Liggio, L. P. 1990. "Evolution of French Liberal Thought: From The 1760's To The 1840's"

EVOLUTION OF FRENCH LIBERAL
THOUGHT : F r o m the 1 7 6 0 ' s to the

1840's°
Leonard P. Liggio*
Introduction
French Liberal Thought went through a complex evolution around the end
of the eighteenth century. This complexity is difficult to grasp and therefore often
left aside. Hence, when commentating on this period, scholars have a tendency -
some will say "for the sake of clarity" - either to focus their attention on a selection
of well-known thinkers (Say, Bastiat, and Turgot, or Montesquieu and
Tocqueville), or to classify them by school (an economist, for instance, will often
open his presentation of this period by an introduction on mercantilism, followed
by sections on Physiocracy, the English Classical School, and its Continental
Prolongation).
Although these approaches have their merits, we will follow none of them
closely in the present essay. Indeed, we wish above all to give an exact idea of the
richness and diversity of French Liberal Thought. For this purpose, we will choose
to spend more time than usual studying some less known persons: Sieyes,
Benjamin Constant, Destutt de Tracy, etc.
The French Liberal Thought of that time was not only diverse, it was also
profound, rich. A "liberal" was not just - and even, not necessarily - a partisan of
"laissez-faire" fighting against state interference. He was often at the same time a
philosopher, an historian, (a traveller), and a politician involved in the great
whirlwind of the French Revolution or of its premises or consequences.
"The author wishes to thank Professor Edward McLean for his permission to publish this essay first
presented at the Pierre Goodrich Lectures on the History of the Concept of Liberty, Wabash College,
Crawfordsville, Indiana ; and the editorial referees whose comments have been particularly helpful.
'Distinguished Senior Scholar, Institute for Humane Studies at George Mason University, Virginia
(U.S.A.).
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102 Journal des Economistes et des Etudes Humaines
In the first part of this essay, attention is first drawn on the intellectual and
political landscape of France in the eighteenth century until the French
Revolution. We then look more closely at the contributions of Dupont de
Nemours, Condillac and Condorcet. The second part opens with an analysis of the
causes of the French Revolution. It is followed by a reflexion on the thoughts of
two great persons of this revolution: l'abbe Sieyes and Destutt de Tracy. Finally,
we conclude this essay with a description of the liberalism of Benjamin Constant, a
liberalism that tried to take into account the lessons learned from the revolutionary
period.
Parti
1.1 The Background For French Liberalism
Originating in the middle ages, the French universities became one of the
two sources of European wide systems of university education. In Paris, from
where the English and German universities took their lead, moral philosophy was
given pride of place. In the Italian universities, where the liberal arts were
presented, moral philosophy was discouraged as conflict-ridden, and rhetoric was
encouraged as a safer preparation for legal studies. The Humanism of the
Renaissance was a major source for French religious reformers, and the University
of Paris was the seat of the beginnings of French Protestantism. After the removal
of French Protestant academics across the borders, the University of Paris became
a center for the Catholic Counter-Reformation.
It was from the University of Paris that the writers of the Parlement of
Paris1 and the supporters of the Estates-General received their inspiration for their
critiques of the growth of royal bureaucracy. The strength of the Catholic
opponents of bureaucracy in the Estates-General led finally to the refusal of the
royal government to call the Estates-General after the session of l6l4. Cardinal
Richelieu's oppostion to the provencial critics through l 6 l 4 led to the Estates-
General not meeting again until 17892.
'The Parlement was primarily a jurisdictional authority, the highest of the kingdom. It is only
progressively that it became involved in political matters.
T h e book on the sixteenth century parliamentary movements in France by J. Russell Major is the
starting point for this topic.
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Liggio. Evolution of French Liberal Thought 103
The Fronde, and the Reactions against Mercantilism in France

and in England
The successor of Cardinal Richelieu, Cardinal Mazarin, caused a great

opposition movement, the Fronde, 1648-52, during the minority of Louis XTV. A
rich harvest of French political thought is to be found in the pamphlet literature
associated with the Fronde. The long-term origins of the Fronde are found in the
General Crisis of the Seventeenth Century, of which the Thirty Year's War was a
part. The Fronde was led by members of the parlements, especially the Parlement
of Paris, by great nobles and their supporters, and members of the clergy, around
the archbishop of Paris, Cardinal de Ritz. The pamphlet literature was an attempt
to criticize the growth of centralization, under Richelieu and Mazarin, which
became the platform on which Louis XIV and Colbert built their massive
bureaucratic, mercantilist structure.
The mercantilism of Louis XIV and Colbert was developed in the attempt
to capture revenues for the crown in a period of declining economic conditions
stemming from the previously high levels of taxation to finance the Thirty Years'
War. Louis XIV's own wars, for which mercantilism was the preparation, caused
widespread economic and social dislocation, misery and crisis. Mercantilism was
the economic system of the militarily aggressive state. Mercantilism's purpose was
to assure the state of financial and economic resources for the conduct of war. As a
result, a large religious opposition to mercantilism or state intervention in the
economy grew3.
Archbishop Fenelon drew on the humanist traditions of the Catholic
Reformation to challenge the growth of the state power. This Catholic tradition
exalted human reason and minimized the role of original sin among ordinary man,
and saw the consequences of original sin more in the opportunity for multiple evil
in the decisions of politicans than in those of ordinary men. The Spanish Jesuit,
Luis de Molina, was one of the large number of Catholic thinkers emphasizing the
optimistic view of human nature when not associated with state power4.
Fenelon's mentor, Abbe Claude Fleury (1640-1723), shared the attack on
mercantilism and war, based on a positive view of ordinary human nature. The
mercantilists saw conflict and immoral aggrandizement as part of original sin, and
mercantilism as the necessary means to achieve success in permanent war. Abbe
Fleury and Archbishop Fenelon, in opposing the contempt for man's reason and
the premise of human depravity, supported the consumer revolution in which the
free choices of morally good, rational men, was a positive part of God's plan. The
market society was a morally approved natural society in contrast to the immoral,
imposed political structure of economic regulation and taxation.
'Among the economists who criticized the mercantilist doctrine were Pierre de Boisguilbeit (1646-1714)
and Richard Cantillon.
*The Catholic optimistic view of ordinary human nature is discussed by Palmer-1939. An important role
should be given to Pierre Gassendi (1592-1655), a priest who had a major influence on Locke's
thinking.
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104 Journal des Economises et des Etudes Humaines
An important part of the view point represented by Abbe Fleury and

Archbishop Fenelon was the positive view of science and technology. Science
could provide solutions to problems and the application of technology would
enrich and improve the conditions of men through the operation of consumer
choices in the market. Fleury and Fenelon emphasized that the mercantilist
attempt to subsidize particular industries to maintain employment actually
destroyed employment because it was based on taxes and restrictions on the mass
of the population whose purchasing power and freedom of choice were destroyed
by the mercantilist regulations. These anti-mercantilist arguments were taken up
by a group of reformers by the beginning of the eighteenth century5.
The disaster of wars and mercantilism under Louis XIV led to attempts to
solve financial problems with central banking and inflation in the Mississippi
Bubble of John Law. The Bubble's collapse brought forward Cardinal Andre
Hercule de Fleury (1653-1743) as Prime Minister for nearly twenty years. Since war
was the cause of economic and social crises, Fleury joined with the English Prime
Minister, Sir Robert Walpole, in pursuing a policy of detente. Walpole had come to
power at the same time for the same reasons, the collapse of the South Sea Bubble
in the context of the debts of war. England was the greater beneficiary of detente
because Walpole was able to keep England out of conflict longer then Fleury.
Walpole cut military costs, reduced taxation, and through salutary neglect
permitted the lapsing of enforcement of the mercantilist regulations. The lower
military spending and consequently lower taxes permitted an explosion of savings
and consumer demand which was satisfied first by the massive smuggling
permitted by salutary neglect, and second by the introduction of technology to
mass produce for this exploding consumer market.
In France, there were much greater mercantilist structures to be
challenged, and dynastically imposed foreign wars. Max Hartwell has indicated
the differences between what was accomplished in England and France in the
eighteenth century, and why there was a much greater possibility for the Industrial
Revolution in England than in France. Nevertheless, it was the era of Whig
Hegemony in England that impressed Voltaire and Montesqieu. It was during the
premiership of Cardinal Fleury that Anglomania became dominant in France
intellectual circles. Voltaire's introduction of Locke's political thought and of
Newton's scientific thought, and Montesqieu's praise for the constitutional and
legal system in England created a new climate of opinion in France. Montesquieu
explained how England's system of minimal government, lacking a centralized
bureaucracy provided the necessary foundation for freedom. His 1748 L'Esprit des
Lois was the foundation of French liberal thought, and generalized in public
opinion the concepts of checks and balances and of separation of powers.
'cf. Rothkrug-1965.

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Richard Cantillon, Precursor of European Liberal Thought

The mid-18th century renewal of Anglo-French warfare with increased
taxes and stalemate of reform of mercantilism led to the emergence of modern
economics among French thinkers, as well as among the Scottish thinkers who
were their friends as residents in France, such as David Hume and Adam Smith. At
the origin of this development in economic thought was the Irish-French financier,
Richard Cantillon (1680-1734)6.
In contrast to Quesnay and Mirabeau, the founding-fathers of the
Physiocrats, Cantillon's work influenced a parallel tradition of French economics,
which then influenced the later Physiocrats, as well as Adam Smith.
Cantillon's most important impact had been on J.C.M. Vincent de Gournay
(1712-1759), who Schumpeter considers one of the greatest teachers of all time.
Gournay, basing himself on Cantillon's text, developed the school of economics on
which modern economics is based (W. Stanley Jevons, when he rediscovered the
Essai, called it the beginning of modern economics). Gournay communicated his
more complete grasp of economics to Anne Robert Jacques Turgot (1727-1781)
who had a profound influence, as did Cantillon's work, on Adam Smith, especially
through Turgot's Reflexions sur la formation et la distribution des richesses (1766)7.
Turgot: The Gretit French Economist of the XVIII °

Tuigot had written the Reflexions during David Hume's tenure as secretary
to the English embassy (1763-1766), and Adam Smith's residency in France (1765-
1766).
Turgot came on to the scene following the publication in 1748 of
Montesquieu' s L'Esprit des Lois. Turgot's early work as a seminarian at Saint-
Sulpice and Sorbonne, On the Benefits which the Christian Religion has
Conferred on Mankind and On the Historical Progress of the Human Mind
(1750) contributed to the concept of human history as a discovery process.
History could provide the data by which men would be enable to avoid future
errors. In 1756, Turgot (appointed assistant to Gournay, the Intendant du
Commerce, after being a Conseiller au Parlement de Paris) wrote for the
Encyclopedie the articles : Foires et Marches, and Fondations. Tuigot posited a
conception of human rights in his article on Fondations:
Citizens have rights, and rights that are sacred to the very
heart of society. The citizens exist independently of society and
are its necessary elements. They enter society in order to put
themselves, together with all their rights, under the protection of
laws that assure their property and their liberty.
'Hayek praised Cantillon's Essai sur la nature du commerce en general (1734) in his introduction to
Hella Hayek's 1931 German translation of the Essai. Hayek notes that Cantillon had a major impact on
the Physiocrats. Elsewhere, Hayek points out that although the Marquis de Mirabeau relied on
Rousseau for his economics, he became the discipline of Quesnay and Cantillon (Hayek-1985).
The Reflexions was published with an introductory note by Dupont de Nemours in 1769-1770, and
translated into English anonymously with Adam Smith the
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Α major portion of the correspondence between Hume and Turgot

concerns Rousseau, but a portion of it concerns economics. Turgot developed a
subjective theory of value which was pursued by the Abbe Etienne de Condillac,
anticipating the Marginal Revolution of Menger in 18708.
W. Stanley Jevons , in Theory of Political Economy, delared of the school
of Cantillon and Turgot:
The true doctrine may be more or less clearly traced

through the writings of a succession of great French economists,
from Condillac, Baudeau, and Le Trosne, through J.B. Say,
Destutt de Tracy, Storch, and others, down to Bastiat and
Courcelle-Seneuil. The conclusion to which I am ever more
clearly coming is that the only hope of attaining a true system of
economics is to fling aside, once and for ever, the mazy and
preposterous assumptions of the Ricardian school.
Schumpeter has later noted (1954) :
It is not too much to say that analytic economics took a

century to get where it could have got in twenty years after the
publication of Turgot's treatise had its content been properly
understood and absorbed by an alert profession. As it was, even
J.B. Say - the most important link between Turgot and Walras -
did not know how to exploit it fully.
For Schumpeter the three greatest 18th century economists were Turgot,
Beccaria and Smith (Schumpeter -1954) :
If we are to compare Turgot's scientific personality with

those of Beccaria and A. Smith, significant similarities strike us
first ; all three were polyhistoric in learning and range of vision;
all three stood outside the arena of business and political
pursuits; all three displayed a single-minded devotion to the duty
in hand. Turgot was undoubtedly the most brilliant of the three...
Influences from England and America
The second half of the Eighteenth Century was filled with important
writings and important debates. One aspect was the growth of Anglophobia. Thus,
English constitutional institutions and political thought, after being dominant
among all thinkers in the first 2/3s of the 18th century, came into disrepute in
France. There was a line of French conservative criticism of English institutions,
and a line of Liberal criticism of English institutions. With the American Revolution
"As Turgot's Eloge de Gournay (1759) is the major source for Gournay, Dupont de Nemours' Memoires
sur la vie et les ouvrages de Μ. Turgot (1782), and Condorcet's 1786 Vie de Turgot (translated into
English in 1787) are the major sources on Turgot. Dupont de Nemours edited the Oeuvres de Turgot (9
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this criticism became intensified and continued into and through the French
Revolution and the Napoleonic Empire. The Physiocrats formed one of the Liberal
anglophobe groups, the other was formed by the followers of Rousseau, including
Abbe Mably, Baron d'Holbach, Denis Diderot, and Jean-Paul Marat. Much of this
debate had to do with their various attemps at understanding the English
constitutional system. The concept of the separation of powers and checks and
balances was available in Montesquieu and DeLolme , as well as earlier in Voltaire.
The later philosophes began to think in terms of the legislature as the
expression of the "General Will" and therefore sought a government structure
which lacked checks and balances which were viewed as medieval, Gothic
institutions. In a sense, there was a strong utilitarian current among the French
liberals who wished to see an efficient government expressing the General Will
through the creation of legislation and through the administration of legislation.
This formed a philosophical base for the developing modern bureaucratic state
which was replacing the older, medieval institutions.
The emergence of the new bureaucratic state and of its philosophical
justification is a watershed in political thought. The French Jacobins' state was an
heir of the modern bureaucratic state and its opponents among the continental
Enlightened Despotisms were similarly heirs. Thus, there arose a conservative
philosophy to justify the conservative bureaucratic states, and a radical philosophy
to justify the jacobin bureaucratic state - this radical philosophy was the source of
some elements of 19th century socialism. Classical liberalism remained the
defender of the traditional political philosophy of Western civilization, and in
particular found its expression in English and American constitutional thought.
Edmund Burke, of course, was an important spokesman for this tradition9.
A major source of debate in France arose with the formation of the new
states from the thirteen American colonies and the Articles of Confederation, and
the Federal Constitution. The divisions among the French philosophes about the
American constitutions was very diverse. Some of the advocates of greater
government control and less economic freedom, on the ground that morality was
undermined by material goods and by the commercial spirit, favoured some
American state constitutions as providing mechanisms to keep in check popular
demands for material improvement. In other words, some thinkers such as Abbe
Mably saw the American constitutions as checks on commercial development and
consumer demand, providing the possibility of a moral universal poverty - the
poverty of a moral economy.
Others saw the American constitutions as just such barriers to consumer
demand and criticized the new constitutions for it. Turgot in his letter to Dr. Price
expressed this perspective. The moral economy of poverty was challenged by
utilitarian thinkers seeking the morality of economic freedom and economic
growth. Finally, some thinkers saw the American constitutions as barriers to the
introduction of government controls or the innovation of the moral economy in
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America. America was seen as the highest example of economic growth based on
salutary neglect, and the American revolution as a defense of a free economy
against new taxations and restrictions. Thus, the American constitutions were
viewed in this perspective as defenses of a free society from some run-away
enthusiams for government regulations and taxation.
Through Franklin, Adams and Jefferson became part of the social circle of
liberal intellectuals in Paris :
It was dominated on the one hand by that most ardent

liberal, the Due de la Rochefoucauld, and his remarkable mother
the Duchesse d'Anville, by their most intimate friend the Marquis
de Condorcet, and a little later, by Lafayette. The distinguished
Abbes Morellet, Arnauld, Chalut, de Mably, Barthelemy, and the
Papal Nuncio, Comte Dugnani, with whom Jefferson kept up
relations until the Cardinal's death in 1820, were what might be
called the theorizers of this group in contrast to the men of action.
(Kimball-1950, p. 82).
French liberalism was infused with a new spirit with the appearance in
Paris of American's Revolutionary spokesmen. Benjamin Franklin was known to
some Frenchmen already from his years of services in London as colonial agent for
Pennsylvania. As defender of the interests of the colonies, he moved in the circles
of the Whigs, especially the Rochingham Whigs. A fellow colonial agent was
Edmund Burke, parliamentary secretary to the Marquis of Rochingham (twice
prime minister) and colonial agent for New York. As American minister in Paris
from 1776 to 1784, Franklin made a major impact on the highest levels of French
society. This provided an introduction to two other American ministers : John
Adams, 1778-1784 and Thomas Jefferson, 1784-1789- When Jefferson arrived,
Turgot, whose mind had the "gigantic stature" greatly admired by Jefferson, had
died in 1781. But, he had the closest acquaintance with two of Turgot's friends, the
Due de la Rochefoucauld and the Marquis de Condorcet, both the same age as
Jefferson.
John Adams quickly had become friends of the duke and his mother :
The Duchess d'Anville and her son, the great friends of

Turgot, were said to have great influence with the Royal Academy
of Sciences, to make members at pleasure, and the Secretaire
Perpetuel, M. d'Alembert, was said to have been of their creation,
as was M. Condorcet afterwards... Their Family was beloved in
France, and had a reputation for patriotism, that is, of such a
kind of patriotism as was allowed to exist and be esteemed in that
kingdom, where no man, as Montesquieu says, must esteem
himself or his country too much. (Kimball-1950, p.84).

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1.2 Dupont de Nemours : Crom the Edict of July, 1764,

to the Hundred Days of 1815
A Friend ofTurgot and tbe Physiocrats
In her introduction to her translation of The Autobiography of Dupont de

Nemours, Elizabeth Fox-Genovese sees Dupont de Nemours as one of the
"growing number of political economists and sociological historians in England,
Scotland, and France, especially those now known collectively as the Scottish
Historical School"(Fox-Genovese-1984, p.7). Dupont had become an associate of
Frangois Quesnay (physician to Madame de Pompadour, favorite of Louis XV),
and of Victor de Riqueti, Marquis de Mirabeau (the "Friend of Mankind"). Thus,
Dupont was an important figure among the physiocrats, along with the Abbe
Nicolas Baudeau, and Pierre Le Mercier de la Riviere. Quesnay was an intellectual
authority figure for Dupont, and saw Dupont as the continuer of the physiocratic
school. But, Dupont became part of another school of economics whose founder
was Vincent de Gournay, and whose major expositor was Anne-Robert-Jacques
Turgot. Dupont and Marie Jean Antoine Nicolas Caritat, Marquis de Condorcet,
became Turgot's closest aids.
Closely associated with Turgot, were two other disciples of Gournay, the
father and son, Daniel-Charles Trudaine (1703-1769) and Jean-Charles-Philibert
Trudaine de Montigny (1733-1777), successively, director of the Ponts et Chaussees
(bridges and roads) and intendant of finances. Turgot, Dupont, and the Trudaines
worked together on the Edict of July, 1764 to establish limited freedom of the
export of grain, as well as on the edicts of Turgot in 1776 leading to his dismissal
from office.
Dupont reports that his book on Export and Import of Grain led to his
meeting Turgot.
But what was much more flattering to me, much more
useful, what contributed infinitely to the happiness and honor of
my life, I owe to this book the beginning of the friendship that M.
Turgot deigned to show me. Barely had he read it, but he came to
seek me at my Father's and showed me an esteem, a confidence,
a tender interest that, coming from htm, were more touching
than can be said.
The ideas of M. Turgot were perhaps not as profound as
those of M. Quesnay, but their compass was much broader; he
dug them less deeply and linked them up with each other more.
The Doctor sought his principles in nature and in Metaphysics. He
said : This is what should reign in the worid, and he could be
understood only by a small number of vigourous thinkers. The
Magistrate included in his the entire mass of human knowledge
and the general history of the universe. He showed that men had
only reasoned well and had only been happy to the extent that
they had approached the truths that he was exposing. One could
follow him provided one had some logic and sense, but what
especially made M. Turgot more
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loving. To please Μ. Quesnay it was necessary to have intelligence

and talent good for something. To be cherished by M. Turgot, it
was enough to have a good, honest, and sensible heart. Yet one
did not recognize immediately the full charm of his company. At
first, he only appeared wise, learned, and sweet. One had to have
lived with him to know how affectionate and demonstrative he
was. (In Fox-Genovese-1984, pp. 263-264).
Turgot was one of the few recipients of Dupont's letter writing. "I liked to
write letters, and in writing them I abandoned myself to all the philosophical
views that crossed my mind. My letters became long, sometimes rich." Quesnay
reproached Dupont for writing privately, rather than concentrating on education
of the public: "You should write nothing except for the Public, and nothing that is
not to last for two thousand years." (In Fox-Genovese-1984, p.272).
Dupont selected one or two persons with whom to correspond regularly.
"As long as M. Turgot was alive it was to him, and he received at least eighteen
hundred letters from me, of which he replied to about one thousand. He saved
most of mine, which have been returned to me. I have all of his ; they are very
curious. When I lost him, M. and Mme. de Lavoisier inherited that abandon of my
heart, and, if they did not bum them, they too should have a couple of thousand
letters from me." (In Fox-Genovese-1984, p. 273). Later, Dupont corresponded
with Thomas Jefferson10.
On Property Rights
As on many matters of philosophy, John Locke is the starting point for

French concepts of property".
The main concepts of property rights in eighteenth century France were
focused in the writings of the Physiocrats.
Dupont de Nemours was the Physiocrat who was confronted with
alternative theories of property rights in the Constituent Assembly of 1789-1791·
Firmly commited to a republican government, he insisted
that it be moderate and judicious, by which he meant that it reflect
the interests and engage the responsabilities of property holders.
Property itself that cornerstone of social order, would normally
constitute the reward of work, a concept he valued as hightly as
any other zealot of the work ethic. Families constitued the basic
unit of society and its microcosm. (Fox-Genovese-1984, p.22).
'"Dupont's letters to Turgot and Lavoisier have not survived, but three hundred letters from Turgot to
Dupont are deposited in the Eleutherian Mills Historical Library, (Winterthur MSS) Delaware. Gustav
Schelle published many of these in Lettres de Turgot ä Dupont de Nemours de 1764 a 1781 (Paris,
1924). See also Chinard-1931.
"Locke himself was aware of the debate on the interest among French philosophers in the late
seventeenth century stimulating his analysis of the nature of money and its important role in the
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Dupont had acquired his first lessons in natural law at

Quesnay's feet, and he never abandoned those early convinctions.
In his correspondance with Jefferson in the early years of the
nineteenth century, he refers to Quesnay's brilliant, if largely
forgotten, article on natural law ("Observations sur le droit
naturel des hommes reunis en societe", Journal d'Agriculture
(September, 1 765), edited by Dupont ). Dupont, following
Quesnay, could never accept the idea of a social contract that
either restricts or augments man's natural rights. Property, man's
inalienable right to the enjoyment of that which belongs to him,
must be understood as a presocial right that no legitimate society
can restrict in any way. The entire point of society is to facilitate
the individual's enjoyment of his property. If for Quesnay the idea
of property closely ressembled an abstract economic concept, for
Dupont it gradually had acquired social substance. From the
mid-1770s, when he first started working with and for Turgot on
the Memoire sur les municipalites, he envisaged property as
literally a piece of the realm. (Fox-Genovese-1984, pp. 22-23).
Honore-Gabriel de Riqueti, Comte de Mirabeau (son of the "Friend of

Mankind") was the leader of the Assembly. Mirabeau differed with the majority
who were influenced by Locke's view of the absolutist nature of private property.
The debate is well summarized by Larkin (1930, pp. 217-20).
The real issue was between those who held that property
was a natural right, not to be interfered ivith except for very grave
reasons and with due compensation to the individual whose
interests were affected, and those who held that it was primarily a
social convention based on human needs and capable of being
modified whenever the State deems it necessary. The former point
of view found expression in the Rights of Man in 1789, in the
speech of Cazales on inheritance laws in 1791, and in that of
Lasource in September 1792. Lasource's language reminds one of
Locke. "Everyone entering the social pact," he states "brings with
him his properties, and the protection of these properties is the
object of the social contract. They are, therefore, sacred and the
nation cannot dispose of them except for the general good, and
then ivith full compensation."
The other view of property rights is well illustrated by the
speeches of Mirabeau and Robespierre in the debate on
inheritance laws in April 1791. "The right of property", according
to Count Mirabeau," is a social creation. Not only can the law
protect and maintain property, but it may also determine and
regulate its scope and content."
Robespierre also... was not prepared to accept the full
radical conclusions which might be deduced from the doctrine
that property is a social convention ; that the State rather than
the individual is the real owner.
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wealth was the source of political inequality and destructive of

liberty, but, like other members of the Jacobin Party, he regarded
equality of possession as impraticable in civil society... In the
Convention Parliament Danton, with Robespierre's approbation,
demanded a declaration to the effect that property was sacred.
And Robespierre approved of the action of the Convention in
voting the death penalty against anyone who would propose an
agrarian law (18 March, 1793)·
On Education
After seeking to defend Louis XVI in August, 1792, Dupont went into
hiding in the countryside until the Committee of General Security on 25 Messidor
(July 13, 1794) ordered his imprisonment. But with Thermidor, and Robespierre's
death, he was released. Under the Constitution of the Year III, he was elected to
the Council of Elders (October, 1795). But, in the Coup d'Etat of 18 Fructidor An V,
he was forced to resign, and he began plans to move to America, where his son
Victor has served in a diplomatic mission to Philadelphia under the First Republic,
1793-1794. Dupont's whole family went to America in 1799 ; he returned to
France in 1802, fled France in the Hundred Days of 1815 after leading the
deposition of Napoleon in 1814 and died in America in 1817. He was most
anxious that Jefferson arrange the translation of his Vues sur I'Education
Nationale (1794) to assist Americans to transmit the values acquired from the
revolution as a foundation for progress.
Quesnay, Turgot and Dupont believed that their work indicated that a
science of man, a social science was about to develop parallel to the
developments in the physical sciences by chemists such as Lavoisier12 and
astronomers like Dupont's friend, Joseph Jerome Lefran?ais de Lalande. The
Physiocrat, Pierre Le Mercier de la Riviere, saw this as the next stage in the
formation of public opinion. They believed that it was imperative that human
ignorance be replaced by knowledge of the natural social order among the
general population, for it was not possible for the natural, social order to be
imposed by force13.
1!Antoine-Laurent Lavoisier (1743-1794) was the founder of modern chemistry. A farmer-general of
taxes, he became interested in political economy. After his execution in the Terror, his economics
works were published by Pierre-Louis Roederer. Lavoisier had loaned Dupont the money for him to
open a print shop in 1791 with his son, Eleuthere-Irenee Dupont, who had previously studied the
manufacture of gunpowder in 1787 at the Regie des Poudres, where Lavoisier was a director. Their
close association is indicative of the relationship of science and political and moral sciences in the
Enlightenment. Condorcet, we will see, combined these elements in his own person.
13Le Mercier de la Rividre-1767, p. 50.

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1.3 Condillac, "the Philosopher to the Philosopher"
His View on Social Sciences
Abbe Etienne Bonnot de Condillac (1715-1780) is perhaps the least well-

known among English-speaking scholars of the great philosophes of eighteenth
century France. He was born in Grenoble, and was the younger brother of the
Abbe Mably (one of the Abbes who were close friends of John Adams and
Thomas Jefferson). Condillac was acquainted with Jean-Jacques Rousseau who
had been the tutor in the family of Condillac's uncle, M. de Mably in Lyon.
Condillac continued the theory of knowledge of Locke in opposition to the work
of Descartes, Leibniz, Spinoza and Malebranche. In his critique of innate faculties,
Condillac had an impact on English thought in the nineteenth century, especially
James Mill, John Stuart Mill and Herbert Spencer.
Condillac's major works were : Essai sur l'origine des connaissances
humaines (1746), Tratte des systemes (1749), Tratte des sensations humaines
(1746), Tratte des sensations (1754), and Le Commerce et le gouvernement,
consideres relativement I'un ά l'autre (1776). His Cours d'etudes (1767-1773),
written for the instruction of the duke of Parma, grandson of Louis XV, contained
his contribution to historical topics, expressing his close association with English
ways of thinking.
Condillac refined Locke's "historical, plain method" to a more precise form
of analysis with a stress upon language. Turgot had contributed an article,
"Etymologie", (part of his wider study of the subject) to the Encyclopedie that
language/logic was a calculus for philosophy. Keith Baker has noted that Lavoisier
believed that chemistry would be successful only when he had developed its own
language14. Baker adds (1975, p.112) :
The idea that a successful science is primarily a well-

made language became the watchword of the Ideologues - in this,
as in many other things, the true heirs of the Enlightenment - they
regarded "ideology", the philosophy of signs, as the only means of
reducing the moral and political sciences to positive truths as
certain as those of the physical sciences.
Baker reports that Condillac died early in August 1780 from a "putrid
bilious fever" which he attributed to hot chocolate which Condorcet had served
him. This was especially sad as "it is true that Condillac had always detested
Condorcet". Condorcet published in the September 25, 1780 fournal de Paris, a
notice on Condillac indicating that Condillac was not original compared to Locke.
Further, he charged that Condillac's Le Commerce (1776) neglected the writers on
economics who had anticipated him. Condorcet concluded :
H
Baker-1975.
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We do not make these observations in order to diminish

the glory of M. de С***. He knew better than anyone that no man
discovers a complete science single-handed. The "motto probem
sine matre creatam " will never be adopted by a philosopher who
has made true discoveries. (In Baker-1975, p.115.)
Condorcet's use of the line of Ovid was an implied attack on Montesquieu
as the line had been placed at the head of the L 'Esprit des Lois. The young future
Ideologue, Dominique-Joseph Garat, close friend of Condorcet's close friends, M.
and Mme Suard, responded in the Journal de Paris (October 5, 1780) praising
Condillac as the "rival and perhaps the conqueror of Locke", and defending
Montesqieu. Condorcet told Turgot he would not bother to respond, but was
stimulated to write a draft essay. Baker reports Condorcet's conclusion from the
debate about Condillac (Baker-1975, p. 117):
In a great number of questions in philosophy, morals,
and politics, this analysis of ideas is identical with the method of
discovering truth because the truth involved are so simple that
they need only to be stated to be accepted. But one should not
therefore conclude in general, Condorcet insisted, that the
method of making a discovery and the analysis of ideas in the
abstract sciences are one and the same thing.
According to Baker (1975, p. 118) :
Like the physical sciences, then, the moral and political
sciences must be reduced by the method of analysis to positive
truths based on "general facts and rigorous reasoning". So
convinced was he that positive scientific truth was grounded
upon the twin foundations of observations and analysis, that
Condorcet suggested in a fragmentary plan for the history of the
sciences that they advance by a dialectical movement, oscillating
between periods dominated successively by the spirit of
observation necessary to elicit facts and to detail them accurately
and by the systematic spirit necessary to classify these facts and to
perceive their relations and consequences. There arrives a stage
in the development of every science where it demands so much of
the energy of the scientist to work through the detailed facts
accumulated by observation that the discovery of general
principles requires superhuman intelligence. At such a stage,
Condorcet maintained, the scientist must await a revolution in
method that will make it possible to reduce the inchoate mass of
detail to general truths.
In conclusion regarding Condillac, Baker expressed the following (1975, p. 116-117) :

Condillac's thinking has been frequently cited in this
discussion as evidence for more general developments in
eighteenth century thought. Nowhere more clearly than in his
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systematic pages is the structure of Enlightenment thought in

France revealed. His achievement was to combine, digest, and
put into systematic form, views often found scattered elsewhere in
the philosophical and scientific thought of the period. Yet if
Condillac by his typicality may be regarded as "philosopher to the
philosophes", his direct influence upon them remains
problematic. If Condorcet is representative in this respect, we
must beware of the assumption that the philosophes automatically
or uncritically found their philosophical themes in Condillac's
writing.
A strong influence
Condillac's influence remained strong through the period of the French

Republic and the First Empire into the Bourbon Restoration. His ideas were
continued by Destutt de Tracy and the Ideologues. His collected works were
published in 1798 and on several subsequent occasions until the last edition in
1822. At that time, the Lockean ideas of Condillac and the Ideologues were
replaced by the idealist philosophy based on German influences represented by
Victor Cousin15.
Peter Gay in several works on the Enlightenment16 sees the Enlightenment
as the beginning of social sciences, the Scottish Enlightenment, with Hume, Smith,
Ferguson, playing a central role. On the other hand, Michael Foucault (1970)
insists that the social sciences were not possible in the eighteenth century.
According to him, the social sciences were possible only after the important
redeployment of epistemology accomplished by Destutt de Tracy in his Ideologie.
Foucault's insistence that the clarity of thinking achieved by Destutt de Tracy's
approach was the necessary precondition of social science is extreme. Destutt de
Tracy made a monumental contribution to the social sciences in general by the
section of his volume on Will which contains his Treatise on Political Economy.
But, whatever his contribution to clearer thinking may have been, Destutt de
Tracy's contribution was a continuation of the eighteenth century of which he was
very much a part, and especially a continuation of the work of Condorcet.
"H.D. Macleod considered Condillac "infinitely superior to A. Smith." Stanley Jevons considered
Condillac to be "original and profound." Joseph Schumpeter felt that Condillac derived his economic
ideas from Turgot, and in comparison to the most brilliant economist of the eighteenth century,
Condillac might have seemed more pale than Turgot.
"Especially Gay-1966/1969. See also Georges Gusdorf, Introduction aux sciences humaines (Paris,
I960) and Les Sciences humaines et la pensee occidentale (Paris, 1966) (volumes four, five and six
concern the Enlightenment).

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1.4 Condorcet
New instruments for the social sciences
Keith Michael Baker's Condorcet is the single, most important contribution

to intellectual history in this generation. Initially inspired by Mario Einaudi, and
written as a dissertation at the Unversity of London under Alfred Cobban, Baker's
Condorcet offers the key to the understanding of the Enlightenment of French
Classical Liberalism in the nineteenth century.
Condorcet drew upon the English thinkers, especially Newton and Locke,
for his general ideas. But, it was from Hume that he seemed to take the most in his
approach to science. The parallels to Hume's A Treatise of Human Nature are
strong, especially to the chapter, "Of Knowledge and Probability". Blaise Pascal of
Port-Royal, and Jacob Bernoulli had contributed greatly to the theory of
probabilities. Of Bernoulli, Condorcet said (in Baker-1975, p. 157) : he "seemed to
recognize more clearly than anyone the full potential of the applications of this
calculus, and the manner in which it could be extended to almost all questions
subject to reasoning."
Keith Baker notes however that it is Hume, rather than Bernoulli, who,
through his analysis of belief, offered to place physical and moral sciences on the
same epistemological level (1975, p. 159-160) :
While Bernoulli therefore opened the way to a social
science theoretically founded on the application of the calculus of
probabilities to the probable experience of human life and
conduct, he still maintained the traditional epistemological divide
between the probable truths of such an art and the demonstrable,
or "scientific", certainty that he regarded as achievable in the
physical sciences. Probability, no matter how precisely calculated,
was still second best to the demonstrable certainty of the
traditional definition of science... But can the principle of
equiprobability, thereby arrived at, be logically extended as a
principle relative to our knowledge (or ignorance) of the world at
large? Hume's analysis of belief seemed to validate exactly such
an extension, in a manner that Bernoulli's reasoning did not. In
Hume's philosophy the principle of equipossibility became an
essential consequence of our ignorance of necessary connections.
Since we can have no logical grounds for associating any one
idea (or event) with another a priori, we must regard all
combinations of ideas (or events) as equally possible. Only by
right reasoning, according to regular rules of philosophizing
which give equal phenomenological weight to events in
experience, can we arrive, as if by a calculus, at an expectation
of the probable recurrence of events we have experienced in the
past.

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It is in this context that Hume's discussion of probability

seems to assume its true significance for the idea of social science
in the Enlightenment. Hume, more consistently than Bernoulli,
adopted a subjective definition of probability that opened up the
probable domain of human experience to the potential role of the
calculus ofprobabilities. More important, he also completely swept
away the rationalistic restrictions that Bernoulli had placed on
the extent of this rule, by denying the possibility of rational, or
"scientific", demonstration in any aspect of human knowledge.
The effect of Hume's analysis of belief was therefore to place the
moral and the physical sciences together in a continuum of
probable knowledge. If a mathematical art of conjecture were
possible, it would apply not only to the probable truths of everyday
life but to the entire realm of human thought and conduct.
Jean Le Rond d'Alembert raised a fundamental objection to the theory of

probabilities which received thorough discussions by Pierre-Simon de Laplace and
Condorcet. Condorcet separated two kinds of certainity : the more or less constant
order of facts ; and the certainty that one knows these facts.
Condorcet's argument that the moral sciences can equal

the physical in reliability hinges, in effect, on this distinction
between the "certainty of a science", and the "certainty of its
results." At any given time, the results of the moral sciences may
be less probable than those of the physical sciences. If the
observation of facts is more difficult in human affairs, and their
order consequently less easy to elicit, the moral sciences may in
given cases acquire fewer precise truths. If the order of observed
facts is itself less constant than that revealed by the physical
sciences, then their actual results will be less probable. (Baker-
1975, p.182.)
Baker argues that Condorcet's definition of the social field parallel to a

mathematical model was based on the fact that political questions for
administrative reasons were already associated with a quantitative approach to
social phenomena. Not the least this was the reason because of the close
connection between political questions and the problems of tax-collection.
Moral sciences and tbe rights of man
For Condorcet, as for Turgot, the fundamental issues of the moral sciences
were deeper than the utilitarian issues of self-interest. The moral sciences
provided a guide to the rights of man. Condorcet dealt with the rights of man in
1786 responding to the prize essay proposed by the Abbe Raynal : "Has the
discovery of America been useful or harmful to the human race? If benefits have
resulted from it, what means are there of preserving and increasing them? If it has
produced evil results, how can they be remedied? Condorcet sought to answer by
his De l'Influence de la RevolutionBrought to you byCondorcet
d'Amerique. | Bibliothequelisted four rights
de l'Universite Laval as
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fundamental. First, the right to personal liberty and security. Equally important
was the right to property. Baker notes (1975, p. 218-219) :
Of all the natural rights, Condorcet had argued in the
"Vie de Μ. Turgot", property, the free disposition of what one
legitimately possesses, is the most fundamental. It follows that
"laissez-faire, laissez-passer" must be the first law of civil society.
Everywhere they are untrammelled, particular interests tend
naturally to the common good. Everywhere they are hindered,
agriculture, industry, and commerce must be set free. For what
right can society have over these objects? Instituted to preserve
man's exercise of his natural rights, obliged to watch over the
common good of all, it is required by justice and the public
interest equally to limit legislation to protecting the freest exercise
of the individual's right to property, to establishing no obstacles
and destroying those that exist, to preventing fraud and violence
from contravening the laws." The science of citizenship, as
Condorcet learned it from Turgot, clearly implied the liberal
economic program for which Condorcet campaigned so
vociferously throughout his public career.
The third natural right was the right to the rule of law, and equality before
the law, and the fourth was the right to participate, directly or indirectly, in the
formation of laws.
The Physiocrats, broadly defined to include Turgot and Condorcet, made a
major contribution to the concepts which lead to the Declaration of the Rights of
Man of 1789'7.
The influence on Condorcet's ideas other than the impact of Turgot can be
identified. He places Locke in the forefront of those who contributed to the
progress of moral sciences. Rousseau, Montesquieu, Beccaria and the Italian-
French school of economists, of whom Schumpeter has been admiring, are
important. But, along with Locke, it is the Scottish moral philosophers who had
the greatest influence, Hume, Smith and Ferguson18.
Some continuity in French liberal thought
Condorcet, in his Eloge de Michel de l'Höpital introduces a study of

legislation in the decline and fall of states. His tribute to the Chancellor de
l'Höpital who led the fight for toleration in the sixteenth century placed Condorcet
in the way of an important milestone in the history of French Liberalism.
17
See especially Marcaggi-1912.
"On the impact of the Scottish moralists, see Alengry-1903.
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Condorcet's subject, Michel de l'Hopital (1505-1573) was a central figure

in the struggles for toleration. He was connected to the Bourbons, and studied law
in Padua and Bologna for almost a decade and was an official of the Papal court in
Rome. After a dozen years as a councillor to the Parlement of Paris, he was sent
by Henry II as representative to the general council (Council of Trent) which was
meeting in Bologna. In 1560 he became chancellor of France and was at the
center of conflict for a decade. He introduced several edicts of toleration, and in
addition, sought to reform the general system of law. He was a leader of the
Politiques who were royal officials who backed into a principled defense of the
right of toleration. Toleration of different ideas is the first step to the classical
liberal philosophy. Non-interference of the government with beliefs leads to
almost complete limitations on state interference, since almost everything is a
matter of belief, interference with which the state must abjure to be just19.
His work on the French constitution
Condorcet was very active in the pamphlet war that preceded the French
Revolution. In his Lettres d'un citoyen des Etats-Unis a un Frangais sur les affaires
presentes (1788) he questioned whether property is respected when taxes are
placed arbitrarily. Condorcet was an advocate of multiple votes by taxpayers in
proportion to their payments ; small taxpayers should combine in proportion to
the one vote equal to their joint taxpayment. This was based on Turgot's analysis
that taxpayers are the same as shareholders, and voting should be based in
proportion to the amount of taxes payed.
During the early years of the French Revolution, Condorcet was very
active in the debates on a new constitution, on protection of individual rights, and
on education. With the end of the constitutional monarchy, Condorcet, who had
been a Girondin representative for Paris in the Legislative Assembly, was elected
by his native department to a seat in the Convention, taking his seat in September,
1792. On October 11, 1792 Condorcet, along with Thomas Paine, was elected a
member of the nine-member Committee on the Constitution. He became its
leading member and was the principal author of the Consitutional project of 1793-
Much of constitutional work was devoted to the mechanics of rational decision-
making and voting. Basing himself on Turgot, Condorcet sought radical
decentralization of administration, with such a wide dispersal of power, that it
would be nearly passive.
"The most valuable literature of toleration, from the point of view of French Classical Liberalism, came
from another level of the debate separate from the Catholic and Huguenot literature on social contract,
obedience, popular sovereignty and revolution. Michel de Montaigne had retired from the Parlement
of Bordeaux to study and write (he later was elected mayor). Basing himself on Plutarch, Montaigne
composed ninety-three essays which expressed his own personality against external interference, as
well as an essay on Raymund de Sabunde, a Spanish scholastic whose natural theology Montaigne had
earlier translated into French. Montaigne edited Etienne de la Boetie's Discourse ort Voluntary
Servitude, one of the early contributions to French Classical Liberalism. La Boetie had been a leading
French Renaissance scholar and close friend of Montaigne ; Montaigne's essay on Friendship refers to
La Boetie, as do La Boetie's epistles to Montaigne.
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" The action of governments is too complicated; they act

too much, on too many matters. This complication, this useless
action, necessarily results in an obscure, indirect influence which
arouses suspicion... The people that wishes to be free and peaceful
must have laws and institutions that reduce the action of
goverment to the least possible quantity." (Condorcet-1792, pp.
324-325).
Condorcet's constitutional plan received the fury of the Jacobins. In the
name of Rousseauist principles of a republic of virtue, Condorcet's constitutional
plan was attacked inside and outside the Convention. On May 13, 1793, he
proposed that the Convention submit a constitution to the people or resign for
new elections for a Convention. On June 2, Condorcet and other opponents of the
Jacobins were expelled from the Convention and the Terror began. He wrote an
important protest to these measures comparing his constitution to the one that the
Jacobins imposed from parts of his constitutional plan. On July 8, the Convention
ordered him to be arrested, his papers sealed and his library confiscated20.
With the Convention threatening his arrest, Condorcet went into hiding
and observed the onset of the Terror. He wrote the Esquisse d'un tableau
historique des progres de l'esprit humain which was published in 1795 and
distributed throughout the country by order of the Convention after the fall of
Robespierre during Thermidor. The work we have is unfinished for the decree of
outlawry against Condorcet was issued March 13, 1794 as the Terror reached white
heat. Condorcet sought refuge in the country-side but was suspected and arrested
on March 27; he was found dead in prison on March 29 of a heart attack or poison.
M
At that historic moment, Condorcet had published an essay on the application of calculus to the moral
and political sciences. Interestingly enough, two decades earlier Condorcet had criticized Pietro Verri,
patron of Beccaria, for his over eager attempts to apply mathematics to the social sciences. The market
was a complex of values, choices and preferences that was not compressed into simplistic
mathematical applicatons. The market was "that mass of operations exercised independently by a great
number of men and directed by the interest, the opinion, one might even say the instinct of each one of
them."

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Part Π
II. 1 The French Revolution : A watershed event for

France and for French liberalism
Tbe public finance crisis
The French Revolution went through a number of phases with possible

positive/negative reactions to each phase. Thus, it is necessary to be specific about
the phase of the French Revolution about which one is speaking. Due to new
break-throughs in economics, we are better able now than before to understand
the French Revolution. The contemporary break-throughs primarily are the
refinement of public finance analysis, contractarianism and constitutional
economics which have been associated with Nobel Laureate James Buchanan.
The French Revolution was the final act of a centuries long public finance
crisis in which the French state had borrowed to pay for deficits until the interest
payments were beginning to consume much of the revenues. The bondholders
wished to insure increased revenues to protect their government bond
investments ; the non-taxpaying nobles wished to avoid being the victims of the
public finance crisis. In the end, both groups suffered nearly complete losses
through repudiation and expropriation.
In the face of the potential imposition of taxation on the nobles, the
summer of 1789 witnesses a major peasant uprising. The nobles for decades had
been attempting to regain feudal dues from peasants who had over centuries seen
the feudal payments reduced to minor amounts while the legal status had
remained on the books. In the face of the growth of this feudal reaction, the
prospect of the nobles paying taxes ment the strong likelihood of the nobles
extracting their tax payments from the peasants. Throughout France the peasants
seized the chäteaux or record offices, and burned the charters and records of
feudal payments.
By this destruction of feudal records, the peasants of France freed
themselves and became legally the independent landholders that they had been in
fact. Thereafter, in the French Revolution, the peasants were satisfied, passive
observers of Parisien politics, except when inflation, price controls and
requisitioning armies attacked the peasants' insistence on market prices against the
urban politicians' attempts to impose the communitarian, moral economy of low,
government imposed prices. Peasants, along with village and town investors,
increased their property owning by buying lands confiscated from nobles,
"enemies of the Republic", and from the Church.
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The attempted solution
In October, 1789 the National Assembly made the first great contribution
to the debacle of the French Revolution. In the face of the fiscal crisis, it was
decided that the properties of the Catholic Church, representing almost thirty per
cent of the wealth in France, would be nationalized. The argument was that the
property had been donated by kings, nobles and commoners to the Church for
spiritual and charitable benefits of the nation ; the nation now was using the
wealth in a more beneficial way in the fiscal crisis. In return, the Church would
receive annual grants from the state for salaries of clergy, and the state would
undertake the activities previously paid for by the Church from the donations of
the faithful - schools, hospitals, asylums, poorhouses, orphanages, etc. The clergy
became salaried civil servants, while the voluntary charitable institutions became
state institutions as the religious orders of nuns, monks and teaching and nursing
brothers were expropriated and disbanded in France. This was in contrast with the
Austro-Hungarian decrees which required the contemplative religious orders to
undertake direct practical activities, such as teaching and nursing.
The properties of the church had been formed over more than a dozen
centuries from donations. Since the donations were from the kings and nobles, in
large measure, it could be claimed that it was a less than legitimate source of
funds. But, there is a large jump from there to the idea that the state should take
those funds to be used for public expenditures. The consequences for education,
charity and church activities directly can be seen from the first constitution of the
French Revolution, The Constitution of September 3, 1791, issued by the National
Assembly. Under Title I, "Fundamental Provisions Guaranteed by the
Constitution", the major part provides :
The Constitution guarantees the inviolability of property,
or a just and previous indemnity for that which a legally
established public neccessity requires the sacrifice.
Property reserved for the expenses of worship and for all
services of public benefit belongs to the nation, and is at its
disposal at all times.
The Constitution guarantees conveyances which have
been or may be made according to the forms established by law.
Citizens have the right to elect or choose the ministers of their
religions.
A general establishment for 'public relief shall be created
and organized to raise funds, relieve the infirm poor, and furnish
work for the able-bodied poor who have been unable to procure it
for themselves.
'Public instruction'for all citizens, free of charge in those
branches of education which are indispensable to all men, shall
be constituted and organized, and the establishments thereof
shall be approportioned gradually, in accordance with the
division of the Kingdom.

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National festivals shall be instituted to preserve the

memory of the French Revolution, to maintain fraternity among
the citizens, and to bind them to the Constitution, the "Patrie",
and the laws. A code of civil law common to the entire kingdom
shall be drafted.21
The nationalized church lands were to be the fund on which government

notes would be issued to pay for government expenses. The notes, the assignats,
were issued in an amount much less than the value of the church lands ; as the
land was sold, the assignats were to be redeemed. Instead, succeeding legislatures
issued more and more 'assignats' creating the massive inflation accompanied by
price controls and imprisonment and death for violations of the price controls
which formed the basis of the economic terror. It was easier for the politicans to
keep borrowing by issuing assignats, than to face economic reality on the grounds
that France was a rich country and could afford more public debt.
As the crisis became more intense, politicians saw external conflict as a
relief from internal pressures and declared war on Prussia and Austria.
Conscription was imposed, peasants wished real money and not paper money for
their products (requisitioning armies were sent to the country-side to take food at
the controlled prices), and merchants and manufacturers were imprisoned and
executed as "enemies of the Revolution" for failure to accept paper money or for
selling at market prices rather than at government controled prices. The lessons
learned by the French peasant majority was that money was the life blood of the
economy and hard money was the only blood not poisoned. This lesson remained
a bedrock of French politics until the Second World War.
The position of the French liberals

The criticisms by French economists of the time, especially by Pierre
Samuel Dupont de Nemours, of the monetary policies of the French Revolution
are a brilliant contribution to economic analysis. The monetary history of the
French Revolution is a monument to the economic criticism made by Dupont and
others. Similarly, French Liberals contributed other important ideas in the debates
of the French Revolution. The Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen in
August, 1789 was a milestone in constitutional ideas, but there were not the
political institutions to implement the constitutional ideas. In contrast to England
and America, the French Liberals undertook their researches and analysis in a
political system which lacked the institutions to be influenced for implementing
Liberal ideas. In France, the state was separate from social developments, and
thus, tended to be immune to the influence of public opinion, until the differences
were so extreme or irreconciliable that revolution was the answer. The French
21Themodel for this was the expulsion of the Jesuits in 1764. Preceding the abolition of the order by the
Pope in 1773 ; remnants lasted by accident in White Russia and in Maryland, being the basis for the
foundation of Georgetown University in 1789.Brought to you by | Bibliotheque de l'Universite Laval
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Revolution was a series of revolutions, concluding with Napoleon's seizure of

power to bring calm by establishing hard money and conciliation of the Catholic
majority. The Restoration of the Bourbon monarchy in 1814-1815, the July
Revolution and the establishment of the Orleans monarchy in 1830, the 1848
Republic followed by Louis Napoleon Ill's Second Empire, the Paris Commune of
1871 and the creation of the Third Republic indicate the century of policital
instability following the French Revolution.
The French Liberals did not have a major political or electoral base. The
peasant majority wanted maintenance of private propety, including hard money
(gold standard), and respect for religious customs (traditional Catholic religions
worship provided by the village cure). The French Right has stood for the politics
of the peasants. The French Left has either threatened private property (and hard
money) or accepted private property, but always threatened respect for religious
customs.
French Liberals tended to appear to side with the French Left on the
religious question. While the French Left showed deference to religious customs
and thinking, and to religious authorities, the French Liberals ignored them. The
French Liberals favored formal, voluntary institutions such as religious institutions.
But, ignoring religious customs and thinking was not a major problem. The
important problem had to do with private schools. More correctly, the problem
was the creation of state schools. Once the state was involved in education it
created a context of conflict. Since preceding state involvement in education,
education was a private matter mainly the activity of various elements of religious
entities, especially Catholic religious orders. In the decades preceding the French
Revolution, there had been extensive debates regarding education and the role of
the Catholic religious orders. In general, Enlightenment opinion held that the roles
of these religious orders had been negative because they provided education,
health care or charity too widely among the population.
The widespread complaint among Enlightenment thinkers was that the
Catholic education systems educated too many of the poor to literacy in a society
where there might not be enough employment for literate people. The religious
orders were using their incomes to interfere with the natural order as these
childrens' parents had not saved enough to purchase an education, thereby
competing with the children of parents who were bureaucrats or heirs of
bureaucrats.
The answer of Enlightenment thinkers was that foundations and beneficies

on which the private schools were based should be expropriated. A new state
school system would be created which would limit education to the most talented ;
these most talented would have to have the money to support their living away
from home to attend the few elite secondary schools in the major cities. The
expropriation of religious foundations and the creation of the state school system
ment a major division in French society. French Liberals during the French
Revolution played a leading role in the creation of the state school system, and in
the nineteenth century tended to support the state school system and oppose the
re-creation of a religious school system. French Liberalism condemned itself to
disconnection with its natural supporters among
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and private property. (This was not unique to France ; Liberals in England,
Scandinavia and Germany had parallel experiences.)
A surprising strategy to implement liberal ideas
The French Liberals of the era of the French Revolution initiated their
contributions to Classical Liberalism by seeking a strategy to implement Liberal
ideas. Tuigot, Dupont and Condorcet sought to achieve this goal by trying to gain
control of the Academy of Sciences. The Academy would provide guidance to the
government on reform and policy. When the financial crisis created the
Revolution, Dupont and Condorcet sought to create intellectual centers by which
to influence public opinion and decision-makers. Although the Revolution swept
these efforts away and Condorcet committed suicide on being arrested, after the
fall of Robespierre the circle of Condorcet which survived sought to influence the
creation of new state intellectual institutions and to control them. The French
Institute was one such institution, especially its Class of Moral and Political
Sciences. The second was the new state school system, especially the Ecoles
centrales, the secondary schools set up in the major French cities. The French
Liberals were engaged in their conception, organization, staffing and curriculum.
Finally, they published a journal, the Decade philosophtque, named after the new
revolutionary calendar's ten day week. Established in 1794, J.B. Say was the editor
during the first half dozen years of its existence.
Dupont, Talleyrand, Sieyes and Condorcet were among the large number
who proposed new plans for education in France in the period of the Revolution.
These plans tended to be aimed at a secular education. However, there tended to
be a difference between those who saw a central place for historical, and the
moral and political sciences, and those who wished an almost exclusive emphasis
on natural sciences and mathematics. In the tumult of attempting to find the
perfect system of education and then to impose it by government decree, a huge
amount of talent was expended. The more that the impact of the meaning of the
Terror, and its Rousseauian republic of virtue, sunk into the consciousness of the
members of the legislatures, the more questionable the whole enterprise would
seem.
Π.2 Abbe Sieyes and the art of political sciences
Against the English constitutional system
The Abbe Sieyes (1748-1836) is best known as the author of What is the
Third Estate? (1789). What is the Third Estate? was published in January, 1789 and
had the greatest influence on the opposition to the King's ministers in the period
preceding the Estates General. The 1789 Estates General was the first meeting of
the representatives of the three orders since 1614. In addition to the election of
deputies of the clergy, nobles and commons by local assemblies, each orders'
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local assemblies produced books of grievances {Cahiers) for the deputies to

present at the meeting of the Estates General22.
Sieyes was influenced by the French philosophes, Voltaire, Condillac,
Helvetius, Quesnay, Abbe Saint-Pierre, Mably and the Encyclopedic, indicating
more attention to philosophy than theology. But, the greatest influences on Sieyes
were the Scottish and English writers. John Locke was a major influence, directly
and indirectly. Sieyes' political thought was the Lockean tradition of the Etat
gendarme (the nightwatchman state) as opposed to the communitarian totality of
Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Among the many English writers whom Sieyes read were :
Bacon, Cumberland, Cudworth, Shaftesbury, Bolingbroke, Mandeville, Hutcheson,
Richard Price, Adam Smith, Sir James Steuart, and David Hume's History and the
essay on the Populousness of Ancient Nations. But, Sieyes was not a proponent of
the English constitutional system. In 1792 he wrote a fragment in which he
criticized Montesquieu's Esprit des Lois. He opposed a two-house legislature and
the balance of powers.
Sieyes expressed a hostility to the English constitutional concepts and for
the historical sciences on which constitutional concepts in England were based. In
What is the Third Estate?, he said (1789, pp. 175-76) :
No people, they say, has done better in terms of political
constitutions than the English. If this is so, then the products of the
political art ought to be the same at the end of the eighteenth
century as they were in the seventeenth century! The English did
not lag behind the enlightenment of their time ; let us not lag
behind the enlightenment of our own. Above all let us not get
discouraged by seeing nothing in the past that is suited to our
condition. The true science of the state of society does not date
from very far back.
What methodology for the social sciences
Sieyes, like many French intellectuals had been impressed by the progress
of science in England under the leadership of Sir Isaac Newton. But, Sieyes
disagreed with those who applied the experimental method and basis in
experience of physics to the social sciences. That application ment the search of
historical records to study and compare earlier developments in constitutional
systems.
22
Abbe Sieyes was born in Provence and studied at the theological faculty at the Sorbonne and at the
seminary of Saint-Sulpice from 1765 to 1775. He became a secretary to a bishop in Brittany and, on the
bishop's transfer to Chartres in 1780, Sieyes became vicar-general. In 1786 he was councillor to the
chamber of the clergy of France ; in 1787 representative of the clergy in the Provincial Assembly of
Orleans, and in 1788 chancellor of the chapter of the diocese of Chartres. After the Revolution, Sieyes
explained his role : "I survived." As a member of the Convention he voted the death of the king in
January, 1793 and then removed himself from the political scene until the overthrow of Robespierre. He
then served as minister to The Hague and to Berlin, and as Director in the Directory. He assisted
Napoleon to become first consul with Sieyes as second consul ; he became first president of the Senat
of the Empire. After 1814 he lived in exile in Brussels,
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Sieyes, in another of his works appearing previous to the meeting of the

Estates General (Sieyes-1789, pp. 1-2), said :
Order a clock from a clockmaker and see if he bothers to
consult the history of clockmaking, true or false, about the
different ways the early industry used to measure time. Quite
rightly he considers that the prolonged probing of the human
mind during the centuries of ignorance is far less suited to guide
his craft than that branch of mechanics in which the laws and
ideas of modern genius are expressed.
Social mechanics has been equally enriched in our own
day by the long creative nights of genius. Why then do we refuse
to consult it over the true means of satisfying the great needs of
political societies?
Sieyes believed that the successful methods of natural sciences had given a
wrong direction to the development of the moral and political sciences. He
believed that the search for facts and data of the historical sciences, similar to the
natural sciences, had negative results. He contrasts historical facts against truth. He
continued in the Vues (1789, pp. 29-33) :
It has become accepted that nothing is to be decided
except by facts. This is because despotism has everywhere begun
with facts, and because it is necessary for it always to offer this
false model, which is at its service, rather than the truth, which is
independent and condemns it.
Every day we see a foolish form of pedantry endeavouring
confidently to deny the philosopher who goes back to the
principles of the social art. Useful and fruitful meditation appears
to the ponderous scholar simply as the work of idleness, and when
the man of superior talents has abandoned with disgust, as much
as with wisdom, the sad story of the errors of our forefathers,
mediocrity throws itself into the task of industriously annotating
every page of history. It sees in the mere talent of reading and
transcribing the merit "par excellence", and the answer to every
question.
Unfortunately, the very philosophers who, in the course of
the present century, have rendered such signal services to the
physical sciences, seem to authorize this ridiculous confidence,
and to lend the force of their genius to these blind declamations...
His object is to understand nature, and since he has not
been called upon to assist either with his counsel or with his hand,
the plan of the world's system, since the physical universe exists
and maintains itself independently of his corrective mediations, it
is indeed necessary that he restricts himself to the experience of
facts. Physics can be nothing else than the knowledge of "what is".
Art, bolder in its flight, sets out to bend and accommodate
the facts to our needs and enjoyments ; it asks what ought to be
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for the utility of man. Art is ours ; speculation, combination and

operation belong to us equally. Well, of all the arts indubitably the
first is that concerned with arranging men in relation to one
another according to a plan which is most favourable to all. And
I ask, is it necessary here to consult facts in the manner of the
physicist? What ought to be the true science, that of facts or that of
principles?...
Undoubtedly, true politics combines facts and not
chimeras, but it combines : and like the architect who prepares
and realizes his plan in his imagination before executing it, the
legislatator conceives and realizes in his mind the totality and the
details of the social order that fits the peoples.
Sieyes, like Mably and Rousseau, refers to the "legislator" who will bring
forth a constitutional system : the implication is that Sieyes is the "legislator".
Sieyes' critique had two aspects of historical thinking in mind. He opposed
those who searched in historical data for information concerning social and
constitutional systems which succeeded and failed. Similarly, he attacked those
who viewed man's history as demonstrating that man had inherent and common
desires and wants on the basis of which a consistent constitutional approach could
be developed. Sieyes was perceptive to see that these were two aspects of the
same way of thinking. Contemporary historians of political thought would
associate these with the contributions of F.A. Hayek. It is especially interesting to
see the connection between Hayek and those to whom Sieyes was addressing his
remarks, the Economistes, the Physiocrats and the French market economists.
An independent thinker
Sieyes' rejection of history and naturalism in social sciences is related to

his theory of knowledge, which was based on the writings of the Abbe de
Condillac. But, Sieyes was not completely in the tradition of sensationalist
epistemology. The school of Condillac came into being during the post-Terror,
especially, during the Directory, Consulate and First Empire, and was known as
the Ideologues. Those most closely associated with the school were Destutt de
Tracy, Volney, Garat, Cabanis, and Laromiguiere, all of whom were close
associates of Sieyes. William von Humboldt met the Ideologues and Sieyes,
visiting Paris in 1798. He differentiated Sieyes from the Ideologues in a letter to
Schiller (June 23, 1798). Humboldt saw Sieyes as approaching the idealism of Kant
and Fichte. Compared to Condillac, Sieyes directed his attention toward individual
human action. Is the claim true that the idealist philosophy of Kant and Fichte was
the metaphysical side of the French Revolution? Sieyes' idealism seemed to give
him confidence that man could transcend his nature by his will.
This view placed him at odds with the Economistes. He opposed not only
the Physiocrats but also the economic writing of Turgot, Condillac, Smith and
finally, J.B. Say. He differed from the Economistes who had a limited view of
"public goods" (justice and police), and desired a separation of private and public
activities. For the Physiocrats, public power
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with absolute property rights, and its actions were severely limited by the physical
world of man's nature.
The role of the sate
Parallel to his analysis of the nation as a constituent political entity, Sieyes

was also concerned with the nation as a sum of the private works of society and of
the public functions. The public functions were the army, the law, the church and
the administration. To a large degree, the public functions were represented by the
first (clergy) and the second (nobles) estates. Army officers tended to be nobles of
the sword; the judges of the Parlements and judicial officers, and officials of the
administration were often nobles of the robe. The private functions were the work
of the Third Estate. Sieyes posited the supremacy of the legislature's majority as
the inalienable will of the people expressed by the legislature's majority. For him,
anarchy replaced order when there was a mixed constitution, on the medieval or
English model, where the parts can balance and neutralize each other to inaction.
The private works are the main activity of society and the sources of the
support for the public functions. Sieyes believed these should be freed from
government restrictions and controls. He stated that the role of the law was to
protect liberty (Essays on Privileges, p. 2) :
The legislator is established not to accord but to protect

our rights. If he limits our liberty, it can only be in relation to acts
that are harmful to society, and for this reason civil liberty
extends to everything that the law does not forbid.
But, it is likely that Sieyes did not see strong limitations on the powers of
the sovereign will of the nation expressed through the legislature's majority. Man
has two occupations : the taming of nature and the production of goods, and
relations with other men. In the first, Sieyes favors liberty, in the second, he seeks
a system of social control to express the general will.
It has been recognized earlier that men can do much for

one another's happiness. Hence, a society founded upon
reciprocal utility is really in line with the nature means that
present themselves to man for the attainment of his goal. Hence
this union is an advantage and not a sacrifice, and the social
order is like a continuation, or a complement of the natural
order. Thus even if all the sympathetic faculties of man did not
lead him in a very real and powerful though not yet enlightened
way, to live in society, reason alone would do so. (Rights of Man
and Citizen, pp. 23-25).
On July 11, 1789, Lafayette presented to the National Assembly the first
draft of a declaration of rights. Sieyes' Exposition of the rights of man and citizen
was presented to the Constitutional Committee on July 20, and received a wide
circulation in France. Sieyes' work was not a listing of rights, although he added
one to the end, but a systematic presentation of his views on the state.
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He sought to create a declaration of rights which would be universal and

applicable to all people. It was not a declaration of rights of individuals reserved
against the state ; it was to be a positive, systematic statement by the people to the
state of the powers and obligations of the governors. Sieyes criticized the
American constitutions (Fausses Declarations (1795)) :
But the Americans envisaged the new authority that they
were going to establish in the same way that government power
had been envisaged up till then. They wanted to arm themselves
against the oppression of authority; ; they declared their own
rights ; and they supposed that, everything then being settled,
they could devote themselves in peace to their own affairs. The
memory of the evils they had suffered, and those of which they
had been most sensitive, guided in general the pens of those who
drafted the "declaration of rights".
Sieyes general perspective is not that the state is a necessary evil, but that
it is a positive good. He has been contrasted with Locke on this point. Yet, he
posits a philosophy of man's self ownership.
Liberty exercises itself on common things and owned
things. The first is ownership of one's person. From this original
right springs the ownership of actions and of work, for work is
simply the useful employment of the faculties ; it emanates
patently from ownership of one's person and actions.
Ownership of external objects, or real property, is
similarly only a consequence and an extension of personal
property... These conditions are sufficient to make this object my
exclusive property. The social state adds to this, through the
strength of a general agreement, a kind of legal consecration ;
and one has to assume this last act in order to give the word
property the full meaning that we are accustomed to give it in our
policed societies. (Rights of Man and Citizen, pp. 26-27.)
The implication of Sieyes' approach is an evolution sense of property in
comparison to the Physiocrats' view that the absolute right of property pre-dates
the social contract. He indicates that in the modern world, or within the social
contract, property becomes of greater concern to the state than to the individual.
In his description of rights, Sieyes declared :
No one can fail to see that the members of society derive
the greatest advantages from public properties, public works, etc.
It is well known that those citizens whom misfortune has
rendered incapable of satisfying their needs have just rights to the
help of their fellow-citizens, etc. It is well known that nothing is
more suited to perfect the human species, both morally and
physically, than a good system of public education and
instruction, etc... But a Declaration of Rights is not the right place
for a list of all the benefits that a good
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for the people. It suffices here to say that the citizens in common
have a right to all that the state can do in their favor. (Rights of
Man and Citizen, pp. 29-30.)
Murray Forsyth concludes his study on Sieyes with the following remark
on Sieyes' influence (1987, p. 222) :
Of the great English liberal writers only Lord Acton seems

to have been fully familiar with Sieyes' work and to have held him
in high regard. He wrote: "In the little band of true theorists
composed of Harrington and Locke, Rousseau and Jefferson.
Hamilton and Mill, the rank of Sieyes is very far from being the
lowest." On another occasion he said that had he had the time he
"would have tried to explain the connection between the doctrine
of Adam Smith, that labour is the original source of all wealth,
and the conclusion that the producers of wealth virtually compose
the nation, by which Sieyes subverted historic France."
Lord Acton, like most political theorists and historians has read Sieyes'
What is the Third Estate? It is the major work of Sieyes and had the greatest impact
as a writing. Yet, Sieyes was a central figure in the French Revolutionary period for
a d o z e n years. His b r o a d e r i d e a s had an impact on the legislation a n d the
formulation of policy in the period. Sieyes' views provide a valuable introduction
to the defects in the thinking of the majority of leaders of the French Revolution,
and those defects had a continuing influence on nineteenth century French
Liberalism both as a consequence of the memory of the French Revolution and as
a mode of thought.
Π.3 Destutt de Tracy, father of the Ideologues
Τbe young liberal monarchist

Antoine Louis Claude Destutt d e Tracy w a s the founder of Ideology".
D e s c e n d e d from early fourteenth century Scottish archers in the Dauphin's
regiment, Tracy (whose father died of wounds as an officer) entered a household
regiment (Black Musketeers, founded by the Scotch) as a cadet at fourteen. He
had been a disciple of Voltaire, whose works he re-read, and made a pilgrimage to
Fermey at sixteen, where Votaire with his hand on Tracy's head g a v e him a
p h i l o s o p h i c a l benediction. Voltaire m a y h a v e influenced Tracy's c h o i c e of
Strasbourg where he could attend the university while studying at the artillery
s c h o o l . S t r a s b o u r g University w a s a c o s m o p o l i t a n e d u c a t i o n a l center f o r
Europeans. Tracy studied mathematics and geography, but benefited most from
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the renowned courses of Christofer Koch, the historian who was a Protestant and
rationalist. Koch's fifteenth volume Histoire abregee de traites de paix was the
basis of the most popular course for students interested in diplomatic careers.
Koch emphasized an analytic method, causation and comparison in his course on
the "Revolutions of Europe since the Fall of the Roman Empire", which had a
lasting impact on Tracy's approach to social evolution.
The Formal education mixed the informal at his ancestoral chateau where
his grandmother recounted the contributions of her ancestor, the great Jansenist,
Antoine Arnauld of Port Royal, and his grandfather discussed the physiocrats,
particularly, Dupont de Nemours (whom Tracy until Dupont's death always called
"my dear master"). Tracy was appointed councellor to the French ambassador to
Savoy ; from Turin he could visit his mother's relatives in Geneva.
With the calling of the Estates-General, Tracy became associated with the
liberal nobles in Paris in the Committee of Thirty, including Adrien Duport,
Lafayette, de la Rochefoucauld, etc. Tracy was elected to the Second Estate
(nobles) in the Estate-General where he tended to support all the reform
measures. In January, 1790 he read the reports of Edmund Burke's criticism of
French Revolution, and on April 3, 1790 he spoke against Burke in the National
Assembly, which was the basis of his pamphlet, Translation of a Letter from
Monsieur de Tracy, Member of the French National Assembly to M. Burke, in
Answer to his Remarks on the French Revolution (London, 1790). Tracy felt that
France's problems were due to the wars of Louis XIV primarily, and also Louis XV.
He did not think that England's oligarchy, with rotten boroughs and impressment
of seamen was a model. He believed that the new constitution created a
federation of republics (departments) under the hereditary monarch. As a
regiment commander, Tracy approved the ending of noble privilege and opening
of officers' positions to merit.
Tracy was a member of the Societe de 1789 which included Lafayette,
Dupont de Nemours, Condorcet, de la Rochefoucauld, Sieyes, Talleyrand,
Lavoisier, and several future Ideologues - Garat, Volney, Cabanis, and Roederer24.
He was associated with the Feuillants, the liberal monarchist party, opposed to the
Jacobins. Tracy was active in behalf of voting rights for Coloured and Blacks in
Santo Domingo who were property owners. He worked closely with the Abbe
Gregoire, the later constitutional bishop of Blois. Tracy was appointed a brigadier
general in Lafayette's command on the German front. But Tracy retired to Paris
and Lafayette emigrated. Tracy studied the chemistry of Lavoisier and Fourcroy, as
well as Buffon. He settled in Auteuil to which Condorcet had moved. In Auteuil,
Madame Helvetius continued her salon of admirers of her philosopher husband.
Franklin, Adams and Jefferson were regular members of the salon, and admirers of
her two "good abbes" (in the words of Franklin, Adams and Jefferson) Morellet
and de la Roche. Dr. Cabanis was Madame Helvetius' adopted son and continued
Helvetius' morality of self-interest. Stuying Condillac, Tracy along with Condorcet
looked to progress in the humane sciences, in the moral and political sciences.
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The Terror
With the onset of the Terror, Condorcet went into hiding ; Tracy was
arrested for incivisme. While his cellmate, Jollivet, wrote on progressive taxation
and mortgages, Tracy studied Condillac, and then Locke. Condorcet took poison
in prison in March, 1794 ; Lavoisier was guillotined on May 8. Expecting to be
tried on eleventh Thermidor (July 29) he wrote that "if heaven leaves me some
time to live and study", he would write works on thought-knowledge-truth, on
virtue-happiness-loving, and on liberty-equality-philanthropy.
The lack of sufficient analysis explains why one has not

yet arrived at the deductions or intermediary propositions
necessary for making the identity of these palpable. I hope to prove
by facts, what Locke and Condillac have shown by reasoning,
that morality and politics are susceptible of demonstration. (In
Kennedy-1978, p. 37.)
On ninth of Thermidor (July 27) Robespierre was overthrown. In early

October, Tracy was released, his hair had turned completely white during the
Reign of Virtue. One can understand why Tracy totally disdained politicians. He
refused to engage in politics and in a letter to his disciple and friend, Stendhal
(Henry Beyle) he wrote on October 10, 1821 (in Kennedy-1978, p.38) :
Why are men always more concerned about the means of

seizing power than about learning...what they should want to do
when they become powerful? It is a failing apparently inherent in
our species. It did us much harm during the French Revolution,
or rather it was what made it fail. And this is what long ago made
Swift say, in his mordant style, that men love to climb up ladders
like apes ... and when they are on top, they don't know how to do
anything but show their behinds.
Kennedy describes the mental situation following Themidor. Condorcet

had written in 1792 : "Robespierre is a priest and will always be only that." The
universities were closed, the French academies were abolished, and some leading
scientists were executed. The Decade philosophique, edited by Jean-Baptiste Say,
recalled (10 Messidor, An IX) : "For Robespierre, a scientist and a philosopher
were aristocrats." The Terror had been a declaration of war on the Enlightenment.
As a follower of Rousseau, Robespierre denounced the Encyclopedie. While some
historians of science have sought to excuse the Jacobins (L.P. Williams for
instance), Henri Guerlac, Marshall Clagett, etc. emphasize the attack on civilization
which the Terror represented. In this they share the view of Tracy.
Daunou and the Institut National
Lavoisier, Condorcet and many others died in the Terror. The survivors of
the prisons were many : Dupont de Nemours, Destutt de Tracy, Pierre Louis
Ginguene, Constantin Frangois Volney, Pierre Louis Roederer, and Pierre Claude
Francois Daunou. Danou was an ex-Oratorian, member
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author of the Constitution of the Year III (1795). It is he, who, in the spring of
1795, gained the assent of the Convention to print three thousand copies of
Condorcet's Esquisse d'un tableau historique des progres de l'esprit humain, co-
edited by Daunou and Madame Condorcet. Daunou's influence was strong during
the Directory ; but he quickly was at odds with Napoleon. His Essai sur les
garanties individuelles was the great statement of constitutional protection of
individual rights ; translated into Spanish, the book had almost as much success in
South America as Tracy's Commentary on Montesqieu had in North America25.
Through Daunou efforts, the Convention (October 25, 1795) created the
Institut National with classes of literature, science and moral and political
sciences. The class of moral and political sciences was headed by the Section of
the Analysis of Sensations and Ideas (of which Tracy became an associate), other
sections included Geography, History (Abbe Raynal and Christopher Koch),
Morality (Abbe Henri Gregoire), Social Science and Legislation (Daunou), and
Political Economy (Sieyes, Dupont de Nemours, Talleyrand, Roederer). Daunou
became president of the Institut National, which was "a living Encyclopedia" said
Daunou, according to Picavet (1891/1971-p. 70). It was the culmination of the
work of the decade of revolutionary legislatures, 1789-1799, it had a high
proportion of former priests or members of religious orders, especially Oratorians.
Tracy and his associates learned from the experience of the Terror that human
nature required complete analysis and explanation to discover the foundations for
self-government. Tracy and the Ideologues, like their friend and correspondent
Jefferson, considered education, both in the narrow formal sense, and in the wider
education of public opinion, as crucial for success of self-government and of
human progress.
A critique of Cartesian and Kantian theories
While the complete works of Condorcet were being published, Tracy

identified and criticized the philosophical system which was to challange and
supercede the Locke/Condillac philosophy .· Kantianism. Tracy andJ.-B. Say, as
editor of the Däcade Philosophique, criticized the philosophy of Descartes and Kant.
Tracy was influenced by Hobbes' concept of self-interest. He disagreed
with Hobbes that war was man's natural state, "for if it had been, he would never
have escaped primitive bellicosity." (Kennedy-1978, p.l67.) For Tracy, according
to Kennedy (1978, pp. 167-168),
"Daunou was the author of a twenty volume Cours d'etudes historiques as well as the Discours sur
l'etat des lettres en France au Xllf Steele; his articles on Peter the Venerable, Saint Bernard, Richard of
Saint-Victor, Robert Grossetest, Thomas Aquinas and Albertus Magnus were famous. In the Restoration
he was appointed editor of the Journal des Savants, and in 1819 professor of history in the College de
France where his lectures were attended by Tracy and Augustin Thierry (who wrote an article on the
lectures in the Censeur Europeen. (July 5, 1819).
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(the) origins of society could be explained "ideologically"

or grammatically : men enter into society as they learn to
communicate and negotiate their conflicting rights. Like Hobbes,
Tracy believed that the ensuing agreements which constitute
society were the result of conventions, but Tracy stressed the
natural standard for all conventions. Conventional property
could not exist without faculties. In entering society, man neither
abandons a part of his rights nor sacrifices his liberty, as all
contract theories had presupposed. Rights for Tracy were "always
limitless", and were only modified by the way they were realized.
Tracy's opinion on Montesquieu
Through his son-in-law, George Washington Lafayette and his father,

Marquis de Lafayette, as well as Dupont de Nemours and J.B. Say, Tracy was
introduced to Thomas Jefferson, member of the Institut National and President of
the American Philosophical Society since 1797 (of which many French savants
were members). In I8O6 Jefferson wrote Tracy to thank him for copies of his
books and to annouce Tracy's election to the American Philosophical Society. In
1809, complementing Jefferson on retiring after two terms, Tracy asked Jefferson
to translate and publish his Commentaiy. Jefferson wrote to Tracy (January' 26,
1811) on publication of the Commentary in Philadelphia : "I declare to you, Sir, in
the spirit of truth and sincerity, that I consider it the most precious gift the present
age has received." Jefferson repeated this statement to many, including Dupont de
Nemours, Thomas Cooper and Albert Gallatin. Jefferson translated part of the
Commentary and sent the manuscript to William Duane, editor of the Aurora to
finish and publish it in Philadelphia.
Tracy's A Commentary and Review of Montesqieu's Spirit of Laws
(Philadelphia, 1811) represented a change from Tracy's earlier admiration for
Montesqieu in his 1790 M. de Tracy ä M. Burke due to the influence of
Condorcet's critique of Montesquieu.
This may explain, as Emmet Kennedy points out, why Jefferson embraced
the Commentary (Kennedy-1978, p. 210) :
The rejection of Montesquieu's relativism, the sanction of
popular sovereignty and representative government, the
correction of Montesquieu's territorial principle, the
condemnation of colonialism, the critique of taxes, national
debts, bank monopolies, and all but defensive wars, the distrust of
excessive executive power and of government interference, the
stress on public education and the separation of church and state
were all famed principles ofJeffersonian democracy.
Montesquieu and Madison had explained representative government
existing in large territories only by federation. Le Federaliste (Paris, 1792/1795) was
translated by Trudaine de la Sabliere. But Tracy took a non-Girondin line that
representation could exist in large states without federalism due to foreign military
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threats, as when France declared war on Austria and Prussia. For Tracy, war was
the enemy of mankind, and he underlined Montesquieu's contributions by
discrediting all excuses for war. Tracy advocated European federation as the
solution to war. He agreed with Montesquieu that republics should not have
colonies and he praised the granting of equality to territories as the inclusion of
Louisiana as a state.
In fact, Tracy differed with Montesqieu due to over half a century
separating them. Montesquieu's great work had been published at the high point
of English and French economic development under Sir Robert Walpole and
Cardinal Fleury. Their policies of lower taxes had created the consumer demand
for which the Industrial Revolution was the response. But, as we recalled it earlier,
France deviated from this direction in the second half of the eighteenth century.
Wars caused higher taxes and national debt, and the reluctance to undertake the
economic reforms coming in the wake of the analyses of Turgot and Hume. The
French Revolution was the result. What Montesquieu had seen as unchangeable
facts in England - medieval institutions protecting the individual from the
emerging central state, and sweet commerce eliminating social and economic
problems - had been otherwise in France after his death. Condorcet and Tracy
differed with Montesquieu on the need for active reform where the evolution of
sweet commerce did not operate.
The role of the state according to Tracy
Tracy made several points which were to continue to be central to the

Liberal analysis in nineteenth century France. The political ruling class will
continue to incorporate into themselves the most capable of the rising middle
class. "The poor, by their "thrift" and commerce... would soon become the most
wealthy and powerful... if they were not constantly fleeced by every man."
(Kennedy-1978, p. 173)
Many of Tracy's ideas had been expressed in his Quels sont les moyens de
fonder la morale chez un peuple? which was his response to the Institut
National's competition topic of 179826.
In the essay, Tracy expressed a "quasi-Hobbesian conception of human
nature where individual wills conflict with other wills, striving to be free in their
movements, but continually meeting opposition." (Kennedy-1978, p.65). Tracy
presented his critique of Jacobins :
2
"In 1797 the question had been: "What institutions would be most appropriate for returning a people to
the principles of morality after political revolutions?" which implied a restoration of traditional morality
caused by the revolution itself. The new theme implied that morality had yet existed. The paper that
Tracy submitted was reprinted in the Mercure frangais (Ventoise, An VI, February, March, 1798) and
published as a pamphlet. It was discussed at length in the Censeur Europeen in the Restoration, and
published along with the French publication of the Commentaire sur "L'Esprit des Lois" de Montesquieu
in 1819. Brought to you by | Bibliotheque de l'Universite Laval
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Journal des Economistes et des Etudes Humaines 13 7
By reducing taxes the government could furnish the

working class with the financial means and leisure for their
children to profit from school, without which a "legion of
schoolmasters" and learned societies would be useless. Reliance
upon a few moral lessons, a few civic 'fetes", was to ignore the
crucial role of more basic institutions, "to neglect the artillery of
an army to occupy oneself with its music. "(Kennedy-1978, p. 65)
In the Directory debate between the advocates of moral incentives

(Theophilanthropists) and advocates of institutional environment, Tracy was
strongly influenced by the institutionalism of Montesquieu and Helvetius.
The contrast between the 1798 essay and the Commentary can be found
in Tracy accepting the idea of general education, and at the same time, the
statement of opposition to state education. These themes of general education,
and the exclusion of the state from education were well received by Tracy's
Jeffersonian readership of the Commentary. Kennedy notes (1978, pp. 174-175) :
Most remarkable is his complete reversal of his eartier

recommendations for government control and supervision of
education. The prohibitive, ascetic morality which Montesquieu
prescribed for democracies - state regulation ofproperty, dowries,
and marriages (which Tracy explicitly criticized) - and the
Napoleonic adaptation of the Directory's control of national
culture impressed upon him the dangerous uses to which state
intervention could be put. National representative governments
should therefore simply "leave nature to act" - a maxime which
conformed will to his sensationalist libertarianism and his
growing distrust of any government not founded on "ideological"
principles.
The ideal government, according to Tracy (in Kennedy-1978,p. 175),

which strongly desires all correct ideas to spread and all
errors to vanish will not think of attaining this end by paying
writers, by having professors, preachers, and actors speak, by
supplying preferred elementary textbooks, by having almanacs,
catechisms, instructions, pamphlets and journals written, by
multiplying inspections, rules, censorship in order to protect what
it thinks to be the truth. It will simply allow each one to completely
enjoy the noble right of saying and writing what he thinks, fari
quae sentiat, quite confident that when opinions are free, it is
impossible that with time, truth will not emerge .
The economist
Tracy's Commentary replaced Montesquieu's geographical and climatic

determinism by an economic one. He saw commerce having a central role in
modern society and saw mercantilist ideas about balance of trade as an illusion.
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Influenced by Malthus, Tracy challenged the view that population growth was part
of prosperity. Tracy sought a limit on population increases (Tracy-1811, p. 251) :
To deprive (man) of his life is a crime authorized by

many legislators, against whom theologians of those countries
have not protested. On the other hand to take measures in
advance, to prevent animated beings from being born, when they
could only have been unhappy and rendered their species so, is
an act of prudence which some theologians have considered a
crime...
Tracy emphasized the mutual benefit from every exchange. He contrasted

exchange with taxation which was always an attack on private property and
completely negative in its applications. Tracy believed that so-called public works
were better performed by private enterprise. He feared most the government's
control over money.
By November, 1811 Tracy had finished the fourth volume of his Ideology,
his Тгайё de la Volonte and sent a copy to Thomas Jefferson. Jefferson undertook
the translation of this work which was published in Georgetown in 1817 as A
Treatise on Political Economy ; to which is prefixed a supplement to a preceding
work on the Understanding, or Elements of Ideology ; with an Analytical Table,
and an Introduction on the Faculty of the Will. Jefferson expected Tracy's book to
become the textbook in economics at American colleges. Indeed, it was adopted
by many colleges and made a major contribution to American academic
economics. However, the work which became the pre-eminent economics
textbook in American colleges was J.B. Say's Treatise on Political Economy ( Paris,
1803, 1814; American editions from 1821). Along with Say's Treatise, Tracy's work
contributed to French political economy dominating American academic
economics until late in the 19th century. French political economy had many
attributes giving it superiority to English utilitarianism and Ricardian-Millian
economics. American benefited from the choice of French over English economics
during the major part of the 19th century.
Tracy had a basic understanding of the role of utility in determining price,
of the capitalist and the entrepreneur. He considered the government as a parasite
whose expenditures were unproductive. According to Kennedy (1978, p.200) :
The scourges of the economy, for Tracy, are not

capitalists, but the idle "rentiers" (government bondholders),
colonialists, bank monopolies, public loans, debts, and
governments whose consumption of the produce of others' labour
is wholly useless and "destructive.
Tracy was an advocate of the unity of the sciences who, with Descartes
and Leibniz, saw mathematics or calculus as the unifier in a world of chaotic
accumulation of knowledge. Condillac and Condorcet had seen social
mathematics as the solution. "With Locke, Tracy had recognized that mathematical
constructs do not exist in nature ; much of reality was not quantifiable."
(Kennedy-1978, p. 49).
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Since much of their content was поп- measurable, a

"charlatan" application of statistics could not make them more
scientific. By 1805, his break with Condorcet was explicit when
he pitted his own logic against Condorcet's social mathematics...
Sergio Moravia in his "La Scienza della societa in Francia alia
fine del secolo XVIII" (Firence, 1968)... brilliantly traces from
Condorcet to J.B. Say the rise and decline of the idea that
mathematics and statistics were the panacea for the uncertainty
of social sciences. However, he overlooks the fact that Tracy in his
"Memoire", anticipated Say's 1802 rejection of the mathematical
standard. (Kennedy-1978, pp. 49-50).
The legacy of Destutt de Tracy

With the Restoration of the Bourbon Monarchy in the spring of 1814, Tracy
was able to expand his contacts. John Quincy Adams, who as American minister
to the court of St. Petersburg had given care to the captured Victor de Tracy after
the retreat from Moscow, was in Paris and in frequent conversation with Tracy.
Benjamin Constant, returning to France, became a neighbor and frequent visitor of
Tracy. They became part of the salon of Madame de Stael, along with the von
Humboldts and James Mackintosh. Tracy became a mentor to the younger
generation of liberals. Charles Comte and Charles Dunoyer, the editors of the
Censeur Europeen, reflected the influence of Tracy. They had been influenced by
the economics of J.B. Say's Treatise on Political Economy, by Benjamin Constant's
Spirit of Conquest and Usurpation, and by Comte de Montlosier's histories.
During the years of the Bourbon Restoration and the July Monarchy, until
the Revolution of 1848, Tracy's ideas had a continuing impact on intellectuals,
especially until Tracy's death in 183627. A more long lasting impact was the
contribution of Jean-Baptiste Say because during the Restoration he was able to give
courses as well as write extensively. Although Tracy's ideas were similar in general to
those of Say, his were more philosophical and written more clearly under the
influence of the eighteenth century Enlightenment philosophes. Say was more
directly an economist or political economist in the line of eighteenth century
economists, such as Turgot and Smith, and wrote on the actual economic
developments in the Restoration. But Say was more influential even in the U.S. with
twice as many English (14) editions of the Treatise as in French between 1814-185928.
27
The growth of attention to the Humane Sciences in the last couple of decades has lead to the revival
of interest in Tracy. The view of history of Condorcet and Tracy has drawn attention to mankind's
evolution to gain control over nature, science and social organizations through the development of
human reason and understanding of social cooperation. See for instance, Michael Foucault (1970)
who devotes much attention to Tracy's thinking.
Cheryl B. Welch (1984) provides also a valuable analysis of the thinking of the French Liberals,
especially Tracy and J.B. Say, on economics, political thought and constitutionalist theory. Comparison
is made with English Philosophical Radicalism and Utilitarianism, especially Jeremy Bentham.
An other important contribution has been made by Brian William Head (1985). This work was written
under the direction of Ken Minogue as well as Maurice Cranston and Jack Lively, at the London School
of Economics. Head deals with the liberals' concern with scientific method and certainty, individual
and society, moral education, limits of social mathematics, political economy, class and inequality.
*cf. Teilhac-1928, pp. 33-34. Brought to you by | Bibliotheque de l'Universite Laval
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Conclusion
Benjamin Constant and the rejection of Enlightenment
Although Benjamin Constant emerged in the same intellectual context as

Tracy, in the Directory and Consulate period of the French Revolution, Constant
was not a child of the Enlightenment philosophes. Being Swiss and having studied
in Edinburgh, his political philosophy was formed in total reaction against the
Jacobin Terror. Constant was an Anglophile and rejected the Enlightenment system
building. During the Directory, Constant was strongly influenced by William
Goodwin's Enquiry into Political Justice 29. Hayek rediscovered Constant while
writing the Constitution of Liberty. Constant, the Anglophile, was most congenial
to Hayek's thinking. Constant was strongly influenced by Montesquieu, and
contributed to the restoration of Montesquieu's influence in nineteenth century
French liberalism. Being against the formal system of the Enlightenment thinkers,
Constant is classed with other French Anglophiles as a Romantic.
Guy Dodge has noted that Constant's political philosophy has been
neglected in the twentieth century due to the sustained attacks on liberalism by
the exponents of conservatism, Marxism, Freudianism, existentialism, and the New
Left30.
The revival of interest in Constant in France was due to the recent
availability in the 1960s of a major manuscript collection (including the manuscript
translation of Goodwin) called Oeuvres manuscrites de 181031.
^Constant's uncle had translated Goodwin's novels into French. Constant wrote on Goodwin in the
Directory (and republished his writing in the Restoration) ; however, his manuscript translation of
Goodwin was circulated among French liberals but remained unpublished (and was re-discovered
only a quarter of a century ago).
There have been some recent treatments as Harvey C. Mansfield, Jr., The Spirit of Liberalism (1978).
Yet, these have been insufficient given the impact Constant had on French thinkers as well as Georg
Hegel and Lord Acton. Cf. Dodge-1980.
"From these manuscript essays Constant published his three great writings of the Restoration period :
De l'esprit de conquete et de l'usurpation dans leurs rapports at/ее la civilisation europeenne (1813-
14), Reflexions sur les constitutions, la distribution des pouvoirs et les garanties dans une monarchie
contitutionelle (1814), and Principes de politique applicables ä tous les gouvemements representatifs
(1815). There were many other shorter works, many collected in the Melanges de litterature et de
politique (1829), and his longer work, the five volume De la religion constderee dans sa source, ses
formes et ses developments (1824-31) and the two volume Du polytheisme romain constdere dans ses
rapports avec laphilosophie grecque et la religion chretienne (1833).
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Religion as a moralfoundation for liberty

Constant's researches on comparative religion were undertaken mostly at
the University of Gottingen, in Hannover. Benedetto Croce believed that
Constant's contribution to liberty was to show the religious nature of liberalism
and the unity of religious and political liberty before Alexis de Tocqueville and
Lord Acton. Of Calvinist ancestry, Constant was influenced by the Scottish
Enlightenment, Tracy, and the philosophes toward irreligion. But, observation
changed his mind.
Forty years have passed away since the triumph of an

infidel philosophy at the epoch of the French Revolution. Where
are we now? A mysterious agitation, a desire for religious faith, a
longing for religious hope, are everywhere manifested.
Constant saw the necessity to avoid "two false positions" : "religion is the
natural ally of despotism," and "the absence of the religious sentiment is favorable
to liberty". Constant's companion, Germaine de Stael, had written shortly before
her death (Stael-1817) :
The secret had been found of exhibiting the friends of
liberty as the enemies of religion : there are two pretexts for the
singular injustice which would exclude from this earth the noblest
of sentiments, alliance with Heaven. The first is the Revolution as
it was effected in the name of philosophy, an interference has
thence been drawn, that to love liberty it is necessary to be an
atheist. Assuredly, it is because the French did not unite religion
to liberty that their revolution deviated so often from its primitive
direction.
Apparently for the same reason, Constant rejected Helvetius' ethic of

egoism :
What have we seen in all Europe for twenty years?
Enlightened self-interest reigning without rival, a system founded
principally by Helvetius, which teaches egoism and derides the
whole idea of self-abnegation.
For Constant only religion established the moral foundation for support of
liberty and resistence to oppression.
(When) Christians appeared, they placed their point of

support beyond egoism. Liberty is nourished by sacrifices. Liberty
wishes always for citizens, sometimes for heroes. Religious
convictions give men strength to become martyrs.
Constant was influenced equally by Condorcet and by Burke. In 1822

Constant expressed his opposition to the utilitarian thinking of Bentham in an
economic work regarding the economic writings of one of the Napolitan school of
eighteenth century economists, Gaetano Filangieri : Commentaire sur I'ouvrage
de Filangieri. Brought to you by | Bibliotheque de l'Universite Laval
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Constant strongly distinguished between ancient military society and

modern commercial society. Montesquieu's sweet and gentle commercial society
received deeper analysis by Constant. The ancient liberty of active participation in
collectivity required the sacrifice of the enjoyment in peace of individual liberty.
This "liberty" of the ancients, this anachronism, was the late eighteenth century
Enlightenments form of response to the sweet and gentle commercial liberty of
Montesqieu. This anachronism of the political thought of Jean-Jacques Rousseau
and Abbe de Mably led to the rivers of blood in the Terror and the invasions of
Europe undertaken by the perfect admirer of the ancients. The Terror called forth
the sacrifice to the fatherland. As Leo Strauss notes in Natural Right and History,
the moderns "lack the public spirit of the patriotism of the ancients. They are more
concerned with their private affairs than with the fatherland. They are bourgeois
rather than citizens" (p. 253). Strauss should have emphasized that the modern
commercial societies are Christian. The "liberty" of the ancients is only possible
under paganism. It requires paganism to have worship of the fatherland, and the
spurning of the private virtues. Christianity is the necessary condition for the
liberty of the moderns, for the modern commercial society, the opposite of the
ancient military society rooted in state worship. Constant associated the exclusion
of the public realm and the supremacy of the private realm in commercial societies
to the absolute recognition of private property due to Christianity. Constant's
theme can be found in Acton's The History of Freedom in Antiquity. Edouard
Laboulaye, the editor of Constant's political writings, in an essay, "La Liberie
Antique et la Liberie Moderne", (in Laboulaye-1863), noted :
To proclaim that God has rights is to tear us under the

unity of despotism. There is the germ of revolution which
separates the ancient from the modern world.
Laboulaye points to Rousseau's Social Contract (Book IV, Chapter VIII) :
Jesus came to establish on earth a spiritual realm ; which

separating the theological and political systems caused the state to
cease to be one, and brought about divisions which have never
stopped agitating Christian peoples32.
According to Roger Henry Soltau (1931, pp. 40-42) :
The setting forth of the essential practical working of the

system that was most likely to translate into reality the ideal just
put forward by de Broglie was the work of Benjamin Constant...
KNuma-Denis Fustel de Coulanges in his Ancient City (1866) notes that modern liberty came from the
private realm of the ancient world. The private property of the family is sacred because it is the seat of
the family religion of which the father and mother are the joint priest. The state may not enter the
private property's absolute separation except by act of sacrilege. Fustel de Coulanges finds this
religious based absolutims of private property in the Indo-European cultures, and was able to disprove
the Marxist myth, shared by eighteenth century philosophers, such as Rousseau, Mably, etc., of
primitive communism. Brought to you by | Bibliotheque de l'Universite Laval
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His supreme distinction lies undoubtedly in his unique grasp of

the essentials of the working of the parliamentary machine. He
realized its complexity, the numerous fictions that alone make it
live, the real nature of its checks and balances ; and his supple
and elastic mind, the very fickleness of his outlook, made him
rejoice in a study of this delicate mechanism, and enable him to
see its finer points far more clearly than Guizot with his more
rigid and legal outlook, although Guizot had given much more
time to the study of England and had in many ways a greater
and deeper mind... His view of those rights was narrow, and he
cannot be classed with those who really built society on the
principle of the equal inherent rights of all citizens, political as
well as social - he is a Liberal, not a democrat - but he is a true
champion of freedom in his perpetually reiterated view that the
sovereignty must be limited by the anterior inalienable rights of
the individual to freedom of bodily action, of religion, ofproperty,
of opinion - the last involving complete freedom of expression and
therefore of the press...
Ralph Raico has correctly identified the central concern of Constant - to

rebut the political ideas of Jean-Jacques Rousseau regarding sovereignty and the
general will (Raico-1987, p. 49).
Accepting the idea that social life necessarily brings with

it the total alienation of one's rights, Rousseau was thus the
modern originator of the notion that freedom in a social context
is identifiable with a condition of equal submission to the
interests of the community and equal participation in the exercise
of political power. Constant believed that the championship of
unlimited popular sovereignty by Rousseau and others
represented much less of a break with the historical political
pattern than might at first appear to be the case.
The following 1818 addition to the Principes de politiques (1815) indicates

the direction of Constant's critique of Rousseau (Constant-186l)33 :
The precaution recommended and to be followed is all the

more indispensable for the fact that party leaders, however pure
their intentions, are always reluctant to limit sovereignty. They
regard themselves as its heirs-presumptive and are concerned to
preserve it for future use even while it is in the hands of their
enemies. They distrust this or that kind of government, this or that
class of governors ; but if they are allowed to organize authority
after their own fashion and to entrust it to agents of their choice
they will try to extend it to its maximum.
"as quoted in Simon-1972, pp. 64-66. Brought to you by | Bibliotheque de l'Universite Laval
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Unlimited popular sovereignty creates...a degree ofpower

in human society too great by definition, which is an evil no
matter in whose hands it is placed. Whether it is entrusted to a
single man, to several, or to all, it will be found equally as evil...
There are weights too heavy for human hands. The error of those
who, out of a genuine love of liberty, have given popular
sovereignty unlimited power derives from the way in which their
political ideas have been formed. They have seen in history a
small number of men, or even a single one, in possession of
immense power which did a great deal of harm ; but their anger
was directed against the possessors of the power and not the
power itself. Instead of destroying it they thought only of
displacing it. It was a scourge which they considered a conquest.
...The consent of the majority by no means suffices in all
cases to make its acts legitimate ; there are some acts that
nothing can make legitimate. When any authority commits acts
of this sort it matters little from what source it claims to derive, it
matters little whether it is called an individual or a nation ; it
might be the entire nation with the exception of the citizen whom
it oppresses, and the act would still not be legitimate.
Rousseau did not recognize this truth, and this error has
turned his "Social Contract", so often invoked on behalf of liberty,
into the most terrible aid to all kinds of despotism... Once granted
that the general will can do everything, the representatives of that
general will are the more to be feared the more they declare
themselves to be merely the docile instruments of this so-called
will, and the more they have at their disposal the force or the form
that suits them. These people, by virtue of the unlimited extent of
social authority, legalize that which no tyrant would dare to do
in his own name.
According to Raico, Constant represents the complete break with the
Enlightenment and French Revolution which becomes the character of nineteenth
century liberalism. An idea which seems to have originated with Constant is that a
further guarantee against despotism is to be found in certain extra-governmental
institutions capable of tying the loyalties of men against the day when the state
might once again, as in the time of Robespierre, attempt to become the be-all and
the end-all of social life. It was for this reason that he severely criticized the
reckless spirit of uniformity and the senseless passion for pseudo-mathematical
"symmetry" which inspired many of the Revolutionary measures. This was
particularly true of such powerful social elements as regionalism (Raico-1987,
p. 53):
The interests and memories which are born of local
customs contain a germ of resistance which authority suffers only
with regret, and which it hastens to eradicate. With individuals it
has its way more easily, it rolls its enormous weight over them
effortlessly, as over sand. Brought to you by | Bibliotheque de l'Universite Laval
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Liberalism: The French way
Constant was a leading force in nineteenth century liberalism's rejection of

utilitarianism ; he did not find in the greatest-happiness principle the foundation
of a free society, but in the ethical principle of self-perfection:
...Is it true that happiness - of whatever sort it might be - is
the unique end of man? In that case, our road would be quite
narrow, and our destination not a very lofty one. There is not one
of us, who, if he wished to descend, to restrict his moral faculties,
to degrade his desires, to abjure activity, glory and all generous
and profound emotions, could not make himself a brute and a
happy one... it is not for happiness alone, it is for self-
perfectioning that destiny call us...
Raico calls our attention to Constant's prediction of the evils of legislation.
Legislator's errors have consequences for all of society, and not a single individual
as with individual decisions. Legislators feel the burden of errors in legislation less
than the ordinary citizen ; the information feed-back to legislators of the effects of
their actions is longer than among citizens ; it is difficult for legislators to admit
errors for prestige's sake ; and
legislation has the defect of all collective decisions : it is a
"forced give-and-take between prejudice and truth, between
interests and principles," while decisions taken by individuals
have the chance of being, in this sense, purer. (Raico-1987, p. 48).
Alexis de Tocqueville, in the second volume of Democracy in America
contrasts the French enjoyment of abstraction with the English disdain of
abstraction. He sees egalitarianism in an unfree society as contributing to
generalization and abstraction. England, as a free society, enjoyed social
differences, leading to interest only in the particular, in the concrete, and in the
unique individual. In June, 1849, Francis Lieber, Prussian born, but resident in
America for over two decades, wrote in a Columbia, South Carolina newspaper
(he taught at the University of South Carolina, before appointment to Columbia
University) :
The higher, the more intellectual, and the more ethical the
being is, the more prominent is also his own peculiar
individuality. The same progress is observed in the scale of civil
liberty. Individuality is almost annihilated in absolutism -
whether this be of a monarchical or a democratic caste - while the
highest degree of freedom (in the Anglican view of the subject)
brings out the individuality of every one and the individual
activity of each, as best it seems to him, in its freest play. (Lieber-
1849, p.718)
Lieber saw Anglican Liberty as the result of the strong emphasis placed
upon absolute limitation of public power. He thought that this was the result of the
common law tradition, in contrast of the centralization and dominance by
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government which occurred in Europe in the seventeenth and eighteenth

centuries. But, the origin he finds in the establishement of individual rights of
every husbandman in Magna Charta. As a consequence,
public interference is odious to them. Government, to
them, is not considered the educator, leader, or organizer of
society. On the contrary, in reading the many constitutions which
this race has produced, and the object of which is to define the
spheres of the various public powers and to fix the rights of the
individual, it is almost fancy to read over all of them the motto,
"Hands off." (Lieber-1849, p. 719).
Lieber sees centralization as having destroyed the institutions which

would provide the opportunities to develop a free society.
Necessary consequences of the Gallican view are that the

French look for the highest degree of political civilization in
organization, that is, in the highest degree of interference by
public power. (Lieber-1849, p.721).
Lieber penned these lines one block distant from the home of Louise
Cheves McCord (18Ю-1879) who had translated and published in 1848 Frederic
Bastiat's Sophismes Economiques. Mrs. McCord was a Huguenot ancestry and a
French speaker. She was strongly influenced in her political and literary writings
by the French liberals, especially Bastiat.
Given the great influence which translations of French liberal writings had
in America - Tracy, Say, Bastiat, Guizot, to begin with - it is a wonder that
American writers did not look beyond the political situation in France toward the
French liberal writers. Indeed, many of the critical views that they developed
regarding the French were based on the analyses which they had read among
French liberal authors. It did not seem to strike them that there was a liberal
tradition in France just as there was a centralizing spirit in England stemming from
Bentham and the Utilitarians, and that much of nineteenth century French
centralization was justified by reference to Bentham and the Utilitarians.
The French liberals provide us with a very important comparative
opportunity for a deeper and more complex approach to the study of liberty.

Authenticated
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Liggio, L. P. 1990. "Evolution of French Liberal Thought: From The 1760's To The 1840's"

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EVOLUTION OF FRENCH LIBERAL

THOUGHT : F r o m the 1 7 6 0 ' s to the

1.1 The Background For French Liberalism

The Fronde, and the Reactions against Mercantilism in France

The successor of Cardinal Richelieu, Cardinal Mazarin, caused a great

An important part of the view point represented by Abbe Fleury and

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Richard Cantillon, Precursor of European Liberal Thought

Turgot: The Gretit French Economist of the XVIII °

Α major portion of the correspondence between Hume and Turgot

The true doctrine may be more or less clearly traced

Schumpeter has later noted (1954) :

It is not too much to say that analytic economics took a

If we are to compare Turgot's scientific personality with

Influences from England and America

9 cf. Stanlis-1958, Acomb-1950. Brought to you by | Bibliotheque de l'Universite Laval

It was dominated on the one hand by that most ardent

The Duchess d'Anville and her son, the great friends of

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1.2 Dupont de Nemours : Crom the Edict of July, 1764,

A Friend ofTurgot and tbe Physiocrats

In her introduction to her translation of The Autobiography of Dupont de

loving. To please Μ. Quesnay it was necessary to have intelligence

As on many matters of philosophy, John Locke is the starting point for

Dupont had acquired his first lessons in natural law at

Honore-Gabriel de Riqueti, Comte de Mirabeau (son of the "Friend of

wealth was the source of political inequality and destructive of

1!Antoine-Laurent Lavoisier (1743-1794) was the founder of modern chemistry. A farmer-general of

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1.3 Condillac, "the Philosopher to the Philosopher"

His View on Social Sciences

Abbe Etienne Bonnot de Condillac (1715-1780) is perhaps the least well-

The idea that a successful science is primarily a well-

We do not make these observations in order to diminish

In conclusion regarding Condillac, Baker expressed the following (1975, p. 116-117) :

systematic pages is the structure of Enlightenment thought in

Condillac's influence remained strong through the period of the French

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New instruments for the social sciences

Keith Michael Baker's Condorcet is the single, most important contribution

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It is in this context that Hume's discussion of probability

Jean Le Rond d'Alembert raised a fundamental objection to the theory of

Condorcet's argument that the moral sciences can equal

Baker argues that Condorcet's definition of the social field parallel to a

Moral sciences and tbe rights of man

Some continuity in French liberal thought

Condorcet, in his Eloge de Michel de l'Höpital introduces a study of

Condorcet's subject, Michel de l'Hopital (1505-1573) was a central figure

His work on the French constitution

" The action of governments is too complicated; they act

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II. 1 The French Revolution : A watershed event for

Tbe public finance crisis

The French Revolution went through a number of phases with possible

The attempted solution

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National festivals shall be instituted to preserve the

The nationalized church lands were to be the fund on which government

The position of the French liberals

Revolution was a series of revolutions, concluding with Napoleon's seizure of

The answer of Enlightenment thinkers was that foundations and beneficies

A surprising strategy to implement liberal ideas