French Liberalism, Historiography New and Old

In this month’s Modern Intellectual History is a review essay from Michael Behrent on the recent historiography of French liberalism. This is a service to the profession: describing, evaluating, condensing, and extrapolating from a substantial body of recent work. The historiography of French liberalism has often in the past generation looked in two directions. First, it argued against the idea of its own Sonderweg vis-à-vis English liberalism, supposedly the ideal-type. Second it had to grapple with liberalism’s relation to republicanism, which is of course an older and, especially in France, more significant political idiom. As for the first, it seems that even American historians are finally ready to stop regarding continental Europe as presenting various detours from the one true path hewn by the UK. As for the second, Behrent suggests that it is the very illiberalism of much of French political culture that makes French liberals in particular so interesting.

Rather than summarizing Behrent’s summaries, I want to extract the broader perspective taken, he argues, by this new historiography. The landmarks in the background here include François Furet, Lucien Jaume, and Pierre Rosanvallon. The works at issue include (but are not limited to) the Geenens and Rosenblatt edited volume, Aurelian Craiutu’s multivolume project on moderation, Helena Rosenblatt and Steven Vincent’s different approaches to Benjamin Constant, and Emmanuelle Paulet-Grandguillot on the legacies of Rousseau in Sismondi and Constant—indeed the central figure here is very much Constant, not, say, Tocqueville. Behrent writes that “these works endeavor not so much to return French political thought to some indefinable liberal fold as to show that understanding how liberals contended with the peculiarities of French history can enrich and broaden our understanding of liberalism—to see it not merely as a doctrine, but as an emotional and moral disposition, a form of political judgment, and a specific political style” (449). According to Behrent, this recent scholarship seeks “to probe some of the constitutive dilemmas of liberal thought from a historically informed perspective.”

In that spirit, he offers three broad questions. Let me take them out of order. Behrent’s final question: “can the history of French liberalism—and liberalism tout court—be approached as a history of emotions, sentiments, and passions?” (476). My own tendency here would be to reframe this question as one about the liberal subject (reading Gossman’s wonderful Basel book has pushed me to think more widely about this). This is a little like Isaiah Berlin’s suggestion that at the heart of all political theories there is a theory of the human being, an anthropology. Asking after that leads in the direction of intellectual history rather than a sort of prosopo-psycho-biography of elites. But certainly the point, Constant’s point, that we are impassioned subjects but that we are nonetheless free is a relevant one that gets at some fundamental questions—are we free in our reason, or in our passion (Adolphe)? To whom would that distinction even make sense? Is that distinction, in fact, central to freedom as an idea in the modern world? Or only the European 19th century? Here is a historical question! 

Behrent’s first question concerns—following Bobbio’s famous analysis—the relationship between liberalism and democracy. These books “lend credence to the view that liberalism’s pedigree is largely independent of democracy’s—or, to the extent that they are related, liberalism must be seen as a reaction to the problems democracy raises” (473). Ultimately, with Spitz, Behrent wants to see in French liberalism an axiomatic democracy. Thus “liberalism has a democratic lining,” because without genuine democracy, individual freedom is empty. This is after all partly Constant’s argument in the famous essay on the liberty of the ancients and moderns—you must have both of these, even if you cannot expect or compel all moderns to be politically involved as all citizens were in the ancient world. But it is also—and here I would push back against Behrent’s characterization—especially in the French case very much about the Republic. Spitz, certainly, sees it in this way. Without the political action of the Republic, no liberalism. This is compatible with a much more negative view of liberalism than Behrent really allows into court, for instance Domenico Losurdo’s, in which cutting out a portion of the population as less-than-equal is essential to liberalism’s assertion of individual rights. Is talk of democracy supposed to preclude that reading? I don’t think it can. Behrent also points—this is the middle question—to the hoary opposition of of political to economic liberalisms. I have been convinced by J.T. Levy (and Marx!) that this is not a useful way of dividing the field, and it’s true that in France it is an especially muddy distinction. The economic, especially, was always on its face political (all the way back to Turgot’s ill-fated attempts at market liberalization).

Let me turn now to a venerable history of nineteenth century French political thought, one written by the British historian Roger Soltau (about whom I know very little, in fact). All proportion maintained, his view of French liberalism is an interesting contrast with the one in Behrent’s review essay. In his chapters on the end-of-century crisis of liberalism, he argues that, indeed, liberals ceased to defend any kind of meaningful “philosophy of freedom,” and hence had no real politics. They sank to defending bourgeois (not middle class) interests. This was indeed a relation of opposition, rather than necessity, between liberalism and democracy—the latter was certain to bring socialism, after all. So this was a problem, but there were also two areas of fundamental bad faith (not Soltau’s term) for French liberals—questions in which the bourgeoisie wasn’t even able to think clearly about its own interests. Soltau looks to one of the most unrepentant “economic” liberals of the age, Paul Leroy-Beaulieu, to show how even the liberals were blinded by nationalism. In the name of national defense, the state had to be allowed anything. Similarly, beholden perhaps too much to the Republic, liberals were unwilling to challenge frankly illiberal anticlerical policies. As Soltau puts it, “If modern French Liberalism has proved so weak both before Jacobinism and Traditionalism...it is surely because its freedom of judgment was inhibited, as it were, on...the position of the Church in France and that of France in Europe” (304). The religious question at issue here isn't the same as it was for Constant--and the reflexive nationalism is also not the same as Jennifer Pitts' Turn to Empire (although neither is without relation). It is the freedom of judgment—the courage of thought—that he sees on the part of Charles Renouvier on both these issues that most impresses Soltau. Renouvier the neo-Kantian is, indeed, the only living representative of “the philosophy of freedom” that he sees in later 19th century France.

Why go back to a book written perhaps ninety years ago? (Other than, as in this case, almost pure serendipity?). For one thing because it seems to me that, although we may disagree about many of Soltau’s judgments, it would still be worth thinking about French liberalism and anticlericalism and nationalism—the places where, “its freedom of judgment was inhibited,” which are often telling. For another because, if we can see in Behrent’s analysis the pervasive influence of Furet, in Soltau we see (very much on the surface) that of Henry Michel, a historian of French political thought and a great advocate of Renouvier. And we can see Soltau working, as it were alongside another interwar historian of liberalism, Guido de Ruggiero (who looked to Croce's idealist liberalism). The latter, like Soltau, believed that, for complicated reasons, on a European level toward the end of the 19th century liberalism had ceased to be a genuine philosophy of freedom and had become merely the ideological cover of an increasingly unhappy bourgeoisie. This is no longer a popular opinion--why not? Both Soltau and Ruggiero were manifestly looking over their shoulders (Ruggiero literally) at fascists and “Bolshevists.” Historians of liberalism today ought to think hard about their—our—own investment in the object (whatever that object turns out to be).

Paul Lapie. "La justice pénale"

A colleague recently pointed me to a short essay, “La justice pénale,” by Paul Lapie in the Revue de métaphysique et de morale. It’s from the March 1898 issue of the journal and this colleague came across it because the Union pour l’action morale reprinted and distributed it. Lapie, and the Rmm, have figured in my work before. So I read with interest and finally could no resist writing a little bit about it.

The essay, only about 12 pages long, might at first look like a book review, although it appears in the “Questions pratiques” rubric. At its head we find a book listing: Jean Cruppi, La cour d’assises, but also “La collection des journaux française, depuis six mois.” Many of Céléstin Bouglé’s essays from this period had similar notices, but I’m not sure how common the practice was. Especially in Bouglé’s case, the notices are clearly intended for the curious reader, but also as sign of scholarship, a bibliography even in the field of what was never really admitted to be polemic. In other words: I may be writing about contemporary political matters, but I’m a scholar not just some scribbler. It’s hard, though, not to smile at Lapie’s breezy ‘the papers in the last six months...’

In any case, the essay is divided into two parts—institutions et croyances—and the first draws directly (or so it appears) on Cruppi to present practical issues in this particular part of the French legal system, arguing that the vices of the civilian courts are magnified in the military ones. I’m not prepared to adjudicate in any useful way these claims. But a few points. First of all, the judges are not really impartial, because they are associated so closely with the prosecutors. We needn’t be thought simply to be copying the English system, Lapie says, if we simply want to bring a bit more independence and institutional separation to the judge (265). Judges also simply do not have the time to think about cases in a meaningful way. Lapie quotes Cruppi telling us that some judges are obliged to rule on as many as a hundred cases a day (262). Absurd. To judge, after all, is complex. “Les faits établis, ils [les juges] sauront appliquer les lois. Mais comment les faits sont-ils établis?” (261).  Even the question of what happened is not so straightforward, “l’accusé est-il l’auteur du fait incriminé?” is one question, another is “l’accusé est-il responsable de son acte?” (262) Finally is correct application of the law. Thus there are three questions, the first is essentially historical, the second moral, and the third juridical. One needs both time and method—science—even and perhaps especially for moral problems.

And here is Lapie’s great theme. Given the current state of affairs, judges and juries have no choice but to fall back on “la conscience.” Since in this format I can, here is a large block quote:

(263)

Among the things I wish I understood a bit better is the claim here about the yes-or-no nature of the judgment. Is this really the case? And I am a little amazed at the link between the historian and the judge. How common was this comparison at the time? (It’s history, not historiography that is supposed to be the Weltgericht). But it’s really the necessity of falling back on ‘intimate conviction’ that Lapie finds objectionable. He admits that judges have no choice: “la méthode qu’on les contraint de suivre les supent [sic?] dans le vide.” They are obliged to fall back on experience guided by intuition to make rapid decisions. This is not acceptable. Lapie raises the practice of indicating doubt as to true guilt with lighter sentences as an especially outrageous byproduct of the situation.   

In the case of military justice, the situation is even worse. Without impugning the honor or rectitude of the officers concerned, it is still necessary to point out, Lapie says, that here there is hardly any of the juridical learning that, at least, civilian judges have. “Nous retrouvons donc dans la justice militaire, aggravés par l’incompétence, les vices de notre justice pénale.” Conscience is invoked especially often within the military.

(265)

Especially that last line! And this is in March of 1898. Zola had been convicted for libel only the month before—not, of course, that the name “Dreyfus” appears anywhere in this piece. Indeed the above is one of the more direct references to what Lapie also refers to later on as “the present crisis,” with no modifiers.

Since any citizen might be obliged to sit on a jury, why not bring some measure of juridical education into the curriculum? This is not, Lapie hastens to add, to say that we should teach everyone law, only “tous devraient avoir acquis le goût et l’habitude de la recherche méthodique” (266). Here, again, the historian is the model. We demand more evidence of “esprit critique” in the historian reconstructing “les faits et gestes de Clovis” than of judges, and this is wrong. This plea for education makes Lapie transition to the second part of the essay, which looks at the underlying cause for the institutional problems, which Lapie sees in “croyances...la survivance d’anciens préjugés” (266). I’ll point out, given this straightforward refusal of sociology, that the first article in the very next issue of the Rmm is Durkheim’s “Représentations individuelles et représentations collectives.”

Two contrasting pairs of terms dominate the second half of the essay: justice and order, as a pair of governing principles, and then conscience and science. We claim today, following the Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen, says Lapie, to prioritize justice. But it is easy to see that most people—a legacy of empire?—prefer order. The appeal to conscience is simply another form of the religious mindset. Yet it remains widespread in “une sorte de kantisme instinctif d’après lequel il suffit d’obéir à sa conscience pour faire le bien” (268). And we should vigorously refuse the idea that balance must be struck between order and justice. Of course, the government is charged with maintaining order. But we must not be hypnotized by the old regime: “la justice n’était jadis qu’un moyen de maintenir l’ordre; l’ordre ne doit être maintenant qu’un moyen de garantir la justice” (268). For we inhabitants of the 21^st century, this remains an attractive formulation. But Lapie’s counter-intuitive move is to firmly reject the appeal to conscience in just this context. To have the “intimate conviction” that you have done your duty is almost completely worthless. Some lines from one extraordinary paragraph: “La conscience n’est souveraine que si elle est éclairée...Un jugement n’a de valeur morale que s’il a de la valeur logique: s’il ne’st pas appuyé à des preuves, il est presque nécessairement la cause d’une injustice...Il n’y a donc pas de probité morale distincte de la probité scientifique: toute action reposant sur un jugement, la méthode qui sert à établir des jugements exacts peut déterminer les actions bonnes...la morale n’est pas seulement affaire de conscience, mais affaire de science...une conscience dénuée d’esprit scientifique peut devenir criminelle” (269). With that last line, especially, Lapie offers the precise opposite of the more typically 20^th century judgment that science without conscience easily (inevitably) becomes criminal.

Lapie wants to retain the idea of collective action and morality—that is, political choice and commitment—but without the pernicious form of collective responsibility that holds an individual responsible for the supposed crimes of, say, the race, family, nation, and so forth. In a curious turn of phrase, Lapie writes “Toute notre étude est destinée à montrer que nous sommes tous responsables de la crise qui vient d’éclater” (270). I take this to mean that the study he is now winding up shows that the present crisis has roots in collective conscience, in various collective and institutional failures for which we are all, in a certain way, responsible. Because, he goes on to say, we aren’t all equally responsible. Those who have simply failed to conquer their outmoded prejudices, who have failed to reform institutions as justice demands, that is the vast majority, are partly to blame, “mais quelques hommes, qui ont joué un rôle important dans l’affaire, encourent une responsabilité plus directe” (270).   

In sum, for Lapie, the current crisis—the affair, not yet capitalized—has to do with our failure to fully assume the moral consequences of the scientific revolution. Systematic doubt is difficult, and so we prefer not to practice it. But if justice is to be our ordering principle, then we must prefer truth to opinion or mere conscience. Lapie wraps things up neatly, invoking in his closing paragraph the difference between authorship of an act and the various grades of responsibility and social consequence, as well as closing with the same mot from Tostoy (or, Tolstoï)—“il est très bon qu’un cas de conscience se pose pour la France”—good indeed, Lapie says, if we meet the challenge not with simple reaction, but with measured self-criticism and improvement of “nos institutions et de nos esprits” (271).

How to interpret this text, and the appeal it had for the Union? It is, most obviously, a text in favor of revision of the verdict against Dreyfus. Lapie argues powerfully against the injustice built into military courts, and is clear that truth, pursued in a scientific way—and here is an argument for a certain style of republican professor—must be the overriding value. That truth and justice are coincident he feels he may simply assert. The ‘instinctive kantism’ remark is interesting in light of the neo-Kantianism that pervaded the Rmm, but Lapie himself—as many others—was as much a Platonist as anything else (although what that means is a difficult question). Much that Lapie says appears today almost laughably naive, and surely one must quickly ask after who, exactly, is in a position to enunciate the truth of which he speaks. And yet.

The desire for a public that is institutionally committed to methodical doubt, to the pursuit of justice through that of truth—this is appealing. And further there is something appealing about the round rejection of conscience-claims. This sounds, on its face, flatly antiliberal. Freedom of conscience is a fundamental freedom. But I don’t think this is quite what he means. He means, rather, that because you feel something deeply does not mean you have any kind of right to assert it as true. We can go one further and say that since truth is intersubjective, this can be extended to mean that you do not have a right to oblige others to accept what you feel deeply just because you are “intimately convinced” of it. This is, as Lapie would doubtless be happy to further explain, an Enlightenment point of view. There is no truth, and so no justice, without ruthless critique. It would be easy to object to this sort of position, for instance in its characterization of conscience, in the necessary connection of truth and justice, or in how Lapie relates the individual to the institutional. Indeed people Lapie knew well made such objections to him at various points. He has, nonetheless, the merit—more rare than one might think—of writing with great conviction about the need to temper conviction with evidence and doubt.

SFHS 2015. Part One of Two.

This past weekend was the meeting of the Society for French Historical Studies at Colorado College. I saw a number of excellent papers and some quite cohesive panels. I’m going to do brief write-ups of only two of these panels. The first, here, is a panel titled “Education, Religion, and Laïcité in Republican France,” with papers by Linda Clark, Eleanor Rivera, and Rachel Hutchins.

Linda Clark—“Women Educators and the Politics of Laïcité: Normal School Directrices, 1879-1889”—spoke about the directrices of écoles normales for women in the first decade after the institution of generalized secondary education for women. In this period, there were approximately 180 such directrices (Clark has the exact number, but I missed it). A few écoles normales already existed, of course, but a large number of new women were needed to run the new schools that would be created under the law. Eventually, although not at first, these women would be trained at the new ENS at Fontenay-aux-Rose. Clark opened her talk with a letter sent by an archbishop to Jules Ferry in 1880. Did Ferry know, the archbishop asked, that one of his directrices was a Protestant? Ferry replied that he did, but that her religion was not important, only her professional capacity. Clark is broadly interested in this question: how laïque were these early teachers? Who were they? Clark’s paper was rich with valuable detail about this all-important group. After all, if the schools were the heart of the republican project, and the republic could survive only if it ‘won the battle’ for women, then this group—those who would run the schools to teach the teachers—was of great importance.

Clark divides her subjects into three groups. There were 17 normal schools for women in France when the new law went into effect in 1879. 10 had laïque directrices, and all these were retained as new schools were opened. This is the first group. Second are the 33 directrices appointed to newly-created schools mostly in the first year (79-80), who did not pass through Fontenay-aux-Rose. Third is the remaining majority, women who passed through the ENS at Fontenay and thus received the laique training that was, ideally, supposed to prepare them for their task.

Clark’s paper showed that, at first, Ferry and co. had to rely on more Catholic teachers, and allowed much greater latitude for the expression of Catholic doctrine on the part of these directrices. In fact, especially in the early years, Catholic directrices sometimes met with more success in effective laicization than did non-Catholics. There was great turnover in the first few years. This depended in part on regional differences, with more turnover in more Catholic areas. Vendé saw four different directrices in four years. Mostly these women were not married. The directrice had to live in the school, so some people thought they should not be married, or perhaps that it wasn’t a good idea to have husbands in the “couvent laïque.” On the other hand there are several examples of married women as directrice causing no particular difficulty or scandal.  Republicans were in principle committed to tolerance, so they noticed but accepted Catholic directrices as long as this didn’t disrupt or obstruct laicization. Religious practices on the part of directrices could be cause for dismissal—often were, although sheer incompetence was as well—but there are also cases of directrices being accused, and then defended successfully. Perhaps surprisingly, complaints came both against too radically laïque directrices and against those who were not laïque enough. By the late 1880s, there was less tolerance for Catholics. Once the ENS at Fontenay is running, dismissals because of excessive Catholicism drop off sharply. Only 1 of the 81 who went through was, ultimately, dismissed for catholic practices. 

My central take-away here was that, indeed, these directrices were an effectively laïque bunch. Compromises were made, especially at first, but the larger picture is of a surprisingly effective construction of a corps of elite teachers.

Eleanor Rivera’s paper, “Neutral Space: Laïcité and Early Third Republic Classrooms,” also examined the contested edges, we might say, of Ferry-era laicization efforts, but in a quite different mode. She uses the optic of space to inquire about how laicization worked at the level of the primary school, focusing on the Seine-inférieure. In fact what this means is a close look at very local conflicts over the signs and symbols of religion mostly within classrooms—especially crucifixes. I wonder, then, if Rivera’s framing might be different: perhaps it is not so much space as material or visual traces of religion that interests her? Or perhaps I’m over-remembering the spatial framing of her paper?

However that may be, the paper itself was a fascinating and detailed recounting of several such conflicts. Although at a different level of the French educational systems than Clark, Rivera’s paper also demonstrated the great variations according to local response that characterized efforts at laicization—and, concomitantly, the flexibility in many cases of the higher administration. Even after it became illegal to have crucifixes up in classrooms, many remained when local conditions made it difficult for the administration to have them removed without great conflict. Guidelines existed, Rivera tells us, for when and how local teachers might best take these symbols down (over a long break, quietly, quickly, and decisively). Conflicts nonetheless arose. Rivera recounted in some detail one particular sequence in which a local mayor declared his complete legitimacy—given by universal suffrage—in attempting to re-install a crucifix removed from a classroom in his town. This is interesting partly because the election of mayors was an innovation on the part of the Third Republic, and so we see here a nice dialectic of democratic legitimacy being accepted by opponents of republican policies. The broader point of Rivera’s research (at least this part of it) was that especially in primary education, teachers and administrators were willing to retain a substantial amount of Catholic paraphernalia in and around the classroom if it meant they could get the children into the school, and they could still control the curriculum.

Rachel Hutchins’ paper took us out of the early Third Republic and into the (late?!) Fifth Republic. She is interested in the uses of the term “laïcité” since 1980 in French primary school curriculum and textbooks (which are importantly different). Hutchins’ paper, too, was rich with detail and impressed upon me how little I know about recent French pedagogical debates. For instance, in the early 1980s official policy removed ‘histoire’ from the curriculum, replacing it, on the basis of reasoning drawn from Piaget and Annales historians, with direct interaction with artifacts and historical documents, but without significant framing? If this is even partly right, I’d be interested to know more. 

In any case, Hutchins’ central argument is that, especially in the textbooks that schoolchildren actually use, laïcité has undergone a process of idealization. It has been transformed, in Hutchins’ excellent phrase, “from value to myth.” She shows the differences between the official position taken in the preambles to various curricular documents and the actual content of the textbooks, which are not legally required to fit in any particular way with official curricula. An important turning-point, she argues, came as around 1985 national history returned to primary school curricula. At first, in textbooks from the late 1980s, laïcité is mentioned only briefly, if at all. By 2008, however, the main textbook for primary use on civil education gives exactly as much space to laïcité as to liberté, égalité, fraternité. Despite space also given to explicitly anti-racist messages, this way of presenting the 1905 law in fact re-enforces, and this last is a paraphrase of Hutchins, traditional nationalism in the guise of republican universalism. Hutchins even shows that Islam is handled in history textbooks so as to emphasize its warlike, conquest-oriented aspects. The crusades appear as a ‘reconquest’ on the part of Christian rulers. Muslims were commercial and scientific in the past, but not, these textbooks suggest, in the present. This part of Hutchins’ paper was very interesting, but I would have liked to see it treated in a broader way—not something, of course, there was time for in the paper.

A number of useful questions emerged from the audience. (There was a very substantial comment from Barry Bergin, but for some reason my notes from it are missing, so I won’t try to reconstruct it—suffice it to say that he raised several of the below points as well). Hutchins, for instance, who had framed the curricular changes she describes largely in terms of xenophobic or anti-immigrant discourse and the rise of the FN, was asked about other possible relevant changes. These are indeed numerous and not to be discounted in post 1968 France. Jean Pedersen asked two (related!) questions of the panel as a whole, which I shall mangle in paraphrasing. First, what is really the continuity or the difference between laïcité in 1880 and the same term today? Second, the form taken by laïcité in all these papers is subtractive (my word), that is it removed symbols or practices in order to achieve ‘neutrality.’ What about an (American) positive or inclusive model of neutrality? This last, for any number of reasons, was indeed never on the table in France. In fact, Rivera told in response a nice anecdote about a newspaper column in which this very specter was raised—a crucifix with a cross, a start of David, a ‘head of Mohammad’ (!), the mason’s level, all together—as a possible outcome of botched laicization. This appeared as an abomination in the 1880s. (And today it is left to Slavoj Zizek to become outraged (or at least worked-up) about the “coexist” bumper-stickers made out of these symbols.) Pedersen did not really get an answer to her first question—indeed it is a difficult one.

Of course, laïcité even over the long-term has been the object of an enormous amount of excellent scholarship in France. Jacqueline Lalouette leaps to mind here. It seems to me that we would be well-served to analytically separate republican anticlericalism, which has roots well before the Revolution and which played such an important role in it, from laïcité, which I would understand as a 19^th century synthesis of free-thinking and Protestant approaches to deconnecting organized or institutionalized religion from morality. It seems pretty clear that in the late 19^th century, in the run-up to 1905, Protestants played a key role in laicization, and that, at least on its face, there was nothing atheist (we might say) about laïcité. The default understanding—the rhetorical frame in the present—seems to be that laicization worked in the Third Republic, but isn’t working now, should be made to work with the same moral energy and clarity that it had in the 1880s. Certainly the papers in this panel suggest that Ferry’s project (not that it was only his) was a remarkable one. But it seems clear that to really understand the laïque schools of the 1880s, we need at least to begin with the educational policies and politics of the Second Empire. We need to think about the significance of the Paris Commune in shaping political possibilities (and fears) in the first decades of what would become the Third Republic. Republicans were not simply Enlighteners fighting obscurantist Catholics. They were also (even the more staunchly democratic among them) property-owners fighting socialists. And then if we want a bilan of the Republican school system, we’d better think very hard about the 1930s and Vichy, in particular the extent to which the latter had “Republican origins.” Hutchins’ characterization of laïcité in recent years as a “myth” rather than a “value” of the republic seems, at least from my perspective, dead on. The place that the concept—the administrative strategy—of laïcité had in the political conjuncture of the early Third Republic made it a functional part of the Republic and gave it, it seems to me, a completely different meaning than it has today. Laïcité may have been a genuine myth in the late 19th century, and today merely rhetorical cover. 

All of which is a long-winded response to three great papers, Bergin’s comment, and questions from the audience—as well, I should say, as conversation after the panel. Having just written substantially more about this than I meant to do, I’ll commit to doing the same (although at less length) tomorrow with another, quite different panel: “Beyond Determinism: Rethinking the Philosophy of History and Political Economy in Postwar France.”

Goldstein in the AHR

Goldstein, Jan. "Toward an Empirical History of Moral Thinking: The Case of Racial Theory in Mid Nineteenth-Century France." AHR Feb 2015. 

How should historians approach moral evaluation of positions that operate in fields which we now broadly agree are morally reprehensible? Given that historians cannot avoid and ought not reduce their work to moral judgment on their subjects, what is the responsible approach? This is the broad guiding question that Jan Goldstein frames for herself in her address as president of the AHA. She proposes an “empirical history of moral thinking” and provides an example of this with a work-in-progress on mid-19^th century French race science. Here, she says, the broad and correct rejection of race science on the part of the contemporary historical community actually poses a methodological problem.  The essay and the material are quite wonderful. Apparently reactionaries have been bravely pointing to ‘science’ to justify racialized hierarchy and regretfully shrugging their shoulders since at least 1847. The paper starts with a debate at the ethnographic society of Paris in that year, then looks at the reaction to Gobineau’s book, especially from Tocqueville, and finally considers Renan. I look forward with great anticipation to the book. And yet. I’m not sure that I understand the methodological intervention that is supposed to be happening here.

Certainly the problem itself—as I understand it, of moral judgment in historiography—is interesting. And the alternatives of either condemning outright all who seemed to accept race-thinking or of pretending not to pass any judgment at all, are not satisfactory. But is this really the alternative with which we are faced? Do practicing historians actually require additional methodological equipment in order to make moral distinctions between racists (or people making moral decisions more generally)? I’m not so sure. Goldstein’s approach sounds vaguely Foucaultian: “I have tentatively concluded that the moral field in question was structured by at least four...considerations, which constituted lines of force within it.” Goldstein is distinguishing between a space of moral decision and an intellectual field. I’m not sure that there is such a distinction, methodologically speaking. The tools developed within sociology of knowledge and the history of science seem to me reasonable well suited here to a reconstruction of the discursive space or the problem situation, and therefore to allow for evaluation of the positions taken. How is what Goldstein is doing here different from other excellently practiced intellectual history?

The talk is elegantly constructed and rich. The four “lines of force” according to which she believes the moral field around race science at this time organized itself are as follows. First, the ethos of scientific objectivity. This, she says, is basically at this moment Comtean. Second, the question of responsibility--that is, is it legitimate, or morally acceptable or necessary, to reject a scientific finding because it would have negative political or social consequences? Third is the Cousinian distinction between spirit and matter. To take a philosophical or scientific position arguing on the basis of material—race—was to deny spirit, mind, and so was (to Cousinians) inherently immoral. Fourth was the widely held belief that, as it is written somewhere, all men are created equal. This comes both in Christian and Republican or Enlightenment flavors.

Goldstein takes us first into the 1847 debate at the Ethnographic society on “the distinctive characteristics of the white and black races and the conditions of association of these two races.” This was presided over by Gustav d’Eichthal, a Saint-Simonian, and featured Victor Schoelcher who would soon, after the revolution, successfully campaign for the abolition of slavery in the French colonies as well as Courtet de l’Isle, who Goldstein describes as a lapsed Saint-Simonian and a major source of inspiration for Gobineau. Among the many interesting things to come out of this debate is the basic assumption, voiced by d’Eichthal, that there is a fundamental incompatibility between a scientific approach to race and the assumption of inequality. In the wake of the ’48 revolution and a wide acceptance of abolition, ethnography comes to seem, Broca says, “not a science, but as a cross between politics, sociology, and philanthropy.” As a result, for Broca, Renan, and others, a strong effort will be made to maintain that the two can simply coexist.

Goldstein turns next to the reception of Gobineau’s work on the inequality of races. She is especially interested in Tocqueville’s response. Partly because he is so eloquent and otherwise influential, but also because he is one of relatively few people—although he does this mostly in private—to reject on moral grounds the whole project that Gobineau pursues because of its negative socio-political consequences. Others draw, although not very effectively, on the axiomatic equality of human beings. Then there is the more powerful argument from dualism. Perhaps my favorite quote in a text rich with wonderful ones: “All of philosophy resides in…its being distinct from phrenology.” Here, especially, it is clear—as Goldstein argues explicitly at the end of the paper—that the language of science has extraordinary moral power. Only drawing on a combination of other arguments is it possible to contest it. Goldstein thus has some sympathy for those who are not quite able to convince themselves that something accepted as science—race—however repugnant it might be, is really to be rejected on moral or practical grounds.

She turns, finally, to Renan. I won’t try to reconstruct her arguments in any detail, although I’m very pleased to see him taken so seriously. That she finds Renan “interminably equivocal” is not surprising, this was a common judgment at the time. But I am a little surprised if the real point of the argument—as seems to be the case—is to wonder whether one can be justified in finding Renan, at all, an attractive figure given how easily he was folded into the world of Edouard Drumont. Certainly understanding the structure and ordering of Renan’s writing on (what turned out to be) race is important. That he struggled with the consequences of his own positions is surely important. I am not sure that I’m convinced by the argument Goldstein seems to be making here about the power of Comtean science. Comtean positivism, she writes, was “all about” hierarchy. Yes. Is this really enough to explain the importance, for Renan, of maintaining the superiority of the Aryan over the Semitic language/race groupings? I don’t know.

Certainly it seems to me that the clear supplement for this sort of recovery of moral judgment is to understand where this field itself came from. How is it that not only science, but this particular kind of science, completely committed to hierarchy, came to possess such moral prestige? This is a contextual argument. We get some of this in discussions of Schoelcher and then Bonapart. But if, as seems to be the case, a great deal is going to be laid at Comte’s door, then some powerful explanation for his success has got to found.

I kept thinking, because it’s a good book, and because it’s also about the rise of racial thinking, about Tom Holt’s The Problem of Freedom. (Holt is another former president of the AHA). He is not so interested in recovering moral judgment. And he wrote specifically about the British context. I don’t know the scholarship well enough, but I wonder if anyone has evaluated how those arguments fit into a French context? Quite differently, of course, but the question of post-emancipation labor must surely have arisen? Or perhaps the French case can be a test of some kind for his arguments?