French radicalism through the eyes of John Stuart Mill

The paper attempts to highlight some under-researched aspects of the interaction between British and French radical political thinkers and activists during the period between the July Revolution of 1830 in France and the early years of the Third Republic. It focuses in particular on the decisive impact that the aftermath of the July Revolution of 1830 had for the perception of French politics by the most Francophile British radical, John Stuart Mill. In this context, Mill's astonishingly dense coverage of French affairs in The Examiner and the relation between that coverage and Mill's radical agenda at home are explored. The Revolution of February 1848 and the establishment of a Republic in France raised new hopes and led to a new round of Anglo-French radical co-operation and manifestations of fraternity. However, it was the frustration of the expectations raised by 1848 (fatally by the time of Louis Napoleon Bonaparte's coup d’état in December 1851) that had the most profound effect on the perception of French radicalism outre-Manche. A detailed analysis of which French ‘radical’ parties, factions and personalities attracted Mill's sympathies and support from 1830 to the beginnings of the Third Republic is offered, along with the reasons why Mill was attracted by some of the people and factions in question and not by others. The paper winds up with a few comments on Mill's strenuous efforts to contribute to Anglo-French mutual understanding and fellow-feeling and his strategies to that effect.     

Jeremy Bentham, the French Revolution and political radicalism

An unresolved debate in Bentham scholarship concerns the question of the timing and circumstances which led to Bentham's ‘conversion’ to democracy, and thus to political radicalism. In the early stages of the French Revolution, Bentham composed material which appeared to justify equality of suffrage on utilitarian grounds, but there are differing interpretations concerning the extent and depth of Bentham's commitment to democracy at this time. The appearance of Rights, Representation, and Reform: Nonsense upon Stilts and other essays on the French Revolution, a new volume in The Collected Works of Jeremy Bentham, containing definitive texts of Bentham's writings at this crucial period, offers an opportunity to reassess this debate. First, Bentham's most radical proposals for political reform came not in the so-called ‘Essay on Representation’ composed in late 1788 and early 1789, as has traditionally been assumed, but in his ‘Projet of a Constitutional Code for France’ composed in the autumn of 1789, where he advocated universal adult (male and female) suffrage, subject to a literacy test. Second, it may be doubted if the very question as to whether Bentham was or was not a sincere convert to democracy is particularly helpful. Rather, it may be better to see Bentham as a ‘projector’ during this period of his life. Third, the nature of Bentham's radicalism was very different at this period from what it would become in the 1810s and 1820s, for instance in relation to his commitment to the traditional structures of the British Constitution. Having said that, his attitude to the British Constitution remained complex and ambivalent. At his most radical phase, in the autumn of 1789, he advocated wide-ranging measures of electoral reform while at the same time harbouring aspirations to be returned to Parliament for one of the Marquis of Lansdowne's pocket boroughs. To conclude, it was, arguably, the internal dynamic of Bentham's critical utilitarianism, rather than the events of the French Revolution, which was ultimately responsible for pushing him into a novel form of radical politics.     

塔列朗与法兰西近代民族国家的建立

法兰西近代民族国家建立的进程,开始于1789年的法国大革命,结束于1830年的七月革命。塔列朗的政治活动贯穿于这一进程的始终。他在大革命期间,推动教会资产国有化,参与起草《人权宣言》;在督政府时期,以较新的外交理念促成法国外交部的改革;在拿破仑帝国时期,参与了重要条约的谈判,并力图遏制拿破仑的称霸政策;在波旁王朝复辟时,起草了“1814年宪章”,尽力维护大革命的成果;在七月革命中,抛弃了复辟王朝,支持承认大革命现实的路易.菲利浦登上王位,并出任驻英大使出席伦敦会议,为解决欧洲重大外交问题付出了努力。事实证明,他并非如一般史家所描述的那样,是一个以自身利益为行为准则,没有信仰的政治变色龙,而是一个以法兰西民族国家利益为行为准则的政治家。他为法兰西近代民族国家的建立做出了重大贡献。     

论法国七月王朝君主立宪制的建立

1830年革命爆发后,大资产创建了七月王朝．它是法国君主立宪制发展的最高和最后阶段。七月王朝君主立宪制的合法性基础在于它对复辟王朝的政治制度既肯定又否定,既继承又发展,既有趋同又有超越。法国大资产与土地贵族之间的天然敌对关系,则孕育了七月王朝取代复辟王朝统治的历史必然性。由于近代法国长期存在的宪政困境和大资产本身的局限性,致使七月王朝君主立宪制具有难以避免的缺陷。     

Italian political culture in historical perspective

This article examines Austrian policy towards the Italian states from the Congress of Vienna to the revolutions of 1848. It argues that the paramount concern of Habsburg policy was not revolution, but rather the maintenance of a hegemonic position in the peninsula against threats from the Habsburgs’ traditional enemy ‐ the French. Revolution caused significant concern only because it might provide the French with a pretext for intervention in the peninsula. Consequently a number of strategies were adopted both to forestall insurrection (vigorous policing, encouraging moderate reform programmes, armed intervention), and to retain influence over the peninsula's rulers (diplomatic pressure, dynastic and military alliances, promises of assistance against unrest). However, by the 1830s the Austrians were faced by increasing challenges to their position of dominance. This was in part because of the personal ambitions of individual Italian rulers, but it also reflected the changing situation in Paris after the July Revolution, and in Vienna after the death of Francis I.     

The Jacobinism and patriotism of Ernest Belfort Bax

This article examines Ernest Belfort Bax's interpretation of the French Revolution and traces the impact that his idea of the Revolution had on his philosophy and his political thought. The first section considers Bax's understanding of the Revolution in the context of his theory of history and analyses his conception of the Revolution's legacy, drawing particularly on his portraits of Robespierre, Marat and Babeuf. The second section shows how the lessons Bax drew from this history shaped his socialist republicanism and discusses his support for Jacobin methods of revolutionary change. The third section of the article looks at the ways in which Bax's reading of revolutionary history affected his internationalism and shows how his ‘anti-patriotism’ led him to support the Anglo-French campaign in 1914. I argue that the Bax's understanding of the French Revolution gave body to his philosophy and greatly influenced his understanding of the socialist struggle. Bax believed that socialists had history on their side, but was so emboldened by the idea of the Revolution that he was led to advance a view of socialist change that undermined the historic values that socialism was supposed to enshrine.     

Jeremy Bentham,the French Revolution and political radicalism

An unresolved debate in Bentham scholarship concerns the question of the timing and circumstances which led to Bentham's ‘conversion’ to democracy, and thus to political radicalism. In the early stages of the French Revolution, Bentham composed material which appeared to justify equality of suffrage on utilitarian grounds, but there are differing interpretations concerning the extent and depth of Bentham's commitment to democracy at this time. The appearance of Rights, Representation, and Reform: Nonsense upon Stilts and other essays on the French Revolution, a new volume in The Collected Works of Jeremy Bentham, containing definitive texts of Bentham's writings at this crucial period, offers an opportunity to reassess this debate. First, Bentham's most radical proposals for political reform came not in the so-called ‘Essay on Representation’ composed in late 1788 and early 1789, as has traditionally been assumed, but in his ‘Projet of a Constitutional Code for France’ composed in the autumn of 1789, where he advocated universal adult (male and female) suffrage, subject to a literacy test. Second, it may be doubted if the very question as to whether Bentham was or was not a sincere convert to democracy is particularly helpful. Rather, it may be better to see Bentham as a ‘projector’ during this period of his life. Third, the nature of Bentham's radicalism was very different at this period from what it would become in the 1810s and 1820s, for instance in relation to his commitment to the traditional structures of the British Constitution. Having said that, his attitude to the British Constitution remained complex and ambivalent. At his most radical phase, in the autumn of 1789, he advocated wide-ranging measures of electoral reform while at the same time harbouring aspirations to be returned to Parliament for one of the Marquis of Lansdowne's pocket boroughs. To conclude, it was, arguably, the internal dynamic of Bentham's critical utilitarianism, rather than the events of the French Revolution, which was ultimately responsible for pushing him into a novel form of radical politics.     

试论19世纪30～40年代法国共和运动的勃兴

19世纪30~40年代是近代法国社会、经济发展和变化的重要时期。在这个时期,资产阶级共和派为继承大革命精神、发扬共和原则和实现共和制度,进行了持续的斗争,共和运动因此勃兴。这场共和运动方式多样,派别众多,为法国最终确立共和制度打下了坚实的理论和群众基础。     

Memory,history and national identity in Vichy France

Vichy France mobilised memory-managers to explain that the Revolution was over, to promote a deeper understanding of the French past and to help find a place in a European 'New Order' invigorated by the Germanic peoples. They demonstrated that a time of elites, or of 'knights', had returned. New people of old stock would displace the rabble risen in the Jacobin Empire and renew France by re-rooting her in her authentic past and collective memories. As Pe´tain toured the revered places of France's memory, the Republican rites and rituals were displaced by older symbols and ceremonies. Jewish and Masonic over-representation under the Third Republic encouraged a serene consensus for their exclusion. Vichy's search for a people's rooted, communitarian identity and heritage mustered prodigious, selfless, energies. The French wanted to be who they 'really were' and so vigorously sought themselves in their traditions and their past, with pernicious results.     

Taming sovereignty: constituent power in nineteenth-century French political thought

Political theorists recently focused their attention on the history of the idea of constituent power. This, they claim, shows that the notion of pouvoir constituant expressed the radical and absolute power of the sovereign people. In other words, constituent power pointed at the democratic and irresistible core of popular sovereignty. In this paper, I argue that the analysis of nineteenth-century French political thought offers a different account of constituent power’s history. Relying upon archival resources, I show that in the aftermath of the French Revolution politicians and legal scholars used constituent power to tame the very idea of sovereignty and the powers from it derived. First, during the Restoration constituent power was used to pose a limit to the power of the monarch. Second, throughout the July Monarchy scholars resorted to constituent power to oppose the Parliament's claim to be the sovereign power and the only legitimate author of the constitution. Moreover, they also used it to claim that claim that, even if the people was sovereign, its power was restricted to authorizing the constitution. Third, during the Second Republic, jurists and politicians addressed the people’s sovereign power in terms of constituent and constituted power. While the first was meant to disappear after the constitution’s approval, the second was a second-order power limited by the hierarchy of norms and the rigidity of the constitution.     

Free trade, feudal remnants and international equilibrium in Gaetano Filangieri's Science of Legislation

In his main work, The Science of Legislation (1780–1783), the Neapolitan Gaetano Filangieri proposed a set of extensive political and cultural reforms. These reforms were necessary to free eighteenth-century societies from the remnants of feudal institutions that obstructed international peace and economic growth. Filangieri's ideas were shaped by the international political climate between the seven Years’ War and the eve of the French Revolution. Reinterpreting Montesquieu and Genovesi through the influences of French radical and Enlightenment thought (Helvétius, Raynal, l’Encyclopédie), as well as the economics of Hume, Verri and the Physiocrats, he concluded that European modernity was inherently contradictory.From this perspective Filangieri set out to force a clean break between the technical horizons of mercantilism and enlightened absolutism and a society based on civil rights, a fair distribution of wealth and resources, and free trade. Proper ‘scientific’ knowledge of the rules and principles of legislation would allow governments to balance out the natural and cultural factors that characterise individual states, and to identify the appropriate model for social and economic development. If all states acted on their proper interest, international free trade and peaceful competition between states would emerge and the potential for general economic growth be materialised. Thus, the natural equilibrium and ‘universal consensus’ among nations could be restored.     

Vengeance, justice and the reactions in the Revolutionary Midi

This article explores the nature of political conflict, violenceand justice in the Midi provençal during the French Revolution.It emphasizes the continuity of conflict between rival factionsdividing most communes in the region throughout the Revolutionarydecade, conflict that frequently issued in individual and collectiveviolence, most notoriously the prison massacres of the WhiteTerror (or the Reaction, as it was known among contemporaries)at Aix, Tarascon and Marseille in the spring of 1795. Thesemassacres, among the most spectacular expressions of collectivevengeance and popular justice in the Revolution, presented thenascent judicial system of the Revolution with some of its greatestchallenges in the pursuit and punishment of these crimes, notleast because of the political partiality of the judicial authorities.This article further illustrates how the phenomenon of multipleReactions between warring factions, representing fundamentalsocio-economic differences and competing visions of the Republic,provides an understanding of the whole Revolutionary processin the region.     

The lost cause: failed French ultimata and the restoration of papal rule in Rome in 1849

In one of history’s ironies, the republic that arose in Rome out of Europe’s revolutionary wave in 1848 was crushed by the new republic that had formed in France at the same time. In an additional irony, the destruction of the Roman Republic and the restoration of the papal theocracy were overseen by the internationally renowned champion of constitutional rights and freedom, Alexis de Tocqueville, then France’s foreign minister. This article sheds new light on this dramatic series of events through an examination of the French diplomatic correspondence, which reveals growing dismay at the direction in which events were unfolding. The correspondence also gives a sense of how close the French came to abandoning the pope, a decision that could have changed the course of Italian and French, as well as Church history.     

Colonial Dreams and Nightmares: British and French Perceptions of Republican Policies in Spanish Morocco (1931–1936)

Historians’ continuing interest in the origins of the Spanish Civil War has recently extended to the colonial policies of the Spanish Second Republic in Morocco, a relatively unexplored issue in previous decades, which has informed new approaches to the military uprising of July 1936. Foreign sources and archives, however, have been generally overlooked in this context. This article claims that British and French delegates in Morocco made critical observations about republican reforms in Spanish Morocco, which have much to add to this debate. They raised questions regarding the continuity of republican policies in Morocco and the anti-republican attitudes within the Army of Africa. They also challenged conventional knowledge concerning the difficulties encountered by alternative colonial projects in Morocco. In the end, their reports not only questioned metropolitan options but also anticipated the attitudes of the British and French governments, vis-à-vis the military rebellion.     

Illusions of revolution: François Furet's critique of Marx

In this article it will be argued that François Furet's attempt in Interpreting the French Revolution to provide a conceptual history of the French Revolution through a synthesis of Tocqueville and Cochin's historical and sociological accounts fails methodologically. It does so in two ways: Firstly, in its aim to distinguish between conceptual, explanatory history and empirical, narrative history, and secondly, in its distinction between revolution as process and revolution as act. Drawing on Claude Lefort and Paul Ricoeur's interventions in the historiographical debate, I demonstrate that these seemingly methodological concerns, conceal a deeper historical and political question concerning the nature of the ‘event’ of revolution. In response to Furet's oblique turn to Hegel in his later work, this article traces the nature of the ‘conceptual inversion’ Furet claims to find in Hegel and Marx's accounts of the French Revolution. In relation to Marx, it is argued that Furet's critique fails to capture the allegorical nature of the political in Marx's thought, and underplays the significance of revolution as the basis for both the separation of the social and the political and their attempted unity. The article ends with some remarks on the importance of language and culture in rethinking the relationship between Hegel and Marx.     

1933年希特勒在德国上台与法国的反应

1933年1月30日,希特勒就任魏玛共和国总理,标志着德国纳粹化的开始。德国国内形势的恶化引起了法国的严重不安。但是．由于法国当时正面临严重的财政危机,因此,在希特勒上台次日组阁的达拉第政府不得不将如何恢复财政平衡视为第一要务;同时法国国内相当一部分人对与希特勒新政权达成和解还抱有幻想,这最终促使法国政府在对德政策方面采取了“理智而冷静”的政策,没有作出过激的反应。     

'The purity of the blood': Poncet de la Grave,pronatalism and empire

This article will analyze key publications of Guillaume Poncet de la Grave (1725-1803), formerly the monarchy’s representative to the Admiralty Court, who worked during the Ancien Régime to restrict immigration to France, particularly that of people of color. He was also a passionate advocate for French imperial expansion. After the Revolution, in his political tract Réflections on the Unmarried, he expressed his anxiety over a declining French birthrate and a desire to have the state monitor marriage, sexuality, and reproduction in order to increase legitimate births. In this work he identified threats to what he referred to as ‘the purity of the blood’ within and without France, and proposed to the Republic legislation designed to eliminate them. Poncet de la Grave’s career has been largely neglected but his former position merits a closer look at his political writing, which expressed significant, constant objectives that demonstrate thematic continuity over a tumultuous time. French fears of depopulation and national ‘degeneration’ were still strong at the turn of the century, and remain of great interest to historians eager to understand how they were discussed in the context of great historical change.     

Book Reviews

Book reviewed in this article Tudor Women: Commoners and Queens. By Pearl Hogrefe. (Ames: Iowa State University Press, 1975. Pp. xiv, 170. $11.25.) The Matrimonial Trials of Henry VIII. By Henry Ansgar Kelly. The Atlantic Slave Trade and British Abolition, 1760-1810. By Roger Anstey. British and American Abolitionists: An Episode on Transatlantic Understanding. Edited by Claire Taylor. The Age of Capital, 1848-1875. By E. J. Hobsbawm. Gladstone. By E. J. Feuchtwanger. Lord Salisbury. By Robert Taylor. Gladstone. By E. J. Feuchtwanger. Lord Salisbury. By Robert Taylor. From Radicalism to Socialism: Men and Ideas in the Formation of Fabian Socialist Doctrines, 1881-1889. By Willard Wolfe. The False Dawn: European Imperialism in the Nineteenth Century, By Raymond F. Betts. Britain in the Nineteen Twenties. By Noreen Branson. Nonconformity in Modern British Politics. By Stephen Koss. Trust in Tobacco: The Anglo-American Struggle for Power. By Maurice Corina. The Formation of National States in Western Europe. Edited by Charles Tilly. Society in Crisis: France in the Sixteenth Century. By J. H. M. Salmon (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1975. Pp. 351. $22.50.) The Jansenists and the Expulsion of the Jesuits from France 1757-1765. By Dale Van Kley. Society and Politics in Revolutionary Bordeaux. By Alan Forrest. Respectable Folly: Millenarians and the French Revolution in England and France. By Clarke Garrett. The Economic Modernisation of France, 1730-1880. By Roger Price. Revolution and Reaction: 1848 and the Second Republic. Edited, with an introduction, by Roger Price. Italian Intervention in the Spanish Civil War. By John F. Coverdale. Carlism and Crisis in Spain, 1931-1939. By Martin Blinkhorn. Social and Political History of the German 1848 Revolution. By Rudolph Stadelmann. Translated, with an introduction, by James G. Chastain. Beleaguered Tower: The Dilemma of Political Catholicism in Wilhelmine Germany. By Ronald J, Ross. Christians and Jews in Germany. Religion, Ideology, and Politics in the Second Reich. By Uriel Tal. Victors Divided: America and the Allies in Germany 1918-1923. By Keith L. Nelson Women in Nazi Society. By Jill Stephenson. The Socialism of Fools: Georg Ritter von Schönerer and Austrian Pan-Germanism. By Andrew G. Whiteside. Twentieth-Century Yugoslavia. By Fred Singleton. The Great Trek of the Russian Mennonites to Central Asia, 1880-1884. By Fred Richard Belk. White against Red; The Life of General Anton Denikin. By Dmitry B. Lehovich. Civil War in Russia, 1917-1920. By John Bradley. The Death of Stalin. By Georges Bortoli. Trans, by Raymond Rosenthal. The Unfolding of Neo-Confucianism. By Wm. Theodore de Bary and the Conference on Seventeenth-Century Chinese Thought. The Opium War, 1840-1842: Barbarians in the Celestial Empire in the Early Part of the Nineteenth Century and the War by Which They Forced Her Gates Ajar. By Peter Ward Fay. The Kingdom of Johor, 1641-1728. By Leonard Y. Andaya. Aborigines and Colonists: Aborigines and Colonial Society in New South Wales in the 1830s and 1840s. By R. H. W. Reece. The Puritan Origins of the American Self. By Sacvan Bercovitch. George Mason: Gentleman Revolutionary. By Helen Hill Miller. Silas Deane: Patriot or Traitor. By Coy Hilton James. The Toll of Independence, Engagements and Battle Casualties of the American Revolution. Edited by Howard H. Peckham. Slavery, Race and the American Revolution. By Duncan J. MacLeod. The Philadelphia Riots of 1844: A Study of Ethnic Conflict. By Michael Feldberg. Beyond the Civil War Synthesis: Political Essays of the Civil War Era. [Contributions in American History, No. 44.] Edited by Robert P. Swierenga. Joseph Jones, M.D., Scientist of the Old South. By James O. Breeden. Whitelaw Reid: Journalist, Politician, Diplomat. By Bingham Duncan. Financing Anglo-American Trade: The House of Brown, 1800-1880. By Edwin J. Perkins. Ambiguous Imperialism: American Foreign Policy and Domestic Politics at the Turn of the Century. By Göran Rystad. The Making of the Diplomatic Mind: The Training, Outlook, and Style of United States Foreign Service Officers, 1908-1931. By Robert D. Schulzinger. Wisconsin: A History. By Robert C. Nesbit. The History of Wisconsin. Volume I, From Exploration to Statehood. By Alice E. Smith. Frank Murphy: The Detroit Years. By Sidney Fine. The Reaffirmation of Republicanism: Eisenhower and the Eighty-Third Congress. By Gary W. Reichard. Simple Justice: The History of Brown v. Board of Education and Black America's Struggle for Equality. By Richard Kluger. A Peculiar People: Iowa's Old Order Amish. By Elmer Schwieder and Dorothy Schwieder. Movie-Made America: A Cultural History of American Movies. By Robert Sklar. The Navajos and the New Deal. By Donald L. Parman. Studies in the Colonial History of Spanish America. By Mario Góngora. Translated by Richard Southern. Mexico Views Manifest Destiny, 1821-1846: An Essay on the Origins of the Mexican War. By Gene M. Brack.     

Rally politics and political organisation: An institutionalist perspective on the French far Right

The study of the French far Right has often overlooked the relationship between parties and institutions. Here the presidentialisation of French politics under the Fifth Republic is taken to signal the institutionalisation of a form of rally politics within the French party system. Using a neo-institutionalist definition of institutions, rallies in the Third, Fourth and Fifth Republic are examined in turn. The conclusion is that the relative success of the Front national (FN) should be understood in light of the opportunities provided by the institutional framework in place in France from 1958 onwards.     

Vienna and the Jews, 1867–1938: A cultural history

This article examines Ernest Belfort Bax's interpretation of the French Revolution and traces the impact that his idea of the Revolution had on his philosophy and his political thought. The first section considers Bax's understanding of the Revolution in the context of his theory of history and analyses his conception of the Revolution's legacy, drawing particularly on his portraits of Robespierre, Marat and Babeuf. The second section shows how the lessons Bax drew from this history shaped his socialist republicanism and discusses his support for Jacobin methods of revolutionary change. The third section of the article looks at the ways in which Bax's reading of revolutionary history affected his internationalism and shows how his ‘anti-patriotism’ led him to support the Anglo-French campaign in 1914. I argue that the Bax's understanding of the French Revolution gave body to his philosophy and greatly influenced his understanding of the socialist struggle. Bax believed that socialists had history on their side, but was so emboldened by the idea of the Revolution that he was led to advance a view of socialist change that undermined the historic values that socialism was supposed to enshrine.