Camille Hyacinthe Odilon Barrot
Barrot (1791-1873) was prominent liberal monarchist under the July Monarchy in France (1830–48) and a leader of the electoral reform movement of 1847.
Throughout his early public career he consistently opposed the centralization of power. The reforms that Barrot championed failed to materialize, but in 1848 a republican revolution deposed King Louis-Philippe. Barrot joined the moderate Republicans and was appointed to high ranking posts under Louis-Napoléon Bonaparte.
In 1852, Barrot, dismissed from office, mounted a campaign against Louis-Napoleon’s law that he called “stifling centralization”, “the apoplexy at the center and the paralysis of the extremes.” The law restricted the right of local councils to hold public meetings and allowed Paris to replace the locally elected heads of those councils with crown appointees.
In 1861 he published a collection of his arguments entitled “Of Centralization and Its Effects” (Paris: H. Dumineray, l861). Decentralization, he argued, would liberate the energy and manners of the people; diminish the hostility between classes, increase the nation’s prosperity and stability, and strengthen representation in government. He favored home rule for provinces and a strong judiciary to protect rights, particularly the preservation of family estates and property.
Elias Regnault was Barrot’s chief of staff during his brief period as prime minister (1849-51). Over the next two decades he amplified Barrot’s argument for “the provinces to reclaim their place in the life of society and in the political and intellectual domains, and its position as the source of the light vivifying France.”
The ideas of Barrot and Regnault inspired Russian liberals. The nobleman Peter Dolgorukov wrote “On Changing the Form of Rule in Russia”, that proposed nearly autonomous provinces. Vladimir Chalcasski wrote an enthusiastic and widely read review of Alexis de Tocqueville’s “The Old Regine and the French Revolution” (Rosskaia Beseda, 1858). (For the story of the decentralization debate in Russia, see Frederick S. Starr, Decentralization and Self- Government in Russia 1830-1870 (Princeton U. Press, 1972)).