Republicanism

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REPUBLICANISM

ancients and moderns
the rights of man
exclusions
revolutionary aftermaths
bibliography

The French Revolution created the modern European republican tradition. The broadest and most general definition of a nineteenth-century republican was someone who aspired to liberty, equality, and fraternity, the triad of revolutionary virtues. Republicanism was complex and creative because its adherents had to resolve the inherent tensions between these revolutionary ideals while simultaneously defending the problematic legacy of the Revolution. The specificity of European republicanism lay in its unequivocal embrace of democracy. The Anglo-American, or Atlantic, republican tradition contrasted the republic, a mixed form of government, with democracy, a simple form. This opposition made no sense in modern European republicanism. In consequence of this development European republicanism distanced itself from an entire canon of early modern republican theory, a body of work that stretched from Niccolò Machiavelli's (1469–1527) commentaries on Livy to The Federalist Papers, based on precisely this distinction between republic and democracy. European republicanism was a curious ideology, one that developed as a continuous tradition of interpretation of an event, rather than a set of texts. Unlike competing nineteenth-century political ideals such as socialism, liberalism or even conservatism, republicanism had no founding mothers or fathers. Republicanism was the continuing project of instituting revolutionary democracy, of achieving the French Revolution, while debating the nature of that very democracy and the legacy of the Revolution.

ancients and moderns

A republic, for most early modern people, was any lawful state. Classical republicanism, or the neo-Roman theory of a free state, in Quentin Skinner's phrase, was a theory of the best kind of lawful state, which thinkers from Machiavelli to James Harrington (1611–1677) and beyond asserted was one in which the citizens governed themselves. Antimonarchical republicanism was a particular argument, generated after the execution of Charles I (r. 1625–1649) of England in 1649, that citizens could not govern themselves under a monarchy. The thrust of classical republicanism was to identify the qualities necessary for a citizenry to be selfgoverning, a set of qualities loosely organized under the term virtue. Virtue was the capacity to prefer the public good to one's own interests, or at least to recognize that the two were identical. The consensus among theorists as different as the Abbé Mably (1709–1785) and Thomas Paine (1737–1809) was that the main condition of virtue was material independence. Slaves, wage earners, children, women—indeed, anyone who relied on another—could not exercise virtue. In effect this restricted citizenship to property-owning male heads of households. The developing economies of the Atlantic world generated an interesting debate internal to republicanism, the luxury debate, which turned on the political consequences of the increase in non-landed property in a commercial society. Antique republicans argued that only landed property fostered virtuous independence while modern, or commercial, republicans criticized the martial tenor of the antique virtues and argued for a new set of polite or civil virtues generated from commercial society. In all cases the central problems of republican theory were to identify the persons who could exercise virtue and to design a constitution that would allow them to exercise power.

French revolutionary republicanism turned the republican debate on its head. During the Revolution the republican problem became to identify the institutions that would allow everyone to achieve virtue and so participate in political life as a citizen, rather than to find the virtuous citizens who already existed in the population. The universality of this aspiration could be inspiring. The French Republic restored Jews and colonial slaves to equality and liberty. The Jacobin constitution of 1793, which was ratified but never put into force, comprised a breathtaking aspiration to participation in the political process. Any law might be overturned by a reviewing process that could be initiated by local citizens. The Jacobins also generated new sets of rights claims, particularly the right to education and to welfare. Radical Jacobins went even further and argued for a right to work. The ideal had effects in realms outside the classically political: Philippe Pinel (1745–1826) transformed the treatment of the mentally ill as chief "alienist" in the Salpêtrière hospital in Paris by releasing them from incarceration and developing courses of treatment based on conversation, in the hope of restoring fellow citizens to their places in the republic.

All these claims were based on the republican idea that citizens had to be able to participate in public life on an equal footing if a modern society was to flourish. This complex position was not first arrived at as a theoretical reflection but was worked out in the complex conditions of revolutionary politics. In the context of the Revolution this notion of citizenship was a limited, moderate position on an ideological spectrum that wentfrom the Marquis de Sade's (1740–1814) libertarianism to the revolutionary conservatism of Joseph de Maistre (1753–1821). Republicanism argued that the equality enjoyed in political citizenship could stabilize and compensate for the inequalities generated by difference in the economy, society, and the arts. The politics of the Republic would reconcile self-asserting and self-interested modern people to one another and generate a social ethic appropriate to a modern commercial society. The consequence was that other spheres, such as the family, property relations, and education did not need to be revolutionized directly. The strict principles of democracy were to be limited to citizenship; other forms of authority were appropriate in other spheres. Democracy in the state and individualism in society were to be reconciled by moeurs, common values or culture. Republican institutions, such as schools, hospitals, theaters, festivals, and the military were to be schools of moeurs. The Republic comprised an institutional form, democracy, and an ethical aspiration to a limited kind of moral equality. The big problem within republicanism was identifying the boundary between politics and ethics, between the institutions that citizens used to represent themselves, such as suffrage, and the institutions that allowed them to know themselves as citizens, such as literacy.

the rights of man

The French Revolution did not begin as a republican revolt. A republic was an unthinkable regime in 1789, largely because France was understood to be too unequal to tolerate universal citizenship. Political thinkers interpreted contemporary France through the lens of ancient Rome and argued a republic would provoke a civil war between patricians and plebeians. The republic became a necessity because the monarch, Louis XVI (r. 1774–1792), could not accommodate his throne to the new realities. The failure of the monarchy demanded an alternative to be found if the country was not to descend into anarchy. The most important element of the three-year legacy of revolution was the language of rights. The Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen, debated by the National Assembly between 20 and 26 August 1789, was not a republican text. It was created to set the terms of legitimacy for the new regime, to set a baseline for the exercise of power. Its specific provisions, such as rights to religious expression and the presumption of innocence in legal procedures, were not consistent derivations from a coherent theory of rights but compromises that reflected the complexity of French historical experience. The first five articles however, asserting the equality of rights and the goal of government as the protection of rights and identifying the primordial rights as liberty, property, security, and resistance to oppression, were to define the Revolution and consequently republicanism. The Republic, declared in September 1792 after mismanagement of war had fatally discredited the monarchy, inherited these aspirations and had to accommodate itself to them. All citizens would have to enjoy all rights, the principle of universality was incontestable, and if citizenship demanded virtue then virtue would have to be universal also.

Republicanism has never fully mastered the conditions of its birth. A battery of thinkers such as Etienne Clavière (1735–1793), Jacques-Pierre Brissot (1754–1793), the Marquis de Condorcet (1743–1794), and Camille Desmoulins (1760–1794) offered inspiration on what universal virtue demanded and how it might be achieved. The politics of 1792 and 1793 overshadowed these efforts and generated its own images and archetypes of mobilized virtuous citizenship such as the sansculotte, the canonical popular revolutionary identified by his trousers rather than elite knee-breeches, or the far-left radically egalitarian enragé. These figures represented political virtue as the willingness to act directly to represent the people against its representatives or the state. This version of virtue identified republicanism with revolutionary energy and made commitment to continuing the Revolution an end in itself. It identified republicanism, and particularly the right to resist oppression, with the right to bear arms and to insurrection. One meaning of fraternity came to be the bond between volunteers fighting together against the enemy, be they internal or external. This strand of republicanism also promoted a citizen army and eventually demanded universal male conscription, initiated in the levée en masse of 1793. The Parisian radical storming the Tuileries and the soldier of the republic fighting across the Rhine were both versions of the people in arms. The nation, the state, and the people were all possible forms for the sovereign and each promoted its version of the citizen in arms: national guardsman, soldier, and sans-culotte.

The repertoire of insurrectionary republicanism was elaborated from 1792 to 1795. The only new element that would be added to insurrection by nineteenth-century republican rebels would be the barricade, and it is arguable that the barricade represented a retreat from the claim to represent the people to representing, and defending, a people, be it of a quartier or the working class. A particular feature of the culture of insurrectionary republicanism was exemplary defeat and moral victory through death. This could take the form of the Girondins, who opposed the centralizing Jacobins around Maximilien Robespierre, singing republican songs in the tumbrel on their way to the guillotine, or the heroic suicide of the Prairial martyrs stabbing themselves with a dagger and then passing it to a comrade while in the dock for rebellion. The most advanced form was the cult of the martyrs, such as Lepeletier de Saint Fargeau (1760–1793), Jean-Paul Marat (1743–1793), and Joseph Bara, a drummer boy in the army of the West put to death by Vendean counterrevolutionaries. Each of these was memorialized in paintings by Jacques-Louis David (1748–1825), although only the Death of Marat (1793) survives in finished form and is the best illustration of the moral authority claimed by the republican rebel.

The brother in arms, dead or alive, was not the only, or even the major, version of universal citizenship. From 1792 to 1799 administrators, political leaders, and political thinkers struggled with the interrelated problems of pragmatically making a democratic republic function and conceptually working out on what basis it should function. It has been argued that the division between Montagnard (the radical delegates who sat in the highest seats, or Montagne [Mountain], of the Convention) and Girondin, crucial to the politics of the Convention, was based on two different ideas of the republic, classical and commercial. This position is very difficult to sustain. Marie-Jean Hérault de Séchelles (1759–1794) was the principal author of the radical 1793 constitution and so strongly aligned with the Montagne, and also a dandified lawyer whose intellectual background was indistinguishable from that of the Brissot circle. The focus on institutions was shared by such radicals as Louis-Antoine-Léon de Saint-Just (1767–1794) and moderates such as the Marquis de Condorcet (1743–1794). Debates between factions in the Convention took place within a shared conceptual language. That language was elaborated by groups of reflective public actors, such as theCercle sociale, a prototypical think tank and publisher organized around the constitutional bishop Claude Fauchet (1744–1793). After 1794 the most important such unit developing republican thought and practice was the group contributing to the weekly journal La décade philosophique. The problem of generating insight into a new kind of regime, the modern, democratic, commercial republic, was so rich that it spun out a series of innovations. The second section of the Institut, a research body for the human sciences founded in 1795, can reasonably be seen as the birthplace of the modern social sciences: psychology, sociology, and anthropology, all disciplines that sought to understand the citizen of this new entity. One of the most successful areas of reflection was political economy. Jean-Baptiste Say (1767–1832), a member of the Décade coterie, developed Adam Smith's (1723–1790) ideas on labor value to generate a republican political economy, one that imagined the market as one of the institutions that taught the republican virtues of self-command and love of the public good to the citizenry.

Between the end of the Terror in 1794 and the rise of Napoleon Bonaparte (r. 1804–1814/15) in 1799 republicans had the opportunity to experiment with these ideas. During Thermidor and the Directory an alternative model of universal virtue emerged, one that saw citizenship as a feature of everyday life in a commercial republic rather than as an extraordinary capacity for direct action maintained by the people. Modern republicans argued that the most characteristic features of a modern commercial society, the industriousness of the population and communication in print culture, created republican moeurs. They argued that the role of a republican state was to ensure that there were outlets for industriousness and that every citizen could participate in print culture. Their first institutional innovation was a republican political economy that turned on the critique of monopoly, an endorsement of free trade, and an embrace of national development strategies. Industriousness was the basis of citizenship; therefore anything that hampered work was a political evil. The critique of monopoly in turn produced a preference for small units of production, particularly for owner-occupier farming. The second characteristic commitment was the embrace of right to education.

Every citizen should be capable of participating in public debate and the duty of the community was to equip them to do so. These economic and educational policies were to be reprised by the Third Republic as were some of the characteristic features of the public culture of the commercial republic, especially anticlericism and a penchant for celebrating national anniversaries with industrial exhibitions. The first industrial exhibition was set up as the Festival of the Republic at the Champs de Mars in 1798. By 1799 elections were beginning to become another important entry in the inventory of institutions that fostered republican virtue. However, it would take a century for republicanism to embrace the suffrage as a superior kind of political activity to insurrection and republicans have never abandoned the principle that in the last analysis the population retain the right to assert themselves directly. The relationship between the two wings of republicanism, insurrectionary and modern, remained unpredictable throughout the nineteenth century.

exclusions

Republicans argued that rights were political, and so limited in scope, but that the social sphere should be organized in a manner that allowed citizens to assert their political rights. This distinction, but not disjunction, between politics and society allowed republicanism enormous flexibility. It allowed republicanism to recognize differences without having to inscribe those differences at the level of political identity. It was this flexibility that allowed for the easy integration of German- and Occitan-speaking areas of the country in an ideal "one and indivisible" republic, but it also denied that any purchase to any particularity in political identity. The Republic would be unfriendly to Occitan even as the peasantry of Southern France became one of its social bases. Managing the relationships between political and social identities was difficult and often as unsuccessful in theory as it was in practice. This was nowhere more evident than in the relationship of republicanism to women.

Clear thinkers condemned the exclusion of women from political rights from the very outset of the Revolution. Condorcet, who was later to embrace republicanism, published his plea for inclusion of women in the political nation in the Journal de la société de 1789 in July 1790 arguing that "either no individual of the human species has genuine rights, or all have the same rights; and he who votes against the rights of another, whatever that person's religion, color or sex, thereby foregoes his own rights." Yet the arguments of Condorcet, Mary Wollstonecraft (1759–1797), Olympe de Gouges (1748–1793), and Etta Palm (1743–1799), all feminist theorists active in the Revolution, were all ignored and sexual difference was the only social distinction inscribed as essential to political life. The reasons for this particular exclusion are still debated. A body of scholarship argues that the very notion of universality appealed to by republicans has masculine assumptions built into it and that the Republic was inherently committed to excluding women from public life. Another line of interpretation argues that the exclusion was a failure to overcome the cultural context and points to the adaptation of republican ideals by women as different as Sophie de Grouchy (1764–1822), the theorist of feminism and moral sentiment, and Louise Michel (1830–1905), the Communard fighter and working-class organizer at the end of the century, to support the idea that republicanism held genuine universal promise.

What is undoubted is the complexity and contradiction of this particular zone of engagement. A particular, odd idea of female autonomy was embraced by republicans. Directly after the declaration of the Republic in 1792 the Convention passed a law allowing for no-fault divorce. This was on the grounds that women had the same right to self-realization and autonomy as men. However, women were confined to the private or domestic sphere, and in consequence they could only pursue their happiness in this limited sphere. Divorce compensated for the limitations of femininity by releasing women from particular situations and allowing them to pursue their self-realization. This central paradox of acknowledging women as autonomous beings by limiting the scope of that autonomy also characterized other republican measures such as the provisions mandating female inheritance in the Civil Code. Republicanism would continue to be contradictory in its attitude to female citizens right through the period.

revolutionary aftermaths

The problematic legacy of the Revolution to republicanism comprised three distinct elements. The Republic had concentrated power in the hands of the Committee of Public Safety, which relied on the cooperation of Jacobins and sans-culottes to exercise a dictatorship. The committee had ruled through Terror and had justified that Terror as the lawful will of the people. Finally, the Republic's doctrine of popular sovereignty was as intolerant of all national difference as it was of political difference and had unleashed a destabilizing general war. Republicans reflecting on the revolutionary experience had to explain how citizenship and popular sovereignty did not threaten civilized life with dictatorship, terror, and destruction of the international system.

This particular debate remains current and is constitutive of the continuing legacy of the French Revolution. Conservative thinkers, drawing on the work of Edmund Burke (1729–1797) or Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770–1831), have contrasted the irrationality of popular will with either the reason of the legal tradition incarnated in the state or the trust created between individuals in the local and specific interactions of social life. Liberals from Constant to François Furet (1927–1997) have argued that citizenship has to be interpreted within constitutional constraints if it is not to offend against liberty. Socialists beginning with Charles Fourier (1772–1837) have denounced the republican embrace of political citizenship as a sham, an illusion distracting from the real forces of the economy and technology operating in modern life. Political theory has interacted with historical interpretation. The Third Republic evaded the instability that had plagued the earlier incarnations, but the regime cannot be taken for an unproblematic example of a successful republic. A vibrant tradition of historical interpretation has argued that the eventual triumph of the Third Republic in France after 1871 masked the transformation of republicanism into French liberalism in the hard school of the Second Empire.

In the aftermath of the Revolution French republicans identified the political community as "le peuple" rather than "la nation." The French historian Jules Michelet's (1798–1874) 1846 book using the title was the most visible example of the celebration of a moral community with a definite character that preexisted political constitution. What the people demanded and the nature of the people could be differently interpreted within the republican tradition and these contrasting ideas reflected the continuing division between insurrectionary and commercial republicanism. One strand argued that the conditions for the advent of the people had to be brought about by a conspiratorial elite. Louis-Auguste Blanqui (1805–1881) gave his name, Blanquism, to this tendency in France. Blanqui developed the strategy of revolutionary will, the public uprising of an armed vanguard as a catalyst to a general rebellion, and carried it through in the failed Paris uprising of May 1839, the model for the barricade scenes in Victor Hugo's (1802–1885) Les Misérables (1862). The majority tradition, led in the 1840s by parliamentary orators and journalists such as François Arago (1786–1853) and Alexandre-Auguste Ledru-Rollin (1807–1874), saw the task of republicans to be to gain their rights for the people, notably the suffrage. The end of privilege, understood as the monopolization of rights by an elite, would reveal the true moral nature of the population to express itself. Republicans developed an impressive array of public manifestations, such as subscription banquets and political funerals, designed to illustrate their popular support while evading legal restrictions on political assembly. A strong republican press, best represented by Le National and La Réforme, allowed republicans to develop their ideas and to communicate them to their constituency. The two traditions coalesced in the 1848 February revolution in Paris. Republicans such as Alphonse-Marie-Louis de Prat Lamartine (1790–1869) and Ledru-Rollin worked to dispel the fear of the Republic by such measures as the repeal of the death penalty and the renunciation of all territorial ambitions. The compromise between the wings of republicanism unraveled in the uprisings by the poorer districts in June. The June revolts were interpreted, particularly by Karl Marx (1818–1883), as an illustration of the bankruptcy of republicanism in the face of the demands of mass, class-divided societies.

Republicanism outside France enjoyed its apogee in 1848. The argument that legitimacy lay with "the people" was equally attractive to reformers in England and nationalists in Hungary and Italy. The notion that industriousness was a characteristic of citizenship was central to the claims of the Chartists. One of the leaders of the Chartists, Feargus O'Connor (1796–1855), was the grandnephew by marriage of Condorcet and Sophie de Grouchy, and both his father and uncle had been republican rebels in Ireland in 1798. His ideas were in direct continuity with the Jacobin revolutionaries, and his "land plan" in particular was inspired by the republican preference for independent labor over wages. Italian republicanism was bifurcated in exactly the same way as French republicanism; the insurrectionary and social strands were represented by Giuseppe Garibaldi (1807–1882) and Giuseppe Mazzini (1805–1872) respectively. The commercial republicans' emphasis on industriousness was a core ideal for Lajos Kossuth (1802–1894) in Hungary as he sought to disassociate national sentiment from the caste privilege of the Magyars. A modern Hungarian nation would be a commercial society rather than an ethnic group dominating a subject population by appeal to the ancient constitution. Republicanism infused the revolutionary outbreaks of that year but their failure in turn generated its greatest crisis.

The manner in which republicanism would survive as a real political option after the debacle of 1848 was indicated by the republic that was least influenced by French experience: Switzerland. Béla Kaposy has argued convincingly that an independent Swiss commercial republicanism had developed from the 1750s and that by the 1860s it had arrived at a clear notion of a modern commercial republic, one in which the republic guaranteed the welfare of the citizens. The Swiss extended commercial republicanism to welfare, to insuring the citizens against the risks generated in modern capitalist society. Swiss republicanism also embraced the language and practice of civil society and argued that a dense associative life was a positive political good. Welfare and civil society were to be the animating ideas of French republicanism as it recovered from the disaster of 1848. The diversity of republican thought that exploited this opening is striking. On the left Léon-Michel Gambetta's (1838–1882) Belleville programme of 1868 laid out an array of social rights that the Republic would defend. Maximilien-Paul-É mile Littré (1801–1881) was an unabashed elitist, but he argued that the political health of the Republic depended on trade unions, a free press, and widespread participation in political clubs. All of these measures would be passed into law by the Third Republic. They complemented the creation of universal primary education, through the Ferry Laws, and industrial planning, such as the Freycinet Plan, which were already inherent in commercial republicanism. Under the Third Republic republicanism rearmed itself with a political movement, radicalism, a social base, particularly among the small-holders of the south, the Midi rouge, a new doctrine that illuminated the movement, solidarism, and finally embraced suffrage as the basis of the citizen's public commitment.

The division between revolutionary and commercial or social republicanism was not entirely healed by the Third Republic. The Communards were pardoned in 1880, but the memory of the Parisian revolutionary tradition could not be effaced. Georges Clemenceau (1841–1929), for example, flirted with the appeal of direct action in his support for General Georges-Ernest-Jean-Marie Boulanger (1837–1891) in 1889. But the alliance that sought justice for Alfred Dreyfus (1859–1935) aligned the two in the 1890s, and the appeal to the nation in arms would again be deployed in 1914 in support of the institutions of the existing republic and not its revolutionary twin. Elsewhere revolutionary republicanism retained its capacity to encourage direct action. Kossuth's commercial republicanism was the paradoxical inspiration for the founding of the Irish Republican Party, Sinn Féin, and in 1916 this vanguard of the people would express itself in Dublin. Republicanism continued to suggest criteria of legitimacy that could not be fully represented by a state.

Nineteenth-century European republicanism was dominated by the French experience. The ideals were forged in the Revolution, undermined in 1848, renewed and institutionalized in the Third Republic. Elsewhere republican influence was more sporadic and derivative. Republican ideals could be found in unexpected places, however. In the aftermath of the failure of Chartism in England, working-class radicals in London experimented with republican ideals. William James Linton (1812–1897) founded the Bethnal Green Republican Propagandist Society and published The English Republic, which sustained the continuity of English republicanism into the later part of the century. These kinds of movements were always vulnerable to events in France and the English republican movement collapsed in the aftermath of the Paris Commune. In France the political culture eventually learned how to comprise the repertoire of republican political action, to accommodate direct action without threatening the system of governance. Elsewhere, in such countries as Italy, Spain, and Ireland republicanism in 1914 remained a revolutionary faith.