4 - Liberty in a levelled society: Charles Dunoyer, Benjamin Constant, and Prosper de Barante

Summary

Restoration liberals did not just criticize the royalists' aristocratic liberalism. They also made a more positive contribution to the post-revolutionary debate. If both Jacobinism and the royalists' aristocratic liberalism were anachronistic ways to preserve liberty in the levelled society of post-revolutionary France, alternative political models needed to be sought. In the response to that challenge, the internal division of Restoration liberalism became clear. For liberals did not formulate one but several alternatives to the political doctrines of their opponents, which were not necessarily compatible.

LAISSEZ-FAIRE LIBERALISM: CHARLES DUNOYER

An important contribution to the development of a liberal alternative to the royalists' aristocratic liberalism was made by a group of publicists and political thinkers known as the ‘industrialists’. They propagated a theory of social change, which, as we have seen, conceived of the history of France as a transformation from a military, war-based economy, in which a dominant class lived off the produce of the majority of the citizens, to an industrial society, in which all citizens were engaged in productive labour. This social transformation, industrialists preached, should be followed by a political transformation that would create a state more in accordance with the needs of the new industrial society. As a group, however, the industrialists were far from agreeing on the political implications of these presuppositions.