By Francesco Giosuè

From the tennis court to the great constitutional debate, the Moderates, who may be called the Liberals, were predominant and Mounier was their tactician. […] With some of his friends, he deserves to be remembered among the men, not so common as they say, who loved liberty sincerely; I mean, who desired it, not for any good it might do them, but for itself.[1]

Jean-Joseph Mounier was thirty-one years old when the French Revolution broke out. A royal judge born in Grenoble in 1758 to a family of négociants, he is usually known as the leader of the Dauphiné insurrection in 1788, but also as the promoter of the Tennis Court Oath, President of the first Constitutional Committee, and then of the National Constituent Assembly during the October Days of 1789. After the rejection of his political projects centered on bicameralism and the absolute royal veto, Mounier was shocked by the eruption of the masses into politics that October.[2] He returned to Dauphiné, where he meditated on counter-revolution. He was thus one of the first revolutionaries and one of the first counterrevolutionaries, just as he was among the first émigrés, reaching Geneva in May 1790, and Weimar in 1795. Granted amnesty by Napoleon Bonaparte in 1801, he returned to France, where he was appointed Prefect of Ille-et-Vilaine and then State Councilor in 1805. He died the following year.

What is most interesting is that since the early nineteenth century, according to the political press and historiography, his name has always been associated with the birth of some of the most important concepts in contemporary political thought. A liberal, a moderate, a constituent, leader of the first revolutionary “party” – the Monarchiens – but then, on the contrary, he is defined as a conservative, a man of the right, a counter-revolutionary, perhaps even the inventor of the “girouettes politiques.”[3] Looking more closely at these definitions, we must recognize them all as accurate, except perhaps the last one. And it cannot be otherwise if, following Pierre Rosanvallon and Jörn Leonhard, we consider the plurality of the political categories of liberalism, conservatism, and moderatism at a time when, between the eighteenth and nineteenth century, they were in the process of being defined.[4]

Therefore, Mounier was a liberal because he believed in a State that guaranteed individual rights, first of all the rights to freedom, property and security, alongside the need for political rights, such as the one to expression through of a free press, the right to non-class participation in the functioning of the State, and lastly the right to resist tyrannical oppression.[5] But Mounier’s liberalism lies also in his constitutionalism, in which he found the true meaning of modernity and which can also be red as the result of his Enlightenment faith in the autonomous emancipatory capacities of man.[6] Moreover, considering the meaning of liberalism as outlined by Leonhard, Mounier’s emphasis on political representation and on the legitimation of political obligation through popular consent further affirms his liberal identity. But the constituent was also a conservative and a man of the right. In fact, as Timothy Tackett recalled, in the Assembly the Monarchiens voted alongside the most radical royalist right, and conceiving the political arena as a reserved domain for culturally and economically elites to be contrasted with the “populace,” Mounier insisted more and more on the need for a strong executive power – firstly by postulating the absolute veto, secondly by theorizing a “dictatorship” of the king, and then openly adhering to the counter-revolution.[7] Indeed, at first Mounier took part, together with his friend Lally-Tollendal, in the earliest counter-revolutionary attempt known as the “Maillebois conspiracy,” and later operated from Switzerland as an informant for the British, alongside Mallet du Pan.[8]

However, Mounier was clearly a revolutionary. Looking to the England of 1688, he accepted revolution as a means to transform the Ancien Régime, a system he believed had collapsed by its own inherent flaws, without any blame on Enlightenment philosophy and certainly not due to any conspiracy.[9] The revolution he deemed necessary was one that would lead to a constitutional monarchy and, above all, to a unified regime in which there would be no qualitative distinctions among subjects or provinces. In its place, a new form of distinction based on wealth was to emerge, making the ideal of equality the most detestable of chimeras.[10] But, as we have seen, Mounier was also revolutionary in the deeper sense that the core of his thought rested on the affirmation of individual liberties and on an Enlightenment culture that set him apart from counter-revolutionary ideology, typically dogmatic, confessional and staunchly hostile to the Lumières.

Lastly, Mounier was always a convinced monarchist because he saw in the king the cornerstone of French history as well as the only guarantee against anarchy, whether assembly-based or popular. He never had any faith in republicanism in the great states, not even in the American one, of which he predicted the transformation into a “stadtholderate.”[11] Furthermore, although he had a great importance in the definition of the “parti Monarchien,” he was never a party man.[12] He was not because he considered politics in a consociate form, so much so that defining him as a modern theoretician of parliamentarism, based on organized competition, would be anachronistic.  What Mounier was certainly not is a “man of girouettes” as d’Herisson defined him, and in fact his thought always maintained this great coherence.

The first to shed light on Mounier’s thought was the Scottish lawyer Lord Francis Jeffrey in 1802.[13] As founder of the Edinburgh Review, one of the most influential Whig journals of the early nineteenth century, Jeffrey inaugurated this periodical with a review of the work De l’influence attribuée aux philosophes, aux francs-maçons et aux illuminés, sur la Révolution de France, published the year before by the former constituent. This demonstrates not only that Mounier’s reception across the Channel was swift, but also that for the Scotsmen – student of Dugald Stewart – ,Mounier was well suited to introduce a journal that was openly liberal and reformist.[14] Thus, to the Scotsman, Mounier was not merely a prominent intellectual, being the first to reject Barruel’s absurd theory, but a true liberal.[15] Therefore –and this is fundamentally important– the first time Mounier’s thought underwent a systematic analysis was thanks to one of the most important circles –the Edinburgh Review – for the affirmation of liberalism, not only in the United Kingdom. Mounier was thus presented for the first time to the Anglo–American public as a “man of talent,” an heir to the philosophes whom he defended in his essay, but even more so as one of the founders of political liberalism who, because of his adherence to the “principles of liberty” and his “notions of regulated freedom,” appeared to Jeffrey as embodying the qualities of a “middle ground.”

Surprisingly, the revival of Mounier’s thought seems to follow the process of the semantic and political affirmation of liberalism. And thus, in France in 1818, François Guizot – who, notably, never wrote a comprehensive work on the Revolution – chose to dedicate one of the only three articles he ever wrote on the subject specifically to Mounier. He published a lengthy article in the Archives philosophiques, politiques et littéraires, the journal of the Doctrinaires, in which he drew on Mounier’s thought to argue that neither liberal ideas nor the philosophers of the eighteenth century should be held responsible for the evils of the Revolution.[16] “We must absolve liberal ideas and those associated with the so-called philosophers of the eighteenth century from the accusation of having caused the evils of the Revolution.”[17] If, therefore, the connection between the Monarchiens and the Doctrinaires might be much closer than has been studied so far, it also remains the case that many Doctrinaires, Royer-Collard in particular, were influenced by the Scottish School and were in contact with the liberals across the Channel, while others, Cousin in particular, were among the first in France to take an interest in Kant. Mounier was an avid reader of the Scottish school: he read Hume in his youth, while in the last years of his life he read Dugald Stewart and Adam Smith.[18] Furthermore, as an article published in 1797 in the Magasin encyclopédique shows, Mounier was one of the first Frenchmen to take an interest in Kant, discussing his philosophy with Benjamin Constant, who, along with Necker and Madame de Staël introduced him to the Cercle de Coppet.[19] So, if Mounier’s constitutionalism and even more the importance he accorded to freedom of the press will be taken up by the Doctrinaires among whom his son Edouard was a militant, further research into his political and intellectual activity could also contribute to a better understanding of the transnational diffusion of liberal ideas.

---

Francesco Giosuè is a graduate of the University of Milan and the University of Grenoble. His graduate thesis is on the political thought and sociability of the constituent Jean-Joseph Mounier (1758-1806). He has published on the political philosophy of the Enlightenment and begins his Ph.D. studies at Sciences Po (Paris) in the fall of 2025, where he will focus on the origins of the Liberal Internationalism in the “Age of Revolutions.”

Title Image: Mounier travesti en jockey désertant l’Assemblée Nationale. La lanterne est en croupe et galope avec lui, Musée de la Révolution française de Vizille, Numéro d’inventaire: 1989.197. Mounier, wearing a hat evoking his proposal of the absolute veto, is threatened with death by the lantern – symbol of the hanging of aristocrats, invented by Camille Desmoulins ­– which chases him on his way back to Grenoble. From the horse’s mouth emerges the title of one of his most controversial works: Appel au tribunal de l’opinion publique.

Endnotes:

[1] Lord Acton, Lectures on the French Revolution, ed. John Neville Figgis and Reginald Vere Laurence (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 2000), 95; 98.

[2] Jean Egret, La pré-révolution française 1787-1788 (Paris: Puf, 1962), 303-338; William Doyle, “La pensée politique de Mounier”, in François Furet and Mona Ozouf, ed., Terminer la Révolution. Mounier et Barnave dans la Révolution française (Grenoble: Pug, 1990), 25-41.

[3] On the Monarchiens see Vladislava Sergienko, “Les monarchiens au cours de la décennie révolutionnaire,” Annales historiques de la Révolution française, 356 (2009), 177-182.

On these definitions see: Madame de Staël, Considerations on the Principal Events of the French Revolution, ed., Aurelian Craiutu (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 2008), 141-142; François Guizot and Royer-Collard, ed., Archives philosophiques, politiques et littéraires, vol. 3 (Paris: Fournier Libraire, 1818), 47-55; “Jean-Joseph Mounier,” in Biographie Universelle ancienne et moderne, vol. 30 (Paris: Michaud, Libraire-Éditeur, 1821), 310-325; Introduction to Jean-Joseph Mounier De l’influence attribuée aux Philosophes, aux Francs–Maçons et aux Illuminés sur la Révolution de France (Paris: Ponthieu, 1822), I-LXXI; “Jean-Joseph Mounier,” in Biographie nouvelle des contemporains ou Dictionnaire historique et raisonné de tous les hommes qui, depuis la Révolution française ont acquis de la célébrité, vol.14 (Paris: Librairie historique Hotel d’Aligre, 1824), 204-212; Léon de Lanzac de Laborie, Un royaliste libéral en 1789 (Paris: Plon, 1887), 21-29; 103; Maurice d’Hérisson, Les girouettes politiques: un constituent (Paris: Ollendorff, 1892), I-XX; Jules Michelet, Histoire de la Révolution française (Paris: Alphonse Lemerre Éditeur, 1888), 201; Jacob-Peter Mayer, ed., Alexis de Tocqueville, Fragments et notes inédites sur la Révolution (Paris: Gallimard, 1953), 208; Louis Blanc, Histoire de la Révolution française, vol. 2 (Paris: Pagnerre-Furne, 1869), 213; Jean Jaurès, Histoire socialiste 1789-1900, vol.1 (Paris: Jules Rouff et Cie, 1900), 269; 309; François-Alphonse Aulard, Histoire politique de la Révolution française (Paris: Armand Colin, 1901),12; Gaetano Salvemini, La Rivoluzione francese 1788-1792 (Milan: Pallestrni, 1905), 134; Armando Saitta, Costituenti e costituzioni della Francia rivoluzionaria e liberale (1789-1875) (Milan: Giuffrè, 1975), 3; 82; 166-167. In the most recent and complete work on Mounier’s thought, he is defined as a “radical moderate” and one of the most important defenders of the representative government at the eve of the Revolution. Aurelian Craiutu, A Virtue for Courageous Mind: Moderation in French Political Thought 1748-1830 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2012),70; 72-109.

[4] Pierre Rosanvallon, Le moment Guizot, (Paris: Gallimard, 1985), 14-18; Jörn Leonhard, “From European Liberalism to the Languages of Liberalisms: The Semantics of Liberalism in European Comparison,” Redescriptions: Yearbook of political thought and conceptual history, 8 (2004), 17-51.

[5] Mounier clearly supported the “natural” right to resist oppression it in the Article 9 of his Draft of the First Articles of the Constitution, read in the session of July 28, 1789. Jean Bart, “Résistance à l’oppression et droit d’insurrection,” in Roberto Martucci (ed.,), Constitution & Revolution (Macerata: Biemmegraf, 1995), 262.

[6] “La Constitution n’est autre chose qu’un ordre fixe et établi dans la manière de gouverner; que cet ordre ne peut exister s’il n’est pas appuyé sur des règles fondamentales, créés par le consentement libre et formel d’une Nation ou de ceux qu’elle a choisis pour la représenter.” Rapport du Comité chargé du travail sur la Constitution par M. Mounier (Paris: s.n., 1789), 2.

In Mounier’s thought, public opinion is both a true tribunal of reason and a constitutional guarantee. In the summer of 1790, he himself addressed an Appel au tribunal de l’opinion publique to justify his choices. “Les droits qui appartiennent à tous les citoyens sont protégés par l’opinion publique qui, en dernière analyse, est toujours le plus ferme appui d’une conslitution.” Jean-Joseph Mounier, Nouvelles observations sur les État généraux de France (s.l., s.n, 1789), 212.

[7] Monarchien’s conservatism came: “in part from the desire for a strong central authority to counter the popular unrest, in part from a deep reverence for the tradition that they sought to maintain ultimate sovereignty in the hands of the king. Many Monarchiens – like Malouet, Bergasse, and Virieu – were also strongly attached to the traditional values of religion.” Timothy Tackett, Becoming a Revolutionary (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996) 186.

[8] Barry Shapiro, Revolutionary Justice in Paris, 1789–1790, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993) 175-187; Harvey Mitchel, The Underground War against Revolutionary France (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1965) 32-34.

[9] “L’octroi des subsides réservés aux états-généraux, la nécessité de leur concours pour toutes les lois, leur périodicité, et la responsabilité des ministres; ces quatre principes opéraient donc une révolution dans le gouvernement français.” Jean-Joseph Mounier, Recherches sur les causes qui ont empêché les François de devenir libre et sur les moyens qui leur restent pour acquérir la liberté (Genève, s.n, 1792), 44. “Pendant que l’ancien gouvernement s’écroulait sur ses bases, et que le choc des parties qui le composaient accélérait sa ruine, j’emploierai tous mes efforts pour rendre avantageuse à ma patrie une révolution inévitable.” Ibid., XI; “Voilà donc une révolution nécessitée par des causes qui n’ont pas le plus léger rapport avec les philosophes. Est-ce la philosophie qui a créé la vénalité des places de juges, leurs prétentions et leurs différens avec la couronne ? Est-ce la philosophie qui a produit la ruine des finances?” Mounier, De l’influence, 28.

[10] “L’égalité politique de tous les hommes est tellement une chimère, que même si l’on entreprend de l’établir, on ne fait que changer le rôle sans anéantir l’inégalité précédente.” Mounier, Adolphe, 53.

[10] Mounier, Recherches, 199.

[11] Mounier, Recherches, 199.

[12] “Je ne vois aucun avantage pour l’état dans la formation des clubs politiques, connus sous les noms de Monarchiques ou de Jacobins […] sous quelques rapports qu’on les envisage, ils excitent l’esprit de partie, les opinions s’y exaltent, les idées y fermentent, et les motions les plus chaudes sont toujours celles qui font les plus applaudies.” Mounier, Réflexions politiques sur les circonstances présentes (Genève: Barde, Manet et Compagnies, 1791), 47-48.

[13] Lord Francis Jeffrey (1773–1850) was a Scottish lawyer and judge who founded in 1802 The Edinburgh Review, the first openly liberal Scottish periodical. Cf. Biancamaria Fontana, Rethinking the Politics of Commercial Society: The Edinburgh Review 1802-1832 (Cambridge University Press, 1985), 21.

[14] Jeffrey’s stance toward the revolutionary political forces appears to be in line with the position previously held by Mounier. “It will be remembered, too, that M. Mounier, after cooperating in a revolution that was to consummate the felicity of his country, was obliged to leave it to the mercy of an unprincipled faction; and it may be conjectured, that he who was disappointed in the issue of these transactions, has also been mistaken as to their cause.” Lord Francis Jeffrey, Art.1 De l’influence attribuée aux philosophes, aux francs-maçons et aux illuminés, sur la Révolution de France, in The Edinburgh Review (1802-10), no.1, (Edinburgh: Archibald Constable and Co, 1802), 1.

[15] “We cannot dismiss this work of M. Mounier, without bearing testimony, once more, to the candour and liberality which he has constantly preserved in treating of a subject, that has, more than any other, exasperated the prejudices of men.” Jeffrey, De l’influence attribuée aux philosophes, 1.

[16] François Guizot, “Politique spéciale: De l’influence attribuée aux Philosophes, aux Francs-Maçons et aux Illuminés sur la Révolution de France par J.J. Mounier,” Archives philosophiques, politiques et littéraires, 3 (Paris: Fournier, 1818), 48.

[17] Guizot, “Politique spéciale,” 48.

[18] He read Stewart’s Élémens de la philosophie de l’esprit humain and Smith’s Métaphysique de l’âme, ou Théorie des sentiments moraux. Manuscripts of Mounier, BMG, R.6314 (7/4), f. 60-63; BMG, R.6314 (7/4), f. 58. Stewart was a Whig and when he was in Paris in 1789, he supported Mounier’s ideas. He frequented Jefferson in that same period, and we know that he had Mounier’s works in his library. Alexandra Hyard, “Dugald Stewart, les « économistes » et la Révolution française,“  Annales historiques de la Révolution française, 346 (2006), 115-141.

[19] Jean-Joseph Mounier, “Lettre sur la philosophie de Kant,” Magasin encyclopédique n.3, vol. 5 (1797), 409-414.

Further Reading:

Philippe Bourdin (ed.), Les noblesses françaises dans l’Europe de la Révolution (Rennes: Presses Universitaires de Rennes, 2010).

Antonino De Francesco, La guerre de deux cents ans: une histoire des histoires de la Révolution française (Paris: Perrin, 2018).

François Furet, Ran Halévi, La Monarchie républicaine: la constitution de 1791 (Paris:  Fayard, 1996).

Robert Griffiths, Le centre perdu: Malouet et les “monarchiens” dans la Révolution française (Grenoble: Presses Universitaires de Grenoble, 1988).

Michel Vovelle (ed.), Aux origines provinciales de la Révolution (Grenoble: Presses Universitaires de Grenoble, 1990).

Michel Vovelle (ed.), Bourgeoisies de province et Révolution, (Grenoble: Presses Universitaires de Grenoble, 1987).