An Intergenerational Political Community? The Concept of Future Generations in French Forest Policy Debate, 1830–1850

Are future generations members of the people? In the tumultuous early 19th century France, different and often contradictory conceptions of who was to be included in the political community were developed (Rosanvallon 1998, 2000). This paper examines conceptions of future generations in French political language 1830–1850 as they appear in discussions on forestry. Since trees grow slowly, forest politics inevitably directs attention to posterity, and is therefore an area in which concerns for future generations can be studied. References to future generations are often dispatched as merely rhetorical, in the sense of ornamentation. In this paper, such references are instead taken seriously and interpreted in relation to differing conceptions of popular sovereignty as well as of political community, including or excluding future people in different ways. From the end of the 18th century, political renewal was often conceptualized in generational terms. The trope of a revolt of the young against the old was inherent in the revolutionary political model: the revolution of 1789, and perhaps even more so that of 1830, were often conceptualized in a generational way (Parnes, Vedder, Willer 2008). Radical writers and politicians celebrated the generational break as a force of political renewal and legitimacy. The principle that long-term political claims were illegitimate since future generations were sovereign in their own right had figured in the works of Rousseau and Condorcet as well as in the 1793 Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen. Conservative thinkers on the contrary underlined the strong connections between generations. The conflicting uses of the concept of generation are classically illustrated in the iconic disagreement between Thomas Paine and Edmund Burke. Against this backdrop, future generations continued to figure in political language in the early 19th century. Liberal republicans such as Adolphe Thiers saw future generations as closely entangled with the issue of private property and its transfer from one generation to the next. More radical debaters instead underlined the interest of future generations as an instance of the common interest, of the res publica, and therefore worthy of state protection. Also, Tocqueville theorized the differing relations to future generations as a function of the political regime already in the 1830s. (Intended for the panel ”The people and the masses in conceptual history”)