This is a well-researched, ambitious and cogently written monograph that surveys Bentham's connections with France over fifty years. Enlightenment and Utility situates the origins of classical utilitarianism within the initial European context of 1780s enlightened radicalism and reform through to the more sombre attitudes of the post-1815 era. The volume focuses on the singular importance of European politics and intellectual culture in the formation of Bentham's utilitarianism, the relationship between Bentham's thought and French political philosophy, and the successive attempts to disseminate his ideas and influence decision-making in Bourbon, Revolutionary, Napoleonic and Restoration France. Bentham's thought is intimately bound up with Francophone philosophy and philosophers: as de Champs puts it, as a ‘traveller, translator, pamphleteer and epistolary correspondent, Bentham was physically and socially embedded within the intellectual networks of a cosmopolitan Enlightenment in which French remained a vehicular language’ (19). By adopting a French lens through which to view Bentham's life and activity, we can understand better his specific position within the complex intellectual and political times he lived through and which he wished to influence.
The five parts of Enlightenment and Utility flow chronologically. Part I details Bentham's moves to enter the European Republic of Letters. Under his father Jeremiah's insistence, Bentham learnt proficiency in French at a young age. Enlightened French philosophy served to inspire much of Bentham's thought. From Helvétius, he learnt the utility principle; from Voltaire, irreverence towards (illegitimate) authority; and from d'Alembert's ongoing dialogue with Locke and Condillac, Bentham built up his own reflections on epistemology. He would use his language skills to enter first the cosmopolitan intellectual networks of 1770s London, and from here wider European intellectual culture. He translated Voltaire's Christianity-mocking The White Bull, added a Preface containing similar sarcastic commentary on Christianity and especially biblical criticism, with Bentham moulding his satire to British religious debate. This was followed by a translation of the first volume of Marmontel's Les Incas in 1777. Bentham sent copies of his View of the Hard-Labour Bill (1778) to d'Alembert, Morellet and Chastellux, and positioned himself in accompanying letters as a fellow reformer engaged in schemes of modernisation and improvement.
Bentham would switch his authorial language from English to French when drafting the huge Project for a Complete Body of Laws. The Project, the subject of Part II, illustrated Bentham's ambition to contribute to continental legal reform. Writing in French was partly a pragmatic decision: Bentham wanted his Project to be read by the Francophile Catherine II. But it also indicated how Bentham was immersing himself in and contributing to a pan-European conversation about reforming law codes. Bentham's thought demonstrates clear inspiration taken from Helvétius, Beccaria and prominent criminal law reform projects taking place on the Continent. And de Champs stresses that the 1780s were a ‘much more creative period’ for Bentham ‘than has so far been recognised’ (82) – a creativity stemming from engagement with continental legal reform. She also stresses that Bentham was not the most radical thinker, but one in tune with leading enlightened legislators such as Montesquieu. Bentham's Project argued for the transformation of laws on the basis of the utility principle, to be enacted through a cautious gradualism involving the cultivation of enlightened public opinion, and set out in a new, clear legal vocabulary. As de Champs ably discusses, Bentham was opposed to the distribution of property, attacked common and Roman law, and adopted a merely ameliorist and gradualist position on slavery.
Through his patron Lord Lansdowne, Bentham met the Genevan Étienne Dumont in the late 1780s. Bentham was tremendously lucky to have the energetic and enthusiastic Dumont dedicated to the translation and dissemination of Bentham's works in France. Part III explores how, aided by Lansdowne and the connections he enabled, Bentham's hopes were raised for informing debate within Revolutionary France. Noticeably, Bentham engaged with the French Revolution and not with the ideological blowback in Britain. He was part of a distinct group of cosmopolitan reformers who wished to modernise France but without transforming it into a republic. Revolutionary France was the great laboratory for political proposals, though Bentham would be disappointed with the muted reception his ideas met with. De Champs stresses how Bentham's revolutionary writings emerged, often directly, out of his earlier Project. Bentham is shown to modify his initial support for a qualified expansion of the franchise, founded on the criterion of literacy, in the face of increasing popular violence. Still, Bentham believed in the Revolution's promise and he hoped to influence it as a foreign expert. But he did not gain much of a hearing and the Terror soon shut down the moderate reformists and Bentham with them.
Part IV surveys the brief moment of opportunity in 1802 for Bentham to influence French politics. Bentham's connections helped him to publish that year his Traités de legislation civile et pénale and Esquisse d'un ouvrage en faveur des pauvres. With the heirs of Helvétius, the Idéologues, in charge, this should have been the moment for sustained French engagement with Bentham's ideas. But renewed war broke communication between Britain and France, leaving Bentham's hopes for influence again disappointed. Bentham's fame in France had risen in 1802, building on ground prepared by the networks established during the Revolution and especially by Dumont and Samuel Romilly. The latter two had done much to keep Francophone interest in Bentham's work alive in the intervening years, far more than Bentham did. The publication of Dumont's edition of Traités de legislation in 1802 increased Bentham's stock as a legal reformer worth reading in France and Europe at large. Indeed, it is from the French Traités that Bentham's work was translated and spread across the rest of Europe, but especially in Spain, Portugal and Latin America. With Anglo-French hostilities by 1803 again cutting lines of communication, the 1802 moment brought about nothing tangible. Hopes for influence were dashed as quickly as they were raised.
Part V deals with what happened after the 1815 Restoration. Bentham influenced debate within early French liberal circles, with his writings studied by de Staël, Constant, de Chateaubriand, Say, de Saint-Simon and Lafayette. Yet by 1830 utilitarianism had been evicted from its already precarious perch within French political philosophy. Benthamite thought lost any aura that it did have due to the criticisms of de Staël and Constant. The former accused utilitarianism of weakening the foundations of moral obligation, while Constant's natural rights discourse pushed out the utility principle. Bentham had his friends, but again he was not on the right side of French history. André Morellet agitated to get Benthamite principles implemented in French law. Marc-Antoine Julien and Jean-Baptiste Say were impressed by Bentham's grounding of political economy on rational, scientific principles. Indeed, Say was Bentham's principal French correspondent during the Restoration, followed by Lafayette. But neither man's enthusiasm shifted the sense that Bentham's thought was of secondary, even tertiary, importance.
Enlightenment and Utility has a bone to pick with national myths about Bentham. To Francophone political philosophy, utilitarianism is something alien. To Anglophone political philosophy, Bentham is excised from liberalism due to his ability to pass as a philosophe. As an aside, this reviewer, a junior academic, has taught on history of political thought and European Enlightenment courses at four different English universities and never once was Bentham mentioned. De Champs's detailed research exposes the hoary opposition of British and Continental political philosophy, established by Michael Oakeshott and consolidated by Isaiah Berlin, as grossly misinterpreting Bentham. Bentham's example, de Champs contends, also challenges the interpretative constraints Enlightenment studies has got itself wrapped up in recently. Benthamite utilitarianism emerged out of its author's immersion in French language and thought, and was a ‘product of a consistent linguistic, cultural and political context in continental Europe’ (p. 200) as much as it was that of Britain. The Francophile Bentham is neither radical Parisian philosophe nor conservative Anglican moderate, and nor are his followers in both Britain and France. Pick a famous interpretative schema for Enlightenment studies – Venturi, Pocock, Israel – and Bentham does not fit. Here de Champs aligns herself with Roy Porter's more capacious account of the British Enlightenment – one that can accommodate and celebrate Bentham's role – and James Burns's embedding of Bentham into both French and British enlightenments. Indeed, Bentham was a ‘perfect illustration of the cosmopolitan aspect of the European Enlightenment’ (p. 12).
De Champs argues against dividing Bentham's career into a first half focused on legal reform and a latter half focused on democratic politics. She stresses the continuity of interests and motivations throughout his career. By tracing Bentham's intellectual activity against the context of his engagement with France and the French language, de Champs argues, we see continuity between the young and older Bentham. The argument centres on the claim that the Project contained many of the central ideas that remained important to Bentham throughout the succeeding four decades. De Champs calls on her fellow Bentham scholars to study Bentham's thought across the long duration of his political activity. She argues that his thought is consistent, though modified and enriched by events, and that the emphasis on the battling forces of present happiness and security of property was changed according to circumstance.
De Champs has immersed herself in archival material to trace the personal and behind-the-scenes circulation of Bentham's ideas within the French-speaking world. Enlightenment and Utility is a transnational history and one that wishes to advance the study of the ‘global Bentham’ (p. 17). Understanding the subsequent worldwide spread of Benthamite ideas requires understanding the stepping-off point of France – it is from the Traités that Bentham reaches the rest of the world. Enlightenment and Utility does an excellent job in reconstructing the personal connections, patronage links and activities of translators and well-wishers in the attempt to establish Bentham and utilitarianism in France. De Champs marshals all resources available to her and puts the best spin on it. Yet the overall impression remains that, while France might have been particularly important to Bentham, Bentham was not particularly important to France. De Champs has given much colour to the picture of Bentham as part of a generation of enlightened reformers and radicals coming of age in 1780s Europe and remaining, in one role or another, until the 1820s. But he was not a leading member of that generation in terms of France.
Enlightenment and Utility encourages us to think of Bentham not as quintessentially English, but as a cosmopolitan English participant in a Europe-wide reform movement. Evidence for Bentham's significance in France is, ultimately, underwhelming. It is to her credit that de Champs acknowledges and analyses the causes for this. To this reviewer, an outsider to the precision of Bentham studies, the man at the centre of the story often reads like someone who did not follow through. It is a story of grandiose but unfulfilled hopes of influence, unsent or ignored letters, trips to Paris where Bentham does not actually do much proselytising, nominations to be a foreign citizen of republican France that are rejected, and so on. Bentham is often only a bit-part player in the European movement in which de Champs situates him and where he, more often than not, failed to contribute, participate, or energetically seek the distribution of his ideas. For brief moments, such as during the 1802 peace, a window of opportunity opens for utilitarianism to have an impact. But it was just as quickly, and forcibly, shut. If anything, this is a story of renewed disappointment and failure, of Bentham not influencing debate or decision-making.
De Champs's story is still very much worth telling. Readers accustomed to bombastic claims of singular significance that characterise much current historiography will need to adjust their antennae. Enlightenment and Utility is a meticulously researched and ambitious piece of work that does not shy away from the smallness of the triumphs and the extent of the difficulties and failures of Benthamite utilitarianism in France. In the process de Champs writes interestingly about the intellectual culture Bentham conceived himself as being part of and which he tried to influence, and about the continuities in his thought from the 1780s through to the 1820s. Enlightenment and Utility is also a necessary, indeed central, component of any project to write a global intellectual history of Benthamite utilitarianism.
