Post #597

The rise of liberal society in modern France has been regarded as something of an historical contradiction. Alexis de Tocqueville, for example, remarked in his studies of democracy in Jacksonian America, the Ancien Régime and the French revolution that the tradition of strong centralized government in France, first under monarchical then under Jacobin and Napoleonic regimes, made voluntary association much more difficult if not impossible. As Jean-Jacques Rousseau might have suggested in Le Contrat Social (1762), the tendency of French Republican regimes to represent the General Will made virtually subversive all political parties, labour unions, and similar groups. French laws regulating, and occasionally outlawing, such association underscored the familiar adage that civil liberties in France had to be authorized before they could be enjoyed. This particular political culture significantly handicapped the growth of all civic life independent of the state—or so political scientists and historians have long argued. In the past 35 years, however, social and cultural historians, including Maurice Agulhon and William Sewell, have discovered a rich tradition of French association, defined regionally and professionally, that survived from the eighteenth century across the revolutionary divide into the nineteenth century, because such sociability was at least as much social as it was instrumental. As Cynthia Truant (1994) has argued, the Ancien Régime’s compagnonnages, for instance, well known for their regulation of journeymen’s lives during their grand tours of France, formed the basis of modern labour unions for both sociable and occupational purposes. J.S. Allen - Freemason Feminists: Masonic Reform and the Women's Movement in France, 1840-1914, in Women’s Agency and Rituals in Mixed and Female Masonic Orders, ed. by A. Heidle and J.A.M. Snoek (2008), p. 222 Обнадеживаетъ.