French Liberalism from Montesquieu to the Present Day, ed. Raf Geenens and Helena Rosenblatt

Abstract

The last few years have witnessed a renaissance in the study of French liberalism. In 2008, Andrew Jainchill showed how classical republicanism constituted the intellectual topsoil from which a French liberalism emerged after the Terror. Annelien de Dijn (also in 2008) examined ‘aristocratic liberalism’ in French liberal thought, endeavouring to rescue the tradition from the analytical straitjacket of Jacobinism, and, in 2011, Jeremy Jennings’s œuvre on French political thought presented a work of synthesis pitched in a distinctively liberal register. Similarly, Aurelian Craiutu’s 2012 study of moderation considers how this concept underpinned liberal thinking in the pre- and post-revolutionary years. With this volume of essays, edited by Raf Geenens and Helena Rosenblatt, we have an additional, and useful, contribution to this growing and sophisticated literature. The editors have assembled a notable collective of scholars whose research has spearheaded the intellectual recovery of French liberalism as a distinct political tradition. The problem for liberalism, as it has typically been understood, has been its frailty compared to the ideological and political dominance of the republican left. Republicans and socialists laid claim to a set of canonical texts, institutions, conceptual abstractions (such as liberté, égalité, fraternité), memories and myths: political nutrients that sustained their hegemony until the late 1970s. Liberalism, by contrast, never acquired such a range of practices and discourses, and failed to develop a clear tradition. Its procedural aspects, such as its faith in the importance of elections, and substantive positions—such as the emphasis on the rule of law and freedom of expression—were usually deemed to be elements that furnished the liberal side to republicanism, rather than constituting a set of ideals that gave shape and content to a stand-alone liberal tradition. One still gets a sense that the essays here represent the debate that, simply put, endures between those who see a coherent liberalism and those who do not, but it is a discussion conducted with an increased sensitivity to the conceptual richness and historical importance of French liberalism.