What Is French Liberalism?
| Published date | 01 May 2024 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1177/00323217221126727 |
| Author | Arthur Ghins |
| Date | 01 May 2024 |
https://doi.org/10.1177/00323217221126727
Political Studies
2024, Vol. 72(2) 551 –569
© The Author(s) 2022
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DOI: 10.1177/00323217221126727
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What Is French Liberalism?
Arthur Ghins
Abstract
It has become commonplace to argue that Benjamin Constant and Alexis de Tocqueville form
a distinct French liberal tradition going back to Montesquieu. Yet Tocqueville showed little
interest in Constant, and early nineteenth-century French liberals did not recognize Montesquieu
as the father of French liberalism. Based on these observations, this essay demonstrates that
the French liberal tradition is a belated construction and explains how, when, and why it was
invented. Exhuming the origins of the French liberal tradition, I argue, is important for our
understanding of the history of liberalism and the mechanisms behind ideology formation.
Keywords
liberalism, political doctrine, ideology, tradition, Tocqueville
Accepted: 30 August 2022
It has become commonplace to argue that Germaine de Staël, Benjamin Constant,
François Guizot, and Alexis de Tocqueville constitute a distinct liberal tradition.1
Raymond Aron and his collaborators, the story goes, recovered this tradition in the 1960s
and 1970s (Sawyer and Stewart, 2016). Because of France’s troubled political history, we
are told, French liberalism developed features that set it apart from other brands of liberal-
ism, especially Anglo-American liberalism, and it is worth studying for that reason
(Behrent, 2016). A variety of core features distinguishing French liberalism have been
proposed.2 Various strands within French liberalism have also been disentangled (De
Dijn, 2008: 5; Jaume, 1997; Vincent, 2011: 177–178). This internal diversity, specialists
have argued, does not imply that French liberals did not share key intuitions. In fact, they
shared a historical approach to political concepts, a sense of the interconnectedness of
society and the state, and an attention to political engagement as a way of preserving
individual independence (Craiutu, 2003: 276–281; Geenens and Rosenblatt, 2012;
Siedentop, 1979).
The starting point of this essay is the following two puzzles. Constant and Tocqueville
are often portrayed as the two towering figures in the French liberal tradition. Yet scholars
have shown that Tocqueville had no special interest in Constant (Gannett, 2003: 32–35).
King’s College London, London, UK
Corresponding author:
Arthur Ghins, King’s College London, London WC2R 2LS, UK.
Email: arthur.ghins@kcl.ac.uk
1126727PSX0010.1177/00323217221126727Political StudiesGhins
research-article2022
Article
552 Political Studies 72(2)
On the other hand, the French liberal tradition is often traced to Montesquieu (Geenens
and Rosenblatt, 2012: 1). But although Constant and Tocqueville read and admired
Montesquieu, they did not see him as an exclusive source of inspiration, and not a dis-
tinctly liberal thinker. Given these puzzles, this essay asks: when and why did the idea of
a French liberal tradition first emerge?
This essay reveals that the French liberal tradition is a belated construction.3 In the
early 1860s, in the French Second Empire, a liberal party—the Liberal Union—was
formed. By that time, Mme de Staël and Constant were long dead (d. 1817 and d. 1830,
respectively). Guizot’s mentor, Pierre-Paul Royer-Collard, had died in 1845, and
Tocqueville was recently deceased (d. 1859). Members of the Liberal Union created the
French liberal tradition to strengthen liberalism’s legitimacy against Napoleon III’s
Caesarism and a possible resurgence of socialism. In the 1860s, liberals wished to uphold
individual and political liberties against administrative centralization and state interven-
tion. As a result, early versions of the tradition included Constant, Royer-Collard, and
Tocqueville, who were cast as apostles of fundamental liberties against despotic regimes.
Montesquieu was adjoined to their names later. In the early 1870s, after the downfall of
the Second Empire, the French debated whether France should be a republic or a monar-
chy. Former members of the now-defunct Liberal Union were split on the question.
Center–left and center–right liberals turned to Montesquieu as the great theorist of liberty
under different regime forms. At this juncture, Montesquieu became the founding figure
of the French liberal tradition.
The distinction between doctrine and tradition is central to the argument of this article.
By political doctrine, I here mean a set of concepts that its author sees as a guide to politi-
cal action. By tradition, I mean a succession of thinkers that are perceived as sharing
substantial views about politics and are thought to have been successively updating each
other’s arguments over time. This distinction allows us to perceive that, from the mid-
nineteenth century onwards, at least in France, liberals have been adapting the authors
and themes of the liberal tradition to match preferred definitions of liberalism as a politi-
cal doctrine in shifting contexts. Of course, competing accounts of liberalism and the
liberal tradition can emerge at the same time. For example, in the 1860s in France,
Edouard the Laboulaye defended an individualist liberalism emphasizing small govern-
ment. As a result, he portrayed Constant and Tocqueville as great individualists.
Concomitantly, Charles de Rémusat advocated a moderate liberalism focused on the role
elite social bodies had in preserving liberty. On his terms, Constant and Tocqueville were
apostles, not of laissez faire, but of the decline of freedom under the pressure of demo-
cratic leveling. In the 1870s, debates about liberalism shifted. The key issue for liberals
was no longer opposition to Caesarism but rather regime forms. Conceptions of liberal-
ism were updated, and so were corresponding versions of the French liberal tradition,
which now included Montesquieu. As I want to suggest, identifying how central this
distinction was to the invention of the French liberal tradition can help us to apprehend
the history of liberalism as a process of reinvention of preferred liberal traditions in light
of shifting conceptions of liberalism as a political doctrine.
I
Like other scholars, I rely on an “actor’s category” approach to liberalism (Bell, 2016: 5).
I track how liberals “defined themselves and what they meant when they spoke about
liberalism” (Rosenblatt, 2018: 2). For the purpose of this essay, it is helpful to distinguish
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