The Issues and the Adversaries 397
position to Parliamentary Reform in England some years before, and elaborated
them as a critique of the French Revolution, on which he wrote his Reflections in
1790.^14 In general, in this view, any deliberate, planned, or rational and conscious
remaking of institutions was difficult, impossible or delusive; societies must change
if at all by an imperceptible organic growth; custom, tradition, and habit must de-
termine the content of law. Each country in this respect must follow its own pecu-
liarity or national spirit. “Reason” was not to be trusted. There were no “rights of
man” but only rights of Englishmen or other such actual communities. The French
Revolution, according to this doctrine, was really un- French, inhuman, and con-
trary to the structure of the universe and the will of God. The extreme French
émigrés, so far as they had any philosophy, agreed with this one. The future Louis
XVIII, who became claimant to the French throne in 1795, was also of this school
in the 1790’s, though not in 1814.
Next came a more conciliatory form of conservatism, favored by men who had
taken part in the Revolution of 1789, but who had by 1792 joined the emigration.
In this group was J. J. Mounier, who had sponsored the Tennis Court Oath and the
Declaration of Rights, and favored, in 1789, a constitution in which the king
should have an absolute veto and the assembly be in two houses. In the same group
were the Swiss Mallet du Pan, P. V. Malouet, who had been intendant of the navy
before the Revolution, and a number of others who formed a colony of liberal
émigrés in London in the later 1790’s. They were in touch also with the more lib-
eral of the émigré clergy, especially Boisgelin 5 Fontanges, and Champion de Cicé,
the archbishops respectively of Aix, Toulouse, and Bordeaux. As these men saw it,
the Old Regime required modernization. Total restoration was neither possible
nor desirable. They accepted the replacement in France of the Three Orders—
clergy, nobles, and Third Estate—by a more modern representative system of
which individual citizenship and property should be the basis. They favored a
clearly ordered constitutional monarchy. To them the most unmanageable obstacle
was the Extreme Right, whose obstinacy, they felt, by alarming the French people,
threw France upon the mercy of the Left. They believed that political action and
forms of government could be and must be rationally directed. They were too
much interested in practical politics, and in intelligent action, to accept a kind of
vegetable theory of merely organic social development. These constitutionalist or
liberal émigrés, or conservatives as distinguished from outright reactionaries, an-
ticipated better than any other group the actual settlement of 1814. As political
analysts, since they were detached from the excited ideologies of Right or Left,
they probably would have a strong appeal to many twentieth- century American
readers, to whom, however, they remain almost unknown. Their trouble was that,
however intelligent, they had no following.
Next, and in the middle of the present spectrum, came those constitutionalists,
or moderate revolutionaries, who remained active in France at the beginning of
14 On Burke see p. 492. Malouet (see below) remarked in late 1792, that “M. Burke avait toutes
les idées d’un aristocrate français,” and that “les Anglais en général, sont disposés à croire que le com-
merce du monde et la liberté sont deux choses qui leur appartiennent exclusivement.” P. V. Malouet,
Mémoires, 2 vols. (Paris, 1874), 11, 260–61.