Last year, Andreas Kalyvas and Ira Katznelson published a brief, bold book on a topic from which historians of political thought have tended to shy away, curiously enough—the relations between republicanism and liberalism as political ideologies in the age of the American and French Revolutions.Footnote ¹Liberal Beginnings: Making a Republic for the Moderns is relentlessly polemical, blaming this neglect on the historians and theorists responsible for resurrecting the early modern republican tradition over the last few decades. Pocock, Skinner, Wood, Petit, and more are assailed for having indulged in what Kalyvas and Katznelson call “republican nostalgia”—that is, for having wrongly presented republicanism as an alternative to modern liberalism, rather than its parent and precursor. Instead, the authors of Liberal Beginnings set out to show the ways in which republicanism evolved into liberalism, in and through the works of a set of leading thinkers—Smith, Ferguson, Paine, Madison, Staël, and Constant. Their story has a happy ending. Whatever was valuable and actual in republicanism was smoothly incorporated into early liberalism, for which they turn the dictionary inside out in search of approbative adjectives—“situated,” “thick,” “sturdy,” “confident,” “open,” “immanent,” “heterogeneous,” and “syncretic.” How persuasive is their account? Not a few readers will detect a hint of protesting too much in this kind of cheerleading. “Thick,” “sturdy,” and “confident” are surely not the first terms to spring to mind in regard to this gallery of thinkers, Staël and Constant least of all. It also seems clear that Kalyvas's and Katznelson's coverage of French thought, confined almost entirely to that pair, is too cursory to sustain their case. At one end, Montesquieu and Rousseau, the titans who together defined republicanism for the revolutionary generation, make only the most fleeting of appearances in Liberal Beginnings. At the other, Tocqueville, acknowledged on all sides as the master thinker of French liberalism, is missing altogether. Nevertheless, the attempt at treating anglophone and French thinkers within a single interpretative framework is in itself a virtually unprecedented feat, for which Kalyvas and Katznelson should be congratulated. For who could doubt that they are on exactly the right path in chasing their prey onto French soil?

It is in this context that the simultaneous appearance of the books by Annelien de Dijn, Andrew Jainchill, and Helena Rosenblatt takes on its significance. It would be wrong to suggest that the Cambridge “school”—the chief object of Kalyvas's and Katznelson's polemical ire—has ignored France. The pioneering efforts of Keith Baker, studying political “languages” and “discourses” in their precise historical contexts in Inventing the French Revolution, have recently been spectacularly broadened and deepened by those of Michael Sonenscher, in Before the Deluge and Sans-Culottes.Footnote ² But Baker and Sonenscher, focused exclusively on eighteenth-century thought and its relation to the Revolution, necessarily stop short of the problem pursued by Kalyvas and Katznelson. Not so French Political Thought from Montesquieu to Tocqueville, Reimagining Politics after the Terror, and Liberal Values, which together offer us a striking extension of the Cambridge method and outlook into new historical territory. De Dijn is, in fact, a student of Quentin Skinner, Jainchill's argument revolves around a conception of “classical republicanism” inspired directly by Pocock, and Rosenblatt's first book already gave us the most important recent study of Rousseau in relation to his Genevan context.Footnote ³ Moreover, the three volumes fit together—if with certain tensions between them—rather in the fashion of Chinese boxes. French Political Thought from Montesquieu to Tocqueville, indeed, casts a much wider net than Liberal Beginnings, starting and ending with the giants who are missing from the latter. Reimagining Politics after the Terror, which also concludes with reflections on Tocqueville, narrows its focus to the pivotal episode in the crystallization of liberalism, the transition from First Republic to First Empire. Liberal Values, finally, offers a vivid new profile of the thinker whom nearly all commentators—including Kalyvas and Katznelson—now regard as the central intellectual figure of that episode. All in all, it would be difficult to imagine a more thorough response to the challenge posed by the authors of Liberal Beginnnings.

Despite its broad reach, extending from the early eighteenth century to the late nineteenth, French Political Thought from Montesquieu to Tocqueville is not the general survey implied by its title, but instead tracks the fortunes over time of a single political tradition or “language.” Rather than any of the established objects of Cambridge attention—ancient constitutionalism, classical republicanism, natural-rights theory, political economy—the language in question is one that de Dijn presents as a discovery: “aristocratic liberalism.” The term itself has long been in circulation, of course, and indeed recently served as the centerpiece of Alan Kahan's widely noted comparative study of Burckhardt, Mill, and Tocqueville.Footnote ⁴ But where Kahan describes that trio as sharing a set of values inspired by ancient and modern conceptions of individual “excellence,” de Dijn sees “aristocratic liberalism” as a more narrowly French tradition, whose inaugural figure was Montesquieu. She is not, however, particularly interested in the various constitutional contrivances—“separation of powers,” “checks and balances”—with which his name later became linked. Montesquieu's liberalism, she argues, was instead grounded in a much deeper historical vision, which he shared with his older and less circumspect compatriot, Boulainvilliers. For both, liberty in France was a gift of the Middle Ages, depending upon the landed property and political privileges of the aristocratic social order that had descended from the feudal nobility. There were differences between the two thinkers:

Either way, “aristocratic liberalism” of this kind was naturally bound to attract few followers in the second half of the century, as the Bourbon monarchy, thoroughly tarred with the brush of “despotism,” stumbled toward the Revolution.

With the collapse of the Old Regime, however, Montesquieu's arguments came into their own, de Dijn argues. During the Revolution, one-time aristocratic radicals and reformers rapidly rediscovered the virtues of social hierarchy and monarchy, as well as the attractions of the English model of their interrelation. Not surprisingly, Restoration royalists embraced Montesquieu's notion of an umbilical connection between aristocracy and liberty even more warmly and comprehensively: “No moderate government can exist, and even less true liberty, without an aristocracy,” wrote Charles Cottu, whose De l'Esprit du gouvernement anglais of 1820 marked the high point of the Royalist celebration of the English constitution (45). More unexpected, perhaps, is the fact that liberal thinkers, too, now warmed to the idea that some sort of “intermediary power” was the best means of preserving liberty in a “levelled” society. At the start of the Restoration, their commitment to equality as a principle was still strong enough to send most liberals off in quite different directions, either towards the classic expressions of laissez-faire “industrialism,” as in Dunoyer, or to what de Dijn calls the “neo-republican” liberalism of the later Constant. But faced with the ultraroyalist ascendancy after 1820, and gripped by an increasing sense of the threat to liberty posed by modern egalitarianism, liberals began to borrow the Montequieuean themes of their opponents. This was a tendency, de Dijn suggests, first seen among the “doctrinaires”—Royer-Collard, de Broglie, Auguste de Staël, and, above all, Prosper de Barante, early champion of the “decentralization” of the state. The arrival of the July Monarchy then split the ranks of French liberalism into an establishment “Resistance” and an opposition “Movement,” neither of which was particularly drawn to “aristocratic liberalism.” But the vitality of the tradition was more than restored by the young Tocqueville, inspired by his sighting of the egalitarian future in a society still more “levelled” than that of France. If the stamp of Constant's “neo-republican” liberalism was still discernible in the first volume of De la Démocratie en l'Amérique, this vanished in the second, which, for de Dijn, represents Tocqueville's full embrace of a Montesquieuean conception of “intermediary power”—though with a deeply pessimistic twist, given Tocqueville's conviction of the irreversibility of democratic “levelling,” which seemed to doom modern society as a whole to the “soft despotism” he had glimpsed in North America. Little occurred in the succeeding decades to relieve the pessimism of “aristocratic liberals,” whose ranks, under the Second Empire, included the later Tocqueville, Laboulaye, Barrot, and Montalembert, and, in the early Third Republic, Taine. However, despite its apparent marginalization and defeat, de Dijn concludes, “Aristocratic liberalism . . . was not a minority tradition; rather, it constituted one of the most important ways of thinking about liberty in nineteenth-century France” (189). Nor was its life entirely over, since its echoes were audible a century later in the revisionist historiography and neoliberal revival associated with François Furet.

By any measure, French Political Thought from Montesquieu to Tocqueville makes a quirky addition to Cambridge's Ideas in Context series. Its miniature scale, covering a century and more in less than two hundred pages, means that even texts that seem central to its argument receive very scant attention. Some eighteen pages are devoted to La Démocratie en l'Amérique, by far the longest sustained analysis in the book; but L'Ancien Régime et la Révolution is dispatched in two paragraphs. As for the wider historical context for “aristocratic liberalism” in France—the political contours of the Restoration, July Monarchy, Second Republic, Second Empire, Third Republic—these are barely gestured at. No reader will want to dispute the claims that a wide range of liberal thinkers in France, from Constant to Tocqueville and beyond, believed that some form of pre-political social hierarchy was the last, best obstacle to egalitarian “despotism,” that they often appealed to the authority of Montesquieu in doing so, and that they frequently cited the English aristocracy and constitution as models of “intermediary powers” in action. For all that, de Dijn provides ample evidence: long citations, well translated, are an attractive feature of French Political Thought from Montesquieu to Tocqueville. But without the comparative calipers that even a brief consideration of non-“aristocratic” liberalism would have provided, de Dijn's stronger claims—for a unitary tradition of “aristocratic liberalism,” descending directly from Montesquieu and operating at the center, rather than the margins, of nineteenth-century political thought—are very difficult to judge. Indeed, what no reader can miss is the fact that “aristocratic liberalism” seems to have been shadowed at every step by a competing political language with far greater claims to centrality in France—republicanism. De Dijn describes De l'Esprit des lois itself as already a rejoinder to “republican detractors” of the Bourbon monarchy in the middle of the eighteenth century. In fact, for every commentator who has detected proto-liberal elements in Montesquieu, there has been another to claim that the author of De l'Esprit des lois was plainly himself a republican, of one kind or another—classical, modern, or both at once.Footnote ⁵ At the other end of her story, de Dijn acknowledges the debt that Tocqueville owed to what she herself calls “neo-republican” liberalism; other interpreters have, of course, gone much further than this in assigning Tocqueville a prominent position in the “classical republican” canon. If the shadow of republicanism thus falls across the two leading exemplars of “aristocratic liberalism,” in a wider setting increasingly dominated by competing republicanisms, then this would seem to put a considerable amount of pressure on the category—almost certainly a minority outlook, for good or ill, perhaps not even quite a distinct “language” or “paradigm” at all.

What these difficulties point to is a general occupational hazard for practitioners of the Cambridge approach: making do with ever finer-grained description of ever-multiplying paradigms and traditions, or their hybrids, without attempting an account of their dynamic interaction, of the kind called for by critics such as Kalyvas and Katznelson. Of course, a synoptic survey of French political thought from Montesquieu to Tocqueville, accounting for the development and interrelation of republicanism and liberalism in terms of precise historical contexts, would be a colossal undertaking, perhaps beyond the range of any individual scholar. Nevertheless, Andrew Jainchill's Reimagining Politics after the Terror does attempt something like that, for what is perhaps the single most crucial episode in this wider story—and with striking success. There was a time when the decade separating Thermidor and the advent of the First Empire—Directory and Consulate—was the neglected middle child of Revolutionary history. But Jainchill's study of this period is, in fact, the latest in a series of rediscoveries of these chapters in the Revolution by a younger generation of anglophone scholars. Reimagining Politics after the Terror owes something both to James Livesey's engaging analysis of the political culture of the Directory in Making Democracy in the French Revolution (2001) and to Howard Brown's incisive account of the transition from Directory to Consulate in Ending the French Revolution: Violence, Justice and Repression from the Terror to Napoleon (2006). But Jainchill goes beyond Livesey and Brown in two decisive respects, offering a new and convincing interpretation of the development of political thought in this period, with a central bearing on the problems pursued by Kalyvas and Katznelson in Liberal Beginnings.

The first novelty of Reimagining Politics after the Terror is to make an extended case for regarding the Directory as the period in which “classical republicanism,” in the full Cambridge sense of the term, reached the peak of its influence over the political life of the First Republic. This is, of course, to fly in the face of conventional understandings of the Jacobin adventure, with its hyperbolic cult of classical antiquity—a view recently stamped with Keith Baker's authority, in a famous brief foray onto the terrain of the Revolution.Footnote ⁶ Without offering a full-dress reinterpretation of Jacobin republicanism, Jainchill insists that it was a hybrid whose dominant strains—“a chiliastic sense of time and voluntarist democratic sovereignty” (11)—were entirely alien to the classical republican tradition. Jainchill's argument for the classical orientation of what he terms the “republican center” of the Directory is then laid out in two chapters. The first provides by far the most detailed and convincing analysis of the Constitution of the Year III that we possess. Using the Thermidorian reapppropriation of Rousseau from the Jacobins—which produced his panthéonisation—as a starting point, Jainchill reveals the extent to which the Directory's design, presented to the Convention by Boissy d'Anglas in June 1795 and ratified with few changes in August, corresponded to the classical norms of the “mixed” or “balanced” constitution, as understood by republican theorists from Polybius and Cicero to Harrington and John Adams. At its center was the Revolution's sole experiment with bicameralism, balanced by an independent executive; to the Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen at the head of the constitution was now added a list of duties, originally ornamented with references to “republican virtue.” In the succeeding chapter, “The Post-Terror Discourse on Moeurs,” Jainchill demonstrates the degree to which the political culture of the Directory pinned its hopes for the success of the Constitution of the Year III on the power of ideas. He explores the burgeoning public subsidization of properly “republican” books and journals, in the wake of Thermidor; the strenuous search for new forms of civil religion, of which Théophilanthropie was only the most notorious; and the National Institute's sponsorship of essay contests such as that of 1797 (“What Are the Most Effective Institutions to Establish the Morality of a People?”—with “Happiness” later substituted for “Morality”). The latter drew forth Say's first published work, Olbie, or an Essay on the Means of Reforming the Moeurs of a Nation, which Jainchill reads, to great effect, as a classical-republican utopia, very much indebted to Harrington.

“France fully participated in the early modern Atlantic ‘Machiavellian Moment,’ to use Pocock's terminology, only after the Terror,” Jainchill concludes (11). Like all such “moments,” this one proved precarious and fleeting. The second great innovation of Reimagining Politics after the Terror is to offer a compelling contextual account of why and how some of the leading intellectual lights of the Directory's “republican center” began to leave their classical moorings behind and move, haltingly, toward a self-consciously “modern” republicanism. At the start of his third chapter, Jainchill reminds the reader that a conceptual contrast between “ancient” and “modern liberty” had long incubated in eighteenth-century thought, and had already figured in the face-off between Girondin and Jacobin republicanisms. But the “liberal republicanism” that started to surface after Thermidor, he argues, was not a mere echo of Girondism, whose emphatic embrace of commerce and exaggerated hostility toward “ancient” participatory liberty it lacked. Its initial statements, in the pamphlets and books of Charles-Guillaume Théremin and Germaine de Staël's unpublished manuscript “Des Circonstances actuelles qui peuvent terminer la révolution et des principes qui doivent fonder la république en France,” brought altogether new elements to republican thought. Théremin was one of the first popularizers of Kant in France, which helped lead him, among other things, to an early call for female emancipation. For her part, Staël might well have figured in Annelien de Dijn's book, since her project for restoring stability to the republic envisaged the creation of an aristocratic “intermediary body,” in the form of a Council of Elders sitting for life. At the same time, Staël's solution to the problem of providing an ideological foundation for republican moeurs was a theocratic one, involving the public embrace of Protestantism. If the prodromes of “liberal republicanism” in Théremin and Staël owed something to intellectual inputs from beyond French borders, the foreign entanglements of the Directory provided their own stimulus to thought, as Jainchill shows in his fourth chapter—a marvelous analysis of the debates over the nature of the French empire now taking shape, from the notion of “natural borders” to the unwonted emergence of a swarm of “sister republics,” with attendant dilemmas over federation and annexation.

One further element was needed, however, to bring “liberal republicanism” proper into being. The essential catalyst was provided, of course, by 18 Brumaire and the triumph of what Jainchill, borrowing Howard Brown's term, calls “liberal authoritarianism”—a lineal descendent, he remarks, of the “legal despotism” once championed by Physiocracy. Jainchill's fifth chapter bookends his first, with a detailed analysis of the Constitution of the Year VIII, the brainchild of Roederer and Sièyes, long the most consistent intellectual opponents of classical republicanism of any variety. It was the experience of what might be termed “actually existing legal despotism” under the first years of the Consulate that then elicited the first major statements of “liberal republicanism,” in a dialectical process that Jainchill presents in three steps. First, the crackdown that followed the assassination attempt of December 1800 sharpened the minds of the new regime's liberal architects: the military tribunals announced by Portalis a month later provoked a “furious” response from even Sieyès himself, police reports indicated. Next, the combination of a vastly increased censorship and the Concordat produced a striking deflection of political concerns onto the terrain of religion. Constant was prevented from publishing Sismondi's Recherches sur les constitutions des peoples libres, and Staël was expelled from Paris after dedicating Delphine to “the silent but enlightened in France,” but the National Institute was able to sponsor an essay contest in 1802 asking, “What Was the Influence of Luther's Reformation on the Political Situation of the Different European States and on the Progress of the Enlightenment?” The prize was captured by Charles de Villers, another notable promoter of Kantianism, with an essay that Constant described as “the most hostile work against Catholicism that may ever be published” (269). Finally, it was Constant himself who drew the conclusions, returning to a manuscript that he had probably begun in 1798, around the time that he had started to use the adjective “liberal” to refer to political first principles. De la Possibilité d'une constitution républicaine dans un grand pays was finished between 1801 and 1803. First published only in 1991, the text has remained understudied in scholarship on Constant—dismissed as “classical republican” by Kalyvas and Katznelson. For Jainchill, however, the manuscript—which moves from a ringing defense of republican principles and assault on monarchy (with Bonaparte plainly a target), to an elaborate scheme of electoral filtering processes, a proposal for a pouvoir préservateur to balance legislative and executive power, and a concluding insistence on the protection of “individual liberties” as the aim of the entire structure—is the first comprehensive statement of liberal republicanism. As such, it provided the unchanging core of Constant's mature outlook, which found its full expression in the published work that made his fame as a political thinker—De l'Esprit de la conquète et de l'usurpation, Principes de politique, and the 1819 speech on “ancient and modern liberty.”

Reimagining Politics after the Terror concludes with a brief glance at the fate of “liberal republicanism” from the later Constant to Tocqueville. The labeling is different, but the mapping of French political thought over the next few decades otherwise looks similar to that of de Dijn. If his precise account of its origins is new and compelling, Jainchill is, of course, far from the first to see Constant as standing at the head of a tradition whose aspiration was to combine the assets of “ancient” and “modern” liberty in varying ratios. Roughly speaking, this has been the view to which most of the scholars responsible for the Constant revival of recent decades have adhered—Holmes, Fontana, Gauchet, Jaume. It is also the consensus that Helena Rosenblatt seeks, if not exactly to overturn, then at least to revise and enrich dramatically, in Liberal Values: Benjamin Constant and the Politics of Religion. As she points out, only the most willful reader of Constant can overlook the central role of religion in his life and thought—everything that led Stendhal mockingly to call him “the Bossuet of the Protestants.” But nor has any scholar succeeded in taking the epithet with the seriousness it deserves, Rosenblatt argues, partly owing to the lingering grip of Marxism on the interpretation of political thought. Even those who have addressed the topic have done no more than “scratch the surface” of an issue that in fact turns out to be the key to grasping the character of Constant's liberalism. For far from limiting herself to the tracking of a single strand of his thought, what Rosenblatt actually proposes in Liberal Values is a root-and-branch reinterpretation of Constant's intellectual career as a whole, with large consequences for our view of the historical origins and meaning of liberalism.

On Rosenblatt's telling, Constant began his intellectual career—whose every phase, from his father's assumption of the direction of his education in 1774 to his death in Paris in the first year of the July Monarchy, she reconstructs in meticulous detail—as a teenage adherent of the French Enlightenment: atheist follower of La Mettrie and Helvétius, fan of Crébillon. But the history of religion, as central object of fascination, was there from the start as well. Constant spoke on the “Influence of Pagan Mythology on Manners and Character” at university in Edinburgh at age sixteen; in Brussels, at eighteen, he already recorded his intention to write a history of polytheism—the kernel for the work that would be published as De la Religion some four decades later. The initial turn in a specifically Protestant direction seems to have had a double catalyst: exposure to the intellectual world of late Enlightenment Paris, deeply polarized over religion, followed by Constant's assumption of the post at Brunswick-Wolfenbüttel, where he enjoyed his first encounter with the German Enlightenment, above all the liberal conception of “progressive revelation,” introduced by Semler and made famous by Lessing. He was at work on a manuscript titled “The Spirit of Religions” even before his head-over-heels encounter with Staël in September 1794—a work, she declared, that “showed a talent equal to Montesquieu.” Reuniting in Paris the following year, the lovers found themselves in the thick of Thermidorian intellectual life. Andrew Jainchill's account of this conjuncture stresses the extent to which the “republican center,” toward which Staël and Constant gravitated without hesitation, fixed its sights on ideas as the crucial terrain of political struggle. Going a step further, Rosenblatt insists on the overwhelmingly religious character of the ideas in question. Staël's own call for a Protestantization of the French Republic was a direct response, she argues, to the counterrevolutionary Catholic offensive launched in these years by Bonald and Maistre. In Constant's own case, however, as in Jainchill's narrative, it took Brumaire and the initial experience of the Consulate to complete his own political and moral education. Here, too, Rosenblatt highlights the religious dynamic behind the gathering liberal response to Bonapartism, which renders the Concordat an even more central event in its emergence than in Reimagining Politics after the Terror. Chauteaubriand's assault on Protestantism in the Génie du Christianisme, whose second edition was dedicated to Napoleon, earning its author a post at the embassy in Rome, was matched by the violence of Staël's counterattack on Catholicism in Delphine. Her expulsion from France led Constant, still following in Staël's tracks, on his second and still more decisive sojourn in Germany. It was there, in 1804, Rosenblatt argues, that Constant, encountering Goethe, Schiller, Wieland, the Schlegels, and Schelling, and reading Herder for the first time, discovered and embraced the distinction between inward religious sentiments, and the outward form of their expression, that would henceforward serve as the linchpin of his thought.

The result was to permit Constant to “become Constant,” as Rosenblatt puts it. The first work of his intellectual—liberal—maturity was not the manuscript retrofitting republicanism for a “large country,” selected by Jainchill, but rather the 1806 version of Principes de politique applicables à tous les gouvernements. Politically, its innovation was indeed a refusal to endorse any particular form of government, including popular sovereignty, in order to insist on erecting absolute barriers for the protection of individual liberties and rights. Private property, in particular, was “inviolable” and “sacred”—not merely as an end in itself, but for the “proprietary spirit” that it inspired. For the philosophical foundation of Principes de politiques was a vision of individual moral development directly indebted to the English Protestant tradition of Rational Dissent, whose most recent representatives were Priestly, Paine, Price, and, above all, Godwin. Gone was any trace of Enlightenment hostility to religion, or utilitarian calculation of its advantages: “I place religion higher,” Constant wrote, “I do not see it as a supplement to the gallows or the wheel.” Religion was instead “the most natural” and “the purest of all emotions”; and “Tolerance is nothing else than the freedom of all present and future religions.” This warm embrace of Protestant first principles deepened over the next few years, reinforced by Constant's continued intellectual partnership with Staël, which long survived their personal break-up. These were the years in which he helped her complete De l'Allemagne, her own tribute to the contributions that Protestant “free inquiry” had made to the cause of liberty; and in which the wider Coppet circle was swept by a “wave of mysticism,” which earned a new audience for Guyon and Fénelon. Despite the surface turmoil of the end of the Empire and the first years of the Restoration—Constant's unseemly political acrobatics, the infatuation with Madame Récamier and duels with his rivals, Staël's death—Constant's fundamental convictions remained completely unshaken. Posterity has fixed on the 1819 speech at the Athénée Royale comparing “ancient and modern liberty” as the distilled expression of his mature political outlook. But Rosenblatt reminds us that this was preceded by weeks of lectures on religion at the same venue. Their record is now lost, alas, but they are a sign that Constant was hard at work on the book that he himself clearly regarded as the culmination of his intellectual career—De la Religion, whose first volume finally appeared in 1824, nearly forty years after its writing had begun. Struggling against time, Constant added three more volumes to it before his death at the end of 1830; a posthumous fifth volume was published a year later. The penultimate chapter of Liberal Values offers a detailed reading and defense of De la Religion, set against the tumultuous intellectual context of these years, in which religion and politics remained inextricably joined. “For forty years,” Constant wrote in 1829,

The italicized term, Rosenblatt explains, was soon to become a term of art in liberal Protestantism, the uplifting response to accusations of having promoted its dreary and selfish opposite, “individualism.”

In their own account of Constant's development in Liberal Beginnings, Kalyvas and Katznelson deploy a term of art of their own, describing his liberalism as resting on “immanent” foundations. Rosenblatt avoids all such euphemism, demonstrating once and for all the extent to which Constant's lifelong engagement with Protestant theology and moral philosophy was neither a personal foible nor incidental to his political thought in the slightest—rather, was the condition of possibility for the emergence of his brand of liberalism. Liberal Values is certain to have a large impact, and not merely on our understanding of Constant. For although it remains an intellectual biography in form, its subject's unique historical position—both as inheritor of multiple traditions of European political thought (French, British, and German) and as privileged witness to and participant in the Revolution and its aftermath—give it implications far beyond any individual life. Reading Liberal Values is to experience something of the perceptual switch effected for the preceding period in the history of French political thought by Dale Van Kley's brilliant study The Religious Origins of the French Revolution (1996), which rewrites the history of French political thought, as its subtitle suggests, all the way from “Calvin to the Civil Constitution.” Although Rosenblatt's tale begins at the precise moment that Van Kley's ends, she makes virtually no effort to connect her own episode to earlier chapters in the larger narrative recounting what might be termed “the waning of the Reformation”—though the tantalizing references to Guyon and Fénelon in Liberal Values give us some hints about how this might be done. But a sketch for a sequel entitled The Religious Origins of French Liberalism is easy to discern in Liberal Values. This would be a revision of received interpretations very much in tune with our times, with its widespread conviction of the theological foundations of all political thought.

Would it be compatible with the accounts of the origins and character of liberalism in French Political Thought from Montesquieu to Tocqueville and Reimagining Politics after the Terror? De Dijn has little to say on the contribution of religious thought to “aristocratic liberalism.” Jainchill, as we have seen, engages far more directly with the subject. But there remains an evident difference of opinion about the conceptual opposition between “ancient and modern liberty,” and the aspiration to join the two, as expressed in the 1819 lecture—plainly central to Constant's political thought for Jainchill, sharply downgraded in Rosenblatt's estimation. Beyond that, the more pressing question is whether the picture of Constant's intellectual development as depicted in Liberal Values can be seen as a general pattern, replicated more widely among the leading liberal thinkers. The example of Tocqueville suggests that the possibility cannot be ruled out. But whatever the verdict of subsequent scholarship in this regard, one thing seems certain. The account of the frictionless evolution of republicanism into liberalism on offer in Liberal Beginnings is impossible to reconcile with the evidence presented in Political Thought from Montesquieu to Tocqueville, Reimagining Politics after the Terror, and Liberal Values. Where Kalyvas and Katznelson celebrate the happy birth of a liberal ideology at peace with its ancestors and confidently betokening a “republic for the moderns,” these books suggest that French liberalism, at least, issued from something closer to a terrible childbed, and bore the scars to prove it. Jainchill's close-up analysis of the whiplash experience of the Directory and Consulate, the crucible in which “liberal republicanism” first emerged, explains perfectly why Rosenblatt's profile of its most acute mind should reveal so agonistic a figure, exhausting himself in a struggle to face a fearful modernity by recourse to one kind of premodern ideological prop or another, classical republican or liberal Protestant. The panorama presented by de Dijn, moving from the master thinker who preceded Constant to his most distinguished successor, traces a very sharp decline, from the serene and self-assured “aristocratic liberalism” of Montesquieu to the bleak and battered variant that survived in Tocqueville. Liberalism may have come into the world “thick,” “sturdy,” and “confident” elsewhere in Europe; in France, for better or for worse, “brittle,” “frail,” and “anxious” would probably be more like it.