“You might, if you pleased, have profited of our example,” Edmund Burke chided the leaders of the French Revolution in 1790, with the “Glorious Revolution” in mind: “Your constitution, it is true, whilst you were out of possession, suffered waste and dilapidation; but you possessed in some parts of the walls and in all the foundations of a noble and venerable castle. You might have repaired those walls; you might have built on those old foundations.” But was Burke right? Was anything remotely resembling the English 1688–1689, revolution politely disguised as “restoration,” ever really possible in France? Tradition has tended to regard the Monarchien campaign for bicameralism and an absolute royal veto, rejected by the National Constituent Assembly in September 1789, as the last, best hope for such an outcome. Jacques de Saint Victor, an ornament of contemporary center-right liberalism in France, suggests that we should look beyond the Monarchiens, to the “aristocrats” or “noirs,” who formed a not inconsiderable bloc in the Assembly through 1791, for a political program more faithful to what Burke had in mind. La première contre-révolution is a welcome study of the leading intellectual lights among the “noirs,” as their thinking evolved in and through the tumult of the first years of the Revolution.

The chief objects of Saint Victor's attention are all fascinators: Jacques Antoine Marie de Cazalès, famed for his fiery oratory, as well as his duel with Barnave; the comte de Montlosier, who went on to take fine literary revenge on a host of enemies after the Revolution; and the abbé Maury, wily political operative and future archbishop of Paris under Napoleon. Saint Victor's account of their brief careers as leaders of an “aristocratic” coalition in the Constituent Assembly is divided into four parts. His starting point is with the principles they shared, inherited from long traditions of aristocratic opposition to Bourbon absolutism. Above all, these were the authentic representatives in France of precisely the same kind of “ancient constitutionalism” whose English history was reconstructed by John Pocock; defenders of what they regarded as a perdurable constitutional order, which, weakened by a century or more of royal “despotism,” now faced an even more menacing popular adversary. Finding themselves at the head of a large opposition bloc within the Constituent Assembly, the “aristocrats” turned, after the defeat of the Monarchiens, to developing their own plans for reconstructing the traditional constitutional order, which Saint Victor analyzes at length in the second part of La première contre-révolution. Deeply committed to Enlightenment conceptions of “national sovereignty” and “the separation of powers,” the “aristocrats” entertained a number of different ways of recasting the Estates-General as a tri- or bicameral representative assembly, all of them, however, more royalist than the Monarchiens, not to speak of the king himself. This was a political outlook, Saint Victor concludes, rooted in eighteenth-century conceptions of “mixed government,” which also anticipated the “limited monarchies” of the nineteenth.

Behind these political principles lay deeper ideas about the shape of society, to which Saint Victor turns in the third part of the book. Mingling patriarchal ideals from Roman antiquity with feudal “trifunctionalism,” the “noirs” inherited from Montesquieu a fundamental belief in an umbilical link between the “intermediate powers” of a society of orders, and political and individual liberty. The final section of La première contre-révolution then assumes a narrative thrust hitherto lacking. In it, Saint Victor recounts how the “aristocratic” bloc, which initially defended a moderate Gallicanism, was gradually captured, as the Civil Constitution of the Clergy took shape, by an ultramontane minority within it, led by the redoutable abbé Maury. What the Vatican archives reveal, Saint Victor argues, is the essential role played by Maury and his allies in securing the papal condemnation of the Civil Constitution. The ensuing schism doomed the “aristocratic” opposition, which scattered into emigration, as the constitutional monarchy formally declared in September 1791 began to skid toward its destruction, less than a year later. With the First Republic, there emerged the second, more enduring “counterrevolution,” the very different tradition that descended from Bonald, Maistrre, and Barruel; the one remembered by posterity. But the first “counterrevolution,” ironically, may have inflicted the most lethal damage on the Revolution.

La première contre-révolution is by far the finest study of this particular coterie of political thinkers and actors that we possess. Keen sympathy for an object of study does not always yield insight. But here it does, owing, above all, to the intelligence and clarity of Saint Victor's readings of the texts and speeches at hand. These benefit, too, from deft references to a spectrum of later commentators: Carl Schmitt, Leo Strauss, Hannah Arendt, Louis Dumont, John Pocock, and Antonio Negri. Unlike Burke, Saint Victor entertains no illusions that the “aristocratic” project for restoring the “ancient constitution” of the French monarchy could ever have succeeded. As he concedes at several points, the social basis for such a political program was utterly lacking, the French nobility having long since parted company with the English gentry in its economic and political orientation. But the pursuit of lost causes can have fateful consequences. Perhaps the most striking aspect of La première contre-révolution is the central role that it assigns the “aristocrats” in bringing the Civil Constitution of the Clergy to grief, as if the “noirs,” faced with the failure of their political hopes, found their revenge in wrecking the religious settlement framed by their opponents. As they say, ça donne à penser.