ABSTRACT
Tocqueville’s claim that ‘liberty regards religion as its companion in all its battles and its triumphs, as the cradle of its infancy and the divine source of its claims’3 is not unique to him. In fact, the distinguishing mark of nineteenth-century French liberalism is the conviction that liberty cannot be established without religion. Benjamin Constant was probably the first to acknowledge the intimate relationship between religion and liberty, arguing that ‘religious people can be slaves, but no irreligious people has ever been free’4 and that ‘liberty
always wishes for citizens, sometimes for heroes. Religious convictions give men the strength to become martyrs’.5 Constant, who was the most widely read author of his age (next to Jeremy Bentham) is the major source of inspiration for nineteenth-century liberals. Though Tocqueville only once refers to Constant in his writings,6 he, as a nineteenth-century liberal, must have been familiar with the latter’s ideas. Besides, many of Tocqueville’s personal acquaintances, such as Guizot, Royer-Collard and Broglie, had been intimates of Constant until the latter’s death in 1830.7 Moreover, Tocqueville nostalgically refers to the Bourbon Restoration (1814-1830) in which Constant had been such an important actor:
I had spent the best days of my youth amid a society that seemed to increase in greatness and prosperity as it increased in liberty; I had conceived the idea of a balanced, regulated liberty, held in check by religion, custom, and law; the attractions of this liberty had touched me; it had become a passion of my life; I felt that I could never be consoled for its loss, and that I must renounce all hope of its recovery.8
