Geneviève Rousselière’s Sharing Freedom: Republicanism and Exclusion in Revolutionary France grounds itself on an exclusion of its own—that of French history from contemporary Anglo-American neo-republican theory. This vast body of scholarship, which includes the work of Frank Lovett, John Pocock, Quentin Skinner, and Phillip Pettit, excludes the French case from the “republican theory [that] has been mobilized in the past decades as a normative political discourse offering an alternative to liberalism, socialism, and communitarianism” (p. 9). In correcting this omission, Rousselière has several aims.

The first is to address the fact that, of course, France considers itself explicitly republican. Recently, the assignation of “republicanism as the official doctrine of French institutions,” however, has been put on trial (p. 3). The Indigènes, Rousselière writes, have challenged the republican legacy of the French state, claiming “it is time for France to question its Enlightenment (Lumières) and for the egalitarian universalism affirmed during the French Revolution to stamp down this nationalism” (quoted, 2). Opening the book with these postcolonial challenges, Rousselière demonstrates that, first, it is clear that France belongs to an established republican tradition, if it is to be considered subject to such a postcolonial critique; and second, that French republicanism also evinces evident legacies of exclusion.

The second aim of Sharing Freedom is to unpack both the tradition of French Republicanism and its exclusions in great historical and theoretical detail. The driving thesis of the book is that French republicanism is unique due to its “theoretical inconsistency”—the “contradiction between general claims of inclusion and circumstantial justifications of exclusion” (p. 7). While it is not foreign to republicanism to inscribe exclusionary practices or elitism, Rousselière claims that the French revolutionaries birthed an “eclectic tradition” (p. 70) when they began applying the logic and lens of republicanism to their universalist aspirations. This leads to what Rousselière terms the paradox of national universalism: “all individuals belong to the republic on the basis of their allegiance to universal principles, yet only those who already belong to the historical nation can belong to the republic” (p. 221). Because republicanism as such relies on a robust conception of a common good—refracted through the idea of a ‘people’ or national identity that carries with it exclusionary categories of belonging—it sits uneasily with the universal aspirations of something like the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen (1789), which demands equality and freedom for all on individual grounds.

Rousselière’s historical task is to investigate how and why the French revolutionaries employed the language of republicanism and drew on its tradition. As she writes, there was “an immense difficulty [to] the revolutionaries’ task: appropriating and modifying a theory which was not immediately suited for the role they wanted it to play” (p. 34). The “diversity” of the republican tradition in Greek and Roman antiquity, the Italian Renaissance, 17th-century England, and European and American republics “created layers of complexity that directly impacted the revolutionary reflection on republicanism, as revolutionaries mobilized different aspects of the tradition to answer ad hoc concerns” (p. 34). Throughout the book, Rousselière returns to this claim that “we need to look at French republicanism not as one unitary doctrine, but as a range of possibilities” (p. 139), drawing on a tradition that provided “mixed guidance to modernity” (p. 70).

Thus, there is a diversity of whys in addition to hows in this historical narrative. Why were the revolutionaries drawn to republicanism? Because of its language(s) of freedom, of the common good (then translated into the general will, e.g., in the work of Rousseau), of self-government, and of virtuous citizenship. As a consequence of how these ideals applied to their particular circumstances, the revolutionaries then assembled around some common points of agreement about their own republicanism in its developmental phase. First, they concluded that republicanism as an old tradition would have to be adapted; second, that this adaptation followed from their commitment to the new principle of inclusive equality; third, that their republicanism would be “violently anti-monarchical” (p. 117); fourth, that it would follow the central republican idea “of opposing domination in all its forms” (p. 118); and fifth, that it would be founded on popular sovereignty and popular self-government. Any unity we could presume from this list is, however, illusory. Rousselière writes that “Republicanism does not become a unified theory in this period but rather carries a range of possible, though not all compatible, solutions to the historical problems created by the rise of the popular sovereign and the dismantling of the old regime” (p. 139).

To put it bluntly, French republicanism as it is presented here seems to be a bit of a mess—by Rousselière’s own admission. Indeed, this is a central part of her thesis: that because of its ad hoc and disunified qualities, French republicanism managed to smuggle “hidden premises” that contain exclusions and injustices into its current iteration. “The past,” Rousselière writes, “bequeathed more than the [revolutionaries] imagined” (p. 15). The fourth chapter of Sharing Freedom is devoted to the many ways in which these premises gave complex and unjust answers to the problems of slavery and female citizenship in particular.

It is on this more methodological point that I think Rousselière might owe the reader some more explanation or argumentative development. She writes specifically that she is not concerned with causal explanations: “rather than asking whether ideas can cause political events, I am specifically concerned with the elaboration of a specific political theory and its mobilization during the Revolution and its aftermath. I focus, so to speak, on the reasons given by revolutionary thinkers and agents, refraining from making claims about causation itself” (p. 33). The claim seems to be that the diversity of republicanisms employed frustrates a causal claim in and of itself, that such causality would be univocal and therefore could be traced back, as it were, to a specific republican politics. But surely Rousselière wants to make some version of a causal claim here when it is possible for a tradition to bequeath an inheritance or some premises, even if they are hidden.

Whether or not we would want to call it “causal,” then, the question becomes for me: what is it that the republican tradition in particular contributes to the French paradox? Or put another way: why ought we assign the blame for the tensions and difficulties of the French case to the invocation of republicanism when it is equally possible to say that the fault lies in the other half of the paradox of national universalism—namely, the revolutionaries’ apparently competing commitment to the emerging modern desires for universal, individual rights and equality?

The paradox of the French brand of republicanism may in fact reveal that the modern proclivities (or, on Lovett’s terms, their excesses) of the revolutionaries corrupted their own source material. Perhaps France was never republican, even if it insists on using the word. Here, the argument would be that there are no hidden premises bequeathed by republicanism; rather, the forces that counter republicanism—of universal right, for example—are the source of this “troubled inconsistency” (p. 7). While Rousselière wants to focus on the fact that the revolutionaries invoked the republican tradition because “they needed the past to create the future” and wanted to ground “their revolutionary endeavor in the lineage of previous attempts at fighting against domination” (p. 33), surely the reply of Rousselière’s contemporary neo-republican interlocutors on the charge of the exclusion of the French case in their work would be: well, precisely, this is because they were demonstrably bad republicans.

But this is precisely the line that Rousselière wants to counter. There is something that she wants to say that places France into the republican tradition as such. And much of this hinges on an argument that also borders on a causal claim in Rousselière’s excellent chapter on Rousseau. Rousseau, she writes, developed a “new social ontology of interdependence” (p. 29). It is Rousseau, in fact, who appears to develop the paradox of national universalism. She writes:

Rousseau’s dual attention to the ethnos and demos (the historical and rational foundation(s) of the state) is also, according to Rousselière, “a specific shortcoming of French republicanism [that] arises in the indistinction between the two that this theory cultivates” (p. 98). In this way, Rousselière concludes the chapter by writing that “Rousseau’s reworked theory of republicanism had significant problems that were transmitted to the revolutionaries” (my emphasis, p. 102). On this account, it was Rousseau’s genuine attempt to situate himself within the republican tradition, and the revolutionaries’ correspondingly genuine commitment to republican ideals, that solidified the transmission of both these virtues and vices.

The book concludes with a reaffirmation of the originality of French republicanism, rendering it a worthy candidate for inclusion in the history and theory of the republican tradition. While Rousselière concludes with three normative takeaways about what such an approach might offer to us in the contemporary landscape—that it contains a theory of emancipation, republican democracy, and a form of social theory—I am still left wanting more in terms of its theoretical contribution when it comes to the claim for the French case’s uniqueness being constituted (it seems primarily) in its failure to live up to its own republican aspirations. Is it the case that the failures of the French Republic are bequeathed to it by its republicanism, or does France in fact fail to share freedom—both in the past and the present—precisely because it never quite committed itself to the universalist, modern world it helped usher into being? Strangely, a counter-intuitive conclusion we might draw from Rousselière’s rich analysis is that the solution to all of the inconsistencies and paradoxes we find in the French case might be to admit that the path forward is not to situate France more firmly within the republican tradition but instead to abandon the moniker of its republicanism altogether.