The perils of facilité: a study of the career and published works of Alfred de Falloux (1811-1886)

Abstract

Alfred de Falloux (1811-1886) is an important figure in the political and religious history of France in the nineteenth century. His work both on the Committee for Public Works in May-June 1848 and the law of 15 March 1850 that bears his name are testimony to his important role in the history of the Second Republic (1848-52). He was also a prolific author for the cause of liberal Catholicism and for a constitutional monarchy under the auspices of the Pretender of the Senior House of Bourbon: his Memoires d'm Royaliste is a major source for this thesis. He is thus a representative of a generation of politicians that has suffered from relative neglect over the past half century. But his role in parliamentary politics demonstrates the weaknesses of parliamentary politics and constitutional monarchism at this important period in French history, as does his liberalism in the face of the reactionary politics that displayed impatience towards constitutionalism. A member of the Acadmie fran^aise, and a deeply devout Catholic genuinely concerned for the plight of the working classes, as well as a benevolent landlord, Alfred de Falloux was also an accomplished and ambitious politician, forever willing to allow the end to justify the means. These contradictions that lay within his complex nature are indicative of the paradoxes that beset France at a time of political, social and religious crisis, a period to which the bulk of this thesis is devoted. His espousal of royalism that was moderate and conservative arrived at a time when moderate conservatism was discredited by its involvement in the Rue de Poitiers group, and was in the late nineteenth century eclipsed by laic conservative republicanism, and the extreme ideas of the counterrevolutionary right. The failure of the moderate right, and of Alfred de Falloux, is pertinesit to the history of Church and of royalism in France.