The Unexceptional State: Rethinking the State in the Nineteenth Century (France, United States)

Abstract

In the past thirty years, historians have deeply renewed our understanding of the state in the early republic period of the United States as much more powerful, deep reaching, and proactive than the traditional image represented. In France, too, new work has revised our vision of the state in the early nineteenth century, which looked different from the triumphant, Napoleonic leviathan that often appears in discourse. Yet both historiographies, having evolved separately, still base their conclusion on implicit comparisons, with an imagined “European” state or with a later “modern” state. This article uses the new historiographies on both countries to go beyond those unstated exceptionalisms to propose a reconstruction of the state in that period. Pulling those studies together, and mobilizing insights from one to shed light on the other, it recovers a common repertoire of statecraft that emerged in the revolutionary era. It hinged on fostering consent of key segments of the population and therefore organized the work of the state in mostly nonbureaucratic forms. States in that period reflected a particular enmeshing of public and private forms that needs to be analyzed for itself, especially if we want to understand the specificity of today’s practices.

New Directions in Political History

“…Claire Lemercier and I have recently argued that exceptionalist approaches of the state have prevented us from understanding common threads across countries, and thus skewed our perspective on the early American state. 38 Breaking down those borders would, I submit, equally benefit our approach to the political history of the United States for our period. Simply consider, for instance, that the period going roughly from the 1860s to WWI is meaningful and significant across many parts of the world.…”