A Companion to the Political Culture of the Roman Republic. Группа авторов

uses of Roman references by eighteenth-century French writers, it is vital to realise that the Roman republican ideology had been made widely available by many authors who did not have the slightest intention of using it as a tool of political change against the Ancient Régime.² The Traité des études (1736, 4 vols., 1st ed. 1726–1728) of Charles Rollin, the ‘pedagogical bible of the Ancient Régime’ (Nicolet 2000: 264), repeatedly refers to ancient Greek and Roman works as models of republican virtue and patriotism, without considering this as incompatible with the educational goal of forming faithful subjects of monarchy. In line with the purposes of the University, Rollin’s work aims at ‘educating the great men in the Republic of Letters’ (vol.1 A v^r), that is to the ‘art of eloquence’ (A iii^v), but not without considering the moral and political objective of such an instruction: ‘making them virtuous…good citizens’ (Disc. Prelim. xx–xxi, i–ii). As to the Romans, however, Rollin (vol. 3, 555–571) devotes two quite long sections to two features of their ‘character’: their ‘hatred of kingship (royauté)’ and their ‘excessive love of freedom’ (see Chapter 28). These are also found, revealingly, in the Dictionary of Furetière (1727: vol. 4) at the entry ‘républicain’: ‘He that is in love with the freedom of his country; he who hates the monarchical government.’ As the Dictionnaire de l’Académie (1694: vol. 2, 398) points out, the term républicain ‘is sometimes taken pejoratively, and means mutinous (mutin), seditious, having sentiments opposed to the monarchical state in which he lives’. The fact that in Furetière’s Dictionary four paragons of Roman virtue are then mentioned as ‘great republicans’ – the two often conflated pairs of Brutuses and Catos – is indicative of the specific links between the republic, virtue and freedom encapsulated by the Roman Republic. First, virtue as the inaugural and founding expression of the love of freedom, that compelled Lucius Junius Brutus to drive out the Kings – note here that the agreed commonplace is that suppressing kingship meant recovering freedom (see Rollin 1736: vol. 3, 555). Second, virtue as the appeal to integrity of mores against the corruption of the republican order (Cato the Elder). Third, virtue as the love of freedom to the point of preferring to die rather than to live in servitude under Caesar: Cato the Younger, one of the ‘great men’ who ‘suckled, along with milk, the hatred of sovereigns and the love of freedom’, as he is presented in F.M-C. Deschamps’ Preface to his play Caton d’Utique (Deschamps 1715: 3; see Fabre 1991). Fourth, virtue as the courage to kill the tyrant: Marcus Junius Brutus, a ‘fierce republican’, as Caesar names him in Voltaire’s play The Death of Caesar (1741: 3.4, 52; see Abbé Lamare’s Avertissement to the play, ix; on the Roman reference in Voltaire, see Quastana 2006). It was a republican virtue in each case, the achievement of which was not envisaged as the supreme goal (cf. Pocock 2003: 518) but rather it was seen as a means to settle, maintain and recover freedom (see Skinner 2002: chapters 6–7; see also Chapter 2 in this volume). It is this thread that will be followed here.

      4.3 Liberty

Among the profusion of works dedicated to the translation of Roman authors (historians and philosophers) and to the study of the Roman Republic’s fate (Grell 1995), Montesquieu’s Considerations (1734) and The Spirit of Laws (1748) are of paramount importance. While they unquestionably contributed to shaping the eighteenth-century understanding of Roman republican history, institutions and ideals, they also proved to be serious obstacles for the intellectual and political project of reviving the relevance of the Roman republican experience, in the midst of a deeply monarchical France. Embedded as it is in a ‘moral philosophy’ (Larrère 1996), Montesquieu’s historical and presociological thought remains deeply impressed by the ‘nobleness’ of ancient virtues (Montesquieu 1951: 1127, 1131). However, if political freedom is not just a chimera in modern times, for Montesquieu it is the English constitution that best typifies it, and republican freedom is but one of the numerous meanings various peoples have given to this highly polysemic word (liberté) according to their ‘customs of inclinations’ (1748: 11.2). Moreover, if virtue and commerce can be reconciled, it is to be found in modern commercial republics, not in outdated ancient models (Spector 2004: 44).

      In this respect, an important milestone is passed when history is directly assessed in political terms in the name of an anthropological claim, as it is in one of the most important political philosophers of eighteenth-century France, Gabriel Bonnot de Mably (1709–1785; see Wright 1997):

History is good enough to occupy a child’s curiosity if it is not a school of morals and politics. Let it display the rights of the people. Let it never wander from this first truth, from which all other truths arise, that man is made to obey not the wills of another man but only the laws.³

      Such an approach provides a key to understanding a recurrent pattern in the republican use of Roman references throughout our period: if republican Rome had been ‘the wisest government established among men’ (Mably 1758: 221) and if the Roman people should be deemed a ‘model of all free peoples’ (Rousseau 1754: 39), it is because they have illustrated an independent anthropological truth, almost erased in French people’s minds by centuries of monarchical rule, that men love freedom (Mably 1758: 39; Rousseau 1754: 39, 127), that they are destined for liberty (Rousseau 1754: 64) and that they must be virtuous and sovereign in order to maintain it – and that if they do not desire to recover it, it is because they have been accustomed to their servile condition (Rousseau 1762: 3.12, 129).

      The function of ancient models, thus, is neither to historicise civic virtue, as chiefly Montesquieu did in order to dismiss it, nor to exalt it to the point of becoming a motive for nostalgic lament: their function is to show ‘what men can be by showing us what they have been’ (Rousseau 1752: 544; see 1755: 61; 1762: 3.12, 129; Lepan 2007: 99).

Just as Cicero claimed that freedom is ‘proper to the Roman race and name’ (Cic. Phil. 3.29), Rousseau (1754: 134–136; 1762: 1.4) makes freedom the badge of humanity and uses numerous Roman references to unveil the true nature of what authors such as Grotius or Pufendorf, wooing sovereigns (1762: 2.2, 68), strive to describe as the many compensations for the loss of freedom. To those, like Hobbes, who claim that political association necessarily means giving up one’s freedom and who deliberately assimilate rulers and masters, Rousseau (1754: 131–132) opposes the notion that ‘the worst’ possible situation is to ‘see oneself in someone else hands (se voir à la discretion de l’autre)’. He then illustrates his account of the ‘fundamental maxim of the political right (droit politique)’ and uses Pliny the Younger’s extolment of the emperor’s ‘virtue’ whose contempt of ‘ambition’ and ‘unlimited power’ (postestas infinita) maintains the freedom of his people: ‘the peoples gave princes to themselves to defend their freedom, and not to enslave themselves. “If we have a prince, said Pliny to Trajan, it is in order that he preserves us to have a master” [Pliny, Pan. 55.7].’⁴ Tacitus, ‘who knew the heart of man’ (Rousseau 1764: 842) is not only useful for highlighting the constitutive link between servitude and servility (1762: IV.2, 146 (Tac. Hist. 1.85); 1764: 842 (Tac. Hist. 1.36)), but also provides valuable assistance in showing how some important goods nevertheless do not make up for the loss of freedom.

First, the flourishing of ‘letters and arts’ should not divert our attention and make us neglect its ‘fatal effect: idque apud imperitos humanitas vocabatur, cum pars servitutis esset, [what was called humanity by the inexperienced but was a part of servitude]’ (Rousseau 1762: 3.9, 123–124, quoting Tac. Agr. 21; see also 1750a). Second, peace, often held as the condition for letters and arts to flourish, is no less an equivocal good. All too often, the peoples who ‘pride themselves on their peace and quiet’ do not even realise they are ‘in chains’: ‘Miserrimam servitutem pacem appellant [a wretched servitude they call peace]’ (Rousseau 1754: 132, quoting Tac. Hist. 4.17; see 1762: 3.9, 124, quoting Tac. Agr. 31; see Arena 2016 for