Where is liberalism heading?
“The Republic divides us least.” So said Adolphe Thiers, a shapeshifter of 19th-century French politics in the Marco Rubio mold. By the early 1870s, the various factions in French society had exhausted themselves fighting. Since 1814 there had been two restorations of the Bourbon dynasty, a liberal Orléans dynasty, a socialist commune, waves of clericalism and anti-clericalism, two periods of military dictatorship and a second Bonaparte. Out of this exhaustion came the Third Republic, the creation of Thiers and Léon Gambetta. The Third Republic was a triumph of liberalism: the recognition that France was now a plural society over which no one social force could gain a permanent mastery.
