Banning, Lance. The Sacred Fire of Liberty: James Madison and the Founding of the Federal Republic (NY: Ithaca, 1998) Cornell University Press. Paragraphs pertaining to Property according to the index.

  pp. 98-9.

Virginia, it is true, had managed to avoid the most objectionable measures of the postwar years: paper money, postwar confiscations, and laws preventing citizens (though not their British creditors) from suing for recovery of debts. To Madison, however, the escape seemed narrow and increasingly in doubt, nor was it any consolation to a man of continental vision that the malady seemed national in scope. Throughout America, he was beginning to conclude, the “multiplicity,” the “mutability,” and the “injustice” of provincial laws were calling into question “the fundamental principle of republican government, that the majority who rule in such governments are the safest guardians both of public good and of private rights.” The framers of the early revolutionary constitutions, he soon observed, had thought that “a provision for the rights of persons” (that is, for republican government) would “include of itself” protection for the rights of property and for the other liberties that individuals had not surrendered to the state. Every year, however, was producing rising doubts that this assumption was correct. “What we once thought the calumny of the enemies of republican governments,” he would tell the Constitutional Convention, “is undoubtably true”: wherever “a majority are united by a common interest or passion, the rights of the minority are in danger”; the rule of the majority was not assuring a consistent preference for the well-considered interest of the public as a whole.

  pp. 104-5.

Madison had doubtless followed the reports of growing trouble in New England as he traveled in September from Annapolis through Philadelphia to Richmond. Reaching the Virginia capital, he had been greeted by alarming letters from his correspondents in New York, and as the session lengthened, all his information from the north prepared him for the worst. At this point, he was taking his correspondents at their word. On November 1, repeating language from a frightening report from Henry Lee, he told his father that the rebels were “as numerous” as the supporters of the Massachusetts government “and more decided in their measures. ... They profess to aim only at a reform of their constitution and of certain abuses in the public administration, but an abolition of debts public and private and a new division of property are strongly suspected to be in contemplation.” On November 5, Washington reported that a frantic letter from Henry Knox, who had just returned from Massachusetts to New York, informed him that the rebels’ “creed is that the property of the United States has been protected from confiscation of Britain by the joint exertions of all and therefore ought to be the common property of all.” Knox suggested, Washington continued, that the Massachusetts rebels could be joined by discontented farmers from Rhode Island, Connecticut, and New Hampshire “so as to constitue a bod of twelve or fifteen thousand desperate and unprincipled men, ... chiefly of twelve or fifteen thousand desperate and unprincipled men, ... chiefly of the young and active part of the country.” Other correspondents warned him that the Shayites might be leagued with the Vermonters and that British agents were encouraging the insurrection. Madison was primed to credit that as well.

  pp. 135-7.

Inconsistencies and errors in the laws could be reduced by skillful draftsmen. Steadiness and wisdom could be aided by a council of revision, which would also give the weaker branches of the government a means to guard their own preserves from legislative usurpations. Still, the legislature was to make the laws; and given their insistence on a separation of the three great branches, it was logical for Madison and Jefferson to look for steadiness and wisdom mostly from a better constituted upper house. In classic theories of mixed government, the second house was always thought of both as the essential locus of these missing virtues and as the part of government that would protect the few against the power of the many. Revolutionary thought had broken only partially with these conventions. For republicans, of course, the few ere not to be distinguished from the many by their birth, and they were not to be accorded different legal rights. Even for republicans, however, it was common to assume that every aggregate of individuals would naturally contain a few who could be readily distinguished from the rest by their superior experience, their greater property, their leisure, or their wisdom. This distinction was a heritage as old as ancient Greece, and it was strongly reinforced for many revolutionary thinkers by the circumstances of the middle 1780s. Thus for Madison and Jefferson alike, the great desideratum was to constitute an upper house that could impart the steadiness and wisdom missing from the early revolutionary constitutions, but without infringing the equality of rights to which they were committed. For Madison, at least, this wish was deepened by a growing recognition that the rights of propertied minorities were just the rights that were endangered most repeatedly by overbearing lower houses. It was here, in fact, that his ideas diverged most clearly from his friend’s; and it was here, as well, that he was least successful in resolving the increasing conflict of his liberal with his majoritarian commitments.

  As in 1784, Madison agreed with Jefferson in recommending Maryland’s provision for the indirect election of the upper house. (Virginia’s was directly chosen by the voters.) Whereas Jefferson, however, now proposed to change Virginia’s three-year term for senators to two, Madison proposed to lengthen it to four or five. Moreover, Caleb Wallace’s request for recommendations on the suffrage prompted some additional suggestions for ways to make the upper house distinctly different from the lower and, in consequence, more capable of counterbalancing the will of the majority with other qualities required by an enduring constitution. To restrict the suffrage to the landholders, he wrote – which was the practice in Virginia – would “in time” exclude too many from the franchise. “To extend it to all citizens without regard to property, or even to all who possess a pittance, may throw too much power into hands which will either abuse it themselves or sell it to the rich who will abuse it.” Therefore, Madison proposed a “middle course”: “narrow the right in the choice of the least popular and ... enlarge it in that of the most popular branch of the legislature,” as was the practice in North Carolina and New York. This solution, he admitted, might “offend the sense of equality which re[i]gns in a free country” (and which he himself had said in his Memorial was a fundamental feature of republics). Still, he saw “no reason why the rights of property, which chiefly bears the burden of government and is so much an object of legislation, should not be respected as well as personal rights in the choice of rulers.”

  When Madison elaborated his ideas about a constitution for Kentucky., the Virginia struggle over an assessment to support religion had not yet been resolved. The Jay-Gordoqui crisis and the prospect of a federal convention lay ahead. Over the succeeding months, as he prepared for this convention, Madison concerned himself initially with the debilities of the Confederation, and it was this analysis that led him to propose a sweeping reconstruction of the federal system. But once he had concluded that the needs of the Confederation demanded its reordering as a republic, all of his ideas about the constitutions of the states were relevant to his proposals. All his discontents – and all the deeper discontents of many of his colleagues – had to be considered.

  In his proposals for Virginia and Kentucky, Madison did not abandon any of his revolutionary maxims. He still believed that power can corrupt, that governmental officers will always be inclined to free themselves from their dependence on the people, and that the “fidelity” of rulers to the ruled was the essential, first requirement for a proper constitution. By “fidelity,” it seems apparent, much of what he had in mind was the responsiveness and faithfulness of rulers to the body of the people, not to any smaller part thereof. Thus, he thought Virginia’s freehold franchise was too narrow. He insisted, too, on annual elections of the lower house, on secret ballots, and on constitutional provisions for maintaining a proportionality of representatives to population.

  By itself, however, as the states’ experience had shown, a prompt response by government to the majority’s immediate demands was not the only quality to be desired. “Fidelity” meant something more. In the circumstances of the middle 1780s, Madison was more and more inclined to favour measures that would temper the majority’s demands with wisdom, steadiness, and new protections for the rights of the propertied few (who were the most conspicuous minority until the struggle for religious freedom led to new ideas about this problem). Fearing the executive, as revolutionaries always had, he pinned his hopes primarily on the part of government that classic theories of the balanced constitution had conventionally associated with stability and wisdom, favouring an upper house that would be chosen indirectly or by freehold suffrage. A differential suffrage, to be sure, accorded poorly with his dedication to equality as well as private rights, which helps explain his great enthusiasm for a large republic armed with the capacity to intervene when state majorities insisted on injustice and thus to solve this problem in a different way. For just this reason, though, the concept of a differential suffrage graphically suggests the lengths to which he had been driven by the conflict of his two commitments and his consciousness that this intrinsic tension would be troublesome however much the size of the republic was enlarged. For years, he had been thinking of a range of constitutional devices meant to reconcile his liberal and his republican commitments, and most of his ideas were interwoven in the resolutions of May 29. Under the Virginia Plan, one house would be elected by the people. The second house would be elected by the first from persons nominated by the states. The resolutions did not merely aim to make the powers of the central government coequal with its duties. They proposed, as Madison expressed it, “to perpetuate the Union and redeem the honour of the republican name.”

  pp. 181-4.

In modern commentaries on Madison’s special role at the convention, nothing has been emphasised more properly or more consistently than his determination to protect minorities against majority infringements of their rights. His fear of unrestrained majorities stares out at modern democrats from page after page of his account of the debates, and it is absolutely clear that he was most especially concerned for properties minorities among the people: creditors who had been cheated by Rhode Island’s legal-tender laws, who were prevented from pursuing private suits for debt, or who were forced by moratoriums on taxes to forgo the payments promised them on public obligations. All such legislation, he believed, was morally repulsive, incompatible with civilised society, inconsistent with the rights that Independence was intended to secure, and thus increasingly subversive of the revolutionary faith. Holding these convictions, Madison was not content to hope that an enlargement of the sphere of republican government would render it less likely that a factional majority would form. He also wanted to create a federal watchdog over local legislation and to raise imposing obstacles to national majorities as well, so clearly so that many modern analysts regard the Constitution as a system of redundant checks, too often working to defeat all action.

  Time and time again, in the course of the proceedings, Madison spoke forcefully for measures that would check majority desires. He opposed the popular election of the senate and, at first, of the executive as well. Notes by King and Lansing quote him as suggesting that [Mnemotechnique] “the senate ought to come from and represent the wealth of the nation.” His own notes leave no doubt that he desired, at minimum, an upper house that would be small enough and firm enough and far enough removed from popular demands to “interpose against tempestuous councils,” whether in the lower house or among the body of the people. “What he wished,” he said, “was to give to the government that stability which was everywhere called for and which the enemies of the republican from alledged to be inconsistent with its nature.” To secure it, he was not afraid that seven years would be too long a tenure for the senate. “His fear was that the popular branch would still be too great an overmatch for it.” At one conjuncture, he was even willing to support a nine-year term, although he would have linked this with a perpetual ineligibility for reelection.

  King and Lansing may not have quoted Madison precisely. Some of his positions changed before the meeting closed or as a consequence of later, more mature reflection. As he said much later, the context of the meeting “made it natural” for the convention to be more concerned for national vigour and for new restraints on popular legislation “than was perhaps in strictures warranted by a proper distinction” between temporary evils and problems “prematurely inherent in popular forms of government.” “I was among those most anxious to rescue [the principle of self-government] from the danger which seemed to threaten it,” he recollected, “and with that view, was willing to give ... as much energy as would ensure the requisite stability and efficacy. It is possible that in some instances this consideration may have been allowed a weight greater than subsequent reflections within the convention or the actual operation of the government would sanction.” It sometimes happened also “that opinions as to a particular modification or a particular power of the government had a conditional reference to others which, combined therewith, would vary the character of the whole.” A nine-year tenure for the senate was probably an illustration of this final observation. Madison supported this extended term soon after the convention had decided on election by the legislatures of the states and at the peak of his concern that such a senate might be dangerously subservient to state desires.

  Still, Madison’s determination to protect the propertied minority was not a temporary deviation from his normal course. Neither was the thought that unrestrained majorities could threaten both the rights of property and the community’s enduring interests, which he did not identify with the majority’s immediate desires. To modern democrats, in fact, some of his least attractive statements are the ones that seem to have been motivated more by his concern about the distant future than by his alarm about the current situation:

An increase of population will of necessity increase the proportion of those who will labour under al the hardships of life and secretly sigh for a more equal distribution of its blessings. These may in time outnumber those who are placed above the feelings of indigence. ... No agrarian attempts have yet been made in this country, but symptoms of a levelling spirit ... have sufficiently appeared in a certain quarters to give warning of the future danger.

The proper time to make provision for this danger, he believed, was now – while ownership was so widespread that the majority was as attached to property as to their other rights. Therefore, he was greatly tempted by the concept of a freehold franchise. “Viewing the subject on its merits alone, the freeholders of the country would be the safest depositories of republican liberty. In future times a great majority of the people will not only be without landed but any other sort of property.” This propertyless majority might then combine against the rights of property “or, which is more probable, they will become the tools of opulence and ambition.”

  This speech embarrassed Madison when he reread it later in his life. It was the only one, in fact, on which he later wrote two notes disclaiming his position at the meeting. “Men cannot be justly bound,” he wrote, “by laws in [the] making of which they have no part. Persons and property being both essential objects of government, the most that either can claim is such a structure of it as will leave a reasonable security for the other.”

  As this later comment shows, however, Madison was not embarrassed by his view that property deserved protection, only by the thought that this concern had led him to neglect another fundamental precept of the Revolution. Even in the aftermath of Shay’s Rebellion, he had not in fact forgotten that “the rich may oppress the poor,” that “property may oppress liberty.” At no point in his life did he believe that the protection of the rights of property was more important than the people’s right to rule. This was, indeed, the very point on which he may have differed most profoundly from some others at the meeting. What he did believe, however – and believed throughout the rest of his career – was that “in a just and a free government the rights both of property and of persons ought to be effectually guarded,” that the former had been gravely violated during the preceding years, and that transgressions of these rights were likely to become more threatening as ownership decreased. All of these considerations – and the last not least – were fundamental to his thought about the purposes and necessary character of constitutional reform.

  Passage after passage from the records of the meeting strikes the reader once again with the intensity of Madison’s revulsion from conditions in the states. Everywhere, he was convinced, experience had shown that all effective power tended to be sucked into “the legislative vortex,” that legislative power tended to be concentrated in the lower house, and that the lower houses, when unchecked, were dangerous custodians of private rights and public good. He plainly wanted multiple impediments against a federal replication of this problem. Accordingly, when urging that a legislative veto should be vested in a council of revision, he observed that even the combined resistance of the president and judges might prove insufficient to defeat the legislature’s tendency “to absorb all power.” This was the real source of danger to the American constitutions,” he insisted, that it “suggested the necessity of giving every defensive authority to the other departments that was consistent with republican principles.” Again, when he opposed the substitution of two-thirds for the three-fourths currently required to override a presidential veto, he argued that experience had shown that all the checks attempted in the states were insufficient to defeat “legislative injustice and encroachments.” In August, he observed that the convention planned to frustrate legislative usurpations by employing two devices borrowed from the constitutions of the states: a senate modeled on the Maryland provision for an indirect election, and a veto modeled on New York’s. “Separately,” he argued, these devices “had been found insufficient.” Whether they would prove effective when combined was still unclear, but he preferred to take additional precautions. For example, near the close of the convention, in order to avoid a legislative choice when there was no majority in the electoral college, he moved to make the electoral decision final even if as few as a third of the electors were agreed.

  Here, however, it is crucial to revert again to Madison’s original intentions and to call insistently for equal emphasis on the other side of his distinctive role at the convention, which was evident, indeed, in several of the passages just quoted. For, by focusing excessively on his undoubted fear of unrestrained majorities, as well as by confusing his determination to erect a “national” system with a wish for a consolidated one, many studies leave a false impression of his overall position. But passage after passage from the records of the Federal Convention also show that Madison intended to restrain the legislature and the people only to the point that this appeared consistent with republican commitments. Although he was convinced that “the preservation of republican government” required effective checks on instability and legislative usurpations, he was also certain that it “required evidently at the same time that in devising [these], the genuine principles of that form should be kept in view.” In emphasising his determination to restrain majority excesses, we should never let outselves forget that it was popular self-governance that he was working to preserve.

  p. 204.

The many contributions of this famous essay, Federalist no. 10, are so well known that they should not require elaborate discussion. On the authority of Montesquieu, opponents of the Constitution endlessly repeated that republican self-government was inappropriate for politics of great extent. Madison’s inversion of this powerful convention was the most impressive answer to the most profound objection to the Constitution. Drawing silently on David Hume, but mostly on the lessons of the last ten years, he argued that the truth about a people’s government was nearly the reverse of what some “theoretic politicians” had supposed: popular regimes were likely to be stablest, longest-lived, and freest from a factious spirit in direct proportion to their size. To make this argument complete, he carefully distinguished modern representative republics from the classical democracies that Montesquieu had used as archetypes of popular regimes. And in the character of the United States, he found materials to challenge suppositions that had been embedded in the theory of the mixed republic since the days of ancient Greece. From Aristotle forward, advocates of mixed or balanced governments had focused on the need to counterpoise the wishes and to blend the virtues of the many and the few. Madison was still determined to secure the virutes that this long tradition had associated with these “natural” social groups; his condemnation of majority injustices still emphasised the danger to minorities (especially to properties minorities) whenever overbearing power rested with the many. But in America, as he conceived it, people did not naturally divide into two social groups; and in the cultural and regional variety of the United States, he saw a prospect that the multiplicity of social differences would control their tendency to do so. The classic conflict of the many and the few could be contained in the United States without confiding portions of political authority to officers who would be independent of majority control.

  p. 249-50.

Writing in The Federalist, he had again affirmed the warning. “Nothing short of a Constitution finally adequate to the national defence and the preservation of the Union can save America from as many standing armies” as there are states or separate confederacies, he had insisted, “and from such a progressive augmentation of these establishments in each as will render them ... burdensome to the properties and ominous to the liberties of the people.” Without the general union, liberty would everywhere be “crushed between standing armies and perpetual taxes.” The revolutionary order would collapse.

  Henry “tells us the affairs of our country are not alarming,” Madison complained. In fact, however, both the federal and state conventions had assembled in the midst of an immediate crisis of American union, and the Union was the necessary shield for the republican experiment that Henry wanted to preserve. Nor was even this the sum of current dangers. The nation also faced a second crisis, which Henry failed to recognise in his repeated condemnations of “the tyranny of rulers.” In republics, Madison suggested, “turbulence, violence, and abuse of power by the majority trampling on the rights of the minority ... have, more frequently than any other cause, produced despotism.” In the United States – even in Virginia – it was not the acts of unresponsive rulers, but the follies and transgressions of the sympathetic representatives of state majorities that tempted growing numbers of the people to abandon their revolutionary convictions. “The only possible remedy for those evils,” he protested, the only one consistent with “preserving and protecting the principles of republicanism, will be found in that very system which is now exclaimed against as the parent of oppression.”

  With these words the framer introduced the train of reasoning that had produced another of his crucial contributions to the Founding. In every state the lower houses had struggled to protect their citizens from the economic difficulties of the middle 1780s. Many of their measures – paper money, laws suspending private suits for debt, postponements of taxation, or continued confiscations of the property of former loyalists – had interfered with private contracts, endangered people’s right to hold their property secure, or robbed the states of the resources necessary to fulfill their individual and federal obligations. Essentially unchecked by the other parts of government, the lower houses had ignored state bills of rights and sacrificed the long-term interests of the whole community to more immediate considerations. As this happened, Madison believed, a disenchantment with democracy was threatening to spread through growing numbers of the people, who might eventually prefer a despotism or hereditary rule to governments unable to secure their happiness or even to protect their fundamental rights. The crisis of confederation government, as he conceived it, was compounded by a crisis of republican convictions, and the Constitution was the only instrument that promised an escape from all the interlocking dangers with which liberty was faced.

  Madison assumed a very special place among the founders – more special, I would argue, even than is commonly believed – because he personally bridged so much of the abyss between the revolutionary tribunes such as Henry and the aspiring consuls such as Hamilton, with whom he formed a brief and less than wholly comfortable alliance. He fully shared with higher-flying Federalists not only the determination to invigorate the Union, but also the emotional revulsion from the populistic politics facilitated by the early revolutionary constitutions – from conditions Elbridge Gerry called “an excess of democracy.” Madison believed, as Hamilton [had], that revolutionary governments were so responsive to the wishes of unhampered, temporary state majorities that they dangered the unalienable rights that Independence was intended to protect. He agreed with other Federalists as well that just, enduring governments demanded qualities not found in popular assemblies: protection for the propertied minority (and others); the wisdom to discern the long-term general good; and power to defend both against more partial, more immediate considerations.

  pp. 313-4.

Supporters of the secretary’s plan were stunned by Madison’s proposal, much as most historians have been. Elias Boudinot immediately replied that the Virginian’s motion did more credit to his heart than to his head. For government to overturn the former owners’ free decisions to assign their notes was hardly justice by his definition, besides which it was doubtful that the records would permit the government to discover who the original creditors were. As other moved to Madison’s support, a host of one-time allies strengthened Boudinot’s complaint. Theodore Sedgwick pointed out that the Virginia’s plan would “strip one class of citizens, who have acquired property by the known and established rules of law, under the specious pretense of doing justice to another” – and at a cost of [$1.6 million] more per year than Hamilton’s proposal. Over the succeeding days, Wadsworth, Laurence, Boudinot, and Ames repeatedly attacked his motion, objecting first to its unworkability and devastating consequences for the nation’s public credit, but insisting too that it was wholly inconsistent with good faith. Assignability, they argued, had been part of the initial contract. Proceeding on that basis, secondary holders had assumed a risk, employed no fraud, and given value for certificates received.

  Madison could only say that this was not “an ordinary case in law,” but one that had to be decided “on the great and fundamental principles of justice,” to which the heart was truly the best guide. The government was fundamentally responsible for the predicament of its disbanding soldiers, and Madison could not “admit that American ought to erect the monuments of her gratitude, not to shoe who saved her liberties, but to those who had enriched themselves in her funds,” “The injustice” had been “flagrant” and “enormous,” making its “redress a great national object.” “A government ought to redress the wrongs sustained by its default.”

  Still, the critics made a devastating case – so telling, for that matter, that historians have been as skeptical about the framer’s motives as most of his contemporaries were. Although the transfer of the debt had started early in the 1780s, Madison had never hinted that he would support discrimination. For him to do so, many thought, was a “perfidious desertion” of his principles of public conduct, marking him as an “apostate” from the maxims he had long supported. And, indeed, these critics made a point that we should understand in all its force and depth. Opponents of his plan did not just say that it was costly, probably unworkable, and deeply threatening to the republic’s credibility with foreign and domestic lenders. They saw it as a form of thievery, as more dishonest than the measure Madison opposed. And there is no denying that in point of simple fact, discrimination would have been as bald a governmental interference in existing private contracts as any of the local legislation Madison had frequently condemned. It would, quite literally, have taken property from some and given it to others. It would have been more redistributive in its intent and operation than Rhode Island’s law requiring creditors to take repayment in the state’s inflated paper. But for these very reasons, I would think, it seems plausible that Madison was acting from expediency alone: that this was really a manoeuver to recoup his damaged standing in Virginia, to defeat assumption, or to curry favour with the rabble out of doors. Something deeper was at work; and if we hope to grasp it, we are best advised to take him at his word and put  his reasoning in context. Only thus can we recover his assumptions.

  Madison’s contemporary papers throw no light on his decision to support discrimination. They do not even show that he had made this choice before returning to New York. But this is quite consistent with his late-life recollections. Here, he wrote that his decision to support discrimination grew from “the enormous gain of the [secondary] holders, particularly out of soldiers’ certificates, and [from] the sacrifice of these, to whom the public faith had not been fulfilled.” In 1783, when he condemned the concept of discrimination, “the case of this class of creditors was less in view. ... Until, indeed, the subject came close to view and the sacrifice of the soldiers was brought home to reflection, he had not sufficiently scanned and felt the magnitude of the evil.” Therefore, he did not propose discrimination in November 1789, when he replied to Hamilton’s request for his advice on managing the debt. Instead, the thought “grew rapidly on him on his return to Congress as the subject unfolded itself and the outrageous speculation on the floating paper pressed on the attention.” Even congressmen did not restrain themselves from purchasing certificates through brokers at the same time that their actions were transmuting those certificates “into the value of the precious metals.”

  p. 357.

“The boasted equilibrium” of Britain’s constitution, he maintained in “British Government,” was not a consequence of institutional arrangements but of popular opinion in that country – in so far as Britain really had (or had historically possessed) a governmental equilibrium at all. Madison reminded those who were inclined to praise the British system or to imitate the policies of British statesmen of the Lockean foundations of the Revolution. “As a man is said to have a right to his property, he may be equally said to have a property in his rights”: in his opinions and their free communication; in the practice and profession of his faith; in “the free use of his faculties and free choice of the objects on which to employ them”; and, in short, in “everything to which a man may attach a value ... and which leaves to everyone else the like advantage.” Government was “instituted to protect property of every sort,” not merely property defined as one’s material possessions. No government was worth admiring which did not “impartially secure to every man whatever is his own.” And judged by these criteria, he made it clear, neither the British government nor British economic practices were worthy “pattern[s]” for Americans to follow. However well these guarded individuals’ material possessions, the British system also violated a myriad of ways “the property which individuals have in their opinions, their religion, their persons, and their faculties.” Through its mercantilist economic system and its grinding and invasive taxes, the British system even violated “that sacred property which Heaven, in decreeing man to earn his bread by the sweat of his brow, kindly reserved to him in [also permitting] the small repose that could be spared from the supply of his necessities” for leisure and relief from his fatigues.

  p. 366.

From the progressive era to our own, polemicists and scholars have disputed the intentions of the founders; and as modern scholarship has put him in his place as first among the framers of the Constitution, first among the writers and tacticians who secured its ratification, first among the congressmen who put a working federal government into effect, and first (once Jefferson’s imposing shadow was removed) in organising the resistance that eventually became the nation’s oldest political party, Madison has naturally become a major focus for these disputations. Despite two hundred years of change, Americans prefer to stress the continuity of their political regime and thus to look back to the years surrounding the adoption of the Constitution for the principles behind it. There are still political advantages in an appeal to the authority of Madison or Jefferson or other “Founding Fathers,” still a strong temptation to enlist them in a cause. And there is still an inclination, as there was in Charles Beard’s day, to blame them for the evils thought to be endemic in the system. Indeed, as modern social critics have increasingly associated the “empowerment” of disadvantaged groups with how we understand and write about the past, as some of them have set about deliberately to reconstruct this understanding from the point of view of people who were once ignored, the inclination to condemn the founders may have risen to the point that it is stronger now than during Beard’s own time. Progressives blasted the creators of a system that protected property at the expense of other rights and seemed to stand between the people and reform. Modern critics add that it protected slavery, permitted the extermination of the natives, and excluded women from political participation.

  p. 368.

The Madison who speaks to us today through modern secondary studies is in largest part a creature of our own interpretive conventions. It is not James Madison we hear, but through thick earmuffs, a dramatic, distant character who echoes back imperfectly the fears or aspirations of a later time. The eighteenth-century gentlemen whose most particular contempt was saved for the projectors, jobbers, and promoters of his day speaks powerfully, to one time, as the theorist of bourgeois counterrevolution. To another, he appears the spokesman (villanious or admirable, according to the writer’s own convictions) for the modern “commercial” republic, which is pretty much what he profoundly hoped America would not become. The man who thought he was devoting his career to vindicating liberty – by which he meant a system based entirely on the people and responsive to their well-considered will – is summarised as having meant that ordinary people ought to have as small a part in governing as democratic notions would permit, so that the propertied might long protect themselves against the prospect of redistribution. The constant champion of charters and the ablest advocate that the United States has ever seen of an extended, but compound, republic is recast as a New Dealer who retreated from and then dissembled his original desire to centralise the system. The living figure who attempted desperately to get around a choice between two partially conflicting conceptions of human freedom, who tried to set a standard of disinterested public service, and who urged affectionate consideration for the interests of the other citizens who were embarked in the collective effort, is represented as a theorist who moved the nation from its classical republican to modern liberal foundations and assured it that a calm pursuit by everyone of their particular self-interests would suffice for modern times – if only, by mechanical contrivances, ambition could be made to counteract ambition.

  pp. 371-3.

Madison was not, of course, a democrat by current definitions of that word. His concept of the people usually excluded large proportions of the population. In addition, he decidedly did not believe that the immediate and unelightened inclinations of majorities of people should be put into effect without resistance. But this was not because he valued order and protection for the rights of property above all else, although he was in fact quite deeply dedicated to protecting both these things. It was because he knew that every kind of right could be endangered by majorities of people, especially when heated passions were involved. He may have been, for modern tastes, markedly conservative defender of republican self-government. This is quite apparent if we weigh him on a modern scale. But we should not forget that what he was committed to conserving were the most profoundly revolutionary institutions and convictions of his time.

  Madison’s commitment to the people’s rule may not have been as eloquent, as unreserved, or as incautious as Jefferson’s or Thomas Paine’s or that of some of his opponents in the ratification struggle (who, however, were resisting a proposal that would place substantial federal powers, for the first time, in the hands of the immediate representatives of the voters). His was not the sort of democratic faith attractive to the radical imagination, in his own time or in ours. For all of his, however, Madison was very much a democrat by eighteenth-century standards – and even by some tests that many of the most self-righteous modern democrats would fail. Like Jefferson, who used this term, while Madison did not, he clearly hoped that “natural aristocrats” would rule, not any Dick or Jane who might as well be chosen by blind chance. (Most founders were “elitists” in this sense.) But “natural aristocracy,” the two Virginians thought, should rest exclusively on merit and the people’s recognition, not on wealth, or birth, or formal educational attainments. Moreover, the “aristocrats” who led should never, as they saw it, cease attending to the people’s needs and will. [Fart sound] Madison was certainly as firm if not as eloquent a spokesman for political equality as either Jefferson or Paine, and this does not exhaust the senses in which he was thoroughly entitled to this label. However much he feared an unrestrained, self-interested, and passionate majority of people, Madison would also adamant that once the proper checks had been imposed and passing passions had been cooled, the will of the majority must rule. Our century has blamed him for his fears or praised him for his wisdom. It could just as justifiably have asked if he was really hopelessly romantic. For, in truth, how many of our own contemporaries share his faith that the majority of ordinary people can and should be trusted once their will has been matured – even with constructing or remodeling the fundamental law? How many modern democrats believe, with Madison, that fundamental liberties of both the private and the public sort are safer with the people than they are with an elite of federal officers and judges?

  Americans (whatever others may believe) prefer to see themselves as a pragmatic people: realistic and contemptuous of speculative theory. The Constitutional Convention has been celebrated by admirers for its practical solution to the problems of its day. It has been blamed by others for its heartless bargaining among a set of men who reasoned more from their experience and current needs than from the noblest aspirations of their theory. Similarly, Madison has seemed to some a realistic hero of the Founding: the sober man of prudence who detoxified the democratic Revolution. To others, he has seemed the coldly realistic champion of property and private rights who led the way to the emasculation of the democratic promise. His contemporaries often saw him in completely different terms: as an imperial, infatuated stickler for the merely theoretic; as a man of honest heart and probably unrivaled knowledge who, for all his brilliance, had too little understanding of the world.

  p. 472n77.

See the discussion of his “Memmorial and Remonstrance against Religious Assessments” in Chapter 3. Consider also his essay “Property” (National Gazette, Marcy 27, 1972, P-JM 14:266-68), which seems to me consistent with the intensively analysed passage from Federalist 10:58. Here, as in the later essay, Madison took great care to make it clear that “the first object of government” is to protect “the diversity in the faculties of men from which the rights of property originate,” not simply to protect property more narrowly defined.

Banning, Lance. The Sacred Fire of Liberty: James Madison and the Founding of the Federal Republic (NY: Ithaca, 1998) Cornell University Press. Paragraphs pertaining to Property according to the index.

Hobsbawm, Eric. “Part I. Developments, Chapter III. The French Revolution, or Hobsbawm’s Opinion on the French Revolution of 1789 and its Subsequent Events, Subchapter One being a Brief History the Importance, Cause, and the First Phase of the Revolution, Subchapter Two being a Brief History of the Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizens and Revolutionary War, Subchapter Three being a Brief History of Revolutionary Year II or Jacobin Period, Subchapter Four being a Brief History of Thermidorian Period and Napoleonic Period” (NY: New York, 1996) Vintage. Originally published by Weidenfeld & Nicolson (London, 1962)

  An Englishman not filled with esteem and admiration at the sublime manner in which one of the most IMPORTANT REVOLUTION the world has ever seen is now effecting, must be dead to every sense of virtue and of freedom; not one of my countrymen who has had the good fortune to witness the transactions of the last three days in this great city, but will testify that my language is not hyperbolical.

  The Morning Post (21 July 1789) on the fall of the Bastille

  Soon the enlightened nations will put on trial those who have hitherto ruled over them. The kings shall flee into the deserts, into the company of the wild beasts whom they resemble; and nature shall resume her rights.

  Saint-Just. Sur la Constitution de la France, Discours prononcé à la Convention 24 avril 1793

  I

  If the Economy of the nineteenth century World was formed mainly under the influence of the British Industrial Revolution, its Politics and Ideology were formed mainly by the French. Britain provided the model for its railways and factories, the economic explosive which cracked open the traditional economic and social structures of the non-European World; but France made its Revolutions and gave them their ideas, to the point where a tricolour of some kind became the emblem of virtually every emerging Nation, and European (or indeed World) Politics between 1789 and 1917 were largely the struggle for and against the Principles of 1789, or the even more incendiary ones of 1793. France provided the Vocabulary and the issues of Liberal and Radical-democratic politics for most of the World. France provided the first great example, the Concept and the Vocabulary of Nationalism. France provided the Codes of Law, the model of scientific and technical Organisation, the metric system of measurement for most Countries. The Ideology of the modern World first penetrated the ancient Civilisations which had hitherto resisted European Ideas through French influence. This was the work of the French Revolution. *

  [* This difference between the British and French influences should not be pushed too far. Neither centre of the Dual Revolution confined its influence to any special field of human activity, and the two were complementary rather than competitive. However, even when both converged most clearly – as in socialism, which was almost simultaneously invented and named in both Countries – they converged from somewhat different directions.]

  The later eighteenth century, as we have seen, was an age of Crisis for the old régimes of Europe and their economic systems, and its last decades were filled with political agitations sometimes reaching the point of revolt, of colonial movements for autonomy sometimes reaching that of secession: not only in the USA (1776-83), but also in Ireland (1782-4), in Belgium and Liège (1787-90), in Holland (1783-7), in Geneva, even – it has been argued – in England (1779). So striking is this clustering of political unrest that some recent historians have spoken of an ‘Age of Democratic Revolution’ of which the French was only one, though the most dramatic and far-reaching. (1)

  Insofar as the crisis of the old régime was not purely a French phenomenon, there is some weight in such observations. Just so it may be argued that the Russian Revolution of 1917 (which occupies a position of analogous importance in our century) was merely the most dramatic of a whole cluster of similar movements, such as those which – some years before 1917 – finally ended the age-old Turkish and Chinese Empires. Yet this is to miss the point. The French Revolution may not have been an isolated phenomenon, but it was far more fundamental than any of the other contemporary ones and its consequences were therefore far more profound. In the first place, it occurred in the most powerful and populous State of Europe (leaving Russia apart). In 1789 something like one European out of every five was a Frenchman. In the second place it was, alone of all the Revolutions which preceded and followed it, a mass social Revolution, and immeasurably more radical than any comparable unheaval. It is no accident that the American revolutionaries, and the British ‘Jacobins’ who migrated to France because of their political sympathies, found themselves moderates in France. Tom Paine was an extremist in Britain and America; but in Paris he was among the most moderate of the Girondins. The results of the American Revolutions were, broadly speaking, Countries carrying on much as before, only minus the political Control of the British, Spaniards and Portuguese. The result of the French Revolution was that the age of Balzac replaced the age of Mme Dubarry.

  In the third place, alone of all the contemporary Revolutions, the French was ecumenical. Its Armies set out to revolutionise the World; its Ideas actually did so. The American Revolution has remained a crucial event in American History, but (except for the Countries directly involved in and by it) it has left few major traces elsewhere. The French Revolution is a landmark in all Countries. Its repercussions rather than those of the American Revolution, occasioned the risings which led to the liberation of Latin America after 1808. Its direct influence radiated as far as Bengal, where Ram Mohan Roy was inspired by it to found the first Hindu Reform Movement and the ancestor of modern Indian Nationalism. (When he visited England in 1830, he insisted on travelling in a French ship to demonstrate his enthusiasm for its Principles.) It was, as has been said, ‘the first great Movement of Ideas in Western Christendom that had any real effect on the World of Islam’, (2) and that almost immediately. By the middle of the nineteenth century the Turkish word ‘vatan’, hitherto merely describing a man’s place of birth or residence, had begun to turn under its influence into something like ‘patrie’; the term ‘liberty’, before 1800 primarily a legal term denoting the opposite to ‘slavery’, had begun to acquire a new political content. Its indirect influence is universal, for it provided the pattern for all subsequent revolutionary Movements, its lessons (interpreted according to taste) being incorporated into modern Socialism and Communism. *

  [* This is not to underestimate the influence of the American Revolution. It undoubtedly helped to stimulate the French, and in a narrower sense provided constitutional Models – in Competition and sometimes Alternation with the French – for various Latin America States, and inspiration for democratic-radical Movements from time to time.]

  The French Revolution thus remains the Revolution of its Time, and not merely one, though the most prominent, of its Kind. And its origins must therefore be sought not merely in the general Conditions of Europe, but in the specific Situation of France. Its peculiarity is perhaps best illustrated in international terms. Throughout the eighteenth century France was the major international economic rival of Britain. Her Foreign Trade, which multiplied fourfold between 1720 and 1780, caused Anxiety; her Colonial System was in certain Areas (such as the West Indies) more dynamic than the British. Yet France waas not a Power like Britain, whose Foreign Policy was already determined substantially by the Interests of capitalist Expansion. She was the most powerful and in many ways the most typical of the old aristocratic Absolute Monarchies of Europe. In other words, the conflict between the official framework and the vested Interests of the old régime and the rising new Social Forces was more acute in France than elsewhere.

  The new forces knew fairly precisely what they wanted. Turgot, the physiocrat economist, stood for an efficient Exploitation of the Land, for Free Enterprise and Trade, for a standardised, efficient Administration of a single homogenous national Territory, and the Abolition of all restrictions and social Inequalities which stood in the way of the development of national Resources and rational, equitable Administration and Taxation. Yet his attempt to apply succh a programme as the first minister of Louis XVII in 1774-6 failed lamentably, and the failure is characteristic. Reforms of this character, in modest doses, were not incompatible with or unwelcome to Absolute Monarchies. On the contrary, since they strengthened their hand, they were, as we have seen, widely propagated at this time among the so-called ‘enlightened Despots’. But in most of the Countries of ‘enlightened Despotism’ such Reforms were either inapplicable, and therefore mere theoretical flourishes, or unlikely to change the general character of their political and social structure; or else they failed in the face of the resistance of the local Aristocracies and other vested Interests, leaving the Country to relapse into a somewhat tidied-up version of its former State. In France they failed more rapidly than elsewhere, for the resistance of the vested Interests was more effective. But the results of this Failure were more catastrophic for the Monarchy; and the forces of Bourgeois change were far too strong to relapse into inactivity. They merely transformed their Hopes from an enlightened Monarchy to the People or ‘the Nation’.

  Nevertheless, such a generalisation does not take us far towards an understanding of why the Revolution broke out when it did, and why it took the remarkable road it did. For this it is most useful to consider the so-called ‘feudal reaction’ which actually provided the spark to explode the powder-barrel of France.

  The 400,000 or so persons who, among the twenty-three million Frenchmen, formed the Nobility, the unquestioned ‘first order’ of the Nation, though not so absolutely safeguarded against the intrusion of lesser orders as in Prussia and elsewhere, were secure enough. They enjoyed considerable Priviledges, including Exemption from several Taxes (but not from as many as the better-organised Clergy), and the Right to Receive Feudal dues. Politically their Situation was less brilliant. Absolute Monarchy, while entirely aristocratic and even feudal in its ethos, had deprived the nobles of political independence and responsibility and cut down their old representative Institutions – Estates and Parlements – so far as possible. The fact continued to rankle among the higher Aristocracy and among the more recent noblesse de robe created by the Kings for various purposes, mostly Finance and Administration; an ennobled Government Middle class which expressed the double Discontent of Aristocrats and Bourgeois so far as it could through the surviving Law-courts and Estates. Economically the Nobles’ worries were by no means negligible. Fighters rather than earners by Birth and Tradition – Nobles were even formally debarred from exercising a Tade or Profession – they depended on the Income of their Estates, or, if they belonged to the favoured Minority of large of court Nobles, on wealthy Marriages, Court Pensions, Gifts and Sinecures. But the Expenses of noble status were large and rising, their Incomes – since they were rarely businesslike Managers of their Wealth, if they managed it at all – fell. Inflation tended to reduce the Value of fixed Revenues such as Rents.

  It was therefore natural that the Nobles should use their one main asset, the acknowledged Priviledges of the Order. Throughout the eighteenth century, in France as in many other Countries, they encroached steadily upon the official Posts which the Absolute Monarchy had preferred to fill with technically competent and politically harmless Middle Class men. By the 1780s four quarterings of Nobility were needed even to buy a Commission in the Army, all bishops were Nobles and even the keystone of Royal Administration, the Intendancies, has been largely recaptured by them. Consequently the Nobility not merely exasperated the feelings of the Middle Class by their successful Competition for official Posts they also undermined the State itself by an increasing tendency to take over provincial and central Administration. Similarly they – and especially the poorer provincial Gentlemen who had few other Resources – attempted to counteract the decline in their Income by squeezing the utmost out of their very considerable Feudal Rights to exact Money (or more rarely Service) from the Peasantry. An entire Profession, the feudists, came into Existence to revive obsolete Rights of this kind or to maximise the yield of exisiting ones. Its most celebrated member, Gracchus Babeuf, was to become the leader of the first Communist Revolt in modern History in 1796. Consequently the Nobility exasperated not only the Middle Class but also the Peasantry.

  The position of this vast Class, comprising perhaps 80 per cent of all Frenchmen, was far from brilliant. They were indeed in general free, and often Landowners. In actual quantity Noble Estates covered only one-fifth of the Land, clerical Estates perhaps another 6 per cent with regional variations. (3) Thus in the diocese of Montpellier the Peasants already owned 38 to 40 per cent of the Land, the Bourgeoisie 18 to 19, the Nobles 15 to 16, the Clergy 3 to 4, while one-fifth was Common Land. (4) In fact, however, the great Majority were landless or with insufficient holdings, a deficiency increased by the prevailing technical Backwardness; and the general land-hunger was intensified by the rise in Population. Feudal Dues, Tithes and Taxes took a large and rising Proportion of the Peasant’s Income, and Inflation reduced the Value of the Remainder. For only the Minority of Peasants who had a constant Surplus for Sale benfited from the rising Prices; the rest, in one way or another, suffered from them, especially in times of Bad Harvest, when Famine Prices rules. There is little doubt that in the twenty years preceding the Revolution the Situation of the Peasants grew worse for these Reasons.

  The financial troubles of the Monarchy brought matters to a head. The administrative and fiscal Structure of the Kingdom was grossly obsolete, and, as we have seen, the attempt to remedy this by the Reforms of 1774-[7]6 failed, defeated by the resistance of vested Interests headed by the Parlements. Then France became involved in the American War of Independence. Victory over England was gained at the cost of final Bankruptcy, and thus the American Revolution can claim to be the direct Cause of the French. Various Expedients were tried with diminishing Success, but nothing short of a fundamental Reform, which mobilised the real and considerable taxable Capacity of the Country could cope with a Situation in which Expenditure outran Revenue by at least 20 per cent, and no effective Economies were possible. For though the extravagance of Versailles has often been blamed for the Crisis, Court Expenditure only amounted to 6 per cent of the total in 1788. War, Navy and Diplomacy made up one-quarter, the Service of the existing Debt one-half. War and Debt – the American War and its Debt – broke the back of the Monarchy.

  The Government’s Crisis gave the Aristocracy and the Parlements their chance. They refused to pay without an extension of their priviledges. The first breach in the front of Absolutism was a hand-picked but nevertheless rebellious ‘assembly of notables’ called in 1787 to grant the Government’s demands. The second, and decisive, was the desperate Decision to call the States-General – the old feudal Assembly of the realm, buried since 1614. The Revolution thus began as an aristocratic Attempt to recapture the State. This attempt miscalculated for two Reasons: it underestimated the independent intentions of the ‘Third Estate’ – the fictional entity deemed to represent all who were neither Nobles nor Clergy, but in fact dominated by the Middle Class – and it overlooked the profound economic and social Crisis into which it thre its political demands.

  The French Revolution was not made or led by a formed Party or Movement in the modern sense, nor by men attempting to carry out a systematic programme. It hardly even threw up ‘Leaders’ of the Kind to which twentieth century Revolutions have accustomed us, until the post-revolutionary figure of Napoleon. Nevertheless a striking consensus of general Ideas among a fairly coherent social Group gave the Revolutionary Movement effective unity. The Group was the ‘Bourgeoisie’; its Ideas were those of Classical Liberalism, as formulated by the ‘philosophers’ and ‘economists’ and propagated by Freemasonry and in informal Associations. To this extent ‘the philosophers’ can be justly made responsible for the Revolution. It would have occurrred without them; but they probably made the difference between a mere breakdown of an old régime and the effective and rapid substitution of a new one.

  In its most general form the Ideology of 1789 was the masonic one expressed with such innocent sublimity in Mozart’s Magic Flute (1791), one of the earliest of the great propagandist works of Art of an Age whose highest artistic achievements so often belonged to Propaganda. More specifically, the demands of the bourgeois of 1789 are laid down in the famous Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizens of that year. This document is a Manifesto against the hierarchical Society of Noble Priviledge, but not one in favour of democratic or egalitarian Society. ‘Men are born and live free and equal under the Laws,’ said its first article; but it also provides for the existence of social Distinctions, if ‘only on grounds of common utility’. Private Property was a Natural Right, sacred, inalienable and inviolable. Men were equal before the Law and Careers were equally open to Talent; but if the Race started without handicaps, it was equally assumed that the runners would not finish together. The declaration laid down (as against the Noble Hierarchy or Absolutism) that ‘all Citizens have a Right to Co-operate in the Formation of the Law’; but ‘either personally or through their Representatives’. And the Representative Assembly which it envisaged as the fundamental organ of Government was not necessarily a democratically elected one, nor the régime it implied one which eliminated Kings. A Constitutional Monarchy based on a propertied Oligarchy expressing itself through a Representative Assembly was more congenial to most Bourgeois Liberals than the Democratic Republic which might have seemed a more logical expression of their theoretical aspirations; though there were some who did not hesitate to advocate this also. But on the whole the classical Liberal bourgeois of 1789 (and the Liberal of 1789-1848) was not a democrat but a believer in Constitutionalism, a secular Government by Tax-payers and Property-owners.

  Nevertheless officially such a régime would express not simply his Class Interests, but the General Will of ‘the People’, which was in turn (a significant identification) ‘the French Nation’. The King was no longer Louis, by the Grace of God, King of France and Navarre, but Louis, by the Grace of God and the Constitutional Law of the State, King of the French. ‘The source of all Sovereignty,’ said the Declaration, ‘resides essentially in the Nation.’ And the Nation, as Abbé Sieyès put it, recognised no Interest on Earth above its own, and accepted no Law or Authority other than its own – neither that of Humanity at large nor of other Nations. No doubt the French Nation, and its subsequent imitators, did not initially conceive of its Interests clashing with those of other Peoples, but on the contrary saw itself as inaugurating, or taking part in, a movement of the general Liberation of Peoples from Tyranny. But in fact national Rivalry (for instance that of French Businessmen with British Businessmen) and national Subordination (for instance that of conquered or liberated Nations to the Interests of la grande nation) were implicit in the Nationalism to which the Bourgeois of 1789 gave its first official expression. ‘The People’ identified with ‘the Nation’ was a revolutionary Concept; more revolutionary than the Bourgeois-liberal Programme which purported to express it. But it was also a double-edged one.

  Since the peasants and labouring Poor were illiterate, politically modest or immature and the process of Election indirect, 610 men, mostly of this stamp, were elected to represent the Third Estate. Most were lawyers who played an important economic Role in provincial France; about a hundred were Capitalists and Businessmen. The Middle Class had fought bitterly and successfully to win a Representation as large as that of the Nobility and Clergy combined, a moderate ambition for a Group officially representing 95 per cent of the People. They now fought with equal Determination for the Right to Exploit their potential.

  The Third Estate succeeded, in the face of the united resistance of the King and the priviledged Orders, because it represented not merely the views of an educated and militant Minority, but of far more powerful Forces: the labouring Poor of the Cities, and especially of Paris, and shortly, also, the revolutionary Peasantry. For what turned a limited Reform agaitation into a Revolution was the fact that the calling of the States-General coincided with a profound economic and social Crisis. The later 1780s had been, for a complexity of reasons, a period of great Difficulties for virtually all branches of the French Economy. A bad Harvest in 1788 (and 1789) and a very difficult winter made this crisis acute. Bad harvests hurt the Peasantry, for while they meant that large producers could sell Grain at Famine prices, the majority of Men on their insufficient holdings might well have to eat up their Seed-corn, or buy Food at such Prices, especially in months immediately preceding the new Harvest (i.e. May-July). They obviously hurt the Urban poor, whose Cost of Living – Bread the staple Food – might well double. It hurt them all the more as the improverishment of the countryside reduced the Market for manufactures and therefore also produced an industrial Depression. The Country poor were therefore desperate and restless with Riot and Banditry; the Urban poor were doubly desparate as Work ceased at the very moment that the Cost of Living soared. Under normal Circumstances little more than blind-rioting might have occurred. But in 1788 and 1789 a major convulsion in the Kingdom, a Campaign of Propaganda and Election, gave the People’s desperation a political perspective. They introduced the tremendous and earth-shaking idea of liberation from Gentry and Oppression. A riotous People stood behind the deputies of the Third Estate.

  Counter-revolution turned a potential mass rising into an actual one. Doubtless it was only natural that the old régime should have fought back, if necessary with Armed Force; though the Army was no longer wholly reliable. (Only unrealistic dreamers can suggest that Louis XVI might have accepted Defeat and immediately turned himself to a Constitutional Monarch, even if he had been a less negligible and stupid man than he was, married to a less chicken-brained and irresponsible woman, and prepared to listen to less disastrous advisers.) In fact Counter-revolution mobilised the Paris masses, already hungry, suspicious and militant. The most sensational result of their mobilisation was the capture of the Bastille, a State prison symbolising Royal authority, where the revolutionaries expected to find Arms. In times of Revolution nothing is more powerful than the fall of Symbols. The capture of the Bastille, which has rightly made July 14th into the French national day, ratified the fall of Despotism and was hailed all over the World as the beginning of Liberation. Even the austere philosopher Immanuel Kant of Koenisberg, it is said, whose habits were so regular that the citizens of that town set their watches by him, posponed the hour of this afternoon stroll when he received the News, thus convincing Koenisberg that a World-shaking event had indeed happened. What is more to the point, the fall of the Bastille spread the Revolution to the provincial Towns and the Countryside.

  Peasant Revolutions are vast, shapeless, anonymous, but irresistible Movements. What turned an epidemic of Peasant unrest into a irreversible Convulsion was a combination of provincial Townrisings and a wave of Mass panic, spreading obscurely but rapidly across vast stretches of the Country: the so-called Grande Peur of late July and early August 1789. Within three weeks of July 14th the social structure of French rural feudalism and the State machine of royal France lay in fragments. All that remained of State power was a scattering of doubtfully reliable Regiments, a National Assembly without coercive force, and a multiplicity of municipal or provincial Middle Class administration which soon set up Bourgeois armed ‘National Guards’ on the model of Paris. Middle Class and Aristocracy immediately accepted the inevitable: all feudal Priviledges were officially abolished though, when the political situation had settled, a stiff Price for their Redemption was fixed. Feudalism was not finally abolished until 1793. By the end of August the Revolution had also acquired its formal manifesto, the Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen. Conversely, the King resisted with his usual stupidity, and section of the Middle Class revolutionaries, frightened by the social implications of the mass Upheaval, began to think that the Time for Conservatism had come.

  In brief, the main shape of French and all subsequent Bourgeois-revolutionary Politics were by now clearly visible. This dramatic dialectical dance was to dominate the future Generations. Time and again we shall see moderate Middle Class reformers mobilising the Masses against die-hard Resistance or Counter-revolution. We shall see the Masses pushing beyond the Moderates’ aims to their own social Revolutions, and the Moderates in turn splitting into a Conservative group henceforth making common cause with the Reactionaries, and a Left wing group determined to pursue the rest of the as yet unachieved Moderate aims with the help of the Masses, even at the risk of losing Control over them. And so on through Repetitions and and Variations of the pattern of Resistance – Mass mobilisation – shift to the Left – split-among-moderates-and-shift-to-the-right – until either the bulk of the Middle Class passed into the henceforth Conservative camp, or was defeated by social Revolution. In most subsequent bourgeois Revolutions the moderate Liberals were to pull back, or transfer into the Conservative camp, at a very early stage. Indeed in the nineteenth century we increasingly find (most notably in Germany) that they became unwilling to begin Revolution at all, for Fear of its incalculable Consequences, preferring a compromise with King and Aristocracy. The peculiarity of the French Revolution is that one section of the Liberal middle class was prepared to remain revolutionary up to and indeed beyond the brink of anti-bourgeois Revolution: these were the Jacobins, whose name came to stand for ‘radical revolution’ everywhere.

  Why? Partly, of course, because the French Bourgeoisie had not yet, like subsequent Liberals, the awful Memory of the French Revolution to be frightened of. After 1794 it would be clear to Moderates that the Jacobin régime had driven the Revolution too far for Bourgeois comfort and prospects, just as it would be clear to revolutionaries that ‘the sun of 1793’, if it were to rise again, would have to shine on a non-bourgeois Society. Again, the Jacobins could afford Radicalism because in their time no Class existed which could provide a coherent social alternative to theirs. Such a Class only arose in the course of the Industrial Revolution, with the ‘proletariat’ or, more precisely, with the Ideologies and Movements based on it. In the French Revolution the Working Class – and even this is a misnomer for the aggregate of hired, but mostly non-industrial, wage-earners – as yet played no significant independent part. They hungered, they rioted, perhaps they dreamed; but for practical purposes they followed non-proletarian leaders. The Peasantry never provides a political alternative to anyone; merely, as occasion dictates, an almost irresistible force or an almost immovable object. The only alternative to Bourgeois radicalism (if we except small bodies of ideologues or militants powerless when deprived of Mass support) were the ‘Sansculottes’, a shapeless, mostly urban Movement of the labouring Poor, small craftsmen, shopkeeprs, artisans, tiny entrepreneurs and the like. The Sansculottes were organised, notably in the ‘sections’ of Paris and the local political Clubs, and provided the main striking-force of the Revolution – the actual demonstrators, rioters, constructors of Barricades. Through journalists like Marat and Hébert, through local spokesmen, they also formulated a policy, behind which lay a vaguely defined and contradictory social ideal, combining respect for (small) private property with hostility to the rich, government-guaranteed Work, Wages and Social Security for the Poor man, an extreme, egalitarian and libertarian Democracy, localised and direct. In fact the Sansculottes were one branch of that universal and important political trend which sought to express the interests of the great mass of ‘little men’ who existed between the poles of the ‘bourgeois’ and the ‘proletarian’, often perhaps rather nearer the latter than the former because they were, after all, mostly poor. We can observe it in the United States (as Jeffersonianism and Jacksonian democracy, or Populism) in Britain (as ‘radicalism’), in France (as the ancestors of the future ‘republicans’ and radical-socialists), in Italy (as Mazzinians and Garibaldians), and elsewhere. Mostly it tended to settle down, in post-revolutionary ages, as a left-wing of middle-class Liberalism, but one loth to abandon the ancient Principle that there are no Enemies on the Left, and ready, in times of Crisis, to rebel against ‘the wall of money’ or ‘the economic royalists’ or ‘the cross of gold crucifying mankind’. But Sansculottism provided no real alternative either. Its ideal, a golden past of villagers and small craftsmen or a golden future of small farmers and artisans undisturbed by bankers and millionaires, was unrealisable. History moved dead against them. The most they could do – and this they achieved in 1793-4 – was to erect roadblocks in its path, which have hampered French economic growth from that day almost to this. In fact Sansculottism was so helpless a phenomenon that its very name is largely forgotten, or remembered only as a synonym of Jacobinism, which provided it with leadership in the Year II.

  II

  Between 1789 and 1791 the victorious moderate Bourgeoisie, acting through what had now become the Constituent Assembly, set about the gigantic Rationalisation and Reform of France which was its object. Most of the lasting institutional achievements of the Revolution date from this period, as do its most striking international Results, the metric system and the Pioneer emancipation of the Jews. Economically the perspectives of the Constituent Assembly were entirely Liberal: its policy for the Peasantry was the enclosure of Common lands and the encouragement of rural Entrepreneurs, for the Working-class, the banning of Trade Unions, for the small Crafts, the abolition of Guilds and Corporations. It gave little concrete satisfaction to the Common People, except, from 1790, by means of the secularisation and sale of Church Lands (as well as those of the emigrant nobility) which had the triple advantage of weakening Clericalism, strengthening the provincial and Peasant entrepreneur, and giving many Peasants a measurable return for their revolutionary activity. The Constitution of 1791 fended off excessive Democracy by a system of Constitutional Monarchy based on an admittedly rather wide Property-franchise of ‘active citizens’. The passive, it was hoped, would live up to their name.

  In fact, this did not happen. On the one hand, the Monarchy, though now strongly supported by a powerful Ex-revolutionary bourgeois faction, could not resign itself to the new régime. The Court dreamed of and intrigued for a crusade of royal cousins to expel the governing rabble of commoners and restore God’s anointed, the most Catholic King of France, to his rightful place. The Civil Constitution of the Clergy (1790), a misconceived attempt to destroy, not the Church, but the Roman absolutist allegiance of the Church, drove the majority of the Clergy and of their faithful into opposition, and helped to drive the King into the desperate, and as it hoped suicidal, attempt to flee the Country. He was recaptured at Varennes (June 1791) and henceforth Republicanism became a mass force; for traditional Kings who abandon their Peoples lose the Right to Loyalty. On the other hand, the uncontrolled Free Enterprise economy of the Moderates accentuated the flunctuations in the level of Food-prices, and consequently the militancy of the urban Poor, especially in Paris. The Price of Bread registered the political temperature of Paris with the accuracy of a thermometer; and the Paris masses were the decisive revolutionary force: not for nothing was the new French tricolour constructed by combining the old Royal white with the red-and-blud colours of Paris.

  The outbreak of War brought matters to a head; that is to say it led to the Second Revolution of 1792, the Jacobin Republic of the Year II, and eventually to Napoleon. In other words it turned the History of the French Revolution into the History of Europe.

  Two forces pushed France into a general War: the extreme Right and the moderate Left. For the King, the French nobility and the growing aristocratic and ecclesiastical Emigration, camped in various West German cities, it was evident that only foreign intervention could restore the old régime. * Such intervention was not too easily organised, given the complexities of the international situation, and the relative political tranquility of other Countries. However, it was increasingly evident to Nobles and divinely appointed Rulers elsewhere that the restoration of Louis XVI’s power was not merely an act of Class solidarity, but an important safeguard against the spread of the appalling Ideas propagated from France. Consequently the forces for the reconquest of France gathered abroad.

  * [Something like 300,000 Frenchmen emigrated between 1789 and 1795.]

  At the same time the Liberals themselves, most notably the Group of politicians clustering round the deputies from the mercantile Gironde department, were a bellicose Force. This was partly because every genuine Revolution tends to be ecumenical. For Frenchmen, as for their numerous sympathisers abroad, the liberation of France was merely the first installment of the universal triumph of Liberty; an attitude which led easily to the conviction that it was the duty of the fatherland of Revolution to liberate all Peoples groaning under Oppression and Tyranny. There was a genuinely exalted and generous passion to spread Freedom among the revolutionaries, Moderate and Extreme; a genuine inability to separate the cause of the French nation from that of all enslaved Humanity. Both the French and all other revolutionary movements were to accept this view, or to adapt it, henceforth until at least 1848. All plans for European liberation until 1848 hinged on a joint rising of Peoples under the leadership of the French to overthrow European reaction; and after 1830 other movements of national and liberal revolt, such as the Italian or Polish, also tended to see their own Nations in some sense as Messiahs destined by their own Freedom to initiate everyone else’s.

  On the other hand, considered less idealistically, War would also help to solve the numerous domestic Problems. It was tempting and obvious to ascribe the difficulties of the new régime to the plots of émigrés and foreign Tyrants, and to divert popular discontents against these. More specifically, the devaluation of the Currency and other troubles could only be remedied if the Threat of Intervention were dispersed. They and their ideologist might reflect, with a glance at the record of Britain, that economic supremacy was the child of systematic aggressiveness. (The eighteenth century was not one in which the successful Businessman was at all wedded to Peace.) Moreover, as was soon to appear, War could be made to produce Profit. For all these reasons they majority of the new Legislative Assembly, except for a small Right wing and a small Left wing under Robespierre, preached War. For these reasons also, when War came, the conquests of the Revolution were to combine Liberation, Exploitation and political Diversion.

  War was declared in April 1792. Defeat, which the People (plausibly enough) ascribed to Royal sabotage and Treason, brought radicalisation. In August-September the Monarchy was overthrown, the Republic one and indivisible established, a new age in human History proclaimed with the institution of the Year I of the revolutionary calendar, by the armed action of the Sansculotte masses of Paris. The iron and heroic age of the French Revolution began among the Massacres of the political prisoners, the elections to the National Convention – probably the most remarkable Assembly in the History of Parliamentarism – and the call for total resistance to the invaders. The King was imprisoned, the foreign Invasion halted by an undramatic artillery duel at Valmy.

  Revolutionary Wars impose their own Logic. The dominant party in the new Convention were the Girondins, bellicose abroad and moderate at home, a body of parliamentary orators of charm and brilliance representing Big Business, the provincial Bourgeoisie and much intellectual distinction. Their policy was utterly impossible. For only states waging limited Campaigns with established regular Forces could hope to keep War and Domestic Affairs in watertight compartments, as the ladies and gentlemen in Jane Austen’s novels were just then doing in Britain. The Revolution waged neither a limited campaign nor had it established Forces: for its War oscillated between the maximum victory of World revolution and the maximum Defeat which meant total Counter-revolution, and its Army – what was left of the old French army – was ineffective and unreliable. Dumouriez, the Republic’s leading general, was shortly to desert to the enemy. Only unprecedented and revolutionary methods could win in such a War, even if Victory were to mean merely the defeat of Foreign Intervention. In fact, such Methods were found. In the course of its Crisis the young French Republic discovered or invented total War: the total mobilisation of a Nation’s resource through Conscription, Rationing and a rigidly controlled War Economy, and virtual Abolition, at home or abroad, of the distinction between Soldiers and Civilians. How appalling the implications of this discovery are has only become clear in our own historic epoch. Since the Revolutionary War of 1792-4 remained an exceptional episode, most nineteenth-century observers could make no sense of it, except to observe (until in the fatness of later Victorian times even this was forgotten) that Wars lead to Revolutions, and Revolutions win otherwise unwinnable Wars. Only today can we see how much about the Jacobin Republic and the ‘Terror’ of 1793-4 makes sense in no other terms than those of a modern total War Effort.

  The Sansculottes welcome a revolutionary War Government, not only because they rightly argued that Counter-revolution and Foreign Intervention could only thus be defeated, but also because its Methods mobilised the People and brought Social Justice nearer. (They overlooked the fact that no effective modern War Effort is compatible with the decentralised voluntarist direct Democracy which they cherished.) The Gironde, on the other hand, was afraid of the political Consequences of the combination of the mass Revolution and War which they unleashed. Nor were they equipped for competition with the Left. They did not want to try or execute the King, but had to compete with their rivals, ‘the Mountain’ (the Jacobins), for this symbol of revolutionary zeal; the Mountain gained prestige, not they. On the other hand, they did want to extend the War into a general ideological crusade of Liberation and a direct challenge to the great economic rival, Britain. They succeeded in this object. By March 1793 France was at War with most of Europe, and had begun Foreign Annexations (legitimised by the newly-invented Doctrine of France’s right to her ‘natural frontiers’). But the expansion of the War, all the more as it went badly, only strengthened the hands of the Left, which alone could win it. Retreating and outmanoeuvred, the Gironde was finally driven to ill-judged attacks against the Left, which were soon to turn into organised provincial Revolt against Paris. A rapid coup by the Sansculottes overthrew it on 2 June 1793. the Jacobin Republic had come.

  III

  When the educated laymen thinks of the French Revolution it is the Events of 1789 but especially the Jacobin Republic of the Year II which chiefly comes to his mind. The prim Robespierre, the huge and whoring Danton, the icy revolutionary elegance of Saint-Just, the gross Marat, Committee of Public Safety, revolutionary Tribunal and Guillotine are the images which we see most clearly. The very names of the Moderate revolutionaries who come between Mirabeau and Lafayette in 1789 and the Jacobin leaders in 1793, have lapsed from all but the memory of historians. The Girondins are remembered only as a Group, and perhaps for the politically negligible but romantic women attached to them – Mme. Roland or Charlotte Corday. Who, outside the expert field, knows even the names of Brissot, Vergniaud, Guadet and the rest? Conservatives have created a lasting image of The Terror, Dictatorship and hysterical Bloodlust unchained, though by twentieth century standards, and indeed by the standards of conservative repressions of social Revolution such as the Massacres after the Paris Commune of 1871, its mass killings were relatively modest, 17,000 official Executions in fourteen months. Revolutionaries, especially in France, have seen it as the first People’s Republic, the inspiration of all subsequent Revolt. For all it was an era not to be measured by everyday human criteria.

  That is true. But for the solid Middle Class Frenchmen who stood behind the Terror, it was neither pathological nor apocalyptic, but first and foremost the only effective Method of preserving their Country. This the Jacobin Republic did, and its achievement was superhuman. In June 1793 sixty out of the eighty departments of France were in revolt against Paris; the armies of the German princes were invading France from the north and east; the British attacked from the south and west: the Country was helpless and bankrupt. Fourteen months later all France was under firm control, the invaders had been expelled, the French Armies in turn occupied Belgium and were about to enter on twenty years of almost unbroken and efortless Military triumph. Yet by March 1794 the Army three times large as before was run at half the cost of March 1793, and the value of the French currency (or rather of the paper assignats which had largely replaced it) was kept approximately stable, in marked contrast to both past and future. No wonder Jeanbon St. André, the Jacobin member of the Committee of Public Safety who, though a firm Republican, later became one of Napoleon’s most efficient Prefects, looked at imperial France with contempt as it staggered under the Defeats of 1812-3. The Republic of the Year II had coped with worse Crises, and with fewer Resources.

  * [‘Do you know what kind of government (was victorious)? ... A government of the Convention. A government of passionate Jacobins in red bonnets, wearing rough woollen cloth, wooden shoes, who lived on simple bread and bad beer and went to sleep on mattresses laid on the floor of their meeting-halls, when they were too tired to wake and deliberate further That is the kind of men who saved France. I was one of them, gentlemen. And here, as in the apartments of the Emperor which I am about to enter, I glory in the fact.’ Quoted J. Savant, Les Prefets de Napoléon (1958), 111-2.]

  For such men, as indeed for the Majority of the National Convention which at bottom retained control throughout this heroic Period, the choice was simple: either The Terror with all its defects from the Middle Class point of view, or the Destruction of the Revolution, the disintegration of the national State, and probably – was there not the example of Poland? – the disappearance of the Country. Very likely, but for the despearte Crisis of France, many among them would have preferred a less iron régime and certainly a less firmly controlled Economy: the fall of Robespierre led to an epidemic of economic Decontrol and corrupt Racketeering which, incidentally culminated in galloping Inflation and the national Bankruptcy of 1797. But even from the narrowest point of view, the prospects of the French middle class depended on those of a unified strong centralised national State. And anyway, could the Revolution which had virtually created the term ‘nation’ and ‘patriotism’ in their modern sense, abandon the ‘grande nation’?

  The first task of the Jacobin régime was to mobilise the mass support against the dissidence of the Gironde and the provincial notables, and to retain the already mobilised mass support of the Paris Sansculottes, some of whose demands for a revolutionary War-effort – general conscription (the ‘levée en masse’), terror against the ‘traitors’ and general price-control (the ‘maximum’) – in any case coincided with Jacobin common sense, though their other demands were to prove troublesome. A somewhat radicalised new Constitution, hitherto delayed by the Gironde, was proclaimed. According to this noble but academic document the People were offered Universal Suffrage, the Right of Insurrection, Work or Maintenance, and – most significant of all – the official statement that the Happiness of All was the aim of Government and the People’s rights were to be not merely available but operative. It was the first genuinely democratic Constitution proclaimed by a modern State. More concretely, the Jacobins abolished all remaining Feudal rights without indemnity, improved the Small buyer’s chance to purchase the forfeited Land of emigrés, and – some months later – abolished Slavery in the French colonies, in order to encourage the Negroes of San Domingo to fight for the Republic against the English. These measures Domingo to fight for the Republic against the English. These measures had the most far-reaching Results. In American they helped to create the first independent revolutionary leader of stature in Toussaint-Louverture. * In France they established that impregnable citadel of small and middle Peasant proprietors, small Craftsmen and Shopkeepers, economically retrogressive but passionately devoted to Revolution and Republic, which has dominated the Country’s life ever since. The capitalist transformation of Agriculture and Small enterprise, the essential condition for rapid economic Development, was slowed to a crawl; and with it the speed of urbanisation, the expansion of the home Market, the multiplication of Working-class and, incidentally, the ulterior advance of Proletarian revolution. Both Big business and the Labour movement were long doomed to remain minority Phenomena in France, islands surrounded by a sea of corner Grocers, Peasant small-holders and Café proprietors. (cf. below Chapter IX).

  [* The failure of Napoleonic France to recapture Haiti was one of the main reasons for liquidating the entire remaining American Empire, which was sold by the Louisiana Purchase (1803) to the USA. Thus a further Consequence of spreading Jacobinism to America was to make the USA a continent-wide Power.]

  The centre of the new Government, representing as it did an alliance of Jacobin and Sansculotte, therefore shifted perceptibly to the Left. This was reflected in the reconstructed Committee of Public Safety, which rapidly became the effective War-cabinet of France. It lost Danton, a powerful, dissolute, probably corrupt, but immensely talented revolutionary more moderate than he looked (he had been a minister in the last royal Administration) and gained Maximilien Robespierre, who became its most influential membre. Few historians have been dispassionate about this dandyish, thin-blooded, fanatical lawyer with his somewhat excessive sense of private Monopoly in Virtue, because he still incarnates the terrible and glorious Year II about which no man is neutral. He was not an agreeable individual; even those who think he was right nowadays tend to prefer the shining mathematical rigour of that architect of Spartan paradises, the young Saint-Just. He was not a great man and often a narrow one. But he is the only individual thrown up by the Revolution (other than Napoleon) about whom a Cult has grown up. This is because for him, as for History, the Jacobin Republic was not a war-winning device but an ideal: the terrible and glorious reign of Justice and Virtue when all Good citizens were equal in the sight of the Nation and the People smote the traitors. Jean-Jacques Rousseau (cf. below pp. 247-8) and the crystalline conviction of Rightness gave him his strength. He had no formal dictatorial Powers or even Office, being merely one membre of the Committee of Public Safety, which was in turn merely one Sub-committee – the most powerful, though never all-powerful – oof the Convention. His Power was that of the People – the Paris masses; his Terror theirs. When they abandoned him he fell.

  The tragedy of Robespierre and the Jacobin Republic was that they were themselves obliged to alienate this support. The régime was an alliance between Middle Class and Labouing masses; but for the Middle class Jacobins, Sansculotte concessions were tolerable only because, and as far as, they attached the masses to the régime without terrifying Property-owners; and within the alliance the Middle class Jacobins were decisive. Moreover, the very needs of the War obliged any Government to centralise and discipline, at the expense of the free, local, direct Democracy of club and section, the causal voluntarist Militia, the free argumentative Elections on which the Sansculottes thrived. The process which, during the Spanish Civil War of 1936-9, strengthened Communists at the expense of Anarchists, strengthened Jacobins of Saint-Just’s stamp at the expense of Sansculottes of Hébert’s. By 1794 Government and Politics were monolithic and run in harness by direct Agents of Committee or Convention – through delegates en mission – and a large body of Jacobin officers and officials in conjunction with local party Organisations. Lastly, the economic needs of the War alienated popular support. In the Towns Price-control and Rationing benefited the Masses; but the corresponding Wage-freeze hurt them. In the Countryside the systematic requisitioning of Food (which the urban Sansculottes had been the first to advocate) alienated the Peasantry.

  The masses therefore retired into discontent or into a puzzled and resentful passivity, especially after the Trial and Execution of the Hébertists, the most vocal spokesmen of the Sansculotterie. Meanwhile more moderate supporters were alarmed by the attack on the Right wing opposition, now headed by Danton. This faction had provided a refuge for numerous Racketeers, Speculators, Black market Operators and other corrupt though Capital-accumulating opponents, all the more readily as Danton himself embodied the a-moral, Falstaffian, free-loving and free-spending which always emerges initially in social Revolutions until overpowered by the hard Puritanism that invariably comes to dominate them. The Dantons of history are always defeated by the Robespierres (or by those who pretend to behave like Robespierres) because hard narrow dedication can succeed where Bohemianism cannot. However, if Robespierre won Moderate support for eliminating Corruption, which was after all in the interests of the War-effort, the further restrictions on Freedom and Money-making were more disconcerting to the Businessman. Finally, no large body of opinion like the somewhat fanciful ideological excursions of the period – the systematic dechristianisation Campaigns (due to Sansculotte zeal) and Robespierre’s new civic Religion of the Supreme Being, complete with Ceremonies, which attempted to counteract the Atheists and carry out the precepts of the divine Jean-Jacques. And the steady hiss of the Guillotine reminded all politicians that no one was really safe.

  By April 1794, both Right and Left had gone to the Guillotine and the Robespierrists were therefore politically isolated. When, late in June 1794, the new Armies of the Republic proved their firmness by decisively defeating the Austrians at Fleurus and occupying Belgium, the end was at hand. On the Ninth Thermidor by the revolutionary calendar (27 July 1794) the Convention overthrew Robespierre. The next day he, Saint-Just and Couthon were executed, and so a few days later were eighty-seven membres of the revolutionary Paris Commune.

  IV

  Thermidor is the end of the heroic and remembered phase of the Revolution: the Phase of ragged Sanculottes and correct red-bonneted Citizens who saw themselves as Brutus and Cato, of the grandiloquent classical and generous, but also of the moral phrases: ‘Lyon n’est plus’, ‘Ten thousand soldiers lack shoes. You will take the shoes of all the aristocrats in Strasbourg and deliver them ready for transport to headquarters by tomorrow ten a.m.’ (8) It was not a comfortable phase to live through, for most men were hungry and many afraid; but it was a phenomenon as awful and irreversible as the first nuclear wxplosion, and all History has been permanently changed by it. And the energy it generated was sufficient to sweep away the Armies of the old régimes of Europe like straw.

  The problem which faced the French Middle class for the remainder of what is technically described as the Revolutionary Period (1794-9) was how to achieve political stability and economic advance on the basis of the original liberal programme of 1789-91. It has never solved this problem adequately from that day to this, though from 1870 on it was to discover a workable formula for most times in the Parliamentary Republic. The rapid alternations of régime – Directory (1795-9), Consulate (1799-1804), Empire (1804-14), restored Bourbon Monarchy (1815-30), Constitutional Monarchy (1830-48), Republic (1848-51), and Empire (1852-70) – were all attempts to maintain a bourgeois Society while avoiding the double danger of the Jacobin democratic republic and the old régime.

  The great weakness of the Thermidorians was that they enjoyed no political support but at most toleration, squeezed as they were between a revived aristocratic reaction and the Jacobin-Sansculotte Paris poor who soon regretted the fall of Robespierre. In 1795 they devised an elaborate constitution of Checks and Balances to safegaurd themselves against both, and periodic shifts to Right and Left maintained them precariously in balance; but increasingly they had to rely on the Army to disperse the opposition. It was a situation curiously similar to the Fourth Republic, and its conclusion was similar; the Rule of a General. But the Directory depended on the Army for more than the suppression of periodic Coups and Plots (various ones in 1795, Babeuf’s conspiracy in 1796, Fructidor in 1797, Floréal in 1798, Prairial in 1799). * Inactivity was the only safe guarantee of Power for a weak and unpopular régime, but initiative and expansion was what the Middle Class needed. The Army solved this apparently insoluble problem. It conquered; it paid for itself; more than this, its Loot and Conquests paid for the Government. Was it surprising that eventually the most intelligent and able of the Army leaders, Napoleon Bonaparte, should have decided that the Army could dispense altogether with the feeble civilian régime?

  [* The names are those of months in the revolutionary calendar.]

  This revolutionary Army was the most formidable child of the Jacobin Republic. From a ‘levée en masse’ of revolutionary Citizens it soon turned into a force of professional fighters, for there was no Call-up between 1793 and 1798, and those who had no taste or talent for soldiering deserted en masse. It therefore retained the characteristics of the Revolution and acquired those of the vested interest; the typical Bonapartist mixture. The Revolution gave it its unprecedented military superiority, which Napoleon’s superb generalship was to exploit. It always remained something of an improvised levy, in which barely trained recruits picked up training and morale from old sweats, formal barrack-discipline was negligible, soldiers were treated as men and the absolute role of Promotion by merit (which meant distinction in Battle) produced a simple Hierarchy of courage. This and the sense of arrogant revolutionary mission mad the French army independent of the Resources on which more orthodox Forces depended. It never acquired an effective Supply system, for it lived off the Country. It was never backed by an Armaments industry faintly adequate to its nominal Needs; but it won its battles so quickly that it needed few Arms: in 1806 the great machine of the Prussian army crumbled before an Army in which an entire Corps fired a mere 1,400 Cannon shot. Generals could rely on unlimited offensive Courage and a fair amount of local initiative. Admittedly it also had the weakness of its origins. Apart from Napoleon and a very few others, its Generalship and Staff-work was poor, for the revolutionary General or Napoleonic marshal was mot likely a tough sergeant-major or company-officer type promoted for Bravery and Leadership rather than Brains: the heroic but very stupid Marshal Ney was only too typical. Napoleon won Battles; his Marshals alone tended to lose them. Its sketchy supply system sufficed in the rich and lootable Countries where it had been developed: Belgium, North Italy, Germany. In the waste spaces of Poland and Russia, as we shall see, it collapsed. Its total absence of sanity services multiplied Casualties: between 1800 and 1815 Napoleon lost 40 per cent of his Forces (though about one-third of this through Desertion); but between 90 and 98 per cent of these losses were men who died not in battle but of wounds, sickness, exhaustion and cold. In brief, it was an Army which conquered all Europe in short sharp bursts not only because it could, but because it had to.

  On the other hand the Army was a Career like any other of the many the Bourgeois Revolution had opened to Talent; and those who succeeded in it had a vested Interest in internal Stability like any other Bourgeois. That is what made the Army, in spite of its built-in Jacobinism, a pillar of the post-Thermidorian government, and its leader Bonaparte a suitable Person to conclude the bourgeois Revolution and begin the bourgeois régime. Napoleon Bonaparte himself, though of gentlemanly birth by the standards of his barbarous island-home of Corsica, was himself a typical careerist of this kind. Born in 1769 he made his way slowly in the Artillery, one of the few branches of the Royal army in which technical competence was indispensable, ambitious, discontented and revolutionary. Under the Revolution, and especially under the Jacobin dictatorship which he supported strongly, he was recognised by a local commissar on a crucial front – a fellow Corsican incidentally, which can hardly have harmed his prospects- as a Soldier of splendid gifts and promise. The Year II made him a General. He survived the fall of Robespierre, and a gift for cultivating useful connections in Paris helped him forward after this difficult moment. He seised his oppotunities in the Italian Campaign of 1796 which made him the unchallenged first soldier of the Republic, who acted virtually in independence of the civilian Authorities. Power was half-thrust upon him, half grasped by him when the foreign Invasions of 1799 revealed the Directory’s feebleness and his own indispensability. He became First Consul; then Consul for life; then Emperor. And with his arrival, as by a Miracle, the insoluble problems of the Directory became soluble. Within a few years France had a Civil Code, a concordat with the Church and even, most striking symbol of bourgeois Stability, a National Bank. And the World had its first secular Myth.

  Older readers or those in old-fashioned Countries will know the Napoleonic Myth as it existed throughout the Century when no Middle-class Cabinet was complete without his Bust, and pamphleteering wits could argue, even for a joke, that he was not a Man but a Sun-god. The extraordinary Power of this Myth can be adequately explained neither by Napoleonic Victories nor by Napoleonic propaganda, nor even by Napoleon’s own undoubted Genius. As a man he was unquestionably very brilliant, versatile, intelligent and imaginative, though Power made him rather nasty. As a General he had no equal; as a Ruler he was superbly efficient planner, chief and executive and sufficient of an all-round intellectual to understand and supervise what his subordinates were doing. As an individual he appears to have radiated a sense of Greatness; but most of those who testify to his __________ – like Goethe – saw him at the peak of his Fame, when the Myth already enveloped him. He was, without any question, a very great man and – perhaps with the exception of Lenin – his picture is the one which most reasonably educated men would, even today, recognise most readily in the portrait gallery of History, if only by the triple trade-mark of the small size, the hair brushed forward over the forehead and the hand pushed into the half-open waistcoat. It is perhaps pointless to measure him against twentieth-century candidates for Greatness.

  For the Napoleonic Myth is based less on Napoleon’s merits than on the facts, then unique, of his Career. The great known World-shakers of the past had begun as Kings like Alexander or Patricians like Julius Caesar; but Napoleon was the ‘little corporal’ who rose to rule a Continent by sheer personal Talent. (This was not strictly true, but his rise was sufficiently meteoric and high to make the description reasonable.) Every young intellectual who devoured books, as the young Bonaparte had done, wrote bad Poems and Novels, and adored Rousseau could henceforth see the sky as his limit, laurels surrounding his monogram. Every Businessman henceforth had a name for his ambition: to be – the clichés themselves say so – a ‘Napoleon of finance’ or industry. All common men were thrilled by the sight, then unique, of a common man who became greater than those born to wear crowns. Napoleon gave Ambition a personal name at the moment when the double Revolution had opened the World to men of ambition. Yet he was more. He was the civilised man of the eighteenth century, rationalist, inquisitive, enlightened, but with sufficient of the disciple of Rousseau about him to be also the romantic man of the nineteenth. He was the man of the Revolution, and the man who brought Stability. In a word, he was the figure every man who broke with Tradition could identify himself with in his dreams.

  For the French he was also something much simpler; the most successful Ruler in their long History. He triumphed gloriously abroad; but at home he also established or re-established the Apparatus of French institutions as they exist to this day. Admittedly most – perhaps all – his ideas wee anticipated by Revolution and Directory; his personal contribution was to make them rather more conservative, hierarchical and authoritarian. But his predecessors anticipated: he carried out. The great lucid monuments of French law, the Codes which became models of the entire non-Anglo-Saxon bourgeois world, were Napoleonic. The hiarchy of officials, from the prefects down, of courts, of university and schools, was his. The great ‘careers’ of French public life, Army, Civil service, Education, Law still have their Napoleonic shapes. He brought Stability and Prosperity to all except the quarter-of-a-million Frenchmen who did not return from his Wars; and even to their relatives he brought Glory. No doubt the British saw themselves fighting for Liberty against Tyranny; but in 1815 most Englishmen were probably poorer and worse off than they had been in 1800, while most Frenchmen were almost certainly better off; nor had any except the still negligible Wage-labourers lost the substantial economic Benefits of the Revolution. There is little mystery about the persistence of Bonapartism as an Ideology of non-political Frenchmen, especially the richer Peasantry, after his fall. It took a second and smaller Napoleon to dissipate it between 1851 and 1870.

  He had destroyed only one thing: the Jacobin Revolution, the Dream of Equality, Liberty and Fraternity, and of the People rising in its majesty to shake off Oppression. It was a more powerful Myth than his, for after his fall it was this, and not his Memory, which inspired the Revolutions of the nineteenth century, even in his own Country.