Continental liberalism FRANCE

French liberalism after the Restoration of the Bourbons was necessarily deeply influenced by the British model of constitutional monarchy, and often gave a conservative emphasis to the need for social stability, the importance of laws, the limitation of executive power and the restriction of popular participation in politics, notably in the writings of FRANÇOIS GUIZOT (1787–1874), leader of the group, with PIERRE PAUL ROYER-COLLARD (1763–1845), known as the ‘Doctrinaires’, who sought a middle way between absolutism and democracy. Royer-Collard stressed the importance of preserving freedom of the press, of Parliament and of the judiciary, and regarded religious freedom as the foundation of both society generally and the limitation of Jacobinical or Bonapartist state power in particular. Guizot became much more conservative after the Revolution of 1830, and remained a determined opponent of democracy, finally being forced into exile after the 1848 Revolution. Another prominent theorist of liberalism after the Restoration was Germain Necker, Baronne DE STAËL (1766–1817), who with BENJAMIN CONSTANT (1767–1830) warned of the propensities of both Bonapartism and monarchical absolutism, and advocated emulation of the British constitutional model (see her Considerations on the French Revolution, 1818). An anti-Bonapartist, Constant saw freedom of the press as the best security for protecting liberal principles. He was instrumental in bringing Louis-Philippe to the thronein 1830.

A more moderate liberalism emerged after the 1830 Revolution. Its leading intellectual figure, ALEXIS DE TOCQUEVILLE (1805–59), is best-known for his Democracy in America (2 vols, 1835–40), which asserted that an overpowering spirit of equality in the USA tended to undermine minority rights and to produce a ‘tyranny of the majority’ in public opinion. In his assessment of French politics after 1830 Tocqueville stressed the triumph of the middle classes and a concomitant growth in equality of conditions. Regarding the trend towards governmental centralization and increasing uniformity as inevitable, Tocqueville argued that the state bureaucracy would tend increasingly to act both as a new aristocracy and as caretaker for the needs of the majority, who would gradually cede all powers of self-responsibility to it. These themes were reiterated in his later The Ancien Régime and the Revolution (1856). During this period the Positivist doctrines of AUGUSTE COMTE (1798–1857) also influenced liberalism, particularly through their stress on the need for meritocracy. After 1848 a more radical form of liberalism began to emerge. Romantic writers like ALPHONSE DE LAMARTINE (1790–1867) UFged a reassessment of the positive elements of the 1789 Revolution, while VICTOR HUGO (1802–85) saw a democratic ideal as an alternative to socialism after 1848. Following Louis Napoleon’s coup d’état in 1851 conservative and Catholic liberals like Charles de Montalembert (1810–70) again stressed the validity of the British constitutional model. In this period a republican opposition also emerged, which included such thinkers as Hugo, the historian Edgar Quinet (1803–75) and the lawyer Léon Gambetta (1838–82).

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Encyclopedia of nineteenth-century thought 384 GERMANY

German liberals in the early nineteenth century were concerned in the first instance with liberation from French rule, then with avoiding an extreme reaction after the defeat of Napoleon. The movement for national unification did not develop substantially before 1848, but became a central focus for liberal thought thereafter. Prior to this German liberals were concerned with plans for creating popular representative assemblies, introducing freedom of the press and similar rights, and establishing economic freedom. As with France, the British model was particularly important to German writers, but until late in the century social and economic conditions in Germany were not analogous to Britain’s, while the strength of the monarchy and landed aristocracy, particularly in Prussia, was more difficult to limit. Republican liberalism, accordingly, remained much weaker than in France, while Romantic conceptions of a common fatherland were correspondingly stronger. Economic liberalism, too, was correspondingly weak, and the protectionist spirit, epitomized in FRIEDRICH LIST’S National System of Political Economy (1841), stronger. Unless we except Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770– 1831), whose conception of constitutional monarchy outlined in his Philosophy of Right (1821) represents at best a very conservative liberalism, Germany produced few liberal thinkers of international stature. Of note, however, are the writings of the Prussian legal reformer Heinrich von Stein (1757–1831); the development of individualism in Wilhelm Humboldt’s Essay on the Limits of the Action of the State (1851); the constitutionalist programme of the Göttingen professors’ protest against the Hanoverian government in 1837; and the various manifestos and programmes issued during the 1848 revolutions, which concentrated on freeing Germany from Austrian influence and founding a new liberal constitution. An important strand of economic liberalism was represented in the co-operative movement founded by Hermann Schulze-Delitzsch (1808–83).

Continental liberalism FRANCE