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The Richness and Importance of 19th Century French Classical Liberalism

When one thinks of Classical Liberalism (if one thinks of it at all!) one usually thinks of the version of liberalism which emerged in Great Britain during the 19th century. Its intellectual forebears were John Locke in the 17th century and Adam Smith in the 18th century, whilst its main representatives in its heyday were David Ricardo, Richard Cobden, John Stuart Mill and William Gladstone. High points in its intellectual and political activity were the 1st Reform Act of 1832, the abolition of the Corn Laws in 1846, the publication of Mill’s Principles of Political Economy in 1848, the formation of the Liberal Party in 1859, the publication also in that same year of Mill’s On Liberty, and the Prime Ministership of William Ewart Gladstone (for the first time in 1868). If other branches of the classical liberal movement are mentioned (e.g. Spanish, German, or Russian liberalism) they are usually seen as smaller and less important off-shoots of the main branch which is firmly rooted in England.

It is our intention in this anthology to present another substantial trunk of the classical liberal tree which flourished in France during the 19th century. It is not just another sub-branch of the main Anglo plant but a vigorous and thriving entity which in many ways rivaled its English counterpart and even in some areas (we argue) surpassed it. If we were to rewrite the above paragraph from the perspective of the French classical liberal tradition it would go something like this:

Its forebears were Montesquieu and Turgot in the 18th century, whilst is main representatives in its heyday were Jean-Baptiste Say, Frédéric Bastiat, Alexis de Tocqueville and Jules Simon. High points in its intellectual and political activity were the creation of the July Monarchy in 1830, the abolition of slavery in 1848, the publication of Bastiat’s Economic Harmonies in 1850, the publication of the Dictionnaire d’économie politique in 1852, and the Prime Ministership of Jules Simon (1876-77).

The French classical liberals also enjoyed an international influence like their British cousins: Jean-Baptiste Say’s Treatise (1803) circulated widely in North America influencing generations of students of economics; Bastiat’s Economic Sophisms (1846-48) were quickly translated into most of the major European languages and enjoyed sizable sales; and of course the writings of Alexis de Tocqueville had and continues to have considerable influence. However the lens provided by French liberalism provides a very different and sometimes unique perspective on events in spite of the many similarities it shared with other liberal movements elsewhere. It shared with its English counterparts, for example, a common desire to place limits on political power by means of constitutions, to introduce the rule of law and protections for individual liberty, to reduce or eliminate tariff protection, to deregulate the economy, and to reduce the threat of war through free trade, open borders and international arbitration. Where the view of the world changes for the French compared to their English counterparts was the result of the effects of the French Revolution. How does one explain this cataclysm which shook Europe for 25 years, and how does one live with its ongoing consequences?

To begin to understand the issues which French liberals and others had to grapple with one should list a few of the significant events which occurred on the eve of the period under discussion: the creation of a democratic republic founded upon a written constitution and a declaration of rights, the execution of the monarch, the dispossession of the established church and the landed aristocracy, a hyper-inflation caused by the rapid issuing of paper currency (the assignats), the coming to power of a military dictator, and the use of a massive “citizens” military force to violently invade and “liberate” the rest of Europe from “feudalism”, and a 20 year war against the other monarchical states of Europe. It is therefore not surprising that all political and economic schools of thought had to deal with the problems of the source of political legitimacy, the nature of individual and political rights, the justifications put forward for property rights (especially landed property), the role of constitutions and bills of rights in limiting political power, the nature of the different social and political classes which contended for power, the role of paper money and the national debt in funding government activities, the proper role of the military in a civil society, and the proper way to achieve lasting social, intellectual, political, and economic change.

The legacy of all these unsolved political and economic problems was combined with the fact that quite similar groups which had fought each other for control of the state in the ancien régime and the revolution persisted into the new century, where a complex and apparently unresolvable five-way contest engulfed the country for decades. On one side there were the conservative, royal legitimists, aristocrats, and the church who wanted to “undo” the Revolution; and then there were the Bonapartists who idolized Napoleon, the Empire, and the “glorious” days of French expansionism and “liberation”. A number of new groups now entered the mix, with the classical liberals and liberal-minded constitutional monarchists who wanted to modernize the crown and reduce the power of the state, making up a third group; a fourth was the newly wealthy landed elites and emerging financial and industrial bourgeoisie who wanted to use the power of the state to protect their own interests in agriculture and industry, and they were all joined in mid-century by a fifth group, the new socialist intellectuals and parties supposedly speaking in the name of “the people” who wanted to begin building elements of what would become known as the “welfare state.” All of these contending forces came to a head in the bloody confrontations of 1830, 1848, and 1870. Again, given this tumultuous history, it was not surprising that classical liberalism in France would give a lot of thought to the nature of political and economic classes, who comprised them, where their power came from, and how they used that power. These periodic explosions would also give a certain urgency to those theorists and politicians who were trying to find solutions to all these problems.

One unique direction in which the French classical liberals moved in order to solve these problems was to link “political” and “economic” liberty together into a more “holistic” understanding of the nature of individual liberty. Formal constitutional or legal “liberties” were, given the constantly changing nature of the régimes in 19th century France, seen as insufficient grounds for a robust defence of individual liberty. Deeper, morally-based claims to property, or “natural rights”, were required and this is what many French classical liberals provided.

A second unique contribution of the French liberals was to stress the natural sociability of human beings in a free market. When left free to dispose of their property rights as they saw fit and in the absence of state or other institutional violence, people had a natural tendency to “truck, barter and and trade” to use Adam Smith’s expression. This might at first glance seem a strange position for French observers to hold given all the violent upheavals and cycles of repression and liberation which French society endured during and after the Revolution, but these events were seen as “disturbing factors” (Bastiat’s phrase) which unsettled the deeper, and more “naturally” flowing currents of human behaviour. The social and economic benefits provided by the division of labour, comparative advantage in trade, deregulation of the economy (“laissez faire, laissez passez”) [see Garnier (1852)], and mutual cooperation were so enormous that they kept resurfacing in spite of the upheavals which disturbed the French political and economic landscape. Thus one might contrast this approach, one of “sociable individualism”, with the common caricature of American or English classical liberalism as advocating “rugged or atomistic individualism”.

A third aspect to the French version of classical liberalism which we should especially note is the role that class plays in their social theory. A cataclysm like the French Revolution demanded an explanation and this naturally drew the attention of liberal historians and social theorists. Their unique contribution was to frame their analysis in terms of contending social, political, and economic groups (“classes”) who sought, won, excercised and lost political power at various times [see Beaumont (1839), Thierry (1859)]. Although “class analysis” is more commonly associated with Marxist social theorists this is in fact incorrect as French classical liberals pioneered this approach as Marx himself was quick to acknowledge. Building upon the “four stage theory” of social and economic evolution developed by theorists in the Scottish and French Enlightenment (nomadism, pastoralism, agriculturalist, and commercial - with their corresponding forms of exploitation such as banditry, slavery, feudalism, and mercantilism) Jean-Baptiste Say and his many followers (Comte, Dunoyer, Thierry, Bastiat, Molinari) expanded this analysis in an effort to explain how the French Revolution came about, how it degenerated in the Napoleonic Empire and Restoration, and the new role which would be played by the emerging “industrial” class. Variations of this “social” approach to the study of history and politics would be adopted by many working in the classical liberal tradition throughout the 19th century (Guizot, Tocqueville, Taine).

The Link between Political and Economic Liberty

For most 19th century French classical liberals there was a strong and necessary connection between political and economic liberty. This connection was broken in the late 19th and twentieth centuries when the “new liberalism” suggested that extensive government regulation of the economy could and should exist side-by-side with, and indeed be separated from, the traditional “political liberties” of freedom of the press and constitutional representative government. For French classical liberals in the early and mid 19th century this was definitely not the case. At the foundation of this more complete notion of individual liberty was property, understood as the (natural) right to control one’s own person and by extension to come to own external physical objects such as land and goods. This was the perspective adopted by Jean-Baptiste Say in his Treatise on Political Economy (1st edition published in 1803, but reprinted with extensive revisions many times) and maintained by mid-century political economists such as Frédéric Bastiat in essays such as “The Law” (1850) and his unfinished treatise Economic Harmonies (1850). [See also Roederer (1800), Faucher (1852), Wolowski and Levasseur (1863)). This view marked a clear break with the English school of political economy which in the 19th century increasingly came under the influence of Benthamite and Millian notions of property which were justified more on the grounds of social “utility” than of natural right which was the case in France. It was this strong moral conviction about the justice of property that sometimes gave a harder edge to the French liberal critique of state invention and regulation than was the case in the English speaking world.

A good example of this two-pronged defence of liberty is the decades-long agitation for freedom of speech which really only came to an end in the Third Republic with the passing of the “Loi sur la liberté de la presse du 29 juillet 1881.” [See Destutt de Tracy (1811), Daunou (1819, Tocqueville (1830), Béranger (1833)]. One sees the usual “political” justifications for having a free press (the expression of a wide range of opinions, engaging the citizens with the activities of the state, exposing errors or venality on the part of the legislators, and so on), but these are laid alongside another defence for freedom of speech, namely that when the state and its censors prevents free speech this was a violation of those citizen’s property rights to freely use their persons and their property as they saw fit. On the other hand, it was argued that the violation of an apparently “political right” to freedom of speech cloaked a deeper “economic” purpose, namely censorship was designed to protect the vested “economic” interests of those who controlled the state from scrutiny or criticism by those who paid the taxes and tariffs which benefited those elites. Thus in the eyes of the classical liberals an issue like freedom of speech was like a piece of rope which owed its strength to the interweaving of both political and economic threads.

Something very similar could be said about another perennial issue which occupied classical liberals for most of the 19th century, namely free trade, but this time from the other direction. Free trade is seen by most people to be an “economic” issue which concerns the most productive use of resources across international boundaries and the flourishing (or not) of local industry and labor. It was certainly often seen this way in the often acrimonious debates in England and France during the 1840s when the abolition of the “Corn Laws” came to a head in 1845-46 with the agitation by Richard Cobden in England and his friend and colleague Frédéric Bastiat in France (Cobden won the battle in 1846; Bastiat lost his in 1847 but had a delayed posthumous victory when Chevalier signed the Anglo-French free trade treaty with Cobden in 1860). Yet the French liberal economists saw that this supposedly purely “economic” issue had profound political implications for the state of liberty. The political dimension to this infringement of economic liberty can be seen clearly in the following examples: Napoleon’s Continental Blockade (1806-1814) was part of his political struggle against Britain and the forces of monarchy; the protection of French agricultural products from foreign competition shored up the landed elites which controlled the French state during the Restoration and the July Monarchy; and the protection of French manufacturing industry shored up the interests of the rising financial and manufacturing elites which were beginning to rise to prominence during the July Monarchy. The French liberal economists quickly realised that in order to bring about signifiant political change in France the economic privileges of the ruling elites had to be done away with, and this meant free trade and the end of protection. [See Chevalier (1852)].

Further examples of the intimate connection between political and economic liberty in French classical liberalism can be found in many of the other issues which were taken up during the course of the 19th century, such as the abolition of slavery (slavery violated the property rights of the slave, whilst the profits from slavery was a crucial foundation stone for the political power of the colonial landed elites), opposition to the privileges of the Catholic church (the church was exempt from most taxes and possessed massive land holdings often through state grants, and their near monopoly on education meant that free and competitive private alternatives were handicapped), and opposition to the rise of socialist parties in a democracy such as the policy of the national Workshops in the 1848 Revolution and the foundation of the Radical-Socialist Party in 1901 (the property rights of tax payers were violated when a majority voted for confiscation and redistribution of property to fund socialist welfare measures, and the political power of the party leaders, bureaucrats, and state functionaries increased to the point where they came to dominate the government apparatus). [See Taine (1890), Guyot (1893)].

Liberalism and the Social Sciences

Liberalism has generated much thought about the nature of politics. In fact, the revolution of 1789 can be considered to be the source of the most important political thinking of the 19th century. Almost unanimously, liberals accepted the Revolution and the principles which flowed from it, but remained wary of the excesses of democracy. For example, Benjamin Constant and Sismondi expressed fear of the “social power” and the “tyranny of the people” respectively, and Alexis de Tocqueville worried about the “tyranny of the majority”. Constant and Tocqueville, who are to some degree the two principle pillars of political thought of the century, would come to have an enormous influence as the century wore on.

In France liberalism profited fully from the emergence of the social sciences in order to establish both its empirical and theoretical approach to these matters. When romanticism began to run out of steam around the mid-century mark the social sciences attempted to define themselves as true sciences, drawing inspiration in most cases from the model of the physical and biological sciences. This tendency can be seen very clearly beginning in 1803 when Jean-Baptiste Say’s Traité de l’économie politique appeared and later in the work of Charles Comte (Traité de législation (1826)) and Charles Dunoyer (Nouveau traité d'économie sociale (1830)). The numerous treatises of political economy which appeared subsequently by Courcelle-Seneuil (the Traité théorique et practique d’économie politique, 2 vols. (1856), Études sur la science sociale (1862)), Henri Baudrillart (Manuel d’économie politique (1857), Études de philosophie morale et de l’économie politique, 2 vols. (1858)), and Frédéric Passy (Mélange économique (1857)) sought to tie the idea of liberty to a kind of scientific ideal. Or, to put it in other words, political economy became an instrument which sought to promote diverse ways of thinking about liberty. Thus in this intellectual context, a new reading of economic behaviour was created which many French theorists placed at the centre of their analysis. For example, Frédéric Bastiat was interested, particularly in the Harmonies économiques (1850), not so much with the producer but with the consumer, and it was about the latter that he penned his many discourses and “sophisms”. In addition, in opposition to Ricardo and Smith he developed a theory of value which placed the emphasis not on some kind of objective quantity but on the subjectivity of the economic actor, thus prefiguring the work of the Austrian School later in the century. If liberalism rejected conservatism after 1789, after 1848 it rejected the many socialist and then Marxist theories of socialism which were becoming established in the market place of ideas.

It is often said that the 19th century was the century of history because of the large number of significant events which unfolded during its course. But one could also say that the 19th century is just as much the century of historical method, in the sense that history attempted to define itself as a science under the influence of a kind of positivism, but a form of positivism was often very far removed from that of Auguste Comte. This “scientific history” (histoire-science) defined itself at first in its break with the romanticism in the style of Michelet and then in opposition to a philosophy of history which was deemed to be too abstract and too remote from empirical facts. This new history, which was inspired by the model of the natural sciences, sought to provide a new interpretation of the French Revolution, most notably in the work of Taine. Contrary to the historians of his day, Tocqueville refused to see this event as a fortuitous, completely unforeseen event. Rather he thought that it had been in preparation for centuries and that the coming together of all the necessary preconditions was the clearest illustration of this. As for Taine, he turned to the Revolution in the aftermath of the defeat of 1870, which, as it did for Renan, produced in him a deep melancholy combined with a feeling of urgency. His critique of Jacobinism and statism is one of the severest in all the 19th century and prefigures the historical revisionism of the 20th. Tocqueville and Taine, who developed each in their own way what one would later call “historical sociology,” were not for all that, positivists. They severely criticised the vision of history which one finds in the work of Auguste Comte who was a disciple of Saiint-Simon and the founder of the positivist doctrine. In many passages in his Cours de philosophie positive (1830-42) Comte repeats his hostile remarks about political economy and never fails to severely criticise Jean-Baptiste Say. Political economy appears to him to be a science of individual interests which cares little about explaining the meaning of historical development. The only economist who is appreciated by Comte is Charles Dunoyer, precisely because he attempted to explain the idea of liberty from an historical perspective. In a letter addressed to John Stuart Mill Comte describes Dunoyer’s La liberté du travail (1845) as a “remarkable book”.

This historical detour which we have taken at the very beginning of the development of the social sciences is a most useful one because it allows us to correct certain erroneous conceptions. With good reason, sociology today is recognized as a discipline which is hostile to liberalism. But this view of the matter can be explained no doubt by the domination of Durkeimian collectivism (or holism) at the beginning of the 20th century and by Marxism after the Second World War, both of which have profoundly coloured the discipline. However, during the 19th century sociologists contributed much to the development of liberal ideas even though they were rarer in France than in England and the United States. Raymond Aron has shown clearly in his Étapes de la pensé sociologique (1967) the range of sociological analysis undertaken by Tocqueville. More recently (2004) Raymond Boudon has declared Tocqueville to be the precursor of historical sociology in France and has convincingly shown that the Tocquevillian approach is worthy of being called scientific. In addition, Richard Swedberg in Tocqueville’s Political Economy (Princeton University Press, 2009) has emphasized that Tocqueville’s work, especially that on pauperism and many passages in Démocratie en Amérique (1835, 1840), draws considerably upon ideas derived from his study of political economy.

Summary of the Content

In order to provide a glimpse into the world of 19th century French classical liberal thought we have selected examples from each of the main historical periods and regimes and from the key disciplines of economics, political theory, sociology, and history. We have even included some examples from literature to show how deeply these problems and issues penetrated French society. The debate about liberty was not confined to the university lecture halls, the Chamber of Deputies, or the salons, but also seeped into the streets and the goguettes (singing and drinking societies). As Bastiat said during the July Revolution of 1830 it was better to spill red wine while singing satirical political songs against the regime than for troops to spill the blood of protesters in the streets. Of course, both happened in 19th century France. [See Béranger’s songs].

For our collection we have chosen material from 28 authors spanning nearly the entire century, 1800-1899. There are 4 from the Empire (up to 1815), 5 from the Restoration period (1815-1830), 4 from the July Monarchy (1830-1848), 8 from the Second Republic (1848-1852), 6 from the Second Empire (1852-1871), and 4 from the Third Republic (1871 onwards).

By the end of the 19th century, classical liberalism in France had become a shell of its former self. The Méline tariff (1891) and the tariff wars with other European states had undone the work of Bastiat and Chevalier in the 1840s and 1850s. The rise of socialist parties and vested interest group politics meant that the government was steadily expanding its powers to tax, regulate, and redistribute and was thus moving away from the liberals’ vision of a strictly limited night-watchman state. [See Leroy-Beaulieu (1891)]. The scramble for overseas territories and colonies accelerated in the 1880s and 1890s (Algeria 1830, Shanghai 1849, Tunisia 1881, Indochina 1884, much of North and West Africa in the 1880s and 1890s) resulting in dramatically increased costs for domestic tax payers and considerable tensions with the other imperial European powers, not to mention the mistreatment of the subject “colonials”. It is not surprising that one of the longer-lived French classical liberals, Gustave de Molinari (1819-1912) concluded in is aptly entitled book Ultima Verba [Final Words](1911), that everything he had fought against during his long life was returning to haunt the classical liberal movement, namely protectionism, statism, socialism, militarism, and colonialism. When the First World War erupted, introducing “war socialism”, mass conscript armies, huge government debt, and hyper-inflation there was very little left of the classical liberal movement in any country and certainly not in France.

It is the aim of this anthology to bring back for scholarly appreciation and scrutiny this once vibrant and interesting branch of the classical liberal tree which struck root and blossomed during the 19th century.