Contenu du sommaire

The “Considerations on the Government of Poland”: Rousseau as a historian and anti-modern legislator ? Rousseau is commonly considered a “poor historian” and more of a political theorist than a legislator. The Considerations on the Government of Poland clearly disproves these assumptions. At the request of Count Wielhorski, the Bar Confederation representative in France, Rousseau disclosed his reflections on the constitutional reform of Poland in the years 1770-1771. Taking part in the large debate between Philosophers of the Enlightment, European Courts and Polish Magnates, Rousseau revealed a penetrating knowledge of the history of the Polish institutions and proved to be a genuine reformist, a proponent of a “conservative republicanism” concerned to ensure not only the respect of such national institutions as the liberum veto, the Confederations and the elective monarchy but also the emancipation of the serfs and the progressive promotion of the peasantry.

Stanislas de Clermont-Tonnerre on Freedom of Religion in 1789Stanislas de Clermont-Tonnerre was the sole proponent of the separation of Church and State, instead of the confiscation of Church property, to secure the freedom of religious opinion in 1789. His individualistic philosophy of religious freedom opposed the Civil Constitution of the Clergy, the idea of a “national civic religion” and the cult as a public service. From the freedom of thought as a unique premise, he deduced a judicial status of religion anticipating our contemporary liberal democracies. He was in this Benjamin Constant's acknowledged master.

Pavane for a Happy Revolution
Stanislas de Clermont-Tonnerre fought in 1789 to allow Jews to obtain French citizenship. But we neglect the man behind this dramatic gesture. Supporter of the “slow politics” principle, he fought within the “monarchien” group (Mounier, Lally-Tollendal and Malouet) to establish a strong executive power and can still be used today to shed light on the debate on the presidential function of the Fifth Republic.

“The beginning of a new century”: the intellectual and political debate in Germany around 1800In face of the revolutionary “degeneration” of the Directory (1795-1799), “The beginning of the new century” (Schiller, 1801) crystallises the German debate of the years 1790-1800 over three interrelated sectors: Fichte's politics from “Jacobinism” to the nationalism of the Addresses to the German Nation; following Fichte's and Kant's subjectivism, the genesis of the First Romanticism (Novalis, Schlegel), its irony and its reactionary “turn”; the development of Hegel's thought as a critique of Fichte's and Kant's subjectivism and romantic irony, the central question becoming the State faced with the conflicts of the civil society.

From Saint-Simonian industrialism to the scientific management founders: the utopia of cooperation
This paper shows a genealogy of industrialism by evoking two striking figures of its history: first, that of Claude-Henri of Saint-Simon, father of the industrialist doctrine, then that of Frederick Winslow Taylor, founder and popularizer of the scientific management. The political and utopian project of building a society wholly regulated by cooperation is at the heart of our analysis.

Léon Duguit on growing social complexity and the decline of sovereignty
Léon Duguit considered legal theory and social transformation studies to be one and the same thing. He therefore viewed the theoretical difficulties met by the legal science of his time as evidence of the obsolescence of certain notions. Public law kept reaching doctrinal dead ends and the reason of this had to be found in the inadequacy of a number of concepts to social facts. Although Sovereignty and State personality had historically displayed their theoretical and practical efficiency, the social transformations witnessed by Duguit required that they be overcome by the notion of public service.

Quid leges sine moribus? Jean Massabiau or the constitutional aporia of republicanism in the first nineteenth century. Forgotten in France, Jean Massabiau (1765-1837) had an impact in Brazil, influencing one of the founding fathers: Silva Lisboa. Curator of the Sainte-Geneviève Library, he left a work marked by classical republicanism. Convinced that moral guarantees are more important than legal and constitutional guarantees, he minimizes the interest of modern constitutionalism. He changes his mind during the July Monarchy, by proposing a new type of constitution, mixing old and modern guarantees.

How to study the history of political ideas?
How should we make an history of political ideas? We propose to systematically present four approaches that attempt to answer this question: the contextualist method, known as the Cambridge School, the Marxian social history of political ideas, conceptual history and the popular history of political ideas. The interest of such a comparison is to highlight the convergences and divergences between these different approaches and to enable the researcher to grasp what each of them allows in terms of interpretation.

Jacques de Cassan
Jacques de Cassan was one of Richelieu's political lawyers. Quite forgotten today, he endeavoured to demonstrate the legitimacy in law of the pretentions of the French crown over certain possessions of its neighbours. And since there were scarcely any other arguments, he turned towards the old feudal law in order to demonstrate the validity of these pretentions at a time when modern monarchies and unified nation states were being put in place. The Thirty Years War revived all these territorial ambitions, even the oldest amongst them. The claims were specious, the reasoning daring, the history arranged, but Cassan lifted the veil on the Cardinal's last hesitations in the face of public opinion and Europe. It says much on the state of mind of the governments of the time, on their will to power and on their fanatic expansionism.