| This dissertation is a study of the historical genesis of French Liberalism in the political culture of Thermidor, the Directory and the Consulate, the three brief regimes spanning the years 1794 to 1804. It focuses on the political imagination of the political and intellectual elites who comprised France's republican center during those ten years; the institutional implications of their ideas; and the importance of the political discourse of the moment for the genealogy of French Liberalism.; The dissertation advances two principal arguments. First, I argue that post-Thermidor French political culture was determinately influenced by the early modern political language of classical republicanism. Second, I argue that French Liberalism emerged contingently across the ten years from 1794 to 1804, and was decisively shaped by a host of classical-republican concerns and themes stemming from post-Thermidor political culture.; The dissertation begins in the wake of the Terror, as a group of revolutionary veterans, France's republican center, sought to end the Revolution and anchor the Republic in stable ground. In doing so, I argue, they imagined the body politic in classical-republican terms and articulated solutions drawn from the classical-republican repertoire, such as restricting the franchise to the virtuous and property-holding few; balancing constitutional powers; legislating citizens' duties; and attempting to remake France's moeurs on classical-republican grounds. Over the next few years, as the Directory lurched from one crisis to the next, a growing proportion of France's political and intellectual elites grew disillusioned with the political system. The result was the coup of Brumaire and the liberal-authoritarian Constitution of the Year VIII (1799), which reflected, in large measure, the political theories of Emmanuel-Joseph Sieyes and Pierre-Louis Roederer. As Bonaparte's rule grew dictatorial and the authoritarian side of the Brumairian settlement became increasingly pronounced, many former members of the republican center dissented in liberal-republican terms. The principal themes of this liberal republicanism---limned beforehand by Germaine de Stael and Charles-Guillaume Theremin, but receiving its fullest expression in Benjamin Constant's Fragments d'un ouvrage abandonne sur la possibilite d'une constitution republicaine dans un grand pays---constituted the central kernel of French Liberalism. |
