Social conservatism and economic liberalism in nineteenth-century French bourgeois thought: The life and work of Louis Reybaud

"Social Conservatism and Economic Liberalism in Nineteenth-Century French Bourgeois Thought: The Life and Work of Louis Reybaud" by Jennifer Heyne examines the ideas of Marie-Roch-Louis Reybaud in the broader context of nineteenth-century French politics and culture. A man of letters, Reybaud was the author of the first comprehensive criticism of socialism and of popular novels which criticized the July Monarchy. Reybaud was raised in the middle-class world of Marseilles, a port city where family business gave him experience in the sugar industry and world travel. Because of this varied background, his thought is the work of a man who was both a pragmatic homme d'affaires and a broad-minded homme de lettres. He embraced social conservatism and political liberalism, which so many of his peers held as important to the stability of post-revolutionary France. Thus, Reybaud must be understood not only as an independent and innovative thinker, who directed his intellectual energies to a systematic critical analysis of social utopian theory and to Voltarian political satire, but also as representative of the nineteenth-century French bourgeoisie, who sought a moderate and sensible course for French civilization. This research then contributes to our understanding of the construction of middle-class ideas on government, the industrial revolution, and the conflicts and problems encountered by modernization. Reybaud's was not a blind defense of the bourgeoisie. Along with Honore Daumier and Honore de Balzac, he exposed all the flaws of professionals, industrialists, and men of commerce, whose sobering notions of morality and politics often seemed shallow, hypocritical, and corrupt. But Reybaud saw too that the middle class must now guide French civilization; thus he sought to understand those cultural strengths by which the bourgeoisie might provide the cornerstone of a politically strong and economically prosperous French nation. Reybaud's perspective is then both usual and unusual--he espouses views typical of the middle class, views, however, which are not commonly explored in nineteenth-century French studies and so deserve more attention by modern scholars. My dissertation is an attempt to fill this gap in scholarship on the French bourgeoisie.