Reimagining Politics After the Terror: The Republican Origins of French Liberalism

Andrew Jainchill poses an historical problem with contemporary overtones. After his pathbreaking work, the decade between Thermidor and the establishment of the Empire will no longer be a political black hole during which bourgeois interests ran wild. The classical republican theories that had animated the revolutionaries did not disappear; private interest did not replace public spirit. Jainchill illustrates the emergence of a modern 'liberal republicanism' that recognizes that liberalism can no more survive without republicanism than republicanism can ignore the principles of liberalism. Jainchill's careful historical reconstruction will interest political theorists who are not primarily specialists in the French revolution. Although Jainchill does not mention it directly, it is tempting to ask whether his liberal republicanism does not offer hints for dealing with our own recent experience.

Reimagining Politics after the Terror is a splendid, sophisticated, and important contribution to the historiography of eighteenth-century France, and to our understanding of the origins of modern political thought. Andrew Jainchill marvelously illuminates the history of the late revolutionary period in France and the origins of modern liberalism.

This extraordinary book shatters the scholarly myth that the rise of modern liberalism took place on the ruins of classical republicanism. Instead, liberalism arose as a far-reaching transformation within republicanism. Andrew Jainchill unearths these liberal beginnings in France not simply by focusing on canonical figures and high texts, though the masterful readings are there. Most important, he provides a compellingly rich contextualization of the political moment after the revolutionary terror that sparked the invention of liberalism from republican sources. The disquieting features of the transformation, including the implications for domestic security and foreign policy, are not neglected. Theoretically incisive and methodologically convincing, Reimagining Politics after the Terror is a landmark work.

This is an excellent book. Andrew Jainchill convincingly argues that one cannot properly understand French Liberalism without understanding the specific problems and crises out of which it emerged, and without also appreciating the strange persistence of classical republicanism in the 'mental toolkit' of the period's intellectual elites. Paying equal attention to political concepts and political reality, Jainchill offers a richly nuanced portrait of the post-Terror period in French history and a fresh rereading of some of its major thinkers. This well-written and informative book should find a wide readership, and I recommend it highly.