Outline of republicanism in France

The following outline is provided as an overview of and topical guide to republicanism in France:

Intellectual roots of the republican tradition

Republican doctrine put together its own list of precursors over time, what Claude Nicolet calls a "republican patrology". The list took more or less final shape in 1924, when Lucien Lévy-Bruhl set out the "republican ideal" for the Cartel des Gauches: he traced it back to the Greek city, skipped the Middle Ages almost entirely, and picked the story up again with the Enlightenment. Nicolet notes that what such a canon includes and leaves out is "rarely innocent and always significant"[1]

  • Antiquity – the problem of the liberty of the ancients versus that of the moderns ran through French political thought from Constant to Laboulaye and beyond. The old identification still worked in 1942, when Jules Isaac wrote Les Oligarques and defeated republican France recognized itself in democratic Athens[1]
  • The Reformation – the mainstream reasoning that ties Protestantism to liberty is, in Nicolet's account, a liberal idea rather than a republican one. From about 1880 the republican mainstream went for full laïcité, although several of the men running that fight came from Protestant backgrounds (Ferdinand Buisson, Jules Steeg, Félix Pécaut). Earlier, under the Second Empire, admirers of the Reformation had been common among republicans; Edgar Quinet told Buisson that the reformers were "not enemies, but ancestors"[1]
  • Cartesianism – plays a surprisingly small part in the canon. Jules Simon is one of the few republicans who cited Descartes by name, on the point that individual reason judges every authority. His formula: "Descartes is not a republican, but one cannot be a republican without Descartes"[1]
  • The Enlightenment – everyone agreed this was where the republican spirit really came from, but the inheritance was awkward to handle. The philosophes had all died before the Revolution, their ideas got along fine with enlightened despotism, and Aulard showed that none of them actually asked for a republic[1]
    • Montesquieu – got harsh treatment from Condorcet and later from Destutt de Tracy, while Restoration monarchists and then liberals like Tocqueville and Laboulaye took him up instead. The republicans of 1848 and the Second Empire barely cited him at all. Things changed after 1875, when there was finally a republican constitution whose separation of powers jurists could argue about; Montesquieu also came back separately, through Comte and Durkheim, as a forerunner of sociology[1]
    • Voltaire – faded badly between 1800 and 1815, and the romantic republicans had little use for him either. The positivist 1860s brought him back as the standard-bearer of free thought, and the failed centenary celebration of 1878 made him a rallying point in the anticlerical fight. Gambetta said at the time: "I feel free enough in spirit to be the devotee of Joan of Lorraine and the admirer and disciple of Voltaire". The opportunist and radical republics stayed broadly Voltairean in temper, but republican legal writers never cited him[1]
    • Rousseau – "the great affair of the republicans". Nobody could avoid him and nobody could agree about him. He was read as the theorist of popular sovereignty and direct democracy; liberals from Mme de Staël and Constant on blamed him for the Terror; Comte's typology filed him under the "metaphysical" spirit. Jaurès still concluded that "Rousseau was republican"[1]
    • Mably – probably the most openly republican writer of the century, as Nicolet reads him, yet the nineteenth-century republicans hardly noticed him. In 1848 his critics made him out to be a precursor of communism, and Marx and Engels later treated him as a precursor of socialism. Only around 1900 did jurists, Esmein especially, point out that he was the one writer who had actually predicted a revolution[1]
    • Condorcet – unlike the others, he lived the Revolution and chose the Republic. For much of the century he was mentioned only in passing. His real entry into the republican pantheon came with Ferry, who from the Salle Molière speech of 1870 onward openly placed his school program in the line of Condorcet's plan for public instruction, and then with the wave of studies of 1901–1906. From then on the Radicals appropriated his image.[1]

Republicanism in France by period

18th century

  • During the French Revolution – the monarchy was toppled by popular insurrection on 10 August 1792, and the first French Republic declared on 22 September 1792;[2] the republic came about more by accident than by design, as most revolutionaries of 1789 had aimed at a constitutional monarchy rather than the abolition of royalty[3]
    • Girondins (1791-1793) – principal designers of the democratic Constitution of 1793; thirty-one deputies from the Gironde were tried in June 1793 on a charge of "federalism", although only two of the accused had any real connection to federalist ideas[4]
    • The Mountain (1792-1799) – contributed to the drafting of the Constitution of 1793, which extended suffrage to all adult males[5]
      • Jacobins (1789-1794) – Although Rousseau was a "virtual patron saint" of the Jacobin clubs, the Jacobins were skeptical of popular sovereignty;[6] in foreign policy they expected France to defend her "natural frontiers" rather than annexing willing populations[7]
      • Cordeliers (1790-1795)
    • The Plain (1791-1795)
    • Thermidorians (1794-1799) – drew their firmest support from the prosperous beneficiaries of the revolution (buyers of national properties, state-bond investors, army suppliers); the Constitution of Year III (22 August 1795) established a "liberal" republic of proprietors and drastically reduced the electorate[8]
  • Under the Directory – popular politics was suppressed in the name of stability and order;[9] the five-member collegial executive, a compromise among the parties, met hostility from both left and right, and the experiment was never repeated[10]

19th century

  • Republicanism in France in the 19th century – the founders of the Third Republic referred constantly to the political, intellectual and social experiences of the century, most of which they had lived through personally; for Nicolet, the failures and lessons of 1848–1870 in particular shaped later republican theory and practice[11]
  • Under the Consulate and First Empire – Even after declaring himself an emperor, Napoleon kept using the name of the Republic. [2] The transition to the Consulate in 1799 preserved the "republic of notables" with strong executive branch, although the collegial bodies shrunk from five directors to three consuls in 1800 and a single emperor in 1804.[12] The First Empire was brought down by military defeats that endangered the nation itself, an experience that influenced republican view of Bonapartism[11]
    • Jacobin republicans
    • Idéologues – a movement of savants engaged in politics (Cabanis, Volney, Destutt de Tracy, Daunou), heirs of the Encyclopédistes and above all of Condorcet, for whom public instruction was at once the condition and the goal of a republic; having welcomed Brumaire, most turned to opposition, and Napoleon purged the Tribunat in 1802, suppressed the second class of the Institut in 1803 and banned their journal, the Décade philosophique, in 1807; for Nicolet their program amounted to "the Third Republic under the Directory", although that republic, quick to claim founding fathers, curiously neglected them, with only Condorcet emerging from the disgrace;[13] the true heirs of the philosophes stayed "perfectly outmoded and almost forgotten" until François Picavet's study of 1891[1]
  • Under the Bourbon Restoration
    • French Republicans under the Restoration (1815–1830) – the secret societies of the Restoration (like Charbonnerie), recruited their memeber mostly from former soldiers. This made the first generation of nineteenth-century republicans prone to direct action and military-style discipline[11]
  • Under the July Monarchy – self-declared republicans were few and remained a small minority; republican ideas were voiced by a low-circulation press, openly (the Revue républicaine of 1833–1835) or by allusion in such titles as Le National, La Réforme and the Revue du Progrès[11]
  • Under the Second Republic – born of an improvised revolution, the regime was nonetheless marked by a constant concern for legalism: the provisional government organized elections to a Constituent Assembly within two months, and that freely elected assembly formally legalized the Republic; the June Days, a genuine civil war repressed by Cavaignac with the approval of most republicans, opened a lasting fissure in republican legitimacy[11]
    • Moderate Republicans (1848–1870) – held a majority in the Constituent Assembly elected in April 1848, but after the elections of 13 May 1849 republicans of all shades retained only a minority (some 300 of 800 seats) in the very assembly that was the base of their program; the electoral law of 31 May 1850 then struck some four million voters from the rolls[11]
  • Under the Second Empire – the political experience of the Empire, with the subversion of universal suffrage, the army participating in the coup, doubling of the administrative and police apparatus between 1852 and 1870, and personal power relying on the plebiscites, taught harsh lessons to republicans[11]
  • Under the Third Republic

20th century

  • Republicanism in France in the 20th century

21st century

In the 21st century republicanism is associated with the rightist parties and laïcité, the French version of secularism.

See also

References

  1. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 Nicolet 2014, ch. I.
  2. 1 2 Hanson 2002, p. 431.
  3. ↑ Fontana 2024, § 1.
  4. ↑ Fontana 2024, §§ 3, 6.
  5. ↑ Fontana 2024, § 3.
  6. ↑ Hanson 2002, pp. 432–433.
  7. ↑ Fontana 2024, § 7.
  8. ↑ Fontana 2024, §§ 1, 4.
  9. ↑ Hanson 2002, p. 433.
  10. ↑ Fontana 2024, § 5.
  11. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 Nicolet 2014, ch. IV.
  12. ↑ Fontana 2024, §§ 1, 5.
  13. ↑ Nicolet 2014, ch. III.

Sources

  • Fontana, Biancamaria (2024). "French Republicanism". In Lovett, Frank; Sellers, Mortimer (eds.). The Oxford Handbook of Republicanism. Oxford University Press. doi:10.1093/oxfordhb/9780197754115.013.6. ISBN 978-0-19-775411-5.
  • Hanson, Paul R. (2002). "Republicanism in France". In Kors, Alan Charles (ed.). Encyclopedia of the Enlightenment. Vol. 3. Oxford: Oxford University Press. pp. 431–433. ISBN 978-0-19-510430-1.
  • Nicolet, Claude (2014) [1982]. L'idée républicaine en France (1789–1924) (EPUB) (in French). Paris: Gallimard. ISBN 978-2-07-209769-0.
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