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Conservatism from the French Revolution to 1848

The Challenge of the Enlightenment, Industrialization and the French Revolution

This chapter will examine how conservatism developed from the advent of the French Revolution in 1789 to the 1848 revolutions in Europe and the American Civil War. Essentially, as we argued in Chapter 1, conservatism came into existence in this period as a reaction to the industrial revolution, the Enlightenment and the French Revolution. Because they posed such an overt challenge to previously existing traditions, these three phenomena inspired an explicit ideological reaction - in the form of conservative ideology. However, delineating precisely how conservatism developed in these years is a complicated task, for three reasons.

First, the industrial revolution, the Enlightenment and the French Revolution were all complex, multi-stranded, even occasionally contradictory phenomena, and hence diagnosing the challenge they posed to conservatives is not simple. The industrial revolution, for instance, had an impact not only on the nature of work and production and the relationship between agriculture and industry, but also on the development of banking and credit, since the latter proved essential to a developing industrial economy (Lee 2006: 46-7). And in view of the urbanization that industrialization caused, it also raised questions about how such newly urbanized areas should be represented politically and their social problems dealt with - whether by the state or through other agencies.

Equally, the 'Enlightenment' was a deeply complex and ambivalent intellectual movement, whose proponents differed amongst themselves, both philosophically and politically. Philosophically, under the influence of new seventeenth-century scientific methods, most notably those of Isaac Newton, Enlightenment thinkers tended to agree that the natural world could only be understood in terms of material processes, rejecting earlier Aristotelian doctrines that it should be viewed as purposive, in terms of a teleology.1 But they differed significantly over the degree to which such methods could be used to explain human conduct, with some thinkers (such as the French physician and philosopher Julian Offray de La Mettrie) arguing that human actions could be understood purely in terms of material laws - if they could be understood at all - whilst others, notably Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Immanuel Kant, claimed that human agency was distinguished from natural processes by being the product of a free will (La Mettrie 1996; Rousseau 1923: 184; Kant 1997: A534/B562). Critically, too, they also differed over the degree to which human conduct could be understood as motivated by reason. For those amongst the Enlightenment thinkers who were 'rationalists', such as Kant, it was entirely plausible to claim that human behaviour could be understood as (ultimately) the product of reason (Kant 1997: A651/B679). By contrast, for those like David Hume, who believed that reason could perform at best a calculative, instrumental function, it made much more sense to view human conduct as ultimately motivated by 'passions' - by desires and traditions (Hume 1965: 414-16). Politically as well, Enlightenment thinkers differed over what would guarantee an enlightened society, with some, such as Voltaire, favouring the regimes of 'enlightened despots' such as Frederick the Great, and others, such as Jeremy Bentham in his later work, arguing that only a fully democratic state could eliminate corruption and maximize the happiness of all (Bentham 1973: 295-6).

Finally, although in one sense the French Revolution was clearly an epoch-making event, one which for many scholars marks the beginning of modernity, it too went through several different ideological stages, and hence had several conflicting political implications. Clearly it posed a challenge, in the most concrete sense, to the traditional institutions of the ancien régime, especially the Bourbon monarchy and the established church - and by extension to similar monarchies and churches across Europe. But whether the ultimate implication of the revolution was a moderate representative democracy (as recommended by the Girondins), a direct democracy backed up by a theory of universal natural rights (as recommended by the Jacobins), or the modernizing imperialism of Napoleon, was far less clear. That the revolution could inspire radical thinkers as different as Tom Paine, Richard Price and Thomas Jefferson is a testament to how diverse its political implications were.2

The second reason why it is difficult to identify how conservatives formulated their responses to the industrial revolution, the Enlightenment and the French Revolution is that conservative thinkers did not formulate their responses to these new developments purely reactively, in the sense of simply trying to reverse what had occurred. Given how complex and radical the changes involved were, this would have been a tall order in any case, but in fact early nineteenth-century conservatives, in harmony with the theory we put forward in Chapter 1, focused instead on trying to manage the pace of change, concentrating their fire on whichever innovations they felt were particularly harmful. Thus, for some conservatives, the most worrying modern development was the rise of modern commerce, which tended to dissolve the 'organic' relationships of pre-capitalist society by transforming all social relationships into those of property owner and labourer, or producer and consumer. For other conservatives, it was the rise of the rationalistic strain within the Enlightenment, with its tendency to undermine religious faith, that was most concerning. And for others again, it was the potentially destabilizing implications of the French Revolution, and especially its doctrines of natural rights and participatory democracy that were most worrying. To state this is not, of course, to suggest that there was no coherence to these responses or overlap between them - on the contrary, many, perhaps most, conservatives in this era were intent on upholding traditional structures of authority, religious faith, economic inequality and the importance of landed property. Rather it is simply to highlight what we saw in the last chapter - that although such ideological commitments are relatively stable (within the era we are considering), they ultimately constitute adjacent rather than core concepts within conservatism, so we should not expect to see conservatives espousing them in every case.

Finally, the task of delineating the nature of conservatism in the early nineteenth century is complicated still further by the obvious fact that particular national and political circumstances often had a significant role in determining both the threats to the pre-existing order and the resultant conservative response. If there were some significant similarities between conservative positions in different countries in this period, nevertheless the national background against which conservatives operated also clearly played an important role. Thus, in Britain, a common conservative response to the effects of the French Revolution and an increasingly industrial society was to emphasize the importance of preserving traditional intervening institutions between individual and state, and to restate the importance of tradition and the common law. Conversely, in France, although unsurprisingly conservatives were particularly preoccupied with combatting the effects of the revolution, they were often less keen to stress the importance of traditional institutions in view of the widespread dissatisfaction with the ancien régime. And of course in America matters were different again, since however conservative some of the doctrines of the framers of the Constitution and of the Federalist Papers were - and, in a different way, those seeking to uphold traditional ways of life in the south - there was no escaping the fact that the republic was founded de novo, as an experiment, and that this coloured the doctrines of conservative ideological responses. To explore how conservatism developed in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, then, we will examine its development in different national contexts, firstly in Britain, before passing on to consider France, and lastly the very different world of the early republic in America.

Conservatism in Late Eighteenth- and Early Nineteenth-Century Britain

In late eighteenth-century Britain, even before the advent of the French Revolution, conservatism was evolving in a context where increasing commercialization and urbanization had already led to significant concerns about how society was developing. First, the advent of a much more commercially organised society had led to concerns amongst some politicians and political thinkers as to whether this would adversely affect public morals.3 Second, more concretely, the rising population, and in particular the spiralling costs of having to pay poor relief, raised genuine questions about the feasibility of feeding the British population, worries most pungently articulated in T. R. Malthus's Essay on Population (1798). Finally, the experience of fighting the American War of Independence, the notorious levying of 'taxation without representation', and the increasing urbanization in Britain itself had already sharpened worries about a political system that disenfranchised considerable numbers of even propertied voters.4 Nevertheless, the...