Constructing liberal Cartesianism: spiritualism, republicanism and the political uses of the history of modern philosophy in nineteenth-century France

Abstract

Abstract

This article argues that nineteenth-century French spiritualists appropriated and consolidated a liberal interpretation of Cartesianism that functioned as a key resource for shaping republican rhetoric and political identity. It reconstructs the narrative through which Victor Cousin and his republican disciples presented themselves as the heirs of a specifically French tradition of free thought linking spiritualism to the legacy of Cartesianism and of 1789. By analysing the place accorded to René Descartes and Nicolas Malebranche in philosophical writings and polemical interventions by figures such as Francisque Bouillier, Amédée Jacques, or Jules Simon, it shows how the history of modern philosophy was mobilised as an instrument of political struggle and intellectual self-definition in post-revolutionary France. It further suggests that this spiritualist narrative helped give liberal and republican uses of Cartesianism a durable rhetorical and institutional resonance under the early Third Republic, thereby inviting a reconsideration of the place of spiritualism in the intellectual history of modern French liberalism and republicanism.