The following outline is provided as an overview of and topical guide to republicanism in France:
Intellectual roots of the republican tradition Republican doctrine put together its own list of precursors over time, what Claude Nicolet calls a "republican patrology". The list took more or less final shape in 1924, when Lucien Lévy-Bruhl set out the "republican ideal" for the Cartel des Gauches: he traced it back to the Greek city, skipped the Middle Ages almost entirely, and picked the story up again with the Enlightenment. Nicolet notes that what such a canon includes and leaves out is "rarely innocent and always significant". Antiquity – the problem of the liberty of the ancients versus that of the moderns ran through French political thought from Constant to Laboulaye and beyond. This identification remained influential in 1942: in Les Oligarques, Jules Isaac presented democratic Athens as a model in which defeated republican France could recognise itself. The Reformation – in Nicolet's account, the usual association between Protestantism and liberty belongs to liberal rather than republican thought. From about 1880 the republican mainstream went for full laïcité, although several of the men running that fight came from Protestant backgrounds (Ferdinand Buisson, , Félix Pécaut). Earlier, under the Second Empire, admirers of the Reformation had been common among republicans; Edgar Quinet told Buisson that the reformers were "not enemies, but ancestors". Cartesianism – plays a surprisingly small part in the canon. Jules Simon is one of the few republicans who cited Descartes by name, on the point that individual reason judges every authority. His formula: "Descartes is not a republican, but one cannot be a republican without Descartes". The Enlightenment – everyone agreed this was where the republican spirit really came from, but the inheritance was awkward to handle. Most of the major philosophes invoked by later republicans had died before the Revolution, their ideas got along fine with enlightened despotism, and Aulard showed that none of the major pre-revolutionary writers actually called for a republic. Montesquieu – Condorcet and later Destutt de Tracy criticised his work, whereas Restoration monarchists and liberals such as Tocqueville and Laboulaye adopted his ideas. The republicans of 1848 and the Second Empire barely cited him at all. Things changed after 1875, when there was finally a republican constitution whose separation of powers jurists could argue about; Montesquieu also came back separately, through Comte and Durkheim, as a forerunner of sociology. Voltaire – faded badly between 1800 and 1815, and the romantic republicans had little use for him either. The positivist 1860s brought him back as the standard-bearer of free thought, and the failed centenary celebration of 1878 made him a rallying point in the anticlerical fight. Gambetta said at the time: "I feel free enough in spirit to be the devotee of Joan of Lorraine and the admirer and disciple of Voltaire". The opportunist and radical republics stayed broadly Voltairean in temper, but republican legal writers never cited him. Rousseau – "the great affair of the republicans". Nobody could avoid him and nobody could agree about him. He was read as the theorist of popular sovereignty and direct democracy; liberals from Mme de Staël and Constant on blamed him for the Terror; Comte's typology filed him under the "metaphysical" spirit. Jaurès still concluded that "Rousseau was republican". Mably – probably the most openly republican writer of the century, as Nicolet reads him, yet the nineteenth-century republicans hardly noticed him. In 1848 his critics made him out to be a precursor of communism, and Marx and Engels later treated him as a precursor of socialism. Only around 1900 did jurists, Esmein especially, point out that he was the one writer who had actually predicted a revolution. Condorcet – unlike the others, he lived the Revolution and chose the Republic. Republicans mentioned Condorcet only occasionally for much of the century. His real entry into the republican pantheon came with Ferry, who from the Salle Molière speech of 1870 onward openly placed his school program in the line of Condorcet's plan for public instruction, and then with the wave of studies of 1901–1906. From then on the Radicals appropriated his image.
Place in French politics
In France the word république has never been a neutral constitutional label. From the Revolution onward it carried a judgement of value. For more than a century, the term identified one side in conflicts over France's form of government. Dorothy Pickles described the resulting tradition not as a body of doctrine but as a set of beliefs and emotions about the proper relationship between state and citizen and between government and legislature, held all the more firmly because the French had repeatedly had to fight for them. Two overlapping versions of the republican idea grew out of that fight, one on the left and, later, one on the right, although the line between the two has never been clear or consistent. Republic as a value – the men of 1789 did not intend to copy Athens or the United States and first built a constitutional monarchy; when the counter-revolution tied itself to the throne, supporters of the Revolution turned to the republic in 1792. Chénier's Chant du départ already contrasted free republicans to monarchical "slaves". Republic as a symbol – the vocabulary of the tradition ("the Republic, one and indivisible", "the sacred right of insurrection", "the rights of man and the citizen", "popular sovereignty", "a secular, democratic and social Republic") works as a political shorthand for episodes of French history and has become the symbolism of a mystique; every Frenchman's Republic has a special meaning for him, but it is not always the same Republic. Laïcité – developed through the republic's conflicts with the Catholic Church and eventually became a constitutional principle. Republican governments made the secular school one of its chief instruments, while the separation of churches and state in 1905 established a different settlement based on state neutrality toward religion. By the late 20th century, debates over immigration, Islam and the public expression of religious identity had made laïcité one of the central contested meanings of republicanism. Constitutional instability – it is often said that France has changed her constitution on average every twelve years since 1789, with extremes running from the 21 days of the Acte additionnel of 1815 to the 65 years of the Third Republic. Following Duverger, Pickles divides this sequence into three cycles: constitutional monarchy gave way first to a republic and then to a form of dictatorship in 1791–1804, 1814–1870 and 1875–1940. Until 1958, no regime felt secure enough to stop fearing its own overthrow. Left republicanism – through the 19th century and much of the 20th, a "good republican" was expected to hold more than an anti-monarchical position: attachment to the Revolution, to the nation, to the common people who had supplied the movement's street fighters in Paris and Lyon, to laïcité and suspicion of the Catholic clergy, and to the primacy of elected assemblies over the executive and over any dominant personality. Each requirement grew out of a historical experience (the Church backing the monarchy, generals and Bonapartes staging coups). This outlook became the core of the "republican tradition" and what has been called a "maximal definition" of the republic: the constitutional form plus the values that historically came with it, complete with a cult, rhetoric and a symbolic apparatus of its own. For most Socialists and some Radicals the belief that modern France dates from 1789 remained integral to republicanism; after the Boulanger affair Léon Bourgeois told royalists seeking a rapprochement that accepting the Republic was not enough, they had to accept the Revolution. For Socialists, commemorating the Commune at the Mur des Fédérés held the same importance as 14 July. Radicals instead emphasised anticlericalism and educational opportunity rather than economic equality. In institutional terms this wing leaned toward , and its memory was that the Directory led to Napoleon, the Second Republic to Louis-Napoléon and the Third to Pétain. In its late 20th-century form, left-wing (or liberal) republicanism shares with Anglo-American liberalism a foundational commitment to ethical universalism, based on the egalitarian philosophy of the Enlightenment and the heritage of 1789. Right republicanism – until 1848 the conservative camp associated the word with terror and irreligion. Liberals such as Tocqueville, who could accept neither legitimism, Orléanism nor Bonapartism, arrived by elimination at the idea of a lasting, American-style republic; Thiers made the same calculation succeed in 1871–1873, and his defection from Orléanism gave the left the support it needed to establish the regime. Alongside the founders' republic there developed a republic of ralliés (latecomers), reduced to a "minimal definition": the constitutional form without the accompanying revolutionary values. Right-wing republicans of unquestioned loyalty to the regime, such as presidents Doumergue, Poincaré and Coty, cared less about general principles than about techniques of government and the need for a strong executive, and tended to associate the left with a taste for weak government. Their historical memory ran the other way: the First Republic had turned into the Convention and the Terror, the Second was tied to socialism and the Third had been heralded by the Commune. External danger has repeatedly made this wing prone to acquiesce in extremism; war helped bring down the First and Third Republics and the Algerian rebellion the Fourth. In its late 20th-century form, right-wing republicanism generally combined communitarian nationalism with essentialist or historical claims about French national superiority. It emphasised cultural homogeneity and the alignment of political and cultural membership. What separates it from the far right of the National Front is its confidence that the nation can assimilate newcomers and its unambiguous acceptance of republican democratic traditions; Philippe Séguin's 1991 essay on the Republic and the exception française (French exceptionalism) is sometimes considered a representative statement. Common ground and blurred lines – Pickles singles out three tendencies shared across the tradition: insistence on the individual citizen and his fundamental freedoms, expressed in a taste for complex electoral systems and in the declarations of rights attached to the constitutions of 1791, 1793, 1795, 1848, 1946 and 1958; exaltation of the elected assembly over both the second chamber and the government, which on the left means assembly government and on the right a defence of the prestige of Parliament, both agreeing that Parliament votes the laws and the government executes them; and a "constitutional attitude" of rigidity born of instability, each new regime writing its constitution as a strait-jacket against the danger it had just survived, which in practice amounted to a plan for winning the last war. In practice, the dividing line shifted. Under the Fourth Republic, Socialist prime ministers Mollet and Pflimlin sought a stronger executive. A presidential system also temporarily attracted supporters on the left, including Blum in 1946 and, later, Vedel and Duverger. Where majorities of the two wings reliably faced each other was on Catholic schools, the rights of Parliament, state control of the economy, social security and electoral law.