Concept

Doctrinaires

Overview

During the Bourbon Restoration (1814–1830) and the July Monarchy (1830–1848), the Doctrinals were a group of French royalists who hoped to reconcile the monarchy with the French Revolution and power with liberty. Headed by Royer-Collard, these liberal royalists were in favor of a constitutional monarchy, but with a heavily restricted census suffrage—Louis XVIII, who had been restored to the throne, had granted a Charter to the French with a Chamber of Peers and a Chamber of Deputies elected under tight electoral laws (only around 100,000 Frenchmen had at the time the right to vote). The Doctrinaires were a centrist, as well as a conservative-liberal group, but at that time, liberal was considered to be the mainstream political left, so the group was considered a centre-left group.

During the July Monarchy, they were an intellectual and political group within the Resistance Party. Led by the Duke of Broglie and François Guizot, the Doctrinaires held powerful posts throughout the reign of Louis-Philippe. Broglie (1835–1836) and Guizot (1847–1848) were both Prime Ministers of France, although Guizot and the Doctrinaires dominated the political scenery during the premiership of Marshal Jean-de-Dieu Soult (1840–1847).

Overview adapted from Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 4.0; see the article history for authors).

Possible passages

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to the learned patronage of well-intentioned bourgeois doctrinaires, who utter their ignorant stereotyped common-places, their characteristic nonsense, with the profound tone of oracles of scientific immaculateness." If the well-intentioned bourgeois doctrinaires sometimes appear in the guise of retired theoreticians of the Second International, this in no way deprives their characteristic nonsense of the right of…
Leon Trotsky, Dictatorship vs. Democracy
Names Doctrinaires twice; opens on Doctrinaires.
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According to this, the executive and one branch of the legislature were to be during good behavior, i.e. for life, and the governors of the States were to be named by these two permanent organs. This, however, was rejected; on which Hamilton left the convention, as desperate, and never returned again until near its final conclusion. These opinions and efforts, secret or avowed, of the advocates for monarchy, had…
Thomas Jefferson, Memoir, Correspondence, and Miscellanies, From the Papers of Thomas Jefferson, Volume 4
Close in meaning to Doctrinaires; the term itself is not named.
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And such a race, unless of disembodied angelic constitution, would simply have taken up the task where human beings assumed it upon emergence from the condition of anthropoid apes. In spite of sudden and catastrophic revolutions, the essential continuity of history is doubly guaranteed. Not only are personal desire and belief functions of habit and custom, but the objective conditions which provide the resources and…
John Dewey, The public and its problems
Opens on Doctrinaires; names Doctrinaires.
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Philosophers who discussed Doctrinaires

Louis de Bonald

Related ideas

Place in the tradition

Part of French philosophy.

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