H-France Review Vol. 3 (August 2003), No. 88
Sudhir Hazareesingh, Ed. The Jacobin Legacy in Modern France: Essays in Honour of Vincent Wright. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2002. x + 244 pp. Notes, appendix, and index. £35.00 U.K. (cl.). ISBN 0-19-925646-2.
Review by David G. Troyansky, Texas Tech University.
I remember trying, as a graduate student in the late 1970s and early 1980s, to work out the various meanings of Jacobinism in the language of Michel Vovelle, who in so many ways has embodied the orthodox legacy of the French Revolution. Discussion of Revolutionary Jacobinism of the 1790s posed relatively few problems then--the literature focused on Jacobin clubs and revolutionary sociability in differing regional contexts--but Vovelle's use of the term went beyond identification with a particular kind of politics or history, and the term seemed to refer to revolutionary and not-so-revolutionary republicanism, the centralizing state, and a form of national or cultural identity in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. More recently, Vovelle has committed those ideas to print.[1] His book joins Patrice Higonnet's appreciation of the double nature of Jacobinism-- individualist and universalist--as among the more important studies of the topic.[2] Higonnet, in a most original way, links Jacobinism to Old Regime cultural tendencies, but he also looks forward and recognizes it as transcending the context of the Terror and contributing in creative ways to modern politics, thus going beyond the simpler anti-Bolshevik optic of François Furet. Yet Higonnet's focus remains on the Revolutionary period, and Jacobinism in particular nineteenth and twentieth-century contexts still demands greater scholarly attention.
The Jacobin Legacy in Modern France makes an important contribution to the history of French political culture. It is a Festschrift honoring the late Vincent Wright, whom Sudhir Hazareesingh describes as a "'republican' Jacobin--with more than a few Bonapartist trimmings" (p. 11), and whose historical and political science scholarship brought together the various concepts and manifestations of Jacobinism, especially in work on the French administrative elite of the nineteenth century. Hazareesingh, whose own work has investigated nineteenth-century Jacobinism, has assembled authors representing the range of Wright's interests and spanning the entire period since the French Revolution.[3] The Jacobinisms that emerge concern republicanism, Bonapartism, state service, freemasonry, the uses of education, Gaullism, French territorial integrity, and collective identities in an era of multiculturalism. They have to do with changing the world, but also structuring and governing it. Indeed, they take us into the world of bureaucracy as well as ideology.[4]
Hazareesingh's introduction does more than provide an appreciation of Wright and a taste of what comes in each chapter. It also offers a useful typology of Jacobinisms that goes beyond the political scientist's approaches to those of historians appreciative of different contexts and contingencies. In exploring the meanings of Jacobinism across time, he borrows from Vovelle's analysis of "transhistorical Jacobinism" (p. 7), along with the theoretical ideas of Lucien Jaume and the political reflections of Jean-Pierrre Chevènement.[5] Hazareesingh offers three basic distinctions. Republican vs. revolutionary Jacobinism describes the familiar tension between different legacies of 1789. Left vs. right permits further delineations, as left encompasses communists, progressives, and libertarians, and right includes both liberal and populist strains. State vs. action, derived from Jaume, embraces those who serve the state and those who challenge it. That last distinction proves quite useful in situating the servants of the state, who were so often the objects of Vincent Wright's historical scholarship.
Individual chapters bear out the utility of Hazareesingh's typology, but each has its particular strength, and I will address them, as they appear, in chronological order. The first two explore Jacobinism and warfare in the nineteenth century. Karma Nabulsi's treatment of republican justifications of war demonstrates that calls to arms in 1870-71 grew out of intellectual groundwork dating to the early 1830s, joining together both memories of the Year II and contemporary republican interpretations of the 1830 Revolution and revolts in 1832 and 1834. For Nabulsi, republicans claimed to be fighting despotism and defending liberty, but they also mobilized in time of war a vision of republican citizenship that derived from the earlier struggles. Hazareesingh's chapter also discusses memories of war, but in the particular context of honoring veterans of Revolutionary and Napoleonic campaigns. He examines ceremonies of 15 August, which functioned as a national fête in the Second Empire and blurred distinctions between Jacobinism and popular Bonapartism. Thus, Napoleon III's regime attempted to transcend ideological tensions and construct a national memory through a process of commemoration. In its processions, feasts, and banquets, the fête encouraged civic pride and national identification, anticipating Third Republic commemorations of 14 July. Public ceremony in the Second Empire has already been treated by Matthew Truesdell, but Hazareesingh combines the history of commemoration with the study of honor in post-revolutionary France, a field that received some stimulus in the work of William Reddy.[6]
Writings on honor often emphasize both the construction of a collective group through the actions of the state and the various uses individuals make of the state. The chapters of Jean-Pierre Machelon and Maurice Larkin work in those respective directions. They also build directly on Vincent Wright's scholarly foundation. Machelon explores the prefects from 1870 to 1914, and asks, "How did the prefectoral institution, which was created by an authoritarian, centralized regime, adapt itself to the progress of political democracy?" (p. 69). He recognizes the continued political role of the prefects, dependent as they remained upon the government, but he claims they underwent a process of professionalization as they emerged as an increasingly republican administrative elite. Purges came to an end in 1879, with subsequent reshuffling occurring according to electoral shifts. He describes the early Third Republic as "a regime that had inherited a great administrative tradition, but which was unsure about its legitimacy and its future and was constantly subject to revisionist assaults." The result was a "fusion between the militants and the 'men of skill', between State and government" (p. 88).
Larkin returns to a theme that opponents of revolutionary Jacobins made famous, the supposed link between Jacobinism and freemasonry. Far from opting for the conspiratorial, Larkin nonetheless observes the operations of people trying to forge political networks and appropriately takes his inspiration from work by Wright and Hazareesingh concerning an earlier period.[7] His chapter examines "the role that the Grand Orient played in provincial life and in furthering the personal interests of its members" (p. 90). Larkin reports that two thirds of lodges supported radicals while one third supported socialists. Yet, he claims that efforts at petitioning the state were not as successful as is sometimes claimed. His study of the correspondence of eight provincial lodges indicates five attempted interventions per day, but only a ten percent rate of success. Yet, he finds that freemasonry gave its provincial members an important source of meaning in their lives, occasions for serious discussion, and opportunities for charitable activity (p. 96).
We move from the provinces to Paris in the chapter by Philip Nord on Sciences Po, an institution whose role in training public servants evolved in challenging circumstances. In the period 1901-1935, when it offered schooling in liberal capitalism, 685 of 740 new recruits to the Grands Corps came by way of Sciences Po. But by the Popular Front, it was seen by the ascendant left as a "liberal, elitist, private, Parisian, bourgeois" institution deserving of reform (p. 116). Sciences Po made overtures to the university and key politicians. Christophe Charle has described its persistence as an elite institution.[8] Nord's approach emphasizes its adaptability. He tells the story of ideological movement from liberalism in the 1930s, accommodation under Vichy, an opening to the Resistance in 1942-43, and reform-mindedness with the Liberation. A challenge from the Communists in 1945 echoed the anti-elitist rhetoric of the Popular Front, but the institution negotiated a central role for itself, combining public and private features. It emerged as a state institution, with considerable autonomy, for the training of Keynesians and technocrats, its faculty including some of the most prominent academic social scientists in the country. For Nord, the reform of the institution "helped to stabilize democratic institutions even as it edged French democracy away from the Jacobin revolutionary republicanism that lay at its origins" (p. 146).
Douglas Johnson narrows the chronological focus to 1944-45 in a brief narrative of de Gaulle's reconstruction of the French state. In part he studies the familiar stories of his relationship to the Allies and to the various parties of the Resistance, but Johnson is primarily interested in the restoration of republican legality and of a powerful centralized state. A certain idea of Jacobinism, thus, linked the Right to the Republic. His sources include the relevant scholarly works of the 1990s, but he ignores the public debate of that era concerning the continuing responsibility of the state in the Vichy period. For him, the French state had been abandoned by Vichy (p. 156). At least, the focus on de Gaulle's perspective gives that impression, and the chapter sheds light on de Gaulle's predicament.
From Johnson's narrower chronological focus we move to more sweeping, theoretical treatments of the Jacobin legacy. Olivier Ihl's chapter discusses the role of honors in eighteenth and nineteenth-century thought and their use as a "systematic instrument of governance" (p. 158) in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. "The France that was born out of the Revolution has instituted twelve times more honorary distinctions than her monarchical predecessor did in 500 years" (p. 160). For Ihl, the shift from a cult of equality to one of emulation and honors indicates the importance of the majesty of the state. He analyzes the late Enlightenment work of Giuseppe Gorani, whose Recherches sur la science de gouvernement appeared in Italian in 1790 and, in revised form, in French in 1792, and the early nineteenth-century work on recompense by Jeremy Bentham. The importance of honor, as mentioned above, has already been discussed by Reddy for the first half of the nineteenth century. Ihl describes its continued importance.
In a sense, Ihl demonstrates a contradiction at the heart of the French state and its egalitarian Jacobinism. Yves Mény also describes an important paradox. In the Tocquevillean view, the French state is nothing if not centralized. However, Mény describes considerable provincial resistance to Jacobin uniformity. He discusses the special cases of Paris, Alsace-Lorraine, and the overseas territories, and has particularly important things to say about the implementation of policy on public education and social welfare. Uniformity emerges as a rhetorical device permitting local variation, political clientage, and even a kind of corporatism. And while he provides examples from more than two centuries, he is clearly concerned about the present when he concludes, "The territorial order of the Republic is dysfunctional and schizophrenic: it no longer corresponds either to its own organizational schema or to rules of economic efficiency, and even less to the needs of democracy" (p. 195).
Similarly, Dominique Schnapper voices doubts about the long-term viability of the Jacobin model. She tells a familiar story of immigration and integration, but she complicates it with important discussions of educational policy, regional languages, and the continued vitality of rural communes. For her, Jacobinism has been a "principle of integration and a political ideal directly linked to French national mythology" (p. 206). In practice, it has been possible for the government to deal in special ways with cities and ethnic populations. "Caught up in its own dynamic, the tendency of the Jacobin welfare state, whether through social, cultural, or ethnic intervention, is towards a movement from the collective to the individual, from the universal to the singular" (p. 210). Regionalism and globalization result in an erosion of Jacobinism, but she recognizes its historic flexibility, at least thus far. Interestingly, Europe seems a greater challenge than any of the ethnic and immigration issues. In a final remark she suggests that in the construction of Europe a more liberal British model of citizenship will win out over a state-controlled French one.
Each of the studies in the book has something to add to its particular scholarly context. Together they provide a serious consideration of how to balance history and political science. Vincent Wright's oeuvre, listed in the book's appendix, reminds us of the possibility of multidisciplinary research. Hazareesingh and his colleagues, in a kind of Jacobin ceremony of their own, honor and emulate Wright. They demonstrate that one does not shed one's theoretical concerns in entering the archives, nor does one theorize without a thorough grounding in the sources. Still, one comes away wondering whether Jacobinism now has too many meanings to be useful. When it was an object of debate between orthodox and revisionist Revolutionary historians, it seemed much simpler. Now it can be a stand-in for republicanism, revolution, civil service, group identity, and "Frenchness" itself, but perhaps the latest scholarly literature on Jacobinism will permit a new appreciation of the diversity of French political cultures in a two-hundred-year period.
LIST OF ESSAYS
-
Sudhir Hazareesingh, "Vincent Wright and the Jacobin Legacy in Historical and Theoretical Perspectives."
-
Karma Nabulsi, "'La Guerre Sainte': Debates about Just War among Republicans in the Nineteenth Century."
-
Sudhir Hazareesingh, "'Honorable and Honoured Citizens': War Veterans of the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Eras under the Second Empire."
-
Jean-Pierre Machelon, "The Prefect, Political Functionary of the Jacobin State: Permanences and Continuities (1870-1914)."
-
Maurice Larkin, "Fraternity, Solidarity, Sociability: the Grass Roots of the Grand Orient de France (1900-1926)."
-
Philip Nord, "Reform, Conservation, and Adaptation: Sciences-Po, from the Popular Front to the Liberation."
-
Douglas Johnson, "General de Gaulle and the Restoration of the Republic."
-
Olivier Ihl, "Emulation Through Decoration: A Science of Government?"
-
Yves Mény, "The Republic and its Territory: The Persistence and the Adaptation of Founding Myths."
-
Dominique Schnapper, "Making Citizens in an Increasingly Complex Society: Jacobinism Revisited."
-
Appendix: The Works of Vincent Wright.
NOTES
[1] Michel Vovelle, Les Jacobins, de Robespierre à Chevènement (Paris: La Découverte, 1999).
[2] Patrice Higonnet, Goodness beyond Virtue: Jacobins during the French Revolution (Cambridge, Mass., and London: Harvard University Press, 1998).
[3] Sudhir Hazareesingh situates what he calls "republican municipalism" between the extremes of Jacobinism and federalism. From Subject to Citizen: The Second Empire and the Emergence of Modern French Democracy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998).
[4] For a look at bureaucracy in a Revolutionary Jacobin context, see Catherine Kawa, Les ronds-de-cuir en Révolution: Les employés du ministère de l'Intérieur sous la Première République (1792-1800) (Paris: Editions du Comité des travaux historiques et scientifiques, 1996).
[5] Lucien Jaume, Le discours jacobin et la démocratie (Paris: Fayard, 1989) and Echec au libéralisme: Les Jacobins et l'Etat (Paris: Kimé, 1990); Jean-Pierre Chevènement, La République contre les bien-pensants (Paris: Plon, 1999).
[6] Matthew Truesdell, Spectacular Politics: Louis-Napoleon Bonaparte and the Fête impériale, 1849-1870 (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997); William M. Reddy, The Invisible Code: Honor and Sentiment in Postrevolutionary France, 1814-1848 (Berkeley and London: University of California Press, 1997).
[7] Sudhir Hazareesingh and Vincent Wright, Francs-Maçons sous le Second Empire (Rennes: Presses Universitaires de Rennes, 2001).
[8] Christophe Charle, "Savoir durer: la nationalisation de l'Ecole libre des sciences politiques, 1936/1945," Actes de la recherche en sciences sociales, no. 86-87 (March 1991): 99-105.
David G. Troyansky
Texas Tech University
david.troyansky@ttu.edu
Copyright © 2003 by the Society for French Historical Studies, all rights reserved. The Society for French Historical Studies permits the electronic distribution for nonprofit educational purposes, provided that full and accurate credit is given to the author, the date of publication, and its location on the H-France website. No republication or distribution by print media will be permitted without permission. For any other proposed uses, contact the Editor-in-Chief of H-France.
H-France Review Vol. 3 (August 2003), No. 88
ISSN 1553-9172
