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8 Democracy and the Press in Rosanvallon's Historiography1 8 Democracy and the Press in Rosanvallon’s Historiography1 Greg Conti Pierre Rosanvallon has spent much of his career interrogating the tensions be- tween democracy and liberalism, above all as they have arisen in the history and political theory of modern France. This chapter seeks to probe one such tension with regard to an issue that has received little attention in the Anglophone schol- arship on Rosanvallon, despite flitting through nearly all of his works: the press. While the range of his accomplishments grows by the year, one of Rosanvallon’s greatest talents remains reconstructive: he is among today’s finest scholars when it comes to exposing the core political-philosophical problems underlying histor- ical debates. For this reason, the best way to approach Rosanvallon’s thought on the press is by turning to his reconstruction of past outlooks on the subject. In particular, his treatments of two nineteenth-century approaches to the press stand out both for their virtuosity as exercises in conceptual history and for the way they address some of the more permanent difficulties of theorizing the relationship be- tween electoral democracy and a free press. These two are what we might call (a) the doctrinaire approach, which was best exemplified in the work of the historian- philosopher-statesman François Guizot and which experienced its heyday during the Restoration and July Monarchy; and (b) the Bonapartist or Caesarist approach of Napoleon III’s Second Empire of 1852-70. What these two outlooks share is that, in Rosanvallon’s historiography, they are both pathological. Neither properly establishes the connection between a free press and democracy. Nevertheless, he does not present them as equally deficient. 1 Wherever possible, I have cited from available English translations. However, many of Rosanvallon’s texts, as well as of the nineteenth-century sources discussed, remain un- translated; for all titles given in French, the translations are my own. 134 | Greg Conti While both cases are characterized by a split between democracy and the press, it is the Bonapartist viewpoint that he considers especially wrongheaded and perni- cious. Exploring the reasons for this asymmetry in his treatment of Guizot and Napoleon III not only enlightens us about Rosanvallon, but raises a few provoca- tive questions for democratic theory. This chapter proceeds as follows: section one sketches Rosanvallon’s recon- struction of the doctrinaire and Bonapartist theories of the press. The second sec- tion probes the similarities and differences between the two theories as Rosanval- lon understands them. The final section then offers a critique of his interpretations; in a nutshell, I argue there that Rosanvallon goes too easy on Guizot but too hard on the Bonapartists. This failure to rightly judge the force of the two views points us to a lacuna in Rosanvallon’s thinking about democracy: namely, that despite the breadth of his catalog he has not given a precise accounting of how elections under universal suffrage are related to other elements of a broadly speaking “mod- ern democratic” system, such as a vibrant civil society, the rule of law, a degree of equality and welfare provision, or (what concerns us at present) a free press. ROSANVALLON’S RECONSTRUCTIONS OF TWO NINETEENTH-CENTURY VIEWS Although scholarship on Rosanvallon has not accorded the press a primary place, his depictions of the doctrinaire and Bonapartist conceptions of the press are minor masterpieces of conceptual history. Beyond being avenues into Rosanvallon’s thinking about issues of the press, its freedom, and its relationship to democracy, these depictions are worth revisiting in their own right, for they examine moments in the history of political thought which are of intrinsic interest but which have gotten little play in English-speaking political theory. In both doctrinairism and Bonapartism, a dissociation between democracy and a free press is present, although the dissociation arises in a very different manner. This tension is the aspect of Rosanvallon’s surveys of these schools of thought that will be of most concern to us. For Rosanvallon, the jumping-off point for understanding the doctrinaires on the press is the recognition that they saw it as an instrument of representative gov- ernment itself: “The liberty of the press for them is not so much a safeguard [against misgovernment] or a means of exercising a fundamental liberty as it is a means of government and the expression of a social necessity.” (Rosanvallon 1985a: 65) This conception of the press was part and parcel of what Rosanvallon Democracy and the Press in Rosanvallon’s Historiography | 135 believes to be a great breakthrough of doctrinaire theory, which was to have re- conceived representation in an expansive manner, as an interactive, discursive pro- cess and not as simply an act of authorization or a transfer of sovereignty.2 Per- ceived in this framework whereby representative government is a “process of a cognitive, not mechanical, type,” the press fits right in alongside more traditional political institutions such as elections and parliaments as a factor of governance (Rosanvallon 2000: 15). The press, thus conceived, was essential to the construc- tion of an intelligent and informed rather than an arbitrary sociopolitical order (such as the ancien régime had been). “The liberty of the press, explain de Broglie, Guizot, Rémusat, and Royer-Collard, corre- sponds to a necessity, a social need. It is not only the exercise of a natural faculty, a fulfill- ment of an individual liberty; it is ‘one of the elements of the new social state [nouvel état des sociétés].’” (Rosanvallon 1985a: 66 [the quote is from Rémusat]) The press is “the heart and the regulator of a democratic society,” Rosanvallon’s doctrinaires declare (Rosanvallon 1985a: 67). It followed that, in terms of their “fundamental intuition” about a politics in which the ruling force is “publicity,” the “liberty of the press” was on par with (or even lexically prior to) other mech- anisms of representative government; it was a “potent means of establishing a new type of political communication […] of achieving a reciprocal revelation between power and the public” (ibid). In stark contrast to “liberalism” of the English/Ben- jamin Constant-variety, Guizot and his comrades laud the liberty of the press for allowing “‘society to show itself to itself [se faire spectacle à elle-même]’” and for constituting an “essential means of interpenetration of government and soci- ety” (Rosanvallon 1995a: 67-68). Rosanvallon allows the statesman Charles de Rémusat the definitive word: “Only through the press can citizens communicate among themselves and take note of their opinion; by it alone can authorities receive light from them and render it back to them; and this exchange is necessary if citizens and the authorities are to march in the same paths.” (Rosanvallon 1995a: 68) 2 Guizot “highlights the archaic character of procedural approaches [to representation] in order to draw attention to the increasingly informational character of the relationship between power and society in the modern world.” (Rosanvallon 2000: 114-5) 136 | Greg Conti The doctrinaires, then, are the high-water mark of a tradition of French thought (which Rosanvallon tracks in other contexts as well3) in which the press is treated as something approximating an equal partner with official state institutions in the task of representative government. The press has a representative function, con- veying the truth about society’s condition to the organs of power and allowing the acts and debates of the latter to react back on the citizenry in a progressive and enlightening manner. A free press is, moreover, not just an important player in this expansive “notion of representation […] [as] political communication,” but is it- self a kind of symbol of a politics that, in contrast to closed or fixed societies like the ancien régime (Rosanvallon 1985a), is conducted as a give-and-take amongst the public and its governors. The theoretical upshot of such a view will occupy us in the remaining sections; for now, it is critical to spell out one implication, emphasized repeatedly by Ro- sanvallon. This is that the reorientation of representative government around pub- licity, public discussion, the interaction of ideas and the intimacy between state and society – all mediated through a free press – lead to the marginalization of elections and of political democracy. Rosanvallon is clear that elections as such are not very meaningful from the doctrinaire perspective: “In this optic of political communication, the mechanisms of election ultimately play only a secondary role.” (Rosanvallon 1985a: 69; Rosanvallon 2000: 116) From the “basic intuition [...] to consider the press as a means of government and not simply a liberty,” the doctrinaires drew very “conservative” conclusions (Rosanvallon 2011: 211). If “every individual” was represented and given a “consultative voice” through the press, if elections were just “one element of a much larger system for the genera- tion and circulation of information and opinion,” then an equal vote could be seen as something other than an urgent democratic right (Rosanvallon 2011: 212).4 And 3 On the revolutionary era, cp. e.g. La démocratie inachevée, 50-1. On the importance for incipient nineteenth-century working-class movements of this notion of journalism and publicity as continuous with political representation, cp. Rosanvallon (2014: part II; 1988: 134-8). 4 As Rémusat would say, even in a moment of resigned acceptance of a democratic fran- chise, “universal suffrage is only a legal means of getting the people to take part in their government. Whether it is the best means for all times and places, how could one claim this?” Even when doctrinaires expressed a more open attitude toward universal suf- frage, they did so in a way that was strictly limited to instrumental considerations, and never came close to articulating any of the views which see universal suffrage as a democratic first principle (Rémusat 1863).
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