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One view of French political thought is that it is a local version of a wider European intellectual phenomenon, one possibly so tied to European history that the notion of a separable French variant lacks focus. However, those who prefer to paint only on a European-wide canvas themselves make a case for a French variant. For example, they make the invidious comparison between Englishman John Locke’s and Swiss-born Frenchman Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s versions of the social contract as the good and bad examples of a common European endeavor, continuous from Thomas Hobbes on, to construct an understanding of democratic sovereignty. Such comparisons ignore, however, the specific purposes to which Locke’s and Rousseau’s arguments were put in their national contexts. Interconnected though modern European and North American political thought may appear, it can be broken down into national histories because political thought is also a response to, and an effort to affect, the peculiarities of a country’s institutions and practices.

Two Species Of Civil Society

To pursue the invidious comparison in question, it establishes a pejorative account of French political thought as the bad other of English thought, a cautionary tale for Lockean liberals of some of the ill-fated uses to which the contractualist vocabulary might tempt its adherents. French thinkers, beginning in the nineteenth century with Alexis de Tocqueville, got into this game as well in hoping that the potential in France for what we might call “illiberal liberalism” (whose roots were classically exhibited in Tocqueville’s The Ancien Régime and the French Revolution) could be corrected by looking for instruction from abroad in England or the United States (as expounded in Democracy in America). The post–World War II French antitotalitarian liberals, beginning with Raymond Aron and Michel Crozier and culminating with François Furet, pursued the same line in seeking to correct the political habits of their compatriots by a timely transplantation of Anglo-American ideas.

On the other side of the ledger, Tocqueville’s Democracy also shows the author’s misgivings about America, starting with the famous chapter that considers the fate of blacks and Indians. Crozier eventually wrote a disapproving book, Le Mal Américain (The Trouble with America). In addition, Pierre Rosanvallon, a successor to Furet, has recently suggested (in a perhaps unintended homage to Louis Hartz) that a liberalism that is too sure of itself runs into its own pathologies. The history of the illiberal liberalism of the French can be turned on its head. France struggled harder than other nations to create a liberal civil society, but in compensation it may now be more on guard against utopian fantasies regarding its new-won achievement. If the history of French political thought has changed in recent decades, it is principally because of the felt need to highlight these concerns regarding the status of French civil society and the long struggle to find a space for it in the shadow of one of the principal republican legacies of the French Revolution: the Jacobin state and the idea of the nation as one and indivisible.

The Three Eras Of French Political Thought

French political thought falls into three eras: (1) the monarchical period, from the fifteenth to the seventeenth century; (2) the eighteenth-century nexus of Enlightenment and revolution; and (3) the republican period, from the nineteenth century on. The monarchical period tells a story in which the seventeenth-century growth of the absolutist state seemed initially a naturally protective response to the horrors and intolerant fanaticism of the sixteenth-century religious civil wars, despite the presence of an even older, fifteenth-century constitutionalist tradition that was helpless in the face of such terrors. Following Nannerl O. Keohane, this era exhibits an alternating rhythm, and occasional synthesis, of thinking that was respectively constitutional, from Claude de Seyssel and Francis Hotman to Fenelon, Duc de Burgundy; absolutist, from Jean Bodin and Cardinal de Richelieu to JacquesBénigne Bossuet; and individualist, above all Michel de Montaigne but also including René Descartes (Passions of the Soul) and the Jansenist and Jansenist-influenced variants (Blaise Pascal and the Duc de Rochefoucauld).

The three features of the first era were often interwoven. As an absolutist, Montaigne was no liberal constitutionalist. Nevertheless, he established a psychology of the self that was an important legacy to his fellow Bordelais countryman, CharlesLouis de Secondat et de Montesquieu. Together, Montaigne and Montesquieu constructed a distinctively French “liberalism of fear.” In Judith Shklar’s classic account, this French liberalism was focused not on English-style contractual right but simply on the human vices. Cruelty was without exception the worst vice and nearly the sole responsibility of states to eradicate, its being not otherwise the purview of liberal governments to tell people how to live. One can detect, as Stephen Holmes shows, liberal constitutional elements even in Bodin’s absolutist model. Montesquieu works this paradox in another manner. The juridical definition of monarchy found in The Spirit of the Laws begins in agreement with Bodin (“in a monarchy the prince is the source of all political and civil power”) but then subverts the claim by stressing a constitutional role for “intermediary bodies” that relies on aristocratic honor as a decidedly individualist instrument for civil disobedience to the crown.

The second period is the nexus of the French Enlightenment and the French Revolution (1789–1799) from the death of Louis XIV in 1715 to the final defeat of Napoleon Bonaparte in 1815. This was a century of transformative thinkers brought to bear on a decade of transformative actors. Among representative figures there was the dramatist and essayist Voltaire (François-Marie Arouet). There were the Encyclopedists Jean le Rond d’Alembert and Denis Diderot. Michael Sonnenscher reminds us that we must not forget the Abbé Sieyès, whose 1789 Qu’est-ce que le Tiers État? (What Is the Third Estate?) may have set the course for subsequent events. Among the actors there were the Gironde advocates of a federal republic such as Jean-Pierre Brissot standing in intransigent opposition to the Montagnards of the Jacobin Club, advocates of a unified, indivisible republic, such as Louis-Antoine de Saint-Just. One cannot understand French political thought without reflecting on how obsessively the French regarded the historical question of the influence, real or imagined (and if real, beneficial or malign), of the philosophes on the revolutionary generation of 1789 to 1799. On the recent account of Dale K.Van Kley, it may as much be the case that the story of revolutionary origins lay in religious crises. But the role of the secular Enlightenment was simply too juicy for both celebrators and despisers of the revolution to ignore.

Two thinkers, neither typical, are iconic figures for considering the paths taken and not taken in the revolutionary years: Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Montesquieu. Montesquieu’s beloved parlements overplayed their hand in the early 1770s Maupeou regime, discrediting the very instrument that Montesquieu’s disciples had counted on for a British-style transition into constitutional monarchy. Although the revolutionary years witnessed a failed attempt in this direction, by then the ideas of Rousseau had rushed in to fill the ideological vacuum. The author of Discourse on Inequality and The Social Contract had in fact adopted both Montesquieu’s egalitarian model of republican government and his anthropological insistence on customs and manners as the mainstays of regimes. In juridical terms, however, if Montesquieu’s preferred form of rule— the reformed monarchical state—represented the domination of ancient constitutional elements over absolutist arguments, Rousseau presented a picture of the republic in which the idea of Bodinian absolutist sovereignty achieved its democratic formulation. The creation of the republic from the ashes of absolute monarchy did not lay to rest the absolutist hegemony of the state over society.

Rousseau has become a far more problematic figure in light of a renewed appreciation today of the relevance of his political concepts to the revolutionary founders of the Jacobin republic and in the perspective of feminist authors concerned about his attitudes toward women. Rousseau is not simply the great egalitarian democrat of two generations ago but also a misogynist ant liberal whose conceptual understanding of democracy played a role in blocking the establishment of a pluralist civil society. But as nineteenth-century political actors sought in the succession of regime changes for the right balance between state and civil society, they were often motivated by the suspicions borrowed from the Jacobin disciples of Rousseau for whom the central threat to the whole democratic community was posed by the contrarian opinions inherent in merely partial associations. There was no absence of perceived threats from civil society. Rousseau spoke to liberals who feared the hostility of the Catholic Church to the republic and to socialists who dreaded the growing powers concentrated in the owners of industry. Nevertheless, in the absence of any legitimacy for individuals who inhabit the intermediary bodies of civil society, which are necessarily partial and self-interested, there could be no legitimacy in the creation of a new regime, however universal its aspirations, because all would-be universal actors are also tainted by the fact that they too possess only a particular identity. The issue has survived in the contemporary controversy about whether veiled Muslim women should be allowed in French public schools as a sign of respect for their special cultural origins or (and quite apart from the feminist angle) whether the school should be honored as the last refuge for the young to learn—not how to defend their particular identities, but how to release the grip of partiality and group self-preference to develop more encompassing loyalties.

The original currents of thought of the nineteenth century either were inspired by the revolution or stood in some degree of unease with it. On the classic account of René Rémond, three successive regimes gave their names to abiding political ideologies. (1) Legitimism, born in the Bourbon restoration of 1815 to 1830, wedded parliamentary government to an ancienrégime monarchy that blurred the boundaries between state and civil society. Ironically, this reactionary philosophy helped to establish, Anne Sa’adah suggests, a more pluralist socialism, a deuxiéme gauche, among Catholics and other voters who in the 1980s had moved left but rejected the Jacobin state and its hard view of the boundary between state and society. (2) Orleanism, the signature enrichissez-vous creed of the 1830 to 1848 constitutional monarchy, was unique in lacking a popular nationalist base. It was, however, a French version of an individualist, procapitalist liberalism. (3) Bonapartism legitimated two empires (Napoleon, 1801–1815, and Louis, 1851–1870) by exalting executive authority as the embodiment of popular nationalism. Bonapartist appeal allowed Charles de Gaulle and the architects of the Fifth Republic (1958–present) to graft an American-style executive or presidential authority onto older models of parliamentary government found in the Third (1870–1940) and Fourth (1946–1958) Republics.

A host of liberal thinkers kept hopes for a republican regime alive by advocating a cautious, postrevolutionary moderation.Witness Madame de Staël or Benjamin Constant, who split republican theory down the middle and jettisoned the (to Constant) dangerous part that Constant identified as the participatory liberty of the ancients (and of the recent, troubling revolution) in favor of the personal, commercial, and intellectual liberties of regimes he dubbed “modern.” But republican ideas found renewed sustenance in a great variety of nineteenth-century authors (to list only three, the liberal Catholic Felicité de Lamennais and the historians Jules Michelet and Edgar Quinet) who planted intellectual seeds that blossomed in the brief Second Republic (1848–1851) and the more enduring Third Republic.

The revolution also provoked originality on the extreme right—for instance, in Louis Bonald, the theocrat who claimed that the revolution was divine punishment for the sins of France. More striking was Joseph de Maistre, the passionate ultramontane absolutist who expressed the rage of the Jacobins themselves, although his fury was instead directed at the whole of Enlightenment and revolution. In Maistre one finds a violence of thought and manner that offers a foretaste of what the authoritarian nationalism of Maurice Barrès (author and activist) and Charles Maurras (leader of Action Française) were to provoke in the twentieth century: namely, Fascism.

France nurtured three original socialist minds, none inclined to the Marxist variant, which was too indebted to the French Jacobin tradition; each was distinct from the other, antiauthoritarian, and seeing initiative properly coming from below. Each also showed a Girondin affinity for decentralization: in local communities, the phalansteries of Charles Fourier; in the anarchist federal principle of Pierre-Joseph Proudhon; and in revolutionary syndicalism and the “general strike” of Georges Sorel. We need only add to this pantheon the name of Louis Althusser, the original Marxist savant of the late twentieth century.

The prosecution for espionage and imprisonment of the innocent Jewish army officer Alfred Dreyfus (1894–1906) created yet another yawning division among the political clans, pitting army against the republic, right against left. And not incidentally, novelist Émile Zola’s famous “J’accuse,” addressed to the president of the republic, established the public ideal of the “engaged intellectual,” of which the post–World War II writings of Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir were such distinguished models. The rise of the Soviet Union divided the French left after 1920 between socialist and communist. These partisans aside, the horrific slaughter of trench warfare in World War I (1914–1918) also created a generation attracted either to never-again pacifism or to brute-force Fascism. The latter would prepare some members of this unhappy generation to collaborate in the Vichy regime (1940–1944) even as Vichy also provoked, famously, the Resistance, that strange coalition of communists and organized Christians. It also established after World War II (1939–1945) Christian democratic parties that in the Fourth Republic split the difference between left and right.

Beginning in the 1930s, the French political intelligentsia exhibited a remarkable fascination with German idealist and postidealist philosophy, principally Hegel, on whom Alexandre Kojève gave his famous lectures, and Nietzsche and Heidegger, a source not only for the poststructuralists, including Jacques Derrida and Michel Foucault, but for their predecessors among the phenomenologists and existentialists, figures such as Sartre, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, and Albert Camus.

The Four Preoccupations Of French Political Thought

There are four ways in which French political thought as a whole may differ in its emphases and style from other national discourses. (1) From early on it was attentive to anthropological and psychological concerns—that is, it was more genuinely fascinated by the habits and manners of diverse peoples, despite the blindness of official Fifth Republic ideology to issues of ethnicity and religious origins. (2) Early and late, it was more historically oriented, or more inclined to find legitimization for practices in answers to historical questions. (3) A novel development, from Descartes and the Enlightenment to Henri de Saint-Simon, Auguste Comte, Ernest Renan, and Émile Durkheim, it was with varying degrees of conviction inclined to see in rationality and science a legitimization for public administration as either a supplement to or even a substitute for political representation. (4) As illustrated earlier, these preoccupations were often brought to bear on the constantly renewed debate about the proper limits of state authority with respect to the expanding or contracting limits, the independence or dependence, of associational life.

Anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss’s identification with Rousseau in Tristes Tropiques came from the latter’s famous preference for the habits of hunters and gatherers over those of “civilized” Europeans, but where did Rousseau come by his sympathy for the alien and the remote? The answer is Montaigne. Skeptical and horrified in equal measure at Machiavellian politics and religious war, Montaigne achieved in the Essays an anthropological masterpiece of inversion, “Of Cannibals,” which asserted the moral superiority of such tribes over allegedly more “civilized” Europeans. In addition, the Essays were psychologically per formative. They helped generations of readers fabricate a modern—that is, mobile and private—self that could survive both political and religious over commitment.

An intense appreciation for history was the second feature of a French manner of political thinking. It also played a role in supporting the anthropological and psychological outlook. When, in the last section of Spirit of the Laws, Montesquieu leans toward a modified form of the Comte de Boulainvilliers’s thèse nobiliaire, and against the thèse royale that claimed that the French state was heir to the Roman Empire, he committed himself to anthropological sympathy for the barbarians of the north much as Montaigne drew our attention to the moral superiority of cannibals.

The disputed origins of France in either the Roman Empire or the barbarian conquest posed the fork-in-the-road historical question for monarchical France. Do the French identify with the defeated classical empire and inherit its failings, or do they identify with the uncivilized, still-pagan conquerors? On the nobiliaire view, the invasion of the barbarian Germans (“our fathers the Germans”) that ended in the conquest of Roman Gaul not only legitimated the Frankish aristocracy but, because of the happy manners of the nomadic conquerors, put French government on the long, torturous road to political freedom. One sees hints of these archaic sentiments in Tocqueville’s wistful look at the nomadic American Indians in Democracy. He imagines them as bearing a likeness to his own aristocratic ancestors.

The republican era replaced the old historical questions with new ones. France had been refounded in revolution. Gallo-Romans and Germans disappeared from historical consciousness, but there was now a new fork-in-the-road question. On one hand, should one distill from the tea leaves of French revolutionary history a celebration of the legitimacy of revolution as the road to the liberation of peoples? Starting with Karl Marx’s reading of French crises from the Great Revolution to the 1870 Commune, there were many revolutionaries in the next two centuries who, because they once lived in France, learned that revolution was a revelatory moment in the upward climb of humanity. On the other hand, should one begin from the prospect that revolution had been less than a success—even a disaster—but that, nevertheless, it was a new origin for France and an experience from which something useful had to be pried? This was more or less the perspective of Tocqueville and other liberals of the post-1815 generation.

The Enlightenment gave rise to a novel preoccupation that turned out to have a bright future—the ideal of reason or rationality. The latter term is forever associated with the name of René Descartes—father of Cartesian rationality—although Descartes himself thought politics was too complex for science and recommended only a quiescent “provisional morality.” Rationality is often in conflict with the other traditions. It is typically a rival to the historical view. As science and enlightenment depended on a view of the uniformity of human nature, neither subtle psychology nor attentive anthropology was quite the forte of the rationalist outlook either. But again there were iconic figures capable of playing all three parts. Montesquieu, master psychologist and skilled practitioner of longue durée history, was also in no small part a founder of the modern social sciences. However, he neither thought that scientists should rule nor that individual reason amounted to much. In free countries, he insisted, it matters not whether “individuals reason well or badly” but whether they are in the habit of freely speaking their reasons in public forums. Reason is the consequence of the mediation of institutions—in this case, the separation of powers that pits ambitious reasoners against one another—a cult of honor (“virtue” in republics, “merit” in England) that channels private desires into public interest and political representation that legitimates offering reasons (good or bad) in public.

In the nineteenth century the historian and politician François Guizot managed to eliminate representation from the formula. For him the “public reasons” that emerged from the mediation of institutions might well serve as a substitute for political representation itself. This manner of raising the authority of rational agents above representative institutions that depend merely on opinion follows in the tradition of eighteenth-century physiocrats—for example, François Quesnay and Pierre-Paul Le Mercier de la Rivière and, after them, reformers such as the Baron Turgot and the Marquis de Condorcet. As Rosanvallon has shown, in the rationalist school there was no right to make bad law. Legislatures could be discredited, much as scientists would be if they allowed error to substitute itself for truth. The guarantee of freedom and rights did not lie in the arbitrary or wild expressiveness of representative government but in rational procedures for collecting evidence that led to truth. This was, of course, a perfect ideology for the postrevolutionary survival of the ancien-régime state bureaucracy, as was exhibited in Napoleon’s establishment of elite schools (grandes écoles) and scientific research institutes connected to the state.

Last but not least is the central theme in this account—the preoccupation of French thought with the sovereignty of the state and its potential for conflict with individuals and groups situated outside the state. To what degree should state authority legitimate independence for the partial associations, the intermediary bodies of society? To what extent can these associations become a threat to the purposes of the state and those it represents, whether that concerns its independence in the midst of religious war or in the midst of class war? A contrast suggests itself. In the Anglo-American world, civil associations are more often than not, and sometimes naively, regarded as presumptively good. In the traditions of French political thought, civil associations are more often than not, and sometimes ill-advisedly, regarded as presumptively bad.

Have any recent political thinkers broken with these traditions? The most likely candidates are Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida. Foucault, however, preserved something of the older French intellectual habits. A critic of Enlightenment rationalism and the despotic practices it founded, he ended up adopting a guise toward democracy that was severe, skeptical, and watchful—not unlike Tocqueville’s democratic pessimism. The History of Sexuality shows a thinker fully absorbed in anthropological comparisons. Like Montaigne, Foucault discovered in Greek antiquity the solace of a pagan ethics. The Lectures at the College de France of 1975–1976 (“Society Must Be Defended”) was a defense of civil society. In resurrecting the Comte de Boulainvilliers’s prerevolutionary fascination with the wars of the Barbarian conquest, Foucault argues that it was the French aristocracy (not bourgeoisie or proletariat) who invented a subversive historical discourse that was a weapon of self-defense for “peoples” and “societies” in an unending war with “officials,” whose kindred weapons were the “disciplinary” human sciences. Foucault’s subsequent interest in “governmentality,” (a rethinking of the issues of Discipline and Punish) is but the classical French quest for discerning in remote but connected habits what Montesquieu called the “spirit that governs men”—now, however, displayed on the micro-level of “bio-politics.”With all the severity of the Cartesian rationalist, Foucault cast an unflattering light on how precisely this Cartesian spirit has invaded and transformed these various practices of civil society.

Let us turn to Jacques Derrida’s later and more explicitly political or ethical writings: Force of Law, Specters of Marx, Politics of Friendship, On Cosmopolitanism and Forgiveness, On Hospitality, Rogues: Two Essays on Reason, and The Beast and the Sovereign. In these writings we find an extreme but still-recognizable version of the Montaignian skeptic. Not unlike the sixteenth century author, Derrida rediscovers in various domains, such as law, justice, and hospitality, a source of unease. They possess an ever-transformative internal dialectic that renders them both demandingly necessary and always undecidable—that is, impossible, or at least impossible to fully satisfy. In passing we mention Derrida’s own taking up of the classical theme of national “spirit” (Of Spirit). Equally interesting is his return to the old French tension between an insistence on sovereign closure to malign external influences and cosmopolitan openness to diverse manners and customs. This whole drama of the post revolutionary period, enacted as the always unhappy compromises between the Jacobin state and the society it would superintend, or the world in which it acted, is played out again in a new deconstructive philosophical key.

Among these master thinkers there is no doubt great novelty, but they are also recognizable iterations of traditional obsessions—symptoms, so to speak, that suggest continuities lurking in every effort to digress from the past.

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