26 Sigonius, C. 1560. De antiquo iure civium Romanorum libri II. Venice.
27 Skinner, Q. 1998. Liberty before Liberalism. Cambridge.
28 Skinner, Q. 2002a. ‘Classical Liberty and the Coming of the English Civil War.’ In Skinner, Q. and Van Gelderen, M., eds. Republicanism: A Shared European Heritage. Cambridge, vol. 2, 9–28.
29 Skinner, Q. 2002b. ‘John Milton and the Politics of Slavery.’ In Skinner, Q. Visions of Politics: Renaissance Virtues. Cambridge, 286–307.
30 Skinner, Q. 2006. ‘Rethinking Political Liberty.’ History Workshop Journal 61.1: 156–170.
31 Streater, J. 1653. A Glympse of that Jewel, Judicial, Just, Preserving Libertie. London.
32 Stubbe, H. 1659. A Letter to an Officer of the Army Concerning a Select Senate. London.
33 Tuck, R. 2006. ‘Hobbes and Democracy.’ In Brett, A., Tully, J. and Hamilton-Bleakley, H., eds. Rethinking the Foundations of Modern Political Thought. Cambridge, 171–190.
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35 Worden, B. 2002. ‘Republicanism, Regicide and Republic: The English experience.’ In Skinner, Q. and Van Gelderen, M., eds. Republicanism: A Shared European Heritage. Cambridge, vol. 1, 307–327.
36 Worden, B. 2007. Literature and Politics in Cromwellian England: John Milton, Andrew Marvell, Marchamont Nedham. Oxford.
CHAPTER 4 Liberty, Rights and Virtue: The Roman Republic in Eighteenth-Century France
Christopher Hamel
Le monde est vide depuis les Romains; et leur mémoire le remplit et prophétise encore la liberté (The world is void since the Romans; and their memory fills it and still prophesies freedom). Saint-Just, Rapport sur la conjuration (31 March 1794)
4.1 Introduction
In his Fragment de l’histoire secrète de la Révolution (1793), Camille Desmoulins, one of the key figures of the French Revolution, notices the disturbing contrast between eighteenth-century France’s monarchical mores and institutions, and the deeply republican education these very institutions had provided to the elite:
Nurtured reading Cicero at school, they [i.e. the republicans of 1789] became fascinated by freedom. We were bred in the schools of Athens and Rome and in the pride of the republic for living in the abjection of the monarchy and under the reign of Claudius and Vitellius. (Desmoulins 1793: 11 n)
This reflection, however, should not be construed as a way of conceding the limited impact of classical culture (Nicolet 1982: 28), since Desmoulins (1793: 11 n.1) goes on to clarify his thoughts in a quite transparent outburst:
Insane government, that believed that we could be enthusiastic about the fathers of the Capitol fatherland without coming to loath the man-eaters of Versailles, and that we could admire the past without condemning the present: ulteriora mirari, praesentia secuturos! (Tac. Hist. 4.8)1
Arguably, Desmoulins’ confidence in pinpointing the political thoughtlessness of French authorities regarding the explosive potential of their educational curriculum is partly due to his privileged but biased position to reconstruct, in hindsight, the power of ancient ideas over the former subjects of monarchy: the National Convention had abolished the monarchy on the 21 September 1792, and most of the revolutionaries were converted to republicanism. Be that as it may, Desmoulins highlights the incredible naïveté to believe that such an obviously political culture should remain confined within the safe cocoon of school literary exercises, largely impervious to serious political concerns (Nicolet 2000: 264).
It has yet been claimed that Roman republican thinking had no real political significance in the enlightened French monarchy (Parker 1937: 71; Venturi 1970: 70–71; Ehrard 1972; Grell 1995: 554, 1156, 1171–1172, 1179): the cult of antiquity was chiefly a ‘cultural and moral’ rather than political phenomenon, appertaining to ‘abstract’ discourse, ‘artless dreams of boyhood’ (Goulemot 1993: 39, 52) or philosophical paganism (Gay 1966: 45 n. 6, 112, for this separation between philosophical and political commitments). By contrast, in favouring linguistic reconstructions of political discourses by historians of political thought, the methodological renewal led by J.G.A. Pocock (1981; 1985: chapters 1–2) and Q. Skinner (2002: Chapter 6) made it possible to trace more dynamically the relevance and strength of political arguments even where these were not political programmes (Pocock 1977: 15). Keith Baker (1990: 3–11) has fruitfully applied this general approach to eighteenth-century France, showing specifically that a ‘classical’ republican discourse inspired by ancient Rome had been an oppositional force to monarchy long before the Revolution (Baker 1990: chapters 4, 6; 2001: 35–36, 39; Edelstein 2014: 85).
This oppositional language, however, is usually seen as doomed to fail to achieve its emancipatory aim, for it was supposedly shaped by premodern ideals of positive liberty conceived of as collective self-government, of the full exercise of civic virtues and military feats of arms among equals. This ‘classical’ or ‘ancient republicanism’, advocated by Rousseau and his followers – as was the case with the political philosopher Gabriel Bonnot de Mably (1709–1785) and the lawyer Guillaume-Joseph Saige (1746–1804), both authors of prerevolutionary inflammatory works – thus proved unable to fulfil the individualistic and private demands of growing commercial, civilised and internally diverse societies (Grell 1995: 469–478 on Mably; Baker 1990: 4, 6). Then put into practice by the revolutionaries Marat, Robespierre, Saint-Just and the Cordeliers Club members, this political language had degenerated into a merciless ‘philosophy of Terror’ (Baker 2001: 53): ‘anticomanie made the Terror’ (Fumaroli 2010: 30). This inherent unsuitability is what was understood by figures such as Condorcet or Paine, who embraced the liberal ‘Republicanism of the Moderns’ that was based not on blind belief in the collective will but on the rationalist discourse of administration and progress; not on the ideal of civic virtue absorbing individual freedom but on the primacy of individual rights; not on an austere and bellicose republic but on an enlightened and commercial society (see Baker 1988, 1990, 1993, 1994, 2001, 2006, 2011; for a similar opposition, see e.g. Ozouf 1988: 766; Raskolnikoff 1990; Hartog 1991; Nicolet 1994; Gueniffey 1994; Grell 1995: 469–478; Jainchill 2003, 2008).
Immortalised by Benjamin Constant’s famous Conference comparing the Liberty of Ancients and the Liberty of Moderns (1819; see also 1814: 2.7), this reading raises a major difficulty, however. The purported champions of classical republicanism hardly verify these oppositions: some of the very texts that supposedly justify this paradigm actually invalidate it (see Hamel 2013 for a critique of Baker’s construal of ancient vs. modern republicanisms). Not only Rousseau and Mably, but also revolutionaries like the Cordeliers, explicitly invoked Roman thinking in some crucial texts as a relevant source for supporting just the ideals usually held as typically modern or liberal: namely a robust protection of individual freedom, and even rights. In addition, some Roman republican themes and arguments can be traced in Diderot and d’Alembert, those very philosophes who most emblematically personify the modern Enlightenment which the revivification of Roman republicanism is traditionally said to oppose.
This chapter thus aims at showing that these authors considered the detour via Roman republican political thinking as an appropriate route to foster the ‘liberation of the individual in the modern era’ (Spitz 2000: 22).