A Republican Ecology? Citizenship, Nature and the French Revolution (1795–1799)

Abstract

After 9 Thermidor and the institutional reorganization following the Constitution of September 1795, and reflection on the reciprocal relationship between human society and what was not yet termed ‘milieu’ or ‘environment’ occupied a central place in Republican thought. It seemed that to shape republican citizens, the new relations between the nation, its population and its natural territory, needed definition. What were the material circumstances, the natural resources and the territorial makeup that the Republic required? Or, what perceptions and ways of using nature should be taught to citizens, so that the regime could be implanted, not only in the French towns and countryside, but also beyond the country’s frontiers? In response to these questions, various thinkers attempted to define the contours of a ‘republican ecology’. This article examines, first affirmation of a ‘naturalist’ cosmology in the Constitution of September 1795; then the attempt to create an environment for republican life, seen as the ‘common good’; and finally, the ecological underpinnings of the ‘republican’ political economy of the Directorial bourgeoisie.