominent figures in the resistance by the parlements went on to become ministers of the king. Sometimes, as with Miromesnil or Malesherbes, they made the transition from one office to the other with an ease that would have been envied by the British Opposition. Still, when in 1775 it was said that the late prince de Conty had been at the head of opposition,32 the reference was to a court faction of no great consequence. It took more momentous events than these to give meaning, in France, to parties (political) or oppositions (constitutional). Without anything corresponding to the British Parliament, there was no ready locus where institutionalized opposition could form, although the parlements sometimes offered a semblance of opposition. By 1787, a new era seemed about to dawn, and Brissot de Warville, later famous as a Girondin, suggested that France emulate the activity of the leaders of opposition in Parliament. He proposed the duc d’Orléans as head of this opposition and the parlements as the means of giving it roots in the nation as a whole. o p p o s i t i o n a n d pa r t y i n t h e e a r ly r e v o l u t i o n The great events that began in 1787 lent an unprecedented urgency to creating practices that would accommodate disagreement that was in danger 30 See Recueil des déliberations, arrestes, remonstrances et représentations du Parlement, sur les affaires de Bretagne (n.p., 1767), 110–11. 31 Correspondance politique et administrative de Miromesnil, premier président du Parlement de Normandie (Rouen and Paris, 1899), 1:95. 32 Journal inédit du duc de Cröy (1718–1784), ed. Paul Cottin and E.-H., vicomte de Grouchy (Paris, 1907), 3:244.

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of rending the central organs of the new order. Consequently, that British freedom, widely condemned for at least a generation as illusory, seemed to warrant a second look. A more serious consideration of certain institutions is evident even in the sort of careless compilations that had conveyed so much of what Frenchmen then thought that they knew about British government. One that appeared in 1789 contained still all of the tired vignettes about the cold, suicide-prone English, but it also said what had been said surprisingly rarely in the past: namely, that party divisions played some part in protecting freedom from the encroachments of ministers. It was evidently a theme very much on the minds of people in that year of 1789, and for good measure, the compiler said it twice.33 Suspicion of the ministers was a natural response in a time when reform had gained official blessing and the nation believed still in monarchy. Who to blame but the ministers? Anti-ministerial feeling – to which the amazing popularity of Necker was but a brief exception – was fast becoming the most hardy of vulgar prejudices. To this, we may trace the decision to deny ministers seats in the National Assembly and the later provision that attempted to rule out a future ministerial career for those who had recently left their legislative duties. It was the basis, too, of that firm resolve to keep the executive weak that persisted into the Directory and beyond. For some thoughtful people, a separation of powers, supplemented by censure or impeachment, was all that was needed to keep ministers in line. But the circumstances of 1789 led more than one independent thinker to wonder if what France needed was an opposition. It was in this spirit that the marquis Ducrest – the person to whom Brissot had addressed his thoughts on opposition – proposed the setting up of an office, to be filled by ten or more people. Their mandate would consist of keeping watch on the ministers and scrutinizing their measures. He wondered whether these officers of the assembly might be known as orateurs, but his other suggestion – that they be called contradicteurs-nés – seems better. A condition of accepting the job was that these anti-ministers must renounce a career under the crown. Thus, proclaimed Ducrest, their service would be disinterested, free of that taint of ambition that surrounded the Opposition in Britain.34 When critics of the Revolution waxed cruel about a taste for abstract reasoning, divorced from the constraints imposed by experience, they usually chose to dwell upon the Declaration of Rights. Yet, the same sort of well-intentioned political rationalism is equally apparent in this proposal to design an opposition. It was, in a sense, reasonable, but 33 [A.-A. Chomel], Repértoire anglois, ou recueil de littérature, d’histoires et d’anecdotes angloises (Paris, 1789), 1:113–14, 2:24–5. 34 Charles-Louis, marquis Ducrest, Essais sur les principes d’une bonne constitution … première partie (n.p., 1789), 26.

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also impracticable. Understandable in its premises, it was distinctly odd as well, for it cut the nerve of that political ambition that was the life of parliamentary government and so made opposition into a sort of judicial body. Something along the same lines did, however, surface a decade later, in Bonaparte’s experiment with the Tribunate. More ambitious were the rather similar thoughts of a naval lieutenant whose ardour for creating a counterweight to ministers may have owed something to the fact that he wrote from the naval bastille at Toulon, where his status is not at all clear. Louis, chevalier de Sade, came from stock that was rather given to singularity of behaviour; his was a collateral branch of the same family as the notorious marquis. In his case, however, his pleasures led him in the direction of political theory. Addressing the Estates General, he sought to awaken their interest in the sorts of procedural questions that would necessarily be unfamiliar in a nation unused to political discussion. In this connection, he made imaginative suggestions about adopting the British use of motions by which to focus debate. This was, in fact, a procedural refinement never fully absorbed into French practice. Sade suggested a superfluity of measures to govern relations between the ministers and the assembly, proposing both the use of censure and scrutiny by an opposition party. Without an opposition’s ceaseless labours, he insisted, ministers would surely prove to be corrupt. Possibly he had not yet made up his mind about whether ministers should be seated in the assembly, a pardonable oversight when the matter had still to be posed by the constitution-makers. On another sensitive point – the eligibility of the opposers to form the ministry – he was also silent, although various comments suggest that he was assuming that the rewards of effective opposing of the ministers might include office. Here it may have been his strongly traditional leanings that induced silence. The claims of an opposition to office were not well sorted out even in British constitutional practice. Additionally, people of Sade’s pronounced aristocratic sympathies would no doubt tread warily on the royal prerogative of choosing ministers. In the Restoration, Sade would re-emerge as one of the firmer voices in favour of emulating the conventions that guided the party struggle in Britain. Sade’s conservatism offers a clue about the future of legitimate conflict in French revolutionary thought. Wary as he might be of ministers, he was also mistrustful of that very popular enthusiasm that was sweeping France. Subsequent writings would find him condemning even the early stages of the Revolution as the work of “cannibals.”35 The need for opposition in France was urgent, he thought, precisely because the French lacked the cold character of the English and might, for that very reason, be less jealous in their defence of 35 Sade, Lettre à Mr. de Fleurieu … ([?Nice], [1791]), 7.

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liberty. This bow in the direction of the fabled légèreté of the French clashed with the possibly more familiar suspicion that it was precisely the national character that rendered French public life more in need of the means of avoiding volatile disagreement than was necessary to curb the phlegmatic British. This assumption, more realistic as events would attest, necessarily constrained a French opposition in its activity.36 Furthermore, Sade was sufficiently old-fashioned to approve of that diverse society of orders that, for good or ill, posed barriers of all sorts to rapid changes. When revolutionary fervour was mobilized against those corps that were distinct from the nation, he continued, against the tide, to use esprit de corps as a term of commendation. At this juncture, it seems to have been those who had never seen the nation as a single, homogeneous unit who best adapted to the notion that both diversity and conflict would always be present. The more whole-hearted proponents of equality and fraternity appear to have been readier to adopt schemes of frictionless harmony. These would, naturally enough, render unnecessary all talk of party, opposition, or legitimate conflict. It was, at best, a difficult exercise to plan for opposition before there was any, especially so because the force of such opposition flourished on private ambition and not its renunciation. That difficulty was soon solved, however, for the Constituent Assembly that brought together the three estates was not long in existence before dividing into factions. Then the unreality of positing opposition in the absence of real forces gave way to that different sort of problem that confronts those who have to pass judgment on political conflict to which they are not just witnesses but also participants. Either situation offered formidable obstacles to the emergence of any meaningful ethic by which to tame conflict without eliminating it. That may well explain why civil modes of disagreement and constitutional opposition are among the rarest forms of politics. By the late summer of 1789, the same debates that gave birth to designating bodies of opinion as Left and Right37 made it a commonplace to describe the assembly in terms of the parties of democrats and aristocrats. It was not quite so simple a matter to identify an opposition, for the assembly was one without a government that could be opposed in terms of literal confrontation. In mid-September 1789, Mirabeau was still referring to opposition as an 36 Sade, Mes loisirs … ou lettre aux États-généraux sur une nouvelle constitution (Toulon, 1789), 244–5, 249. For the different inference that, in France, opposition had to be polite, see P.-L. Roederer, “Si en France l’opposition peut être injurieuse, et vehémente comme en Angleterre,” in Mémoires d’économie publique, de morale et de politique (n.p., [1800–01]), 2:146–9. 37 I have capitalized these terms when, in context, they are used to designate the personnel of a party or faction. However, when one is saying, for instance, that opinion was moving “to the left,” the term remains in lower case.

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event. He was able, however, to give it a locus, when he said that his grasp of the geography of the assembly clearly identified that quarter from which came “les oppositions à l’ajournement.”38 Soon the activity was identified with a particular group and there was talk of a party of opposition.39 Indeed, it is from the debate on the royal veto of 11 September that one conventionally dates the division between the Left and the Right and thus the rise of parties in the Revolution.40 When opposition ceased merely to be an act and became as well a party of men, the vocabulary of revolutionary France had developed to about the stage reached in Britain in the year 1731. It took the better part of a century for the British to turn that group into an organ of constitutional government. Unfortunately, members of the Constituent Assembly did not have a century to make their refinements in constitutional understanding. The dramatic emergence of the division between the Left and the Right was accompanied by two other developments that were harbingers of the troubled future of political conflict in France. Already, by October 1789, there was a name for those moderates who eschewed the extremes of the political spectrum. They came to be known as the marais or marsh, a clear indication that such moderation – even in the less insulting designation of the plaine or plain – was deemed to be no post of honour. Simultaneously with the disfavour visited upon the moderates came the companion assumption that parties themselves were not to be embraced as acceptable identities. Although most often the term “faction” was the way of referring to political connections of which one disapproved, party too came under the ban against disunity. Thus, in that same month of October 1789, one reads in the press that parties were typically groups of individuals whose activities were detrimental to public good, such that it would make no sense to speak of “le parti de France, le parti de la Nation.”41 But how was it possible at once to condemn party, to emphasize the divisions that already beset the representative body, and to offer disrespect to those who sought to remain unaffiliated? Clearly, the enthusiasts who proclaimed the value of unanimity were deeply divided as to those positions around which opinion ought to gather. One might then condemn gatherings of deputies that were differentiated from the mass, while each point of view awaited the nation’s decision to join 38 H.-G.-R. comte de Mirabeau, Oeuvres … discours et opinions (Paris, 1834), 1:247. 39 Suite des nouvelles de Versailles, 23 Dec. 1789, 7–8. 40 Michel Peronnet, Les 50 mots clefs de la Révolution française (Toulouse, 1983), s.v. “Partis,” 209–17. 41 Pierre Rétat, “Partis et factions en 1789: Émergence des désignations politiques,” Mots, no. 16 (March 1988): 69–89 at 79, 73–4. The source quoted on party is the Chronique de Paris of 5 Oct.

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it and no other. Party was indeed to be avoided if it rendered less perfect the union, but where to find that rallying point acceptable to all? On that dilemma rested the paradox whereby those who actively promoted some understanding of the public good might, in the same breath, praise unanimity and accuse all who differed from these views as factious. Never did the assemblies of the Revolution officially abjure the conventional pose that theirs was meant to be harmony without significant divisions. That was the point of motions and decrees against the use of epithets that stigmatized one’s opponents as belonging to some party label. Even the seemingly innocuous name of “moderate” could thus give offence.42 Lest one think that there was an oddly touch-me-not air to all of this, one must recall that party names were the very basis of the activity of parties and were usually bestowed by those hostile to the cause. As it turned out, there would not, for the present, be an opposition in the assembly except in the form of the whole body pitted against the executive power. Commentators have long noted that, in the early autumn of 1789, France came close to gaining a parliamentary government modelled upon that of Britain. This was the scheme for which Mirabeau, still the assembly’s leading light, had pressed. But growing suspicion of the great orator’s motives lost support for his causes, and finally, on 7 November 1789, the deputies voted to make membership in the legislature incompatible with holding office in the ministry. Mirabeau grew even more devious than had been supposed, and conspired to gain a constitutional victory for the king. He resisted the presumption of the legislators to appoint ministers, clearly saw the government of a constitutional monarchy as party government, and advised Louis XVI to associate himself with the strongest party once it had been assured that such a party were not that of popular extremism.43 To the initial affront to royal authority were added provisions that created yet more distance between the branches of government and culminated in the new constitution’s denial of the royal power of dissolution. Following Robespierre’s motion, ex-deputies (and that would soon be all of them) were barred from membership in the next legislature. Each step towards gouvernement d’assemblée created a less propitious climate for the development of party government. In the place of the dialectic between government and opposition, there was much talk of a time when all divisions would yield to the new public spirit as all differences were dissolved in universal brotherhood. Sieyès’s 42 See L’Orateur du peuple (29 fructidor II) [15 Sept. 1794] for such a motion and, for the decree, Procès-verbal de la Convention 62 (11 nivôse III) [31 Dec. 1794]: 183. 43 Correspondance entre le comte de Mirabeau et comte de La Marck pendant les années 1789, 1790 et 1791, ed. A. de Bacourt (Paris, 1851), 2:247–8 (letter of 18 Oct. 1790).

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What Is the Third Estate? became the first literary classic of the Revolution, and in it Sieyès had devoted a footnote, not without some charm, to the belittling of the British parties. As he saw it, the ministers and an aristocratic opposition confronted each other, with king and nation as spectators. The king chose, by convention, the stronger of the two; the nation, with much to fear from both, sought to sustain a balance of power and threw in its lot with the weaker. With a nation coming to choose genuine representatives of its concerns, the entire contest would lose all importance. Just as these words ushered in the era, their restatement under a different title saw it out.44 Robespierre, Saint-Just, and Condorcet perhaps dressed their thoughts less artfully but equally condemned political competition in the English mode.45 The prospect of political competition enjoyed so little legitimacy that few bothered to argue the issue. Others, more ominously, hoped to silence all those who could not share their vision. Both expedients found vigorous application over the next few years, but time’s arrow pointed from talk to violence and not the other way. Neither strategy for securing unity left room for acceptable diversity of opinion, much less a constitutional opposition. But even as each successive decision rendered the possibility of parliamentary government more remote, there were public figures who hoped to reverse the trend. The constitution was to be open to debate for about two years, and even the end of the Constituante found some hoping still that institutions friendly to political competition could be salvaged. People of that persuasion were to be found primarily towards the centre and the moderate right of the political spectrum. The extremists among the royalists wanted nothing less than a restoration of absolutism and their privileges. They had no use for opposition. Future republicans took a different path to the same conclusion. It was then only those Frenchmen who sought a constitutional monarchy who assumed the burden of arguing for a system where all views, including their own, would be countered by the arguments, principled or interested, of others. The distribution of views was evident as early as November 1789, when an alliance of reactionaries 44 Sieyès, What Is the Third Estate? ed. Peter Campbell (London, 1963), 193. Cf. the edition, probably the work of a Jacobin, with an advertisement lamenting the demise of public spirit and issued as Qu’est-ce que le peuple considéré dans ses rapports avec ceux qui le gouvernent et l’administrent? (Paris, [1799]), 26n. 45 For sources displaying Robespierre’s condemnation of party, see J.L. Talmon, The Origins of Totalitarian Democracy (London, 1952), 302. Unfortunately, the texts are keyed to the 1910–13 edition of Robespierre’s works. Other sources are to be found in Rudolf von Albertini, “Parteiorganisation und Parteibegriff in Frankreich, 1789–1940,” Historische Zeitschrift 193 (1961): 529–600.

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and future republicans defeated Mirabeau’s constitutional scheme. One could not even say that Mirabeau himself was ready to defend all that his views entailed. He offered no vision of competing parties, probably because his political sense told him that institutions explicitly based on British practice would be anathema to many. Nor would it have been easy to sell to the Left the notion of a phalanx in the assembly led by ministers, or to the extreme Right the vision of a party organized to force themselves upon the king. It remained for Montlosier, a moderate royalist who would later become a stalwart of the counter-revolution, to make the argument against parliamentary government. He grounded his case, rather uneasily it seems, by trying to sound more anglophile than he then was, while citing still the misdoings of Whigs and Tories. Not their least sin, in his eyes, was their readiness to change places, in which he found nothing to redeem an apparently shameless ambition.46 Here was a speaker who may, at the time, have understood parliamentary government too little, or perhaps he just understood Mirabeau too well. There were certainly hazards of a purely intellectual kind in plunging into the technicalities of ministerial responsibility and its relation to partisan politics. Jacques de Cazalès, a royalist about whose views there was no ambiguity, defended the prerogative of choosing ministers and also the royal power of dissolution. To bolster his position, he offered the evidence of the British constitutional crisis of 1784, when Pitt the younger had won power from the North-Fox coalition through an appeal to the people. Cazalès’s picture of British electoral competition offered a different account of the political actors from that of Montlosier. Both versions were accurate, but they did not fit easily into the same argument.47 Cazalès went unanswered, and one suspects that his speech failed to enlighten the listeners. A final effort to rescue some semblance of parliamentary government came in the debate of August 1791, and the issue was whether deputies might prolong their public lives by moving from the assembly to the king’s service. Perhaps because the end was perceived to be at hand, there was more evidence than before of cards on the table. Adrien Duport, the cynosure for those who sought to raise the desire for political careers to the level of principle, was relatively open about his position. Duport argued for practices that would encourage deputies to found their future ministerial careers on the discomfiture of the ministers of the day. Still, ever cautious, he managed to present this position as conducive to political unity, for it replaced the prospect of a national division between supporters of the king and those 46 The report in Archives parlementaires [hereafter, AP], ed. J. Mavidal and E. Laurent (Paris, 1862–1914), 9:715–16, is very incomplete. More satisfactory is the version in Courrier national, no. 141 (8 Nov. 1789). 47 AP 19 (19 Oct. 1790): 716.

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of the assembly with a more confined and controlled struggle within the latter. In effect, he was arguing still for the shadow of parliamentary government, even though prior decisions had ruled it out. Preceding Duport in this debate had been the eminent lawyer J.-G. Thouret, who was yet more direct in praising the advantages of “un fort parti d’opposition.” In support of such an institution, he waxed eloquent on the process that would transform an ambition for office into public service were the assembly but to mend its ways and open the ministry to those drawn from the ranks of deputies. The voice of Jacobinism was that of Roederer, who, in the idiom of his party, expressed horror at such a parade of private ambition and called instead for what he was pleased to label patriotic opposition. He apologized to his hearers for having to use an expression such as “le parti d’opposition.” He also suggested misleadingly that the previous speakers had been at odds with one another in that Thouret had sought to bring together executive and legislature, whereas Dupont sought an opposition within the assembly itself.48 One student of this debate has generously suggested that Roederer’s case about the nature of parliamentary government was seriously confused.49 More likely, he was just being disingenuous. Speaking later in the month at the Jacobins, he had been quite clear about what the British system entailed. It required two parties, one of the ministers, the other of the Opposition.50 Roederer wanted neither. Successive victories by the Left were presaged in the fact that the only figures who wished to emulate the modes of political conflict known to Britain were inhibited about invoking those institutions lest they be called unpatriotic. Consequently, the arguments of the moderate royalists called monarchiens were very much limited to trying to prevent the weakening of the executive power and to giving ministers a more positive relation with the assembly than was contemplated by a Jacobin understanding of legislative behaviour.51 By contrast, their opponents had little difficulty in 48 Ibid., 29 (13 Aug. 1791): 395–404. 49 See R.K. Gooch, Parliamentary Government in France: Revolutionary Origins, 1789–1791 (Ithaca, 1960), 214–15. For all aspects of the constitutional debate on ministerial responsibility and related issues, this remains the best source either in English or French. 50 See Journal des débats de la société des Amis de la Constitution séante aux Jacobins à Paris, no. 49 (report of session of 25 Aug. 1791): 3–4. 51 See, for example, Stanislas, comte de Clermont-Tonnerre, Analyse raisonnée de la constitution française décretée par l’Assemblée Nationale, des années 1789, 1790 et 1791, 2nd ed. (Paris, 1791), 201–4. A recent exposition of the anglophile ideas of the monarchiens makes no mention of the institutions of party and opposition. See Guillaume Bacot, “Les Monarchiens et la constitution anglaise,” La Revue de la recherche juridique 17 (1993): 709–37.

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discrediting the institutions of constitutional monarchy and could depend on their own growing network of clubs to develop a strong extra-parliamentary base in the nation. There was more to all of this than the record of the debates revealed. Failure of the project to allow the legislators of 1789–91 to stay in national politics was part of that process whereby Louis XVI and his ministers were subordinated to the legislative body and that, in turn, to the Jacobin club. It was Robespierre who had insisted not only that deputies could not simultaneously be ministers but also that the incompatibility should be extended to apply to the period immediately following service in the legislature. Coupled with the supposedly self-denying motion that barred immediate re-election of deputies, this meant that the only people who possessed national political experience were removed, for the immediate future, from active roles either in government or in parliamentary forms of opposition. Not surprisingly, the future belonged to the clubs and especially the national organization formed by the Jacobins. There, certain ex-deputies might find refuge and also considerable influence over their inexperienced successors. For some, the case against party may have represented pre-republican virtue, but it also meant dishing one’s enemies and effectively banishing them from positions of influence. By the same token, the argument for a legislature that fostered ministerial and oppositional parties was intimately bound up with the political futures of its advocates. To claim immaculate conception for political ideas has always been highly suspect. stopping the revolution An important aspect of the early stages of public discourse about party and opposition is that it can only be understood in terms of that more pervasive and primitive form of conflict that we call conspiracy. Much of the intrigue that has been documented in the early years of the Revolution surrounded the figure of Mirabeau. As part of his secret dealings on behalf of the monarchy, the popular orator had devised a scheme to coordinate the behaviour of a number of legislators.52 In conception, if not in actual execution, this was of remarkable complexity and involved the subtlety, known to modern intelligence networks, of leaving the bulk of the participants unaware of the overall aims of the arrangement and even of the identity of most of the other conspirators. Since all were public figures, they were naturally acquainted, but were to remain in the dark as to each other’s designs. 52 Some details of the conspiracy, including Duquesnoy’s part in it, are treated in Eliza D. Bradby, The Life of Barnave (Oxford, 1915), 1:357–8, 381.

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Two of the people who were swept up in this plot were Adrien-Cyprien Duquesnoy, deputy and lawyer from Bar-le-Duc, and Antoine Barnave of Grenoble, one of the rising stars of the Constituante. Duquesnoy laboured in relative obscurity as an able deputy who spoke cogently, but not often. Unknown to his colleagues, he kept a journal of the daily sessions, sharing his insights, it would seem, with someone in the royal retinue. He also wrote some masterly political journalism, of which his authorship was not initially known. Barnave moved on a higher plane and gained an early reputation as excessively ambitious. His connections to the court remained secret until August 1792. From an early point, however, he was recognized as part of that triumvirate, the other members of which were Adrien Duport and Alexandre Lameth, intent on joint promotion of their various designs. Duquesnoy and Barnave both eventually served in that complex attempt to halt the Revolution that we know as the Feuillant party.53 This was a group of deputies that, challenging an increasingly radical Jacobin club, split that body and carried a majority of newly elected deputies into the new assembly in the autumn of 1791. Then, bereft of leadership and resolve, it dissolved some time in 1792. Barnave’s prominence as an intriguer eventually led him to the guillotine; Duquesnoy’s relative obscurity no doubt saved him from that fate. Duquesnoy was an unusually able political analyst, effective in recording those vignettes from the daily proceedings that best served to underline the meaning of events, and he did so by straining the detail through a conceptual screen that extracted the important elements. Where others found gossip and the doings of individuals, his eye was fixed firmly on the level of generalities and an overall pattern. His journal shows its author to be a devoted admirer of Rousseau and, in the early months of revolution, a believer in the cause. From the first, however, he was disenchanted by the cynical and vain posturing of his fellow deputies and, more than once, observed that the Constituent Assembly deserved that public suspicion that it so readily attracted. The journal also affords a compelling record of the sinister power that allowed resolute minorities to reduce much larger numbers to silence. Even before the three estates were united, Duquesnoy marvelled at the strategy of the extremists in the Club Breton. They showed how ten or fewer men might use the timidity of their fellows to dominate a gathering of close to six hundred. Duquesnoy remarked on the growth of party spirit and warned lest French factions become, like the Hats and the Caps of Sweden, the tools of foreign powers.54 Duquesnoy’s voice to the 53 See Georges Michon, Essai sur l’histoire du parti feuillant: Adrien Duport (Paris, 1924), 35. 54 Journal d’Adrien Duquesnoy, deputé du tiers état … sur l’assemblée constituante, 13 mai 1789–3 avril 1790, ed. Robert de Crèvecoeur (Paris, 1894), 1:73, 116.

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larger world was the newspaper that people close to the French court caused to be published. Eventually it came to be considered one of a number of publications that supported the objectives of the Feuillants. The most striking quality of Duquesnoy’s paper was that he avoided the easy alternatives of reporting speeches or of indulging in partisan harangues. Rather, the paper offered a series of analytical essays that sought to capture events under the rubric of some rather abstract concepts. It was in treating the meaning of notions such as popularity, public opinion, or public spirit that Duquesnoy made his most characteristic bid to understand the ethos of the new age of French public life. One of these exercises, noteworthy for its careful distancing of the language from the immediate issues of French politics, was devoted to the subject of political opposition. The very title – “Quelques idées sur une théorie de l’opposition” – suggests a sort of scientific caution absent from competing publications. It scarcely needs saying that, on the whole, the French Revolution was conducted in a very different sort of discourse. The ostensible occasion for the essay was a comment on the spirit of faction by Thouret, acting as rapporteur for the committee on the constitution.55 Thouret’s comments, which were by no means central to his general remarks, were not unlike Duquesnoy’s own concerns, which he had expressed in his journal. Without endorsing the activity of “faction,” Duquesnoy proceeded to offer a very positive account of the activity, in Britain, of the party in opposition. The language of French politics, he said, had been enriched by the expression “parti de l’opposition.” He argued further that the lives of the British people and the quality of their liberty were enhanced by that institution. In addition, he insisted, not entirely convincingly, that it was the possession of a well-established constitution and a system of rights that made the struggle of party a necessary part of British politics. True, he allowed that the motives that animated party politicians were far from pure, but how, he demanded, could that differentiate ambitious Britons from other public men? In describing the British system at work, Duquesnoy reserved his most lyrical tribute for the way in which permanent and systematic opposition raised politics and its devotees to grander conceptions than they would otherwise have embraced, for the process could readily be understood as one in which the participants grew beyond the call of their personal ambitions to perform real service to the nation. A ministry gained a character that transcended its immediate objects as its struggle against the forces of opposition led it to seek the favour, not of this or that town or class of citizens, but of the nation. 55 Ami des patriotes, ou le défenseur de la Révolution 2, no. 19 (2 April 1791): 61–83. For Thouret’s remarks, see AP 24 (28 March 1791): 428.

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The opposition was similarly engaged, so the two struggled ceaselessly to gain that popularity that would seal success for one or the other. Duquesnoy especially emphasized the complementary nature of the two sides and explained that France lacked an opposition on the British pattern precisely because its executive was similarly bereft of a party for its defence. He was rather typical of those foreigners who, truly coming to understand this British institution, were intrigued to discover how signal benefit to the public was, in the main, the scarcely intended consequence of less laudable pursuits. The whole performance resonates, in some ways, with an earlier speech by Clermont-Tonnerre, who, in November 1789, had joined with Duquesnoy in arguing in support of Mirabeau’s cause of having ministers with seats in the legislature. The monarchien Clermont-Tonnerre would then have been seen as a good deal more royalist in sympathies than Duquesnoy, but of course, the latter was losing his revolutionary zeal quite rapidly. It is also true that Clermont-Tonnerre avoided explicit references to the struggle of parties and had tried to present legislative confrontation in a way that emphasized themes less divisive in nature.56 In terms of specifics, Duquesnoy left no doubt that a great merit of the opposition party was that no group could be trusted to rule unopposed and that each must be ready to observe and censure the other if liberty were to be preserved. Clermont-Tonnerre, a brilliant figure who tried as long as possible to appeal to all sides, had fashioned his thoughts for the anti-ministerial majority in the assembly and thus had chosen to emphasize that the interrogators of ministers would be acting in a public-spirited manner. Without denying that possibility, Duquesnoy obviously felt that a British Opposition sought, first and foremost, office. The same acceptance of human imperfection may account as well for Duquesnoy’s obvious impatience with talk of the moral failings of one’s opponents. He looked forward to the day when debates would be confined to words and actions that had a direct bearing upon public business. Duquesnoy left no doubt that Britain had created an institution worthy of emulation. Still, he ended his essay by denying that such systematic opposition could be expected in the assembly. Why not? Because, as he said, the point about this British institution was that it consisted of two parties and, in France, there was no party that sustained the claims of the ministers. What could all of this mean? Very probably it meant that it was Duquesnoy’s purpose to introduce to French opinion the possibility of countenancing just such a party as would publicly support those ministers. After all, the constitution had yet to be completed, and on one well-known occasion, the royalist Cazalès had

56 See AP 9 (6 Nov. 1789): 714.

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sought to tempt the Left to reopen the question of linking legislature and executive by offering the prospect of ministers drawn from its ranks.57 All of the diverse interests that were striving in 1791 to halt the Revolution would have agreed that some working arrangement among the branches of government was necessary. The triumvirate was a group well known for its desire to link careers as legislators with those as ministers, in one way or another, and Mirabeau (among other things) stood for the same goal. The very occasion for Duquesnoy’s journalism illustrates the forms of secret influence that were employed to effect ends that, under the British system, might be openly acknowledged. The best case for parliamentary government – one more often suggested than argued – was that it was the means of bringing into the open that conflict that would otherwise smoulder in the form of corruption, conspiracy, public denunciation, or legal impeachment. Clermont-Tonnerre had suggested as much in the autumn of 1789. Duquesnoy was as familiar with the clandestine side of politics as most, but seemed to appreciate that the same human failings might be channelled more advantageously. Thouret, the deputy whose words had supplied the occasion for writing, was actually in agreement with the purport of the essay and, indeed, was linked to the cause in which Duquesnoy laboured. Before long, Thouret was to argue, in the assembly, that an opposition party turned private ambition, which was present in any event, to public advantage.58 If people ever write the history of political ideas in terms of an effort to give a respectable face to self-interest, the case for party will have a major place in that account. Duquesnoy and Barnave were by no means close in their public relations, or perhaps in any other way. From the early entries in his journal, Duquesnoy was scornful of the young Barnave’s “flux de paroles,” and Barnave’s friend Alexandre Lameth denounced Duquesnoy at very much the time when the article on opposition was being written. Barnave and Duquesnoy may have been on the same page of some master plan to save the monarchy, but it seems safe to assume that they did not see it this way. Barnave’s understanding of the political process does not emerge readily from his public statements; only his notebooks – undertaken between his retreat from public life and his execution two years later – broach the crucial issues. While still in the legislature, he had called for the political responsibility of the ministers to that body. But this did not fit well with adherence to that dogma of the Left that there should be a separation of powers. There is some reason to believe that political expediency sometimes contributed this unclarity and that it was studied, not the product of 57 The speech by Cazalès is the same recorded at 30n47 above. 58 See AP 29 (13 Aug. 1791): 400.

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simple confusion. As long as the Constituent Assembly lasted, Barnave was an important figure, even though he had ceased to be a darling of the Left. It was only when the prospect of power had faded beyond recall that he could try to express his views more plainly. Retirement was followed by the exposure of his dealings with Marie-Antoinette and his arrest in August 1792. Many of his reflections were thus those of a prisoner. Writings, dated as early as March 1792, speak to Barnave’s desire to emulate that British system that he had already defended in debate. He now wrote of a legislative body divided, as in Britain, between two parties, with the government formed by support from the majority party. Initially, he seemed to accept a literal separation of the executive from the legislature but looked nevertheless to closer relations between the two and increased initiative for the executive. His insistence that all free states needed parties even found support in an argument that assumed a separation of powers. To do this, he drew upon a traditional stereotype of British Tories as the party of prerogative and Whigs as that of Parliament. He then added elements from the circumstances of revolutionary France to insist that the assembly was rightly the focus both of opposition and of government, since all public power took its origin there.59 He had come, too, to value an upper chamber, such as had been sought by the Right, but he saw clearly that political struggle would not, primarily, be between the chambers or between the lower house and the monarch, but would be carried on by parties within the same chamber. With the monarchy abolished, he continued to seek avenues for legitimate conflict. He regretted, then, the Jacobin dogma on unity of the legislature, for this, he said, meant that the same people who had destroyed the monarchy had made a republic impossible.60 It was by a circuitous route that Hume’s great insight of 1741 – namely, that all forces met and did battle in the lower chamber – would find a home in revolutionary France as it moved towards a Jacobin vision of gouvernement d’assemblée. The most focused statement on relevant themes was called (at least by Barnave’s editor) “De l’opposition dans un gouvernement.” Like some of the other fragments, it seems to have been written after France had ceased to be a monarchy. Several passages also suggest that the earlier concern for maintaining a separation of powers had become less relevant. After all, the Jacobins themselves had only sought separation to prevent contamination of the deputies by the executive. With all acts of government undertaken in the name of a unanimous people, any meaningful separation of powers 59 Oeuvres de Barnave, arranged by [A.-M.-M.-T.] Bérenger de la Drôme (Paris, 1843), 2:30–1. 60 Ibid., 46.

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had vanished. Whatever his precise constitutional position, a factor that depends on when he wrote down his thoughts, Barnave now assumed that an opposition should be more than an impotent critic or devil’s advocate. It must be able to defeat the administration. This is made clear in his hope that the institution could act as in Britain, where “the triumph of the opposition brings about a revolution in the government, and not in the constitution.” His most impassioned statement can plausibly be seen as a cry against the excesses of government by the assembly. There, he insisted, it was as absurd to conceive of the entire nation in opposition as it was to expect to find it behind the government. The necessity of government for purposes of lending momentum to society found its exact counterpart in the opposition whose office it was to offer a jealous scrutiny of that government, correcting the inattention and errors of those in power and, he added significantly, opposing their tyranny.61 For Barnave as for the Feuillants in general, they had waited too long to stop a revolution that they had actively promoted. Their late wisdom prescribed a mix of energetic government and resolute opposition that their previous labours had assisted in rendering all but impossible. Republican solidarity thus became the order of the day and few there were to challenge it save in the name of a yet more perfect unity. Endless talk of conspiracy or of heresy took the place of that less dangerous form of hypocrisy encouraged by a peaceful struggle for office. With the Terror the dominant fact of domestic politics and war working its usual way with the remnants of dissent, it was not easy to find a moral footing from which to speak of party. One who did, however, was the Dantonist François Chabot, who made his case in the very bosom of republican intolerance, the Jacobin club. It speaks volumes for the times that we have Chabot’s views through the report of another, but their refutation comes to us verbatim. Chabot is recorded as demanding that there be “un parti d’opposition dans l’assemblée,” and of vowing further to form one all by himself in the places left vacant by the Right. This elicited a response that one might expect at a time when the Montagnards at last ruled the Convention, without royalists, without Feuillants, and without Girondins. L.-P. Dufourny de Villiers was the speaker, and he insisted that the pretext for revivifying the Right that lay in citing the need for a party of opposition was unconvincing. One need but reflect, he continued, that France was not Britain and that, whereas the interests of the British people might well demand the presence of opposition to the ministry, the same consideration did not apply in France. There the overriding concern

61 Ibid., 74–81 at 80.

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for the unity of the republic dictated that such a party be absent.62 It was not, at the time, a case easily brushed aside. That Chabot did not long survive his audacity helps to explain why the sentiment that he dared to express was rare, although his notorious corruption also contributed to his end. To keep matters in perspective, one must remind oneself that even to condemn party as then known in Britain suggested a degree of sophistication that was often wanting in political discussion. Speakers in the various political societies who chose to treat British government might offer no more than a simple tale of bad kings or an unsophisticated class analysis.63 In neither case did Whigs and Tories or their like form any part of the scene. Nor could it have been rational, one suspects, to make claims for party struggles when those of the Girondins and the Montagnards had been so dismaying. Jean-Baptiste Salaville was one of the few who, during the Terror, strove to keep alive the ideal of civil disagreement. With Robespierre at the very height of his power, Salaville had to be content with describing the behaviour of a British Opposition in the debate in reply to the Speech from the Throne.64 While the account ostensibly mocked the futility of the exercise, his readers would no doubt have been expected to reflect that even such symbolic resistance was absent in their own political arrangements. Later, in his report of the measures of the Committee of Public Safety, Salaville was even reduced to recording, with apparent approval, Saint-Just’s diatribe against factions.65 One cannot easily know if the endorsement were genuine or not. After thermidor, journalists competed, in safety, for the honour of having come closest to bearding the tyrant. Salaville was among the more dignified in this rush for self-respect. In place of excuses, he offered a fine essay on freedom of opinion that condemned both the late Girondins and their vanquishers in the charge of an intolerance bordering on madness. Quoting Georges Couthon’s justly notorious remark that all had to be of the same opinion, he added a finely phrased rebuttal to the effect that, in seeking the liberty of opinions, one necessarily supported their diversity, even an absolute opposition among them. Were 62 F.A. Aulard, ed., La Société des Jacobins, vol. 5 (Jan. 1793–March 1794) (Paris, 1895), 506, 517–18. 63 See X. Audouin, Discours sur la discussion contre la constitution britannique … (Paris, [a speech of “26 nivôse,” presumably 16 Jan. 1794]); A.L. Lachevardière, Discours sur la constitution et le gouvernement d’Angleterre, prononcé à la Société des Jacobins, à Paris (Paris, [date of the speech was 20 Jan. 1794]). 64 Annales patriotiques et littéraires de la France, no. 405 (22 pluviöse an II) [10 Feb. 1794]: 1823. 65 Ibid., no. 411 (27 ventöse an II) [17 March 1794]: 1962. Cf. Saint-Just, Oeuvres, ed. M. Duval (Paris, 1984), 722–38 at 734.

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opinions, in fact, the same, that very liberty would be pointless. There was thus, he concluded, a contradiction involved in wishing opinions to be at once free and unanimous. The message that forbearance is only needed when we are confronted with ideas inimical to our own here finds classical expression.66 These words implied a good deal less than the revival of competing parties. But who, in the immediate aftermath of 9 thermidor, would readily have asked for that? Perhaps the most characteristic political designations thrown up by the period until the end of the Convention were those employed to describe the considerable number of deputies who declined to take sides and whose conduct sought an inoffensive neutrality between contending factions. Some of these, certainly, were royalists in disguise, afraid to raise their heads lest they be taken off by the militants of the Left. Others, such as Cambacérès, Bonaparte’s future colleague as consul, were simply cautious or timid, notorious for their avoidance of any position that might seem partisan. In the case of the future consul, his approach was to dwell, in a neutral way, upon legal niceties. Of the several ways of referring to this group, including plaine and marais, the term ventres pourris was surely the rudest, and it seems to have entered political language around June 1795, following the journées of prairial.67 After the reaction of thermidor, the Convention had sought to suppress political name-calling, and this placed limits on the language that informed debates, although it could do nothing to banish ventres pourris from general use. Jacques Mallet du Pan, Swiss royalist, kept a confidential record of what was being said outside the official account, and it is all the more precious because its language could not be controlled. In one of his communiqués, he described the ventre as a sort of third force that tended to support the strongest party of the day. Moderation, if it existed, seemed to be associated with a timorous opportunism, and what had earlier been known as “the plain” supplied the battleground on which the protagonists sought to destroy each other. It was not a happy prognosis, but in some of his dispatches, Mallet du Pan hoped for the formation of a true party of opposition, of the sort already familiar in British practice.68 co pi n g w it h pl u ral ism: the b a s c u l e The opportunity presented by the framing of the original constitution had been lost with that of 1791. No successor document left much room for 66 Annales patriotiques et littéraires de la France, no. 565 (7 fructidor II) [14 Aug. 1794]: 2574. 67 Gaston Dodu, Parlementarisme et parlementaires sous la révolution 1789–1799 (Paris, 1911), 211. 68 Correspondance inédite de Mallet du Pan avec la cour de Vienne (1794–1798), ed. André Michel (Paris, 1884), 1:200, 219; 2:134.

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government or politics on anything like the model of Britain. The five individuals who formed the Directory created by the constitution of year III, were chosen by a complex procedure from the ranks of the two legislative councils and were thus, in some sense, dependent on the will of the legislature. There were still elections; indeed, with the passing of the Convention, these grew more important than in the early years of revolution. Still, the two-stage process, with electors chosen to choose the representatives, militated against the formation of parties, although it did not rule out a measure of cooperation by like-minded people. The very fact that would-be deputies could not, until 1797, formally declare their candidacy is enough to suggest the awkwardness for those anxious to engineer consent. Well-known figures might, in the first instance, be returned for many different departments, although this, in itself, did not differ greatly from practice in Britain. For those who wished to unseat the directors, the point of electoral success would be that control of the two councils might make it possible to remove the executive through impeachment. It was not responsible government as monarchiens had visualized it, but it did afford some connection between the personnel of government and the will of the electorate. Dominating the scene was the ineluctable fact that politicians who had served in the Convention were remarkably unpopular in the country. To cushion this effect, the electoral law specified that two-thirds of the seats be reserved for conventionnels.69 Having erred in providing no continuity after the Constituent Assembly, legislators allowed the Convention to live on through its individual members. Most, however, would be swept away by the elections of 1797. The new political order had disavowed the methods both of the absolute monarchy and of the Jacobins, but in finding itself with a badly divided nation, it had no constitutional formula for combining that pluralism with which it found itself and the public order that was the business of government to secure. As a measure of the limited freedom for political comment, there was, for most of the life of the Directory, no term that did justice to the actual behaviour of the government. What in fact it did was ceaselessly to affirm the unity of the nation – an aspiration masquerading as reality – and to attack both royalists and those described by modern

69 On electoral machinery, see A. Kuscinski, Les Députés au corps législatif … de l’an IV à l’an VII: Listes, tableaux et lois (Paris, 1905), 1–31, 118–52; and F.-A. Hélie, Les Constitutions de la France (Paris, 1879), where the decree of 22 December 1789 on the primary assemblies is reproduced at 72–80. The best concise treatment is, arguably, Patrice Gueniffey, “Elections,” in F. Furet and Mona Ozouf, eds, Critical Dictionary of the French Revolution (Cambridge, MA, and London, 1989), 33–44. Practice in relation to declared candidatures is treated in Malcolm Crook, Elections in the French Revolution: An Apprenticeship in Democracy, 1789–1799 (Cambridge, 1996), 70, 183–4.

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scholarship as neo-Jacobins as the extremes that threatened that unity. Since the latter party was, like the government, republican in sentiment, it was often necessary to blacken its reputation by referring to Jacobins as anarchists. Since the bulk of the politically articulate probably leaned either towards the Jacobins or the royalists, the executive Directory had no natural constituency save for those people who were willing to cling, at all costs, to the status quo. This meant, in effect, that a regime that tried to suppress the real divisions of the nation had always in view the need to employ the strength of one side or the other to discountenance the opposite extreme. Such an expedient did not readily admit of any official doctrine save for that of maintaining public order. Little wonder, then, that on the whole one must look beyond the official language of the regime for any genuine effort to contemplate the nature of political conflict. An appropriate mood in which to face the challenges of rule was to evince some sympathy for the general condition of diversity of political sentiment, while still denying to any group the capacity to impose its will on the nation. A very appropriate combination of views appeared in an obscure publication of the year 1795, a time when the nation gained a new constitution and took stock of its situation in the wake of thermidor. Almost lost in the ample political literature of the time were the thoughts of a one-time Jacobin destined to serve as minister of the interior under the Directory. For Dominique Garat, the messianic quest for unity had obviously lost its appeal, and astonishingly in revolutionary France, he had kind words for the political system of the British. Gone are the jibes, common even before the Revolution, at the wickedness or the irrelevancy of party politics, but rather we find an account of the good done by the famous British parties and the ill that they warded off. Perfectly aware that both British parties were committed to the constitution, Garat deemed only one of them to endorse the cause of liberty, the other leaning towards authority, not a view unheard of even in Britain. The circumstances of Pitt’s increasingly reactionary administration render this misperception understandable. More remarkable was the very favourable notice of how British political competition extended beyond the walls of Parliament into the wider society. He commented, too, upon the existence of a sort of formal structure that belonged to the parties, such that their very struggles were themselves institutionalized (“organisée”). Political information, self-knowledge, and a life-giving antidote to the pervasive melancholy of the English character were among the benefits of the agitation created by parties. The sting was, of course, in the tail, and Garat revealed his main concern where he emphasized that the conditions that reigned in Britain only belonged to those regimes when the constitution was already well grounded. The ways of the British were best avoided, even for a polity such as the Florence of the factions of the Ricci and the Albizzi of

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whom Machiavelli had written. There, as Garat apparently knew, the domestic conflict had entailed foreign intervention and had thus been rendered far more serious than before. It required no great acumen to appreciate that such a pattern of conflict was equally out of the question for the France of 1795.70 No more than with Sieyès in 1789 was Garat prepared to recommend for his own nation the political battle between Whig and Tory, but the tone and the substance of the argument were entirely different. Not exactly apologetic about the weak constitutional foundations of France after the Terror, he still offered something very close to that “infant-industry” argument in economics, whereby the arrangements in need of protection were, for the time being, to be sheltered from the rigours of the market. Appropriate to a time when no one could have been serene about the settling of political difference through denunciation, execution, and massacre, the respectful treatment of the British model only made sense with the addition of an unstated assumption. The limited conflict of Britain must, in time, come to afford the same benefits to France as it had already brought to its homeland. Unable to address the real pluralism of the times, Garat’s message could be no more than the veiled suggestion that the securing of some legitimacy for the new institutions might be the prelude to further improvement. Even in comparatively safe times, his view remained ambivalent, as reflected in an odd publication of the Restoration in which he presented the positions of John Wilkes and Jean-Baptiste Suard, a strong anglophile, on the subject of party and opposition, interspersed with his own opinions.71 For the time being, the rulers had to cope with royalists and Jacobins, both anxious to return to some version of their previous situations. The defeated causes had been replaced by a ruling clique with but shallow roots in the society and with support largely generated by a pervasive fear of an alternative yet worse. With the rulers holding the ring against neo-Jacobins and royalists of diverse opinions, the conservative republic was far from secure. The history of the Directory was one of uneasy manoeuvring punctuated by outbursts of violence, by insurrection by dissident groups, and latterly by pre-emptive action on the part of the executive. To the list of significant political dates in the Revolution were added 13 vendémiaire, 18 fructidor, 22 floréal, and 30 prairial, among others, and political vocabulary was enriched by rendering the dates as verbs. One thus came to speak, for example, of deputies who had been “floréalized,” as was the Left in the spring of 1798 following the executive coup against the Right in September 1797. Of opposition there was 70 D.J. Garat, Mémoires sur la révolution, ou exposé de ma conduite dans les affaires et dans les fonctions publiques (Paris, an III), 79–82. 71 Garat, Mémoires historiques sur la vie de M. Suard, sur ses écrits, et sur le xviiie siècle (Paris, 1820), esp. 2:91–119.

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no dearth, but the business of making sense of political competition has always required more than the competition itself. Some notion of the limits of tolerance and the means of dissent has always required a growing period, and no constitution-maker has usefully presumed to spell out the details in advance. The fortunes of Left and Right fluctuated with each new plot, each initiative by the Directory or by foreign governments. There was, however, a marked difference in the way in which the parties perceived their own activity. On the whole, the Left remained in that state of opinion that Saint-Just had bequeathed to it in 1794, with allowances having to be made for the sudden loss of power. After thermidor, some Jacobins lent support to the Directory of 1795, but those who remained loyal to their identity came to resist the measures of a government that had closed down their clubs. Theirs became an opposition that accepted the legitimacy of the Directory of 1795, but there was little tolerance of pluralism, here, and much huffing about national unity. In this respect, they differed from the republicans in power only in that they could more readily indulge themselves in defining the nation in terms that excluded aristocrats, priests, émigrés, generally the rich, and all others who might harbour sympathy for a restored monarchy. Sometimes the neo-Jacobins made statements that sound more accommodating of diversity than they really were. For example, a pamphlet by Antoine François de Nantes began with the observation that representative government was the natural home of civic banquets, political parties, and polemical disputes of all sorts. But the impression of tolerance and goodwill must be read within a caveat that towers over all other sentiments. Yes, there was to be open discussion of issues “entre patriotes,” but the real enemies were excluded from its advantages. In the same text, one encounters very conventional attacks upon party spirit and faction, the latter referring presumably to parties of which one did not approve. There was, to be sure, some recognition of the benefits accruing both to ancient Rome and modern Britain as a result of their divisions, but it would be a serious error to interpret this insight as a sign of imminent pluralism. Indeed, François named only the Whig Opposition as a boon to Britain, as though one might enjoy the blessings of political parties in the presence of but a single example of the type. More cogently, this republican pointed out that the British struggle was between groups who were agreed on the principles on which public business was to be conducted and only disputed over details. Plainly, this might serve as his ideal for France, but it was not reflected in the reality of the day. With reference to the British situation, this was a penetrating analysis not much improved upon before Lord Balfour’s modern invocation of British unity that insisted how this people was so at one that it could afford to bicker.

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For purposes of offering a model of political competition, there was, however, a serious shortcoming. François de Nantes made it quite clear that the Left sought legitimacy only for its own organization and activity, with no intention of sharing the opportunity with its enemies.72 Garat, to whose language this pamphlet may owe some inspiration, was surely being more honest in rejecting any use of party in the France of his day. The alternative was to employ the idiom of British practice to describe a conversation that excluded anyone seriously at odds with Jacobin philosophy. The latter position was very much in the spirit of those revolutionaries who had managed to reconcile a complete freedom of the press with the massacring of royalist journalists. There is a stage in the development of notions about political conflict when emphasis is upon the creation of institutions that further a particular cause. The English Civil War of the seventeenth century saw the equivalent development to that described by François, and there, too, the phenomenon was the creation of an instrument for achieving control, not the emergence of the civilities of a party system.73 The bodies of scholarly literature that hail the development of party in Britain and France have not consistently honoured that distinction. A similar position to that of François de Nantes emerges in the writings of Marc-Antoine Jullien, one-time follower of Robespierre and an organizer of neo-Jacobin activity. There is no doubt that Jullien sought to construct legislative and administrative majorities and, to that extent, followed more or less constitutional means. Again, however, he was unwilling even to call his organization a “party,” but insisted that it be understood to embody the entire nation.74 He apparently saw no irony in combining a dispraise of factions and an insistence that the national spirit had been corrupted from its true path with an allowance that his views were those of a minority. Opposition and party were thus but a prelude to final unanimity and the day, as Jullien fashionably put it, “que la république soit nationalisée.” The same ideological components are to be found in his newspaper, where he echoed the Robespierrist thought that there were but two parties, the good and the evil. To this, amazingly enough, was joined again, in September 1797, a cheerful 72 Antoine François de Nantes, Coup d’oeil rapide sur les moeurs, les lois … dans leurs rapports avec le gouvernment représentatif (Grenoble, an VI), 3, 29, 76–9. 73 See Mark Kishlansky, “The Emergence of Adversary Politics in the Long Parliament,” Journal of Modern History 49 (1977): 617–40 at 625–6. 74 Jullien, Quelques conseils aux patriotes Cisalpins (n.p., [an VI]), 5–6. The copy consulted is to be found in Archives nationales: F/7/3054. I owe both this source and the reference to François to Isser Woloch, Jacobin Legacy: The Democratic Movement under the Directory (Princeton, 1970), 159, 163–4. I cannot, however, accept this scholar’s reading of François and others on party.

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agreement that the forces of royalism, swept aside by the majestic people in 1792, had been preponderant at the time of the recent coup of 18 fructidor. The same insouciant dismissal of those who differed from him had come in his earlier call for unity, after the fall of Robespierre. His notion then of a gracious coming together was to include the surviving Girondins, though not the royalists.75 Jullien contrived, like many another, to keep some appearance of consistency by insisting that the institutions necessary during a revolution were otiose once it was over. On that basis, he greeted 18 brumaire and the arrival of Bonaparte by announcing that political clubs, the nursery of parties, no longer had a future.76 For all their occasional candour about their own relative unpopularity, the neo-Jacobins, as some modern accounts have called them, continued to speak more like a universal church than a sect. Réal, the old Jacobin who later rose to great heights under Napoleon, published his Journal de l’opposition in the aftermath of the thermidorian reaction. Despite its promising title – it was the only paper so named during the period – it made no case for the institution of opposition. Réal objected to the narrow sympathies of the thermidorians, but he showed no inclination to endorse party in general. Indeed, the limited scope of his conception of opposition attracted comment from royalists77. Seemingly closest to embracing the model of party was one Destival – probably the playwright known as Destival de Brabans, since his articles often alluded to the theatre – who wrote in a republican journal that did not accept for itself the label of “Jacobin.” Destival endorsed the activity of clubs, popular societies (a more democratic version of the club), and the sort of Genevan circles of which Rousseau had fondly written. But, more interestingly, he also expressed admiration for the salutary aspects of the conflict between “les Wights et les Torys” and evinced admiration of British public life in general. Destival’s real enthusiasm for the activities of a free society, as in his tribute to the political texture of Britain, with its taverns Whig and Tory, recalls Garat’s work and that of few others in the period.78 Perhaps it was only in the brief interlude that separated the suppression of 75 Le Courrier de l’armée d’Italie, ou le patriote français à Milan 1 (2 thermidor V) [20 July 1797]: 3–4; 26 (22 fructidor V) [8 Sept. 1797]: 109; and From Jacobin to Liberal: Marc-Antoine Jullien, 1775–1848, ed. and trans. R.R. Palmer (Princeton, 1993), 69. 76 [Jullien], Entretien politique sur la situation actuelle de la France (Paris, an VIII), 47–8. 77 See “Esprit public,” Journal de l’opposition, no. 2 (n.d.): 43–6; L. Bigard, Le Comte Réal, ancien jacobin (Versailles, 1937), 94; and, for royalist criticism, L’Abréviateur universel, no. 156 (6 ventôse III) [24 Feb. 1795]: 622. 78 L’Indépendant, no. 33 (3 brumaire VI) [24 Oct. 1797]: 151; no. 49 (19 brumaire VI) [9 Nov. 1797]: 194–5; no. 174 (24 ventôse VI) [14 March 1798]: 695.

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the royalists in September 1797 and that of the neo-Jacobins in the spring of 1798 that this moderate republicanism best flourished. A period in which the threat had abated was, as always, good for generous sentiments. Such manifestations were rare, however, on the left of the political spectrum. Destival showed a propensity to endorse a measure of social diversity without calling it opposition. The converse was the understanding that embraced opposition without offering any organizational locus for it. Such was the vision of the left-wing journalist Joseph Turot, editor of the Gazette nationale de France. His hostility to the Directory got no further than the defence of a national press that might keep the government under scrutiny.79 With the crushing of opponents on either side of the Directory, there remained only a limited basis on which to sustain such a press. Circumstances alone cannot, however, account for the continuing assumption by the Left that a monolithic political will was the natural state of affairs and that all other conditions were pathological. The assumption is illustrated with numbing repetitiveness in the major neo-Jacobin publication Journal des hommes libres. Its resistance to the men of the centre was consistent, even heroic at times, but it was all in the name of confining the politically articulate nation to those who agreed with them or, in the absence of competing claims, might be led to do so. As with the pamphleteer François, this assumption was at work even when the actual words might seem to convey a more generous impulse. A case in point was a successor publication to the Journal des hommes libres, several numbers of which undertook to trace the limits of political competition. Entailed here was a distinction between party and faction, a promising beginning, and an application of the positive connotations of party to cover the nobles and commons of Rome. In stipulating that a party criticized only the operations of government or its personnel and not the principles of the regime, the author, Pierre-Antoine Antonelle,80 seemed as well to be laying the basis for limited conflict on the British pattern. But, as it turned out, his real intention was to crown the efforts of the neo-Jacobins with the title of party and to relegate the royalists to the status of an unacceptable faction. The very possibility of factious conduct on the part of neo-Jacobins was ruled out by definitional fiat, since the only sorts of political groups that could qualify for the title were oligarchical or monarchical. The most recent notice of Antonelle’s essays seems not to appreciate the very narrow limits of his political 79 Turot, De l’opposition et de la liberté de la presse (Paris, an VII), 14–16, 41. 80 Bonnefoi [pseud.], “Quelques définitions à l’ordre du jour,” L’Ennemi des oppresseurs de tous les pays 30 (11 vendémiaire VIII) [30 Oct. 1799]. Antonelle’s pseudonym identifies him as the author. See Max Fajn, The Journal des hommes libres de tous les pays, 1792–1800 (Le Hague and Paris, 1975), 103, 180.

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tolerance.81 Conveniently, France knew no such entity as a demagogic faction. Professor Woloch is surely correct in tracing such an understanding of important political words to a prior publication of the mayor of Paris during the Terror. There, in a tract written in the context of the trial of Babeuf and other conspirators, Pache had offered tendentious understandings of the words “faction” and “conspiracy.”82 Subsequent numbers of the Journal des hommes libres, under a variety of titles, tried to sustain an eccentric and positive understanding of conspiracy that had also been taken from the earlier work. This was much less pathbreaking in its argument than some commentary would suggest. All of the complicated distinctions boiled down to an underlining of John Locke’s remark that all churches were orthodox to themselves. The understanding of party and faction, however useful it may have been for disposing of the royalists, was subtly different from the one current outside of neo-Jacobin circles. The more conventional understanding also entailed a contrast between a faction’s self-interested attack on established government and a more principled defence of, say, the rights of a recognized “ordre.”83 It did not, however, entail the special pleading that accompanied the neo-Jacobin version of the distinction. When we seek the origins of modern notions of political correctness, the Jacobin contribution must not be forgotten. In their efforts especially to prescribe the acceptable limits of speech, they surpassed even the church that they so hated. On the narrow issue of party and opposition, theirs was the vision of Bolingbroke – who saw no need for opposition once the good held power – rather than that of Burke, but Bolingbroke made terrible by the substitution of a patriotic people for his patriot king. Even to contemplate a legitimate party of opposition, as some Jacobins of 1799 did,84 may seem to be a development from the affectation in the early Revolution to eschew party as faction. One must recall, however, that they saw themselves 81 Pierre Serna, Antonelle: Aristocrate révolutionnaire, 1747–1817 (Paris, 1997), 376–7. The author also renders the date of the major article a year earlier than its actual appearance. 82 J.N. Pache, Sur les factions et les partis, les conspirations et les conjurations (Paris, an V); and Woloch, Jacobin Legacy, 396. Pache’s pamphlet was reprinted in Louis Pierquin, Mémoires sur Pache … (Charleville, 1900), 121–53. 83 See, for example, P.-C.-L. Baudin des Ardennes, “De l’esprit de faction considéré par rapport à son influence sur les différens gouvernmens,” in Mémoires de l’institut national des sciences et arts pour l’an IV de la république (Paris, an VI), 1:493–503. The author was neither Jacobin nor royalist, a true supporter of the Directory. 84 See “De l’Opposition,” Le Democrate, ou le défenseur des principes, no. 27 (12 fructidor VII) [29 Aug. 1799].

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as that party because ousted from power. When they had controlled government, they had no such respect for opposition. Recent scholarship that seeks some liberal strain here does so at the cost of what seems to be an excessive indulgence towards that initial politics of exclusion whereby Jacobins might dream of a non-coercive order once all their enemies had been driven from the field.85 In such circumstances, politics itself might well disappear as an activity. Wishing away all sources of friction in the manner either of the neo-Jacobins or of their modern admirers seems unworthy of serious contemplation. The original hope appears at once naive and sinister, if all too familiar an aspect of political zealotry. Modern interpretations that take this fantasizing at its word are based on the admitted truth that ordinary politics can only proceed among people who agree upon some of the rules. That hardly justifies the portrayal of Jacobins as liberals in the making. In the centre were the victors of 9 thermidor, supporters of the Directory, ever to be famous for their tacking from side to side to keep afloat the ship of state. In finding their raison d’être in holding power and balancing the extremes to left and to right, they played out Marx’s explanation of the regime of Louis Napoleon, even before the coup of the first Napoleon. The tactics of the government were widely recognized by their opponents on either side, and this was the case even before the sweeping victory of the royalists in the elections of 1797 and the subsequent coup d’état of 18 fructidor that robbed the rising party of its victory. The Directory was not Jacobin, but neither was it anxious to restore the monarchy in any form, so the republican credentials, at least of most directors, were manifest. Newspapers of a royalist orientation, such as the Gazette française, edited by Joseph Fiévée, or L’Historien, associated with the name of the physiocrat Dupont de Nemours, were joined by a number of writers with left-wing sympathies in describing the strategy of a government apparently intent on discrediting both extremes. Royalists, before fructidor, appear to have been more grateful for the moderation of the Directory than were Jacobins; after all, it had not been long since it would have been fatal to admit any leaning such as the royalists might, with some discretion, now profess. Meanwhile, the revived Jacobins could scarcely have been faulted for entertaining a belief, albeit incorrect, that they and the members of the executive must all be seen as republicans together, for their kind had roots in the Revolution that royalists could never have. Both early in the Revolution and in the days of the Directory, there existed public men whose memoirs were to record royalist loyalties that they

85 Anne Sa’adah, The Shaping of Liberal Politics in Revolutionary France (Princeton, 1990), 6, 170, 198.

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preferred not to share with their contemporaries.86 Perhaps it was for that reason that Joseph Fiévée, in his Gazette, had contented himself with observing that the government balanced factions by factions or, if one liked, parties by parties, without his drawing any firm conclusion on the matter. The Historien was similarly mild, and it was the task of an unknown named Le Franc, writing in a royalist organ, to complain that the strategy of balancing opposed interests must not extend to placing crime and innocence or brigandage and property on the opposed scales. Obviously, the writer thought that this is what had been done to the cost of those who thought as he did.87 One of the most nuanced sets of observations on the shifts of fortune among the factions of the time was unavailable to the general public, for it came in Mallet du Pan’s then unpublished reports. He described the strategy of the surviving Girondins in the Convention as that of using both the royalists and the Jacobins against one another, and later he remarked on how the Directory practised the same manoeuvre as part of a supposed neutralisme towards its opponents to left and to right.88 A generally more militant tone on the part of neo-Jacobins presumably revealed their expectation of somewhat better treatment at the hands of their fellow republicans in charge of the executive. More recently undisputed top dogs than were their royalist foes, many of the neo-Jacobins could not easily credit the fact that publications whose loyalty to the republic was ambiguous at best might circulate freely. For a neo-Jacobin such as ‘Publicola’ Chaussard, the tactics of the Directory were inimical to political health in that the aristocratic republic of the Directory came far too close to a constitutional monarchy. While he was prepared to allow that it might happen that the welfare of the whole arose from the clashing of the parts, he condemned the executive for its sanctioning the existence of a faction that was anti-republican. His way of referring to the obnoxious practice of the directors was “ce systême de balance entre les factions.”89 If this description seems circumlocutory, it must be said that the term later to become famous in this capacity was not, as yet, in general use. The word 86 See Charles Elle, marquis de Ferrières, Correspondance inédite (1789, 1790, 1791), ed. Henri Carré (Paris, 1932), 106, 227–8; and Félix Faulcon, Mélanges législatives, historiques et publiques, pendant la durée de la constitution de l’an III (Paris, an IX), 1:159. 87 Gazette française, no. 1994 (4 messidor V) [22 June 1797]; L’Historien 15, no. 583 (8 messidor V) [26 June 1797]; and Benoit Le Franc, “Du danger des auxiliaries et des contre-poids,” L’Abréviateur universel, no. 152 (12 prairial IV) [31 May 1796]: 606–8. 88 Correspondance inédite de Mallet du Pan …, 1:256–7; 2:63–4, 109. 89 P.-J.-B. Chaussard, Coup d’oeil sur l’intérieur de la république français, ou esquisse des principes d’une révolution morale (Paris, an VII), 12–13.

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bascule – literally, a see-saw, as in the play of children – seems never, in the life of the Directory, to have become the normal way of making reference to such a strategy. Although it would quite soon come to be the political word most intimately associated with the period, its real time would come only with the Restoration, when it might at once characterize the present and illuminate the past. Today bascule remains a stranger even to modern dictionaries of revolutionary language. So to accuse the directors in print was probably just deemed, on all sides, to be dangerous practice; accordingly, public analysis of the balancing of parties was rare indeed. The term may well have entered the political vocabulary only after the anti-Jacobin coup in the spring of 1798, although it had already been current in the vocabulary of social life to refer to the swings and the roundabouts of human existence. In the summer of 1794, for instance, Parisians had attended a popular theatrical piece called La Bascule, but it dealt with private, not public, life. Possibly the earliest effort to make political application came in a curious jeu d’esprit that appeared early in floréal of 1798, just at the time of the Directory’s interference with those elections that would have bolstered the fortunes of the neo-Jacobins. It was a time for talk about the scisson, or cutting off, of membership in electoral colleges and in membership of the Conseil de 500, thus complementing the blow struck at the royalists in the previous autumn. Here, then, was conspicuously displayed, for the first time, the readiness with which the Directory was prepared to deal ruthlessly with the parties on either side. The author of the pamphlet was Louis-Germain Petitain, a sympathizer with royalism and now remembered as a remarkably inept editor of Rousseau. In keeping with this reputation, Petitain’s little offering did no more than to introduce the term bascule to the doings of the legislature; so circumspect was the author that never was it made clear either that it was the executive branch that used this tool or how exactly the tool worked. An innocent reading would suggest that the object of satire was the legislative branch itself.90 Petitain’s coyness did nothing, then, to change the fact that the emergence of a concept to describe the mode of survival practised by the Directory was largely a product of retrospection after the Directory had disappeared. There would, nevertheless, be a few other signs of its presence late in the life of the regime. If we can trust the memory of the last president of the Directory, the term also accompanied that body’s disappearance into oblivion in the coup of 18 brumaire. Lucien Bonaparte, addressing the rump of the legislature on the night of 19 brumaire, is said to have uttered

90 [Petitain], Description d’une machine curieuse nouvellement montée au palais cidevant Bourbon (Paris, an VI), 7–11, 18–21, 23, 37.

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the words “plus d’immoralité, plus de bascule.”91 That statement, if indeed it were ever made, was no doubt the most public utterance of the term. With it, the discrediting of the political experiment just ended could begin in earnest. If Petitain had offered but a very elusive account of the notion of bascule, it was true as well that the neo-Jacobins appear to have been slower than their royalist opponents to accept the fact that both extremes could expect their grasping at power to be ruthlessly put down by the Directory. Expecting little of the republicans in power, royalists should hardly have been surprised at their treatment, but neo-Jacobins remained fated to recurrent disappointment. They thus evinced no apparent expectation that the welcome deportation of royalists in the autumn of 1797 could be followed by a parallel strike against themselves in the following spring. Until fructidor, the government had struck out only in self-defence, and it was all too easy, too, for those of the Left serenely to depict the deported royalists as deserving their fate. Only after floréal was it reasonably clear that the favoured mode of survival of the majority of the directors would be a series of preemptive strikes aimed at whichever side seemed to be on the rise. They were as ready to invalidate a neo-Jacobin electoral triumph as previously they had been to banish right-wing journalists and legislators. Following the disgrace, in the coup of 30 prairial, of those directors most associated with the objectionable practices, the pattern had grown yet clearer. Even then, neo-Jacobins seemed reluctant to see the symmetry in the treatment of the royalists and of their own party. When circumstances made such an insight difficult to avoid, they still absorbed it less easily than had their enemies at the opposite extreme. Noteworthy for its insight about the treatment of the parties was a speech by the Jacobin Pierre-Joseph Briot late in the summer of 1799. Briot condemned the strategy whereby the directors had alternately encouraged and rebuffed both the royalists and his own associates in a system described as “de balancement et de contre-poids.” He recognized both groups as “partis d’opposition,” not a concession often seen from this quarter, and most remarkably, he allowed that the parties themselves were, in some measure, complicit in the misdoings of the directors, for the business of raising or lowering the parties was only, on this account, carried on by co-opting one side to participate in the fall of the other. Each in turn, then, applauded the unconstitutional measures of the Directory when these were aimed at 91 [Louis-Jérôme Gohier], Mémoires des contemporaines, pour servir à l’histoire de France … (Paris, 1824), 1:342. The record of that speech, printed at the time, does not contain these words. However, as spokesman for the body against which the coup was directed, Gohier was an eyewitness, probably an earwitness as well, to the events.

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opponents, only eventually to be hoist on their own petard. More sophisticated than earlier commentators, including Chaussard, Briot was capable of seeing his own party and the royalists as sharing a common situation, and this in itself left him more cogent in his comments than were many others of his stripe. He had seen the bascule for what it was, but if he knew the term, he chose not to use it. Neither did the soon-to-be-famous word commend itself to the press in general. Thus, a neo-Jacobin paper such as Le Républicain and its successors complained chiefly of the scission, or division, executed upon the legislature by the executive power. Briot’s relative sophistication would not suffice to make him into a proponent of a constitutional competition between parties, for he identified the generic parties as always being the good versus the evil.92 That reminds us that his moderation was the product of his circumstances. The old-fashioned and learned way of referring to the strategy that he had analysed was tertius gaudens, the gain of a third party through the manipulation of the main contenders. Such a manoeuvre was naturally painful to the political extremes, royalist or Jacobin, and so unacceptable. However, it might have been more than welcome to that less articulate centre in political life, grateful for any action that put an end to strife and uncertainty. Here the much-maligned Directory might have found supporters for its schemes. These signs of support were unlikely to consist of the detailed jeremiads that issued from the victims of the strategy. Most seem to have been content to approve of a government that sought to distance itself from all parties and, in the interest of maintaining an equilibrium, to attack, if necessary, those who represented the extremes. Such sentiments were abroad from the beginning of the regime in 1795.93 Undoubtedly, there was some valid point in suppressing those anxious to alter the status quo to their own benefit, with the prospect, perhaps, of renewing largescale violence, often then described as anarchy. In seeing the avoidance of these conditions as justifying actions not altogether wholesome, the directors no doubt came to enjoy substantial support. Neither was it necessary to assume that the Directory as a unit so schemed to survive by balancing the forces on either side and using each to check the other. As we know now in detail and as contemporaries were 92 Opinion de Briot sur la situation intérieure et extérieure de la République (Paris, [29 Aug. 1799]), 14, 20. 93 See, for instance, Honoré Riouffe, Quelques chapitres (Paris, [1795]), 51–2; and Hilarion Puget, citoyen français, aux républicains (n.p., n.d.), 1. A less patriotic identification of Puget would know him as the marquis de Barbentane. A handwritten note on the cover of the Widener Library’s copy of this second pamphlet says that it was published “after 1797.”

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also aware, the Directory was itself subject to internal divisions, with some members most fearful of the Jacobins, whereas a majority – three of the five, at least through 1797 – saw the main threat as coming from the confident royalists. When finally the term bascule came to be associated with the notorious tactics of the directors, the expression seemed, in particular, to be identified with the name of Merlin de Thionville and those supporting him.94 Merlin was given this dubious distinction, it seems, because it was he who, in the excitement of 18 fructidor, warned his remaining colleagues in the purged Conseil de 500 that they must not allow the euphoria of the moment to blind them to the remaining danger from the Jacobins. Later during that day, he repeated the advice.95 In so associating himself with the banishment of the royalist threat, he had simultaneously linked it to the danger still posed by the opposite extreme. In fact, Merlin, who only joined the Directory after the banishment of two directors that accompanied the coup, had invented nothing new in the repertoire of reason of state. As the pattern of repression grew better defined, he nevertheless acquired an unearned reputation as the instigator. Since the Directory had military intervention as its ultimate argument, it seems not to have been given to public analysis of its own policies, probably recognizing that it was in its interest to keep political discourse, at least on domestic issues, as bland as possible. In this resolve, it largely succeeded. One member of the Directory whose later apologetics addressed the “prétendu système de bascule” both denied that it had ever been undertaken and pointed, rather awkwardly, to the reasonableness of the manoeuvre.96 Comment that was especially friendly to the balancing strategy had thus to come from outside official circles, although we have heard already from Garat, who was to hold a ministerial post under the directors. One independent source of comment was Charles Théremin, son of a Protestant immigrant. Théremin wrote a perceptive analysis of the historical cleavages in French society that culminated in some remarks on the management of conflict after the fall of Robespierre. He fairly described the Directory as a neutral or non-party executive that tolerated parties in the legislative councils and ruled in the name of a constitutional republicanism that was innocent of the well-known excesses both of anarchists

94 J. Merlinet [pseud.], Théorie des conspirations … ([Tours], n.d.), 24–7. The pamphlet clearly dates from the discrediting of Merlin and his fellow directors in prairial of 1799, thus the choice of pseudonym. 95 Roger Merlin, Merlin de Thionville: D’après les documents inédits (Paris, 1927), 2:643. The pages are numbered consecutively throughout the two volumes. 96 Mémoires de Larevellière-Lépeaux … publiés par son fils (Paris, 1895), 1:406.

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and absolutists.97 Théremin’s attachment to political stability as the foundation for prosperity cannot have been unwelcome among the directors. Less obviously, he lent his support to a measure of political pluralism. It was, of course, among the moderate royalists where the most genuine support for political pluralism was to be found. Perhaps its presence calls for some explanation, since it had not, on the whole, been the beneficiaries of the old regime who had contemplated the advantages of party in the years prior to the Revolution. Nor was there any excess of tolerance in the vengeful mood of the exiled Bourbons and their various courts. From these centres came a stream of violent fulmination that dwelt upon reimposing the privileges of the past and exacting a hundred thousand lives from the makers of revolution. One part of the Right was already well into the process of forgetting nothing even as it learned nothing. They were a serious embarrassment to the other royalists who sought to make a restoration attractive to the general population.98 This task, in itself, might seem to have made even the moderates unlikely defenders of political pluralism, for they were committed to a change of regime and not just a change of personnel at the top. By contrast, it was not nearly so clear that the neoJacobins needed any such dramatic reorientation in a government that was already republican, if of an excessively conservative cast for their taste. The answer to the readiness of constitutional royalists to contemplate limited political conflict may simply lie in their situation. They lived, for the most part, in France and had, on a daily basis, to do business with political opponents. The isolation of the royalistes purs, consigned to exile abroad and in a fantasy of their own construction, bred fanaticism. The royalists who spoke in the legislative councils and who wrote in the papers had to trim their sails. Their talk was of the broadening of the spectrum of acceptable discourse and opinion; they dwelt (with whatever private reservations) on the mildness of a constitutional monarch, of an amnesty, and of conciliation. It was ever their public aim to expand the political community with the readmission of those banished by republican zeal and the probable retention of most existing elements. Despite the democratic rhetoric from the party of the Left, it was actually in the interest of the Right to maximize political participation, for they were secure in the suspicion that the mass of the population liked neither the government nor the left-wing opposition to it. Jacobins, by contrast, had tended to benefit from restricting voter turnout, using both legal proscription and intimidation. Jacobinism had always fared better in Paris than in the 97 Théremin, “Des partis,” in De la situation intérieure de la république (Paris, an V), 25–52. 98 On this matter, see W.R. Fryer, Republic or Restoration in France: 1794–7 (Manchester, 1965), chap. 1 and passim.

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provinces, and with the Right in command of the metropolitan press and the theatres, its openness to competition was founded on a reasonable prospect of success. Fructidor destroyed all hope of an imminent restoration, but it did not, it would appear, entirely break the royalist hold on intellectual life. If their immediate circumstances enjoined distrust of a political monolith, the royalists within France were also without that heritage of positive feeling for a unanimous nation that had been the defining quality of the Left. Even when they stood to gain from the mood of the country, they tended not to hypostatize the sovereign people. The orders of the old regime might thus yield to a more pluralistic understanding of diversity. Complementing the bad memories of populistic rhetoric was the impression, natural to the Right, that politics was largely an affair of elites. The legislative opposition of the Right found its organizational focus in the political club, exactly the sort of body that in Britain served the needs of the embryonic political parties that formed inside Parliament and only gradually extended their activity into the community at large. Much political discussion early in the Revolution focused upon the institution of the club rather than upon the behaviourally specific category of “party.”99 Royalists were careful to distinguish their clubs from those popular societies that had been outlawed by the constitution of year III.100 The latter had been characterized both by their indiscriminate membership and by the practice of associating local branches into a national network in the model that the Jacobins had borrowed from Freemasonry. In dismissing popular predecessors as springboards of disorder and disaffection, the writers of royalist persuasion emphasized that the Club de Clichy was mainly a rendezvous for deputies. Within its confines, they might, so the story went, pursue common purposes without attempting either to impose decisions upon the sovereign councils or to mobilize the populace. That message was disseminated in the press by writers such as the brothers Bertin, Jean-Thomas Langlois, and Dupont de Nemours. The Tableau, the paper that reported 99 A good deal of early commentary on parties, British and French, had tended to identify parties with political clubs and had thus made a case for tolerating competing clubs. See Le Lendemain, no. 37 (6 Feb. 1791): 520–60; (1 March 1791): 735; Journal de la Société des amis de la Constitution monarchique, no. 9 (12 Feb. 1791): 14– 18; and Anon., “Avis aux Français sur les clubs” [March 1791], in Aulard, ed., La Société des Jacobins (Paris, 1891), vol. 2 (Jan.–July 1791), 239–73 at 261–2. I owe this last reference to A. Jane Arscott, “From Corporate Privilege to Freedom of Association: The Place of Clubs in French Revolutionary Political Thought” (PhD thesis, Queen’s University, Kingston, 1992). 100 See, for instance, Charles Lacretelle, “Lettre sur les sociétés populaires,” in Gazette française, no. 1571 (6 floréal IV) [25 April 1796]: 4069–70.

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most sedulously on the private meetings of the deputies of the Right on rue Clichy, emphasized that information about their real activities would dispel the rumour that they sought to overthrow the republic; differences of opinion within the ranks of the deputies were also reported, but with the assurance that these were not signs of any internal disarray.101 The literary talent at the disposal of the cause was much superior in quantity and quality to that available to other persuasions. In keeping with the anglophile leanings of constitutional royalists, their writings appealed often to British experience. This had been a ready source of inspiration for the royalist Mallet du Pan as he had battled the republicans of 1791. Emphasis had then been upon the virtues of civil disagreement between parties divided but by nuances.102 This vision was more difficult to sustain in fighting the exclusifs of the Left, but the Right tried hard to present a road to power that would sound as unthreatening as possible. An article that appeared in the electoral campaign of year V purported to survey the work of a British Opposition. Depicting it as the very essence of Parliament, the writer particularly emphasized the smoothness of the transition from one ministry to another.103 The obvious implication was that France might expect a similar process as it approached constitutional monarchy. The editor and chief writer of the paper in which this article appeared was Joseph Fiévée, much later to be recognized as one of the most formidable champions of the logic of parliamentary rule on the British pattern. Even after 18 fructidor, the dream remained alive. Only days after the royalist press had been shut down, certain papers reappeared under new titles. Isidore Langlois, one of its more intrepid journalists, offered a tribute to constitutional opposition – both in the legislature and in the press – at a time when his less fortunate colleagues languished in the prisons of the Directory.104 101 See L’Éclair, no. 625 (7 messidor V) [25 June 1797]: 635; (17 messidor V) [5 July 1797]; L’Historien 3 [the issue is not accorded a number] (25 ventôse IV) [15 March 1796], 353–5; 15, no. 583 (8 messidor V) [26 June 1796]: 97–9; La Quotidienne, no. 424 (7 messidor V) [25 June 1797]; Tableau de la France et de l’Europe … , no. 342 (14 prairial V) [2 June 1797]: 369 (12 messidor V) [30 June 1797]. For all of the above references and for a wealth of bibliographical guidance on the press of the Right, I am indebted to Jeremy D. Popkin, The Right-Wing Press in France, 1792–1800 (Chapel Hill, 1980), 197 and passim. In all cases, I have consulted the original paper. 102 Mallet du Pan, Du principe des factions en général et de celles qui divisent la France (Paris, 1791), 9, 11. It had first appeared in the Mercure historique, nos 38, 40, 41 (17 Sept., 1 Oct., 8 Oct. 1791). 103 Gazette française, no. 1895 (25 ventôse V) [15 March 1797]. 104 L’Echo de l’Europe et le messager des conseils, no. 4 (30 fructidor V) [16 Sept. 1797].

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Argument more sustained and more disinterested came from Jean-Pierre Gallais, arguably the most gifted journalist of the time and clearly the most readable. Gallais undertook not only to justify the opposition of his royalistleaning colleagues, but also to extend the opportunity to those on the left. He thus insisted that his disapproval of the neo-Jacobin P.-A. Antonelle was the result of the latter’s consorting with Babeuf, whose penchant for conspiracy would soon bring him martyrdom. Antonelle’s role in opposing the government was, by contrast, perfectly acceptable, said Gallais.105 The presence of some such counterweight was essential, he allowed, in all governments not despotic. Yet more remarkably, Gallais carried his stock of ideas with him when he came to write, in some sense, in support of the Directory.106 In a new paper, at first subsidized by the government, he continued still to rehearse most of his prejudices, including the one that exempted no respectable regime from principled and public opposition. Both before and after his coming to terms with authority, Gallais wrote articles that were subtle, balanced, and never merely sectarian cant. In his position as the champion of the directors (or some of them), he showed his moderation in all things in a respect for British institutions. This was tempered by his awareness of the different political culture of France and his support for the institution of the opposition that was hedged in by allusions to the savage harassment that ministers had suffered, especially in the early years of revolution. Unlike some critics of the directors, Gallais did not complain of a balancing of parties. He did, however, refer to a bascule. Initially, in his vocabulary, bascule referred to the process within British government whereby the parties might trade places, with the erstwhile governors becoming the Opposition. There is a fine irony in his using the term that would finally identify the politics of the Directory to describe the normal mechanism of the parliamentary system. If the irony was somehow intentional, Gallais covered his tracks well. Only very late in the regime, with the pattern of symmetrical suppressions becoming more evident and subject to public condemnation in the coup of 30 prairial, did a paper with which he was seemingly connected apply the term bascule, pejoratively, to the strategy of the Directory.107 105 La Quotidienne, no. 16 (16 ventôse III) [6 March 1795]. 106 See Popkin, Right-Wing Press, 179–81. 107 Le Censeur des journaux, no. 15 (25 fructidor III) [11 Sept. 1795]; no. 143 (27 nivôse IV) [17 Jan. 1796]; “Avis aux Jacobins,” Le Nécessaire, no. 37 (18 thermidor VII) [5 Aug. 1799]. Gallais is usually associated with a paper of that name that was closed down at the time of 18 fructidor. See Hugh Gough, The Newspaper Press in the French Revolution (London, 1988), 143–4. The paper cited here seems to have been a revival of it and the numbers in the Bibliothèque nationale are bound with earlier journalism by Gallais.

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For all the diversity of terms for describing the Directory’s treatment of parties, it was the image of the bascule that best served, without resort to a cumbersome expression, to make sense of what had occurred. But Gallais’s use of the word, no more than its other incidental appearances, failed to change the language in any dramatic way. A hostile treatment of the Directory, appearing early in the Napoleonic era, remained content to refer to the system of “equilibrium”; still, one of the first histories of the entire period of revolution had recourse to the now-familiar image.108 That technique came to be seen as the signature of the Directory, and it served as the warrant to condemn the directors both for their anti-parliamentary ruthlessness and for their ultimate failure. The future would show, however, that the politics of equilibrium and an executive that aspired to live between the parties or above them was one way of coping with a divided people. For those comfortable with neither extreme of the political scene, it was perhaps the only one, and the opprobrium that greeted the strategy seems excessive. Gallais’s position on the tactics of the Directory was that the directors hoped eventually to dispense with all parties. If anything, his efforts to present himself as very much a moderate – hostile to Jacobins but not in the camp of extreme royalists – grew more pronounced with time, but never did he allow that the extirpation of the existing parties could relieve the rulers of all opposition.109 In this he was closer to the mark than were those who assumed that the government followed the policy of cynically fomenting strife between the extremes. For all his subtlety, even Gallais, at least in his public statements, failed to capture the reality of a Directory that was itself divided – with Barras, for instance, genuinely afraid of a royalist restoration and Carnot fearing above all else the reassertion of anarchy. Gallais’s caution about revealing his sympathy for the Right grew more apparent as the prospect of a blow against the resurgent royalists became a virtual certainty. That display of prudence did not, however, save him from at least a brief proscription with other victims of 18 fructidor. Still, at his best, he was the master of the sort of pronouncement that could at once endorse the values of his political past, embarrass the neo-Jacobins, and serve the purposes of a centrist position. His work serves well to epitomize a time when loyalties were ambiguous and fluid. Then came 18 brumaire, and ambiguity, subtlety, and political competition all took a long vacation.

108 [P.-F. Henry], Histoire du directoire exécutif de la république française … (Paris, 1801), 1:251; and C.-F. Beaulieu, Essais historiques sur les causes et les effets de la Révolution en France (Paris, 1803), 6:252–3. 109 Le Censeur des journaux, 2nd ser., no. 7 (7 vendémiaire VII) [28 Sept. 1796]; no. 108 (18 nivôse V) [7 Jan. 1797]; no. 143 (22 pluviôse V) [10 Feb. 1797].

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pa r t y i n t h e r e v o l u t i o n In order to understand how the people who lived through the Revolution perceived their divisions, one must return to that oddity, already noted, whereby opinion condemned both party and faction and also offered less than respect to those who sought to find a place between the contending extremes. This meant that only some version of unity – the vision summed up for republicans in a republic “une et indivisible” – was acceptable to that portion of the population that spoke for the Revolution. We would do well, too, to recall that the impeccably royalist chouans of Brittany did not themselves harbour political views friendly to pluralism or to giving a hearing to their opponents. But the various seekers after some national consensus could never themselves agree about the point around which all should congregate. Consequently, they remained in the paradoxical position of at once condemning parties and contributing inexorably to their presence. Two of the political words that the Revolution would bequeath to the Restoration help to sum up the problem. The men whose caution caused them to belong to the ventre left the cause of moderation weaker than it should have been and tended, eventually, to capitulate to an extreme party, inevitably the one closely allied with popular sentiment in the city. The use of the bascule was the other response to party strife, and its practitioners were led to undo the parties through unconstitutional means that left insufficient room for representative government, let alone the parliamentary kind. Opposition and party probably have to exist before one can want them. They have always preceded in reality those constitutional conventions that gave them respectability. The period of the French Revolution is best known for its obsessive suspicion of dissent. At once simple and distasteful, this portrait too easily comes to dominate one’s understanding of the period. Before the Montagnards came to power and after they lost power, there were other possibilities. Imposition of a general will was the dominant theme for only a comparatively brief period, famous and terrible as that time may have been. As a nation, France only made a beginning at embracing political parties and constitutional opposition at the Restoration. As we shall see, the experiment then was tentative, subject to serious interruptions. It is significant, too, that in 1848, during another successfu1 revolution by the Left, there would again be heard hostility to political parties because of their hindering the formation of a unanimous national will.110 Isolated expressions of admiration for British habits gave way, in the Revolution, to real political competition of a sort hitherto unknown in France. 110 Francis Wey, Manuel des droits et des devoirs: Dictionnaire démocratique (Paris, 1848), s.v. “Opposition,” 72–3.

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The attractiveness of the ethics of civil disagreement grew and even the Jacobin ideal of unanimity failed to still the chorus. For the time being, pluralism was the road not taken, but both before the Revolution and during its course, it had carried its share of travellers.

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a study aimed at tracing efforts to master the conventions governing civil disagreement must focus on the friends of those practices. Yet no treatment of these actors and thinkers would make sense if it did not admit at the outset that admirers of British experience faced a stern challenge. A venture in cultural borrowing between two such major civilizations was unusual and so humiliating for many of the French as to provoke denial that it was going on. Yet that was surely the meaning of the institution in France of a form of monarchy so different from French governments of the past. No evasions about the common origins of representative institutions in the woods of Germany could conceal the British stamp on constitutional monarchy. Most of the population knew little of France’s new constitutional order that had been hammered out, at the king’s command, in six days late in May 1814. Moreover, most would have little reason to care for a mode of governance that had been widely misunderstood for much of the eighteenth century before it was systematically denigrated throughout the twenty-five years that separated the beginnings of revolution from the First Restoration. Portions of the nation hailed the return of the old dynasty, although not a few continued to pin their hopes on the promises of the Revolution or the revival of imperial grandeur. To all appearances, the notion that monarchy and a generous liberty might coexist was one with scant support in the French memory. Stranger still were the informal arrangements, including, vitally, political parties and a “formed opposition” on the Westminster pattern. Yet these, in ways yet mysterious, were central to the operation of the new constitutional scheme. Familiarity with such matters had been vicarious through glimpses of Whigs and Tories, or of Roman orders. Those Frenchmen who were well informed about alien institutions were certainly prominent on the public stage or well positioned so to become, but they were few.

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Of the barriers that militated against a ready acceptance of peaceful competition, many were based on the recent history of France. Some of these may be traced, however, to the nature of humans and not just to that of the French. Committing oneself to an endless process of disagreement, interrupted only by some sort of compromise, has never been the stuff that lifted the spirit or warmed the heart. Atavistic human urges command members of the species to dream of a golden age of harmony even as they delight at the prospect of smiting the foe and of emerging victorious over dark forces. The two fit easily into a sequence: first comes the satisfying struggle; then one makes a desert and calls it peace. Like team sports, much of public life in most times and places has partaken of these satisfying outcomes and not the more refined and tepid benefits attached to constitutional rule. A full appreciation of the decorous joys of limited conflict has always seemed most available to the spectator on the sidelines, not to those in the heat of battle. Most of the early students of party and opposition have, nevertheless, been participants in the struggle and not armchair thinkers. These have then had to overcome their very natural inclination to dwell upon the practical question of who is to win rather than to contemplate the worthwhile character of the activity in general. Only rarely, as with one aristocratic Whig of the early eighteenth century, might one say that loyalty to one’s own side was tempered by the realization that two sides, roughly equal in strength, allowed political parties to make their maximum contribution to English liberty and other good things. Some rather special circumstances in England’s political situation of the years 1701–05 yielded this remarkable testimony of a partisan that the nation needed the services of both sides.1 Shute Barrington’s generous encomium to the competition itself would be almost without parallel in the annals of party even in the comparatively secure setting of Britain. The events of 1688 had been very different from the great revolution in France, as Frenchmen often reminded one another. Recreating the same sentiments in Restoration France would have been a task of almost unimaginable difficulty. The political atmosphere of that time and place was hardly conducive to any easy assimilation of the complex understandings that created trust and limited conflict. The legacy of fear and hatred inhibited the growth of institutions hospitable to parties and did so in various ways. Party loyalties within the national legislature – its newness had left no opportunity even to decide upon some general term, such as Parliament, to apply to the two chambers – were discouraged by the choice of a mode of voting that made it easy to hide one’s commitments. Meanwhile, the existing law on associations and public assembly, another reminder of the revolutionary past, was 1 J.A.W. Gunn, “Party before Burke: Shute Barrington,” Government and Opposition 3 (Spring 1968): 223–40.

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hostile to just those forms of political organization that a broadly participant society had eventually to develop. The one discouraged party ties among the elite in the legislature, and the other, combined with the tradition of administrative centralization, impoverished public life beyond its doors. A further result of the past unpleasantness was apparent in the resolve of a succession of ministries to follow a middle course calculated to bar from office the political extremes. The experiment with non-party government did not, as we shall see, succeed in dissolving those identities that contributed to party spirit. Aristocratic or clerical émigrés, one-time Jacobins, and half-pay or no-pay soldiers dreaming still of the Napoleonic era were not so easily dismissed. Whereas the various interests were not much wedded to any form of pluralism, they assuredly resisted the appeal of a moderation that seemed to deny them their place in the sun. Among the host of issues raised by this ministerial balancing act was consideration of the basis of the support enjoyed by governments. The status of the fonctionnaire, and especially of that incumbent of a public office who was also a deputy, formed part of the story; a related aspect of it was the nature of the legislature’s political centre and especially the so-called ventre. A combination of the natural disabilities against which a moderate regime had to labour and the circumstances of Restoration France generated a powerful response in an image of the French character that expressed its rejection of party connections. Based on a selective reading of the moeurs, it was a potent appeal that lent itself to a number of political strategies. Corresponding to this image of national character were perceptions of the British system – some of them rather flattering to the neighbouring nation – that served to document the unsuitability of its institutions to France. Even for proven anglophobes, the alleged facts of British politics would prove to be central to most discussions of the state of the French constitution. To epitomize the situation of post-Bonapartist France, the analysis begins with some consideration of the inherited assumptions about the nature of public opinion as it was to be found in the French nation. Here was an assumption perhaps too deeply experienced and too much taken for granted even to fuel explicit argument. It may help, however, to explain those other factors noted already. who speaks for france? It was Guizot, as public servant and historian, who did much to popularize an explanation of the problem of his time as the presence of two nations within the same state. The expression, in fact, resonated from the time of revolution and earlier. A more precise way of posing the pressing issue noted the presence of bodies of opinion each of which sought to become

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the sole embodiment of the political community. These the comte de Montlosier had already called two nations, and Guizot later acknowledged his predecessor’s dubbing them the party of old France and that of new France.2 These categories capture the situation of both Right and Left during almost the entire course of the period. Having to share membership within a political system with those whom they deeply distrusted, they each yearned to hold sway unopposed. To sustain these incompatible visions of France and its destiny, there had to be some sort of protocol to ensure the primacy of the favoured cause. Available to all was such an understanding with its origins in the ancien régime. The crucial assumption was that holistic view of the political community that endowed it with but a single will. In any community that was manifestly divided, one must not conclude, as we now say, that there existed a division of opinions, but rather that there was no opinion worthy of the name. Any opinion genuinely public spoke with but one voice and brooked no minority reports. Born in the tendency of the monarchy’s publicists to manipulate the views of the community and greatly strengthened by various special interests in the decades immediately before 1789, this understanding of public sentiment gained a terrible new power when a society of orders gave way to the people militant. Then might the rulers, once content to emit a signal and to call the echo the public voice, insist with unprecedented confidence that theirs was truly the general will. Since a community divided was one bereft of opinion and deprived of any social compass, and since it was convenient to assume at most times that there was some dominant spirit abroad, the test of ingenuity was deftly to slough over any apparent failure of unanimity. Assisting in the great work was the propensity of the French language to encourage abstractions such as the nation or the people and, as in the case of the people, to hypostatize it into an entity that became a singular noun. This habit of mind contributed to the emergence of a political process within which one side might secure custody of the nation itself and thus become almost everything, while the other must sink to the lowly estate of being almost nothing. Legitimacy attended but one cause at a time.3 The politics of intolerance that flourished in the Revolution was a game of winner-take-all, and the high stakes affected the very ways of understanding the phenomenon of opinion. Royalists came to think of a certain process for 2 François-Dominique, comte de Montlosier, De la monarchie française depuis la seconde Restauration jusqu’à la fin de la session de 1816 (Paris, 1818), 60–1; and François Guizot, Du gouvernement de la France depuis la Restauration, 3rd ed. (Paris, 1820), v, 31. 3 See Gunn, Queen of the World: Opinion in the Public Life of France from the Renaissance to the Revolution (Oxford, 1995), esp. 356–92.

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eliciting the views of a community and offered too a particular sort of government in which true opinion was held to develop. The theory came to maturity especially in the 1780s and owed much to Jacques Necker, Louis XVI’s controversial minister of finance. Ingeniously, the proponents of this view held that only in monarchy of the French type was opinion an effective political force. Central to the logic of such an assertion were assumptions that built upon the shortcomings ascribed to popular government. These included the fact that such regimes were checked only with difficulty, since they necessarily associated the majority of a populace with the government. By contrast, opinion in a monarchy was held more readily separable from the government and so might function there as a counterweight to those in power. Here was a traditional version of the tyranny of the majority. Other factors peculiar to France – including the demonstrated power there of rumour, gossip, and considerations of reputation – all played a part in the account. Among those whose labours served to keep alive this remarkable claim during the Revolution was J.-P. Gallais, whose career bridged the Revolution and the Restoration.4 With the coming of the Restoration, the claim returned with much else in the baggage train of the allies.5 Indeed, without some understanding of this singular view of public sentiment, it would be difficult to follow the claim of the redoubtable Montlosier, made almost ten years into the new epoch. Admittedly a man of firmly reactionary views, Montlosier denied the presence in France of a true public opinion, and all the incessant discussion and the prominence of what he called “partial” opinions were nothing to the contrary.6 For him, genuine opinion could only take the form of a consensus, never a mere cacophony. A traditional and royalist conception of public opinion was quite different from a miscellaneous collection of differing individual views. Neither was it the same as that esprit public offered by careless writers as synonymous with public opinion. In the more precise usage, a true esprit public was the exact equivalent of British public spirit, one with a content specifically directed to the general good.7 A 4 [Gallais], “Qu’est-ce que l’esprit public?” Le Censeur des journaux, no. 352 (2 fructidor IV) [19 Aug. 1796]; [Gallais?], “De l’opinion publique,” L’Indispensable (28 fructidor VII) [14 Sept. 1799]; and “Esprit public,” ibid. (11 vendémiaire VIII) [30 Sept. 1799]. 5 See “De la république et de la monarchie,” pt 2, La Quotidienne, no. 56 (25 Feb. 1815). 6 Montlosier, La Monarchie française au 1 juin 1824 (Paris, 1824), 99. 7 See ‘X, ’ “De l’esprit public,” Le Spectateur politique, ou Considérations sur l’état présent de la France, no. 1 (16 Sept. 1815): 1–11. This publication accorded space to the writings of J.-B.-A. Suard, long-time admirer of British institutions. It is not to be confused with Conrad Malte-Brun’s Spectateur or other papers that bore variants of the title.

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very similar assumption to holistic formulations of public opinion was the historicist emphasis that proclaimed the spirit of the age. Here, too, it was not enough to allow that many different things were afoot, numerous causes in play; instead, one had to be seen as somehow uppermost and carrying all before it. So it was that the spring of 1818 found three Parisian newspapers – La Quotidienne, the Journal général, and the Journal de commerce – vying to define this elusive force in terms congruent with the political sympathies of each. It was, of course, true that there seemed to be a natural affinity between representative government and public opinion, whatever royalist theory might say. The phrase that opinion was queen of the world was now even more popular than in the previous century. Indeed, it would not be easy to discover any other such expression, derived from the past, so often invoked to describe Restoration politics. In the measure in which republicans knew of the audacious set of ideas inherited from revolutionary royalism, they may have been too astounded to frame a ready rejoinder. Theirs, of course, was the more familiar and less contrived claim that the voice of the nation, that of the bulk of the population, was securely in its camp. Whereas royalists predictably stood for opinions that had first been sifted and weighed, their opponents found their trump card in insisting upon the weight of numbers. Taking as their own a concept with which many royalists were uneasy, the Left proclaimed themselves the nation itself; the inventors of the notion of lèse-nation were nothing if not adept at leaving their enemies nowhere to stand. Even though they had no truck with theories that attached the rule of public opinion to old-style monarchy, the Left shared in the traditional notion, fostered by the theories of Rousseau and the practice of Robespierre, that attributed a near unanimity to the community. This condition, they insisted, was somehow ontologically privileged over that of dissensus. It would be a long time before the vestiges of this unscientific holism gave way before an understanding of public opinion that ceased to depict it as a wave or torrent. It now seems highly probable that there have existed, in any complex society, many divergent opinions and that these were not all focused on the same issues. With many publics, it follows that no account couched in the language of unanimity would make any sense in a free society. In the meantime, even the sophisticate Constant, who favoured a very individualistic account of how opinion was made, continued to wrestle for possession of the soul of France. Louis XVIII had returned to France in 1814 with the desire for union et oubli, but extraordinary difficulties resisted the desired unity and kept open the doors of memory. There was, to be sure, some tendency for those committed to the causes thrust up by the Revolution to employ one sort of language for the public display of good political manners and yet have private thoughts that might be quite different. Thus, most figures in public

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life found it prudent simultaneously to proclaim their loyalty to the king and to the Charte, the constitution that he had bestowed on his people. This did not confront the notorious fact that extreme royalists held the monarchy as the centre of their political identity. Gift of the king or not, the Charte did not invoke the same degree of commitment. By contrast, the values were exactly reversed for those people of the Left who could develop even some tolerance for the restored dynasty. Their warmth of feeling was reserved for a constitutional document that had pledged that, on the whole, the restored monarchy was not seeking revenge and was prepared to live with the many changes wrought by the Revolution. To deny either of these foci of loyalty was to exclude oneself from the ranks of the politically respectable. The distance between what people said about politics and what they meant was thus very pronounced and much remarked upon. Whether, as we shall see, it was Vaublanc growling at deputies who were devious about their intentions or Fiévée’s writing about those matters about which everyone knew but no one spoke, an absence of candour seemed to mark public discourse. The situation became more transparent when men spoke, not of their own priorities, but of their fears. Only then did it become clear that one pole saw the other as Jacobins thirsting for yet another revolution while the other depicted its opponents as bent upon the resurrection of droit du seigneur and religious intolerance. For both sides, the source of their own merit lay in no small degree in the crimes of which they deemed the other capable or already guilty. From such assumptions, any view of the political process that saw the existing bodies of opinion as equally legitimate and on a common footing was doomed to failure. Out of history, people read such asymmetrical relations as to make it most unlikely that different parties could readily compete on the same plane. Instead, each had to raise itself in status, even as it consigned the other to the margins or to oblivion. Sharply defined though they may have been, the competing interests and doctrines did not readily present themselves as political parties, for the culture told both that more advantage might be had by aiming higher. How this could be done is illustrated both by the pretensions of the royalists and by the response invoked from the Left. Since it was the people who identified themselves as royalists whose condition had presumably changed for the better, it was clearly they who were making demands on the restored monarchy, and they did so by insisting that they had suffered on its behalf and must necessarily be first in line to claim the rewards that belonged to loyalty. After decades of exile, or poverty, or obscurity, royalists tended to act with a prickly sense of their superiority, and many of them were even uneasy about having to make their claims explicit. In appreciating the nature of their dismay, it becomes an easier matter to understand how aristocracy was most comfortable in employing the eloquent force of symbolism and ritual to

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silence objections before they appeared. In the new world that followed the Revolution, symbolism could not triumph unopposed. From the outset, there was a case to be made on behalf of a specific subset of the nation. It would be for others to judge the merits of that case. The cachet attached to royalist sympathies was then, from the outset, contestable. Long had it been a matter of dispute as to whether the trials of an exile, either chosen or imposed, were the true mark of loyalty. Those who had emigrated were always open to the accusation that their distinctive badge of honour in accompanying abroad the remnants of the royal family constituted a simple desertion of the homeland. This factor, joined to their expectations of special favour, meant that the language used by royalists was subject to a tension that their opponents were largely spared. A sector of opinion that saw itself as different and deserving of recognition had to generate a consistent judgment as to how it wished to present itself. The very fact that the first five years of the Second Restoration would see ministries that rebuffed the self-identified friends of the monarchy made it difficult for royalists to explain, even to each other, their situation. The more democratic Left could hardly expect, given its dubious past, to be called to office. The king would not easily forget the relative equanimity with which a considerable part of the nation had welcomed back the tyrant during the Hundred Days. Royalists, by contrast, had expected to form the king’s ministry and were mortally offended when those most conspicuous for their ultra-royalism were not called. The basis of their presumption may owe a good deal to the famous formula of Montesquieu whereby the nature of a political regime coloured any number of facets of life within society. Assuming then the tendentious claim that there really existed those whose loyalty to the throne differed in quality from that of others, it seemed to follow that the king’s ministers should be drawn exclusively from that quarter. The assumption surfaces, innocently as it were, in the comment of an admirer of Montesquieu when he said (quite without reference to current polemics) that, in a monarchy, opposition was naturally republican.8 Government then belonged to those of a monarchical persuasion, although that did not answer the question as to how these were to be identified and what sort of organizational tie should unite them. Only by distancing themselves from candidates less deserving of royal favour was the nature of this political ambition to be sustained. When individual political ambitions suffered a check, it was coming to seem natural that the individuals unite to claim their own. More and more, royalists needed to say who they were and 8 [Benjamin Gradis], Considérations sur la politique et sur les circonstances actuelles (Paris, 1822), 34–5.

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why that was worthy of attention. They did, after all, seek power and were constrained to be very clear on whose behalf the claim was made. The very terms that others applied to the ultra-royalists in the years 1815–20 confirmed their identity as somehow out of step with the current of national politics. They were the immobiles, the exclusifs, the pointus, or the ultras. For most of the 1820s, many would remain in opposition. All the while, the words spoken and written by men out of power reflected a hurt wonder that their credentials had not ushered them into the king’s favour. When the First Restoration of 1814 had hardly begun, there was already ample warrant for singling out those subjects who were more royalist than the king. If events had denied these royalists the simple and convenient situation of their ruling unopposed on behalf of their vision of France, it began to seem that they should admit their place, at least pro tem, as a party. It was not an easy choice to make, for some ways of expressing themselves got in the way of others. Guardians of a tradition that claimed descent from Pharamond and custodians of the very French identity, royalists owned an impressive mythology. Yet these men were not seeking office on behalf of the national identity but for themselves alone. The ambivalence of the claim is displayed in numerous political writings, but perhaps never better than in Chateaubriand’s Conservateur, organ of royalist alienation in the years 1818–20. One need but juxtapose two letters to the editor, both written in the late autumn of 1818. One stalwart of the cause presumed to say that the royalists gloried in their not being a party, for to form a party might entail having interests in conflict with those of the state. This nobleman could only reconcile himself to the oddity of royalists appearing as a party within the monarchy by assuming that the party so formed embodied all of France. This said, in effect, that only when no other group was accorded legitimate status as a party might royalists, with some reservations, accept the role. No emanation of the one-party state before its time, this was rather a markedly awkward way of parading support for the cause. Literally to contemplate a party of the whole would seem to suffer from the same logical difficulties as to identify a social class that absorbed the entire population. It did not even make sense to refer to a party against the whole of society, for again the logic that governed talk of parts and wholes would necessarily protest. There were, however, circumstances where reference could be made to a small and selfish group, acting contrary to the interests of the whole. Both in English and in French, the word “faction” was available for the purpose. Much simpler in its concern for direct access to power was the complaint of another nobleman of an ancient and renowned lineage. Preceding Grossin de Bouville’s argument by only a few pages was the letter from

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one La Rochefoucauld who asked only how it could be that, under a legitimate sovereign, the royalists did not appear as “le vrai parti ministériel.”9 For those who entered deeply into the nature of the politics of the time, some variant of this conclusion would come to be favoured, though not without difficulty. There would, initially at least, be the problem entailed in being required to compete for what should ostensibly come as of right. For the time being, it would rather be the first view that prevailed among royalists. Party, in any conventional sense, just seemed for many to be infra dig, and the unfamiliarity of the role did not recommend it. As another writer, contributing to a minor royalist publication, put it, the Left opposition and the ministers might well form parties. Such recourse was not proper for the royalists who were the champions of the legitimate monarchical power in France. A more elaborate position came from the provinces, where a pamphlet-writer argued, rather unconventionally, that it was quite possible to have but one party in a state, for being in that situation necessarily placed its members outside the nation. From such a premise, it would be a solecism of the first order to talk up the fusion of opposites. That would bring together the enemies and the friends of legitimacy, and only the former, because anti-national, constituted a party. Royalists were, rather, France itself, and one could no more meaningfully designate them a party than one could do the same for the nation.10 Such a position most readily recommended itself to people who perceived all political parties as illegitimate and thus factious. Even so, it was unable to account coherently for all the facts. How, after all, were people to refer to their own associates if not by assigning them some name and with it an identity or some doctrine that served to differentiate them from all others? If this were not the thin edge of the wedge that led to self-recognition as a party, what was it? As British experience had long made clear, parties were largely a question of answering to names, and apart from the names, there might not be a lot of organization to attest to their presence. Consequently, the strong royalist sense of identity seemed paradoxical when allied with the truculent denial that they were merely a party. Far better to pursue the alternative of presenting one’s credentials to be the party that had earned the nation’s trust. That is, in fact, the direction in which the royalist dilemma came, 9 L.-A.-H. comte Grossin de Bouville, letter of 8 Nov. 1818, Le Conservateur 1, no. 8: 345–53; and ‘le vicomte de La Rochefoucauld’ [presumably L.-F. Sosthène, later duc de Doudeauville], letter of 21 Oct. 1818, ibid., 1, no. 7: 320–4. 10 ‘L,’ “Il n’y pas de milieu,” La Dominicale (1819), 215–18; and Anon., Un mot sur la fusion des partis, par un français qui n’a jamais été d’aucun parti (Paris and Montpelier, 1817), 16–18.

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in time, to be resolved. Vitrolles, Vaublanc, Fiévée, Frénilly, and, at last, Chateaubriand – all figures whose ideas merit attention – would be among the closest students and the firmest friends of politics conducted via party. Perhaps their commitment came finally to be stronger just because the royalists had travelled further to reach it than had some others. Conceding the need for political competition and the institutions that it entailed was far from easy, and for certain royalists, the understanding was a long time in coming. The response of the Left was less cluttered with dubious assumptions and gave fewer hostages to fortune. Because, in the short run at least, they sought less for themselves, they needed to be less insistent as to what their exact status was. The general position left it uncertain as to whether there was any need at all for a party of the Left to forward the ambitions of the nation. Constant, as the most articulate voice from that side of the political spectrum and the figure whose thought warrants the most sustained examination, often referred to the “parti national” whose membership consisted of those known variously as libéraux, indépendants, or constitutionnels. He might, however, also vary the emphasis in pointing out that what was called a party was really all of France. Such an exaggeration then allowed him, at times, to renounce for his associates the name of party and to reserve it for that minority that he deemed to lack support in the nation. By not forgoing the possibility of the Left’s actually being a party, he effectively hedged his bet. The strategy revealed some reservations about the nature of political parties and did little to enhance public confidence in such bodies. At the same time, it remained clear that if the future lay with parties, those for whom he spoke would be there, suitably arrayed. Nor did this exhaust the variety of emphases, for some on the Left gave prominence to their attachment to national harmony, free of party divisions, and then put the wish to partisan use by blaming the royalists for conspiring against such a happy outcome. Such was the position of Constant’s associate J.-P. Pagès (de l’Arriège), one of the busier political journalists of the time. Substance for the claim lay in the fact that many royalists were fairly open about their desire to turn back the clock on such issues as the goods of émigrés, whereas those of the Left who participated in parliamentary politics professed, at least in public, to be satisfied with the arrangements of the Charte. In the manner of a host of others, Pagès would come, in time, to desert his animus against parties, if not exactly to renounce it. A variant on the theme can be seen in the writings of G.-G. Étienne, who without committing himself regarding the status of his own side, wondered how there could be any warrant for a royalist party in a monarchy. According to Étienne, such a position made sense only within a

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republic.11 The implication was, of course, that all were loyal subjects together and that there was something ridiculous if not sinister in the existence of a group more royalist than the king. Étienne too would soon find occasion to reconsider his opinions on the usefulness of party. As it happens, Constant and the others were the leading lights of the journal La Minerve, and these different emphases were all current at much the same time and responded to a single state of affairs. Étienne’s position struck directly at the central article in the royalist creed, and by taking it literally and with mock innocence, he sought to expose its inadequacy. What he was saying was that only in circumstances such as the struggle of the Catholic League in the sixteenth century was there occasion for a party specifically formed to defend the throne. This stance refused to take seriously that article of faith, put by Chateaubriand and by many others, that there was indeed warrant for a separate identity for those who cherished a special loyalty to the king. The cleverness of Étienne’s argument was that he was able to employ the very language of the royalists’ case to suggest that, far from being the bearer of the undisputed priorities of France, their very presence was gratuitous in a nation of loyal subjects and could only take the form of seeking the advancement of selfish designs. Efforts such as these to epitomize the meaning of recent history would necessarily take at least two different forms, each assertion changed by the other side into its opposite when it met the fault line posed by the Revolution. There was indeed, no doubt, something awkward in the protestations of loyalty from royalists that went beyond anything that the restored king seemed to want. It thus remained the lot of the Left to endorse the role of independents in politics who could pick and choose what causes they supported without regard to the identity of the government that was promoting the measure. The potent appeal of the parti national even made it feasible, after a time, to associate membership in a party with the seemingly

11 Constant, “Des eléctions, du ministère, de l’esprit public et du parti libéral en France,” La Minerve 4, [no. 1] (Nov. 1818): 14–22 at 21; and Constant, “Sessions des chambres,” ibid., 4, [no. 9] (Dec. 1818): 379–84 at 380. The relevant passages may also be found in Constant, Recueil d’articles: Le Mercure, la Minerve et la Renommée, ed. Harpaz (Genève, 1972), 584, 632. Pagès, “De l’unité politique,” Minerve 3, [no. 2] (Aug. 1818), 90–6 at 94; Étienne, “Lettres sur Paris” 22, Minerve 3, [no. 3] (Aug. 1818), 129–43 at 136. Étienne published a collected version of his contributions as Lettres sur Paris, 2 vols. (Paris, 1820). La Minerve was one of many publications belonging to the category known as semi-periodicals. In order to avoid coming under laws regulating the press, the editors published at irregular intervals; the separate issues constituting a volume were undated and bore no number. Individual articles did often carry a date, however.

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antithetical quality of independence.12 In this way, one might simultaneously enjoy the advantages of having some standard around which to gather even as one proclaimed the disinterested nature of one’s cause. Driven by their fears, men were still much given to the thought that all who differed from them should be deprived of any recognized place in the system. Such a disposition to condemn division might then seem to rule out the vocabulary for referring to any legitimate grouping apart from the whole. The upshot of this has been a claim, in modern scholarship, that the habit of employing the terms “party” and “faction” interchangeably was characteristic of the time.13 Such an important allegation justifies a brief interruption of the main theme, for if correct it would cast doubt upon the point of taking seriously the issue of party in the Restoration. True no doubt of pockets of unsophisticated opinion, this was far from an apt description of the views of people who set the terms for political debate. An authoritative treatment of political vocabulary in the Revolution – F. Brunet’s Histoire de la langue française – offers but two examples that simultaneously embraced the two terms of interest: one is Marguerite-Élie Guadet, Girondin of the Convention, who carefully distinguished between party and faction, and the other is Saint-Just, whose animus against all divisions was notorious, which perhaps left him careless about how he referred to them. Still, there were occasions when he had to refer to both his own associates and the Girondins, and then, for strategic purposes, he chose to treat them in neutral language. He might thus write, with no negative connotation, of “deux partis” in the Convention.14 So atypical are many of Saint-Just’s formulations that one would not, in any event, readily take his language as definitive. Evidence drawn from the Revolution is thus far from conclusive and this does not bode well for the claim as applied to quieter times. Typically, in French as in English, the word “party” enjoyed a more favourable connotation than did “faction,” although one must make allowance for that oddity whereby what was known as “party spirit” might indeed be seen as factious and was used by almost everyone to describe the activities of political groups at their worst. In this case, a spirit of party and one of faction came to much the same thing. Neither was it easy, given the marked awkwardness, and sometimes absurdity, of arguing with some other group and simultaneously associating one’s own side with the entire nation, to insist that the other side alone was undesirable. Writers often thus found themselves castigating the party in the nation’s midst and then having to explain why their own side was 12 See Anon., De la véritable indépendance d’un député, à MM. les électeurs (n.p., [1824]), 2. 13 Alan B. Spitzer, “Restoration Political Theory and the Debate over the Law of the Double Vote,” Journal of Modern History 55 (March–August 1983): 54–70 at 68. 14 F. Brunet, Histoire de la langue française (Paris, 1967), vol. 9, pt 2, 825; and Saint-Just, a report of 8 July 1793, in Oeuvres complètes (Paris, 1984), 459.

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somehow exempted from the slur. Even those, such as Claude-Henri, comte de Saint-Simon, who saw both main parties as acting in the manner of factions, still honoured the basic distinction. Similarly a ministerial writer who devoted a small book to the nature of the existing factions remained unwilling to renounce a tenuous distinction between those legitimate divisions that created parties and the excesses seen as factious.15 Turning to another observer who offered an entire book about factions, one finds a natural barrier to perceiving all causes as factious. The chevalier de Fonvielle cast the epithet “faction” at all interests that intended significant change to the institutions of the restored monarchy.16 Consistently castigating them as factious, he offered no label for the interests that supported the social order and did not use the word “party” in his indictment. Most usage was understandably casual and not very self-conscious, and no census of informed opinion is available. One of the few writers to offer a sustained analysis of the two significant words made clear that there was a perfectly respectable meaning of party to designate “a likeness of principles and political opinions among a certain number of persons.” The pejorative term for a coterie with anti-social aims was “faction,” although even the dubious practice of party spirit gained a measure of approval compared to the negative connotation of esprit de corps.17 Yet a further pattern of usage that displays militant disrespect for political parties, without thereby reducing the meaning of the concept to that of “faction,” is visible in writers who resorted to the example of British politics and the inapplicability of that scheme to France. Few were the French observers who would be comfortable in calling both main British parties factious, though there was less regard for the government of the day or for Tories than for the Opposition and Whigs. Thus might a long-standing enemy of party still prove ready to endorse a party of the people in Britain.18 From such a premise, the terms “party” and “faction” necessarily diverged in meaning and denotation. Finally, in scanning those debates about the new electoral law of 1820, the period on which the original claim about the two terms was based, one finds that the language of the representatives affords almost no support for the indiscriminate use of these critical labels. Most interesting is that the term “faction” was comparatively little used, almost as though it were 15 A claim that Saint-Simon made in 1821, quoted in Berke Vardar, Structure fondamentale du vocabulaire social et politique en France, de 1815 à 1830 (Istanbul, 1973), 169; and L.-H. Jules Mareschal, Essai sur les factions (Paris, 1822), 8–9. 16 B.-F.-A. de Fonvielle, La Théorie des factieux, dévoilée et jugée par ses résultats … (Paris, 1815), 8 and passim. 17 Rigomer Bazin, De la monarchie sans la Charte, ou nouveaux doutes éclaircis par un constitutionnel (n.p., [1816]), 4–9. 18 Henri, comte de Franclieu, Du principe des gouvernmens. Des progrès de l’esprit humain (Paris, 1824), 35.

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deemed unparliamentary. A rare case of calling opponents both a faction and a party comes with Stanislas de Girardin, who did indeed so describe the ultra-royalists.19 In using the term “faction,” however, he was assailing that loyalty, whereas the choice of “party” covered a much more neutral reference to his political enemies. Far from documenting the identical meaning of the terms, this signalled their appropriateness to different locutions. Just as little could the conflation of party and faction be attributed to a liberal speaker such as Casimir Perier, who referred to the ultra-royalists as “le parti, ou plutôt la faction.” This said unambiguously that the terms did different work. Similarly, others whose language knew both concepts might simply use one description for a certain political persuasion and the other for a less favoured position. Both the comte de Serre and Camille Jordan, the first a supporter of the legislation, the second an opponent, used the words in this way.20 The conclusion that politically articulate Frenchmen were prone to distinguish parties and factions is irresistible. This does not mean, however, that most came supplied with a usable understanding of what a party was or even a consistent mode of self-identification in terms of party. It suggests only that it was almost the rule for public men to accept the possibility that there were some ways of referring to divisions that were more polite and less pejorative than others. Let us now return to the identities that were posed against one another. Just as the Left might avail itself of the sometimes incautious language of royalism to defeat that cause, so might the press that defended the ministers. One paper, written largely by Charles Loyson and Henri de Lourdoueix, undertook the task of demonstrating that there was no warrant for a royalist party, nor any clear identity that might be given to it. One article took the meaning of party to refer to a gathering of men ill at ease about their rights or their interests, and proceeded to show that there was no longterm basis for such bodies. Attacking from various sides, as it were, the argument suggested that the label of royalist might apply to the entire population governed by the royal house of France. Alternatively, one could hardly claim both the dignified title and a love of servitude – as apparently did some royalists – or support the government – as some self-proclaimed royalists did not – and not be, in some sense, a royalist. In the end, the sentiment that so strenuously claimed to be royalist turned out to be only a collection of sterile memories held by those who had strayed from the

19 See AP 38 (12 June 1820): 445, 414, for speeches of le comte de Marcellus and of Crignon Auzouër. For Stanislas de Girardin’s remarks, see ibid., 436, 428. 20 AP 28 (6 June1820): 368, for Perier; ibid. (30 May 1820): 200–1, for Serre; and ibid., 195–8, for Jordan.

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common path.21 The faith of royalism might then be too great a burden to be carried by a mere portion of the population, or it might, alternatively, be but a vain boast. Either way, the existence of a party of that name had been, at least in the eyes of those who contested their claims, dissolved. It was a very effective challenge, if only because the claims of super-loyalty, in a nation supposedly reconciled – and more – to its king, could not readily isolate any small group. Once the opportunists Talleyrand and Fouché were set aside, the Left seemed incapable of aspiring to any special preeminence. It was for this reason that the colleagues who edited La Minerve did not face comparable embarrassment with their pretension, also disputable, that they were not so much a collection of ambitious men as the advance guard of the nation itself. In keeping its expectations modest, the Left spared itself much trouble. Moreover, in the measure that these men were relatively successful in all telling the same story about their respect for the Charte, they may well have seemed less threatening to the liberties of their fellow citizens than was the Right. The latter group continued to harbour some unembarrassed fossils – one thinks here of the marquis de Chabannes – who saw no merit in representative government, disliked the Charte, and quite frankly yearned for a pre-revolutionary political order. Chabannes was, to boot, no admirer of British institutions and deemed their adoption in France a disaster.22 It is very probable that a similar distaste for British institutions informed a good proportion of those who had attached their fortunes to Bonaparte or to the Jacobins, yet the Left seems to have been more successful in convincing their extremists to keep their eccentric tastes out of print. A striking example of sublimated revolutionary zeal appeared in a work by a one-time admirer of Bonaparte whose endorsement of a unified sovereignty had, as its only acceptable expression, enthusiasm for the king’s possession of legislative sovereignty. To this was joined a defiant rebuke to those who sought to adapt British institutions to France, for the vaunted balance of that constitution was unstable and the system promised only faction and internal division.23 If the Left had a weakness, it was for secret societies and conspiracy, 21 “De l’esprit de parti,” Le Publiciste moderne, ou Essais sur la politique … 2 (20 Aug. 1818): 513–23. Here was a publication sympathetic to the ministers that adhered to the fashion of leaving issues unnumbered and with irregular dating. This smacks of affectation, for one would have thought it in comparatively little danger of legal sanctions. Charles Loyson, who wrote for Doctrinaire publications, is credited with being editor. 22 Argus politique, no. 6 (11 Sept. 1818); no. 10 (3 Nov. 1818); no. 29 (20 Aug. 1820). 23 Jean Chas, Des gouvernmens représentatifs et mixtes (Paris, 1817), 28, 33.

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and these carried their own forms of awkwardness. For the Right, the Achilles heel was all too evident: its members seemed not to know how to stay together, and so, for virtually the entire period of the Restoration, it offered the spectacle of royalists who, in ways not easily accounted for, opposed the king’s government even as others so named supported it. Such a pattern would make most sense were the royalists prepared to grant to all citizens the loyalty that they so loudly proclaimed. This, of course, they would not do. When Constant and his companions said that the vast majority of the population belonged to their side, they may well have been correct, but there would be no ready way of knowing. Certainly, Bonaparte enjoyed his Hundred Days with only a manageable degree of internal dissent, and few could have doubted that he was a more arresting figure than the aging king. True as well that a government of the centre was moved in 1820 to change that electoral law that notoriously allowed too many men of the Left to get elected. Royalists sometimes claimed for their side an absolute majority of the nation but usually chose not to insist too strenuously on the point. In the traditional view of public opinion, mere numbers were perhaps not the main issue if one entertained the view that societies ought to reach judgment through the slow maturation of views shaped by those who were superior in rank and ostensibly in wisdom. Charles, baron Dupin, finally brought the study of demographics to the issue as to who really spoke for the majority. Armed with a quite strident version of the old cry that the Left and the nation were one, he simply claimed that those voters too young to have known the regime prior to the Revolution would necessarily support the new France and the Left, whereas most of those with memories rooted in the earlier era would vote for the Right.24 From such premises, the future did surely belong to the party with which he identified, even though the implicit hypothesis that the promptings of one’s political heart were dictated by the sort of regime into which one had been born was hardly convincing. If a good deal less than science, this was no doubt an improvement over the competing and undocumented assertion that the “honnêtes gens” of royalism were the more numerous. Partisans were naturally greatly concerned about which side commanded numbers and influence, but the question that had to be answered on a daily basis had to do with how a divided nation might be governed. Representative government entailed the expression of interests and opinions, and this made it difficult to ignore the real forces that moved the population. At the same time, it was quite apparent that government consigned exclusively to either 24 Dupin, Forces électorales à la fin de 1827, et situation progressive des forces de la France, depuis 1814, 8th ed. (Paris, 1828), 65–8.

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side of the revolutionary chasm must entail a return to a terror either red or white. Recollections of both remained sufficiently vivid that some alternative naturally commended itself to those who governed. a view from the centre More than one factor was instrumental in the pattern of governance that became clearly defined in the early years of the Second Restoration, but chief among them was surely that strategy by which the king found himself with ministers who were determined to allow neither the revolution nor the counter-revolution to dominate public life. This was not a cause that supplied much nourishment for the mind, and it was far less vocal than were the various groups in opposition. Furthermore, when the politics of the centre did find defenders, they were, in the main, not of the stature of a Chateaubriand or a Constant. Royer-Collard and his fellow Doctrinaires came closest, of well-known figures, to identification with the ministerial strategy, but that group hardly took much direction and proved fickle in its commitment to those in power when their own priorities seemed to be endangered. Although the centrist strategy was responsible for more debate than perhaps any other political issue of the time, its basis was simple: it was that of the traditional ruler who, finding himself hemmed in by two substantial parties hostile to one another, may decide somehow to manage their hatred while avoiding any long-term identification with either side. For parties both large and somehow legitimate in some of their interests, that would seem to be the only alternative to a massacre or a coup, directed at one or both. If scruples or caution ruled out a Saint Bartholomew’s Day or even the arrests and deportations conducted by the Directory, then a more subtle game was in order. It had to be that of using the resources of each of the contending parties against the other and so to hold a balance of power that refused to either of the extremes custody of the national fate. The very same situation with the identical parties had already marked the rule of the Directory with its series of coups, and that era had already named the practice after that seesaw whereby each side in turn was raised high at the expense of the other and later returned abruptly to earth. Like the overworked image of the balance, this was a most imperfect way of depicting the maintenance of political equilibrium, since the parties at either end were but the tools for raising or lowering each other, while the government at the centre set the process in motion. After the uninspired beginning of the First Restoration, to which no strategy has usually been credited, the business of French government came to be, above all, the avoidance of extremes. To describe the process in the language already known late in the time of the Directory required no feat of imagination. Already during the First Restoration, at a time when ministers

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were not yet subject to the charges that later grew popular, one finds a writer who referred to an unpleasant means for controlling threatening forces by invoking the adjective basculaire. This he identified with an instrument of Bonaparte’s recent regime as well as with the earlier Directory.25 The ministerial strategy began in earnest in the ministers’ resistance of the sometimes vengeful royalism that dominated the chambre introuvable of 1815– 16. Those who were most fearful of a counter-revolution convinced Louis XVIII to dissolve the lower chamber and thus to secure a less militant form of loyalty. Using the means at their disposal, the ministers, assisted by the prefects, obtained the desired outcome. Joseph Fiévée, an imaginative journalist of the Right, lost little time in drawing the parallel with the Directory and others who had consorted with two parties in order to use each in turn.26 Complaints about ministries seemingly attached to neither of the two Frances were to become the hardy perennial of oppositions of whatever persuasion. Here the issue was how government ought to be conducted and with what relation to the major currents of opinion. A host of lesser issues were implicated in that central one. Much of the time, disapprobation of this sort brought only silence from the alleged perpetrators of these deeds. The means of containing opinions potentially dangerous to order made up much of the traditional lore of reason of state; consequently, those who practised the balancing of hopes and fears were not given to announcing their aims to the world. It is not, then, surprising that it was those out of favour who traced the moves by which parties were kept from the levers of power and encouraged to expend their energies against one another. Ministers rarely explained themselves so fully. Their minions who wrote newspapers and pamphlets might address the issue of coping with parties, though with a much different emphasis from that of writers who reflected the frustration of those out of power. The term bascule seemed to many an unfortunate expression; only an innocent provincial would use the word in a positive sense while supporting ministerial policy.27 Royalists who felt betrayed by the dissolution of 5 September 1816, noted the relief with which liberals greeted their fall and deemed the Left to be somehow implicated in the act of the king and his ministers. But the great age for this sort of theorizing could come only when political alignments seemed fairly fluid. Ministers who seemed to lean towards one of the 25 [P.-A.-J. Taschereau de Fargues], De la nécessité d’un rapprochement sincère et réciproque entre les républicains et les royalistes (Paris, Jan. 1815), 22. 26 Fiévée, Correspondance politique et administrative VI (Dec. 1816), 38–9. See 208n27. 27 See [Benjamin Mazel], Recherches sur le mechanisme social de la France (Montpellier, 1820), 1:15. He spelled it “bassecule”; he was not an adroit speller and the English “God damn” came out “Gouadem.”

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parties evidently had preferences of some sort. When ministers gave signs of withdrawing their favour from one side and preparing to court the other, then was the time to remark upon the see-saw in full operation. It was not, it would seem, until 1818 that the government of the duc de Richelieu gave rise to the widespread suspicion that, with the aid of an electoral law tailored to their purposes, the Left was gaining power to the degree that might need checking. There were negotiations between the ministers and Villèle, leader of the royalists, but these came to nothing, and the year 1818 ended with the well-meaning Richelieu leaving the ministry to the nominal leadership of a non-entity named Dessoles and the real influence of Élie, comte Decazes, the force behind the dissolution of the royalist chamber in 1816. Events such as these served to unsettle both royalists and liberals and to reaffirm a pattern whereby the ministers were readily portrayed as coquetting with both sides to the long-term profit of neither. Through the next three years – at least until the announcement of Villèle’s ministry of December 1821 – France swayed to the rhythm of the bascule. Should we, in fact, accept the accounts of disgruntled journalists and pamphleteers, these tactics were part of the arcana imperii of all ministries of the Second Restoration and beyond and continued long after the appointment of a royalist ministry under Villèle. Indeed, Thiers’s tactics of the early 1870s for governing a deeply divided nation attracted the same label as the efforts of the Directory or of Decazes. An early example of disrespectful attention to the ministerial system came from the pen of a man of the Left, perhaps best known for his unperformed plays that mocked the political ways of his time. In his survey of politics in the year 1817, Hyacinthe Decomberousse gave notice that one of the best means for contesting the ministerial posture towards the established opinions was to assert the claims of party and opposition. He scorned those who sought to balance parties and to favour them in turn, and he likened the strategy, as would others, to the wiles of Catherine de Medici. This, he said, was quite unlike the more respectable balance of power of British policy towards Europe. To this condemnation of domestic intrigue he added praise for those legitimate products of political division, so different from factions and also quite unavoidable. There followed separate analyses of the opposition, as one particular sort of party, and of the much criticized party spirit. To bolster the obvious value of political opposition in the cause of freedom, Decomberousse offered the intelligence that the most distinguished members of the British Parliament were in fact members of its Opposition. Careful in seeking to remove the sting from partisan feeling, he allowed that moderates in public life were preferable to extremists. At the same time, he censured political turncoats and offered some thoughts on the good sense that might be drawn out of Solon’s

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famous law whereby the virtuous were encouraged to take sides in any major conflict.28 Later publications sought to discredit both the angry breastbeating of the ultra-royalists and the ignoble self-seeking of the ministerial supporters. His little comedy Le Ministériel, ou la manie des dîners of 1819 can only have helped to strengthen a popular view of the undignified basis for the ties that held together that following. There would be some who took issue with the ruses of ministers without thereby endorsing parties, but many did express some regard for the institution – just through a disdain for non-party government – although often their commitment was less than perfect.29 Whereas it may seem odd that there should initially appear to have been more critical comment from liberals than from royalists, it is explained no doubt by the mechanics of hope in a three-sided struggle. While the royalists were clearly consigned to the political wilderness, they had little reason to doubt the genuineness of feeling that seemed relatively hostile; thus, it would have been the lot of the liberal Left to ponder whether the apparent movement away from their enemies was really good evidence that their priorities were dear to the ministers. Benjamin Constant, with his usual acuity, was early in the field and broached on several occasions the question of the ills that would follow any government’s distancing itself from both established opinions and then trying to suppress both. On his second pass at the matter, he named the solecism as the bascule and carried that habit into some later commentary. Constant tended in these statements to avoid direct charges and to express himself in the conditional mood, ideal for expressing reservations without directly charging the ministers with bad faith.30 It was also more prudent to speculate about possible changes than to speak ill of them once they had taken place, for the latter course might appear dangerously like an attack on the king. It was for this reason that, oddly enough, certain ministerial reshuffles, long subject to speculation, were greeted with virtual silence once they had been announced. For those around Constant, the sin of the ministerial game was compounded by the fact that what they often saw 28 [H-F.-I. Decomberousse], Revue politique en l’année 1817 (Paris, 1817), 24n, 9– 12, 31–4, 39n. 29 See, for example, a less sophisticated effort by Gabriel Bourbon-Leblanc, Les Ultra-Royalistes, les Indépendans et les ministériels au tribunal de l’opinion publique (Paris, 1817), 11. 30 Constant, “D’une assertion de M. Bailleul,” Minerve 1, [no. 4] (Feb. 1818): 165–9 at 168; Constant, “Second lettre … à M. Charles Durand,” ibid., 3, [no. 4] (Aug. 1818): 145–57 at 150; and B.C., “De la formation d’un nouveau ministère,” Minerve 6, [no. 6] (June 1819): 245–51 at 246. The relevant passages may also be found in Recueil d’articles, 1:348, 509; 2:845.

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in the balancing of parties was a turning away from that truth represented by their side. Royalists already had learned to express the same concern. The expectation that a ministerial coup would soon fend off the rising fortunes of the Left was current by the late autumn of 1818, and not just in liberal publications. It was a time to see again what a liberal journalist, in a fine pleonasm, called “l’équilibre de bascule entre les deux partis.”31 These objections to the balancing act were voices in favour of allowing the political divisions expression, but they were usually also pleas on behalf of the position that seemed most deserving. Ever pursuing his unique vision, Montlosier went the partisans one better and expressed no regard for either party – although clearly he feared the party of the Revolution – for his was the aspiration for a return to a France where party loyalties did not belong. Montlosier condemned the bascule, without descending to details, and aptly named the ministers the contreparti.32 Since their means of trying to eliminate parties did not suit him, Montlosier played out his role of condemning all positions. To be critical of the enemies of party might seem to invite competition on that basis, but often the sentiment was a good deal more complex than that. From the end of the year in 1818 until the same period of 1821, changes of ministry or rumours of the same accompanied the beginning of each new legislative session. Such times were rich in speculation about ministerial designs. The growing uncertainty meant that the dashed hopes of the royalists might well revive, even as the gains of the liberals in the one-fifth renewals of the lower chamber might signal that they had become a threat and were thus due for a rebuff. The proposed changes in the electoral law served to place the Left on notice, and some shifts in the emphasis of articles placed by the police in foreign papers had the same result. An offending article that attracted some attention had appeared in the Times of London, no less, attributed to its correspondent in Paris. Liberal journalists then remarked that the bascule was truly in operation.33 By June of 1819, the tenor of the ministry in conducting its legislative agenda suggested a break with the Left,34 one that indeed would prove to be long term, even though the Right as yet found rather little reason to feel 31 “Des coups d’état,” Lettres normandes 4, letter 5 (26 Nov. 1818): 171–6 at 176; and H … , “Première lettre sur Paris,” Journal de Paris 316 (12 Nov. 1818), this from a paper more favourable to the ministers. 32 Montlosier, De la monarchie française depuis la seconde Restauration jusqu’à la fin de la session de 1816 (Paris, 1818), 321, 347, 66. Since Montlosier wrote several books with almost identical titles, it seems best to repeat the full title of a work already cited. 33 Le Constitutionnel, no. 154 (3 June 1819); ibid., no. 164 (13 June 1819). 34 Prosper Duvergier de Hauranne, Histoire du gouvernement parlementaire en France: 1814–1848 (Paris, 1862), 5:162.

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appeased. The events of June, in fact, gave encouragement to the antiministerial royalist press to spell out as never before the disfavour with which it viewed the ministerial instrument. Sometimes the observations took the form of merry satire, as when a correspondent reported upon a provincial Machiavel, the mayor of a local council, who had learned from the doings in Paris to preside over his five-man body by cultivating its division into a left, right, and centre, the last of these consisting of but one person. Less playful by far was the article, running for two and a half columns, that traced the bascule back to the actions of the Committee of Public Safety in the Revolution. Presumably, what the author had in mind were the events of March 1794 where factions left (Hébert and the Cordeliers) and further right (Danton and supporters) were summarily destroyed. There was really no consensus on the origins of the word’s political use, and some found its presence already in the assembly of 1789. Though obviously reflecting royalist anxiety about that party’s fate, the article concentrated on the prospect that the liberals had perhaps outlived their usefulness and could no longer be encouraged without allowing them to supplant the existing ministry.35 So pronounced was the newly fashionable term, its resurgence far surpassing the currency of the notion under the Directory, that it might be applied to forms of sharp practice in commerce. Of course, bascule had long been used in perfectly innocuous contexts, but this one seemed to underline its primary use as a pejorative political word. There were also writers who, deeming the term vulgar, used it apologetically.36 Initially, the ministers did what they thought necessary, and it remained for the parties in opposition (or whatever they were pleased to call themselves) to point in horror. By the summer of 1819, however, the ministerial writers had had a good deal to say themselves, some of which had prompted the new level of awareness about what was, after all, a continuing situation over a number of years. Decazes, the strongest figure in a succession of ministries in only the last of which he was officially president of the council, had never been reticent about his hopes for the nation. He was obviously genuinely convinced that his mission must be to allay the disturbances created by parties and truly to carry out his sovereign’s promise of union and forgetfulness. While he was still minister of police, he admitted that his favouring restraint of the press was precisely because the newspapers were the arms of the parties. A reduction of the 35 ‘Lw, ’ untitled in Le Drapeau blanc 2, no. 14 (29 June 1819); and ***, “Origine et progrès du jeu de bascule,” ibid., no. 21 (6 July 1819). Starting in 1823, this paper came gradually under the influence of the ministry. See Christian Maréchal, La Mennais au Drapeau blanc (Paris, 1946), 282. 36 L’Indépendant, no. 140 [really 141] (27 Sept. 1819); for evidence of inhibition about using the word, see Drapeau blanc, no. 175 (14 June 1823).

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political damage attributable to publications would then be a step towards realizing the great cause of seeing the parties that divided France expire at the foot of the throne. His relating the presence of currents of opinion fed by a partisan press to the continuing presence of parties led this loyal subject of the king into difficulties. He employed a very revolutionary turn of phrase in wishing both to be rid of the parties and to soon see in France but one public opinion. In so expressing himself, he was in all likelihood ignorant of this echo of the revolutionary passion for unity. Another significant admission came in the same speech when the minister affirmed that one had, of late, talked much of parties and perhaps too much. Allied with this remark was the much more significant one, in response to the reproach that the ministers had themselves command of a party, that this was indeed true and that this party was greater than was generally realized. Indeed, it would soon be true that there would be no other.37 This was not in any way a suggestion that the ministers expected to rule France unopposed, and the modern distress that such talk would provoke has no place here. Still, the minister had apparently fallen into that same habit of expression that left the royalists and the liberals unsure as to whether they might best present themselves as a legitimate party or as the nation and its tradition in epitome. In fact, he saved himself the bother of sorting out these alternatives when, in a later speech, he contrived to combine them. François-Régis, comte de La Bourdonnaye, the ultraroyalist zealot, had chided the minister for his faults and had added a standard reference to the isolation of a ministry with no foundation in either of the major groups into which France was divided. As a consequence of this weakness, there arose the strategy for maintaining power, or as La Bourdonnaye, with uncharacteristic eloquence, described the ministry, “The oscillations of the political bascule rocked its cradle.” In due course, Decazes answered the sneer about the bascule merely by commenting mildly that the use of the coup as a cure for faction was no longer feasible. More interestingly, he admitted to the condition of being without a party, a happy weakness, as he saw it. This was a government that did not rest upon a party; instead, it had its foundation in “that immense part of the nation that was a stranger to all factions.”38 Here, perhaps, was a public man whose low opinion of political organization among deputies led him to ignore the difference between parties and factions. If so, this linguistic habit was seriously in conflict with the other one of claiming the support of a party that encompassed the whole. Nor did the pun about “partie” afford a particularly graceful exit from the dilemma. A better indication of his real 37 AP 18 (29 Jan. 1817): 418–19. 38 Ibid., 25 (24 Dec. 1819): 758–9, 765.

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policy comes, not from phrases coined impromptu in the heat of debate, but in his instructions to prefects prior to the election of 1816. There he commanded them, in the name of the king, to secure the election of men who belonged to no party.39 Decazes had earned the status of the king’s favourite, and an eventual dukedom, by doing yeoman service in what proved to be a misdirected effort to extirpate party. His theorizing came in his speeches, and he did not offer his thoughts in writing. However, Decazes’s young wife wrote an account of his strategy in terms of an unembarrassed effort to hold the nation together by cooperating as much as possible with first one party and then another. Thus stated, it all sounded quite sensible and innocuous.40 Unfairly blamed by the royalists for not preventing the assassination of an heir to the throne, the duc de Berry, Decazes fell from power. Seemingly oblivious to the fact that by virtue of the policy with which his name will always be associated he could afford to have no fast friends among the contending parties, nor probably any lasting animosities, ultra-royalists made him a villain. So long as parties persisted, it had to be his aim, using both hopes and fears, to preside over their quarrels. At the very moment when the royalists celebrated his resignation, Decazes had been introducing that electoral law that, suitably revised, would secure their future fortunes. Later in the Restoration, the term with which his rather weak government was firmly associated was bascule.41 Long after he had disappeared from the centre of power, there were rumours abroad that Decazes would return to high office; that possibility was among the factors that helped to keep the term in current use, but the activities of subsequent ministries also helped. For a later age, it was Guizot whose name was linked with the juste milieu, used by some as a euphemistic way of referring to the bascule. That serves to remind us that there were indeed ways of explaining what Decazes had set out to do that might seem entirely inoffensive. It had been the task of a number of writers to do just that. There was no single pattern in the defences offered for the non-party rule of Richelieu, Decazes, and others; some wrote for money and some for 39 Cited in Roger Langeron, Decazes, ministre du roi (Paris, 1960), 110. 40 Ernest Daudet, Louis XVIII et le duc Decazes, 1815–1820 (Paris, 1899), 257–8. See, too, Jean-Benoît Yvert, “Decazes et la politique du juste-milieu: ‘Royaliser la Nation, nationaliser la Royauté’ (1815–1820),” in Roger Dufraisse, ed., Revolution und Gegenrevolution: Zur geistigen Auseinandersetzung in Frankreich und Deutschland (München, 1991), 193–210. 41 [Léonard Gallois], Biographe de tous les ministres … jusqu’à nos jours (Paris, 1825), 208–18 at 214; and Alexis Lagarde, Biographie des ministres depuis la Restauration (Paris, 1826), 40–5 at 43.

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love. Among the least reputable strategies for disorganizing opposition were those conducted by a director of the police, employing writers who withheld their names, though not very successfully. These were the people behind the notorious correspondance privée that figured in the columns of foreign newspapers.42 It is not even safe to assume that one who put his name on his work was above taking payment for it, since the philosopher Pierre-Hyacinthe Azaïs was on the payroll of the police and sought credit, too, with a public on which he had made scant impression. Neither were these funds wasted, for this writer managed to present the case in credible terms. His whole theory of compensations, spelled out in three volumes, had presented life itself as a set of swings and roundabouts, such that what one gained another lost. Thus, ideally a good society would see some evening out of the ups and the downs. This, he said, was precisely what animated the ministers when they were attentive to the needs of all interests and sought, in the long run, to favour none. If ministers seemed detached and remote from the parties, that was the price of the impartiality that went with their offices. Since both the royalists and the liberals sought disproportionate influence, it was but following the dictates of wise governance to play the role of moderator. He even admitted, with serenity, that part of the overall plan sought to perpetuate the animosity between the two extremes lest they combine to overthrow authority. Affirming that in the nature of things there would always be parties, the point was simply to use moderation to limit their effects.43 The tone was altered in another of Azaïs’s numerous pamphlets directed at Chateaubriand. There he said less about impartiality and offered an unapologetic defence of the government’s leanings towards the liberals. The one insight worthy of a philosopher came when Azaïs predicted that the demise of the royalists – an outcome not contemplated in the earlier tract – must be followed in time by that of the liberals, for Left and Right sustained one another and provided for each a raison d’être.44 Direct answers to the recurrent charge expressed by the word bascule came in a newspaper. There the anonymous writer spent three full columns in expounding the difference between a government’s allying itself 42 They were Joseph Lingay and the comte de Lagarde-Chambonas. See É. de Waresquiel and J.-B. Yvert, Histoire de la Restauration, 1814–1830 (Paris, 1996), 204. 43 Azaïs, Du système politique suivi par le ministère, ou réponse à l’ouvrage de M. de Chateaubriand sur le même sujet (Paris, 1818), 10–12, 27–9. Cf. the less effective reworking of the same ground in Azaïs, De le situation morale et politique de la France à la fin de la session de 1818 (Paris, 1819), 38–41. 44 Azaïs, A M. Le Vte. de Chateaubriand … sur la situation des choses et des esprits (Paris, 1818), 31.

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successively with each of two parties and its presiding in suitably impartial fashion. On this telling, the ministers were not acting weakly but were executing their mandate in the only appropriate way, and firmly. A later issue carried a denial that the ministers were in any need to cultivate either of the extremes, for the majority in the lower chamber inhabited just that centre where the ministers found their supporters. Still pursued by Le Censeur from the left and the Gazette from the right, the Journal de Paris at least agreed to state explicitly just what the parties of the day were. The tone of exasperation is most apparent: “I admit that there are but two parties in France; are you satisfied?”45 In light of the real questions that had arisen as to whether a true party was to be found at any point on the political spectrum, this meant that, for at least one major publication with ministerial sympathies, the groups in opposition merited the respectable name of party, not faction. Moreover, the ministers and their following made no claim to any such title. Like all papers supporting the ministers in a period of frequent ministerial changes, the Journal sometimes had difficulty in maintaining consistency. Where this ministerial organ and those of the opposition differed was on the issue of whether a ministry had to base itself on some party. The royalists of the Gazette insisted that a ministry of no party was one without any programme or any intelligible position in politics46 – a suitable retort to opponents who had often said that royalists against the king were creatures beyond comprehension. This should not be taken to mean that the Gazette itself had always been rock solid in its allegiance, for in the very recent past, its management had given up a tradition of political dullness couched innocuously in ministerial terms. The newly militant Gazette still had not joined in recriminations about the villainies of the bascule. This was not lingering good feeling, however, for the paper instead argued, with a refined malice, that truly to have earned that particular word, one should have found that the ministers alternately stroked and struck the parties, whereas they seemed rather to have remained unjust to the men of all parties.47 In contrast to the Gazette, Étienne of La Minerve stressed how each speech, each government measure, was followed by one calculated to placate the side left displeased by the previous manoeuvre. Usage was far from consistent, however, even for a given writer, and Étienne sometimes associated this form of intrigue with damaging either side in turn, sometimes with various expedients employed by a ministry of neither side to obtain 45 Journal de Paris, no. 167 (16 June 1819); no. 201 (20 July 1819); no. 266 (23 Sept. 1819). 46 Gazette de France, no. 263 (20 Sept. 1819). 47 Gazette, no. 168 (17 June 1819).

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short-term support.48 In fact, no very precise definition could do justice to a form of rule that had as its very nature the readiness to change rapidly and thus, seemingly, to vacillate. Necessarily entailed was a variety of twists and turns according to a scheme that was not openly avowed. All critics of the system agreed that it lacked that firm and steady progress so well conveyed by the French word marche. Other emphases emerged in the debates conducted by royalists with ministerial writers. More explicitly attached to certain measures and a substantive code than were liberals whose creed emphasized adherence to the Charte, the self-styled royalists were especially given to the complaint that the middle way of the ministers violated absolute moral values. Even within the ranks of the Right, there were differences in emphasis, with writers in La Quotidienne and in the Journal des débats – at a time when much of its best writing was from the Danish geographer Malte-Brun – more inclined to such views than those in Le Drapeau blanc, also royalist. There were, to be sure, objections here to the rude game of the bascule, but what most came to move royalists with a strong sense of mission was the incoherence of seeking some via media between their priorities and those that were diametrically opposed. The ministers were widely described as doing just this, yet an oscillation from one extreme to the other was no way to achieve it, the royalists averred. Not easily reconciled with that sort of objection was their more characteristic one that the very ambition somehow to split the difference was wrongheaded, just because it sought to reconcile crime and virtue, good and evil, or was the equivalent of driving one’s carriage in the middle of the road.49 To seek the middle way on principle was, the royalists insisted, to consort with evil or mediocrity or plain irrelevance; instead one must choose, and they entertained no doubts as to the quarter where wisdom and goodness were found. When they admitted to being at one extreme, as did an incautious journalist in La Quotidienne, the royalists were playing into the hands of the government. What they really wanted to say was that theirs was the correct side and they the friends of the state and of the king. With their disfavour seemingly near its end, royalist language grew more insistent. The self-assurance of the royalists that their course was one of true loyalty usefully reminds us of the strength that belonged to a policy of resisting the extremes. One of the defences of the practice that appeared in that 48 Étienne, “Lettres sur Paris” 60, Minerve 6, [no. 6] (June 1819): 266–74 at 266; “Lettres sur Paris” 80, ibid., 3, [no. 2] (Nov. 1819): 78–92 at 82; “Lettres sur Paris” 73, ibid., 7, [no. 8] (Sept. 1819): 367–81 at 380. 49 La Quotidienne, no. 145 (25 May 1819); no. 174 (23 June 1819); no. 176 (25 June 1819); and Journal des débats, 11 June 1819.

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summer of 1819 came from the anonymous figures responsible for the correspondance privée. Though it did not succeed in removing all suspicion of dirty tricks, the article, appearing in the Times, did recall to mind the dominant reality. Two parties existed that agreed only in attacking the ministers. The alternative to what was called the system of bascule must surely be the blind submission to one of the two extremes. Far from moving from one side to the other, the government sought a middle course that was rightly seen as one of moderation. Those who criticized this choice must then think that the way to follow the mandate to rule would be to use violence. The exoneration, however, denied any such intent and, moreover, distanced the aims of the current ministers from the violent measures of the Directory. Even the executive directors seemed not to have been manipulative in the pattern suggested by current rhetoric, said the article, for they did not systematically implicate each side in the destruction of the other. The facts of 18 fructidor, for instance, would not fit that interpretation. So the unflattering historical parallel was inapt at both ends and the true policy of the French government the only alternative to supine surrender to one side or the other. An ultra-royalist who later published the correspondence as a sort of indictment made very clear that he knew the identities of the writers when he pointed out that both were too young to know, first-hand, anything of the Directory.50 Charles Lesur has been identified as the author of an ably argued ministerial pamphlet that pointed out how the extremes of opinion wanted everything to go their way and, typical of those out of power, were afflicted with an inability to understand practical difficulties. To lash the ministers’ system with the epithet bascule was to overlook precisely why the ministers were there in the first place. In adopting neither side and in losing on one question that majority that they regained on the next, the ministers were acting as they should. Both parties, as it happened, were ill named, since the ultras might better be called “aristocrats” and their liberal opponents “democrats.”51 This was responsible language, for it deliberately lowered the stakes in circumstances where others sometimes invoked the spectre of civil war, a new revolution of the Left, or a violent reinstatement of the prerevolutionary order.52 Although talk of supposedly heinous machinations had become a public cause in the spring of 1819 and declined for a time thereafter, the issue 50 [J.-B. Salgues], Les mille et un calomnies (Paris, 1822–23), 3:253–63 at 260n. 51 [Charles-Louis Lesur], De l’état des partis et des affaires à l’ouverture de la session de 1819 (Paris, [Nov. 1819]), 38–9, 44, 2–3. A handwritten note on the copy in the Douglas Library, Queen’s University, names Lesur as the writer. 52 See, for instance, C.D., Des partis et la modération (Paris, 1821), 10, 14, 23.

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remained alive. Another able defence of a somewhat different ministry appeared two years later than that of Lesur. It reveals how little matters had changed. In a nation securely attached to royalty, this anonymous writer affirmed that the royalists continued to claim special consideration for themselves. On the other side, the liberals, called here the “popular” party, similarly claimed the will of the nation as expressing their case for preferment. Nothing, insisted this writer, was more ridiculous. Here were two groups, neither very coherent in makeup, that boasted their relation to a France that managed to ignore them, serene and calm among the Cassandra cries of the parties. Since each party followed the maxim that those not with them were against them, they jealously complained about any supposed ministerial alliance with the other. Their complaints destroyed one another, and thus the parties, contrary to their intentions, justified the position of the ministry.53 Even with the emergence, in late 1821, of the ministry of Villèle and Corbière, there were yet voices in the land that complained of compromise, a weak and vacillating administration, and the sacrificing of virtue to a base desire for office. There was a clear majority in the Chambre des députés, and with the passage in 1824 of the legislation that abolished one-fifth annual renewals, that majority seemed safe for some years. But there remained both a reduced liberal party and a royalist contre-opposition, the latter gaining considerable strength once Chateaubriand was dismissed from office in 1824. Perhaps nothing had changed. Writing of the state of the nation with an ostensibly royalist government securely in power, Montlosier continued, unmoved, to trace the presence of the established technique of rule from the Directory up to the present time. His was an agenda that took little account of the ripples on the surface of events that accompanied the changes of ministers. From another quarter came the same suspicion, couched in terms of Villèle’s apparent wish to keep his royalist following at a distance by inviting some hopes on the part of the depleted forces of the Left. Weights in the balance, hopes and fears, dividing in order to rule, the elements were all very familiar. If anything had changed from the days of the ministries acknowledging their centrist nature, it was the allowance that Villèle was not initially credited with wishing to destroy the parties, but just with wanting to manage his own large majority.54 Whoever the writer, it was a person whose use of the expression “parti national” to describe the liberals clearly identifies his loyalty. With their electoral gains a thing of the past, liberals might even have 53 Anon., De l’état actuel de la France (Paris, [Nov.] 1821), 8, 64, 39. 54 ‘Poly,’ Tactique de M. de Villèle (Paris, 1822), 10–14, 17, 30–1. The conventional attribution of this work to Alphonse Mahul seems doubtful, a doubt sustained by A.-E. Barbier’s standard Dictionnaire des ouvrages anonymes.

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been nostalgic for the old ministerial tactics. J.-P. Pagès, who had served an apprenticeship at La Minerve lamenting the policy of Decazes, now offered such a reading of the situation. From his perspective, the fault of the new electoral law was that it deprived the ministers of that independence whereby they had been able to raise or lower the other groups according to the needs of the state. Now the ministers had thrown themselves into the arms of the royalists, and the chamber lacked a centre. With that centre gone, room for manoeuvre had vanished. Curiously, Pagès seemed to be so accustomed to a ministry that controlled the middle and resisted opposition from either side that he depicted Villèle as facing two oppositions as before, one of which was part of the ministerial following!55 He must have deemed the royalist opposition, prior to the adhesion of Chateaubriand, as unworthy of mention. The point behind Pagès’s formulation was presumably to bring home the realization that extreme demands might not be easy for the moderate Villèle to resist. Had the claim been intended as a prediction of where future events would lead, it was prescient indeed. For the time being, however, there remained royalist claims unsatisfied. Of the less moderate element of those who rejoiced in the name of royalists, there were men who enjoyed no more perquisites than they had under Decazes or Richelieu. From Charles Delalot, a royalist of extreme views, came a novel application of a tactic all too familiar in its general outline. The way in which ministers hoped to promote censorship of the press was by promising each of the two oppositions the appealing prospect that it would effectively silence the other. Schadenfreude thus joined the inducements to participate in the bascule. Delalot extended his imaginative harassment to discerning, in a statement by Villèle, one part intended to pacify one opposition and another part designed to perform the same service for the other.56 Later, he very clearly implied that the current ministers were perpetuating “les moyens d’intrigue et de bascule” developed by their predecessors. Though usually too aloof to dignify such thrusts with any answer, both Villèle and Corbière were goaded to address the charge. The former was especially effective in his dry rejoinder that, in light of the recent electoral results, it would not be easy to put the system of the bascule into play.57 Undoubtedly he was at least correct in suggesting that his clear majority rendered it unnecessary. The ministers took special pains to rid themselves of Delalot’s irritating presence, and he was defeated in the election of 1824.

55 Courrier français, no. 56 (25 Feb. 1822). 56 AP 32 (3 July 1821): 577–8; 38 (8 Feb. 1823), 288. 57 AP 39 (3 April 1823): 124 (Delalot), 127 (Corbière), 132 (Villèle).

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That did not, by any means, end the refrain that the ministers were playing each end against the other, although that language seems to have moved out of a parliamentary setting. J.-A.-P. Sarran was a royalist whose main concern lay in securing a restitution of the property of émigrés, and Villèle’s well-earned reputation for moderation was not reassuring. Sarran’s suspicion of the ministry made him part of the literary shock troops of the contre-opposition. Sometimes, however, his personal resentments got in the way of his argument, and one pamphlet that had bascule in the title said virtually nothing about that condition. His most effective effort was a long treatment of recent political history in which his most telling argument served to connect the current ministers with their predecessors by virtue of there being no complete and dramatic break in terms either of personnel or of system. Sarran’s capacity to believe ill of the ministers extended to the charge that they had literally fomented the parties and then used them to their own purposes. Without offering anything specific by way of evidence, he also used the fact of the gradual change in the character of ministries to elide the distinction between the strategy followed by Villèle and the “jeu de bascule” as practised by those who had preceded him in office. Further publications added little by way of insight save for the judgment that, whereas Decazes had never believed in liberty and the monarchy, Villèle, in pursuing the same strategies, was acting as renegade and was thus more dangerous than was someone from whom little had been expected. Sarran was not a very analytical observer, and an excess of detail not well connected to his complaints about the politics of “divide and rule” became wearisome.58 The contre-opposition, initially without newspapers of its exact leaning, expressed itself through pamphlets when the message was not carried by speakers such as La Bourdonnaye. Offering the same message as Sarran, but mercifully brief and seemingly better informed, was a pamphlet that attracted much attention in the press. In keeping with its dissidentroyalist connection, the argument depicted Villèle as having cultivated a third party.59

58 Sarran, La censure auxiliaire du “Courrier français,” ou mémoires pour servir à l’histoire de la bascule ministérielle … (Paris, [1821]); Sarran, Appel d’intérêt public au gouvernement contre le ministère (Paris, 1824), 64–5, 75; Sarran, Du ministère Villèle et de ses oeuvres (Paris, 1825), 8, 161, 26; and [Sarran], Le Mal et le remède (Paris, 1826), 82. 59 Anon., Avis aux députés de 1824, ou politique de M. de Villèle, 2nd ed. (Paris, 1824), 37n. The writer was responsible for a number of anti-ministerial pamphlets, identifying himself by reference to his other anonymous publications. On the contre-opposition publications, see Louis, baron de Viel-Castel, Histoire de la Restauration (Paris, 1870), 13:147.

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Even with what must seem to be a diminished need for the concept, the term bascule continued to dog the steps of the ministers. Where Decazes might be insulted by reminding one’s contemporaries of the Directory, the name of Decazes, along with the term bascule, introduced into an account of current events, now sufficed to suggest continued misdoings.60 Importantly though, the nature of the mechanisms for controlling the actions of a fragmented opposition at least suggested that some causes might prosper as others declined. For that very reason, the bascule was not the worst of situations and might be welcome in some quarters. As the reign of Charles X saw increased emphasis on thoroughly reactionary policies, there were further complaints that Villèle was not sufficiently resisting the move to the right and should follow more of a middle course. A body of opinion that feared disaster might well have come to appreciate the virtues of a scheme for frustrating all parties if it were to seem the only alternative to total surrender to one of them. The presence of a parti prêtre, inimical to the politics of secular constitutionalism, was lent some support even by Villèle himself, hard pressed by a sovereign whose conception of France was well to the right of his moderate chief minister.61 With exaggerated fears combining with the reality of unpopular measures that Villèle seemed unable to resist, figures with liberal inclinations were ever more compelled to reconsider the substance of their objections to the ministry. One of these was Narcisse-Achille Salvandy, credited by some to be, in his style, a young Chateaubriand. At the outset of the reign of Charles X, Salvandy was still pursuing the line of argument that portrayed the ministers as rightly rejected by the “partis” of both the Left and the Right and as thus without roots in either of the significant bodies of opinion. Like many others, he seemed to assume that the ministers were of no party. Three years later, he echoed Pagès’s fear that the ministry, in taking the agenda of reaction as its own, had failed sufficiently to maintain its independence. Still truculent in tone, the condemnation was of a government that should have striven more to place itself in the centre. Was there not, Salvandy wondered, room for ten ministers between those men who were hostile to representative government and those who were less than loyal to the dynasty? Clearly there was, by his reckoning, ample room, especially

60 La Quotidienne, no. 170 (18 June 1824); Cyprien Demarais, Voyage pittoresque dans l’intérieur de la Chambre des Députés, suivi du Temps présent … 2nd ed. (Paris, 1827), 142–3. 61 W.M. Winter, “The Villèle Ministry” (PhD thesis, University of Colorado, Boulder, 1968), fol. 199.

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since he depicted the liberals as also royalists.62 Most interestingly, the argument suggested that Villèle should welcome escape from entanglements on the other side. The worry of the moment was whether a ministry that ceased to vacillate might move briskly off in the wrong direction. Better, perhaps, to be tantalized by ministers who danced between the firmly committed groups than to be confronted by some who had allowed themselves to be captured by the forces of reaction. There had been some ways of presenting the bascule with a human face, although neither the maladroit speeches of Decazes nor the efforts of his mercenaries had made the case with sufficient skill, and efforts continued to render a middle course attractive.63 There had been a point in the claim by a supporter of Decazes in 1818, when he had insisted that the enthusiasts for a ministry that took sides would have to commend Henri III, who placed himself at the head of a religious party, not Henri IV, who earned his great name by refusing to do so. A supporter of Villèle’s – one who admitted the presence of a royalist party with several sub-parties, only one of them ministerial – predicted that when the minister fell from power, he would lose his reputation as a man of character.64 Well before then, however, Villèle had become “un homme de trop.” While the late stages of his ministry saw a coalescing of opposition from both sides, he nevertheless offered one further variant in the game of which he was often accused. After the decision, in 1827, to dissolve the chamber, even though he owned a majority and – thanks to the septennial provision in the new electoral law of 1824 – could have a secure term of office for that majority, some people wondered why he had given up so much. Speculation went so far as to intimate that Villèle had urged on the king an election, one that he could hardly expect to win, simply in order to escape the clutches of the extremists. Alternatively, if we can credit the quite odd tale of that half-pay officer who was convinced that the election had been a move to undo the extremists of the Right, Villèle had apparently also been willing to move towards the liberal leadership had they been prepared to do business with him.65 Since we know, at least, that 62 N.-A. Salvandy, Le nouveau règne et l’ancien ministère (Paris, 1824), 33. Cf. Salvandy, Insolences de la censure, et considérations sur la politique en général du ministère (Paris, 1827), 6, 61. 63 H.A. K … S [Henri-Alexis Cahaisse, following Barbier], Les ministres anciens et ceux de l’époque actuelle (Paris, 1826), 35. 64 J.-B.-T. Leclère, Pensées politiques sur les partis en France et les événemens du jour (Paris, 1826), 7, 16. In a publication of 1821, Leclère had called himself a student of law. 65 J.-B. Flandin, Révelations sur la fin du ministère de M. le cte. de Villèle … (Paris, 1829), 81, 88, 203–4.

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Villèle had chafed under the burden of the ultras, the leader of the longest-serving ministry of the Restoration may have been too little appreciated. The familiar language about the bascule politique came to be applied, in turn, to the moderate and temporizing ministry of Martignac in 1828– 29,66 but not, of course, to that of his successor Polignac. That reminds us that one could do worse than try somehow to manage all parties, and in bringing on the revolution of 1830, Polignac would do it. loyalties: honour, conscience, and jobs From the point of view of most Frenchmen involved in the political system, the main issue appears to have been on what basis one should award one’s loyalty and, indeed, to what sort of unit. The ties that bound both supporters of the ministers and their opponents were important matters on which there was remarkably little agreement and a good deal of misunderstanding. The narrative will first summarize the situation with respect to those political groupings recognized as existing; attention then shifts to the attitudes meant to belong to citizens confronted with political divisions. To illustrate these matters, we begin by examining those arguments intended to minimize the claims of political parties as known, at the time, in Britain. As seen already, the main bodies of opinion, divided over the Revolution, were none too anxious to proclaim themselves to be political parties, though not as inhibited about so identifying others. It has already been suggested that the successive ministries were even more coy, for they tended to further distance themselves from the very notion of party and were less than candid about their own general political orientation. One major reason, then, as to why Frenchmen did not readily accept a mode of politics frankly expressed as the politics of competing parties was that the spokesmen for the various orientations were, to begin with, markedly reluctant to see themselves in that capacity. The same considerations that moved royalists or liberals to be dissatisfied with the status of a party also governed the calculations of the ministers. Apparently horrified at the very idea of the ministers heading a party, the writer of an essay previously cited said how serious a matter it would be were the king to head one party and thus be seen to turn his back on the other. It is worth noting that the same publication later printed another essay that made it very clear that the supposed independents in fact acted in concert to displace the ministers and left little doubt that legislative business was a battle between ins and outs.67 The first-mentioned essay assumed a fusion of the 66 La France nouvelle, nouveau journal de Paris, no. 846 (25 Nov. 1829). 67 “De l’esprit de parti,” Le Publiciste moderne 2 (20 Aug. 1818): 521–2; and “Les Mystifications libérales …,” Le Publiciste moderne 3 (Sept. 1818), 59–67.

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king and his ministers that seemed, in that context, unsubtle. The claim also serves to make clear the view, too rarely offered an explicit defence, that there were broadly two sides to political life, although the ministers supposedly belonged to neither. The second essay, in different fashion, went some way as well to endorsing the expectation that parties were unlikely to go away. The widespread revulsion that had greeted the ministerial presumption to steer a non-partisan course seems, on the whole, to have contributed to the political education of the nation and to have helped to assimilate the two-party model in a manner that was based on French experience and not just that of Britain. The impression, widely shared it would seem, that representative government was an affair of ins and outs belonged to that British heritage that was being selectively, often uneasily, assimilated when it was not subject to outright rejection. That the pattern is now recognized as, in some degree, mythical even within British experience is hardly relevant; the model was real and influenced expectations in France. Since having a party was so much a matter of self-perception, it still made sense to ask, as some did, whether the ministers had a party or not. When the question arose early in Villèle’s ministry, the most forthright and pragmatic answer was that, in as much as the ministers stayed in office by commanding a legislative majority, it must be assumed that they had one.68 How ministers and this majority came together was another matter. Often people wrote as though the ministers formed a party, not that a body of followers generated the ministers. Mocking the former arrangement, a short-lived Doctrinaire paper argued from an anglophile orientation and a very independent stance vis-à- vis the ministers that this was to get matters backwards. If a party was meant to support and render popular the men in office, how, it wondered, could the men in office create the party? The writer invoked John Locke’s famous example about foundations or their absence – one that had become popular in France – and suggested that a parallel situation, for purposes of supporting the universe, was to place the elephant upon the tortoise and the tortoise upon nothing at all!69 An image borrowed originally from East Indian philosophy thus damned the arrangement from a logical point of view. But it was all too true that ministries were typically formed through intrigue at court and not through the battles in the chambers. When Richelieu’s second ministry gave way, at the end of 1821, to the ministry led by Villèle, some people were pleased to see the representative system working according to plan and others were more demanding. The implacable Sarran, looking back, refused to allow that a new ministry had ever been 68 Courrier français, no. 354 (20 Dec. 1822). This was the successor to the Courier, cited in chapter 7, with spelling changed to suit a different political orientation. 69 Courier français, no. 145 (12 Nov. 1819).

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created out of the ranks of those who had led the assault against the old one. He was thinking of the fact that Villèle and Corbière had been insinuated into the old ministry, and then for a time dropped from its ranks, long before they led its replacement. This meant that the change was less than a clean break. Modern scholars also vary in their fastidiousness about what such a transition would have to be.70 Ministers who seemed to defend their predecessors or just to continue their practices might fall afoul of purists in constitutional etiquette, as when Felicité, abbé de Lamennais, objected to the lack of definition in the positions taken by Villèle. Certainly the circumstances in which Villèle left office were subject to the same objections as those in which he had entered, for the new ministers seemed not to have earned their spurs in the heroic opposition to the old ones.71 Through all the intrigue that scarred so much of the parliamentary business of the time, one senses the presence of an ideal, recognizable to many even when it was not manifested in events. It is expressed by Charles Étienne, lately become a deputy, when he hailed the twoparty struggle now possible in the emergence of Villèle’s ministry as the “indispensable condition” of representative government. A year before, he had been one of the deputies most eloquent on the need for a ministry that was uniform in sentiment and did not mix elements of different principles.72 His later and stronger statement was one that not all his hearers would have endorsed. It was then the more impressive, since it came from a man who, feeling no fondness for the royalist government, saw past the immediate circumstances to grasp the logic that must govern a coherent struggle of principle. The same categories dominate the portrait of parliamentary life sketched by Louis Cauchois-Lemaire, a journalist whose leanings were more imperial and Jacobin than were suited to a representative monarchy. Yet the periodical in which he appears to have been the main writer presented two legitimate elements within the chambers – the government, whether supported through corruption or genuine sentiment, and a constitutional opposition whose views were suitably left-wing.73 Cauchois-Lemaire typified usage in one sense, for he 70 Sarran, Appel d’intérêt, 84, 213. Joseph Bonnefon, in Le Régime parlementaire sous la Restauration (Paris, 1905), saw here a perfect correspondence with the rules of parliamentary government (244); the more demanding Louis Michon, in his Le Gouvernement parlementaire sous la Restauration (Paris, 1905), was not of that view, and rightly not (266). 71 Lamennais, “De l’opposition,” Drapeau blanc, no. 108 (18 April 1823); Lamennais, “Quelques réflexions sur notre état present,” ibid., no. 131 (1 May 1823); and Courrier, 4 Jan. 1828. Some articles that pressed this point were by Alexis de Joussain. See his article from the Courrier of 22 Aug. 1828 in his Discussions politiques de 1823 à 1830 (Paris, 1835), 341. 72 AP 34 (19 Jan. 1822): 111; see also AP 29 (8 Jan. 1821): 561–2. 73 Cauchois-Lemaire, “De la contre-révolution,” Bibliothèque historique 12, [no. 3] (1819–20): 149–56 at 152–3.

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readily joined all but ministerial writers in identifying the ministers as heading a party, damned the ultras of the Right as a faction, and declined to say exactly what one should call the members of the constitutional opposition. No doubt, they would best be viewed, from his perspective, as the nation incarnate. Nevertheless, there was ample evidence that even those with a penchant for populistic rhetoric had come to think of political competition as structured very much along the lines of the familiar British parties – ‘Wighs’ and ‘Thories’ on this telling. With a majority government under Villèle marking, for some at least, the smooth transition from government to opposition, the naturalness of a two-sided struggle became yet more evident. For one observer who evinced frustration that France had been forced to wait for seven years before representative institutions had begun to function smoothly, recent changes reflected the expectation that a ministry that lost its majority would necessarily give way to the most distinguished members of the opposition.74 This overlooked, of course, both that there tended to be more than one party in opposition and that there was no guarantee that the sovereign would use his prerogative of choosing ministers to accord with the voice of public opinion. Both issues would continue to haunt public life in the next seven years. It remains clear that, from the first days of the Restoration, there had been an inchoate impression, revealed in many forms, that politics in a representative regime ideally would involve two sides and only two sides. Furthermore, the ministers were expected to lead one of those sides, so a no-party ministry confronted by several oppositions did not match the ideal. Explicit formulation of the point usually leaned on the British precedent and was apparent both when there was reason to suppose that politics would sustain two main groupings and when, as was usually the case, the scene was more fragmented. Formal treatises that so argued came quite early in the period; later, with the fact of competing groups familiar to all, the newspapers took up the theme. Not infrequently the expectation of a two-sided political struggle was allied to the hope that the opposed sides could reach some common ground, as the Whigs and Tories of Britain seemed on the whole to have done.75 The form taken by the ideal differed according to the sympathies of the writer. Thus, a strong liberal such as Leon Thiessé could contemplate a regime where the two 74 D ***, ex-préfet, De la monarchie en France (Paris, Dec. 1822), 12, 27, 36. 75 See, from an ample literature, [Joseph Lingay], “Du parti de l’opposition en France,” Le Nain vert 1, no. 13 (Aug. 1815): 267–70; Louis-Auguste Dupuy, Un Roi, un ministère, une France (Paris, 1817), 10–11; [Jacob-Fréderic Lullin de Chateauvieu], Lettres de Saint-James (Genève and Paris, 1820), 1:60; Gazette de France, no. 190 (9 July 1821); and A.B. ***, étudiant en droit, De la Charte et les partis en France (1822), 54–5. All of these writers appear to be royalists of some stripe, for even Lingay, who wrote at times at the behest of the ministers, expressed admiration for such royalists as Chateaubriand, Vaublanc, and Fiévée.

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parties – one habitually pro-ministerial and the other “presque toujours” voting against their measures – were held together by the Charte and a general commitment to constitutional government.76 By contrast, men of goodwill of pronounced royalist leanings – one thinks, for example, of the comte de Pradel77 – contemplated very much the same sort of party struggle, but one where a common loyalty to the king was the adhesive that rendered party competition unterrifying. Distinct from the last two positions was the theme of some ministerial writers that appeared to entail acceptance of a struggle of ins and outs on the British pattern, but still complained that the French Tories (or ultra-royalists) had not learned to concede defeat when others were called upon to govern.78 The argument probably was disingenuous, for in blaming the royalists in opposition for all difficulties, the writers suggested little more than that it was good for the nation that those who so claimed power were thwarted. Only an incautious reader would take this to be a genuine admission either that the ministers headed a party or that the British model was to be followed. One should remind oneself, when consulting these arguments, of the many degrees of sophistication reflected there. Some wrote from an easy command of the literature on British politics and might even have reproduced from such apologetics the hardy resort that found even the abuses of the constitution inextricably linked to the whole. Others, usually less sympathetic, had difficulty disentangling accident and coincidence from constitutional law. One of these wrote that a British Opposition, which he deemed too relentless, was always headed by the current prince of Wales.79 There were, of course, others who found some warrant for a third party that might, in a manner of speaking, knock together the heads of the unreasonable extremists, and that expedient did find occasional support. Recourse to such a party had been part of political wisdom in the religious wars of the sixteenth century and re-emerged in the Mazarinades of the

76 [Thiessé], Examen des principes émis par les membres de la majorité et de l’opposition de la chambre des députés pendant la session de 1816 (Paris, 1817), 31, 40–61 (a chapter entitled “Du parti de l’opposition”). 77 See 158n58 below. 78 “Coup d’oeil sur la session,” Le Spectateur politique et littéraire (1818 [individual issues bear neither number nor date]): 433–41. The comments here resemble a signed article, in the same year, by the historian and journalist Charles Lacretelle. See “De l’esprit de parti,” ibid., 249–55. Auger, Loyson, and Lourdoueix joined him in this publication. The last three will all reappear in chapter 7. 79 For examples of sophistication and its absence, see respectively Paul-A.-J. Taschereau de Fargues, La Verité sur l’Angleterre (Paris, 1816), 23; and Louis-H.-G., comte de Franclieu, Du principe des gouvernmens. Des progrès de l’esprit humain (Paris, 1824), 36.

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mid-seventeenth century.80 That idea was in the air in 1818 just as France was becoming preoccupied with the politics of the bascule and seems to have been another reading of the anti-party stance of the ministers. The elder Lacretelle (brother of the one cited in note 78) lent a respected name to the proposition that a third party could be useful, but then denied that any such party existed. His thoughts on the matter also confused some of his readers, since they were couched in the form of discrete maxims that then, maxim-like, contradicted one other. The political veteran Bénaben favoured some such party, though was unclear as to where to find it. Sometimes the Doctrinaires of Royer-Collard and Guizot appeared to be such a third party, but their ambiguous relation to the ministry would have limited the appeal of such a model. Naturally enough, the ministers seemed, to their opponents, to constitute that party, although their denial that theirs was a government by party made the assumption a controversial one. Not surprisingly then, Jouslin de La Salle, a journalist who responded to the fashion of the day, devoted an essay to arguing the proposition that France had no need for a third party.81 If parties there were to be – and it would be difficult to address reality in terms that denied their presence – then two parties seemed to constitute that reality, however little that situation spoke to the best of all possible worlds. Just because political divisions were appearing both to be difficult to dispense with and to fit readily into a natural bifurcation was not sufficient grounds for Frenchmen to applaud the development. One might, as had a strong royalist in the chambre introuvable of 1815–16, point to the success of the British in naturalizing opposition by changing it from a dangerous faction to an acceptable party and yet prescribe unanimity as the only safe course for France.82 Was there any one pattern supposedly belonging to representative institutions? Were those destined to work within this machinery well disposed to it or even competent to grasp its intricacies? Had the various French traditions resources that might sustain something quite different from the British pattern? These questions demanded answers, and a significant portion of the political debate sought to shed light on the subject. Three documents, drawn from different points of view, may serve 80 See La Mercuriale faisant voir: I Injustice des deux partis … II La necessité d’un tiers parti pour reduire [sic] les deux à la raison (Paris, 1652), 4–5, 21–3. 81 P.-L. Lacretelle, Des partis et des factions (Paris, 1818), 6, 10–11, and esp. maxims 40 and 44; L.-G-J.-M. Bénaben, “De l’opposition,” Le Modérateur 1 (May 1818–April 1819): chap. 4, 32–8 at 38 [chapters are clearly indicated, whereas individual issues are not ]; and A.-M. Jouslin de La Salle, “Sur les factions connues dans l’histoire sous le nom de tiers-partis,” La Sentinelle de l’honneur …, no. 4 (1818): 139–45. 82 Speech of comte Grossin de Bouville, AP 16 (13 Feb. 1816): 151.

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to illustrate how careful observers might recognize the need to make room in French political institutions for the divisions that existed, even as these observers recorded their reservations about the prospect. The three chosen for this purpose include an aristocrat of enlightened views, an anglophile churchman with loyalties rooted in pre-revolutionary France, and a self-described proletarian. Alexandre, comte de Laborde, was an admirer of British institutions who was frankly sceptical about how well they would function in the setting of post-Napoleonic France. Unstinting in his admiration for the “admirable” mechanism of British government, he found much of its success in the political weight accorded to noble property and the resultant influence wielded by the peerage in county elections. Turning to the feasibility of assembling the elements in France, he pointed, with many others, to the weakness of the French peerage and the impossibility of finding a stabilizing force comparable to the rich nobles of Britain. More interestingly, he also cited the character of his countrymen, suggesting that the famous légèreté of Frenchmen would not afford much support to the new institutions. A British ministry was generally securely in power and could depend upon its party to support it. Indeed, here one finds Laborde already emphasizing that British ministers were uneasy with a bare majority and felt comfortable only if they commanded the loyalty of two-thirds of the House of Commons. In the next few years, others would work up this claim. Laborde likened the public men of France to a bad orchestra where each individual sought to shine, or in this case, to present his own little system, make his own speech, independently of all other engagements. Consequently, the support of a French ministry was likely to vanish at the first small reverse. From the days of the First Restoration, then, the national character had emerged as an issue in evaluating the norms that would govern political competition. Laborde’s optimism was reserved for the long term, when a strong aristocracy might bring more stability.83 Despite his aristocratic proclivities, he sat on the centre-left when eventually he joined the lower chamber. No more optimistic was the judgment of another commentator of 1814, who was responding to the query, by the London Chronicle, as to whether France now needed an opposition fitted out on party lines. The answer was that the petty jealousies of a French ministry might render it so unformidable as to make such a counterweight of little importance. Again, French moeurs were appearing as a

83 A.-L.-J., comte de Laborde, Des aristocraties représentatives, ou du retour à la propriété dans le gouvernement (Paris, 1814), 53–4, 109, 109n, 104. This version of his thoughts was printed but never published.

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barrier to emulating the British, and on this score, the writer in La Quotidienne sounded rather apologetic.84 More securely attached to the old order was Charles Constance d’Agoult, who had risen to the rank of bishop just before the Revolution. No less than Laborde, he saw the British pattern of politics as at once worthy of reproduction in the Restoration and difficult to assimilate. Again, the emphasis was upon the stability afforded an administration with strong ties to a firm majority among the representatives of the people. Regretting the immediate past history of the French, their unfamiliarity with the skills needed for the new form of government, and their ignorance of the issues that it brought forward, d’Agoult was literally inclined to write at times of the failure of the experiment as though it were already fact. Still, he seemed far from willing to endorse anything but the forms dictated by the Charte. The cause for his pessimism lay with the apparent incapacity of individuals to work together to any good purpose. The missing ingredient was, he said, esprit public, or more specifically, experience in assembling in order to conduct public business. In the manner of Laborde, but more elaborately, he excoriated the French passion for individualistic self-importance, especially as displayed at the legislative tribune. The portrait here of a nation of facile writers who pressed their thoughts on their colleagues in the form of speeches written out in advance was to epitomize the culture of the chambers in the Restoration and the criticisms that it provoked. Few aspects of British parliamentary usage would make such an impression as insistence that speeches be delivered with minimal benefit of notes and that, in general, there be genuine debate, undertaken in the spirit of the moment. The absence of these conditions seemed to display the costs of a civic education that had not prepared public men for their new responsibilities. But the culmination of the indictment took the issue of party ties and made it the central failing of these schoolboys in politics. Early in his argument, d’Agoult had marked the isolation of the individual legislators, and he returned to the theme with a vengeance. The French representatives congratulated themselves in being superior to their British counterparts by virtue of the French disdain for that party spirit and those divisions that existed in Parliament where majorities duly sold their votes to the ministers. The caustic riposte to this hypothetical objection was that those who held such opinions had failed to appreciate that a political assembly was not a judicial tribunal where one’s first duty was impartiality. A different sort of calculus measured the wisdom and public service of such an assembly.85 84 H.D., “De l’opposition dans les Gouvernements représentatifs-II,” La Quotidienne, 15 Sept. 1814. 85 [d’Agoult], Lettre à un Jacobin; ou Réflexions politiques sur la constitution d’Angleterre (Paris, Oct. 1815), 84, 91–3, 103, 111.

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Already Laborde had seen the value of those ambitions that were expressed in the rivalry between the parties in Parliament, and here was a lesson yet more pungent in expression. Far from constituting the sort of virtue that Frenchmen innocently supposed, an assembly without a compact majority was not so much impartial as incompetent. There followed high praise for that British loyalty to party and the shame suffered by politicians who failed to honour their declared loyalty. However immoral this might have appeared to the naive political tyros who occupied the chambers in France, the firmness of British parties contributed to the public good and was eminently reasonable. All constancy in the performance of government must hang on that insistence that individuals so behave.86 It had been a solemn and compelling sermon on the text that the effectiveness of borrowed institutions must necessarily turn, not upon laws, but on what the author called a series of actions to be performed by individuals. From this premise, the French had contemplated the laws and the formal structures but had yet to incorporate the relevant actions and understandings into their conduct. It was, to be sure, rather early in the Restoration to proclaim the experiment a failure, and presumably d’Agoult did not himself wish that outcome or he might have spared his readers some of his crossness. It was apparently still true at this time that those just elected had, in all probability, no prior experience of legislative politics and expected to associate in the assembly with those who came from the same area. Thus, as in the beginnings of the Revolution, representatives still sought to seat themselves according to locality and not in terms of ideological leanings.87 The third figure to be introduced by way of illustration offers the perspective of how traditional prejudices against party might erode under the pressure of political competition. The author J.-J.-L.-G. Monnin had been a royalist under the Directory and had suffered for it in the coup of 18 fructidor. His known contribution to the political discourse of the Restoration took the form of two pamphlets and a signed article in a periodical. The pamphlets reflect what must have been a very commonplace sense of hostility towards the extreme views expressed both by the friends of the great Revolution and by its avowed enemies. Rejecting both, he called upon voters in the elections of 1817 to display a public spirit, used here in the sense of a patriotic attitude. The king, he said, had no liking for parties, and his subjects should join him in discountenancing them. The two that he discovered were equally dangerous, for one sought to turn society back into 86 Ibid., 112–13, 119. 87 Émmanuel de Waresquiel, “Un paradoxe politique: La Chambre ‘introuvable’ et la naissance du parlementarisme française (octobre 1815–avril 1816),” Commentaire, no. 58 (Summer 1992): 409–16 at 412.

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what it had been before the Revolution, whereas the other wished to recommence that Revolution.88 The modern scholar may well think that proto-revolutionaries were better at disguising their real sentiments than were some of the ultra-royalists, but the view expressed by Monnin was undoubtedly a natural one for people who, most of all, sought peace. Surprisingly, then, the name Monnin appears not much more than one year later on a statement that took parties as the natural focus of life in an assembly of representatives. In that article, he took care to explain how opposition in a republic was apt to create a force that would threaten to overwhelm the government, an apt way of alluding to the coups to which the Directory had recourse. In a monarchy, by contrast, opposition was salutary and without the demagogic capacity that might too readily turn the populace against its rulers. The sovereign, indeed, needed protection against a minister grown too ambitious and might thereby gain advice as to who deserved rewards and who punishment.89 One would gather from these comments that the ministry of Decazes had not found favour. The quality that raised the brief article above the ordinary was the blunt realism of the analysis. In all representative monarchies, one learned, there were two forces, corruption and opposition. These, as it happened, were the entities that Frenchmen of the eighteenth century had purported to discover in British politics, and usually the treatment had been unfavourable. However, Monnin was not content with the traditional judgment. The force of corruption, he said, was the natural outcome of the overweening ambitions of those in authority. Faced with non-compliance, they would simply use the resources at their disposal to win supporters. It was this natural temptation to which men in office were prone that necessitated the presence of opposition, although Monnin was equally ready to explain the development of a ministerial following by the presence of the opposition. In effect, then, the two sides created one another. In light of this pattern, Monnin expressed amazement that morally sensitive people should think it best that deputies and the peers “should vote and speak independently, without previously planning together about concessions … and on points of resistance.” Why, he wondered, should such a union be dismissed as factious? If those who had been bought (literally, vendus) were free to associate, why must the upright

88 Monnin, Première lettre sur le patriotisme à MM. les députés (Paris, 1817), 17, 20; and Lettres d’un prolétaire à messieurs les électeurs de 1817 (Paris, 1817), 14–15. 89 ‘Monnin,’ “De l’opposition,” in [J. Juge, ed.], Lettres françaises, ou correspondance sur la politique, la littérature et la morale, no. 3 (Jan. 1819), 90–8. The general tone of the publication was that of hostility to the ultra-royalists and sympathy for moderates of the Left such as Constant and Camille Jordan.

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remain isolated and unable to unite against the plans concocted in the antichambers of the ministers?90 The echo here of Burke’s dictum about political combination was surely coincidental. It is clear from this account that the writer identified with those virtuous forces that contested the claims of the ministers and their hirelings. But he also recognized more than one opponent and insisted that those who were simultaneously friends of the Charte, the people, and the king must fight on two fronts (contre deux partis). One acted at the behest of the ministers, and the other was animated by memories of ancient privileges that it wished to revive. Thus, the initial and generic division into a ministerial party and an opposition did not exhaust the relevant categories, for there was that party, clearly the ultra-royalists, whose members were then neither ministerial nor of the virtuous opposition. Monnin referred to the group with which he identified as “ce parti de l’opposition,” so in all he recognized three parties, two of which were subject to suspicion. Thus spelled out, his analysis was consistent with the general orientation of the publication in which it appeared, although it obviously marked a retreat from the judgment of 1817 that the extreme Left was as great a threat as was the extreme Right. The circumstances of 1819 had evidently convinced him that the parliamentary opposition of the liberals was distinct from the cause of dangerous revolutionaries. Also conducive to developing this benign view was his treating opposition as a sentinel on behalf of king and people and the article said nothing about its members seeking office for themselves. Here was what eighteenth-century British politics had thought of as a “country” position, ever suspicious of the ministers and unambitious to consort with corruption. It was in this spirit that Frenchmen of the Restoration called themselves independents. All three of the writers introduced here serve to display a recognition that French attitudes and practices were inhospitable to politics conducted along party lines. At the same time, they contributed arguments to the effect that there were new things to be learned and that the nation would be the better if these were learned as soon as possible. Such reminders would not have been necessary had there not been a strong current of opinion arguing for a mode of conduct that resisted the British emphasis upon party and that might be accepted as more in accord with indigenous ways. Some versions of this teaching no doubt expressed a very traditional repugnance to the propensity of political figures to act in concert. The language of moral principle was very largely that based upon the individual person, whose judgment, independence, honour, and conscience might all contribute to the moral case

90 Ibid., 93–4.

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against party affiliation. The same potent considerations were ready to hand for interests whose objections to party were less pure. The bulwark most readily erected against the incursions of party was an appeal to the national character of the French, and ministerial writers carried forward their presumption to be somehow above the strife of parties by seeking to disarm those who might seek to oppose them. This might readily be done by presenting the expectation that there be an opposition party as an alien one and inapplicable to French ways, however suitable it might be to Britain. Different versions of the story may be culled from the early numbers of the Annales historiques des sessions, a publication that, in its ten volumes appearing from 1816 to 1823, supported the administration of the day. In time, Isidore Gautier du Var and J.-A.-M. d’Auréville, the writers of that political survey, would change their tune to emphasize, in their pamphlets, the merits of enforcing loyalty to the ministers and also of opposition that was disciplined and coherent.91 In both cases, the British model loomed large. A mild form of the case that sought to discourage party loyalties is visible in a long essay by Azaïs, the philosopher. There he pointed out, first, that the dynamics of parties within an assembly were pernicious, since the results were extremes of opinion. Members of the rank and file sought the favour of leaders and thus grew more pronounced in their views so as to focus attention on themselves. Ever respectful of the British example, he undercut its relevance by insisting upon the remarkable homogeneity of that nation compared to the divisions of France over the previous century and a half. From this homogeneity, he continued, grew that impression that a British ministry would always appear as the head of a column and that a column would be a party. No such conditions could obtain in France. A more truculent route to the same conclusion came in an unsigned piece in the same paper. It appealed to the tendency in Britain for members of Parliament to receive their consciences at their election or as part of the bench where they chose to sit. All ministers might well be said to seek a party, but the crucial issue was whether it was to be a permanent bond or an accidental and temporary one that varied with the issue. A French ministry did not seek permanent ties, since it was ambitious to garner support both to left and to right.92 From such assumptions, it had been unwise, one must think, for the writer even to associate the ministry with a 91 [Gautier du Var], Des résultats des élections de la première série et des causes qui l’ont amené (Paris, 1822), 13–14, 31; and [d’Auréville], Du système de l’opposition en France (Paris, 1826), 63. 92 Azaïs, untitled article, Journal de Paris, no. 219 (7 Aug. 1818); and Anon., “Revue Politique III,” ibid., no. 281 (8 Oct. 1818).

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party, for such fleeting connections were not what the term usually implied. More detailed in the investigation of national character was the notice accorded in the writings of Bénaben, already cited above on the uses of a third party. Again the argument turned on the different situations in Britain and France and especially the more volatile character of French politics. Opposition by Englishmen was cold and calculating, more of a role than a true conviction. Very different was that activity that proceeded from the hearts of Frenchmen, born of genuine conviction, and was liable to manifest itself in anger, perhaps violence. A form of opposition worth following in France must be one that voted with the minister one day, against him the next, that was based upon principle and not men, and that responded to specific circumstances and was not concocted in advance. Especially important for Bénaben was that the activity be individual in inspiration and not a collective product, that it be the outcome of the conscience of a man, not of a party stratagem. In keeping with this position, Bénaben associated party with esprit de corps and condemned both. He evinced a certain unease at the evidence that the ministers organized a defence of their measures and laid the blame for any such signs of political mobilization on the provocation of those who indulged in systematic opposition.93 The farther reaches of the mode of argument that rejected party ties for French legislators was capable of offering a caricature of British politicians as men who served their parties under a sort of military discipline and acted, according to a popular expression, as machines to grind out laws. Such arrangements ruled out the virtues that might flourish in France, these being the fairness and open-mindedness required to actually listen to arguments and the generosity of spirit, the vivacity, and the sensitivity to influences that allowed the listener to be swayed by eloquent conviction, whatever his prior engagements. Here in all its splendour was the positive face of that levity and thoughtlessness so often charged against the national character. Solemn and relentless, the British were strangers to this set of capacities.94 The apparent absence of that fixed and unvarying majority, as it was known in Britain, was thus the consequence of decisions specific to particular issues, with no sort of general commitment to men or to programmes. A ruling by the officer equivalent to the Speaker of the 93 Anon., untitled article, Journal de Paris, no. 244 (2 Sept. 1818); and Bénaben, Le Moderateur, chap. 4, 32–5. For a late example, crudely argued, see Anon., Du Roi, de la chambre et des ministres par un royaliste (Paris, Dec. 1821), 9, 11, 14. 94 Anon., Première lettre de M. Le vicomte de Chateaubriand (Paris, 1816), 10–18. Despite some resemblance in title and substance to a work by Azaïs, it seems not to be his. I have treated some aspects of this subject in “Conscience, Honour, and the Failure of Party in Restoration France,” History of Political Thought 21 (Summer 2000): 1–18. Here I have sought to mine the rich literature for different examples.

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Commons made the point that one could speak of a majority in the chamber only as a record of those who had already pronounced on a particular question; all other efforts to invoke the majority in some future context were out of order, for there was not, in any permanent or overarching sense, any such body.95 Here, in official usage, was an endorsement of those claims of individual conscience that, in the eyes of the participants, lent dignity and meaning to public life. It is useful to recall, however, that notorious appel nominal of 1792 by which the members of the Convention had been required, individually, to associate themselves with the king’s guilt or to bear the odium of their colleagues. Those votes had been punctuated by much testimony as to the deputies’ response to conscience. Ironically, it was such events that led a later generation of legislators to seek the exercise of conscience in private. This, in due course, would invite queries as to whether conscience were really what animated most of the votes. For the time being, that vision of French political mores that treated the typical personality as one preoccupied with honour and the freedom to follow one’s own lights was by no means limited to the writers who sought to support the ministers. Certainly, however, it was the ministry that had a strong interest in disorganizing opposition and in rendering its activity unacceptable even as it availed itself of its control over offices to construct a loyal following. In some ways, this meant that the ministry was in a most vulnerable position in casting stones at party loyalty, for it was so notoriously the beneficiary of votes purchased with public employment or the prospect of it. Not infrequently, defenders of ministerial practices purported to find in British use of sinecures an affront to French delicacy that was not present in the role of the député fonctionnaire. One factor that strengthened the case against party was that others – apparently with no sinister interests – believed these caricatures and said the same. A good example is the work of that Fonvielle, already presented as an extreme case of anti-party zeal. Never, he wrote, would the delicacy of French notions of good behaviour tolerate the British attitude towards parties, a taste that he likened to those other British failings such as the penchant for cockfights and boxing matches! Rather than embracing those attitudes that were indulgent towards the practices that secured a firm majority for the ministers, the nation ought to renounce representative government altogether. In point of fact, Fonvielle probably viewed such an outcome with some equanimity.96 Just because of his obvious eccentricity, the good faith of this commentator can hardly be questioned. It was 95 For vicomte Lainé’s ruling, see AP 16 (16 March 1816): 594. 96 “D’un parti de l’opposition,” Le Parachute, ou mémories de l’académie des ignorants 2, no. 11 (March [?] 1819): 356–69; and Le Parachute monarchique, ou mémoire de l’académie des ignorants, no. 5 (Aug. 1819): 63–83. Fonvielle was the editor of these publications and presumably the main contributor.

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more the source of pride of the so-called independents than of traditional royalists to boast of their independence, but there were others of pronounced monarchical opinions who said somewhat the same. Coming late in the life of such arguments was the complaint of Georges-Bonaventure Battur, a conservative in both politics and religion. What had changed was that Battur no longer sought to rebuff influences that seemed inimical to French notions of honour and conscience; rather, writing in the late 1820s, he had to concede that these malign forces had triumphed. The world had become politicized in ways that had imposed on public affairs a sad uniformity, as he put it. Parties and coteries pressed their stamp on individuals and robbed them of those qualities that had given them a value purely personal. All valuable personal traits were increasingly absorbed by the associations to which people belonged.97 This pessimistic judgment could only make sense after a decade and more of a testing of individual conscience through the routines of parliamentary politics. It is more compelling evidence of the increased salience of party when its enemies, rather than its friends, make the announcement. organizing political competition Unlike some forms of political propaganda, the appeal to the nobility of the French character was easily undermined by other themes in the rhetoric of the day. For one thing, and quite inconveniently for those who argued otherwise, the ultra-royalists thought that they were following conscience when they voted as a block against the non-party ministries of 1816–21, and their ninety black balls on all votes during the session of 1819 became a matter of pride.98 Conscience was thus ambiguous, and by no means need it have entailed moving in and out of opposition, according to the issue. It was all very well to intone that the English were venal and unprincipled and dully regimented in a way that could never be thought possible of Frenchmen, but increasingly it was being said that the same techniques that steadied the ministerial ranks in Britain also did their work in France, although the idealized portrait of French moeurs had long resisted that possibility. The tale of French honour was already wearing thin when one enthusiast for the superiority of non-party government could do no better than to offer the weak claim that few deputies in France sold themselves to the ministers in the manner that was commonplace in Britain. Such assertions still did good work in resisting the attractions of party, and the author was, in fact, so hostile to political divisions as to label 97 Battur, La Verité, ou le conservateur des lettres et des lois, no. 2 (Aug. 1827): 193. 98 Drapeau blanc, no. 112 (22 Apr. 1822).

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any group with interests contrary to those of the majority as a faction.99 What the argument inadvertently revealed was how notorious it was becoming that conscience was not the dependable resort of the ministers and thus that the basis for expecting opposition to be unstructured was deprived of its main rationale. Already in 1818, an administration fearing for its majority in the lower chamber began to press its supporters, and especially those who enjoyed public offices, to show loyalty to the ministers or to forgo the employments that they enjoyed. Those who were disaffected with the ministers thus began to rail at that sort of creature – the ministerial supporter – who was attached to power for other than patriotic reasons.100 Increasingly, the opposition press found itself wishing both to condemn a government that refused to act as though it led a party and to insist that it stayed in power by suborning the votes of deputies over whom it could exercise influence. Thus understood, the ministerial tributes to conscience and independence seemed pure hypocrisy. In successive issues in the autumn of 1819, Étienne, in La Minerve, moved from a sly suggestion that the main evidence for the organization of a ministerial following was in the items in departmental budgets to a forthright charge that the ministériels were typically men without conscience.101 That did not, of course, rule out pleas for the value of political independence by individuals, but it changed the grounds of debate. More and more, it would seem awkward to cite the honour of the race when very clearly some of its prominent members allowed their consciences to be swayed by status or pecuniary considerations offered by the ministers. When the numbers so influenced might suffice to ensure to the government its majority, there was then an explanation that competed with conscience for purposes of explaining political dynamics in an assembly. The supposed chasm between British corruption and French delicacy seemed to be closing, and this was especially evident when a noble writer, critical of the ministers, sought to combine rhetoric about the harshness of imposing upon French consciences with the intelligence that it was perhaps, after all, the British ministers who did better by way of preparing their followers, through consultation and argument, for their duty when the house divided. The well-known deputy Camille Jordan said the same.102 What 99 A. Carrion-Nisas fils, La France au dix-neuvième siècle, ou coup d’oeil sur l’état présent … de la morale et de la liberté (Paris, 1821), 125, 82. 100 [F.-C.-H. Farcy], L’Esprit du ministère, depuis le commencement de la Révolution jusqu’à nos jours (Paris, 1818), 11. 101 Étienne, “Lettres sur Paris” 73, Minerve 7, [no. 8] (Sept. 1819): 367–81 at 380; “Lettres sur Paris” 74, ibid., 7, [no. 9] (Oct. 1819): 416–28 at 419. 102 Auguste-Hilarion, comte de Kératry, Documens nécessaires pour l’intelligence de l’histoire de France en 1820 (Paris, 1820), 69–73. For Jordan, see pages 428–30 below.

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had begun as a national trait was in danger of being debased to a difference of opinion as to the amount of individual judgment that representative government could allow. Under Villèle, the pressure on public servants who were also representatives became more open. Prior to the elections of 1822 and 1824, a circular demanding political loyalty was sent to the employees of his own department, that of finance.103 Later, Salvandy, who had been sympathetic to the ministerial intrigue of the Decazes government, would write indignantly of Villèle’s administration, which was forced to purchase its support in the chamber. Nor did the other side now limit its response to denials or silence, for a ministerial apologist of 1826 was actually reduced to instancing the fact that loyalty might as readily yield to the gold of a private banker as to formal appropriation from the treasury. This was an obvious allusion to the resources of the financier Laffitte, whose wealth was thrown into the scale of opposition.104 By that time, the refrain about conscience as affording the support of the ministers had ceased to be nearly as prominent as in the early years of the period. What is more, all persuasions had come to present what they actually did as compatible with the dictates of conscience, and by bringing partisan behaviour under that mantle, they deprived wavering loyalties of their exclusive claim to represent conscience in politics. In a related development, the category of “independents” – a useful label when men of the Left wished not to be too obvious in opposing ministers who might be partial to their cause – had to be understood anew. Specifically, it had to be made compatible with the strategies followed by parties in a legislature, and these dictated practices that seemed not easily to fit the character of independence. The original emphasis was present still when a liberal publication treated the expression “faction des indépendans” as hilariously oxymoronic. Others could understand independence in a sense compatible with supporting the national party and even with seeking office.105 By the time of the election of 1827, the label suggesting independence seems in large measure to have disappeared from political vocabulary; it was not among the self-descriptions for which the enemies of the ministers were invited to vote. The Left had learned to act in the manner of a party. No aspect of the political language can better illustrate that partisanship that seemed, among political activists, increasingly taken for granted than the jibe that followers of the ministers were, because of the nature of their 103 Duvergier de Hauranne, Histoire du gouvernement parlementaire (Paris, 1865), 7:5. 104 Salvandy, Le nouveau règne, 40; and Cahaisse, Ministres, 36. 105 Journal du commerce, du politique et de littérature [soon to become Le Constitutionnel], no. 79 (20 March 1819). Cf. the sources cited at 74n12 and 96n27 above.

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attachment, an inferior tribe in politics. These hypocritical opportunists, or tartuffes politiques, were becoming particularly objectionable at just that time when the manoeuvre of the bascule had come to strain the patience of both Left and Right and for much the same reason. Both the politics of balance and the practice of seeking to win the loyalty of deputies through the bestowal of offices were means of avoiding any coming to terms with the strongly partisan demands – sometimes merely for different policies, sometimes for office as well – that came from those in opposition. The more transparent the absence of direction in a ministry, the greater its need to employ its resources to gather supporters. Hence, the complaints of cynicism on the part of ministers came to be extended to embrace the charge that vanity and venality on the part on individual deputies were also part of the problem. Revived from the past was the epithet ventre or ventru, the first term typically designating a portion of the chambers and the latter an individual member of the same. Modern scholars have been far from unanimous as to the origin of the term. The expression probably owed one of its connotations to the activity of those timorous souls who, wishing to stay neutral among the extremes of the revolutionary assemblies, allowed the care of their stomachs to coincide with votes where their loyalties would be subject to a distressing scrutiny. The term did, of course, mean simply the middle of an assembly, but without some such significance relating to the business of feeding oneself, it seems doubtful if the pejorative label of the “marsh” would have been supplemented by yet another expression. In the Restoration, and not later than 1818, the designation ventre had ceased, in its primary sense, to insinuate a lack of courage to proclaim one’s views without thereby ceasing to be an aspersion on the character of those so described. The new breed supported the ministers more from greed than from fear, it was thought. As early as those articles placed in the foreign press by the Decazes ministry, there was speculation that there might be a shift of some ministerial supporters towards the ultra-royalists. The group, called collectively the ventre and individually ventrus, took their guidance from the ministry of the interior, one of these articles suggested.106 What game the police and their masters were playing in planting these canards remains a mystery. Hitherto the existence of a following based on ministerial largesse had not been a topic fit for public discussion. The writers in opposition, not previously conspicuous for their attachment to talk of the new ventre, were prompt in making the expression their own. Certainly, within the next year recognition of the ventrus had become the very latest in political language, and royalists joined with erstwhile

106 Les Milles et une calomnies 2, no. 157, quoting the Times, 7 Feb. 1818.

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republicans in their dispraise.107 With the fashion well established, others made precise connections with the vocabulary of the Revolution, and Léon Thiessé quoted one Ducos about the earlier use of the term.108 In the less dangerous time of the Restoration, the fault of the ventrus may have been no greater than a readiness to take advantage of the entertainment offered by the ministers to deputies, who, without any indemnity, had to support themselves in the capital. Ministerial dinners served as one of the less expensive forms of political cement. When Arthur, comte O’Mahony, a royalist writer, scorned the bloated figures of these recipients of official favour and interpreted their presence as intended to blunt the influence of “des partis réels,” he was typifying the opinion of both the Right and the Left that moderation of this sort was not an honourable course. A squib written against Villèle defined the ventre as the seat of the intellectual faculties and remarked on his having more conscience than any other in France, his having bought great amounts of that quality from others.109 At the end of the Villèle era, the figure of the ventru continued to be conspicuous in the caustic little verses that ushered into oblivion the longest-serving ministry of the Restoration.110 Of course, any stick might serve to beat the ministers, and many different causes were wrapped in the one epithet. For some, the fault lay with the conduct of ministers who strove to sap the independence of the electors’ representatives; for others, the blame belonged with those deputies who submitted. From such perspectives, the ideal would remain avoidance of any continuing connection. Still, the efforts to contrast the party loyalties of Britain with the principled individualism of the French were seeming more and more, not just wrong in themselves, but naïve. Thus, they failed to penetrate that hypocrisy whereby deputies spoke of conscience or moderation and, in fact, allowed themselves to become the brute votes that sustained the government of the day. Whereas French practice might then 107 A.J., “Les Inconvénients attachés au système de choisir les ministres dans le parti ministériel,” Boussole politique, administrative et littéraire 1, no. 10 (15 Dec. 1818): 427, 430; [L.-A.-F. Cauchois -Lemaire], “Le Ventre, pathologie politique,” Le Libéral … 1, no. 6 (May 1819): 213–15; and La Quotidienne, no. 168 (17 June 1819). For other uses of the expression, see Bernhard Mönch, Der politische Wortschatz der französischen Restauration in Parlament und Presse (Bonn, 1960), 58–9. 108 Léon Thiessé, “Le Ventre,” Lettres normandes 6, no. 2 (9 April 1819): 54–63 at 58. As it happens, there were two members of the Convention so named. 109 Drapeau blanc 80 (3 Sept. 1819); and [Denis Magalon], Petit dictionnaire ministériel (Paris, 1826), 63, 20. 110 Anon., Les Adieux d’un député ministeriel … , ou la conversion d’un ventru (Paris, 1827).

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be disappointing, the very hypocrisy showed where French principles stood, and the traditional hostility to party government might remain unscathed. Such a position probably belonged to a number of the left-wing critics of ministerial designs. Even in these quarters, however, there was ample room for ambivalence and for an ungrudging admiration of the form of political competition known in Britain. An extraordinarily prolific advocate of these views was the abbé de Pradt, who in some respects displayed a very French propensity to regret the “obsequious fidelity” to the ministers that French practice had, he said, imported from Britain. In place of such indignities, he offered the more noble prospect of support both for ministers and for opposition to them that was principled and directed only against measures and not men. By a fine irony, to which he was possibly oblivious, that very formula for an opposition that was selective rather than systematic was itself drawn from British usage. But its attractions were then most evident in France of the Restoration where Pradt urged the electorate to seek representatives freed from party ties, hoping that, given the right sort of opposition, the ministers themselves might cease to expect blind, unreflective support.111 For all these clichés of anti-party sentiment, Pradt was also strongly inclined to look to British practices even in relation to electoral competition. For instance, he was impressed by the fact that the British central government was not nearly as intimately involved in elections for Parliament as were the servants of the French government, and this fact, combined with the financial independence of many public men in Britain, left an impression of fairness lacking in the comparable French institution. He stressed, too, the advantages derived by a French ministry from the great number of local employments in their gift compared to the slender means at the disposal of the British government. Like many another knowledgeable Frenchman, he advocated more inspiration from the other side of the Channel in increasing the number of offices that were made incompatible with membership in the Chambre des députés, and he commended the British convention whereby a member of Parliament appointed to an office under the crown was required to resign and stand again for Parliament. Between 1817 and 1828, several efforts to legislate such a reform would run afoul of the ministers. In furtherance of his ideal of the moral independence of public figures, he railed, too, at the scandal associated with the presence of the ventre and again left the impression that matters

111 Pradt, Lettre à un électeur de Paris (Paris, Sept. 1817), 110–15; and Pradt, Préliminaires de la session de 1817 (Paris, Nov. 1817), 55.

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were conducted better across the water.112 Pradt even subscribed to the unlikely formula that there belonged to representative government a logic that must impose itself after the same fashion in both nations, although this did not prevent his wishing to minimize the influence of parties in his own country. Ambivalent if not contradictory at times, his views expressed in 1820 seem to have had a very different emphasis from those published in September 1817 and the difference lay in a much more marked appreciation of the strengths of the institutions as they existed in their land of origin. In Pradt’s case, the issues of the day in France had not entirely stilled his nativist prejudices, but they had effected the virtual disappearance of facile pronouncements about the noble character of French public life. In this respect, his thought seemed to reflect in microcosm the movement of argument in the press and the pamphlets. When French ministries were moved to forgo the rhetoric about earning each majority anew by appealing to the consciences of uncommitted legislators, their unacknowledged volte-face was a matter of cashing in on the advantages attached to power. The insistence that those enjoying the fruits of office be loyal to their political superiors did not come unopposed, and the French term destitution that described the loss of a position suggests an enormity untranslatable into English. The delicacy of the matter was evident in the need to impose a representative monarchy on the administrative structures of Bonapartist France when it was just inconceivable that all functionaries, whatever their past commitments, could be replaced with any haste. Thus, dismissals of office-holders for political disloyalty tended to become causes of some note. Some of the more prominent figures who were invited to choose between conscience and the comforts of office were several of the Doctrinaires whose situation is treated elsewhere. For these figures, and others who departed less noisily, there remained the ever-available plea for a conscience unconstrained by orders from above, while spokesmen for the ministers themselves must have been less than comfortable in seeming to ape the political indelicacies of Englishmen. Still, that is precisely what some ministerial writers did, and once hostile to the discipline of British practice, they came to invoke it in the interests of a majority that was, in the favoured idiom, “compacte,” not “flottante.”113 In such ways, Frenchmen of the Restoration did come, by degrees, to accept the necessity of organization and leadership in politics, difficult as the transition was. It was the decade of the 1820s that saw a new appreciation of these realities even as the political struggle pushed the parliamentary system towards revolution. The modes of 112 Pradt, Des progrès du gouvernement represéntatif en France (Paris, Dec. 1817), 93– 5; and Pradt, De l’affaire de la loi des élections (Paris and Rouen, 1820), 101–2, lxix. 113 [Isidore Gautier du Var], Du résultat des élections de la première série …, 31.

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organization that gained recognition did so in an order that reflected the emergence of party lines in the chambers and the gradual extension of partisan activity to the business of securing the election of representatives who belonged to one’s side. From early in the period there was comment on the efforts made by members of the chambers to organize themselves for the conduct of legislative business, of which more shortly. The major bone of contention became clear when the arrangements for linking peers and deputies of similar views came to include the organization of electors. Increasingly, the exigencies of competitive party politics came to resist that distrust of associations that official repression, joined to individualism, had created. One of the factors that challenged talk of conscience even as it limited the strength of party ties was the secrecy of the vote in the chambers. Many people in public life carried grim memories of the bullying that had gone on in revolutionary assemblies, and they were resolved to have a secret vote on all important divisions to replace the roll call and the assis et levé of that earlier practice. In 1814, when the chambers were choosing their mode of voting, there had been voices among the peers in favour of emulating the British use of division lobbies, but the claims of timidity had their way. Before long, however, there were again mutterings against the abuses that found encouragement under the new system. The liberal Parent-Réal, a close student of institutions, scolded French deputies for their cowardice and for their venality, with not a word about the allegedly delicate consciences of his colleagues. Not only did he recommend open voting on the British pattern but also the physical reshaping of the Chamber of Deputies in the Palais-Bourbon. This would mean that the fluid political loyalties to which a hemisphere contributed might give way to the clear-cut choice between one side of the house and the other.114 Anglo-Saxons who later waxed sententious about the way in which the shape of an assembly might contribute to its character should know that Frenchmen, conscious of the merits of a two-party arrangement, had long been of the same opinion. Although the use of coloured balls and urns may certainly have left ministers uncertain as to whether their patronage had secured the support of the office-holder, the situation was probably, on the whole, to the advantage of the executive, for it made the situation of silent ministerialists an easy one. The Restoration witnessed but one serious attempt to resurrect open voting 114 [Nicolas-Joseph Parent-Réal], Les Hommes du centre (Paris, 1820), 9, 30. For another such suggestion see Charles-Louis, marquis de Fontanges, Du mode des élections comparé avec celui qui est en usage en Angleterre (Paris, 1820), 24. French scholars remain, it seems, unaware of Restoration thought on this issue and cite only AngloSaxon sources. See Jean-Philippe Heurtin, L’Espace public parlementaire: Essai sur les raisons du législateur (Paris, 1999), 63n.

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in the chambers – that of de Serre – although the draft law on elections in 1820 had proposed that electors should have to sign their ballots as an obvious attempt to ensure the dependence of office-holders. Such an arrangement, formalizing the government’s influence over the electors, would have sufficiently secured a chamber of the desired complexion as to make a secret vote by deputies of little significance. One wonders, however, how the legislators could have survived the absurdity of a call to the voters to exercise a strength of character that they themselves declined to display. For whatever reason, the offending clause (25) did not appear in the draft that was debated in the chambers.115 Nevertheless, unflattering references to the existing system continued to appear.116 Not until the efforts of Duvergier de Haurenne, Doctrinaire, deputy, and the great historian of parliamentary government, would the rules be changed late in the July Monarchy. As a major debate in the year 1843 makes very clear, a secret vote was part and parcel of a loose system of affiliation or the old ways of “conscience,” whereas preferences openly avowed belonged to a form of party discipline on the British pattern. Duvergier was an eloquent exponent of British ways, with systematic opposition and compact parties; A.-F. Vivien, another constitutional expert, defended traditional French practice.117 Whereas it may well seem in retrospect that secret voting in the chambres cut the nerve of any firm party discipline, it did not, to all appearances, deprive ministries of their following. Opposition writers did sometimes, however, suggest, probably wrongly, that open voting would better suit the ministers. The very fact that Villèle could warn deputies who held office that disloyalty might cost them their posts also suggested to those in opposition that the ministers must have means of determining both how votes were cast in the chambers and how députés fonctionnaires behaved, as citizens, in the electoral colleges.118 In both cases, there was scope for a voter who wished to testify to his loyalty to reveal his leanings to some spectator. An increasing number of dismissals in the years when Villèle was consolidating his position as chief minister suggests that the government availed itself of its advantages. The extent of the problem found memorable expression when General Foy, a liberal stalwart, made clear that, in a nation 115 Georges-Denis Weil, Les élections législatives depuis 1789 (Paris, 1895), 92; and 24 (15 Feb. 1820): 216, 221. 116 See, for example, Anon., Deuxième lettre d’un électeur de Paris à quelques électeurs de département, sur … les votes des membres de la chambre des députés (Paris, 1829), 23–4. 117 Journal des débats, 23 March 1843. Work on the Archives parlementaires ended with World War I, when the compilers had reached the year 1839. 118 Étienne, “Lettre sur Paris” 83, Minerve 8, [no. 5] (Dec. 1819): 210–23 at 211; and Courrier français, no. 51 (20 Feb. 1824). AP

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with 500,000 fonctionnaires, of whom some 20,000 were electors, the resources at the disposal of the ministers threatened the independence of the electorate (then less than 100,000).119 The number of public servants as offered by Foy is in accord with statistics published during the July Monarchy, and indeed, that number was endlessly repeated even when the true total had surely grown a great deal larger.120 Although the failure to change voting practice attests to the fact that public men were, in the main, comfortable with the secret vote, it remained true that there were ample opportunities for them to display their loyalties and that many availed themselves of these occasions. Some of those who lost their offices owing to partisanship had made no secret of their leanings and had spoken openly against governmental measures. One thinks of the Doctrinaires or of Dupont de l’Eure who had combined opposition with a judicial appointment. There was then no need, in some notorious cases, for the ministers to pry into the character of an individual vote. Another institution of the time leads to the same conclusion, for members of the chambers were often to be found as habitués of the various gatherings, held usually in private dwellings, that brought together those of the same political stripe. A journalist of the time seems to have been literally correct in the claim that these members enjoyed no special immunity from article 291 of the penal code and that their status as legislators only protected their right to meet during the legislative session and in committees.121 However, his complaint that important people were granted unfair privileges was misleading, since private gatherings, by invitation and held at irregular intervals, were legal within the terms of the law and the limit of twenty in attendance did not apply. Unless the real source of complaint were that some had a commodious house in the first place, there was no evident unfairness. In fact, the state took a benign approach to such political gatherings during the Restoration and made no effort to bring them within the terms of proscribed behaviour. This was in accord with the comparatively liberal attitude towards those clubs of the revolutionary period that had served mainly as a meeting place for deputies. Significantly, the term club was not applied to the gatherings of the Restoration. 119 AP 36 (6 June 1822). The number recorded in the collected speeches is 600,000, which is probably closer to the truth. Discours du général Foy … (Paris, 1826), 2:133. 120 Henry Chardon, L’Administration de la France: Les fonctionnaires (Paris, 1908), 135. 121 L’Indépendant, no. 186 (12 Nov. 1819). For the claim that there was some such immunity, in that such gatherings could be deemed but prolongations of the legislative session, see Georges-Denis Weil, Le Droit d’association et le droit de réunion … (Paris, 1893), 81.

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A form of political organization that linked deputies and the electorate raised issues of a more serious kind, and the status of such arrangements occasioned much debate. First came the charge, dating from the spring of 1819, that the forces of the Left had created, in Paris, a sinister comité directeur that issued instructions to lesser bodies in the provinces. The very nature of such a connection conjured up memories of the Jacobin organization and the animus against a network of that character. Of course, the obvious response was that those in opposition to government had necessarily to create an organization outside of the organs controlled by the ministers, for it was the prerogative of the ministers to pursue their political goals from inside the public structures. General Foy, in the debate over the electoral law of 1820, anticipated his later argument as he pointed out the disparity in resources between the ministers and their opponents.122 Thereafter, few men of the Left missed an opening to add detail regarding an electoral machine where the ministers named the presidents of electoral colleges – who might themselves be candidates in those very districts and so preside over their own election123 – and where prefects and subprefects routinely mobilized electors, especially those in public employment, to the side of the ministers. Even the government’s control of the semaphore telegraph, it was said, assisted in tipping the scales to that side. Foy and others had little difficulty in demonstrating that both sides employed means to summon support, and few could deny that it seemed, under a representative government, to be legitimate behaviour. No one appeared literally to have denied that electors had the right to discuss their common business before casting votes, but defenders of the government tended to argue that, whereas the influence exercised by local magnates and officials was quite proper, that emanating from the committee seated in Paris was not. There was also prolonged disagreement as to whether allowing most electors to vote close to home (as under the law of 1820), rather than in the chief town of a department (as under that of 1817), was an advantage for the electors or an imposition on them. For some ostensible purists, even the suggestions made by newspapers were deemed to sully the pristine innocence of the citizen. It was true as well that the electoral laws of the time left every incentive for the electors to do their business and depart – there was, for instance, to be no discussion in the precincts of the electoral colleges – and so necessarily political education that might compete with official sources had to be organized privately. Such efforts invited, from ministerial prints, the charge of seeking imperium in imperio, a point of view that epitomized the primacy, in France, of the public realm 122 AP 27 (15 May 1820): 597–8. 123 Courrier français, no. 347 (1 June 1820).

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over the private or merely social. Even in the twentieth century, political analysts continued to affirm that the only well-organized French party was necessarily the ministerial one, for it was the same as the national administration.124 Royalist morale, in abeyance since the dissolution of 1816, revived with the passage of the electoral law of 1820, and self-proclaimed royalists were not slow in emulating the Left in organizing the electors of the provinces.125 In 1821, Alphonse Mahul brought out his Tactique électorale à l’usage de l’opposition, a sophisticated and, in its three editions, widely used guide for adversaries of the government. One newspaper, then more royalist than the ministers, hailed it as worthy of being adopted by the royalists.126 The complicated political divisions of the time left the royalists with a government that leaned in their direction but that continued to try to occupy the centre; in such circumstances, royalists were likely to be uncertain whether their proper place lay in government or in opposition. Though in some respects the best, Mahul’s was not the first such publication. Frequent changes in the electoral law must have been confusing for a population not much accustomed to representative government and having good reason to suspect the practice of holding elections. In a number of departments, there thus appeared guides for the perplexed, spelling out the legal rights and duties of electors, with special attention to the qualifications for voting. Some of these works were dry accounts of the law, but most deserted a bland tone to seek to combine political education with partisan advantage. Publications directed towards liberals – who saw themselves as in opposition under ministries both of the centre and of right-wing sympathies – placed a high priority on overcoming the inhibitions about political activity that the Restoration had inherited from both the Revolution and the Empire. One such vade mecum, written by Charles Goyet, soon to be a close associate of Constant and his chief local organizer, addressed article 291 of the penal code, which, from the time of the Empire, had placed stringent conditions on the citizens’ opportunities to congregate and to belong to associations. The law, he pointed out, forbade gatherings of more than twenty persons that assembled daily or at regular intervals, but he insisted that local electoral committees might so conduct themselves as to escape the applicability of that clause. Possibly uncertain of his grounds when writing of a law that had not really been tested, he added that should the authorities 124 ‘Mermeix’ [Gabriel Terrail], L’Angleterre, aspects inconnus (Paris, 1911), 150. 125 See M.N., Considérations sur les élections, adressés à MM. les électeurs de l’Yonne (Auxerre, 1820), 8; and Charles Vernay, Des élections royales (Lyon, 1820), 34–5, 9. 126 Gazette de France, no. 275 (3 Oct. 1821). The writer was C.-J.-A., comte de Colnet du Ravel. For detailed treatment of Mahul’s manual, see pages 458–9 below.

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deem large electoral committees illegal, one must loudly proclaim one’s rights. Then, anticipating the direction that later tactics would follow, he noted that, to the regret of the ministerial forces, there was as yet no law against dinners. Goyet recommended following the English example, for that experience had shown how large areas could be mobilized politically, and he particularly cited the value of regular correspondence among those who shared political principles. The result, he wrote, should yield a central electoral committee in the chief town of the department, with lesser ones at the levels of the arrondissement and the commune. This set the tone for later publications aimed at reducing the advantage that naturally belonged to a ministerial party that cloaked itself in the attributes of national and local government. As events would demonstrate, the great disproportion in resources between the ministers and their opponents could not, in the end, defend an unpopular administration. Some later publications, such as those by Mahul, paid more attention to the article of the penal code that sought to discourage gatherings of more than twenty persons, whereas Goyet apparently assumed that a gathering had to combine all the attributes of an illegal association in order to attract unfavourable attention.127 In the attempt to bolster the cause of opposition, an important goal was that of emphasizing the legitimacy and dignity of the institution that undertook such a vital part of representative government. Not the least remarkable feature of Alphonse Mahul’s brief text was his according a capital letter to the body known as the “Opposition.” Not as yet the invariable rule even in Britain, this rendering had as yet been fairly rare in French usage. It can be found, for instance, in a very early defence of the need to support ministerial majorities by the presence, in the Chamber of Deputies, of a large number of fonctionnaires. The writer of this frank avowal of ministerial influence had adopted a conciliatory tone towards the other side and had thus designated the two legitimate forces in the chamber as “Gouvernement” and “Opposition.”128 The polemicist Leclère, already introduced as ministerial in sympathy, did the same in the body of a pamphlet, though not in its title.129 Such marks of respect paralleled British activity of almost a century before, where the obvious presence of an organized ministerial 127 Goyet, Manuel des électeurs de la Sarthe (Le Mans, [1818]), 12–14. Some of the same material had already appeared in Le Correspondant électorale, July–Oct. 1818. 128 Anon., Guide des électeurs (Paris, 1817), 50n. A publication with a similar title is said to have been distributed, on behalf of the ministers, in 18,000 copies. One Simon was the author of what may have been a later edition – Mémoires de M. De La Rochefoucauld, duc de Doudeauville (Paris, 1862), 8:359. Doudeauville was inspecific about dates, but seems here to have been referring to the period of 1822. 129 J.-B.-T. Leclère, Reproches à l’opposition no. IV (Paris, 1823), 16–17.

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following made it difficult to deny similar advantages to the Opposition. The French language, of course, readily lent itself to the use of a capital, for there was no adjectival use of the word, as in English, where a capital letter seemed less appropriate; Mahul simply wrote parti de l’Opposition. Those seeking freedom for the activity of an opposition did well to underline its respectable office, and the usage of granting the noun an upper case came to be adopted, for instance, by the Journal des débats even before the paper entered into opposition in the summer of 1824.130 A more telling mark of the growing respect for the institution of opposition was the comment in one ministerial paper that the official publication Le Moniteur had ceased to refer to anti-ministerial men as a faction or a comité directeur but now gave them their correct designation as “l’opposition” (uncapitalized). This the paper hailed as a positive step.131 It seems fair to say that open political competition – of a sort of which there had been but a hint under the Directory – flourished in the 1820s. Paradoxically, the theoretical essays on the mechanics of politics à l’anglaise had grown much less common than in the early years of the Restoration. Even the genre of electoral manuals grew derivative.132 By way of compensation, there was evident in the provinces a flourishing of political organization that sprang up prior to elections and, with some guidance from the sophisticates of Paris, spread the mores of a new civic culture. For the party often known as constitutionnel, it became natural to portray the competition as a two-party affair, for the liberals were disinclined to take an ever-present opposition of the Right very seriously. By April 1822, one thus sees in a major liberal print that the electoral lists were open and “two parties” confronted each other. There followed frequent reports of the business of getting names on the electoral lists, choosing candidates and proclaiming their merits, and reporting the unfair tactics of those officials who employed threats or enticements to secure supporters for the ministers. A significant way to refute those who still sought to impugn opposition efforts was to insist that, contrary to the charge of the ministerial press, lists of candidates were not prepared in Paris and foisted upon the provincials, but rather the voters of, say, Indre-et-Loire were consulted in the composition of an electoral slate that reflected local sentiment.133 Two years later, 130 Journal des débats, 7 and 16 Feb. 1824. 131 Journal de Paris, no. 48 (17 Feb. 1824). 132 Leonard Gallois’s Almanach des électeurs de Paris et des départemens, 2nd ed. (Paris, 1824), seems to have taken the best part of the analysis from Goyet and Mahul; see “S’il est nécessaire de se réunir avant l’élection,” 34–45. 133 Le Constitutionnel, no. 100 (10 April 1822); no. 117 [misnumbered 127] (27 April 1822).

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there was more of the same, and the press records the consulting en plein jour of the electors at Rouen and their being informed of their constitutional rights. Tales of the misdoings of prefects who commanded electoral loyalty of all public employees abounded, to which was added an account of the dispatching from Paris of an agent électoral to take charge of the election in a department where the prefect was, no doubt, faltering in his efforts.134 One can imagine with what glee the last intelligence would be received, since part of the disadvantage of opposition forces was that their electoral agents were readily recognizable, whereas those of the government were disguised by their official appointments. There was, in addition, a tendency for the liberal press to contrast the electoral struggle in France with that in Britain, and then the papers cited those factors within British practice that had struck Pradt as affording more of a sense of fair play. Were these conditions to be present at the local level in France, opposition might aspire to power under true constitutional liberty.135 Whether British practice was as scrupulously fair as it was perceived to be is another question, but certainly Frenchmen of the Restoration never ceased to remark on how lords-lieutenant in Britain – who usually served beyond the life of the government that had appointed them – might owe no loyalty to the majority in Parliament but rather support the minority. Understandably, it would not have been tactful for Frenchmen to employ these comparisons to denigrate the national character. However, all such comments carried with them a tacit rebuke to the flattering portrait of a nation where the dictates of honour and conscience must prevail. Just when the public’s political education seemed to be a cause on the rise, the elections that gave life to political organization very largely ceased. The electoral law of 1824 replaced the annual renewal of one-fifth of the Chamber of Deputies by a system of integral renewal on a septennial basis. Apart from by-elections, there was then no need for electoral activity until such time as the king might dissolve the Chamber of Deputies. This, in fact, happened in 1827 when the manifest unpopularity of Villèle’s government called for some such expedient. There followed that electoral alliance that brought together elements of opposition ranging from republicans to constitutional royalists. All the major figures treated here, with the exception of Vaublanc and Frénilly, were seemingly associated 134 Le Constitutionnel, no. 5 (5 Jan. 1824); no. 22 (22–3 Jan. 1824); no. 35 (4 Feb. 1824). 135 Le Constitutionnel, no. 351 (17 Dec. 1821); no. 36 (5 Feb. 1824). The most recent treatment of political organization in the period is Robert Alexander, Rewriting the French Revolutionary Tradition: Liberal Opposition and the Fall of the Bourbon Monarchy (Cambridge, 2003).

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with the effort. Spearheading the mobilizing of opposition was the body called the Société des amis de la liberté de la presse,136 soon after followed by its left-wing equivalent, Aide-toi, le ciel t’aidera. In terms of tactics, the new associations marked little development from those followed by the opposition of the early 1820s. It was, of course, necessarily a national effort, since all departments would go to vote at the same time. Much of the literature took the form of identical sixteen-page sets of instructions that varied only in terms of the department to which they were directed. There was the same effort as before to steer clear of any suggestion of illegality by reminding local committees of the articles of the penal code that confined acceptable gatherings to small numbers and to a pattern of meeting that was neither daily nor at regular intervals. Publications of the association stressed the evanescent character of Aide-toi, such that a local body need assemble but once and need leave no visible trace of its passage. At the same time, it had to be emphasized that this was no secret society and that its purposes were entirely legitimate. If anything, the agenda in 1827 seemed more modest than that for elections up to 1824, when organizers had contemplated several days of electoral activity. Some of the advice about circumventing the penal code’s regulation of associations was confusing in that it seemed to dither about whether a gathering that was legitimate in terms of other criteria specified by article 291 needed to limit its numbers.137 Compared to the draconian regulations made law in 1834, the practice of the Restoration remained very indulgent, and there was comparatively little need to make fine distinctions between illegal and permissible acts.138 Aide-toi continued to rally liberal forces for what remained of the Restoration, including for the election of 1830, and ended its days in the July Monarchy as a republican body. A mere thirty-five years after its passing, one commentator had to be corrected for calling it a secret society.139 It was, of course, nothing of the sort, but its care in avoiding the unfavourable attention of the authorities left that impression and contributed little by way of documents on which to base later history. The election of 1827 gave rise to a new measure of good feeling between liberals and constitutional royalists, thrown together, almost against their 136 See 393n129 below. 137 [Ludovic Vitet], Aide-toi, le ciel t’aidera. Aux citoyens et aux électeurs (n.p., [1827]), 4–5. 138 A publication of the Second Empire reveals a far more specific catalogue of licit behaviour than can be found prior to 1830. See André Rousselle, Manuel des réunions publiques non politiques, publiques électorales, électorales privées (Paris, 1869). 139 See the exchange between ‘S.D.’ and Fréderick Lock in L’Intermédiaire des chercheurs et curieux 5 (1869): cols 48, 204–5.

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wills, by the need to combat a common foe. The significant innovation was that candidates, normally opposed to each other though equally in opposition, had been prepared to stand down in favour of one another in order to prevail over a ministerial candidate. This created visions of a new era of mutual understanding and moderation, tacitly based, one must assume, on the expectation that the ministerial party of Villèle would find no place in the new order. The elusive consensus on political rules and the basis of a stable regime seemed to some to be at hand, and the unthreatening ministry of Martignac lent substance to this optimism. An unsigned article in the influential Journal des débats condemned the anti-party tactics of the previous ministers and hailed the emergence of a party based upon principle, distilled from the widespread discontent of 1824–27. How the diverse sentiments brought together were to form the basis of a stable system – were the liberals or the royalists meant to claim government and what of the ministers of the day who seemed different from both? – were matters left unresolved. The expectation that a closer following of British electoral practices would contribute to further improvement informed another item in the same paper.140 Similar promptings are to be found in an attractively argued case for moderation by a liberal deputy. He emphasized especially that a more open manner on the part of the authorities would render opposition itself less hostile. In particular, he cited the presence of a law, of despotic origin, that discouraged the sort of gatherings that a constitutional opposition needed. The successful experiment in peaceful assembly that had marked the election of 1827 gave a fillip to the neglected cause of freedoms of association and assembly and the central place of these in free governments. An important contribution on the subject, with attention to political mores, political parties, and elections, came from the pen of the young Prosper Duvergier de Hauranne.141 What was being expressed here was the fervent hope that French political life could come to reflect a sort of civility that could banish the fears and close all the wounds created by the Revolution. Throughout the Restoration, there had been expressions of distaste for the tendency for intrigue to play a 140 “De la force de cohesion des partis politiques par un député,” Journal des débats, 27 May 1828; and untitled piece, signed “un de vos lecteurs,” ibid., 29 May 1828. 141 Amant-Jacques Lherbette, De la nouvelle France et de ses représéntans (Paris, 1828), esp. the chapter entitled “De quelques mesures utiles à l’opposition constitutionnelle,” 89–106; [Duvergier de Hauranne], “Des associations,” Le Globe, no. 47 (5 April 1828): 315–17; no. 50 (16 April 1828): 339–41; and no. 52 (23 April 1828): 353–5. For evidence on authorship, see Jean-Jacques Goblot, La jeune France libérale: Le Globe et son littéraire (Paris, 1995), 578.

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part that should have been left for a confident openness. A royalist admirer of British institutions had underlined the difference between public men in France and Britain when he depicted the French politician, as being restrained by pride from publicly seeking office or condescending to canvass.142 That concern for honour that supposedly expressed itself in conscience apparently had other by-products. Paralleling the development of the abbé de Pradt’s thought about politics were the reflections of a provincial avoçat, as they epitomize the slow process of making sense of foreign institutions. Charles-Guillaume Hello had been a member of the chambre that sat during Bonaparte’s Hundred Days and had then retired from public life until the July Monarchy. One of his activities was to reflect on the political order, and in three editions of his main work,143 he left a record of his notions of political propriety and their evolution. Conspicuous in the treatise was a degree of resentment at those who aped British politics that one might expect to find in a one-time admirer of Bonaparte. In this spirit, he initially rejected the automatic partisan voting of the House of Commons in favour of that sort of imitation that could improve upon the original. Hello sounded rather conventional and old-fashioned in his praise of conscience, although he had the good sense to find it on the side of opposition that had to labour without the inducements that belonged to the ministers. Opposition was the conscience of representative government, he wrote, its value in no way reduced by its being a spontaneous growth independent of legislative fiat. In common with many French students of parliamentary government, he tended rather to intellectualize the process. For instance, he endowed the replacement of one party by another with the metaphysical conceit that saw opposition as deserting a party at the very moment when it assumed office. The praise for opposition was matched by an equally generous, and less familiar, tribute to parties. They brought life to representative government, and it would be equally fatal to deprive them of energy as to allow one to rule unopposed. Neither did Hello’s bow to conscience serve, as so often ten years before, to corrode the bonds of party. Rather, he insisted that a party should expect loyalty and that to change parties because of ambition was unacceptable conduct. Unanimity on some common principles rendered parties respectable, dispute made them passionate, and the constitution had come to find them necessary. 142 B.M.T.C., Du gouvernement représentatif et des élections de 1824 (Bordeaux, 1824), 5. 143 The work itself remained unknown to the author of one of the few notices of Hello’s career who credits him but with “some pamphlets.” See Sherman Kent, “Two Official Candidates of the July Monarchy,” American Historical Review 43 (1937–38): 65–73 at 70.

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The Restoration saw no nobler tribute to that institution. By the end of his book, Hello’s attitude to Britain seemed to soften to the degree of allowing him to commend its respect for individual liberty as opposed to France’s typical focus upon order.144 There was even better in store for his readers, and the second edition, in press at the time of the July Revolution, reflected a development in Hello’s ideas. By no means had the author become an uncritical anglophile, but favourable citations of British precedents had grown more numerous. One heard still of Robert Walpole’s techniques of corruption, but also of the dictum of his son Horace that the extinction of faction would be the demise of party. Among the improvements was a more careful exposition of the way in which the constitutional monarchy rested upon opinion and how public opinion needed political parties as its conduits. The setting out both of parliamentary opposition and of what he now called “the theory of parties” had grown more detailed as well. Also emerging more clearly than before was the thought that party struggle could not be tamed by artificial and formal procedures. Neither alternating parties in power nor the dead end of trying to admit both simultaneously into office could give life to politics. Counsels of moderation here prevailed, accompanied by a spirit of optimism that owed nothing to the revolution that was going on that summer. Serenely removed from the barricades was the thought that, like the Tories of the eighteenth century, the French liberals would some day capture power. Hello offered, too, the warning that, in seeking to destroy their opponents, the French were prone to forget that there had to be two parties – or else none.145 The final edition falls outside the Restoration, yet it serves well to illustrate the ongoing story. In keeping with Hello’s habit of publishing in interesting times, this edition appeared in January 1848, shortly before yet another revolution. The great difference between the British and the French, it now became clear, was that the British possessed political parties, whereas the French did not. Moreover, administrative influence that choked the freedom of elections would ensure that no true parties would develop in France. Never to be confused with the naïve enthusiasm of the anglophile, Hello came finally to offer a quite splendid panegyric upon the British institution that he had hoped to improve on French soil. He had already explained that it was an “esprit politique” in Britain that sustained the party system. Then 144 Hello, Essais sur le régime constitutionnel, introduction à l’étude de la Charte (Paris, 1827), 239–42, 84, 273, 279–81. 145 Hello, Du régime constitutionnel, 2nd ed. (Paris, 1830), 409–15 (“Démonstration du système par l’opposition parlementaire”), 436–41 (“Application du principe à la théorie des partis”).

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he offered the ultimate tribute: “After the veneration of natural law, I know of nothing more noble among human institutions than the character of the parties in England.”146 To add that the writer had himself been a ministerial candidate in an electoral system that afforded deputies in opposition a reduced chance of success serves to illustrate the ironies of the situation in France.

146 Hello, Du régime constitutionnel, 3rd ed. (Paris, 1848), 2:299–300.

3

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it was 10 april 1816 and the french minister of the interior rose to offer his final thoughts on a bill, introduced the previous December, to alter the electoral law. The bill had undergone a difficult passage in the Chamber of Deputies, and the very different version that had emerged from committee had failed to win acceptance in the upper chamber and lacked as well the support of King Louis XVIII and a portion of the Richelieu ministry. As sponsor of the offending legislation, the minister now called upon the lower chamber to accept defeat on a constitutional measure dear to the majority. By way of offering comfort to that frustrated majority, he indulged in some personal reflections. As much as he was convinced that a minister must unite, in thought and action, with his colleagues in order to secure their common goal (la marche du gouvernement), so did he also believe that he was permitted to keep his individual opinion on important issues of policy.1 Although his situation might seem to place him at odds with a chamber that had presumed to amend the ministerial bill, he assured the deputies that he too had favoured that form of fiveyearly integral renewal proposed by them and rejected by the other constitutional powers. One respected a decision, he said, reached through constitutional means. Yet the end of the affair allowed the minister, in effect, to step outside his official role to make common cause with the majority in the elected body. The French were learning about parliamentary government, and the lessons were sometimes trying. The words spoken that day were a dramatic sign that all was not well within the duc de Richelieu’s ministry, divided between three ministers sympathetic to the ultra-royalist majority in the elected body – the famous chambre introuvable – and the rest of their colleagues, who were distanced from such anti-revolutionary zeal. Beginning in May of that year, a reluctant king 1

AP

18 (10 April 1816): 180.

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bade farewell to his doughty minister of the interior. A colleague who shared his sympathies also lost his post along with a third minister whose departure was required by way of a side payment to Monsieur (the future Charles X), who would not lose the services of the minister of the interior without a struggle. The principle of ministerial solidarity – one of the subtleties of the British parliamentary tradition – had won at least a temporary victory. In the First Restoration, prior to the Hundred Days, this principle had yet to emerge. It had gained recognition, however, when Talleyrand had greeted an ultra majority in the autumn of 1815 by telling his colleagues that they must make way for a ministry more in accord with public sentiment; moreover, they must all leave office together.2 The next ministerial reshuffle, already mentioned, was the prelude, not of a mass resignation of ministers, but of the procuring of a legislature more sympathetic to the ministers then in place. In September 1816, the king dissolved the chamber and thus secured a measure of harmony between his ministers and the elected representatives. As the chambre introuvable passed into history, the meaning of the epoch had yet to be defined for the future of the constitutional experiment. Ministerial solidarity was certainly one of the complex practices to which those in public life had to adjust, yet there were others of at least equal importance. One of these was the need for some working relationship between a ministry chosen by the king and a chamber chosen by the electorate. Resolution of this two-way pull by acceding to the will of the elected majority would constitute what came to be known, especially in the parlance of British colonies, as responsible government. The phrase was never prominent in British domestic politics, and the practice to which it referred was a rather recent acquisition and remained surrounded by moot points. The incident of 10 April demonstrated how complex the rules of the game were and how they might conflict, for only by declaring his private reservations about government policy could the minister ally himself with the majority in the Chambre des députés. The minister who figured in these important events was Vincent-Marie Viénot, comte de Vaublanc (1756–1845). He was not inexperienced in the politics of legislatures, for he had appeared before the Estates General of 1789 as part of a delegation and had served as a member of three subsequent bodies – the Legislative Assembly of 1791–92, the Conseil de 500 under the Directory, and the Corps législatif during the Consulate. For a decade he had supported the cause of Napoleon as an imperial prefect of the department of Bouches-du-Rhône, and he continued, for a time, in that 2 See Jean Barbey, Le Conseil des ministres sous la Restauration (Paris, 1936), 145; Jean Mayoux, La Solidarité ministérielle … (Paris, 1918), 27; and Marcel Navarre, La Chambre introuvable (Paris, 1911), 55.

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capacity under the restored Bourbons. At the time of his indiscretion of 1816, he had not been a member of the legislature, for the Charter made provision for ministers speaking in either chamber without their acquiring membership. Vaublanc’s disgrace as a minister was followed by his election to the lower house in 1820 as a deputy from Calvados. There he sat until 1827 and was several times chosen as one of the vice-presidents of the chamber.3 Few public figures occupied prominent situations over a longer period or through more different regimes. As early as 1792, he had been deemed by some observers the leader of the royalists in the assembly, and it seems to have been his intervention in August of that year that saved Lafayette from condemnation by the left-wing deputies. On the eve of the Revolution of 1830, Vaublanc’s was a name that still figured in the press as a possible minister. Talleyrand is said to have been one of those who thought that recalling Vaublanc to office might strengthen the fortunes of the monarchy late in the reign of Charles X. Indeed, in July 1830, he was one of those summoned to deliberate at the Conseil d’État.4 By then, of course, the cause of the king and his ministers was all but lost. Following the July Revolution, Vaublanc continued to be an occasional contributor to the press in his capacity as a legitimist not reconciled to the reign of Louis-Philippe. Sometimes he wrote on the practices and style that he sought for French politics, especially on the topic of party and its place in public life. This theme was the hallmark of his political thought. Also significant in Vaublanc’s later years were his efforts to proclaim and justify the principles that had guided his political career. This was the work of six volumes of recollections; his Mémoires, in four volumes; and his twovolume Souvenirs, filled with lively observation and confident assertion accompanied by a wealth of biographical detail not otherwise available. Vaublanc had, for much of his career, been a royalist of the staunchest sort, and his speeches, even of the revolutionary era, breathe his partisan commitments. His self-vindication of the 1830s nevertheless tended to read his current understanding of issues back into the 1790s and so to suggest a rather 3 Biographical information is to be found in the standard sources Michaud, Biographie universelle, 43:10–16; Firmin Didot, Biographie générale, vol. 45, cols 1014–19; Biographie des hommes vivants (Paris, 1819), 5:489–92; [P.-F-.N. Massey de Tyronne], Biographie des députés de la chambre septenniale de 1824 à 1830 (Bruxelles, 1826), 440– 3; and in Auguste Boullée, Biographies contemporaines (Paris, 1863), 1:234–53. F. Barrière, author of the introduction to a late edition of Vaublanc’s Mémoires, offered only minimal details, though clearly he had known his subject. See Bibliothèque des mémoires relatifs à l’histoire de la France … (Paris, 1857), 13:iii–xvi. 4 See Le Constitutionnel, no. 304 (1 Nov. 1829); no. 328 (24 Nov. 1829); La Quotidienne, no. 340 (6 Dec. 1829); and Boullée, Biographies, 250–1.

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more consistent record of thought and action than can be reconciled with the facts. It is clear, however, when one consults his thoughts of 1792 on ministerial responsibility or those of 1797 regarding political meetings, that he was already contemplating how best to combine order with some measure of competition. It is no less true, however, that he was ready to accommodate himself to some of the prejudices of the time and place. His anglophile views of the Restoration were probably a more recent acquisition. An anonymous critique of the draft constitution of 1795, now with reasonable probability deemed the work of Vaublanc, makes clear the limits of these leanings. When that document offered a lesson on the nature of a true balance of power, his apparent approval of British arrangements stopped well short of recommending, at the time, that sort of party struggle that others had learned to respect. Already, however, the pamphlet testified to his large intellectual debt to Montesquieu. Nor would a reading of his work on FrenchBritish rivalry lead one to suppose that the author would become a champion of the British system of politics. After the manner of most political writing tolerated in Napoleonic France, it was circumspect and rather dull.5 When Vaublanc tells us, as he often does, that his political ideals were formed out of the revolutionary experience, we have little alternative but to believe him. Certainly, the commitment to a parliamentary model, once made, remained reasonably firm. The charge often made against the ultras – viz., that their loyalty to the practices of representative or parliamentary government was a fleetingly brief flag of convenience in 1815–16 – cannot apply to Vaublanc. Whereas his later years do find him expressing regret that the constitutional experiment had foundered on the imperfections of the people and the times, his grumbling encompassed chiefly the French use of borrowed institutions and left the underlying principles unscathed. A lesson presumably learned in the assemblies of the Revolution was that to be less than resolute in pursuit of one’s cause was the height of folly. Vaublanc records his pride in being recognized as a sturdy warrior in the king’s cause, as when the Girondin Ducos once said to him that, unlike some others, he was free and voted just as he chose. Of course, Vaublanc had not always said exactly what he thought, for the bluff, soldierly manner that he affected was quite consistent with artful technique, as when he invoked Rousseau in support of his arguments against the Left. Less gleeful was his recollection of the embarrassment of having to mutter the words that disavowed his political loyalties as the price of a seat in the Conseil de 5 [Vaublanc], Réflexions sur le plan de constitution presenté par des onze (Paris, [1795]), 29, 31; and Vaublanc, Rivauté de la France et de l’Angleterre (Paris, 1804). The first of these has sometimes been credited to Louis-Philippe, comte de Ségur, although Vaublanc’s memoirs proclaim it as his.

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500. Such transparent evasions were commonplace but were painful for Vaublanc. There is also some question as to what precisely his true sentiments were on first joining the Legislative Assembly. In November 1791, he was elected president of that body, and in this capacity he entered rather fully into the mood of the moment in suggesting to his colleagues that a deputation that he had led to the king had bent the royal will before that of the assembly. The same imperious tone informed a comment about the princes who had gone abroad. Finally, there was a revolutionary note in some remarks that Vaublanc made in the name of the committee of public instruction in January 1792. Since the courage that he later displayed can hardly have been a quality previously absent, it would appear either that his royalist loyalties did indeed harden during the grim days of 1792 or else, as he later argued, that he had cunningly pursued the strategy of seeming sympathetic to revolutionary sentiment the better to guide it into harmless channels. It remains true that such lapses from grace stand out in a career dedicated to forthrightness and political consistency as guiding principles. Even an unsympathetic modern critic has, in fact, mustered rather little evidence of other than some calculated silences.6 In the search for political weathercocks, a favourite game of the Restoration, Vaublanc was not spared, and although more innocent than many others, he had earned some rebukes. When Vaublanc’s political enemies eagerly sought to dredge up his past, they tended to insinuate, with documentation drawn from Le Moniteur of the Revolution, that his militant royalism was by way of compensation for past transgressions. These efforts to discredit him pursued him into retirement and greeted his later return to public life. Even Benjamin Constant, not himself free of such suspicions, tried his hand at this game.7 Vaublanc was, by contrast, proud of his four proscriptions during the Revolution, including one by the commune of Paris, one by the Committee of Public Safety, a death sentence imposed by the Convention for his role in 13 vendémiaire, and his banishment by the Directory on the occasion of 18 fructidor.8 6 See Pierette Girault de Coursar, “Mémorialiste … comme menteur: I Le comte de Vaublanc,” Découverte: Bulletin trimenstriel du comité pour l’étude de Louis XVI et de son procès 8 (Jan. 1975): 9–20. This serial, mimeographed rather than printed, is to be found in the Bibliothèque nationale in Paris. 7 Boullée, Biographie, 235–7; [Louis Cauchois-Lemaire et al.], “Notes pour servir à la biographie de plusiers hommes monarchiques,” Bibliothèque historique 7, [no. 2] (April 1819): 77–81; and “Fragmens pour servir à la biographie d’hommes monarchiques,” ibid., 11, [no. 3] (Nov. 1819): 108–11. For the exchange with Constant, see AP 31 (14 April 1821): 7–10. 8 Vaublanc, Mémoires sur la Révolution de France, et recherches sur les causes qui on amené la Révolution de 1789 et celles qui l’ont suivie, 4 vols (Paris, 1833), 1:298, 361–2; 2:375.

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For all that, intimations that his loyalties were easily sloughed off continued through his career as a deputy. Indeed, Chateaubriand’s wife never forgave Vaublanc the occasion when, in republican fashion, he had kept on his hat in the presence of Louis XVI. Almost four decades after the event, the memory lingered.9 These charges all related to the one brief period of a few months and found no general support in a nature that seems to have been imprudently bellicose rather than devious. Had he not, however, chosen his ground for battle with some care, he would hardly have survived to fight another day. The persistent reflections upon the ways of legislative bodies offered ample occasion to revisit his personal triumphs. A certain vanity was part of Vaublanc’s nature, and critics of his political views were inclined to explain them in light of that tendency. A case in point is the story of his presenting himself, while minister, as the ideal model for an equestrian statue of Henri IV. Recollections of the time are full of vignettes that illustrate exaggerated behaviour that provoked nothing worse than mirth. A delightful picture of his blustering retreat from office recounts his balm for injured pride in the insistence that no fewer than five others would be needed to replace him.10 Yet there was more to his position than mere self-affirmation, and his strong invocation of loyalty and of leadership lent the substance to an understanding of party in constitutional rule that regrettably was too rare among those of his political stripe. Although Vaublanc was not spared the need to account for his indiscretions during the Revolution, he can be judged largely innocent of using the years of retirement from public life to impose a consistent political creed on his years of activity during the Restoration. The suspicion that this could have happened would follow naturally from the fact that his most copious set of political opinions came after the years of activity. Fortunately, however, Vaublanc published a pamphlet of forty-five pages, Histoire du gouvernement représentatif en France, in February 1820, and this, in epitome, offers the same positions as do his more ample thoughts of the 1830s. Published at the time of the assassination of the duc de Berry (the text makes reference to that event), Vaublanc’s effort to combine theoretical insight and the pursuit of political advantage appears to have been ignored amidst the strong feelings unleashed by the event of 13 February. When the daily press was finally able to put aside the pious generalities of the sort that the assassination had made mandatory, only an enthusiastic 9 See A. Lagarde, Biographie des ministres depuis la Restauration (Paris, 1826), 106–8; and Les Cahiers de Madame de Chateaubriand, ed. J. Ladreit de Lacherrière (Paris, 1909), 198, 210, 239. 10 A. de Vaulabelle, Histoire des deux Restaurations (Paris, 1874), 5:84–5; and Memoirs of the comtesse de Boigne (1815–1819), ed. Charles Nicoulloud (London, 1907), 2:120.

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reception by Claude-Joseph, baron Trouvé, in Chateaubriand’s Conservateur11 and one in the royalist Drapeau blanc took notice of the pamphlet some three weeks after its publication. In the latter, the unsigned column devoted to praise of the pamphlet offered an insightful analysis of the need to bring mores into accord with institutions. It also paid the author the gracious compliment of regretting his absence from public life. Some two and a half years later, in 1822, the same paper again acclaimed the work and announced that it was about to be reprinted as part of a collection called Mélanges politiques deserving of rescue from oblivion.12 That particular reprinting seems, however, never to have taken place, but oddly enough it had already been rescued by the publisher Dutot, who, it seems, had brought out a reprint, apparently unchanged, earlier that year.13 There is also a publication, dating from 1830 and hitherto unidentified, that serves to document the way in which the opinions that figure both in the pamphlet and in the autobiographical publications were still avowed as the July Revolution drew near. This anonymous pamphlet of but eight pages was reprinted from the newspaper in Lille to which Vaublanc sometimes contributed. The message – to the effect that principles must be public, not secret, and that common sentiments must necessarily entail fidelity to individuals and the acceptance of leadership in political parties – makes his authorship a virtual certainty. These were the characteristic positions on Vaublanc’s political compass. The text even contains examples, including expressions of contempt for the intrigue favoured by Catherine de Medici and positive precedents cited from British practice, that would later figure in his reminiscences.14 The continued presence at this time of Vaublanc’s commitment to a constitutional struggle between parties is especially important because that same month of February 1830 saw the uproar associated with a small book by Antoine Madrolle in which that ultra argued for a way out of the constitutional impasse that then existed between Charles X, unwilling to give up 11 Claude-Joseph, baron Trouvé, Le Conservateur 6, no. 77 (March 1820): 552–7. In the manner of some other publications, the issues or deliveries into which the volumes were divided were numbered, not within each volume, but from the first issue. 12 Drapeau blanc, no. 66 (6 March 1820); no. 232 (20 Aug. 1822). 13 See Urbain Guilbert’s enthusiastic review in the Journal des débats, 21 May 1822. The original publisher had been Lenormant. Despite the evidence afforded by the review, no copy of the new edition has come to light. A similar absence from the weekly lists of publications suggests that the police may have seized most copies. 14 Anon., Sur les partis et les factions, extrait du Journal du Nord, 2–3 fév. 1830 (Lille, n.d.), 1, 4–5. He records other submissions to that newspaper, one from 1829, but not this one. See Vaublanc, Mémoires, 4:206.

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the Polignac ministry, and a majority in the chamber that refused to cooperate with the ministers. In an argument that rehearsed the various expedients for providing the king with a parliamentary majority that would be less threatening to royal interests, Madrolle cited various schemes, including that of Vaublanc in 1816, for framing an adequate electoral law. Then, injudiciously, he suggested that some departure from the Charte might be necessary in order to settle matters.15 Madrolle was notorious for his often superfluous offering of citations to the publications of others, and he noted a good number of prominent figures, not all of them of the Right, who saw difficulties with existing institutions. Apart from the egregious invitation to unconstitutionality, the document was an able presentation of the constitutional gridlock that would bring down the regime. Rather awkwardly for Vaublanc, he was one of four royalists – including Frénilly, de Salaberry, and the less well known Alexandre de Guillemin – who endorsed Madrolle’s statement at the end of the text. He and the others, in a state of evident chagrin, later withdrew their endorsement. A measure of Vaublanc’s reputation for probity lies in the fact that one royalist publication went out of its way to deny (incorrectly, as it happens) that he could possibly have lent his name to such an undertaking.16 But Vaublanc’s partisanship was strong, and as seen in the original article in the Journal du Nord, he was hostile to intrigue and any tendency to evasion as to one’s true sentiments. Direct confrontation was not, to all appearances, on his list of political faults to be avoided. th e f r e nc h a n d l eg i s lat iv e b o di e s Vaublanc’s experiences as a representative in four different regimes left him with a stock of prejudices regarding the ways of French institutions. Works treating the history and nature of representative bodies were rather new in French experience, but they were not uncommon in the Restoration,17 and their number included a major document by his friend the 15 Antoine Madrolle et al., Question d’état. Mémoire au conseil du roi (Paris, [1830]), 85n, 117n. 16 Le Conservateur de la Restauration 8 (30 March 1830): 212. Individual issues of this weekly were neither numbered nor, in the early volumes, dated. The paper is the same described by Nora E. Hudson as Le Conservateur de 1828. See “The Circulation of the Ultra-Royalist Press under the French Restoration,” English Historical Review 49 (1934): 687–97 at 695. 17 See, for example, Félix Bodin, Études historiques et politiques sur les assemblées représentatives (Paris, 1823); and Antoine Madrolle, Histoire des assemblées délibérantes … (Paris, [1829]).

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comte de Frénilly, of whom more later. Vaublanc’s piquant observation, however, allied to bold generalization, a combination reminiscent of the Cardinal de Retz in the seventeenth century, offered stronger fare than most. Whereas Retz had directed his ironical gaze upon the doings of the parlement of Paris and had remarked upon the degree to which the magistrates were subject, like all other mortals, to manipulation, Vaublanc focused on the series of experiments in representation since 1789. Sharing Retz’s eye for human foibles, Vaublanc constantly lamented the apparent inaptness of the French for the sort of politics introduced by the Revolution. This was a theme endorsed by people on the Right, Madrolle, for instance, who regretted all concessions to a new age. In Vaublanc’s position there was, by contrast, a marked ambivalence. True, he insisted as did others that the French were poorly equipped to secure good results from new institutions, but to his eloquent dispraise of the ways of his countrymen he added an impressive understanding of the form of government. His was no anti-parliamentary tirade of the sort familiar to those with a nostalgic fondness for pre-revolutionary times. Primarily, it would seem, the French malady was one of national style. Absent in the French character as Vaublanc presented it was that sort of courage that could cope with the prospect of future ruin by taking energetic action to ward it off. Not that Vaublanc wished to deny to his countrymen their due share of physical valour; nor was he ungenerous in acknowledging a courage of resignation that lent steadfastness to a doomed cause. The thing needful, however, was an ability to respond in resourceful fashion to dangers not yet fully manifest. From Retz’s retrospection of the 1670s, Vaublanc borrowed the insight that fear dominated much of public life. Further dicta drawn from Retz’s dealings with the parlement of the Fronde spoke to a process of reduction to the lowest common denominator that turned a group of accomplished men into mere peuple.18 Contrary to Retz’s argument that suggested a failing of public bodies in general, Vaublanc had turned the emphasis against the behaviour found specifically in French assemblies. He thus found the key to the alleged passivity of the legislators of the Revolution in a propensity that was a national fault but not a universal human trait. The diagnosis of revolutionary assemblies that pointed to the terrible power exercised by resolute minorities had already been documented. Some few wrote later to try to excuse their compliance, and from a strongly leftish position, Henri-Baptiste Grégoire, a revolutionary who became a deputy in the Restoration, coolly explained how twelve or fifteen could 18 Retz, Oeuvres, 9 vols (Paris, 1872–87), 2:73, 3:270; and Vaublanc, Mémoires, 1:293, 315, 424.

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dominate those huge legislative bodies that had existed until the time of the Directory.19 The paucity of such documents must surely be explained by the fact that some had unfairly benefited from such bullying tactics and others, by knuckling under, had deprived themselves of any perspective from which they might, with decorum, pass judgment. His own generally honourable behaviour lent credibility to Vaublanc’s musings on the failings of those who sought to stem the tide of revolution. Single-minded and ruthless in prosecuting their designs, the forces of the revolutionary Left, known indiscriminately to Vaublanc as Jacobins, were without the fatal weakness of the royalists or honnêtes gens. What distinguished the losers from the ultimate winners was the marked reluctance of the former, without access to supportive mobs in the streets, to state their views with force and candour. By seeking to soften the differences apparent in the legislature, by striving to be ingratiating, the Right and the moderates had grown ever weaker. There developed a pusillanimous incapacity to do other than temporize or retreat before aggressive behaviour. In this way, a clear majority of the royalists had been reduced to abject silence, and thus, morally disarmed, they suffered the desertion of the plain, those who had initially attempted to remain neutral between the contending sides. Those seeking to halt the Revolution had thus played Judas with their true sentiments, and failing to placate their enemies, they had instead inflamed and strengthened them. The Jacobins, he averred, learned to exploit the weakness of insecure legislators by making the already open mode of voting yet more nerve-wracking by calling for votes by roll call. This served further to intimidate those who, granted the obscurity of a less conspicuous vote, might have been firmer. Vaublanc was no friend to a secret vote for legislators, but he recognized the costs imposed by the system of the Revolution.20 The desideratum sought by Vaublanc appears to have owed its name to a comment by Bonaparte in 1809, but it was the Restoration that made it a part of political language. “Civil courage” was the more subtle civilian equivalent of the virtue most often attributed to the effective warrior. The expression appears in Le Censeur européen, edited by Comte and Dunoyer, as early as 1817 and later gained prominence in various writings of Joseph Fiévée around the year 1820. Later, during a debate in the chamber, Basterrèche, a deputy of the Left, had occasion to lament the rarity of le courage civil, a quality that he deemed more valuable than the military variety. Vaublanc warmly endorsed the sentiment,21 although he seems not to

19 Mémoires de Grégoire, ancien évêque de Blois (Paris, 1840), 1:381. 20 Vaublanc, Mémoires, 1:287–8. 21 AP 43 (8 Feb. 1825): 266, 269–70.

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have incorporated the expression into his own repertoire. The nature and merits of courage civile soon became a popular topic for academic essayists. The weakness of which Vaublanc complained had, of course, its decent drapery, and there were more ways than one to practise denial. Of the ventrus, whose want of firmness was much assailed by others, Vaublanc said nothing. He was much more interested in the means whereby royalists in the revolutionary assemblies had been moved, time and again, to betray their beliefs from fear of exposure to the threats of their enemies of the Left or to intimidation by the revolutionary mob. Common and costly as such faults had been, Vaublanc strove to read a lesson by reference to practices that might readily be found among men of all persuasions and in ordinary times as well as those of crisis. He thus spread wide his net to capture the folkways of those whose shortcomings had been less exposed to condemnation. Vaublanc’s quarry were not so much the evasions of those who tried to become invisible as the tactics employed by anxious or devious men who remained in the chamber and even called attention to themselves in mounting the tribune. Here lay the explanation for the metaphysical quality of so much French political discourse. According to Vaublanc, the difficult business of choosing sides was circumvented by those who simply masked their personal shortcomings by resort to cloudy affirmations of commitment to the public good. Alternatively, wavering spirits who feared to offend applauded subtle distinctions that blurred the major divisions of opinion and so sloughed over the great choices that had to be made. Pride in one’s own creation exacerbated the condition, so that a conscience too delicate to accept guidance from others might find a pretext for a sort of neutrality by espousing views that were uniquely its own. Vaublanc would do much to illustrate this concern, for it touched on his own commitment to a partisanship that was not afraid of offending potential enemies because rooted in a connection to those of the same mind. By contrast, the damage owed to the combination of vanity and extreme individualism did as much as the craven mores of the past to prevent the formation of respectable alliances in politics. The very modes of speech-making that French practice tolerated were conducive to the faults already enumerated. Written speeches, not necessarily even the creation of the speaker, were friendly to unwelcome selfindulgence, and this aspect of political manners was unfavourably noted by others.22 Vaublanc abhorred this aspect of public life and was proud of his own well-known capacity for natural and reasonably clear exposition, unaided by notes. Even political opponents had positive things to say about 22 See, for example, “De la necessité d’exclure tout discours écrit dans les assemblées délibérantes” by ***, in Journal de Paris, no. 317 (12 Nov. 1816).

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his commanding presence and his sonorous voice. Trenchant in his explanation that no competent public speaker relied upon even such an invisible aid as memory, he was venomous in his contempt for that misunderstanding that had criticized him as a minister for not bothering to prepare formal discourses for the ears of the chamber. Rather, the speaker who truly commanded his brief was he whose understanding of the issue at hand made it a simple matter to improvise in ordering materials and in finding the exact language that did justice to the thought. In a speech of 1826, he made clear how wrong it was for his less articulate colleagues to speak of extemporaneous addresses, for this did not imply thoughts delivered without benefit of reflection. By using the tribune to make books, the French had impoverished their public life. As with all of his strictures on parliamentary procedure, Vaublanc was here concerned with creating the conditions for that set of practices that sustained the British House of Commons. In particular, he admired the way in which British conventions of speech-making were partial to the presence of parties within Parliament. There, according to his understanding, responsibility for putting an argument was wisely left to some five or six orators; meanwhile, those others who shared the same general orientation were left in a silence that could only advance the causes that they embraced. Among the silent, Vaublanc recorded, had been the great Newton. Very different were the French, who had directed the life of their assemblies towards theory rather than action. Consequently, they had denied the imperatives of partisanship and had becalmed the spirited exchanges of debate in an excess of idiosyncratic opinions, prepared in advance, and too often delivered by people with little talent for the task.23 Stories of legislators who strove to simulate a spent passion, days after the speech that had provoked it, illustrate the problem. Understandably, this estimate of his fellows was the sort of judgment that contributed to Vaublanc’s reputation for vanity. An admiration for British political practice was not, of course, uncommon amidst the Anglomania of the Restoration. Vaublanc’s, however, was not an undiscriminating reverence for all things British but was tightly focused upon those aspects of representative government that might communicate to his nation the excellences that belonged to British politics. As a student of Montesquieu, Vaublanc well appreciated that practices were rooted in a way of life with which they were congruent. Still, he sought to transplant certain practices – especially in the form of rules – in order that new habits might more readily appear. It was in this spirit that he hoped 23 Vaublanc, Mémoires, 3:476, 4:97; and AP 46 (20 Feb. 1826): 65–6. On Vaublanc as a speaker, see Mémoires du baron d’Haussez, ed. la duchesse d’Almazan (Paris, 1896), 1:177.

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that the French might emulate the British institution of the Speaker and supply that office with prerogatives for ordering the business of a chamber. To his strong feelings about the pattern of parliamentary oratory was added hostility to French use of the tribune as an encouragement to demagogic postures and other forms of self-indulgence. Instead, he sought revival of the practice of having members speak from their places, as had in fact been the case in the early Constituent Assembly. Vaublanc’s attachment to the Committee of the Whole as found at Westminster was similarly directed towards encouraging the use of procedures that entailed a minimum of flourish. Predictably, too, he was unhappy with the physical arrangements of French chambers. Vaublanc would not have been the first public man to regret a circular shape that made easy precisely that combination of political timidity and a penchant for paper-thin distinctions that he sought to banish, but while his complaint figures only in the Mémoires, he incorporated the observation, as most others did not, into a general understanding of the politics of his time. Neither was he unique in observing that French legislators were prone to speak in the absence of a motion that required the assembly to do anything. A regulation of August 1791, intended for the guidance of the Legislative Assembly, had had the same problem in view, and such criticisms of European legislatures continued to be heard in the twentieth century.24 Like many enemies of the Revolution, Vaublanc reserved the term “metaphysics” for a use of the mind that confounded the direct addressing of practical problems. Resolution, courage, and a certain transparency of character formed the elements of his prescription for managing crises. He knew of few political complaints for which the strong medicine distilled from his revolutionary experiences would not provide the specific. Suspicious of general maxims, such as the injunction always to move with one’s century,25 he approached public life with a wealth of anecdote and the occasional maxim tested by experience, but with little by way of the adhesive afforded by general ideas, systematically expounded. A John-Bullish attachment to hands-on effort emerges from his life as a prefect. Indeed, his memoirs read very much like numerous others left by the district officers of a later age. A sally directed at a minister who is alleged to have sought political order by writing twelve thousand letters was that, in writing a lot and in doing nil, this figure was a true product of the siècle des lumières. His own tendency to equate hours in the saddle with a prefect’s success – supported by a yet more alarming 24 Vaublanc, Mémoires, 4:82–5; Roger Bonnard, Les règlements des assemblées législatives de la France depuis 1789 (Paris, 1926), 132; and Herbert J. Spiro, Government by Constitution (New York, 1959), 132. 25 Vaublanc, Souvenirs (Paris, 1838), 1:488.

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claim that the reading of two letters from a prefect could reveal a fitness for this equestrian mode of administration – made him a figure of fun in some circles.26 His conviction that character allowed one to rise above circumstance was complemented by suggestions that most men were simply too weak to follow his precepts. It was not a formula calculated to endear him to his colleagues, although he chivalrously allowed that women, fortified by religion and motherhood, were made of sterner stuff. Were it all a matter of manly bluster, Vaublanc would not figure at all as a political thinker. But he had better to offer. Weakness might indeed be irremediable in the nature of individuals, but institutions that brought together like-minded people offered a sort of answer. Rising above their individual weakness, men of goodwill were no longer condemned to fall prey to the Jacobins of the world, for the secret that had allowed successive minorities to capture the Revolution – and to isolate and defeat waves of resistance that came too late and were unaware of their real strength – was simply the readiness to accept leadership in the political arena. With that insight, Vaublanc himself became a political theorist of sorts, one committed first to understanding and then to recommending the institution of party. pa r t y r e c o m m e n d e d ; o p p o s i t i o n e n d o r s e d When Vaublanc lamented irresolution in the ranks of the royalists, vanity at the tribune, and fear at the roll call, he was pointing to a widespread aversion to public attachments and the discipline that they demanded. The Jacobins, with their skilful organization, had been united in the assemblies of the Revolution and potent in the streets, especially through the use of political clubs and inflammatory writings. Against such techniques, gentlemen who took pride in acting independently were no match: “They staked their honour to be entirely independent, and to consult only their consciences; a banal expression behind which weak men always find refuge, and which absolves them of having that loyalty and that candour that attachment to a party exacts.”27 It was a message that emerged in most considered form in the Mémoires of old age, but the credo had already supplied the content of memos written to the future Charles X while Vaublanc was still a minister. Their substance, in turn, figured in his pamphlet Du gouvernement représentatif en France and was the leit-motif of a good number of his speeches in the 1820s. As the full record makes clear, it was not conscience 26 Vaublanc, Mémoires, 2:15; 3:97,153; and for the mirth provoked among political opponents, Histoire de mon temps: Mémoires du chancelier Pasquier, ed. M. le duc d’Audiffret-Pasquier (Paris, 1894), 4:2–3. 27 Vaublanc, Mémoires, 1:293.

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itself to which Vaublanc objected but its being invoked as a rationale for avoiding those party ties that offered the only true means of realizing political aims. It goes without saying that men of Vaublanc’s persuasion found the Jacobins of revolutionary days largely devoid of conscience, but it was their resolve, not their ruthlessness, that he recommended. Rather than spelling out the nature of party with any precision, Vaublanc was content to think in terms of some measure of “systematic organization” of those who shared a general orientation within legislative chambers. In support of this, he cited the law of Solon that insisted upon partisan commitment, not neutrality, during civil strife, and he often referred to a dictum of the great Condé about preparing to fight one’s enemy while that enemy was still distant. Yet the strategy seems to have differed little from Burke’s dictum that “when bad men combine the good must associate.” Certainly, the goal was party in the then familiar British sense of informal working arrangements among legislators, with little or no attention to the place of such arrangements in the larger society. This was the most complex form of continuing organization that was likely to emerge in that gathering of notables that the times made possible. Vaublanc, while still a minister, would have known of the evening gatherings of royalists held at the house of one Piet-Tardiveau, the deputy known as the hotelier of the monarchy, and of those of Doctrinaires in the rue Saint-Honoré. He would have been familiar, too, with the rudimentary extra-parliamentary meetings known during the time of the Directory. He and La Bourdonnaye, the prominent ultra, sponsored one such gathering in 1821. As one account has it, this was an attempt to check the influence of Villèle over the well-known royalist assembly hosted by Piet.28 How he reconciled this activity with a belief in following established leaders, he never bothered to explain. Vaublanc’s later injunctions did not descend to detail and were couched in terms of desirable results and the avoidance of past errors. Of the precise mechanism for political success he had little to say, save that its presence was meant to inform the daily proceedings of the Chamber of Deputies and to give meaning as well to all clauses of the Charte that spoke to relations between the ministers and the assembly and the responsibilities of the deputies. The most attractive and positive-sounding rendering of party spirit sounded suitably Aristotelian. It was, he wrote in retirement, founded on virtues and formed “political friendships.”29

28 Ibid., 4:102–3. Among the numerous accounts of Piet’s establishment, see Auguste, baron de Frénilly, Recollections … (1768–1828), ed. Arthur Chuquet (London, 1909), 313–14; and Victor Donatien de Musset-Pathay, 1828. Nouveaux mémoires secrets, pour servir à l’histoire de notre temps (Paris, 1829), 90–1. 29 Vaublanc, Mémoires, 4:150.

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By invoking the claims of conscience, Vaublanc had identified that appeal to high-mindedness that served, especially in France, to resist the call of party. One suspects, however, that characteristically French notions of honour and personal independence made an appeal to conscience especially attractive to the apprentice parliamentarians of the Restoration. To the believer in an inner beacon to govern conduct Vaublanc’s response was that no great good was likely to emerge from a series of disconnected efforts, however earnest intentions might be. The stage of a public career when conscience made the crucial difference was the very beginning when one properly allied oneself with certain firm principles. Even then, a personal vision of goodness only promised realization when men were prepared to act in concert. Conscience presided over the initial decision to pursue goals under the leadership of certain figures. Futile, however, to cavil at some later date just because the party chiefs ran counter to one’s preferences, as on some detail of a clause in a bill. It was pretentious to summon up conscience in support of an idiosyncratic path when that act threatened a general design that conscience had already endorsed. The dissenter was free, no doubt, to attempt to win over a party’s leaders, but if that failed, the sacrifice had not been one of conscience, but simply of opinion. Conscience was implicated only in large designs, not in details. Of course, were leaders to desert those aims that had united a party in the first place, one was well advised – frankly and in public – to disavow allegiance, as had Edmund Burke in his famous break with the party of Fox. Thus went Vaublanc’s pamphlet of 1820.30 Clearly, his return to public life took place under a banner that set out the code of conduct of a deputy as Vaublanc understood it. It is testimony to his somewhat militaristic understanding of leadership that it never seems to have occurred to him that leaders who betrayed the principles of a party might themselves be drummed out. Neither might he have been comfortable fitting his own efforts to undermine Villèle into his general doctrine. Party emerged in Vaublanc’s code as the cure for a record of futility on the part of those royalists who represented, to his mind, the best in the national tradition. Little wonder, then, that at a time when there was no basis in French practice to sustain a clash of parties on the British model, he concentrated upon those elements in French political mores that rendered new institutions essential. Fear, as displayed in revolutionary assemblies, and the pretext of conscience were the most obvious targets. Yet there were other dimensions of the problem that made clear how deeply rooted it was. A condition that seemingly paralleled the self-indulgence of parliamentary speechmaking was the petty egoism that discouraged sinking differences in a noble 30 [Vaublanc], Du gouvernement représentatif en France (Paris, 1820), 37–40.

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cause. From this vantage point, the royalists of the Revolution emerge looking not so much timid as stiff-necked in their narrow loyalties. Vaublanc instanced the many branches of royalism that had flourished, in jealous competition, during the relative freedom of the Directory. His account of expatriate royalists who would rather remain exclusive and impotent than receive into their number those with whom they had once disagreed had many echoes in French self-analysis. One is reminded of the quip by the journalist Joseph Fiévée that each day’s arrivals in Coblentz were snubbed as collaborators and that the moral superiority of their accusers derived from their arrival as refugees one day earlier. This absence of unity was a disaster, argued Vaublanc, for had the royalists been arrayed under effective leaders, they might well have restored the monarchy through an agreement with Bonaparte.31 The further reaches of that unclubbability that boded ill for party lay in a French propensity for intrigue rather than for loyalties openly avowed. Vaublanc, with his reputation for indiscretion, was especially prominent in voicing the complaint, and it is one that commended itself – sometimes against the Left, sometimes against the Right – to later commentators whose own experiences led them to the same conclusion. Contemporaries who felt the same also employed Vaublanc as a text.32 Vaublanc’s prescription for political health made him more prone to perceive the disease of unsuitability for party politics in the royalists than in others. Among the Jacobins, he recognized the presence of a terrible virtue that had led to their successes. By contrast, he roundly condemned the royalists of the Revolution for their disingenuous behaviour on major issues, such as the merits of the constitution of 1791 or the scheme to have Lafayette march upon Paris. The argument also suggested that the more acceptable the views of a group, the less appropriate their conduct seemed to be. Traces of the affliction were evident among some of the Girondins, as when Vaublanc sensed that the orator Vergniaud was speaking contrary to his true opinion or that Condorcet was ever fearful, incapable of looking others in the eye, and afflicted with an embarrassed air. Even the most ruthless of the king’s enemies, he concluded, had at times suffered lapses in their audacity.33 This observation allowed him to shift the focus of the argument from the timidity of the past to an atmosphere that haunted French politics still. The pervasiveness of an excessive subtlety invited the conclusion that, over 31 Vaublanc, Mémoires, 2:379, 410. 32 See Paul Thureau-Dangen, Le Parti libéral sous la Restauration (Paris, 1876), 87,107, 189; Prosper Duvergier de Hauranne, Histoire du gouvernement parlementaire en France, IV, 16; and Louis, chevalier de Sade, Des orateurs et des écrivains politiques dans un gouvernment représentatif (Paris, 1823), s.v. “conscience,” 209–11. 33 Vaublanc, Mémoires, 1:301, 304; 2:111.

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a period of forty years, there had been a great difference between what individuals ostensibly stood for and what they had said. During this time, the majority of all representative bodies thus consisted of people who maintained this tension between real and manifest sentiments.34 In the breadth of his condemnation, Vaublanc learned to transcend the partisan suspicions that the Left harboured disloyal feelings towards the Bourbons or that the Right was less than sincere in embracing representative institutions. Pessimism of this sort was what fed thoughts in retirement that perhaps the borrowed parliamentary institutions were just not viable in France, that possibly they were even in decline in the land of their birth. During the Restoration itself, however, Vaublanc had continued to strive to make the system work, and only occasionally during the July Monarchy did his faith seem to waver. The pamphlet on representative government was his most considered statement, but it was complemented by a number of speeches in the lower chamber that served to bring his theoretical lucubrations into the light of day and to the test of parliamentary usage. It had been the singular merit of his pamphlet to make explicit the connection between party loyalty and the business of a legislature; he had offered the judgment that the French would fail to master parliamentary institutions until such time as they saw the relation between the narrower loyalty and the broader claims of public duty. And what was this form of organization of which men were invited to learn? Vaublanc wrote: “I shall use the word party to denote a gathering of men who, in politics, have the same opinions and purposes. Thus the royalists themselves form a party.” The reference to the status of royalists as a party towers in significance over Vaublanc’s passable understanding of what sort of entity a party was. A virtue of his definition was that it underlined the respectable nature of such a bond, thus making it evident that party was not, as later he would put it, something that one should anathematize. What was crucial, however, was the extension of the designation to those who, on principle, were necessarily loyal to the king. Notoriously, at this time, some royalists continued to resist the role that was reserved for them. Vaublanc’s tendency to treat party as a panacea in politics and his manifest disappointment at the failure of the royalists of the 1790s to forge such an ideological instrument left him impatient with any talk by his contemporaries that might damage political union. Choosing nevertheless to seduce fellow royalists rather than lecture them about past failures, Vaublanc blandly bypassed the practical issue as to how one might best bridge differences among individuals with the mild assurance that, were royalists but firmly to unite, they would

34 Ibid., 1:194; and Vaublanc, Souvenirs, 1:321–3.

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be assured of forming the majority.35 That hardly said enough to convert the politically illiterate, and it seemed not sufficiently to address the real difficulties of convincing all those who cherished a loyalty to the Bourbons to support the same men and measures. Neither did his reassuring language penetrate to the heart of the problem of parties in representative government. This called for examination of how men of a common persuasion must make the initial concessions that allowed them to unite and then how they might learn to share a political space with others of a different orientation. Vaublanc was not likely to be unaware of the various situations into which political fortune might thrust a party. After all, he had begun the Restoration as a minister more in accord with the opposition than with his ministerial colleagues. Returning to the Palais-Bourbon in the elections late in 1820, he appears to have voted sometimes with the extreme Right as part of a contre-opposition that still felt free to oppose a government that was gradually taking on a right-wing complexion. Contrary to the strategy that Vaublanc hoped to see in a chamber cleanly divided into two parties and at odds as well with his rhetoric about unity, his own opposition was not of the unvarying variety but depended very much on the issues. As of the session of 1822, which saw a full-blown royalist ministry, Vaublanc was said to have voted more often with a centre position than with the far Right.36 For example, as rapporteur on the government’s scheme for extending the existing measures for censorship on the press, Vaublanc took a position that pleased neither the ministers nor the Left in opposition; yet, in general, he stoutly defended a free press. His positive record on the liberty of the press probably owed much to his linking it to the activity of parties.37 He was a persistent critic, too, of commercial policy, especially as it affected the colonies. Yet he normally lent his support to the budget, and he supported the new electoral law of 1824, a measure that he had favoured when himself a minister. The ministers seem to have sought to placate Vaublanc at the time of the elections that preceded the session of 1824. One sign of favour was his appointment as the presiding officer of an electoral college, and another came when his name was included on the ministerial list of candidates for vice-president of the chamber.38 It seems fair to say, however, that Vaublanc was closer to the throne, especially on the accession of Charles X, than to the ministers. Despite the signs of favour that seem to have done their work in detaching Vaublanc from the fierce opposition of the ultras 35 [Vaublanc], Du gouvernement représentatif, 5, 15. 36 P*** P*****, Biographie des députés composant la représentation nationale pendant les sessions de 1820 à 1822 (Paris, 1822), 38–40. 37 AP 32 (29 June 1821): 468; ibid. (7 July 1821): 617. 38 Alfred Nettement, Histoire de la Restauration (Paris, 1868), 6:599–600, 631.

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around de La Bourdonnaye and Delalot, he seems to have remained at odds with the chief minister even after moving away from the impatients, as Villèle’s royalist opponents were sometimes called. There were still periods of favour, and sometimes Vaublanc enjoyed the honour of supporting the king’s measures in the capacity of a commissaire du roi, as on the law of 1825 relating to the indemnity for émigrés. Although Villèle’s influence eventually cost him the confidence of Charles X, Vaublanc ended his career as legislator as a minister of state and a member of the Conseil supérieur du commerce et des colonies. Unfriendly observers among the popular biographies of deputies sometimes cast him in the role of a ministerial supporter, pure and simple,39 but that was a blatant misreading of his record, which shows that he had not been loath to dissent from the ministers and had sometimes agreed with their firmest opponents. From the outset of his return to public life, Vaublanc made it clear that he saw it as an arena dominated by a struggle between parties. The chamber that he joined in 1820 was divided into four different groupings, not an ideal setting for emulating British party politics. Those whose political views were akin to his sat as the contre-opposition to distinguish it from the opposition of the Left, known to others as libéraux and to Vaublanc as démocrates or, more truculently, as révolutionnaires. Judged in terms of the substance of its aims, this body of the Left was naturally one for which a staunch royalist could cherish no admiration. From the perspective, however, of one anxious to instruct his countrymen in the ways of political parties, the true evil resided rather in that ministerial cohort devoid of all party designation. As one of Vaublanc’s speeches put it, it was greatly regrettable that the style of British politics had made so little headway in France. It was the fault of the ministry to have put the chamber into disorder, and its most distressing aspect was that the chamber was not, in fact, split between two parties that were clearly differentiated one from the other, but contained a centre, itself divided. He attributed all the most positive attributes of partisanship to that ideal sort of division, regrettably absent in France, for he believed that, with room for idiosyncrasy and evasions removed, the best state of an assembly was one in which two groups of deputies were “frankly” and “loyally” divided in their opinions. This version combined his concerns both for some understanding shared by the two sides and for the presence of bonds that supplied cohesion to each. Returning to his animus against the ministerial tactics of 1821, he insisted that those ministers must appear at the head of one of the parties.40 39 See A. Lagarde, Nouvelle biographie pittoresque des députés (Paris, 1826), 151–2; and Louis-François Raban, Petite biographie des députés (Paris, 1826), 104. 40 AP 29 (11 April 1821): 712.

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Had he sought to reduce his major prescription for public life into a single sentence, this recommendation would have served the purpose admirably. His was then the moral and strategic situation of all who, as partisans, should will the triumph of their own party and subscribe to the dictum forged in the heat of the Revolution that those not with them were against them. At the same time, the abstract principle of legitimate and constitutional partisanship reserved the burden of odium for those who declined to tack their colours to the mast and not for a declared opposition. In fact, Vaublanc saw the ministerial phalanx as potential allies whose absence of character deserved odium because they betrayed a cause to which they belonged. Other of his texts made quite clear the variety of pretexts for withholding support – whether by way of excessive independence or a faint-hearted and unrealistic commitment to harmony and slogans about unity and the public good. The age had given birth to political formulae intended to support middling positions. It was Vaublanc’s business to insist that there were no such viable places and that, as the Mémoires would later echo, between two parties the only neutral ground was timidity.41 A variant image of the claim was his saying that there was no more a viable middle way between contending causes than there was a viable way between the opposites of fidelity and infidelity. When a pamphlet of the day introduced a commanding figure from the Right who excoriated neuters, or those who failed to display an allegiance, in such language,42 the writer was referring surely to Vaublanc, with the imaginary conversation supposedly set in the chamber of 1820, that to which he had been elected. From this vantage point, the plain of the early Revolution had been a monument to cowardice and self-deception; its membership had flattered themselves as statesmen and had brought to their cause only arrant failure. Vaublanc brought a yet more sinister interpretation of the strategy to confront the agents who had preyed on the fears of others, likening it to Catherine de Medici’s playing one faction off against another. Against any presumption to ignore the aims of contending parties, Vaublanc’s speech of 11 April had offered the notion that, in some sense, the two causes that ideally would be locked in contention were both “honourable,” for both could be seen as directing their efforts towards the same goal – the grounding of a stable constitutional monarchy – even as they followed different routes. It had taken Vaublanc little time after joining the chamber to enunciate his model for parliamentary politics. 41 Ibid., 29 (9 Jan. 1821): 572; and Vaublanc, Mémoires, 4:99. 42 ‘le franc Picard,’ Les Dîners: Ou, conversation politique entre quatre députés de différens côtés de la chambre (Paris, 1821), 44. This was published some months after the relevant speech.

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But it was not enough, though a step in the right direction, to affirm the ultimate respectability of the heirs of the Revolution. What was their role to be? Explicit acceptance of the British model committed its admirers to contemplating two opposed parties that advanced into office and withdrew from it as units. On this point, Vaublanc had committed himself from the time of his sympathy for the frustration of the chambre introuvable of 1815–16. In March 1816, he had written to Richelieu that the business of the ministry was to form, maintain, and lead the majority in the Chamber of Deputies. In England, one governed with the majority, and for France, that was the only course of action that offered success.43 That taken for granted, Vaublanc’s pragmatic approach was not to deal much further with the constitutional issue, but rather to make every effort to secure an acceptable majority in the chamber. A serene assurance that there was a secure royalist majority in the nation allowed Vaublanc to contemplate a party system that would yield only outcomes that were welcome to people of his persuasion. Thus, the prospect of the king’s being forced to accept ministers whom he deemed hostile to the monarchy need not be contemplated. Neither was there need to concern oneself with the dangerous proclivities of some figures among the liberals, for such views would never come to command the chamber. It is this faith that informed the rather patronizing assumption, never very closely examined, that the natural place for a party of the Left was in opposition, where it would do service as the watchdog of liberty. The major speech of April 1821 expressed this assumption, as did various passages in the Mémoires, such as where Vaublanc mused that the chamber of 1815–16 might have been the better for having a stronger voice that could have opposed that of the ultras.44 Several aspects of the situation of the early 1820s favoured this complacency, for the fortunes of the Right were again ascendant. It was no less true that, at this time, a generation learning to look to Britain for its model of government saw there a party of authority firmly in control and its Whig opponents in seemingly endless disarray. Even in writing his recollections in the 1830s, Vaublanc might take satisfaction that, at least, the republic had not been reinstated. Indeed, he almost certainly felt still that, with better management, the catastrophe of 1830 could have been averted.

43 Archives nationales: 239 Archives personnelles 2 [papers of Vaublanc], as cited in Nicholette F. Brown, “Ultra-Royalist Deputies in the Chambre introuvable, 1815– 1816” (PhD thesis, Duke University, Durham, 1969), fol. 170. That file has now been reclassified as F 1b. I. 176/6. However, it no longer contains the most interesting documents, and I have yet to gain access to them. 44 Vaublanc, Mémoires, 3:282, 471.

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Other elements of the British experience may also assist in explaining Vaublanc’s emphasis. Although he was probably unaware of the fact, he was, in considerable measure, returning to the argument that Walpole’s writers had employed in the 1730s. That first grudging acknowledgment of the place of party chose to recognize a “formed Opposition” as the price of acceptance of that ministerial organization that secured a parliamentary majority for the king’s measures. Thus, it was the men who had enjoyed power, not the disaffected, who had been instrumental in making conceptual space for constitutional opposition. But they did not do so with the expectation of ceding office to their tormentors. Rather, those in power were ready to tolerate the Opposition on the tacit understanding that its members would continue to be thwarted by royal and ministerial influence. Vaublanc’s gracious granting of a place to a party of opposition was at least in part a consequence of his trust that it would stick to its post without any hope of relief and leave governing to the more acceptable side. If the modern sensibility rebels at the thought of anything so unsubtle as party identity that was narrowly functional in terms of ruling or opposing those who ruled, one must say in Vaublanc’s defence that his was the task of convincing royalists that they should actually see themselves as one party of a field that included at least two. Given the Jacobin or Bonapartist roots of the Left, these people, too, offered unpromising ground for lessons in constitutional rule. Apparent imperfections in the argument may appear most defensible when placed in the context of the conventional view – then still known to British political discourse – that opposition was a measure warranted only by extreme circumstances and that one’s own virtuous inclinations were not in need of its corrective powers. Vaublanc offered something more subtle than this, and perhaps we may then forgive the presumption, still common among British Tories of that century, that theirs was naturally the party of government. As will soon be evident, there were others in France who proclaimed this doctrine more crudely than did Vaublanc. There was a further British influence at work here, and it too served to mitigate the arrogance of Vaublanc’s perspective. Both his pamphlet and some of the later speeches contemplated a process of civic education whereby all sides would learn modes of behaviour calculated to generate trust. This, he hoped, would banish those habits of evasion and intrigue that had invited partisans to think the worst of their opponents. The alternative style, offered as a mere potential, was one where the commitments of deputies were frankly acknowledged and pursued with what he was pleased to call an “honourable energy.”45 Part of the desired result was, it seems, a relation, never spelled out with any care, between deputies accepting leadership in 45 [Vaublanc], Du gouvernement représentatif, 11.

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parties and the development of a new civility. He insisted that the practice of making commitments “franchement pronouncés” and the complementary acceptance of leadership would bring finesse to political ambition and could be expected to moderate partisanship in an inoffensive direction. He wrote of how party leaders, accustomed to one another’s principles, could not fail to create a mutual respect among adversaries, for that was the reward of principle openly and consistently pursued. The animus, frequently expressed, against an assembly where everyone wished to have his say was here repeated in terms relevant to taming excesses of political feeling. A modern equivalent would be those theorists of political pluralism who relied upon elites to negotiate on behalf of ethnic or religious followings that had little by way of useful contact. The result of a healthy loyalty, conducted free of equivocation, would be that the parties would readily unite – as did those in Britain – in time of emergency. There was much to be gained from the secure knowledge that, as he oddly put it, the parliamentary struggle would not be carried to the point of crime.46 An attractive aspect of an understanding of public life conducted by cohesive parties was Vaublanc’s insistence that conflict openly conducted might more readily contribute to civility than to its opposite. He delighted in tales of political enemies who made the effort nonetheless to treat one another with regard; one such courtesy that he had received from the Bonapartist minister of the interior Carnot stuck in his memory. The more commonplace form of civility that he had in mind was that shared patriotism would unite opponents against a common threat.47 The fact that Vaublanc’s most complete statement of the ideal was reserved for a time when his royalists had become legitimists under an unwelcome king should not lead to the conclusion that he had only just learned the important lesson about civility. The promise of a political process at once more predictable and more wholesome certainly offered a corrective to a major imperfection in the politics of the Restoration. For both Left and Right, memories of the past were too vivid to yield readily to the polite conventions that inspired anglophiles. Yet these did hold out the prospect of better times for all, and perhaps even a state of affairs where power could safely be placed in the hands of either party, for this surely was the point of Vaublanc’s vision of party connections that were all honourable. The work of 1820 was certainly one of the high points of his conciliatory mood, and it coincided with the improvement of royalist fortunes. This, too, was probably the period at which 46 Ibid., 16–17. 47 Vaublanc, “Des égards que les partis se doivent muteullement,” Renovateur 2, no. 1 (July 1832): 213–18. Later, Vaublanc pointed especially to this piece as a presentation of his views. Vaublanc, Souvenirs, 2:206.

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Vaublanc’s personal stock stood at its highest, and he gained even the approval of the fastidious Fiévée, who in the early 1820s found little to please him.48 Still, later years brought more specific proposals for making the chamber more effective as a forum for diverse political loyalties. One issue that afforded Vaublanc the opportunity to express his views was that of ministerial responsibility. Never resolved during the Restoration, it remained for many a matter solely of legal accusation for which there were no agreed mechanisms in place. Vaublanc, by contrast, perceived the issue in terms less of punishment than of a continual monitoring of ministerial action that would secure compliance with the will of the majority in the chamber. This had been the theme of his first speech in 1821 following his election, at which time he had rebuked Pasquier for not speaking the language of representative government. He returned to the theme in 1823 and again tried to explain how inadequate an instrument was the search for criminal wrongdoing on the part of ministers, when all that the majority needed to pursue was a line of conduct in harmony with its sympathies.49 That view did not, of course, serve to offer the last word on a complex subject. Later in the same month, Vaublanc offered comments of a yet more constructive sort. The occasion was a debate on trade and financial policy, topics on which he came to enjoy a European reputation. Vaublanc was, by this time, becoming somewhat more sympathetic to the orientation of an administration under Villèle that was securely royalist, and part of his address was devoted to scolding those deputies whose niggling points of detail threatened to check the march of the government. At the same time, however, he was quite prepared to berate as well the ministers for their unwillingness to table documents sufficient to allow the chamber to make an informed judgment on policy. So he expressed regret over the absence of openness in explaining policy and of a readiness to use committees to investigate economic issues, both of which were part of the superior procedures in place at Westminster. The picture that he described was that of an ideal chamber that was strong vis-à-vis the ministers, who themselves were effective to all good purposes through the influence that they wielded over the majority. By all accounts, Villèle remained unmoved. The praise of party itself played no part in this speech, but present was a lesson on parliamentary manners. There Vaublanc rebuked those deputies who murmured at his expression of views but chose not to speak against them. But, 48 See page 244 below. Then Fiévée changed his mind and professed himself affronted that Vaublanc’s Mémoires had suggested that they had been agreed about major issues. Correspondance de Joseph Fiévée et de François Ferrier (1803–1837), ed. Étienne Hofmann (Berne, 1994), 201 (a letter of 1833). 49 AP 39 (15 March 1823): 664.

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he reminded them, they were not sent there by their constituents just to listen to those who shared their sentiments. Indeed, they had especially been sent to benefit from points of view of which they did not partake. Here again one encounters Vaublanc presenting arguments that had long ago accompanied the rise of British parties as a relatively accepted part of parliamentary life; issues were to be discussed in the presence of two sides, both of which possessed resources for furthering their designs. Because the issue at hand found Vaublanc comfortable with the substance of policy, he sounded more ministerial than usual. Still, he adhered to his belief that disagreement that was structured and conducted within a set of civil conventions was the defining quality of representative government.50 One of his published works on commerce echoed the substance of the speech. Again, he sought energy from a set of ministers supposedly ready to pursue goals in accord with his strong royalism. But ministers of whatever orientation had to earn their way. It emerged, then, that the majority had indeed to support the ministers, but this also imposed a cost on the ministers themselves. Deputies were required, according to Vaublanc, to give up their pose of independence and allow private conscience to yield to the greater cause. At the same time, that majority had to be both “instruite et persuadée” in its commitment. For the ministers to seek to bind deputies to their agenda on any other basis was unacceptable. Thus, his desired reforms touched the mores of both leaders and followers. For one so prone to urge a partisan agenda even at the expense of tender consciences, Vaublanc showed some sensitivity to the legitimate demands of deputies beset by a ministerial monopoly over information. On this point, a scholarly work on constitutional practice has recognized the novelty of his contribution within the French tradition.51 Even the liberal historian of parliamentary life in the Restoration paid tribute to his accomplishment here, although Duvergier de Hauranne appears to have had some difficulty, on the whole, in taking Vaublanc seriously.52 m i r a g e i n t h e we s t At a time of unprecedented French scrutiny of British government, Vaublanc must have had few equals in the specificity of the lessons 50 Ibid., 39 (31 March 1823): 30–7. 51 Vaublanc, Du commerce de la France (Paris, 1824), 218. An earlier work had argued the same; see Vaublanc, Du commerce de la France en 1820 et 1821 (Paris, 1822), 32–3. For academic recognition, see Alphonse Vigne, Ministres et assemblées délibérantes: Leurs rapports de 1789 à 1830 (Aix-en-Provence, 1909), 127–8; and Alain Laquièze, Les Origines du régime parlementaire en France (1814–1848) (Paris, 2002), 319–20. 52 Duvergier de Hauranne, Histoire du gouvernement parlementaire en France, 7:362.

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learned and their relevance for the sustaining of party politics. Most obviously, his was an understanding of politics rooted in the particular, concrete, and human side of the activity. Of the disembodied entities encouraged by revolutionary metaphysics, the French who adhered to his priorities had doubtless seen and heard enough. Drawing upon British language, familiar as early as the 1740s, of contrasting a focus on men with one on measures, he unhesitatingly chose the men. Measures, or “principles” as he called them, encouraged a sanctimonious preoccupation with one’s conscience. His preferred alternative of an acceptance of leaders offered a mingling among and mutual support of roughly similar views for the sake of obtaining some grand end to which all felt committed. So strong was his preference for loyalty to men that the fact of their ostensibly embodying principles sometimes slipped from view. Principle then became, to his mind, the excuse for demagogic declamation, and men were then to be accepted as the only focus of loyalty. Consequently, when political structures failed, the fault lay in the weakness of individuals. For the physiocrat Quesnay’s dictum that the laws must govern, he had only scorn, for such formulations missed the nature of reality. Support for this prejudice came from Charles James Fox and, in particular, his History of the Reign of James II.53 Vaublanc’s strictures on the dangers of a preoccupation with conscience were part of his political faith during the 1820s and did not have to be introduced with the reflections of old age. Louis, chevalier de Sade, whose reflections on parliamentary institutions had begun before the Revolution, was an enthusiastic admirer of Vaublanc and used the latter’s language to damn those political cowards who concealed their sentiments under the guise of conscience. Sade wrote more than did Vaublanc on these matters, and it is also possible that, with their being very much of one mind, some of Vaublanc’s later thoughts mirror Sade’s formulations.54 On the manner of French imitation of things British, Vaublanc was anything but complimentary. He thought that his countrymen had been maladroit throughout. The problem lay in a mode of borrowing that was at once too literal, even servile, and yet fatally inexact. He instanced the borrowing of trial by jury, liberty of the press, electoral procedures, and the establishment of a peerage as examples where the results had been less than satisfactory. On the last of these, his views were particularly

53 [Vaublanc], Du gouvernement représentatif, 33; and Vaublanc, Souvenirs, 2:120. 54 Sade, Préceptes politiques à l’usage d’une monarchie (Paris, 1822), 47, 62; and Sade, L’Art de faire des lois (Paris, 1820), s.v. “impartiaux” (144–6).

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strong.55 Although he did not trouble to spell out exactly in which respects all of these institutions had failed to please or how their appropriation might have been more successful, it was clear that Vaublanc sought both a firm grasp of their operation in Britain and then an adaptation suited to the character and circumstances of the French. Since the Restoration offers an example of a remarkable effort to transplant institutions, when there was neither time to study the original nor opportunity to tailor new ways to their environment, the charge cannot fail to sound uncharitable. When he cited the effort to create a peerage to supply some equivalent to the English aristocracy, he was probably not so much insensitive to the profound difficulty of the task as resentful that his own efforts to frame an electoral law had not been well understood. Vaublanc himself had been profoundly aware that what French government most needed was a form of aristocratic influence that would support a monarchy that was dangerously weak. To expect to supply the deficiency overnight was not reasonable, and indeed, the whole history of the period speaks to the extraordinary sensitivity of any effort to create privilege in the midst of a representative system. It may well be fair to credit the critic with more understanding of these issues than had most public men, but still his intolerance displays that arrogance of which Vaublanc’s enemies complained. All but lost in a sea of condemnation was his approval of an institution such as the legislative initiative of the French monarch, where he did not wish to emulate British practice. For all Vaublanc’s strictures on the awkwardness of French borrowings, it also needs to be said that his familiarity with the political culture of Britain was far from perfect. Painfully aware of how much the neighbour had benefited from slow evolution, he was sometimes innocent about the fact that this evolution had yet to yield what one might consider theoretically optimal results. Thus, Vaublanc shared with many of his countrymen the flattering misconception that British politics lived up to the vision of its most insightful commentators and that practices had already assumed some coherence. When, for instance, he offered sturdy British partisanship as a model worthy of imitation, he was fond of remarking that the House of Commons knew no “neuters” of the sort that dishonoured the Chamber of Deputies. Clearly, he had no first-hand appreciation of the difficulty with which party leaders sustained their positions. Not for such friendly admirers 55 AP 32 (7 July 1821): 616; Vaublanc, Mémoires, 4:117; and Vaublanc, Souvenirs, 2:10. On the general importance of this issue, see Sanford J. Gutman, “Justification for an Aristocracy during the French Restoration” (PhD thesis, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, 1976).

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was there an understanding of personal followings – one thinks here of the Grenvillites – that escaped party designations, of brute ministerial votes at the disposal of any ministry, or of independent members or those but mildly partisan who had to be cajoled to “come to town” for important divisions. British parties, as befitted models of excellence, dwelt in an imaginary realm that was largely removed from commonplace human failings. Interestingly, Vaublanc had French contemporaries who knew this better than he.56 Modern study of the growth of British political parties has long been bedevilled by tendencies to project theoretically elegant models on an untidy reality. The result has often been to magnify the salience of party. In truth, the British themselves did not then know much about the pattern of their parties, and scholars of the twentieth century continued to confess ignorance.57 Since he was in no position to consult what was not yet known, Vaublanc’s prescription for France adhered to the high road of a party system in which clear lines of division and a spontaneous loyalty were combined with a general patriotism that discouraged excesses of partisan zeal. It would, however, be too indulgent to overlook the fact that there were even fellow ultras who, unlike Vaublanc, had sought sanctuary in Britain and who, for all the limitations of the state of knowledge, had a more nuanced understanding of a complex reality. One of these was Jules, comte de Pradel, whose eloquent tribute to party spirit was set in a series of observations that admitted the presence of political neuters in Britain as well. Pradel knew his Hume, his Burke, his Lord John Russell – who had published his work on the English constitution in 1821 – and his Horace Walpole.58 Pradel himself wanted to write a treatise on British government, but regrettably, he seems never to have completed it. The sustenance that Vaublanc drew from British experience consisted largely of evidence that British politicians did believe in party and organized political life around it. His pamphlet on representative government 56 See, for instance, Maurice Rubichon, De l’Angleterre, 2nd ed. (Paris, 1816), 1:167, for a table that depicts the fragmentation of the existing membership of the Commons. Rubichon’s hostility to existing British institutions was no barrier to an accurate record. 57 Still valuable is D.E.D. Beales, “Parliamentary Parties and the Independent Member, 1810–1860,” in R. Robson, ed., Ideas and Institutions of Victorian Britain (London, 1967), 1–19. 58 [Pradel], Consultationes épistolaires (Paris, 1822), 232, 10, 242–3, 291. A letter, supposedly by a British member of Parliament, is a particularly good defence of party; see 289–96. An earlier but less effective treatise also argued for the importance of party and its inoffensive nature. See [Pradel], Des principes de la monarchie constitutionnelle et de leur application en France et en Angleterre (Paris, 1820), 68–9, 85.

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offered the formula for which he sought acceptance. It was well bulwarked with British precedent, but the central theme was transparent. A deliberative assembly, if it were to function successfully, needed leaders for its parties. Such leaders had to be openly recognized (avoués) and afforded real support by their followers, but a support that was voluntary in nature.59 Of interest is Vaublanc’s stress upon leadership; that there should be parties he took for granted, and the point was to ensure that they functioned as effective actors. Part of the process of national education entailed his insisting that not every interested coterie satisfied the understanding of what a party was. Party and faction were very different, and although Vaublanc neglected to offer formal definitions, he evidently saw political parties as committed, in a public way, to national purposes. Such a view was far from unique in French usage – and it seems to have predominated among public figures – but the general disrepute of admitted divisions, especially during the Napoleonic period, had done little to render the distinction universally familiar. Vaublanc saw Sir Robert Walpole as the great statesman of party, and to him – not to his son Horace Walpole, the true author – was attributed the dictum that the extinction of parties was the breeding ground of faction. Rarely did Vaublanc express anything but the greatest horror for faction; only in the context of that connivance of individuals that he called “intrigue” did he find a practice yet more base.60 Those British politicians to whose speeches Vaublanc turned to support the tribute to party included George Grenville, with his alarm at the possible passing of party names; John Robinson, manager of the elections of 1774 and 1780 on behalf of the treasury; and John William Ponsonby, chief whip of the Whigs prior to the great Reform Bill. Also summoned to the cause, and apparently Vaublanc’s favourite text for the purpose, was Castlereagh’s speech in praise of party differences. Castlereagh had disavowed the value of members of the House who were ostensibly “impartial” and proclaimed that party men were perfectly suitable to render the right decision, as on a committee. It was but necessary to secure the presence of both sides. Further comments that traced British freedom to party conflict, as well as references to a spirit of decorum that accompanied the conflict and rendered it innocuous, also assisted the case.61 A surprising omission from such hymns of praise is the name of Edmund Burke. Vaublanc did, indeed, mention his readiness to quit one public connection when he 59 [Vaublanc], Du gouvernement représentatif, 42. 60 Vaublanc, Des administrations provinciales et municipales (Paris, 1828), 55–6. 61 Vaublanc, Mémoires, 1:260, 291; 4:113, 150; no sources were offered for any of these remarks, but for Castlereagh, see Hansard 35 (7 Feb. 1817): cols 270–1. Vaublanc also cited this speech in the chamber. See AP 32 (29 June 1821): 468.

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could no longer agree with that company, and he saw Burke’s candid defence of the move as laudable. But of Burke, the more formal theorist of political ties, he seems to have said nothing. The record contains other gaps of a different sort. Apart from a famous defence of party such as Burke’s, there were others less well known even in the country of their birth. Richard Grenville, Lord Temple, is now assumed to be the author of an anonymous pamphlet of 1768 that can be interpreted as offering a more whole-hearted defence of party than anything that Burke wrote. A yet more powerful invocation of what exactly it meant to be bound by party ties was written from within the party that Burke had left. The author, Sir Robert Adair, has never been honoured as an early advocate of that institution, although he made his name as a diplomat.62 Of course, Vaublanc had in fact done rather well to discover as much supporting opinion as he did. Indeed, there were not great numbers of British oracles available to be cited upon the points of interest. It was part of the circumstances of a generation of public-spirited Frenchmen to be led to enquire with some care as to what institutions they needed and how to accommodate them to French mores. It must then have been difficult to bear in mind that the British models of political success were, to all appearances, unaware of how they had arrived at their current situation and none too interested in finding out. People such as Vaublanc were thus inclined to write, at times, as though the British nation, or at least the elite, had consciously chosen certain institutions and that these then enjoyed consensual support. Nothing, surely, could have been further from the truth. Language that was hostile to party was almost certainly more readily to be met with in Britain than were documents that endorsed it. Furthermore, most public men in Britain seem to have devoted no effort to scrutinizing the institution, even when their daily practice took it for granted. In tacitly assuming that the British had made up their minds, this enemy of metaphysics was revealing himself to be more of a rationalist than he would have cared to admit. Vaublanc’s admiration for a set of British practices was proclaimed in a style that was, in some respects, remarkably un-British. th e c r i me o f 1 8 1 6 i n c o n t e xt Vaublanc wrote, in mock horror, of his “crime impardonnable” of April 1816. Does some familiarity with his thought and its context explain the constitutional gaffe or pardon it? Posterity has been almost unanimous in 62 [Temple], A Letter to … the Duke of Grafton, on the Present Situation of Public Affairs [1768], extract in Gunn, Factions No More, 187–91; and [Adair], A Whig’s Apology for His Consistency (London, 1795).

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passing a rather severe judgment. As reported by the future chief minister Villèle, a royalist far more cautious and opportunistic than was the impulsive Vaublanc, the remarks of 10 April were not well received in the Chamber of Deputies. The daily press leaves a contrary impression in terms of the reaction of the ultra majority,63 but the newspapers made little effort to unravel the meaning of it all. At the very least, the words uttered at this time must have been unanticipated by the listeners. Decazes, who had disputed jurisdiction over internal security with Vaublanc, privately condemned the speech because he was a strong supporter of the notion that all ministers tell the same story. The hardy ministerialist Pasquier was far more personal in his disavowal and averred that had not naiveté, stupidity, and vanity played so large a part, Vaublanc’s act would have been treasonable.64 Even a strong royalist such as the comte de Ferrand later joined the chorus that proclaimed the inexcusability of the speech. Nevertheless, Vaublanc was then and remained a popular figure with the ultras, and Barante’s judgment that even the ultra-royalists tolerated his allegedly maladroit style with difficulty appears highly partisan.65 Recollections of the period, by no means all of a markedly royalist leaning, still leave evidence that Vaublanc’s bon mot at the time of his famous speech on the electoral law had found its mark. He had said that representative government had not been invented for the repose of ministers, and the expression became enshrined, at least for a time, in French political idiom. The press employed the turn of phrase, and echoes of it were not uncommon in the language of the chamber, as in the speeches of Royer-Collard. A pamphlet, apparently distributed gratis by the ministry of 1818, echoed Vaublanc’s dictum, although that ministry included none of his admirers. It was still being cited in a treatise from the end of the reign of Charles X that sought to capture the dynamics of French politics.66 Some of those who quoted 63 See the account in Le Constitutionnel, no. 102 (11 April 1816). The paper was no friend to Vaublanc’s party but recorded the “joy” that greeted his announcement. 64 Mémoires et correspondance du comte de Villèle (Paris, 1888–90), 2:34; Ernest Daudet, Louis XVIII et le duc Decazes, 1815–1820 (Paris, 1899), 135n; and Histoire de mon temps: Mémoires du chancelier Pasquier (Paris, 1893–1895), 4:89–90, 5:389. 65 Mémoires du comte Ferrand, ed. le viscomte de Broc (Paris, 1897), 168; and Souvenirs de baron de Barante, de l’académie française, 1782–1866, ed. Claude de Barante (Paris, 1892), 2:247–48. 66 See, for example, A. d’Egvilly, Mémoires historiques et politiques de 1820 à 1830 (Paris, 1830), viii; Gazette de France, no. 1121 (6 Oct. 1817); Anon., Du ministérielisme (Paris, 1818), 15; [F.-C.-H. Farcy], L’Esprit du ministère, depuis le commencement de la Restauration jusqu’à nos jours (Paris, 1818), 45; and Alphonse-Jacques Mahul, Tableau de la constitution politique de la monarchie de France selon la Charte (Paris, 1830), 360.

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Vaublanc were doubtless unaware of the source, for the dictum rapidly became the sort of on dit that passed as traditional wisdom. One contemporary who appears not to have been too gravely shocked by the whole affair was King Louis XVIII. He was rather partial to Vaublanc’s strong convictions, and we have the testimony of Richelieu’s sister that the king was only persuaded to part with his outspoken minister when the chief minister insisted that it would be a matter of choosing between his own services and those of Vaublanc. Pressure from the Russian ambassador, who disapproved of Vaublanc’s sympathy for the ultra deputies, cannot have aided his cause.67 When the fall from office came, Vaublanc remained still in the king’s good graces. Historians of the nineteenth century and after have offered negative comment even less nuanced than that of contemporaries. For these commentators, few of whom appear to have returned to the documents of the time, the incident stands simply as a failure to abide by one of the most salient conventions of that form of government to which the French were in the process of adapting their public life.68 Nor can a recent and sympathetic effort to rehabilitate Vaublanc’s reputation be supported in the claim that the derivative abuse of moderns was entirely the fault of Ernest Daudet’s hostile comments that date from the late nineteenth century.69 Vaublanc’s contemporaries contributed almost as many critics as admirers. The fact that two standard twentieth-century sources both erred as to the date of the incident can hardly have assisted modern understanding.70 One can perhaps allow that condemnations of Vaublanc that occur in more recent surveys of the period are probably just derivative of those 67 Marie Antoinette, marquise de Montcalm, Mon journal (1815–1818): Pendant le premier ministère de mon frère, ed. S. Charléty (Paris, 1936), 151; and Correspondance diplomatique du comte Pozzo di Borgo, ambassadeur de Russie … et du comte de Nesselrode (Paris, 1890), 294, 316. 68 Vaulabelle, Histoire, 5:84–5; Louis de Viel-Castel, Histoire de la Restauration (Paris, 1861), 5:601–4; Pierre Marx, L’Evolution du régime représentatif vers le régime parlementaire de 1814 à 1816 (Paris, 1929), 189; and Maria Sofia Coriulo, “La Chambre introuvable et les principes du régime parlementaire,” in Parliaments, Estates and Representation 1 (June 1981): 50–70 at 63. 69 Marcel Baudot, “Le Comte de Vaublanc ministre de l’intérieur au temps de la chambre introuvable: Un libéral obsédé par la passion du maintain de l’ordre,” in Actes du 103e Congrès national des sociétés savantes, Nancy-Metz 1978: Section d’histoire moderne et contemporaine (Paris, 1979), 2:349–62 at 349. See, too, Ernest Daudet, Histoire de la Restauration, 1814–1830 (Paris, 1882), 147. 70 See Joseph Barthélemy, L’Introduction du régime parlementaire en France sous Louis XVIII et Charles X (Paris, 1904), 139; and Paul Bastid, Les Institutions politiques de la monarchie parlementaire française (1814–1848) (Paris, 1954), 313.

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made earlier.71 A very interesting criticism and one that touches the basic dilemma of France in the Restoration comes from the individual who best combined the roles of an analytical observer and a political actor. Duvergier de Hauranne claimed that Vaublanc had misread the nature of the concord between the ministers and the majority of the House of Commons in that he had failed to see that the ministry emerged out of that majority. By contrast, Vaublanc had wished, in his bill on the electoral law, to create a majority to suit a ministry already in place.72 The objection, however, seems oblivious to the notorious fact that it was precisely the arrangements for finding a majority to support the king’s ministers on which the vaunted stability of the British system rested.73 Royal, ministerial, and aristocratic influence regularly brought a lower house into accord with the complexion of the ministry, at least in the long run. For where else lies the meaning of the defeat of the Coalition in the Britain of 1784? Vaublanc had indeed wished to lend more influence to royal and aristocratic interests and hoped, as did many after him, to achieve this through an electoral law that placed the greatest weight in the hands of property and the notables who held significant offices. His recollections make clear that he deemed this arrangement to be in the best tradition of parliamentary government; indeed, he likened it to Pitt’s scheme for adding two hundred county members.74 This was not, however, the source of his personal preoccupation during the session of 1815–16, when he chafed under the experience of belonging to a ministry whose direction was so little in accord with that of the chamber. The ultra demand was indeed for ministers who emerged from the chamber’s dominant leaning and did not, like the ministry of which he was an atypical member, seem estranged from that body. Thus, if his draft electoral law clashed with the judgment of his learned critic, his personal conduct was a response to the incongruence between the lower chamber and the ministers. It is revealing to reflect that the legislative project that Vaublanc sponsored had the same principle as those still being sought on the eve of the July Revolution. Such an effort to concoct an arrangement that had emerged in Britain over centuries and without discussion was probably doomed to failure, not to mention its conspicuous unfairness. Yet this was arguably the sort of constitutional device that might have averted the fatal clash of July 1830. 71 See, for example, M.D.R. Leys, Between Two Empires: A History of French Politicians and People between 1814 and 1848 (London and New York, 1955), 66. 72 Duvergier de Hauranne, Histoire du gouvernement parlementaire, 3:370. 73 As ministerial writers in France had long been aware. See Abel-François Villemain, Le Roi, la Charte, et la monarchie, 2nd ed. (Paris, [1817]), 22. 74 Vaublanc, Mémoires, 3:499, 536.

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The general purport of the legislative project on elections was to render more probable that long-term coincidence of views between ministers and representatives of the people as parliamentary government absolutely required. To be sure, Vaublanc admitted his disagreement with his colleagues on a detail of the legislation. This was, in fact, a breach of the etiquette that had developed in the British Parliament. Of greater import, however, was his basic difficulty with a ministry that was at odds with the Chamber of Deputies. The whole point about ministerial solidarity was that ministers typically entered and left office as a body (though there was scope for dropping individual members), and the point of this solidarity was because the king’s choice of ministry was expected to have some relation to the electoral returns and the sort of assembly that they yielded. To insist, then, on Vaublanc’s faux pas in isolation from the whole situation was to overlook the even more central constitutional abnormality of which he was complaining. Vaublanc’s gesture of loyalty to the ultra majority affirmed a principle at the very core of that skein of conventions that the French were trying to assimilate. In so doing, he had arguably violated a less central convention. The latter was one, as he triumphantly pointed out, that the British ministry had also violated when individuals declared themselves in favour of Catholic emancipation even though bound by cabinet decision not to pursue it. All this said, it is also true that Vaublanc sustained the effrontery of his initial outburst. Specifically, it appeared to contemporaries that when he visited the Luxembourg to place the proposed electoral law before the peers, he gave equal weight to the legislation proposed in the name of the king and that emanating from the lower chamber.75 Whatever relations were meant to obtain between the ministers and a majority, that posture in a minister does seem inappropriate. To those who knew him, Vaublanc was apparently a vivid presence. He had a leaning towards belles lettres, and the papers that recorded his speech of 10 April also carried reports of his election to the Académie royale des beaux-arts. To have been a minister of the interior who, while seemingly still in office, offered to the public some portion of his epic poem Le dernier des Césars suggests an intrepidity denied both to the general run of ministers of the interior and, even more so, to sensitive literary folk. The feeling that he had made partisan use of appointments to the academy did nothing to help his reputation among men of letters. Predictably, the poem attracted far more attention than its merits warranted, and most notice was cruelly critical. Five years after its first appearance and also after Vaublanc’s retreat from office, a review in a paper unsympathetic to ultra opinions devoted a page 75 Camille Rousset, Un Ministre de la Restauration: Le marquis de Clermont-Tonnerre (Paris, 1885), 142.

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and a half, of an issue of four pages, to the poem in order to beg Vaublanc to commune in future with the muses only for purposes of calming his passions. Never, it added merrily, must he show the results to a soul. Other comment recommended the performance of the ostensible tragedy at carnival time.76 It is of this literary escapade that Frénilly commented when he confessed a reluctance to read the work, and how having done so, managed in time to forgive his friend. Of the serious critical comment on his work as a minister, that by Joseph-Henri, comte Lainé, his successor at the ministry, certainly sounds devastating.77 One should recall, however, that Vaublanc and Lainé simply differed both on the beneficiaries of patronage and on the nature of the so-called royalist terror of the time. Balanced against such hostility is an ample record of testimony as to the undoubted probity and noble character of the man. It can be found in an anonymous pamphlet that dates from before his ministry and from memoirs written long afterwards. Writing of Vaublanc as he was in 1822, the comte de Salaberry lauded his verve and combativeness as that of a head still young. If there were any criticism entailed in the choice of words, it seems to have been of the friendliest sort. One admirer even suggested that the ultimate failure of the ruling branch of the Bourbon monarchy could be related to the impossibility of Vaublanc’s superiority being welcome in the first Richelieu ministry.78 In an era that favoured ministers who were grey administrators, Vaublanc was exceptional. It is an irony of history that Vaublanc is remembered, if at all, for illustrating the problem of introducing into France institutions that were unfamiliar and so subject to the sort of solecism that people have deemed the famous speech of 1816 to represent. Yet his major commitment was precisely to the cause of establishing in France a working parliamentary system, replete with parties such as existed in Britain. Recognition of his originality and tenacity in arguing the issue has been rare indeed.79 Vaublanc wrote 76 Le Constitutionnel, no. 291 (18 Oct. 1821); for similar comment at the time of its first appearance, see Le Nain jaune réfugié 3, [no. 10] (1816): 234; 3, [no. 13] (1816): 308. The epic poem is commonly credited to the year 1819, but this cannot explain a review plainly dating from the spring of 1816. 77 Émile de Perceval, Un Adversaire de Napoléon: Le Vte. de Lainé (Paris, 1926), 2:57, 15, 117. 78 Anon., De la direction des suffrages dans les colléges électoraux (n.p., [1815]), 13; Félix, vicomte de Conny, Lettre sur les affaires présentes (Paris, 1824), 26; Souvenirs politiques du comte de Salaberry sur la Restauration [ed. by his grandson] (Paris, 1900), 1:97; and [Louis-Joseph, comte Du Hamel], Quelques-unes des causes principales qui ont amené la Révolution de 1830 (Paris, 1831), 65. 79 But see Nora Hudson, Ultra-Royalism and the French Restoration (Cambridge, 1936), 184–5, 187–8.

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fondly of political friendships and saw parties and their activity as something honourable. This remained true when, as an embittered legitimist, he continued to urge respect for political opponents. It is to a considerable number of writers and speakers, both of the Right and of the Left, to whom the French owed an understanding of the constitutional mechanisms of representative government in the Restoration. Those in search of insights into the complementary institution of party must look as well to various sources, but here Vaublanc’s combination of strong partisanship and a commitment to civility stands high above the crowd. Yet the perversity of historical convention attaches to his memory sentiments foreign to his political goals. consorting with the enemy Vaublanc’s combination of a strong partisanship with a capacity to see beyond it was shared with his friend Auguste-François, comte de Frénilly (1768–1848). Younger than Vaublanc and managing to survive the Revolution with more of his family’s resources intact, Frénilly made a good marriage that spared him any necessity of coming to terms with Napoleon. He thus spent the years of the Empire as an increasingly prosperous gentleman farmer and authority on scientific agriculture. Until the second Restoration, Frénilly was known to the public, if at all, as a man of letters; he wrote plays and an opera and shared his friend’s taste for writing epic poetry. During the Hundred Days, which he spent in exile in England, he turned to writing about politics. Through the influence of the baron de Vitrolles, this activity eventually brought him into active politics. But first Frénilly was to write rather a lot about the subject, and indeed, the bulk of thoughts about government – including the Restoration’s most revealing work on legislative assemblies – had appeared five years before he was to gain a seat in the Chamber of Deputies. Frénilly was a reasonably careful and systematic thinker, and his works quite readily reveal the focus of concern that guided his various observations. He was, of course, a royalist and, as he noted in 1816, had been one since 1789. Left unsaid was the obvious point that, prior to that time, there was no such loyalty that could be distinguished from some other, for everyone ostensibly worshipped within the same faith. With the coming of a deep and lasting division in the nation, Frénilly chose his side and never left it. Of course, the same might be said of many aristocrats such as he, but the same facts could be interpreted with different emphases and some fled politics or rejected an assembly as the seat of struggle. For Vaublanc, the message came to be a sort of military metaphor that drew up forces for the peaceful competition within representative government and enjoined a closing of ranks to avoid the pitfalls of neutrality or the silence that came

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with fear. Frénilly reflected similar priorities in his firm insistence that the most compelling facts about French public life were those deep divisions that had become apparent in 1789, and it was his understanding that the new legislative bodies would reflect these divisions. His first political publication had as its aim articulating the lessons to be learned from the initial return of the Bourbons and the subsequent lapse into Bonapartist rule. Shocked like most of his class by the ease with which the adventurer had resumed the reins of government, Frénilly reflected that the previous quarter century had stripped the nation of sound institutions on which to build. Unlike England after Cromwell and his revolution, France had suffered no mere convulsion of the state but one of society, “hors d’état.” This had left it without the sort of public spirit that the political order needed.80 Significantly, his esprit public was the public spirit made famous by the British and not the revolutionary synonym for public opinion. The question of the hour was how royalists, faced with a people sundered by the fact of the Revolution, were to respond. Here Frénilly sketched a series of possible strategies for dealing with those whom he unhesitatingly designated as “Jacobins.” One might attempt to heal old wounds and to unite with them. One might go further and allow them to control the government in the hope that the responsibilities of rule would neutralize their propensities. A third possibility was for the king to seek to hold the balance even between Jacobins and royalist France, emulating presumably that short-lived experiment whereby George III, in the previous century, had striven to preside over a government that somehow rose above party. Finally, there was the possibility of ruling by the royalists alone in a move that might offer pardon to revolutionaries but sought nothing but death for revolutionary principles. By following this path, one might by degrees come to re-establish the ancient institutions. It was, of course, this strategy that Frénilly favoured. Inherent in his choice was the attitude – all but universal among émigrés and other victims of the Revolution – that the two sides were far from being equal in status. At the base of this asymmetry lay the dismissal of Jacobins as a tumultuous faction. Opposing them were the royalists who constituted France.81 An inference to be drawn from this expression of principle was that the order of the Charte, provided through the bounty of the sovereign, was an unwelcome gift that must still be accepted. The desire to reinstitute elements of the ancien régime made reservations about the new legal order

80 [Frénilly], Considérations sur une année de l’histoire de France (Paris, 1815), 14– 15, 27. 81 Ibid., 185–99.

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quite clear. What precisely this boded for the future of representative government was the business of other works to spell out. Greater fame would doubtless attend the name of Frénilly had this author not been so unfortunate as to have been overtaken by events. When the Considérations appeared in November 1815, it was already clear that the royalists were not even going to dominate the ministry as Frénilly had hoped. The lower chamber was indeed in what he would have deemed good hands, but it was in no position to bestow a bit of clemency on its enemies and then to rebuild the old order. His book had two immediate consequences, it would seem. It gained him status with the future Charles X and so made realistic his new-found ambition to enter politics, and it closed on the author the doors of the Académie royale des beaux-arts,82 proof that “Jacobins” abounded still. Later, Frénilly would regret that his major work appeared in circumstances that deprived it of much of its significance. People who chose, as he did, to publish in the autumn were apt to find that a new legislative session changed the terms of discussion. His rueful term for that situation – one perhaps put in play by Fiévée – was that of prophètes du passé. One may question the author’s own judgment that his first political work was his best, for much of it is simple narrative. He was soon to improve upon it. His first venture into political writing had, from all appearances, been penned under the presumption that the business of government might perhaps be conducted free of the presence of those Jacobins whose cause had finally been defeated. The dismissal of the chambre introuvable put paid to that. It was not that the enemy had returned to power, but rather there remained a ministry that, while less objectionable than it might have been, was still not firmly royalist in the sense understood by Frénilly. Gone was that ultra majority that might, in time, have encouraged the choice of a ministry more to its taste. So there had been two disappointments since that first pamphlet, the intransigence of the Richelieu ministry and the dismissal of the ultra chamber. The dissolution of 5 September was a blow to all who shared Frénilly’s opinions, but to him it must have been especially trying, for again he had been in the midst of seeking to make sense of a state of affairs that had now changed for the worse. The ensuing election would also hand him the first of several defeats in his campaign to become a deputy for Oise. Of the two publications that he offered in November 1816, at least the slighter of the two – a pamphlet of some eighty pages, dated 26 October – addressed the world as it then existed. It was written as advice to a colleague, apparently more fortunate than he, who had just been returned to the chamber. This, then, was Frénilly’s programme by 82 Frénilly, Recollections, 272–3.

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which he could participate vicariously in the work of the legislature. One suspects that “M. de C.,” the colleague who carried Frénilly’s hopes for the session, was Marie-Barthèlemy, vicomte de Castelbajac, fellow ultra and future collaborator on Le Conservateur who, at least in the 1820s, lived next door to the author’s house in town. The theme suffusing the pamphlet is the pessimistic one that the French had much to learn about their new form of government. Numerous are the references to the disadvantages under which French government laboured, at least in contrast to the smooth sailing enjoyed in the British model. To ease the transition to a British form of government, Frénilly offered Montesquieu and Burke as his political authorities, although it was never entirely clear, apart from an emphasis upon tradition, in what Burke’s wisdom was held to consist. Nevertheless, it is evident that Frénilly wished to recommend, above all, moderation to his colleagues in the legislature. The advice was the more necessary because, as he put it, the British Parliament was always wise, however foolish its members might prove to be. Bereft of the cushion supplied by tradition, a French legislature was prone to heed the voices of extremism. Never, it seems, was Frénilly unmindful of the service done, as of that time, by the British legacy of 128 years of constitutional rule. His nation, by contrast, had to commence its building of the edifice of government with work on the third floor.83 Happy was the land, said this admirer of Montesquieu, where the government was as old as the mores. Descending to specifics, Frénilly identified the issue most in need of good sense as the deportment of the royalists in a chamber were they no longer to constitute the majority. By his calculation, the deputies hostile to the Revolution were roughly matched in numbers by those who were – as he delicately put it – less hostile. Both of these bodies he denominated as parties. As British experience indicated, the division of the nation into parties served to neutralize the poison that might inhere in that freedom of the press that was demanded by representative government. The thought was undeveloped but seems to have entailed the commonplace that no great damage would ensue when both sides, adequately provided with organs, might reply in kind to all attacks. Foreseeing the possibility that the royalists might actually prove to be the weaker of the parties, Frénilly envisaged a new and vital role for that party, for in a nation divided into parties, it had to be the weaker one that was most attached to a press free from all imposition. It was understandable, he wrote complacently, that the dominant group would not find the language of balance and liberty highly agreeable and would seek rather to monopolize the enjoyment of public liberties. In the new legislature, the royalists would probably inherit the role of the minority of the day and so would have to make the 83 [Frénilly], Lettre à un membre de la Chambre des députés (Paris, 1816), 15–16, 37.

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case for a free press. Clearly, Frénilly feared that the experiences of those of his own kind had done little to prepare them for their responsibilities in a political order that would entail party competition. In this spirit, he reminded his colleague that the royalists who had heartily favoured measures against journals such as Le Nain jaune and Le Censeur when they had commanded the votes must now expect such threats to their own publications. A ministry less friendly than before would only add to their troubles.84 Too constitutionally correct to write here of the king, Frénilly was probably also thinking of Louis XVIII’s obvious impatience with ultra opinions. Like many of his party, he was not on speaking terms with his restored sovereign. These were salutary lessons of a sort that French public life had afforded scarcely any previous occasion to articulate, and their value was not diminished by the fact that the author of these thoughts would not himself always prove capable of living up to the message. There was more to all of this than the prudential warning that those who saw themselves as rulers were going to be treated at times like subjects. Frénilly had, for the time being at least, set aside the language that described his opponents as Jacobins and, with it, some aspects of that asymmetry with which he had previously viewed the competing sides. Not only were both now recognizable as parties, there was even some disposition to allow that the new mode of government would entail sharp changes of fortune, an insight that came to many public men who pondered the struggle of parties. Frénilly made his position unequivocal in his observation that those who governed must temper their desire to trample upon their opponents by the sobering thought that such unfair advantages were sure, in future, to be visited upon them. It was then a good thing for all that the preferences of the weaker party come, on this issue, to inform the practice of the government. As if his previous comments had been insufficient, Frénilly reminded his correspondent that the royalists were now “dans les conditions de l’opposition de l’Angleterre.”85 Theirs was still the greatest proportion of the landholders, and they could not be thought of as an alien faction or party hostile to the state. Hence their status was an honourable one, but they had become that party whose interests demanded the fullest possible liberty of the press. With this in mind, Frénilly discouraged any thought of having a paper exclusively devoted to reporting the doings of the chamber. It would, inevitably, take on a party colour and, he suggested, the wrong one at that. Further to encouraging the spread of his insights regarding the virtues of competition, Frénilly pointed out that, quite apart from his argument that political advantage was transitory, the ministers of the day should embrace the expectation that interests would be diverse. Official talk 84 Ibid., 19–21. 85 Ibid., 22.

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of unanimity, he realized, misled no one, and there was a certain gaucherie in the presumption that the nation could be unanimous. The next sensitive issue to be dealt with was that of ministerial responsibility. Here Frénilly was more careful than were most of his articulate countrymen to make clear that the practice prescribed by the Charte was not so much a venture independent of British conventions as a first approximation to them. Clearly, he saw little permanent value in the resolve of the framers of the Charte to allow for the impeachment of wayward ministers. The “fact” of responsibility, or its political dimension, was the vital one. Yet however imprecise the status, as yet, of the legal process, the political one was still less developed. In France, then, it was wise to establish the right to hold ministers legally responsible while one awaited the emergence of more meaningful procedures. This recommendation was accompanied by a deft summary of British practice that left no doubt of Frénilly’s understanding of parliamentary government. The British, he maintained, so respected the “law” of responsibility that its letter never had, in practice, to be invoked. Rather, that law had become a habitual usage that obtained, not between two powers that were mutually hostile, but between two homogeneous powers. That was a roundabout way of alluding to the community of sentiment that must normally exist between the ministers and the parliamentary majority. Frénilly’s thoughts on political responsibility found a favourable reception by no less a commentator than Joseph Fiévée when, unaccountably, he chose to review Frénilly’s pamphlet rather than the book on legislatures that had appeared at the same time and from the same publisher. Fiévée’s point was to insist that, owing to the well-known bonds that united a British ministry and the majority in the Commons, the very idea of responsibility was reduced to a bare notion. Applying the same logic to France, he anticipated that actual practice with regard to the punishment of ministers would be less severe than the letter of the law might suggest.86 Frénilly was thus in accord with the enlightened views of the time. In general, so committed was he to approaching the situation that obtained across the Channel that he favoured the expression parlement to refer to the king and the two chambers in a single body; it was not something that could otherwise be expressed economically in French.87 With seeming regret, he felt it necessary to adopt the term for the now defunct bodies of magistrates rather than the English word for its legislative body.

86 Ibid., 28–9; cf. Fiévée, the review, signed T.L., in Journal des débats, 21 Nov. 1816. 87 It was a complaint heard, too, in other quarters. See the comment by Auguste, comte de Kératry, in Le Courrier, no. 217 (5 Aug. 1822).

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It was with the third major theme of the pamphlet that Frénilly showed most clearly wherein lay the influence of Montesquieu. It had been the latter’s destiny to teach several generations of French people that there would properly be a fit between the form of government and a host of other attributes of a society. With respect to the ultra programme in the Restoration, this meant that the triumphant return of the monarchy should be accompanied by corresponding changes both to other institutions and, especially, to those belonging to government itself. The issue from the previous session that best framed the problem was the unsuccessful effort to design a new electoral law. The events surrounding that failure included the rise to prominence of Villèle, who had been the rapporteur of the relevant commission, and Vaublanc’s disgrace. The nation would only secure a new law in the next year, and it would not be one with a royalist leaning. Of the current makeshift arrangements, Frénilly could hardly have been more dismissive; the system was worthy, he said, of one designed by those enthusiastic Girondins Brissot and Anacharsis Cloots. At the very least, Villèle should have taken pains to substitute a monarchical tone in a ministerial model that was excessively democratic. Therefore, the absent quality was presumably something more along the lines of the weight given to property and noble influence in Britain. It was a cause in which Vaublanc’s bow to the political notables in his draft electoral law had been one of the moves. Most reflective of the sort of law that Frénilly sought was his slightly euphemistic reference to those “points de repos” that abounded in the British system. Their contribution was so to cushion the political order that “the movement of elections is but a tavern rumour that does not extend to the state.”88 What the graceful language served partially to obscure was the sentiment that the sort of electoral law that was the desideratum of the moment was one calculated to rob elections of much of their meaning. This search for pre-revolutionary France in the Restoration boded ill for work of reconciliation and leaves some uncertainty as to how moderate the defenders of the scheme could be. A properly monarchical electoral law would, one might suppose, simply abolish elections. Put more charitably, Frénilly’s advice displays the horror of far-sighted royalists who saw already that the fate of the monarchy was in jeopardy unless some powerful aristocratic element could be added. The closing statement of loyalty to a Charte that contained no such specific served but to underline the dilemma. the nation divided Frénilly had begun with the assumption that it was now the turn of people like himself to take up their natural role as rulers; his discomfort in discovering 88 [Frénilly], Lettre à un membre, 33, 54–5, 60.

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that this would not necessarily come to pass colours all of his major writings. For some of his persuasion, their response was to write again and again the history of the Revolution as if they hoped thereby to make their own virtue evident. Frénilly chose instead to write of representative assemblies and their functioning in relation to those divisions that so obviously scarred public life. Given the preoccupations of opposition royalists, it was a promising way whereby one might consider the forces within the nation and their place within the new institutions. Further enriching the ingredients was the everpresent fact of British politics and the apparent success of that system. The result gave scope for consideration of both constitutional conventions and existing hatreds; the weight of history no less than the mores that were appropriate to borrowed institutions might find there a place. Passing quite rapidly over obvious so-called divisions such as that of ruler and ruled, individual interest and national good, or the territorial components of the nation, Frénilly reached matters more central to his concerns. For this student of politically relevant divisions, the most obvious models were those offered by the experience of his own nation contrasted with that apparent in British politics. British institutions served then as the foil by which Frénilly might best display the challenges that France had to face. Both nations knew political cleavage, but that in Britain, said Frénilly, was chiefly regarding the set of hands on which power should be bestowed. Such squabbles were without effect on the structure or the regular functioning of British government. Never mind that Englishmen, in the 1790s, had spoken of revolution and armed themselves against it and that the social question was now looming as never before; Frénilly rested serenely in the faith of the anglophile who could proclaim that the opposed parties would, in a moment, join against any third body that posed a real danger. Here was that public spirit, the child of history and guarantor of a secure future. In Britain, public life could dwell on forms; in France, however, the differences were substantive and cut to the bone. Almost a century before Arthur Balfour’s memorable enunciation of the depth of British consensus, this observation, previously current in revolutionary thought, had a home with the royalists of the French Restoration and their yearning for those foundations that circumstances denied them. The very different grounds of dissention that existed in France received here a number of different expressions. What Frénilly initially offered was the obvious tension that existed between monarchical ideas and those derived from the revolutionary or liberal alternative. Doubtless, what he wanted to say was that the latter were alien to the nation and disloyal to its constitution, but of course, prudence decreed that he had to say much less. The inhibition complicated the task of showing exactly how the prospect in France was so much graver than in the neighbouring system. Mention of

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the presumption of liberal ideas in France stumbled on the fact that they also existed, in apparently benign form, across the Channel. Thus, he had to be content with the ingenious if unconvincing formula that liberal ideas were threatening precisely where they enjoyed limited support, as presumably in France. This entailed the assumption that such ideas were a dead letter among the masses but might come alive when inspiring some authoritarian figure, such as Napoleon. Nor could Frénilly free himself from inhibitions when he tried to formulate the different foci of loyalty in the two nations. The English, he alleged, loved their constitution and respected their king, whereas his own people loved their sovereign and respected the political rules.89 But this can have fooled no one, for the problem in France, as all readers must have been aware, was that too many Frenchmen, including Frénilly, loved the king not at all, though for diverse reasons. Simultaneously, it could be said that whereas it seemed inexpedient to revile the Charte, many royalists treated it as an unfortunate pis-aller. Again, Frénilly’s own views contributed to that lukewarm commitment to constitutional government that here he regretted. There are various vocabularies for purposes of analysing political cleavage, and Frénilly evinced a firm resolve to dispense with one of the most familiar, at least in the thought of the previous century. Not for him was there talk of “balance” in the sense, sometimes employed, of referring to a balance between the king and the people that might obtain, say, in Britain. Following a line of argument that had come to prominence as early as the 1770s in Britain, he denied that this mechanical image much illuminated human affairs. One might be said to balance grain, lead, and similar inert masses. Life, however, resisted such patterns, and when two political forces maintained a durable state of equality, it was only because some third force so held them. In a monarchy with a representative government, the preservation of the system rested with an aristocracy that, one supposed, prevented the direct clash of sovereign and people. Here possibly Frénilly was being tentative or perhaps just oblique, but in making an aristocracy essential for the form of government just adopted in France – and in offering Britain as benefiting especially from it – he seemed to be trying innocuously to identify the missing element in French representative government. As his earliest writings had already suggested, this desideratum was a force akin to the vaunted aristocracy of Britain, one that might prevent a constitutional monarch from sinking beneath the weight of the popular element. This emerges from his comment that the entire people, a notion

89 [Frénilly], Des assemblées représentatives, par l’auteur “des considérations sur une année de l’histoire de France” (Paris, 1816), 76–7, 79, 88.

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incapable of precise identification, was not such a unit as might be expected to offer either support or resistance to the throne.90 A throne truly confined by a benign force was one influenced by the aristocracy, or so it seemed. Since no survivor of the Revolution could readily have denied that those presuming to speak for the people might pose a threat to the sovereign, the emphasis must have been on that body’s inadequacy for purposes of defending the monarchical principle. There was no explicit mention of the aristocracy’s protecting the people from royal ambitions, although the constant recourse to British practice might readily supply the omission. So central was the role of a strong aristocracy in supplying the foundation of political order that Frénilly chose to treat separately certain other instruments of rule that also contributed to the well functioning of a constitutional monarchy. He cited the place in Britain of public opinion, the right of petition, the good name of the ministry, and the places at the disposal of the sovereign as of this nature. His allowing the imperfection of these various factors inspired the further observation that they exemplified the case of a nation “administered so wisely that evil itself was constrained there to produce good.” He even allowed himself to call the order so maintained a balance of power, but quickly added that, though the term existed abroad in ordinary speech, it did not mean that there could literally be an equilibrium in human affairs.91 The only one of the four instruments from which Frénilly sought, in some degree, to distance himself was that of public opinion. On that topic, he offered the familiar royalist sentiment that such opinion was both important and weighty in inverse ratio to the mass of humanity that produced it. The fifth chapter of Frénilly’s book was entitled “De la division,” and there he set out the agenda that supplied the substance of much of the rest of an argument that made its way through a succession of topics – majority and minority, opposition, ambition on the part of deputies, and the legislative initiative. What united these topics, in a manner of speaking, was that they all contributed to an appreciation of those recurrent divisions that might surface within assemblies, between the two chambers of a bi-cameral legislature and between the representatives and the ministers.92 Armed with a taste for rendering reality in abstract terms, Frénilly had no difficulty in channelling the same set of facts through the different concepts that were employed in representative government, while at the same time he managed both to reserve certain important topics to the end and to avoid any detailed analysis of others. His initial premises about life in an assembly were composed, one 90 Ibid., 20. 91 Ibid., 85–6. 92 Ibid., 101.

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might suppose, as an ironical reflection upon the Bonapartist version. Unanimity in an assembly, Frénilly insisted, was not a useful quality; that body’s office was to bring together opposed sentiments. Nature might, he allowed, have placed the opposed views within the mind of each individual; instead it had led to assemblies where different groups maintained opposite views. Just with what precision nature had performed her task remained less than clear, for Frénilly remained inconsistent in his way of visualizing the relative size of the two sides of the division. Initially, he referred to “un nombre plus ou moins égal de chaque parti.” But he then immediately qualified this to explain that there would, in fact, be a stronger and a weaker group and that the former would supply unity of direction to government, whereas the minority would act as a counterweight. The evident hesitation in these remarks suggests the presence of a genuine ambivalence in visualizing political cleavage. The partisan – and Frénilly was very much one of those – had already spoken in his earlier pamphlets, where the presence of Jacobins within the state appears as a serious imperfection. Yet the exigencies of representative government demanded an assembly where the differences were both well defined and lasting. More importantly, his reading of the political scene would put his side, at the time of publication, in the minority, if not in relation to the liberals, not yet numerous in the chamber, at least vis-à-vis the ministerial following. Only this consideration can have sanctioned his contemplating some sort of equality for what were, ideally, but two sides, even as he reiterated his claim that a true equilibrium was out of the question. More telling still was Frénilly’s development of the notion that the maintenance of a division within the assembly was of cardinal importance for the political health of the nation. Party struggle, as here conceived, was a sort of warfare, but warfare that was regulated, limited. Should the struggle literally grow violent or even so unequal in character as to destroy the weaker side or to deprive it of all hope of victory, then one party would reign unopposed, and as he put it, the peace and unanimity in the assembly would signal a change “de système dans l’État.” This was not to be wished, and so a genuine but limited struggle had to be maintained. Never did Frénilly spell out in detail what should constitute the reasonable hopes of parties. The point would seem, however, to reside in his further comments about a ministry, unable to carry its measures, leaving office. It would then appear that the lesser party might well aspire, not just to have its views taken seriously or to serve as a counterweight, but to succeed to control of the government. The opposite danger to a struggle grown violent was that of an assembly whose term had lasted too long. There the warfare might become so attenuated that the assembly came to resemble those parlements of the past where a growing esprit de corps reduced their political value in proportion. An assembly so united ceased to serve its purpose. One is reminded of talk, a full century later, of a

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république des camarades. Though Frénilly made no attempt to dwell upon his distinction, the argument spelled out a nuanced account of the ways in which healthy competition might give way to conditions less salutary. There was, however, a general principle that served to explain why neither conclusive victory nor an era of good feelings would be other than enervating. It was the maxim that “peace in the state would end the day that war in the assembly came to an end.”93 Some of these calm statements were extraordinary – especially the one that insisted that success should be a possibility for both sides – and their author cannot be said to have fully accepted their implications. There seems to be no near parallel in French political writing of the time to this trenchant statement of the merits of political competition, although some of the essays of Francis Jeffrey in the Edinburgh Review had, by then, explored the notion of party and opposition as the natural recourse of a polity that afforded a sort of safety-valve for the expression of political tensions that, too confined, would grow dangerous.94 Whatever Frénilly’s inspiration for this position, it was no parenthetical allusion, for it served as the foundation for the more general treatment of divisions within the state. Just as society had to be spared that warfare that might, without serious cost, be confined to the legislature, so other organs of government must similarly go unscathed. It was in this spirit that Frénilly pointed out that the division that he had portrayed must not come to be expressed as one between the two chambers. Thus did he dispose of one of the perennial sources of misunderstanding about the nature of parliamentary conflict. Several observations from the earlier portions of the argument serve to explain why the chambers must each contain the struggle instead of each being united against the other. In his opening tribute to British government, Frénilly had been careful to warn the reader that one must not expect different majorities in the Lords and the Commons, for the influence of individual lords served to supply the membership of the lower house. Stronger by far had been his statement about the distressing state of the aristocracy in the Restoration, where, he noted, it was quite clear that the Chambre des députés was more aristocratic than was the relatively poor peerage created by the Charte. In fact, this embarrassment defined Frénilly’s strategy for changing the institutions of the day so as to lend more political weight to the Chambre des pairs.95

93 Ibid., 102–3. 94 See the essay of 1812, cited in Gunn, “Influence, Parties and the Constitution: Changing Attitudes, 1783–1832,” Historical Journal 17 (1974): 301–28 at 320–1. 95 [Frénilly], Des assemblées représentatives, 104–9, 19n, 27–8.

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The same disposition to reaffirm the locus of conflict by banishing it from the places where error might seek to create it informs the comments on the other vital set of relations among the powers of government. This consisted of the sensitive relations between the representative body and the sovereign or, more specifically, the ministers chosen by him. Here, no doubt, the spirit to be exorcised was that of gouvernement d’assemblée as it had functioned during the early years of the Revolution. No room, then, existed for a division that placed the ministry and the lower chamber in a state of conflict. By way of evidence, he simply offered the concord that regularly obtained between the majority in the House of Commons and the ministers. Principles adopted in Parliament governed the state, and when those principles changed, the ministers would normally be expected to quit office. Were it to be objected that the ministers might condescend to adopt the principles of the majority, he replied that his hypothesis was perfectly compatible with that outcome, so long as the conversion was genuine and not merely the result of a clinging to power. The sovereign as well, argued Frénilly, must accommodate himself to these facts, and his was but the decision to seek a dissolution in hopes of gaining a majority to support his ministers or to change the ministers right away. The choice of language clearly reveals Frénilly’s complaint that, during the life of the chambre introuvable, the king had done neither. Were the new chamber to reaffirm the views of the old, the king would then be virtually compelled to yield to its preferences. Frénilly did, however, contemplate, in rather bold terms, the possibility of an intransigent ruler who continued to dissolve successive recalcitrant chambers, essentially the situation that would arise in 1830. The cost, he remarked dryly, would be an unacceptable degree of disorder and suspension of representative government. In a more conciliatory tone, he allowed that these conventions might necessitate the sovereign’s giving in to an unwise legislature, but he saw no prudent alternative. Could there, he asked, be such a division between the elected majority and the ministers? The question was disingenuous, of course, for his readers would appreciate all too well that Frénilly continued to fight the battle of the chambre introuvable, only recently dismissed. Solemnly, he answered his own question. There was indeed room for a short-term anomaly of this sort, but the same British precedents that revealed the problem proclaimed that it would be of short duration. Especially pointed was Frénilly’s firm endorsement of those measures available to an assembly that found its will ignored by the ministers; supply would not be voted and no law would pass. Of course, he added carefully, such resistance might be judged unjust, but no one could deny that the means and the right to use it both belonged to the representative body. Counter-arguments to his position amounted only to saying that the

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sovereign might rule against the elected body; alternatively, should one wish to retain such an institution, one must rule with it.96 In the very year in which Royer-Collard had predicted the end of the monarchy were the deputies to prosecute such a struggle, here was an avowed ultra who calmly envisaged nothing less as an accepted part of the existing order. The business of what followed was to pursue the thread of division into those political bodies that were to serve as its natural home. The disavowal of an inter-cameral struggle entailed the presence of ministerial auxiliaries within each chamber. It followed that each would also house those members not so inclined. It was time to contemplate the relations between majority and minority. What was of importance was that Frénilly assigned a place to both. Nevertheless, his analysis was much coloured by the previous contention that the link between ministers and majority constituted the life of the newly acquired system. This, abetted by his metaphysical cast of mind, led to a marked exaggeration of the place of the majority and minimal attention to the place of the minority. The point of the struggle within a chamber lay in the desire of the weaker side to change its status, and the minority, as such, was a notional sort of entity save in its aspiration to realize itself as the majority. Not its present status but its possible one served to give it substance. In this respect, Frénilly said, minority status was like a lottery ticket that had its meaning fixed on the future. The realm of value, then, was that of the majority; it was real for one group, and the goal and raison d’être of the other. Such ontological flourishes aside, the significance of the coexistence of the two bodies lay, in particular, in the fact that it imposed upon the majority the need for cohesion. Those associated with the majority must all move in the same direction, following uniform views, and it was their cohesion as a body that compensated for the fact that the chambers themselves could not be unanimous. Of special concern here was the claim on behalf of “conscience,” and Frénilly joined with most other defenders of British patterns in insisting that too tender a conscience was the nemesis of parliamentary government. Those whose personal leanings, or raison locale, dictated one direction on one vote and another on the next would soon discover that “this itinerant majority would ruin the state in saving its conscience.”97 A majority with neither leadership nor fixed principle would be one unconnected to the ministry. It was the theme of this discussion of the majority that its members must forgo the luxury of perverse voting even as the king and his ministers were accorded the capacity to employ a reasonable degree of influence in order to secure a majority in the first instance. In a state with two parties, 96 For the material drawn upon in the last two paragraphs, see ibid., 109–19. 97 Ibid., 126.

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he added implausibly, the administration would not allow such influence to run to excess, for it would be denounced by the other side. This at least suggested that there was meaning in the presence of the minority party in that it might, while still inferior in numbers, serve to draw attention to the shortcomings of the ministry and its supporters. One reason why the chapter devoted to majority and minority had given such short shrift to the latter was that Frénilly’s organization of the book made provision for further attention to the minority under the label of the opposition. He explained, with perhaps excessive attention to theoretical symmetry, that what was a minority in relation to the assembly became an opposition vis-à-vis the ministry. At this point, he repeated what had already been claimed for the party of the ministers and pointed out the value of internal cohesion for those ambitious to wrest the government from the current ministers. Frénilly’s analysis of opposition politics was cursory at best and reflects little interest in what an opposition, even one on the British pattern, actually did. The chapter was written in February 1816, at which time the ultras continued to hope for changes in the ministry that might augment their influence. The circumstances of the time must surely account for the emphasis on certain rather contrived hypothetical examples of the conventions that should govern ministerial resignation. The upshot of this was Frénilly’s expression of a typically ultra resentment that so many people whose past service had not warranted royal favour had remained close to power. Such an opinion epitomized the case against the conciliatory ways of Louis XVIII. Also drawn from the immediate circumstances of his associates was Frénilly’s careful distinction between “the opposition party in the state and a party that would be outside the state.” Consequently, there were those legitimately involved in opposing other men but loyally connected to the regime and others whose hostility extended to the state itself.98 This served notice that royalists anxious to leave the ranks of opposition were still going to be very particular about who might be acceptable in that role. It was a theme to which Frénilly would return. Properly understood, the functioning of a system of government modelled on that of Britain was an assemblage of practices and conventions all of which were interrelated. In order to make sense of the whole, the enquirer had necessarily to take notice, not just of formal bodies, laws, and precedents, but also of the doings of individuals united for purposes of which the law took no cognisance but which were essential to the political process. Perhaps it is for this reason that Frenchmen like Frénilly looked in vain for any definitive guidance from British sources. There was little enough of that, which helps to explain Frénilly’s unachieved resolve to 98 Ibid., 135.

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write his own work on the parliamentary system. In this preliminary effort to reveal the logic that must guide the French copy, one sees the problems that awaited the unwary. Frénilly had written his treatise without much employing those party names that served to trace the loyalties that underlay the transaction of public business. With seeming reluctance, he had occasionally referred to liberal and monarchical views and the difference between them, but in these passages he treated the opinions as though they somehow existed independently of any identifiable set of men. Conversely, when he did refer to parties, the reference was to there being more than one, and he avoided naming them. For most purposes, he appears to have favoured the functional labels of majority and minority to those with more specific historical associations. Part of the problem lay, of course, in the presence of a ministry that, without being truly liberal, kept his sort of royalist at a distance. One other reason for this apparent coyness about party names lay in Frénilly’s opening comment to the effect that he wished to treat assemblies in general and so to allow his narrative to move readily between the experience of Britain and that of France. Closer to the truth was his other commitment to maintaining an air of impartiality and thereby avoiding being taxed with writing from a spirit of party.99 Unstated, but probably sufficient to account for the omission, were his own past reservations about assigning a notional equality to his royalists and those whom he had called Jacobins. His unwillingness even to award his enemies the relatively cold comfort of opposition made coping with the real divisions of the nation a matter of some difficulty. The compromise that is manifested here was to praise the culture of partisanship but to remain judiciously imprecise about the identities of those arrayed against one another. This alone allowed him to maintain an air of statesmanship that was no doubt intended to raise his treatise above the noise of partisan wrangling. It would also have been a source of comfort that much of the text was written during the life of the chambre introuvable, a time when Jacobins were not much in evidence and there was every expectation that the sovereign’s stubborn adherence to his ministers must eventually yield to the strong ultra majority. The constitutional triumph of the elected majority and the cause of ultra-royalism might then together signal that all was well. Chapters intended to vindicate ambition on the part of deputies and those on the collective capacities for legislative initiative and amendment residing in the lower chamber all reflect this strategy of rendering the hopes of the ultras respectable. Lending substance to the suspicion that this was more a livre de circonstance than the author admitted was his zeal in combating an unidentified 99 Ibid., 6.

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orator who had insisted that the full range of parliamentary tactics for turning an opposition into a government was not suitable for France. Frénilly’s technique here was not literally to quote any text but rather to place statements in italics, accompanied by the claim that he was presenting the views of the orator. It is not, then, at all certain with whom he was doing battle. But Frénilly cannot have been unaware of two major speeches of February 1816, both of them intended to support the ministers and to discourage precisely those ambitions for which he was the advocate. The first had been the famous statement by Royer-Collard in which he had claimed that for a majority in the chambre to dictate the king’s choice of ministers was to turn France into a republic. Two days later, on 14 February, there followed the more conciliatory statement of that veteran minister Pasquier. The minister took pains to soften some of his colleague’s language but insisted, too, that in France governments must not be too readily responsive to shifting majorities and that the French character required that private conscience prevail over party. It speaks volumes for that lack of candour of which Frénilly and others complained that Pasquier’s private sentiments seem to have been impatient about the self-indulgence of the French deputy and his resistance to a salutary discipline.100 So the chamber heard conventional sentiments, while Pasquier’s private record – admittedly the product of a somewhat later date – was much more in accord with the views of Vaublanc and Frénilly. Pasquier’s public disavowal of the politics of party was not without some subtlety, as it turned, among other considerations, on how British traditions of self-government made the fall of a ministry less serious than in France. There were comments as well on how the small number of elected places relative to the French population ensured fierce competition and reduced the likelihood that incumbents could expect to be returned as readily as in Britain. Further shielding the king’s ministers from the rude shocks of parliamentary ambitions was the status of France as more monarchical in character than was Britain. The sentiments noted here correspond reasonably well to the italicized passages in Frénilly’s Des assemblées, but there are no direct parallels in language.101 Possibly, then, Frénilly had some other source or was conflating Royer-Collard and Pasquier into a generic ministerial position.

100 See Mémoires du chancelier Pasquier, 4:276. He began writing these recollections as early as 1822. 101 Frénilly, Des assemblées représentatives, 171, 172,175, 176; Discours prononcés dans les chambres législatives par M. le baron Pasquier, chancelier de France,1814–1836 (Paris, 1842), 1:153–72; and AP 16 (14 Feb. 1816): 157–60. For Royer-Collard’s speech, see pages 417–19 below.

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For someone whose dissent from this theory of representative government was thoroughgoing, Frénilly was surprisingly inhibited about displaying in full his preferred model. There was, however, nothing half-hearted in his insistence that the French, having adopted British government, had to accept the conclusion that, were the new government not to alter moeurs, then the moeurs would, in turn, change the borrowed institutions. Less dramatic in its concern than Royer-Collard’s warning, this carried nonetheless the possibility that the great experiment might fail. Yet to appreciate Frénilly’s gingerly handling of party, the very life-blood of the Westminster model, one need but consult the passages where he sought to lend dignity to the struggle for power. In his chapter 8, written in defence of ambition for office, the abstract tenor of the discussion reveals an apparent intention to render innocuous the striving of public men without making mention of that commitment that was both its instrument and its justification. The same disinclination to approach the dangerous question of party too closely informs his most elaborate refutation of self-righteous talk about the consciences of French deputies. Such talk was carried on with a view to discrediting a commitment to British partisanship, but the defence proceeded, in the main, without direct reference to the foci of loyalty that were in dispute. Consequently, Frénilly was content to allude to a regular rotation in the state, without specifying that it must be political parties that were the units being rotated. Furthermore, the assault on an antiparliamentary understanding of conscience neglected to explain in what name one might abrogate these claims of conscience. The language for treating the alternative to a stiff-necked insistence on conscience could scarcely have made it seem less attractive: “[O]ne quits the straight way of morality to cast one’s self in the evasions of intrigue; one sacrifices a bit of one’s conscience as a man to a sort of public conscience, and a compliance that modifies principles without detracting from them sometimes serves the state better than a loyal and invincible tenacity.” Only in the elaborate table of contents was it explained that it was the point of this passage to show how conscience and conviction might well “jettent les hommes dans un parti décidé.”102 How understanding of the fragile growth of party loyalty might be enhanced by reference to intrigue seems mysterious, although elsewhere Frénilly shows that he possessed a notion of a “legitimate conspiracy,” based on party, as a proper alternative to a conscience totally independent.103 Certainly, the thoughts on intrigue 102 [Frénilly], Des assemblées représentatives, 156–61, 219, 270. 103 See Frénilly’s untitled essay on representative assemblies in Le Défenseur 2, [no. 3] (?July 1820), 150–60 at 151. A note tells us that the essay had been written in 1815.

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remained in need of some such gloss. Without an appreciation of the writer’s difficulty in depicting the existing shades of opinion as parties, the reader would remain puzzled at this tentative performance, unsure as to why the call to party loyalty sounded so faintly. The book’s final encounter with the self-imposed taboo regarding party occurs in comments regarding the debates of the winter of 1816 on the electoral law. Here it becomes plain that those to whom he referred as “partisans des idées libérales” had pressed for an electoral law threatening to the monarchical nature of France, whereas the confessors of the monarchical faith had failed to cohere on an effective alternative.104 Clearly, those royalists who sought to be more than a party had disappointed by behaving as though they were less. It cannot have been easy to write both as partisan and disinterested analyst about the subtleties of a system that was essentially foreign and seemed as well to violate the mores of France. With that amiable candour with which Frénilly judged his own work, he apparently took no pride in this one, and indeed, it was imperfect. Still, a smoother, less ambivalent performance would have been less revealing of what problems the existing divisions posed. The feat of sloughing over problems was the more readily done in short pieces that made no effort to describe the entire political setting. Some of these, paralleling sections of the book, appeared in Frénilly’s short-lived journal, set up with the aim of building understanding between the French and their English neighbours. Here can be found a forceful attack on a ministry that sought to be of all parties and thereby to evade one of the conventions governing parliamentary government. There were strictures, too, on the ministerial resistance to the British practice that required both that ministers have the support of a majority in the lower chamber and, therefore, that they acknowledge a form of political responsibility.105 Frénilly was prominent among those who took issue with any suggestion that conditions in France somehow precluded the full implementation of government and opposition strictly along the lines of party. Nevertheless, the issue that embarrassed his constitutional understanding was precisely 104 [Frénilly], Des assemblées représentatives, 243. 105 X., “On the Proceedings of the present Chamber of Deputies,” in The Correspondent; Consisting of letters, moral, political and literary, between eminent writers in France and England … (London, 1817), 136–46, 297–314. This appears to be the work of Frénilly himself, written in late 1816; the initial F., in this work, disguises the contribution of Fiévée. On this publication, which also appeared in French, see Pierre Reboul, Le Mythe anglais dans la littérature française sous la Restauration (Lille, 1962), 30, 375. The French version – Le Correspondant – is more ample than the one set of the London edition that has been consulted. The former consists of five issues, the last published in April 1818.

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that of whether one could expect, in France, a polite changing of places between ins and outs. It was not, as his assault on ministerial doctrine showed, that he expected ministers to aspire to immortality. Rather, the great question related to the identity of the players. Frénilly’s contributions to Le Conservateur leave no doubt that all of his original concerns remained alive. Discussion of the situation within the legislative chambers finds Frénilly recognizing two sides to the political debate – royalists and democrats. He continued to regret that the ministers still contrived to live between the ideological camps, ready to lean towards the popular side in order to check the royalists, but noticeably less prepared to do the reverse. Giving vent to the impulse that he obviously had been controlling in the writing of his book, he remarked upon his own usage. He referred to the two “sides,” he said, because it would be an injury to the defenders of the throne to refer to them as but a party.106 There was still worse in store. In the second part of his survey, he applauded a sentiment, belonging to Auguste-L.-P., vicomte de Saint-Chamans, to the effect that royalists naturally played the ministerial role in an assembly, whereas the leanings of the others fitted them to form the opposition. The observation had appeared in the middle of that nobleman’s description of life within the chambers, which chapter was the longest in his survey of the session of 1817 – that best chronicled of all the Restoration’s legislative sessions. Saint-Chamans shared many views with Frénilly, including a distaste for the absence of cohesion among men who shared the same opinions about public life. He went further, however, in insisting that the lesson to be learned about the behaviour of a French chamber was that, unlike the House of Commons, its members could not be brought together under the leadership of men, but only by the sway exercised by doctrines. All of those hymns of praise to the independence of the French character were now turned to the task of insisting that only ties based upon men’s opinions could organize a French chamber. Those hommes-machines whose discipline made the House of Commons work could not be found in France. Eventually, then, for Saint-Chamans it was the axis of doctrine, not that of ministry and opposition, that had to become dominant. With this, there would in effect come to be but one primary division within the chambers, that of royalists and democrats. But the popular party was not made for governing, for its aim was ever to transfer power from the executive to the legislative chambers. Thus, by a natural course of events – “la force des choses” – the democrats would gravitate into opposition, even as the royalists wedded their loyalty to the 106 Frénilly, “Coup d’oeil sur la situation du ministère de France en 1818, 1819 et 1820,” Le Conservateur 1, no. 9 (Nov. 1818), 408–24 at 418.

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crown to the cause of the ministers. Only then would there be a ministry, of the British sort, sustained by a firm majority. 107 Frénilly saw nothing with which to quarrel in the notion that there was a certain fit between the monarchical faith and the exercising of power. He may also have seen an attractive elegance in the argument that this state of affairs should come about, not through his own party’s claiming a prerogative to rule, but as the natural outcome of the proper functioning of representative government. He did, however, object to one of Saint-Chamans’s assumptions. The source of distress lay with the other’s too ready concession that there was, in fact, a place for the democrats in the scheme of things. There was, said Frénilly, such a political creed as “démocratie absolue,” and it was republican in its commitments. For such a position, there was literally no role, consistent with public safety, in a monarchical state. The crucial distinction at once secured the credentials of a legitimate opposition and barred the way for republicans to assume that role. The shibboleth of legitimacy was whether or not a group was truly within the state, and the fault of the democrats was that theirs was a position that fell outside the monarchy. They were not “a party in the state that aspires to direct it, but a party outside the state that aspires to destroy it.” A legitimate opposition, he made clear, was free to strive to govern some day, but only towards monarchical ends. In a republic, that party would necessarily be republican, just as that outcome was insupportable within the French monarchy.108 The position was, at first blush, more generous to opposition than was that of Saint-Chamans, with his bland assumption, in the passage cited, that events would consign the same group to toil forever in opposition. Frénilly’s own understanding, however, was purchased at the very high cost of banishing one political opinion from public life altogether. th e d i l e m m a o f pa r l i a m e n t a r y r o y a l i s m A familiar tale that charts the decline of the royalist cause explains the outcome largely in terms of the coming apart of the alliance among the related causes of monarchy, aristocracy, and church. Avowed royalists who remained 107 Auguste-Louis-Philippe, visc. de Saint-Chamans, “De la situation intérieure des Chambres dans cette session,” chap. 6 of his Revue de la session de 1817 (Paris, 1818), 197, 244, 251–3. He was less well known than were his brothers, the prefect and the distinguished soldier. For notice of his career, prior to his election in 1824 to the chambre, see Biographie des hommes vivants (Paris, 1819), 5:278. Lagarde’s jibe that he wrote large books that no one read (Nouvelle biographie … des députés, 139) seems malicious. 108 Frénilly, “Coup d’oeil … ,” Le Conservateur 1, no. 10 (Dec. 1818), 441–50 at 443–4.

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in opposition against a royalist ministry complicated the pattern, as did variation among the royalists in their zeal for the institutions supplied by the Charte. Frénilly’s difference with Saint-Chamans reveals yet another basis for contention. It was not so much that two thoughtful royalists differed greatly as to the position to take vis-à-vis the other side; rather their hopes for parliamentary government foundered on the character of the other party, and this constantly left both in grave danger of embracing that tolerant system even as they gutted it of its essential nature. For Frénilly, the very presence in public life of vestiges of Jacobinism was a standing threat to the monarchy itself. For this reason, he sought some means – an effective electoral law, a strengthened aristocracy, more decisive use of monarchical and religious influences, or some other – to fashion for the French monarchy what time and indirection had done so well for the British institutions. Nor did SaintChamans dissent about the nature of the danger, for some of his other writings amply attest to his dismay at the tendencies of the electoral law of 1817 and his regret that royalists had to learn to play the game of seeking popularity, even though they were less proficient at it than were their political enemies.109 Saint-Chamans also shared with Frénilly a contempt for any understanding of public opinion that offered the barest hint of populism. Both hoped for a parliamentary process as little disturbed as possible by outside forces. Frénilly had almost certainly exaggerated his differences with his fellow royalist, for in his response to the projected electoral law of 1820, Saint-Chamans contemplated the possibility that the Left might win command of the lower chamber. If, he mused, the victorious party consisted of royalists but with a liberal flavour, there would be no problem for the monarchy. They would be an opposition in the state. Unfortunately, what he saw in the names arrayed against the royalists were those who constituted an opposition against the state.110 Here, too, was Frénilly’s problem, with all its capacity to threaten a regime of peaceful competition. It is, to be sure, telling that Saint-Chamans was not willing to concede the reins of power to a transient majority of the wrong stripe; obviously, he trusted that the royal power of dissolution could soon return a royalist majority. Closer acquaintance with the realities of daily politics seems to have done nothing to change the views of either man; after election to the Chambre des députés, both held firm to ingrained prejudices. These opinions included a readiness to defend those practices by which the king’s

109 Saint-Chamans, De la loi des élections (Paris, 1819), 5–7; and Saint-Chamans, De la popularité (Paris, 1821), 2. 110 Saint-Chamans, De la loi des élections, 14–15.

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ministers maintained command of a majority in the elected body.111 On such matters, they were numbered among the more articulate spokesmen of royalists in power. Neither, though, cut the figure that Vaublanc did in his career as a deputy; indeed, Frénilly’s weak voice made him an unprepossessing speaker. Because he was difficult to hear, he may have benefited from generous estimates of the profundity of his thoughts.112 The document that most fully presents Frénilly’s later views is the substantial treatise in which he defended the legislation to amend the electoral law and thereby to institute integral renewal and septennial elections. In his logic of demanding action before successive partial renewals brought near a dangerous instability, he mirrored Saint-Chamans’s argument of 1819. The major difference in emphasis between Frénilly and Saint-Chamans was that the latter, even as he had shared his fears that a Jacobin majority would attempt to impose itself on the king and so precipitate a crisis, had remained more conciliatory in tone. Although Saint-Chamans had appreciated the fact that some of these people threatened an opposition against the state and not just within it, he wished still to have reason to think, as he put it, that the Left consisted only of “a party of honest men … in opposition to the government about certain shades of attachment for liberal ideas.”113 Faced, at the time of new electoral law of 1824, with a similar opportunity to dish the other side, Frénilly was no less fearful but less accommodating in his language. As before, he denied the title of a legitimate body to those who currently sat on the left. He looked, then, to the presence of a true opposition that was one of monarchical principles. It would behave, not as an enemy to the establishment, but as an esteemed rival that might, in time, reasonably aspire to replace the current majority. He went on to argue that it should not be a matter of indifference were one to have an opposition more or less royalist than the ministers. For the safety of the state, the natural arrangement was for there to be an opposition that, while loyal to the system, was less wedded to monarchical principles than were the ministers and their majority. He expressed admiration for the anomaly of a party in opposition that was yet more monarchical than the majority, but then his pen ran away with him and he suggested that, in such an

111 For Frénilly, AP 39 (2 April 1823): 107; and for Saint-Chamans, AP 42 (10 July 1824): 171–3. 112 See Journal des débats, 8 Feb. 1822, reporting on his maiden speech, cited in José Cabanis, Charles X, roi ultra (Paris, 1972), 138. A surviving pen portrait describes Frénilly the deputy as a likeable littérateur who recruited votes for the ministers. Raban, Petite biographie des députés (Paris, 1826), 49. 113 Saint-Chamans, De la loi des élections, 14.

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event, the king should assume leadership of such devoted supporters.114 How this was to fit the traditions of parliamentary government, he did not bother to explain. Thus it was that even the situation of a respectable opposition – one “unie sous une bannière honorable” – was left unclear. There was still the prospect that such an opposition might win its way to power, but how, then, would the condition that government be more monarchical in sentiment than those in opposition be maintained? Was the possession of a majority doomed to be brief, as Saint-Chamans had argued? Alternatively, was occupancy of the seats of power to alter the proclivities of men, rendering those who had been monarchical enough for opposition now more royalist as befitted the governing party? The tendency to credit Frénilly with profundity neglects to explain his capacity for obscurity. In this work, as elsewhere, Frénilly referred to his ongoing study of British parliamentary institutions, and few can have surpassed this public man in his admiration for these institutions. Yet the student of British ways was ever prone to flirt with the compromising of the basic principles in order to come to terms with the condition of France. This he did not admit, for as in his earlier assault on the enemies of ministerial responsibility, he had pressed the claim that in accepting new institutions one must accept the mores that came with them or else adapt the institutions. It was evidently for the other side to display those mores that would make it safe for the existing order. Still, he seemed to allow that not all fault was on one side, for the defence of integral renewal contained the assertion that the parties in France were evasive about expressing their real views. Here he wrote an indictment that was intended to refer as well to the royalists. Both sides, he insisted, fought masked and continued to skirmish in this manner over the ground of politics and administration.115 In proclaiming the partisan end behind integral renewal and a septennial convention, he was certainly more candid than were many others and evidently saw himself as seeking some higher ground. Ironically, however, Frénilly could not admit how badly his proposals for political survival fitted with the conventions of the revered form of representative government. Frénilly offered no further public thoughts on the party struggle, but his views lived on in the pages of the last of the major publications intended to rally the cause of the ultra-royalists. It both pillaged his Assemblées for material and proclaimed that book the greatest political work to appear in

114 Frénilly, Sur le mode et la durée du renouvellement de la chambre des députés (Paris, 1824), 105–6, 108. 115 Ibid., 65.

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France during the Restoration.116 By this time, the author had quit the Chambre des députés on his appointment as one of the new peers of 1827. If a willingness to struggle with the dilemmas of one’s time serves as the test of greatness, then perhaps the praise is less fulsome than at first it must seem. The year 1828 also affords another reminder, based on the thoughts of Saint-Chamans, that sharing precisely the same fears as Frénilly’s need not entail his assumption that the Left should somehow be purged. SaintChamans offered a new survey of the state of affairs among the contending parties, and again, allowing for his obvious fears for the future of the regime, it was very accommodating. By way of emphasis on how partisan commitments led to exaggeration, he noted that the two sides had labelled one another. Thus, the French equivalent to Tory and Whig were the epithets of absolutist and republican. Yet surely, he insisted, the liberals were, in fact, loyal to the throne and the royalists to the Charte. Here was precisely the issue on which he had almost choked ten years before, but now the tone was noticeably more hopeful. The major political groupings were, Saint-Chamans thought, likely to coexist for some time, especially since the British scene had sustained two parties, divided by no serious issues, for over a century. Consistent with these soothing sentiments was his continuing insistence that the only strong ministry must be one focused upon the centre right, for not even the centre left of the chamber offered the prospect of a stable monarchy. His final plea – mixed with the sombre judgment that France’s short experience with representative government had not been reassuring – was for loyalty to the Charte.117 Such rays of hope were not out of place during the Martignac ministry then in power, but the generally sanguine mood was tempered still by an element of pessimism. For Saint-Chamans, the end might come through popular acceptance of absolute monarchy as had occurred in seventeenth-century Denmark. One might well suspect that already he had the premonition of something worse for the ultra cause. From Vaublanc’s draft electoral law of 1816 to the final days of the reign of Charles X, ultra-royalists had sensed that they could not hope to prevail in the political competition unless the rules and perhaps even French social structure were made more accommodating to their cause. That some 116 See “Considérations propres à établir un jugement sur l’opinion publique ou les majorités,” Le Conservateur de la Restauration 1 (1828): 231–9; and “Du secret mobile d’un chambre des députés,” ibid., 2 (1828): 69–74. General praise comes at 1:432. The passages borrowed from [Frénilly], Des assemblées représentatives, were from 92–3 and 158–61. 117 Saint-Chamans, De l’état des partis dans les chambres et des alliances possibles entre eux (Paris, 1828), 28–32, 44, 123, 172, 241, 198.

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of them should have had so much to say in favour of the British model is remarkable when the absolutist alternative was so very near and apparently acceptable to many colleagues. If their loyalty to the rules of competition was, at times, inferior to their understanding of the new system, that should occasion no surprise. Lacking faith in the vox populi, they were all too often betrayed, too, by poor judgment on the part of those rulers whom they ostensibly revered. There remained, nevertheless, a readiness on the part of Vaublanc, Frénilly, and Saint-Chamans to invest energy and hope in parliamentary institutions and to strive to make the best of them. They were not, one must be aware, the first choice of any of these three. As Saint-Chamans – whose public stance remained milder in its language than Frénilly’s – wrote in his book of 1828, some arrangement other than the Charte was probably better, but in his inapt metaphor, one did not kill one’s second wife for purposes of resuscitating the first! Both prudence and patriotism seemed then to call for spirited commitment to party, opposition, and the conventions that made them work. As each of these three showed, there was a readiness to enter into the dance, but also an awkward presumption to assign roles to the other dancers. In this respect, Vaublanc comes off with the best record. As Madrolle’s proposal of 1830 made clear, the presumption to create some buffer to protect the regime against the Left would not be forgotten in certain quarters. During the Restoration, it was also associated with the name of Charles Cottu, a respectable jurist and indefatigable advocate of a stronger monarchy. The theme re-emerged under the July Monarchy in the writings of Charles His and, more influentially, in the work of the journalist and provincial editor Henri Fonfrède. As the political history of this next experiment in constitutional government would attest, the only alternative to a forthright changing of the rules was the employment of the resources that naturally belonged to the government of the day to cheat its opponents of their dreams of power. That, of course, was exactly what Charles X’s ministers attempted. Those of Louis-Philippe would, in turn, make that manoeuvre into a system of governance. It is in the light of such a political dead end that one must judge the efforts of a Vaublanc, a Frénilly, or a Saint-Chamans to keep alive the hope of the marriage of constitutional government and political competition. Fearful of breaking the emerging rules and unable to change them, they consoled themselves with the fancy that, were the Right firmly to draw itself together, it might truly supply the personnel of the governing party. Although the success of the allegedly anti-monarchical forces would constitute a disaster for the monarchy, that did not rule out victory, fair and square, for their side. More generously still, Saint-Chamans had also hoped for the emergence of a struggle between parties equally royalist in their views. Seen in context, the

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ultra ambition was understandable, although a weak foundation for longterm stability. To expect the ultras to have done better than they did is probably to underestimate the unparalleled difficulty of their situation. No other free society to that time – certainly not Britain – seems to have had to cope with such fragile institutions and as profound a constitutional division. The combination necessarily strained the limits of tolerance and the ethics of civil disagreement. It was a presumption of the parliamentary system that the opposition must be able to carry the day, and yet the ultras sought to bar from power any party that posed a threat to the regime. This they genuinely believed to be true of the liberals. It cannot, alas, be argued in their defence that the alternation in power of opposed parties was as yet an unfamiliar notion. Observers of no marked political sophistication seem to have assumed that there was something natural in the British model. One example may suffice. A writer most familiar for his popularizations of science wrote one of the many journalistic paeans of praise to the institution of the opposition. He conceived it as an association of like-minded men following a set of fixed principles calculated to bring them into office. In this account, the opposition was the major support of representative government, a nursery of statesmen and based on an “honourable emulation.”118 If, by contrast, the views of some of the parliamentary ultras seem bizarre, absurdly unjust, one must conclude only that their fears of a return to republican revolution might have overwhelmed their intellectual commitment to British institutions. The British precedents that they cherished would carry them only so far. In eighteenth-century Britain, the system of competition for office had proven consistent with the sovereign’s never losing a general election. That hope of enjoying both a respectable parliamentary system and the advantages of offices for themselves was the stuff of ultra ambitions. Of course, even in Britain, William IV would have to give up a ministry that he would rather have retained, and this made it clear that the House of Commons might not have supported just any ministry because it was dear to the king. For the French to have entered the 1830s in the same situation, but marked with less readiness to give way, was no sign of constitutional ignorance. It meant only that France, in 1830, lacked the constitutional capital to manage the sort of crisis that, in the same period, could be managed in Britain rather easily.

118 “Des institutions nationales,” L’Oracle français, no. 12 (1819): 361–70 at 366–7. The editor of this publication and probable writer of the item was A.-A.-V.-S. de Montferrier.

4

Fiévée: Paradoxes by Instalment

joseph fiévée (1767–1839) was a journalist and political thinker, and in both capacities, he was arguably one of the most remarkable of his kind in the Restoration. The Revolution had found him in Paris, practising his trade as a printer. In 1790 he also collaborated in writing a comédie that gave notice of his future literary ambitions. His name first became linked to politics when he served as printer to the Girondin paper Chronique de Paris, and for his trouble, he had his print shop destroyed by a mob sympathetic to the victorious Montagnards. Some have presumed to see in this connection an initial commitment to the cause of revolution, but Fiévée always took pains to proclaim his distance from Condorcet and the others who wrote for the paper.1 Fiévée’s autobiography, prefaced to his final publication, is revealing about his life only up to the early nineteenth century. According to his own account, Fiévée played rather a significant role in the events that surrounded the fall of Robespierre. A report of the following year certainly places him among the leaders of the primary assembly of the district Théatre-français. The report makes it quite clear, however, that in his capacity as secretary he was without influence over his fellow members and was isolated on account of his strongly royalist views.2 1 For the charge, see Hippolyte Castille, Les Journaux et les journalistes sous l’Empire et sous la Restauration (Paris, 1858), 15; and Alfred Pereire, Le Journal des débats, politique et littérature, 1814–1914 (Paris, 1924), 85. Fiévée’s account consists in his comments at the time and later in the Revolution. See Chronique de Paris, no. 73 (14 March 1793); letter in Courier républicain, no. 547 (16 floréal III) [5 May 1795]: 36–7; and letter in Le Thé, no. 9 (24 April 1797): 35. This organ of extreme royalism did not deign to employ the revolutionary calendar. 2 Fiévée, Correspondance et relations de J Fiévée avec Bonaparte pendant onze ans de 1802 à 1813 (Paris, 1836), 1:i–clxxvi at ciii–v. It was separately published in A.M. de Lescure, ed., Mémoires sur les journées révolutionnaires et des coups d’état (Paris, 1875), 97–213. Compare, on matters of detail, Journal des patriotes de 89, no. 31 (29 fructidor III) [15 Sept. 1795], 122.

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Following his unhappy brush with the extremists of the Revolution, which included a time in prison during 1793, Fiévée entered into the profession of journalism. Some of his expressions of political opinion took the form of letters to newspapers, as when he found space in the columns of a royalist-leaning daily to argue that republican liberty of the press, with its practice of punishing writers after publication, was more onerous than the pre-publication censorship used prior to the Revolution. The end of 1796 saw him ensconced as sole editor of the Gazette française, and there one finds the occasional signed article, although most of his contributions appear to have remained anonymous.3 The dangerous trade of a journalist in the revolutionary years did not leave very ample scope for expressing strong political views, and Fiévée was perhaps more cautious than were certain others. What appears to have been a major preoccupation for him was the task of defining the means wherein traditional values might flourish and so confine the claims of a revolutionary regime. Both in his newspaper and in a pamphlet he is to be found contemplating the respect that political prudence dictated should be paid to established religious sentiment. This concern was one that offered some scope for subtleties, especially since Fiévée himself seems never to have been much burdened by religious commitments. What emerged, adroitly presented as well-meaning advice for the rulers of the day, was that no government could readily afford to alienate dominant opinions, such as those represented by religious belief, or it risked the formation of a political party hostile to its pretensions.4 Variants on the theme would supply Fiévée with many columns of print over the following decades. It was during his time with the Gazette that Fiévée also came to be associated with the Clichyens – as the members of a club, made up chiefly of royalists who sat in the legislature of the Directory, were known.5 The purge of 18 fructidor closed down the royalist press and proscribed their editors. Fiévée escaped into the countryside into a lifelong relation with Théodore Leclercq, as well as into the art of writing novels, which was the first occupation to bring him a significant reputation. The one novel that became rather famous was La Dot de Suzette. This interlude in his life has been well pieced together by Fiévée’s one biographer.6 3 La Quotidienne, no. 82 (22 floréal III) [11 May 1795]; Le Véridique, ou courier universel (24 frimaire V) [14 Dec. 1796], which offers a positive response to his debut as an editor; and Gazette française, no. 1840 (23 nivôse V) [12 Jan. 1797]. 4 Fiévée, De la religion considerée dans ses rapports avec le but de toute législation (Paris, 1795), 20, 24. 5 For hostile notice of his presence, see Courrier de l’armée de l’Italie, no. 14 (27 thermidor V) [15 Aug. 1797], 57. 6 Jean Tulard, Joseph Fiévée, conseiller secret de Napoléon (Paris, 1985), esp. 58–115.

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g ov e r n m en t o f b r ita i n : m o d el or th r e at ? Of the prominent journalists in the royalist camp, some, such as J.-P. Gallais, passed into a silence that lasted for decades. Others, among them J.-B.-A. Suard, came again to address the public but found no ready audience for their prejudices. A man of letters who sought a good living in the France of Napoleon did well to make his peace with the first consul. Fiévée did that with an endorsement of the coup d’état of brumaire, which, by a comparison with the dreadful circumstances of the Revolution, managed to say the right things without becoming too effusive. His Du dix-huit brumaire opposé au système de la terreur appeared in 1802, and that summer, on the recommendation of the rising politician Pierre- Louis Roederer, Bonaparte dispatched him on a mission to England to reconnoitre the state of the once and future enemy. At the same time as Fiévée opened up his role as informant to Napoleon, he was able, too, to follow his profession of journalism. The result was a set of lively and largely hostile impressions of English society. Paralleling his private services in procuring intelligence, Fiévée also secured the objectives of the regime on at least two fronts. The instrument by which Fiévée did this was to emphasize, even to exaggerate, the anglophilia of the philosophes, and specifically Voltaire, Rousseau, and Helvétius. Thus, even as Fiévée’s letters on England asserted the relative excellence of French ways, he simultaneously strove to discredit those on whom he blamed France’s recent misfortunes for their slavish admiration of perfidious Albion. By wounding the philosophes and the traditional enemy through the sides of each other, he had found a clever and elegant way of making relevant points with a minimum array of assumptions. It was, in fact, the animus against the alleged begetters of revolution on which opinion in France fastened, for there was nothing remarkable about the reservations expressed about the institutions of a nation with which France had recently been at war; far different was the impact of an impugning of the names commonly credited with wedding the Enlightenment to a revolutionary impulse. The Lettres sur l’Angleterre became a cause celèbre before their serialization in the Mercure was complete. The ensuing polemic is estimated to have fathered some fifty articles in the papers.7 The fuss over the philosophes was important because, in inheriting the remnants 7 Simone Balayé, “Un journaliste français à Londres en 1802: Deux notes inédits de Fiévée à Bonaparte, premier consul,” in Harry Cockerham and Esther Ehrman, eds, Ideology and Religion in French Literature: Essays in Honour of Brian Juden (Camberly, 1989), 49–68 at 53. See, too, Balayé’s “Un ennemi des lumières: Le journaliste Joseph Fiévée,” in Mario Matucci, ed., Atti del Colloquio internazionale gli “Ideologues” e la rivoluzione (Pisa, 1991), 19–27.

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of the Revolution, Bonaparte had as well taken over the ideological baggage that had supposedly inspired it. Like the Directory before him, it was Bonaparte’s strategy to appeal to the heritage of the Revolution when it suited his purposes, and at the same time ruthlessly to suppress all those who tried in any literal way to forestall the imperial direction of his rule. Part of the ambivalent response to the Revolution was the experiment with the Tribunate, intended to supply the legislative branch with a weapon, though a weak one, to restrain the actions of the executive. The mission to England was commissioned just months after Bonaparte’s impatient gutting of that admirable experiment, and Fiéveé’s narrowly institutional comments were relevant to its demise. Compared to the furore about the eighteenth-century philosophes, here was a dimension of Fiévée’s letters that attracted little attention either at the time of its appearance or since. The serialized letters as they appeared between late May and early September had offered but fleeting references to the institutions of party and opposition, and these had come in the course of letter six, which had included an unfriendly description of the electoral process in England. Criticisms of that letter in the Journal de Paris raised objections to its author’s prejudice against the great names of the philosophical party. This provoked Fiévée to write a conclusion to the original letters, and there, by way of responding to the charge that he had been unfair, he chose to illustrate his case by referring to aspects of British government about which the philosophical enemy had been absurdly uncritical. The most concrete in a series of glittering abstractions was the notion of “Opposition” to which he devoted no less than twelve pages.8 Never one to minimize the currency of human error, Fiévée sought to account for the excesses of admiration for the British constitution by citing both the self-serving agenda of the precursors of revolution and their apparent failure to read the reality with discernment. The deceit practised by the philosophes was, it seems, induced by the need to offer glowing illusions for purposes of inciting revolution. Part and parcel of the strategy was the sewing of discontent with French institutions through the gratuitous praise of foreign alternatives. Explaining the misreading of British government was made yet more complex, for Fiévée introduced Montesquieu in support of the proposition that laws and manners in Britain were in conflict – and so, presumably, difficult to read – as nowhere else. To support the case, he instanced, too, the fact that Englishmen disagreed about their institutions, and here he offered Blackstone as 8 Fiévée, Lettres sur l’Angleterre et réflexions sur la philosophie du xviiie siècle (Paris, 1802), 235–46. Here he began his use of a capital letter for the term “opposition,” but only on occasion and not in accord with the British practice of employing it only to designate the body rather than the practice of opposition.

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corrected by Bentham.9 The place of opposition here was to demonstrate the unwisdom of political imitation. Never did Fiévée attempt to show that any of the people cited, either British or French, had anything specific to say about opposition, so the logical status of the example remained precarious. One is left with at least a suspicion that Fiévée was seeking some excuse to discuss the subject of the Opposition in Britain and had created a pretext only with a certain awkwardness. Once he had managed to back into this topic, Fiévée’s comments on it were perceptive. He took it for granted that human frailty necessitated the presence in all governments of some form of opposition, and here he clearly equated the term with a set of counterforces. In particular, he dusted off a familiar conceit of the eighteenth century to instance the presence of such an inhibiting force even in the Ottoman Empire, where the violation of custom and especially religious custom would bring reprisals on the head of the mightiest of despots. Commonly, the point had been made by citing the universal sway of public opinion as embodied in the mores even of nations not provided with representative bodies. Given his history of support for the liberty of the press and his master’s clear intention to tolerate no freedom for criticism, Fiévée doubtless thought it the better part of valour not, at this time, to invoke public opinion. By positing a natural form of opposition, Fiévée was able to argue how otiose it was to try artificially to design such an institution, for that promised the danger of one’s having two oppositions – a natural one conformable to local ways and a foreign borrowing. Pressing his advantage, he added the possibility that, in the event of revolution, there might coexist three oppositions. This seemed to suggest that there was always an indigenous opposition in some form, although Fiévée did not deign to reconcile the assumption with his earlier assertion that the Ottoman sultan was far more circumscribed than was the Convention of recent memory. The latter, according to him, had destroyed tradition, family, religion, and laws and so had left no basis on which to rear the activity of opposition.10 Of French oppositions in the more distant past, there was mention both of the “grands seigneurs” up to the time of Richelieu and that of the parlements at a later date. More recent experience left Fiévée evasive, and he blamed the maladroit rationalism of the philosophers for the fact that an “opposition légale” had not emerged in the eighteenth century. An opposition, he insisted, needed foundations, and at that time, support could come only from the Revolution itself. In recording his horror at the habits recently displayed in French politics, Fiévée presumably thought that he 9 Fiévée, Lettres sur l’Angleterre, 229. 10 Ibid., 236–7.

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had sufficiently discouraged any close enquiry as to how the universal function was acquitted at the time of writing. Other comments, seemingly directed to the same end, included a tribute to glory and the concomitant reduction of opposition in the reign of Louis XIV, as well as a veiled criticism of an unnamed “grand homme” who had sought to spell out the limits of legitimate opposition. One wonders if this was Suard, once Fiévée’s associate in the Clichy set, and now, seemingly, on the other side on the issue of opposition.11 For one whose criticisms of the philosophes had shown him to be an enemy to unbounded generalization, Fiévée himself was rather vague about the specifics of the British form of opposition. He did, however, make it clear that, in context, it was at times useful, and because it reposed upon old habits and national interests, rarely dangerous. Like most Frenchmen with his view of recent events, he almost certainly bore the Opposition in Britain a grudge for its embracing of the Revolution. Without even naming the competing units involved in British political life, he noted that, generically, these bodies were parties; he seemed, too, to be reasonably indulgent to their presence. More relevant to Fiévée’s purpose was his careful spelling out of geographical factors – relative size and British insularity – that resisted any effort to replicate the British experience in France. For one thing, the constant oppositional stance of a British Opposition was illsuited to French circumstances. Here the argument is quite elliptical, but it would seem that Fiévée had in mind the more exposed situation of a continental power. He cited as well the French tendency to accord to their governors greater latitude than was consistent with the jealous British tradition. A French government could not be confined as could others, and hence the necessity of implementing in France an understanding of liberty quite different from that propagated by the Revolution. Here was yet another reminder that some leeway was to be accorded to France’s rulers before the specific form in which the imperative of opposition might be realized could be sought out. In all of these comments, Fiévée chose to emphasize the measure in which the Revolution had tended to press rulers too closely and not, as one might also have observed, the fact that no viable pattern of opposition had emerged from revolutionary fervour. Fiévée stoutly denied that his strictures on the philosophes were in any way relevant to Montesquieu, yet this was his work in which Montesquieu’s spell was most evident. For purposes of making his case against indiscriminate borrowing, the model was well chosen. Whether Montesquieu should be credited with another quality of Fiévée’s work is uncertain. Already the reader is in the presence of a penchant for arresting formulations that 11 Ibid., 238n.

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never quite made contact with a sufficient body of specifics. The audacity of the identification of certain philosophes with Anglomania and of both with the Revolution is breathtaking. The school that had truly believed in political competition à l’anglaise was surely the monarchiens, friends neither to the Revolution nor to the further reaches of eighteenth-century philosophy. Nor was Fiévée’s authority on British government, Charles Baert’s Tableau, an inspired choice. It had just appeared, although much of it had been written earlier, and it was not, on the whole, destined for great influence. It was still, to all appearances, one of the first works on Britain to employ a tragedy within a prominent political family to spell out a moral about British parties. In 1770, Charles Yorke, son of Lord Hardwicke, had deserted the Rockingham faction to accept the office of lord chancellor. He died shortly after, said by some by his own hand, victim of the stigma attached to political apostasy. Baert thus joined to the French fascination with an alleged English propensity for suicide the myth of a quite extraordinary loyalty that suffused the ranks of British political parties. It was not a conjunction that was calculated to make the institution of party at all attractive, and in that capacity, the tale did valued service among French publicists for decades.12 Fiévée, in fact, made no use of Baert’s comments on the British Opposition, and that is probably because his purpose was to argue for the inapplicability of the institution to the circumstances of his own country, not to try to render it ridiculous as found in its homeland. These efforts to make sense of opposition, without introducing it into France, can only have improved Bonaparte’s understanding of the issue, despite his various public statements that reduced the work of a British Opposition to attempts to induce the ministers to buy them off.13 All of this was consistent with the fact that the supposed contradiction between laws and moeurs from which the argument had begun seemed in no way illuminated by the rather elaborate excursus on opposition. Since the writer was anything but an unsubtle thinker, it is probable that Fiévée’s use of the concept of opposition was intended to justify the brutal suppression of the power of the Tribunate. Already in that summer of 1802, there had been a much less artful effort to discredit the competition of parties as foreign to the needs of the nation.14 The context in which Fiévée presented his argument and that within which it was received both rendered marginal the 12 Charles A. Baert-Duholant, Tableau de la Grande-Bretagne (Paris, 1802), 2:247– 50. For other uses of the same incident, see my “Conscience, Honour and the Failure of Party in Restoration France,” nn. 47, 48, 49. 13 For one such statement, see Maurice Schumann, Dictionnaire … des opinions et jugements de Napoleon Ier (Paris, 1964), s.v. Opposition, 2:151. 14 L.-P. de Bugny, De l’esprit de parti en France au xixe siècle (Paris, 1802).

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issue of counterweights to government. Yet, in fact, it was closer to being an issue of the day than was the reputation of some eighteenth-century thinkers. The importance of the issue figures in what was probably the first review of the book – that by E.-A. de Wailly in the Mercure. This paper was naturally friendly to Fiévée’s views, for it had commissioned the original articles and he had been associated with it since its revival in 1800. Since all of the other material had already appeared there, the review said a good deal about what was new and, in this connection, emphasized how much the subject of opposition had been argued in France since 1789. There was a careful and respectful presentation of Fiévée’s insistence that the usefulness of this institution in some circumstances did not warrant drawing any general conclusions good for all societies.15 What the reviewer did not add was that most of the heated debate had taken place, not in the days of revolution, but in the past year. Bonaparte had been tiring of even the modest check posed by the Tribunate. Fiévée would return, under different circumstances, to the problems of political imitation and to that most characteristic of British institutions, the Opposition. For more than a decade, however, his published writings would be uncontroversial in the main, limited to apparently innocuous pieces of journalism and to numerous reviews of the work of others. These latter appear to be the only ones that he normally signed. Judging from those that were reprinted over the years in Le Spectateur français au xixe siècle, a digest of writings of the time, the bulk of the content dealt with literature and philosophy. Much of his output, and in particular that with political content, was conveyed to Bonaparte and remained unknown to the public. Nevertheless, Fiévée remained an independent thinker and eventually lost the editorship of the Journal de l’Empire for his failure to maintain positions sufficiently close to those of the government. It was also in these years that he was pondering some of his most comprehensive and elusive ideas about public life. One of these formulations, reworked in a number of different contexts, was to become a sort of signature of Fiévée as a political thinker. This was his effort to compress the meaning of politics into some relation between, on the one hand, interests and, on the other, opinions. This formulation was much imitated in the Restoration, and not just by Chateaubriand. There was, to be sure, nothing new in the recognition that these two concepts summed up much that was of importance in human society. Each in its own way had been proclaimed as the key to human affairs, and the two had shared prominence since the late seventeenth century.16 Their 15 Mercure de France 10, no. 70 (8 brumaire 11) [30 Oct. 1802]: 262–71 at 265–7. 16 Gunn, “Opinion in Eighteenth-Century Thought: What Did the Concept Purport to Explain?” Utilitas 5 (May 1993): 17–33 at 17–22, 33.

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coming together in Fiévée’s thought arose rather naturally as a result of his apparent mandate to report to Bonaparte both on the mood of the public and on any insights that he could offer as to the interest or well-being of the nation. This would seem to invite at least some attention to the question of how policy made with an eye to one of these considerations might affect the other. Fiévée began to communicate regularly with the master of France in October 1802, the very month when Lettres sur l’Angleterre appeared. From the outset, the unstated premise of the proffered advice was that the government of France already had command of priorities and, far from seeking public inspiration as to the direction of policy, needed to know the public mind the better to control it. For this reason, the memoranda have a great deal more to say about public opinion than about the interests of individuals or the state. Throughout, however, ran a current that suggested that opinions were the unstable agents in human affairs, whereas interests provided the basis of stability. An early example was the suggestion that there were royalists from opinion and those from interest and that the former had remained in France, whereas the latter had emigrated. Presumably, the recipient was to gain the encouraging intelligence that those royalists still in the country were those whose loyalties were more fluid and accommodating. Probably Fiévée, who had been arrested after brumaire for his royalist views, wished still to say that he was one of these. The contrast remained a staple in his repertoire, but the emphasis shifted to underline the importance and value of interests over opinions. Repeated reference to the volatile nature of opinion contrasts with Fiévée’s comment on how the mores and interests of Britain ruled that polity, obviously to its advantage. Despite some previous dispraise for the British, these confidential thoughts were, in general, significantly more respectful. A more explicit bracketing of opinion and interest, to the credit of the latter, held that political action had to be proportioned to interests, whereas opinions had more to do with the general form of government than with specific institutions. A certain emphasis, at least, emerges here, although the thought remains far from transparent. Finally, in the summer of 1808, the imperial eye would have occasion to consider the proposition that opinions were indeed very powerful but served merely as the banner for underlying interests that might not yet have fixed upon their goal. The same passage, explaining why revolutionary politics always failed to bring order, said that politics itself, when best understood, was nothing other than the conciliation of interests. When, by contrast, it sought to bring opinions into harmony, the effort went astray, as in the late Revolution. The glittering abstractions of opinion and interest afforded the framework for many of Fiévée’s political insights, but he was at his best when he

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escaped them. Sometimes his bite derived from his being less abstract, more specific, as when he offered a hypothesis as to why the spirit of European capitals must be republican. Alternatively, its source could be uninhibited and perceptive judgments on individuals, as when he explained that Bonald was disqualified to be a popular “prophet of the past,” whereas Chateaubriand might succeed.17 Those observations that best captured the quality of Fiévée’s future political analyses spoke to the linkage of institutions, whether the affinity between a free press and regimes supplied with a deliberative assembly or, even more effectively, the naturalness in Britain of numerous independent associations that spawned a spirit of opposition. The same, transposed to France, would be both dangerous and contrary to the national mores. In these comments, the analyst obviously strove to find, in a reassuring way, reasons other than the absence of French liberty for the disparity in institutions. He thus emphasized the distance to which a French government went to provide certain cultural amenities and modes of encouragement to the gifted that in Britain were necessarily provided by non-governmental bodies. There was, then, a sense in which such a proliferation of organizations might seem, in France, to be gratuitous. Yet a hint of criticism entered as well, for Fiévée presumed to complain of a French habit of taking for granted that the government would sustain all initiatives and thus remove any incentive for private efforts. Again, the argument was carefully angled away from the suggestion that blame lay in any quarter other than national mores.18 In the Restoration, Fiévée would be one who strongly opposed those administrative traditions that seemed especially incompatible with creating genuine self-government; already the seeds of such an insight were evident. The thought of the Revolution would have tended to treat both a free press and the flourishing of associations as individual rights, if they were treated at all. Fiévée, by contrast, was interested in the institutions that were inseparable from the existence of particular forms of rule. The inspiration was that of Montesquieu, though directed to questions outside the latter’s range of concerns. The thoughts communicated to Bonaparte in 1808 provided some of the substance of a book that Fiévée wrote and caused to be printed in 1809. It did not, contrary to what is sometimes assumed in later accounts, come to be published until September 1815. Gone was the Machiavellian tone that had run through the confidential correspondence and the frankly disrespectful treatment of a public whose opinion was to be shaped 17 Fiévée, Correspondance … avec Bonaparte, 1:11 (Oct. 1802), 106 (Jan. 1803); 2:4–6 (May 1804), 345 (July 1808), 368 (Sept. 1808), 38 (Aug. 1804), 273 (July 1807). 18 Ibid., 1:140 (April 1803), 107–10 (Jan. 1803).

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at will. Nor did the legacy of Montesquieu, so useful in supplying the categories within which to compare nations, survive the transition, for it was not relevant to the narrower theme of a book focused upon France.19 The result was, not surprisingly, an effort to formulate the relation between interests and opinions, shorn of that context that had given life to the original distinction. Taken as advice to a populistic dictator, the original comments made sense, although their meaning remained in need of more by way of an explicit agenda than Fiévée was ever inclined to offer. In their new form, they were simply a series of observations upon the balance of social orders in French history, all of them intended to shed light upon a general thesis about the relations between opinions and interests. On the whole, this thesis tended to be buried in a historical narrative that occupied most of the volume. Some judgments did, however, emerge, the chief of them the claim that, whereas competing interests might be conciliated, even force could not be relied upon to modify opinions. Thus, interests were the stuff of politics, and opinions, however powerful, were rather unsettling influences. There was acknowledgment of how the opinions of the ancient world were less dangerous than modern ones because of the latter’s connection with religion. The comment seems to echo Hume’s famous distinction, made in his essay “Of Parties in General,” between parties of principle and those based merely on negotiable interests. Present as well was recognition of Cardinal Richelieu’s role in controlling opinion, of Necker’s disservice to the nation in placing national interests at the mercy of mercurial opinion, and of the unfortunate quality of opinions that served to ignite the great revolution.20 Taken as advice for the world in general, Fiévée’s thoughts lost some of their edge, especially since they were not accompanied by any account of his priorities. From this ballet of categories, the reader was presumably meant to conclude that both interest and opinion afforded the fuel for conflict but that only interest offered a secure foundation for public life. Given France’s long love affair with opinion and the familiar character of flightiness associated with that people, one might conclude that the conciliation of disparate positions would 19 For valuable treatments of Fiévée’s thought on other themes, see Jacques Caritey, “Un Préfet de l’Empire: Joseph Fiévée, maître des requêtes, préfet de Nièvre,” La Revue administrative 14 (1961): 138–49 (with remarkable archival material); Jeremy Popkin, “Conservatism under Napoleon: The Political Writings of Joseph Fiévée,” History of European Ideas 5 (1984): 385–400; and Guy Thuiller, Témoins de l’ administration (Paris, 1967), chap. 3. 20 Des opinions et des intérêts pendant la Révolution (Paris, 1809), 10, 13–14, 209, 173, 11. For the facts of publication, see A. Monglond, La France révolutionnaire et impériale (Paris, 1957), 8:27n.

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be especially difficult in France. On the evidence of this work, it was only when Fiévée returned to address the nature of conflict in terms of specific institutions that he would hit his stride as a political thinker. His connections with the press assured Fiévée of notice for his work, and on this occasion, the major review appeared in the Journal des débats, with which he had enjoyed a long association. The reviewer J.-.J.-F. Dussault was best known as a literary critic but showed himself more than competent to challenge the difficulties of the book. Only works of some importance merited three-part reviews such as this one, but respectful attention did not amount to uncritical favour. Dussault appreciated the intellectual elegance of an attempt to employ these magic terms to resolve all political questions, but noted that, as with Montesquieu and his tripartite division of governments, the result was Procrustean. Most seriously, the phenomenon of opinions did not appear to be well focused. In effect, the book had offered three different versions of what was, for the uninitiated, a single phenomenon. There was first that opinion that was called by Pascal (and by others before him) the queen of the world. Dussault correctly inferred that, in offering this motto as the one that graced his own book, Fiévée could have intended no disrespect to what it entailed. How, then, to make sense of this epigraph in light of references to those destabilizing influences known as “opinions,” and further, how did both relate to what seemed to occupy for Fiévée an intermediate level of respectability – the notion of opinion publique?21 Dussault did not presume to unravel the confusion but contented himself with remarking that such terminology could spread a cloud over even such luminous thoughts as those under consideration. Only those already familiar with comparable efforts, published late in the eighteenth century, might hope to grasp the issue. These readers, aware that there once had been a genre of commenting on opinion, might then penetrate the code. The key to much of what had been interpreted as contradictory assertions about opinion amounted to nothing more than the claim that the work of opinion prior to the Revolution had been salutary, whereas after 1784 and Necker’s lifting of the veil that had screened public finance, the scene had turned distinctly ugly. Opinion, the queen of the world, had been the sentiments on which a scheme of orders rested, and the higher orders contributed disproportionately to that mainstay of the social fabric. The work of this opinion was then to hold people together in an order that used a near-unanimous sense of community to preserve the whole. The “opinions” unleashed by the Revolution were of a nature that threatened all order, 21 Journal des débats (4, 12, 20 Sept. 1815). They were reissued in Dussault’s Annales littéraires, ou choix chronologique des principaux articles … (Paris, 1810–24), 4:444–64.

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for they emanated from various quarters and were no longer amenable to direction by grave men of sound reputation. Not for a moment can it be claimed that Fiévée had said all of this clearly, but this rendering serves to make sense of what seems otherwise oracular in tone and opaque in substance. In the correspondence with Bonaparte, he had already defended a depersonalized view of public life that gave pride of place to traditions and what might now be called structures. A nice illustration was his claim that the revolutionaries had persisted in killing men, oblivious to the fact that the resistance that they sought to overcome resided in mores, interests, and needs, factors that existed independently of the will of the masses.22 It was a thought that would, for the immediate future, be more explored in German than in French. Fiévée seems to have subscribed to the familiar royalist teaching that public opinion might only function well in a monarchy – he had said as much to Bonaparte – and he obviously looked forward to a time when authority could preside over a shared national opinion that was the product of respect and legitimacy rather than terror.23 The royalists of the Revolution had never been remarkably effective in furthering a view of opinion of the sort favoured by Fiévée, even though they condemned the form of opinion that then oppressed them. Some of them made a measure of headway towards a helpful way of looking at matters when they treated the opinion of the ancien régime as a quality of the society as a whole and not as a simple aggregate of individual opinions, but twentieth-century language serves better to make the point. By this reckoning, one might well say that opinion in its holistic capacity was indeed different from the anarchical clash of isolated subjectivities that Fiévée saw as opinions. Of public opinion itself, the story is also complex. Fiévée later denied, first in one of his prefectorial reports and later in a publication, that either the word or the thing had been known before the reign of Louis XIII – that is, before the age of Cardinal Richelieu.24 The historical reconstruction here is remarkable, and Fiévée’s insight would long remain without competitors. Dussault was, then, perceptive in seeing public opinion as a more respectable entity than mere opinion, and yet as qualitatively different again from the traditional queen of the world. The element of blatant manipulation, new with Richelieu, was presumably what made the difference. Had Fiévée bothered to explain that before the Revolution there had already been profound changes in the workings of public sentiment, he would have prevented the confusion of some of his readers. To his credit, 22 Fiévée, Correspondance … avec Bonaparte, 1:116 (Feb. 1803). 23 See ibid., 1:229 (April 1804); and Gunn, Queen of the World, esp. 373–4. 24 Fiévée, Histoire de la session de 1816 (Paris, 1817), 344–5; see, too, the passage quoted in Jacques Caritey, “Un Préfet de l’Empire: Joseph Fiévée … ,” 141–2n.

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Fiévée saw a pattern in these matters that had escaped others, but his historical reconstruction was too elliptical to help the uninitiated. We must assume that Fiévée saw no way to stem the tide of public opinion, especially in a representative regime, so the goal had to be to prevent revolutionary excesses. Not until the author of these thoughts expressed views on party and opposition would these earlier categories contribute to useful insights into Restoration politics. All this said, there remains a mystery about the way in which Fiévée expressed his ideas. In both of his first two books on politics, he had been less than revealing about what was at stake and thus about the whys and wherefores of his performance. In keeping with the apparent lack of candour about the point of writing in 1802 of the Opposition in Britain was the strongly royalist agenda behind the thoughts about opinion and interest. In this case, however, it was not a matter of writing a conclusion weightier and much different from the original articles; the ambiguity was rather derived from what was intended as an adaptation of royalist doctrine to accommodate that new form of one-man rule that had come with Bonaparte. For whom had the unpublished advice been intended? Was it simply put aside in anticipation of those better times that must come? Perhaps Fiévée had deemed this suitable fare for France under the Empire, and it had been Bonaparte, never friendly to political speculation, who had vetoed publication. In any event, there can be little doubt that this journalist had fashioned for himself an unusual and arresting style, striking even among those few writers happy enough to be widely read. Possibly a bit of mystery was intended only for purposes of rendering the product yet more attractive; conceivably Fiévée had sensed that as France entered the Romantic age, the time for Cartesian clarté was over. Whatever accounts for the style of presentation, it seems to have been very much a part of the man. H.-N.-J. Auger, later to become a man of letters, records an encounter with Fiévée when the latter was at the height of his reputation. Here we have a description of a tall, well-proportioned, and robust man who dominated his surroundings, especially in conversation. At the same time, there is also the intriguing intimation of a mode, even of speaking, whereby the obvious energy of the thought was, in some degree, hidden by what the young observer described as a form of “coquetterie.”25 It might then seem that for some reason Fiévée habitually sacrificed matter in favour of manner and that his approach to issues was oblique rather direct. Was it his notorious homosexuality that lay at the basis of his character? There is reason to doubt it, if only because his liaison with Leclercq was so very notorious in that Fiévée, the elder of the two and the one who 25 Mémoires d’Auger (1810–1859), ed. Paul Cottin (Paris, 1891), 296–7.

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was first to become well known, seems to have made very little effort to hide it. His propensity cost him, it is conceivable, some opportunities in the world, perhaps even his career as an energetic and, to all appearances, effective prefect. If it had any bearing upon his singularly elusive way of making a case, it must be admitted that perhaps, in this instance, there was no loss to lament. Conceivably, his way of writing made his fortune, and part of the persona was that of an observer who was immune to the temptations of office. In this capacity of an independent royalist, happiest when berating those in power and singularly uninterested in succeeding them, he was well known. It is for this reason, no doubt, that Fiévée has sometimes been identified as the author of a heavily ironical guide for aspirants to places in government. The text itself refers to his celebrity as one who resisted the profession of fonctionnaire.26 It would not be inconsistent with Fiévée’s ample pride to draw attention to his own virtues, but the laboured style speaks to his not being the author. In the First Restoration, Fiévée continued his practice of writing letters that commented on the politics of the day; this time, however, his output came to be dedicated to the duc de Blacas, then minister in charge of the royal household, and the letters were intended, no doubt, to be read by Louis XVIII or his advisers. The earlier letters to Bonaparte would supply the model, and Fiévée’s previous commitments would afford ample reason not to hurry the texts into print. Later, when these letters were published – usually with such elaborate afterthoughts (called développements) as to increase their length several fold – he shared his insights with the public. Because Fiévée had recently seen fit to publish his remarks on opinions and interests, it must be assumed that his views of 1809 had not changed greatly. Indeed, the first letter of the first part of his Correspondance politique et administrative – the work that began its life as the private correspondence dedicated to Blacas and surely the one that more than any other established Fiévée’s place in political writing – took up the theme that had figured so prominently in the Lettres of 1802. There was the same insistence that one people could never presume to become another, no matter how earnest the effort at imitation. Were that not intended to warn France of the dangers of trying to adopt foreign ways, and specifically the parliamentary government of Britain, it is not clear what the counsel could mean. This letter was dated only two weeks before the proclamation of the

26 Anon., M. Terme, ou la science de conserver les places; par un employé sous tous les régimes de 1788 à 1817 (Paris, 1817), 128. Fiévée’s name was readily associated with publications that were probably not his. For another such attribution, see Émile de Perceval, Un adversaire de Napoleon: Le Vte. de Lainé … , 2:86n.

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Charte.27 Thereafter, it had become clear that Britain would in fact be the model for new institutions and almost all trace of Fiévée’s scorn for institutional borrowing disappeared, at least in any sense that disparaged the alien institutions. The emphasis came to be one of understanding the system that was to serve as model. l i b e r t y, m i n i s t r y, a n d g o v e r n m e n t : some elementary lessons The positive orientation towards British institutions had entered into the correspondence with Bonaparte in the form of an admission that they were no doubt serviceable within their indigenous setting. This had been true, for instance, in Fiévée’s perceptive analysis of those bodies, such as clubs, that served in Britain to contain what he called “l’esprit d’opposition.” Such arrangements, he explained, were part of the logic of such a system of government. His noting the important fact that British parties did not discuss fundamentals or disagree about them – an absolutely essential consideration that must give pause to French observers – was another such effort to suggest how it was that British arrangements worked at least for Britain.28 Now it was time to transcend Montesquieu’s teaching to the extent of allowing that, with care, institutions might be borrowed. The need for such a concession was readily apparent in the circumstances of France, but Fiévée’s royalist sentiments, no longer confined by having to fit the constraints imposed by the Empire, had to find expression. It was a loyalty that complicated his thought and came forward precisely for purposes of avowing that the restored monarchy could never be expected to function in the British manner. The two different demands of emulating British representative government and remaining loyal to a French tradition of monarchy were reconciled, somewhat tenuously, in the statement that admirers of a constitution à l’anglaise assumed that a king did nothing. Almost all dangers might then be removed 27 Fiévée, Correspondance politique et administrative commencée au mois de mai 1814, 15 parts (1815–19), I, 1: 27. Parts are indicated by Roman numbers; letters are in bold. Publication began in September 1815. The letters, especially the earlier ones, were reprinted a number of times. However, the substance of successive editions seems to have varied chiefly in the number of separate letters that were reprinted together. There is little to indicate that Fiévée altered his published versions once they had appeared in print. What the publisher calls the fourth edition of part V appears to be identical to the text of the first edition. But reprinting the contents of a periodical was rare enough. For the meeting of the commission to prepare the Charte, see Pierre Simon, L’Élaboration de la charte constitutionnelle de 1814 (Paris, 1906), 77. 28 Fiévée, Correspondance … avec Bonaparte, 1:107 (Jan. 1803), 8 (Oct. 1802).

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from the model were it acknowledged that the king would act directly upon affairs, as it seemed that a French ruler must do. Limiting himself to immediate circumstances, Fiévée cited the task of having to put together a fragmented nation, without institutions or doctrines.29 That was his way of describing the dilemma of being caught between discordant traditions that could neither be reconciled nor forgotten. Were Fiévée’s favoured method for expounding political truths to be reduced to a simple statement, it would be that what mattered were not discrete institutions but the relations that obtained among a set of bodies and practices. He never thus explained himself in so many words, but this can be inferred from some of his examples. He suggested, for instance, that a naïve attempt to emulate the forms of representative government would proclaim that British liberty resided in the two houses of Parliament. But, he objected, this was to miss the fact that the home of British liberty lay in all of the nation’s institutions and that the houses of Parliament served but to display that liberty. Consequently, a nation such as France might come to possess the requisite forms and lack still the substance of political representation. It would then be, he said, but a false representation. This came at the very outset of his first letter in May 1814. Further displaying the elusive locus of political freedom, Fiévée wrote of British suspicion of standing armies, or as he oddly put it, a king and an army together seemed to place liberties in peril. Recourse to Britain’s insular situation answered the problem, though in roundabout fashion. A later comment completed the story with a comparison of attitudes, French and British, towards the military. For Napoleon, the army was not so much a military formation as a form of state cast in military terms. In Britain, by contrast, one spoke in time of peace only of specific regiments, whereas in wartime there might be several armies but no monolithic military power.30 Rarely could a foreigner have so cleverly attached the famous nominalism of British categories to the cause of British freedom. Separated by a whole letter from the earlier comment, this letter also illustrated nicely how attitudes or mores rather than laws or formal arrangements might be the basis of freedom. In the same vein was the treatment accorded to the freedom of the press as the British provided for it. There were various ways of perceiving this condition, and the least useful was that of the philosophical rationalism of the eighteenth century. From that perspective, it was a universal value, in keeping with the tendency of the philosophes to raise each of their prejudices to the status of an absolute principle. But this ignored the lesson of experience, which made it clear that such a liberty could flourish only 29 Fiévée, Correspondance politique I, 3: 90–4. 30 Ibid., I, 1: 23; I, 3: 99–100.

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where a balance among the contenders for power made it inexpedient to crush one’s opponents. As the journées of vendémiaire and fructidor well illustrated, those in power need not extend such good things to a weak enemy. The liberty as it existed in Britain was thus an unplanned outcome of the struggle for power. Fiévée specifically instanced the political parties as the active agents; liberty of the press existed because “the struggle and the balance of the parties there form the action of the government.” In similar fashion, he presented this liberty as maintained, in part, by the liberty of the legislature, which liberty was in turn protected by that of the press. Each factor was then simultaneously cause and effect. A later addition to the letter confirmed the way in which a free press was an essential condition of representative government, necessary for purposes of maintaining the multiplicity of views that it invited. Without it, the day belonged to “un seul parti.” Further pursuing the subject of a free press as a political ideal, Fiévée employed the Napoleonic epithet idéologie to describe the assumption that it was desired by all and for all, when really each feared its use against himself and sought exclusive use of it. It was nevertheless useful to all, including those governments that unwisely withheld it. A later publication returned to the way in which all liberties in Britain were connected and even argued that the French overvalued the liberty of the press because it was not perceived within a comparable network of complementary liberties. The argument remained alive in 1821.31 Though not employing the language of the Scottish enlightenment, the analysis made skilful use of the earlier discovery that the essential goodness of a condition such as a free press was insufficient to secure that condition. It is clear from the above that Fiévée’s empirical treatment of the antecedents of freedom did not rule out firm cross-cultural generalizations. In general, he had explained – based upon British evidence – those conditions under which one could expect liberty of the press to exist. He had expended no effort in hailing the virtues of this sort of freedom, but rather limited the analysis to a cool explanation of how certain ways of behaving affected other ways of behaving. In rejecting the principles that he saw as the common resort of the philosophers, Fiévée was not even maintaining that one must avoid recounting the virtues of some political institutions, but he had made it reasonably clear that he deemed it fatuous to commend those institutions whose merits supplied no means for bringing them into existence. Consistent with this austere instrumentalism, he had offered some rather original arguments for seeing value in the political competition that so often struck French observers of British politics as at 31 Fiévée, Histoire de la session de 1817 (Paris, 1818), 53; and Fiévée, Histoire de la session de 1820 (Paris, 1821), 50.

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best vulgar, at worst a cynical charade. There are documents from eighteenth-century Britain that remark in passing on how certain freedoms seemed to be a by-product of party struggles, but these are rare indeed and they lack Fiévée’s theoretical sophistication. Most importantly, the example of the liberty of the press spoke to those views of Montesquieu that had influenced the earlier writings. It made clear how very subtle a condition political liberty was, how difficult to establish, and, above all, with what care a people must enquire as to what it was getting when attempting to borrow the relevant institutions. Not stated in the example – whether from generosity of spirit or because the thought was not yet expressible, it is difficult to say – was that it was conceivable that the current beneficiaries of a good political order might be in no position to explain why it worked well. Whatever the state of British understanding, there seemed absolutely no doubt in Fiévée’s mind that the bulk even of informed Frenchmen were ignorant of the mechanics of the British constitution. The issue that seems chiefly to have inspired this thought was the situation of kings and ministers on either side of the Channel. As usual with Fiévée, the argument was far from linear in exposition, and he tended to revisit again and again the same issues, varying the emphasis on each occasion. This was, in part, the consequence of his returning to the letters initially written in 1814 to offer substantial addenda that responded to developments through the summer of 1815. As usual, the additions were written before the original correspondence had appeared in published form. The first contrast that he offered to his countrymen was that the office of minister in the two countries was quite different. French ministers were pre-eminently administrators, whereas their British counterparts never entered into the detail of administration and excelled as speakers in Parliament and as party men. From such a party, he pointed out, the British minister gained an orientation on policy and support in his endeavours. Not only the ministers found parties to their benefit; the king of France, rightly called father to his people, might still derive advantage from some subset of that people. Or, as Fiévée casually put it, “il est très politique qu’il ait un parti.”32 One assumes that here he thought of placing the ministry in the hands of a set of men already connected and not of the monarch’s private preferences. For one who never wrote as much as a single sustained essay on the nature of political parties, Fiévée found ample opportunity to point out their place in the political order. No doubt it was the very unfamiliarity of the institution and the dubious reputation of the British parties that left these comments of July 1814 so unemphatic and fleeting. Further contributing to the elusive quality of the observations was that the argument made no pretence of 32 Fiévée, Correspondance politique III (Dec. 1815), 7: 7, 14.

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moving in regular fashion from one system to the other. Rather, one finds isolated comments, such as that about the need of the king of France for a party, without any explicit reference to the situation of the king of England and of what significance the life of parties had for him. The most obvious area of incomprehension of the British constitution was, apparently, the status of the king. The king, in British practice, was above the political fray and not subject to complaints from the people. When it sounded as though complaint were directed at the king, one might be sure that instead the ministers were intended. Neither was it constitutionally decorous to appeal to the king’s opinions on any issue, for he possessed no personal opinion, only a formal will. But how, pondered Fiévée, could this be put to a French audience, for they would never understand. (He seems here to have forgotten that much of the rhetoric early in the Revolution had said quite clearly that the fault lay in the ministers and that the king was ignorant of their wrongdoing.) French perception erred again in assuming that such treatment reduced the king to a nullity, for it was in truth the strongest evidence of great respect. To the original warning of June 1814 that a French king would necessarily be a more commanding figure than an English one was now added the refinement that the office of kingship in Britain was more robust than most Frenchmen imagined. But the real conceptual struggle lay, evidently, in grasping the different sets of relations that were possible between king and ministers. On this issue, Fiévée’s views understandably developed in step with the rapid changes that were unavoidable in a new political order. Thus, in 1814, his letters emphasized the distance that separated the ways of French politics from that ministerial solidarity attributed to a British cabinet. Napoleon had contributed to folkways already well established prior to the Revolution when he sought, for his own purposes, to keep his ministers divided. The antecedents that could sustain solidarity were thus absent in France, and efforts merely to imitate the British in this respect would prove futile. The dealings between a French king and his ministers had taken the form of a series of bilateral relations, and Fiévée saw little prospect of immediate change. There was also the related issue of ministerial responsibility, which was an expectation based, in large measure, on an antecedent bond among the ministers. In the politics of absolute monarchy, individual ministers were disgraced, or worse, but any effort to emulate the emerging practices of representative government – and Fiévée revealed his awareness of just how recent a growth British practice was – entailed some notion of collective responsibility. Of the prospects for such a practice, Fiévée was yet more sceptical, complaining that he could attach no clear meaning to the notion of responsibility of French ministers. In that summer of 1814, he could thus proclaim, with no hint of his characteristic subtlety, that the

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very notion of a ministry, joined by a sense of solidarity and as a body responsible, entering and leaving power together, must in the existing state of France be a dream.33 The Hundred Days and the coming of the Second Restoration separated Fiévée’s initial thoughts on the prospects of a ministry in the British style and his later updating of the relevant letters. By this time, some of the mistakes of the First Restoration had been corrected and none more than those elements of practice that had been redolent of a past age. Talleyrand had been especially committed to the encouragement of homogeneity and solidarity in the ministry, and the proclamation of Cambrai, issued by Louis XVIII in late June1815, signalled a new resolve to change practice; Fiévée’s report on the legislative session of 1815 noted the improvement.34 The mood of his conjectures about the borrowings from Britain had changed too, if hardly to optimism, at least in the direction of a readiness to await further developments. But the abatement of scorn at naïve responses to one issue did not mean that Fiévée now saw nothing but clear sailing. Instead, the very events that marked the new resolve to strive for a different sort of ministry laid the basis for a new complaint, for if ministers who were but the king’s advisers after the old fashion were unpromising materials for a new form of government, a new-style ministry might also pose problems. Fiévée found the text for his latest round of objections in the statement of the ministry in July 1815. The ministry of Talleyrand, Fouché, and Pasquier, which, in the event, would not stay on to meet the chamber elected in the late summer, had emphasized its homogeneity and solidarity, just as the king wished it to do. Fiévée could scarcely quarrel with that resolve and seemed to approve of the course being taken. Undoubtedly, he detested Fouché, who had been responsible for his arrest in 1800, but that prejudice had no constitutional significance. Fiévée nevertheless found grounds for concern in the fact that the new ministerial solidarity had apparently been responsible for the rise of a corresponding constitutional solecism. This was the view, one allegedly become current in public discussion, that the ministry was, in fact, the government.35 Armed with an updated pretext for constitutional lessons, Fiévée sallied forth. This initial formulation left to one side the apparently unanswerable question as to who precisely deemed the ministry to be the government; it was not until some years later that Fiévée and others following his lead identified Charles Comte, the political economist, and Louis-Emmanuel, count Corvetto, the Italian-born minister of finance, as among the culprits. 33 Ibid., II (Nov. 1815), 6: 86–7; III, 8: 63–81 at 80. 34 Joseph Barthélemy, L’Introduction du régime parlementaire en France, 134–6; and Fiévée, Histoire de la session de 1815, 2nd ed. (Paris, 1816), 139. 35 Fiévée, Correspondance politique V (March 1816), 10: 68–70.

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Prior to any clarification, the charge that the ministry had swallowed the government seems to have been taken up by others.36 For all the loose ends in the presentation, it is evident that the issue, however artificial, afforded a grand opportunity to treat a complex web of relations not fully understood even in the home of parliamentary government. Crucial to the argument was Fiévée’s claim that the hallmark of a body’s being part of the government was that it participated in the formation of the will of society, politically speaking. By this standard, a French ministry was not even a part of the government, but merely senior agents of that superior assemblage of powers. Primarily, said Fiévée, it was the king in France who embodied the will of society, but his will was also the product of prior consultation with other bodies that together constituted the deliberative power. In support of his contention that those who offered British usage in support of the identification of ministry and government were in error, Fiévée responded that they obviously knew nothing of England. Yet his confidence was misplaced. Already the English language knew the expression “government” to refer to the government of the day, and when a politician was then asked to form a government, it was the ministry that was intended. This did not, however, speak to Fiévée’s fear about a constitutional monstrosity that would escape the influence both of the king and the legislature. The fact that ministers did not have to sit in the chambers served to make them yet more menacing. By 1819–20, the record was rendered more exact when Fiévée, without alluding to his previous assertion, deftly spelled out how in Britain the ministry did in fact come close to being equated with the government. This followed from the fact of its being the product of a numerous majority in the lower house, which gave it a certain independence in relation to the king. Still, this did no damage to the contention that a ministry in France was, in some sense, an inferior executive agency dependent upon the wills of other bodies. Potential for resentment at the constitutional presumption of ministers was a real possibility; Britain had been through all of this in the middle of the previous century.37 In addition, Fiévée had a strong logical position in 36 Fiévée, untitled article, Le Conservateur 2, no. 23 (March 1819), 474–93 at 489–90; and Charles-Joseph, marquis d’Herbouville, “Les Ministres sont-ils le Gouvernement?” Le Conservateur 5, no. 58 (Oct. 1819), 253–71 at 253, 265. For a further echo of Fiévée’s charge, see marquis de Saisseval, Du pouvoir royal avec la Charte … (Paris, 1816), 8. 37 Fiévée, Correspondance politique III, 7: 49–55; V, 10: 68–70; VI (Dec. 1816), 28– 9 (beginning with this part, the correspondance with Blacas was at an end and the internal division into letters ceased); Fiévée, “Du directoire et du ministère de 1815,” Le Conservateur 4, no. 40 (June 1819): 21–32; Fiévée, Examen des discussions relative à la loi des élections …, 2nd ed. (Paris, 1820), 47; and Gunn, Beyond Liberty and Property (Montreal and Kingston, 1983), 66–7.

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the claim that the branches of the legislature, including the king, were placed above responsibility to any higher power, whereas a French ministry was, in some sense, responsible. His scorn for the rhetoric of popular sovereignty helped to sustain this position. On occasion, as in a review in the Journal des débats in 1816,38 Fiévée toyed with the argument that in a developed parliamentary system as in Britain, the parliamentary majority rendered ministerial responsibility a dead letter. It was a position consistent with making a British ministry akin to the government and so above responsibility. Here was another respect in which the views of the First Restoration – and specifically that the notion of responsibility was without meaning in France – had given way in the Second Restoration to a different emphasis. The experience of reasonably effective ministerial solidarity was providing at least one of the required conditions. Instead of the bland dismissal of the whole issue, as in his review of 1816, Fiévée moved to a more considered position that sounded rather like that argued already by Constant. Legislating a code that spelled out forms of ministerial misdoing seemed simply unwise, and Fiévée advised instead that time would doubtless develop procedures better than would laws.39 This was a topic on which, thereafter, Fiévée said little. As one contemplates the French literature on the subject – ample, uninspired, and relentlessly legalistic – it is easy to see that there was little in the issue of ministerial responsibility to satisfy his delight in conceptual play. For a number of reasons, Fiévée had recourse to this nightmare about a ministry that might supplant the true organs of government. His dislike of Fouché and his sympathy for the chambre introuvable against the duc de Richelieu’s first government cannot have been irrelevant considerations in setting his hand against the pretensions of ministries. It may even be that his own failure to secure any post from the ministers of the restored Bourbons contributed to his suspicions of the ministerial level of executive power. Although Fiévée had remained a prefect (of Nièvre) during the First Restoration, there was no such office for him thereafter and his opinion of administration in general may have been affected. Critics of his Histoire de la session de 1815 noted Fiévée’s contempt for the function that he now referred to as that of a clerk, and it was further understood that Fiévée had a political strategy of attempting to weaken the ministers vis-à-vis the Chambre des députés and had to do so in such a way as not thereby to damage the monarchy. Resisting any effort to identify the two elements of the executive while simultaneously denigrating the ministry

38 As cited at 171n86 above. 39 Fiévée, Histoire de la session de 1816 (Paris, 1817), 78–9.

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must have seemed a viable position to him. Fiévée’s distinction between ministry and government – of which the book on the session of 1815 offered a brief and unsatisfactory version – made most sense when linked to another favourite distinction, and a more meaningful one, between administration and government. This latter emphasis served the purpose of a contrast between the new political order ushered in by the Charte and the unchanged Bonapartist administration that was fated to weigh down all efforts at genuine reform. Carping at the ministry’s seeking identification with the government was not much more than the cause of a season, but the concern about the ominous presence of administration was a worthier object and one to which he long adhered. If Fiévée’s complex distinctions were the product of personal pique, the world nevertheless took him at his word and celebrated his independence in notoriously purporting not to want any place in government.40 However, the weighty element in this protracted plea seems to have been Fiévée’s genuine animus against ambitions to extend the executive power and his equally real loyalty to the powers to be found in the monarchy and in the chambres. This commitment was consistent with that one strand of ultra-royalism to which Fiévée adhered to the end – the need to reverse that process of centralization that had already been under way with Cardinal Richelieu and had culminated with Bonaparte. The difficulty that lay in all of this was Fiévée’s tendency to allow some particular argument to lend energy to several different prejudices. The result was that his efforts to support enlightened doctrines on the crucial questions that surrounded representative government were likely to run aground on the shoals created in pursuit of less crucial objectives. A journalist’s propensity to pour all his resources into the cause of the day did nothing to retard this process, and so Fiévée, for all his undeniable cleverness, was frequently open to the charge of having contradicted himself. A later allusion to his animus against elevating the ministry takes the form of the sarcasm that everyone knew that the ministers were the government.41 For anyone newly come to Fiévée’s work, this could only be confusing. ministries and oppositions Apart from the office of secretary of state, a relic of personal royal government that was not retained in the Second Restoration, all of the parts of

40 [Chevalier Armand Philpin], Examen des doctrines de MM. Fiévée et de Chateaubriand … (Paris, 1816), 25; and J. Caritey, “Un Préfet de l’Empire … ,” 147n. 41 Fiévée, Correspondance politique X (Feb. 1818), 120.

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the political machine of the restored dynasty had a place. The problem was that of adjusting their mutual relations in the interests of creating the maximum degree of agreement. Fiévée had begun his treatment of political machinery by criticizing certain usages that seemed to render the ministry too prominent. Further thoughts drew closer to the more vital issues that surrounded the relation of the king’s ministers to the membership of the lower chamber. Fiévée had been especially committed to the cause of those ultras who had formed the majority of the chambre introuvable, and if we may believe one of the hostile reviewers of his Histoire de la session de 1815, he spoke of that majority with a proprietary air as “ma chambre.”42 This comic patronage, as the reviewer called it, presumably reflected the patron’s belief that his writings of 1814–15 had created the appropriate royalist mood among the electors, although most actually came into print too late to have any such effect. There was, then, no difficulty in cherishing a loyalty to both king and chambres, and that was true whatever the political disposition of the electoral body, for all respectable and avowed opinions accepted the monarchy. The source of uncertainty lay, of course, with the ministers, described in the language of the Charte as the king’s ministers. Fiévée had already explored the dangers of a ministry that arrogated to itself too much authority and a status too grand. This revisiting of the bogey of Great Britain under George II suggested a situation in which ministers escaped control both by their royal master and by the elected lower chamber. But no remarkable forms of misbehaviour – not even the relatively mild forms that men on the Right saw in the ministry of 1818–20 dominated by Decazes – were necessary to create practical and conceptual difficulties. These had long been manifest in the need to reconcile the formal choice by the monarch with the practical necessity of securing cooperation from the Chambre des députés. Moreover, the familiar issue as it had emerged in British parliamentary practice was further complicated in France, for the French continued to seek conceptual clarity where their predecessors on this road had been more concerned with the mere avoidance of day-to-day difficulties. The constitution granted to France by Louis XVIII assigned to the kingly office formidable powers, including a legislative initiative that many came to judge excessive and vexatious, and it made the choice of ministers his as well. The Charte did not, of course, specify on what inspiration the ministers should come and go save that the efficient cause would be the king’s pleasure. After treating the way these matters were managed in Britain, 42 Journal général de la France, 15 Sept. 1816. This is the third of a three-part review signed Auger – undoubtedly Louis Auger, the editor of this daily for much of its life.

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Fiévée admitted, with an uncertainty that was rare for him, that one could not tell what form the French adaptation would assume. The obvious pitfall lay in any royal resolve to form the ministry from the dominant opinion in the lower chamber. Convenient as this arrangement might have been for the conduct of business, it brought with it the need to dispense with the services of those ministers in favour of those who, at some later date, might command a legislative majority. The easy means of ensuring harmony between the ministers and the chamber carried with it, Fiévée hinted, the seeds of a future crisis. How all of this would work out, he added cautiously, could not yet be known.43 It was as telling a premonition as any of the future course of constitutional relations in the Restoration. This was written sometime during the life of the chambre introuvable of 1815–16, and Fiévée’s caution was rooted in the fact that there had yet to be an occasion to practise normal constitutional forms in the creation of a ministry. The first two ministries had come into being in the absence of legislative bodies, and the third had been created when that chambre of the autumn of 1815 had been elected but not yet convened. Fiévée had, however, ceased to proclaim that British arrangements would simply not apply, since the initial prognosis – based on the resignation of a ministry that did not expect to enjoy the support of the newly elected lower chamber – seemed promising. The degree to which Louis XVIII would be prepared to avoid acting on his private impression that he was an absolute ruler was then unknowable, and the propensities of the elected deputies were equally uncertain. In the previous reign, Bonaparte had imposed a humiliating passivity on his legislative chambers; it was thus far from clear whether from this tradition there would arise a vigorous opposition in the legislature. It was perhaps the desire to avoid anticipating the rise of institutions that might not materialize that led Fiévée to write of hypothetical forms of political conflict in a quaint vocabulary, not British in provenance, that referred to conditions such as the “balance des oppositions” and the “choc des oppositions”44 this from the man who had, to a large extent, begun his career as a political thinker, with his impressive description of the work of opposition in all states. The context of the comments was Fiévée’s hope that whatever political conflict might arise would take place so as to leave the French king serenely removed from all unpleasantness. This use of “opposition” to refer, not to a body at all, but to an activity, smacks of vocabulary in Britain of the early 1730s, before the Opposition was born. The intent was probably just to suggest the potential for different forms of 43 Fiévée, Correspondance politique III, 7: 53. The comments are taken from the “développemens” of the original letter and so cannot be dated precisely. 44 Ibid., II, 5: 71–2; II, 6:106.

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conflict beyond the civility of parliamentary debate. The likelihood that conspiracies were on his mind is suggested by the portentous comment that, with the king raised above such oppositions, no political police would be needed. Fiévée then added that at least the time was not yet. The tenth and last letter dedicated to the duc de Blacas had been dated 25 January 1815, and the final version of that letter, incorporating both more theoretical reflections and thoughts on more recent events, appeared in March 1816. It began with conventional strictures on the practice of borrowing. Soon, however, it became apparent that Fiévée reserved his dispraise for unwise attempts to apply British ways to France. He took for granted that borrowing there would be, but that intelligent adaptation was essential, and this had to be based upon a knowledge of political practices in both countries. Then he launched into what seemed initially to be a tribute to ministerial reason of state, as when he said that a private person might follow his conscience but a minister was confined by his position and his duty. Soon it became clear that the real object of attention was that vaunted individual conscience and its place in French politics. Along with all other friends of party connections, Fiévée had come to confront the challenge supposedly offered by French mores. It was a theme worthy of his concern, for finally he was addressing one of the most crucial problems in adapting the culture of the House of Commons to French experience. The result was one of his most impressive sets of observations. Writing for those who knew their own nation, he did not trouble to explain in any detail why conscience posed any problem. Clearly, the traditional independence of the politically active aristocracy placed too much stock on individual honour to accept direction outside the constraints of military discipline, and sometimes not there. Conversely, the craven obedience demanded of those who entered public life under Bonaparte had left room neither for the promptings of conscience nor for the individual initiatives that were a part of representative government. It was not a gratuitous or merely pedantic lesson. How, Fiévée asked, did a ministry manage to attract and command its following in Parliament? Could it find room in the opinions that it endorsed for all the nuances of individual commitment? His answer suggests that his understanding had long transcended those stereotypical cardboard characters described by Baert as preferring party loyalty to life itself. A perfect sensitivity to all variations of opinion was rendered unnecessary because British procedures in forming a ministry were quite sensible and a useful model: “The ministry in England does not, in the main, form amongst men having the same opinions, but amongst men strong enough to make some concessions in the interest of the state and to advance thereafter in agreement.”45 The 45 Ibid., V, 10: 29.

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example that enjoyed a certain reputation in predominately Roman Catholic France remained that of Castlereagh’s moral commitment to Catholic emancipation and his willingness not to press for the reform owing to his ministerial colleagues’ fear that it would provoke disorder. This principled decision to hang together in the service of the greater good was what explained the solidarity of a ministry. Were the condition explainable by the force of corruption, one could never account for the fact that those possessing power came to forsake it, yet experience displayed the spectacle of public men giving up when their presence there no longer seemed to accord with the public good. Especially interesting was Fiévée’s insistence that the pattern offered by a British ministry was not one peculiar to that nation, but proceeded from the nature of the human mind. Consequently, it could be reproduced, without difficulty, in France. He was presumably thinking here of the dictates of reason and perhaps even of self-interest, but nowhere did he explain. When one reads Fiévée, the suspicion grows that cultural barriers to the transmission of institutions reared up to oppose practices of which he did not approve and tumbled before those that accorded with his own views. But the evidence of an emerging ministerial solidarity was already manifest, and what was more urgent was some reason to suppose that a wider sort of bond was feasible. The same factors that held together a ministry might also secure it a following, and this was something not yet seen in French experience. The ministries of the Revolution had been in an almost perpetual state of tension with the assembly of the day, and even the existing Charte seemed to sustain the distance between ministers and the chambers by treating the practice of ministers having seats in the legislature as a matter of indifference. Crucial to Fiévée’s argument was the claim that just as ministers commonly set aside their private preferences in the name of facilitating the transaction of the national business, so did ordinary legislators. No sacrifice of what he called “opinions dominantes” was necessary for those who habitually supported ministers. Knowing in advance what others stood for, they had allied themselves with those others, and it was not to be expected that their general orientation would change from day to day. These views formed a general system, and it was to this position that one’s loyalty was given. Fiévée professed wonder at how his countrymen could see abnegation of what one stood for in this relationship; rather, the ties of party served as the most suitable means for sustaining and giving force to one’s political opinions. Of course, there would be those who could not sink their fate into the system of a ministry, and for these existed the opportunity to associate instead with an opposition, itself as invariable as was the majority. Never could this phenomenon be explained by alleging corruption as the adhesive that held together the opposition, for here was an attachment to a party that controlled no resources

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by which to induce membership on grounds other than the accord with one’s own sentiments. There would, argued Fiévée, always be those who said that it was better to have no parties with all of the same opinion. By way of rebuttal, he cited that incongruity of such an arrangement with the nature of the human mind as displayed under all forms of government.46 In the careful parallelism by which the argument proceeded, this was one of the more impressively sustained positions in a repertoire where continuity of the logic was at times difficult to discover. Confronting a hypothetical French sceptic, Fiévée faithfully reproduced the sort of argument that had sustained national pride against the temptation to adopt British institutions. In this spirit, he introduced a French deputy who commented, with distaste, on that majority in the House of Commons that constituted “a party ready to decide before listening,” a charge that presumably applied as well to the votes of the British Opposition. In support of a very characteristic prejudice of French public men, Fiévée’s deputy offered the high road defined by a truly French spirit of independence and an “esprit national” that, spurning this mode of politics in the name of one’s honour, abandoned it to the British. Rarely did Fiévée waste his rhetorical powers on the arguments of his opponents, and the care with which he did so in this case testifies to the importance of the stereotype of British parties. Now he flew to the defence of the institutions the nature of which he had set out to explain and never was his counter-revolutionary past more evident. If, he ventured, one wished to see organization that sought only a majority vote, then one ought to consult the experience of the French political clubs – those of the Revolution, one would gather. Should want of principle require illustration, then various comments that had more recently been heard in the French chambers on the issue of exiling the regicides supplied an apt example. Never, averred Fiévée, had such disgraceful speaking against one’s conscience sullied the proceedings of the House of Commons. To the common impression that a real sacrifice of one’s priorities was required of the member of Parliament, Fiévée replied, on the whole, that there was no sacrifice and that the only “concessions” there were had to do with members respecting the conventions that governed public speech. This meant that one did not allude in public discourses to the main constitutional verities on which the political process rested. These, he claimed, included the prerogatives of the crown and, less plausibly, even the conditions on which ministers served and the power that belonged to the majority. Thus, he based the compact groupings of British politics on the underlying consensus in public life, for this provided a firm foundation for 46 Ibid., 31–2.

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fixed relations, with a reduced number of inflammatory topics to occasion ruptures among public men. As a statement of the developing Whiggish myth of British agreement on fundamentals, this was nothing short of remarkable and seemingly without any equally reflective equivalents in political literature written in English. It seems, on certain points, exaggerated and to serve, too, to divert attention from the obvious consideration that, necessarily, party discipline would exact a price, though possibly not on matters of the greatest import. Sustaining his argument with great vigour, Fiévée used the accusation that a British member of Parliament was prone “décider avant écouter” as a refrain with which to punctuate his refutation. It was decidedly not so, he insisted, if only because the leaders in Parliament went to great pains to inform their followers of pending activity and, in private, to iron out difficulties before they reached the floor. Extolling the practices whereby politicians in Britain “vivent entre eux,” his treatment of caucusing explained that if one knew “how many precautions they take to preserve the union formed of the same opinions, one would not believe that individual independence had been banished from parliamentary deliberation in a country where individual independence is, on the whole and above all, carried to excess.”47 He also seems to have wished to suggest that the appearance of brute votes disinclined to give ear to the arguments of the other side was also a misconception and that, in fact, the practices of Parliament also encouraged a certain candour with the other side. It was not thus to be expected that any ministerial scheme would come as a surprise to Parliament. At this point, however, the treatment of the etiquette employed in dealing with allies was not well distinguished from that relating to the treatment of the other side of the chamber. When he had exhausted the potential of the charge about brute votes, Fiévée changed the focus to concentrate upon the alleged French virtue of indépendance. This, he objected, was not proven by one’s possessing unsystematic opinions or by one’s pursuing the other undignified antics that Frenchmen were pleased to pass off as revealing this honourable condition. The problem simply lay in the fact that interests in France were floating, not fixed, so individuals indulged in an endless process of “pour et contre” in a land where no one else was of one’s party or of one’s opinion. Whereas the French wandered in a maze of possibilities, the British politician remained securely rooted in his preferences. Of course, Fiévée was not about to condemn his nation to perpetual inferiority and seems to have blamed prevailing circumstances on the corruption wrought by Bonaparte more than any other factor. Essential conditions were as yet missing, but one looked to the day when the 47 Ibid., 34.

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union that obtained among the royalists would assume both the appearance and the force that belonged to a true party. When it came, it would not be an accomplishment that would in any way diminish French life, he said. It would, indeed, add pride to the prevailing French character without damaging its vaunted independence. However dangerous the game of appealing to French readers by offering British virtues, Fiévée had sought to make it more difficult to offer the dreadful example of Britain as a prop for complacent attitudes. This essay left no doubt that, whatever failings might beset British foreign policy, “nothing is more loyal than the internal politics of England.” Here Fiévée had attained a degree of confidence in the future of French representative government not previously seen in his work. Now he seems to have felt empowered to proclaim, contrary to the actual practice of the ministry, that to tell those in office that they had no need of a majority to support them in the elected chamber was to err. No ministry, he was now convinced, would last long without such support. There would then operate in the nation’s mores a change both prompt and remarkable, and its most noteworthy feature would be that incompetents in office would not long survive.48 The very language of this enthusiastic conclusion invited the reply that the ministers remained the king’s ministers and that the etiquette of replacing a ministry offered difficulties for which there was no firm constitutional solution. But these would supply the thoughts of more sombre days; for the moment, in March 1816, these premises seemed to be without serious challenge. It need not have been any single event, but surely the dissolution of September 1816 must have served to remind Fiévée that the instruments of rule belonging to representative government included various techniques whereby an administration might evade the reckoning that he had predicted. For one thing, the French king was not the passive captive of electoral majorities, for as events had proven, he was in a position to dissolve a chamber, such as that of 1815–16, and secure one that was more in accord with the bent of his ministers. Nor could the greatest admirer of British politics deny that such an outcome was very much in accord with the conventions honoured in the home of parliamentary government. This sobering lesson – instanced by the ministerial majority returned in the autumn of 1816 – might also be reinforced by the knowledge that there was no party banner that triumphed in those elections, merely the cause of the ministers of the day and those who chose to support them. Fiévée’s theory was thus subject to reverses. The potential for party government and opposition organized on party remained real, but for the meantime, one’s principles had to cope with an imperfect reality. 48 Fiévée, Correspondance politique V, 10: 89.

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A new emphasis pervaded Fiévée’s report on the session of 1816, which, like all his output, sought to invest the events of the day with the categories of theory. Replacing the confidence that the immediate future lay with ministerial majorities of the right bent was resignation to the minority status of the ultra-royalists. No closer than before to influencing the counsels of the king, those of Fiévée’s persuasion had now to consider the prospect of life in opposition. As the avowed friends of the dynasty, the ultras needed to emphasize the loyalty of their opposition and its public-spirited character. Not for the royalist deputies of 1816 the expectation that their loyalty to the king and his policies would surely be rewarded by a ministry drawn from their number. It was against this background that Fiévée began his annals of the session by reminding his readers of the need to confine ministerial power. Later, he discussed the services performed by an opposition. The body was now sometimes accorded a capital letter, as in British usage, though his practice was far from consistent. He took these comments on the benefits of the institution from British practice, and he showed his awareness of the remarkable newness of oppositions in French public life by adding that only British examples here carried the authority of experience.49 There followed a slightly bewildering treatment of the possible dangers that an opposition presented. These ranged from the unprincipled opportunism of mere office-seeking to the threat posed, in the circumstances of France, by opposition that was not factious but principled. Undoubtedly, he intended by the latter to refer to those deputies who opposed from the left of the chamber. This, despite appearances, was not a return to the thoughts of 1802, for Fiévée again adjusted the balance of his comments by resorting to the philosophical maxim that everything that afforded activity to men had a place in the social order, but one needed still to regulate use. Without his ever saying so, it seems clear that Fiévée wished to convey the suggestion that some positions offered a respectable form of opposition and some did not. This impression is but fortified when the argument reverted to his patented cliché that steadfastness was to be found in interests, especially those rooted in property, whereas we knew not from where our opinions came. Thus, a line that could not be traced by that between principles and ambition, nor yet by the distinction between good and bad principles, could sufficiently be marked by the difference between solid interests and flighty opinions. To ensure that the credentials of a loyal royalist opposition were adequately presented, he added the curious observation that perhaps only true royalists deemed the sovereign prerogative to be so worthy of respect that they would not presume to give the king ministers who were not his 49 Fiévée, Histoire de la session de 1816, 107, 417, 419.

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choice.50 The direction of the contrast became apparent when he recalled with satisfaction how the hated Fouché had entered office under the Bourbons by means of intrigue but had retired at the behest of the king. Clearly, those whose loyalties were to Jacobin or Bonapartist principles were not easy to countenance in the role of opposition, whereas royalists, for all their chagrin at the dissolution of 5 September, could be trusted with that office. This was no doctrinal retreat from the commitment to parliamentary government that elsewhere Fiévée defended so resolutely; it was a strategic move conducted within that set of practices. At the end of that year of 1816, Fiévée introduced his most telling judgment on the current chamber with his analysis of the basis of the existing majority. The proclamation that had ended the life of the chambre introuvable had simultaneously reduced the numbers in the Chambre des députés to 258. This, he then proclaimed, was an insufficient number to generate a majority that was a meaningful representation of the public. This law of small numbers would appear to have no antecedent in the political literature of the time, yet Fiévée strove, with some success, to make it credible. The logic of the analysis was that an assembly in which the difference between government and opposition was reduced to a small number of votes would be one where the crucial decisions would turn on the idiosyncrasies of individuals. Given a more ample field of play, the numbers that conferred the right to govern would be less confined by such adventitious factors. The calculation was much affected by the looming magnificence of the House of Commons, with its impressive complement of some three times that of the French equivalent. This situation allowed, said Fiévée, for a phenomenon such as a “political” majority, or one which was, to all appearances, more demanding than a simple numerical majority of the total vote.51 Surely, this was not intended to be an apostrophe to public opinion, for Fiévée retained his horror at its place in popular regimes.52 Therefore, the message was that the reduced numbers, effected in the autumn of 1816, had disabled the new ministerial majority from endorsing the ministry in any authoritative way. The quality of an assembly of adequate size was presumably that it allowed for an accounting of the ministry with the nation and one that did not narrowly turn upon mathematics. It was in this spirit that Fiévée insisted on the rightness of British cabinets’ resigning without having lost a vote in the Commons; it sufficed that the majority had been a narrow one. 50 Ibid., 121–2. 51 Fiévée, Correspondance politique VI, 79–83. 52 Fiévée, Histoire de la session de 1816, 143–4; and Fiévée, Correspondance politique VII (1817), 23.

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Later writings continued to repeat the discovery of how a political majority could not be generated in a chamber that differed in size so greatly from the ample numbers of the House of Commons. The core of the argument – which admitted of a number of variations – was that a French ministry as then constituted was cut off from the strength that it might otherwise enjoy. Neither did the electoral law of February 1817 render the assumption any less tenable, for the beginning of the annual renewals of the chamber by fifths had the effect of weakening the hold of the ministers. At times, the argument about the inadequate majority reverted to much earlier musings about the manner in which traditional monarchy made room for public opinion. Fiévée’s prejudices probably left him reluctant to assign much importance to more modern forms of public opinion, but unable entirely to discard the notion, he contented himself with arguing that for opinion to have significance in a representative regime, one needed a chamber divided into majority and minority.53 This, however, he began to argue, was precisely the state of affairs that was absent in France, and consequently the business of government was embarrassed by constant malfunctioning. Dubious as he was about public opinion, Fiévée’s positive commitment to the forms of British political competition remained strong. Thus, he conceded a role to this opinion in a well-functioning representative system. For the time being, however, the connection in France between the public and the lower chamber was broken with the absence of clear lines of division within that chamber. The presence of well-defined loyalties was a condition assisted by the presence of unchanging interests in the place of shifting opinion, or as he sometimes put it, the desiderata of solidity and constancy could come when “doctrines” enjoyed their due weight.54 The exact nature of this condition remained, as with many of Fiévée’s distinctions, uncertain. However, he did make it plain that doctrines had ceased to play their appointed role with the betrayal of the royalist majority of 1815 and that an absence of doctrines was then the fault of the ministry. Setting aside the conceptual excess, the plight of France could be put simply as the absence of firm legislative majorities based on the sort of loyalties that created them in the British House of Commons. Specific reasons that accounted for the state of affairs – as in Fiévée’s complaint of 1818 that the new electoral law was at fault – came and went, as did electoral laws. Yet some version of the allegation sustained much of his analysis from the dissolution of 5 September through to the events of the 1820s. A new 53 Fiévée, “Spectacle curieux,” Le Conservateur 1, no. 9 (Nov. 1818): 402–7. 54 Fiévée, Correspondance politique IV (Jan. 1816), 9: 1–3; Fiévée, Histoire de la session de 1817, iv–v; see also “N’y a-t-il des opinions en France?” in Fiévée, Correspondance politique VII, 23–34.

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electoral law in 1820 would add 172 new deputies and marked the end of one reason for the absence of meaningful majorities. Nevertheless, after the increase in the number of deputies, an obscure admirer continued to cite Fiévée’s argument.55 Perhaps he had not entirely grasped the fact that while Fiévée continued to attack the ways of securing majorities, he had discarded the original emphasis. Changing times also wore out the attraction of Fiévée’s earlier enthusiasm for distinguishing between ministry and government, as new faults of the ministers came to afford attractive targets. By contrast, there was a hardier quality to the basic objection about the lack of a regular union between ministry and the elected chamber, for even as the supposed basis of the complaint shifted, the condition itself seemed to fasten its grip on public life. The original frustration of the chambre introuvable had been directed at a ministry resistant to the demands of a rather compact majority. By insisting, however, that supporters of the ministry be committed to doctrines and themselves form a clearly defined body, Fiévée was able to adapt the original objection to circumstances where the ministry did enjoy the support of a majority, but one whose membership might vary with the issue. This situation obtained into the 1820s but was less evident during Villèle’s long ministry. The basis of complaint had then become how one came by a majority, and not that none was to be found. By 1818, then, Fiévée waged war on a ministry that was permitted “se glisser entre les partis” and that was accused of proceeding without any firm doctrine, a situation necessitated by its having to cobble together a new majority on each successive issue. As before, the British parliamentary scene supplied the test of political rectitude, and there the ministers were held to be effectively constrained by dominant values that, for their own self-preservation, they would not flout. In woeful contrast to this idyllic scene was the position of a French ministry outside all fixed doctrines, all parties, and fearing the liberty of both the press and the tribune. It was a sad commentary on the irresolute and opportunistic quality of French government that the ministers, as he said in 1821, waited until they found a majority before knowing what they wished to propose.56 The priority accorded to the existence of a firm set of ministerial commitments and policies came to override other of Fiévée’s ideas. His histories of both the session of 1815 and that of 1816 had extolled the value, perhaps symbolic, of having a peculiarly French practice in relation to the Speech from the Throne that opened the legislative session. By 1819, this pride in resistance to the intrusion of British procedure had worn 55 [J.-B. Baleste], Concordat entre les diverses opinions politiques (Paris, 1824), xviii, 143. 56 Fiévée, Histoire de la session de 1817, 3, 8; and Fiévée, Histoire de la session de 1820, 47.

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thin, and he seemed no longer concerned that the words uttered by the king be deemed to be his own. More important now was that the ministry appear, in some degree, to be formally bound to do certain things. As it was, the uncertainty as to whose words were delivered meant that the substance of such speeches was disconcertingly general. Meanwhile, a British government in possession of “une majorité fixe” made clear that the objectives detailed in the speech were those of the majority, for they would be held accountable and had to defend the speech.57 As usual with such reversals of emphasis, Fiévée gave no sign that he had ever thought otherwise. The electoral law in 1817 had ushered in a period during which a franchise that was calculated to weaken support for ultra-royalism was instrumental in reducing the strength of the Right in the Chambre des députés. With numbers thus depleted, some ultras resorted to anti-parliamentary activity of the sort known during the Revolution, and the conspiracy of 1818 known as “du bord de l’eau” served to compromise avowed royalists and render them more vulnerable to the police power wielded by Decazes. This, paradoxically, would encourage ministerial efforts to shift the balance again towards the ultras, inviting them to moderate their opposition to the ministry. In the politics of the time, a party grown too weak became a candidate for encouragement, lest its rivals grow too strong. As Fiévée later wrote, he had offered no history of the session of 1818 because he was so disgusted with the errors then being made by the royalists with whom he was identified. In 1817 he had already begun to call himself a “royautiste” to emphasize the frustrations of trying to be a royalist in the absence of any such party.58 The term found no favour with the public, and J.-P. Pagès went out of his way to condemn it as a strange way of suggesting that affection had passed from persons to things.59 In thus intimating that the term pointed to some deficit in affection, he was dead right about its apparent author. This feeling permeated Fiévée’s writings of this period such that, without some awareness of the nature of his displeasure, one finds it difficult to follow the irony of his arguments. An extreme example of this mood can be found in an article where Fiévée sustained for pages on end the guise of an observer puzzled as to why the royalists and the king’s ministers should be at odds with each other. In this persona, he proffered advice to royalists in all public capacities and told them that they must desert the cause of provincial and communal liberties, that of liberty of the press and of individual rights, in order to find common 57 Fiévée, “Lettre de Paris,” Le Conservateur 5, no. 62 (Dec. 1819): 473–88 at 474–6. 58 Fiévée, Quelques réflexions sur les trois premiers mois de l’année 1820 (Paris, 1820), 14; and Fiévée, Correspondance politique VIII (Dec. 1817), 10. 59 [Pagès], De la responsabilité ministérielle (n.p., [1818]), 10.

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cause with the ministers. This tactic of sarcasm was, of course, a dangerous one when the only point of offering such barbs was the solemn fact that some royalists were, to all appearances, disavowing the liberties of the new constitutional order and others were, in fact, seeking accommodation with the ministers. Fiévée dubbed deputies – including, one supposes, royalists – who were content to offer silent support to the ministers as “les circonspects.”60 With the rapid changes in the fortunes of all parties, the term had relevance only to a fairly brief period, and so, like other coinages, it never succeeded in entering the language. A similar creation had been his referring, in the ninth part of his Correspondance, to those who were not royalist, left-leaning independents or devoted ministerial followers by the sixteenthcentury term “politiques.” This, too, had failed to win general acceptance, perhaps because this group’s supposed desire to escape being compromised by the ministers while holding on to administrative posts came so well to fit the Doctrinaires. Better calculated to express what he meant were more straightforward pleas that the traditional royalists remain true to themselves and resist absorption into the ministerial ranks. Especially galling was that some royalists had allowed their opposition to abate without their receiving any material recognition for their efforts. As Fiévée tartly expressed it, without any such sacrifice on the part of the royalists, Decazes would still have chosen his colleagues in another quarter. Such words mirrored the frustration of the royalists, but it was Fiévée’s analysis of proposed and real changes in the electoral law that served best to present his understanding of the mechanics of government. A major departure by some of the royalists was their readiness to contemplate a further change in the rules governing political competition. Fiévée had shared with them his distaste for the law of 1817 and its partisan intention, but he diverged from them in his equal dissent from any effort to erase the first injustice by a second. An argument that he adduced against further changes was that in order to procure a ministerial electoral law, one needed to already have a chamber in accord with the wishes of the ministry. Accordingly, the measure was unnecessary on the same logical grounds, one might say, as John Dunning’s famous resolution of 1780 censuring ministerial influence in the House of Commons. In any house in which such a motion could pass, the dangers of influence could surely not be as great as had been claimed. Clever as Fiévée’s version of the argument was, it did not come to terms with his awareness that what the ministry wanted was to move constantly from one side to the other, accommodating each opposition in turn, but not too 60 Fiévée, “Comme il faut être Royaliste,” Le Conservateur 2, no. 18 (Feb. 1819): 219–27; and Fiévée, Quelques réflexions sur les trois premiers mois, 139–44.

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much. Fiévée made little of the concept of the bascule, probably because it was in general use and he was fondest of turns of phrase for which he could claim paternity. He dismissed the tactic as an artifice of the Renaissance introduced from Italy.61 As with Vaublanc and others, Catherine de Medici represented for Fiévée the very antithesis of parliamentary mores, and he blamed her example for many of the ills of contemporary politics. A factor that had become more or less constant within Fiévée’s shifting agenda of issues was the appeal to the practice of Britain and the guidance to be found there, especially with respect to the conventions that must guide political competition. In one of his most explicit endorsements of ministries based upon party, he pointed out that British parties had twenty (!) times gone from minority to majority or the reverse, but never as the result of an official ordinance or of changes in the law. It was changes in the interests within the electorate and their reflection in the House of Commons that effected such reversals. On a more general plane, Fiévée also supported his case by suggesting that any further changes to a law would necessarily be deemed hostile to some party, and thus new changes in substance would suffer still from the spirit of the law of 1817. This argument also figured in the fourteenth part of the Correspondance politique, which appeared in January 1819. Furthermore, he said, after noting the relative absence of intrigue in British politics, the very nature of an electoral law meant that it was supposed to balance interests in the nation and that this was incompatible with its being tailored to the interests of any one party.62 The circumstances of the Septennial Act of 1717 or the fierce struggles that would surround 1832 might invite some scepticism about such a rosy picture of British fair play, but Fiévée, always now partial to things British, had fully succumbed to that form of anglophilia abroad in the Restoration. The thoughts on changes in the French electoral law dwelt specifically on the discussion that had taken place prior to the law’s introduction, although, confusingly, the pamphlet appeared months after the actual passage in June 1820. The next set of constitutional lessons was occasioned by Fiévée’s distress at the manoeuvring towards the right of the political spectrum that followed the assassination of the duc de Berry. At this juncture, Fiévée’s disapproval was directed towards Villèle and Corbière, the one-time ultras who were admitted into the ministry without this signalling any significant change in the fortunes of their erstwhile colleagues. Fiévée’s position here 61 Fiévée, Examen des discussions relative à la loi des élections, 85; and Fiévée, Histoire de la session de 1820, 110. 62 Fiévée, Histoire de la session de 1820, 71; and Fiévée, Examen des discussions, 5– 6, 65, 68.

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seems to have been that the royalist party should spurn all overtures of this sort and that, resisting the loss of its identity, it should continue to oppose. Taking up the call that he had sounded on the issue of the electoral law, he insisted that the royalists be the party of liberty and not confine themselves to the silly role of pleading for the general principles of royalism against the ministers of the king. A useful opposition would offer different principles. He depicted the recruits to the ministry as pursuing a self-indulgent course in their wish to head the opposition or enjoy the fruits of office as their personal convenience dictated. By Fiévée’s reckoning, his associates had sacrificed their doctrines – in his language, the equivalent of selling one’s soul – in 1819 and in so doing had swallowed an electoral law that the ministers had needed more than they. Meanwhile, as of 1821, matters went on as before, with royalists sitting on the right, and the centre, now reinforced, still in control. Better, he then said, to have sought to overthrow the ministers rather than to have had elements of the royalist party join with them. The case was argued in several of Fiévée’s publications of the time, but most forcefully in the elusive language of his Ce que tout le monde pense, ce que personne ne dit. Here he reverted to the sarcasm of some of his earlier assaults on royalism gone wrong, so that the reader has to cope with phrases – such as the one that says how expecting royalists to act like a party puts them in a deplorable condition – that invite misunderstanding. Fiévée’s real priorities were conveyed by the statement that “the royalists cannot oppose the king’s ministers save by writing on their banner something that was not on the ministers’ banner.” Translated into less metaphorical language, the message read that royalists should continue to assert the cause of public liberties. Running through the argument was his familiar theme of contrasting interest and opinion, and as before, the party based on interest carried the day. By now, however, the brew was strengthened by contrasting “doctrines” – the ideological counterpart of interest – with ineffectual opinions.63 All readers of Fiévée would, by this time, have known that he thought that there was no message then inscribed on the ministerial banners. Presumably one of the truths that all the world knew was that the leaders of the royalists had betrayed the cause, but Fiévée did not trouble to say this. He did say that the existence of secret doctrines different from those avowed in public made a mockery of current politics, and this, too, was doubtless one of the commonplaces that was rarely uttered. Fiévée himself had been saying as much from as early as 1817.64 To claim to be saying what no one else had dared to say was literally inaccurate, but no other writer had as forcefully pursued the 63 Fiévée, Ce que tout le monde pense, ce que personne ne dit (Paris, 1821), 14, 35. 64 Fiévée, Histoire de la session de 1816, 222.

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argument that there was nothing shocking about having royalists in opposition. Journalists on the left were prone to such thoughts, but none of them would be as disappointed as was Fiévée at what he deemed the want of principle among royalists. Fiévée had come to prominence as the spokesman for an attractive blend of traditional monarchical sentiment and constitutionalism on the British model. He feared, rightly as now we know, the loss both of the cause of liberty and of that party that was meant to be its champion. in praise of the fixed majority Implicit in the model that Fiévée increasingly applied to public business was the assumption that there should be a more or less firm majority in the legislature. Many of his comments on British politics alluded to this state of affairs or took it for granted. Growing displeasure with the manner in which Decazes conducted the ministry of 1818–20 found a ready focus in the notoriously inchoate character of its policies, and the swing to the right that followed the assassination of the duc de Berry served only to accentuate Fiévée’s concern. Events now admitted of the interpretation that the royalists themselves were in process of being fragmented. This meant that the expectation that a ministry have some prior cohesion based upon a general orientation was extended to embrace the further expectation that alternative parties be ready formed in the Chambre des députés so that any new majority might also be coherent and possess some predictable focus. There was nothing new in Fiévée’s accepting as a sign of constitutional rectitude that there would be two sides to the chamber with homogeneity on each, but the era of the bascule invited a strong restatement of the point. Still, in counselling the royalist contre-opposition to continue its work, he must have expected there to be, as before, oppositions both of the Right and of the Left. Again, given the premises of representative government as practised in Britain, it was the lower chamber that had to be treated as the linchpin of the system. Following the ordinance of 5 March 1819, which provided for the creation of peers in order to secure a ministerial majority in the upper chamber, Fiévée was then able to argue that a broader strategy had become evident. This was the intention of the ministers to break any formed majority, contrary to their interests, that might emerge in either chamber.65 The parallel between the events of March 1819 and those of 5 September 1815 was there to be drawn by all. Following Montesquieu, Fiévée argued that regimes tended to have some dominant objective – his treatment of Britain and France under 65 Fiévée, “Le Fond des choses,” Le Conservateur 2, no. 24 (April 1819): 518–28 at 519.

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Bonaparte and then in the Restoration shows that these could change – and he argued, too, that a political party similarly had some overriding purpose peculiar to itself. In very much the same way, one may find, at various stages in his journalistic career, interests to which most other themes were subordinated or in light of which they were interpreted. When Fiévée came, in the Second Restoration, to rather an enthusiastic embracing of the major features of British parliamentary government, the case for a fixed majority was already a desideratum. When the misdoings of successive ministries seemed to militate against such an order, the theme gained in intensity until it seemed all but obsessive. The real problem, as at least some of his writings make very clear, was that ministers themselves sought a majority but they sought one on their own terms. In 1816, this had dictated the engineering of a dissolution and the use of royal influence (i.e., prefectorial and other forms of official involvement in elections) to procure a more tractable chamber. In the discussions leading to the new electoral law of 1820, the whole point, Fiévée argued, was that the ministers sought both to maintain their hold on office and to escape that sort of firm programme that might be required were they to command a stable body of supporters. Beginning in 1819, he pointed out, there had been trial balloons in anticipation of moving to general elections on the British pattern. In the event, however, the ministers did not pursue what in France was called integral renewal, because the outcome of such a system was itself difficult to predict. Only in 1824 would Villèle’s ministry feel sufficiently confident to abolish the annual partial renewal by fifths. Fiévée’s relative contentment with the system of partial renewals had much to do with his dismay at the readiness of men in office to change the fundamental laws for purposes of short-run partisan advantage. If he also appreciated the measure in which the existing system made political activity an annual occurrence and so contributed, through the press, to political education, he kept that argument to himself. Most prominent in the treatment of these complex matters was Fiévée’s growing disenchantment with all political groupings: he had no reason to seek further electoral gains by the liberals, he despised the ministers, and he had lost confidence in the royalists who were leagued with those ministers or were at least passive in the face of their misdeeds.66 His reading of ministerial disingenuousness about the reasons for fiddling with the electoral law seems to have been reasonably accurate, although it is possible that he was rather too ready to assume dark dealings when there were genuine differences of opinion as to what the law should require and what results any contemplated change might have. There were advantages in having a lower chamber whose membership remained stable for a time; no 66 Fiévée, Examen des discussions, 82–95.

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one wrote more of the merits of a fixed majority than did Fiévée himself. There were advantages as well in annual infusions of new members who reflected the current views of the electorate. Later in the decade, the press would also point out that the Villèle ministry found its large majority difficult to manage, a factor that could not have been on people’s minds in 1820. Despite the brittle style that inhibited Fiévée from moralizing, he regretted the damage resulting from electoral laws being made into the tools of a party. This dealt a heavy blow to institutions still too recent to have gained legitimacy. The fact that Fiévée sometimes suppressed for polemical purposes was that the contestants in a competitive political system all wanted to be supported by a majority but might change their minds, according to circumstances, as to how the end might best be brought about. It was surely with this consideration in mind that Fiévée had once argued in 1816 that it would be a strange thing were the king to provide for a ministry a majority that they could not by their own devices secure for the king and, of course, for themselves. The fear being expressed was surely that Louis XVIII would exercise his prerogative in order to procure a more cooperative chamber. By the end of the first series of the Correspondance in 1819, Fiévée had learned more about the scope of the royal prerogative and his comments reflected his experiences. Here, in more detail than ever before, he strove to spell out the subtle play of forces that surrounded translating a majority into a ministry. He began by describing how a majority party in representative government would form the ministry with the malcontents consigned to opposition. He added that, in such a system, ministers would tread lightly lest the erstwhile minority become, in turn, the majority. However, he was quick to add, the sovereign did not sleep in such a regime and might, as events in British history demonstrated, intervene to undermine a ministry and cause it to lose its majority. Further adjusting the balance, Fiévée primly observed that this must not be the result of mere caprice on the part of the sovereign; rather the outcome should reflect the ministers’ retirement before the onslaught of “un parti formé des hommes habiles.” In another of his essays of that year, Fiévée emphasized that the king’s role was not limited to handing over ministerial power to an available opposition; he thus contemplated as well the possibility of a dissolution. This, he carefully explained, would be in order were there reason to suppose that an appeal to the electors might yield a majority in a sense different from that which opposed the ministers within the chamber.67 Here, finally, was confrontation with the most sensitive issue in parliamentary government: the sovereign did, indeed, choose ministers, and 67 Fiévée, “Suite des lettres sur la situation intérieure de la Chambre des députés et du ministère,” in Correspondance politique XV (Feb. 1819), 9–10; and Fiévée, “Le Fond des choses,” Le Conservateur, 519.

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no one else could invest them with the seals of office, but his ultimate choice was, at least in considerable measure, constrained by the objective question of where the majority lay. Some scope for manoeuvre was part of the prerogative, as Fiévée had always been aware, but it did not sustain the ambitions of a king who proposed to govern without regard to the disposition of the Chambre des députés. This does not mean that earlier preoccupations had been totally set aside, but priorities had apparently now shifted. The then weak electoral situation of the royalists and current talk in the ranks of the ultras that opposition was no place for men such as they may have moved Fiévée to insist as never before on the centrality of a majority and its implications for the whole political process. Whatever his immediate motives, he was certainly moving in the direction of arming the right sort of legislative majority with the means of asserting itself. Paralleling his new readiness to reflect upon the mechanics of the generation of ministries, then, was a cautious endorsement of the legislative initiative of the chambers. This, too, was a bold move, for articles 19–21 of the Charte denied to the chambers the power to initiate laws, although there was a cumbersome procedure whereby they could accomplish the same end. Fiévée could not propose ignoring the written constitution, but his comments on the chambers’ possession of the power of amendment and his criticism of the low priority accorded to petitions both endorsed a very liberal impatience with practices that confined the activity of a future legislative majority that might wish to depart from the preferences of the ministers.68 Nevertheless, he managed still to insist that, unlike the situation in Britain, French government rested very largely with the king. Evidently, Fiévée was in the throes of changing his mind about some important matters, but in the process his commitment to the forms of British government seems never to have wavered. Instead, he simply grew more ready to explain himself. The preoccupation with displaying the rules that governed what he described as “la logique des partis” had even intruded in a volume of his Correspondance that ostensibly dealt with foreign policy – it was the one that landed him in such trouble and eventual imprisonment – where he broke off the apparent topic of discussion to remind his readers how difficult politics was in a nation unaccustomed to public debate and without stabilizing institutions. This interruption of a different theme was sustained only briefly, but it reminds us that the logic to which he referred consisted, almost certainly, in those tested conventions

68 Fiévée, Histoire de la session de 1817, 78–9; Fiévée, untitled article, Le Conservateur 2:474–93 at 484; and Fiévée, Histoire de la session de 1820, 146, 157.

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whereby political competition in Britain was carried on.69 They were rarely, it seems, far from his mind. Although the king’s name never intruded into Fiévée’s condemnation of existing practices, it is not difficult to reach the impression that the faults so apparent in the ministers were viewed with some indulgence by their royal master. The fact that Fiévée would not allow that a French ministry could enjoy the same independence of the royal will as a British one lent further emphasis to the point. The question set out in the preliminaries of the final sessional history was the crucial one: “Will the ministry and the majority be in accord or in opposition?”70 From this there followed a series of questions regarding the origin of ministries, their intentions vis-à-vis the lower chamber, and the general tenor and direction of public business. The familiar insistence that small numbers of deputies left no room for a true political majority – one of the characteristic flourishes of Fiévée’s commentary – had given way by 1820 to other complaints about the nature of French ministerial majority, for he insisted still that there had really been no firm majority since the dissolution in 1816. All the ills of the land seemed, then, to flow from this shortcoming, and here we find our journalist at his most ingenious. He contrived, for example, to link the insensitivity of the Decazes ministry towards individual liberties to the insecurity of a ministry having to assemble, issue by issue, its legislative majority. This was what made strategic sense of the censorship of the press demanded by the ministry, for a ministry rendered weak by its unreliable following in the chamber was wont to seek security behind laws that had been conceived in order to lessen the damage done by opposition. By contrast, a British ministry need not have been nearly so sensitive and might, when necessary, even take quite high-handed executive action and rely upon its majority to pass a bill of indemnity.71 For Fiévée, this was better than enshrining one’s management of a crisis in the form of legislation. Consequently, one might argue – counter-intuitively, to be sure – that the absence of a majority might render a ministry at once irresolutely timid and dangerous to liberty. Throughout his writing on Restoration politics, Fiévée had made much of the fact that political liberty was not a condition readily put in place by mere fiat. His most evocative tributes to political competition by parties had stressed the point, and he returned to it in 1821 as he argued that high-minded activity or the setting aside of self-interest was not the mother of liberty. Just as oppression might grow as an unintended outcome of ministerial strategy, so the opposite condition might be traced to a complex 69 Fiévée, Correspondance politique XI (March 1818), 85–7. 70 Fiévée, Histoire de la session de 1820, vi. 71 Fiévée, Quelques réflexions sur les trois premiers mois, 109–10.

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chain of causes. It was thus arguable that existing liberties owed more to the “quarrels” among those who disputed the privilege of commanding government than did the efforts of those who professed to be liberty’s defenders.72 It was an argument entirely familiar to eighteenth-century Britain but not one that had held a high place within the rationalism of the Revolution or the Empire. One factor that must have been an implied criticism of Louis XVIII was that ministries were formed outside of an existing majority, the ministry that had to cope with the chambre introuvable being a case in point. Still, such a ministry necessarily set about finding itself a majority with which to work. There was indeed merit in Fiévée’s past suggestion that the majority, in a sense, produced the ministry rather than the reverse. Yet the practice of Britain had witnessed both conditions, as Fiévée himself had admitted. A related objection was that French ministers seemed not to be encouraged to act as though they were themselves deputies. This situation underlined the fact that the origins and sympathies of the ministry did not lie with the chamber in which, increasingly, the ministers of the Restoration had accepted formal membership. Nor did a minister on being dismissed take a place within the ranks of opposition as British practice might suggest. Thus, the ministers seemed not to recognize a legislative chamber divided into majority and minority. The fact that French ministers were in no way equivalents to the sort of politician who attained office in Britain interested Fiévée, and he returned to the matter when a French minister who had been dropped from a ministry did return to the Chambre des députés. This corresponded to the behaviour of Vaublanc and seemingly to that of few others. Fiévée noted the anomaly and appeared to approve of it.73 Piecing together his position from a number of oblique comments, one gathers that Fiévée saw in erstwhile ministers who disappeared from the scene the shadow of court politics and the sort of exile imposed upon a public man whose usefulness to the king was at an end. One thinks here of Choiseul, disgraced and rusticated in 1770 in a way that had entailed both silence and absence from the political centre. By contrast, Fiévée expressed admiration for those defeated politicians who returned to the action, hoping again to win office. Several passages in the Correspondance treat this as the very essence of representative government. 72 Fiévée, Histoire de la session de 1820, 49–50. 73 Ibid., 211; and review of Vaublanc’s Du commerce de la France en 1820 et 1821, in Journal des débats, 21 Dec. 1822 (signed T.L., the initials of his companion Théodore Leclercq and Fiévée’s pseudonym of the time). Fiévée’s use of this transparent disguise was well known to contemporaries. See Anon., Des journalistes et des journaux (Paris, 1817), 15–16.

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It is a measure of the fecundity of the repertoire displayed here that the ministers’ faults could be presented in so many ways. From noting their failure to respect the views of a clear majority in the chamber, the argument shifted to the charge that much effort had been expended to prevent the formation of any majority that might threaten the situation of the ministers. At a time when the notion of “counter-opposition” was familiar, Fiévée discovered in the ministry the practice described as “de faire opposition à l’opposition.” The denial, characteristic of ministerialists, that there were but two sides to important questions led to fragmentation in the lower chamber. There were two oppositions and a ministry that, by refusing to situate itself as other than in the middle, gathered support and opposition from both sides while committing itself to neither. The ministers thus sought to confine political activity as much as possible and to encourage the impression that neutrality was a useful and honourable posture. All such claims, Fiévée objected, turned to the advantage of those in office.74 The absence of a firm majority also contributed to a general lack of candour in the proceedings of the chambres. He never seems fully to have spelled out quite what the case for this claim was. One factor was certainly the basic inconsistency on the part of ministers who strove, in public statements, to deny the presence of any coherent majority, even as they were forced by the logic of the system to seek a majority for themselves and to offer inducements to recruit supporters. This majority was, however, not gained by hanging out colours to invite those in agreement to adhere and others to find different company; instead, one came to support the ministers without having knowledge of what they stood for. More than once Fiévée suggested that they stood for no coherent position and sought only to remain in office. In the language favoured by Fiévée, those whom he attacked lacked doctrines, and the reason that they lacked doctrines, he added maliciously, was that they expressed confidence in the Doctrinaires. Fiévée’s conclusion of 1821 that nothing said in public during the previous session had been true was a measure of his growing fear that intrigue was the real motor of public life. It was this theme, borrowed perhaps from speeches of the one-time minister Vaublanc, that prompted Fiévée, in his history of the session of 1820, to express great respect for the former’s views.75 His regard for Vaublanc – who had always been a party man and not a remote administrator – expressed his 74 Fiévée, Histoire de la session de 1820, 201, 93. 75 Fiévée, “Le mépris des fausses doctrines … ,” Le Conservateur 4, no. 46 (Aug. 1819): 328–40 at 339–40; Fiévée, “Y’a-t-il des crimes d’opinion dans un pays qui n’a pas de croyances?” Le Conservateur 6, no. 70 (Jan. 1820): 195–203; and Fiévée, Histoire de la session de 1820, 2, 215–17, 320.

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suspicion of those ministers who were most adept at functioning behind the scenes and lacked the stomach for the cut and thrust of parliamentary debate. This propensity was clearly, in Fiévée’s mind, one of the factors contributing to the constant threat of intrigue. But there were others. Chief culprit in sustaining an atmosphere of intrigue – and the consideration that lay behind the prevalence of apolitical ministers – was clearly the process of constituting a ministry. Here Fiévée was not alone in his impatience with ministries that emerged from negotiations unrelated to the business of the chambers. If Fiévée expressed himself rather cautiously on the point, the sensitivity of the matter was probably the reason. Forced to admit that, for one reason or another, a chamber might be without a natural majority, he insisted that at the very least the lot of a ministry emanating from any other source must be made intolerable. As he put it, while it could well happen that the absence of a clear-cut majority might preclude the ministry’s being the product of the two chambers, that was not the end of the matter. An accord between the ministry and a legislative majority was indispensable in the existing system. This meant that action by the chambers (le jeu des chambres) might suffice to deny to any ministry that was the product of intrigue the ability to sustain itself.76 What precisely was entailed by way of action in the chambers he declined to specify, but presumably the sort of harassment that he conducted against silent ministerial votes could be part of the process. Later in the decade of the 1820s, one would have expected the arsenal of the disaffected to include refusal to pass the budget, but the relatively mild political climate in which he was writing was not one in which the possibility of refusing supply was much discussed. Elsewhere, when he wrote of “jeu,” it referred to that open and honourable interplay of parties that was, to his mind, the life of representative government. Intrigue militated against people’s saying what they meant, and the public proclamation of loyalties thus suffered. It was consequently a blow to Fiévée’s ideal pattern when the party with which he identified was tarred, in the spring of 1818, with the charge of descending to conspiracy in order to get its way. Making the best of a bad situation, Fiévée set out an ideal of public conduct whereby royalists should form a public association and – resorting to his ample fund of paradox –visualized the royalists publicly conspiring for the general maintenance of civilization. This offered an innocuous sense of the term “conspiracy,” but he was surely in a position to know that not all royalists had so confined their activity. The practice of justifying party allegiance as a sort of public conspiracy has been employed to explain Burke’s view of the association of good men, but the credit for saying it, in so many words, surely rests with Fiévée and others of the generation that had begun to write during the 76 Fiévée, Correspondance politique XV, 14.

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Revolution.77 If this were the only kind of clandestine political activity that Fiévée then deemed legitimate, he had well and truly distanced himself from the ultra cause, for it was not only the embarrassment of du bord de l’eau that weighed on the record but also the constant intriguing of Monsieur, the future Charles X, and his court. Of course, those most guilty of intrigue were the ministerial forces, and Fiévée returned over and over to the oddity of political support bestowed in the absence of any firm policies or public commitments. It was the House of Commons that supplied the model of excellence in combating the politics of intrigue. Factions there existed in Britain’s Parliament, as there must in all such bodies unless, like those of Bonaparte, they were too inconsequential to warrant them. But British politics knew little of intrigue owing to the publicity given to political manoeuvres. The practice in Britain also cast an unfavourable light upon the way in which political recruitment was carried on in France. Despite the self-flattering French portrait of a people too independent to be bound by the ties of party, Fiévée vehemently dissented from the portrait. Returning to a theme argued at length in 1816, he insisted on the superiority of the British approach. In Britain, he said, one only grouped around a public man because he was the chief advocate of a position that one had adopted oneself. Pity, by contrast, the French who were expected to attach themselves to men of whose present and future plans they knew nothing.78 The inference was plainly that intrigue – supplemented by that political pressure on state functionaries of which Fiévée naturally disapproved – was the true basis of French ministries. As a move to the right became apparent after the elections of November 1820, Fiévée had to cope with the fact that the ministry, though certainly not a self-proclaimed administration based upon party, was one with an excellent prospect for commanding a reliable majority. Before this prospect had become yet more marked in the partial election of the next year, Fiévée had published his Ce que tout le monde pense. It rapidly enjoyed three editions, its popularity assisted by his condemnation of those tactics that sought to co-opt the leaders of the royalists in order to prop up the ministry rather than making a clean sweep of bringing the royalist party to power. It was the government’s failure to live up to Fiévée’s high expectations for parliamentary rule that led him to create the concept of a new sort of majority that was consistent with a numerical advantage but deficient in all other respects. Replacing the original law of small numbers was the formula for what he called a “conditional majority” – something less than either the “political” majority or the permanent, fixed, and principled party for which he had been looking. A 77 Fiévée, “Avis aux royalistes,” Le Conservateur 3, no. 29 (April 1819): 97–100; cf. Harvey C. Mansfield Jr, Statesmanship and Party Government (Chicago, 1965), 174–5. 78 Fiévée, Examen des discussions, 64–5; and Fiévée, Correspondance politique XV, 15.

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fixed majority identified by Fiévée’s constitutional theory was to be gained either by producing a ministry from within the dominant opinion in the chamber or by the ministers’ adopting as their own the dominant opinion. The latter course of action would entail an explicit ministerial endorsement of a body of principles and could only, one would suppose, avoid the appearance of opportunism because the existing ministry had never announced any principled commitments and so could not be accused of deserting them. It may seem odd that Fiévée favoured an explicit avowal of principle rather than a movement of royalists into office. There were two reasons for this. One was surely that, in the accession of royalists to the ministry, the displacement of the old ministers had neither been total nor displayed the sort of ringing electoral victory contemplated by his preferences. The second, and the admitted reason for his displeasure, was simply that the hostility of some of the royalists towards public liberties made their presence in power a danger.79 What later he allowed to be true was already quite evident. Faults there might be in the conduct of all political actors, and certainly his countrymen had not been entirely apt pupils in assimilating the refinements of the British constitution, even as modified by the Charte. It was also true that Fiévée, who had once spoken of the chambre introuvable as though it were his property, was set upon a new course. journalist of the opposition Most of Fiévée’s major works reveal that, at any one time, he was introducing – sometimes at first tentatively or obliquely – certain themes even as he was phasing out others. One facet of his political journalism, but more a mood than a set of ideas, was his apparent retreat from an attachment to the ultra-royalists and their cause. It was not the work of an instant, and there was more than one precipitating factor. It seems, for instance, quite possible that, following the confirmation of his three-month sentence to prison, he was prepared to offer his pen to the government. There is the testimony of Louis-Mathieu Molé, one of the ministers of Louis XVIII who left a very candid record of judgments about contemporaries, to this effect. Previous efforts to make sense of Fiévée’s movements seem not to have availed themselves of this testimony. Indeed, it would seem that, on the seizure in January 1818 of part XI of his Correspondance, he was already open to purchase by the ministers. The more serious overtures apparently took place in May of that year, and such was the ministers’ respect for a dangerous facility with words and images that Molé recorded the meetings of the ministers with their sovereign in which a deal with Fiévée was the subject of 79 Fiévée, Ce que tout le monde pense, se que personne ne dit, 31–3.

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conversation. Decazes, whose judgment prevailed on such occasions, was ready to accommodate Fiévée but unwilling to himself negotiate what he obviously deemed an unsavoury arrangement. On that bit of squeamishness the business allegedly stalled, and Fiévée was required to serve his sentence.80 After this time, Fiévée went on to write some of his best analyses, as in Le Conservateur, so the evidence tells us only that his political enmities were seemingly capable of some abatement, depending on circumstances. There is no reason to suppose that his true constitutional sympathies were similarly fluid. If Fiévée’s credibility ever suffered, it is more likely that literary extravagances rather than ministerial influence were responsible. Fiévée’s next difficult time was presumably his effort, supported by influential colleagues on Le Conservateur, to get elected to the Chambre des députés in the partial renewal of November 1819. According to an unsympathetic fellow journalist, he managed to gain but fifteen votes from the electors of Vaucluse; moreover, the report added mischievously, the voluble and sociable Fiévée had resigned himself to withdrawing from the world as a Trappist monk. That unlikely eventuality did not materialize, but the same source offered, over the next months, a series of comments that suggested some restlessness on Fiévée’s part. Not all of these were mere canards. His disagreement with colleagues on Le Conservateur was bruited more than once during 1819, although his articles continued through the life of the paper. More interestingly, Fiévée was said to have terminated a long-standing working relationship with the Journal des débats to move to the Gazette de France, and the record does, in fact, suggest his absence from the one and his presence at the other. Uncharitable critics traced his departure from the Journal des débats to his own shortcomings as writer and analyst, but the more probable reason, offered later by Fiévée, was that he refused to work at a paper that printed items at the request of the ministry. His departure from that paper may have been around the beginning of 1819 and seems to have lasted until April 1822. Undoubtedly, there was some interest in Fiévée’s movements, and both his abilities and his wellknown vanity made him a favourite target for gossipy or satirical rivals. Few are the issues of the Lettres normandes, written by Léon Thiessé and Eugène Balland, that do not pay some malign attention to these matters.81 The items culminated in an unsympathetic pen-portrait in a series called “Galerie des petits Grands Hommes de ce siècle.” Amidst all the rumours, some 80 Louis-Mathieu Molé, Le Comte Molé, 1781–1855: Sa Vie – ses mémoires, ed. Marquis de Noailles (Paris, 1924), 3:228–9, 311–15. 81 See Lettres normandes 5, no. 4 (16 Feb. 1819): 158; 6, no. 3 (19 April 1819): 83; 7, no. 7 (8 Aug. 1819): 274; 8, no. 3 (19 Sept. 1819): 104; 10, no. 8 (3 May 1820): 314; 11, no. 4 (5 Aug. 1820): 175–81.

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of which cannot be confirmed, there was ample evidence that Fiévée had, in fact, been drifting away from his party, and alleged statements of his that he was an ultra-royalist no longer were mixed with speculation that perhaps he would move full circle and become again a Bonapartist. The stream of reports had Fiévée first rejoining and then departing from La Quotidienne, a paper to which he had contributed regularly as late as November 1816. As one rumour had it, he had acquired a quarter interest in the paper in the summer of 1819.82 Certainly, in the latter half of 1819, he was contributing regularly to its columns, sometimes under the familiar pseudonym of “T.L.,” sometimes under his own name. In early 1820, at least one unsigned leading article in La Quotidienne bears all the marks of his journalism. Complicated compared to the work of most others, the article – a jeremiad on the state of the nation in which the ministry enjoyed no majority – contained a reminder, dear to Fiévée’s heart, that a British ministry that suffered from even a slender majority, much less minority status, would make haste to resign. Serving to bolster the analytical texture was a distinction between public opinion and opinion légale that he would later incorporate into one of his pamphlets. The essay closed with a bravura display of intellectual dash in which Fiévée managed to visit several of his favourite themes. Thus, in rapid succession, he lamented French failure to grasp the nature of representative government, used both established British practice and that developing in France to illustrate the idea that patterns emerged in such a system independently of human calculation, and concluded with the intriguing thought that the freedoms enjoyed in such a society enhanced the influence of the political journalist. Especially between sessions, he argued, the journalists ruled the political scene and drove out those private correspondences that in the past had spread calumny and contributed to intrigue. The low esteem in which he held public opinion was evident, but so, too, was his recognition that it was a category with which the political commentator could hardly dispense.83 Indeed, on the very day that this essay appeared, the future chief minister had opined in private that Fiévée, at La Quotidienne, managed to form a sort of public opinion himself. The comment in Lamennais’s correspondence that Fiévée formed a party all on his own expressed a similar impression. His performance in La Quotidienne amply supported a later boast, in another paper, that were Fiévée in any doubt about having his

82 Le Renommée, no. 42 (26 July 1819). 83 La Quotidienne, no. 7 (7 Jan. 1820); cf. Fiévée, Quelques réflexions sur les trois premiers mois, 124–38.

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material recognized, he would more often sign his name.84 He does not seem to have remained very long at La Quotidienne in this reappearance, although he did continue to use its columns for purposes of advertising his pamphlets and also to explain that he had only changed the format of his observations from a periodical to separate pamphlets so that they might escape the attentions of the censor. The editors of that paper had grown critical of Fiévée’s desire that the royalists stay in opposition until they could claim office on their own terms. This was probably why the paper ignored the three editions of his influential work of the spring of 1823 that dealt with the situation in Spain. This publication, it would appear, found him out of sorts with ministerial policies and ready to admit his preference for opposing a dominant party. His penchant for a politics of interests over one of opinions continued still to serve as a trademark.85 Having, to all appearances, cut his ties with the newspapers with which he was known to be associated, Fiévée had lost his pre-eminent position in the journalism of the Restoration. His Histoire de la session de 1820 made light of all talk of apostasy by asserting that he had never aspired to be a journalist in the cause of the ultras and his ambitions had been satisfied in his role as a political writer. The liberal Constitutionnel told a different story and one not lacking in subtlety. It depicted Fiévée as a royalist in sentiment but dismayed by the opportunism of Villèle, disgusted by the insensitivity of other royalists to his priorities, and convinced that all other points on the political spectrum harboured ministerialists (some in disguise) or revolutionaries. A corporal’s guard of stalwart ultras seemed then to be the only members of the lower chamber with whose views he retained any sympathy.86 Their number was said to include Vaublanc, well known for his commitment to opposition and party on the British model, and comte de La Bourdonnaye, whose lack of moderation was still consistent with some respect for representative government. This leaves an impression quite different from that record of transactions made by Molé, a number of whose allegations find no support from any other source. Three moments charting the swings in Fiévée’s political orientation have their source in Molé’s memoirs. Following his release in 1818, Fiévée is said to have returned to opposition, vowing vengeance on the government and expressing, as well, violent antipathy towards Louis XVIII. In November 1820, just at the time that the ministers were deciding to take in the two prominent royalists, 84 Mémoires et correspondance du comte de Villèle (Paris, 1888), 1:312; Correspondance inédite entre Lamennais et le baron de Vitrolles, ed. Eugène Forgues (Paris, 1886), letter of 16 March 1822, 98; and Journal des débats, 11 Jan. 1825. 85 Fiévée, De l’Espagne et des conséquences de l’intervention armée (Paris, 1823), xii, 94–5. 86 Le Constitutionnel, no. 273 (2 Oct. 1821).

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Molé reported Fiévée to be ministerial in sentiment, but not as an ultra. From January 1822, one has, again courtesy of Molé, the portrait of a sad figure supposedly abandoned by all shades of opinion. At this juncture, Fiévée allegedly sought the support of Talleyrand and Molé in his quest to become the editor of a paper. Both the existing Courrier and the Pilote, about to begin operations, seemed to be possibilities.87 Nothing along these lines would appear to have transpired, and questions remain about what to make of Molé’s revelations. The enemies who sought to portray Fiévée as a vicar of Bray would find confirmation in reports such as these, even though his apparent availability never appears to have led to his lending his pen to the ministerial cause. Whether or not they purchased his silence is another matter. A royalist paper, which itself had its difficulties in sorting out its commitments, insinuated that this had been the case and claimed that the time that Fiévée had spent studying events in Spain had cost the ministers dear.88 Fiévée himself sometimes treated the changes in his professional life in terms of a cessation of writing, but he seems to have been referring to a rather brief hiatus. The silence – if one seeks a silence that was complete and of long duration – is not easy to find. He produced several major works in 1821 but seemingly not much journalism, and by the next year his work was again to be found in the columns of the Journal des débats. Admittedly, most of this was confined to the small literature of book reviews that he signed with Leclercq’s initials. These tended to offer less political insight, both because the topics were not narrowly political in character and because the conventions of reviewing reduced, even for him, the opportunity to preach one’s own creed. He appears as well to have continued to attempt to get elected as a supporter of the opposition, for it was surely he who was the subject of an unkind description of an aspirant who was peddled (colporté) from one department to another in search of receptive voters.89 It was thus not for some time that one sees again unsigned articles with the complex distinctions and elusive cleverness that belonged to his best polemics. When they reappeared, in the Journal des débats, it was immediately after the dismissal of Chateaubriand in June 1824 and that paper’s immediate move into opposition. An article that associated conventional party competition with monarchy and intrigue with representative government possessed a quality of paradox that could only be Fiévée’s. Again, easy to attribute to its source is a powerful argument to the effect that the king’s choice of ministers was not a simple and innocent preference by a 87 Molé, Le Comte Molé, 1781–1855, 4:34, 391; 5:14. 88 Drapeau blanc 80 (21 March 1823). 89 J.-B.-T. Leclère, Reproches à l’opposition (IV), 12.

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fatherly figure, but an act of state and one properly subject to critical scrutiny. A spirited defence of the personal quality of opposition with the plea that this was in accord with British language sounds very like Fiévée. So does the additional consideration that if some excessive incivility marred the French form of opposition, this was because there was so little that was settled and sanctified by tradition compared to the British experience of general agreement in a wide range of issues. A learned disquisition on the ethics of dissolution and the circumstances in which power should simply be handed over to those in opposition was probably Fiévée’s creation, and another, in which the current majority enjoyed by the ministers was challenged by the amount of opposed sentiment in the country, was, by the fact of slightly arcane distinctions, surely his.90 Through the middle of the decade, Fiévée’s contributions increased in number and importance, and by the election of November 1827, his name appeared on a number of leading articles. All the while, the signed reviews afforded some occasions for pointed political comment and some phrasemaking as well. One recognizes Fiévée’s delight in the play of language in a complaint that an author had treated the government too lightly: “It is impossible to say more gracefully that Mr. de Villèle does ill even the ill that he does.”91 The politics of the day had moved a distance away from the constitutional principles that so interested Fiévée, and despite his having devoted part X of his Correspondance to the concordat with Rome, he seems not to have had much taste for the religious concerns that increasingly occupied many disputants. There were opportunities, however, to criticize plans for local administration in light of his strong bent towards both decentralization and the sort of space for political competition made available in Britain. This he had done earlier in his Lettres sur le projet d’organisation municipale of 1821. Another of his pamphlets on this theme had served as the occasion for a spirited attack on the bascule and went so far as to contrast favourably Bonaparte’s treatment of political diversity with the measures favoured by the ministers of the day.92 To say, as Fiévée did, that the tyrant had never played off one group against another was arguable at best. To claim further that Bonaparte had never created a purely ministerial party of the sort known to Decazes and his successors neglected the fact that Bonaparte had had little use for political parties or opposition in any form. Fiévée’s was also a respected voice on economic policy, and here he 90 Journal des débats, 15 June 1824, 1 Dec. 1824, 12 July 1825, 13 Dec. 1825, and 1 Jan. 1826. 91 Ibid., 6 July 1826. 92 Fiévée, Examen du rapport fait à la chambre des députés, au nom de la commission nommée pour le projet d’organisation municipale (Paris, 1821), 16.

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subjected to a searching criticism the policies that were the major accomplishment of the Villèle years. As in so many other pursuits, he found French understanding of this aspect of public life inferior still to that of Britain. He emphasized, too, the way in which administration in Britain was independent of the government of the day, something that could not be said of France.93 Throughout his public life, Fiévée did more than almost any other to emphasize how imperial practices continued to govern day-to-day administration. No aspect of his thought better demonstrates how he found his natural place in opposition. If the change in Fiévée’s situation was exaggerated in some quarters, what meaning did it have for his political thought? The uncharitable claim by Stendhal that Villèle had simply purchased his silence was made, presumably, without any knowledge of the earlier events to which Molé was a party. But, curiously enough, the period of silence for which a sinister explanation was offered – that supposedly beginning in 182594 – was not very silent nor, let it be said, friendly or even neutral towards the ministers. One need but consult the pamphlet Résumé de la conviction publique sur notre situation, appearing in April 1825. There he denied that the ministers had understood the conventions of British public finance and called upon all segments of opposition to reject Villèle’s project for managing the debt. So he did not cease to write, did not even cease offering pungent political comment. Consequently, if the ministers had made a bargain, it was a bad one indeed and cannot have lasted for long. Venal, to the degree of allowing his silence to be rented, Fiévée may have been, but it seems unlikely that there can have been the sort of bargain that was so confidently proclaimed, for the quid pro quo cannot be found. It is possible that certain papers were influenced by the government not to receive certain materials, and the trade in newspapers with public money is evidence that such manoeuvres were on a large scale.95 Nor was it unusual for difficult individuals to be the beneficiaries of some sort of secret-service fund. To the extreme claim that there were annually thousands of young people failing to gain places in government and then drifting into journalism, Fiévée’s unworried reply had been that he had known precisely four such and that all of them had been bought off.96 Presumably, then, it could happen, but the hypothesis in the form that it has been handed down has created a void 93 Fiévée, Résumé de la conviction publique sur notre situation financière et moyen proposé pour en diminuer les dangers (Paris, 1825), 1–2, 8. 94 Tulard, Joseph Fiévée, 210. 95 There seems to be no study of this practice, but its presence is well known. See, for instance, Georges Cazenave, Une camarilla sous la Restauration (Paris, 1955), 135. 96 Fiévée, Histoire de la session de 1820, 296.

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where none existed, for it rests on the assumption that Fiévée wrote nothing for the public between 1825 and the eve of the July Revolution. There is, however, not only his occasional journalism with which to fill the void but also the significant return to the Correspondance politique, some three hundred additional pages of which appeared early in 1828. This attests to the fact that although the cause of ultra-royalism had seemingly lost a warrior, that of British-style party and opposition had not, for the new periodical remained committed in that quarter. It was Fiévée’s party stripe that had undergone transformation. When, in 1827, he presumed to stand again for the lower chamber – surely not the act of a tame pensioner – there were mocking questions as to what colours he would bear. Fiévée’s answer nicely captured the studied ambiguity of his political loyalty: “It is I who am the liberal, if the ministry is royalist.”97 The liberal commitment, it turned out, could be satisfied by a measure of moderation that contrasted with tendencies fostered under Villèle, so the oppositional posture was not unalterable. In January 1828, the Martignac administration came into office, and Fiévée chose this juncture to return to his famous Correspondance, last seen in 1819. His new letters, fourteen in number, appeared between February and April of that year. The argument of the revival revealed still the acuity of the original, yet it laboured in places under a burden that the original had been spared. Fiévée wished well to this ministry, or some variant of it, and the direction of the eversubtle argument was that the forms of parliamentary government must obtain in combination with a measure of readiness to compromise. Were one to seek precedents in earlier dicta, they would come in those passages in which Fiévée, holding still that party was of great value for most times, had lauded the partisans of Britain for the readiness with which they were capable of putting party aside and coming together around the flag in times of national distress. Fiévée proclaimed no such crisis, but he did present considerations that might win the assent of both ministerialists and the “Opposition.” Implicit in the analysis was the imperative that there be a ministry that could actually govern by enjoying a working majority in the chambers, but that at the same time the support not be so overwhelming as to exempt the ministers from sensitivity to diverse claims. Much more evident than an apparent approval of the recent change was Fiévée’s hostility to the previous ministry and its record on public liberties. He made clear as well that he had not entirely forgiven royalists for their faint commitment to such liberties. Apart from such avowals, Fiévée conducted his case for toleration 97 Journal des débats, 13 Nov. 1827. He was not elected, though his candidacy in Indre-et-Loire was well supported by the Parisian dailies. See Sherman Kent, The Election of 1827 in France (Cambridge, MA, 1975), 122n.

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and moderation very much as before. That is to say, he tended to present preferences as analytical conclusions, the outcomes necessarily dictated by logic. Sometimes this left unstated the priorities according to which outcomes should come to be desired. The letters began with a firm endorsement of the necessity of opposition in a constitutional regime. Explicit, too, was the value of an opposition that was suitably provided with policies such that it could credibly assume office. By the same token, the ministers needed to be similarly equipped. Illustrative of the fine line that Fiévée was attempting to walk, he acknowledged the virtues of opposition that was “systématique dans la loyale acception de ce mot.” Yet this form of conduct was not, it seemed, suitable for the times, and he thus looked forward to a lower chamber in which “blind ministerialism and systematic Opposition will be in a minority position.” Even more conciliatory was the interesting thought – born no doubt from decades of attention to the alleged British consensus – that representative government had a property that turned potentially political questions into less highly charged matters of administration. The difference was presumably that between questions of principle and those of expediency among people who shared a set of principles. This meant that one might look forward to there being members of the opposition who would be capable of looking at administrative matters on their merits, an obvious curtailment of systematic opposition. This, he warned, would only be possible if a ministry were forthright and did not, as in the past, hide an agenda hostile to freedom under the cloak that proclaimed an imminent crisis.98 Several other assumptions served to render this praise for moderation clearer because qualified in various ways. There was an implied trade-off in his suggestion that the opposition that had eventually led to the dismissal of Villèle should not clamour too avidly for places in the higher administration. Further, it would appear that, by way of exacting concessions from the ministers, he also put quite firmly the need for portfolios in the ministry to be allocated with a view to the distribution of opinion in the Chambre des députés. Here he boldly grasped that nettle that had always been so inhibiting for the admirers of parliamentary conventions. The king, he continued to say, had still the right to choose ministers from what quarter he wished; on the other hand, choices made outside the legislative bodies 98 Fiévée, Nouvelle correspondance politique et administrative I, 2 (Feb. 1828): 33, 29; II, 7 (March 1828): 13, 17. In writing of the opposition in the context of French politics, Fiévée had continued his earlier, albeit irregular, practice of adopting the use of a capital letter to designate the office. Since this concession to British usage was characteristic of Fiévée and of few others, it may well have been his influence that had led the Journal des débats in that direction.

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constituted an insult that might carry the gravest consequences. Any viable ministry thus had to be drawn largely from the majority in the elected chamber. He deemed it best, presumably thinking of the suspicion to which ministers were currently subject, that this majority be what he had since 1821 been calling a “conditional” one. Later he foresaw the prospect of a majority more compact and stable,99 properties that he usually deemed to be the truly healthy ones. Capping a delicate structure of mutual accommodation was the pronouncement – whether as description or invitation it was left unclear – that it was natural to be both liberal and royalist, so that party designations within the chambers meant rather little. Inasmuch as constitutionalists accepted the Charte, they accepted royalism as well. The relevant propositions were not entirely symmetrical, since Fiévée grumbled still about royalists whose record on liberty was very imperfect. From these observations, he concluded that there were really only two parties, those who accepted constitutional government and those who did not. Since he contemplated still an opposition – and moreover a moderate one – it is not clear in what sense it could avoid the designation of party. The position was, however, consistent both with his judgment that the old ultra contreopposition should deem itself un-needed and with his new emphasis on pragmatic issues, rather than on what one would now consider ideological ones.100 This last point obviously reflected Fiévée’s impatience with religious preoccupations rather than any discovery about the drift of events. Fiévée’s admiration for a political process essentially British had accompanied him in his ideological travels, and he sought, as before, a mode of conducting business that avoided both arbitrary government that would crush all dissent and that sort of warfare that would threaten all order. Yet, in 1828, he seems mainly to have sought peace; therefore, his attachment to the energetic party competition of Britain seems not to have been the lesson that the times most required. Systematic opposition and, with it, the banishing of ambiguity returned when the Martignac ministry left office in 1829. Between November 1829 and 26 July 1830, Fiévée tells us that he wrote against the Polignac administration for Jacques Coste’s new paper Le Temps. Articles in this paper were unsigned, and the fine-spun logic of his characteristic pieces does not always emerge conspicuously in the deluge of angry attacks on the last ministry of the Restoration. There are, nonetheless, a good number of pieces where both theme and language suggest his hand and that of no one else. These appeared in the daily “Bulletin politique,” a sort of leading article, 99 Ibid., I, 2: 35; II, 11: 75; II, 13: 101; III, 14 (April 1828): 47. 100 Ibid., II, 7, 2–5; I, 6, 98.

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sometimes fragmented into brief comments but usually consisting of a sustained argument. When the text consisted of a complex resume of the relations between the ministry and the majority, with an emphasis on the oddity of the two not being the same, one suspects that Fiévée was at work embellishing the bare facts familiar to all. Conceptual claims as to the exact nature of the king’s government, on the nature and prerogatives of a “power” in the state, and on the origin and composition of a “constitutional majority” all suggest the same inspiration.101 Items entitled “Du style figuré en politique” or “Cours de la logique politique” depart far enough from the idiom of most political journalism to be his in all probability. There is also the curious advice proffered to voters that they should support either the best or the worst, the latter choice serving to provoke such distaste as to bring down the ministers.102 The ample use made of British experience is certainly consistent with past performances, but he was not alone in favouring such lore. One element missing was Fiévée’s long-standing assumption that he was charged with teaching the French about the virtues of competition through compact parliamentary parties. The articles seemingly by him continued to assume its existence, but the pressures of the time also led to his referring to the ministerial following as a party or worse, whereas almost the entire nation stood against them. This concession to the language of radicalism can only be taken as a measure of the gravity of the crisis. Apparently, the government’s readiness to flout the rules of constitutional government warranted such an emphasis. It reminds us of how only certain conditions provide the right setting for party competition along the lines that Fiévée had long promoted. His desire to give Martagnac’s ministry a chance might warrant its attenuation just as the thoroughly unacceptable Polignac government might require stronger medicine still. Under Polignac, Fiévée’s taste for compromise had, for the time being, disappeared, and his account of the period, written as a pamphlet, insisted that he had then preferred civil war to any temporizing. He said, too, that his aim had always been liberty and that this was what had made him comfortable only in opposition. His general view became clear in the charge that the ministers of the time had thought that the Charte should be granted but in morsels, as though other nations should follow Britain only at a distance of some centuries. One of the few twentieth-century comments on his political

101 Le Temps, journal des progrès politique, 2 Jan. 1830, 928; 3 Jan. 1830, 938; 27 Feb. 1830, 1591–92; 22 March 1830, 1867. The individual issues were not numbered; the numbers refer to the columns. 102 Ibid., 22 April 1830, 2227; 23 July 1830, 3321; 4 May 1830, 2371.

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thought confirms the self-revelation of the pamphlet.103 The record of Fiévée’s contributions continued for a time into the July Monarchy, and to the extent that one can extract dominant preoccupations, he remained unalterably hostile to any notion that the ministers of the moment could call themselves the government. He also expressed scorn for that catchword of the day – the “juste milieu.” Differences that were freely admitted were, for him, the necessary foundations of the parliamentary regime; the alternatives of intrigue and secret negotiations were alien to the system. In denying that any splitting of the difference would suffice, he came close to Vaublanc’s view that there was probably no room for a useful third position between two opposed systems of policy. When he stated his preferred strategy for the opposition – and this was that it should become the majority through candour at the tribune and service to the public – he labelled his advice “[T]he opposition must wish to remain as a minority.” What the arresting title did not say was that he meant simply that an opposition might only change its situation in certain ways, and accommodating itself to the ministry or deserting its post for a few offices was not one of them.104 This, of course, had been his understanding of what Villèle and Corbière had done at the beginning of the decade. The cultivation of paradox, even at the cost of confusing his readers, was by then an ingrained trait, not readily to be set aside in the name of a dull transparency. Fiévée’s political thought reveals a marked consistency in content, and this despite the fact that, more than most figures, he clearly changed sides during the years of the Restoration. This may seem paradoxical for so doughty an advocate of disagreement conducted along party lines, but never had he insisted that, in endorsing partisanship, one might put principle aside. No other writer was really like this one either in content or in technique. His apparent respect for the struggle itself over loyalty to any protagonist finds, however, some sort of parallel in the inspired eccentricity of the comte de Saint-Simon, whose commitment to his own agenda placed him outside the political mainstream of the time. Even before the Hundred Days of 1815, Saint-Simon offered a very British view of the parties of ministry and opposition and offered the telling observation that the obvious way for a united ministry to come to power was through the common experience of opposition. This was a neat solution to the difficulties offered by Louis XVIII’s early penchant for surrounding himself 103 Fiévée, Causes et consequences des évenéments du mois de Juillet 1830 (Paris, 1830), 1–2, 10–11; and B. Yvert, “La Pensée politique de Joseph Fiévée,” Revue de la Société d’histoire de la Restauration 4 (1990): 11–25. 104 Le National, no. 187 (6 July 1831); “Juste milieu,” no. 41 (7 Feb. 1831); no. 18 (18 Jan. 1831).

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with ministers unconnected with one another.105 A yet more marked neutrality between opposed sides is visible in the thought of the exiled philosopher Jósef Hoëne-Wronski, who, for his own good reasons, was a stranger to the existing parties. He pointed out that the claims of both sides created by the Revolution erred in their pretensions to exclusive legitimacy. Moderation based on a political scepticism was his preferred way.106 Fiévée’s far richer political categories resist close comparison with either thinker, although all three stand out in their originality amidst the commonplaces of the day. It was surely the ingenuity of Fiévée’s paradoxes that accounts as much for his remarkable popularity in his own time as for the lasting intellectual quality of his work. There are more judgments of Fiévée’s journalism passed by those who knew it at first hand than can readily be recorded here; he was a significant and controversial figure for his contemporaries. What he wrote illuminated even as it puzzled. Thus, an alleged admirer referred to his “profound obscurity” in the manner of the oracles of old, and another less friendly commentator remarked on his taste for tendentious definition and distinctions that were forced.107 His authoritative air was also marked especially by those who thought it unwarranted. The first part of a three-part dissection of his Histoire of 1815 finds the anonymous critic mocking Fiévée’s laughable selfassurance.108 This, if anything, grew more pronounced, and his later comparing himself to Montesquieu was not well received. There was more to it, however, than a cheeky boastfulness. Irony, obliquity, periphrasis, and a studied form of elliptical argument were all there as well and helped to lend to his paradoxes a characteristic flair. Often his critics, in Le Constitutionnel for instance, cited an absence of direction in his essays and the frequent appearance of the apparent non sequitur. Especially elusive were those arguments – such as his well-known proposition to the effect that there could be no majority in an assembly with few members – where the source of confusion was both his studied effort to be cryptic and his tendency not to distinguish 105 Saint-Simon, untitled essay, in [Charles Comte and Charles Dunoyer, eds], Le Censeur, ou Examen des actes et des ouvrages qui tendent à détruire ou à consolider la constitution de l’ état (1815), 3:334–56 at 343–6. 106 [Hoëne-Wronski], Le Sphinx, no. 1 (Dec. 1818): 12–14; no. 2 (March 1819): 4–6; and Hoëne-Wronski, Problème fondamental de la politique moderne (Paris, 1829), 1–13, 36–7. 107 Untitled letter to the editor, [Charles Loyson and Henri de Lourdoueix, eds], Le Publiciste moderne 1, no. 1 (14 Feb. 1818), 63–8 at 65; and Saint-Marcel [i.e., Joseph Lingay], Considérations sur quelques doctrines politiques de M. Fiévée (Paris, 1816), 7–8, 30. 108 Journal de Paris, no. 244 (31 Aug. 1816).

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between connections that were empirically visible and conclusions that were logically entailed. There was nothing, in principle, that made a majority – even a strong majority – out of the question in a relatively small number of deputies, so the argument necessarily had to turn on specifics and probabilities. In neglecting to offer a straightforward account, Fiévée may have been reflecting some of the shortcomings of a clever autodidact, although more likely the pattern was calculated. This penchant for obscurity was also a boon for less imaginative journalists, who might fill out columns by rendering clear issues made conspicuous by Fiévée. Thus, one finds Étienne expounding on the details that illustrated the likelihood of the fragile majority in ways that the author of the claim had never deigned to do.109 The same fillip to the work of others is apparent in offerings by the ministerial writers d’Auréville and Gautier du Var, who went so far as to identify the initial number of their review as “Parallèle des opinions des auteurs avec celles de M. Fiévée.”110 The respectful, if dissenting, parallel to Fiévée’s views perfectly illustrates the measure in which, however partisan and eccentric, his arguments readily supplied the language of discussion. Once handed the categories for treating the political process, it was relatively easy for others to distance themselves from Fiévée’s emphasis. His importance for his time rests, then, on his striking antitheses – whether opinion and interest, government and administration, or, more profoundly, the tension between timid moves towards freedom and the lingering tradition of centralized despotism. For all his intellectual faults, Fiévée was a figure with which those who purported to be up to date had to make some judgment, so that even his most dismissive critics – such as one much less successful commentator on the times – contributed to his prominence.111 The taste for abstractions was, in part, responsible for the occasional bracketing of Fiévée with Guizot. However, his name also appeared routinely in the company of Chateaubriand, Constant, and the other major commentators on public affairs.112 There was, of course, especially good reason to identify Fiévée with the name of Chateaubriand, not only because of their joint labours on Le Conservateur, 109 “Lettres sur Paris” 43, La Minerve 5, [no. 1] (Feb. 1819), 13–30 at 19. 110 Annales historiques du session des corps législatif, années 1814 et 1815, vol. 1 (Sept. 1816), title page; vol. 2 (Sept. 1816), “Parallèle … ,” 427–67. When these volumes were reprinted in 1817, the comment about engaging Fiévée remained but the substance of the rejoinder had disappeared. 111 See A … … H [Auguste Hus], De la littérature de MM. de Pradt, Fiévée et Villiers (Paris, 1816), 6. 112 See “De M. Fiévée et M. Guizot,” Le Défenseur 3, [no. 2] (autumn 1820): 83– 7; “MM. Fiévée, de Montlozier, de Salvandy et Guizot,” Conservateur de la Restauration 7 (March 1830): 269–71; and J.-B. Férat, De la civilisation en France, ou essai sur les causes qui arrêtent les progrès (Paris, 1828), 81.

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but owing to the similarity in the substance of what they contributed to the common cause.113 Not a few authors who set to criticize both together ended by concentrating upon Fiévée’s work, a tacit recognition of his leadership in that way of writing. A law professor in Poitiers went further and said simply that since the two were arguing the same case, he would attend exclusively to Fiévée and dispatch the great man’s views at the same time.114 Ready as he was at times to acknowledge Fiévée’s virtuosity, a prickly literary legend cannot have felt entirely serene about being so relegated to a secondary role. An observer even managed simultaneously to bring together these last two in terms of literary reputation, while associating Fiévée’s political goals with those of Constant.115 A more judicious way of associating Fiévée with Constant was offered by Conrad Malte-Brun, who would have worked with Fiévée on several papers. He treated the two as of comparable weight as political authorities but of entirely different sentiments. The same source mentioned Bonald and Fiévée in the same breath, though one cannot imagine that the admirers of either could have been happy to find their hero in such company. The dull and learned Bonald was the very antithesis of what made the other such a successful journalist. Predictably, people of a left-wing persuasion were less than enchanted with associating the name of Fiévée, the sometime ultra, with that of Constant.116 Nevertheless, Constant was reasonably cordial to a fellow journalist who might appear on the same side as he, and he was known to have said, early in their relations, that Fiévée’s abilities deserved better causes. Although he was influential and a celebrity among political commentators, part of this journalist’s fame depended upon his taste for the extraordinary, and few were the political opponents who did not find the opportunity to score Fiévée’s taste for metaphysical constructions of what was comparatively simple. As one reviewer put it, in beclouding the obvious, Fiévée appeared not to wish to be understood.117 Another commentator, who did not hesitate to introduce Fiévée’s name among the most prominent publicists of the day, gently chided him for his obscurity, here again understood as the affliction that came naturally to oracles. A writer of memoirs who recalled Fiévée as one 113 See Paul-Auguste Taschereau de Fargues, La Verité sur l’Angleterre (Paris, 1816), 39; and Benjamin Laroche, Le Cri des patriotes français sur la loi des élections (Paris, 1819), 10. 114 [Pierre Boncenne], Lettre à M. Le vte. de Chateaubriand, pair de France (Paris and Poitiers, 1816), 21. 115 L’Aristarque français, journal du soir, no. 76 (28 Feb. 1820). 116 Conrad Malte-Brun, Les Partis, esquisse morale et politique: Ou, les avantures de Sir Charles Credulous (Paris, 1818), 71, 252; and Lettres normandes 4, no. 17 (18 Dec. 1818), 264–72 at 266. 117 J.P. V[ienno]t, review of the 14th part of the Correspondance, Journal de Paris, no. 17 (17 Jan. 1819).

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of the ablest dialecticians of the day had obviously entered more fully into the spirit of his arguments.118 The positive comments were often very positive indeed, and public men such as Pasquier and Molé were quick to praise his abilities, whatever reservations they may have had about his principles. Less prominent in his own time but better known to posterity than many of the other admirers was the philosopher and public man Pierre Maine de Biran. His private jottings record the considerable impact that Fiévée’s Correspondance made in that busy life.119 When retirement and then death had removed him from the public eye, Fiévée came still to be remembered as one who had stood for the right causes in constitutional law.120 Influence was not limited either to those who avowed it, and Prosper Duvergier de Hauranne, leader of the enlightened reformers during the July Monarchy, probably owed more of his assumptions to Fiévée than his occasional citations would suggest. Foreigners, perhaps because out of range of his verbal darts, were especially respectful, and if Fiévée’s own boast to have a following in the Ottoman Empire cannot be verified, his good name in Britain is manifest. The New Times of London claimed for him an honourable celebrity all over Europe. Furthermore, with Fiévée retired from the ranks of active writers, John Stuart Mill was still singing his praises.121 Even as Fiévée’s journalism was coming to a close, a book in German traded on the name and linked him misleadingly with Stendhal.122 Whether the more significant attention from Mill was a tribute only to the analytical virtuosity of Joseph Fiévée or also to his services to the cause of representative government, it cannot now be known. Clearly, the journalist had earned both forms of recognition.

118 [J.-F.-N. Dusaulchoy de Bergement], Lettres Parisiennes (Paris, 1817), 42. Cf. Edouard Mennechet, Seize ans sous les Bourbons, 1814–1830 (Paris, 1833), 91. 119 Maine de Biran, Journal, ed. Henri Gouhier (6 Jan. and 12 March 1816), (Neuchâtel, 1954), 1:97–8,111–12. 120 Le Siècle, no. 350 (21 Dec. 1843); and Hippolyte Bosselet, La Liberté ajournée (Paris, 1864), 36. 121 New Times, cited in [J.-R.-P. Sarran et al. eds], Bibliothèque royaliste, faisant suite au Correspondant 5, no. 2 (15 Feb. 1820). Sarran continued to praise Fiévée in his Du ministère Villèle et de ses oeuvres, 199. J.S. Mill, Collected Works, ed. J. A. Robson, vol. 12 (Toronto, 1963), letters of 5 March and 13 Oct. 1835, 250–1, 276–7. 122 Friedrich Wilhelm Carové, ed., Ueber Frankreich, Italien und Spanien von Fiévée … (Leipzig, 1831), where the first portion (1–26) consists of extracts from Fiévée’s Causes et consequences, published after the July Revolution. Earlier, Constant referred to another such work, containing pieces on religion by Chateaubriand, Fiévée, and himself, that was stopped at the French customs. Courrier, 22 June 1829, in Constant, Recueil d’articles, 1825–1829, ed. E. Harpaz (Paris, 1992), 424–6.

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Constant and Company: An Almost-Loyal Opposition

the cause of representative government – and especially one conducted in a spirit of moderation and respect for one’s opponents – had enemies enough in Restoration France. Was the greater threat that of nostalgia for a time without elections, or did it reside with men whose allegiance lay with the Revolution? And what of the Bonapartist cause? For if the ancien régime recognized no merit in such institutions and the Convention befouled them with its violence, had the era of Bonaparte not caricatured them? The anti-parliamentary attitude was a great river fed by various tributaries. Less easy, it would seem, to construct the case for debate rather than conspiracy, or for legality rather than violence. But such a case had to be made, and men from different political orientations took up the task. The school of Guizot and the Doctrinaires did much to explain and justify the Charte from premises now taken to be liberal. Better known than Guizot, at least during the Restoration, and cherished by later ages as the austere Royer-Collard could never be was another liberal, Benjamin Constant de Rebecque (1767–1830). Constant was the voice, if not exactly the leader, of the left-wing opposition in the 1820s. But his credentials reached back much further to his service as a publicist on behalf of the Directory, his gallant role in Napoleon’s doomed Tribunate, and his constitutional theorizing of 1814–15, which included supplying France with a constitution. Then came the last decade of the Restoration and Constant’s compelling presence in the lower house, complemented by some three thousand pages of surviving journalism, most of it the product of the years since 1816. When Guizot turned to academic pursuits and Chateaubriand, too, often sulked between diplomatic assignments, Constant applied his strong bent for theory on the affairs of the day. In the realm of political thought of a sort meaningful both to his own time and to posterity, Constant carries a strong presumption to be the dominant figure of the time. Despite his not founding any school of thought, Constant is conveniently treated alongside two other thinkers with whom he was close; these are his long-time companion Germaine, baronne de Staël, with a glance at

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her son Auguste de Staël. Constant and Auguste appear to have been close at one time, and of course Constant was the presumptive father of Auguste’s half-sister Albertine. Others, both allies and critics, will help to provide a context for the ideas of this central player. r a l ly in g t o t h e r e vo l u t i on Constant has long invited the minute exploration of his intentions. Not only did he subject himself to such examination – both in his private diaries and in his fiction – but others have been noticeably willing to join the enquiry. Even his surname, as he himself was aware, lent itself to queries as to just how constant he was. His motto was Sola inconstantia constans. It has been all too easy to bring in the verdict that an unusually great disjunction between thought and feeling, inconstancy in his loyalties, and a certain capacity to distance himself from them were, in fascinating measure, his nature. The first occasion for testing his political commitment came in the Paris of the Directory, itself a setting that might remind critics of the difficulties of planting one’s standard in any definitive way. Replacing the desperation spread by the Terror was a milder form of uncertainty in a regime sufficiently weak, and hence mild enough, to leave alive those who wished it no good. This complicated the business of choosing sides, for it afforded some room to ponder the future and to experiment with possibilities. What cause would emerge triumphant, and how could one conduct oneself so as to avoid offence to any future patron? In confronting such dilemmas, Constant was not alone, so the temptation to explain matters by the peculiarities of his character may be joined by other considerations. As his correspondence reveals, Constant’s attitudes towards the early Revolution varied over time, and there remain uncertainties, for instance, as to whether some comments of 1793 should be taken as favourable to the Convention. Certainly the next year, prior to thermidor, finds him proclaiming that “middling parties are worthless,” but by the autumn this flirtation with the Jacobins had passed.1 His first political essays, appearing anonymously in J.-B.-A. Suard’s Nouvelles politiques, attacked the expiring Convention. These were published in late June of 1795 and seem to have marked an error in 1 Constant, Les “Principes de politique,” ed. Étienne Hofmann (Genève, 1980), 1:52, 61, 70n (where the first volume consists entirely of the editor’s commentary). The use here of quotation marks, as well as italics, is for purposes of distinguishing this original version from the one that Constant himself eventually published in late May 1815, towards the end of the Hundred Days. Here I have followed Hofmann’s convention. See also Gustave Rudler, La Jeunesse de Benjamin Constant, 1767–1794 (Paris, 1909), 462.

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judgment, for Constant then came under fire as a sympathizer with royalism. It took him less than a month to find a more acceptable outlet for his work. Not long after the author had broken with Suard, he appears to have set aside his uncertainties and associated himself with the newly formed Directory. Whether this commitment represents the growing influence of Mme de Staël or an unprincipled bounder’s grasping for the main chance is a question that need not be resolved here.2 What is clear enough is that Constant then undertook to defend the Revolution and continued to do so until it disappeared in Bonaparte’s coup d’état. With the general change in sympathies made manifest, it is not difficult to trace other dissonances in attitude, as when Constant argues, in a letter of 1794 to Mme de Charrière, that Robespierre’s Terror was not incompatible with a long-term march towards liberty, whereas in a political publication of 1797, he says, more or less, the opposite.3 To multiply examples of such apparent inconsistencies at this time may, however, be misleading, for a general volte-face necessarily entails corresponding changes of mind on a number of issues. Not so to change would be the greater incoherence and might suggest the absence of any overall position. More compelling is Guillemin’s evidence of material considerations that seemed to control Constant’s political and personal affinities. Here, too, it is a risky undertaking to impute motives when circumstances are complex and more difficult still to discover a pattern of response when each occasion for choosing sides is different from the last. The history of France, over a period of forty years, was to supply several such occasions, and few were the political figures who did not in some degree compromise themselves by consorting with regimes of different stripe. All too often the only alternatives were silent passivity or exile. The choice that Constant made was ostensibly between the executive power and a legislature that showed leanings that were increasingly royalist. Risings both by the poor and by the gilded youth had to be suppressed, and the directors then chose a path that attempted to steer between the extremes. Survival of the regime might require reliance upon the strength of the side that was, for the time being, less threatening in order to hold down the other extreme. It was with this configuration of forces in mind that Constant undertook to gather support on behalf of a government committed to the status quo. A first effort was the essay in the form of a 2 The unflattering hypothesis has been argued in a number of publications by Henri Guillemin, especially in his Benjamin Constant: Muscadin, 1795–1799 (Paris, 1958), 49 and passim. 3 See Patrice Thompson, “La Terreur de Benjamin Constant,” in Dominique Verrey and Anne-Lise Delocrétaz, eds, Benjamin Constant et la Révolution française (Genève, 1987), 61–72 at 62, 71.

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letter written in July 1795 to the editor of a republican paper. The late winter found him writing a much expanded version of this appeal, while his companion Germaine was composing her treatise on the passions and their relation to government. Both works serve well to bring out an approach to political conflict relevant for the times and still very familiar in the doctrines and the practice of the Restoration. Constant’s argument was a sophisticated variant of the familiar call for revolutionary solidarity, the theme that gave life and rhetorical content to whole careers in the 1790s. The circumstances of 1796 made unconvincing an argument that ignored the presence of more than one interest with reason to be unhappy with the government; consequently, an effective appeal had to offer more than incantations about national unity. Recognition of a cluttered political landscape did not, however, entail endorsement of diversity, and Constant found common ground with the orthodox language of the Revolution in his portrayal of the current rulers as the only ones conceivable. With the forces of anarchy thrown back at 4 prairial and those of reaction on 12 vendémiaire, the men in power might then be saluted as the only bulwark against further descent into disorder. Theirs was the position that promised the continuation of representative government, whereas all alternatives would lead either to a renewal of the Terror or an attempt to restore the institutions of the pre-revolutionary order. Constant’s language was, in the main, that of the Revolution, but he offered as well an apparent moderation in effectively separating himself from the cause of the neo-Jacobins, here referred to as terroristes. With the centre secured for his own cause, he then proceeded with the pressing business at hand, which was to convince his readers that no salvation was to be had in restoring a royalist regime. For some purposes, Constant’s argument was well served by his presenting the Directory as the mean that separated the two extremes, both obviously unacceptable in their potential for violence. It was useful as well, however, to offer the alternative scene of numerous schools of malcontents that differed significantly even within a general orientation. This is what he was doing in a clever portrait of disaffection showing the parties as each too weak numerically to act without allies. The result, he insisted, would be appeals to revolt that went unheeded. In order to gain support, he theorized, each faction would be loath to reveal its specific leaning and would follow the strategy of maximizing support by dwelling on generalities. But the effort to avoid alienation of other malcontents would fail anyway, owing to the suspicions about what precise alternative one might be assisting to power. This game theoretical model thus explained how a party, unaided, could not displace the government and how neither candour about objectives nor silence about them could prove

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successful.4 Most malcontents would then support the Directory in any event. The analysis was intended, presumably, to treat only the neoJacobin opposition to the Directory, for Constant then offered a separate anatomy of the forces of royalism. Here he assured the nation that counsels were so divided as to yield no agreement even on the identity of the king who should be restored. Nor were the moderate or constitutional royalists more than a small minority, and these were unacceptable, he said, to all republicans and to the bulk of the extreme royalists. This last group was itself full of jealousies and divisions; his listing of its components – chouans, Vendéens, émigrés – sufficiently identified its diversity.5 A remarkable quality of this argument in support of order is that it said scarcely anything of what that government stood for. Apparently, in serving as a barrier against royalist and terrorist, the government sufficiently revealed its credentials. Indeed, the apparently nondescript nature of the rulers of France comes more and more to appear as a virtue with the revelation of Constant’s animus against party spirit. Parties and the sort of politics that they brought with them constituted a threat to order and the status quo. It was the signal quality of party spirit, said Constant, that those afflicted could only judge institutions in terms of the persons involved; it was a strength of his analysis that it was supposedly disinterested, thus capable of analysing institutions because he belonged to no party. That same party spirit, associated as well with “factions,” accounted for the spirit of excess that accompanied partisanship. Factions or parties (the specific term seemed not to matter) turned the extreme state of a fever into a regular condition.6 Those in the middle, by contrast, would seem but to occupy a location and, point-like, to have no other quality. Just being there placed them in a state of grace, and Constant was generous in his praise for those who, surrounded by party spirit, held still to the middle as best they could. He did, however, allude to 4 Constant, De la force du gouvernement actuel de la France et de la nécessité de s’y rallier (n.p., 1796), 26–7. This is the first edition, published in Switzerland. There followed a serialization in the official Mercure de France and then, possibly, larger Paris editions, one of them, as Constant recorded in a letter to his uncle, of 2,000 copies. (See Constant, Lettres à sa famille [1775–1830], ed. Jean-H. Ménos [Paris, 1932], 149.) However, it remains unclear whether a Paris edition ever appeared. (See C.P. Courtney, A Bibliography of the Writings of Benjamin Constant to 1833 [London, 1981], 9–10.) There was an English translation in 1799. For a long time, the most accessible French text was that in Carlo Cordié, Gli scritti politici giovanili di Benjamin Constant (1796–97) (Como, 1944), 3–89. The edition of 1988, edited by Philippe Raymond, is then especially welcome. Unless otherwise noted, it is the first edition that is cited here. 5 Constant, De la force, 42–7. 6 Ibid., 4, 65.

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the possibility that the government, when pressed hard from one extreme, might of necessity lean in the direction of the other. The observation received no elaboration, but its significance was understood by a reviewer who accorded particular attention to refuting the claim of that passage.7 Equally in need of pursuit to some conclusion was Constant’s elusive comment to the effect that it was one thing to attempt the downfall of a regime and quite another just to wish the incumbents to be gone.8 Constant’s aim had been to discourage any expectations of a peaceful restoration of the royalists, and his most obvious prejudice had been against those bodies that fanned the flames of partisanship. His premises prompted a challenge in the pamphlet of Adrien Lezay-Marnésia, another member of the coterie around Mme de Staël, one whose ideas she had cited and with whose political thoughts hers were said to have much in common.9 Much of Lezay’s pamphlet was taken up with an imposing analysis of the formation of public opinion that seems to have been the work of his mentor Roederer, the latter now cured of his earlier Jacobinism. Central to the argument, however, was a case for something quite different than the desperate holding of the ring that seemed to be Constant’s only remedy against the triumph of violent solutions. Lezay argued that Constant’s position offered no stability, for the continual vacillation of the government that was needed to maintain the balance was no prescription for governing. Taking up Constant’s effort to think strategically, he offered the model of a system where there was no holder of the balance, but where contending parties instead sought the prize of commanding the state. Assuming as he did that this struggle would be conducted in the presence of an enlightened public opinion, one where the cries of the masses were answered by the judicious judgments that came from the upper reaches of society, the competition of parties would be benign. As Lezay saw it, the presence of a third party – for that is how he visualized the interventions of the executive Directory (although it was not, of course, how its members perceived themselves) – served but to keep the legislature in a state of continuous unease. He did not go into the reasons, but it 7 See the letter from one who styled himself “un habitant des Pyrénées” in Mercure français 23, no. 38 (20 messidor IV) [8 July 1796]: 75–96 at 84. 8 Constant, De la force, 34, 25. 9 He and Constant had obviously met as early as 21 November 1795. Dominique Verrey, Chronologie de la vie et de l’oeuvre de Benjamin Constant (Genève, 1992), 1:205. More generally, see Elisabeth Bourget-Besmer, Une famille française sous la Révolution et l’Empire: La Famille de Lezay-Marnésia (Paris, 1985), 83–8. For Lezay’s intellectual relations with Mme de Staël, see her “Réflexions sur la paix intérieure” (1795) in Staël, Oeuvres complètes [ed. Auguste de Staël] (Paris, 1820–21), 2:95–172 at 126n; and Basil Muntaneo, Les Idées politiques de Madame de Staël et la constitution de l’an III (Paris, 1931), 58.

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must already have been clear to him that the directors’ survival was dependent on keeping the dangerous extremes off balance. In order to attain stability, it was necessary that the three actors be reduced to two (“deux partis bien prononcées”) of which one championed the government’s prerogative against popular forces while the other served as guardian of public liberty against threats from the government.10 The British model of fact or legend was presumably Lezay’s inspiration here, with the two parties conceived in a slightly static and old-fashioned way. In other respects, the model has earned applause for its intimation of how political competition might be relied upon to render both contenders more moderate as they are pushed, in their search for support, towards the political centre.11 The problem with this intriguing passage is that the elusive state of moderation is so tersely set out as to leave the reader with the impression that the real challenge had been addressed only in theory and that the hardest part was yet to come. An age that had yet to explore the concept of consensus found it difficult to create a credible account of the process whereby the mores changed from fanaticism to a tolerant moderation. Emergence of an intelligent public mind was all very well, but it only pushed the elusive condition back one stage. Given a calm and insightful public, all might be well, but because extreme and mutually fearful opponents seem not to create the means of their own transformation, how was such a public to be secured in the first instance? Nevertheless, family correspondence records that Constant was taken aback by the sophistication of the riposte, although he did have an answer to the central argument about taming party competition. Lezay had taken for granted that the government constituted a third party, but a weak one. Constant implicitly revealed his own preference for a nonparty government that found its role in controlling the extremes when he argued that the government remained unpersuaded that it needed to have a party for itself. Seeking such a party, said Constant, was the fallacy encouraged by all factions as they sought to form the centre and then settle into

10 Adrien, comte de Lezay, De la faiblesse d’un gouvernement qui commence, et la nécessité où il est de se raillier à la majorité nationale (Paris, an IV), 60–1. Again, the “habitant des Pyrénées” was unerring in the choice of what was important. See Mercure français 23, no. 40 (10 thermidor IV) [28 July 1796]: 193–217 at 214. For references to other responses, see Christian Viredaz, “Comptes rendus contemporains et réponses aux écrits de Benjamin Constant (1787–1833),” Annales Benjamin Constant 6 (1986): 93–133. 11 Philippe Raymond, in his edition of De la force du gouvernement (Paris, 1988), 17–9, thus credits Constant’s critic with a remarkable anticipation of “majoritarian logic” worthy of a later age.

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government.12 Constant seems to have taken some care to avoid designating the executive directory as a party within the state, although his correspondence sometimes finds him referring to the left extremists as “jacobins” and the respectable centre as “républicains.” The tacit denial that government and party could be conflated was in keeping with his resolve to prevent either of the acknowledged parties from forming the government. The core of Constant’s rebuttal lay in his statement that Lezay assumed the existence of some middle point at which one or the other party combined with Lezay’s majorité nationale might coalesce. Alas, there existed no such generally avowed centre. No “cri unanime d’assentiment” could then ensue, for each party created its own supposed centre and invited an unconvinced nation to join it. The stable centre of confidence, here assumed, was chimerical.13 In positing the desideratum as already in existence, Lezay had reached the logical equivalent of a plan to bell the cat. It speaks to the moderation of Constant’s vision that, thus provoked, he chose not to dwell on his alternative. Parsimony dictated saying only that Lezay’s scheme was not workable, and we are deprived of further thoughts on political competition. Lezay’s interesting thought that competitors should render themselves attractive to the uncommitted went unexplored. The closest that Constant came here to reviewing the nature of the extremists who had been introduced in his previous pamphlet was his observation that the royalists could be assumed to be insincere in their profession of principles. Specifically, their advocacy of the liberty of the press contrasted with a previous animus against it. This told him that parties adopted each other’s principles when it suited them. He then remarked that the royalists’ natural leanings were not in accord with their circumstances. This meant that parties would modify doctrine to accord with their fortunes but could not be expected to undergo any genuine change of heart. The effect of the comment was then softened by Constant’s pious assurance that his words were not to be taken as applying to those whose over-zealous opposition to government was the result but of inexperience and was well intentioned still.14 Presumably, it was good republicans, and not the constitutional royalists, who were then to deem themselves exonerated. Constant and Lezay went a further round that turned upon the latter’s retrospective tribute to the Terror as having contributed, in curious fashion, to creating national solidarity. This Lezay argued in his pamphlet of 12 Constant, Des réactions politiques [30 March 1797], in Écrits et discours politiques, ed. O. Pozzo di Borgo (Paris, 1964), 1:21–91 at 34, 222, where Constant is quoting page 52 of Lezay’s Faiblesse. 13 Ibid., 34. 14 Ibid., 59–60.

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April 1797 entitled Des causes de la Révolution et de ses résultats. Constant, who at one time had himself been ready to defend that epoch, disagreed strenuously. The two would thus seem, in an odd way, to have traded places, save that both were ostensibly on the side of the Directory. The editor of Constant’s response has suggested a promising answer to Lezay’s somewhat unlikely hypothesis in noting how Lezay’s republican credentials were suspect and so he might exaggerate the value of the Terror. Indeed, J.-P. Gallais, a sympathetic observer, wrote in the spring of 1796 of the government’s “persecution” of Lezay. In the circumstances, there can be hardly any doubt that Lezay’s leanings were quite other than republican.15 This usefully reminds us that the very category of public opinion was, at that time, more the property of royalists than of republicans and that any intimation of political parties of the British type was also anathema in most republican circles. A further clue as to Lezay’s position was his association with Roederer, himself then a circumspect royalist. When Roederer’s paper reviewed the debate between Constant and Lezay, it was careful to be complimentary about both and, characterizing their views, said that Constant was of the school of Necker, whereas Lezay followed Montesquieu.16 There were precious few republicans who would wish to assume the mantle of Montesquieu; neither for that matter was Necker’s reputation then on the rise. This second clash ended the exchange, since Lezay neglected to respond. Nor does the second dispute itself make much sense apart from the original debate. Given the oddity that Constant’s various collections of writings omit his first pamphlet, the later publications that figure in his encounter with Lezay are the familiar ones, and their competing formulae for political stability amidst the contending parties are all but forgotten. Even a study that takes the “politique de bascule” as an important theme invokes the late stages of the argument as though the two combatants had just taken the field.17 Constant’s apparent suppression of the text of his De la force, owing to its outspoken strictures on monarchy, combined with the world’s having forgotten Lezay save for his contact with his famous adversary, account for the oversight.

15 Pozzo di Borgo, in his introduction to Constant, Des effets de la terreur [1797], in Écrits et discours, 93–112 at 94. Gallais defended Lezay in his Censeur des journaux, no. 246 (10 floréal IV) [29 April1796]. 16 Journal de Paris, no. 263 (23 prairial IV) [11 June 1796]. 17 François Furet, “Une polémique thermidorienne sur la Terreur: Autour de Benjamin Constant,” Passé Présent 2 (1983): 44–55. Other studies, too, appear to have begun accounts of the debate with Constant’s Des réactions. See Mauro Barberis, Benjamin Constant: Rivoluzione, constituzione, progresso (Bologna, 1988), 24–39.

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Constant had taken the position that the presence of factions or parties did not entail government by these units. Not considered in his exploration of political rectitude was whether citizens outside the legislature might rightly combine for purposes, not of replacing the government, but of supporting it in its present course. That, however, is exactly what ensued when Constant, in the summer of 1797, joined with Jean-Pierre Chazel in forming what came to be known as the Club de Salm. Constant became secretary of the club, in which capacity he was engaged in that network of political bodies, known generically as cercles constitutionnels, that spread rapidly beyond the first such unit, at the Hôtel de Salm, to the provinces. The purpose of the cercles was that of fostering support for republican institutions.18 It was characteristic of the time that royalists, themselves accused of being a political party, were also suspicious of those gatherings that smacked too much of the Jacobin organization of the past. Justifying this distinction was the plea that the royalist centres, such as the Club de Clichy, consisted largely of likeminded members of the legislature, whereas gatherings on the Left looked to the mass organizations of the Jacobin period.19 Nevertheless, it was a royalist majority that passed legislation that, in July 1797, dissolved existing clubs of any stripe and effectively did away with freedom of assembly. The debate on the future of political clubs makes it quite clear that legislators had found it all but impossible to defend gatherings that catered to their persuasion while banning those of their opponents. It might seem that Constant’s Club de Salm would go the way of all others, but existing tensions between legislature and executive made it possible for legislation to go unenforced. Soon the coup of 18 fructidor did away with the threat from the royalists, and the directors then made their sympathy for organization of the Left quite clear. Constant was writing at this time as a man of that persuasion who had dismissed the Club de Clichy as a decadent institution. He was delighted to see official favour for republican associations. A speech shortly after fructidor hailed that event and recorded, too, the zeal, allegedly both unanimous and spontaneous, that marked the overturning of the legislation against clubs. He betrayed no sign of acknowledging his inconsistency in damning the presence of one sort of organization and promoting another that seemed destined to take up an equally partisan task and in a more militant and aggressive fashion than the gathering of royalist-leaning deputies had shown. The very qualities that commended an assembly of notables to some would justify his turning towards the masses. Nor was the 18 The account in a standard work on revolutionary clubs is puzzling, since it treats the cercles and the club as separate and unrelated entities. See Auguste Challamel, Les Clubs contre-revolutionnaires (Paris, 1895), 507–14. 19 Jeremy Popkin, The Right-Wing Press in France (Chapel Hill, NC, 1980), 88, 197.

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record readily put right by the strained language in which the hitherto defender of procedural niceties justified the coup of 18 fructidor as being but a republican “centralization” on behalf of liberty. None of that violation of forms that he had so abhorred in De la force du gouvernement seemed now to apply; neither would he allow that the patriotic purging of the legislature could be confused with a simple exercise in the use of armed force. With this orthodox performance in the logic of revolutionary rhetoric, posterity has not been indulgent.20 In the invoking of revolutionary unanimity, subject to some fiddling to secure only acceptable voices, one encounters the true mind of the Revolution, ever fearful of diversity and all too ready to endorse a pre-emptive strike against one’s supposed enemies. Much later, Constant would have reason to move away from the Jacobin vocabulary of this early stage of his public life and would find his endorsement of the violence of fructidor an embarrassment. Of more interest than the matter of his consistency is his marked commitment to social animation on behalf of a great public that was assumed to share his priorities. Long after the Jacobin language had ceased to appeal to him, there would remain that penchant for identifying his cause with that of the nation. It was not an emphasis that was friendly to the ready acceptance of equally respectable but competing parties. This was a theme capable of presentation in tandem with others quite different in emphasis. Of this one is reminded when Constant offered his final major work of the revolutionary era. There he combined a longing for a time when people were less isolated in their uncertainty, when they more readily joined together in genuine community where, in particular, they might agree upon the claims to superiority that true communities might recognize without dissolving into dispute. It was a sentiment true to Necker’s writings of the 1780s and one to which some writers of royalist leaning were much given.21 However, Constant’s reading of Necker, under the tutelage of his daughter, was the likely source. The skilful blending of emphases paid its respects both to the past and to a properly revolutionary attitude: “One must re-establish amongst all irreproachable citizens solidarity on the matter of reputation.” As early as 1795, de Staël had offered her own version of the thought, with a hint of regret about things past that seems more natural to her than to Constant.22 20 Speech of 16 September 1797 at the mother-house of the proposed cercles, in Constant, Écrits et discours, 115–30 at 119, 126, 115. Critical comments by the editor are to be found at 128, but also, at 232n, an exoneration of Constant from some of the charges that have emerged in relation to this period. 21 Gunn, Queen of the World, 373. 22 Constant, Des suites de la contre-révolution de 1660 en Angleterre (Paris, an VII), 94. Cf. Staël, “De l’influence des passions sur le bonheur des individus et des nations,” in Oeuvres complètes, 3:5–298 at 86.

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For the latter, it was only a community, suitably purged, that could be entrusted with rebuilding the process of recognizing virtue through the authoritative emerging of public opinion. In chapter 7 of his De la force du gouvernement, Constant had sounded a note that recurred throughout his public life when he strove to make his polemic as impersonal as was compatible with his addressing events of the day. For one thing, he offered the improbable sentiment that he was not writing against any form of government at all, but rather only as the enemy of any further revolution. To this he added the observation – reminiscent of some statements by Saint-Just – to the effect that ideas were independent of men and were more the product of “la force des choses.” This impersonality in his categories fitted well with the very civil tendency to present himself as far removed from any concern with personalities and, essentially, as disinterested. As his preface adroitly argued, it had been the tendency of party to attach judgments about institutions and processes to individual agents, whereas his purview offered something superior. Throughout his career, there is evidence of his seeking to conduct argument on the plane of civility, an ambition that only occasionally appears to have worn thin in the heat of debate. Already, in his response to Lezay, one notes how gracious he sought to be about his opponent’s abilities. But one had, still, to debate, and if one aspect of the evil of party was that it sought to affix blame on individuals, the natural conclusion was that blame should, where possible, attach itself instead to parties and factions. This penchant to find the ill in public life as residing in the action of men in concert had a respectable history in eighteenth-century British individualism. One encounters it, for instance, in the statement of Nathaniel Forster, Oxford don and social thinker, when, during a discussion of how each way of life created its point of view peculiar to itself, he regretted the presence of these “several interests of a middle kind between the personal advantage of each individual and the general good of the Community … oftentimes too powerful for both.”23 The British most readily identified economic bodies as belonging to this category, but the prejudice also helps to explain why political parties were subject to suspicion. Constant’s liberalism may have been only in the process of developing into a set of coherent notions, and it seems wise to heed the caution that his behaviour might not yet be fairly measured by the lights of the mature doctrine.24 He had already, however, come to express a certain indulgence for unconnected individuals – or, at worst, an indifference towards them – combined with a conventional regard 23 Nathaniel Forster, An Enquiry into the causes of the Present high Price of Provisions (London, 1767), 96n. 24 Constant, “Principes,” 1:93.

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for the welfare of the social whole. The unit of analysis that escaped any hint of positive feeling was this sort of partial interest, imposing upon both the individual person and the community. In Constant’s version, the formula was made complicated by holistic and deterministic elements such as “la force des choses,” but this did nothing to weaken the animus against party. There was a phrase, in French usage as in British, for identifying the source of an unwelcome extremism in public life; one referred to “party spirit.” It was a conveniently unmetaphysical way of bearing in mind that, of course, individuals were the stuff of social action but their wrongdoing might still be attributable to bonds and the moral climate that gave the individuals some larger identity. In the young Constant’s shifting impressions of the great revolution, one expression served, unambiguously, to capture his revulsion for at least some of the action, and that expression was “esprit de parti.” It served to explain his views in 1793, and he used the expression on many occasions thereafter.25 Throughout Constant’s Des réactions politiques, he spelled out the dangers in terms of a series of abstractions such as préjugés, l’arbitraire, and passions. In each case, the unidentified agent through which these malign factors acted was surely the royalist cause. In order to recount the horrors of partisanship, it was unnecessary even to pronounce the words “faction” or “party.” It would help, however, to fill in the blanks left by Benjamin’s rather elliptical style to consult what Germaine was writing, at much the same time, about the passions and parties. The respective agendas of these two offered strong parallels one with the other, and the family resemblance of work emanating from de Staël’s coterie has been noted more than once.26 If her vocabulary differed significantly from that of her companion, it lay in her appearance of sustaining, as he did not, a reasonably firm distinction between the term “faction,” which seemed always to have a negative connotation, and “party,” which was not inherently pejorative and whose meaning was more dependent upon the context. Thus, factions were interests that failed to show concern for the public cause or, alternatively, were demagogic in their very essence. Factions appear here as seeking power and deserving of rebuke, whereas those in power were taken to be a “party” in a sense seemingly neutral. So to distinguish between factions and parties was to be in accord with the usage of constitutional royalists of the time.27 At times, she also 25 Ibid., 44. 26 See, most recently, Simone Balayé, “Le Groupe de Coppet; conscience d’une mission commune,” in Madame de Staël: Écrire, lutter, vivre (Genève, 1994), 321–42 at 331. 27 Staël, “De l’influence des passions,” in Oeuvres complètes, 3:28, 88–9. For royalist usage, cf. the extract from Nouvelles politiques, a paper of the time, declaring the end of faction, but not of party, reprinted in Le Censeur des journaux, no. 241 (5 floréal 4) [24 April 1796].

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wrote of the Jacobins of whom she disapproved and of moderates whose views she endorsed, and both might be designated as parties. The sole use of the term “party” that was invariably uttered in a critical sense was “l’esprit de parti”; it was always a condition to be avoided, and de Staël associated those times afflicted with party spirit with “la fureur et … la stupidité des idées absolues.”28 It is, however, in her essay that specifically examined party spirit as a particular sort of passion that the insight that enjoyed a somewhat more tenuous existence in Constant’s language came to fuller elucidation. Party spirit was, above all, unique among the passions, and for several reasons. For one, it was far from being universal in the manner of the other passions, but varied with social circumstances. It also had the property, otherwise unknown, of enjoining terrible acts on the part of people who were normally honest souls. By nature, it was a strong passion, sometimes serving as a mask for other passions, but in itself, it was amply powerful and in need of no support. Although party spirit admitted of quite frivolous causes, as when opposed sects formed within the fine arts, de Staël’s observations were directed chiefly towards the truly significant parties to be found in politics. Party spirit did serve to unite men, but as she put it, they were united “par l’intérêt d’une haine commune.” For that reason, party spirit did not function in the calculating manner that one might associate with the term “interest.” Instead, party spirit inoculated its victims against those second thoughts that would turn it into a mere plan, opinion, or interest. For party spirit, there were, it seems, no counterweights, while all other passions, because essentially egoistic in nature, might come to balance and moderate one another. Here lay the full horror of the phenomenon, for party spirit lived in individuals but used them for its own purposes. By way of example, she cited the loss of individual reputation by those who became the tools of party. Finally, in this roll of infamy, party spirit produced a particular hatred of moderation such that the real enemy was less the partisan of opposite stripe as people of middling views. Party zealots perceived moderates as, in effect, free riders, gaining benefit from the virtuous struggle in which they declined a part.29 The invitation to contemplate the party of Robespierre and Saint-Just in their condemnation of the indifferent is readily apparent. The reader of this imaginative tour de force is left thinking that Constant had made it reasonably clear why he deemed the royalists to be a threat and 28 Staël, “Réflexions sur la paix adressés à M. Pitt et aux Français” [1794], in Oeuvres complètes, 2:35–94. 29 Staël, “De l’esprit de parti,” in “De l’influence des passions,” 159–95. An admirer of these thoughts reproduced them, without naming the author. See Anon., De l’esprit de parti (Lyon, 1818), 13–30.

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why the so-called republicans of the Directory were much preferable to the terrorists, but that he had failed, in large measure, to offer a compelling defence of his assumptions about the shortcomings of the parties. Quite often the reader finds phrases that seem to echo those that had come already to Constant’s companion. Such textual parallels are accepted as suggesting the influence of de Staël, even by an interpreter who sensibly points out that those who think basically the same way about common issues are very likely to express themselves along similar lines.30 On other occasions, Constant’s essays on the problems of the same period seem comparatively undeveloped, as though he were aware that the telling insight had already been offered, leaving but variants of it or else something less fine. A case in point is Constant’s treatment, in 1796, of the difficulty faced by moderate royalists, and by others whose opinions might prove acceptable, in wielding influence against the more extreme positions. The conclusion, based largely upon his assertions about the dangers posed by various persuasions, was that the republicans, and only they, could properly hold power. How much richer and persuasive were the thoughts of de Staël, arguing in 1794–95 that the dread force of extreme party spirit necessarily annihilated the small voice of reason that sought to inhabit the space between parties. She had written, with a sort of poetic licence, of that “secret treaty” between Jacobin and aristocrat whereby these extremes would together act out their opposed aims so as to render the middle ground uninhabitable.31 It is true, of course, that her object in 1795 and that of Constant in 1796 were not precisely the same; she had sought a coming together of constitutional royalists and moderate republicans, whereas Constant’s emphasis was less conciliatory to the Right. It is evident that, for all his notorious dithering about commitments, Constant’s categories for treating political conflict were clearly in the republican, if not the Jacobin, tradition. Even after she had disavowed her royalist connections, de Staël continued to share in the greater willingness to discuss partisanship that was then characteristic of the political Right. Yet the fact remains that her technique in presentation was also, at this time, manifestly superior to his. Consider her argument, not just that the distribution of political forces made it likely that moderate voices, unless garbed in the authority of the state, would be drowned out, but that extremism was the natural outcome of party spirit. No mere assertion, this proposition was bolstered by the observation not only that individuals, taken individually, might well have sensible opinions, but that when they were united into a party, the very fact of this 30 See the sympathetic treatment in Béatrice W. Jasinski, L’Engagement de Benjamin Constant: Amour et politique (1794–1796) (Paris, 1971), 195–203. 31 Staël, “Réflexions sur la paix adressés à M. Pitt,” 57.

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union fused all individual views into a single and intolerant position. Was such an esprit de corps necessarily extreme? She thought this to be the case and supported the claim with a clever argument. Even those who sought the path of moderation, said she, were at length forced to adopt views more extreme than the ones initially congenial to them. The reason lay in the human penchant to ascribe extreme views to others, whatever the truth of the matter. The upshot, then, was that people who attributed to others an opinion different from their own would henceforth shun the others’ company. Consequently, even against one’s better judgment, one was cast into the companionship of those who supposedly held similar views. The result was a self-confirmation of the original belief, albeit, perhaps initially a misconceived one. Reduced to a succinct formula, the argument was that, in order to succeed in a revolution, one needed such a degree of fanaticism as was incompatible with holding the moderate views that lived in the centre.32 Whether or not we must accept that confident generalization about how a political inclination might take root is another matter. The fact that her own leanings were held to be dangerously royalist at a time when she was a sort of republican would serve to give the reader pause, and indeed, despite the continued distrust of republicans, her faith seems not to have wavered. Nevertheless, the strength of de Staël’s analysis lay in its offering some hypotheses about parties and party feeling in general whereby she might then apply general principle to the particular facts of the case. This was in keeping with her insistence that party spirit, of all passions, was the most uniform in its effects. This conviction offered at least the appearance of considerations derived from general principles. By contrast, Constant’s argument smacked of special pleading, and his effort in Des réactions to derive principles from facts is distressing. Constant’s mastery of the telling polemic was yet to come. The scientifically inclined might have objected that de Staël’s principles, in the absence of historical evidence, had no basis other than the facts of the party struggle under the Directory and that hers was but an abstracted empiricism. Still, it succeeded in framing the issues in terms more memorable and more convincing than could Constant’s intellectually more modest venture. The same dark thoughts about the prevalence of party spirit may have accompanied his political writings, for he tended to draw very much the same practical conclusions about the value of proclaiming loyalty to the existing regime. But Constant’s negative account of party provided less by way of explanation, even though offering the same hostages to fortune should he wish to endorse party at some later date. His animus against party, as it was revealed in the Revolution, was less well explained but hardly less categorical. It was to prove a prejudice not readily to be sloughed off. 32 Staël, “Réflexions sur la paix intérieure,” 108–9, 139.

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t h e tr i b u n a t e a n d t h e o p p o s i t i o n With the coming of the Consulate, Constant ceased to be the enthusiastic champion of the existing regime, for the status quo had changed with the demise of the Directory. He had, for some time, hoped to be elected to the Council of 500, as created under the constitution of 1795. His appointment to the newly formed Tribunate – gained through approaches both to Bonaparte and Sieyès – fulfilled his ambition. However, it was to a very different sort of legislative body that he found himself appointed, for in some sense not yet well understood by anyone, it was to acquit itself of the task of scrutinizing the measures that came from the Conseil d’État. His previous writings had given him little occasion to consider the nature of a legislative opposition, although his correspondence had sometimes referred to that in the British Parliament.33 Now, in the curious arrangement sanctioned by the constitution of year VIII, Constant became part of a body that possessed neither a legislative initiative nor the power of making law, but that was intended to discuss measures preliminary to their being brought before the Corps législatif. The latter body would be mute but had the power, after weighing the claims of the executive branch with those of the Tribunate, to enact or reject the proposals. As envisaged by Sieyès, this realization of his scheme of 1795 would introduce an element of balance into the political system, but the supposed subordination of both executive and Tribunate to the legislative body would, in theory, ensure an orderly process.34 Was this a sort of opposition, finally rendered legitimate? It was a question that, from the beginning, was of some interest. Commentators of Constant’s time and later have agreed that, in admitting the eloquent Constant into the assembly that talked, Bonaparte had chosen well. But what was to be expected from the 33 Rudler, Jeunesse, 465. 34 The scholarly literature on this subject is not very enlightening. Useful on the procedures of the Tribunate, though rather too dependent on the near-contemporary work of Thibaudeau, is Roger Dutruch, Le Tribunat sous le Consulat et l’Empire (Paris, 1921), 6–7 and passim. A valuable bibliography, though some entries suffer from imprecision, can be found in A. Gobert, L’Opposition des assemblées pendant le Consulat, 1800–1804 (Paris, 1925). Effective use of newspapers is evident in Raymond Giddens Carey, “The Liberals of France and Their Relation to the Development of Bonaparte’s Dictatorship” (PhD thesis, University of Chicago, Chicago, 1945). Biographical information of the chief figures of the opposition is offered in Gilbert Stenger, La Société française pendant le Consulat: Aristocrates et républicains (Paris, 1904), 393–429. Constant’s speeches receive ample attention in Charles Durand, “L’Exercise de la fonction législative de 1800 à 1814,” in Annales de la faculté de droit d’Aix-en-Provence, n.s., 48 (1955): 1–185 at 44n, 46n, 49n, 61–2.

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speakers? Membership had come through grace and favour rather than as a mandate from the people, so if the job was that of opposing, the situation of the opposers seemed equivocal at best. With two-thirds of the membership derived from the now defunct legislative bodies of the previous constitution, there would have been little reason to suspect many of these members to be fastidious about resolute action in an allegedly republican cause; their very survival attested to their strong stomachs. Therefore, interest was probably greatest in discerning the leanings of those, like Constant, chosen for the skills that they might contribute. For some two weeks prior to the opening of the legislative session it was rumoured that there would be an opposition within the Tribunate. The Gazette de France, for instance, had retailed such suggestions, even as it intoned the official position how there was no place in the scheme of things for any sort of opposition apart from that between the various authorities as set out by the constitution. The basis for this speculation was ostensibly that certain people had suggested how official government newspapers would prompt the creation of publications to oppose them and that from these would emanate an opposition. Much more tentative in its conclusions and equally prone to distance itself from its sources, Le Diplomate repeated from some other source the ambiguous assurance that, despite fears of an opposition, one could take comfort in the presence, in the Tribunate, of eloquent figures such as Constant. Quite how this should allay, rather than inflame, the original fears went unexplained.35 Whether these canards had any basis in the plans of the members of the Tribunate seems open to doubt, but they served the purpose of warning against any such plans. There may even have been an element here of the methods of the agent provocateur. Constant addressed his fellow tribunes only in the third day of their activity, yet from his first words there was little doubt that he intended to play a part of some significance. Uppermost for the more spirited tribunes was the need to set out as ample an understanding of the mandate of their assembly as was possible, simultaneously defusing the rumours intended to deprive them of public confidence. Girardin, speaking not long before Constant, had, for instance, sought to explain that the Tribunate was not an organized opposition and the body itself not a “foyer d’opposition.”36 Pressing ahead upon the 35 Gazette de France, no. 739 (1 nivôse VIII); no. 750 (12 nivôse) [22 Dec. 1799 and 2 Jan. 1800]. Excerpt from Le Diplomate, 4 nivôse [24 Dec. 1799], reproduced in F.W.A. Aulard, Paris sous le Consulat: Recueil de documents pour l’histoire de l’esprit public à Paris (Paris, 1903), 1:69. Aulard’s work is a valuable collection of documents from the administration, especially the police, and of gleanings from the metropolitan press. 36 AP, 2nd ser., 1 (15 nivôse VIII) [5 Jan. 1800]: 23. Relevant portions also appeared in Girardin, Discours et opinions, journal et souvenirs de S. Girardin (Paris, 1828), 1:90.

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same theme, Constant denied the accuracy of speculations about the intentions of members of the Tribunate and the wisdom of pursuing that sort of opposition of which they were accused: “One seems to treat the Tribunate as a permanent focus of opposition, having for its special calling the combating of all measures presented to it.” But such tactics, he averred, would be valueless, for only a discriminating choice of issues on which to oppose could prove effective, whereas a general attitude of hostility to the government’s measures would result in rendering the Tribunate unworthy of attention. In a characteristically ironical vein, Constant also pointed out that an administration continually opposed on all issues would blame the opposition for policies gone wrong. Not limiting his purview to affirming the responsible intent of the tribunes, he developed a more aggressive line of reasoning in challenging the attitude of a Consulate that treated sparring with the tribunes as though it were warfare. He ended with the peroration that envisaged any tampering with the Tribunate’s independence as creating a silence that would be heard throughout Europe.37 Already, Constant was developing some arresting images for purposes of challenging the Bonapartist language of authority. So to oppose the existing powers, even as he repudiated any notion of conducting systematic opposition, perfectly mirrored the strategy of those journalists who did the bidding of the first consul by discussing a form of opposition that they sought to discourage. Constant, as it happened, had already rehearsed his speech before delivery, and in the small world of the politically significant and the ambitious, his intentions had probably been known in advance. In any event, he was not responding just to the earlier and unfocused speculation by the press, but to a very direct attack that had appeared in a paper that same day. A pre-emptive strike, apparently intended to refute the case for opposition before it was spoken, came in Roederer’s Journal de Paris, as Sainte-Beuve informs us. Here the speculative tone had all but vanished, and the language, though protected by the subjunctive mood, smacked more of indictment: “Do we know well what the Tribunate is? Is it true that this is organized Opposition? Is it true that a tribune is condemned always to oppose the government without reason and measure, to attack all that it does and proposes, to speak against it even when he most approves of its conduct?”38 If, concluded Roederer, these suppositions were true, then to serve as a tribune was the most odious of undertakings. The intensity of the onslaught and the status of its originator – Roederer had been 37 AP 1:30–4 at 30. It is reprinted in Constant, Écrits et discours, 1:139–53 at 139. 38 Aulard does not reprint any part of this article, and the most accessible source is the excerpt recorded in C.-A. Sainte-Beuve, Causeries de Lundi (Paris, 1857–1910), vol. 8, art. “Roederer (fin),” 371–93 at 372. For another statement of Roederer’s views, see the article cited above at 26n36.

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party to the coup of 18 brumaire – made this a significant challenge to anyone hoping to make good use of the Tribunate. As Sainte-Beuve explains, the Journal de Paris had been on the streets some hours before Constant rose to speak in the Palais royale, so this could have served as Constant’s provocation. There is also, however, the evidence that it was Stanislas Girardin who employed the very expression about organized opposition that appears in Roederer’s paper. Seeking another candidate for the publication that may have offended Constant, one discovers a similar article, also appearing on 15 nivôse but dated the previous day, in Le Publiciste. Here the gravamen rested with the inappropriateness of “une opposition permanente et nécessaire” among the organs of state, combined with the unkind suggestion that tribunes might seek popularity and in the wrong places.39 Since the notion of an allegedly “permanent” opposition was explicitly taken up in Constant’s rejoinder, one may guess that his, in fact, had been the task to respond to Le Publiciste, while Girardin answered Roederer. Whether this division of labour served to confirm the suspicion of organized opposition is uncertain. What is clear is that the presence of so many articles and speeches saying very much the same thing has proven to be confusing. Sainte-Beuve would seem to have misidentified Constant’s opponent, and he certainly employed some of the words uttered by Girardin when he meant to quote Constant. Such are the ways of party rhetoric. Le Publiciste returned to the debate the following day but was content only to quote the article from the Journal de Paris, whereas, on the day after that, it accorded space to Constant’s effort to prevent the disarming of the Tribunate. Of the two papers, Roederer’s seems to have had the better arguments, for there was something incoherent in the objections of Le Publiciste to the tension between the powers set up by the constitution. This had been Sieyès’s avowed aim. Neither was it sensible to assume that the Tribunate as a whole would afford opposition, for only a distinct minority within it could be suspected of that inclination. The newspaper that appears to have been first in the field with unsettling speculation continued beyond these opening salvoes, but it added little apart from introducing the notions of “party” and “faction” into the issue.40 The focus of debate then shifted, for a time, from the modalities of opposition to questions of substance. Constant made no more than a dozen speeches in his two years as a tribune, one of them before the Corps législatif when he was chosen as one of three members to present the views of the Tribunate. In addition, he intervened briefly on some occasions in order to offer comments on 39 “De Paris,” in Le Publiciste (15 nivôse VIII) [5 Jan. 1800]. 40 Gazette de France, no. 758 (20 nivôse); no. 761 (23 nivôse) [10, 13 Jan. 1800].

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procedure.41 Constant was next heard from on a significant matter when he attempted to carve a more ample role for the tribunes in dealing with petitions. As before, he was scrupulous about not emphasizing the effort to expand the competence of the Tribunate – sensible as that aggrandizement would be at a time when precedents needed to be established – but rather he stressed the element of duty over that of enlarged prerogative. Following again the path laid down in his first speech, he sought both to render legitimate specific instances of scrutiny of the executive and disagreement with it and to dismiss charges of his trying to entrench opposition in any objectionable form. This time, however, he put first the legal and moral basis of the tribunes’ activity and appealed to their collective interest in carrying out a worthwhile mission: “opposition est votre droit.” The need to still the ever-watchful critics followed in his reiteration of the unthreatening nature of the proposal. It was not, he insisted, a chamber committed to “permanent” opposition, but neither was its duty fulfilled by eternal approbation of the acts of the executive.42 The force of such a performance depended entirely upon Constant’s choosing relevant criteria to describe the activity of opposition while exercising the greatest care lest he create alarms about the presence of some body that was going to carry on the activity of opposing. In fact, the language of the original charge and of Constant’s reply left the issue badly posed, since the term “permanent” was poorly chosen for purposes of distinguishing between opposition that was occasional, not continuous, and opposition that was, on principle, unceasing. One might be led to think that the business of opposition if not permanent would surely be temporary, but this again captures a misleading dimension of the activity. In fact, since the Tribunate was part of the state, its mandate was to do in perpetuity whatever it was meant to do, barring some change in the constitution. Constant was, however, ready at times to say directly that the opposing done by the tribunes would be occasional rather than routine, and thus he removed the ambiguity present in the language of the debate. Not even those journalists who had so sedulously spread unease about incipient opposition really intended to declare that the function of the Tribunate was to be but temporary; indeed, the Gazette de France had suggested quite a different emphasis when it insisted, on occasion, that the role of opposition really lay in the future and that the time was not yet. Opposition was more a bogey than a concept on which there was any consensus, and the ambiguity that surrounded an unfamiliar institution allowed for some judicious evasion of issues. Probably this circumspection was to be seen on all sides of the case, for the 41 Étienne Hofmann records the dates of the major speeches in his edition of the “Principes,” 1:204–5n. They are also readily traced in Kurt Kloocke, Benjamin Constant, une biographie intellectuelle (Genève, 1984), vol. 1. 42 AP 1 (12 pluviôse VIII) [1 Feb. 1801]: 132–6.

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spokesmen for the consuls appear to have made no mention of the British roots of the institution. To have suggested such inspiration would, in the circumstances, have come close to alleging treason on the part of tribunes, and such charges were seemingly further than anyone wished to take the matter. Since the same people responsible for the Consulate were the authors of this other institution, the debate enjoined a certain caution on the part of the participants. When people debated similar issues in the Restoration, the topic had become better understood and the language correspondingly clearer. One way in which members of the Tribunate might seek to placate opinion was for their language to emphasize a basic solidarity with the regime and the nation. Whereas the term “opposition” might still be available, suitably shrouded in ambiguity, terms suggestive of some body that lent coherence to the efforts of members who wished to oppose were unacceptable. Constant and others thus appear not to have taken up the initial fears, expressed by the Gazette de France, about “un parti d’opposition”; furthermore, they tended to introduce the pejorative term “faction” into discussion and then firmly joined all others in denouncing such unpatriotic gatherings. In the course of his speech on the procedures for dealing with petitions, Constant managed to introduce both of these sensitive terms into an avowal of ties with the nation, “liens qui ne seront pas des liens de faction, des associations de parti.” In the speech already noted, Girardin contributed a negative reference to “faction,” and Honoré Riouffe, a friend of Constant’s since 1795 who had followed him to the tribune after his maiden speech, did the same. Of course, protestations that one was averse to faction were a bit like those of well-meaning honesty – both very common and hardly conclusive in the speech of public men. Some tribunes, however, were suspected of being implicated in what the British would then have called a “formed” opposition, so it was a useful stratagem to affirm one’s orthodoxy. Unlike Constant, the other two survived the purge of 1802, so they cannot have been among the prime suspects. It was not long, in fact, before police reports made reference to evidence, apparently gathered over a period of time, that tribunes who were hostile to the executive gathered at the house of Duveyrier, author of the quip that Bonaparte would be but an “idole de quinze jours.” Further reports record surveillance of ex-thermidorians dining chez Jean-Charles Bailleul, and although the police referred to the party of opposition, the reports also suggest the presence of different disaffected parties that were attempting to coordinate activities.43 These reports came in the 43 Aulard, Paris sur le Consulat, 2:137 (22 Jan. 1801), 192 (23 Feb. 1801). These sources were cited in Louis Madelin’s magisterial study of the Consulate to which all students of the period are indebted. However, his compression of the information suggests a degree of complicity on the part of Bailleul that is left unresolved in the original reports. See Le Consulat (Paris, 1939), 4:321.

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period of increased concern for security that followed the attempt, at the end of 1800, to assassinate Bonaparte. The incident had provoked draconian measures against “brigands” and, from Constant, a predictably strong objection to arbitrary police methods. On that occasion, he argued in terms of a slippery slope that, starting with the control of lawbreakers, could easily lead to unwarranted treatment of peaceful citizens. His continuing efforts to ingratiate himself with a suspicious government included an allusion to his loyalty to the status quo, secured by his ownership of biens nationaux.44 Mme de Staël and others following her lead saw this opposition to Bonaparte’s introduction in early 1801 of new judicial machinery as the provocation for renewed denunciation of the Tribunate’s activities, this time possibly even from the highest quarter. De Staël recalled that Bonaparte’s displeasure was responsible for a strong rebuke in the papers. One of Constant’s biographers has interpreted this reference to a rebuke to mean that the official journal of record conveyed the message. The staid Moniteur was, however, silent on the issue, but not the Gazette de France, where a long article, full of indignation at the metaphysicians in the Tribunate, bears the characteristic language and prejudices of the first consul.45 A further article, from a source not yet identified,46 fulminated in more specific terms against the presence in France of an opposition. In Britain, it argued, such an institution was warranted, for there the king was the people’s enemy. In France, by contrast, the climate of freedom was secured by the fact that the executive represented the people and to oppose it was thus to oppose the people itself. It would be another year or so before Joseph Fiévée would supply Bonaparte with rather more sophisticated, less Jacobin-sounding arguments by which to fend off the threat of an opposition. This was hardly the first occasion on which the Tribunate had sought to check the impatient first consul, and the relative ferocity of the outburst probably owed something to the government’s 44 AP 2 (5 pluvôse an IX) [25 Jan. 1801]: 179–88. 45 Staël, “Dix années d’exil,” in Oeuvres complètes, 15:36–7. See also Elizabeth W. Schermerhorn, Benjamin Constant: His Private Life and His Contribution to the Cause of Liberal Government in France, 1767–1830 (London, 1924), 190. Schermerhorn here quotes two different sources, apparently under the impression that all of the material had appeared in the Moniteur. The long article from the Gazette de France came on 4 February, the day following passage of the controversial legislation. See Aulard, Paris sur le Consulat, 151–4. 46 It was probably the Journal de Paris, but the relevant issue is missing in the microfilm issued by l’Association pour la conservation et la reproduction photographique de la presse, as is that for the other possible candidate, Le Publiciste. Were originals for filming readily to be found, the text would surely not have remained incomplete.

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now possessing information about the efforts of a minority of the Tribunate to work together. From the beginning, there could scarcely have been reasonable objection to the readiness of some individuals to oppose the will of the executive in accordance with their consciences and personal predilections. The danger – at times none too well explained – had rather been seen as a sort of conspiracy or unholy alliance known as faction. It was this party whose presence Germaine de Staël took for granted where her recollections of the period refer to the effort to establish an opposition à l’anglaise, although she named none of the members. Bailleul, himself described as the supposed host of an opposition-minded group, later confirmed that it had indeed been Constant who had invited him to enter into “une opposition systématique.” As Bailleul told the story many years later, he had resisted the approach and, insisting still on the value of each member’s maintaining his independence, he particularly dissented from the notion that any coalition of these individuals could survive the wrath of Bonaparte. Nevertheless, he tells us, complacently, a small portion of the members coalesced under the name of the “comité des lumières” and thus probably sealed the fate of the Tribunate.47 Since the police of the time made quite clear that there was opposition in the Corps législatif as well as in the Tribunate and that discontent among the tribunes had more than one focus, it would be possible for a tribune to disapprove of Constant’s efforts while remaining silent about his own. What Bailleul’s role had actually been is now open to conjecture, but there seems to be no document, other than Bailleul’s work on Napoleon, that so unequivocally confirms Constant’s place as ringleader and as one seemingly ambitious to be, if only in a sub rosa capacity, the leader of the opposition. Little wonder that official knowledge of this tiny cell of discontent should bring indignation, for unlike the promptings of individual conscience, such an organization seemed to be inconsistent with the understanding on which the regime had set up the Tribunate in the first place. The very process of assigning seats in the assembly had been for purposes of preventing cliques from sitting together. It had been the teacher’s recourse against unruly schoolboys, here brought to bear upon serious matters. An identical animus against action in concert was the practice of secret voting through the use of coloured balls to be deposited in an urn. That usage would, as we know, continue to weigh upon French legislative proceedings, and although it did not necessarily secure personal independence of the members, it would certainly inhibit the formation of party bonds.

47 Staël, “Dix années d’exil,” 5; and Jean-Charles Bailleul, Histoire de Napoléon (Paris, 1838), 3:122.

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All legislative sessions, apart from the first one, began on 1 frimaire. The business of the Tribunate responded to no formal timetable, but there developed a pattern whereby early winter, or nivôse–pluviôse in the revolutionary calendar, was the point at which business had proceeded long enough to yield initiatives and conflict. Each of the first three years of the new regime thus reflected the pattern whereby the activity of checking a popular and successful government raised the issue of the proper limits of opposition and of the body that housed the activity. Had there been a clause in the constitution of year VIII mandating an annual constitutional crisis, the regularity could hardly have been more marked. It is surely the confusion engendered by the same issues appearing for discussion in the same places at approximately the same times to which we owe the considerable difficulty that scholars have had in sorting out their evidence. A case in point is the citation offered by Pierre Paganel, historian of the French Revolution and the major theoretical exponent of the institution of the opposition to write during the Empire. In his case, writing did not entail publication, and most of the first printing of his history was seized in 1810 and destroyed in 1813. Paganel is well worth reading for his merit alone, but of interest at present is his reference to an article on “opposition” that, he said, had appeared in the Journal de Paris in nivôse VII.48 He did not recommend reading the article for the support that it lent to his views, but rather because it illustrated how ambition and circumstances of the moment might rise up against principles sanctified by time and experience. By these principles he meant his own, and by his negative comments he was pointing towards the last major attack on the malcontents within the Tribunate. The relevant article was not, in fact, published in 1804, but two years earlier, in January 1802. What Paganel could have read in that month in 1804 was a standard caricature of the British Parliament and the parties to be found there.49 Much more interesting was the article of 1802, which we are told was inserted by Roederer, the publisher.50 The article succeeded in choosing, from the stock of arguments available for belabouring an opposition, some more effective than previously seen. First and foremost, it accepted, without question, the rectitude of there being such a body as “une opposition.” In the past, opposition had been treated, in the main, as an exercising of individual consciences. Such a concession made it necessary to spell out 48 [Paganel], “Opposition,” in Paganel, Essai historique et critique sur la Révolution française (Paris, 1810), 1:69–84 at 84. In the much more accessible edition of 1815, the corresponding citation is 66–80 at 79. 49 Journal de Paris, no. 114 (24 nivôse XII) [15 Jan. 1804]. 50 Girardin, Discours et opinions, journal et souvenirs de S. Girardin, 3:253.

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limits for acceptable conduct, and here the virtues of total hostility to the institution become apparent. It was not easy to specify the bounds of propriety, and in the article’s tentative air, the writer’s difficulties were evident. What he sought was well-intentioned activity by people adequately experienced in the business of public affairs. Here one imagines in the background the journalist’s ultimate master railing at metaphysicians. Speakers who hesitated to utter an improvised phrase were being too careful, and this itself, it seems, made their good faith suspect. There was praise here for the extemporaneous debates of the British Parliament. British practice was again to the fore when the anonymous journalist pointed out that an opposition was most wholesome when the same legislative body contained a “majorité constituée,” banded together to support the government. Further reference to British ways entailed pointing to how that opposition sought to quit its station and gain office. Although the argument here is somewhat elliptical, this was surely not being recommended for France and presumably suggested only that the conditions for formed opposition were absent in French government. The crucial assumption that allowed this line of reasoning to be, at once, respectful about British parliamentary practice and disinclined to recommend its adoption was a sort of protectionist argument about the unity demanded by a regime that was of recent origin and threatened from abroad.51 That was a more refined version of Constant’s earlier plea to Frenchmen to rally to the Directory and very much what Garat had been arguing in 1795. Constant’s last speech in the Tribunate had been delivered at the end of December 1801, and his last but one had continued his practice, not just of opposing measures, but of struggling to find ways to arm the assembly for its unequal struggle. In this case, he sought the capacity to challenge an individual item to obviate the necessity of having to accept or reject legislation as a whole.52 In modern parlance, this was an “item veto.” Less than two weeks after this latest analysis of opposition, the process for renewing the Tribunate in such a way as to end the careers of difficult figures such as himself had begun. By February, these arrangements had been formalized. What Bonaparte called purification, Mme de Staël designated a creaming off of the best. The Tribunate laboured on for some years, but it no longer afforded a home for any significant opposition. The Gazette de France, which had first sounded the alarm, was the last to drop the subject, pursuing the defeated opposition into February.

51 “De l’opposition,” Journal de Paris, no. 105 (15 nivôse X) [5 Jan. 1802]. It was reprinted, the next day, in Journal des débats. 52 AP 3 (4 nivôse X) [25 Dec. 1801]: 259–63.

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To all appearances, Constant left his duties quietly, offering but a mild quip to his friends about the first consul’s leaving him his head. He put forward no formal defence of the activities, public or clandestine, of the supposed opposition. The only sort of answer made to the Journal de Paris was from Suard, with whom Constant had broken before 18 fructidor. In two successive articles, Suard examined the play of ambition in the British Parliament, with particular attention to the way in which an often sordid pursuit of office might be ennobled by the public benefit that resulted from it. Judiciously comparing the weapons available to opposition in France and to the British Opposition, he found that in France the government was immovable in law and that the Tribunate had no effective foundation in public support. He even canvassed the “delicate” question as to whether the tribunes might refuse to sanction treaties, but left the matter unresolved. It had been a subtle reworking of the earlier and more critical analysis of opposition, but where the Journal de Paris had sought to discourage it, Suard confined himself to noting how little room the current regime had left for its activity.53 He had at least made amends for the oddities of earlier items in Le Publiciste. For the second time in his career, Constant had been, more or less, at the centre of efforts to make sense of political conflict within a constitutional setting. In the first instance, it was his critic Lezay who had ventured onto the terrain, but Constant had managed to disagree without taking up the premises in any detail. In a way yet more obvious, his apparent ambitions to create systematic opposition within the Consulate must be seen as lying behind a good many newspaper columns on the etiquette of expressing disagreement and organizing to that end. Still, Constant had spoken few words in public that even remotely cast light on the issue, and wrote, for public consumption, nothing relevant. Of course, were he truly seeking new avenues for expressing discontent, writing to the newspapers would hardly bring prosperity to his venture. For some time to come, the political dinner would be a resort of all groups seeking to coordinate action; indeed, for some causes, it would be virtually the only instrument available. Accepting or rejecting invitations to social occasions was a powerful means of sending political messages; one need but observe the chagrin with which both de Staël and Constant recalled, years later, the snubs that had followed Benjamin’s maiden speech to the Tribunate. Circumstances necessarily placed the machinery of organized opposition in the private realm, possibly even one that had to be kept secret. Self-proclaimed meetings of 53 J.B.A.S., “Qu’est-ce qu’une opposition dans un gouvernement?” Le Publiciste (16 nivôse X) [6 Jan. 1802]; and “Seconde lettre sur l’opposition,” ibid. (27 nivôse) [17 Jan. 1802].

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public men who sought to exchange information and foster solidarity had been known as clubs. But the sort of connection that would serve the purposes of an opposition within a legislative body had found defenders only among the royalists of the Club de Clichy and the like.54 The more populistic sort of cercle founded by Constant in 1797 had been for a different purpose. Thus, Constant brought to his situation no experience from any acceptable quarter, and he may already have heard Bonaparte’s comment, revealing his desire to control the press, that a newspaper was but a club dispersed.55 Accordingly, Constant almost certainly indulged in opposition, but he seems not to have theorized about it very much. The fact that what people say or refrain from saying can be so tied up with their circumstances appears to challenge the strategy of those studies that have sought to sever thought and action and to discuss them separately.56 In the absence of any substantial record of what Constant thought that he was doing, it is not easy to fit this segment of his career to the rest. It seems true to say that his later commitment to freedom is consistent with, and amply demonstrated in, the period of the Tribunate. Greater difficulty lies in showing continuity with his previous loyalty to the Directory, where he was quite prepared to sacrifice the legalities in procedure to the goal of strengthening a regime that he deemed capable of further improvement. True, he opposed, in that equivocal way necessitated by the rules, the regime that had toppled the one to which he had bestowed his loyalty. The problem lies in discovering that consistency of principle that his admirers have seen as overriding apparent flexibility in the choice of means by which to attain it. The principle, if principle it was, that sustained loyalty to the Directory had been, it seems, aversion to the aristocratic factions and a need for stability in public life instead of that civil war promised by some extremists. Opposition to the powers of the day was only a priority, however, when the threat from the royalists persisted. When fructidor had removed it, the call of national unity was much less peremptory for Constant. This argument gains some support from de Staël’s unpublished writings that followed the coup of fructidor, writings to which Constant very probably made some contribution. There 54 See the sources cited above at 57n101. 55 Quoted in A. Périvier, Napoléon journaliste (Paris, 1918), 97–8. 56 Paul Bastid’s two volumes of Benjamin Constant et son doctrine (Paris, 1966) come to mind. This is not to question the value of a pure history of events that has no intention of doing intellectual history or, indeed, of looking at theories at all. See, for example, Louis de Villefosse and Janine Bouissounouse, L’Opposition à Napoleon (Paris, 1969). A similar effort, without any marked interest in either theories or institutions, is P. Gaffarel, “L’Opposition littéraire sous le Consulat,” Révolution française 16 (Jan.–June 1889): 307–25, 397–432.

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she proclaimed not just the bankruptcy of the royalist cause, but also the inefficacy of the government’s resolve to balance the two extremes in the posture of tertius gaudens. With the leaders of one extreme banished, the only remaining option was to embrace republicans, even extreme ones, and thus to bring the government and revolutionary sentiment together.57 One may suppose that she hoped thereby to disarm the Jacobins, rather than rendering the Directory more extreme. Bonaparte himself had been very much a republican, but as he consolidated power, the attractions of being able to manipulate two different parties were not lost on him. Thus, he sought to undo some of the work of fructidor, in the hope of eventually dissolving all interests not his own.58 In an unsettling way, Constant’s record of eschewing party connections and Bonaparte’s more emphatic dismissal of them bear some resemblance one to the other. Both would appear to be rooted in the siege mentality of the revolutionary Left. Neither had much by way of good to say about political divisions in the France of their day. A trifle awkwardly for the record, French parties were almost the only ones so far mentioned in Constant’s brief literary career, save for a passing reference, taken from Lord Clarendon, about the undertaking at the English Restoration to sweep away all parties and factions.59 Far from adding to his repertoire, this seems but to confirm its nature. Bonaparte is, in fact, more readily associated with some sentiments that were at least neutral about party than is Constant. At much the same time as he took the first step towards neutralizing the Tribunate, Bonaparte had remarked in the presence of Thibaudeau that English parties were quite unlike that clash between the privileged orders and the Revolution that was the hallmark of French ones. Then, not to appear too warm towards British institutions, he had added dismissively that the parties in England were manned by those who sought merely to be bought off by the crown. That suspicion was surely available as well to critics of the opposition in the Tribunate, since the means of entry, for one such as Constant, suggested ambition as much as a zeal for public betterment. Even more revealing of the difficulty with which any admirer of party politics could gain a hearing are the words in which, publishing decades later, Thibaudeau would try to assess the Tribunate. Was it, he asked, an opposition of principle or of 57 Hofmann’s edition strives, not always convincingly, to preserve the consistency of the record. For de Staël’s contribution, see Édouard Herriot, Un ouvrage inédit de Madame de Staël: Les Fragments d’écrits politiques (1799) (Paris, 1904), 52–3; and Staël, Des circonstances actuelles qui peuvent terminer la Révolution et des principes qui doivent fonder la république en France, ed. John Viénot (Paris, 1906), 110–13. 58 See Mémoires du comte Miot de Melito (Paris, 1858), 1:283. 59 Constant, Des suites de la contre-révolution, 16.

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party, of conscience or of accidental hostility; was it variable or immutable?60 An assumption that party and principle might go together was, seemingly, not an easy point to make in the Restoration, yet alone under the Consulate. The choice for many lay between presenting party as dangerous and, alternatively, presenting it as but the pursuit of unedifying ambition. That Bonaparte, tyrant in the making, should express himself more fully on any issue than would an insecure subject is hardly a source of wonder. Constant had already predicted the coming of a very audible silence. th in k i n g a b ou t p ol i t ic s The decade or so following Constant’s ejection from the Tribunate saw him pursuing various interests, but during certain years, he was to a significant extent reflecting, reading, and writing on political questions. The years 1802–03 and 1806 were, apparently, such times. He did not, however, publish on that subject, nor did he take an active part in what then passed for politics. As he told his friend Prosper Barante in 1808, the only paper that was readily open to him was Le Publiciste,61 and the few contributions that have been discovered include no major political statement. The full fruits of his labours have only appeared in print in comparatively recent times, so it is probably still too early to know in what respects this heap of evidence, new to most scholars, will alter the estimate of Constant the political thinker. Familiarity with the contents of the manuscripts can only enhance respect for their author as a serious student of politics,62 but even those most wedded to the tales of his opportunism cannot readily have doubted his intellectual gifts. Possibly those readers who have wondered at the facility of someone who, after 1814, could write a number of closely argued works in a short space of time will appreciate now that the basic ideas were germinating over a period of years. Attention both to the thought and to the language also reveals a good deal of repetition that extends to parallel passages in the two works that long remained in manuscript. Constant’s use of amanuenses 60 [A.-C. Thibaudeau], Mémoire sur le consulat, 1799 à 1804 (Paris, 1827), 226, 193. The effort at assessment appears in his Le Consulat et l’empire, ou Histoire de la France et de Napoléon Bonaparte de 1799 à 1815 (Paris, 1834), 1:132–3. 61 “Lettres de Benjamin Constant à Prosper Barante: Première partie, 1805–08,” Revue des deux mondes, 5th ser., 33 (July 1906): 241–72 at 270. 62 For a description of the archive in Lausanne, see Hofmann’s 1:385. The other major work now published is Constant, Fragments d’un ouvrage abandonné sur la possibilité d’une constitution républicaine dans un grand pays, ed. Henri Grange (Paris, 1991). Since the exact period of composition is unknown, I refer to the works of 1810, the time when both were re-copied.

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would have made it an easy matter to cannibalize his past work. By way of compensation, the admirers of views that have matured over time can find here new evidence of profundity. What is most apparent to the reader of the revolutionary tracts is that, by contrast, Constant the philosopher strove to abstract his analysis from the quotidian issues that had necessarily figured in his efforts to shore up one particular government or to restrain the arbitrary inclinations of another. To this end, he took as his self-denying ordinance the refusal to have recourse to that sort of detail that pertained only to certain forms of rule. Or, at least, that seems to be the purport of a sentence much revised. This resolve must then be seen as an awkward working out of the initial focus of his reflections, which, he had said, were confined to principles independent of any specific constitution, such as a monarchy or a republic.63 It would be a grand instrument for fending off wrath if one could devise a theory that would accommodate either a restored monarchy of some sort or the emergence of a constitutional republic. Yet the effort was an odd one. As a guide for the writer of these thoughts, it was scarcely an intelligible criterion, and readers must wonder at the status to be accorded to examples that were necessarily drawn from somewhere. Needless to emphasize, Constant was less than consistent in following this resolve, and his manuscripts are the better for it. Though not realizable, the rule of thumb did serve to distance the writings from the details of past commitments, and that may have been the point. In June 1803, he wrote to his cousin that circumstances made it difficult for him to stick to his current writing because he knew neither for what public he wrote nor whether he would ever find one.64 One suspects that this alludes more to the uncertain political future of France than to the matter of religion, in which his interest was growing. However inhibiting it must have been to be fearful of being associated with ideas that would possibly alienate some group, Constant had to make some commitments. In the choice of themes and the effort to find general principles, his prior loyalties leave more than a trace. In this resolve not further to be embarrassed by events, one finds one of the keys to the writings that followed his retreat to private life. Apart from Constant’s later reiteration that the defence of liberty was the thread that drew his career together, he seems to have provided no straightforward gloss to explain what he wished to accomplish. From all appearances, Montesquieu was a major inspiration for so ambitious an undertaking. Yet it was a Montesquieu deprived of a typology of diverse models of 63 Constant, “Principes,” 2:199. 64 Benjamin and Rosalie de Constant, Correspondance, 1786–1830, ed. Alfred and Suzanne Roulin (Paris, 1955), 41.

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government and society and constrained to find universal meaning in the categories to be analysed. Like his predecessor, Constant offered no anatomy of human nature to display the moral significance of diverse political patterns, and again similar to his authority, he tended to present confident statements about what the world was like, while leaving the realm of moral truth or preference to be inferred. The result too often tends towards a set of comments on the conditions in which public opinion, for example, might flourish. These are rather severely limited to speaking of liberty of the press, but he refrains primly from enquiring into those political structures that sustain the desired condition. And why? Because the analysis was intended to isolate the liberty of the press and that public opinion that presumably found organs in the press. Consequently, Constant found himself noting the decline of Spain that resulted, he thought, from its intellectual stagnation or commenting upon the different ways in which Prussia and France had managed to maintain some measure of public opinion. Britain, acknowledged to have an “esprit national” worth the acquaintance, had, however, to be passed over because that unique case was so closely related to a political constitution that Constant had bound himself not to discuss. In another passage, we find him beginning to explain how a free government created from “opinion” generated a public spirit that permeated the entire machinery of government. Then, presumably coming too close to institutions peculiar to Britain – his exemplar throughout of public spirit – he ends the discussion with the abrupt reminder that such matters were foreign to his subject. “So much the worse for the subject,” one is tempted to say. Or again, as he put it later in the same manuscript, he was treating exclusively those issues that related to civil liberty and not those having to do with political liberty.65 These artificial limits imposed a high cost, for the theme of “opinion” and its political importance is one of the most vital ones in Constant’s reflections, and its treatment illuminates what Constant thought about political parties. In many respects, the political writings of these years serve to record Constant’s continuing loyalty to republican institutions, but one now qualified by an apparent realization that Britain – the enemy of his enemy Bonaparte – left more to be said in favour of a constitutional monarchy than he had admitted in his polemics on behalf of the Directory. This admission leaves its mark as well on the manuscript that was ostensibly devoted to defending the feasibility of a republican regime. The resolve to write as though certain desirable outcomes were equally attainable in a monarchy or a republic was one way of reconciling these contrary pressures. Constant’s elision between these forms had more than one useful 65 Constant, “Principes,” 2:139–42, 347, 463.

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outcome, among them his insight that some of Montesquieu’s too-rigid contrasts had more to do with the difference between ancient and modern than between coexisting institutional forms. The category that undoubtedly might be found in a number of different institutional settings was public opinion; indeed, Constant, who had at least read Hume’s History, appears to have been familiar with the British tradition – fostered by Sir William Temple and later by Hume’s political essays – of finding it everywhere. His closest approach to this position cited Bentham in support of the claim that, in the Ottoman Empire, arson was the equivalent of presenting a petition. Whether or not Constant would subscribe to the most far-reaching claims for the empire of opinion, he certainly deemed public opinion to be the life of states, and one, depending upon circumstances, that came to the fore through various social conduits. Increasingly, he seems, too, to have been led in the direction of finding in Britain the model of freedom and of a vigorous public spirit, and his manuscript, ostensibly on republics, offered the same sentiment without effectively explaining how a nation lacking this quality might attain it in the first place. Public spirit, after all, was the product of free institutions, so how might a nation without them secure this prerequisite for the spirit that brought life to public affairs?66 Yet we need look no further than another of Constant’s views for an excellent reason for not examining constitutions, especially the British one, too closely. Specifically, of embarrassment to Constant’s idolizing of the queen of the world were traces of the very revolutionary, if not Jacobin, legacy of hostility to those parties that were such a part of British public life. The result was a maze of promising openings that petered out in his refusal to contemplate how various parts of a social and political system were, in fact, related. That very capacity had been the magnificent strength of Montesquieu’s work, and it is thus ironical that reflections so obviously rooted there should prove defective in this way. Faced with an impasse that inhibited making fruitful causal links, Constant was left embracing British ways as a very selective and half-hearted admirer. That is what he would long remain. What we find Constant saying is that public opinion could not be free to do its benign work in circumstances where a nation remained seriously divided, for political divisions “suivant les partis,” as he oddly expressed it, had the malign effect of rendering some beliefs criminal and others beyond reproach. Such conditions banished that state of calm in which individual independence might flourish.67 The sentiment betrays a degree of 66 Constant, Fragments, 190. Cf. Constant, “Principes,” 2:505–6. This latter passage illustrates the problem but does not seek an answer. 67 Constant, “Principes,” 2:443.

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ambivalence that was so much a part of Constant’s nature, but in one of its dimensions it does strike a note familiar to the literature of the French Revolution. It is now established that one of the understandings that dramatically separates that time from the present century was its propensity to deem public opinion to be most fully realized when the great mass of a population was of one mind. Opinion divided, uncertain in its focus or fluctuating, left the nation with no true opinion at all. Modern understanding would not query the notion that a population might be so terrorized as to have no expressible sentiments, but it would also be aware that the opinion that existed at any time would be far from unanimous and, indeed, would contain many sub-publics. Thinking in much less pluralistic terms had not been limited to Montagnard fanatics, for as moderate a republican as Mme de Staël had written that when two political parties in furious engagement divided an empire, there was precious little public opinion.68 The emphasis in Constant displays the same quality of moderation, and so his was not a call, in the spirit of the most hyperbolic revolutionary rhetoric, to sink all differences in a cause. Rather, he complicated the case by insisting that party fury prevented individuals from reaching their own judgment; he alluded, as well, to Mirabeau’s dictum that opinion was individual and specifically distanced himself from the revolutionary penchant for creating or regenerating opinion in some acceptable form. Lest one recall that Rousseau, too, simply wished individuals to reach their conclusions on the general will free from the interference of partial interests (such as parties), one must allow in Constant’s defence that he was, by this time, hostile to the austerities of the manner of thinking that would found the people’s triumph on the oppression of individuals. The works under examination are shot through with a nominalism that insisted on banishing pretentious talk about collectivities in favour of maximizing individual freedom. No physiocrat could have done it better; hence Rousseau and Mably, with their propensity to hypostatize the people’s cause into a monster of oppression, were by now decidedly out of favour. It is no less true that, in time, Constant would be the author of a formulation of the complex relations of opinion and interest that does pay due regard to the inevitability of diversity of opinion.69 For present purposes, it is necessary only 68 Staël, Des circonstances actuelles qui peuvent terminer la Révolution, 89. See, too, at 65n3 above. 69 See Constant, Commentaire sur l’ouvrage de Filangieri (Paris, 1822), 2:290; and Gunn, “Opinion in Eighteenth-Century Thought,” 24–5. The work that pays most attention to Constant on opinion is Biancamaria Fontana, Benjamin Constant and the Post-revolutionary Mind (New Haven and London, 1991), chap. 6; it contains some references to the comments in the “Principes.”

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to emphasize that in the manuscripts, and especially in his “Principes de politique,” his elevation of the category of “opinion” was at the expense of any indulgence towards the presence of parties in the state. Opinion, as employed here, was a safeguard for the governed, whereas parties or factions related to that aspect of public life in which people sought to exercise political power. To emphasize the first and to avoid the second were to become the major landmarks in Constant’s politics. Already, in the draft of the “Principes” that was completed, it seems, in 1806, Constant had offered an initial formulation that set the ancient ideal of the large-scale involvement of the community in political decisions against the modern preoccupation with raising barriers to that power in the name of individual freedom. A theme that was to burst upon Europe in his De l’esprit de conquête, where he portrayed Bonaparte as an atavistic monster, was already in germination. As is well known, this theme is, to all appearances, based on a hint in de Staël’s unfinished essay of 1799. There may well be other sources for Constant’s firm individualism, for Sieyès, Pierre-Claude Daunou (his colleague in the Tribunate), and Charles Théremin have all been cited as sharing in the development of a point of view that many have associated only with the Restoration and with Constant. The last figure, author of De l’incompatibilité du système démagogique avec le système d’économie politique des peuples modernes (year VIII), may have afforded some inspiration for what is now deemed Constant’s most characteristic insight. In particular, this viewpoint may have contributed to Constant’s animus against the politics of parties, as when he contrasts the solid objects of investigation in political economy with those “questions de parti” with which enlightenment made no contact.70 It is, nevertheless, all too probable that it was no one factor that accounts for Constant’s unease about political divisions. Whatever the causes, the effects are evident throughout the manuscript of the “Principes.” There is scarcely any passage that contains the word “parti” where it does not carry negative associations. Even Constant’s tribute to the virtues of the British electoral system, as illustrated by the constitutional crisis of 1783–84, employs the term “parti” as one of rebuke and, indeed, seems to suggest that the defeated coalition had been a party, just as if the triumphant Pitt and his supporters had been anything else. When, however, Constant makes reference to limiting authority by dividing it and thus putting in balance its different parts, it is clear from the context that what he had in mind were organs of government, not extra-constitutional 70 Constant, “Principes,” 2:399. For the hypothesis on a common point of view, see Jean Bourdon, La Constitution de l’an VIII (Rodez, 1942), 102–9. This work is worthy of more attention in the literature.

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bodies. Especially striking is the range of manifestations encompassed by dangerous social divisions. Constant sometimes referred to the Greens and the Blues of the Hippodrome in Constantinople as generic terms to identify a sort of activity, and, he insisted, the same labelling was commonplace during the Revolution. More original was his identifying divisions that were not, in the first instance, political in order to display the crucial point that their substance was not what was essential to their nature. Instead, he singled out that spirit of party that de Staël had so elegantly reviled. Not the specific bones of contention between the jarring sects, but the engagements into which selfinterest entered were responsible for the excesses that so disturbed Constant. The same process that accounted for the Byzantine goings-on could equally well explain how it was that people had solicited lettres de cachet to dispose of “les gluckistes et les piccinistes,” or the same could serve to vent one’s rage against Jansenists or atheists. Unfortunately, with party spirit assuming so prominent a place in his chamber of horrors, Constant showed no signs of competing with de Staël in the analysis of the psychology that sustained this phenomenon. There are indications, too, that he knew Hume’s classic “Of Parties in General,” for he quotes him on the Prasini and the Veneti of Constantinople.71 He must, however, have decided that his own thoughts needed no sustained nourishment from such sources. That seems, on the whole, a pity. When, for instance, Constant tells us that parties or factions (he uses the terms here indiscriminately) follow circumstances and not principles, one wonders what could have inspired a thought that lacks the quality of being intuitively true and might have benefited from Hume’s awareness that religious parties, confident of their possession of truth, could be the most terrible. Nor is there any sign here of de Staël’s very satisfactory reworking of Hume’s point about how the mutual supports of party immunized men against doubt. Evidently, these thoughts about party cannot have been of great import to the writer or one suspects that he would have written better. Regarding the category of “opposition,” Constant was more positive and pointed out how it might find a haven in religious quarrels. No doubt, he was thinking as well of how similar refuges were offered, in his own day, by literature and the salons. The thought remains, however, undeveloped. There was but one portion of the argument, if one may so call it, where Constant did make contact with the almost ineradicable nature of serious divisions among humans. In the course of his assailing institutions that counterfeited freedom and so mocked it, he claimed that such regimes united all the ills of tyranny and of a republic torn apart by violent factions. 71 Constant, “Principes,” 2:512n, 542–3, 641.

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Such a description seemed to fit neither the classical source in Tacitus nor Constant’s recent experience with the Consulate, but still he said it. He attributed as well to unnamed sources the notion that freedom would have to be delayed until the factions were destroyed, and he responded that the factions would not, in fact, be destroyed so long as the dawn of freedom was put off. It seems to be a fine, elevated sentiment and adequately lapidary in expression, but it leaves the reader distinctly puzzled. Was it then true that a sufficient liberty in human affairs might literally banish this ill of faction and where was the condition achieved? This early statement of the relation between faction and freedom is startling in its way, but seems neither to be true nor to offer any support for political competition. In February 1817, Constant would offer instead the far more meaningful maxim to the effect that those who lamented the presence of what he then called parties might reflect that their demise would be costly: “I have never seen parties dead but where liberty [too] was dead.” Since this later comment appears to be the only passage, in its several versions, where Constant said unequivocally that parties and their struggle were a necessary part of representative government, it is of some importance and represents a development in his thought. He offered the first version of the improved formulation as a journalistic response to a speech by Royer-Collard in which that orator supported the government’s measures on the press with the sentiment that parties would always tend to implicate newspapers in their misdoings. There would then be no safety until the death of those parties and other organizations of the disaffected, about which Royer-Collard was yet more negative. In declaring parties alive and well and unlikely to suffer the death that some sought for them, Constant’s Annales de la session expanded on the original thought. There he referred specifically to those parties that were inherent within representative government. The argument also appeared in later collections, sometimes in abbreviated form.72 One other early comment about party men allowed that they might, in fact, be well intentioned in their public conduct, yet they would never assist in limiting social authority. Why not? For the simple reason that each saw 72 Ibid., 2:494; cf. Constant, “Des chambres” 6, Mercure de France 1, [no. 6] (Feb. 1817): 262–72 at 271. It is reprinted in Constant, Recueil d’articles: Le Mercure, La Minerve et La Renommée, ed. E. Harpaz (Genève, 1972), 1:96. For another text of the crucial comment, see Constant, Annales de la session de 1817 à 1818 (Paris, 1817–18), 103. J.-P. Pagès and Camille Saint-Aubin joined Constant in writing this work. See as well Constant, Collection complète des ouvrages publiés sur le gouvernement representatif, 2nd ed. (Paris, 1820), vol. 4, pt 7, 164; and Constant, Cours de politique constitutionnelle, 3rd ed., ed. J.-P. Pagès (Bruxelles, 1837), 344. In the last mentioned, a portion of the text from the Annales is omitted.

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himself as heir to that realm and would not then limit its extent even while, temporarily, it rested in the hands of enemies. Constant’s later-maturing Fragments offered another version of this thought and complicated it by seeing this as a case where the failing of the constitution was that it was vulnerable to damage in being placed between contending parties. Furthermore, in a manner that left the passage difficult to follow, Constant here introduced, presumably as an example of virtue, the relations between the ministers and the Opposition in Britain.73 The oddity, for a reader of the manuscript who has already seen the first passage, lay in first the author’s using the action of party men with a negative emphasis and then finding a positive application for it. The version from the Fragments first appeared in print in May 1814 as Réflexions sur les constitutions … dans une monarchie constitutionnelle. However, when the passage was again printed in the “Principes,” the work that appeared during the Hundred Days, the versions, negative and positive, figured in different chapters. The first use, which stressed the way in which contending parties were of no use in curbing the dangers of popular sovereignty, appeared in chapter 1. The second, which placed a positive construction on party contentions as not endangering the constitution, came in chapter 7, on the business of legislatures.74 Constant revised his manuscript “Principes,” his single most elaborate political work, in ten days during April 1815. It is not surprising that his drawing upon his past thoughts creates certain problems for the reader. The crucial point in these passages was the need for what we would now call “consensus.” Constant was evidently pleased with this formulation of the desideratum of a political order where parties might compete without endangering the constitution. The same thought, expressed more simply, had come from Castlereagh when he had once opined that party struggle in the first Restoration must be consistent with the safety of the sovereign. Despite some confusing passages in the Fragments, that work and the thoughts that it contributed to the published writings possess one striking virtue. They demonstrate that the enervating attempt to avoid constitutional specifics had ceased to muddy the waters. The inhibitions about discussing British affairs in an open and candid way had vanished and with 73 Constant, “Principes,” 2:29. Cf. Constant, Fragments, 287 ff. 74 Constant, “Réflexions sur les constitutions … ,” repr. in Constant, Cours de politique constitutionnelle, ed. Edouard Laboulaye, 2nd ed., ([1872]; Genève-Paris, 1982), 1:167–271 at 221; and Constant, “Principes de politique applicables à tous les gouvernements …,” in ibid., 1–165 at 8, 66. This edition of the main political works is cited hereafter as Laboulaye. The Collection complète, in eight parts and four volumes, is indeed more complete but much less accessible. Laboulaye is correct in seeing this work, in both editions, as carelessly assembled.

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them the contortions into which Constant had forced his previous argument. No longer, then, would it be necessary for him to attempt to treat the conventions that surrounded the refusal of supply as though they were some political universal. He was now free to say quite openly that Britain set the standard of freedom and that, successful as the British monarchy was, its virtues could not easily be replicated in the monarchies of Europe. Contrary to what some might say, this did not mean that the way to liberty was closed, but that it must be attained by different routes. It seems odd that a work explicitly devoted to demonstrating how republican forms might flourish in a nation such as France should so free itself from the embarrassment about how to draw upon British experience, but this was, in fact, the case. No need now to write as though monarchy and republic might be conflated or even to resort to Montesquieu’s treating Britain as sui generis and so a sort of republic by courtesy. With the admission that the British formula might be valuable even to republics but would require adaptation, the flow of ideas ran more smoothly. Thus, whereas the more ambitious analysis of the “Principes” had but one reference to the British constitutional crisis of 1783–84, the work on republics had recourse to it on at least three occasions. That seems significant, since no event in the century better contributed to an understanding of party. So open had become the admiration of British constitutional practice that Constant even allowed himself to say that one should take less than seriously the continual censure of policy by the Opposition. That, he allowed serenely, was what it did in playing the role that led it to occupation of the ministry. At long last, there was a place to display the lessons learned from reading Necker’s books on executive power, and Constant gave firm support to an arrangement whereby ministers should be drawn from members of the legislature. These considerations and the convention whereby the ministers needed to maintain a majority in the Commons were central to a chapter devoted to the means of preventing both corruption and servility in legislative bodies. The subject of responsibility on the part of rulers merited separate treatment; again the conventions of parliamentary government showed the way, with particular attention to the responsibility of those who advised the king.75 That matter would be of great interest to Constant in years to come. To be sure, the British seemed to conduct their political life, on this telling, without any groups of public men with names such as Whig or Tory. Even on this score, however, there were indications of a greater appreciation of units such as these. A discussion of the British monarchy turned rapidly to the topic of public spirit, and at this point Constant graciously allowed that where such a spirit existed, even institutions defective in theory might function well in practice. 75 Constant, Fragments, 328, 286–8, 398, 344–5.

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This concession is paralleled by praise for the folkways observable in parliamentary elections – the very issue about which unfree Frenchmen had been encouraged to wax indignant. Most interesting of all was the passage that served to rehabilitate, within limits, the name of factions. Beginning with Montesquieu’s observation that a quiet republic was an unfree one, Constant offered qualified support. Factions did have their uses if, and only if, their activity was the product of ambition. Factions that promoted the interests of orders in the state were likely, however, to destroy it.76 It is not difficult to see in the competition for office the facts of British parties. In rejecting the struggle between nobles and commons, it is at least possible that Constant was resisting the famous counter-claim by Machiavelli, whose Discourses had purported to find Roman freedom in such a division. Most of the surveys of Constant’s political ideas begin their examination when, not far from fifty and released from the thraldom of de Staël, he returned to publishing his thoughts on public affairs. Here one can sympathize with the objections raised by a scholar such as Hofmann, who was steeped in the early work and so finds the focus misleading. The companion objection – that scholarship on Constant has not been sensitive to context – also has merit. A nineteenth-century edition of the political works that provides a serviceable index and casual identification of texts is rather like a mere collection of timeless maxims.77 Yet one needs to point out that, mitigating the charge that context has been ignored, a host of discrete ideas or phrases and much of the general orientation of the later thought were presaged earlier and did not, in fact, respond much to surrounding circumstances. In the musings of his manuscripts, Constant has already decided that barriers to the intrusion of government were more vital than were opportunities for the populace to become directly involved in politics. As one of the more recent commentaries reminds us, Constant identified the partisans of ancient liberty, based on political participation, with the excesses of the Jacobins.78 A horror of l’arbitraire had convinced him that power had to be divided and, if possible, tamed by the presence among formal institutions of some neutral power, be it the relative moderates of the executive Directory, a senate, or, as at last he came to conclude, a constitutional monarch. This part of the agenda had emerged as early as his Des réactions politiques. Doubtful about the capacities of most of mankind, Constant embraced public opinion, not because of its certified truth – a claim that he probably never wished to make – but because of its power 76 Ibid., 189–93, 291–3, 143. 77 Oeuvres politiques de Benjamin Constant, ed. Charles Louandre (Paris, 1874). 78 George Armstrong Kelly, The Humane Comedy: Constant, Tocqueville and French Liberalism (Cambridge, 1992), 42.

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to shame or otherwise coerce rulers into moderating their conduct. Of course, much depended upon “institutions,” that term pulled, in some puzzlement, from the abbé de Mably. Representative government, and especially a genuine and transparent form of it, would serve to protect those human concerns and would ideally afford sufficient participation to safeguard the liberties that were the true locus of human development. Constant’s impatience with systems left these preferences without any firm foundation either in the metaphysic of rights (he preferred, it seems, the term “liberties” but also employed the former expression) or in the utilitarian alternative. It sufficed, no doubt, that the public responded well to such a concern for its peace and welfare. d o i n g p o l i t i c s : i n t i m at i o n s o f pa r t y Armed with his store of theory, Constant returned to the politics of the day. He conspired first to replace the failing Bonapartist Empire with Bernadotte. Then, in rapid succession, he proffered advice to the restored Bourbons, to a seemingly more tractable Bonaparte, and yet again to Louis XVIII and his court. To have kept all the while one’s head literally on one’s shoulders was a feat in such turbulent times. Adding to the feat, he left a literary trail of precepts that held together reasonably well across different regimes and volatile public moods. Constant had followed the allies to Paris in 1814, unsure of his reception owing to his well-known plans to place Bernadotte on the throne. When his new-found zeal for the legitimate dynasty led him to revile Bonaparte, even as the rest of France braced to greet him anew, Constant decided upon flight, but after three days, he in fact returned to tame the tyrant. His central role in crafting the Acte additionnel – the Benjamine as the streets delightfully dubbed it – yielded a document that promised constitutional rule for Bonaparte’s subjects. To Constant’s great satisfaction, Chateaubriand might even report to Louis XVIII in Ghent that it was an improvement over the Charte.79 This could be no immediate consolation to its prime author, and after Waterloo, Constant again explored the joys of foreign travel. He was back in Paris again, however, by the autumn of 1816. During his self-imposed exile, he had visited the English Parliament, where it was the extemporaneous speeches that impressed him most. Yet he wrote to Mme Récamier that he felt a greater affinity for the most exaggerated member of the party then conducting the white terror in France than for the most liberal of Englishmen. Constant’s returns to Paris – after the fiasco with Bernadotte and after the return of Bonaparte – had been accompanied by efforts to rehabilitate 79 Constant, Mémoires sur les Cents Jours [1820] (Paris, 1961), 162. Further efforts at exoneration can be found in J.-J. Coulmann, Réminiscences (Paris, 1869), 3:85–7.

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himself for further political activity. Following his English exile, this took the form of a pamphlet, De la Doctrine politique qui peut réunir les partis en France. Although the contents were not especially accommodating to the ministers, Constant made his peace by sending the first copy, accompanied by warm sentiments, to Decazes, the up-and-coming man. Despite its vision of a coming together of hostile forces, it also affords about the most sympathetic treatment of parties that Constant would ever write. Was this the influence of a visit to Parliament? If we contemplate the common storehouse of materials on which Constant drew for all his political writings and the consequent overlapping of themes and language from one work to another, the writings of 1813 to 1816 emerge as a fairly unified body of constitutional theory, interspersed with other thoughts. True, as Constant’s editor Edouard Laboulaye pointed out, there were variants among editions, some of them the product of political caution, and Constant himself admitted a temptation to drop certain items from his collection of 1818–20 because times had changed. Then there were the circumstances of which neither Constant nor Laboulaye wrote, such as the decision not to reprint De l’esprit de conquête because of the sensibilities of some supporters who were Bonapartists.80 The contradictions in a record that was rich in opportunities for creating them were duly pointed out by enemies, most assiduously by Charles Loyson. This critic seems more cogent in singling out seemingly inconsistent patterns of conduct than in discovering arguments that were literally contradictory, but he offered two cases of the latter.81 His Publiciste, unlike the newspaper of that name a generation before, was not friendly to Constant. All considered, however, Constant had developed a view of the political order that had travelled, surprisingly unscathed, through different ideological climates. In insisting that liberty had been his unchanging plea throughout his career, Constant was naturally being too undemanding of himself. The most dur of the ultra-royalists or the most unregenerate of the Bonapartists or Jacobin regicides would equally have said that the realization of their aims would yield liberty as well. One has to look at notions at a lower level of abstraction – such as the singling out of partisan laws that, in making exceptions, violated the impartiality of the legal order – to find perfect continuity 80 Laboulaye, 1:vi, lix; and Constant, Lettres à Bernadotte, ed. Bengt Hasselrot (Genève and Lille, 1957), lvii n. 81 Charles Loyson, Guerre à qui la cherche … (Paris, 1818), 131–50, 171–85; and his Lettre à M. Benjamin Constant, l’un des rédacteurs de La Minerve (Paris, 1819), 5. For later comment of the same sort, see Armand Lods, “Les Variations politiques de Benjamin Constant,” L’Intermédiaire des chercheurs et curieux 96, no. 1801 (15 Dec. 1933); 97, no. 1819 (30 Oct. 1934).

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between his thoughts of 1797 and those of thirty years later. His ideas had not been proofed against all eventualities, and they were still decidedly open to different emphases. One is reminded of the perceptive comment by one scholar that there has emerged no consensus on just what Constant was saying on the question of sovereignty.82 On this issue, we may well imagine that he wished both to stay true to his abhorrence of the anti-individualism to which Rousseau’s doctrine was susceptible and, at the same time, to not sacrifice his standing with those of the Left who had long been attached to the vocabulary of popular sovereignty. Similar contrary pulls explain much in the lack of definition in some of Constant’s formulations. Had he, in the process, changed his republican inclinations? Probably not, and almost certainly he had experienced no dramatic conversion to constitutional monarchy.83 The fact is that, beginning with the Directory, he tried to find stability and the prospect of yet better times in whatever government fortune visited upon France. He wished, moreover, to be in France and in politics, and these wishes were incompatible with too unyielding a set of commitments. All great fissures in the life of nations have left some figures conspicuously allied with a past that fitted ill with their present situation and stranded, in a sense, on both sides of a chasm. It was true of many at this time, and when challenged, Constant was always ready to respond, in effect, “tu quoque.” Constant’s political theory had as its goal the providing of a political order at once stable, secured against the violence that he seems to have feared more than did some others, and free in the sense of offering effective protection of individual liberties. His stature as a founder of the European liberal tradition has been dependent on this last consideration – the product of Constant’s own insecurities, his Protestantism, his alleged foreign status in France, and, above all, one suspects, his almost unparalleled record of earning the suspicion of people in power. Few had managed, as he had, to have created doubts, as in 1795, about his devotion to the Revolution and then to follow with a seeming betrayal of the royalist cause. Then to have become, at various times, the enemy both of Bonaparte and, to all appearances (twice), of the Bourbons and to have been an exile, successively, from the one and then the other were accomplishments that contributed to certain clear priorities. His constitutional thoughts would have viewed the political process more from 82 Jana S. Hearn, “The Schoolmaster of Liberty, or the Political Views of Benjamin Constant de Rebecque” (PhD thesis, Indiana University, Bloomington, 1970), fol. 118. 83 For corroboration, see comments by Henri Grange in Constant, Fragments, 98–9; and E. Harpaz, “Benjamin Constant entre la république et la monarchie,” Annales Benjamin Constant 12 (1991): 43–52 at 43. Jean Hiestand, in Benjamin Constant et la doctrine parlementaire (Genève, 1928), 64, argued, though not I think convincingly, to the contrary.

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the station of the citizen or subject than from the heights of power. Protection from authority and the assurance of redress against it could hardly have failed to assume, for him, the status of paramount objectives. It was the essence of that modern liberty of which he wrote. Three elements were joined in forming the main outlines of this constitutional vision. It was necessary, first, to have some power that had harmony and an unthreatening form of order as its whole concern. This was the elusive neutral power that he had been seeking in several different institutional forms and that he hoped to find in a constitutional ruler, be it an improved form of Bonapartist rule or the absolutist Bourbons confined by legal forms. Closely connected to this desideratum was the need to make accountable those agents of the executive whose acts could not, by their very nature, be construed at all times as benignly neutral. This was the problem of providing for responsibility. The third piece of the puzzle was the liberty of the press, the mechanism whereby public opinion could function as a counterforce to check the potential for arbitrary power. The three factors were linked in a chain that began with the authority that, raised in dignity above the rest, might find its satisfaction in holding the polity together. It would be aided in this task by elected representatives and by the public at large, both of which might contribute to raising barriers to misrule. It was not a scheme that, in its fundamental assumptions, showed other than revulsion for sustained conflict. Constant’s famous indictment of Bonaparte in the Esprit of 1813 had reached its most perfect eloquence in the condemnation of warfare; the author’s hopes for domestic politics posited a corresponding state of repose. The animus against conflict is evident in Constant’s most compelling argument for the presence of the neutral power. His example of the cost of its absence was Roman history and the tale of violence that marked struggles between the nobles and the people, that very experience that had moved Machiavelli to pen a passage famous in political lore. By investing all authority in active parts of the governmental machinery, a people made their institutions the battleground between competing forces. The result was described thus: “Thus each party takes turns seizing the power that should be confined to neutral hands.” No wonder that his writings copied in 1810 had been so negative about those parties that embodied the interests of orders in the society. In one of his most impressive surveys of the political machinery of the past, Constant sought to show that, in the absence of an agreed mechanism for depriving of office or authority those whose deprivation was in the public interest, that function was left either to one’s erstwhile allies in misdeeds or to one’s enemies. In neither case could he see a peaceful resolution, nor yet in the infinite regress of setting up watchdog bodies that themselves needed

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watching.84 Constitutional monarchy, as opposed either to despotism or to republican institutions, could do the job because the king (or emperor?) acted from above and neither as ally nor competitor. Here is what Constant had been getting at in his awkward formulation, already noted, where he had written of the vicious consequences when one party, seeking to dish another, had to damage the constitution to get at it. Constant had always credited the much-esteemed Stanislas, comte de Clermont-Tonnerre, victim of the atrocity of 10 August 1792, with the insight that the royal power must be distinguishable from the executive. Even his tribute to the martyred constitutional royalist was phrased so as to suggest that he was no party man, because a moderate.85 While it was true that this monarchien spoke the jargon of his day in eschewing party spirit and also afforded a model of one who simultaneously combated anarchy and despotism,86 Constant rather sloughs over the fact that this was a man of the Right, slain by the mob. He also maintained his silence about the fact that Clermont-Tonnerre’s doomed struggle was to supply Louis XVI with the tools that allowed a British sovereign to preside without endangering his subjects. In a constitutional guide published during the Hundred Days, that was understandable. The essential link in the concatenation that secured constitutional monarchy was the responsibility that belonged to those, especially ministers directly appointed by the sovereign, who saw to the execution of the acts of government in place of a king who, by convention, could do no wrong. The ministers were connected both to their royal master who appointed them and to the legislative bodies where, as Constant had learned from Necker and Clermont-Tonnerre, the king should have found them in the first place. No political structure served better to trace the fine lines that were meant to define a space between the pitfalls of royal despotism and popular tyranny than the conventions that spelled out the nature of this ministerial responsibility. Early in 1815, already less than pleased with the regime of the Bourbons but also desirous of a place in government, Constant made it the subject of his important pamphlet De la responsabilité, and he returned to it in the “Principes” and elsewhere. The Charte had left definitive treatment of the matter to later legislation, and, in fact, the moment for resolving the matter would never arrive during the life of that document. Constant himself would later be responsible for a much more elaborate statement in the Acte additionnelle, a document that, of course, lapsed with the fall of Bonaparte. Still, even this effort has struck modern students of 84 Constant, “Principes de politique,” in Laboulaye, 1:21–2. 85 Constant, “Réflexions sur les constitutions,” in Laboulaye, 1:178; Constant, “Principes de politique,” in Laboulaye, 1:142–3. 86 Clermont-Tonnerre, Analyse raisonnée de la constitution française, sig. A3, 204.

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constitutional law as somehow half-hearted and inadequate to the task for not making provision, for instance, for the questioning of ministers.87 The apparent strategy that governed Constant’s public statements on ministerial responsibility was not to jar too severely the various prejudices abroad in the nation. Consequently, his pamphlet took the very narrow and legalistic understanding of responsibility that was present in articles 55 and 56 of the Charte and, into this container, poured the substance of what amounted to a political, not criminal, rendering of responsibility. Thus, he insisted, with apparent perversity, that it was not arbitrary or illegal activity that led to the invoking of ministerial responsibility but the ill-use of legal power. Wars conducted without energy, peace treaties negotiated without wisdom, or finances managed honestly, though badly, might all come under the rubric in English law of “high crimes and misdemeanours.” In other words, these acts or patterns of conduct might be construed as treason, one of the two offences mentioned in the relevant article. But, asked Constant himself, was such an understanding not one that left a great degree of discretion in the hands of those who accused ministers, and did this not encourage arbitrary proceedings?88 His response was to invoke British practice where these actions almost never went to full term, for the mere threat of a formal process led to resignation, where proceedings never pursued ex-ministers beyond that point, and where actual penalties (other than the loss of office) had not been invoked in recent times. This was reassuring enough, no doubt, but the British precedents went only so far, and, surprisingly perhaps, Constant lashed out at those of his countrymen who sought the purely political remedy of declaring that a minister or ministers no longer possessed the confidence of the chamber. Despite its being of comparatively recent origin – in substance, this had led to Walpole’s resignation in 1742, and the language of non-confidence on the part of a majority of the House had accompanied the fall of Lord North in 1782 – the form of expression had already been familiar to Necker in 87 Maurice Deslandres, Histoire constitutionnelle de la France de 1789 à 1870 (Vaduz and Paris [1932], repr. 1977), 1:757. It seems, however, anachronistic to fault Constant for such an oversight, a procedure that had only been formally recognized in Britain in the 1780s and had remained there at a rudimentary level. Yet he did know of the practice of interpellation. See AP 30 (6 April 1821): 608; also found in Constant, Discours de M. Benjamin Constant à la Chambre des députés (Paris, 1827), 1:448–9, a collection that includes neither speeches in the Tribunate nor those delivered after 1827. 88 Constant’s words continue to be much discussed within French law. See Pierre Desmottes, “Le Mythe de Benjamin Constant,” in De la responsabilité pénale des ministres en régime parlementaire française (Paris, 1968), 17–23.

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1792.89 Constant’s reasons for deserting British practice at this point reveal a complex set of assumptions about the political process in France. First, he offered the argument that such a motion was otiose, presumably even in British circumstances, for, given certain factors indispensable to constitutional monarchy, no minister could maintain himself, motion of non-confidence or no, unless he enjoyed substantial support in the form of votes. The required conditions, both essential and absent in the France of his day, were “a ministry that acts in concert, a stable majority, and an opposition well distanced from that majority.”90 It is not the smallest irony in the work of an often puzzling thinker that Constant allowed himself, in this manner, to introduce the basic mechanisms of the politics of the House of Commons even as he said that France was not yet ready and so rebuffed them. What he hinted at but did not say, in so many words, was that there was yet another ingredient still missing, and that was a convention whereby the ministry might only maintain power by commanding that majority in the lower chamber. It is tempting to think that the oddity of the argument reflects a quite genuine effort to spare France an abrupt introduction of a subtle set of practices that it had taken Britain well over a century to bring to its present state. He may then be thought truly to be playing schoolmaster in the hope of a gradual introduction of practices still not widely familiar in France.91 Assuredly, he would already have known just how foreign and even distasteful the British constitution was to many on both ends of the political spectrum. His second reason for rejecting this most political of forms of responsibility was that, unlike a formal accusation, it offered no specifics and lent itself to irresponsible use. Constant must surely have been aware that ministers in Britain could hardly be sheltered for long from adverse public sentiment and that a discredited government would see the erosion of its majority. He spared his French public such refinements, however. 89 A recent work that records the relevant British precedents while simultaneously revealing continued French interest in the subject is Denis Baranger, Parlementarisme des origines: Essai sur les conditions de formation d’un exécutif responsable en Angleterre (Paris, 1999), 32, 352, 254–90. 90 Constant, “De la responsabilité des ministres,” in Laboulaye, 1:383–442 at 408. An English translation appeared in the Pamphleteer 5 (1815): 299–330, 315*– 29*. See, too, Constant, “Principes de politique,” in Laboulaye, 1:1–165 at 87. The same chapter, on votes of non-confidence in ministers, appears in almost identical form in both works (408–10 and 87–9). 91 See the argument in Mary Susan Hartman, “The Liberalism of Benjamin Constant during the Bourbon Restoration in France” (PhD thesis, Columbia University, New York, 1970), fols 129–30. This and a subsequent article (q.v.) are unusually penetrating studies of Constant’s thought.

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The third reason, and reaching at last the point of it all, was that a motion of non-confidence seemed too directly to dispute the wisdom of the sovereign’s original choice, so it challenged the royal prerogative.92 In these words, Constant declared the French monarchy as yet incapable of withstanding the sort of impertinent rebuke that the monarchy of George III had barely noticed. Surely, here he was quite correct, in the sense that the Bourbons were as yet settling uneasily back into their country – less easily than they thought, as the events of March 1815 would soon show – and had none of the resources in the form of that strong and popular aristocracy that could be taken for granted in Britain. In a curiously backhanded way, Constant had provided his most positive commitment to a political order that required the informal organization of elected representatives in order to perform, and he had endorsed such bodies, in function if not in name, for both the support of the ministers and for opposition to them. Without a doubt, he contemplated a true opposition in the form of a body that sought to wrest power from the ministers and not merely to correct their mistakes. Indeed, having made the connection between possession or loss of confidence in terms of votes within a chamber, he had followed up this observation by making the connection between legislative majorities and public opinion and concluded that, in successfully appealing to it, “elle met de votre parti la majorité nationale.”93 Opposition, in these terms, was ostensibly, then, a formed opposition, better known as a party. What did Constant mean in going beyond the limits of French constitutional experience while still defeating the expectations of those who sought the British parliamentary system? Some analyses have suggested that his command of the conventions of the British constitution was imperfect or, at least, still in process of developing.94 A different reading of his various sets of thoughts on responsibility – but especially the pamphlet of early February 1815 – would have it that his mingling of criminal and legal responsibility was no blunder and that what he truly wished to do was to fend off that intimidation of ministers by the legislature that had figured in some of the darkest days of the Revolution. Thus, Hartman has argued that Constant’s greater trust in the executive, joined to his ambition to secure an appointment in the gift of the government, led to a formula for overcoming deadlock in the 92 Constant, “De la responsabilité des ministres,” in Laboulaye, 1:408–9; and Constant, “Principes de politique,” in Laboulaye, 1:1–165 at 87–8. 93 Constant, “De le responsabilité,” in Laboulaye, 1:410, 417. The same passages recur in Constant, “Principes de politique,” in Laboulaye, 1: 1–165 at 89, 77. 94 Paul Bastid, Benjamin Constant et sa doctrine (Paris, 1966), 2:923–4; and J.-A. Bédé, “Chateaubriand, Benjamin Constant et la question constitutionnelle (1814–1816),” Revue d’histoire littéraire de la France 68 (1968): 981–94.

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machinery of government that was more indulgent to the royal and executive powers than the British precedents would have dictated.95 This analysis, coming in such an excellent treatment of political thought, deserves careful consideration, but the present account can endorse it only in part. One may certainly document Constant’s desire for some office, so one premise is easily sustained. It was not until a month after the appearance of this pamphlet that, following a talk with Lainé, who was about to become minister of the interior, he finally despaired of attaining one,96 although one must wonder why he had thought himself a likely prospect. Under the unusual circumstances of the Consulate, Constant had combined a desire for employment with active opposition. However, his alleged leaning towards executive rather than legislative power is more difficult to accept, given the greater proximity of the latter to the wellsprings of public opinion. We must recognize Constant’s involvement as a literary auxiliary to emerging opposition activity in the second half of 1814. Surely, this was not just a shoring up of the executive and the throne, unless one accepts Bonaparte’s understanding that the efforts of oppositions were always just to raise the price at which they would come over to join the ministers. Only in the years 1796–99 did Constant cleave to the executive branch; for the rest of his career, he seems to have suspected its good intentions. So, at best, evidence may allow for his recognition of the relative weakness of the French monarchy compared to the British and thus the wisdom of not, at first, arming the enemies of the ministers too well. The subject of these thoughts would not be himself were this concern not beset by reservations and cross-currents. Also encouraging scepticism as to whether Constant even thought of executive versus legislature is that the arrangement of drawing ministers from the legislature was one that he favoured and one that discouraged his dwelling on any firm separation of powers. Accordingly, his efforts on behalf of a frail monarchy and its ministers emphasized the fact that a truculent majority in the lower chamber might only prevail if it were clearly speaking for the nation. As the manuscripts reveal, the example of Pitt the younger in 1783–84 had greatly impressed Constant, and later he made much of the fact that the royal power of dissolution, when allied with public opinion, was a positive force in conflicts between the chambers and the ministers.97 Constant could 95 Mary S. Hartman, “Benjamin Constant and the Question of Ministerial Responsibility in France, 1814–1815,” Journal of European Studies 6 (1976): 248–61. 96 Constant, Journaux intimes, ed. Alfred Roulin and Charles Roth (Paris, 1952), 434. 97 “Observations sur le discours prononcé par s. e. le ministre de l’ intérieur …” [1st ed., Aug. 1814], in Laboulaye, 1:477–504 at 494–7. This point is sometimes misunderstood. See Guy Howard Dodge, Benjamin Constant’s Philosophy of Liberalism (Chapel Hill, 1980), 90.

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never have felt for the monarchy the same regard that he had for public opinion, that final authority in the assemblage of forces meant to render government constitutional. One should probably accept Hartman’s thesis that Constant was not simply confused about the sort of responsibility that obtained in Britain; that is made the more plausible by his apparent understanding, as shown in the Principes de politique, of how responsibility figured in the careers of Lord North, Lord Melville, and others. The other factor that may help to explain the oddness of Constant’s pamphlet on responsibility is that the logic of writing of British practice with any degree of precision naturally led him to recognize the existence of those political connections that gave meaning to the legal framework. When Constant admitted that the day-to-day workings of constitutional monarchy necessitated blocks of supporters of ministers and opposition, he had said a great deal on a subject about which he had heretofore said little that was positive. This, in itself, may tell us something about his alluding so offhandedly to the form of limited parliamentary conflict that, in retrospect, seems crucial to everything that he was saying. Heir to a tradition of suspecting the bona fides of parties, more than of the legislative bodies that housed them, he had lured himself into an argument that said more than he had probably wished to say. This seems to explain more than any penchant for the prerogatives of the executive power. One consideration apparent in the Principes suggests, not confusion about the workings of British government, but the difficulty of assimilating to his other prejudices a model of government derived from British practice. In one passage Constant offered an analysis – already present in his manuscripts – of how the ambition of a British Opposition would preserve the constitutional order in the hope that some day it would take control. This, as noted above, was an image that had previously figured more than once in his writings and with varying emphasis. Immediately following this paragraph comes one in which the erstwhile parties were demoted to the status of factions and the advice – sounding quite old fashioned in light of the foregoing – that since factions could not be eradicated, it was best to render their triumph as innocuous as possible. Both observations had histories in the manuscripts of the previous decade, but the second seems not to belong in the same work that looked forward to ministerial and opposition parties as the normal and eventual units for organizing a legislative chamber. Yet more striking is Constant’s objection to the plan for partial renewal by fifths of the Chambre des députés. His reason was that the “éléments de discorde” represented by deputies elected at different times must be banished from the chamber. Instead he offered an alternative where the struggle between conservative and progressive opinions should be carried

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on between different chambers and not in the heart of a single one.98 Tempting as it may be to assume that Constant was here reverting to the ancient view of parties as competing orders in the state – a condition of which he had been disapproving – it appears more likely that he offered his argument against renewal by fifths without considering its jarring effect on other passages written with different intent. The chapter on elections where the comment occurs was otherwise full of very positive comments about British politics, including Constant’s fine tribute to political gatherings where twenty thousand Englishmen came together with not a soldier in sight, this contrasted with French experience where a gathering of three would necessarily be joined by two soldiers in order to separate the individuals.99 Thus, to assume that a portion of his fifth chapter should consciously disavow that basis for party confrontation that chapters 7 and 10 affirmed would seem less than credible. The first of these other passages presented the model of an opposition striving to replace the current ministers. Chapter 10 said even more plainly, in a passage already quoted, that constitutional monarchy demanded “une majorité stable, et une opposition bien séparée de cette majorité.”100 Admittedly, Constant tended to refer to parties in very general terms and did not so designate the opposed cohorts of the legislative chambers, although the language seems to afford no other term by which to refer to them. Moreover, his positive references to structured political disagreement went well beyond his long-standing position that faction and liberty were subtly allied. Here the case for accepting the British way of doing parliamentary business entailed the clear affirmation that constitutional monarchy needed such institutions. To point out that the original constitutional monarchy had disappeared with the return of Bonaparte could only gesture towards other passages that spoke to the awkwardness of trying to combine the general with the particular, or comments made for the mood of one regime with those designed for another. There is no doubt, as well, that Constant hoped that Bonaparte, then back in the saddle, would accept a much more constitutional form of rule. For all 98 Constant, “Principes de politique,” in Laboulaye, 1:48. 99 French visitors to Britain paid their most rapturous tributes to this aspect of political freedom. See Jérôme-Adolphe Blanqui, Voyage d’un jeune français en Angleterre (Paris, 1824), vii. British visitors to France reciprocated with comments on the conspicuous display of the heavy hand of authority. See, for instance, John Scott, A Visit to Paris in 1814 … (London, 1815), 31–2, 77. 100 Constant, “Principes de politique,” in Laboulaye, 1:1–165 at 66–7, 87. The passages contemplate party struggles within legislative chambers. In the first edition of 1815, the passages from chapters 5, 7, and 10 come at pages 94, 129–30, and 173. One can, then, be assured that the editor faithfully presented the original passages.

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the embarrassing traces that his rapid changes of front had left in his major piece of political analysis, Constant knew of what he wrote when he discussed Britain, and there, cool and sometimes ironical as the language was, the nature of the commitment was unambiguous. Constant had said enough about responsibility to attach his name to that topic from that day to this. The work accomplished none of the possibly multiple aims of its author, and it seems to have puzzled at least some of its readers. The Edinburgh Review, a publication rather prone to offer what content it chose on the slightest pretext, took notice of the pamphlet but turned the review into a discussion of the liberty of the press, combined with a celebration of Bonaparte. If Constant needed coaching on the British constitution, that problem was passed over. Stranger still was the response of an organ of those ministers from whom Constant did seek employment. The reviewer accused Constant of seeking to create a new liberal profession where previously there had been no need for the service. This was the profession “de faire parti d’opposition,” a career that, it implied, Constant was inventing for his own purposes. Looked at from a later perspective, the sarcasm suggests that France was catching up to Britain rather rapidly, for we must recall that the sally in the House of Commons about the “loyal Opposition” would come only in the 1820s. Slyly feigning a sympathy that was really absent, the reviewer pointed out that Constant’s coming to France only late in the Revolution would have spared his knowing of the humiliations suffered by the king’s ministers. Even less pleasantly, he pointed to Constant’s foreign origins to account for a failure not to realize that the “fracas” sanctioned within the House of Commons did not fit the delicacy of the French character. Constant’s self-promotion as teacher of France did not escape notice, and there was a nice phrase about the manner in which philosophers deemed themselves to be still at the beginning of the world.101 From all appearances, the court and the ministers were thus conscious of no kindness that Constant had wished to bestow upon them. More importantly, Constant’s comments on British practice had been taken up in a way that left no ambiguity as to whether he was discussing political parties. It is a paradox redolent of Constant’s earlier career that he won a considerable name as a political theorist just on the basis of his treatment of responsibility, a political understanding of which was highly dependent on assuming a struggle of parties as in Britain. He had also endorsed the importance of ministerial and opposition parties for the realization of constitutional monarchy, 101 Edinburgh Review 25 (June 1815): 112–34; and Gazette de France, no. 50 (19 Feb. 1815); no. 58 (27 Feb. 1815). The reviewer in the Gazette called himself “B__re,” surely Jean-François Bellemare.

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but in the same breath he had proclaimed, with what emphasis it is far from clear, that the conditions did not yet exist in France. Undoubtedly, he kept becoming involved with the subjects of party and opposition, and in no merely incidental way; yet his position on these institutions remained imperfectly defined. Further involvement was no more distant than the publication that signalled his return to the political scene following exile in England. Back in France, Constant complained to Récamier of the undiminished party spirit and the presence there of two parties – the ministerial one and the ultras – neither of which was for him. It was against this background that he wrote explicitly, really for the first time, of the parties in France. He began, Burke-like, by saying what a party was. It was, said the first sentence of his pamphlet, “a gathering of men who profess the same political doctrine.” The complex sentence, seen in its totality, offered the assurance that he used the term in no unfavourable sense and managed as well to find room for the beginning of his critique of the ultras that sustained the rest of the publication.102 A pattern that, largely unchanged, would be evident for the rest of Constant’s public life had now emerged. Parties did exist, and it was nowhere made clear that they should not exist, but the present ones left much to be desired. Where lay the faults of that party that had figured in the very first sentence of the pamphlet? Its members had paid lip service to the principles of freedom but in such a way as to find no credibility with the rest of the nation. From this presumed hypocrisy by the Right, there resulted the fact that all parties spoke the same language, but some fought only for principle, while others wished to reverse those in office and, one assumes, to take their places. It was, however, not just a lack of candour with which he taxed the ultras; their fault lay in the unacceptable character of their aims. Anticipating the strategy and the vocabulary that would carry him to the end of his life, Constant put it this way: “But any party, any association, any gathering of men, in power or out, that does not muster itself around national principles will nowhere find acceptance.”103 Nothing precise by way of an immediate threat to liberties can be found here, for the victims of the assault were those supporters of the chambre introuvable who had never enjoyed office and whose command of the legislature had been broken by the dissolution of 5 September 1816. It was their record of aristocratic pretensions and disregard for liberty to which Constant alluded. Singled out for specific attention were Chateaubriand, as author of the famous De la monarchie selon la Charte, and Fiévée, for the sixth part of the Correspondance. The two were 102 Lettres de Benjamin Constant à Madame Récamier, 1807–1830, ed. Louise Colet (repr. Genève, 1970), 327, 328–32; and Constant, “De la doctrine politique qui peut réunir les partis en France” (Dec. 1816), in Laboulaye, 2:283–308 at 285. There was an English translation, but it did not appear in the Pamphleteer. 103 Constant, De la doctrine, 301.

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subject to the double charge that insisted both that they were disingenuous about their real principles and that, in endorsing principles such as Constant had himself put forward, they were derivative in their thought. In this way, Constant gave preliminary form to that persistent suspicion that the apparent possession of the right ideas by admirers of pre-revolutionary France was an impossibility. At the same time as he sought to demonstrate that royalists were Johnnies-come-lately in speaking of liberty, he was able, very much as a minor theme, to remind the public of the priority, not to mention the genuineness, of his own creed. Despite its title, De la doctrine politique qui peut réunir les partis en France reached out with no markedly conciliatory spirit towards bodies of opinion different from that of the writer. There was no declaration of war on the ministers, nor any guarantee of support, but in not associating them with a party, Constant seemed to accept their perception of themselves. For the ultra-royalists, whose saying of the right things seemed but to compound their offences, there was no quarter, and the only prospect seems to have been that they depart the scene. Interestingly, despite the effort to lend a favourable sense to the term “party,” the only group so identified was the ultras. So the goal of reuniting parties seems to have consisted in good measure in the disappearance of dissidents of the Right. At this stage, Constant spoke ostensibly from the vantage point of a lawgiver, privileged to know the needs of the nation. Those national principles to which all acceptable positions must subscribe were evidently his. Soon, however, he was to lend a more precise identity to the locus of national principles, and this came to pass through the revival of the label of “indépendant,” previously current in the First Restoration and now used to designate those people who, supporting the Charte, did so within the stance of constitutional opposition to the ministers. This served, then, to distinguish them from others – such as the Doctrinaires – who promoted views that were later to be understood as somehow liberal, but did so at this time from within the ministerial ranks. This change seems to have taken effect during the summer of 1817.104 Usage, as might be expected, remained subject to development, and those on the Left might also answer to the labels of libéral or constitutionnel; the former suggested the more extreme position. Constant, in his private correspondence about politics, seems to have used the term libéral exclusively105 and so to have reserved indépendant and constitutionnel for public consumption. 104 Achille de Vaulabelle, Histoire des deux Restaurations (Paris, 1874), 5:421–2; and Bertier de Sauvigny, La Restauration (Paris, 1955), 145. Duvergier de Hauranne offers a somewhat different account and one that places talk of the political label in 1816; see Histoire du gouvernement parlementaire en France, 3:520–1. 105 Benjamin Constant et Goyet de la Sarthe: Correspondance, 1818–1822, ed. E. Harpaz (Genève, 1973), 75, 300, 440, 726.

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made for opposition For Constant, credited by his opponent Charles Loyson with being the creator of the identity indépendant, the use of the term was a sort of battle cry that served to underline the freedom of those so described from dependency on either the ministers or the counter-opposition of the ultra-royalists. Its inheritance of a label borne by those who, in 1815, had wished to proclaim their independence of both Bonaparte and the Bourbons had a certain logic to it. The complaint of a modern historian, such as de Sauvigny, that the bearers were hanging out false colours and feared to reveal their true intent – whether Bonapartist or neo-Jacobin – will not do as a description of Constant’s own position, although it probably captures the truth about some of the company that he kept. The first major piece of writing in which Constant presented the identity of independence was his pamphlet written for the election of 1817. Those so denominated, he said, had under the republic cared more for liberty than for the republic and under the monarchy were unready to settle that monarchy upon the debris of their freedoms. Their fondness for royalty was based upon its constitutionality and not, he had no need to add, on memories of Bourbon absolutism. Now that he had a focus for his approval, Constant was less ready to condemn without reserve, and here he went so far as to grant that the three parties whose presence he now recognized were all friends of the Charte. In light of the ferocity previously directed at the ultras, this must reflect a concern not to rule out making common cause with others who opposed the ministers. For the ministers themselves, there was a report card that refused to condone lois d’exception but that held out the prospect of firm support for the appropriate measures. This was not, it seems, to be either abject obedience or systematic opposition. Most significant, though, was the claim that the independents were the very voice of the immense majority and the totality of those who were reasonable. At this point, the ever-present currents that so often threatened to transform one of Constant’s opinions into its opposite became apparent. Having just granted a sort of legitimacy to three political formations called parties, he then suggested that his own loyalties were fixed upon a higher plane, for he offered the doubt as to whether “one could call the immense majority of the French a party.” The ministerial paper that chose to criticize his pamphlet at some length remained still quite mild in tone. Perhaps the writer, like others, was confused by Constant’s curious ambivalence.106 The notion of a special status for the political organization of the constitutional Left was not the invention of anyone in the Restoration in that it simply recaptured the presumption of the most extreme revolutionaries to 106 Constant, “Des élections prochaines” [Sept. 1817], in Laboulaye, 2:309–46 at 315, 330; “Sur les indépendans,” Moniteur universel, no. 259 (16 Sept. 1817).

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speak for all. Genuine as Constant was in his rejection of revolutionary populism and talk of a general will, he was evidently prepared, at one blow, to consign both other elements of opposition and the government itself to the status of interests that were marginal to the march of the nation. The sentiment provided a rationale for a mode of behaviour whereby political discourse might be conducted, in the marvellous phrase, par la fenêtre. Despite the tiny electorate, unrepresentative deputies, and a narrow political agenda, the politics of the Restoration might then be carried on, by some participants, through addressing primarily those outside the chamber. Once again, Constant had played a significant role in the business of trying to make sense of political conflict, and once again his efforts stopped short and, indeed, reversed themselves in remarkable fashion. Only when electoral results suggested that his principles were strong in the country did Constant deem it a sound strategy to appeal beyond the chamber in support of the claim that his associates were more than one party among others. One thus finds him using this argument up until 1820, by which time the gains by the Left had come to an end. At times, it was no more than a mild reminder that he presumed to speak for those who, in the quality of their principles and the size of their following, were underestimated by the appellation “party.” Again, in 1829, when the government’s unpopularity in the country had become quite evident, Constant seemed to allude to the same proposition when he allowed that to call the opposed groups in the chamber the two parties was how people spoke, but it seemed to be an inexact way of putting it. As always with such fleeting observations, he may have been thinking not just of the dignity of the cause for which he spoke, but also of the relative insignificance of his opponents.107 On less auspicious occasions, he might be content with calling the Left the “parti national” or with denigrating his opponents as a faction and anti-national in their tendency. Finding any parties at all could be a problem, as some descended to something less honourable and others soared above. Similar to his different use of party labels in his correspondence, Constant’s letters to the faithful Goyet refer both to his friends and his enemies, within the 107 Constant, “D’une assertion de M. Bailleul … ,” La Minerve 1, [no. 4] (Feb. 1818): 165–9 at 167; Constant, “Des élections, du ministère, de l’esprit public et du parti libéral en France,” ibid., 4, [no. 1] (1818): 14–22 at 21; Constant, “Session des chambres,” ibid., 4, [no. 8] (Dec. 1818): 379–84 at 380; and Constant, “Des aveux échappés aux ennemis de la loi des élections,” in ibid., 8, [no. 12] (1819–20): 529– 43 at 529. These passages may also be located in Constant, Recueil d’articles: Le Mercure, La Minerve, 1:347, 584, 632; 2:1133. For the later comment, see Constant, Recueil d’articles, 1829–1830, ed. E. Harpaz (Paris, 1992), 20, from Le Courrier français, 7 Aug. 1829.

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chambers, as parties. If his respect for competition through political parties remained very imperfect, he had, at least, largely put aside the vulgar habit of using the terms “party” and “faction” indiscriminately. Constant had not taken long to find his place in French political life; it would be in opposition and, within that role, a course of opposition that aimed at taming the excesses of the ministers rather than at gaining office for himself. In light of past rebuffs, that decision seems to have been sensible. Almost two years before his election to the chamber in 1819, Constant was one of the leaders of the indépendants who sometimes met at his residence in rue d’Anjou, faubourg Saint-Honoré. His lengthy apprenticeship had given him a considerable stock of political ideas, and his long-time contention that the realms of theory and practice were continuous and mutually supportive lent confidence to his opinions when at last he came to be elected. But it would not be an easy matter to discover new political ideas in the repertoire of concepts and prejudices that he would carry into the 1820s. Those who upbraided him for his promiscuity, especially political, would scarcely be in a position to realize that he had long held to certain views, even though the circumstances for airing them and the causes in which they were enlisted might change. With a role that did not alter, from his first election to the end of his life, his changes of front – at least until the crisis of 1829–30 – came to be but minor ones, as he rethought the merits of partial renewal of the lower chamber and the like. Still sounding authoritative on important constitutional questions, Constant had ceased to write long treatises. The times changed as well, and the bitterness of divisions, exacerbated first by the electoral law of 1820 and then by the mood of the reign of Charles X, discouraged the sort of constitutional treatise that had been in fashion early in the Restoration. Possibly the erstwhile teachers of good political manners had come to despair of finding receptive readers beyond the number who already shared their preferences. The most interesting of his writings for purposes of an understanding of his views on party and opposition was never published and has been recovered with a portion of the manuscript missing. In this essay, he contemplated the place of the “parti constitutionnel” at the outset of what was to be a rightwing government supported by an electoral law designed to keep it in power. He described the party with which he identified as firm and predictable in its principles and as one taking its inspiration directly from the nation rather than from leaders. With quite unusual candour, he admitted a shortcoming in the party: it did not offer to the nation or to the government what might be expected from an “opposition,” for it did not present itself as poised to replace those ministers that it opposed. Or that seems, at least to be the message, for the text breaks off at the crucial juncture. Also present was a careful exposition of the stable party lines of Britain and the way in which the Whigs,

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for instance, readily coalesced around powerful families such as the Devonshires and the Bedfords. In France, by contrast, individuals functioned alone, without the benefit of the pre-existing association formed by such families, and so at best their coming together was fleeting and devoid of the solid support available across the Channel. The tone here is almost wistful, without any of that conventional fantasy about the incompatibility of the French character and political concert, a mild version of which he had once expressed. The two sets of comments, just recorded, were also complementary, for Constant wrote of how the great political families of Britain would, depending on their political fortunes, replace one another in office or in opposition. Furthermore, the absence in France of this situation appears here as a sign of immaturity. Apparently, one should expect in a mature system the existence of such private bodies corresponding to “combinaisons politiques.”108 Just below the surface of this discussion of these respectable families being called to office or dismissed was the factor about which writers of the Left were habitually silent. Of course, it was natural for those in opposition to covet office. But in Restoration France, where the prerogative of choosing ministers had yet to receive a serious challenge, there was little expectation that men such as Constant would ever be welcomed to the council chamber. The high-minded independents who served the people without prospect of gain were surely making the best of a difficult situation. Only faced with the most serious provocation would supporters of the Charte finally conclude that the choice of ministers might have to be dictated by the votes of the lower house of the legislature. Like Chateaubriand, who had to discard his most promising work on the subject, Constant seems to have offered his most intriguing thoughts on opposition and party to himself alone. These were the years during which Constant pursued opposition steadily, for want of any alternative, but with a moderation that serves in retrospect as the proudest monument in his public life. He did not become even unofficially leader of the opposition, in a nation that recognized no such office, for he was only a leader in the sense of serving as spokesman for others less gifted than he. His genuine commitment to individual independence, combined, one supposes, with the number of cross-purposes that attended his projects, made him odd man out in many political schemes. Too able to follow, he was yet too subtle, too mercurial, and too attached to his own conceptions to be a satisfactory leader. This surely accounts for the distance between Constant and both his journalistic colleagues and his political ones. Consequently, he 108 Anne Hofmann, “Un inédit politique de Benjamin Constant: De la Charte constitutionnelle, telle que le ministère de 1820 l’a faite,” Annales Benjamin Constant 17 (1995): 97–138 at 112–15.

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was sometimes embarrassed by the positions taken by his associates in the revived Mercure de France, then a pillar of liberal doctrine, and he sometimes tried to deny any connection with that paper; later, he appears to have had similar disagreements with colleagues on the Minerve, on which he was the best writer but one frustrated by his colleagues’ lack of subtlety. In the hope of avoiding rule yet more arbitrary, his preferred strategy was to be more accommodating to the government than they. His priorities thus dictated taking the ultra-royalists as the most dangerous enemy while showing some restraint in opposing those men in power. In the counsels of the Left, both before and after his election for Sarthe, he began by being perceived as too radical, but his long-term reputation with those who joined him on the far left of the chamber was that of a moderate.109 Only about a year after his involvement in shaping an alliance of several different left-leaning elements into the non-party of indépendants, Constant was to be found saying that he spoke for no party but for himself alone.110 The great popularity that Constant eventually gained with the youth of Paris owed much, of course, to his powers as a speaker and as a writer, to which was added no doubt the fascination of his raffish reputation. His mordant wit probably, however, contributed to his leaving the impression of being more negative than he really was, while he was less adept at expressing positive sentiments. Too often, then, his qualified support for the ministers or diminished opposition to them could be measured only by the intensity of rebukes directed at the ultras. Any public figure whose praise comes expressed in faint damns is a prime candidate to be misunderstood. A biographer once wrote that Constant was not a good party man. This neglects, however, the fact that he was effective when he chose, in 1829, to act as a sort of central figure of the Left and that his reputation for unclubbability is probably the result of his shunning some of the extremes of less judicious colleagues. In practical matters, he thus embraced ties that his political theory treated so gingerly. Perhaps Constant’s best insights into political diversity and the need for a balance of forces had to do with the absolute need for a press independent of the government of the day. Here the relation to parties was, at best, implied, and he seems never to have made that explicit appeal to prudence – familiar in British argument since the reign of Anne – that noted how any group, once in opposition, would 109 I have benefited greatly from Hartman’s careful spelling out of this pattern. See her “Liberalism of Benjamin Constant,” fols 279, 302, 326–7, 333. 110 Constant, “Session de 1817 à 1818,” in Cours de politique constitutionnelle, ed. Pagès, 311–55 at 336. Essentially the same text appeared in the original Annales de la session de 1817 à 1818. Constant’s three annual reports on the legislative sessions from 1816 to 1819 do not appear in Laboulaye and are thus less well known than their merits warrant.

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wish for a free press in order to defend itself. His journalism of the period when he was poised to enter the Chambre des députés reflects his miscellaneous, never systematically argued, collection of objections to parties and their spirit. Included was their tendency to attack individuals rather than principles and their encouraging a brilliant struggle rather than practical results obtained quietly, as well as their propensity to undermine and negate those principles that they espoused.111 Amidst this chaos of assertion and very elliptical argument, the occasional indication of a more considered view comes as a surprise. Of this sort was the article, already cited, from early in the life of the Mercure. It offered a tentative connection between parties and freedom; later refinements on the brief observation made it clear that parties were inherent parts of representative institutions but also, importantly, that such a constitution confined their excesses even as it was responsible for their existence. Beginning with the idea that the effort to eradicate factions might take freedom with them, Constant’s thoughts had indeed matured into a more complex formulation, though but an isolated paragraph in a sea of polemic.112 Nevertheless, it marks the high point of his sympathetic interest in the institution, although subsequent literature on Constant has paid little attention to such thoughts.113 Gone too, however, were the very negative sentiments of his days as a pure theorist. Participation in those rudiments of organization as came into existence for 111 Constant, “Des chambres” 5, Mercure de France 1 (1 Feb. 1817): 203–15 at 212; and Constant, “Des chambres” 7, ibid., 1 (15 Feb. 1817): 301–19 at 305, both to be found as well in Constant, Recueil d’articles: Le Mercure, 76, 109. To follow Constant’s journalism and that of his collaborators, an essential source is E. Harpaz, L’École libérale sous la Restauration: Le“Mercure” et la“Minerve,” 1817–1820 (Genève, 1968), “répertoire des collaborateurs,” 367–402. 112 See the article as cited in note 72 above. The more developed version comes in Constant, Annales de la session de 1817 à 1818, 102–3. The only significant difference between this and the one in Pagès’s edition of 1837 is that the latter reflects the editing out of references to Constant’s connection with the Mercure. As late as 1820, these references remained unchanged; see Constant, Collection complète, pt 7, 163. 113 But see Hans L. Rudloff, “Die Enstehung des theorie der parlementarischen Regierung,” Zeitschrift für die gesamte Staatswissenschaft 62 (1906): 597–631, where Constant’s views on constitutional conflict are placed in the setting of those contemporaries who shared an interest in the issue. Another study from the same source examines Constant on opposition but makes no mention of party. See A.M. Dolmatowsky, “Der Parliamentarismus in der Lehre Benjamin Constants,” ibid., 63 (1907): 581–626. The work that best focuses upon party, with a view to later German developments, is Lothar Gall, Benjamin Constant: Seine politische Ideenwelt und der deutsche Vormarz (Wiesbaden, 1963), 283–94, 401–2.

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the fighting of elections and other matters of strategy may have reconciled Constant to the more open forms of constitutional conflict. If he never came to deliver lessons on the merits of party, his public vocabulary had come to associate competing parties with liberty. It was a connection made too rarely in French thought. Only in moments of frustration did he revert to the aspersion that the ultras were a mere faction or the boast that his associates represented something greater than a party. In conciliatory moods he even, a trifle facetiously, wished for the ultras a future as Tories and thus as full contributors to constitutional rule. More gravely, in keeping with the growing tensions that accompanied the resurgence of the Right, he would argue that the ultras did appear as a party but one that was variously described as attempting to insinuate itself into the ministry and thus to capture it or as the emanation of a clandestine force hostile both to the monarchy and the nation. This double-edged charge left scope both to assail the ministers for fostering an unadmitted alliance with the Right (including the sinister forces supportive of the king’s brother and the Jesuits) and to object to the policy of the bascule by which ministers sought to place themselves above party connections.114 His linking of the Right with religious extremism was part of the talk about what came to be known as the “gouvernement occulte” by that clandestine body of the religious Right called the Congrégation. Such discourse began around 1820 and continued throughout the decade. Amidst the numerous complaints about the bascule, not even Constant’s most relentless critics seem to have recalled that, back in 1796, he had seen some merit in the strategy. Against the range of condemned practices, there emerged Constant’s notions of parliamentary propriety. He associated himself frankly with “opposition,” but one that was proportioned to public opinion and the constraints of the Charte and so not systematic. However, as party legislation and procedures that were discriminatory towards opposition members increased, Constant came to see most measures as undeserving of support. It was only, however, when confronting the government of Polignac that Constant came to endorse systematic opposition in order to drive the ministers from power. A number of remarks made in debate leave no doubt that Constant deemed a normal arrangement to be one in which – as he had visualized in his pamphlet on responsibility – there were two parties and one was synonymous with the ministers. This ruled out the bascule, and Constant remained unhappy as 114 La Renommée, prospectus, 2 (probably circulated with first number of 15 June 1819]); Constant, “Des chambres” 1, Mercure (1 April 1817): 28–32 at 31 (and in Constant, Recueil d’articles: Le Mercure, 1:13); AP 28 (23 May 1820): 58–60; and ibid., 31 (14 May 1821): 418 (also in Constant, Discours, 1:354–60, 521, where the speech of 14 May is incorrectly dated the 13th).

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well with the way in which electoral manipulation had by 1820 created a firm ministerial majority. The British precedents that fuelled his expectations did not, however, warrant treating the opposition as the inheritors of office. Constant knew all too well that opinion in France would see this as trenching upon the royal prerogative, so he contented himself with depicting his associates as driven only by a sense of duty and content just to correct the ways of the incumbents. This made all the more credible his diagnosis of the office-hungry ultra-royalists as unconfined by constitutional inhibition. When the ministers did, again in accord with Constant’s understanding of the norm, have a firm majority, the implacable oppositionist was left complaining that the prerogatives belonging to the majority did not include breaking the rules.115 To support his contentions, Constant often appealed to British procedures, sometimes on the very general grounds that British ministers were not afraid to share power with a party and refused to stoop to petty subterfuges. At a more technical level, he hoped that France might adopt the British practice of having a member who accepted office submit himself again to the electorate and, to cite but one more example, that the French might understand a concept of responsibility that extended as far as the advisers who had recommended ministers to the king. Constant greeted Serre’s attempt to bring in parliamentary procedures on British lines with some enthusiasm, although he could not endorse all of the proposed reforms. For example, the notion of limiting written speeches was close to his heart, for his experience of Westminster had led him to see the absurdity of a supposed debate that consisted of inflexible prepared treatises. Such views, indeed, had attracted respectful objections from another figure of the Left.116 Constant was anxious, however, not to change the manner of nominating membership of so-called commissions – committees, drawn from the bureaux into which the chambers were divided117 – whose job it was to scrutinize legislation in detail and then to report back to the full chamber. Assignment to membership had been done alphabetically or by lot, and Serre had wished to move to choice by the chamber as a whole. Constant’s objection was because he thought that 115 AP 30 (6 April 1821): 607–12 at 609; ibid. (14 May 1821), 414–21 at 418 (Constant, Discours, 1:453, 521); Le Courrier français, 23 April 1821, 12 March 1823, in Constant, Recueil d’articles, 1820–1824, ed. E. Harpaz (Genève, 1981), 135, 309. 116 [Nicolas-Joseph de Parent-Réal], Lettre à M. Benjamin de Constant sur l’obligation de improviser dans les assemblées législatives (Paris, 1815). 117 The French commission was the equivalent of the committees at Westminster, but the bureaux had no parallel in British parliamentary usage. See Eugène Pierre, Traité de droit politique, électorale et parlementaire (Paris, 1908), 860n. One is tempted to speculate that the recognition of organized parties might have rendered this sort of organization unnecessary.

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there was, as yet, too little room for fair play to ensure any places for the minority. His exact words speak volumes: “Unhappily, it is not yet in our character to pay homage to the wisdom of those whose opinion does not conform to our own.”118 What was significant, but not directly stated here, was that the British practices that had inspired Serre often depended upon a bedrock of common understandings that was simply not present in France. Nothing better than this illustrates Constant’s awareness of the relative immaturity of French political mores and the need for further experience. It is significant, too, that it was partisan feeling, relatively benign in the British context, that provoked Constant’s concerns about public life in France. This realization, but other factors as well, made for a noteworthy ambivalence in his attitude towards the British model. To say, as some have, that Constant stood out in the period for his devotion to British ways is to overlook more passionate admirers, many of them drawn from the ranks of those who had found in Britain a sanctuary from the Revolution, along with some of the Doctrinaires. Articulate champions of British politics were thicker on the ground than has hitherto been admitted. It is true, however, that Constant’s earliest writings in the Restoration were subject to the complaint that he constantly saw French affairs – as in his expectations of the reading public in France – through a British lens.119 Some such comments came, it would seem, from critics to the right of Constant. But the intensity of Constant’s commitment certainly did not grow; rather, a cooling trend seems to have gathered momentum in the 1820s, although the contrary continues to be affirmed.120 Room for disagreement arises because French thought in general, and especially that of the Left, came more and more to an appreciation that the political organization of both government and opposition needed to follow the British pattern. At the same time, Constant remained guarded in his commitment, probably even more than before. From all appearances, when the bulk of Constant’s political utterances had

118 Constant, “Des élections de 1818,” in Laboulaye, 2:359–94 at 391–2; Constant, “De la responsabilité des ministres … ,” Minerve, 13 Dec. 1819, 241–51 at 244 [in Constant, Recueil d’articles: Le Mercure, La Minerve, 2:1080–81]; Constant, “Session de 1817 à 1818,” in Cours de politique constitutionnelle, ed. Pagès, 325. 119 F. Cheron, Sur la liberté de la presse; réponse à un article inséré dans le Journal des débats … , et réflexions sur le brochure de M. Benjamin de Constant … (Paris, 1814), 49. 120 See Dennis Wood, Benjamin Constant: A Biography (London and New York, 1993), 231. There are also scholars who stress the British influence on Constant and, by offering no qualification, seem to exaggerate it. See Jean Mistler, “1767– 1967: Benjamin Constant, prophète du libéralisme,” Les Annales conferencia, n.s., 208 (Feb. 1968): 3–16 at 9.

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to be fitted to brief articles or to speeches in the chamber, he had become less of an admirer of the British constitution and his references to it grew more double edged. The tribute to Sir Samuel Romilly, delivered at the Paris Athenaeum in 1819, mixed respect for his subject and notice of the shortcomings of British politics. A later session in his “Cours sur la constitution anglais,” of which there seems to be no complete record, made much of the inapplicability to France of institutions that created liberty elsewhere. The liberal press, with obvious relief, congratulated him for his readiness to recant on an error that he had made previously. Both Constant’s journalism and his speeches reflect a tendency to balance the refrain about British freedom with appropriate qualifications as to corruption, growing inequality, and the movement of opposition and the civil politics of Parliament out of doors where harsher tones prevailed.121 Constant’s rhetorical capacity allowed him, at times, to deny the need for recourse to British precedents even as he wallowed in them. Such a feat of paralipsis comes, for instance, in a speech of 6 April 1821. Public figures of various persuasions might be nonplussed by hearing much of British liberty, but in particular, some of the unreconstructed republicans or Bonapartists, who usually voted with Constant, felt this way. A Bonapartist who had heard enough of this supposed infatuation went so far as to deny that Constant’s anglophilia left him any real concern for France and deprived him as well of any credentials as a liberal. A commentator suggests that, after the period of this criticism, Constant had less to say on the subject.122 Strongest of the objections to Constant’s dalliance with British assumptions regarding ministerial responsibility and opposition came from Bailleul, long ago his fellow tribune.123 At once a

121 Journal du commerce, no. 24 (24 Jan. 1819); Constant, “De L’Angleterre,” La Minerve 2 (6 May 1818): 42–50 at 49 (in Constant, Recueil d’articles: Le Mercure, La Minerve, 1:398); and Constant, “Recueil des discours prononcés au parlement … ,” La Minerve 7 (7 Aug. 1819): 6–13 at 8 (in Constant, Recueil d’articles: Le Mercure, La Minerve 2:899); and AP 48 (9 May 1826): 451–2. 122 Théodore Fadeville, Benjamin Constant jugé par ses actions, ses discours et ses écrits (Paris, 1824), iv, 47. On the theme of Constant as a cautious anglophile, see Henri Gougelot, L’Idée de liberté dans la pensée de Benjamin Constant (Melun, 1942), 64–73; he rightly dismisses the charge that Constant was other than discriminating in his attachment to British institutions. The same observation greeted the appearance of Laboulaye’s edition. See L. Wolowski, Mémoire sur le cours de politique constitutionnelle de Benjamin Constant … (Paris, 1862), 9. 123 J.-C. Bailleul, Sur les écrits de Mr. B. de Constant … ; quelques réflexions sur une opposition au ministère dans les chambres (Paris, [1817]), 110–14. Bailleul’s battle against an opposition went on for decades but with only incidental reference to Constant.

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supporter of the regime and firmly opposed to legislative tactics not endorsed by the Revolution, Bailleul was probably still, in the end, the most systematic critic and one of the fairer ones. Whether or not the nature of Constant’s political company inhibited his writing, it is quite clear that it put him, at times, in an awkward situation. Jaded and cynical as he may have been, Constant had, to all intents and purposes, made a genuine commitment to the effort to make government under the Charte a viable system. To endorse the proposition that he did more than any other to cause the parliamentary system to take root in France may, nevertheless, be pressing the evidence too hard.124 Certainly, one may say that his war against laws that favoured the government or allowed exceptional departures from due process sought to bring to public life a fairness calculated to reconcile all parties to the new institutions. His favourite jibe at the ultras was that they wished ill to those institutions, yet he cannot have been unaware that around him were men of the Left who themselves wished no good to the regime and who put little faith in parliamentary politics. Constant appears to have wished to avoid any public break from people such as Lafayette, Voyer d’Argenson, and Manuel, but neither did he seem to share their apparent readiness to experiment with conspiracy and violence. Before he became a deputy, he had already shown a marked inclination to temper his criticism of the government for fear of antagonizing anti-constitutional forces. To no small degree, Constant suffered for his supposed extremism, and that extended to his being prosecuted for alleged offences and being subject both to police surveillance and to other forms of harassment intended to thwart his political agenda. Sadly, this was not enough to secure him the entire trust of the Left, where, for some, his moderation spelled a readiness to temporize on matters and perhaps even to support, in secret, measures against which he had spoken. Prior to his first being elected to the chamber, Constant had distanced himself from La Société des Amis de la Liberté de la Presse as a body too radical for his taste. It shared, in fact, only a name with Chateaubriand’s later creation. In 1820 Lafayette had to give assurances to colleagues that Constant had not defected, and in 1824 relations were so bad that some deputies on the extreme Left regretted Constant’s re-election. The liberal comité directeur, charged with fighting the election of 1824, had sought to have Constant stand down in favour of Jacques-Antoine Manuel. Confident of election in Paris, Constant had apparently declined to do so. This

124 J. Lucas-Dubreton, The Restoration and the July Monarchy, trans. E.F. Buckley [1926] (New York, 1967), 43.

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created lasting tensions within the Left.125 Constant had been defeated in November 1822 and so was not a deputy when the liberals, in 1823, had quit the chamber in protest over Manuel’s expulsion. Perhaps this served to loosen certain bonds and strengthen the impression that Constant would have been serene about his colleague’s absence. Beyond all accidents of fate, however, there was an impression, too widespread to be readily dismissed, that Constant’s political stance was too timid. Modern scholars may, at times, have been so impressed by complaints of Constant’s contemporaries as to make the extraordinary claim that opposition from the Left had expressed itself primarily through plots.126 This does less than justice to Constant’s effort to depict the road of legality as the only honourable one. Yet is it possible that, for all his qualified endorsement even of parliamentary opposition, Constant had flirted with something stronger? He was, in his private life, a compulsive gambler and may have taken chances in other realms. There were documents that linked him, though loosely, to the conspiracy in Saumur in 1822. Interestingly, a source that expresses doubt that Constant was in any way involved still does not cite the recollections of Laffitte, the banker, who is ambiguous as to whether the great names associated with the conspiracy had consented to be named in that capacity. Admirers of Constant have been accused before of passing over the events of this period too lightly.127 If Constant did have some passing involvement in these matters – lending his 125 Sylvia Neely, Lafayette and the Liberal Ideal, 1814–1824 (Carbondale, 1991), 146, 250, 356. For the trouble with Manuel, told of course from his point of view, see E. Bonnal, Manuel et son temps: Étude sur l’opposition parlementaire sous la Restauration (Paris, 1877), 411–15. 126 For evidence of Constant’s perceived conservatism, see Jean Guillon, “Benjamin Constant et Paul-Louis Courier,” and Pierre Bonnoure, “Benjamin Constant et Pierre-Jean de Béranger,” both in Pierre Cordey and Jean-Luc Seylaz, eds, Benjamin Constant: Actes du congrès Benjamin Constant (Genève, 1968), 75–7, 79–83; Norman King, “Constant et Béranger: Un monarchiste s’explique à un républicain,” Annales Benjamin Constant 5 (1985): 95–103. The unwarranted claim that opposition in the Restoration was extra-parliamentary occurs in Jean Defrasne, L’Antiparlementarisme en France (Paris, 1990), 19. 127 Villèle, Mémoires et correspondance (Paris, 1889), 3:214, mentions, in a letter of November 1822, a compromising set of documents. Alan B. Spitzer exonerates Constant in his Old Hatreds and Young Hopes: The French Carbonari against the Bourbon Restoration (Cambridge, MA,1971), 188; cf. Jacques Laffitte, Mémoires, ed. Paul Duchon (Paris, 1932), 133–4. A work that overlooked the events of 1821–22 is Victor Glachant, Benjamin Constant sous l’oeil du guet (Paris, 1906), a position criticized in Edmond Biré, Écrivains et soldats (Paris, 1907), 1:49–67.

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name perhaps to those conspirators who had presumed to include him in a provisional government – his normal attachment to constitutional methods remained real, for the Charte seemingly continued to embody his preferred form of politics. The difficult days when the ministers of Charles X sought to govern against the expressed wishes both of the electorate and of a majority of the lower chamber placed a strain on Constant’s principles, but never did he take greater pains to explain his various positions. When opponents cited his writings of 1814 that had seemed to discourage extreme forms of opposition, such as refusing to approve the budget or declaring want of confidence in the ministers, he patiently explained how all other avenues had already been explored. Indeed, he had already sought to bring an accusation against the ministers through the crimes of treason and misuse of funds as specified in the Charte, and 1830 found him denying still that he wished to impose ministers on the king. Instead, he called for a dissolution to break the deadlock.128 His demands that the ministers cease to govern through makeshift support and present a fixed majority amounted to saying that the conditions that he had long ago associated with a British understanding of political responsibility must now prevail. Constant saw clearly that it made little sense to insist on ministerial solidarity and disarray on the part of the rest of the chamber. Hence, his call for a coherent ministerial system was linked to his admitting that opposition must now be directed at displacing the ministers. Not three weeks before, he had denied counselling systematic opposition.129 In fact, Constant had long dithered on the question, and in comments as early as the Principes of 1815, he had contemplated an opposition that might employ all constitutional means to deprive the ministers of their majority. The return to a stronger conception of opposition brought with it Constant’s insistence that the fall of Villèle and of Martignac had both been odd, since those who had opposed them had not been the beneficiaries. He had thus seen very clearly that those who conducted such an opposition as he now finally sought should expect to be called upon to replace the ministers once their defeat had been secured. Here Constant was actually recommending the British system, although his text, disingenuously, denies

128 “Un Dernier mot sur le refus du budget,” Le Courrier français, 5 Jan. 1830; untitled (22 March 1830), in Constant, Receuil d’articles, 1829–30, 135–6, 275–6; AP 54 (14 June 1828): 725–6; 61 (15 March 1830): 580. 129 Constant, “De la terreur qu’inspire … d’un possibilité d’une dissolution …,” Le Courrier français, 29 April 1829, in Constant, Recueil d’articles, 1825–29, ed. Harpaz (Paris, 1992), 345–46; cf. Constant, “Prévisions réalisées,” Le Courrier français (10 April 1829), in ibid., 307.

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it.130 Neither was the insistence that a new set of ministers should be distanced from the old in principles and personnel a new one for Constant; it seems to have been his view in a debate of January 1821 and was already explicit in writings of 1819.131 It was assuredly not reservations about the place of opposition that lent an elusive quality to Constant’s remarks; rather, it was those parties that gave life to opposition and with whose role he had never, it seems, been comfortable. When a later writer, the acknowledged leader of the constitutional opposition of the day, cited Constant as an authority on opposition, it was not difficult just to take for granted the presence of that clash of rival parties that was always for him so problematic.132 The greatest impediment to positing two close-knit parties, one of which should assume power when the other lost it, was bringing unity to the heirs apparent. The strains of that time prior to the July Revolution had made themselves felt in the ranks of the Left. Constant wavered between the strategies of declaring that the liberals’ “union solide” resonated with national opinion and admitting that individuals differed considerably in their degree of impatience or resignation. In the latter mode, he was wont to acclaim a respect for differences that made a sort of military discipline – a clear allusion to French perception of British practice – unsuited to France. This was the case for a sensitivity to the individualism of French public men, to their resistance to being herded, and to the demands of conscience. It was with this attitude that he greeted the announcement by Voyer d’Argenson and another that they were resigning. Constant said that he understood their frustration in dealing with the government but that he drew different conclusions.133 These were familiar themes in the period. Hemmed in by his commitments to conscience and individual independence, Constant sounded almost comical in his efforts to address the real problems of securing a common front on the part of his colleagues of the 130 Le Temps, 19 Dec. 1829, in Constant, Recueil d’articles, 1829–30, 68–9. For the place of this assumption in constitutional theory, see Louis Michon, Le Gouvernement parlementaire sous la Restauration (Paris, 1905), 266. 131 Duvergier de Hauranne, Histoire, 6:127–8; and La Renommée 1 (15 June 1819). 132 See, for example, C.H. Odilon Barrot, “Opposition,” in [William Duckett, ed.], Dictionnaire de la conversation et de la lecture (Paris, 1837), 41:75–7. 133 Constant, “Comment le ministère aura-t-il la majorité dans la chambre des députés?” Le Courrier français, 27 Jan. 1829; Constant, “Du centre droit, du centre gauche … ” (5 Feb. 1829), and Constant, untitled (26 Feb. 1829), in Constant, Recueil d’articles, 1825–1829, 214–21 at 216, 231–2, 267–71; Le Courrier français, 7 Aug. 1829, in Recueil d’articles, 1829–30, 17–21; and Le Courrier français, 14 July 1829, in Recueil d’articles, 1825–1829, 456.

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Left. Especially vexing was the self-serving of Eusèbe Salverte, recently elected deputy from Paris, and his apparent unreadiness to confine himself to the strategies followed by the bulk of the liberals. An article of 26 April 1829 gingerly suggested that a deputy might well observe silence rather than press for motions that had no immediate chance of attracting support. Only with the help of contemporary comment does it become clear that the occasion for this gentlest of rebukes was Salverte’s insistence on proceeding with a motion to punish the late ministers when the others sought measures of administrative reform. This source also calls attention to the antics of Charles Dupin, another loose cannon with whom Constant had to contend.134 The same constraints, dictating simultaneously a show of strength and moderation, applied to the presence of the rudimentary electoral organization that had come into being. It had been especially conspicuous in the election of 1827 but had been present as early as 1818. Speaking against insinuations about the presence of a sinister “comité directeur,” the left-wing equivalent of the Congrégation, Constant sought to make it sound entirely inoffensive because grounded in the duty of citizens to make knowledgeable choices and in their right to consort with one another. In so arguing, he was in accord with the sentiments of most public men and the practice of all parties.135 So, if Constant remained uneasy with the concept of parliamentary parties, he had learned, it seems, a good deal about ensuring a presence outside the legislature. The credit accorded Constant for having great influence in the process of domesticating parliamentary politics must measure his success in dissuading others from recourse to cruder measures. It cannot be taken to mean that his vision excelled all others in enthusiasm or in clarity of definition. The cold romantic, the liberal without optimism, was too complex a person for that, and such a character, and worse, had been awarded to him by contemporaries.136 Looking for an uncomplicated and forthright endorsement of that conflict according to rules that forms the essence of parliamentary government, one 134 Anon., Lettre explicative d’un électeur de Paris à quelques électeurs de département, sur les réunions, les seances, les discours et les votes des membres de la chambre des députés (Paris, 1829), 13. 135 AP 53 (29 March 1828): 184. Of the general histories, Vaulabelle’s is the most informative about the organization of politics; see his Histoire des deux Restorations, 5:422, 495–7. 136 See J.-B-T. L******, Quelques portraits politiques (Paris, 1823), 14–15. The author of this mordant portrait was surely one Leclère, a pamphleteer of the time. See 95n64 above. Leclère drew attention to Constant’s eloquence without vigour and found a trace of charlatanism in his performances. It must, however, be admitted that this was no friend to the Left.

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must turn one’s gaze elsewhere. Such an endorsement was present, for instance, in the reflections of an obscure public servant in Paris. Louis Hubert’s plea to tolerate all parties until they gave evidence of being subversive would probably have struck partisan sophisticates as naïve. By contrast, his case for party as an educative device and as a means of promoting civism and his effort to trace the theory by which parties could be understood were worthy of a larger public than they found.137 Much closer to Constant, one may cite the unqualified enthusiasm of young Auguste, baron de Staël, who endorsed his eminent mentor on ministerial responsibility but left out the ambiguities of the original. Staël’s other writings breathe an anglophile ethos that had no equivalent in Constant’s mild and equivocal allusions. Staël once traced the French aversion to regular political connections to vanity and ignorance, although he would probably have had to broaden his categories to capture the case of Constant. One need but compare Staël’s unstinting admiration of the House of Commons and the civility between political opponents that was to be found there to the paler impressions that Constant had recorded, as in his letter to Récamier. The extemporaneous speeches intrigued both of them, but whereas Constant’s laconic approval drew no firm conclusions, the younger traveller tied the point to the conditions for making representative government work.138 Less technical than Auguste in her analysis, but equally enthusiastic about party competition British-style, was his mother, whose posthumously published thoughts on the French Revolution include a fine chapter on liberty and public spirit in Britain. The firm connection that she made between party and liberty has echoes in Constant’s work, but nothing nearly so substantial and unequivocal is to be found.139 The reservations with which Constant approached the subject of concern here entailed an intellectual cost, for his occasional efforts to suggest a correlation between party conflict and freedom did not pause to explain what values – in terms of securing freedom, civic education, or whatever – might reside in the institution. Typical of a strong partisan who had resisted the placing of political union on any firm basis was Constant’s rebuke to Louis, vicomte de Bonald, who had deemed all opposition dangerous. Less than conclusive about his own position was Constant’s 137 Louis Hubert, Necessité des partis politiques sous un régime constitutionnel (Paris, 1817), 20, 40, 4. 138 Staël-Holstein, “De la responsabilité des ministres,” in Oeuvres divers de M. Le baron Auguste de Staël (Paris, 1829), 1:1–43; Staël-Holstein, Du renouvellement intégral de la chambre des députés (Paris, 1819), 32; the pamphlet is reprinted in the Oeuvres divers, 1:44–106; and Staël-Holstein, Lettres sur l’Angleterre (Paris, 1825), 371–2, 377. This latter is found as well as volume 3 of his Oeuvres divers. 139 Mme de Staël, Considérations sur les principaux événemens de la Révolution française (Paris, 1818), 3:211–45.

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calm observation that Bonald’s stand was inconsistent with some of his other public statements.140 One can admire the philosophical parsimony of the riposte while still hoping for more by way of self-revelation. Much of the fascination in Constant’s political ideas is surely related to their enigmatic quality. Had he been more ready to invest himself in his intellectual positions, less prone to an ironical evisceration of the ideas of others without fully spelling out his own, he, too, might have found a simple faith in parliamentary government or in revolutionary conspiracy. As it happened, Constant could summon up no confidence that those in office would play fair, so his tributes to constitutional rule were less robust than they would otherwise have been. Similarly, his genuine distaste for unconstitutional conspiracy still left him closely identified with others who were less discriminating in their political techniques. Inhabiting what space there was between these two commitments, he remains an endlessly elusive figure. On Constant’s death, in December 1830, the tribute of Le Constitutionnel was that he seemed to have been created for opposition. Amidst the fulsome language that accompanies the loss of such a figure, that comment seems just right.

140 Constant, Mélanges de littérature et de politique (Paris, 1829), 445, 449. The texts with which Constant took issue are to be found in Louis, vicomte de Bonald, “Pensées sur divers sujets,” in Oeuvres (Paris, 1817), 6:27–8, 79, 147.

6

Chateaubriand: The Literary Lion as Political Theorist

françois-rené, vicomte de chateaubriand (1768–1848), was for contemporaries France’s greatest living literary figure, and he has continued to this day to be the focus of massive scholarly attention. A French publication has marked the centenary of his being sacked from his ministerial post in 1824, and the hundred and thirtieth anniversary of his death was deemed worthy of space on the front page of the nation’s most prestigious newspaper.1 Since the politics of his time counted among his many concerns, his thoughts on this set of issues have attracted some of the interest that has attended both the Génie du Christianisme and his more literary works. The century and a half since his death, during which his political thought has enjoyed frequent if somewhat fleeting attention, has not yielded any firm consensus as to his importance as a political thinker. Unsurprisingly, this consideration has often been secondary to the undeniable importance of Chateaubriand the political actor, whether as peer of France, minister of state, member of the king’s council in exile at Ghent, foreign minister, or ambassador to four of the major courts of Europe. That career has been meticulously chronicled already,2 and other commentators have been left with the more elusive goal of trying to say what it all meant. It is understandable as well that the world has most wanted to fathom the workings of a remarkable literary imagination, a capacity not displayed to best advantage amidst the solemnities of constitutional debate. This focus on the man and his brilliant gifts has coloured interpretations of the political ideas, where the question most at issue has been 1 See Pierre H. Dubé and Ann Dubé, Bibliographie de la critique sur François-René de Chateaubriand, 1801–1986 (Paris, 1988); J. Dessaint, “Le Pot au lait de Chateaubriand,” Revue de Paris 4 (July–Aug. 1924): 181–93; Philippe de Saint-Robert, “Une pensée politique pour Chateaubriand, Le Monde 10, no. 421 (2 Aug. 1978). 2 Émmanuel Beau de Loménie, La Carrière politique de Chateaubriand de 1814 à 1830, 2 vols (Paris, 1929).

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whether Chateaubriand’s self-understanding – he depicts himself as devoted to the high plane of principle – can be reconciled with the record of words and deeds. The issue of the consistency of his thought, in a good number of accounts, claims pride of place over the detailed propositions. There has been almost complete agreement, even among those who endorse the consistency of his politics, that Chateaubriand was not an especially gifted theorist. His was not, then, an existence devoted to preserving intact some doctrinal formula. Unity, to the degree that it may be discovered, lies rather in a strongly felt patriotism combined with a firm commitment to what he held to be the path dictated by duty and honour. It is somewhat easier to trace the influence of these sentiments in foreign policy than in the tangled skein of domestic politics, but there, too, he can be seen to have adhered, in large measure, to the principles into which he had been born. The fact that this guiding light flickered in the gusts of a strong scepticism may be cited in favour of the character under examination. He was not given to embracing causes without some reservations, some arrière pensée, as his balanced assessment of both the Revolution and the Restoration attests. But he remained, by and large, true to his loyalties, and for him, a steadfastness in public causes was purchased, no doubt, at greater cost than for those who had never experienced his doubts. Joining this capacity to qualify his judgments was an awareness of the tendency of absolutes to erode under the pressure of changing circumstances. This has been described, at times, as opportunism. The term can fairly be applied here, however, only if one adds that this habit of mind was not employed in order to supply excuses for Chateaubriand’s feathering his nest. Quixotic to a fault, he subordinated material concerns to principle. The belief that the monarchy, and especially the elder branch of the Bourbons, might not reign forever was certainly one that Chateaubriand owned more than once. Yet such an insight did no more than to add a sense of tragedy to the doing of one’s duty. It was not self-interest as others understood it that moved the proud and poor aristocrat, but rather his honour.3 This surely accounts for the contrast between the rather petty vanity evident in Chateaubriand’s character 3 Among the analyses, in a vast literature, that have contributed to this conclusion are Henri Mazel, “L’Unité de vues politiques de Chateaubriand,” Mercure de France, n.s., 96 (March–April 1912): 883–6; Henri Sée, “Les Idées et tendances politiques de Chateaubriand,” Revue d’histoire littéraire de la France 32 (1925): 38–49; Bernard Chenot, “La Pensée politique de Chateaubriand,” Mercure de France 309 (Aug. 1950): 687–702; Pierre Clarac, “L’Unité de la pensée politique de Chateaubriand,” Revue des travaux de l’Académie des sciences morales et politiques 115 (Oct.–Dec. 1962): 46–60; and, with a less sympathetic emphasis, Victor Giraud, “La Carrière politique de Chateaubriand,” Revue des deux mondes, 13th ser., 44 (March–April 1928): 654–75.

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and the nobility of his readiness to sacrifice comfort to principle. Few public careers are so studded with moments of dramatic renunciation. He spurned the favour of Bonaparte and did not even care to proclaim the principle that moved him. In 1816 and again in 1824, Chateaubriand preferred the promptings of his conscience to office, and his pride produced the same result in 1828, when he refused to join the ministry except on his own terms. When the era ended in the July Revolution, there was Chateaubriand, in a series of grand gestures, prepared to mortgage his future in favour of a flawed cause that would, he thought, give meaning to his life. Two years later, his scruples equally rejected the proposal that he become head of a provisional government, intended to follow a proposed coup. Again, there is something characteristic in his scorn for a post that he described as “ministre plénipotentiare de nuit.”4 The attitude did not shield him from political trouble, but it embodied a dignity that usually accompanied his acts. The youth who went, without enthusiasm, to fight for the Bourbons and the aging statesman who renounced his place in the public realm in deference to his ties to a dynasty for which he had mixed feelings were the same. Here was a compelling tribute to some continuity of purpose and feeling, even if it was not exactly the stuff of pure principle and admitted of no theoretical statement. He was a busily unfaithful husband, and the records of his travels are littered with borrowed materials and unlikely details that make for a good story. In the words of an English admirer, “[T]here is a very considerable number of people who must be accounted congenitally uncapable [sic] of enduring the trammels of reality.” Chateaubriand was one of them. Still, the same author offers a tribute, with no superior in French writings, to the magnificence of Chateaubriand’s adherence to principle.5 the preceptor of constitutionalism? There is a bitterness that sometimes suffuses the recollections in the monumental autobiography that occupied Chateaubriand in his later years. Old men may indeed forget, but, in particular, they may also embellish. His recollections detail the deeds of a long life, and no false modesty intercedes to lighten the account. This was, after all, the man who was pleased to refer to that war in Spain that coincided with his serving as minister of foreign affairs as his Spanish war. However, this habit of self-praise was already present during 4 Quoted in Louis Martin-Chauffier, Chateaubriand, ou l’obsession de la pureté (Paris, 1943), 317. 5 W.S. Lilly, “Some Notes on Chateaubriand,” The Nineteenth Century and After 69 (Jan.–June 1911): 636–51 at 643, and 1054–72 at 1066.

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his most active years. Of his De la monarchie selon la Charte, he wrote, in 1827, that it had served to fix opinion about the nature of French government, and the next year found him saying that no one had as consistently and as often as himself sprung to the defence of the liberty that undergirded constitutional government.6 In retirement, he was to claim to have formulated the principles of representative government,7 that set of conventions, entailing certain relations between executive and legislature, that the French came generally to know after 1830 as parliamentary government. No student of the period of the Restoration can afford to assume that opinion about the form of government ever became fixed in the popular imagination or among the public men who competed for power. That, of course, was the problem that doomed the first experiment in replacing Bonaparte’s regime with something better. But, at least, the project did gain some formulations more influential than others, and here it would be imprudent, prior to examination, totally to dismiss Chateaubriand’s boast. Of that major work of September 1816 that presumed to join the fates of the monarchy and the Charter, more in due course. For the present, one must review what Chateaubriand is known to have thought about those institutions that Louis XVIII had bestowed in 1814. Here there are some difficulties, for whereas the trained intellect of a Constant tried to formulate the outlines of the sort of government that he deemed superior to the Napoleonic model, Chateaubriand offered no such theoretical riches. It has been argued, at least of his pamphlets of the First Restoration, that he was content to reject the views of his adversaries without subjecting his alternatives to the discipline of systematic statement.8 The same is apparent in the earlier effort to come to terms with his very ambivalent reactions to the French Revolution. This had come in Chateaubriand’s first major publication, the essay on revolutions. Even reading this puerile heap of learning through the protective screen of its author’s fond admission of its shortcomings, written thirty years later, the reader has little reason to see this as the product of a political philosopher in the making. Neither is the great 6 Chateaubriand, “De la monarchie selon la Charte” (preface to the edition of 1827), in Oeuvres complètes, ed. C.-A. Sainte-Beuve (Paris, n.d.), 7:159; and preface to the section “De la presse,” in ibid., 369. Yet more grandiloquent claims are sometimes attributed to 1828, a time when Chateaubriand saw himself as having saved constitutional government. See Georges Cattuai, “Intuitions et contradictions politiques de Chateaubriand,” Table ronde, no. 241 (Feb. 1968): 55–69 at 57. 7 Chateaubriand, Mémoires d’outre tombe [1849], ed. Maurice Levaillant and Georges Moulinier, Pléiade ed. (Paris, 1951), 2:8, 482. 8 Marcel Reinhardt, “Chateaubriand et la question constitutionnelle au début de la première Restauration … ,” Revue historique 201 (Jan.–March 1949): 72–8 at 73.

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writer that Chateaubriand was soon to become readily visible here. The want of system and the digressions that drained the argument of its coherence limit the occasions for finding great insight. There is, however, some evidence of an awareness of those British institutions that were destined to form the government of the Restoration. Two chapters supply the bulk of the material – those treating the two parties in the Senate of Carthage and the allegedly similar confrontation in the British Parliament. An older and wiser Chateaubriand acknowledged shortcomings, yet refused to repudiate the work.9 Absent in the parallel was any marked effort to relate the political divisions to common causes or to compare them in their effects. The closest that the text came to such an effort are the comments compressed into a single paragraph. There one learned that the parties, in both cases, were ably led by members of the best families and that their strife was especially evident in time of war. Most tellingly, he added that a nation so divided gained that advantage whereby the rivals scrutinized each other carefully and so had good reason to condemn the failings of their opponents. This was equated, rather unconvincingly, with leading the parties to embrace virtue, if only from personal interest.10 There was little here to make the case for governments that were conducted in terms of party competition, and comment on British parties seemed ill-informed. Following the comments that had been directed primarily at Carthage was a chapter devoted to the minority and the majority in the British Parliament, called by Chateaubriand “cette courte histoire de l’opposition.”11 This reveals, if nothing else, that it was the institution of opposition, the minority, or what elsewhere he called the “country party,” that was worthy of note. Yet nowhere were the implications spelled out, and he offered no evidence of the presence of a Carthaginian equivalent. It is clear that the young author knew about the basic mechanisms of British parliamentary life, including the details of the NorthFox coalition of 1782 and its outcome, and there was a further chapter, as inconclusive as the rest, related to Fox and Pitt. There remained a half-hearted effort to sustain the parallel between the parties of Carthage and Britain, but the absence of any detail regarding the latter deprived this ambition of any 9 Chateaubriand, Essai sur les révolutions; Génie du christianisme, ed. Maurice Regard, Pléiade ed. (Paris, 1978), 146n. An unauthorized English translation of 1815 is called An Historical, Political and Moral Essay on Revolutions, Ancient and Modern (London, n.d.); it was incomplete, although one is not inclined to treat that as a defect. See also Georges Benrekassa, “Chateaubriand et le refus du politique: Le moment de l’Essai sur les révolutions,” Romanisme: Revue du dix-neuvième siècle 51 (1986): 5–16 at 7. 10 Chateaubriand, Essai sur les révolutions, 144. 11 Ibid., 152.

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substance. Why, then, he bothered to introduce this theme of parties as a means of understanding the great revolution in France is less than clear. An initial attempt to equate Athenian parties within the populace with the factions of the revolutionary Convention had come to naught and, thirty years later, earned its parent’s expression of bewilderment.12 The invoking of the parties of Carthage and Britain was a further effort to comment obliquely on the disasters caused by revolutionary parties in France, and emphasis upon the elite nature of the combatants in Carthage and Britain was, no doubt, a condemnation of the very different composition of the factions within the Convention and other such bodies. If the exotic examples were poorly explained, it was likely because it was the state of his homeland that moved the exile. The salience of French parties and the negative conclusions that Chateaubriand drew from their existence served, in fact, to lead him to a very negative view about politically relevant associations in general, and this was his most telling comment on the subject. Writing in a later chapter on the French clergy, Chateaubriand delivered himself of the revealing judgment that “[i]t is not in the nature of the human heart to associate to do good; there lies the great danger of clubs and fraternities. Men place their hatreds in the common stock, and almost never their love.”13 The context was the revolutionary commonplace of the dangers that resided in esprit de corps, but there can be little doubt that parties, at least those of the Revolution, shared in the indictment. In this connection, it may be recalled that the one public service apparently rendered by the opposed parties of Britain and Carthage was but an outgrowth of their mutual hostility. Clearly, the French nation was not indebted to this book for any subsequent command of the principles of British government. Chateaubriand’s Génie du Christianisme, when it appeared in 1802, did much more for his reputation, but it contributed nothing to the cause of political understanding, narrowly understood. In fact, the reassuringly conventional sentiments of this very successful work included a firm focus upon Roman Catholicism that contrasted with an earlier flirtation with the thought that Protestantism offered more affinity with liberty. Also accompanying the exile’s return was a stout insistence that Montesquieu’s discovery of the British constitution in the woods of Germany did less than justice to French institutions that had the same origin. In the same mood was the insistence, typical of royalist political thought, that held French freedom of thought under the old monarchy to be the equal of that condition under any other known government. There was thus no warrant to dwell much on British forms, 12 Ibid., 71n. 13 Ibid., 416.

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although the argument did mention in passing that corresponding to British public spirit was French national honour. Later, he was to make much of that factor. The only fleeting reference to representative government was for purposes of crediting its discovery to the church universal.14 Nor did Chateaubriand’s occasional journalism in the Mercure de France during the years 1800–07 add greatly to his record as a student of government. Of the essays that are known to be his, there is but one that deals directly with politics – and with British politics at that. This brief survey, of the summer of 1801, did, certainly, make a good deal of the apparent ignorance of the French public about things British, and the author presented himself as situated to instruct them. None of the respects in which the writer illustrated the superiority of his understanding is, in any way, remarkable. As before, in the work on revolution, Chateaubriand avoided the names of Whig and Tory, a sensible choice for the time, and identified parties in Parliament in functional terms as those of the ministers and the opposition. He added too, a third, which he denominated the “Anglicans” around Wilberforce, but the analysis makes it quite plain that this group was more usefully viewed as a faction within Pitt’s following that got its own way on some occasions by threatening to go over to the other side. In this respect, it remains unclear whether the ignorant French public was greatly mistaken in its assumption that the contending parties were two in number, for the examples render uncertain the understanding of “party.” A further erroneous opinion, apparently abroad in France, was of the consequence of a British parliamentary Opposition. Here Chateaubriand was able to display his superior knowledge by recounting the low fortunes of the Opposition in Fox’s declining years.15 Compared to Fiévée’s report to Bonaparte on the Opposition in Britain, one that appeared in the same periodical a year later, this was not inspired analysis, and it suggests that the first consul would supply himself with a better source of intelligence. There can be no doubt that the ambition to be a constitutional schoolmaster had already stirred, although the teacher had still, it would seem, much to learn. Another sign of the presumption to pronounce authoritatively on political matters surfaces in Chateaubriand’s long-delayed response to the death of the duc d’Enghien three years before, the incident that had set him irrevocably at odds with Bonaparte. It came by way of an allusion to current events in a review that purported to deal with Alexandre de Laborde’s travels 14 Chateaubriand, Essai … Génie du christianisme, 1070, 840, 842, 1076. 15 Chateaubriand, “Recollections of England,” in Recollections of Italy and England and America, with Essays on Various Subjects in Morals and Literature (Philadelphia, 1816), 65–78 at 73 –4. The original was “De l’Angleterre et des Anglais,” Mercure de France 5, no. 26 (1 messidor IX) [5 July 1801]): 103–15.

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in Spain. There was an undeniable grandeur in the haughty threat that it was in vain that Nero (i.e., Bonaparte) prospered, for Tacitus was already in the Empire.16 There can be no reason to doubt the identity here of Tacitus, but as a modern scholar has pointed out, people sometimes wondered how seriously to take the fine words.17 Quite apart from the personal failings that left Chateaubriand a moral crusader of diminished credibility may have been an awareness that the stylist in him sought to dramatize his views so much that form seemed to prevail over substance. We may also reflect that the real Tacitus did no harm to Nero, except with posterity, and that the Nero of the nineteenth century chose not to take offence. Nevertheless, the nemesis called Tacitus did have his day, and that day was 30 March 1814, when an armistice was being negotiated that would lead to the tyrant’s abdication and the First Restoration of the Bourbon dynasty. De Buonaparte, des Bourbons, et de la necessité de se railler à nos princes légitimes …, Chateaubriand’s ponderously entitled pamphlet of April 1814, was later described by Louis XVIII, its beneficiary, as worth the support of one hundred thousand troops. No constitutional subtleties troubled the readers of this rhetorical tour de force. The point was simply to set out the crimes of Bonaparte’s regime, among which the murder of d’Enghien figured prominently, and thus to document the case for abandoning the usurper. The hopes that royalists had once invested in Bonaparte were excused by reference to the expectation that he might prove to be a Monck who would restore the monarchy as had his seventeenth-century predecessor. The glory that had surrounded French arms could here be embraced but only through reducing the stature of the emperor. Thus, Chateaubriand depicted, with a due measure of pathos, the meanness that lay behind an alleged kindness to the poor and the horror attending the survival of the commandant of an army left dead in Russia. Stripped of that capacity for magnanimity that marked a true sovereign, Bonaparte then stood revealed as having taken for himself credit for the deeds of the French people on whose greatness he had been parasitic. And with the usurper rejected, where could the nation turn to find a replacement? “The King,” Chateaubriand intoned dramatically.18 16 Review of Voyage pittoresque et historique de l’Europe, Mercure de France 29 (July 1807): 7–21 at 7. 17 Michel Peltier, “Chateaubriand, l’aristocrate des libertés,” Écrits de Paris: Revue des questions actuelles, Oct. 1979, 85–90 at 85. 18 Chateaubriand, “De Buonaparte et des Bourbons,” in Mélanges de politique (Paris, 1816), 1–81 at 33, 44, 42, 52. This was the brief title by which the work was thereafter known. I have used this collection for all of the early pamphlets not readily available in the original form. The texts are also all to be found in Chateaubriand, Oeuvres complètes, vol. 7.

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There were words of praise, too, for Louis XVIII, but more for the tradition of kingship that resided in his person. If strong feelings, allied to a facile pen, could dignify the situation of a dynasty ignominiously swept back in the entourage of traditional enemies, Chateaubriand had struck his blow for legitimacy and the aspirations of the royalists. Dismissed by some as the product of personal animosity, this reservation could still not cheat Chateaubriand of the credit for raising high the white flag of royalism and, above all, for doing it at the opportune moment. It would be a time when the charge of one’s being a girouette would be much heard and Chateaubriand would also be tarred with that brush.19 He had, to be sure, coquetted with the great man, with the two never quite agreeing to terms. This was what had doubtless prompted Bonaparte once to quip that buying Chateaubriand was not the problem; it was settling on the price. This contributed, in some quarters, to the suspicion that sufficient recognition of his merit would have dissolved the latter’s opposition. However, the promptness and force of this firm proclamation of loyalty left him well armoured against the slur. To this point, Chateaubriand had offered no constitutional doctrine, for his message had been but to accept the king with whatever political arrangements came with him. Very different was the situation late in 1814 with the Charte and a functioning representative government now in place. Now, in his Réflexions politiques, he undertook to justify the new institutions and to address simultaneously the discontents both, on the one hand, of Bonapartists and republicans, whose world had apparently collapsed, and, on the other, of those royalists who sought a return to the old order. The situation of the first constituency had been put by Lazare Carnot in a memorandum addressed to the king, and it was Chateaubriand’s task to answer this impertinence while at the same time offering some reassurance to the defeated cause. Carnot had skilfully presented a vision of national unity vitiated by the prospect of vengeance by the émigrés and a white terror meant to banish from public life any who were infected with liberal ideas. More aggressively, he also expressed the revolutionary commonplace that the death of Louis XVI was the fault, not of those directly implicated in the deed, but of his supposed protectors, who, declining to do their duty, had deserted his cause and their country. This was enough to ensure enormous notoriety for this document, although one has difficulty in accepting the claim that six hundred thousand copies had been disseminated as a clandestine publication.20 The 19 Various attacks on Chateaubriand are in Le Nain jaune réfugié 3, [no. 5] (1816): 113; 3, [no. 8]: 192; 4, [no. 12] (1816): 266–72; and 4, [no. 23] (1816): 532ff. See, too, D.H. Carnahan, “The Spirit of the Nain jaune: Its Attitude towards Chateaubriand and Romanticism,” PMLA 43 (1928): 844–62. 20 Carnot, Mémoire adressé au roi, en juillet 1814, 4th ed. (Paris, 1815), v.

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argument struck at the Achilles heel of a revolutionary royalism torn between an internal opposition and external warfare in conjunction with foreign powers. It effectively held that the royalist presumption that the true nation had gone abroad with the emigration was odd indeed and that those who had fought beside the nation’s enemies were in no position to designate themselves as the very identity of France. Committed to countering Carnot’s argument, Chateaubriand was also to be the bearer of reassurances that the new order was compatible with all interests and that there was no return to the world as it had been prior to 1789. Although Chateaubriand was necessarily unforgiving of the regicides and unable to accept Carnot’s version of responsibility for the death of Louis XVI, it was still the intent of his argument to enjoin peace and quiet and to insist that, terrible as the work of revolution had been, the bulk of the population was innocent of the atrocities. This produced a document that was intended to be at once powerful and moderate. The king himself, we are told, had taken a direct interest in its writing, and, in a remarkably conciliatory tone, it embodied his aspiration to be king of all of France. The author would never repudiate this work, for he was too concerned with his own consistency for that, but he should have had reason to deem the pamphlet far too conciliatory to the Left.21 Almost obscured by the urgent need to secure loyalty from those who identified with the revolutionary and imperial past was the difficult business of reconciling royalists to a form of rule that seemed to be part of a heritage that they abhorred. Here the strategy dictated reverting to earlier thoughts, expressed in the Génie du Christianisme, on the measure in which the best of British institutions were, in reality, part of the distant past as well, including that of France. While the caricature of crusty old aristocrats, nostalgic for feudalism and the droit du signeur, can be overdone, there were surely many among those dispossessed by the Revolution who would just as soon have dispensed with Louis XVIII’s constitution.22 Any survey of political opinions that relied upon printed sources would probably underestimate the strength of traditional prejudices that were so out of place in the neighbourhood of Louis XVIII, the restored Bourbon. Those who had 21 See J.-A. Bédé, “Chateaubriand as a Constitutionalist and Political Strategist” in Richard Switzer, ed., Chateaubriand. Proceedings of the Commemoration of the Bicentenary of the Birth of Chateaubriand (Genève, 1970), 29–43 at 39. Bédé here promised a further look at Chateaubriand’s work in the context of the problem of finding experienced office-holders who were loyal to the new regime. However, this further analysis seems never to have appeared. 22 For a useful survey of these views, see Daniel Kemp Kelly, “Ultra-Royalism: Ideology and Politics under the Bourbon Restoration” (PhD thesis, University of Wisconsin, Madison, 1964), fols 65–94.

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truly learned nothing and forgotten nothing were custodians of a cause that resisted sophisticated statement of the sort that could fare well in competition with the theories of constitutionalism now made fashionable. One standard-bearer who wrote a substantial book was the comte de SaintRoman, whose extreme views found the source of modern error in, of all places, the work of Montesquieu. A serial publication of the same stripe – one that appeared from 1818 to 1821 – was the Argus politique of the reactionary marquis de Chabannes.23 It was this considerable element of royalist opinion that in 1814 had already begun to pursue the paradoxical course of questioning the royal will in the name of a royal prerogative more ample than the one that Louis XVIII wished to enjoy. Still, it seems, inexpert in matters constitutional, Chateaubriand accepted here the guidance of RoyerCollard, a figure whose ideas will be examined in due course. In Chateaubriand’s text, the future Doctrinaire’s characteristic disavowal of elements crucial to the logic of the British model shows through.24 The mode of government that emerged was calculated to be as accommodating as possible to the mores of the French nation, for here was a cause that might gain support at the ideological extremes. The most significant claims of this sort were compressed into chapter 14 which treated the respective roles of the ministers and the activity of opposition.25 Purportedly written in order to soothe the sensibilities of constitutionnels, those on the Left whose background was the written constitutions of the Revolution, the considerations adduced here would go some small distance, too, to speak to those royalists with reservations about the new order. The first major point, then, was to reassure those who rested in the revolutionary tradition, ever suspicious of executive power. It was thus essential to insist that fear of this influence was exaggerated and that the means of reining in the ministers was available. The ministers were responsible, Chateaubriand boldly claimed, leaving to a subsequent edition the admission that the law governing responsibility had still to be framed and that the situation remained unsatisfactory.26

23 Alexis-Jacques de Serre, comte de Saint-Roman, Refutation de la doctrine de Montesquieu sur la balance de pouvoirs, et aperçus divers sur plusiers questions de droit public (Paris, 1816); and Jean- Frédéric, marquis de Chabannes, L’Argus politique. Typical of the latter is issue no. 10 (3 Nov. 1818), which combines an attack on the Charte and one on Chateaubriand as a defender of it. 24 As argued convincingly in Beau de Loménie, Carrière politique, 1:29–30. 25 Chateaubriand, Réflexions politiques sur quelques écrits du jour et sur les intérêts de tous les Français (Paris, 1814), 72–8. 26 Chateaubriand, Mélanges de politique, 187n.

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Another sensitive issue, broached here but not resolved, was the notorious absence of solidarity within the ministry. In this case, the king had yet to follow the logic of the system promulgated in his name. Understandably, Chateaubriand could do little more than to record dissatisfaction on these grounds without proposing any specific remedy save for a general observation on how the French sought immediate gratification on matters on which the British had required centuries to make headway. Most relevant of the arguments intended to disarm criticism of the Charte was the reminder that ministers of weak abilities would be driven from office by opinion and that those of bad faith would never be able to hoodwink an enlightened nation. The effort to banish concerns about arbitrary measures, incapacity, or intrigue thus managed, in a paragraph or two, to sweep to one side some of the most difficult constitutional issues that would dominate the next sixteen years. Especially breathtaking was the confident air in which he told his readers that a minister, chosen by the king, would necessarily retreat from office before public displeasure. He had not, to be sure, said “ministers,” for ministerial solidarity did not yet exist, but neglected here was the obvious problem that the wishes of the sovereign were not just relevant, but paramount. Had it all been as simple as this account had it, the politics of the two Restorations would have been much different. An account of the resources available for purposes of ensuring good behaviour by the ministers necessarily led to the topic of opposition. Here the fine balance imposed by existing prejudices dictated resolute defence of the effectiveness of the institution to all good purposes, combined with a judicious salving of national pride. The Bonapartist era had seen some rather sophisticated writings on the inappropriateness to France of British modes of parliamentary opposition, as in the work of Fiévée. It was the business of Chateaubriand to endorse that activity called “opposition” even as he discountenanced any notion that the body known in Britain as the Opposition could be transplanted to France. Not only in France was there lacking any such alliance of rich and powerful families as sustained a British Opposition, but the very practice of opposition had necessarily to be different in France. One of those criticisms of the new political order that Chateaubriand had cited earlier was the concern that existing opposition in France was no match for the resources of the ministers. Having first attempted to render these ministers as unthreatening as possible, his argument now turned to supplying opposition with additional support. The treasure on which Chateaubriand drew was nothing less than the character of the French nation as presented, especially, in the political theory of the old order. Then, and in royalist literature since that time, no factor was more emphasized than the measure in which the most effective counterforce to government was the power of public opinion. We have already

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encountered the boast that it was a nation without elective representatives that most effectively harnessed this power in the people, a resource that somehow was unavailable to regimes where the people were actually involved in their own governance.27 It had been an argument to which the name of Montesquieu had been associated, a point made succinctly in Chateaubriand’s maxim that “l’honneur n’est que la plus belle des opinions.”28 Chateaubriand had long held that France in pre-revolutionary days had been a land with remarkable freedom of expression. The role performed by opinion in the tradition to which he appealed was to sing those songs and to frame those witty sayings that would cause unpopular ministers to quit the public stage as their royal master learned the mood of his people. Translated into the working of the regime under the Charte, the extraordinary influence exercised by opinion meant that a well-turned speech in the legislature might resonate beyond its walls to a far greater extent than would be the case in Britain. Similarly, those within the same walls could more readily be summoned to a good cause than could the bespoken votes of members of the Parliament at Westminster. What made orators potentially so effective was the very independent nature of the French character, one resistant to direction from outside and, indeed, more amenable to the promptings of a sense of what was right than to the ties of interest. Oblivious to the fact that he had just spun a political theory from the materials of national character, Chateaubriand insisted that the mysteries associated with this factor escaped the trammels of all theories; in particular, they rendered the behaviour of individuals unpredictable. The blandishments and the rewards in the gift of ministers were thus no assurance that they would be able to bring to their side even deputies who had promised their support. Most deputies as here portrayed were content to follow their own lights, their honour and their conscience. With these potent words, Chateaubriand offered both the prospect of effective checks on power and the certainty that the process would take a form that was characteristically French. It was a character presented as generous in its tendencies, relatively disinterested in pecuniary matters, and firmly principled. In its preferences, Chateaubriand’s admirers might readily see something of him. Each issue introduced into a chamber peopled with individuals of this sort could be expected to call forth a different division. This, he said, meant that the specific differences of opinion apparent in the chamber reflected nothing more than the ideas and principles of individuals, and it was not possible to identify a continuing set of people as constituting the opposition. That opposition grew, declined, and grew again with no relation to any ties of party. One would 27 See page 66 above. 28 Chateaubriand, Réflexions politiques, 108.

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have thought, he continued, that there were no ministers present,29 so oblivious were discussants to the origin as opposed to the substance (“la loi même”) of the measure under examination. Set in the context of remarks about the benign role of ministerial influence, this tribute to the French character meant that it was opposition and not the ministry that was the proper source of concern.30 Here was the classic statement of a reassuring account of French political mores that served to strengthen the nation against any enthusiastic efforts to emulate British partisanship. Ministerial spokesmen would trade on such phrases after their author had occasion to move away from the claim. What Royer-Collard had almost certainly contributed to the text was the insistence on the inapplicability to French circumstances of the supposedly disciplined troops that faced one another across the House of Commons. The whippers-in then coming more into use in Britain of that day would doubtless have been surprised to learn that theirs was the happy lot of commanding the services of public men unmoved by any consideration but party loyalty. The truth of the British end of the contrast was, however, of less importance than the significance of this impressive early statement that British mores could not and should not be imported into the conduct of business in the French chambers. It was a statement the more effective because of the evident moderation of the language employed. In an argument carefully tailored to the cause of being as inoffensive as possible, there was none of that bitter anglophobia that figured in some excursions into the subject of the political culture of Britain. Frenchmen of all persuasions might have been expected to respond well to the judgment that their folkways posed severe limits on the degree to which a foreign way of government might be foisted upon them. In order to speak simultaneously to different sets of concerns, the argument tested the limits of logic in telling the one-time followers of Bonaparte that the Chamber of Peers embodied a spirit of liberty, not of privilege, and joined a republican dimension to that of aristocracy. For the royalists, there was the reminder that France’s continental situation necessarily demanded a stronger executive power than that known to modern Britain. By contrast, erstwhile republicans had heard much more about the prospect of popular resistance to misrule. One might think that the circumstances of a restoration that offered the resurgent royalists a regime very unlike the one lost to revolution should have dictated a more ample regard for their sensibilities. Yet only in his 29 The ministers who were present would, at this time, have attended but for purposes of defending legislation. Until Villèle’s long ministry, it was not the regular practice of ministers to spend much time in the chambers. 30 Chateaubriand, Réflexions politiques, 77.

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chapter 16 did Chateaubriand recognize such a constituency. The answer lies probably in the simple fact that the personnel of the existing Chambre des députés and a considerable portion of the peers consisted of the very same men who had served Bonaparte. The people who had reinvented legislative opposition, on the issue of liberty of the press, in October 1814, had previously known no such luxury as open protest. Probably no one knew whether they would be, in the main, exhilarated by the new experience or would long for the glories of the Empire. Nevertheless, the evident response to Carnot’s pronunciamento, attesting to the unwillingness of his sort of people to be thrust aside, made it imperative that this sector of opinion be the target of the effort at accommodation. Nor had it been, from all appearances, émigré churchmen or royalists who had raised the concerns about insufficient controls on the ministers, but veterans of Bonaparte’s understanding of a guided form of government. Awareness of the inadequacies of the new institutions had arisen, naturally enough, among those charged with making them work, and there is ample evidence that the experiment began in rather halting fashion.31 Publishing his work in the third month of representative government under the Restoration, Chateaubriand was necessarily early in the field in his treatment of those aspects of British practice that required adaption to the local moeurs. This alone lent importance to this text, for it shares with the more famous De Buonaparte the virtue of timeliness. In the event, the argument about the honour and independent consciences of the French became the mainstay of opinion of neither the Right nor the Left but flourished best, at least for the immediate future, in the company of the apologists for those administrations that sought to rule without themselves being a true party. Here again one learned that the Charte discouraged the fixed party lines favoured by the British, and the alternative spelled out conduct more in accord with a national character given to individualism, generosity of spirit, and the promptings of conviction and conscience.32 Appropriately enough, this language came easily, at least for a time, to those Doctrinaires of the centre who claimed the privilege of office along with the liberty to follow their own drummer for the issues of the day. The fullest statement of the case would probably be that 31 See speeches of Jacques Faget de Baure and Albin de L’Horme in AP 13 (22 Nov. 1814): 659–60; and 14 (8 Dec. 1814): 88–9. On the defects of government at this time, see Duvergier de Hauranne, Histoire du gouvernement parlementaire en France, 2:206–9, 231; and Michon, Le Gouvernement parlementaire sous la Restauration, 53. 32 “Des ministres,” in [J.A.M. d’Auréville and I. Gautier du Var], Annales historiques des sessions du corps legislative 4 (1818): 104–20 at 107, 109, 113; and CharlesLouis Lesur, Annuaire historique universel de l’année 1818 (Paris, 1819), 88–9, 191.

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offered by the popular Camille Jordan in his La Session de 1817, and his friend Royer-Collard too was associated with such views. Little wonder that the Journal général, organ of Royer-Collard, expressed its approval of the Réflexions politiques in a review spread over three issues.33 Of course, that is evidently where Chateaubriand’s inspiration had come from, and so what would come to be the Doctrinaire teaching on independence was already abroad under the name of Chateaubriand before being claimed by its true author. Friends of the British model, such as Fiévée and Vaublanc, would later have to struggle against the powerful argument that a formed opposition and an organized support of the administration were somehow antithetical to the French character. If there was a difference between this classic invocation of the French spirit and the less inspired efforts that would follow, it would seem that the epigoni of the next few years would stress a political process in which battle lines were fluid and the ministers might govern through a series of ad hoc, shifting majorities. The accent, then, was on the dynamics of an assembly that discouraged effective opposition. The softer tones of Chateaubriand’s argument had emphasized the attractive side of a sturdy independence that was guided by one’s honour and one’s conscience, although the result would be the same. There is no reason, however, to assume that the full implications of the argument were apparent, even to the author and his advisers, at the time of writing. In keeping with the effort to be conciliatory, there was little by way of hostile reaction and the larger issues about the future of government and opposition were not, it seems, much taken up. One defender of Carnot did, however, disapprove of Chateaubriand’s supposed enchantment with British government and made it clear that he could find no virtue in the presence of competing parties in a state.34 He was evidently unaware that Chateaubriand was trying to still rather encourage party conflict and that he held, as yet, no brief for such activity. The author of a more respectful reply expressed surprise that there had not been more by way of comment about the political literature of the time.35 This, however, mirrors a lack of understanding of Chateaubriand’s strategy, which was to 33 See the review by ‘Auger,’ Journal général de France, no. 92 (1 Dec. 1814); no. 94 (3 Dec. 1814); no. 96 (5 Dec. 1814). I discuss this review on page 402 below, in connection with the thought of the Doctrinaires. 34 On the response to the Réflexions politiques, see Albert Cassagne, La Vie politique de François de Chateaubriand: I Consulat, Empire, première Restauration (Paris, 1911), 449. A chaotic criticism from the left is Henri, comte de Franclieu, Considérations critiques et politiques sur les Réflexions politiques de M. de Chateaubriand (Paris, n.d.), 19–20, 86, where he seems to argue for but one party. 35 Anon., Réflexions sur les Réflexions de M. de Chateaubriand (Paris, 1815), 14.

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answer Carnot while offering as little provocation as possible and to calm fears of the vengeful royalists around Bonald and the Journal royal without encouraging their aims. The hard words being uttered on the political extremes were not going to find a forum with an author who had every reason not to want these people to speak for themselves. Far better the euphemistic language of reconciliation, although this too failed to please, especially those royalists such as Bonald who thought, perhaps with some reason, that the Réflexions politiques came much too close to betraying the cause of royalism. Here, from the opposite extreme, was an echo of the insinuations of Le Nain jaune to the effect that Chateaubriand had compromised himself already with Bonaparte and so was less than credible in his commitment. Probably more effective, for devoid of all effort to be clever, was the cry of pain, written from Spain during the Hundred Days, from an émigré of 1791 who laments the apostasy of one in whom he had placed his confidence.36 Not all of the subsequent comment on our publicist’s output was even about the Réflexions politiques; one Charles-Joseph Bail waited until the Hundred Days before publishing an attack on the De Buonaparte. Apparently, he had been unable, in June 1814, to find a publisher for it. The rapidly changing fortunes of the time left this Bonapartist destitute, and Chateaubriand himself displayed true magnanimity in trying to improve the poor man’s lot.37 It was sensible, no doubt, that an effort to paper over the seemingly unbridgeable gulf that separated the two sides of the Revolution should have been optimistic, even a bit Pollyanna-like, in coming to terms with the enormity of the problem. It was left for time and good intentions to improve the system; for the present, the priority was to defend what the king had already granted and to discourage any hope of realizing the dreams of more extreme solutions. The answer to Carnot had contained more substance than did some simplistic pleas for royalist and revolutionary to be reconciled, but it surely suffered from the difficulties under which a defensive posture must labour. Among the loose ends was an inability to relate the manifest division of France into two “opinions” to the prescription for a legislative process into which the participants supposedly entered without prior loyalties. Even the one reference, in chapter

36 ‘Émigré de 91,’ Réflexions picardes, ou réponse aux Réflexions politiques de M. Chateaubriand (n.p., [1815]), 58. 37 Chateaubriand, Correspondance générale (1815–1820), ed. Pierre Riberette (Paris, 1982), 3:361. Helpful in the main on the response to Chateaubriand’s work, Beau de Loménie treats this critic as though he were addressing the later work. See his Carrière politique, 1:31.

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19,38 to the well-known political parties of Britain was ambiguous. It remained unclear whether they were a remnant of the tensions that had accompanied the restoration of the Stuart line or testimony of the success of the ultimate healing. No doubt, the achievement in the Réflexions politiques was the best possible at the time, and certainly it pleased the king. In different circumstances, Chateaubriand would have to express himself rather differently, and Louis XVIII would be much less pleased. Absent from Chateaubriand’s later litany of self-praise would be the perfectly defensible claim that he had done much to colour opinion on all sides of the most vital constitutional issue of the period. This was a versatility that even the “enchanter” would necessarily shrink from owning, for it challenged that consistency of sentiment that was his proudest demand upon posterity. Chateaubriand’s Rapport sur l’état de la France was his next political work, written at Ghent, where he had retreated as part of the court in exile. This time the tone was different, for it is not in the nature of those driven from their homeland to sound magnanimous. The ostensible point of the pamphlet was to emphasize that, in accepting Bonaparte once more, the French had not done well for themselves. There was also an echo of the emphasis of November 1814, for Chateaubriand cited as a virtue of the exiled king that he had made no distinction between those innocent of past crimes and those who were repentant. A good many royalists would have agreed, with emphasis, but without the complacency that marks this comment. Hidden amidst a recitation of the failures of Bonaparte’s new government and the merits of the previous one was some recognition that, given a second chance, Louis XVIII must do better. Reverting to the list of constitutional improvements mentioned in the Réflexions, Chateaubriand was careful to credit the king with having already been moving in the right direction when his efforts had been cut short. Thus he praised him for possessing the right intentions in relation to the hereditary peerage, the unification of the ministry, and encouragement of the arrangement whereby the ministers, in accord with the spirit of the Charte, might be seated in the legislative chambers. More candidly, addressing a wider public in a later edition of the Réflexions, he referred to these as his own proposals.39 Thus is explained the evasive conditionality of verbs that had been intended to suggest that Louis XVIII would have seen to all those urgent institutional reforms that Chateaubriand was now recommending for the future. In the same spirit of making the best of a bad situation, the closing comments gave credit to the king’s Charte for providing a model for Bonaparte’s Acte 38 Chateaubriand, Réflexions politiques, 121. 39 Chateaubriand, “Rapport sur l’état de la France” (12 May 1815), in Mélanges de politique, 295–362 at 334; and Chateaubriand, “Réflexions politiques,” in ibid., 185n.

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additionnel, while simultaneously affirming that the latter document offered sufficient freedom to France to allow for its ousting of the usurper.40 In the event, the victorious allies after Waterloo spared the nation that risk. p ol i ti c a l th eo ry o f the ultr as There would be no further major political statement until September 1816, but before then much would happen to alter Chateaubriand’s notions about what sort of government France had and ought to have. The Second Restoration took place, and the whole problem of reconciling a deeply divided nation again presented itself. This time, the issue around which the exchange between Carnot and Chateaubriand had turned was exacerbated by the injuries and humiliations caused by two more rapid reversals of condition, to which was joined the fragility of a regime that had surrendered so tamely in March 1815. The royalists who returned with their king were, less than ever, in a mood to forgive and forget, and in the summer of 1815 they received a name. In a document whose title reminds us of Chateaubriand’s advice to the king, Joseph Fouché, making himself as usual indispensable to the rulers of France, wrote of the danger posed by what he called “les opinions ultrà-royalistes.” The label was set within an argument that expounded on the dangers posed by the presence within France of “deux nations” and the consequent further danger of a struggle among divergent political opinions, parties and factions.41 Here was the language, already with a history in the discourse of the Revolution, that figures as different as Montlosier and Guizot would adopt as their own. After the fashion of most party denominations, that of “ultra” began in a spirit of hostility and was not readily owned by those so described. The king was no longer prepared to work with a lower house chosen under a different regime, and in the ensuing elections of August, the people called ultras formed a substantial majority in the famous “chambre introuvable.” Talleyrand and Fouché soon ceased to be indispensable, but the king’s choice of new ministers yielded a ministry more moderate than was the Chambre des députés. We have already seen, in Vaublanc’s career as minister, the strains that ensued. The session that began in the autumn of 1815 saw increased room for tension between those who associated their hostility to all that was revolutionary with an ardent royalism and the person of the king, who sought a less exclusive political shibboleth. At some point early in the Second Restoration, royalists of the ultra variety had begun to murmur, though most often their frustration took the form of proclaiming 40 Chateaubriand, “Rapport sur l’état de France,” in Mélanges de politique, 348–53. 41 Joseph Fouché, duc d’Otrante, Rapport au Roi, sur la situation de la France … le 15 aoüt 1815 (Paris, 1815), 50, 19, 26.

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loyalty to the king and suggesting that he needed to be served by ministers who better reflected the sympathies of the elected chamber. Since he had already foregone the services of Talleyrand’s ministry in deference to the leanings of the newly elected chamber, there were hopes that he might do the same again. Ultra-royalism found its motto in the phrase first uttered in debate, in the middle of January 1816, by the comte de Béthisy. It was much repeated thereafter, and served as the title of an anonymous pamphlet that appeared following the prorogation of the chambers: Vive le roi quand même. Present was a constitutional issue far more complex than anything that might be captured by the witticism. The fact that ministers might serve without becoming members of either chamber perpetuated practice that was rooted in pre-revolutionary times and in the Revolution itself. In the former period, there had been no legislature with which to interact, and at the height of the Revolution, there had been no strong executive power to prevent ministers from being the creatures of whatever assembly existed. With royal absolutism and government by the assembly both things of the past, established practices were of little assistance. What were the proper relations among the sovereign, the ministers, and the two chambers? To supply an answer would be the work of the entire period of the Restoration, and more. Chateaubriand had occasion to comment upon such matters only once during the session of 1815–16. The opportunity came during the debate in the peers on a new electoral law, and his words lent support to that mode of conducting business that was to be found in the House of Commons and not in the uneasy relations between ministers and the elected chamber that marked the current session in France. Contrary both to the expectations of the Charte and to the content of the law as it finally emerged in 1817, Chateaubriand argued that the true sense of representative government dictated subjecting the entire chamber to re-election at the same time, as opposed to that partial renewal described earlier. In support of his contention, he offered a number of considerations, not all of them fitting well together. The uniting theme, such as it was, suggested that an annual influx of new deputies could only serve to disturb the smooth working of a chamber. From the perspective of the ministers, it would threaten to unravel those understandings that secured the agreement between ministers and the majority needed to secure passage of the king’s legislation. Implicit in the claim was the assumption that one might indeed expect to see a firm majority – such as that elected in August 1815 – the members of which retained their cohesion throughout the life of the chamber or, at least, over a series of different issues. Or, again, altering the perspective, that same partial renewal might appear to hand over to the executive an annual supply of inexperienced legislators who would easily be divided or seduced by ministerial intrigue. In such an event, effective opposition to the ministerial programme would

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be sacrificed. Relevant, presumably, in either set of circumstances was the probability that partial renewal would deny to the king the use of his power of dissolution, which, if used, would come to constitute a sort of coup d’état. Though not condescending to explain himself more fully on the matter, Chateaubriand must have been thinking of how the dissolution would catch deputies at different stages in their terms and so would act more to the disadvantage of some than to that of others. Entertaining one supposed merit of partial renewal – the possibility of its contributing to sloughing off those deputies whose extreme views were unwelcome – he countered with the predictable objection that the process might carry off the wrong people. In any event, he concluded, the independence of the French character precluded trying to dictate such outcomes.42 The whole discussion had been embarrassed by the uncertainty about the status of the proposal for partial renewal, since the Charte had specified such a procedure, whereas a royal ordinance of July 1815 had dictated the use of the alternative. Chateaubriand grandly swept away bickering about the constitutional competence of the chambers by pointing out that when the Opposition in Britain sought electoral reform, the response was not to deny it the power so to argue; rather, the government simply used its majority to vote down the proposed reform. Given the notorious absence of a ministerial majority in the lower chamber, one must suppose that this was intended to be a peculiarly cruel cut. All in all, the performance seemed to display some disposition to alter the position of his Réflexions politiques, for there was little evidence here of a form of representative government especially tailored to French mores. Further to chart the emergence of those views that came to full flower in Chateaubriand’s political classic De la monarchie selon la Charte, it is useful to consider the state of constitutional thought in France in that year of 1816. Known for climactic reasons as the year without a summer, it was a bumper year for political theory. A measure of the traffic in this literature is the confession of fatigue by a reviewer who complained that, in a period of two months, he had been required to read twelve hundred pages on the subject of representative government.43 Not included in the total would have been a relatively slight effort, a literal pamphlet of but seventy-eight pages, that had appeared, seemingly without prior announcement in the press, at the end of 1815. Public notice of this work would come only in January 1816. This was the creation of the baron de Vitrolles (1774–1854), a figure better known to the inner circles of court and ministry than to the reading public. The pamphlet was published anonymously, and authorship was first credited to the 42 Chateaubriand, “Opinion sur le projet de loi relatif aux élections,” in Mélanges de politique, 543–64; this is also to be found in AP 17 (3 April 1816): 88–91. 43 Malte-Brun in La Quotidienne, no. 355 (22 Dec. 1816).

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marquis de Lally-Tollendal, probably because he was an anglophile known to have views on constitutional matters and one who would attempt, more than once, to introduce some coherence into the confused issue of ministerial responsibility. Vitrolles, by contrast, was most familiar in the role of a political manager, and Louis XVIII owed his crown, in no small measure, to the energy and resolve that Vitrolles had shown in 1814. Also a soldier, Vitrolles had fought for the Bourbons before joining the emigration of the 1790s, and he fought for them again in 1815 when he led the resistance to Bonaparte in the Midi during the Hundred Days. This adventure had cost him his freedom, and it was, apparently, the arch-intriguer Fouché who, for his own purposes, intervened to spare Vitrolles his life. A connection with Fouché was not calculated to enhance one’s reputation in most circles, but even more interestingly, Vitrolles was a long-time crony and man of business of the comte d’Artois, the future Charles X. This made him, in the language introduced by Fouché, an ultra. Readers of the pamphlet Du ministère dans le gouvernement représentatif might have been forgiven for not seeing in it the hand of Vitrolles, for representative government was not the consuming passion of those in the coterie of the king’s brother and successor. Nor were Vitrolles’s own experiences with the political system of the First Restoration such as to commend such institutions to him, since he had enjoyed the singular distinction of filling the post of secretary of state, the office that served to focus the activity of ministers who, in the main, enjoyed bilateral relations with their sovereign. This was a mechanism characteristic of personal rule, and it was thus the antithesis of representative government as its admirers were coming to know it, for the individual ministers were the creatures of the sovereign. With the formation of Richelieu’s ministry prior to the session of 1815–16, Vitrolles lost his important position owing to Richelieu’s refusal to have, in the council of ministers, one who was the king’s personal representative. Deprived of much of its influence, the post was later abolished. At one time, however, Vitrolles had recommended Chateaubriand as his replacement should the king so desire. Already, there had been signs that Vitrolles was having doubts as to whether some of the king’s political practices were in keeping with the times. In particular, Vitrolles had favoured having the Talleyrand ministry meet the newly elected Chambre des députés, whereas the king had insisted on finding new ministers prior to any recourse to opinion in the legislature.44 Someone whose duties had 44 Eugène-François-Auguste, baron de Vitrolles, Mémoires, ed. Pierre Farel [using the original edition of the manuscript published, in 1884, by Eugène Forgues] (Paris, 1951), 2:418, 294–5. The first citation has no equivalent in the edition of 1884; the second is to be found at 3:230.

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been, as it were, almost anti-parliamentary had seemingly become more sensitive to the nature of politics under the Charte, for his recommended course of action was, in fact, the one then favoured by British constitutional practice. Chateaubriand would later congratulate himself, in a grand phrase, on conducting a feudal array to the defence of the liberty of the press; not less surprising was the discovery that praise of representative government had come from one more accustomed to the practices of absolutism. Bereft of his post, before it had ceased to exist, Vitrolles had to be satisfied with the largely empty title of minister of state, and to take his place as a deputy in the newly elected chambre. In the argument of Vitrolles’s pamphlet, there was little that would have been entirely new to political sophisticates, but French opinion had been subject to misconceptions with regard to each of the three major principles that he developed. Moreover, the logic by which various elements formed a system had also bred confusion, much of it encouraged by the red herrings – having to do with resentment at the supposed imposition of foreign institutions and appeals to national honour and French mores – by which people managed to remain vague about the implications of the Charte. That document itself suffered from some of the same uncertainty as to what exactly the new scheme of government entailed, especially surrounding the activity of the ministers, arguably the actors who formed the linchpin of the governmental process. Passing over a focus either upon the monarch, the central figure among pre-revolutionary categories, or that sort of assembly that had been the engine of revolution, Vitrolles set out to expound upon the situation of the ministry as that body whose relations with all others might reveal the logic of the new system. The three principles extracted for examination were these: a certain understanding of ministerial responsibility, a recognized relation linking the ministers and the Chambre des députés, and a unifying mechanism that might secure effectiveness throughout. The general proposition that accounted for his agenda was that there was some incoherence between that order laid down by the Charte and the prevailing understanding of the role of ministers in the government of France.45 In setting out his argument, Vitrolles sought first to connect the elements that were most familiar within French theory or practice to those that were comparatively alien to it. Through this strategy, considerations that seemed least comfortable within the French tradition might be shown to be entailed in those already assimilated. What better way to begin, then, than by appealing to the salience of public opinion for French public life? This uncontroversial proposition made contact with a Jacobin article of faith that had seen in the supposed voice of the people the cutting edge of popular sovereignty and 45 [Vitrolles], Du ministère dans le gouvernement représentatif (Paris, 1815), v–vi.

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had provided as well some of the mental furniture of all but the most unregenerate of royalists. Ably taking his starting point in the near consensus about the queen of the world, Vitrolles argued that such a force needed both to be made effective and to be rendered inoffensive. Its effectiveness would be secured through the elected chamber that would serve as its organ. Furthermore, opinion had to be made compatible with legitimacy and the hereditary principle. Vitrolles managed here to elicit the conclusion that inviolability of the king, as specified in article 13 of the Charte, meant that it was the king’s ministers who must weather those gusts of sentiment that had been implicated in bringing down the monarchy. This, he went on to argue, implied that the ministers were responsible before the chambers, not just legally responsible as individuals as article 55 seemed to contemplate, but politically responsible and as a body. Since article 55 was rather obviously in the tradition of those little-used British devices of the bill of attainder and impeachment, it was no easy matter to claim convincingly that political responsibility was already implied by the existing arrangements, but this is what the argument was designed to do. At this stage Vitrolles allowed his position to emerge but slowly, for with apparent caution he was attempting to make a point about the situation of the king that was not, in all likelihood, shared by many of his countrymen, including Louis XVIII himself. The rather circuitous route towards the desired conclusion entailed a summary of British constitutional conventions and said very little indeed about the king of France. Indeed, so careful was he not to offer hostages to fortune by saying anything that might seem to reduce the political influence of the sovereign, that one reader of the argument has assumed that Vitrolles had rejected collective responsibility as undermining the royal authority.46 Assuredly, that was not the message, but this misreading testifies to the care with which Vitrolles had striven to fend off wrath as he sought to align the prerogative to life in a constitutional monarchy. He had managed to show that the proper office of public opinion, working through the votes of elected representatives, would be to check the ministers without touching the sovereign. Later, a critic would point out that, in point of fact, the king was perfectly capable of judging public opinion himself without recourse to the assistance of the chamber and that, prior to the Revolution, kings had regularly dismissed ministers on their own reading of the public mind.47 All this was true, and so the attempt to offer a tactful 46 Ibid., 15–29. Cf. the interpretation of Vitrolles in ibid., 28–9, offered by Douglass Hall McNeally, “Constitutional Monarchy in France, 1814–1848” (PhD thesis, Northwestern University, Evanston, 1963), fol. 110. 47 César-Guillaume, cardinal de La Luzerne, Sur la responsabilité des ministres (Paris, 1816), 24.

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reorientation on the matter of political responsibility was less than wholly successful. Jokes, gossip, songs, and graffiti had long been the downfall of ministers, and it was really the need to emphasize the convention that ministers normally leave office as a body that was the point of it all. The importance of public opinion was nothing peculiar to representative government. A cost associated with talk of mixed government on the British model was that it had encouraged discussion of the relations between legislature and executive couched in terms of equilibrium and of counterforces. Such images of the jostling that belonged to the British system had long fallen afoul of French thought, whether in relation to absolutism or to gouvernement d’assemblée. Although Vitrolles made initial references to these categories, they failed to do justice to his more characteristic message that the Charte had brought to France an integrated set of institutions that, of necessity, imposed its own logic upon national politics. There was no need even to depict the process of constitutional borrowing as one for which he had to make a case, for the deed was done, and resident within the machinery of representative government were those codes of conduct that need but be recognized in order to make the model work. It had not, he insisted, been a matter of idle borrowing of unrelated pieces of machinery, but the taking over of a complete system, each part of which had its assigned work to do.48 Mechanistic language was not the best medium for conveying what Vitrolles wanted to say, and he was able to discard it in favour of a perspective that offered more by way of gestalt as the developed argument came into view. The problem with effecting lucid presentation of such an argument was that, ideally, the reader should grasp the whole in one fell swoop, whereas it was in fact necessary to present items seriatim. It is clear that any political writer who set out to settle the issue of ministerial responsibility in France of the early Restoration had an uphill struggle. There was a sense of unease – derived no doubt from a tradition of extreme centralization and an authoritarian executive – about the Charte’s lacunae on that subject. The security seemingly afforded by the formal accusation of ministers who broke the law was what even the better-informed members of the public grasped best. Notions impinging upon the more subjective and political regions of ministerial failure or incapacity of a sort unconnected with any legal wrongdoing were both more sensitive and more difficult to understand. They seemed to raise issues about the king’s exercising of his prerogative, for were the ministers not of his own choosing? So politically charged was this matter that even Constant, first to present in print a full analysis of the issue, had had to make considerable allowance for the undeveloped state of public information. Leaving little 48 [Vitrolles], Du ministère, 10–12.

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doubt that he favoured moving to British practices, he had declined to offer a timetable for their acceptance. Constant had left the matter in an odd state of irresolution, for he had raised difficult questions and then suggested that one await a more propitious time to bite the bullet. The marquis de Lally-Tollendal, who remained active in efforts to assimilate British ways, was to prove even more wary in his choice of language. The unaccommodating views of knowledgeable public men across the political spectrum suggested that it was not just those ministers who benefited from inaction who were disinclined to do very much; neither royalists nor the school of Saint-Simon, whose agenda placed them off the normal political spectrum entirely, but in a leftwards direction, seemed to know quite what to recommend. Finally, J.-P. Pagès, Constant’s associate and future editor, would join others in according Constant primacy in broaching the issue, but he, too, would fail to go much beyond some comments about the British practice that had towered over the discussion.49 Unsurprisingly, given the difficulties that inhered in the question of ministerial responsibility, Vitrolles had nothing to say about the evident disarray in which the Charte had left matters, and he presumably thought that the legal sanctions already contemplated might be used when appropriate. His concern, however, was to make clear that political responsibility was part of the package already received as representative government. Illustrating that concatenation of elements allegedly part of political responsibility was the manner in which this responsibility rested upon certain conditions both within the ministry and within the Chamber of Deputies, as well as between the two. The initial rapid overview of British procedures sought to convince the reader that this system was coherent, effective, and actually present in France, whatever people might think. It remained to add the details that supported the original contention. The second principle introduced here was that the ministers needed a base of support in the lower chamber, else the role of that body in bringing public opinion to bear on policy would be incompatible with gaining assent for a legislative programme. The same logic applied to the situation of the king: he might indeed appoint whom he wished, but this freedom was illusory if it did not light upon those men capable of attaching to their cause a majority of the

49 Trophime-Gérard, marquis de Lally-Tollendal, “Développement de la proposition … relativement à la responsibilité ministérielle,” in Chambre des Pairs de France. Imprimés diverses, session de 1816 (Paris, 1816), 1:19; “De la responsabilité des ministres,” Le Spectateur politique, no. 3 (30 Sept. 1815): 76–88; ‘C.,’ “Sur la responsabilité des ministres,” Le Politique [Saint-Simon’s publication] (Paris, 1819), 335–41; and [Pagès], De la responsabilité ministérielle (n.p., [1818]), 17n, 51–2, 59, 78–85.

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elected chamber.50 Here the simple imperative of lending firm direction to the public business served as a constraint on both ministers and king. Nor did Vitrolles shrink from saying that the king’s choice should be from those whom the chamber might “designate.” He might well have found more scope for sweetening the pill by giving some attention to the fact that the wishes of the chamber limited discretion but hardly dictated the choice in detail. One must suppose that the impersonal imperative of advancing public business was so evident, and assumed to be so great a priority for the sovereign, that there was little need to discuss that formal autonomy that belonged both to ministers as moral beings and to kings by virtue of their prerogative. Ministers unwilling to accept a check from the chambers might, no doubt, resign, and a monarch dissatisfied with performance by the lower chamber might, indeed, dissolve it. Paralleling the reference to the power of dissolution was a brief comment on the conditions of honourable resignation.51 It was a topic too little canvassed in the period. As before, the spectre of the king’s being imposed upon by these arrangements just did not arise in any direct fashion. There was an admission that there might be a “despotisme légal” exercised by ministers, but in Britain this was over the two houses and not over the king. The circumstances, he explained, had come about in the 1790s when British ministers benefited from a public opinion so at one that it left insufficient support for opposition that might check the executive. Such silence about the situation of the king seemed to take for granted that the role cast for the king of England had come to France amidst the machinery of representative government. It was true, however, that the Charte had left the French king with that legislative initiative that Chateaubriand and others were to find confining, and the text was silent too about that royal advantage. At least, then, there was no challenge to it. That connection between ministry and legislature, embodied in the second principle of government, had been easily explained, since everyone allowed that some accommodation must exist in a system in which legislation involved both the king and the two chambers. Vitrolles had referred to the connection as “un lien de confiance et d’intérêt,” and the description left all of the details still to be made clear. The third condition essential for representative government was labelled, quite ambiguously, as “unité du ministère.”52 The discussion took very much for granted that internal cohesion among the ministers that had so obviously been absent during the First Restoration, and the probable reason for not making much of this condition would have been to avoid seeming to criticize 50 [Vitrolles], Du ministère, 34, 31. 51 Ibid., 38. 52 Ibid., 49–65.

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Louis XVIII for retaining past their time trappings of personal government. That unity had undoubtedly been entailed in the very notion of political as opposed to legal responsibility, and it was implicit as well in a connection to the lower chamber, whose confidence must repose in the ministers collectively. The centre of attention at this stage in the exposition was, now, the role that political parties were to play in the new order of things. No constitutional enactment could govern this development, and there was an ample store of French prejudice that spoke against the emergence of parties under any auspices. Nevertheless, this was where the argument had arrived. The basis for this venture into unfamiliar territory had been Vitrolles’s comment about how the French exaggerated the place of corruption in the consolidating of a British administration. The real work of effecting unity was the presence of a natural link among those with similar opinions.53 This was the element, Vitrolles allowed, that had been the last to emerge in Britain, but it served as the spring of the entire form of government. It was party that supplied the social adhesive that created regularity and predictability in the operation of government. The resulting “march systématique” rested upon the foundation of a firm and lasting majority, dependent upon the impulse of party spirit. The very choice of that last expression for purposes of capturing such a form of loyalty was remarkable, for it had been usual to refer to the evils in party connections in terms of that state of feeling that hardened hearts against the appeal of other loyalties. Now it had emerged as a political virtue and the factor that secured the coherence of the political order. Another way of his making the point was to say that there was advantage in having political attitudes that were tied together in a neat bundle as they were not, for instance, in judicial proceedings. Behind the comment lurks the fear that the French, more familiar with magistrates than with party men, might expect private judgment and judicial independence to prevail in a legislative chamber. Amplifying upon a point already introduced in support of political responsibility, Vitrolles pointed to the expectation that ministers have a programme to be judged by the chambers, and this programme was not to be dictated by the chambers or even anticipated by them. Given this initiative and leadership, a following was essential. By the same token, coherence in support of the ministers dictated the same on the part of those of a different persuasion. Of the opposition, there was little discussion, but Vitrolles made it perfectly evident that a developed parliamentary government entailed the presence of two distinct parties and that such a clear-cut division between supporters and the rest was of particular benefit to the ministers. Here he presumably was thinking of nothing more complex than the assistance afforded to the legislative 53 Ibid., 41.

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programme from a distribution of opinions that could, in large measure, be known in advance. He had added that the opposition itself was useful to the ministry,54 and, by this, one was probably meant to contemplate the advantages to be derived from systematic criticism, much in the way in which public opinion, even if unfavourable, had long been recognized as valuable to rulers. To know the quarter from which an attack might be expected to come would naturally be advantageous; by comparison, a body in which opinion was so mobile as to be shapeless and unpredictable denied any such assistance. Vitrolles did not pursue the point, however, so we are unable to know in what measure he may have toyed with the idea, to be found in modern “conflict theory,” that it might be valuable to each side to have a well-disciplined opponent. That there was a definite advantage as well to the minority in having structure and consistency in the opinions that supported the government is quite clear; the row over the no-party administrations of Decazes and Richelieu would later afford proof of that. Having given credentials to formed parties, Vitrolles was also insistent that he was not endorsing all forms of faction, and he went on to observe that the nation would have been spared much suffering had the factions of the late Revolution struggled “pour obtenir le ministère” instead of seeking to capture the state. There could be no more unambiguous statement than this that the prize that was being sought was access to office – nothing more, but also, nothing less. This was a major assumption when unqualified by any of those stipulations, all too common in the Restoration, that one side or other possessed a natural lien on office. The studied neutrality of this observation made the constitutional lesson far more palatable in some circles than a statement loaded with partisan language. Of course, for those who had no objection to some struggle so long as they were ensured victory, this forthrightness would not be welcome. Of the modalities for creating the desirable form of conflict, the author said that he must abstain from speculation. He surely saw the ridiculous side of presuming to orchestrate free, but limited, conflict. He also appears to have been aware that the materials for nourishing this form of politics were readily to be found in human nature and but needed opportunity for expression: “[Instead of our being surprised that party spirit sometimes serves as guide and regulator, we should rather admire an institution made for men, and which makes such great allowance for human passions.”55 What might be the objections to such an account of French political institutions? Since provocation of potential opponents was not, ironically, the point of this hymn to conflict, Vitrolles confined himself to rather general considerations. He offered the thought that those who remained independent of 54 Ibid., 70, 74. 55 Ibid., 70.

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party affiliation might seem to be the only reasonable ones, but he concluded instead that it was they who impeded instead the march of government. Of that very French attachment to one’s own opinion, he simply countered that there was merit in joining one’s views to those of others and in coming together under a banner. He also had words in response to that delicate sense of honour that persisted in treating all political issues as though each were a unique legal case having to be judged de novo. The brisk riposte said that political life turned on extensive schemes that called for some general orientation from which to begin. In these terms, he acknowledged the presence of the vaunted French conscience, and he declined to make concessions to it.56 It is usual to date the first signs of rudimentary electoral organization with the onset of partial renewals in 1817, but gatherings of like-minded deputies began with the session of 1815–16. The first stirrings of this sort of structure in the Restoration are important and have been little noticed. It is thus the more unfortunate that an account by the young Victor Hugo in the Almanach royal placed events far too late and appears to have erred in other respects as well.57 Political dinners and social intercourse among those of the same political faith had already been known, of course, under the Directory and in the Consulate. Such informal socialization was, it seems, useful for purposes of orienting new arrivals. The expectation of newcomers to the session of October 1815 that they would sit beside those from their home departments testifies to the prevailing innocence about ideological divisions. That party spirit that set political machinery in motion was obviously in need of some initial nurturing. But it was no part of Vitrolles’s intention to descend to the specifics of what little party activity there was, for his approach was limited to asserting the naturalness of there being a division into two parties and, save for their dual nature, his parties lacked faces or personalities. So long as the chamber divided in two, the conditions of the model were satisfied without further enquiry into the banners under which people gathered. The argument of Du ministère dans le gouvernement représentatif gave no privileged place to an ultra majority; it specified a ministry and a majority that marched to the same beat. The only clue to the ultra loyalties of the writer lay in the asymmetrical character of an argument in which it was assumed that first one established the character of the chamber and then one found a ministry to fit that character. It would have been consistent with the desired state of concord for a ministry to seek to assemble for each issue, or for the programme as a whole, a majority by doing what political observers would call “working” the chamber. This was not just an abstract possibility; in 56 Ibid., 70–3. 57 Edmond Biré, L’Année 1817 (Paris, 1895), 148–51.

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fact, it would become the modus operandi of the period more often than not. It remained true, nevertheless, that the logic of the British system held that one chose ministers acceptable to the House and not the reverse, however much pensions and places might, in practice, serve to reconcile members to the ministers that they had. The success of a British sovereign in obtaining satisfactory electoral results must also have been known to Vitrolles and to at least some of his readers, although Vitrolles himself would give evidence in 1830 that he did not favour the direct involvement of the king in elections. Further contributing to at least an air of neutrality was the effort to recognize the political resources belonging to all the players defined by the Charte. The analysis he offered in Du ministère allowed him to avoid joining some of his contemporaries in those metaphysical debates that asked what constituted a “pouvoir” or whether the respects in which one must, in constitutional propriety, distinguish the ministry from the sovereign had spawned, in the form of that ministry, a new and ominous entity. More practical than speculative, the pamphlet served rather as a manual that explained the forms of accommodation that might allow the machinery to work well. Vitrolles wrote of the royal power of dissolution and of the capacity of the deputies to refuse supply, but with no particular emphasis, thus leaving the impression that at least the second of these was no part of the routine transaction of business. It was only towards the latter part of the text that he offered some comfort to those who might well have read the argument as seriously threatening to the situation of the king. He had occasion to note that, in choosing ministers, the king might impose conditions on their service (as had George III in the case of Charles James Fox); moreover, he quoted the British sovereign as having said, in resisting the objections of some ministers that it had not been they that were the objects of complaint, “[Y]ou must all go out.” With the same apparent emphasis, he found another occasion to say that one must not presume to tell the king what to do.58 This was again done without emphasis and served, if anything, to obscure the fact that the system here deemed to be in place was one that Louis XVIII seems to have wanted, even though current arrangements manifested it only in part. It might, still, have been more judicious to expound further on that recognized capacity of the British sovereign to express an antipathy towards certain public men and to exercise that antipathy by excluding them from his service or at least by making them marginal. As recently as 1804, that constitutional monarch George III had refused to have Fox in the cabinet. It could hardly be argued, of course, that the same applied to an entire party, and this may supply the reason for touching on the matter but 58 [Vitrolles], Du ministère, 60, 75.

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lightly. Silence, too, might conspire as before to maintain a reassuring stance on the freedom left to the sovereign to pursue his will. There was no mention of that residue of past practice that allowed the king to appoint ministers who were not members but who would continue to speak in the chambers by virtue of ministerial status. This can only have been from a desire not to press too hard the assumption that the “admirable” British constitution had been received virtually intact. Given the extraordinary emphasis upon the need for a sound working relationship between ministers and the chambers, the careful reader could hardly fail to conclude that seating the ministers among the deputies and peers was conducive to developing the desired outcome. It was wise to say as little as possible about the placing of fetters upon the royal will, although much was surely implied by referring to that system, bestowed by Louis XVIII himself, as a “monarchie représentative.”59 The ultimate rationale for this confident presentation of the existing political order was the argument that the Charte had been granted and, in the main, gladly accepted. Thus, Vitrolles was free to insist that in vain might it be said that the French knew nothing of these arrangements, for they were not their own. This approach offered a subtle rebuke to people such as Chateaubriand who had suggested that, in deference to French mores, one might pick and choose among the constitutional items. Nothing was more forthrightly asserted than that, in unpacking the machinery, one must account for all of the pieces. Among those pieces were political parties, and no document of the time made that case more effectively. One consideration available for purposes of protecting the author from charges of servile copying of the British was that one could not readily locate that text in English that could possibly have served as the model. There was no British equivalent to such a grand synthesis, although the Edinburgh Review under Francis Jeffrey had done better than most in pointing to the essential place of party in the scheme of things. Even that source offered no single statement that might have been absorbed, and the most telling articles written up to that time – those of the period 1807–12 – had a good deal to say about the place of the House of Lords. Most of this material would make no sense in the circumstances of the poor and relatively uninfluential peerage of France. The texts that Vitrolles cited were the histories of Hume and Smollett, the British statutes, and the Annual Register. The most curious bit of British lore came in a reference to the career of George Hammond, the undersecretary for foreign affairs in the period 1795–1809. Hammond had been a friend of his political superior Charles Canning, a figure of some interest to the French. Apparently, Hammond, after serving under three separate foreign ministers, had become an object 59 Ibid., 67.

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of ridicule,60 and the point of the reference was to indicate how pervasive was the influence of party in British public life. It might extend to the replacement of senior advisers on policy, who must not expect careers unaffected by changes in the personnel of ministries. In this case, there had, of course, been a period of political turbulence accompanying the later years of the career of Pitt the younger, but it was, in fact, not a time of very marked partisan divisions and the significant ones turned more on personal quarrels. Why the narrative should condescend to make fleeting and ambiguous reference to such a career is unclear. Most probably, it was intended as a supportive comment on the current “épuration” sought by the ultras, who resented the continuation in office of those whose loyalty to the current regime was suspect. If so, this would constitute yet another break in Vitrolles’s tone of cool impartiality, for he must have been interpreted as saying that political changes far less momentous than the return of a dynasty occasioned the loss of past patronage, and that one could not claim a freehold in public employments. It says something about the relative optimism of the time – at least compared to the intransigency that later gripped politics in the Restoration – that the publication was not read as a mere bow to current circumstance, and no one seems to have troubled themselves in tracing indulgence to the purging of Bonapartists and revolutionaries. There were reviews in the major publications,61 and this alone suggests a recognition of the relative importance of this small pamphlet among the current flood of political commentary, much of which consisted of discussion of matters less obscure than treated here and written from a position more readily identifiable. Least responsive was Le Constitutionnel, the journal of emerging liberal sentiment, firmly based upon the Charte. Possibly the editors found reason to suppose that such an argument at such a time was a vehicle for the discontent of the ultra majority of the chambre introuvable. It took a month to comment, and when it did, it blundered seriously in claiming that it had been argued that when ministers and the majority were at loggerheads, the king should accept that the opinion of the chamber should prevail over that of the ministers. This was an unsubtle reading of the message that the king had to have good reason to suppose that the deputies were not the custodians of existing opinion, and that an appeal to the electorate would yield a verdict that would confirm the ministers in their places. Vitrolles had not been blind to the British experience of 1783– 84 that justified a dissolution. He had emphasized, however, that the king would be well advised to exercise some care before supposing the chamber to 60 Ibid., 42–3. 61 For notice of reviews, I have benefited from the guidance offered in Duvergier de Hauranne, Histoire du gouvernement parlementaire, 3:526–30.

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be wrong, for misjudgment would prove embarrassing. The prerogative of dissolution had not been mothballed, but it had been made reasonably clear that an unwise decision would plunge the monarchy into partisan politics. For all this, the reviewer quoted the vital passage about needing parties that confined their competition to the quest for office, and added but an exclamation mark. A generous allocation of two and a half columns concluded with the accolade “[O]ne recognizes throughout the statesman and the good citizen.”62 The same disposition to mix warm praise with reservations is evident in the Journal des débats, royalist organ of Chateaubriand’s friends the brothers Bertin. Sounding quite like Chateaubriand’s own position in his Réflexions, the reviewer objected to the account of the party struggle in the chambers as slighting the demands of “conscience” and the private lights of the individual. Here, too, the point was made in a tendentious fashion, for it suggested that deputies were “thrown” willy-nilly into a party whose dictates they must then follow without further examination. In fact, what Vitrolles had written was that the very existence of party was a coming together of people who had become conscious of the general views that they already shared. He had then been prepared to insist that short-run objections to the direction of the party must necessarily be subordinated to the larger objective that had prompted membership in the first instance. Most prepared to present the case, and even in places to supplement it, was La Quotidienne, the major paper most sympathetic to ultra sentiment. It came to the rescue of that invitation to assemble under a banner that most directly challenged the self-understanding of those who dominated French public life and who, after the obedient, mute legislators of the Empire, wished to express themselves. The reviewer restated the original claim that insisted upon the greater good of a general plan of action. Forging ahead with the argument, he said that some concessions to the need for action in concert were but a small price to pay: “One must sometimes sacrifice some portion of one’s will in order to secure the triumph of one’s political principles.”63 Mingled with praise for the rare talent for exposition and for the newness of the point of view was an uncritical endorsement of the argument. This was not warrant for the claim that all royalist opinion had fallen meekly into line, for there were those admirers of bygone days for whom anything but personal rule by the king was a dangerous innovation. The formidable rebuttal offered by cardinal La Luzerne has already been noted, and there were others, including the Traité de la monarchie absolue by

62 Le Constitutionnel, 26 Jan. 1816. 63 Review by ‘A,’ Journal des débats, 16 Jan. 1816; review by ‘G,’ La Quotidienne, 12 Jan. 1816.

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the eccentric marquis Ducrest, and that from Saint-Roman, although the latter concentrated his fire, when it came, on Chateaubriand. Absence of response need not mean that the message was already familiar to readers or approved by them. Reviewers may rightly have concluded that there would be less interest shown in anonymous works and that there were hazards involved in crossing swords with an opponent before one knew how well connected he was. As it happened, despite the positive reception in the press, this remarkable pamphlet was never reprinted and is today a surprisingly rare item.64 There is no conclusive evidence that the police had in any way interfered with distribution, but there is, in fact, no record in the Bibliographie de la France of its publication. In other cases, such an absence certainly pointed to official displeasure. In keeping with the author’s good relations with the heir to the throne, the printing was done by the royal printer and publication by the respectable house of Dentu. Neither, however, was proof against ministerial action to silence a publication written to support the ultra majority in the lower chamber, even as it had sought to educate the public about parliamentary government. Vitrolles maintained his connection with the ultras, and in 1818 he was discovered to have been the author of some documents first written for the benefit of foreign powers, one of which the Decazes administration published under the title Note secrète exposant les prétextes et le but de la dernière conspiration. Most of the circumstances of these intrigues are irrelevant for present purposes, save that the position taken on the nature of French government remained very much what it had been in 1815. In the first of these reports, written during the prorogation of the chambre introuvable, he complained of the warfare waged by the ministry on the ultra majority. Recording that the ministry objected to the presence of party spirit, he continued: “… but they are unaware that the government that was adopted is nothing other than the regular establishment of the parties, that the Whigs and the Tories have balanced one another for a hundred and forty years in the House of Commons without serious impropriety, because these parties are within the constitution.”65

64 The National Union Catalogue for North America records but one location, and there is one other at the Widener Library, Harvard, seemingly still unattributed. The Bibliothèque nationale also holds the title, catalogued in the supplement to the holdings of current publications. This suggests some delay in procuring a copy, which has been a fate most commonly befalling publications of provincial origin. 65 Vitrolles, “Aperçu de la situation de la France au 15août 1816,” in Mémoires et relations politiques, ed. E. Forgues (Paris, 1884), vol. 3, note B, 465. In the modern edition, which adds notes to Forgues’s text, see vol. 2, note E, 450.

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Vitrolles added that the British system taught that the king was ill-advised to maintain for long a ministry at variance with the elected majority. The same theme figures in the second in the series that details the misdoings of a ministry that excluded those royalists most anxious to demonstrate their loyalty. Noteworthy, in the early portion of the text, was a dismissal of the empty call for a “fusion” of parties as a metaphysical idea without foundation in the world. Nevertheless, this did not prevent his offering a vision of a regime that, properly conducted, might retain the loyalty of all. Resorting to the technique of posing objections to his own propositions and then responding to the objections, Vitrolles characterized his position as presuming to throw the king and the ministry into the arms of a party. He was not slow to repudiate the charge and to claim that it misinterpreted his position. By this he presumably meant that there was no intention of bringing the sovereign down into the political struggle; however, since he evidently did not wish to recapitulate his careful treatment of the prerogative done in 1815, the answer here was brief and elliptical in making no firm distinction between king and ministry. What emerged most forcefully was that the system adopted was, in its essence, one of parties, for it offered a public forum for airing the differences by which the nation was divided. Under those circumstances, it made no sense to attempt to sustain a ministry that sought to remain isolated from the real forces that existed.66 A third document, also from Vitrolles’s pen, was the one distributed by the police in the hopes of discrediting the ultras as traitors to king and nation. This famous Note secrète repeated arguments, and even language, present in his earlier memoranda and added an emphasis on the seeming contradiction of setting up a form of government that encouraged party activity while attempting, at the same time, to stifle it. The previous emphasis upon public opinion remained prominent and here served to reinforce the point that representative government invited competition between parties, for, as he said, public opinion was always divided. That, in itself, was a precious insight within the French tradition, where too often writers on public opinion had portrayed it as a single gigantic wave. The one awkward oversight was that, divided as public opinion was, there was no good reason to expect it to bifurcate neatly into two cleanly demarcated camps, as the parties were supposed to do. Although the text may well have been tampered with by the police, the continuity of arguments already introduced marks it as Vitrolles’s work, and he admitted authorship to Chateaubriand and others.67 Because the trail of 66 Vitrolles, “Aperçu de la situation de la France au août 1817,” in Mémoires et relations politiques, 1884 ed., vol. 3, note C, 473, 477; and 1951 ed., vol. 2, note F, 454, 457. 67 [Vitrolles], Note secrète exposant les prétextes et le but de la dernière conspiration (Paris, 1818), 21–3; Mémoires (1884), 3:259; and ibid. (1951), 2:311.

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documents led back to the entourage of the comte d’Artois, the whole business was an embarrassment to the ultras. Since Louis XVIII was little pleased by what he deemed to be interference with French foreign relations, Vitrolles’s stock at court declined and he lost his status as a minister of state. There had been a disposition to discount this remarkable defence of parliamentary institutions as the guise under which ultra designs on power might find the semblance but not the substance of principle. That was what Guizot would argue in his Du gouvernement représentatif of 1816, and, remarkably, in light of the twists and turns of his own long career, he repeated the charge in his memoirs. Some modern scholars have taken up the refrain, although others have been ready to note, not merely Guizot’s own concessions to the needs of the moment, but also the inaccuracy and unfairness of his criticisms of Vitrolles.68 There were, to be sure, those ultras for whom the niceties of liberal constitutionalism were but a flag of convenience, pending the arrival of something better. On those very issues treated by Vitrolles, one might cite La Bourdonnaye, whose conspicuous support for parliamentary conventions may, all considered, have been of less importance to him than were his extreme sentiments and his avidity for office. Bonald’s relatively sorry record on the matter of the liberty of the press is an illustration of a subtle thinker’s readiness to change his mind about such matters depending on who was in power. In the case of Vitrolles, there is no evidence of any rapid change of front. He did, it must be acknowledged, accept a peerage from Charles X, but his unheeded advice in the last days of that regime was, to all appearances, on the side of moderation. There is always, too, the need to recognize political ideas as very much the children of practical needs and, in that capacity, closely tied to what we want. People still read Bolingbroke as an inventor of opposition, though aware that he was not convinced about the need for such activity when virtue and power came to be united. Scholars who despair of wholly disinterested political argument point to the need, at least, to conform as much as possible to one’s public stances or incur the charge of inconsistency. Those who profess principle may expect, then, to find themselves trapped by their own previous rhetorical positions. With no way of our knowing what Vitrolles actually thought, he may be credited, in any 68 Guizot, Memoirs to illustrate the history of my time (London, 1858), 1:133–4. Among the doubters about Vitrolles’s good faith have been Joseph Barthélemy, L’Introduction du régime parlementaire en France, 51; and Joseph Bonnefon, Le Régime parlementaire sous la Restauration (Paris, 1905), 135–6; but cf. Michon, Le Gouvernement parlementaire, 126–30; and, more recently, J.-J. Oechslin, Le Mouvement ultra-royaliste sous la Restauration … (1814–1830) (Paris, 1960), 106–8, 111, for far more respectful treatment.

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case, with so governing his conduct as never to repudiate his teaching. Undoubtedly, too, it left for others a lucid presentation of an attractive version of the political game in which both sides might, in principle, aspire to victory. Whatever the undeclared aims pursued here, that was a most notable accomplishment. d e l a m o n a r c h i e s e l o n l a c h a r t e , a f l aw e d c l a s s i c Little doubt seems to surround the inspiration for Chateaubriand’s most important piece of political writing, De la monarchie selon la Charte, although one would hardly expect him to be generous about revealing his sources, and, indeed, he was not. His biographer has found Vitrolles’s Du ministère, the latter’s brief Déclaration de la majorité of January 1816 (a work of no theoretical interest but widely circulated and reprinted in the press), and the fifth part of Joseph Fiévée’s highly popular Correspondance of March 1816 as the texts that, in particular, Chateaubriand used in its composition.69 Of these, there was no sign in the library, sold in 1817, but there was a copy of Fiévée’s Histoire de la session de 1815,70 one of the few titles by anyone else that he cited. The writing of his book occupied Chateaubriand for most of the summer of 1816. It is one of those publications where the identity of the author is of far more consequence than are the contents. Whereas no one would seriously doubt that the work was far more successful and influential than the pamphlet by Vitrolles had been, there is, by the same token, every reason to think Chateaubriand’s effort less original and intrinsically less powerful than were the thoughts of either Vitrolles or Fiévée. Among the causes of the unearned celebrity was its coinciding with a major political crisis, to which it added fuel, for the unexpected dissolution of the chambre introuvable dashed ultra hopes for the time being. Seizure of most of the copies had, as well, the predictable outcome of making the offending book a celebrated one. It was sensation, not careful exposition, that carried the day, and Vitrolles himself might have had reason to ponder the fact that far more people would have read his two-page Déclaration than the masterly treatise on the place of the ministry. Vitrolles had excelled at showing the logic that inhered in every part of representative government, properly understood, and so wrote a tract that extracted its principles, each of which tended to suggest the nature of the others. Chateaubriand, for his part, would eschew this spirit of synthesis in favour of chopping his subject into very small pieces, so that each of the ninety-two chapters took as its focus only a small part of the whole. The 69 Beau de Loménie, Carrière politique, 1:102–3. 70 Marcel Duchemin, La Bibliothèque de Chateaubriand (Paris, 1932), # 349.

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chapters covered a host of different matters, some of which bore little relation to the others. No single theme united all portions of the book, for its author was, if anything, more intent in pointing out how the concerns of the moment echoed his thoughts on earlier occasions. It was not an argument meant to stand alone on an impersonal logic, and Chateaubriand’s citing of himself as his favourite authority, no less than the honours on the title page that were intended to add weight to his name, spoke to a document written in a personal vein. Who the author was seemed calculated to contribute a good deal to the cogency of what was being said. This was, as we shall see, a technique that necessarily invited responses that were at the same personal level. Those numerous public figures who, like Vitrolles, chose to leave themselves out of the ideas being presented, may have known something worth considering. Since the Charte and the monarchy itself – in the sense both of the general political order and of the status, in particular, of the king – were under examination, the canvas was necessarily a broad one, and there appeared at the outset four elements – the royal prerogative, the peers, the lower chamber, and the ministry. Consistent with Chateaubriand’s earlier contention that there was no return to the monarchy of the past, life under the Charte constituted a new form of government. In the manner of Vitrolles before him, he chose to call it “monarchie représentative.”71 Into the first third of the text, forty chapters in all, went the analysis of the existing government; the remainder consisted of a narrative setting out the record of the three ministries that had existed to date, accompanied, in no discernible order, by a number of specific observations. For a livre de circonstance that put the ultra demand that the king come to his senses and smile upon his true friends, much the most demanding task was to avoid any suggestion of disrespect for the sovereign. Here the execution was, in some respects, careful, the argument calculated to avoid giving offence, just in those places where Vitrolles could well have been more indulgent regarding the king’s prerogatives and sensibilities. Because Chateaubriand lost no time in reviving his demand, first made in a speech in the peers, that the legislative initiative not be monopolized by the king, it was of some importance that this presumption be decked out in respectful terms. He used, naturally enough, the obvious argument that the formula by which the ministers were encouraged to support their measures by invoking the name of the king was no fillip to the royal prerogative. It threatened rather to topple the inviolable divinity of the monarch into the messy stuff of politics and, moreover, would unduly strengthen the ministers. 71 Chateaubriand, De la monarchie selon la Charte (Paris, 1816), vi. The complete text is also to be found in his Oeuvres complètes, 7:155–266.

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Designed as valuable reassurance for those who might fear that this threat would render the king a nullity was chapter 12 where Chateaubriand listed some of the grander prerogatives for purposes of documenting his outrageous claim that a constitutional sovereign was more master of all he surveyed than had been Louis XIV himself. Especially misleading, considering the constitutional concerns of the author and his ultra colleagues, was the bold assertion that the king alone named ministers and dismissed them “à volonté, sans opposition, sans contrôle.”72 Were it not of some concern to complicate and to qualify such a categorical statement, by consideration of the king’s inspiration for such choices, the labour of Chateaubriand’s summer would thereby have lost a good deal of its point. For was it not distress at the choice of ministers, or their retention, that left the ranks of the ultras seething with frustration? The preface to the book had also made it clear that Chateaubriand, in his capacity as a minister of state, was offering the king that advice that might have been bestowed more privately in the council, had that body been summoned. The later statement of the formal capacity to appoint and dismiss here sounds ritualistic, quite out of line with the real concerns of the day. Another supposed element among a long list of prerogatives consisted in the assumption that the king was sovereign legislator, for the law emanated from him. Again, in light of the agenda already presented in chapter 6 of De la monarchie, this seems disingenuous, for the whole point of that wellargued position was that the king’s name should only adorn legislation that had attained the status of law. To emphasize the king’s stake in legislative proposals simply inhibited the process of debate, for it told citizens who wished to contest the measures that emanated from the ministers that they were disobedient subjects who questioned the will of their sovereign. In citing this incoherent fusion of the old and the new, Chateaubriand showed himself at his polemical best, and, significantly, it was on an issue where his opinions had been formulated for some time. Chapter 6 described this state of affairs as altering the traditional role of the king as sole sovereign legislator, and chapter 11, coming but six pages after the initial statement, returned to the incoherence of placing the king both at the beginning and the end of the legislative process, and so demanding that he pass judgment upon his own work. Despite the effectiveness of this plea, the performance suffered from some shortcomings characteristic of the whole argument. A logical point that would have benefited from a single, authoritative statement was spread over two chapters, not even consecutive 72 Chateaubriand, De la monarchie, 14. For quotations, I have offered page numbers from the edition of 1816; most references are to chapters, since these remained constant from one edition to another.

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ones. More seriously, the proposal to distance the king from the process of proposing legislation failed to consider that the obvious merit of allowing for some exercising of the royal will at the beginning of the process was to obviate any recurrence of that dreadful struggle over the royal veto that had darkened the record of the early Revolution. Was the king to be supplied with more incentive to use that veto that was implied in article 22 of the Charte, and if applied to the legislature’s reading of public opinion, how would this sit with a representative monarchy? The proposal was thus subject to complications that might usefully have been aired. Scrutiny of the content of this potentate’s authority yields some prerogatives that were empty of content. What availed it that the king was a father to all particular families? Indeed, how was his power elevated above that of the sultan in Constantinople by the pious intoning that the king was answerable but to God? Some of the observances associated with divine right and thaumaturgical kingship – such as touching for scrofula – would indeed have still been alive under Charles X, but the preface had already made it quite plain that a king answerable to no man was being called upon to do something about the complaints of a peer of France and a minister of state. The incongruity of this account of the untrammelled will of Louis XVIII, as offered by a cheeky subject seeking rapid satisfaction of grievances, would surely have seemed amusing to a writer less self-important than Chateaubriand. The imposing portrait of a royal prerogative – here described as “more absolute” than that of the king’s royal ancestors – had encountered that practical lust for office that eighteenth-century Englishmen had described as “storming the closet.” Sooner or later, the argument would need to desert this realm of alarming juxtapositions to focus more exactly on the place of the ministers, for, although four elements had been recognized as belonging to representative monarchy, the one whose position needed the closest analysis was undoubtedly that of the ministers, who stood, in a sense, between their royal master and the two chambers. It was unfortunate that, unlike Vitrolles, Chateaubriand had taken for himself so ample a story as that of the nature of the monarchy under the Charte, as it entailed the inconvenience that there was no central narrative that led the discussion, in some logical sequence of categories, to the topic of the ministry. Rather, the subject was one to be stumbled over in a variety of places, in some of which its status and functioning were incidental to the ostensible matter under discussion. This led to the curious impression that, like a guilty secret, the need to redefine relations between the ministers and the existing majority in the lower chamber kept reappearing without enjoying the benefit of any single definitive formulation. Just because the matter was so entwined with many others, the reader had reason to regret the absence of a mode of organization reflective of the priorities that obtained in the book as a whole. Chapter 15, which

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promised a treatment of the relations between the lower chamber and the ministers, might have served as an epitome of the argument, but it did not. It had to share the burden of exposition with, at a minimum, chapter 9, on the legislative initiative; chapter 24, on the links among public opinion, the majority, and the ministers; chapter 25, on ministerial solidarity; chapter 39, which rehearsed the point of XV; and chapter 40, which did the same for some of the detail of that early chapter. A combination of repetition and silence about crucial details resulted in a sequence of propositions and descriptions that, far from being linear, curled back on itself at the expense of clarity and rigour. Those critics who have muttered about poets fallen, in their innocence, into the world of politics have possibly been thinking of how a brilliant imagination has rarely been deemed the essential quality for setting out constitutional relations. Some observations, though of interest, seemed to emerge from no firm sense of relevance. Chapter 15, for instance, began by noting that, to attain perfection, the Chamber of Deputies lacked but an electoral law and one on the responsibility of ministers. After this fleeting and inconclusive observation, interest is directed to the solecism of an effort to establish the principle that the ministers were independent of the chambers. Both of the two opening statements seemed to constitute especially plump red herrings, for the contemplated legislation on responsibility of ministers was intended to address legal accusation and not the broader matter of everyday political relations, where ministerial lawbreaking was not at issue. Similarly, it made little sense to suggest that the forthcoming law on elections would serve as capstone to the chamber unless one knew already what sort of law it would be and what sort of chamber it would then return. Chateaubriand’s announced preference for integral renewal was perhaps what he had in mind. Since he had himself served as president of the electoral college at Orléans,73 he would, however, have known of the potential for electoral manipulation quite apart from the importance of how the electorate might be defined. As his some-time colleague Fiévée would later state while jeering at the intent behind a new electoral law, the point of it all was that the ministers would choose the electors who would, in turn, choose the deputies. The clear inference of the quip was that the ministers were aiming at a chamber to suit their purposes, lest the chamber move first to try to influence the choice of ministers. However, as it was, there was no evident connection between the two sources of future perfection of the chamber and the ensuing discussion of the need for ministers to take seriously the duty of appearing, when invited, in the chambers to explain their measures. Indeed, since chapter 24 would 73 See Chateaubriand, “Discours prononcé à l’ouverture du collège électoral à Orléans, le 22 aoüt 1815,” in Mélanges de politique, 389–99.

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eventually offer the thought that the ministers needed to be members of those chambers, the earlier treatment of etiquette between ministers and chambers would appear redundant. It offered only an excuse to recall the bad behaviour of the revolutionary assemblies. The matter presented in chapter 15 was thus narrow and technical, much reduced in scope from a discussion of the promised relations between the chamber and the ministers and due, in large measure, to be rendered out of date by the later proposal. It is almost as though Chateaubriand wrote without anticipation about what he was due to say or reflection as to how something, once said, would fit with what had gone before. The most substantial comment regarding the ministry that this chapter offered was inserted as part of a general assurance that life might still be bearable for ministers apparently at the beck and call of a demanding legislature. They might, Chateaubriand said, be in form the servants of the deputies, whereas they were, at bottom, the masters of the chambers. How so? It was by the simple expedient of moving in conjunction with the majority, without which, he was pleased to add, there was no government. Then he dropped the subject. This was obviously an exercise in elusiveness, for the presentation only hinted at a position and, at every turn, it left loose ends. There had been no explanation of how moving with the majority should be accounted mastery of the chamber, for in principle it equally might amount to servitude to the will of others. Even less convincing was the proposition that government ceased to be when ministers and the majority were not so allied, for had not the late session, especially the latter part of it, seen this failure of the two to coalesce? In what sense, one might wonder, did this banish government? Some of the perplexities arising here had already been displayed in chapter 9, with its brief treatment of the initiative. There, arguing for a change in practice – essentially amounting to an amendment of the Charte that would authorize legislation to originate in the chambers – Chateaubriand argued that the ministers need not thereby be inhibited in enacting their agenda. They might simply prevail upon members of the chambers to introduce those bills that it was their intention to have passed. The bills would duly pass, unless, he added bitterly, the ministers chose, as of late, to follow the system of the minority. So to renounce proceeding in the company of the majority was to wish, in the homely images favoured here, to walk without feet, to fly without wings. This plight was the obvious equivalent in the later chapter to the absence of government. In both chapters, the technique was to introduce, almost casually, the matter of the majority and the ministers, to suggest in the most elliptical of statements the barest outline of what was needed, and then to allow discussion to follow some other course. Presumably, the author was exercising some artfulness in moving, by indirection, towards a

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powerful denouement. One wonders, nevertheless, whether the reader was also meant to be teased by the suppression, in both accounts, of the later resolve to require seats for the ministers in the chambers. No need, then, to have their friends do the work of insinuating the ministers’ priorities into the flow of business. Either Chateaubriand forgot, in writing chapter 24, what he had previously assumed, or he deemed all of this elaborate mincing back and forth as a trope essential to his purpose. Possibly, the introduction of the friends of ministers, who might do the work more easily seen to by the ministers themselves, was all for the purpose of reminding the king and others that the current ministers were ill-supplied with friends, at least within the lower chamber. Chapter 24, where finally it was disclosed that ministers ought to be members of the chambers and not just frequent visitors, had as its major premise a more precise version of that confluence of ministers and majority with which Chateaubriand had, more than once, tantalized his readers: “The ministry must be drawn out of the majority of the Chamber of Deputies, because the deputies are the chief organs of popular opinion.”74 In the event, the much delayed revelation about ministers needing seats in the chambers was but an inference from the principle that found public opinion in the lower chamber. Chateaubriand apparently thought that by being present, the ministers might better gain a first-hand sense of that public opinion of which the deputies were taken to be the main sources. In unpacking these assumptions, there arises more than one reason for pause. For anyone presuming to know about French government of the period, there is first of all the caveat that surely ministers seeking to know public opinion would follow the tried-and-true method of asking the minister of the interior, to whom the prefects from all parts of the nation reported. Further puzzles abounded in the very statement of the relation of public opinion to the chambers. Since it was not the Chamber of Peers that was claimed to be the organ of public opinion, it would seem that the ministers who were to gain enlightenment from that opinion ought to be confined to the lower chamber alone, an innovation that would certainly leap ahead of British practice at the time. But if so, what was the point of writing, as he did, of ministers needing to be members “des chambres”? It was, in fact, only the lower chamber that contained the majority of immediate interest. The Charte had already made provision for creation of new peers for purposes of procuring a majority, and the ministries of Decazes and of Polignac would both, in time, avail themselves of that opportunity. Both as the bastion of the majority and as the home of public opinion, the Chambre des députés rendered reference to the chamber where the author sat unnecessary. 74 Chateaubriand, De la monarchie, 30.

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Furthermore, one might well wonder what it meant to say that the ministry must “come out of” the majority, for the turn of phrase seemed to claim a good deal more than was implied by the imperative of seeking a working relation between ministers and majority. This was not quite the way in which Vitrolles or, it seems, Fiévée would put it. Ultra sentiment in the debates on the electoral law in the winter of 1816 had made the general point as well, as in the remarks by Clausel de Coussergues or by Chateaubriand’s friend Hyde de Neuville.75 Talk of public opinion, Vitrolles’s starting point, was being employed in Chateaubriand’s book as the unifying bond hitherto absent, whereas Vitrolles had assumed no such thing. The whole embarrassment arising from the effort to fit public opinion, resident primarily in one chamber, to the location of ministers, who were, naturally, to be spread between both chambers, was the result of trying to fashion from public opinion a more powerful adhesive than its evanescent nature would allow. It was perfectly sensible to seek to have the ministers as part of the chambers, for it was an important part of the business of making a smooth transition to a sort of parliamentary system. The conditions would be met by the Villèle administration, which in other respects would be such a disappointment for admirers of the British model. Chateaubriand’s exposition had nevertheless fused, in muddled fashion, two different considerations. The same problem about offering some compelling account of the basis for unity is also present in chapter 25, whose function it was to insist on solidarity within the ministry. In this instance, Chateaubriand relied heavily upon British examples to explain why a perfect unity was not to be expected and how it was that some ministers might be replaced and the rest retained. We now know that his friendship with Richelieu’s sister made him reluctant to seek to bring down the government of which her brother was chief minister. Chateaubriand also recognized the possibility of that special condition known as a coalition, where men with different political views might, for the time being, pursue together a common set of policies. Even then, Chateaubriand managed not to come to terms with the fact that what made coalitions worth mentioning by way of an exception was that they brought together people normally to be found in different company. A lack of sensitivity to that consideration made it most difficult to offer an account of unity that promised effective ties even within the ranks of the ministers. The fourth occasion for developing the central proposal came in chapter 39, entitled “Que le ministère doit conduire ou suivre la majorité.”76 Given the circumstances of the time, posing these as general alternatives 75 For Clausel de Coussergues, see AP 16 (12 Feb. 1816): 123; and for Hyde de Neuville, see ibid. (14 Feb. 1816): 156. 76 Chateaubriand, De la monarchie, 46.

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sounds a bit odd, for the prospect of a set of ministers who would take their lead from whatever an assembly said was reminiscent of the worst days of the Revolution, was incompatible with what Chateaubriand had already set out in chapter 9, and made no sense of the king’s role.77 Only in the special circumstances of the moment might there be scope for ministers who had previously ignored the wishes of a compact legislative majority to come to their senses, as it were, and resolve to be more conciliatory in their conduct of business. Following what chapter 9 had argued, this would amount first to following and then to leading the majority. Apparently, it was exactly such a change of heart that Chateaubriand had in mind – hence his warning that a majority that had its will crossed too often might not cooperate with the ministry when it pleased the prodigal ministers to return to the fold – “de rentrer dans la majorité.” This presented the puzzlement that the allegedly wayward ministers had never belonged to that majority and so could hardly be described as returning to it. Of equal interest is Chateaubriand’s fleeting reference to the alternative to the initial set of proposals; he had said that ministers who did neither the one nor the other might themselves disappear or one might “chasse la chambre.” The careless presentation makes it sound as though it were the ministers who might dissolve the lower chamber (for, grammatically, the subject of the verb is “ministère”). If pressing the text so hard seems uncharitable, we must recall that Chateaubriand’s list of royal prerogatives had made no reference to that of dissolution. Was he perhaps anxious not to remind the king that there were ways of disposing of a recalcitrant chamber? Thus ended the analytical passages that offered, in fragmented form, the case for a ministry that moved in conjunction with the chambers and, especially, with a majority of the deputies. What was missing here, for purposes of spelling out a case comparable in power to that of Vitrolles, was any sensitivity to that institution that informed the earlier argument or, indeed, the writings, some still unpublished, of Fiévée. Chateaubriand was seeking to unite public men without his once asking whether there need not be an initial affinity, a loyalty, called party. This was the elephant in the room, one studiously ignored throughout. His marked propensity to look elsewhere is revealed, for instance, in his advice of chapter 26 to the effect that one needed a larger ministry just so as to multiply supporters in attaching personal followings to the cause of the ministers and by satisfying a greater number of ambitions for office. Such stratagems were not valueless in British experience, but they were hardly the major instrument. It was, moreover, as cynical an 77 For a critique of the ambiguity of chapter 39, see M. ***, Examen des quarante premiers chapitres du livre intitulé: De la monarchie selon la Charte (Paris, 1816), 34–5.

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account of the engines for sustaining support as any offered by Robert Walpole, at whose methods most French observers sniffed in disapproval. What Chateaubriand contemplated, however, was Walpole without the Whigs. The most recent editor of this political classic offers evidence of his surprise that Chateaubriand could so readily talk about the majority with never a thought about how party ties would be essential to create and maintain such an entity. He supports the observation by reminding us of a letter written by the king to his favourite, Decazes, in October 1816. There, Louis XVIII was explicit that he deemed ideal a two-party arrangement in which the ministers headed one such body.78 Chateaubriand’s analysis had also come close to ignoring the companion institution of the opposition, although chapter 28 offered, in revealing fashion, a glimpse of the activity. In setting out the conditions for success of ministerial ambitions in the conditions of a constitutional monarchy, Chateaubriand undertook to depict the mood of a French chamber, based we must assume on the rather brief stock of experience on which he could draw. It would avail the ministers nothing, he said, to seek to seduce to their side the more prominent leaders and orators of the chamber, for the rest of the chamber would then simply abandon them. The resistance of the bulk of deputies lay in the fact that “their opposition is an opposition of conscience, and not a matter of party.” Twice before, Chateaubriand had alluded to votes that threatened to violate conscience, and now the larger pattern was made plain.79 Happy was a British ministry, for it needed but to summon its troops and they arrived in London in the name of interest and party. It has been perceptively noted that the word “interest” had a pejorative connotation for Chateubriand,80 and thus the judgment of this form of behaviour sounded less than favourable. Very different it was in France, where bestowal of places availed one less in the way of purchased loyalty and where the activity of opposition was differently constituted. Some small display of civility on the part of a minister might go farther, for – in a phrase that attracted attention in responses to this work – the effectiveness of a French minister might rest as much in his salon as in his cabinet. So the French conscience, introduced in Chateaubriand’s Réflexions politiques, lived on, and the political loyalties on which the original model for representative monarchy had been formed would break upon it. Only

78 Chateaubriand, Grands écrits politiques, ed. Jean-Paul Clément (Paris, 1993), 2:491n76. 79 Chateaubriand, De la monarchie, 33; cf. 7, 11. 80 Philippe André-Vincent, Les Idées politiques de Chateaubriand (Montpellier, 1936), 121.

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very late in his long life would he unequivocally endorse a point of view more suitable to the practice of parliamentary government. The later chapters were almost devoid of conceptual material, but here and there were indications that the animus against party was an established part of Chateaubriand’s understanding of politics. The vision of harmony, introduced in the Réflexions politiques, reappeared in the confident suggestion that the very presence of a minority in the Chamber of Deputies – that minority with whom he unfairly accused the ministers as having thrown their lot – had only formed as the “reproduction” of the ministerial point of view. This implied that revolutionary or Bonapartist loyalties would rapidly decay unless artificially preserved by an anti-royalist orientation among the ministers. The only group that endured the epithet of “party” was the Jacobins, whom he allowed still to exist, but in their reduced state he deemed them to be toothless. Another passage reveals that he was using the terms “party” and “faction” indiscriminately.81 It was a habit that he would, in time, lose. The most eloquent testimony as to Chateaubriand’s views about parties was his unembarrassed assumption that all of France might be made royalist. If at all possible, this outcome should be pursued, as a duty, by any ministry. This was the position defended in chapters 63 to 65. It seems, then, that Chateaubriand’s notions about political division never coincided with his close inspection of the machinery of government. In 1814, he had admitted that the nation was divided into two different opinions, but he had emphasized that the two might both be accommodated within the Charte. By September 1816, his review of the political order was less ready to proclaim a tolerant pluralism, for his ecumenical version of royalism left any other view an error whose perpetuation became the fault of the ministers. In the first instance, there was political diversity but no disposition to analyse constitutional structures in terms of it; in the second, the readiness to dwell with the diversity had come close to vanishing. Written prior to the dissolution of 5 September 1816, the book carried a postscript that quarrelled inconsequentially with the ordinance that had dissolved the chamber. In keeping with his teaching on the inviolable king, Chateaubriand attributed this affront entirely to the responsible ministers. Owing to the seizure of the book, the usual sources of reviews ignored its presence, and when, in due course, his property was returned to him and it could circulate with impunity, it was already a bit late for reviews. As usual, the official bibliographical record – the Bibliographie de la France – paid no heed to publications that ran afoul of the police. There was, nonetheless, very considerable comment on the part of readers. With that hyperbole that came so effortlessly to him, Chateaubriand estimated that there had 81 Chateaubriand, De la monarchie, 84, 102–3.

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been fifty or sixty publications written in answer to his book. A more modest and much more accurate estimate suggested that there had been about fifteen.82 In fact, the total now traceable amounts to closer to twenty-five, including some substantial books in which Chateaubriand had to share an examination that was accorded as well to Vitrolles’s ideas or to some of the work of Fiévée. This number also includes works written after 1816 that contain comments on De la monarchie and treat Chateaubriand’s more recent writings dating from 1817 and 1818. The world seems to have had no difficulty in discerning some family resemblance among them, and these constitute the great bulk of Chateaubriand’s political treatises. As it happens, the best known responses were from the Doctrinaire camp, such as from Guizot, in works supportive of the ministers and in his Du gouvernement représentatif, and from Villemain, in Le Roi, la Charte. From a liberal viewpoint, there was Constant’s De la doctrine politique, where the author’s ironies fail to mask some irritation that Chateaubriand was little prone to acknowledge intellectual forerunners. Major figures such as Constant and Guizot were, in all probability, going to comment on the issues of the day, whether or not Chateaubriand had also done so. It seems misleading, then, to see their work, as some do, merely as responses to Chateaubriand, tempting target though he was. Different both in intent and in their political orientation were the bulk of the pamphlets – omitting a few anonymous ones whose brevity or oddness makes it difficult to discern what commitments lay behind the criticism – for most were almost equally divided between those of royalists who were puzzled or perhaps offended by arguments that clashed with their understanding of support for the restored monarchy, and those of a slightly larger category that reflected views to the left of Chateaubriand’s. The latter were from people who naturally resented the claim that loyalty to king and the Charte existed only among those of the exact shade of ultraism represented by Chateaubriand. Writers of such responses were free as well to call themselves royalists, and with most of these identifying with the government of the day, the writers admitted no party affiliation. Rarest of all were highly developed insights into the analytical deficiencies of the book, for that called for a rare command of a subject both new and complex. Fiévée, who would have been capable of it, would not have attacked a great author who managed to say favourable things about his work and with whom he shared a general point of view. Less vulnerable, Vitrolles still offered no public comment until the memoirs that he left in manuscript. There he dismissed Chateaubriand’s book as bizarre and incoherent, a 82 Charles de Loménie, Trois anneés de la vie de Chateaubriand (1814–1816): Son rôle et ses écrits à l’origine du royalisme parlementaire (Paris, 1905), 109.

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judgment that resonates with a general and devastating conclusion that Chateaubriand’s brilliant style excused him from needing impressive arguments.83 The similarity of this verdict of a fellow royalist with one passed earlier by a political enemy is striking.84 Expressions of disagreement that came from traditionalists focused, predictably, on the suspicion that Chateaubriand, for all his professed esteem for the monarchy, had sought to dispossess the king of some of his prerogatives. It was a view to be expected among loyal subjects who hoped to see a recreation of as much as possible of the world from before the Revolution. The most persistent of critics from such premises was one Marmet, who spread his distress over two publications, one of book length. He revealed his highly traditional sympathies in his insistence that the chambers were indeed but councils to advise the king and in his expression of horror that Chateaubriand should have compromised his command of language the better to communicate at a popular level.85 More conventionally, Marmet agreed with the usual reading of the intent of the Charte and so insisted, contra Chateaubriand, that the legislative power inhered in the king alone. Despite his endorsing a lowly status for the legislature, Marmet was concerned, too, that Chateaubriand’s proposals would leave the ministers to prevail over the chambers through that sort of venality employed in Britain. The account of relations between ministers and the Chambre des députés evidently left Marmet confused, for he professed an inability to understand how a nominal dependence on the lower chamber might allow the ministers, in effect, to direct the proceedings of that chamber.86 This was truly a difficult part of the original argument, and we must hold at fault Chateaubriand’s own disarray in accepting a pattern in Britain that was the work of parties, while leaving those very parties out of his own account. Especially in the longer work, M. de Chateaubriand réfuté, Marmet’s argument reads oddly, for he appears to be seeking to defend the chambers against ministerial domination, whereas his real loyalties definitely lay with the king. Again, the problem was doubtless the fault of Chateaubriand’s argument, which set out his ideal constitutional pattern in terms that would only make sense when the majority and the ministers shared a common 83 Vitrolles, Mémoires (1951), 2:425–6, 324. There is no Appendix A, the source of the first citation, in the edition of 1884; the equivalent to the second citation is in 3:283. 84 Cf. J.-J. Regnault-Warin, Rapport sur l’état de la France fait au roi dans son conseil par le vicomte de Chateaubriand et réfutation par M. Regnault de Warin (Paris, 1815), 60. 85 L.-C.-H. Marmet, Réfutation des erreurs de M. le vicomte de Chateaubriand (Paris, 1816), 17ff, 9; and Marmet, M. de Chateaubriand réfuté par lui-même (Paris, 1816), 46. 86 Marmet, Réfutation, 13–14; and Marmet, M. de Chateaubriand réfuté, 58–60.

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will. Since Chateaubriand never admitted the work done by party in securing this outcome, Marmet had got lost in the detail. It is a weakness, too, of political theorists to attempt to invoke immutable principle in support of short-term objectives. Much of the sustained crossness of Marmet’s critique reflects an aversion to that British model of which Chateaubriand had, in truth, made very selective use. This feeling may have been almost as typical of unregenerate products of the ancien régime as it was among republicans and Bonapartists. Almost exactly the same confusion that afflicted Marmet surfaced as well in another substantial criticism, one that was, in this case, overtly hostile to representative government. The author objected that he could not understand the principle that the ministers should both emerge from the majority and exercise a benign influence over their colleagues. Put differently, responsibility and dominance seemed incompatible.87 Among the eccentricities to which this book was subject was the author’s extensive citation from authorities that, despite their sometimes promising titles, enjoyed no existence outside his own mind. Consequently, a biographical dictionary’s description of the writer as an “esprit assez confus” seems apt. Yet it must be said that the most interesting of the confusions had been invited by Chateaubriand himself. Less sympathetic to traditional views, save for a firm commitment to leaving the ministers as the creatures of the king, was the ambitious scheme embarked upon by a man of letters named Joseph Lingay who, perhaps because he was a paid writer for the ministers, published under a pseudonym. Intended to run to one hundred chapters, the work actually reached sixty-five and paralleled the organization of Chateaubriand’s book. Once again, Chateaubriand’s vagueness about the nature of the bond of union that existed between the ministers and the chambers returned to haunt him. In this case, Lingay was able to argue, rather cogently, that he found no convincing explanation of how there might exist such an entity as that majority that dictated the working of the system. He treated the assumptions that posited such an entity as “metaphysical.”88 Curiously, for an argument that had found the weakest spot in Chateaubriand’s case, Lingay accepted the possibility that ministers and deputies might be brought together by public opinion, but then he quite sensibly denied that instrumental to such a link could be a homogeneous, immobile mass called the majority.

87 [F.-N. Dufriche de Foulaines], De l’ouvrage intitulé De la monarchie selon la Charte (Paris, 1816), 119–20. 88 C.-M. Léon de Saint-Marcel [i.e., Lingay], De la monarchie avec la Charte (Paris, 1816), 50, 72, 136.

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In his assuming both the work done by party connections and the absence of anything corresponding to British parties, Chateaubriand had puzzled yet another reader. It may well be that this critic, in striving to extract an intelligible explanation for the bond of union from Chateaubriand’s argument, had been led to read into the text an assumption about the salience of parties that was absent in the original. Else, the repeated expression of hostility to party on the British model seems gratuitous.89 This was a response that sounded, in places, very sympathetic to authority and the prejudices of the ultras while containing the insistence that there was no royalist party but only a royalist nation that was loyal to the king. It was a position that had much in common with Chateaubriand’s own and, with some minor adjustment, could serve as well the purposes of the government. Most in tune with the work of a ministerial apologist was the claim that a vision of an exclusive party of royalists was one concocted “dans les grotesques châteaux de nos vieux gentilhommes.”90 That may indeed capture the flavour of some ultra writings – and was consistent with Chateaubriand’s aim of defining a virtuous loyalty that did not belong to everyone – but all assumptions about the place of parties had seen too much in Chateaubriand’s use of British precedents. Much more sympathetic in tone, though less acute in analysis, were the comments by the marquis de Saisseval. In the main, he endorsed Chateaubriand’s views, although he took exception to three of the early chapters that he correctly saw as tending to hedge in royal involvement in day-to-day politics. Saisseval’s concern for an undiminished prerogative thus led to a very respectful dissent. This, one suspects, was the sort of dissent that the author could tolerate, and he paid his critic the rare courtesy of a reply.91 Saisseval’s rather undemanding reading of Chateaubriand left him accepting a constitutional scheme that failed to make sense to more attentive readers. Of a similarly benign character were the thoughts of the conservative philosopher Nicolas Bergasse. He judged most of the criticisms directed at Chateaubriand to be misinformed, but even he gently suggested that possibly Chateaubriand had gone too far in distancing the ministers from their royal master.92 Not very different was the author of an anonymous pamphlet who rivalled Chateaubriand’s earlier Réflexions in his readiness to offer French mores as the barrier to a wholesale introduction of the British 89 Ibid., 207, 234. 90 Ibid., 208. 91 Saisseval, Du pouvoir royal avec la Charte, 11–14, 18. Chateaubriand’s reply came in “Du pouvoir royal,” signed ‘ Z,’ in Le Drapeau blanc (1819), 2:49–61. The pages refer to those of the two-volume edition. 92 [Nicolas Bergasse], Vues politiques arrachées à un homme d’état (Paris, 1816), 2, 6.

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constitution. In particular, he noted the unlikelihood of there being the right proclivities in French politics for sustaining the sort of indissoluble engagement that was known in Britain. Without the fixed majority that Chateaubriand had assumed, a central tenet of De la monarchie disappeared. In delineating that French character that would resist ready formation into a firm legislative majority, the critic’s argument invoked that individual judgment, independence, sense of honour, and openness to reasoned argument to which Chateaubriand had himself appealed in 1814.93 It is true as well that Chateaubriand had never repudiated that character and, with reduced intensity, had returned to its praise in 1816. His failure lay in his not wondering how embracing the flattering version of the French character was compatible with his visualizing a lump-like majority. De la monarchie attracted the least-discerning criticism when forced to share attention with some other work, especially so because the companion piece was usually drawn from the ample repertoire of Fiévée. The famous author did not always fare well beside the entertaining journalist, and he cannot have cared for the verdict of one critic, relatively friendly towards both of them, that if the first were the more imaginative, the second offered more that was clever.94 The tendency to bracket Chateaubriand and Fiéveé as offering but variants of the same doctrine is evident as well in the literature that more obviously was written either from the perspective of the ministers or from one rooted in the revolutionary or Bonapartist past. The attractiveness of Fiévée’s provocative essays led again and again to the ignominious subordination of De la monarchie selon la Charte to the pleasures of trying to outwit the elusive Fiévée.95 Since some of the critics could be quite unpleasant in their few comments, this reticence cannot have been the result of respect for a national literary idol. No more flattering was one rebuttal to Fiévée where Chateaubriand makes an entrance only for purposes of demonstrating that some of his political ideas served to undermine the position expounded by the central figure. Specifically, the critic drove a wedge between the two ultra writers by citing Chateaubriand’s hymn to the nobility of French national 93 Anon., Première lettre de M. * * * * à M. le vicomte de Chateaubriand (Paris, 1816), 17–18, 22–3. 94 Anon., Remonstrances d’un vieux royaliste (Paris, 1816), 25–6. 95 See Louis Bénaben, Procès de l’oligarchie contre la monarchie (Paris, 1817), 13–15; [Philpin], Examen des doctrines de MM. Fiévée et de Chateaubriand, where the latter’s treatment is confined to 75–110; and [Gautier and d’Auréville], La Verité sur les sessions … augmentée de réflexions sur le dernier ouvrage de M. le vicomte de Châteaubriand (Paris, 1818), 135–67, where the authors range over their victim’s ideas from several publications, but constantly involve themselves with Fiévée as well.

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character as an embarrassment to his colleague’s argument for a majority based upon party.96 Considering the relative cogency of the two arguments, it might have been a better strategy to quote Fiévée for purposes of correcting Chateaubriand. So frequent was the association of these two names, before their formal joining with others in Le Conservateur, that one writer suggested involvement of the two in the production of a pamphlet of the day.97 There is no corroboration of this claim, and the pamphlet of October 1816, entitled Conséquences immédiates du système adopté par le ministère, was both brief and said little. It was, however, favourably disposed towards Chateaubriand and that itself was a rarity at the time. Whereas old-fashioned believers in church and king registered disorientation at some of Chateaubriand’s positions, responses that seemed intended to defend the ministers were more often hostile in tone. Sometimes, too, the criticism was unfair, as when an opponent accused his prey of seeking a phantom sovereign who not only would do the bidding of a renewed feudal aristocracy but who would be captured by his ministers and would be unable even to change the personnel of the ministry.98 No doubt the original had suffered from unclarity regarding the role contemplated for a constitutional monarch, since the argument implied that the king’s room for manoeuvre would be limited if he were confronted by ministers allied with a legislative majority. Effective, then, in teasing out implications that the ultra cause was reluctant to face, the charge finds in Chateaubriand a sinister dimension that is hard to document; better to have accused him of confused presentation. Most active among ministerial champions was the self-styled “chevalier de l’union” who wrote three pamphlets in the cause, two of them in 1816. Jubé de la Perrelle, who wrote under this disguise, offered criticism that varied from the silly claims that Chateaubriand’s position followed both the tactics of Sir Robert Walpole and the antediluvian opinions of the vicomte Ducrest to the more insightful observation that Chateaubriand’s views of 1814 and those of 1816 were inconsistent. To take first the unsustainable charges: Walpole believed in party, as Vitrolles had shown, so he offered but faint inspiration, whereas Ducrest, a true reactionary, hardly deigned to recognize the presence of the chambers. Better fare came in Jubé’s recognition that the maxim of 1814 – that a French opposition was more to be feared 96 H.-T. Le Fèvre, Observations sur l’ouvrage de M. Fiévée (Paris, 1816), 115–16. No other work is credited to this writer, yet the book reveals some skill in argument. Probably one has here a nom de plume for someone well known. 97 Philpin, Examen, 117–18. 98 [Alexandre M. Goujon], La Véritiable conspiration dévoilée, ou réflexions sur un ouvrage de M. de Chateuabriand … par un ami de le [sic] monarchie constitutionnelle (Paris, 1816), 13–14.

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than ministerial influence – belied the claims that proved useful to the circumstances of 1816. Here was an instance where inspiration ran downhill, and by 1818 the persistent critic was reduced to complaining that no one yet knew the identity of those honnêtes gens for whom his opponent wrote.99 That particular point had been of interest to many, and one later collector of Chateaubriand’s sayings would explain how the expression had begun, in the previous century, as one that suggested simple probity and had then come to stand for something more reflective of high status and wealth.100 The ambiguous blending of moral and social quality had probably given Chateaubriand no incentive to offer clarification. The month of December 1816 saw a new spate of anonymous pamphlets, concerned mostly with refuting Chateaubriand’s claim, made in the upper chamber, that the government had interfered with the outcome of the elections. These responses contained little but insult and raillery, although one of them, in taking umbrage that Chateaubriand should dare to compare official tampering with French elections unfavourably with British practice, testifies to the anglophobic feelings that ultra writings had inspired.101 It is ironical that Chateaubriand, who had resisted any constitutional role for those parties that held the British polity together, should have been so widely perceived as an uncritical anglophile. From as early as 1815, he had even been credited with being an advocate of those party connections of which his actual words seemed so predictably to avoid mention. a l o n g fare we l l Chateaubriand’s greatest prominence as a controversialist came in the period 1814–16, for by then the stock of ideas that fuelled his next thirty years had already, in considerable measure, been articulated. What remained by way of refinement of his understanding came largely in the form of anonymous contributions, correspondence, and the memoirs. Certainly the central teaching about the sovereign in a constitutional monarchy, the one that allowed him later to congratulate himself as the author of the formula that the king reigned but did not govern,102 was already in 99 [Jubé], Nouvelle lettre du chevalier de l’union à M. le vicomte de Chateaubriand (Paris, 1816), vii–ix, 32; “chevalier de l’union” [Jubé], Lettre à M. le vte. de Chateaubriand, concernant un pamphlet intitulé: De la monarchie selon la Charte (Paris, 1816), 8; and [Jubé], Quelques mots sur la proclamation de M. le vicomte de Chateaubriand (Paris, 1818), 15. 100 Charles-Yves Cousin d’Avallon, Chateaubriandiana, ou recueil de pensées, maximes, réflexions (Paris, 1820), 2:19. 101 Anon., Lettre d’un plébéien à M. le vicomte de Chateaubriand (Paris, 1816), 25–6. 102 The figure conventionally credited with the expression is Thiers. See Alain Lequièze, “Adolphe Thiers, théoricien du régime parlementaire: Ses articles dans Le National en 1830,” Revue française d’histoire des idées politiques 5 (1997): 59–88 at 69–70.

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place. In the degree to which Chateaubriand is correct in this claim, then he had laid the basis of that revolution of 1830 that he would so regret. We seem here to be in the presence of high tragedy. Whatever its true merits, De la monarchie selon la Charte would be, as far as one can tell, the political work that stimulated more controversial publications than any other in a period rich in constitutional theory. The later arguments in favour of the liberty of the press were undoubtedly significant but were less distinctive and, perhaps because more resistant to criticism, were subject to much less comment. It is doubtless, in part, owing to the furore created by this one work that Chateaubriand’s next pamphlet, Du système politique suivi par le ministère, a product of December 1817, should make its mark as the second most discussed of his polemical writings. This argument consisted of a case for the new situation of the ultras, who were no longer a majority that claimed some legitimate influence on the ministry and who found themselves having to compete for attention with a liberal opposition. Without any regard to an earlier agenda keyed to past circumstances, Chateaubriand now set out to dignify the situation of his ultra allies among the deputies. Bold indeed was the avertissement that regretted the absence of any procedure for emulating the British practice whereby Parliament might debate the state of the nation in a battle “corps à corps … entre l’Opposition et le Ministère.” For whatever reason, Chateaubriand had begun to capitalize the office of Opposition in Britain, though no comparable courtesy was extended to the French equivalent. His views thus seem, in retrospect, to have begun a slow but significant development. Since the French chambers were not tooled for such an epic confrontation as described here, he had moved it to the press and, to all appearances, acted there as though he were the leader of the opposition. Very revealing was Chateaubriand’s response to the argument, attributed here to the ministry, that the government should not be placed in the hands of a party. Disregarding the question as to whether or not the government might naturally attract a following, and so quite naturally to constitute a party, he moved instead to exclaim about how odd it was to regard the royalists, within a monarchy, as a party.103 This formulation neatly captured the familiar claims on that subject. Such propositions, stated in various forms, echoed throughout the pamphlet as by far its most remarkable assertions. A royalist minority was one against nature, whereas “[t]he natural opposition today would be a democratic opposition combated by a strong royalist majority.”104 By way of supporting the claim, Chateaubriand invoked the opinion supposedly uttered

103 Chateaubriand, Du système politique suivi par le ministère (Paris, 1817), 16. This may also be found in Chateaubriand, Oeuvres complètes, 7:285–309. 104 Chateaubriand, Du système politique, 44.

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in the Chamber of Deputies by Pierre-Vincent Benoist, a strong royalist in his entourage. However, the only constitutional statement that even remotely approached the question at issue is one where Benoist repudiated the suggestion by a supporter of the administration that representative government was, by its very nature, a prolonged struggle for office. It was a situation that, he said, was alien to the French character.105 Were this the speech in question – and there seems to be no other candidate – it allows us to place on Chateaubriand’s words the remarkable construction that the natural state of affairs should see people such as he secure in their enjoyment of office, dealing with an opposition that had no realistic hope of supplanting them. The apparent leader of the royalist opposition seemed less committed to strengthening the office of opposition than in asserting that it was the liberals who belonged there. Only, one must conclude, while the natural rulers wanted power would a struggle, as practised in Britain, be appropriate. The long-term vision of politics was not one that sat well with the initial appeal for pitched battles as in the Parliament of Great Britain. The pamphlet that had begun by calling for open contention between majority and minority – and ended by condemning the ministry for its failure to secure “une majorité compacte, süre, imperturbable” – seemed to be in the position of demanding some party-like following for the current ministers even as it remained unforthcoming about the status of parties. In support of the claim, Chateaubriand used Fiévée’s now familiar point that the chamber was too small in numbers to make such a strong and lasting majority probable. This version was, however, without the original’s attachment to an explicit commitment to government and opposition by party. The disjunction between end and means, so evident in 1816, lived on, with only a hint that the author was still learning about important institutions. Ready to condemn censorship as “une arme de parti” and indignant that people might suspect the royalists’ defence of freedom of the press as a sign of party spirit, Chateaubriand continued to seek the benefits of party, even as he kept the institution at a distance. Yet the very need to address the political situation in terms comprehensible to his readers seems to have left Chateaubriand no choice but to identify three bodies in the chamber – the independents, the royalists, and the ministerial following. Never did he in so many words call the royalists a party, but his designation of the ministerialists as a ‘‘tiers parti” left little doubt as to the identity of the other two.106 Response to this pamphlet took the form of a dozen or so publications, more than was provoked by almost any other work of the time save for 105 AP 17 (30 Dec. 1816): 756–65 at 761–2. 106 Chateaubriand, Du système politique, 58, 33, 41–2.

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Chateaubriand’s own earlier effort. To all appearances, many of the responses were inspired by the government, and as the work of functionaries or of mercenaries, they lack, in the main, that quality of anguished puzzlement that had been evident in so many of the royalists in 1816. Pierre Azaïs’s intimate journal – the work of that pretentious thinker whom Constant once summarily dismissed as “a bad philosopher” – reveals what interest the Decazes government took in ensuring that Chateaubriand be answered. The record shows that not only Azaïs himself, ambitious for patronage, but also Charles-François Mirbel, remembered as an eminent botanist but then temporarily in the Conseil d’État, and Abel-François Villemain, Chateaubriand’s future biographer, were among the officials assigned to this business.107 The unremarkable quality of the philosopher’s ripostes to the great writer – like Chateaubriand himself, he was disposed to try to locate a focus of national sentiment so potent as to escape the status of being but a party – might suggest that the ministers had squandered public money in buying him a house. Some of his other political writings were, though, of better quality than this. This literature also affords valuable insights into the prevailing understanding of constitutional relations, for although the writers of the rebuttals were surely atypical of the population, their views were calculated to appeal to as wide an audience as possible. Faced with the astonishing assertion that the ultras belonged in office and that, until they got there, the world was turned upside down, the repliers seemed curiously undismayed by the presumption. It did not, however, go ignored. Each of the counterclaims that is worth perusing seems to have found a slightly different way of meeting Chateaubriand’s declared lien on the seats of power. In this gallery of critics, none of whom is of great intrinsic importance, it seems best to lay emphasis upon the arguments and not upon their bearers. The simplest way to challenge that self-righteousness that accompanied the main argument was simply to insist that there was no evidence that could warrant the Cassandra-like air that Chateaubriand conveyed. It was rhetorical conceit, an empty gesture. Put beside this objection, the same critic’s opinion that Chateaubriand, as a thinker, did not rival the immortal Montesquieu sounds unduly respectful.108 The same general position, joined to the revived spirit of the Revolution, traced the exaggerations about imminent disaster to the designs of the feudal aristocracy and the clergy to repossess that power that once they had enjoyed. This entailed a disinclination to enter into the fine points of 107 Michel Baude, P.H. Azaïs, temoin de son temps d’après son journal inédit (1811– 1844) (Lille-Paris, 1980), 1:206. 108 F.-J.-P. Aubert de Vitry, Observations d’un journaliste sur l’écrit intitulé Du système suivi par le ministère (Paris, 1818), 26, 11.

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the constitution by finding elsewhere the significance of it all. On relations between ministry and opposition, this account was satisfied with calling Chateaubriand’s position difficult to follow. J.-C. Bailleul, ex-Girondin and already introduced as a sometime critic of Constant, was author of these thoughts. No mere hack, he displayed in his numerous writings a unique blend of old revolutionary notions and an overlay of conservative prejudices.109 Another sort of answer might introduce precisely those considerations that had figured in Chateaubriand’s Réflexions and had lived on, in paler form, in De la monarchie in order to condemn the ultra case for seeking to import into France the forms of British party struggle. An easy matter, then, to summon up the French character, already sufficiently volatile and in no need of those artificial stimulants to which a cold people resorted in order to embrace the cause of public virtue.110 As argued by Richard d’Allauch, advocate of a law to define the responsibility of ministers, this position would have benefited from some awareness of the substance of Chateaubriand’s earlier polemics. This was a weakness visible in most efforts to refute the ultra position, and it resulted in refutations that were a good deal less devastating than they might have been. Similar in its crediting Du système politique with making the case for the fullfledged British system of parties – and taking as evidence the charge that the ministers, in purporting to shun the support of a party, were isolated – was the critique of one le chevalier Pierruguès. It opened the door to a perfectly conventional dissection of what the British called a “formed” opposition, or one that was often perceived in France as excessively partisan and disinclined to look at the merits of proposals. By looking chiefly at the source of policy and by being constantly alarmist in its response, this tactic, Pierruguès said, was sure to lose the attention of the public for any good purpose. To the charge that eschewing the support of a party isolated the ministers, he replied that, instead, it attached them to the nation as a whole, and he closed the pamphlet with a hymn to concord. An alternate strategy was to take at face value Chateaubriand’s comment on the oddity of royalists in opposition to the king’s ministers. By so yielding the point, one might brush aside the pathetic air with which a romantic writer had sketched this ironical outcome and, calling the ultras to order, tell them that, were they so sunk in reverence for the throne, they should cease to be obstreperous. This was effective exploitation of the weakness in a strategy that began in Chateaubriand’s pointing to the incongruity of the situation of so-called royalists. One might, of course, join the hero of the tale in his expectation that he be conducted to office, but a more natural answer might be that he desist from an unprofitable course of 109 Jacques-Charles Bailleul, Sur les Royalistes de M. le vicomte de Chateaubriand, pair de France (Paris, 1818), 14, 18, 34, iv. 110 Mons. R.D. [Richard d’Allauch], Du système politique de MM. Azaïs et de Chateaubriand envers le ministère (Paris, 1818), 13–14.

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behaviour and cease to unsettle affairs. L.A. Jouveaux, no better known to political theory than is Pierruguès, ended this riposte to the ultras by justifying an administration free of party connections.111 Among the anonymous replies, there were also some that offered intellectual substance. One of these, forcefully speaking for a ministry that recognized opponents on both sides of it, ran to two editions. Here one finds a very direct confronting of that privileged status that Chateaubriand had claimed for his following. In examining the proposition that minorities that were royalist must be accounted a departure from the natural order, the pamphlet noted how asymmetrical were the claims of the ultras and what it called “républicains.” If the latter openly avowed a republic as their aim, they would lose public support, whereas the ultras might serve selfish ends by crying up a monarchy. Also of interest is that slight pamphlet that ostensibly addressed several of Chateaubriand’s works, including his Remarques sur les affaires du moment, which appeared in July 1818. Refusing to come to terms with any of these statements, the author chose to analyse instead that of December 1815 by Vitrolles. Criticism of the principles that Vitrolles’s statement had put forward was mingled with admiration for the quality of the argument and a tendentious account of what had been entailed. In an ingenious variant of the means for resisting the claims of party, this author argued that a party, or faction, did not provide the cohesion that it was expected to offer. It was not “une corporation régulière, disciplinée, obéissant à des chefs.” Instead, it might be discovered that the leaders fell under the sway of the rank and file. Throughout, the reader was presumably meant to understand that it was French parties and French national character that were prone to such behaviour. Most remarkable was the fact that, from first to last, the words of the alleged subject of the pamphlet were never quoted, never cited, and that Vitrolles, representing, it would appear, a clear statement of the principles under scrutiny, bore the burden of the rebuttal.112

111 Le chevalier [P.] Pierruguès, Des principes du ministère actuel en réponse au soixante-cinq pages de M. de Chateaubriand (Paris, 1818), 2–5, 63; and L.A. Jouveaux, avocat, Réflexions d’un solitaire sur l’écrit de M. le Vicomte de Châteaubriand [sic], pair de France, intitulé Du système politique suivi par le ministère (Paris, 1818), 49, 54–5. 112 ‘M. le marquis de … ,’ Quelques mots à M. le vicomte de Chateaubriand … et à M. Benjamin de Constant, ancien tribune, 2nd ed. (Paris, 1818), 45–6; and Anon., Note sur le dernier écrit de M. le vte. de Chateaubriand et sur les doctrines constitutionnelles de ce noble pair (Paris, 1818), 7–9. The timing of the first edition of Quelques mots corresponds with the appearance of what Azaïs described as the work of Mirbel and Villemain that competed with his own. That, and the fact that there was a second edition, comparatively rare for anonymous polemics, suggests that Quelques mots may be their joint publication, financed by the police.

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Without doubt, the most striking claim to be made by Chateaubriand in Du système politique was the notorious affectation that the royalist cause could only find its proper status when its self-proclaimed supporters commanded the government. This presumption might, of course, make sense if his claim that the favoured political species for whom he spoke were truly the great majority of the nation. This possibility foundered, however, on the ultra propensity to question the past loyalties, current good faith, or other credentials of those on both the left and centre, and thus of all but themselves. So, with one emphasis, Chateaubriand made common cause with the great mass of the population – as he had to if the ultras were to enjoy future success – and, with another, he sought office for a select group of acquaintances. By moving from the expansive understanding of royalism to one far more exclusive, he was able both to claim to represent the nation itself and to seek to discredit the eligibility for office of all but the ultra coterie. Making the case yet more elusive in its character was the inhibition imposed by his not wishing to appear to impugn the royal judgment that lay behind the composition of the ministry. It was perhaps the confusing quality of the ultra case that accounts for the very diverse strategies followed by unsympathetic readers in their responses. Some attacked the posture of being above party; others, the claims on public office; and yet others, both at once.113 The critics who were caustic about the ultras’ shameless claim to office would have been afforded more ammunition had they been aware that, in all circumstances, Chateaubriand was not inhibited about seeking jobs for his friends.114 In sober fact, that was not the whole point of royalist claims for a large place in the political order, but it was the most obvious goal that was sheltered behind their high-flown talk. Meanwhile, Chateaubriand’s own opinions were developing under the stress of collecting support in an electoral system that seemed impervious to repeated insistence that there was something incongruous about royalists being confined to opposition. Without offering any repudiation of the earlier position, he came, by degrees, to accept for the royalists the status of a party. The fault of the Decazes government was its lack of definition, “flottant entre les partis,” as Chateaubriand said in 1819. Here already was an anticipation of the language that would later figure in his long-delayed endorsement of party. A further indication of the shift away from past views lay in his recognition that “trois opinions, trois systèmes ou trois partis (peu importe le nom), divisent la France.”115 In fact, it had once mattered 113 See the sources cited above at 73n11. 114 Beau de Loménie, Carrière politique, 2:19; and Max Egger, ed., Chateaubriand inédit. Nouvelles lettres (Époque de la Restauration) (Paris, 1917), 6–16. 115 [Chateaubriand], “Le Conservateur,” Le Conservateur 1, no. 13 (31 Dec. 1818): 624–8 at 627; and “Politique,” ibid., 4, no. 47 (20 Aug. 1819): 353–76 at 362.

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very much what he called these units, and beginning in 1814, he had called them “opinions.” To allow that even the ministers led a party of sorts had represented a considerable development in his understanding, first evident in 1817. The seemingly grudging acceptance of the term “parti,” equally applicable to all recognizable bodies of opinion, was progress indeed. Up to that point, Chateaubriand had wished – subject to some concessions in the interest of being understood – to argue that royalists were on a plane more exalted than that occupied by the liberals on the left, while the ministers were presented as having a party of sorts but one that they did not acknowledge. Now the royalists seemed, for the moment, to have accepted belonging to a category that they shared with the allegedly anti-dynastic forces. Ignoring his retreat from the earlier hauteur, Chateaubriand put a positive face on the situation in referring to himself as having the role of “leader of an honourable opposition.” The attractions of being a constitutional opposition could only have been enhanced had he been aware that the cabinet noir of the postal service intercepted mail between him and Vaublanc, as though the two belonged to a criminal conspiracy.116 It is unfortunate that essays that Chateaubriand wrote on the tactics of opposition were withdrawn from Le Conservateur and never published, a sacrifice to the need to placate Villèle, who disapproved of their content.117 The parallel of Constant’s leaving a similar work unpublished is rather striking. It seems that here Chateaubriand had favoured systematic opposition à l’anglaise, a position that coheres with the signs of a more accommodating attitude towards party ties. In the absence of these documents, the essays from the pen of the chief writer fail to shed light on this aspect of his constitutional position, leaving the bulk of his contributions in Le Conservateur less powerful and less interesting than those of Fiévée. It is perhaps for this reason that Chateaubriand’s Mémoires d’outre tombe is silent about Fiévée, even though the world tended to treat the two writers, at least on political subjects, as almost one. Chateaubriand’s first term as a leader of the royalist opposition ended with the fall of Decazes in 1820, for the revival of the Right led to his ambassadorships at Berlin and then at the court of St James, followed by his seventeen months or so as foreign minister in the Villèle administration. There is evidence, in this stage of Chateaubriand’s career, of a yet further

116 Chateaubriand, Correspondance générale, 3:155 (letter of 12 Oct. 1817 to Mme de Devas); and for the correspondence with Vaublanc, see ibid., 3:448–9 (editor’s note). 117 Villèle, Mémoires et correspondance, 2:317, 319–20; see also Marilyn L. Mitchell, “Chateaubriand and Hyde de Neuville: The Loyal Opposition” (PhD thesis, University of Kansas, Lawrence, 1972), fol. 76.

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development of his understanding of the place of party in French politics. When Villèle and Corbière, the ultras admitted to Richelieu’s second government, resigned their places, Chateaubriand was far from pleased with this shrinking from power. His response, however, was to resign as ambassador to Berlin. In his correspondence, we find Chateaubriand saying that, in representative government, men of the same opinion should share a common fate. Writing to another correspondent, he described the same decision as one that followed from his not wishing to isolate himself “de mon parti.”118 Prior to his resignation, he had also written to Fiévée to instruct him in no uncertain terms to cease his harassment of Villèle, who had served five years as leader “d’un parti,”119 obviously the royalists. Whatever view had to be offered for public consumption, the royalists had finally settled into the situation of a party among others. During the months in office, one finds Chateaubriand being briefed by Marcellus, the chargé d’affaires in London, on the ways of British parties, with emphasis on how there the majority was “compacte et pour ainsi dire disciplinée.” The subordinate’s later comments about party in Britain also make clear how the strong French impression of a military discipline in British parties was derived from current observations, for later Marcellus added that, in 1823, it was not yet possible in Britain for a party man to change parties honourably.120 His superior’s views about such intelligence are not recorded. The one piece of relevant political argument to come out of this period was Chateaubriand’s anonymous tract in support of a new electoral law, based on the same sort of integral renewal for which he had argued in 1816. It was brought out by Le Normant, Chateaubriand’s usual publisher. The reasons given for the new law differed from those offered previously, a natural result of the move from opposition to government. Worthy of note in the version of 1823 was an assurance that ministers would not be guaranteed a long term in office, “surtout avec une majorité française,” and a confidence that it was actually an easier matter to retain a majority under a system of partial renewal. That had been considerably less clear to him when in opposition. In keeping with a constitutional change that brought French arrangements into line with those in Britain, the argument appealed to the benign effects of integral renewal in British politics. Although Chateaubriand never acknowledged authorship, it was well known to the press, and the Moniteur and the Journal des 118 Beau de Loménie, Carrière politique, 1:324; and Correspondance générale (jan. 1821–30 mars 1822) (Paris, 1983), 4:194, 202. 119 Ibid., 953, 307; and Société Chateaubriand, Bulletin, n.s. 3 (1959): 23. 120 Marie-Louis, comte de Marcellus, Politique de la Restauration en 1822 et 1823 (Paris, 1853), including notes added after the correspondence with Chateaubriand, 104, 335n.

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débats both reproduced the text. Contemporaries took for granted that he had contributed to the debate, although they generally failed to name the publication.121 When he returned to opposition, following his dismissal of June 1824, Chateaubriand picked up some of the very same arguments he had used during his first spell in that situation. In articles printed in the Journal des débats, there was the same complaint that ministers who owed office to the royalist sentiment of the nation still rebuffed the true royalists, while these same ministers were presented as interposing themselves, through use of patronage, between the two real parties, the royalists and constitutionalists of the Left.122 From this, it is at least clear that Chateaubriand had not reverted to the primitivism of anti-party arguments. The onset of the reign of Charles X found Chateaubriand ready to empower that new sovereign as a political force, just as he had tried, in De la monarchie, to create the appearance of magnifying his predecessor’s prerogatives. In the hope that Charles would declare his independence of Villèle, Chateaubriand took back that ministerial autonomy that once he had conferred, and now described the ministers as “instruments fragiles” of the mighty king.123 That was not, in the event, a happy prognosis or a position in accord with its author’s true sentiments. In the main, Chateaubriand’s later political argument was not memorable despite his remaining prominent in opposing the Villèle ministry, though not in quite what was perceived as the English fashion, since he seems to have been ready to offer selective support to good measures.124 Such a resolve is intimated, but not made explicit, in the “Première lettre à un pair de France” of November 1824. The body of some thirty deputies and peers who composed Chateaubriand’s following at this time had a name; it was called the défection, echoing perhaps his sentiment that those like himself really belonged in office. With Villèle defeated, Chateaubriand found himself courted, in 1828, as a potential member of the successor ministry under Martignac, was courted again by the Polignac ministry, and refused the dukedom that would have been his if he had deigned to retain his ambassadorship to Rome under that ministry. Finally, he secured his reputation as a man of honour in renouncing his 121 Anon., Du renouvellement intégral (Paris, 1823), 21–2, 9, 18. Notice of his authorship is to found in Beau de Loménie, Carrière politique, 2:114; Jules Manviel, Lettre à M. le vicomte de Chateaubriand (Paris, 1824), 47; and Madrolle, Histoire des assemblées délibérantes, 437, 442, 451. 122 Chateaubriand, articles of 5 July 1824 and 4 Sept. 1825, in Oeuvres complètes, 8:65, 106. 123 Chateaubriand, “Première lettre à un pair de France” (Nov. 1824), in Oeuvres complètes, 7:323–39 at 324. 124 See Mitchell, “Chateaubriand and Hyde de Neuville,” fol. 183.

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peerage at the July Revolution.125 Always the phrasemaker, Chateaubriand had a capacity for arresting expression that seems to have been responsible for his giving a name to one of the political organizations that, created for the election of 1827, contributed to the defeat of Villèle’s government. As part of the process of his becoming sensitive to the necessity for organizing political opinion, Chateaubriand had written of the election in 1819 and the need to counter the efforts of the electoral machinery of the Left. In this connection, he had offered a signed article that said: “But recall the maxim Heaven helps those who help themselves [Aide-toi, le ciel t’aidera]. The royalists may discover that we should apply this maxim to ourselves.” Scholars have turned up more than one unsigned piece by Chateaubriand, but this avowed one seems to have received little attention, even though it gives him credit for one of the resonant political phrases of the period of 1827 and after.126 The conventional judgment has long named the young Ludovic Vitet as providing the name for the political association born in that year, and, of course, the earlier application of a phrase, familiar outside the political context, had been for the purpose of summoning the royalists alone and not the alliance that fought the election of 1827. After Chateaubriand’s article, one encounters other texts that make political use of the expression or of close variants.127 This readiness to advocate political organization was not allied to any explicit affirmation about political parties, and, in this respect, Chateaubriand’s argument resembles his statements on the liberty of the press. There he joined other royalists in treating this liberty not as an individual right but as necessary to the logic of representative government. He was thus content to note the unfairness and the danger of leaving ministerial organs to exercise a freedom denied to their opponents. The closest the argument came to implicating the press with the struggle of parties was, however, his quoting a speech by Bonald in which the latter had said that, in Britain, armed opposition to government had ceased only when opposition became literary.128 There were problems, of course, in assimilating French circumstances to British experience of avowedly party government, but 125 On this part of his character, see Henri Roujon, “Sincérité de Chateaubriand,” in En marge du temps (Paris, 1908), 52–7. 126 Chateaubriand, “Des élections,” Le Drapeau blanc, no. 79 (2 Sept. 1819). For his anonymous contributions to the same paper, see Pierre Reboul, “Chateaubriand au Drapeau blanc,” Annales universitatis Saraviensis (1953) [Saarbrueck], 2:31–46. 127 See Vernay, Des élections royales, 15. 128 Beau de Loménie, Carrière politique, 2:169. For the use of Bonald’s speech of 28 Jan. 1817, see Chateaubriand, Oeuvres complètes, 7:407. Other passages that treat the press in relation to existing political divisions are found in ibid., 383, 506, 634–5.

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others went further than did Chateaubriand in treating competing periodicals and the competition of parties as part of the same process. One of these was his old friend Hyde de Neuville, who argued for liberty of the press on the purely prudential grounds that ministers would do well to extend that liberty to the opposition, for the simple reason that they never knew when they might come to occupy the same situation.129 Usually ready to accord himself a generous role in important matters, Chateaubriand seems never to have wished to associate himself with the phrase that rallied the various oppositions of 1827. Perhaps his responsibility for yet another phrase that would accompany the Bourbons into exile was just too painful. The discovery of Chateaubriand’s hand in the naming of the electoral machinery of the Left is the more interesting when placed in the company of his well-documented responsibility for fathering the Société des Amis de la Liberté de la Presse, predecessor of Aide-toi and the model for it. It was in July of 1827 that Chateaubriand had advocated organizing to displace those ministers responsible for the repressive laws.130 The name of the new organization was based, no doubt, on earlier bodies of a similar nature, some sponsored by the Left. In effect, then, Chateaubriand had, in one way or another, left his mark on both branches of the machinery that gave victory in the election of 1827 to the forces of opposition. Even as the reign of Charles X moved towards its dramatic finish, Chateaubriand had apparently come to an understanding of the melée of contending groups in terms of political parties. There had been an impression, based perhaps on Chateaubriand’s unwillingness to write for La Bourdonnaye’s L’Aristarque, that he had given up this sort of writing, leaving no anonymous journalism not reproduced in the Oeuvres complètes.131 It seems certain, however, that there is some unacknowledged journalism.132 The one piece that has been identified is a gem. Writing of that uneasy alliance of the Left and the Right that had driven Villèle from power, Chateaubriand purported to see the future alignment of what he, at last, recognized as respectable parties. 129 Jean-Guillaume Hyde de Neuville, Les Amis de la liberté de la presse: Des inconséquences ministérielles (Paris, 1827), 7–8. 130 Chateaubriand, “Marche et effets de la censure,” in Oeuvres complètes, 7:495– 515; and Kent, The Election of 1827 in France, 81–88, based on extensive archival work. 131 Beau de Loménie, Carrière politique, 2:202; and letter of January 1827 to La Bourdonnaye, in Egger, Chateaubriand inédit, 12–13. 132 No less an authority than Duvergier de Hauranne described the item cited here in sufficient detail to allow for its identification, although he offered no date for the article. See his Histoire du gouvernement parlementaire, 10:34.

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No longer, he wrote, need ministers seek to find their way between royalists who had no use for the Charte and liberals who were equally cool to the monarchy. The future would belong, on one side, to those whom he called “Torys constitutionnels” and, on the other, to “Whigs monarchiques,” with the more extreme opinions on either side no longer relevant.133 In 1820, as part of his unending search for stability and union, Louis XVIII had asked where the familiar Whigs and Tories of British fame could be found among his people. Finally, Chateaubriand had offered an answer to that forlorn plea. These anonymous thoughts are thus important to an understanding of Chateaubriand’s eventual embracing of the institution of party and have been cherished by Frenchmen who shared that commitment.134 It is possible as well that this article inspired other ones, probably not by Chateaubriand, that were consistent in intent with the first. One such is a spirited argument for an Opposition – the French version had by now earned its capital letter – that was intent on ousting the ministers and securing office for its members.135 So Chateaubriand also played his part in depicting that promised land that, for many, had seemed to beckon in the year 1828. The final word on the nature of opposition returned to that notion of organized resistance that had precipitated the break with Villèle over Le Conservateur. This was a form of opposition that logically entailed a formed body, and the adhesive of such a unit was properly seen as that offered by common loyalty to a political party. It is by no means clear that this insight is present throughout the most active years of Chateaubriand’s political career, but in retrospect it grew luminous. One part of the lengthy memoirs could not wait for posthumous publication, and so Chateaubriand gave to the world, during his lifetime, his thoughts on the period of his foreign ministry and the Congress of Verona. There he left no doubt that it was only the British form of opposition that was up to the task. Gone was all talk – for which he had been in no small measure responsible – about the tender French conscience and the duty of honourably considering all arguments before committing one’s vote. Now he proclaimed the essential powerlessness of conscience and even its irrelevance with respect to matters outside the realm of moral questions. When, as so often in politics, an intellectual judgment was called for, better to rally behind a leader and to enter and leave office with those similarly committed. Too often, men 133 Journal des débats, 11 Nov. 1828. 134 See Jules Arzens, “Gouvernement parlementaire,” in L’Échec du gouvernment parlementaire et le réforme de notre régime constitutionnel (Paris, 1898), 1–54 at 34. This admirer used the account in Duvergier de Hauranne’s volume 10 and seems not to have consulted the original. 135 Journal des débats, 28 Dec. 1828.

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voted their stupidity and called it conscience. Clearly, the alternative to conscience was to be understood as fixed allegiance on party lines: “Opposition called that of conscience consists in floating between the parties.”136 The pejorative connotations of “floating” had been part of his repertoire since 1819, and the image of floating alignments had figured in the widespread revulsion to the bascule. Here at last, amid the echoes of some of his earlier writings, the main author of the plea of conscience gave that claim its proper rebuke. It would surely be unkind to make much of the fact that the necessity of party still appeared only in his scorn for those who abjured it, and the need for such a mechanism was left implied rather than asserted forthrightly. Not surprisingly, then, is that later compendium of his wisdom that attributed to Chateaubriand none but negative thoughts about party and especially its lacking conscience. These thoughts seem to have been drawn from the historical works of the 1820s.137 More significantly, the very late endorsement of party came to be quoted by those who wished for a succinct judgment on the long debates over the nature of constitutional opposition and the sort of organization that it might entail. Chateaubriand supplied the inspiration for an effort to state authoritatively the state of informed opinion on these matters, and he was also echoed by those who did not cite his language.138 This support for the future of constitutional government was his final legacy. It is tempting to suggest that, even with his memorable tribute to firm political loyalties, Chateaubriand had always found it difficult, in principle, to embrace party with the warmth available to some others. Of course, his initial endorsement of the politics of conscience – one both prominent and influential – cannot have made it easy for him to utter sentiments of a very different character, for his earlier emphasis was no youthful indiscretion easily to be cast aside. Even as he prepared his legacy to posterity, he continued, to all appearances, to take as his guide to the British constitution his friend J. Fraser Frisell. It so happens that Frisell’s work on that subject is little deserving of 136 Chateaubriand, Congrès de Vérone. Guerre d’Espagne. Négociations. Colonies espagnoles (Paris, 1838), 2:411. The copy used – bearing the bookplate of “Baron Pierre de Bourgoing” – contains a clipping, from an unidentified newspaper, of a letter, dated 16 March 1917, that cites this passage in support of systematic parliamentary opposition. The relevant passage about the activity of opposition was repeated in Chateaubriand, Mémoires d’outre-tombe, 2:107. 137 Catherine Woillez, Le Génie de Maistre, de Bonald et Chateaubriand, ou dictionnaire morale … (Paris and Lyon, 1861), 213–14. 138 E.-J.-B. Rathéry, “Opposition,” in Encyclopédie des gens du monde (Paris, 1843), 18:716–18 at 718; and ‘Timon’ [L.-M., vicomte Cormenin], Livre des orateurs, 12th ed. (Paris, 1843), 43.

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Chateaubriand’s enthusiasm, as expressed in 1837. Far from being an improvement on the understanding of the mechanics of that system of government, the book took as its major concern the claim that the two houses of Parliament must not be divided in their interests and views.139 It was not an eccentric position, especially in the years of the great Reform Bill, but the insight was hardly exciting or very insightful. In saying the same in 1774, Pierre-Jean Grosley had simultaneously revealed an understanding of the contribution of political parties, a topic that seemed to be of no interest to Chateaubriand’s friend. Few were the devotees of the politics of party who had not paid their respects to the Whigs and Tories, for there seemed to be no other example of comparable weight. Perhaps, then, Chateaubriand’s blind spot is testimony to this friendship. Rarely could a thinker whose own political thought was unsystematic have served so well as the cynosure of the thought of his age. Just owing to his person, what Chateaubriand said about politics mattered and evoked from others their own thoughts. His publications were thus responsible for revealing a good deal about the salient categories of party and opposition, despite his relative silence about the one and his vacillation about the other. His journey towards an understanding of party was long and difficult and parallels that of many others. Learning from his political experiences, however, he did change his mind on important matters, and the change was reflected in his recommendations about conduct in a way not true, for instance, of the more theoretical Constant. In the absence of much by way of a firm doctrine in Chateaubriand’s political thought, the bulk of scholarly commentary about him has taken the form of generalizations, not always convincingly allied to evidence, about his mind and character. Yet, in placing what he said in its context, one may see more readily how significantly he served to define the terms of engagement.

139 Chateaubriand, Sketches of English Literature; with Considerations on the Spirit of the Times, Men and Revolutions (London, 1837), 1:104; and [J. Fraser Frisell], Vue générale de la constitution de l’Angleterre … par un Anglais, 3rd ed. (Paris, 1835), 93–9.

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the doctrinaires were the political theorists of an age that was notable for the amount and quality of its theoretical treatment of public issues. Yet the members of the coterie also played a large part in the business of governance, where they tended to distinguish themselves by their pose of staying above the fray. Their situation in the political centre, consciously distanced from either extreme, made the role of arbiter the more credible. An insistence in maintaining a certain independence of partisan ties, allied to the presumption of a superior knowledge of the issues, made the Doctrinaires both conspicuous and subject to some unfavourable attention. Knowledgeable, detached, and associated with positions that were ostensibly moderate, this school of thought drew much of its small membership from academic circles. Of the figures to be known as Doctrinaires, RoyerCollard, Guizot, Rémusat, and Villemain were, for some portion of their lives, professors. Abel-François Villemain was elected to the Académie française while still very young and was joined there, in time, by all of the above. Also so honoured, becoming in fact the academy’s perpetual secretary, was the veteran journalist and critic L.-S. Auger, editor of a newspaper influenced by Royer-Collard. At the time of his death by suicide, in 1829, Auger was said to have been last seen by the Doctrinaire Barante, which suggests that he had remained associated with the group. Camille Jordan, long-time friend of Royer-Collard, capped a life of scholarly activity by being elected to a provincial academy, as was true of several others, while Charles Loyson, a writer and editor associated with Doctrinaire publications, was a poet of some reputation in his time. Achille Victor, duc de Broglie, when not engaged in politics, turned his hand to the writing of political economy, and Prosper, baron de Barante, another member of the great academy, became an accomplished historian. Although middle-class intellectuals seemed to set the tone of this small elite, their number included some who enjoyed higher status. Broglie was old nobility; Barante, a recent peer; and Hercule, comte de Serre, brought in through his friendship with Royer-Collard, was of noble stock and

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a lawyer. Since the Doctrinaires valued political independence above all, one would not expect the membership to have been established with any formality, and, in fact, the accounts of those who belonged to the group vary from one source to another. Rémusat includes Philippe, baron Mounier, and, for a time, Arthur, comte Beugnot, while the latter claimed no such place for himself in his list but added the name of J.-J.-A. Courvoisier.1 The fragmentation of ideological commitments also occasioned a certain amount of shopping among positions, so Auguste, comte de Kératry, stopped briefly in the centre on a journey towards the left, whereas the duc de Broglie began a prolonged connection with the school, having drifted from loyalties that had been further left. Also treated here is Alphonse Mahul, who as early as the mid-1820s seems to have been part of Guizot’s circle.2 The world seems only to have learned of doctrinaires in the legislative session of 1817, and it is by no means certain by what process the label came to be affixed. The first confirmed mention in print with any political connotation came when a review, given to raillery against those in public life, referred to “le doctrinaire Royer-Collard.”3 The attachment of the label to Royer-Collard’s colleagues may have been a simple matter of guilt by association, a process perhaps aided by a comic song said to have been composed by the ultra Castelbajac, or as another version would have it, a tipstaff of the Chambre des députés may have made the term current. Certainly the summer of 1817 affords evidence of weekly dinners held by Pasquier, then a member of the ministry, and attended by some to whom comte Molé referred, in retrospect, as “doctrinaires.” Molé described occasions where Royer-Collard, Guizot, and Barante – the first a ministerialist in the lower chamber who simultaneously occupied a senior governmental post and the other two also enjoying offices in the government – offered advice to members of the ministry, even as they privately reflected their disdain for some of the company, including the host. A year later, Molé was again incensed as he recounted how he had come into the possession of documents that revealed how the young Charles Rémusat, recommended to him by the youth’s influential parents, repaid the patronage by using his correspondence to mock his mentor. It is not then surprising that Molé deemed this circle to be both pedantic and presumptuous. Such judgments seem not to have been rare.4 1 Rémusat, Mémoires de ma vie, ed. Charles H. Pouthas (Paris, 1958), 1:332–3; and A.-A. Beugnot, Vie de Becquey, ministre d’État … (Paris, 1852), 125. 2 Goblot, Le jeune France libérale, 32. 3 Le Nain jaune réfugié 3, [no. 14] (1816): 324. 4 Molé, Le Comte Molé, 1781–1855, 4:42. Cf. Lady Blennerhassett, “The Doctrinaires,” in Cambridge Modern History (Cambridge, UK: 1907), 40–70 at 54.

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It has been said that the Doctrinaires were without a unified doctrine,5 but this claim surely neglects the measure in which their commitments were necessarily constrained, in some ways, by the alternatives on either end of the political spectrum. A dictum that captured this situation said that neither divine right nor popular sovereignty was a suitable key to political life. In place of the first, they offered a moral earnestness that has its parallels in the views of other opponents both of unenlightened privilege and of proletarian ignorance and disorder. The riposte to popular sovereignty was to proclaim the sovereignty of reason itself, a characteristic alternative if not an entirely satisfactory one. Both of these positions, as it happened, served to fuel that irritating sense of certainty and selfrighteousness that struck so many who crossed the group’s path. Further explaining the impression that these thinkers shared a metaphysical absolute was the understandable need for confident proclamation of a political creed that presumed to challenge other doctrines, ones more firmly rooted in the French past. The egalitarian and populist strain of the Revolution had enjoyed but a brief life as the national dream, but several aspects of the vision had been further strengthened by Bonaparte’s popular authoritarianism. Boasting a much lengthier lineage was the counter-revolutionary faith proclaimed by the ultra-royalists. It was the task of the Doctrinaire school to insist, with a vigour and confidence that its newness and eclecticism only enhanced, that their political agenda was the only one that suited France of the Restoration. At times, this agenda took the form of insisting upon one’s bowing before alleged necessities whose inevitability was, in fact, open to argument.6 It was, after all, an age that was becoming addicted to thinking in terms of laws of history. Frequent claims about the imperative needs of la France nouvelle illustrate the process. In style as well as content, there was, then, a tendency recognizably Doctrinaire, although this ensured consistency neither among individuals nor within the various statements regarding men and things by individual spokesmen such as Royer-Collard and Guizot. At the same time, one may accept Rémond’s insightful observation that the middle position occupied by the school often led to assertions that lacked perfect coherence: for example, the school might refuse to embrace the consequences of an accepted principle or, denying a principle, might still allow its consequences. When first they came to be identified, the Doctrinaires were ensconced in power, several of them still too young by far to qualify for the privilege 5 Gabriel Rémond, Royer-Collard: Son essai d’un système politique (Paris, 1933), 23. 6 Dominique Bagge, “Les Doctrinaires,” in Les Idées politiques en France pendant la Restauration (Paris, 1952), 93–143 at 143.

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enjoyed by forty-year-olds to be elected as deputies. Already, however, they had been entrusted with important tasks. Guizot, for instance, had been taken up by Royer-Collard and had held significant positions in both the ministries of justice and the interior while still in his twenties; turning thirty, he was translated to the Conseil d’État. Barante, some five years his senior, had himself a remarkably swift rise. Both, as it happened, were involved in drafting and defending the electoral law of 1817 along with other important measures. Some part of their notorious confidence about complex matters was thus probably owing to having had the opportunity of a technocratic elite to put their inspiration to work, without any lengthy apprenticeship and on important matters. It is an attitude better nourished in government than outside those corridors. This is presumably what commentators have had in mind when suggesting that theirs was a political style made for power, that a Doctrinaire banished from those precincts was a fish out of water, and that even in opposition one of their luminaries reasoned in the manner of an homme d’état.7 They stayed at the centre until July 1820, at which time the beleaguered second Richelieu government felt compelled to dismiss Royer-Collard, Jordan, and Guizot for failing to support the administration that had provided them with both influence and income. It had been the unhappy duty of Serre, their erstwhile ally, to effect the dismissal. Barante, more willing to do the work of the ministers, was also dismissed from the Conseil d’État, but was offered other employment that, out of loyalty to his friends, he declined. Richelieu, the chief minister, wrote to Serre after the event to record his opinion that the admirers of representative government were not really au fait with its workings if they thought that agents of a ministry owed it no loyalty, and he insisted that the Doctrinaires, failing to convert others to their views, should have resigned rather than waiting to be pushed.8 It is precisely the understanding of the ways of representative government, as found in the speeches and writings of this most theoretical of the persuasions of the Restoration, that invites exploration. The most sustained spelling-out of this understanding comes, not primarily from the speeches of Royer-Collard or from the writings of Guizot, but from the columns of that portion of the press that reflected Doctrinaire priorities. It was not a source about which these public men had much to say, and their silence has imposed some awkwardness on accounts of the management of the Journal général de France. Surveys of the press and biographical notice of L.-S. Auger, long its editor, 7 Roger Langeron, Un Conseillier secret de Louis XVIII: Royer-Collard (Paris, 1956), 133; and Pierre Rosanvallon, Le Moment Guizot (Paris, 1985), 36. 8 Correspondance du comte de Serre (1796–1824), ed. and annotated by his son (Paris, 1876), 4:76 (letter of 16 Aug. 1820).

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have tended to sound uncertain about the control of this paper, a daily that appeared in the years 1814–19. A standard work on the period has even inadvertently disguised its very existence by conflating it with another from the reign of Louis-Philippe.9 It would appear, however, that Royer-Collard was the founder of this publication.10 From all appearances, it remained faithful to his general views until quite late in its existence. Auger appears still to have been editor in 1817, but those who were described in 1819 as editors seem not to have had Doctrinaire connections.11 journalists of the centre The Journal général began its existence with the unusual pledge to serve as a forum for the presentation of arguments for and against all of the issues of the day. The promise of the prospectus was not quite realized, and the paper soon revealed itself as a ministerial print, but with a difference. Compared to the partisan bullying of the papers tolerated under Bonaparte or the bland face offered much of the time by the Moniteur universel or the Gazette de France, this daily did undertake to argue major issues, and it did so at a reasonable level of abstraction from the events of the day. More clearly than some other publications where the Doctrinaire influence was more evident, this one was more focused on ideas than on personalities. The Journal général did not, in the event, escape the danger, all too common on the part of defenders of the status quo, of boring its readers. It did not do so, however, by conveying the impression that there was nothing urgent to discuss. If its conceptual analysis proved too academic for the public, the fault was acquired honestly and displayed with some consistency. For those who were prepared to savour the challenge of the political order, even of the First Restoration, the great question was to define the terms of political competition in ways that avoided both the thuggery of the late Revolution and the deathly silence favoured by the late dictatorship. Taking one’s stand on the Charte, as almost everyone did in at least their public positions, failed to define the measure in which the new system would truly strive to emulate the workings of the British model that was so obviously the major source of inspiration. In the case of most of the 9 E.L. Newman and R.L. Simpson, eds, Historical Dictionary of France from the Restoration to the Second Empire (Westport, CT, 1987), s.v. Doctrinaires, Journal général de France, at 1:331–2, 541. 10 Charles-H. Pouthas, Guizot pendant la Restauration: Préparation de l’homme d’état (1814–1830) (Paris, 1923), 55. 11 [Alphonse Mahul], Notice historique et bibliographique des journaux et ouvrages périodiques publiés en 1818 (Paris, 1819), 11.

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Doctrinaire school, this problem was accentuated by an apparent interest in and sympathy for things British, often in combination with resistance to its importation into France. Ambiguities about the relations between executive and legislature were accentuated in the informal processes of politics, which could never have been specified in the most detailed of written constitutions. The choice of representative government suggested some scope for expressing particular interests, but what degree of legitimate dissent was there to be? Over some four and a half years, the pages of the Journal général led all papers in the attention paid to such matters. If pedantry was the pitfall that attended future academicians, the corresponding virtue was a readiness to set out one’s lessons in some detail. A ministerial view of political life emerged three months into the life of the newspaper in Auger’s three-part review of Chateaubriand’s Réflexions politiques. If ever one sought evidence of Chateaubriand’s inspiration for the ministerial hymn to national character, this early document affords support. Building upon the thought that the French activity of opposing lacked the resources of the British Opposition, Auger depicted a formed Opposition as “convenue,” not as an “opposition réelle” that would, in France, take its lead from public opinion. Chateaubriand’s fear of a French opposition found its complement in a caricature of British legislators, deaf to debate or opinion, stolidly pursuing an unvarying course. Improving on the original, Auger stressed how the dominion exercised in France by the queen of the world was a force readily mobilized by the enemies of power. This served as the equivalent to those great fortunes that made a British Opposition formidable.12 The agenda for future reflections on major issues of politics had thus been set. Divisions in the nation, such as then existed, were to be regretted. They could not, then, be accorded the sort of institutional recognition that was possible in Britain, but opposition would be sufficient for all good purposes. Development of the argument was interrupted by the convulsion of the Hundred Days. That experience could only bolster a concern for order. One report attributed continuing divisions to mischievous rumours such as the one that Bonaparte was preparing to return once more, this time at the head of an army of Turks. J.-B. Salgues, known for his writings on French manners, set an appropriate post-Napoleonic tone by emphasizing the virtue of loyalty and likening an entity such as an opposition party to a dangerous conspiracy.13 After a time, the editors began to express important political arguments in the form of articles, usually unsigned, on the concepts relevant to the new political order. One of the first of these returned to the challenge of 12 Journal général de France, no. 94 (3 Dec. 1814). 13 Ibid., no. 398 (3 Oct. 1815); no. 431 (5 Nov. 1815).

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tracing the limits of an acceptable mode of opposition. Sounding not unlike Auger’s extrapolation of Chateaubriand, the article decried the proposal, in an unidentified source, to organize opposition in conscious emulation of British practice. It was an easy matter, then, to make clear that an opposition was the work of time and favourable circumstances, and that of Britain was so fitted to the formal structures of government as to leave the impression of serving an assigned function. The anonymous writer conceded some virtues to the British model but denied that conditions in France made its adoption desirable, even were it possible. Putting to a new use a term used by Auger, the article described the presence of a French opposition as “trop réelle,” in the sense that it lacked the innocence of intention found across the Channel. This point found telling form in a contrast between the innocuous, unthreatening designs on the offices enjoyed by British ministries and the work in France of enemies of the regime, of the very structures of order. This was not, then, a question of disagreements among legislators, but of a threat that would require the chambers and the nation to unite against it. For the present, the constitution needed defence, and the emergence of an opposition within the legislature had to await more settled times. This did not, of course, rule out individual and incompatible positions on matters of policy, for these naturally followed from the variety of individual minds and characters. The presence of a party to orchestrate the differences needed, however, to be discouraged.14 Disputing an unnamed source that had said that the authorities should octroy an opposition, the answer was that opposition must emerge spontaneously, but only when the time was ripe. Further advice directed at the ultra majority of the chambre introuvable was similarly intended to declare designs on the power of the ministers to be unthinkable. It tended as well to suggest the manifest untruth that party differences were being thinned out into less ominous forms of disagreement, an outcome that a later issue applauded as “défections sans infidelité.” With the existing loyalties at the extremes perceived as so threatening, the case for the institution of party in general could scarcely find a hearing. The elections that followed the surprise dissolution of 5 September 1816 presented another problem for the ministers. How best to rally patriotic citizens to the ministry without seeming to endorse those very parties that the non-partisan ministry sought to dissolve? Furthermore, how should a local and virtuous citizenship be distinguished from vicious faction? The undesirables in the political process were those who circulated lists of candidates for the guidance of their neighbours. By contrast, the good citizen, one was told, must avoid such conduct, nor should he bind 14 “De l’opposition,” ibid., no. 442 (16 Nov. 1815).

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himself in political liaisons. The focus of the argument had shifted from the intrigues of factions to the act of the zealous citizen, for, unable to function in isolation, the good citizen must also act in concert. Faction, one learned, triumphed “in the absence of the union of good citizens.”15 Burke’s association of the good, provoked by the combination of the others, here found yet another echo in the Second Restoration. Unfortunately, the patriotic stance of ministerial supporters seemed to differ little from the dark deeds of faction, but the argument at least seemed to acknowledge that there were circumstances where political organization might serve as an acceptable instrument. A factor that contributed mightily to the difficulties encountered in putting the ministerial case was that, for many purposes, the journalists wished to draw upon British experience of competition by parties and so needed to refer to political parties in respectful terms. Here the only suitable antonym to accompany the praise of party was the term “faction.” The first term applied usually to activity in Britain, whereas damning faction spoke to that in France. What seemed to emerge was that virtuous opposition, based on party, might do good work in Britain but must not be confounded with the sort of dangerous faction to be eschewed in France.16 There were also contexts in which one might write in a neutral, descriptive way of parties that were safely distanced from the dangerous area of French politics; writing of the “parti d’opposition” in Würtemberg is a case in point. An obvious desideratum was clarity – at least within the bounds of the single publication – on the forms of behaviour to be banished from public life. Selfish grasping at power and, more seriously, seeking to bring down the regime were obvious candidates. Yet an article on the vagaries of public opinion made it clear that “party,” in the derogatory sense of the word, might belong to a majority of the population at odds with the true sense of the nation. This left to the ministry the task of enlightening opinion in the interests of the nation.17 Sometimes, of course, it hardly mattered. A call for unity, anticipating the meeting of the chambers, banished faction by fiat by saying, on the basis of very little evidence, that it could not possibly form. There was just insufficient support to sustain it.18 A much more elaborate argument – the first in a series of lessons on the nature of the constitutional order – devoted, in an issue of mid-December 1817, over four columns to the formation and legitimacy of the majority in a legislature. 15 Ibid., no. 759 (1 Oct. 1816). 16 “De l’agitation des partis dans le gouvernement représentatif,” Journal général, no. 941 (6 April 1817). 17 Ibid., no. 889 (11 Feb. 1817). 18 Ibid., no. 1144 (29 Oct. 1817).

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Clearly, the argument was being applied both to Britain and to France. The very fact that one was prepared to contemplate such an entity as a legislative majority, beyond the fleeting outcome of a particular division, suggests that the writer was unready to leave the matter where a ruling of the président of the lower chamber had left it in March 1816.19 To be sure, the preferred situation was a “free majority,” based on conviction. An alternative, described as a “majorité d’engagement,” entailed some less respectable bond between the ministers and those who might be receptive to their aims. Worst of all, it appeared, was a “majorité de parti.” At the same time, the writer introduced, in neutral language, entities called a “parti ministériel” and one of opposition. As before, the line between good and bad conduct was less than clear, but it seemed not to be the same as that dividing British practice and that of France. Even though some sort of harmony between the ministers and the majority was admitted to be essential for the conduct of business, the writer managed still to regret a ministerial following that followed uncritically. For deputies so to behave, however, would be to turn them into courtiers. The problem, then, with a ministerial party was not that it was intrinsically bad but that it did tend, insensibly, to slide into a “majorité de parti.” Such a body was rarely useful, often hurtful, and always dangerous; significantly, its negative qualities seemed to be illustrated in the efforts of a faction to wrest power from the ministers. Thus, the argument turned to the case of a faction in pursuit of office, leaving the status of a ministerial following, the ostensible point of the essay, uncertain. It was all very well to affirm that the French entertained a different understanding than the English about the nature of a ministerial party; the fact remained that this writer recognized such an entity and seemed reluctant to condemn it.20 Presumably, the door was open for some form of support for the ministers that went beyond particular votes. Imprecision of definition, tendentious examples, and qualifications that first asserted something and then took it back all played a part in the bewildering exercise. An axiomatic mode of expression allowed this essay to be elusive about specific people or parties and may have seemed appropriate when the nation’s actual experience with the relevant institutions had been so very brief. Still, such an approach failed to attain any incisive insights and must have puzzled many readers. More immediately worrisome than majorities held together by party was the prospect of one or more minorities so organized; the issue had even intruded in the essay supposedly dealing only with a majority inside the 19 See page 109 above. 20 “De la majorité dans la chambre des députés,” Journal général, no. 1182 (17 Dec. 1817).

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chamber. Here was the real focus of Doctrinaire distrust of political connections. To belong to a minority was an understandable part of the business of legislatures, but membership in an “opposition” suggested an unacceptable degree of premeditation, perhaps even that immersion of self in the fate of a larger body that the writer called a blind obligingness. There were, however, degrees of virtue within the practice initially called simply “opposition,” for opposition might be that of principle or that directed only at individuals and intended to supplant them in office. Rather confusingly, the descriptions of place-seeking included that of “opposition of party,” a designation rapidly replaced by the more obviously reprehensible name of “opposition by faction.” There followed, surprisingly, endorsement of opposition based on principle, where the writer took for granted that all sides were “de bonne foi” and no threat to the nation. This seemed not to be true of France at that time. The fact that most experience of the new form of government was British remained a source of confusion, for it left quite unclear what the moral was for France. As it was, the strictures against scheming to oust those in place were tacitly set aside in the repeated friendly references to the routine of the House of Commons, where the acting out of political passions and the play of opposition had something admirable about it. When readers were told that a British minority accepted defeat philosophically, the message made little sense if a French minority were to lose its identity once a vote was taken. And the further claim that this British minority might, in the next session, gain the upper hand carried with it the prospect that the erstwhile minority might well threaten the life of the ministry. This became clear in the observation that, in Britain, any minority of as much as one-third might prove formidable. Premises of the argument, like the institutions themselves, had been borrowed, and accounting for the differences between Britain and France suffered accordingly. To cite the French renewal by fifths as a significant difference was to misread the identity of the real culprit – the weight of history.21 Since the election just completed had been the first of the Restoration actually to work that way – those of 1815 and 1816 had been new beginnings or the result of a dissolution – renewal by fifths could hardly explain contrasting political climates. The argument of such ambitious pieces of analysis seemed to be seriously constrained by an ambivalence that refused to stoop to the vulgarity of caricaturing British parties. The case for avoiding British practice, or for emulating it only very selectively, remained strangely timid, even as the mass of detail about that practice overwhelmed the reminder that these matters must proceed differently in the France of 21 “De la minorité et de l’opposition dans la Chambre,” Journal général, no. 1193 (29 Dec. 1817).

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Louis XVIII. The best argument had been Chateaubriand’s mythology of national character, and quite early in these essays, it retreated before a reality that denied it. One might well wonder why the invoking of awkward British precedents held such appeal. They did, indeed, supply a fund of allusion and some of the vocabulary for French representative government, but perhaps the major service was that references to the idealized play of party in Britain offered occasions to point out in what respects the different situation of France ruled out, at least in the short run, certain applications. A case in point that worked better than some others came in a brief article that noted with what confidence English women voiced political opinions. Still, the writer concluded, such a pattern would not endanger the neighbouring nation, for the males of that people resolutely ignored the distaff position in politics. Yet, how much more dangerous was such activity in the female-dominated salons of France, because there simple social pique might easily be steered into the current of national politics. Or, again, the French, it was argued, deemed British struggles to be much more significant than they were in fact. They were far from war to the knife, if only because the two sides shared common interests and differed but in their opinions. Thus, it would be discovered that members of the opposed parties professed the greatest esteem for one another. One suspects, here, that the writer had read Fiévée. It might perhaps be true that the corrupt elections that marred British life were no part of the French system – or so one of these ministerialists was pleased to say – but it was true as well that in France there lurked enemies of the regime, something that was not evident to any significant degree in British public life.22 Well-wrought comparisons such as these were too rare. Also salient for purposes of explaining the focus on Britain was that it was taken to be the inspiration of that vision of politics that moved the ultras, at least amidst the bad feelings that had followed the dissolution of 1816. In order, then, to respond to their claims – taken no doubt from the theoretical flagship afforded by Fiévée’s publications – it was useful to present a French style that was not slavishly modelled on foreign ways. An article explicitly challenging ultra admiration of the British system found the attraction in the island’s aristocratic politics and, sounding primly Doctrinaire, pointed out the democratic element afforded by the Charte. As the year 1818 progressed, the attacks on the ultras grew apace, although from any objective standard it was the growing strength of the Left that seemed to threaten the ministry. New circumstances, and possibly new writers as well, led in time to articles with a less tortured stance on British institutions. It could now be said, without 22 Ibid., no. 948 (14 April 1817); and “Sur les élections anglaises,” ibid., no. 1395 (15 July 1818).

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puzzling qualifications, that, on questions such as systematic opposition or ministerial control of nominations to seats in the legislature, the model of Britain was one to be avoided.23 The high-minded resolve to avoid the use of influence in elections, no less than the ban on systematic opposition, remained compatible with views held by Doctrinaires, although ministers were rapidly becoming attached to just those forms of influence that had long worked so well to construct British majorities. For the remainder of its life, the Journal général was to appear more leftwing than ministerial; perhaps there had, indeed, been a change of management. As early as the beginning of 1818, Royer-Collard and his immediate colleagues had so far strayed from simple support of the ministers that the dismissal of these office-holders was already rumoured, as Charles Rémusat’s mother reported. Still, Rémusat could assure his mother with true Doctrinaire hauteur that his friends were in fact more ministerial than were the ministers.24 In an era that knew loyal subjects more royalist than the king, that development of the theme must have been irresistible. In fact, the prominent members of the coterie were unimpressed with Richelieu’s flirting with the royalists to his right, and found little to applaud in the new ministry effectively dominated by Decazes. The name of Kératry appeared in the paper in 1818 and, with it, his apparent move to the left that was signalled by the paper’s attacking the ultras because their loyalty was that of a party, while levelling no such charge against the socalled liberals. On the 7th of May 1819, the paper abruptly ceased publication, but for some time it had seemed to have lost its purpose. Its successor, L’Indepéndant, had the air of being more obviously just a liberal publication, without Doctrinaire associations. It was time for a new venture. The true successor publication – Le Courier français – came into being somewhat more than a month following the demise of the Journal général. The English spelling of the title was, it seems, an effort to be chic. The Doctrinaire proclivities were more evident in the paper itself and were much better documented in memoirs of the time. Le Courier was under the general direction of Guizot, who, without offering much text himself, seems to have set the tone. The political orientation was also of interest to RoyerCollard, who is credited with exercising some supervision. Most of the cohort took some interest in the publication, and no small part of the writing may well have fallen to Rémusat, then aged twenty-two. His correspondence also affords a more sustained record of the writing of a paper than is 23 “De la Charte … et de la constitution anglaise,” ibid., no. 1247 (22 Feb. 1818); “Sur le système de l’opposition,” ibid., no. 1359 (18 June 1818). 24 Rémusat, Correspondance de M. de Rémusat pendant les premières années de la Restauration, ed. Paul de Rémusat (Paris, 1884), 4:68, 76.

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typically available for the period. Here was a member of the Doctrinaire following for whom the English Whig was the culmination of political rectitude and British institutions the benchmark that measured his hopes for France.25 Such thoughts were not, however, very conspicuous in his early journalism. Whereas the Journal général seemed all but oblivious to threats other than from the ultra-royalists, Le Courier took cognizance as well of the threat of the left-wing ultras, a force that had grown beginning with the elections of 1817. The paper would appear also to have been less devoted to shoring up the ministry of the day than to undertaking the slightly different task of presenting the centre as the only position from which France could then be governed. This entailed attacking the extremes on either side. The vulgar term bascule seems not to have figured here; presumably Doctrinaires would in time learn to spell it juste milieu. To be a Doctrinaire was assuredly to eschew the extremes, but in a time of uncertainty about the personnel and views of the ministry – whether it would try to broaden its base to the left or to the right was unclear – the management of the paper gave the impression of having greater certainty about the unacceptability of certain views than about its own commitments. The columns of this paper continued to display the awkwardness of shoring up the centre without seeming to endorse the presence of those entities known as parties or factions. One tactic was to stress that the existing bodies perceived to be parties were fated to dissolve, for it was generally allowed that it was at the extremes of the political spectrum that parties currently dwelt. Even as the absence of party allegiance in the centre came ever more under attack, the paper’s Paris correspondent congratulated the Doctrinaires for their absence of party feeling. Another aid to coherence was the proposition that it was expressly extremism, and not party, that was the enemy. Thus, one might damn all current parties while leaving still some prospect of finding some good use for parties of a different stripe. A reluctance to rule out any value that might belong to parties took the form of allowing that their occasional usefulness was that of a physical indisposition that might serve as a symptom that warns of yet greater dangers.26 For the present, no good could come from trying to govern by party. There were intimations, however, of a different configuration of forces in which party gained some role. The Bonapartist sentiment, treated as a personal following that was something less than a true party, would not become a permanent fixture. Also slated for oblivion were the ultra-royalists, who, 25 Ibid., 6:26, 28, and passim; Rémusat, Mémoires, 1:384–5; and Rémusat, L’Angleterre au XVIII e siècle [1852] (Paris, 1865), 2–3, 7. 26 Le Courier français, no. 21 (12 July 1819); no. 41 (31 July 1819); no. 63 (22 Aug. 1819).

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like the British Tories, were thought to have no future. What would remain as a remnant of the extremes would be a small democratic party – the revolutionaries who were distinguished here from the Bonapartists – that would share the scene with some equivalent to the British Whigs.27 The era of the double opposition formed by the extremes would be over, but opposition there would be still. Indeed, the writers of Le Courier thought that opposition would surface wherever there was sufficient liberty. Here, amidst all of the essays hostile to party, there appeared still that small hope – never entirely extinguished among the more thoughtful observers of the time – that a struggle between two moderate parties was the ideal situation. But, for the meantime, the writers were most inclined to proceed briskly to seek to discredit formed parties. A tribute to the constitutional loyalty of most deputies led into a discussion of how, on arriving in the chamber, the individual deputy chose his banner and the informal gatherings where lawmakers congregated. Most did not come to Paris with the thoughts of making or unmaking governments. According to this account, it all depended on how his department had been treated of late. It followed, then, that the basis for any given legislative majority would be laid during the previous session and in the various departments next due to vote.28 In order to earn a majority one had then to work (travailler) the country. In doing the job of the ministers in seeking to defuse party loyalty in the legislature, this essay managed as well to suggest the sort of activity beyond the chamber where the future efforts of party would lie. Even in its discovery of left-leaning ultras, corresponding to the more familiar ultra-royalists, the paper strove to preserve some symmetry in treating the two unacceptable rallying points for political opinion. This approach allowed room for the recognition of strengths and weaknesses peculiar to each party. The ultra-royalists, linked to memories and an irrecoverable past, had no place in the society created by a post-revolutionary order. Yet their very isolation from the currents of the age was responsible for their esprit de corps. While they never in living memory had controlled the government, the extreme royalists, it was said, retained the loyalty of their troops. The left-wing ultras, or some of them at least, appeared as less isolated but also possessed of less solidarity. Thus it was that the ranks of the Left were swelled by each successive partial renewal of the chamber but, by the end, were depleted through defections. The means for coping with these extremes were, in each case, to detach from the two sets of extremists those who were closer to the centre. A suggestion that elements of the political 27 Ibid., no. 117 (15 Oct. 1819). 28 “Comment une majorité peut-elle se former dans la Chambre des députés?” ibid., no. 128 (26 Oct. 1819).

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Left might readily be enticed away from association with the extremists was not matched by a similar judgment about the Right, and this reflects a trace of the liberal orientation that came readily to these men of the centre.29 This bias did not, however, prevent the Doctrinaires from arguing that the strength in the country of sentiments either revolutionary or Bonapartist posed a more serious threat than any belonging to the far Right. In judging both extremes as unsuited to the new constitutional order, the paper was rather even-handed. Forthright in condemning the heritage of arbitrary government that belonged to the extreme Left, it contented itself with saying that the ultra-royalists were, at best, ready to accept “constitutional” rule. Ministers must be prepared to stroke (ménager) these groups when they were peaceful and to fight them when necessary. Most revealing was the lament that, contrary to experience in Britain, the parties of France had emerged prior to the development of a public spirit, mores, and institutions that could effectively contain them.30 Such an observation, while patently true, was not yet typical of the times and invites comparison with a more modern understanding of French parties as products of a society and not, as in Britain, the children of the House of Commons. If the nice understanding of historical sequences were not Guizot’s, then there must have been another historian among the writers. Less flattering to the ultra-royalists than previous comments was the accusation of their being more prone than their opponents to spreading fears that were especially dangerous to the public peace.31 It was, at that time, probably just the truth that these royalists’ highly coloured visions of Jacobin revolution or a reversion to Bonapartist tyranny were more threatening than the other side’s fears about a relapse to a pre-revolutionary condition. It was thus not inappropriate to remark, as did one article, that the return to public life of alleged regicides and revolutionaries was of great value to royalists, who needed a credible threat from that quarter to justify their own militancy.32 In the next decade, the forces of the Left would retaliate with a vengeance, employing a vision of the parti prêtre and a threatened return to the abuses of the feudal age. On more than one occasion, Le Courier suggested that the extremes of political opinion served to impose coherence on their opposite numbers, so the need for a political cause to find suitable enemies was not an unfamiliar paradox. No writer of Le Courier, however, seems to have offered an analysis with quite the cogency of a comment, allegedly about the parties in Britain, that appeared 29 30 31 32

Ibid., no. 117 (15 Oct. 1819); no. 118 (16 Oct. 1819). Ibid., no. 157 (24 Nov. 1819). Ibid., no. 143 (10 Nov. 1819). Ibid., no. 124 (22 Oct. 1819).

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in a later publication of Doctrinaire leanings. There a commentator said bluntly that the extremes of both parties lived each by virtue of the other.33 With the only possible locus of government firmly situated in the centre, it became a matter of interest as to how one might refer to the supporters of the ministers. One article made reference to the interests that found their place with the ministers as “a ministerial atmosphere that is called, if one wishes, a ministerial party.” Here was a turn of phrase that had proven so difficult to pronounce for the writers of the defunct Journal. Yet this readiness to associate a party with the political centre left it little work to do. A ministry, the same article went on to argue, gained its following from antecedent service: to recognize a party of sorts around the ministers could not change the fact that this group necessarily borrowed the popularity generated by ministerial policies; and it could not artificially, either in national elections or in votes of the chamber, create the initial popularity.34 There was nothing here to suggest that ministers could dispense with a majority and very little by way of emphasis on the virtues of the national character and its independence, a theme still encountered in pamphlet literature. Indeed, the correspondence between Rémusat and his mother – candid and illuminating on the coterie and its milieu – revealed more or less annual speculation about the size and composition of the ministerial majority. In a similar vein, Guizot wrote to Barante in the autumn of 1820 about the probable amount of ministerial support in a chamber that promised to be nearly equally divided between ministerial forces and those of the oppositions. He wrote, at this time, of the support that “we” might expect, and by this pronoun he meant the government that had dismissed him from office some three months before.35 It is not equally clear that the “we” included the royalist elements with which the ministers were negotiating. Their idiosyncratic notion of loyalty had made the Doctrinaires less than reliable supporters, but their attachment to governing was by now a habit. Rémusat’s happy formulation about being more ministerial than the ministers was more than a bon mot. It epitomized practice, and Barante’s recollections of Doctrinaire behaviour in 1815–16 underlines their readiness to press for ministerial policies even when the ministers themselves had begun to temporize.36 33 Ibid., no. 181 (18 Dec. 1819); and Le Globe, journal philosophique et littéraire, no. 66 (8 Feb. 1825). The item was signed “W,” the signature used by Eyre Evans Crowe, an English journalist who took a close interest in France. 34 Le Courier français, no. 145 (12 Nov. 1819). 35 Rémusat, Correspondance, 3:437, 4:205, 6:2; and Barante, Souvenirs de Baron de Barante de l’académie française, 1782–1866, ed. Claude de Barante (Paris, 1892), 2:472–73 (letter of 28 Oct. 1820). 36 Barante, Souvenirs, 2:221.

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The understanding of government that belonged to the academic centre was, to all appearances, the expectation that the government, bestriding the centre of the Chamber of Deputies and enjoying, too, majority support among the peers, should be strong. The opposition, by contrast, should be comparatively weak. The Doctrinaires were powerfully aware of the threat that the existing extremes of opinion posed to the new institutions, and their growing insouciance about contemplating a party of the ministry, albeit not a tightly disciplined formation, suggests that objection to the role of parties was a matter of circumstance. The enemies of the Restoration compromise happened all to be more recognizable as compact bodies than were the supporters of the ministry. The three groups that were called parties – the ultra-royalists, the liberals under various designations, and the Bonapartists – were in their different ways hostile to the conditions demanded by representative government.37 This marked the last major contribution of Doctrinaire theory, although there were further articles that stressed the apathy of the French towards politics and depicted the political extremes as employing lies and grotesque fears in order to avoid irrelevance. Part of the agenda seems to have been to keep politics reassuringly dull, the better to allow new institutions to take root. A rare indication of dissent from the ministerial agenda came when a leading article complained that the secret voting sanctioned by the institutions of the day, for both electors and deputies in the chambers, was contrary to the spirit of representative government. Invoking the then fashionable notion of civil courage, the article insisted that public men ought to be prepared to speak up for their beliefs.38 Although one might imagine circumstances in which open voting would help the ministers, it was generally assumed that the inducements at their disposal worked better without it. Perhaps the more soporific atmosphere of other issues had also affected the paper’s readership. By the late autumn of 1819, according to Rémusat, his colleagues had ceased to take a commanding role. In early 1820, Kératry’s name again announced a new direction, and he changed the paper’s identity to that of Le Courrier français. With the passing of the English spelling, the paper ceased to be an organ of the Doctrinaires. School was out. The didacticism that made the coterie of Royer-Collard and Guizot the nation’s instructors in representative government could be taken by the month as well as daily. Beginning in July of 1817, the Archives philosophiques, politiques et littéraires was as much the product of the Doctrinaires as Le Courier had been, and, in this case, Guizot seems to have taken a more direct role in the writing. Among those outside the inner circle who contributed 37 Le Courier français, no. 157 (24 Nov. 1819). 38 Ibid., no. 185 (22 Dec. 1819).

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political articles with some regularity was Charles Loyson.39 The sense of mission that suffused the periodical is indicated by the division of political articles into politique spéciale, which treated the issues of the day, and politique générale, which sought to enlighten at the level of general principles. There was also a most marked disposition to explain the practices of French government in terms of the immaturity of the system. Thus, the position of the editor (Guizot, presumably) on the question of a legislative initiative for the deputies was that the ministers and the majority in the chambre were not yet sufficiently bonded together to allow for it. Resolved in precisely the same manner was the more technical issue of the role to be accorded the minority in the elected chamber in nominations to the commissions that did the detailed work. Again, it was very probably Guizot who wrote that he was fully aware of the practice in Britain where members of the Opposition had a fair share of places on committees of the House. But, he insisted, this could only come to pass in France when the moral state of the chamber came to resemble that of the House of Commons. On this issue, Constant had thought exactly the same way.40 The Doctrinaires’ teaching on party received an airing in several book reviews. In one such, the reviewer took issue with the proposition that the choice of men for the service of the state must be confined to political partisans, for in France everything was party. True to the view, expounded elsewhere, that party allegiances were the product of the Revolution, the rebuttal said that there was now a new generation whose the members were strangers to the opinions and interests born in revolution. From their ranks would come the men whose loyalty was undiluted by partisan concerns. Another review, this time in Loyson’s collection of essays, offered the judgment that one party necessarily gave rise to another in the sense that the gendarmes must proceed en parti against criminals who acted in concert. This licensed an understanding of party lines as separating the bad from the good.41 It might also have served to make legitimate that conception of a ministerial party as put in Le Courier. The most elaborate look at party was a translation of the complete text of Lord Brougham’s essay on the subject in the Edinburgh Review of June 1818. Here were to be found in epitome 39 See Charles Loyson, Guerre à qui la cherche: Petites lettres sur quelques-uns de nos grands écrivains par un … ennemi de tous les partis (Paris, 1818), 1:12–30, 67–102, 158– 70. 40 “Sciences politiques,” Archives philosophiques, politiques et littéraires, vol. 2 (1818), 408–27 at 423; and Constant, “Session de 1817,” ibid., 2:183–208 at 203. Cf. Constant at page 319 above. 41 “Du choix des hommes,” Archives philosophiques, 2:55–70 at 63–4; and “Guerre à qui la cherche,” ibid., 2:507–12 at 508.

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the major issues as raised in Restoration France: opposition, systematic or no; the claims of individual conscience; a pointed suggestion that those who anathematized party were tacitly in the camp of the ministers; and Burke’s praise of party connections. Several of Brougham’s opinions were calculated to touch a nerve with the management of the Archives philosophiques. Predictably, then, the translation was accompanied by the comment that the ideas there expressed were not all applicable to a nation, such as France, where there was a different distribution of riches and numerous other significant differences. Discarding the apologetic tone of some earlier comparisons with Britain, this article said rather truculently that the French position on these matters might be the right one and not just the best possible for the nation’s circumstances. It was comforting, concluded the article, that, at a time when some in France favoured systematic opposition, the practice was so little sanctioned by British practice that its friends felt obliged to explain and defend it.42 This sounded more like Royer-Collard’s view on British institutions than the emphasis in Guizot, but as always the reviewer remained anonymous. As it happens, none of the more interesting pieces relevant to parliamentary government has been credited to Guizot. The Archives philosophiques failed as a venture in publishing, having lasted only somewhat more than a year. Until the Globe of 1824 and after, and later Guizot’s Revue française, which began in 1828, the world would get along without newspapers or periodicals to promote the doctrine. This did not signal the end of the school’s influence, but starting in 1820, the period of the Doctrinaires’ great prominence as a small knot of intellectuals was coming to an end. One might say, for some purposes, that the group was moving into opposition, but that would require the assumption that in the period of their greatest sway they were unequivocally ministerial men; such an assumption fails to capture their curious relation to power. Perhaps Broglie put it best when he sought to explain his moving, in 1817, from the “liberals” to the more exclusive sect that he described as being at the head of the ministerial forces and serving as their spokesmen. Yet he simultaneously saw himself as assuming the role of “opposition” after the manner of his mother-in-law Mme de Staël.43 Only the Doctrinaires might presume to be at once the articulate shock troops of government and, when it suited them, highly independent critics of that same administration.

42 “De l’état des partis en Angleterre,” Archives philosophiques, vol. 4 (1818), 465– 511 at 465–6. 43 Broglie, Souvenirs, 1785–1870 (Paris, 1886), 1:376. In the English version, the citation is Personal Recollections of the late Duc de Broglie (London, 1887), 1:378–79.

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royer-collard and the politics of independence Pierre-Paul Royer-Collard (1763–1845) was a commanding figure in the public life of the Restoration. He published little on politics, rarely showed his hand in the publications over which he exercised some influence, but acted as the centre for that attachment known as Doctrinaire. His favour admitted people to the circle, and his disfavour, as with his erstwhile friend Serre, terminated the connection. Apart from these personal relationships, his chosen forum was the Chambre des députés, where his speeches were acclaimed as triumphs both of eloquence and of profound reflection. The institutions of representative government were made for rapid reversals of individual fortune, but it was the peculiar fate of Royer-Collard to represent within his carefully chosen words powerful versions of positions that were not easily reconciled even when proclaimed seriatim. Perhaps this was because of the perfect air of authority with which he explained himself and strove to instruct the less enlightened. He was able to make memorable – and so available for comparison with its successors – each moment in his intellectual odyssey. Yet it was also true that individual formulations of RoyerCollard’s opinions were thought to suffer from excessive subtlety that left their content less than clear. Charles Rémusat, never lacking in candour about his contemporaries, suggested that the great man was the victim of his own eloquence. But, of course, the youthful Rémusat had not taken well to this austere leader and had, initially at least, been terrified of him.44 A more nuanced interpretation blames, in part, the middle way, which was such a hallmark of the views belonging to the sect. Its spokesmen were constantly having to resist confinement by unacceptable alternatives, and this had the unsurprising consequence of leading Royer-Collard to offer subtle distinctions when, in truth, all room for manoeuvre between the extremes had vanished. For whatever reason, Royer-Collard serves as a striking exemplar of a ministerial stand that was, in some of its tenets, anti-parliamentary and, later, of an understanding of opposition with far-reaching consequences. Few men who played a central role in the fall of the Bourbons could have begun the Restoration as such a firm defender of prerogative. If this figure has not greatly suffered in reputation for his apparent changes of front, one answer may lie in his characteristic independence. While committed to the defence of royal prerogative, he had never been securely at the beck and call of ministers; thus, when he passed by degrees into opposition – he resigned his post with the Conseil de l’instruction publique in September 1819 and in November refused pleas to accept a place in the 44 Robert de Nesmes-Desmarets, Les Doctrines politiques de Royer-Collard (Montpelier, 1908), 13; Rémusat, Correspondance, 2:339 (letter of 7 Jan. 1817); and ibid., 6:47.

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ministry – the contrast was less marked than it might otherwise have been. Further contributing to the gradualness of the break was the marked continuity of his views, such as those on the merits of annual renewal of one fifth of the chamber, where he said the same thing whatever his nominal relation to the ministers. Nor in opposition did Royer-Collard become a party man. In addition, it may be said that he imbued every opinion with his own peculiar stamp. When he spoke, before 1820, in support of authority, his was not the nostalgia of the ultra-royalists, nor did he share their proclaimed devotion to the monarchy. His support was much cooler and couched in terms of a commitment to the Charte; as has been truly said, he was not then a royalist at all, but a legitimist. In opposition, this loyalty to the constitutional order served to maintain a certain distance between his position and that of others who also disapproved of the ministers. Royer-Collard was in the chambre introuvable as part of the minority that supported the first Richelieu government, and it was there that he made his first great statement on the principles that guided the new political order. It was the new electoral law, meant to replace the makeshift arrangements decreed in July 1815, that provided the occasion. In February 1816, Royer-Collard offered a sort of summary of the Doctrinaire understanding of the political relations that would affect the life of the chamber. He believed in the Charte and in the teachings of Montesquieu, and both authorities told him that partial renewal by fifths was the best electoral system. The Charte had already envisaged such a law, and Royer-Collard, following Montesquieu’s way of assessing institutions, argued that this procedure was more monarchical than the precipitate changes that came with integral renewal. Scarcely bothering to explain himself, Royer-Collard offered the further thought, not less derived from Montesquieu, that an electoral law had to accord with national mores. In particular, one must resist the alleged attraction of five-yearly renewal, or some other variant of the system that obtained in Britain, because the system could not be expected to function in France as it did in the neighbouring jurisdiction. The supporters of integral renewal – the ultra-royalists, who thereby hoped to fix for some time their hold on the chamber – expected it to yield a fixed majority that would create a breathing spell for the regime. In rebuttal, Royer-Collard presented three considerations, each of which sought to translate British processes into French circumstances. To begin with, France lacked experience with a fixed and indissoluble majority of the sort contemplated. Here Royer-Collard had obviously discounted the silent legislators of the imperial epoch because they afforded no meaningful precedent. There was then no prospect of the French deputy taking positions prior to hearing argument; rather, he would reflect on the evidence and pass a personal and informed judgment. Engagement in advance to an

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outcome not yet considered was unknown to French legislative practice. Never, in these proud words, did Royer-Collard betray the slightest acknowledgment that the tradition just invoked had enjoyed a life of less than two years. Furthermore, having ruled out the prospect of the election of a ready-made majority, the speaker similarly discouraged any expectation that ministers might cultivate the chamber in order to secure a following. Indeed, he quipped, in a much-quoted sally, it was an easier matter for the majority of the chamber to capture the ministry than for the majority itself to fall prey to those ministers. The very next year, Abel-François Villemain used the converse of this observation in order to insist that, in the House of Commons, it was in fact a simpler matter for the government to make the majority than was the reverse process.45 Oddly enough, this too was in line with Doctrinaire priorities. It was in France where Royer-Collard deemed electoral results to be beyond the control of government and where he thought the “delicacy” of the national character would preclude the successful use of corruption. Almost certainly too flattering a portrait, this was also, as we have seen, a fashionable thing to say in the early Restoration, and he said it more elegantly than did others. Still, the best was yet to come. It was, according to the most remarkable of Royer-Collard’s propositions, unnecessary for a French ministry to enjoy support both firm and unvarying. This was a British notion and was a natural result of the legislative initiative that belonged to the House of Commons but not to the chambers in France. It was the property of the French monarch, whereas a major part of British government – an image that seems not quite at home in British parlance – belonged in the House of Commons. There followed the soon-to-be famous prediction that the day when the lower chamber could reject the king’s ministers and impose others upon him, “ce jour-là nous sommes en république.” It was a remarkable irony of the Restoration that Royer-Collard would live to execute the sentence that he had so grandly brushed aside when, in his capacity as président of the lower chamber, he bore the address of the 221 to Charles X in March 1830. That hostile address in reply to the king’s speech effectively sealed the fate of the Bourbon dynasty. Of course, neither the circumstances nor the outcome was exactly as envisaged, but the parallel was close enough to be marked by biographers.46 Further offering hostages to fortune, Royer-Collard put his finger on the natural mechanism in representative government for expressing distress at the policy or personnel of the executive; one might, as the British then put it, refuse supply. But RoyerCollard scotched any idea that the king could be seriously embarrassed by 45 Villemain, Le Roi, la Charte, et la monarchie (Paris, [1817]), 22. 46 E. Spuller, Royer-Collard (Paris, 1895), 125.

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the failure of a recalcitrant chamber to pass the budget. He called “almost metaphysical” the expectation that the throne could be so desperate for any given legislation as to accede to the wishes of the deputies. Instead, the sovereign would simply dissolve the chamber and appeal to the people. Well versed in the parliamentary history of Britain, Royer-Collard was doubtless thinking of the king’s victory over Fox and North in 1784. As a final reassurance, Royer-Collard endorsed the small number of deputies – they numbered, in 1816, but 258 – for the very reason that others such as Fiévée, would lament it. A larger mass would strengthen the chamber against the monarchy, and the chamber was strong enough already. Throughout this speech, Royer-Collard was careful to create distance between the British original and the institutions of the Restoration, even as he managed to remain above the angry tone that so often suffused the language of revolutionaries or Bonapartists when they referred to Britain. Were France to follow the lead of Britain in all respects, it would first need to have the geography and the history of that nation and especially that old and rich aristocracy that wielded such control over the other branches of the constitution. He insisted, too, that France would have to take as its own “ce qu’on appelle si improprement les abus de l’Angleterre,” which “abuses” were quite as necessary as was the theory of British government. No proprietor of a rotten borough could have spoken more fondly of the abuses of British government, yet the whole deft performance had as its goal the setting aside of certain expectations that had grown up regarding parliamentary government. On reading such passages, one has doubtless found the original of some of the awkwardness of the Journal général, where others had the task of finding the language to express this ambivalence. Colomb, a member of the ultra majority, responded that Royer-Collard’s views were scarcely consonant with representative government. He brushed aside the previous speaker’s calculated tribute to national character and made clear that in British practice lay the model for relations between ministers and the chambers. The former needed the confidence of the latter, and speakers must not create misconceptions as to the normal state of relations in order to spread fears based on abuses of the system.47

47 AP 41 (12 Feb. 1816): 130–4, 137–41. Texts of Royer-Collard’s speeches are also to be found in Barante, ed., La Vie politique de M. Royer-Collard, ses discours et ses écrits, 2 vols (Paris, 1861); for this text, see 1:215–19. All of Barante’s writing has a slapdash quality, and it was not his practice to offer precise dates for events or speeches. Consequently, an earlier work by a less eminent figure is more useful in some respects. See Léon Vingtain, Vie publique de Royer-Collard: Études parlementaires, with a preface by Albert de Broglie (Paris, 1858).

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The suspicion that Royer-Collard had serious reservations about accentuating the popular element in French government was confirmed in a further speech of that month. There he argued the subtle point that the chambers were properly seen as constituting part of the king’s government, placed there by the king’s will. The Chambre des députés was thus a pouvoir, no bad thing to be, one would have thought. Royer-Collard’s intent, however, was to say that such a pouvoir was not performing a representative function at all, and indeed the very name of representative government, imported from Britain, was misleading. The interests of the nation, as understood then by good and wise men, must be preferred to any other expression of sentiment.48 At this stage in his career, Royer-Collard saw electors as performing a national function and not as pursuing their own narrow concerns through the deputies who notionally belonged to their localities. In the manner of so many other of his opinions, this one too would change without the slightest effect on the imperturbable tone in which its author expressed himself. The early speeches were among his most definitive statements of constitutional relations, but there remained important contributions on particular facets of the system. On the nature and respectability of political parties, Royer-Collard revealed the same sort of vacillation that was present in those serial publications already discussed. Whereas he appears never to have thought well of any sort of political connection other than the informal one of which he was the chief, his specific judgments were called forth by circumstances and varied accordingly. In general, he followed convention to the extent of reserving the term “faction” for the least reputable of political connections. In his most explicit statement of its nature, he referred to faction as “a political party that acts contrary to the established order, and which seeks to change it in its own interest.” Such sinister groupings were not limited to the margins of politics, for one might contemplate the prospect of a faction in power. They might, moreover, be entrenched in either chamber or be ensconced even within the ministry itself. The first such comment coincided with Royer-Collard’s accelerating move towards opposition in the spring of 1820, and two years later, he returned to the theme to dwell upon the possibility of a faction inhabiting either the minority within the chamber or the majority. In the latter case, the majority suspected of harbouring a faction could only demonstrate its purity by treating its political opponents with fairness. Finally, in a speech on the press law of 1827, he cast all hypotheticals aside and complained openly of a faction – the unpopular ministry of Villèle – in government.49 48 AP 41 (24 Feb. 1816): 293–4; and Barante, Vie politique, 1:225–9. 49 AP 27 (17 May 1820): 658; Barante, Vie politique, 2:27; AP 37 (25 July 1822): 103; Barante, Vie politique, 2:172; AP 49 (14 Feb. 1827): 568; and Barante, Vie politique, 2:297.

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So much for faction; what then of its more acceptable cousin? One token of Royer-Collard’s tolerance of the presence of parties was the fact that he linked them to the press and expected to find the main party divisions reflected in associated newspapers or reviews. The two topics were not commonly linked, especially in a form friendly to a free press. More readily, the proponents of a controlled press associated the move with silencing an unwelcome opposition. Henri de Lourdoueix’s De l’opposition et de ses journaux and a similar work by Louis de Bonald, his De l’opposition dans le gouvernement, both of 1827, would be of this sort. Twice in the course of offering his influential speeches on behalf of liberty of the press, Royer-Collard treated the two subjects in tandem. What made legislation on the press especially sensitive, he said, was that it involved the life of the parties, for inasmuch as one provided for the liberty of the press, one also secured “la liberté des partis déchainés.” Possibly, for this reason, Royer-Collard saw no great danger in some regulation of the press at this time. This first debate, early in 1817, must have been one of the last occasions when Royer-Collard sounded like little more than an unusually sophisticated supporter of the ministry, although already he was in some measure at odds with the ministerial position. By late in the year, the drift towards opposition had begun in earnest. Again in 1819, Royer-Collard recognized the connection between the daily and periodical press and the parties, and again he spoke in favour of some restraints on politically motivated writings. By that time, his differences with the ministers were evident, and in 1820 he joined with La Bourdonnaye, from far to his right, in an effort to limit the effect of further proposed legislation. It would be an advantage, he had nevertheless pointed out in 1819, were publications required to deposit funds with the state as a surety for responsible conduct. This would mean that the parties would be encouraged to find responsible and respectable outlets for their views, to the advantage of the public. His commitment to as free a press as possible was genuine, but one cannot set aside the possibility that one factor that reconciled him to a measure of control – usually defended by considerations far more complex than envisaged by the ministers – was the need to impose some check upon incendiary writings that had been inspired by parties.50 In a curious choice of language, RoyerCollard referred to the moderation thereby imposed upon the partisan press as “cette discipline des partis.” This must not be taken to suggest that he possessed an understanding of the essential links that bound men in public life within parties. Indeed, Barante, who was writing from the wisdom of 50 AP 18 (27 Jan. 1817): 332–3; Barante, Vie politique, 1:309; AP 24 (3 May 1819): 74; and Barante, Vie politique, 1:487. Royer-Collard’s speeches on this subject are available in a separate collection; see De la liberté de la presse: Discours (Paris, 1949).

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hindsight, averred that it was precisely that necessary adhesive of parliamentary government, “la discipline des partis,” to which Royer-Collard remained insensitive.51 Already, as we shall see, the term “discipline” was known in a political sense, but throughout the century, when applied to legislative bodies, the French expression most often referred to the rules of the chamber by which deputies were called to order.52 There were other occasions when Royer-Collard further explored the nature of political divisions in relation to the existing form of government. For one thing, he strove to assert some intelligible distinction between party and those other foci of loyalty about which no good could be said. In the debate of 1820 on the new electoral law, the issue that more than any other marked his ultimate separation from the second Richelieu government, RoyerCollard lectured Joseph, vicomte Lainé – no favourite of the Doctrinaires – on his careless conflation of party and faction. There were indeed both to be found within the nation, but, insisted the professorial figure, one must distinguish between “subversive” factions and those “associations of interests enclosed by the established order.” These latter were parties, and they sought, not to ruin the existing order, but to place themselves as advantageously as possible in relation to power. Compared to his previous attempt to associate “factions passagères” with a ruthless quest for domination, this effort apparently conceded that parties themselves might seek office, for only factions posed a serious danger to the constitution. In offering a criterion that seemed to rely more on possession of the right set of motives than on the performance of overt actions, Royer-Collard wrapped his important distinction in no little ambiguity. Neither did he condescend, of course, to name names, but rather he suggested that there were unacceptable extremes to each of which there corresponded a centrist leaning. These centrist leanings were, he said, “honourable,” the one (clearly on the left) because it was identified with twenty-five years of great deeds, the other (on the right) because it was rooted in the historical glory of the nation.53 It is no doubt significant that his warmest endorsement of persisting divisions should come at a time when Royer-Collard’s commitments were changing, but this concession of legitimacy to certain groups did not mean that he granted his wholehearted approval. Undoubtedly, he preferred to have public business conducted, as he put it, in unity and unanimity, without regard to majority or minority. It is apparent as well that his ideas turned on some notion about how the opposed political connections, whether designated parties or factions, fed upon one 51 Barante, Vie politique, 1:422. 52 A.-G. Reynaert, Histoire de la discipline parlementaire. Règles et usages des assemblées politiques … (Paris, 1884). 53 AP 28 (27 May 1820): 166–8; and Barante, Vie politique, 2:43–4.

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another and were thus only to be found in sets of two. This is a point that he made more than once, as when, in 1819, he so described the presence of factions or when, in 1822, he responded to the claim by an ultra-royalist that there was but one party in the chamber with the retort that there would either be two or none.54 In the latter exchange, it is not entirely clear with what exact intent either speaker made his statement. For Royer-Collard, party might well remain an institution with which the nation could dispense, for he seems to have feared violent conflict to such a degree that he made no use of that familiar argument, available to the unconnected, that at the very least one group of rascals might limit the excesses of the other. If he did not expect the proceedings of representative government to avoid disagreements on particular issues, he must have trusted that these need not harden into party conflict. Early in the Second Restoration, he opposed a measure, proposed by Villèle, that would have followed British convention in requiring a deputy promoted to an office to seek re-election. No British political practice was more often enjoined on French government. This, said Royer-Collard, assumed without reason that the chamber needed to be the government’s enemy. There was, to be sure, opposition within the chamber but not between it and the king. Consequently, offices granted by the crown were not, in principle, to be perceived as a threat. A much firmer recognition of the place of opposition was his rather startling endorsement, in 1822, of that refusal of supply that, some six years before, he had dismissed so haughtily. In the later speech, he endorsed that British practice that had “infallibly” passed into French practice. On this occasion, his only concession to his previous stance was the assurance that refusal to pass the budget would, if it came, not be directed against the king but against a ministry deemed incapable of serving the king and the state. Royer-Collard’s choice of words is often puzzling, and whether the transition from Westminster was infallibly done would be hard to say; it had in any event not previously captured his own attention. Later comments on ministerial responsibility seemed to contain a calculated ambiguity as to what precise form of responsibility he was referring, but it seems probable that he meant, not just the legal penalties provided in the Charte, but also political responsibility. Responsibility was not a problem, he noted, were the ministers surrounded by a confident majority. Still, he added cryptically, “majorities pass away, chambers too, and responsibility remains.”55 In the same speech, 54 AP 27 (17 May 1820): 658; Barante, Vie politique, 2:27; AP 37 (25 July 1822): 660; and Barante, Vie politique, 2:163. 55 AP 15 (23 Oct. 1815): 96–7; Barante, Vie politique, 1:292–3; AP 36 (18 April 1822): 397; Barante, Vie politique, 1:156; AP 47 (18 April 1826): 227; and Barante, Vie politique, 2:273–4.

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he alluded to there being different keys to ministerial responsibility, which seems to suggest a possible overthrowing of the ministry through an erosion of its majority. A firmer understanding of that possibility would have banished much confusion about the subject. There was always in Royer-Collard’s comments about opposition a certain tone of restraint, and in some of his speeches, he seems to have preferred the eighteenth-century notion of “résistances,” one of which he identified as liberty of the press.56 Much as he valued his own independence, he appears most to have feared that organized disaffection against the ministers would endanger the regime itself. RoyerCollard did not cut an extravagant figure once his ties with the government had been severed, but his prominence in 1830 attests to his continuing prestige. There were fewer memorable speeches after 1820, but he did not retreat from the political arena as did some others. Since he appeared not to aspire to give theoretical form to his various viewpoints, his impressively grave and thoughtful speeches leave one wondering about the exact scope and intensity of his views and, given their occasional incompatibility, his ranking of their importance. If his words were at times inscrutable, so too were his silences. A significant case in point can be found in the lengthy debates on the double vote in 1820. Here was a watershed of the epoch, for it led to the so-called Third Restoration, marked by the revival of the ultra-royalists. It also saw the dissolution – through death (of both Camille Jordan and Auguste Germain, comte de Montforton, a recent recruit, who died in 1821), retirement, and the simple incompatibility of views – of the Doctrinaire coterie. Individuals among them had still their careers to make, but the influence of the original group would thereafter decline rapidly. On some significant issues, there was no sign of any common position. Thus, Royer-Collard’s correspondence with Serre, to cite one important record of the period, tells us nothing about his views of Serre’s enthusiasm for revamping the procedures of the chamber along the lines of the House of Commons. These proposals included weakening the bureaux and commissions to the advantage of arrangements that looked like the British Committee of the Whole and strengthening the hand of the président to make him more resemble the British Speaker. Serre had first offered this prospect when he served as président of the chamber in 1817–18. His fellow deputies seemed unimpressed with the project, and it came to nought. The silence of the official record is unbroken by any support from his friend Royer-Collard. When keeper of the seals within the ministry, Serre pursued a variant of his idée fixe, this time in the form of a grand plan that encompassed both a new electoral law and legislation for reorganizing legislative procedures. The package offered integral renewal, a lowering of the age of eligibility for 56

AP

34 (22 Jan. 1822): 131–2; and Barante, Vie politique, 2:130.

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deputies, and a provision for following the House of Commons by having a public vote (for most purposes) replace the secret one then employed in the chambers.57 This last provision would have significantly improved the prospect of encouraging some sort of party discipline among the deputies. Richelieu was not willing to support such legislation because it seemed too great a departure from usage. Ill and deserted by most of his associates save for Broglie, Serre saw his favourite measure mutate into the law of the double vote. His favourite clauses seem to have disappeared with almost no parliamentary discussion to which the public had access. Public men were certainly not anxious to indulge in public revelation of their votes; the lack of interest surrounding Serre’s measure makes this clear. Broglie was an exception in sharing Serre’s vision, and his speech in support of the new electoral law was a masterpiece of its kind. There he pressed for a more ample complement of deputies as the specific that would banish the intrigue and ministerial instability that had plagued the chamber under the law of 1817. Broglie envisioned a legislature that contained both majority and minority as compact bodies, for he hoped to see a state of affairs where “les partis se disciplineront sous la bannière de leurs chefs.”58 It was the most elaborate and eloquent tribute to parliamentary government that any Doctrinaire would offer in the Restoration. Again, conspicuously absent was any sign of approval by Royer-Collard, whose strong adhesion to the electoral system of 1817 turned in part on his seeing the alternative of integral renewal as smacking of the late imperial practice. Of course, he had not approved in 1818 of Serre’s entry into office, for it had been undertaken without consultation. However, the two were still communicating when Serre stayed on as a part of the revamped ministry of 1819, for only Serre’s dismissal of his erstwhile allies, in July 1820, seems to have ended their relations; it also terminated his friendship with the anglophile Broglie, once described by Richelieu as the least doctrinaire of the Doctrinaires. It was without doubt that passion for British government, to which both Broglie and Rémusat confessed in retrospect,59 that had lent substance to a speech such as Broglie’s. Royer-Collard was moved by no comparable enthusiasm, even though he remained well informed about British practices and respectful in his references to them. Whereas Broglie supported the government of 1820 by arguing for 57 AP 19 (14 Nov. 1817): 615–21; and Charles de Lacombe, Le comte de Serre, sa vie et son temps (Paris, 1881), 1:327–8, 2:61–3. 58 AP 28 (26 June 1820): 745–57 at 752; and Broglie, “Discours sur le projet de loi relatif aux élections,” in Écrits et discours (Paris, 1863), 2:47–107 at 85. 59 Broglie, Souvenirs, 1:376; Broglie, Personal Recollections, 1:364. For Rémusat, see above on page 409.

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the sort of party struggle that was familiar in Britain, Royer-Collard equally condemned an irresolute administration that lived through patching together incoherent majorities.60 He seemed, however, unprepared to reconcile his strong condemnation with a statement of preference that made sense of it. The idea of a ministry’s needing internal solidarity and a clear direction was a commonplace of the time, yet too often the prescription shied away from the conducting of business through those party ties that would alone secure the result. One sees much the same position, less ably presented, in some of the views of Royer-Collard’s protégé Barante when he sought to explain the fit between French mores and representative government without mentioning any influence that was not indigenous.61 RoyerCollard was much more likely to invoke British institutions, and even while resisting their suitability to France, he was gracious about their intrinsic merit. The debate of 1824 that finally saw the adoption of integral renewal for the Chamber of Deputies found Royer-Collard fending off the British parallel in the most ingratiating terms: “[T]he English government honours humanity; it is excellent for the nation that has it and of which it is capable.”62 In the same debate, he revealed some of his own carefully formulated views when he observed that, for France, all history was in the Charte. Royer-Collard could never have said, with Rémusat, that one went to Britain to learn of government as one went to Italy in search of art. He did, nevertheless, possess an impressive knowledge of those political forms whose adoption he wished, on the whole, to confine as much as possible. Long before Henry Hallam published his Constitutional History in 1827,63 Royer-Collard was familiar with his ideas – probably from the Edinburgh Review – and quoted Hallam on the subtle mutual influences that were so much a part of the British machinery. Hallam’s dismissal of mechanical notions such as balance did not cohere with a vision of politics nourished on Montesquieu and the separation of powers, so he was less accessible to French opinion than was a less sophisticated writer such as George Custance, who enjoyed more attention than he deserved. It may, then, be significant that the reference to Hallam and a view of British government that was sophisticated for its time occurred in that speech in May 1820 in 60 AP 26 (25 March 1820): 719; and Barante, Vie politique, 2:9. 61 Barante, “Sur les institutions politiques et constitutionnelles de la France, telle que le roi se propose de les établir définitivement” (memo written in 1815), in Souvenirs de Baron de Barante, 2:169–76. 62 AP 41 (3 June 1824): 190; and Barante, Vie politique, 2:219. 63 Guizot saw to the translation and publication of a French edition to which he contributed a preface. See Henry Hallam, Histoire constitutionnelle … (Paris, 1828–29), 1:i–xxiii.

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which Royer-Collard went farthest towards embracing the competition of political parties. Not that he was incapable of appealing to the relevance of parliamentary government when it suited him, as when he took issue with the ultra-royalists for misinterpreting the precedents regarding privilege. On that occasion, Royer-Collard quoted John Hatsell, the eighteenthcentury authority on parliamentary procedure.64 Some scholarly commentators have insisted that Royer-Collard changed his mind around 1820 and embraced parliamentary government on the British pattern, and that later versions of his sentiments about the vital constitutional relations contradicted earlier ones, almost word for word.65 A more careful interpretation suggests that he never renounced some of the earlier formulations,66 although it cannot be denied that saying what he wished to say about the relation of the ministers to the legislature became a more convoluted process and the message more elusive. Perhaps it is, above all, for this reason that Royer-Collard seems to have been spared that excoriation by contemporaries that greeted others who seemed to have taken new positions on important matters. It must also be evident that questions of ministerial responsibility and the like did not admit of easy formulation and that great numbers of those in public life must have participated vicariously in his effort to have representative government without the attendant costs. That Royer-Collard should have sounded somewhat different in office than out of it would occasion no surprise; what is remarkable is that the difference was so slight, a tribute to his independent ways in both capacities. It would not be true to say that contemporaries never noticed problems in his views, such as when his identification of the king’s will and that of his ministers came in for heavy criticism for its incoherence.67 What should perhaps occasion comment is that the changes of front were conducted with such aplomb as to discourage attempts to sort them out. It may well then be true that the orator cultivated his style the better to steer his way past the shoals of hostile critics. An unsympathetic observer recounts how Royer-Collard’s enigmatic way of expressing himself once left King Charles X with the impression that the Doctrinaire had recommended the intemperate La Bourdonnaye for his service. Others who admired Royer-Collard were probably left equally at sea as to his meaning. The same perceptive critic described her quarry as 64 AP 28 (27 May 1820): 166; Barante, Vie politique, 2:38; AP 51 (23 April 1827): 415; and Barante, Vie politique, 2:317. 65 Spuller, Royer-Collard, 125; Nesmes-Desmarets, Les Doctrines, 217, 227, 246. 66 Rémond, Royer-Collard, 78–80. 67 AP 18 (27 Jan. 1817): 336. Here the speaker was Robert, comte Maccarthy, an ultra-royalist.

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totally unfitted for public office because of his impractical nature and continual fault-finding.68 The latter quality, too, may have contributed to lending an appearance of continuity to positions that had actually been trimmed over time. It is a pity that Royer-Collard’s commitment to the cause of political independence received no definitive statement. The best such effort to provide a principled objection to political connections on the British pattern comes from the pen of Royer-Collard’s closest friend in public life, Camille Jordan. The occasion for so arguing was one of those reports on a legislative session that formed a successful genre in the early Restoration. The session that began in the autumn of 1817 has already been introduced as the one whose affairs have been the most fully documented, from various perspectives, of any in the period. Among the issues on which Jordan commented was that of the quid pro quo between those deputies who occupied posts in the administration and the ministers whom they served. Was it essential, he asked, that the price of office be an imperious requirement to support the government of the day? The issue was not merely hypothetical, and Jordan explained to his provincial electors how it had arisen in the session just past, that of 1817–18. The apparent dissidence of several deputies combined with the general erosion of the secure majority to make the question one of some moment. In fact, as his book did not say, it was Jordan himself who had used strong language against the ministers on the question of a press law. His colleague Royer-Collard had been more reticent and had supported some limitation on an entire liberty of the press, but he too had been in overt disagreement with the ministry. Both men remained members of the Conseil d’État. By no coincidence, Jordan chose to illustrate, by citing the example of councillors of state, his contention that députés fonctionnaires might, on matters of principle, speak and vote contrary to their ministerial colleagues. The category of councillor included at the time the core of the Doctrinaire sect – Royer-Collard, Guizot, and Barante, as well as Jordan himself. Behaviour by people of this status, said Jordan, constituted no abridgement of the fact that, of course, unity was essential for the advancement of the government’s agenda. Ministerial solidarity was one thing, but the occasional breaking of ranks by more junior officials ought, he insisted, to be treated with indulgence. It was possible, he then suggested, that were abject obedience an unquestioned outcome, there would be a greater incentive to employ ministerial influence to recruit a chamber full of officials whose “mechanical” compliance was already ensured. If, by contrast, some straying from ministerial 68 Comtesse de Boigne, Memoirs of the comtesse de Boigne (1820–1830) (London, 1907–08), 3:189, 161.

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expectations were treated as of little importance, then the government might reap the benefits both of a grateful loyalty from inside the chamber on matters vital to policy and the good opinion of a wider public. All of this appeared to be a bit lame, and stronger fare was clearly needed. It came in the form of playing the British card. Even, wrote Jordan, if Britain did indeed enjoy that firm discipline attributed to its parliamentary troops – and that was far from sure – the value of such discipline remained open to question. This must mean, he said, that the unwavering adherence to pre-defined goals was found not just on the government benches but also across the way. The result would then be nothing more than a “sad immobility,” an exhausting ritual of empty rhetoric and the consequent damaging of the prestige of Parliament. Never conceding that these dangers actually ensued, for party discipline remained but an unverified possibility, Jordan also proceeded to justify measures in Britain whose use would serve no purpose under French conditions. The notorious availability of pocket boroughs as bulwarks of opposition and the presence of demagogic popular boroughs afforded some excuse for a ministry anxious to defend itself by bolstering its own side. But neither condition was applicable in France. The well-known British practice, too, of requiring those who had accepted offices under the crown to run again afforded added justification for imposing solidarity on the re-elected officeholder. French centralization served further to distance its institutions from a model that might suit Britain tolerably well.69 All discussions of cross-Channel differences eventually led to the imperatives that national character imposed. The British might well see advantage in the rigidity of their party lines, and possibly the members of Parliament remained unmoved by the ridiculousness – to French observers – of exacting opinions from individuals in advance. Here, perhaps, one hears an echo of the view expressed in eighteenth-century France that Englishmen were serenely indifferent to what others thought of them. Such was not the case, however, in France, and it would be impossible to bring to those shores the sort of dependence that might be tolerated in London. In France, regard for maintaining the independence of one’s opinions was very great, possibly, he allowed, excessive. It was a part of the traditional conception of honour. No legislative body that failed to pay heed to this value could hope to command the respect of the French nation. Further putting out of the question any aspiration to copy the British were the habits already established among French ministries. In Britain, there were meetings – already known in America as caucusing, for which Jordan used 69 Camille Jordan, La Session de 1817, aux habitans de l’Ain et du Rhône (Paris, 1818), 136–57.

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a circumlocution – that served to take the sting out of the stringency in expectations of loyalty. There was no such provision in France for introducing the rank and file to measures in order to secure their reasoned assent. In any event, the great variety of persuasions already current in France would discourage its introduction. As it neared its conclusion, the argument returned to the note of scepticism already sounded about what really went on in Britain. It was, Jordan insisted, simply untrue that “la discipline parlementaire anglaise” functioned in the manner supposed to exist or in the form in which some wished to import it. The British honoured a distinction between vital issues and those of a secondary order, and with respect to the latter, the government tolerated dissent. This readiness to accommodate its followers might extend even to measures of the first importance. Predictably, Jordan cited the case of Catholic emancipation, where not only junior office-holders broke ranks but ministers as well. It was thus the case that, properly understood, the conventions of British politics were much friendlier to dissent than was popularly supposed. Far from government condemning the conduct of those who found disfavour in the session of 1817, it might applaud such action. Nor was it any bad thing in terms of public well-being that discipline might be relaxed, for this created room for the expression, on great occasions, of something in the nature of unanimity. This rare and splendid phenomenon could never appear in a chamber dominated by “maxims of servility, mechanical falling in line, and absolute engagements.”70 If this was the unaided work of Jordan, then his death in 1821 indeed deprived the public of a considerable talent. One wonders, however, whether the studied moderation of the argument may not have benefited from some of Royer-Collard’s wisdom. Certain of Jordan’s other contributions – speeches only, for he wrote little on politics – display an impetuous quality that is not visible here. Jordon’s book embodied a position that was one of the essential defining qualities of the Doctrinaires, and Guizot’s Archives philosophiques did not fail to accord it a review that went well beyond the original to spell out the school’s vision of a loosely combined centre that would dominate the scene.71 An answer from those of the ministry who had doubtless grown weary of having the Doctrinaires speak in their name appeared three months after the original publication. The author was Henri de Lourdoueix, journalist and novelist, a man of the centre but not of the school of Jordan. It was the task of his substantial rebuttal to present the reality of the danger that the ministers might indeed come to be replaced by those less fit to serve, 70 Ibid., 158–72. 71 Archives philosophiques, politiques et littéraires (1818), 5:80ff.

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and hence to insist that the scope for individual opinions was a luxury that the nation could not bear. It is a tribute to the importance of the Doctrinaires that these lessons in constitutional propriety treated Jordan’s book so gently. By way of painting the consequences of a victory by the Left, Lourdoueix asked if one might expect them, in the manner of a British Opposition come to power, to call themselves ministerials and royalists. His answer was that this would not be the case at all, that, indeed, they would continue to call themselves libéraux and patriotes, while the erstwhile ministers, fallen into opposition, would be known still as ministériels and royalistes.72 Lourdoueix’s rebuttal was a cumbersome effort to make sense of the double capacity in which parties functioned in representative government. Any party would presumably both bear a relation to authority, due to change when an opposition was called to office, and be identifiable by some more lasting body of belief. However much the latter might come to adjust to the temptations of power, one would expect to see a continuing identity. Therefore, whereas the characterization of the left-wing threat made sense in that one would expect them, once in office, to retain that identity, the ministériel label could not as readily be the way of identifying those swept from office. Their royalist sympathies, by contrast, would doubtless remain. Neither did the argument succeed in effectively presenting the hypothetical British Opposition as having acquired its royalist belief only on reaching power. Awkward as the complicated set of parallels was, Lourdoueix was attempting to say that, for some of those men in opposition, the existing regime possessed no legitimacy and that their triumph would be far more serious than a routine replacement of the “ins” by the erstwhile “outs.” So alien were their ways to the constitutional order that Lourdoueix imagined their gaining power only after their assault on the ministry had destroyed, as it were, the fortress and left it incapable of sheltering any strong government.73 The necessary supports of power itself would thus be among the victims of such a change, and this alone is what lent some degree of plausibility to the notion that one-time supporters of ministers would continue, in opposition, to support authority. The obvious solution to the problem as presented was to recommend to the French those means of supporting the ministers that were so well known from British practice. That was not, save in indirect fashion, the direction assumed by the argument. Instead, Lourdoueix pointed to those less notorious aspects of British politics that were conducive to cushioning the clash of ambitions. He wrote of the firm support in Britain for the 72 Henri de Lourdoueix, Opinion d’un citoyen sur la situation de la France, et particulièrement sur les défections dans le Ministère (Paris, 1818), 57–8. 73 Ibid., 61–2.

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national religion, noting that legislative sessions began with public prayer; not needing emphasis was that the consensus in France covered neither religion nor secular matters, thus leaving a considerable population doubly alienated from the establishment, spiritual and civil. The “public spirit” that pervaded British life also played a part. He pondered as well on the fact that the security of the British dynasty rested in those toasts to the king’s health made at the banquets of the Opposition. Unsaid was the stark truth that no such comfort belonged to the king of France. Later in his argument, Lourdoueix quoted Jordan’s rather indulgent account of those weapons of opposition that might excuse the discipline evident in the House of Commons. His point was that the need was that much more urgent in France. Lourdoueix’s case culminated in the simple insistence that acceptance of office under an administration entailed an active loyalty to the ministers of the day. Indeed, he saw nothing wrong with a practice of replacing political appointees when the politician who had secured the appointment had himself left office. Were all public servants to feel that their fate was linked to that of their political superiors, then the ministers would be more difficult to drive from office. To the objection that such an expectation disagreed with the common impression that the chamber was without parties and that individuals there freely expressed their opinions, his answer was that unity of opinions was the mainstay of a government. Those who proclaimed the needs of “conscience” should be prepared to relinquish their employments. What devotion could ministers expect from subordinates openly allied with the opposition? He brushed aside the claim that honour might endorse having both one’s opinions and one’s post. From such assumptions arose a situation whereby the ministers were reproached for having no “party”; from thence proceeded a perceived absence of energy in the conduct of public business. Beyond any doubt, here was a most forthright endorsement of what Lourdoueix called “discipline ministérielle,” and it was in a form responsive to conditions that obtained in France. Perhaps because he wished to avoid the controversial baggage of British political parties, Lourdoueix made no explicit plea for government by party, but he could hardly have intended any other arrangement. He said as much in the claim that “[a]ll governments that wish to be strong must create for themselves a force in accord with their views.” It may not be over-subtle to see the hoped-for instrument of improvement in Hercule de Serre with his British conception of legislative business. The last line of the argument refers to the arm of Hercules.74 There was support later for the self-indulgent behaviour defended by Jordan, as by the left-leaning writer 74 Ibid., 114, 124.

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(and later deputy) Eusèbe Salverte, and this came after the dismissal of the Doctrinaires.75 Save for some of that ministerial journalism written under Doctrinaire inspiration, it is difficult to find a substantial parallel to Lourdoueix’s justification for order in the ministerial ranks. One is reminded that when the Doctrinaires did not author the compelling ideas of the time, they often managed still to inspire them. guizot on representative government François Guizot (1787–1874) spent his early political life as a remarkably youthful éminence grise, and the period of his greatest prominence came during the July Monarchy. While Royer-Collard’s eloquence bore the Doctrinaires’ message in one form, Guizot wielded the busiest pen among the major figures, though not, one suspects, always the best. Guizot’s credentials as a historian were established before he became well known as a public official, and from early in his political life, his authoritative opinions complemented those of Royer-Collard. Together, these two did much to fashion a style of presenting ideas that, joined to a dignity that to some resembled presumption, gave the school its character. As he puts it in his Mémoires, Guizot first mixed with the world in 1807; by 1814 and the first Restoration, he occupied a post in the ministry of the interior, a common experience for several of those treated here. The representative government, of which he was to be the historian, was thus known to him in daily experience. His attainments as historian and his involvement in the issues of the day doubtless reinforced each other, although one is also tempted to say that the appearance of mutual support was, in part, misleading. Guizot’s erudition and his views on existing political structures did not necessarily meet in any grand synthesis, and some of his positions were as transparently partisan and contestable as those of any other man of affairs. His positions did, however, possess an air of authority, and he did his best to lend credibility to his views by emphasizing the positive relations that linked theory and practice. Guizot’s edition of some of the writings of the German Frédéric Ancillon used one of the notes to take to task those who presumed to claim that what was good in theory was valueless in practice, a topic visited previously by Kant among others. Never was the maxim a sound one, Guizot insisted, for theory properly understood merely offered the fruits of observation assembled as general principles. Other notes made the case for centralization in French administration and warned against party spirit. In his praise for a government that rose above party strife, together with a partisanship 75 See Eusèbe Salverte, Un député doit-il accepter des places? (Paris, 1820). It appeared in November of that year.

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that identified a truly national party, Guizot offered a characteristically puzzling set of loyalties.76 The first of Guizot’s writings to probe the nature of that form of government established by the Charte came in the late autumn of 1816. The apparent intent was to appropriate for the centre and left-centre a theory that had, to date, been largely the preserve of the ultra-royalists. The text that he was specifically aiming to challenge was Du ministère dans le gouvernement représentatif, that anonymous book by the baron de Vitrolles, published almost a year before. In choosing it as the work most worthy of his steel, this Doctrinaire was surely well advised. Here was Guizot’s equivalent to Royer-Collard’s address of the previous February on constitutional principles. Against the challenge of those ultras who sought to empower an ultra majority in the Chambre des députés, it was the task of spokesmen of the ministers and of the moderates in the centre to fend off any effort by the forces of opposition to unseat the ministers and thrust themselves in their place. So the point of the exercise was a partisan one, garbed as a lesson on the proper reading of the constitution. Salient for purposes of presenting a case were propositions about the relations among all of the main powers of government and some other forces as well. Three sets of relations were thus important. First was that between the king and his ministers, where opposition could be expected to separate the interests of the two whereas ministerial spokesmen could be expected to unite them. The latter might entail the tactic unsympathetically described in British parlance as “skulking behind the throne,” whereby ministers, to their advantage, excessively identified themselves with their sovereign. The second crucial nexus was that between the ministers and the majority in the chambers but, most importantly, the elected chamber. Finally, there was the status enjoyed by this lower chamber by virtue of the election of its members by the pays légal. At the appearance of Guizot’s pamphlet, the dissolution had done its work and the ministry and the chamber were again of like mind. This circumstance may even have served to lend credibility to Guizot’s claim that he was not concerned with involvement in issues of the moment. This was a useful guise, especially since the respectful summary of Vitrolles’s position was accompanied by the charge that the ultras had allowed their situation to dictate their constitutional theory and that a different situation would

76 Frédéric Ancillon, De la souverainété, et des formes du gouvernemen. Essai destiné à la rectification de quelques principes politiques [no translator or editor given] (Paris, 1816), 142–3, 149–58, 159–62. On the theme of theory and practice in Guizot’s thought, see Dirk Hoeges, François Guizot und die französische Revolution (Bonn, 1973), 93–101.

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call forth different principles.77 Supporting the innuendo was the familiar self-description of the Doctrinaires as fighting on two fronts against extremists, one group of which sought to destroy the Charte, while the other plotted the downfall of the monarchy. Guizot’s Du gouvernement représentatif was the most concentrated and economical statement of the central constitutional relations that the school ever produced, and all in a mere eighty pages.78 Since the differences between his argument and that of Vitrolles were rather subtle, Guizot made the most of his response by offering a clever and elegant epitome of what he took to be Vitrolles’s position. Commanding universal respect were two powers – “inviolable, sacred, invisible” – whose lofty status condemned them to inactivity. These were the monarch and public opinion, the latter known to all literate French people as queen of the world. Each of these powers had an active element that governed in the name of the sacred one. In the case of the king, it was the ministers who so performed, and in the case of the shadowy pre-eminence of public opinion, it was the majority in the chamber, and only there might it serve as the sacred power’s interpreter and organe. These parallel relations functioned by virtue of one further understanding, and that was that the majority, which was the only conduit for the expression of public opinion, itself governed the ministry.79 This last statement imposed on his unnamed opponent a position rather different from what was congenial to the late ultra majority, and the difference made it a comparatively easy matter for Guizot to argue a case that was more nuanced. An important tool for explaining the central relations was a view of British constitutional practices more sophisticated than the one usually credited to Montesquieu or Blackstone, more sophisticated, indeed, than that entertained by many Englishmen of Guizot’s day. In order to say what he wished about the powers of government, Guizot had to argue against the mechanistic understanding of a government that acted through a separation of powers or a system of balances, and these had been the commonplaces of 77 Guizot, Du gouvernement représentatif et de l’état actuel de la France (Paris, 1816), 14. It was reprinted in Guizot’s Mélanges politiques et historiques (Paris, 1869), 1–83. 78 Unaccountably, the standard guide to Guizot’s works describes it as 176 pages. See Charles H. Pouthas, Essai critique sur les sources et la bibliographie de Guizot pendant la Restauration (Paris, 1923), 2. Although it is a separate publication, the bibliography is often to be found bound with the thesis to which it relates, still the authoritative source on Guizot in this period. Guizot by Pouthas makes only brief mention of Guizot’s pamphlet, though with a hint of criticism at its logic. See Pouthas, Guizot, 143–4. 79 Guizot, Du gouvernement représentatif, 16, 21.

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eighteenth-century constitutional theory. As noted earlier, George Custance’s compilation held the stage among accounts of the British constitution; it actually said that a remarkable feature of the British constitution was its separation of the executive and legislative powers. More surprisingly still, Guizot’s Archives would soon praise the work, and it was on that basis that Charles Loyson, one of Guizot’s collaborators, would be moved to translate Custance.80 Without assigning blame for misleading theories, for he never associated the stress on equilibrium with any particular school, Guizot here made it his business to disparage any theory that suggested that the powers of government were in some sense balanced the one against the others. The image of equilibrium, he complained, encouraged the impression that, in France, the king and the legislative bodies were locked in some sort of combat, while in reality the chambers and the king cooperated as a single legislative power. Similarly, one was encouraged to think of opposition as that between the chambers, whereas it existed, in fact, within each. Here Guizot dispatched that traditional source of confusion about the locus of conflict. Such misconceptions led to the greatest confusion of all, for it was then thought that, in Britain, the House of Commons had invaded royal authority (as, indeed, some writers had said in the days of the Empire in France), when in reality the executive had wisely deigned to assume its place within the two chambers. What ensued was a fusion of powers that, properly understood, also discredited the notion that it was the chambers in Britain that made and unmade governments. The argument at this point was precisely the same as that presented by Royer-Collard in the speech of 24 February, earlier that year.81 Guizot now posed a question vital to sorting out the nature of the executive power: Was the ministry in representative government exercising a power distinct from that of the power of the king? “No,” he replied unequivocally. But surely, common sense insists, the question is somehow tendentious, for the identities of king and ministers were not totally fused. Guizot anticipated the objection and argued that it was nothing to the purpose to cite the fact of ministerial responsibility and then to insist that surely king and ministers were not one, since the system presumed to punish the ministers for wrongdoing but never the king. But, said Guizot, the ministers had agreed already that their views were sufficiently those of the king or they would not have accepted office. He made mention as well of the leverage enjoyed by loyal and capable ministers, who might well influence the king sufficiently to ensure that they would never be unjustly 80 Archives philosophiques, vol. 1 (1817), 167–86; Custance, Tableau de la constitution du royaume d’Angleterre [trans. Charles Loyson] (Paris, 1817), 114. 81 Guizot, Du gouvernement représentatif, 30–1; cf. Royer-Collard, in AP 16 (24 Feb. 1816): 292; and Barante, Vie politique, 1:225–6.

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blamed for policies not their own. Guizot’s opponents, moreover, could not compellingly cite the British practice whereby the king’s name should not be invoked in the course of debate; far from making the case that the two, king and ministry, were distinct, this practice confirmed that none presumed to distinguish them. Whether Guizot’s historical research had already made him familiar with eighteenth-century talk in Britain of the ministers as a sinister fourth power is impossible to say. His performance was theoretically more explicit than that of ministerial writers who, in the past, had discouraged close enquiry into the mystery of the relations between a constitutional monarch and his ministers. A second question that needed answering was that already posed, if only in jest, by Royer-Collard. Did the majority belong to the government or, conversely, was the government the property of the majority? Whereas Royer-Collard had anticipated the likelihood that, instead of owning the majority, the ministers were the entity that might come to be owned, Guizot was more solemn and less certain. A formed and disciplined majority, if relentless in its pursuit of power, would eventually either succeed in its quest or lead to the abolition of the representative system. Happily, thought Guizot, reality was not such as to lead to that outcome, for majorities in France were mobile and inconstant. So the majority was not such as an entity as could be assigned rights or have men speak in its name, for said the professor, it was but “a mobile force over which the various parties quarrel.” This clever piece of legerdemain turned the vaunted majority into a process or the site of a struggle, but hardly a body that maintained an enduring identity. All of this meant that office should not readily be conceded to a temporary majority. Guizot went, indeed, so far as to deny that the right of dissolution would have any meaning were the registering of such a majority to be taken as necessitating a new government. He also pounced with triumph upon the precedents of 1784 and 1807 from British history to support the contention that a ministry might well regain its majority and that the royal prerogative of dissolution might serve to dismiss a chamber that had got out of touch with opinion in the nation.82 That observation, of course, made it amply clear that the role of the chamber as an organe of public opinion had to be shared with the king and his advisers. This was the only passage that directly treated the alleged connection between the Chambre des députés and the public, the theme due to be spelled out in Guizot’s writings of the 1820s. On the three issues of the status of the ministry, that of the majority, and the locus of public opinion, Guizot had managed to enunciate a position different in emphasis from that of Vitrolles and one more in keeping with Doctrinaire priorities. The 82 Guizot, Du gouvernement représentatif, 41–4.

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case, however, made surprisingly little contact with the work that had apparently provoked it; on the topic of party, there was no challenge at all. Guizot’s tone in invoking British parliamentary practices was friendly throughout. The argument took no position on the value of trying to emulate the British, but in places it was necessary to explain the British constitution in order both to suggest the basic similarity of French institutions and to account for apparent divergences in the French experiment. One such issue was the legislative power that the Charte had left with the king, whereas in Britain it rested, to all appearances, with the House of Commons. Guizot’s account of the two arrangements skilfully stressed their similarity in principle. Deputies were elected in the first place, not to allow nations to govern themselves, but to ensure their good governance. If the initiative lay with the House of Commons, it was not because it had to belong there, but because the king had chosen that house as the centre of royal authority. Neither could it be said that the Commons, considered separately from the crown, did indeed exercise the initiative, for the existing fusion of powers in Britain made no provision for such a separation. From its revolutionary heritage, France had grown accustomed to assemblies that were the enemies of the king’s government, and it would take some time before the “habitudes politiques” of the French assimilated this fusion of powers.83 Clearly, however, Guizot here anticipated development in the direction of the British system. This admission that the French might be expected to grow into the institutions of representative government was not one that always commended itself to Guizot and company. They were quite as likely to emphasize, in place of the humble situation of apprentice, those different circumstances that would dictate adaptation of institutions to the situation of France. An instance of the unreadiness for full-fledged representative government was the French tendency to see servitude should the government attempt to exercise an influence upon elections or should it strive to mobilize its own party in the chambers. The ministry itself, he said, was hesitant in dealing with the chambers, for it too suffered from revolutionary memories. Yet it was essential, were royal authority to be established as in Britain “that [the ministry] be assured of its influence and surrounded by a party sufficiently numerous, sufficiently strong, that it should have nothing to fear in uniting with it.” No such body could form were those in the government not prepared to show some confidence in the membership of the legislature or to associate it with the ministerial programme. Crucial here was Guizot’s hypothetical mood, for he was not describing a state of affairs that existed already, but one that must come into being in order to secure 83 Ibid., 50–5.

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that cooperative spirit, so evident in Britain, among the powers of government. In consequence of the rapport that had grown up in Parliament, it might truly be said that the government in Britain resided in the ministerial party. In France, then, the task of the ministry would be to form its party or, as Guizot’s language sometimes seemed more precisely to suggest, to place itself at the head of a party already formed. An indication that he deemed the latter to be the true state of affairs was his regret that the ministerial party remained a stranger to the ministry, thereby suggesting as well that this was the fault of the ministers. At the same time, Guizot sounded rather indulgent towards such failings in that he recognized that the political divisions in France were not those of Britain. In the latter case, the members arrived at Westminster already engaged either for the ministers or against them, but bearing no hostility towards the existing institutions. Very different was the situation in France, where some deputies came seeking not the triumph of some political scheme, not the maintenance or the replacement of the ministry, but nothing short of revolution. Not all deputies were so disposed, of course, but it meant that the ministry had, in Guizot’s telling phrase, “faire son armée pendant et par le combat même.”84 It was a telling admission that an army of some description was essential. Such compressed insights are rarer in Guizot’s thought than one would hope. Anyone familiar with twentieth-century notions about the formation of contending units, such as classes, through the process of struggle – or indeed with Otto Neurath’s philosophical image of reconstructing one’s vessel while still at sea – will greet this phrase with surprise and delight. It should be added that, as early as 1816, Guizot had a superior command of the politics of majority-building than had the writers of the Journal général, writing at a later date. He managed better than they to reconcile an acceptance of the loose connections of French politics with the necessity that the ministers take the initiative in building support for themselves. This suggests that, despite some parallels in language, he cannot have been a major contributor to the Journal. Neither could his earlier strictures on party spirit be held to bar the creation of a ministerial following. Admirable as they found the British model, the Doctrinaires were hardly likely to accept the condition of constitutional tutelage without asserting some degree of independence. This may well account for Guizot’s rather uncharacteristic strategy of concluding his eloquent tribute to the imperious demands of representative government by poking fun at some of its folkways. He thus showed himself to be amused by the British taboo against pronouncing the name of the king when his presence suffused the whole system. He noted as well the irony that representative government, a system that extended some 84 Ibid., 57, 60.

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“latitude” whereby governments could reach their goals, was sometimes conceived of as necessarily functioning only in some preconceived, lockstep pattern.85 This hardly altered the tenor of the argument, but honour, no doubt, was saved. Guizot’s pamphlet was an important statement of the case for limiting the danger that an opposition could effect while simultaneously shoring up the government. Some reviewers thought that he had exaggerated the threat of revolutionaries and so had sought to import into the constitution an emphasis upon party that was alien to its spirit. Even the Journal général, which might be expected to be very positive about an associate of RoyerCollard, was less than warm about his apparent fanning of the flames of party and noted, too, not for the last time in Guizot’s career, that his use of terms could be a trifle vague. Another reviewer took up more than one of the huge pages of the Moniteur universel to stress the relation of the argument to the late dissolution.86 Posterity, too, offered a judgment in the person of the historian of parliamentary government in France. Duvergier de Hauranne, who for a time under the July Monarchy would call himself a Doctrinaire and a follower of Guizot, recognized the continuity between this attempt to hedge in the chambers and some of the notes that Guizot had joined back in June to his edition of Ancillon. He noted as well Guizot’s hostility to versions of separated powers and balanced government and how this position went beyond what Royer-Collard and Serre were then saying. It was probably, in fact, true that this argument served only to support Guizot’s animus against the extremists in the liberal camp, and it seems gratuitous in a publication aimed at ultras who seem to have had as little use for these mechanistic notions as did Guizot himself. Perhaps Duvergier de Hauranne also saw this, for his retort to Guizot’s charge that the ultras employed the British model only as a stalking horse was that such opportunism was not true only of the ultras. Also judicious was this historian’s conclusion that Guizot’s difference from his right-wing predecessors was more one of words than of things.87 Here, of course, one must tread warily, since most differences of opinion on matters so subtle as the orientation and spirit of a constitution are likely to turn on the emphasis lent to key terms. Guizot did indeed wish to say things that had not been on the agenda of the ultra party, but, for all that, he and Vitrolles were 85 Ibid., 63. 86 Review by B__T, Gazette de France, no. 325 (20 Nov. 1816); review by R.M., Journal général, no. 810 (22 Nov. 1816); and Moniteur universel, no. 325 (20 Nov. 1816): 1299–300. 87 Duvergier de Hauranne, Histoire du gouvernement parlementaire en France, 3:534–7.

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much closer in their positions than either was to Frenchmen who came out of a republican tradition or who openly endorsed absolute monarchy. When next Guizot returned to offer a substantial treatment of the relations among the powers of government, his situation had changed markedly. He had been dismissed from his post at the Conseil d‘État, and the move to the right that followed the assassination of the duc de Berry was well under way. Guizot’s Du gouvernement de la France appeared before the elections that would, in November 1820, yield considerable gains for the ultra-royalists. Perhaps the most puzzling aspect of the new publication arises from the uncertainty as to where Guizot had positioned himself within the unstable situation of 1820. There is some evidence to suppose that both he and Royer-Collard deemed the duc de Richelieu’s conciliatory gestures towards the ultra-royalists to be a trend of but short duration, and that the Doctrinaires expected soon to be back in their accustomed place near the seat of power.88 To the extent that the perspective had changed since 1816, the crucial difference was that the centre seemed to be giving way and politics increasingly reduced to a division between extremes. Guizot identified with the 155 deputies who had voted against the new electoral law and so leaned to the left. Whereas his cause had before been to rally the centre to fashion a stable majority against all others, his loyalties in 1820 were turned against the rising ultras. No longer were the enemy ambiguously called “revolutionaries,” a term that he had previously used to damn threats to the Charte and the throne; now they were called the “counter-revolution.” It remained true, no doubt, that he disapproved of Bonapartists and the remnants of Jacobinism, but the times called for a different emphasis. Just how different that emphasis was may be gathered from the message of the first sentence of the first chapter: in giving the Charter to France, the king adopted the Revolution.89 There were people who never forgave Guizot the writing of that sentence. The work of 1820 was much longer than the previous, but it said less. A number of the middle chapters bore highly abstract titles, such as “Révolution” and “Contre-Révolution.” Such rubrics allowed their maker to write a curious mixture of history and allusions to current events, and the result possessed neither the flow of narrative history nor the analytical acuity of his earlier work on the logic of representative government. Only chapter 10, entitled “De l’influence des chambres sur la chute et la formation des ministères,” sounds like the previous work. One is put in mind of the dismissive comment 88 For Guizot’s views, see Rémusat, Mémoires, 1:456; for Royer-Collard’s views, see Comtesse de Boigne, Memoirs, 3:53. 89 Guizot, Du gouvernement de la France depuis la Restauration, et du ministère actuel, 3rd ed. (Paris, 1820), 1.

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of the Journal des débats, in a leading article devoted to noticing the new book, that most people needed to have the meaning of Doctrinaire explained to them. The article went on to say that people generally held a middle position and tended to be lost in abstractions.90 Some of the concepts around which Guizot constructed his work were old France and new France, the Franks as opposed to the Gauls. In both cases, one was invited to choose the second of the two. Another quality that invited the charge of abstraction was the relative paucity of proper names, although Whigs and Tories surfaced occasionally. A host of careers stood impugned in the comment that Royer-Collard was the only person of a number who, after five years, spoke and voted as before. Serre’s alleged apostasy also came in for some waspish comment. The contending parties in France were called, confusingly, the “parti national” and that “de la cour,” the latter referring to the counter-revolutionaries whose grip on power was, as yet, far from secure. For a person normally so fearful of popular forces, Guizot now invoked the name of the people on his side.91 Four years before, he had been interested in making legitimate a ministerial party to fend off the anti-ministerial forces. Now he waxed ironical about ministers who pretended to be innocent about their ultra supporters and who protested that their unsought allies voted with the ministers and not the ministers with them. Yet more obviously at odds with an earlier emphasis was his claim that to contest the place of the chambers in influencing the formation of a ministry was to discard representative government.92 Neither proposition was the literal contradiction of what he had said before, but both suggested very different emphases. Among the recent changes that led Guizot to introduce new themes was the imminent division of the lower chamber into two sides clearly divided. This loss of the centre was to be expected in the representative system, but in the short term it spelled crisis. One issue on which he seemed not to have changed his perspective was the political immaturity of France, and he lamented that his contemporaries flattered themselves with being more advanced than they were. In truth, the nation remained in need of schooling and, presumably, by none other than the Doctrinaires.93 For all its relative thinness of content, Guizot’s book managed to offend some and inspire others. A transparently partisan effort to mobilize history in ways relevant to the current elections, it picked at that sore called the Revolution in a manner calculated to capture public attention. At a time when history was the normal accompaniment of a political programme, 90 91 92 93

Journal des débats, 8 Oct. 1820. Guizot, Du gouvernement de la France, 44, 224–5. Ibid., 98, 283–4. Ibid., 97, 285, 289–91.

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Guizot was to become the acknowledged master. Not surprisingly, then, it was an immediate success, and a fortnight or so after publication, a leftwing paper reported that, with the elections now over, the book was all the rage. One spoke of it in the salons, and they argued over it at the opera. It rapidly ran to five editions, the third of which introduced a response to critics. It moved ultra-royalists to paroxysms of distress and had what must have been its desired effect in leaving the impression that a basically conservative thinker was firmly situated on the left. One pamphlet revived a title from the Revolution to write of Trois têtes dans un bonnet, one of those joining Guizot’s being that of Benjamin Constant.94 Guizot’s argument may well have offended more than it pleased. Moderate opinion wished for a more consensual view of politics and was shocked by the waving of the bloody shirt of the Revolution. Also relevant in understanding some of the responses was Guizot’s existing unpopularity in some quarters. A verse portrait of 1819 had referred to him as being in body and in spirit a miniature. In that same year, notice of his speaking in the Chambre des députés in the capacity of a commissaire was also less than friendly. Guizot’s seeming admiration for British patterns of government particularly raised some hackles on the political right. The very progressive Revue encyclopédique, edited by the ex-revolutionary Marc-Antoine Jullien, also sounded rather cool in the four lines that it devoted to Guizot’s work. His intellectual opportunism had not escaped attention.95 A more obvious spokesman than Guizot for the moderate centre was Jean Cohen, himself a literary critic and a writer of history, whose political preferences included the discouragement of opposition of the sort that Guizot’s new tack seemed to be fomenting. These were the very preferences for keeping opposition moderate that Guizot had once espoused, although Cohen betrayed no awareness of the views previously defended by the Doctrinaires as some of them gravitated towards a form of opposition. Cohen’s protest against Guizot’s irresponsible use of history raised the issue of how opposition in representative government ought to be conducted. A later publication of July 1821 took the argument further, this time with only passing mention of Guizot. Cohen was an admirer of the traditional British struggle between ins and outs, and his chief concern was to confine 94 Stanley Mellon, The Political Uses of History: A Study of Historians in the French Restoration (Stanford, 1958), 12–13; Le Constitutionnel, no. 295 (19 Oct. 1820). For the book’s reception, see Pouthas, Guizot, 272–3; and Pouthas, Essai critique, 109. 95 Le Drapeau blanc [collected edition] (1819), 2:94; Achille de Jouffroy, “Aveux des libéraux,” ibid., 2:363–70, 368; and for the complaint about anglophile proclivities, see P.L.B., De la Restauration, considerée comme le terme et non le triomphe de la Révolution (Paris, 1820), 72, 114; and Revue encyclopédique 8:24 (Dec. 1820), 604.

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opposition to positions that respected existing institutions and avoided the introduction of popular unrest – such as the student riots of June 1820 – into acceptable forms of competition. Cohen appears to have been reasonably tolerant of a “formed” opposition on the British pattern and allowed as well that the outs might well come to power. He seems to have thought, too, in terms of there being certain political groups that would normally supply the ministers.96 His prejudices were, then, much like those of Guizot in 1816. Did Guizot, expecting again to be called into public service as the righthand man of ministers, mean to paint such a menacing picture of the current situation and to invoke, in the most divisive way imaginable, thirteen centuries of history culminating in the Revolution? We know that not long after the appearance of Du gouvernement he began work on an ambitious treatise, never completed, on political philosophy. In the surviving draft, one sees some of the views so well argued in 1816 along with others more typical of the outburst of 1820. He adhered still, for example, to his animus against popular sovereignty and to that against the chimerical balance that some purported to see in representative government. By contrast, an endorsement of the distinction between a government that was national and one of special interests sounds more like his bold identification of the Left with the national interest and his endowment of the middle classes with the mandate of history. Moreover, one might suspect, the historian was not being sensitive to the feelings of many of his readers when he referred, insouciantly, to law as the expression of the general will. An equally casual equation of government with the ministers would be no more than the old habit of a now unemployed Doctrinaire.97 When one contemplates the centrality of Guizot’s role over some five years in drafting legislation and briefing ministers,98 his disgrace cannot have been other than a blow. Even as he was becoming famous through his polemics, Guizot was also lecturing at the Collège de France on representative government. Amidst all of the detail, there were gems of insight and the whole was presented in a tone that supports his later claim that here he was pursuing scientific endeavour without even a glance at contemporary applications. On technical 96 [Cohen], Du système des doctrinaires, ou observations sur un écrit de M. Guizot … (Paris, 1820), 18–20, 40; and [Cohen], De l’opposition parlementaire, ce qu’elle est, et ce qu’elle doit être en France (Paris, 1821), 9–11, 16, 27, 31, 39. 97 Guizot, Histoire de la civilisation en Europe … suivie de Philosophie politique de la souverainété, ed. Pierre Rosanvallon (Paris, 1985), 305–89 at 334, 343–4. 98 A convenient summary of these tasks, taken largely from Pouthas, Guizot, can be found in Douglas Hall McNeally, “Constitutional Monarchy in France,” fols 130–8.

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matters – such as how the right of petition matured into the legislative initiative of the House of Commons, or in the impressive reconstruction of how the parliamentary demand in the reign of Edward III to play a direct role in the appointment of ministers had militated against true ministerial responsibility – the scholar showed to good advantage. For all his efforts first to stimulate party solidarity on behalf of the government and then to do the same for opposition, his comment in a lecture that a defect of representative government was that it cut truth in two was heartfelt no doubt.99 The lectures of this time, joined with others, would later become well known under the title Histoire des origines du gouvernement représentatif en Europe (1851). Further polemics were also in preparation, and late in 1821, more than a year after the first salvo, Guizot delivered a second at the tottering government of the duc de Richelieu. Animated by much the same spirit as the book of 1820, Guizot’s Des moyens de gouvernement et d’opposition was closer in its analytical categories to his pamphlet of 1816. It thus provides more to the student of party and opposition than did the tendentious history of the previous year. But before getting to the specifics of institutions, Guizot indulged in some of those abstractions that tended so to frustrate his readers. He combined here two different gambits, the first of which consisted in offering an account of what he meant by “des moyens de gouvernement.” This, he revealed, referred not to individual persons at all but to something far more complex and important. The true “moyens” consisted in the relation between the government and the society with which it was inextricably connected. The relevant instruments resided in the society itself and could not be separated from it; consequently, the society was not to be seen here as passively responsive to governmental action. Instead, it must be understood as providing the means of making government successful and constraining it in certain ways. Power must necessarily, then, be perceived in relation to the imperatives of the existing society, not as isolated from it.100 These observations find their point in a number of less grandiose formulations that occupy the first third of the book. Most obviously, Guizot was distressed, as before, at what appeared to be the imminent coming to power of the ultras. As his earlier bombshell had made tolerably clear, this was to be taken as a denial of that France that had emerged from the Revolution, an effort to turn back the clock to accommodate the émigrés, aristocrats, and conservative churchmen 99 Journal des cours publics de jurisprudence, histoire et belle-lettres (Paris, 1820–21), 1:330, 352, 333. This is purportedly by “une société d’avocats et d’hommes de lettres,” but the two volumes consist wholly of Guizot’s lectures. 100 Guizot, Des moyens de gouvernement et d’opposition dans l’état actuel de la France, 2nd ed. (Paris, 1821), 128–30.

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whose attachment to a vanished world threatened havoc in the existing one. At the beginning of the argument, he had pointed out that even if the Revolution could not supply the model of a government for the existing society, it had sufficiently been responsible for fashioning that society as to preclude any effort to revive the ancien régime. That contention, in itself, may seem to have been an excessively circuitous way of protesting the entry of Villèle and Corbière into the ministry, but such was Guizot’s manner of proceeding. The second démarche was an effort to spell out the political implications of the earlier claim that any government was significantly limited in its ambitions by the sort of society in which it was placed. This entailed identifying the mechanisms that linked the rulers with the masses. The uninitiated might have been forgiven for thinking that possibly a conventional wave in the direction of the queen of the world would have served the purpose, but instead Guizot chose to indulge in an elaborate treatment of the relations between the abstractions of opinion and interest, two of the significant words of the Restoration that Fiévée, in particular, had already established. Perhaps because he was becoming so wedded to the sovereignty of reason while remaining resistant, as always, to the sovereignty of the people, Guizot offered an elaborate defence of the imperative that rulers must consult passions, prejudices, and opinions, and not merely those interests that, for individual people, were dominant. For some reason that he never quite made clear, Guizot insisted that because one never encountered the masses as individuals (un à un), their presence had to be accounted for in terms of opinion and not interest. It followed, at least to the author’s satisfaction, that just as one must not separate government from its moorings in society, so interests and opinions must not be sundered.101 Intended obviously as an elucidation of what had gone before, these passages have the curious quality that belongs to an explicans that is itself more abstruse than the explicandum. The evident concern to condescend to the “masses” while keeping them at a distance may owe something to that quaint notion of Bonapartist social statistics whereby only elite people were truly individuals and thus were incapable of being rolled into a statistical profile from which individuality had vanished.102 More revealing, however, is Guizot’s strong objection to the tradition of Montesquieu in which one was encouraged to take the measure of social practices by reference to their congruence with the spirit or principle of the government. Unstinting as is some of the praise that he lavished on his predecessor, Guizot was clearly of the view that this 101 Guizot, Des moyens, 133–7. 102 See Marie-Noëlle Bourget, “Décrire, Compter, Calculer: The Debate over Statistics during the Napoleonic Period,” in L. Krüger et al., The Probabilistic Revolution (Cambridge, MA, and London, 1987), 305–16 at 311.

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formula got matters backwards and that the government itself was the junior partner in dancing to the tune of social arrangements.103 Following the two less than transparent efforts to explain what he meant by the “moyens” at the disposal of government, Guizot descended to a less elevated level of analysis and strove to suggest how the government might find its modus operandi in the ways of its people and how it might then associate the population in their own governance. In keeping with the welcome retreat from the heights of abstraction, he confided as to how he had witnessed, in the provinces, people living in social isolation with no significant ties to the wider political order. That penchant for centralization, based on the fear that local interests might otherwise colonize the central government, was seemingly a temporary casualty of his own recent alienation from the centre. There followed one of those grand passages that reveal Guizot’s high-minded vision of a France that had learned to cope with its history: “It is in the quarter sessions, in the assemblies of justices of the peace, in the gatherings of burgesses that the Jacobites and Hanoverians, the Tories and Whigs learned, in England, to live together and to manage together a good proportion of the business of the country, all the while disputing in the great national council the general direction of its government.”104 Had uttering these elevated sentiments reflected his main concerns, one might well have wondered why Guizot had bothered with the rest of the preceding obscurities. The moral for the existing government, whose weakness and irresolution he had already attacked, was that it should emulate the administration of William III that had taught Jacobites to become Tories, or that of Bonaparte who had so managed royalists that the party died and the individuals came to serve the Empire. It speaks to Guizot’s agenda more than to the logic of the case that he saw no need at this time to insist on concessions from those on the left whose proclivities might also threaten the constitution. With his pamphlet Des conspirations et de la justice politique of that same year having addressed the issues that arose from the prosecution of Bonapartist conspirators, Guizot could not have been unaware that the enemies of constitutional rule lurked at both extremes. With his tenebrous exposition of the first part of the title complete, Guizot required but three chapters to explain “des moyens d’opposition.” Much of what he wrote here was a very sensible plea – not unlike some that 103 Journal des cours publics de jurisprudence, histoire et belle-lettres 1:6, 72. For passages praising Montesquieu, see Douglas Johnson, Guizot: Aspects of French History, 1787– 1874 (London and Toronto), 332–3; and for a compelling statement of Guizot’s dissent, see Larry Siedentop, “Two Liberal Traditions,” in Alan Ryan, ed., The Idea of Freedom: Essays in Honour of Isaiah Berlin (Oxford, 1979), 153–74 at 157. 104 Guizot, Des moyens, 269–70. Cf. Guizot, Du gouvernement de la France, 290.

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he might have known from the pen of Lord Brougham or other Whigs – for an opposition that was regular, effective, and was given some legitimate scope for its activity. He found more ways than one of making the point that such an outcome was for the benefit of the administration as well as for that of the population in general, for were opposition denied all modes of response save its attempting to destroy authority, all would be losers. It was the task of representative government to ensure that this never came to pass. Appealing to the situation in Britain and in Sweden, he emphasized how important it was that there be outlets, other than the tribune in a legislature controlled by the majority and sitting for only half the year, whereby opposition might be manifested. Among the loci for the expression of a legal opposition were juries whose independence from official influence had been secured; others could be found in the genuine involvement of citizens in local government. In free nations, then, opposition might find a place in various milieux and might take various forms. The organes of this healthy challenge might be local magistrates who were sympathetic, or they might be in the local quarter sessions. Opposition might even reside, he hazarded, among fonctionnaires whose opinions were independent of those of the ministry. That was not the only example that spoke to his own situation, for, perhaps anticipating the loss of his academic appointment (which would came in October 1822), he alluded to the dark dealings of a government that hounded its critics by citing the English administration of the 1680s that had removed Locke from his fellowship at Oxford. In those free jurisdictions that presumably did not include France, the loss of a legislative majority was but the last indicator to a government that the administration was in difficulty, for the less conspicuous forums of political struggle should have already announced the problem. In several different ways, Guizot tried to show that remedies delayed led to serious long-run consequences, while opportunities to exercise opposition tended to encourage constructive uses of it. Thus, when the minority succeeded in having an able magistrate named, inserted a useful clause in a law, or managed to save the revenue of some town, that was a better thing for the nation than the angry declamations of weak and frustrated malcontents. Throughout, he skilfully illustrated how by making opposition routine, it was prevented from growing revolutionary. There was even a conciliatory suggestion that, were the minority to influence a reshuffling of ministers, it might render unnecessary an effort to drive the latter from power.105 If this were, indeed, intended as a bid to return to favour, it went unheeded. The comment also

105 Guizot, “Des moyens d’opposition en général,” in Des moyens, 295–316.

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suggested that Guizot did not share the horror of Constant or of other keen students of parliamentary government at just such a reshuffle. With the general nature of opposition well explained, what remained was to trace its nature first in the chambers and then in the country at large. Here Guizot’s first offering was a model of its kind, for the professor who had never himself been a deputy paid tribute to the business of conducting parliamentary opposition and did it with a breadth of vision and directness in marked contrast to the mannered play of abstractions that had come before. What, asked Guizot, was opposition for? It served to obstruct, if possible, the ministers’ designs with the intent of furthering its own. Representative government possessed the merit of encouraging the formation of parties and inviting them to appeal, competitively, to the public. Parties were thus instruments for exercising power and not ends in themselves; they were to serve the nation and not aspire to master it. One took one’s stand on the claim that the ministers governed badly, so the challenge was to show that one could do better. Too negative a tone was inappropriate in that politics depended less upon critiques and words than upon results. This admission – a surprising one given the source – was an adroit way of making the point that an opposition had to seek the opportunity to be invested with power. In that conclusion lay the key to banishing the inhibitions that surrounded the sort of political competition that Guizot meant to promote. One concern that might block the advance was the very Doctrinaire value placed on maintaining one’s independence, a posture well represented by Royer-Collard. The retort to this hypothetical objection was spirited. If one worried about being taxed with excessive ambition, if one were satisfied with a career of continual opposition, then surely it must be asked why one was critical in the first place. But one did not enter the battle in order to leave the field, after the victory, emptyhanded, for always there had to be a government. Disinterest was rare in individuals, inconceivable in parties, so the recommended practice was a frank bid for office. Indeed, Guizot argued that a party that failed to seek office was thereby likely to attract those who sought only to destroy and who thus became a faction.106 In a single bold stroke, the argument disarmed the conventional case against power seeking and fixed instead the odium of being factious on those whose fulminations were without practical effect. When Marx came, with heavy irony, to excoriate those Young Hegelians who misused the verb “to criticize,” he did no better than this pragmatic defence of partisanship. When modern students of Guizot try to make sense of his thoughts on the subject of party, here is where they should come. By contrast, the claim that the point of Guizot’s thought was 106 Guizot, “De l’opposition dans les chambres,” in ibid., 317–50 at 317–23.

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to abolish the distinction between party and government107 explains too little of interest, for the sentiment fails to make contact with either the categories of the Restoration or those of our own time. What lent energy and a cogency not always present in Guizot’s arguments was his wise strategy, if strategy it was, of confining his remarks to the practical exigencies of securing office, and with it the opportunity to put into practice one’s alternatives for securing the nation’s welfare. The purely constitutional dimensions of the argument – those so firmly put by Royer-Collard – were nowhere to be seen. But the ministers remained the king’s ministers, and Doctrinaires had been known to suggest in no uncertain terms that there were resources for defending the royal will against assaults from those who would presume to dictate it. Never did Guizot deny the existence of such possibilities, yet clearly it was not his current intention to draw attention to these niceties. Instead, such restraint as was to rein in the opposition was to be of its own making, through a combination of prudence and a sense of public duty. To illustrate the first, he instanced the hypercritical tendencies of the British Whigs. Their long spell in the wilderness, Guizot thought, was caused in part by their arguments’ failing to take into account how they themselves might have to adapt to circumstances were they in power. Consequently, the argument implied, this excessive partisanship was not convincing. The same restraint was dictated by the call of duty. Thus, it was wrong simply to decry faults that one might assist in mending or to seek to rally the public against the wrongs wrought by the majority when it was possible to make that majority see reason. The smallest victory in the chambers was then far more worthwhile than the applause of the world outside. Here the practical business of displacing the majority, if only momentarily, was joined to Guizot’s desire to reconcile ambition with appropriate conduct. Further separating the striving for office from all that was crass and ignoble was Guizot’s denial that the personal rewards were such that those avid for riches would be tempted. Public office held forth no such prizes. Perhaps the most insightful considerations adduced here were those that recalled suspicions commonly expressed about Guizot himself. Surely this was the inspiration for his avowal that, in concentrating in a businesslike way on defeating the ministers, an opposition banished fears that it was either a revolutionary cabal or an academic gathering of authors.108 The nice juxtaposition of the sinister and the dilettantish seemed to cover both flanks rather well. Interspersed among the phrases that set out the role of the opposition within the chambers were those that simultaneously related it to politics in the country. By definition, said Guizot, the opposition within the legislature 107 Rosanvallon, Le Moment Guizot, 51. 108 Guizot, Des moyens, 325–37.

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was a minority, so it necessarily found its raison d’être in modes of dissent beyond its doors. It must not, then, accept a status inferior to the majority, for the parliamentary opposition might well argue that it commanded the support of a majority in the country. True enough, one might say, but these words seemed blithely unmindful that the Doctrinaires had never been unduly concerned that the chambre introuvable, not much more than five years before, had been at once a majority and a sort of opposition. Neither had firm governmental majorities been the rule in the intervening years, nor even the ideal state of affairs. Because opposition in the country had been a somewhat haphazard business and little connected to the life of the chambers, Guizot was venturing here on relatively unexplored territory. As Doctrinaire journalism showed, one might argue for the respectability of attempts to swing the vote to one or another candidate, but parties – as opposed to opinions that leaned one way or another – had certainly not penetrated deeply into the localities.109 Here, therefore, Guizot was treading a fine line, and he soon took pains to right the emphasis by insisting that it was not true, of course, that deputies were commanded by forces in the country. It was rather the case that the opposition within the legislature was the head, not the tail, and it would direct “son parti au-dehors,” for it bore the same relation to it as did the government to the whole people.110 What may seem remarkable was that Guizot now could contemplate the opposition’s having its party, an eventuality that he had not always embraced with relish. Obviously, it mattered a lot who constituted that body. All this already said, along with the earlier tribute to the local redoubts that sustained a British Opposition, there was little left to say in the final chapter, entitled “De l’opposition hors des chambres.” Having to all intents and purposes tied the currents of opposition in the country to the personnel of the chambers, he was free again to remind his readers that the opposition in the legislature was France itself, an opposition truly national and that of the party that he called “progressive.” This avoided the height of impertinence reached in his book of a year before, where he had not hesitated to say that there were two parties, the good and the bad, and that those who spoke for the counter-revolution were both weak and bad.111 The initial focus of opposition in the chambers was crucial for purposes of clarity, as were the details drawn from British practice, for these lent life and specificity to the argument. A reader of the substantial book on opposition by the economist Charles Ganilh can appreciate how impoverished and unclear the absence of these factors can leave such an account.112 109 A recent study says the same. See Christine Guionnet, L’Apprentissage de la politique moderne: Les élections municipales sous la monarchie de juillet (Paris, 1997), 139. 110 Ibid., 331, 345. 111 Guizot, Des moyens, 352, 357; cf. Guizot, Du gouvernement de la France, 98. 112 Charles Ganilh, Du pouvoir de l’opposition dans la société civile (Paris, 1824).

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Modern scholars include those who say that Guizot did not appreciate the point of political parties until after 1848, who credit Guizot merely with appreciating organization within a legislative chamber and not in the country, and who deny that he could find any worth in a party opposed to his own.113 Each interpretation finds some support in the writings of a man whose consistency was far from perfect, but none is effectively sustained by the evidence of this book of 1821. There Guizot appears to have seen that opposition must entail the instrument of party, although he said little about that institution. No less clearly, he thought of political competition as having dimensions that extended into the society but that were still part of a constitutional process – not crude rebellion or conspiracy. He returned to this theme, though but obliquely, in a later essay, carefully confined in its specific examples to British and American politics. There he stated that elections needed to be connected with other political rights that were more closely associated with daily life.114 That suggested much about political culture, most of it left unsaid. The test hardest to pass is necessarily that which entails the acceptance of a genuine pluralism, according some recognition to contending parties and a worth and dignity to the struggle itself. This, for the partisan, is the longest mile, but Guizot managed in 1821 to sound more gracious, moderate, and statesmanlike than he had in 1820. Improvement on that performance introduces an inexacting standard, no doubt, but improvement there was. This retrospective judgment seems to find support in the book’s reception, which was milder than that greeting its immediate predecessor. The major review, as identified by Pouthas, was a five-part effort in the Moniteur. Despite this biographer’s description of a review that addressed each issue in turn, the anonymous reviewer seems to have had great difficulty in getting his bearings. Only by the third instalment did the comments find a focus on what was called “le parti de l’opposition,” and then the only firm judgments were those that regretted the necessity, taken to be endorsed by Guizot, of the government’s allying itself with a party. By way of illustrating more acceptable practices, the reviewer offered the example of the Catholic League of the time of Henri IV, which was temporary, and the efforts of George III to

113 Douglas Johnson, “Guizot et Angleterre,” in Société du protestantisme français, Actes de colloque François Guizot (22–25 Octobre, 1974) (Paris, 1976), 111–20 at 113; Louis Girard, “Le Régime parlementaire selon Guizot,” in ibid., 121–9 at 126; and Alan Kahan, “Guizot et le modèle anglais,” in Colloque de la Fondation Guizot-Val Richer, François Guizot et la culture politique de son temps (Paris, 1991), 219–31 at 223. 114 Guizot, “Élections, ou la formation et des opérations des collèges électoraux,” in Encyclopédie progressive (Paris, 1826), 393–424 at 396.

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break the parties of the 1760s to form a non-party government.115 Apart from the obvious effort to affront the Protestant Guizot by use of the first example and this admirer of Whigs by the second, the review found little purchase on the original. But Guizot was sufficiently irked to write a rejoinder in Le Constitutionnnel, to which his reviewer replied in turn. As his correspondence reveals, Guizot was concerned that criticisms of his work not render him unpopular.116 In fact, Guizot’s book was a difficult one with which to come to terms, and not the least because his account of the ministry’s political resources was so odd. Whereas in 1816 he had been content to recommend political organization for the ministerial troops, his interest had now shifted to the opposition, and only that discussion seemed lively or even wholly intelligible. The best response that Des moyens evoked seems not to have been discovered by Pouthas’s industry. It came from a nobleman on the moderate right and was the rough equivalent to the earlier reply from Jean Cohen. Vicomte Tabarié wrote on behalf of many others when he complained that Guizot should really manage to say clearly what he meant and to define his terms. His substantive objection was no less serious, for he accused Guizot of playing the revolutionary. These two objections came together in the suspicion that the current liberal opposition had been less than candid in its aims, for it sought not merely the supplanting of the ministers, but also the destruction of the monarchy. Had Tabarié found Guizot’s detailed arguments less opaque he might have better appreciated both that Guizot was no republican and that he had in fact been reasonably candid about his aims. Tabarié thought that opposition was valuable, but he had as well the fixed impression, hitherto not uncommon in Doctrinaire circles, that a good opposition was the public’s sentinel against misdeeds and that it should aspire to no higher function. His argument thus accused the opposition of following the secret ambition of grasping at office for itself and of being poised to go further to take aim at the throne.117 This failed to make contact with Guizot’s position, if indeed it was meant to do so, for Guizot had said more plainly than he had said most things that the point of opposition was to seek office. He had, in fact, defended the patently exaggerated view that, were the ministry irremovable, then opposition was but a 115 Pouthas, Guizot, 295; and “Troisième lettre sur le parti de l’opposition,” Moniteur universel, no. 322 (18 Nov. 1821): 1567. 116 See the undated letter from the autumn of 1821, addressed to his wife, in Lettres de M. Guizot à sa famille et à ses amis, ed. Mme de Witt (Paris, 1884), 27. 117 [M.-M.-E. Victor, vicomte Tabarié], L’Anti-Doctrinaire, et réponse à M. Guizot sur ses moyens de gouvernment (Paris, 1822), 60; and [Tabarié], “Théorie de l’opposition,” in ibid., 115–25.

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puerile occupation. There was a world of meaning, too, in the phrase “no ministry has ever fallen but before its successors.”118 He should have added that the dictum applied best to Britain, whereas in France it was simply not correct as a description of the way in which ministries were changed. Court intrigue and not the cut and thrust of debate had been the mechanism, and the successors to power had, to date, differed little in policies and outlook from the late incumbents. This is not to deny the well-attested fact that no eighteenth-century administration in Britain lost power without first losing the sovereign’s favour. Yet the relative clarity of party lines in Britain ruled out the ambiguous transitions and much of the intrigue that marked events in French parliamentary government. Des moyens is the richest of Guizot’s early political writings, if only because it betrays signs of his attempting to avoid blatant inconsistency with the views that he had espoused in other circumstances. Nor in later life did he return to any theoretical effort that was similarly ambitious. In retrospect, Guizot remained pleased with this book and spared it some of the criticism that he was to offer the harsher Du gouvernement de la France.119 Booksellers continue to describe it as among the rarest of his works. The signal virtues of Guizot’s performance of 1821 lay in those moderate passages in which he allowed himself to contemplate a form of political competition where the stakes were lower and the struggle less intense than the conditions that stirred fears at the time. Such thoughts were informed by his sound understanding of those very aspects of British politics that were as yet unavailable to the French. Guizot was a repetitive writer and hardly given to making memorable phrases, but fine insights well put are to be found and Guizot’s reputation as a political thinker scarcely prepares us for them. Pouthas, of all the commentators on Guizot, probably offered the most careful treatment of this major work, and he sedulously avoided saying much about the murky thoughts on opinion and interest. Other surveys of Guizot’s thought discuss the book only in cursory fashion.120 In other instances, scholarly attention to Des moyens has chiefly served the purpose of documenting Guizot’s apparent opportunism. Whether this failing is fairly charged to Guizot is a nice question. Certainly he changed 118 Guizot, Des moyens, 329. 119 Guizot, Mémoires pour servir à l’histoire de mon temps (Paris and Leipzig, 1858), 1:297–302; and Guizot, Memoirs to Illustrate the History of My Time (London, 1858– 67), 1:287–92. 120 Pouthas, Guizot, 288–95; Luis Díez del Corral, Doktrinärer Liberalismus: Guizot und sein Kreis (Neuwied am Rhein and Berlin, 1964), 126–7. There is some useful analysis in Duvergier de Hauranne, Histoire du gouvernment parlementaire (1864), 6:429–32.

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the emphasis with which he discussed representative government once he was forced into opposition, and he did so, it seems, more obviously even than Royer-Collard, who as a deputy was less outspoken in his speeches than was Guizot in his writings of 1820–21. It remains true that Guizot held, with some firmness, to an understanding of representative government, and his strategic changes of front during the Restoration have come in for more attention than they may warrant, probably because Guizot himself was wont to point to the same fault in the ultra-royalists. Guizot’s fortunes as a political thinker are starkly revealed in the fact that a scholar who defended him against suspicions of opportunism conceded rather too much in allowing that his thought was not original.121 The best example of Guizot’s opportunism needs, for its display, a broader canvas than the Restoration can offer. His one-time colleague Prosper Duvergier de Hauranne pointed out that Guizot as Louis-Philippe’s chief minister had, after thirty years, returned to his earliest view that a French parliamentary majority was best when mobile and uncertain in composition.122 He had set aside that emphasis when in opposition, if only because critical of ministerial wiles, but returned to it as the favourite minister of the July Monarchy. The practical politician was not one to forgo a useful argument just because he had once proclaimed the opposite. Once removed from active politics, Guizot again allowed himself to endorse the need, in parliamentary government and indeed in all free governments, of political parties. He accepted as well credit for overcoming Louis-Philippe’s reservations about open voting in the chambers, based on the argument that it was the prerequisite for the attainment of disciplined parties.123 For all the shortcomings, some of the political works show a penetration into the logic of what Guizot called representative government that placed him in the first rank among those who treated that important subject. Still, in assessing his contribution to an understanding of the form of government embodied in the Charte, it must be understood that his growing professional interest in British history and his admitted erudition made but a faint impact on what he said about existing British institutions and their fitness for use in France. Often his writings had an antiquarian air that avoided contamination by issues of the day. To assign him a leading role in advocating the introduction of British methods, as some have done, seems 121 For the claim of opportunism, see Roger Soltau, French Political Thought in the Nineteenth Century (New Haven, 1931), 44–5; and Bagge, Les idées politiques, 137–8. The defence, but also the judgment on unoriginality, is in Johnson, Guizot, 60–1, 83. 122 Duvergier de Hauranne, De la réforme parlementaire et de la réforme électoral (Paris, 1847), 36–8. 123 Guizot, Mémoires, 8:1–99 at 93; and Guizot, Memoirs, 8:1–90 at 84.

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misguided. To claim, moreover, that he was the only public man of importance so to argue seems to exaggerate Guizot’s role even as it ignores that of many others of acknowledged stature.124 The claim also invites a clear presentation as to who counts as a figure of importance. Thus, if Guizot the scholar and political theorist boasts an uneven record as a promoter of parliamentary government, Guizot the mature politician seemed not to benefit from his historical learning and theoretical powers and too often appeared to be but cynical. The coterie known as Doctrinaires had an existence after 1821, but their role as a corporate schoolmaster of the populace was at an end. A work of 1831 that sought the hand of the group in all governments of the period simply emphasized thereby its own eccentricity. Among the many works later written to attack Guizot, the posthumous book of a one-time deputy in the Restoration took particular exception to the bad cause supported by Guizot’s “impitoyable érudition” in Des moyens.125 Such notice was, however, as exceptional as the critic’s performance was unimpressive. When Guizot returned to writing for periodicals, as in Le Globe and the Revue française, his contributions smacked more of the “science politique” of the Archives philosophiques than it did of his signature offering of “politique speciale” that had dealt with issues of the day. The few articles on contemporary politics traceable to Guizot are comparatively uninteresting. The one exception is the review article on the society Aide-toi, le Ciel t’aidera, formed to animate anti-ministerial forces in the election of 1827. Here Guizot sufficiently entered into the spirit of optimism of the time that he gave every appearance of sounding conciliatory even towards ultra-royalists. He congratulated them on their apparent readiness to learn the ways of constitutional government, although perhaps the observation was more wish than fact. Villèle, on the other hand, came in for some harsh treatment for his efforts to disorganize and dissolve all parties.126 All of this suggests that Guizot’s commitment to parties as vehicles of political tactics was strong. Still, his continued penchant for centralization – for it seems to have rebounded after 1822 – and his pronounced individualism left him suspicious of all orders or associations that threatened individual autonomy. Catholic 124 T. Zeldin, “English Ideals in French Politics during the Nineteenth Century,” Historical Journal 2 (1959): 40–58 at 43. 125 F. Malebouche, Du système des Doctrinaires (Paris, 1831), 16, 28–31; “Des moyens de gouverement: À l’usage des rhéteurs et des sophistes,” in Louis Revelière, De la vanité des institutions fondées par le sophisme (Paris and Lyon, 1880), 29–44 at 32. 126 Guizot, “L’État de la France,” Revue française 1 (Jan. 1828): 22–45. When reprinted in his Mélanges politiques et historiques, at pages 435–66, it bore the title “Des élections et de la société Aide-toi, le Ciel t’aidera.”

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critics were especially sensitive to this aspect of his lectures at the Sorbonne in 1828–30.127 The best piece of political analysis to appear in the Revue – an article that treated the rise of the Chambre des députés and its relations with the ministry – is not credited to Guizot.128 a f o r g o t t e n wo r t h y If political theorizing declined for a while after 1821, political practice was subject to no such pause, and the association Aide-toi is a reminder that the tides of politics carried people to that sort of extra-parliamentary organization that Guizot was, in a small way, promoting in his work of 1821. The writer who best sustained this theme was Alphonse Mahul, who, after flirting with the Carbonari, came to be associated with Guizot’s school of thought. More than any other, Mahul carried the logic of those who had complained of the lack of political independence for the fonctionnaire one step further by drawing the conclusion that followed from the resolve of a French ministry to dictate the political leanings of its servants. Taking for granted that this was how politics worked, he sought other means by which competition might be conducted with some fairness. Since the ministers were not going to consent to be deprived of political resources, then those of the opposition had to be augmented. Mahul’s concern for this agenda dates, perhaps, from his opposition to the replacement of the electoral law of 1817 with the double vote of 1820. What he saw as most objectionable in the law proposed in 1815–16 was its heavy weighting in favour of conservative interests, and he feared, not without reason, the same in 1820. Always the partisan, Mahul sought instead a law that was most friendly to those expressing new ideas, and he looked forward to a triumph of the leftcentre, the Whigs of France, as he called them more than once. With that cause on the wane by 1820, he continued to hope for conditions favourable to real political competition. A pamphlet of 1822 praised “l’esprit de parti, principe conservateur des états libres.” More forcefully than in any thoughts traceable to Guizot, Mahul hailed as a good thing the disappearance of the third force in the middle, although neither man realized that the immediate prospect was not that of a clear two-party fight. As before, Mahul identified with “nos Whigs,” a true political party and patriots in the 127 Le Correspondant, journal religieux, politique, philosophique et littéraire 11 (19 May 1829): 85–8. The reviewer signed himself as ‘A.’ For comments celebrating the centralization of society see Guizot, Historical Essays and Lectures, ed. Stanley Mellon (Chicago, 1972), 227–8. 128 “Du gouvernement,” Revue française 8 (March 1829), 244–69. I am employing the attributions made by Pouthas in Essai critique, 25–6.

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manner of the British counterpart.129 As early as 1821, Mahul authored a manual for the guidance of the opposition. In its first version, this bore the title Tactique électorale à l’usage de l’opposition. Later, the title was rendered less aggressive in tone, without alteration of the content. Significantly, Mahul lent substance to Guizot’s notions about opposition in the country at large by promoting local organization to secure the election of deputies. Guizot’s welcome attention to extra-parliamentary politics was his most public statement in a short-lived retreat from a complacent centralism.130 However, his British examples of opposition still look bookish and remote from the political struggle compared to Mahul’s directives. The superiority of Mahul’s view of politics over even the models of the more senior Doctrinaires lay in Mahul’s capacity to invest both sides of the struggle with a sort of legitimacy, without in any way compromising his partisanship. Guizot and Royer-Collard had begun by questioning the very constitutionality of the aims of the opposition and, in time, had come to suggest that the government temporarily rested in the hands of a cause alien to the nation and doomed by history. Both reflected the different perspectives that came to be associated, first, with the ministers and then with their opponents. They therefore paid their respects seriatim to both sides, but only by virtue of themselves changing their relation to the men in power. The initial notice of a point of view that accepted the value of firm commitments for both opposition and ministerial parties appeared in a review that Mahul wrote on Garat’s biography of Suard. There, he seemed to resist Garat’s penchant for some degree of political independence by saying that it would bring comfort only to the ministerial side131 – the same point that Brougham had made in Britain. The argument in this review related only to partisanship in the chambers. By contrast, the electoral manual treated competition as it occurred “without doors,” to use the British expression. Mahul treated this as a game, with himself the author of a guide to winning. He was thereby able to convey the impression – it was little more than that – of a competition that necessarily involved two sides, neither of which could readily be deemed ineligible to compete. He thus managed to affirm that there were rules whose observance was in the interest of all. 129 Mahul, Histoire de la loi des élections et des projets du gouvernement (Paris, 1820), 8, 17, 46; [Mahul], Des partis en France et dans la chambre des députés, pendant la session de 1822 (Paris, 1822), 3, 10, 21. A publisher’s description of this latter work as by the author of certain other pamphlets brought a denial from the anonymous author. See Bibliographie de la France 48 (30 Nov. 1822): 720. Mahul’s authorship of the works attributed to him here is not, however, in doubt. 130 See Rudolf Von Thadden, La Centralisation contestée (Vendôme, 1985), 159, 179. 131 Revue encyclopédique 6, no. 17 (May 1820): 331–43 at 341.

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This he did with nothing more profound than the reminder that the dominant party would be wise were it to anticipate the day when, no longer dominant, it was dependent upon the other side’s commitment to the rules. The argument for equal subjection to certain rules applied as well to access to the means for successful electoral competition. Here Mahul argued that in the ordinary course of events there belonged enormous advantages to the majority side. In every department in the nation, there resided a local administration responsive to the centre. And it could not be said, he insisted, that, as in Britain, some share of local patronage might fall to the opposition. Lords-lieutenant might in Britain consort with the Opposition, but no such behaviour was to be tolerated on the part of the French prefect. Consequently, there had to be a parallel local organization that was loyal to the purposes of the opposition. Not content with underlining those considerable advantages that accompanied control of the national government, Mahul cited the informal foci of influence that naturally belonged to the party of the status quo – the salons, for instance. Since comparable institutions did not appear, without effort, on the left of the spectrum, they had to be created. He called them “réunions temporaires et spéciales.” It was not so much his business to design the exact nature of electoral committees as to make clear that the electoral competition that existed made some such organization “legitimate,” and it was the very presence of two sides that made it only just that one should be able, in principle, to match the other.132 The road to the new venture of Aide-toi was already being planned. It seems that, contrary to Pouthas’s impression, Guizot was not politically active in 1827, owing to his wife’s poor health.133 However, the Doctrinaire foundations of the venture are reasonably clear. Mahul had one further service to perform on behalf of representative government as it was then practised. In January 1830, he published a wide-ranging survey of French government under the Charte. Compared to his earlier writings, this possessed the air of a constitutional authority and did not pursue the aims of a particular persuasion. Yet on almost all of the topics discussed, the struggle of the parties intruded both by way of reminders of the opposition’s position on controversial issues and in the form of references to the salience of the fact of party after more than a decade and a half of the constitution. While he seems to have offered no general thesis to place all his views in perspective, Mahul’s recurrent emphasis was on how the formal clauses of the constitution were vitiated or made meaningful by what he was 132 Mahul, Tactique électorale à l’usage de l’opposition (Paris, 1821), 7, 32, 11–12, 23. With the third edition of 1824, the title became Instructions électorales à l’usage des français constitutionnels. 133 See Kent, The Election of 1827 in France, 215–16.

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inclined to call “le jeu du gouvernement représentatif.” Inseparable from that process were those parties that the original constitutional scheme had so little contemplated. This, then, was the analysis that complemented the pragmatics of strategy by showing how party made a difference within the institutions. It was not for this book to speak of organization, but rather of the subtle accommodation that the competition between majority and minority created. The topics best suited to display the point were the related ones of the royal initiative in legislation and the complicated provision that had to do with amendments from the chambers. When the constitution-makers of 1814 bestowed the initiative upon the crown, Mahul explained, it was because they feared intemperate measures from the chambers. Accounting for the anxiety required only an allusion to revolutionary excesses. But very different was the effect of the original provision when applied to a chamber in which there existed parties of the majority and the minority, for that of the majority was headed by the king’s ministers and that of the minority had itself the task of striving to become the majority and to exercise power in turn. Under these circumstances, it was the majority, not the minority, that was deprived by the denial of legislative initiative to the chambers, and that majority spoke in the king’s name. The royal prerogative, in this case, provided a remedy for which there was no condition that needed correction – quite the contrary, since there was a certain awkwardness in denying the chambers the initiative, as it placed critics of legislation in the position of disagreeing with the royal judgment. True it was that discussions took place between ministers and deputies, and the king himself was distanced from the process. This too had its costs, however, as it tended to inhibit deputies who wished both to criticize measures emanating from the crown and to avoid saying openly that the king’s pleasure was not theirs. There was the further mischief entailed in an opposition, feeling that it must honour the claims of conscience, being then perceived as more truculent than it really was. The fault, said Mahul, rested rather with the constitutional convention and the use made of it by ministers. Far from showing hostility to the king, the opposition best understood that the royal prerogative was respected in the most effective way by a sharing of legislative initiative between king and chambers. This would allow for the royal initiative on occasions where one could be assured that unanimity would prevail. In this way, the crown was removed from party strife and might benefit from the credit that came with sponsoring popular measures.134 Mahul’s discussion of elections allowed the repetition of some of the complaints of the early 1820s regarding the advantages that belonged to the ministerial party. Here Mahul, predictably, denied that opposition 134 Mahul, Tableau de la constitution politique, 259–68.

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threatened anything unconstitutional, and insisted that ministerial despotism was the real danger. Further discussions “du jeu des partis politiques” made it entirely clear that France had now entered an era when the king might indeed have to accept as his ministers those who were not to his liking. Mahul passed over this eventuality – the one that Royer-Collard had associated with republicanism – with the comment that the king who so acted was not humiliated, but was merely displaying the virtue of sacrificing his own satisfaction to the public good. This discussion was well supplied with reminders of the imperatives both of a ministry that enjoyed majority support and of systematic opposition. Finally, Mahul recorded the new salience of a legislature firmly divided between majority and minority by dwelling upon the unresolved issue of a law that made precise the legal formulation of ministerial responsibility. He was unconcerned that no such law had yet been passed. Its purpose had been supplanted by the political dynamic in the chambers. Specifically, a minister who enjoyed the support of the majority was, by that fact alone, innocent of wrongdoing. In the event of his losing that support, he lost office and further legal formalities were otoise, for a fallen minister was forgotten and the law, for him, would sleep in any event.135 Although history showed this assumption to be untrue in relation to the ministers of Charles X – and their being tried came to be defended, even using British precedents – the comment stands out as an explanation of how the political reality of party had affected the constitution. Here, no doubt, Mahul expressed his own views and not those of the individuals once known as Doctrinaires; yet his is a valuable perspective on the conventions of French politics on the eve of the July Revolution. Guizot himself may well have thought the same, but we lack any record of his thoughts at this time. Mahul’s close relations with Guizot date, in large measure, from a later period, and the two left public life together in 1848.136 Though a minor figure in a brilliant cast of characters, Alphonse Mahul has not been entirely forgotten. Two recent works of scholarship pay him some attention. As if to underline the fleeting character of his fame, both render his given names inaccurately.137

135 Ibid., 476–8, 504–5. 136 J.-F. Jeanjean, “Guizot et Mahul,” Mémoires de la Société des arts et des sciences de Carcasonne, 2nd ser., 10 (1914–19): 80–290. 137 Not faithful to how Mahul was known in his time is the “A.- Jean Mahul” of Isabelle Backouche’s De la monarchie parlementaire, 1815–1848: De Louis XVIII à LouisPhilippe (Paris, 2000), 81, 97. Similarly without foundation is “Adolphe Mahul” of Lucien Jaume’s L’Individu effacé, ou le paradoxe du libéralisme français (Paris, 1997), 388, 577. The given names were Alphonse-Jacques.

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Mahul’s work serves, too, to remind us of the centrality of the Doctrinaire connection in coming to terms with the mechanics of representative government. Although the gains here were impermanent, like most that was learned from the experience of the Restoration, the group stands out for its memorable wedding of theory and practice. It was not, unfortunately, a union that would continue to characterize the years of Guizot’s great prominence on the political stage. His associate Duverger de Hauranne was to become the champion of party and parliamentarianism on the British model. Guizot, by contrast, failed to find that formula that would allow for a homogeneous ministry that could command a majority in the chambers, and so presided over the collapse of the great experiment.138 The fact of his again offering public support to party only after leaving public life is eloquent testimony to his priorities. Both before and after his spell in office, Guizot’s theory had been better than his practice.

138 R.L. Koepke, “The Failure of Parliamentary Government in France, 1840– 1848,” European Studies Review 9 (Oct. 1979), 433–55 at 434.

Conclusion

the political order of france after bonaparte had begun with none of the advantages enjoyed by Georgian Britain and, all but smothered in its cradle, was relatively ill-favoured by fortune. Too often perceived only as an imperfect alternative to something yet worse – one thinks here of Hilaire Belloc’s advice to cleave to the nurse who offered only that attraction – the Charte gained much support from people who would rather have played by other rules. Yet it survived the Restoration, little altered by 1830, and had succumbed neither to Jacobinism nor to blackest reaction. The public figures who had hoped to tutor their countrymen in the modes of civil disagreement did not succeed in the measure that they had hoped, though there were times, as in 1828 and at periods in the July Monarchy, when civility and order seemed to be the prospect. Those who counselled assimilation of the British model in its spirit had at least set an agenda and defined an ideal that was not then easy to set aside. Their signal accomplishment was to create the presumption that a ministry ought to stand for something and those who opposed for something else. If circumstances often posed difficulties for its application, the political mores were enriched by the very ideal. Guizot, as minister in the 1840s, would not, at his most opportunistic, be moved to defend the sort of no-party administration that Decazes had taken as the norm in the early years of the Restoration. In the beginning, it had not been well understood that the constitutional model required party and systematic opposition in order to work coherently. That expectation lived on through all the insincere talk of unity in the Second Republic and would even reassert itself in the dark days of the Second Empire. In retrospect, we may now observe that the longer the experiment in what was becoming known as parliamentary government lasted, the better the prospects of its continuing to do so. After violent interruptions, as in 1848 and after, it was again the basis of business in 1875. Acceptance of continued political pluralism was the product of experience, informed by learning and imagination; little wonder that the right mix was hardly a routine feat. It was

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an understanding likely to spread rather than contract, even as it grew richer in the successive works of a commentator such as Hello, whose writings bridged the Restoration and July Monarchy. Even as astute an observer as Tocqueville would need some time as a deputy before he came to understand that politics under Louis-Philippe needed real political parties. Although the French government admittedly stumbled from one crisis to another, an historical perspective reminds us that such has usually been the nature of regimes that offer at least a measure of freedom and the hope of doing better. Machiavelli, on the travail of governo misto, and Hume, on the vicissitudes of Britain’s happy constitution, both remind us of the fragility of these arrangements. If, in particular, we join the latter in his conjectures on whether the balanced constitution would pass into absolute monarchy or be felled by a republican coup, it becomes plain that all government that exudes the breath of life is precarious by nature. Britain of the eighteenth century might seem, in retrospect, an island of calm through which a Whiggish freedom might glide smoothly from precedent to precedent; yet the lived experience of those who inhabited the oasis of supposed stability reveals endless alarms. For the institutions that the French had borrowed in 1814–15, survival and occasional renewal was a sort of triumph. In more realms than one, credit belongs to a political process that did better than merely resurrect itself, but rather literally created valuable expectations for the conduct of public business. Part and parcel of the discrediting of the bascule as the daily bread of governance was the weakening of that diffuse sentiment that portrayed the French legislator as the moral superior of those slaves of party who came to their duty already committed to their leaders and their principles. Political clichés possess a long halflife, but undoubtedly this one, with its attractively misleading depiction of the national character, appears never to have recovered from its encounter with reality in the fifteen years of the Restoration. There was just too much evidence that what was ostensibly a judicious withholding of judgment and a willingness to hear all sides of a case was, in sober fact, often something else entirely. It became notorious that it was all too easy to purchase a silent and anonymous vote, with the seller able to enjoy various forms of favour without the need to account for his conduct. On this issue, the comparative rarity of complaints that deputies should avow their commitments in a public vote is probably just a sign that the existing system was too comfortable to forgo. Among the practices of the day that challenged the flattering character was the obvious fact that it flourished most in the ranks of those who hoped to deny to their opponents the support of discipline and organization. Men in opposition were far more disposed to find the measure of the superior French character in their own efforts to pursue justice and honest

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dealing, without the inducements, pecuniary or honorific, that ensured ministerial majorities on both sides of the Channel. It is worth noting, too, that the myth of the French deputy who remained responsive to the appeal of the moment took no account of the notorious penchant of his kind to read prepared speeches, which hardly suggested a firm commitment to enter, unprepared, into the give and take of debate. The independent, as the model of the principled deputy, had very considerably faded from the scene as the 1820s moved forward, one sign among many that the mythology of representative government responded to the experience of its practitioners. Understanding of the mechanics of the chosen form of rule seemed to be improving when Villèle was forced from office, and the different persuasions that combined to defeat him did so in the name of more political competition and not less. The famous address of the 221, in March 1830, put paid to the hopes of the extremists in the train of Charles X who had dreamed that the king’s ministers might survive the hostility of a majority of the lower chamber. The active reign of Louis XVIII had begun with a strong presumption that ministers had no need of a partisan following and that opposition to them should be similarly ad hoc. A compelling sign that the decade and a half had changed perceptions lies in the fact that Royer-Collard, who was in the chair at the vote of 18 March, would once have endorsed both propositions. Should one object that this was but one person and not the bellwether of the nation, it may be replied that there are a number of such signs of political maturation and some relate to the political language of the epoch. The Restoration began with opposition as an individual gesture, and led by the Journal des débats, it ended with Opposition, now suitably capitalized, as an institution of government. Changes in the very idiom of a language are potent indications that something is afoot, and when these have to do with a model that assumes there being at least two sides to the legislative struggle, the political culture itself has presumably undergone some development. A description of politics as the struggle between the parties of movement and of resistance became commonplace after 1830, although public life remained far more fragmented than that neat formula suggested. The insight that division and not artificial unanimity is the very essence of a healthy political order seems more important than the question of the numbers of political actors involved. We are also now aware that this wisdom is, almost certainly, best absorbed before the onset of mass politics. When the men of 1848 were thrust, unexpectedly, into power based on a sort of universal suffrage, theirs was still very much a government that sought to discourage the extremists who looked to extra-parliamentary politics. Somewhere along the way, the active players in French politics had come to expect competition in a lower chamber that was the product of

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meaningful elections, and for this, the Restoration and the onset of the July Monarchy must, in good measure, be responsible. The same trajectory, visible in bodies of opinion, is yet more dramatically displayed in the process whereby individuals moved from a normal unfamiliarity with the units and etiquette of formed opposition and party struggle to an understanding of both. Each of the major figures treated here toiled on a somewhat different facet of the new mores being sought for the nation. Vaublanc had as his highest priority the need to accept political leadership and to set aside that stiff-necked individualism that beset French society. His preference for civility between political opponents was another gesture in the right direction but was secondary to his plea for making political friendships effective in action. Fiévée’s preferred model spoke more directly to constitutional constraints, and in keeping with his largely negative agenda, the journalist ridiculed the pose of conscience and the evasions that accompanied it. With that cause largely triumphant in the early years of the Restoration, his legacy lay in his warnings of an administrative style that had never lost the imperial stamp. Later generations of decentralizers would be much in his debt. A negativity similar to Fiévée’s was Constant’s stock-in-trade, and his acceptance of parties remained largely tacit, with little by way of praise for political action in concert. Liberty of the citizen was his cry, and he called too for a political process that encouraged vigilance against that misuse of state power that he called “l’arbitraire.” Chateaubriand’s tardy embracing of open political competition was manifest only in the false dawn of 1828. More than that of the others, his protracted political education, seemingly painful, revealed the difficulty of making sense of conclusions that flew in the face of ingrained prejudice. A different process by far saw Guizot learnedly articulate the logic of supporting an administration and then an opposition, only to drift away from such views in his years as successful politician. The young theorist had asserted what the crafty practitioner of his middle years set aside. Guizot as first minister may be credited with a reform that encouraged the displaying of one’s colours in the chambre, but more of his efforts assisted the disorganizing of political competition. Only in retirement would he revert to his earlier commitments. The ethics of civil disagreement entailed complex ideas and attitudes drawn from quite disparate bodies of experience. Little wonder that none of the subjects of study offered a simple formula free of cross-pressures or hesitations. Had they done so, the issues would have been less intractable and the people themselves more than human. A major question needing answer is the following: if the issues were so salient for public life in France and the writers and speakers who addressed them so well known that the names of most resonate still for the educated, why is the subject of this study not sufficiently familiar to render the work

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otiose? If the question seems dangerous, it is nonetheless important. One consideration is surely that those who were famous in their own day and sometimes as well in ours were not known for the ideas explored here. Questions about the nature of political conflict and its limits were, in the early nineteenth century, both new and far removed from the ideological claims that supplied the substance of most political ideas. The very business of understanding the mores of living in a divided society or serving in a legislature similarly divided as yet lacked a name, though it is best understood as intrinsic to what is now deemed to be social science. Fiévée, Constant, and company were thus engaged in activity more readily appreciated after the fact than by their contemporaries. But if opinion in their own time did not find the activity worthy of much attention, then posterity would, in all likelihood, remain ignorant of its presence. That, in fact, seems to have been, in great measure, the case. The comparatively subtle considerations that related to analysing and encouraging political civility were not the stuff to display on banners. The very actors themselves would not have chosen the themes drawn out here as the most salient ones – certainly not a Constant or a Chateaubriand, both of whom seem to have done their utmost to sublimate the matter of party connections and conflicts into something else. It just happens to be the case that, for most purposes, winning in politics was more important than was the articulation of the need to find a way of conducting public business free of ancient fears, of conspiracy and of corruption. The result is that the gems of insight here brought to the surface were but a very small part of the great universe of discourse even for gifted political thinkers. Not surprising, then, that social-scientific enquiry avant la lettre was quite inconspicuous and exercised no fascination even for the learned who, following Montesquieu, had learned to contrast lois and moeurs. If inconspicuous for the French themselves, the activity can have been even less salient for Anglo-Saxons, who would have had difficulty in discerning that the apparent failures in French institutions masked a capacity for asking the right questions that seems to have had carried less weight in the relative serenity of Britain or America. The great experiment in cultural borrowing had little influence on the English-speaking world, the members of which had no need to pass any judgment on the process. Another perspective may shed further light on the relative invisibility of the themes of interest here. When French academic lawyers and social scientists wrote, at the end of the nineteenth century, in the Revue du droit public or the Revue politique et parlementaire, they addressed issues familiar to an earlier age. Their articles lamented the weakness of common bonds that could bridge major fissures in the body politic, the legal barriers that inhibited freedom of assembly, and the pervasive influence of the French

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state, still not sufficiently distinguishable from the politicians in office. What they did not do, as far as the evidence goes, was to display an appreciation that a similar agenda had been offered quite early in the century. A case in point comes in the work of Professor Félix Moreau of Aix-Marseille, firm friend of the parliamentary regime and the disciplined political parties that could make it work. Moreau could find, only in the 1840s, a homogeneous cabinet supported by that “majorité compacte” that had long endeared British arrangements to people of his views. He was oblivious, it would seem, to the presence of such an entity in the government headed by Villèle in the 1820s, one that used the same sinister means of persuasion that rightly provoked outrage in later decades. Not only were memories short, but the way in which issues were posed changed over time, and this itself blurred the lines of continuity. The unconvincing claims of conscience and talk of the pernicious tactic of the bascule were on the political agenda no longer, for these were the sites, in the Restoration, of small victories in the name of an honest partisanship. Similar small victories – such as limiting the electoral candidacy of prefects in areas subject to their jurisdiction or requiring the re-election of deputies who accepted public office – had marked the July Monarchy. Some of the language of the 1890s, such as lamenting the state’s still not being neutral in elections, had emerged much earlier, but the issue was not openly debated before the 1870s. That same decade seems to have rediscovered, to the credit of the positivists, Comte’s writings of the 1850s on the notion of “consensus” as the ingredient missing from French political life. Vocabulary changed, as did the seriousness of some of the cleavages, for the emergence of class struggle before 1848 meant that the divisions among the gentlemen of the 1820s must then have seemed mild indeed. It became less persuasive to lament the absence in France of an aristocracy, such as in Britain, to secure unity. Some of the political devices of earlier decades – one thinks of the recourse to a dress code for deputies to create a common stock of moeurs parlementaires, an effort that ceased only in 1838 – would also have seemed, to a later age, just silly. Others, such as the incisive advice that legislators were ill-advised to seek the absence of commitment expected among juries, were now irrelevant, since the mores had adapted. On other issues, such as the absence in the legislature both of discipline and leadership, the complaints of one decade had simply echoed those of previous ones. The three revolutionary disruptions that separated the Restoration from the last decade of the century served to hide the fact that it was a set of truly perennial problems that were addressed when the subjects of Louis XVIII sought a framework of institutions within which they might disagree in relative peace. It remains a nice point as to whether the darkness that has enveloped these efforts is the result of their failing to

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cure the ills of the French community or whether changing emphases, from decade to decade, obscured their importance. In the 1970s, it was still being said that the French system had never been hospitable to organized opposition, but this truth seems never to have invited interest in the long history of grappling with the problem. The French came late to the institutions of concern here, but they came readier to reflect upon them than were the originators across the Channel. The latecomers had necessarily to compare the British system, apparently the serene product of time and absent-mindedness, with their own. The British themselves developed only a limited propensity to count their blessings; public life as experienced day to day seems but a succession of crises and only retrospect can offer a different reading. It was left for the French to ponder by what means their neighbours had so reduced the matters worthy of quarrel as to make open political competition a reality. Before there was talk, other than in Latin, about consensus or of the social capital now so coveted, numbers of French thinkers had conducted a sustained and revealing exercise in comparative institutions and political ecology. In the long run, this exercise offered a lesson in the futility of seeking certain social outcomes by direct assault. We now understand that we cannot readily steer ourselves and others to that exact combination of self-assertion and restraint that seems to yield the elusive state of civil disagreement. To expect to do so seems to be the equivalent of pursuing states of mind or behaviour – such as acting naturally – that come best by way of indirection. Louis XVIII called in vain for his Whigs and Tories; yet the effort to render French politics less terrifying offered valuable lessons. Benjamin Constant put it all in perspective when he called his own generation a transitional one, fated to fight battles so that others would win at the last. He was right, although he could hardly have known that the struggle to set civil disagreement on a secure foundation would occupy another century and a half. To understand why that was so, it helps to begin with the Restoration.

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Index

Acte additionnel, 297, 301, 345–6 action in concert, animus against, 145– 6, 268, 333 Adair, Sir Robert, 160 address of March 1830, 418, 465 agent électoral, 124 agent provocateur, methods, 274 Agoult, Charles Constance, 103–4; anglophile, 103–4; French mistake role of legislature, 103; praise for party, 104 Aide-toi, le ciel t’aidera, 125, 292–3 Alexander, Robert, 3, 124n Allauch, Richard d’, 386 Almanach royal, 357 alternance, 4 ambition, 26, 30, 32; opposition to be free of, 24–5; opposition turns to public advantage, 31, 36, 283; sign of public spirit, 17 Ancillon, Fréderic, 433, 440 Anglomania, 17, 141 anglophilia, 230 Annales historiques des sessions, 107 Annual Register, 359 annual renewal of Chamber of Deputies, 91, 124, 226, 233, 306, 307, 347–8, 417 Antonelle, Pierre-Antoine, 47, 58 apostasy, political, 104, 199

appel nominal, 109 arbitraire, l’, 269, 296 arcana imperii, 81 Archives philosophiques, 413 Argens, J.B. de Boyer, marquis, 16 Argenson, C.-M.-R. de Voyer, marquis d’, 321, 324 Argus politique, 338 Aristarque, L’, 393 aristocracy: force in British politics, 102, 163, 172, 177; weakness after Revolution, 102, 172, 174–5, 177, 187 Artois, comte d’. See Charles X Arzens, Jules, 394 associations, place of, 117, 119, 126, 122, 202 Auger, H.-N.- J., 206 Auger, L.-.S., 397, 402–3 Auréville, J.-A-M. d’, 107 Azaïs, Pierre-Hyacinthe, 87, 107, 108n, 385 Babeuf, Graccus, 48, 58 Baert, Charles: his Tableau, 199, 219 Bail, C.-J., 344 Bailleul, J.-C., 278, 386 Balfour, Arthur, Lord, 44, 173 Balland, Eugène, 242 Barante, Prosper, baron de, 286, 397, 398, 400, 412

480

Index

Barnave, Antoine, 33 Barras, P.-J.-F.-N., 59 Barrington, John Shute, Viscount, 63 Barrot, Odilon, 324 bascule: associated with Decazes, 94; defended, 87–8, 91, 95; under Directory, 50–9; fashionable topic, 84; later use, 81; not relevant to Villèle, 92; Petitain describes, 51; in Restoration, 79–86, 92, 94; term used, 51, 52, 58 Basterrèche, J.-P., 139 Battur, G.-B., 110 Baudin des Ardennes, P.-C.-L., 48n, 83 Bedford, dukes of, 314 Bénaben, L.-G.-J.-M., 101, 108 Benoist, P.-V., 384 Bentham, Jeremy, 197, 289 Bergasse, Nicolas, 379 Bernadotte, Charles-Jean, general, 297 Berry, Charles F. de Bourbon, duc de, 86, 202, 230 Bertier de Sauvigny, Guillaume de, 311 Bertin, brothers, 56, 361 Béthisy, Charles, comte de, 347 Beugnot, Arthur, comte, 398 bill of attainder, 351 Blacas, P.-L.-J.C., duc de, 207, 219 Blackstone, Sir William, 8, 196, 435 Blues and Greens of Hippodrome, 21, 292 Bodin, Jean, 13 Boigne, L. d’Osmond, comtesse de, 427–8 Bolingbroke, Henry St John, Viscount, 15, 48, 384 Bonald, Louis, comte de, 202, 326–7, 344, 364, 392 Bonaparte, Lucien, 51 Bonaparte, Napoleon, 25, 40, 46, 131, 146, 166, 167, 174, 258, 278, 288; and Acte additionnel, 297; on British

Opposition, 199, 246, 285, 305; and civil courage, 139; Edinburgh Review celebrates, 308; ideological strategies of, 196, 285; on parties, 246; on political clubs and press, 284; regime of, caricatures freedom, 257; relations with Chateaubriand, 334– 6; relations with Constant, 273, 279, 297; relations with Fiévée, 195, 196, 201, 205–6; and Tribunate, 280, 284–6; Vitrolles opposes, 349 Bonapartists, 64, 298, 360, 409, 413, 441 borrowing of institutions: Chas on, 77; Chateaubriand on, 339; Constant on, 320; Fiévée on, 207–8; Guizot on, 438; Vaublanc on, 156–7; Vitrolles on, 352, 359 Briot, Pierre-Joseph, 52–3 Brissot de Warville, J.-P., 23, 24, 172 Britain: abuses defensible, 100; balance of constitution, 18, 77, 174; and France contrasted, 127, 141, 172–5, 192, 209, 211, 221–3, 237, 240, 406, 417–18, 431–2; perception of, 108, 109, 436, 440, 443–4; political practices of, 101, 115–16, 122, 141, 151, 156–7, 219, 221–2, 318, 406, 423, 451 Broglie, Achille Victor, duc de, 397–8, 415, 425 Brougham, Henry, 1st Baron, 414–15, 448, 458 Bungy, L.-P., 199 bureaux, 158, 159, 318 Burke, Edmund, 8, 145; on party, 48, 106, 144, 239, 309 cabinet noir, 389 Cambacérès, J.-J. Régis, 40 Camus, J.-P., 13 candour in public life. See sentiments

Index Canning, George, 339 Carnot, Lazare, 59, 153, 336–7 Carthage, parties in senate of, 332–3 Castlebajac, M.-B., vicomte de, 169, 294, 398 Castlereagh, Robert Stewart, Viscount, 220 Catherine de Medici, 136, 150, 230 Catholic emancipation, 164, 220, 430 Catholic League, 73, 452 Cauchois-Lemaire, Louis, 98–9 caucusing, 429 Cazalès, Jacques de, 30 Censeur européen, 88 centralization, 64, 116, 247, 429, 447, 456 cercles constitutionnels, 266 Chabannes, Jean-Frédéric, marquis de Curton, 77, 338 Chabot, François, 38 Chamber of Deputies, shape of, 117, 142 Chamber of Peers, 177, 341 chambre introuvable, 80, 130–1, 151, 178, 181 changes of ministry, conventions regarding, 98, 239, 240, 229–31, 323– 4, 454 Charles X, 94, 132, 148, 149, 349 Charrière, Isabelle, Mme de, 259 Charte, 5; all history in it, 426; and choice of ministers, 217; Chateaubriand defends, 339; and creation of peers, 371; discourages party, 342; first approximation to British system, 171; framing of, 62; gift of sovereign, 167; granted in morsels, 251; Left’s focus of loyalty, 68, 77; on legislative initiative, 217, 354; Madrolle hopes to amend, 137; on ministerial responsibility, 302; as model for Acte additionnel, 345–6; proclaimed, 208;

481

Right cool towards, 68; on royal inviolability, 351; on royal veto, 368; Royer-Collard’s legitimism based on, 417; on treason, 323 Chateaubriand, François-René, vicomte de, 9, 10, 72, 136, 200, 239, 254–5, 309, 328–48, 466, 467 – accepts royalists as party, 388–9 – associations, views on, 333 – attacks plea of conscience, 394–5 – as authority on opposition, 395 – character of, 339–43, 348 – claim as father of representative government, 331 – Congrès de Verone, 395 – consistency an issue, 329 – “De Buonaparte et les Bourbons,” 335–6 – De la monarchie selon la Charte, 365– 82; on appointment of ministers, 367; book seized, 375; does not acknowledge sources, 365, 376; on drawing ministers from majority, 371; fragmented presentation, 365– 6, 367–9; on French conscience, 374; identity of author vital, 365, 366; on ministerial responsibility, 369; on ministerial solidarity, 372; on monarchie représentative, 366; on moving with the majority, 370–1; on opposition, 374; party, as basis of unity, ignored, 368, 372, 373–4; party and faction the same, 375; position on party misunderstood, 377– 8, 379; power of dissolution not considered, 373; problem of veto ignored, 368; on public opinion, 371, 372; relation of ministers and majority marginalized, 368–9; responses to, 376–82; on royal prerogative, 366–8; on seating ministers in chambers, 371; seen as uncritically

482

– – –

– – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – –

anglophile, 382; sources used, 365; work of parties assumed without mention, 379 dismissed from office, 391 Du renouvellement intégral, 390–1 Du système politique, 383–8; acts as though leader of opposition, 383; avoids calling royalists a party, 384; on claims of ultras, 387; credited with endorsing party system, 386–7; ministry needs compact majority, 384; natural opposition democratic, 383; on Opposition in Britain, 383; responses to, 385–7; royalist minority against nature, 383; royalists in monarchy no party, 383; seeks benefits of party without acknowledgment, 384; Vitrolles taken as surrogate for, 387 Essai sur la Révolution, 331–3 Fiévée’s influence not acknowledged, 389 Génie du Christianisme, 333–4 as girouette, 336 governed by principle, 329–30 identifies with Tacitus, 335 influence of Frisell, 395–6 influence of Royer-Collard, 338, 341, 343 inspirer of Aide-toi, 392 as leader of opposition, 389 leads feudal array, 350 lost essays on opposition, 389 ministry floats between parties, 388 moved by duty and honour, 329 myth of national character propounded, 339–43, 348 not a gifted theorist, 329 opinion and honour linked, 340 parties given functional labels, 334 party solidarity endorsed, 390 pattern of renunciation, 330

Index – public career of, 328 – Rapport sur l’état de France, 345–6 – Réflexions politiques, 336–41; reception of, 343–4; views on party misread, 343; visualizes struggle between French Whigs and Tories, 394 – on relations between party and press, 392–3 – vanity of, 330–1 Chausard, “Publicola,” 50, 53 Chazel, J.-P., 266 Choiseul, Étienne-François, duc de, 237 chouans, 60, 261 Chronique de Paris, 193 civic banquets, 44 civic education, 103 civility, hopes for in public life, 153, 166, 466 class warfare, 21 Clausel de Coussergues, J.-C., 372 Clermont-Tonnerre, Stanislas, comte de, 35, 36, 301 Cloots, Anarchasis, 172 Club Breton, 33 Club de Clichy, 266 Club de Salm, 266 clubs, political: dissolved in 1797, 266; gatherings in Restoration not so called, 119; likened to press, 284; nursery of parties, 46 Clychiens, 194, 198 coalition, implications of notion, 372 Coblentz, émigrés in, 146 Cohen, Jean, 443–4 Collège de France, 444, 448 Colomb, J.-P.-Cyrus, 419 comité des lumières, 280 comité directeur, 120, 123, 325 commissions, 318, 424 Committee of Public Safety, 39, 84, 134

Index Committee of the Whole, 142 competitive party politics, flourishing of, 123 Comte, Auguste, 468 Comte, Charles, 139, 213 concordia discors, 13–14 Condé, Louis de Bourbon, prince de, 144 conditional majority, 240, 250 Condorcet, M.-J.-A.-N. Caritat, marquis de, 29, 146 Conflict: hard to orchestrate, 356; limited, 43, 63 Congrégation, 317, 325 conscience: appeal to ambiguous, 110; argument largely disappears, 116; Chateaubriand launches discourse on, 340; claim incompatible with retaining office, 432; as commodity, 114; hypocritical claim, 111, 114– 15; late appeal to, 118; limited role of, 145; made consistent with all behaviour, 112; most evident in opposition, 127; party, the alternative to, 394–5; as pretext, 145; refuge for the weak, 143; role in Britain denied, 107–8; stupidity so called, 395; unreliable basis of loyalty, 111, 116; Vitrolles dismisses plea of, 357 Conseil de 500, 51, 133–4, 273 Conseil d’État, 132, 273, 400, 441 consensus, 263; in Britain, 221; Comte puts concept in play, 468; concept unavailable, 263; search for, 60, 294 Conservateur, Le, 169, 185, 254 conspiracy, in positive sense, 48, 240 conspiracy au bord de l’eau, 228 Constant de Rebecque, Benjamin, 257–327; accepts institution of opposition, 295; accumulates intellectual capital, 286–7; ancient and modern liberty contrasted, 291;

483 appeal to British procedures, 318; on l’arbitraire, 269, 296; arguments of, impersonal, 268; associates cause with nation, 312; attracts suspicion of those in power, 299; Britain sets standard of freedom for, 295; on British political families, 314; calls Azaïs bad philosopher, 385; career in Tribunate, 273–82; case against party, 271; ceases to identify faction and party, 313; chooses masses over notables, 266; chooses Revolution, 259; civility of, 268; compared to Bonaparte on party, 285; condemns lois d’exception, 311; continuity in ideas, 298–9; deems Directory a party, 263–4; deems royalists insincere, 264; dilemma of creating public spirit, 289; on distinction between security and power, 291, 296, 300; on divisions among royalists, 261; drafts Acte additionnel, 297; encourages systematic opposition, 280; endorses fructidor, 267; endorses systematic opposition, 317; engaged with cercles constitutionnels, 266; on factions and freedom, 293, 316; on French political immaturity, 309, 314, 318–19; growing ambivalence towards British institutions, 319–20; hopes for revived basis for earned reputations, 267; hostility to party inhibits analysis, 289, 300; identified as liberal, 311; ignores Britain because unique, 288; ignores separation of powers, 305; on improvisation of speeches, 297, 318; initially appears royalist, 258–9; on institutions, 297; as lawgiver, 310; as leader of opposition in Tribunate, 280; leadership in 1829, 324–5; on ministerial responsibility, 300–8;

484 modelling of party strategies, 260–1; nominalism of, 29; not committed to permanent opposition, 277; not trusted by extreme Left, 321–2; on opposition not aimed at power, 313; on parties as connected with liberty, 293, 316, 317; on parties in arts and religion, 292; on parti national, 312; against party spirit, 261; perception as anglophile, 319–21; persecuted by government, 321; probably innocent of conspiracy, 322–3; on public opinion, 288–90; removed from Tribunate, 282; reputation as a moderate, 315; on role for constitutional monarch, 296, 301; search for neutral power, 296, 300; seeking universal principles, 287; seeks item veto, 282; seems to endorse bascule, 26; on silence heard throughout Europe, 275, 286; on stable majority and opposition separated from it, 307; subject to contrary pulls, 299; thoughts garbled in 1815 version, 294, 307–8; on ultras as future Tories, 317 Constituent Assembly, 27, 33, 41 constitutional crisis of 1783–84. See North-Fox coalition Constitutionnel, Le, 244, 327, 360, 453 constitutionnels, 72 constitution of year III, 41 constitution of year VIII, 273 Consulate, 131, 283, 305 Contant d’Orville, A.-G., 19 contre-opposition, 93, 148, 232, 238, 250 contre-parti, 83 Conty, Armand de Bourbon, prince de, 23 Convention, 40, 41, 49, 134, 197, 333 Corbière, J.-J.-G.-P., comte de, 91, 92, 230

Index Cordeliers, 84 Corps législatif, 131, 273, 276, 280 correspondance privée, 87, 90 Correspondent, The, 184 corruption, ministerial, 109, 114 Corvetto, L.-E., comte, 213 Coste, Jacques, 250 Cottu, Charles, 191 counterweights to government, 66, 197, 200, 339 country party, 106, 332 courage civile: rarity of, 139; topic for essays, 140 Courier français, Le, 408–13; centrist position, 409; change of name, 413; current parties due to dissolve, 409; distaste for secret voting, 413; end of Doctrinaire influence, 413; extremes mutually supporting, 411; ideal of two moderate parties, 410; Left a greater threat than Right, 411; ministerial party recognized, 412–13; opposition a function of liberty, 410; praise for civil courage, 413; on working the country, 410 Courrier, Le, 245, 413 Courvoisier, J.-J.-A., 398 Couthon, Georges, 39 Cromwell, Oliver, 167 Crowe, Eyre, 412 Damiens de Gomicourt, A.-P., 19–20 Danton, George Jacques, 84 Daudet, Ernest, 162 Daunou, Pierre-Claude, 291 Decazes, Élie, comte (later duc), 81, 84, 85, 86, 92, 298, 324 Decomberousse, Hyacinthe, 81 défection, 391 Delalot, Charles, 92, 149 Denmark, absolutism in, 190 Dentu, house of, 362

Index députés fonctionnaires, 109, 118, 122 Dessoles, J.J. P.A., marquis, 81 destitution, 116 Destival de Brabans, 46 Devonshire, dukes of, 314 dinners, as political adhesive, 114 Diplomate, Le, 274 Directory, 41, 49, 84, 90; divisions within, 53–4; tactics of, 13. See also bascule Disraeli, Benjamin, 8 dissent, suspicion of, 60 dissolution: ethics governing, 246; of 5 September 1816, 80–1, 168, 225, 226 Doctrinaires, 238, 397–401 Drapeau blanc, Le, 89 dress code for deputies, 468 droit du seigneur, 68, 337 Du Bocage, Marie-Anne, Mme, 16, 18 Dubois de Launay, Henri, abbé, 20 Ducos, of the Convention, 114, 133 Ducrest, Charles-Louis, marquis, 24, 362, 381 Dufourny de Villiers, Louis-Pierre, 38 Dufriche de Foulaines, F.-N., 378 Dunning’s resolution, 229 Dunoyer, Charles, 139 Dupin, Charles, baron, 78 Dupont de l’Eure, J.-C., 119 Dupont de Nemours, Pierre-Samuel, 56 Duport, Adrien, 30, 53 Duquesnoy, Adrien-Cyprien, 33–6 Dussault, J.-F., 204 Dutot, publisher, 136 Duverger de Haurenne, Prosper, 118, 126, 155, 163, 440, 455, 462 Duveyrier, H.-M.-N., baron, 278 Edinburgh Review, 177, 308, 359, 414 elections: of 1816, 168; of 1817, 104; of 1820, 148; of 1822, 112; of 1824,

485

112; of 1827, 112; of 1830, 125; in Revolution, 41, 47 electoral activity after 1824, 124 electoral colleges, control of, 118, 120 electoral law: of 1817, 120, 226; of 1820, 75, 118, 120, 230; of 1824, 95, 124, 148; monarchical, 172 electorate, size of: in July Monarchy, 6; in Restoration, 119 émigrés, 5, 146; ambiguity of status, 69, 261, 337 Enghien, L.-A.-H. de Bourbon, duc d’, 334 esprit de corps, 26; negative connotation, 12, 22, 75, 108, 333 esprit public, 66, 103, 167, 432 Estates General, 25, 131 estates of the realm, 18 Étienne, G.-G., 72–3, 88, 98 exclusifs, 70 extra-parliamentary gatherings, 144, 357 faction: different from party, 47, 74–6, 159, 422; and party the same: for Chateaubriand, 375; for Constant, 261; in power, 420; related to freedom, 293; tendentious understanding of, 48; use of, 296 fair play, 230, 319 fear in public life, 138, 145, 146, 166–9 Ferrand, Antoine, comte de, 161 Feuillants, 33, 38 Fiévée, Joseph, 10, 50, 57, 68, 72, 80, 99n, 146, 171, 184, 193–256, 369, 380–1, 384; on agreement about fundamentals, 221–2; anticipates crisis of 1830, 218; attacks philosophes, 195; on benefits from parties, 211; on British fair play, 230; on British Opposition, 196–7; on British parties, 198; on

486

Index

British practice as norm, 230, 235–6, 240, 246, 247, 249, 250–1; coins new labels, 228–9; conspiracy, his understanding of, 239–40; on Convention’s destruction of opposition, 197; cultivation of paradox, 252; dangers of political borrowing, 202, 207–8, 211; on dangers of weak ministry, 236; defence of party, 219–23; defender of traditional values, 194; disappointment with royalists, 228–9, 231–2, 241, 248; dismay at ministerial shuffle, 230; dismisses republican liberty of the press, 194; early life, 193–4; electoral ambitions of, 242, 248; exministers in Britain and France contrasted, 237; on fixed majority, 228, 232–4, 236, 238, 241; forms sort of public opinion, 243; France and Britain compared, 198–200, 208–9, 211; on free press and parties, 210; on French centralization, 202, 216, 246, 247; on French unreadiness for representative government, 242, 246; influenced by Montesquieu, 202–3; influence of, 256; on interests and opinions, 201, 203–7, 244; on intrigue, 238–40, 245, 252; on kings and ministers, 212–13; on laws and manners in Britain, 196, 201, 209; on links amongst institutions, 202, 208; on ministerial changes incompatible with parliamentary conventions, 240– 1, 252; on ministerial inconsistency, 238; on ministerial solidarity, 213; on ministers and the majority, 225–7, 250; on ministry as government, 213–17, 227, 252; mission to England, 195–6; mode of argument, 198–9, 252–5; moderation of, under Martignac ministry, 246; on myth of French conscience, 219–23, 240;

on need for doctrines, 226–7; on neutrality as ministerial support, 238; on opposition as activity, 218; on opposition as counterforce, 197; on opposition as part of all societies, 197, 218; on opposition in France, 224–5; on parties and liberty, 211, 237; on political apostasy, 199; on prerogative and dissolution, 234, 236; on principled resignation, 220, 225; proprietary claim on chambre introuvable, 217, 241; on public opinion, 202, 205–6; relations with Bonaparte, 195–6, 199–200, 201–2, 205, 206; relations with Chateaubriand, 254–5; relations with ministers, 241–2, 245; on unintended outcomes, 210–11, 236–7, 243; unlikely that silence purchased, 245, 247–8; writings of (major): Ce que tout le monde pense, 231; Correspondance avec Bonaparte; Correspondance politique, 201–2; Des opinions et des intérêts, 202–4; Histoire de la session de 1815, 213; Histoire de la session de 1816, 215; Histoire de la session de 1817, 210; Histoire de la session de 1820, 210; Lettres sur l’Angleterre, 195–8; Nouvelle correspondance politique, 248 First Restoration, 62, 70, 131, 294, 349, 401 Flandin, J.-B., 95n fonctionnaires, number of, 119 Fonfrède, Henri, 191 Fonveille, B.-F.-A. de, 75, 109 former ministers, role of, 237 Formey, Samuel, 16 Forster, Nathaniel, 268 Fouché, Joseph, duc d’Ortante, 77, 213 Fox, Charles-James, 334, 358. See also North-Fox coalition

Index Foy, M.-S., general, 118–19 François de Nantes, Antoine, 44–5 freedom of association and assembly, 126 French national character. See national character, French; conscience; honour French political immaturity, 303, 309, 314, 318–19 Frénilly, Auguste-François, comte de, 72, 166–84; on absence of candour, 189; ambivalent on proper aspirations of parties, 176–7, 186; appeals to British practices, 169, 170, 171, 172, 173, 174, 175, 178, 180, 184; asymmetry between royalists and the Left, 167; attacks non-party ministry, 184; attempts to treat Britain and France together, 181; avoids references to institution of party, 181, 183–5; capacity for obscurity, 189; career in politics, 166; conflict in chamber prevents that in country, 176; on conspiracy, 183; on danger of liberal ideas, 174; discourages talk of unanimity, 171; distress at want of royal favour, 180; distrusts appeal to conscience, 179, 183; on French political immaturity, 169; hostility to image of balance, 173, 175, 176, 184; on intrigue, 183; on limited party warfare, 177; metaphysical conceits of, 179; on ministerial responsibility, 171; on need for new electoral law, 172; on need to strengthen aristocracy, 177, 187; on opposition outside the state, 180, 186; on party struggle as within each chamber, 177; perceives both Left and Right as parties, 169–70; on political advantage as transitory, 170; on political divisions, 173, 175–81; prefers functional

487

labels to party names, 181; proposed work on British government, 181, 189; on public opinion, 175; public spirit, his meaning for, 167; recognizes royalists as minority, 169–70; on relation between government and mores, 169, 189; on relation between ministry and majority, 178–9; on royalist unreadiness for competition, 170; sees royalists as France itself, 167; two-party system assumed, 169; on unacceptable fluid majority, 179; use of term parlement, 171; writings of: Des assemblées représentatives, 173– 84; in Conservateur, 185; Considérations sur une année, 167–8; The Correspondent, 184; in Défenseur, 183; Lettre à un membre, 169; Sur le mode et la durée du renouvellement 189 Frisell, J.F., 395 Fronde, 138 fundamentals, agreement on. See consensus Galen, 14 Gallais, Jean-Pierre, 58–9, 66, 265 Ganilh, Charles, 451 Garat, Dominique, 42–3, 45, 54 Gautier du Var, Isidore, 107 Gazette de France, 88 Gazette française, 49–50, 194 general will, 290 Genet, Edme-Jacques, 17 George II, 217 George III, 19, 167, 304, 452 Girardin, Stanislas, comte de, 76, 274, 358 Girondins, 38, 39, 46 Globe, Le, 415, 456 Gohier, Louis-Jérôme, 51 gouvernement d’assemblée, 28, 37, 38, 178, 352

488

Index

governo misto, 464 Goyet, Charles, 121–2 Grégoire, Henri-Baptiste, 138 Grenville, George, 159 Grenvillites, 158 Grosley, Pierre-Jean, 21, 396 Grossin de Bouville, L.-A.-H., comte, 70, 101 Guillemin, Alexandre de, 137 Guillemin, Henri, 259 Guizot, François, 9, 10, 346, 376, 433– 57, 463, 466 – anglophile views exaggerated, 455–6 – article on “Elections,” 452 – on case for centralization, 433, 458 – conciliatory towards ultras, 456 – divergence of theory and practice, 462 – on doctrine of two nations, 64–5 – Du gouvernement de la France, 441–4; associates Charte with Revolution, 441; on French political immaturity, 442; responses to, 443–4; writing partisan history, 442–3 – Du gouvernement représentatif, 436–40; answer to Vitrolles, 436; on French majorities as fluid, 437; friendly to British practices, 438–9; on need for ministerial party, 439; responses to, 440 – Des moyens du gouvernement et d’opposition, 445–54; defence of seeking office, 449–50; desertion of centralization, 447; disavowal of independence, 449; extra-parliamentary sites for opposition, 448, 450–1, 352, 458; hopes to make ultras moderate, 447; hymn to quarter sessions, 447; on need for legitimate opposition, 448; on party, 449–50; reception of, 452–4; on relations between regime and society, 445–6; reversal of

– – – – –

Montesquieu’s priorities, 446–7; views on party misread, 452 opportunism of, 455 party struggle within chambers, not between them, 436 return to centralization, 456 against separation of powers, 435–6 supports open voting to encourage party, 455

Hallam, Henry, 426 Hammond, George, 359 Hanoverians and Jacobites, 447 Hardwicke, Philip Yorke, 1st Earl of, 199 Hartman, Mary-Susan, 303, 304 Hats and Caps of Sweden, 33 Hatsell, John, 427 Hébert, Jacques-René, 84 Hello, Charles-Guillaume, 127–9 Helvétius, Claude-Adrien, 195 Henri III, 95 Henri IV, 95, 135, 452 His, Charles, 191 Historien, L’, 49–50 Hoëne-Wronski, Josef, 253 Hofmann, Étienne, 296 hommes-machines of Parliament, 108, 185 honnêtes gens, 78, 139 honour, 7, 124; appeal to waning, 110– 11; inhibits canvassing, 127; rooted in opinion, 340. See also conscience House of Lords, 359 Huard, Raymond, 3–4 Hubert, Louis, 326 Hugo, Victor, 357 Hume, David, 21, 37, 203, 289, 292 Hundred Days, 69, 78, 127, 131, 166, 213, 349 Hyde de Neuville, Jean- Guillaume, 349, 359, 393

Index ideological divisions, innocence of new deputies about, 104 immobiles, 70 impatients, 149 impeachment of ministers, 351 imperium in imperio, 120 indépendant, as political role, 310, 311 indépendants: as group, 72, 112, 313; use of label fades out, 112 ins and outs, 97, 100, 431 institutions, concept of, 297 integral renewal of chambre, 124, 188, 233, 327 intrigue, 126–7, 146, 243; in formation of ministry, 238–40, 454; Mirabeau and, 32; relative absence in Britain, 240, 454 item veto, 282 Jacobin clubs, 31, 32, 33, 44, 56 Jacobins, 37, 41, 42; tactics in legislature, 143–4, 146; as term of reproach, 68, 167 Jansenists, 22 Jeffrey, Francis, 177, 359 Jesuits, 12, 317 jeu, as interplay of parties, 239, 460, 461 jobs and ministerial following, 109 Jordan, Camille, 76, 343, 428–30 Journal de l’empire, 200 Journal de Paris, 88, 196, 275–6 Journal des débats, 89, 123, 245–6, 361 Journal des hommes libres, 47 Journal du commerce, 67 Journal du Nord, 137 Journal général de France, 400–8; ambivance on British practice, 402; British Opposition not right for France, 402–3; British parties respectable, 404; caricatures British legislators, 402; changed tone, 408; conceptual

489

analysis by, 401; distinguishes union of citizens from faction, 404; faction, how understood, 404; on French character, 402–3; French women politically influential, 407; on legislative majority, 405; on ministerial followers, 405; as a ministerial print, 401; on opposition of principle, 406; party to be discouraged, 403; reconciling British model with French needs, 406–7 Journal royale, 344 journées and coups in Revolution: 18 brumaire, 51; 22 floréal, 43; 18 fructidor, 43, 52, 90, 104, 134, 194; 30 prairial, 40; 9 thermidor, 39, 52; 13 vendémiaire, 43, 134, 260 Jouslin de La Salle, A.-M., 101 Jouveaux, L.A., 387 Jubé de la Perrelle, Auguste, 381–2 judicial impartiality, irrelevant in legislature, 103, 355 Jullien, M.-A., 45, 443 July Monarchy, 147, 433, 440, 445 July Revolution, 163, 324, 461 juste milieu, 252, 409 Kératry, Auguste-Hilarion, comte de, 398, 408, 413 king: Right’s supposed focus of loyalty, 68, 335; office in France strong, 212; said to need a party, 211 king’s Friends, 20 Laborde, Alexandre-L.-J., comte de, 102–4, 334; likens politicians to bad orchestra, 102 Laboulaye, Edouard-René de, 298 La Bourdonnaye, F.R., comte de, 85, 93, 144, 149, 244, 364, 393, 427 Lacretelle, Charles, 100 Lacretelle, P.-L., 101

490 Lafayette, M.J. Du Motier, marquis de, 146, 321 Laffitte, Jacques, 112, 322 Lagarde-Chambonas, V.-S. de, 87n Lainé, Joseph Henri, vicomte, 165, 108–9, 305 Lally-Tollendal, Trophime-Gérard, marquis de, 353 La Luzerne, C.-G., cardinal de, 351n, 361 Lamennais, F., abbé de, 98 Lameth, Alexandre, 33 Langlois, Isidore, 57 Langlois, Jean-Thomas, 56 Larevellière-Lépeaux, Louis-Marie de, 54 La Rochefoucauld, L.-F. Sosthène, vicomte de, 71 leadership in politics, 143, 159 Le Blanc, Jean-Bernard, abbé, 22 Leclère, J.-B.-T., 95, 325n Leclercq, Théodore, 194, 237n, 243, 245 Le Franc, B., 50 Left: animus against party fades, 72, 98; belongs in opposition, 151–2, 185–6, 188; committed to separation of powers, 36–7; doctrine of unanimous nation, 47, 56, 60; loyalty to Charte, 68, 77; not seeking office, 69; position more coherent than royalist one, 72; weakness for conspiracy, 77–8 Left and Right, origin of concepts, 26–7 Legislative Assembly, 131, 134, 142 legitimacy, monopoly of, 65 Le Normant, publisher, 136n, 390 Leroy, Louis, 13 lése-nation, 67 Lesur, Charles, 90, 91 Lettres normandes, 242

Index Lezay-Marnésia, Adrien, marquis de, 262–5, 268 libéral, label of, 72, 149, 310, 431 liberty, not matter of laws, 209 liberty of the press: not individual right, 342; and other liberties, 210; overvalued by French, 210; rationalistic view unhelpful, 209; related to parties, 169–70, 210, 393, 421 Lingay, Joseph, 87n, 378 Linguet, Simon-N.-H., 21–2 Livy, Titus, 14 Locke, John, 48, 97, 448 lois d’exception, 311 London Chronicle, 102 lords-lieutenant, 124, 459 Louis XIII, 205 Louis XIV, 19 Louis XV, 18 Louis XVI, 28, 32, 135 Louis XVIII, 67, 80, 162, 217, 218, 244, 335–6; bestows Charte, 68, 441; calls for French Whigs and Tories, 394, 469; favours two-party system, 374; ministerial homogeneity, moves towards, 213; and non-party ministry, 252–3; ultras cool towards, 170 Louis-Philippe, 132, 191, 401, 455 Lourdoueix, Henri de, 76, 430–3 loyal Opposition, in Britain, 308 Loyson, Charles, 76, 77n, 397, 414 Luxembourg, palais de, 164 Mably, G. Bonnet de, 15, 290, 297 Maccarthy, Robert, count, 427n Machiavelli, N., 14, 296, 300, 464 Madrolle, Antoine de, 136–7, 191 Mahul, Alphonse, 457–62; on competition without doors, 458; identifies with Whigs, 457; independence a comfort to ministry, 458; on

Index legitimacy of ministerial and opposition parties, 458; party central to representative system, 460; relations with Guizot, 461; on resources for opposition, 457; Tableau de la constitution politique, 459–60 Maine de Biran, Pierre, 256 majorité constituée, 282 majorité d’engagement, 405 majorité de parti, 405 majority: doctrine of two-thirds, 102, 406; Fiévée’s complaints about, 225, 227, 233, 234, 236; fixed, 232; itinerant, 179; no continuing status after a vote, 109, 405, 437; as opposition, 451; political, 225–6 Malesherbes, C.-G. Lamoignon de, 23 Mallet du Pan, Jacques, 40, 50 Malte-Brun, Conrad, 89 Malvezzi, Virgilio, 13–14 Manuel, J.-A., 321 marais, in revolutionary assemblies, 40, 113 Marcellus, Marie-Louis, comte, 390 marche, applied to government, 89, 130, 355 Marie-Antoinette, 37 Marmet, L.-C.-H., 377–8 Martignac, J.-B., vicomte de, 96; ministry of, 248–50, 391 Mazarinades, 100 measures vs men, focus on, 115, 156 Medici, Catherine de, 81, 150, 230 Melville, Henry Dundas, 1st Viscount, 306 Mercure de France, 195, 200, 315, 316, 334 Merlin de Thionville, Antoine, 54 Mill, John Stuart, 256 Minerve, La, 73, 88, 111, 315 ministerial responsibility: Barnave on, 36; Chateaubriand on, 369; Constant on, 300–8, 352–3; d’Allauch on, 386;

491

Fiévée on, 171, 215; Frénilly on, 133, 154; Lally-Tollendal on, 349, 353; Mahul on, 461; Pagès on, 353; Royer-Collard on, 423–4; Vaublanc on, 133, 154; Vitrolles on, 350–3 ministériels: moved by other than conscience, 109; silent, 117 minister of the interior, office of, 371 ministers, British and French, 211, 240 ministry: consultation of followers, 111, 155, 429–30; formed outside of majority, 237; needs two-thirds majority, 102; said to form its party, 439; solidarity of, 131, 213, 161, 164, 339; support sustained by jobs, 109; uniformity of principle in, 213, 354–5. See also political party minority and opposition, 180 Mirabeau, Honoré-Gabriel Riqueti, comte de, 26–7, 30, 32 Mirbel, Charles-François, 385 Miromesnil, Armand Thomas Hue, 23 mixed government, 14, 16, 21 moeurs parlementaires, 468 Molé, Louis-Mathieu, 241, 244–5, 247, 256, 398 monarchiens, 19, 31, 199, 301 Monck, George, later duke of Albemarle, 335 Moniteur universel, 123, 134, 401 Monnin, J.-J.-L.-G., 104–6 Montagnards, 28, 60 Montesquieu, Charles-Louis, baron de Secondat, 6, 14, 69, 141, 196, 198, 202, 333, 435, 467; Dussault on, 204; Frénilly admires, 169, 172; Guizot dissents from, 446–7; influence on Chateaubriand, 340, 385; influence on Fiévée, 196, 198, 202, 233, 253; influence on Royer-Collard, 417; inspiration for Constant, 287, 289, 296; Lezay-Marnésia belongs to school of,

492

Index

265; on relation between regime and society, 446–7; Vaublanc’s debt to, 133, 141 Montferrier, A.-A.V.-S. de, 192n Montforton, A.-G., comte de, 424 Montlosier, François-Dominique, baron de, 30, 65, 66, 83, 91, 346 Moreau, Félix, 468 Moreau, Jacob-Nicolas, 18 Mounier, J.-J., 19 Mounier, Philippe, baron, 398 Muralt, Béat, 16 Nain jaune 170, 344 national character, French: behaviour at tribune, 103, 140–1; Chateaubriand’s formulations, 339–42; delicacy of, alleged, 109, 111, 308, 384, 418; inapt for representative government, 138; individualism, 103, 117, 140; légèreté, 26, 102, 108; myth of, 64; passivity, 138; physical valour, 138; resists action in concert, 106–7; selfindulgence, 142, 182; taste for metaphysics in politics, 140; theoretical bent, 141; vanity, 140 Necker, Jacques, 24, 66, 203–4, 265, 267, 301 neo-Jacobins, 42, 43, 44, 45; flattering views of, 47–8, 49; response to Directory, 49, 50 Neurath, Otto, 439 neutrality condemned, 89, 150 neutral power, 296; absent in Rome, 300 New Times, 256 Newton, Sir Isaac, 141 nominalism: British, 209; Constant’s, 290 non-confidence, motion of, 302–4 non-party government, 64, 86, 110, 184, 356, 463

North, Frederick, Lord, 302, 306 North-Fox coalition, 30, 163, 295, 419 Nouvelles politiques, 258 Observator français à Londres, 19 office, as reward for opposition, 25 old France and new, 442 O’Mahoney, Arthur, comte, 114 opposition, constitutional rarity of, 26 Opposition (British) and French perception: from activity to body of men, 27, 218; associated with party, 27; associations and, 202; Baert on, 199; based on principle, 406; Bonaparte on, 199, 246, 285, 305; capitalized in French, 122, 383; contrary to French character, 339–40; depicted in eighteenth century, 152, 162; essence of Parliament, 57; formed, 62, 152, 278, 304, 343, 386, 466; Le Blanc on, 22; more respectable than party, 15; noisy impotence of, 20; and press, 392–3; Prince of Wales deemed head of, 100; recognized by party in power, 152; seeks office, 35; systematic, 108 opposition (French): absurdity of nation as, 38; activity, not body of men, 340; against the state, 187; à l’angalise, 280; associated with party, 27; Chabot proposes, 38–9; Chateaubriand leader of, 389; conscience of representative system, 127; Convention destroys basis for, 197; dangerous in republic, 105; disorganized by ministers, 107; effort to design, 24; entails party, 394, 452; essential in constitutional regime, 248; extra-parliamentary loci of, 448– 9, 451; Fiévée capitalizes term, 224, 249n; France ill-suited to, 107, 198; future role contemplated, 43; infantindustry theory of, 43, 282; Journal des

Index débats capitalizes, 123; in legislature, reinvented, 342; likened to conspiracy, 402; made routine, 448; majority as, 451; in monarchy, is republican, 69; more than one, 99; must seek office, 453; naturally republican, 69; no prospect of office, 152, 384; not needed in Consulate, 279; nursery of statesmen, 192; opposition convenue, 402; opposition légale, 197; opposition réelle, 402; without organization, 47; otiose when virtue in power, 48, 152, 364; presents dangers when principled, 224; relation to minority, 180; Roederer recognizes as collectivity, 281–2; salutary in monarchy, 105; sentinel on behalf of king and people, 106; some form in all regimes, 197; in the state, 180; Thouret defends party of, 31; topic for discussion, 200; in Tribunate, 273–82, 285–6; uncertainty about future in 1815, 218; wholesome confronting organized majority, 282 orders of society, 11, 21, 26; Roman, 14, 15, 62 Orléans, L.-P., duc d’, 23 Ottoman Empire, 197, 256, 289 Pache, J.-N., 48 Pagenel, Pierre, 281 Pagès, J.-P., 72, 92, 94, 228, 353 Palais Bourbon, 148 Parent-Réal, Nicolas-Joseph, 117 parlement, as name for French chambers, 171 parlement of Paris, 138 parlements, 22, 23 parties in the arts, 23, 292 parti national, 72, 91, 312, 434, 442 parti prêtre, 94 party discipline, 18, 107, 182, 341, 421–2, 425, 429–30, 432

493

party names, 28, 71, 346; Constant leaves out of British government, 295; Vitrolles omits mention of, 357 party spirit, 261, 269; Grosley defends, 21; G. de Staël on, 270, 272 Pascal, B., 204 Pasquier, Étienne-Denis, baron, 182, 213, 398 peers (British), influence of, 120 peers (French), creation of, 371 people, hypostatized, 65, 290 Perrier, Casimir, 76 personal rule, 349, 355 Petitain, Louis-Germain, 51 Pharamond, 70 philosophes, 15, 195, 196, 198 physiocrats, 20, 156, 290 Pierruguès, P., chevalier, 386–7 Piet-Tardiveau, J.-P., 144 Pilote, Le, 245 Pitt, William the Younger, 30, 42, 163, 291, 332, 334, 360 plaine, in Revolution, 40 Plumard de Danguel, Louis-Joseph, 17, 18 pluralism, political, 41, 44, 153, 446, 452 pocket boroughs, 429 pointus, 70 Polignac, Jules, prince de, 96; ministry of, 96, 137, 250, 317 political abuses, place for, 100 political competition, conventions governing, 230 political friendships, 144 political organization in provinces, 123 political party (parties), institution of: Agoult defends, 103–4; as anti-national, 27, 31; associated with esprit de corps, 108; Barnave defends 37; Barrington understands, 33; basis of discipline, 377, 384; basis of political

494

Index

competition, 404; Bazin defines, 75; British model assumes two, 31, 35; Broglie’s speech on, 425; and business of legislature, 147; within chambers, not between, 21, 31, 37; changing places disconcerts the French, 20, 30; Chateaubriand’s effort to ignore, 379, 384; compatible with national unity, 248; competition within legislative bodies, 177; confused with social orders, 14–18, 20, 21; Constant defines, 309; Constant’s equivocal endorsement, 293, 303, 316, 317; within the constitution, 362; Destival de Brabans defends, 46; detrimental to public good, 27; different from faction, 74– 6; discipline absent, 387; disinterest not possible for, 449; do no harm, 16; Duquesnoy defends 34–5; each restrains the other, 35, 127, 423; emerges ahead of needed mores, 411; expression “opposition party” emerges, 22; Fiévée’s defence of, 219–23; frames national issues, 22; France unready for, 147; French inaptness for, 102, 104; Frénilly avoids term, 181, 183–5; as functional, not named, unit, 20, 181, 334; gives force to one’s opinion, 220; as government and opposition, 20; Grosley supports, 21; guarded approval of Garat, 42–3; Guizot on activity without doors, 447; Hello’s tribute to, 128–9; Hubert’s case for, 326; indispensable in representative government, 98; as instrument of control, 45; king needs one, 211; king not to lead, 96; Left becoming a party, 112; Linguet supports, 22; Lourdoueix suggests need for, 432–3; Mahul on extra-parliamentary activity, 458; makes for accountability,

228; metaphysical treatment of, 20, 127; ministerial hostility to, 415; Mirabeau promotes, 28; Mme de Staël links to liberty, 326; as movement and resistance, 465; moves as a unit, 151; need for common focus of loyalty, 100; needed by ministers, 211, 432; needed in free government 293; one to defend ministers needed, 18, 35; as opposition and corruption, 21; protects against ministers, 24; related to speech-making, 141; and representative government, 98; Right reconciled to, 388; role in opposition, 180; rules govern competition, 458–9; as safety valve, 177; SaintChamans optimistic about future of, 190; salience grows, 107, 319; salience magnified, 158; sign of public spirit, 17; as source of liberty, 159, 210–11; struggles institutionalized, 42; suspicion of, Right and Left, 70– 2; two needed, at least, 152; two parties or none: Hello, 128; RoyerCollard, 423; two-party system: Britain, 31, 37; French support for, 98–9, 117; useful for ministers, 211, 432; Vaublanc defines, 147; Vitrolles on naturalness, 355–7, 361–2. See also Britain; Whigs and Tories Ponsonby, John William, 159 Postel, Guillaume, 13 Pouthas, Charles Hippolyte, 453, 454, 459 Pozzo di Borgo, Charles-André, comte, 162n Pradel, Julien, comte de, 100, 158 Pradt, Dominique Dufour, abbé de, 115–16, 124 Prasini and Veneti, 292 prefects, role in elections, 120, 124, 468

Index Prince of Wales, and Opposition, 100 principles, agreement on, 44, 208, 249. See also consensus prophet of the past, 68, 202 public opinion: as aggregate, 290; dilemma of making moderate, 263; Fiévée himself a form of, 243; French understanding of, 65; as holistic, 65; queen of the world, 67, 204, 289, 361, 435, 446; readily shaped, 202–3, 205; reservations about, 175, 187, 226, 243; salutary in monarchy, 66; as unanimous, 65; unknown before Louis XIII, 298 Publiciste, Le: of Loyson, 298; of Suard, 276, 286, 298 publics, multiple, 67 public spirit, 432 Quesnay, François, 156 Quotidienne, La, 67, 89, 243–4, 361 Rapin-Thoyras, Paul de, 16 rationalism in French thought, 179 Réal, Pierre-François, comte, 46 reason of state, 80, 219 Récamier, Mme J.-F.-J.-A., 309, 326 refusal of supply, 178–9, 239, 295, 418, 423 Rémond, G., 399 Rémusat, Charles de, 397, 408, 412, 413 representative government, 186, 256, 331, 348, 438–9; cuts truth in two, 445; logic of, 116; needs parties, 98 republic, one and indivisible, 60 Républicain, Le, 53 république des camarades, 177 reputation and opinion, 66, 267 résistance, 7, 22 responsible government, 131 Retz, J.-F.-P. de Gondi, cardinal de, 138

495

Revue encyclopédique, 443 Revue française, 415 Ricci and Albizzi, 42 Richelieu, A.-J. du Plessis, cardinal, 203, 205, 216 Richelieu, Armand du Plessis, duc de, 151, 425; ministries of, 81, 86, 92, 97, 130, 165, 349, 400, 445 Right, in Restoration and after: belongs in power, 152, 185–6, 385–6, 388; case for royal favour, 68; disunity of, 78, 186–7; hopes dashed, 168; horror of political competition, 70–1, 170; as more than party, 70, 71, 184, 383; record on liberty, 228, 231, 241. See also royalists; ultra-royalists Riouffe, Honoré A., 278 Robespierre, Maximilien, 29, 32, 45, 54, 193 Robinson, John, 159 Roederer, Pierre-Louis, comte, 31, 195, 265, 275–6, 281 Romilly, Sir Samuel, 320 Rousseau, J.-J., 14, 16, 33, 51, 195, 290 royalism, ambiguous in scope, 388 royalists, in the Revolution: alleged insincerity, 264; failure to unite, 55, 146, 261; favour upper chamber, 37; grateful for Directory’s moderation, 49; hold on intellectual life, 56–7; knowledge of Britain, 5; moderates as anglophiles, 31n; outmanoeuvred by Left, 139; and pluralism, 55; timidity of, 139 Royer-Collard, Pierre-Paul, 338, 341, 343, 416–28, 465; break with Serre, 425; called unfitted for office, 428; as defender of prerogative, 416; ease of changing views, 416, 420; familiarity with British system, 425–7; on inapplicability of British ways, 417–19, 423, 426; inconsistency of,

496

Index

427; independence of, 416–17, 427; insensitive to party discipline, 421–2; insists on two parties or none, 423; Jordan, his possible coaching of, 430; on liberty of the press, 421, 424, 428; on majority and ministry, 417; on ministerial responsibility, 423–4; party and faction, his understanding of, 420, 422; predicts republic from majority dictating to king, 182, 183; as président of chambre, 418; as public speaker, 416; on refusal of supply, 423; on relations of parties and press, 421; subtlety of, 416 Rubichon, Maurice, 158n Russell, Lord John, 158 Sade, Louis, chevalier de, 25–6; on conscience, 146n, 156 Saint Bartholomew’s Day, 79 Saint-Chamans, August-L.-P., vicomte de, 185–90; concern for doctrines, 185; contempt for populism, 187; democrats relegated to opposition, 185; distrust of Left threatens his parliamentarism, 187; growing optimism in 1828, 190; limited commitment of, to Charte, 191; on need for monarchical opposition, 188, 191; on opposition against the state, 187–8; pessimism of, 190 Sainte-Beuve, C.-A., 275–6 Saint-Just, Antoine-L.-L. de, 29, 39, 44 Saint-Romain, A.-J. de Serre, comte de, 338, 362 Saint-Simon, Claude-Henri, comte de, 75, 353 Saisseval, Claude-Louis, marquis de, 379 Salaberry, C.-M. d’Irumberry, comte de, 137, 165 Salgues, J.-B., 39, 402

Salvandy, Narcisse-Achille, 94, 112 Salverte, Eusèbe, 325, 433 Sarran, J.-A.-P., 93, 97–8 scission, 53 seating in French assemblies: by locality, 104, 357; in Tribunate, 280 Second Restoration, 69, 213, 216, 349 secretary of state, office of, 216, 349 self-interest and party, 36. See also ambition sentiments, real and manifest, 146–7, 189 separation of powers: as dogma of Left, 36–7; inapplicable, 6, 305, 426, 435–6, 438 Septennial Act, 230 Serre, Hercule, comte de, 76, 318, 319, 397, 399, 400, 424–5, 432 Seven Years’ War, 15, 17 Sieyès, Emmanuel- Joseph, abbé et comte, 28–9, 273 Simon, ministerial writer, 122n Smith, Nathaniel, 19 Smollett, Tobias, 359 social statistics, 446 Société des amis de la liberté de la presse, 125 Solon’s law, 81–2, 144 speaker, office in Britain, 108–9, 142, 424 Spectateur français au XIX e siècle, 200 speeches, character of: in Britain, 103; in France, 140–1 Speech from the Throne, 39, 227 spirit of the age, 67 Staël, Auguste, baron de: praises political civility, 326 Staël, Germaine, baronne de, 10, 257, 262, 282, 284–5; distinguishes party from faction, 269; on party and liberty, 326; on party spirit, 270–2, 292; on public opinion, 290 Stendhal (H.-M. Beyle), 247, 256

Index storming the closet, 368 Suard, J.-B.-A., 43, 66n, 198, 258–9, 458 suicide, alleged English bent for, 24, 199 Swift, Jonathan, 14, 18 symbolism as pre-emptive argument, 68–9 symbols, reliance on, 103 Tabarié, M.-M.-E. Victor, vicomte, 453 Tableau, Le, 56 Tacitus, Cornelius, 293, 335 Talleyrand-Perigord, Charles-Maurice, prince de, 77, 213, 245, 346, 349 tartuffes politiques, 113 Temple, Richard Grenville, Earl, 160 Temple, Sir William, 289 Temple, William of Trowbridge, 18n Temps, Le, 250 Terror, the, 38, 259, 264 tertius gaudens, 53 thaumaturgical kingship, 368 Théremin, Charles, 54 Thibaudeau, A.-C., 285–6 Thiers, Adolphe, 81, 382n Thiessé, Léon, 99–100, 114, 242 third party supposed stabilizer, 100–1, 108 “Third Restoration,” 424 Thouret, J.-G., 31 throne, skulking behind, 434 Times, The, 83, 90 Tocqueville, Alexis de, 464 Tribunate: gutted by Bonaparte, 282; seating in, 280; site of opposition, 274–83 Trouvé, C.-J., baron, 136 Turot, Joseph, 47 two nations, doctrine of, 64–5, 80, 346 ultra-royalists: block voting by, 110; Charte not first choice, 68, 174, 191; Constant conciliatory towards, 311; and dissolution of 5 September, 168;

497

as French Tories, 100; future as mere Tories, 317, 394; identity centred on monarchy, 68; opportunism alleged, 440; origin of label, 346; relation to Louis XVIII, 170; sincerity suspect, 133, 364. See also Vaublanc; Frénilly unanimity, a revolutionary value, 47 Unigenitus, 22 unintended consequences, 210–11, 236–7, 243 union et oubli, 67 Vaublanc, V.-M. Viénot, comte de, 9, 10, 72, 99n, 130–66, 237, 244, 466; anglophile, 133; apparent concessions to Revolution, 133–5; career in politics, 131–2, 149; character of, 133–4, 135, 142–3, 164, 165; on civil courage, 139; on civility in public life, 153; condemns metaphysics, 142; condemns neutrality, 150; confident that royalists are party of government, 148, 152; constitutional position in 1816, 131; as figure of fun, 135, 143, 155; on French character, 138; on intrigue, 152; legitimist in July Monarchy, 132, 166; literary efforts, 164–5; on ministerial responsibility, 154; as minister of the interior, 130–2; on ministers’ control of information, 155; misconceptions about Britain, 156–7; misunderstanding of, 162–4; on opposition, 151–2; on parliamentary manners, 154–5; pessimism about French government, 147; on pretext of conscience, 145; on political friendships, 144; on political leadership, 143, 144–5, 156; promotes British practices, 141–2, 149, 151–2, 154, 157, 159; proscriptions of, 134; protests at circular chamber, 142; as public speaker, 140–1; as rationalist,

498 160; regrets weakness of royalists in Revolution, 139–40, 143, 146; on relation between ministry and majority, 164; on royalists as a party, 147–8; on royalists’ disunity, 146; writings of: on commerce, 155; Du gouvernement représentatif en France, 135–6, 145, 152–3; early works, 133; in Journal du Nord, 136; Mémoires and Souvenirs, 132; in Renovateur, 153n Vendéens, 261 ventre, 40, 113–14 ventrus, 113–14 Verginaud, P.-V., 146 Villèle, Joseph, comte de, 468; accepts and leaves office as individual, 98, 230, 390, 446; bascule not needed, 92; compact majority of, forgotten, 468; economic policies of, 247; and election of 1827, 95; exacts loyalty from fonctionnaires, 112; on Fiévée, 243; government of, threatens députés fonctionnaires, 118; large majority a problem, 91, 92, 234; ministers of, seated in chambers, 372; ministry of, 154; more moderate than Charles X, 94; too little appreciated, 96; on Vaublanc, 161 Villemain, Abel-François, 376, 385, 397 Viret, Pierre, 13 Vitet, Ludovic, 392 Vitrolles, Eugène-F.-A., baron de, 72, 166, 348–64, 376 – apparent sincerity, 364–5 – author of Note secrète, 362 – career of, 349, 364 – Du ministère, 348–61; on British conventions, 351, 353, 359, 363; British corruption exaggerated, 355; British sources used, 359; conflict rooted in human nature, 356; fallacy of treating political issues as legal

Index ones, 357; focus on ministry, 350; on honourable resignation, 354; on ministerial solidarity, 355; no lien on office, 356; opposition useful to ministry, 356; parties in French government not named, 357; party central to representative government, 355; on party spirit, 355, 356; on political responsibility of ministers, 353, 355; on public opinion, 351–2, 363; rarity of pamphlet, 362; rejects mechanistic language, 352; reviews, 360–1; on role of chamber in designating ministry, 354; two distinct parties needed, 355, 357 vive le roi quand même, 347 Vivien, A.-F., 118 Voltaire, F.-M. Arouet de, 15–16, 195 voting in legislative bodies: intimidation, 109, 117; reform in July Monarchy, 118; relation to party, 118, 280; secret, 117–18, 413, 425; Serres’s effort to reform, 425 Wailly, E.A., 200 Walpole, Horace, 158, 159 Walpole, Sir Robert, 302, 374, 381, 447 weathercocks (girouettes) in politics, 134, 336 Whigs, prestige in France, 44, 409–10, 457 Whigs and Tories, 14, 18, 30, 37, 362; Louis XVIII seeks equivalent, 394, 469; as model of two-party system, 99; taverns associated with, 46 whippers-in, 341 white terror, 336 Wilberforce, William, 334 Wilkes, John, 19, 43 Woloch, Isser, 45n, 48 Yorke, Charles, 199