Liberalism Under Siege: The Political Thought of the French Doctrinaires.

By Aurelian Craiutu. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2003. 356p. $80.00 cloth, $26.95 paper.

Alan Kahan and Roger Boesche have coined the terms “aristocratic liberalism” and “strange liberalism,” respectively, to describe enigmatic nineteenth-century thinkers like J. S. Mill and Alexis de Tocqueville. Aurelian Craiutu dubs the political theory of the French “Doctrinaires”—most notably, François Guizot, Pierre-Paul Royer-Collard, Charles de Rémusat, and Prosper de Barante—an “elitist liberalism.” This may strike some as an odd term of endearment. But this book raises provocative questions about the compatibility between antidemocratic assumptions and a legitimate concern for liberty across a wide swath of nineteenth-century French political thought. Liberalism's strong suit has always been its universalistic and emancipatory thrust, and the case of the Doctrinaires promises important lessons into what Craiutu calls, following Tocqueville, the “difficult apprenticeship of liberty,” marking liberalism's transition in the Restoration years from a purely oppositional philosophy to a concrete method of governance (p. 115).

Living in the wake of the Charter of 1814, which restored the Bourbon monarchs, the Doctrinaires were a vibrant group of thinkers and statesmen whose contributions to liberal political theory have been unduly overlooked, according to Craiutu. This book is not only an attempt to rehabilitate the Doctrinaires but an ambitious survey of the vibrant intellectual life of Restoration France, as French liberals turned to arts and letters and especially “to history in order to find convincing … arguments in favor of the legitimacy of the principles of 1789” (p. 58). Even so, all was not honey and roses for Restoration liberals. French politics was radically polarized. Usually stigmatized as shameless opportunism or weakness of will, moderation became a badge of honor. The Doctrinaires sought a juste milieu between radicals determined to perpetuate the Revolutionary logic of 1789, on the one side, and reactionary ultras who sought to sweep away the liberties to which it had given birth, on the other.

Craiutu builds his case for the enduring significance of the Doctrinaires by his richly detailed history of their struggle to defend liberty under perilous circumstances. This is a fine example of historical political theory at its very best, bringing political speeches and more academic historical and philosophical writings to bear on timeless questions like representation, civil liberty, public opinion, and the problem of political order. However, his case for the relevance of the Doctrinaires also, and maybe more importantly, hinges on their influence on canonical political thinkers like J. S. Mill and Alexis de Tocqueville. The book's highlight is Chapter 4, which focuses on the “Hidden Dialogue Between Guizot and Tocqueville.” Tocqueville scholars have been preoccupied by his remark that he communed regularly with the writings of Pascal, Rousseau, and Montesquieu. Without denying this, Craiutu mounts a compelling case that far and away the greatest influence on Tocqueville's Democracy in America and later writings was François Guizot, whose lectures Tocqueville attended and whose History of Civilization in Europe he requested soon after his arrival in the United States. Guizot and Royer-Collard are the sources of Tocqueville's distinction between political democracy and democracy as a “social condition,” or état social; his celebrated complaints about democratic despotism and modern individualism; and his faith in the Providential march of equality. According to Craiutu, the main outlines of Tocqueville's thinking about democracy were in place long before he arrived in America, and his trip to America was more akin to putting ornaments on the Christmas tree than “the innocence of a dazzled traveler to an exotic new continent” (p. 114).

This book's lone weakness is that it is often hard to tell where the author's presentation of the Doctrinaires' thought leaves off and where his defense of their actions and ideas begins. This becomes an issue in the book's last three substantive chapters on representation, political capacity, and publicity. Craiutu admits that the Electoral Law of 1817 supported by Guizot might legitimately be described as “extremely conservative because of the limited franchise that denied a significant part of the adult population the right to vote.” Like J. S. Mill and other nineteenth-century liberals, the Doctrinaires saw suffrage as rooted in “political capacity,” which is variable and contingent, and thus “the distribution of political rights must follow and reflect the formation of new capacities in society.” The right to vote is “a complex right that depends on the social condition, the moral and material development of society, and the progress of civilization” (p. 236). According to Royer-Collard, “capacity grants full political rights only to those individuals presumed capable of using them reasonably and withdraws it [sic] from those presumed to lack this capacity” (p. 228). The term “presumed” here is key, because despite the Doctrinaires' theoretical appeal to a wide range of complex considerations about “social intelligence” and the deliberative capacity of individuals, this “presumption” of political capacity boils down to the sole matter of social class, limiting suffrage to those who paid at least 300 francs of direct taxes. In fairness, after a long list of Guizot's accomplishments and favorable epigrams about Guizot by leading thinkers of the age, Craiutu pulls no punches in citing his faults (p. 68, 174–177), and records in conclusion his own preference for Tocqueville (p. 274). Still, one wishes that in resurrecting these highly contentious assumptions about political capacity the author had been more explicit in contrasting the Doctrinaires and Tocqueville to achieve a greater critical distance between himself and his subjects (cf. p. 115). For Tocqueville, suffrage is not simply a contingent right that must “follow” or accurately “reflect” some given level of what the Doctrinaires called “political capacity”; rather, the exercise of suffrage generates political capacity by its extension to ever-greater segments of society. The author turns a more critical eye toward the Doctrinaires' restrictions of a free press. Notwithstanding their general appreciation of the importance of publicity and the free exchange of ideas in maintaining a representative government, in 1814 the Doctrinaires supported laws abridging freedom of the press. In this instance, Craiutu not only adduces circumstances and the rationale justifying their controversial decision—and Guizot's eventual support under more auspicious conditions for a series of laws granting greater freedom to newspapers and journals—but he sharply contrasts the Doctrinaires with Benjamin Constant's strong defense of a natural liberty of the press.

Despite the clear lines Craiutu draws between the Doctrinaires' conundrums and liberalism's present discontents, I am not altogether persuaded that the solutions they offered are appropriate for modern democratic society. But even if readers finish this book with nagging doubts about the wisdom and enduring relevance of the Doctrinaires, they will have none whatsoever about the scholarly merits of Craiutu's eloquent plea on their behalf.