Political Thought in the Age of Revolution 1776-1848

Burke to Marx

Michael Levin

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2010
• ISBN:
  9781350307742
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Political History & Theory
• Index: Politics & International Relations

The years between the American Revolution of 1776, the French Revolution of 1789 and the European Revolutions of 1848 saw fundamental shifts from autocracy to emerging democracy. It is a vital period in what may be termed 'modernity': that is of the western societies that are increasingly industrial, capitalist and liberal democratic. Unsurprisingly, these years of stress and transition produced some significant reflections on politics and society. This indispensable introductory text considers how a cluster of key thinkers viewed the global political upheavals and social changes of their time, covering the work of:
- Edmund Burke
- Georg Hegel
- Thomas Paine
- Alexis de Tocqueville
- Jeremy Bentham
- Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels Lively and approachable, it is essential reading for anyone with an interest in modern history, political history or political thought.

1

The Historical Context

In one of the best-known social history books of the last century, Eric Hobsbawm famously designated The Age of Revolution.¹ For him, it was the period between the French revolutions of 1789 and 1848, which he describes as witnessing ‘the greatest transformation in human history since the remote times when men invented agriculture and metallurgy, writing, the city and the state’. His subject was not merely France, but ‘the transformation of the world’ caused by both the French Revolution and the ‘contemporaneous [British] industrial revolution’.² In the same vein, Jay Winik has more recently described the late eighteenth century as ‘the age that gave birth to the modern world. It is also arguably one of the most significant eras in all of human history.’³

The Atlantic Revolution 1776 and 1789

‘The French Revolution has been regarded by subsequent generations as the emergence of the modern political world. It comprised a paradigm shift that irrevocably changed the way in which we think.’⁴ To some, the revolution seemed like a thunderbolt that dropped unannounced out of a clear blue sky. Though it had no precedent in French history, it did have its antecedent causes. The state, for example, was in severe financial difficulties. The wealthiest citizens were exempt from taxation, and both state regulation and internal customs barriers curtailed the development of trade and industry. The Treasury was burdened both by its own cumbersome organisation and by a few decades of unsuccessful imperial competition with Great Britain, losing out to Robert Clive in India and General Wolfe in Quebec, though gaining some vicarious, though not financial, compensation through entering the War of American Independence on the rebel colonists’ side.

In medieval Europe, it was common for monarchs only to summon councils or parliaments when they were in financial difficulties. Consequently, in August 1788 Louis XVI requested the Estates-General to meet the following year. It had last convened in 1614, so there was understandable uncertainty concerning some of the procedures. That it contained three houses – the clergy, the nobility and the Third Estate – was beyond dispute. What now proved contentious was whether to accept the old pattern of voting by Estate, in which case the two privileged orders of aristocracy and clergy could always outvote the Third Estate by two to one. The king had wanted the old traditions followed, but he gave way to pressure from the Third Estate in allowing them to double their traditional number of deputies to 600, leaving the other two Estates with 300 deputies each. So, unwittingly or otherwise, he conceded the principle that was soon to undermine the old regime that numbers were to be granted political weight.

The unresolved problem of whether the Estates should vote separately or together was pre-empted on 17 June 1789 when the Third Estate, by 491 votes to 89, proclaimed itself a National Assembly and called upon members of the other two Estates to join it in reforming France. The consequences of this decision were to seal the fate of the old regime, for in that change of terminology is encapsulated a key polarity between medieval and modern understandings of politics.

The transition from reform to revolution occurred less than a month later, when the old fortress of the Bastille was stormed on 14 July. This event, more symbolic than substantial, has remained the most iconic and famous moment of the revolution. Then on the night of 4–5 August, the aristocracy renounced most of their privileges. Feudal dues, noble status and even the system of Estates were all swept away. Massive and long-entrenched inequalities had been removed. The new presuppositions found expression in the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen, decreed by the National Assembly on 26 August and ‘modelled mainly on the manifestos set out by the Americans some years earlier’.⁵ Among its pronouncements was the belief that ‘Nature has made all men free and equal’, that ‘No man should suffer for his religious beliefs’, and that ‘Freedom of the press is the strongest support of public freedom.’

Until 1791, it had seemed that France might establish a constitutional monarchy on the British pattern. This hope evaporated with the King’s flight to Varennes, his failed attempt to escape over France’s eastern border. The Jacobin Republic with its ‘reign of terror’ followed in 1792–4. War was declared against Austria in 1792, the beginnings of the military export of the revolution to much of the European continent. This tendency was much strengthened when, in 1799, the head of the army became the ruler of the country. Napoleon Bonaparte soon made France the leading European power. In 1804, he crowned himself King of France. In the following years, he looked after his brothers, appointing Jerome as King of Westphalia, Louis as King of Holland, Joseph as King of Naples and Spain and keeping for himself the Kingdom of Italy. By 1812, the borders of France had extended enormously, to the north-east as far as Bremen and Hamburg and to the south-east to include Florence and Rome.

The year 1789, then, has its prominent placing because of the remarkable political events in France during that year and their consequences for large parts of the European continent. There is, however, more to it than that. It was also the year in which the American Constitution of 1787 was put into effect and in which George Washington became the country’s first President. The US Constitution represented, just as much as the French Revolution, a sharp break with previously dominant political assumptions. It was an explicit documentation of the political system, quite novel then for a whole state, but the forerunner of what later became normal. Unlike everywhere else at the time, the Constitution allowed for no hereditary positions, claimed no theological basis and had no state religion or privileges for the church. The head of state, an elected President, was to be subject to law rather than, as under absolute monarchies, his (or, occasionally, her) word being law.

As the US Constitution was a consequence of their revolution of 1776, our age of revolution must begin a little earlier than Hobsbawm’s. In 1776, the 13 North American colonies withdrew from the British Empire by asserting their independence. This seemed a lesser revolution than that in France 13 years later. The French overthrew an indigenous ruling class. Theirs was a truly social revolution that was then spread by conquest around much of the rest of Europe. The North Americans, by contrast, despatched their external rulers back to their home country. Theirs was the first major anti-colonial revolution, which produced what has been termed ‘the first new nation’,⁶ but still the American Revolution had more modest aims than that of France. As Martin Malia has pointed out, the ‘American colonists intended revolution according to the older sense of the word, that is a “restoration” of their historic rights as Englishmen’, as had allegedly happened with England’s so-called Glorious Revolution of 1688. However, ‘when they got through, they had created a new nation and a republic, an outcome that was obviously “revolutionary” in the modern sense of post-Old Regime.’⁷ It is also worth mentioning that the transfer of the Presidency from George Washington to John Adams in 1797 is the first example in modern times of an elected head of state peacefully transferring power to his successor. Already in 1776 Thomas Paine referred to the American colonies as ‘This new world’ which ‘hath been the asylum for the persecuted lovers of civil and religious liberty from every part of Europe’.⁸ The United States of America, then, from the beginning, achieved levels of freedom and equality of opportunity, key aspects of modernity, which contrasted substantially with the absolutist oppression from which parts of Europe were also gradually escaping. (Fuller presentation of the events of the American Revolution is given in Chapter 2, Section 2, on Edmund Burke and Chapter 3, Section 2, on Thomas Paine.)

The idea that these two separate and, in many ways, quite distinct revolutions were somehow linked was not uncommon at that time. Thomas Paine was among those who believed that the message of liberty was brought to France by those of her soldiers who had previously fought against the British in North America. When the American colonists’ war with Britain ended, he believed that ‘a vast reinforcement to the cause of Liberty spread itself over France, by the return of the French officers and soldiers. A knowledge of the practice was then joined to the theory; and all that was wanting to give it real existence, was opportunity.’⁹ Paine’s notion that France was previously acquainted with radical ideas was confirmed by one of the unlikely and remarkable survivors of the French Revolution, Bishop Talleyrand, who recalled that after 1776 ‘We talked of nothing but America.’¹⁰ The Marquis de Condorcet, who was later to play a prominent role in the French Revolution, had for some years previously been closely following American affairs. In 1786, he declared it not sufficient that natural rights

should be written in the books of philosophers and in the hearts of virtuous men; it is essential that the ignorant and weak should read them in the example of a great people. America has given us this example. The act by which she declared her independence is an exposition, simple and sublime, of rights that have been sacred, though long forgotten.¹¹

Later the French aristocrat Alexis de Tocqueville noted that to ‘the rest of Europe the American Revolution seemed merely a novel and remarkable historical event; whereas the French saw in it a brilliant confirmation of theories already familiar to them’.¹² The link, however, is more than ideological. It is also economic, in that French assistance to the American colonists’ cause greatly exacerbated the financial crisis from which their own revolution emerged.

In twentieth-century scholarship, the idea of the Atlantic Revolution was most associated with the Frenchman Jacques Godechot and the American R.R. Palmer. In France and the Atlantic Revolution of the Eighteenth Century, Godechot asserted that the ‘revolutionary movement began in 1768 in the republic of Geneva’ and included uprisings in Russia, Ireland, Holland, Belgium as well as the 1780 Gordon Riots in London and, obviously, the American and French revolutions. In his view, all these disorders between 1770 and 1800 ‘actually belonged to a single great movement and formed a single Atlantic Revolution’.¹³ R.R. Palmer agreed that ‘All of these agitations, upheavals, intrigues, and conspiracies were part of one great movement . . . There was one big revolutionary agitation.’¹⁴

These two revolutions indicated that the long age of court politics was coming to an end; that of mass politics was commencing. In the nineteenth century, the American and French revolutions were often regarded as contrasting examples of democracy in action; its controlled and constitutional face in North America and its violent, arbitrary aspect in France. By the twentieth century, such terminology needed modifying. Neither revolution had been democratic in terms of granting the vote to all men, let alone any or all women. Clearly, however, the revolutions had significantly moved their countries in a more democratic direction.

The Industrial Revolution

The other basic aspect of this transition was the Industrial Revolution. A still extant early marker of this is the world’s first cast-iron bridge, built in Coalbrookdale in Staffordshire in 1779. This fact might be reasonably well known to children in the English Midlands, who enjoy school outings there, but on the whole, the bridge is less famous than it deserves to be. It survives as a monument to a process that transformed the globe and so should, at least, rank with Nelson’s Column and the Houses of Parliament as a symbol of national achievement; that it doesn’t indicates the relatively low status of science and technology in British culture. The iron bridge, then, represents a development that began in Britain and spread around the globe; among other things, it involved a fundamental shift from agriculture to industry and so from rural to urban life.

James Watt’s crucial improvement of Thomas Newcomen’s steam engine occurred just 10 years earlier, in 1769. Around the same time, the textile industry was transformed by the invention of James Hargreaves’s spinning-jenny (1767), Richard Arkwright’s spinning frame (1768) and Samuel Crompton’s spinning-mule (1779). The cotton industry thus set the example in moving production from the home to the factory. It was ‘the first industry to be revolutionized’.¹⁵ These were more than just changes in the nature of production. Human life itself was transformed. The seemingly permanent old world of landed estates and small market towns cocooned in their own local affairs, largely self-governing and relatively self-sufficient, gave way to the enormous industrial conurbations created by the rise of textiles, coal mining and iron and steel production. The development of industry transformed the social structure of society. Rising commercial wealth challenged the preponderance of landed, aristocratic power. The new rich were complemented by a new poor. As the number of agricultural labourers declined, the number of a new urban working class increased.¹⁶

It is well-known that France had its surfeit of political changes; that Napoleon fell in 1815; that monarchy was restored under Louis XVIII; that Charles X abdicated after the revolution of 1830 and that Louis-Philipp...