‘A Just and True Liberty’ The Idea of (Neo-Roman) Freedom in Francophone Counter-Revolutionary Thought (c. 1780–1800)

In this chapter, I find traces and articulations of the neo-Roman idea of freedom in an entirely different intellectual context than the one so eloquently analysed by Quentin Skinner in Liberty before Liberalism: the Francophone Counter-Revolution at the end of the eighteenth century. Like the neo-Romans, the counter-revolutionary authors studied here, François-Xavier de Feller and Charles-Alexandre de Calonne, stated that you can only be free as a citizen in a free state. However, a ‘free state’ for these authors did not mean popular self-government, but instead consisted of the monarchical rule of law and the moderate exercise of royal and clerical power. For these authors, the French Revolutionary Republic was the very opposite of a free state, a murderous despotism as well as anarchy without rules, that turned its subjects into slaves.