A Classical Republican in Eighteenth-Century France: The Political Thought of Mably / Edition 1

by Johnson Kent Wright

Overview

This is an intellectual biography of Gabriel Bonnot de Mably (1709-85), who emerges as a central figure in the history of republican thought in the era of the Enlightenment and the French Revolution.

This book has two related aims. The first is to fill an important gap in historical scholarship. Although Mably, whose career as a historian and political theorist stretched from 1740 to the eve of the French Revolution, clearly played a major role in the intellectual history of his era, there has been no study of his life and thought in English for nearly seventy years. At the same time, the book seeks to advance a novel interpretation of Mably's thought. He has most often been portrayed in two sharply contrasted ways, either as one of a handful of utopian communists and a precursor of nineteenth-century socialism, or as a deeply conservative enemy of the Enlightenment. This study sets forth a different reading of Mably's thought, one that shows him to be a classical republican, in the sense this term has acquired in recent years for students of early modern political thought.

Mably was the author of the most comprehensive and influential body of republican thought produced in eighteenth-century France—a claim with implications that go beyond the merely biographical. These are explored in a final chapter, which draws some conclusions about the character of classical republicanism in France and about the French contribution to the republican tradition in Europe.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780804727891
Publisher:	Stanford University Press
Publication date:	06/01/1997
Edition description:	1
Pages:	276
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x (d)
Lexile:	1590L (what's this?)

About the Author

Johnson Kent Wright is a Lecturer in the Interdisciplinary Humanities Program at Arizona State University.

Read an Excerpt

A Classical Republican in Eighteenth-Century France

The Political Thought of Mably

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By Johnson Kent Wright

STANFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS

Copyright © 1997 Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8047-2789-1

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CHAPTER 1

Introduction: Placing Mably

In 1819, Benjamin Constant delivered a famous lecture in Paris under the title "The Liberty of the Ancients Compared with that of the Moderns." The talk was a distillation of two decades of reflection on the meaning of the French Revolution. Constant's central claim was that the First Republic had represented a vain attempt to transform France into a modern Sparta — an attempt, in other words, to establish a political order based on the "ancient" conception of liberty, which Constant defined as the "active and constant participation in collective power." Such a goal, however, was a dangerous anachronism in a modern commercial nation such as France. The predictable result of the Jacobin experiment was not the restoration of the direct democracy of the ancient city-state, but rather the heedless destruction of a wholly distinct form of liberty, the "peaceful enjoyment of private independence." The latter was the specific product of modern civilization, and was entirely unknown to classical antiquity. What then had led to the attempt in the first place — how could the French have to come to believe that a restoration of "ancient liberty" was both possible and desirable in a modern setting?

The chief culprits here, in Constant's view, were two Enlightenment writers who had devoted their careers to fostering just this delusion. One of these, of course, was Jean-Jacques Rousseau-much of the interest of Constant's lecture in fact derives from his exasperated yet sincere admiration for the author of Du contrat social. His real venom was reserved for the abbé de Mably, a figure far less likely to be familiar to twentieth-century readers, but whom Constant believed bore an even greater responsibility than Rousseau for having glamorized the idea of "ancient liberty." Both Rousseau and Mably had failed — with dire consequences for the succeeding generation — to see that the pure democracy of the classical city-state had been lost forever with the decline of antiquity. The unforgettable lesson of the French Revolution, Constant concluded, was that freedom in the modern world could best be secured by combining ironclad guarantees of individual liberty with "representative government" — in which, he conceded, political self-direction for the vast majority of the populace would necessarily be reduced to an "abstract supposition." The experience of the Terror would serve henceforth as a standing warning against any further experiments with a more direct democracy.

Constant was not alone in this judgment on the French Revolution. The belief that the Jacobin cult of Graeco-Roman antiquity was somehow central to its meaning was widely shared in the nineteenth century, and not merely among Constant's fellow liberals. Karl Marx, for one, was no less struck by Jacobin and Napoleonic imitation of classical political and cultural forms, as famous pages from The Holy Family and The Eighteenth Brumaire remind us. Today, however, any reconsideration of "The Liberty of the Ancients Compared with that of the Moderns" must confront an initial paradox. Constant's lecture has long since come to be seen as a founding document of modern political liberalism — indeed, the notion of a contrast between competing forms of liberty, ancient and modern, has been a staple of liberal polemic for decades. Yet for all its current celebrity, the substance of his interpretation of the Revolution itself is virtually without resonance in twentieth-century historiography. The phenomena to which he drew attention — the classical republicanism of writers such as Rousseau and Mably, and the Revolutionary cult of antiquity that is supposed to have been inspired by it — have largely been ignored by contemporary historians of the Enlightenment and the Revolution; it has been decades since either has attracted serious and sustained scholarly attention. The general indifference to these topics appears still more paradoxical, in light of the recent emergence of a substantial body of scholarship on classical republicanism elsewhere in early-modern Europe, synthesized some time ago in J. G. A. Pocock's The Machiavellian Moment. Surprisingly enough, there have been no efforts to find a place in Pocock's "Atlantic republican tradition" for the Jacobin Republic of Virtue, and remarkably few attempts even to restore the political thought of Rousseau to its wider European context. As for the abbé de Mably, who for Constant and many others was the central figure of French republicanism in the Enlightenment, this disregard has been nearly total. Indeed, it is difficult to think of any eighteenth-century thinker of comparable stature and interest who has received so little scholarly attention over the years. Among other indices of neglect, the surprising fact is that there exists no recent authoritative survey of Mably's thought in either French or English — the only study in the latter language was published nearly seventy years ago.

The chief purpose of the book at hand is to remedy this gap, at least in regard to Mably. In form an intellectual biography, its primary goal is to sketch an accurate and complete portrait of its subject by means of a contextual study of his life and works. At the same time, this book also has a wider ambition. It is perfectly clear that a major reassessment of the political usages of classical antiquity in eighteenth-century France — from the "Quarrel of the Ancients and the Moderns" early in the century to the Jacobin Republic of Virtue itself — is long overdue. What better starting point for such an assessment than with Mably? The larger purpose of this book will be to demonstrate not only that the dominant political language in Mably's writing, which gave it coherence and direction over a long intellectual career, was indeed a French variant of classical republicanism, recognizably belonging to a larger "Atlantic republican tradition," but that Mably was in fact the author of the most important, extensive, and varied corpus of republican thought produced in eighteenth-century France — perhaps in Europe. Such will be the general claims of this study. In order to grasp their specific novelty and force, however, it is necessary to take a closer look both at the career and reputation of Mably and at the current state of scholarship on French republicanism.

Mably's Reputation: Celebrity and Eclipse

Let us begin with some simple facts about Mably's life and work. He was born into the provincial noblesse de robe at Grenoble in 1709. Although he was educated in preparation for an ecclesiastical career — as was his younger brother, Etienne Bonnot de Condillac — he was never ordained. A brief period of employment in the diplomatic bureaucracy of the French monarchy in the 1740s left an indelible mark on his thought. But by mid-century Mably had abandoned what was evidently a promising career in the service of church or state, in order to devote himself entirely to study and writing; henceforth he divided his time between Paris and the country estates of a few aristocratic patrons. By the time of his death in 1785 he had published some fifteen works; the editions of his oeuvres completes that appeared during the Revolution fill fifteen volumes, including three of writings that had previously circulated in manuscript.

What sort of works were these? Even the briefest inspection of Mably's writing reveals two outstanding traits. On the one hand, his thought was exclusively political in orientation-government and society were virtually the only topics Mably found worthy of serious consideration, in a career that spanned more than half a century. "Men were made to live in society," he wrote in a characteristically laconic formula, "and their happiness was left in their own hands; it is thus the study of society, politics, which ought to occupy their attention." The consistency and direction of his intellectual career plainly sprang from a deep conviction about the place of politics in human life. Yet this intense focus should not suggest a narrowness or confinement of vision. For Mably's writing was also characterized by an impressive variety of genre and topic, within the limits of the political. His thirty or so works can be roughly sorted into three main categories. Mably's chief early writings belong largely to the genre of philosophical history, inspired by the model of Montesquieu's Considérations on the Romans: he published Parallèle des romains et des français in 1740, Observations sur les Grecs in 1749 (later revised and published as Observations sur l'histoire de la Grèce in 1764), Observations sur les Romains in 1751, and Observations sur l'histoire de France in 1765. In mid-career, however, his preference shifted toward the philosophical dialogue as a vehicle of self-expression. His first exercise in this genre was written in 1758, but appeared in print only posthumously: Des droits et des devoirs du citoyen. Over the next twenty-five years Mably published a series of book-length dialogues — Entretiens de Phocion, De la législation, Principes de morale, De la manière d'écrire l'histoire — and wrote more than a dozen others, of an impressive variety of length and form, extending over a wide range of sociopolitical topics. A third category, finally, is formed by the large number of specialized, polemical, or occasional works Mably wrote throughout his career. Among these were his guide to international law and treaties, Le droit public de l'Europe (1746, revised in 1748 and 1764), to which he added a long introduction, Principes des Négociations, in 1757; De l'étude de l'histoire, his contribution to the course of study assembled by his brother Condillac for the Prince of Parma (1774, but written earlier); a long and passionate attack on physiocracy, Doutes proposées aux philosophes économistes sur l'ordre naturel et essentiel des sociétés politiques (1768); and, in Mably's final years, two works that examined the prospects for reform in two very different regions of the eighteenth-century world, Du gouvernement et des lois de la Pologne (1781) and Observations sur le gouvernement et les lois des Etats Unis d'Amérique (1784).

All in all, there was hardly a more varied or copious body of political thought produced in eighteenth-century France. Moreover, Mably's oeuvre forms something like an intermittent commentary on the French political scene over a very long period, from the epoch of Fleury to that of Necker — an exceptional resource, it might be thought, for the study of the political culture of the ancien régime. How were these writings received by his contemporaries? By any reckoning, Mably's literary career was a successful one: nearly every one of his published works attained a wide readership, as attested by their multiple editions and translations, and most were favorably received by the contemporary press. A closer look at his "reception," however, reveals one striking anomaly. It was long assumed, largely on the strength of the prestige he enjoyed during the revolutionary period, that Mably had been a typical radical philosophe, his thought a characteristic expression of the most progressive wing of the French Enlightenment. His first book, Parallèle des romains et des français, was indeed in many ways a representative product of the early Enlightenment, and won the warm approval of Voltaire, among others. Yet it was soon violently repudiated by its own author — the result of a striking reversal of political conviction, coinciding with the abandonment of his brief diplomatic career, which saw Mably move from the enthusiastic royalism of the Parallèle to the intransigent republicanism of his subsequent writings. The paradox of this change was that it was accompanied by a growing hostility toward the later Enlightenment, as it moved toward its triumphant maturity in France. No subgroup of the mouvement philosophique, from Voltaire to the Encyclopédistes to the côterie d'Holbach, was spared the criticisms of Mably. Entretiens de Phocion was in part a critique of Helvétius; Principes de morale was a rejoinder to Holbach; Doutes proposées aux philosophes économistes was one of the major attacks launched against physiocratic social thought; and De la manière d'écrire l'histoire contained a brusque dismissal of the great quartet of Enlightenment historiography, Voltaire, Hume, Robertson, and Gibbon. Mably's antipathy for Voltaire was particularly intense, and it repeatedly thrust him into the sort of public polemic he otherwise scrupulously avoided. Not surprisingly, the causes and meaning of this estrangement have come to form one of the central points of controversy in the recent scholarly discussion of Mably. Some historians have minimized the importance of his personal skirmishes with the philosophes, continuing to see him as part of the Enlightenment understood in the broadest sense; others have unhesitatingly assigned him to the antiphilosophic camp tout court. But whatever final judgment is made in this regard, the price of his self-imposed exclusion from the dominant philosophical-cultural movement of his epoch was evidently a heavy one. The possessor of a continent-wide reputation at mid-century, Mably spent the last decades of his life in increasing intellectual isolation. By the time of his death in 1785 he had become virtually a forgotten figure in France.

A year later, Calonne, the controller-general of royal finances, reported the impending bankruptcy of the monarchy to Louis XVI, thus setting in motion the chain of events that was to culminate in the Revolution. It was in this altered ideological universe that Mably unexpectedly acquired a celebrity and respect that surpassed anything he had known in his lifetime. At the height of the propaganda wars of the "pre-Revolution," his literary executors published two works that Mably himself, always wary of absolutist censorship, had prudently withheld from print. The first was the completed text of Observations sur l'histoire de France (its first two volumes had appeared in 1765), which contained a stirring evocation of the original freedom of the French nation before the long night of feudal "anarchy" and monarchical "despotism" had descended on it, and which concluded with a passionate call for the restoration of the Estates-General. It quickly became by far the most frequently cited historical work in the flood of pamphlet literature of 1788-89, hailed as the "the catechism of the French" and the "national code": "This masterpiece of patriotism, erudition, of criticism and philosophy ... was in the hands of every citizen: it was there that they found the precious traces of the heritage of their fathers." The second was Des droits et des devoirs du citoyen, which had outlined — thirty years earlier — a detailed scenario for a transition from absolute to constitutional monarchy in France, one that proved to be an astonishingly clairvoyant prediction of the actual course of events of the "pre-Revolution." It too had a tremendous impact, prompting no less an observer-participant than Mounier to describe Mably thus: "Only one among all our writers had no other goal than to trace the path that we would have to follow in order to overcome the opposition and to achieve the happiness of which men are capable: would I be accused of exaggeration in calling him the legislator of the nation?"

These two works laid the foundations for a revolutionary cultwith the usual trappings of busts, portraits, street-names, museums, and public commemorations in the great festivals — that seems to have been fully the equal of those enjoyed by figures such as Montesquieu, Voltaire, Rousseau, and Raynal. Indeed, Mably's writings, which thereafter became available in more than one oeuvres complètes, proved useful to each succeeding levy of revolutionary leaders and publicists down to Thermidor, owing to their striking political and thematic diversity. Where the "pre-Revolution" had prized him chiefly for his historical and strategic writings, it was his constructive political and constitutional theory — his pointed insistence on the supremacy of legislative over executive power in particular — that received special attention during the Constitutional Monarchy. The leaders of the First Republic could in turn take up his more overtly egalitarian and republican works, with their characteristic emphasis on the seamless identity of "politics" and "morality," and their celebration of the politics of "virtue." Last, but not least important for his subsequent reputation, Mably was hailed by Babeuf and his co-conspirators, both in the Tribun du peuple and at their trial, as a key inspiration for their plans to institute the communauté des biens — a fact that still did not prevent conservative admirers of Mably from appealing to his authority in regard to the exclusion of the propertyless from politics, during the Directory.

(Continues...)

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Excerpted from A Classical Republican in Eighteenth-Century France by Johnson Kent Wright. Copyright © 1997 Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University. Excerpted by permission of STANFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS.
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Table of Contents

Contents

Copyright Page,
Preface,
CHAPTER 1 - Introduction: Placing Mably,
CHAPTER 2 - A Royalist Debut,
CHAPTER 3 - About Face: From the 'Parti des Modernes' to the 'Parti des Anciens',
CHAPTER 4 - Dialogues: Conversations with Stanhope and Phocion,
CHAPTER 5 - Contemporaries: Communists, Physiocrats, Rousseau,
CHAPTER 6 - History: The Politics of the French Past,
CHAPTER 7 - Last Works: Constitutions and the Consolation of Philosophy,
CHAPTER 8 - Conclusion: Classical Republicanism in Eighteenth-Century France,
Abbreviations,
Notes,
Bibliography,
Index,