The Age of the Democratic Revolution

A Political History of Europe and America, 1760-1800 - Updated Edition

R. R. Palmer

• Verlag: Princeton University Press
• Jahr: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781400850228
• Thema: Historia
• Thema: Historia moderna temprana

For the Western world, the period from 1760 to 1800 was the great revolutionary era in which the outlines of the modern democratic state came into being. Here for the first time in one volume is R. R. Palmer's magisterial account of this incendiary age. Palmer argues that the American, French, and Polish revolutions—and the movements for political change in Britain, Ireland, Holland, and elsewhere—were manifestations of similar political ideas, needs, and conflicts. Palmer traces the clash between an older form of society, marked by legalized social rank and hereditary or self-perpetuating elites, and a new form of society that placed a greater value on social mobility and legal equality.Featuring a new foreword by David Armitage, this Princeton Classics edition of The Age of the Democratic Revolution introduces a new generation of readers to this enduring work of political history.

PART 1
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THE CHALLENGE

PREFACE TO PART 1
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There have long been a great many works on the American Revolution, the French Revolution, the beginnings of the parliamentary reform movement in Great Britain, and on Irish affairs, as also, though less known in the English-speaking world, on the several countries of continental Europe during this revolutionary era. This book attempts to bring all these national histories together. It rests heavily upon the work of others, for except in certain parts, notably Chapters I, IX, XIV, and XV, where I have been able to make use of researches of my own, it is built up from monographs, special studies, and collections of printed documents made by scholars in many countries over a long period of years. The book is therefore an example of what we have come to know as a historical synthesis, and I have accordingly thought it necessary to give detailed references, even at the cost of an unseemly parade of documentation, some of it in languages which I make no pretence of understanding and have been able to use only through the assistance of others. The book may be thought of also as an attempt at a comparative constitutional history of Western Civilization at the time of the French and American Revolutions; but “constitutional” is to be understood in a broad sense, without much emphasis on formal provisions, and in close connection with the political, social, and intellectual currents and the actual conflicts at the time. Much of the book deals with the nature of public authority and private rights, of law, sovereignty, and political representation—or with liberty and equality, and with “fraternity” also, if fraternity be taken to mean the sense of equal membership in the community.

Naturally in the preparation of such a work I have incurred more than the usual number of obligations. Colleagues at Princeton and elsewhere have lent their assistance, either by calling my attention to writings that I would otherwise have missed, or by reading and criticizing particular chapters. I have learned a good deal also from my students, from college seniors to authors of doctoral dissertations. Whether as students, or in some cases as research assistants, they have surveyed materials for me or made studies of their own from which I have appropriated useful items, and in more than one case they have saved me from outright errors. There are some eight persons to whom I am indebted for reading Scandinavian and East European languages. In particular I wish to thank my colleague, Professor W. F. Craven of Princeton, for his continuing help in the problems of the American Revolution; Professors Hans Rosenberg, Jerome Blum, C. G. Sellers, and Peter Gay, and Mr. George Dangerfield, for reading and discussing various chapters with me; Professor P. Geyl of Utrecht, for his guidance in Dutch history; Professor Arne Odd Johnsen of Oslo for assistance in Norwegian and Danish; Professors D. W. Rustow and Stanley J. Stein and Mr. Andre Michalski of Princeton for assistance, respectively in Swedish, Portuguese, and Polish; Professor C. E. Black and Drs. R. H. McNeal and W. L. Blackwell for assistance in Russian; Dr. Peter F. Sugar for assistance in Hungarian; and my former students at Princeton, now widely dispersed, Messrs. Immo Stabreit, Demetrios Pentzopoulos, Thomas H. Kean, Elie Zilkha, and John W. Shy, and Drs. Stanley Mellon, Gordon M. Jensen, Donald Limoli, and David Gordon for various contributions whose ultimate usefulness to me they could not always foresee. I am indebted to Professor Stanley E. Howard for assistance with the proofs, and to Mr. Jeffry Kaplow for making the index. I have come to appreciate also the warm interest in the present venture shown by Mr. Herbert S. Bailey, Jr., Director of the Princeton University Press, and the careful work and exacting standards of Miss Miriam Brokaw, Managing Editor of the Press, in preparing it for publication. My debt to the Princeton University Library is very great.

To the Rockefeller Foundation, in its Division of Social Sciences, and to the Council of the Humanities of Princeton University, I wish to express thanks for financial support without which the book could not have been written, since it has been used to free me from teaching and other responsibilities for concentration on the present work. I have received smaller grants from the University Research Fund of Princeton University, mainly for the employment of occasional student assistants. I wish also to thank the editor of the Political Science Quarterly for permission to reprint the substance of certain articles which first appeared in its pages. No one except myself is responsible for any opinions, errors, or shortcomings in the book.

The project has grown beyond what I at first anticipated, and the present work is now seen as the first of two volumes, which together will survey the revolutionary period of the eighteenth century within the area of Western Civilization. The point of division between the two volumes is, in general, the beginning of the wars of the French Revolution. This first volume, entitled “The Challenge,” will I hope be followed by a second, called “The Struggle.” Further reading should make clear the full implication of these terms.

R. R. PALMER
PRINCETON, N.J.
DECEMBER 1, 1958

CHAPTER I
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THE AGE OF THE DEMOCRATIC REVOLUTION

Two great parties are forming in all nations…. For one, there is a right of government, to be exercised by one or several persons over the mass of the people, of divine origin and to be supported by the church, which is protected by it. These principles are expressed in the formula, Church and State.

To this is opposed the new system, which admits no right of government except that arising from the free consent of those who submit to it, and which maintains that all persons who take part in government are accountable for their actions. These principles go under the formula, Sovereignty of the People, or Democracy.

—G. K. VAN HOGENDORP, ROTTERDAM, 1791

A young Philadelphian of good family, Thomas Shippen, in the course of a visit to Europe, where he cultivated the acquaintance of “titled men and ladies of birth,” bore a letter of introduction to Thomas Jefferson, the American Minister to France, who presented him at the court of Versailles. They arrived, one day in February 1788, “at 1/2 past 10 and were not done bowing until near 2.” Young Shippen chatted with the Papal Nuncio and the Russian Ambassador, who “was very polite,” and on meeting a woman and her two daughters who were all countesses he was introduced with all his “titles,” which he thought most people believed to be hereditary. He was then paired with a German princeling for presentation to the King, who mumbled a few words while hitching on his sword. It all made the young man very conscious of his American nationality. He was “revolted” at the King’s arrogance, but even more “mortified at the suppleness and base complaisance of his attendants.” Such oriental splendor he thought worth seeing—once. It set him to thinking, for, as he wrote to his father, he detected ennui and uneasiness on the faces at court, and was more convinced than ever that “a certain degree of equality is essential to human bliss.”

The underlining was Shippen’s own. He added that America was peculiarly fortunate, since it provided the degree of equality that made for happiness, “without destroying the necessary subordination.” No doubt his taste for equality had its limits. Descended on his mother’s side from the Lees of Virginia, and on his father’s from one of the founders of Pennsylvania, Thomas Shippen belonged socially to the groups that had provided many officers of government in America, and it was in fact on this ground, according to the etiquette at Versailles, that he was thought, as a mere republican, to have sufficient rank for presentation at court. On the other hand, Shippen’s own father, a prominent doctor, had been a revolutionary of sorts, having acted as chief medical officer in the Continental Army. More generally, the point is that even Americans of aristocratic standing or pretensions looked on the Europe of 1788 with a certain disapproval.

This little scene at Versailles, revealed in the new edition of the Papers of Thomas Jefferson,¹ may serve to introduce some of the themes of the following pages, bringing together, as it does, Europe and America, monarchy and republicanism, aristocracy and an emerging democracy, and reflecting certain predilections or biases which the author at the outset confesses to sharing, without, he hastens to add, writing from any such point of view in the social scale as that of the Shippens of Philadelphia.

Let us pass from the concrete image to the broadest of historical generalizations. The present work attempts to deal with Western Civilization as a whole, at a critical moment in its history, or with what has sometimes recently been called the Atlantic Civilization, a term probably closer to reality in the eighteenth century than in the twentieth.² It is argued that this whole civilization was swept in the last four decades of the eighteenth century by a single revolutionary movement, which manifested itself in different ways and with varying success in different countries, yet in all of them showed similar objectives and principles. It is held that this forty-year movement was essentially “democratic,” and that these years are in fact the Age of the Democratic Revolution. “Democratic” is here to be understood in a general but clear enough sense. It was not primarily the sense of a later day in which universality of the suffrage became a chief criterion of democracy, nor yet that other and uncertain sense, also of a later day, in which both Soviet and Western-type states could call themselves democratic. In one way, it signified a new feeling for a kind of equality, or at least a discomfort with older forms of social stratification and formal rank, such as Thomas Shippen felt at Versailles, and which indeed had come to affect a good many of the habitues of Versailles also. Politically, the eighteenth-century movement was against the possession of government, or any public power, by any established, privileged, closed, or self-recruiting groups of men. It denied that any person could exercise coercive authority simply by his own right, or by right of his status, or by right of “history,” either in the old-fashioned sense of custom and inheritance, or in any newer dialectical sense, unknown to the eighteenth century, in which “history” might be supposed to give some special elite or revolutionary vanguard a right to rule. The “democratic revolution” emphasized the delegation of authority and the removability of officials, precisely because, as we shall see, neither delegation nor removability were much recognized in actual institutions.

It is a corollary of these ideas that the American and the French Revolutions, the two chief actual revolutions of the period, with all due allowance for the great differences between them, nevertheless shared a good deal in common, and that what they shared was shared also at the same time by various people and movements in other countries, notably in England, Ireland, Holland, Belgium, Switzerland, and Italy, but also in Germany, Hungary, and Poland, and by scattered individuals in places like Spain and Russia.

THE REVOLUTION OF WESTERN CIVILIZATION

To obtain the right perspective on the whole era it is necessary to begin by looking at its climax at the end. This came with the Wars of the French Revolution from 1792 to 1800 or 1801. To these years I hope some day to devote a sequel, and this volume takes the story only to about 1791; but the whole period can best be understood by remembering the unprecedented struggle in which it ended. This struggle had in it something universal; as Burke said, there had been nothing like it since the Protestant Reformation had thrown all Europe into a commotion that overran all political boundaries.³

Burke himself, when he died in 1797, was so afraid of invasion and revolution in England that he gave orders for his remains to be secretly buried, lest triumphant democrats dig them up for desecration. Revolution broke out in Ireland in 1798. Dutch historians speak of revolution in the Netherlands in 1795, when the Batavian Republic was founded, and of a more radical movement of 1798. The Swiss feel that they were revolutionized in the Helvetic Republic of 1798. Italian writers speak of revolution at Milan in 1796, at Rome in 1797, at Naples in 1798. The Cisalpine, Roman, and Parthenopean republics were the outcome. In the German Rhineland there were some who demanded annexation to France, or, that failing, the establishment of a revolutionary “Cisrhenane,” or Rhineland Republic. Elsewhere in Germany the disturbance was largely ideological. The philosopher Fichte, an ardent revolutionary thinker, found it “evident” in 1799 that “only the French Republic can be considered by the just man as his true country.” The city of Berlin was notably pro-French. In Poland, revolution reached a climax in 1794 with Kosciusko. In Hungary in the same year seventy-five members of a republican conspiracy were arrested. In Greece, in 1797, delegates from Athens, Crete, Macedonia, and other parts of the Greek world met at a secret conclave in Morea; they planned an uprising of all Greeks against the Ottoman Empire, if only the French would send weapons, ammunition, and a few units of the French army. A Russian found that the “charm of revolution” had penetrated “deep into Siberia.”

And at the other extremity of Western Civilization, in the thinly settled American West, long after the Terror in France is supposed to have brought Americans to their senses, there was still so much lingering pro-French feeling, so much democratic and republican sentiment, so much inclination to break away from the allegedly aristocratic East, that the outgoing president, George Washington, in his Farewell Address, earnestly begged his Western countrymen to put their trust in the United States. In 1798 the popular hero, George Rogers Clark, holding a commission as brigadier-general in the army of the French Republic, attempted a secret recruiting of Kentuckians to invade and “revolutionize” Louisiana, which was then Spanish, and meant the whole territory west of the Mississippi. Blocked by an unsympathetic United States government, he fled to St. Louis, where, on the uttermost fringes of the civilized world, there was a society of French sans-culottes to receive him.

At Quebec in 1797 a man was hanged, drawn, and quartered as a dangerous revolutionary. At Quito, in what is now Ecuador, the first librarian of the public library was tortured and imprisoned for political agitation. A republican conspiracy was discovered at Bahia, in Brazil, in 1798. A Negro at Buenos Aires testified that Frenchmen in the city were plotting to liberate slaves in an uprising against the Spanish crown. In the High Andes, at the old silver town of Potosi, far from foreign influences on the coasts, the governor was horrified to discover men who toasted liberty and drank to France. The British government, in 1794, a year before occupying Cape Town, feared that there were too many “democrats,” eager to welcome the French, among the Dutch at the Cape of Good Hope.⁴

All of these agitations, upheavals, intrigues, and conspiracies were part of one great movement. It was not simply a question of the “spread” or “impact” or “influence” of the French Revolution. Not all revolutionary agitation since 1918 has been produced by the Kremlin, and not all such agitation in the 1790’s was due to the machinations of revolutionary Paris. It is true, and not without contemporary significance, that persons of revolutionary persuasion were able to install revolutionary regimes only where they could receive help from the French republican army. But revolutionary aims and sympathies existed throughout Europe and America. They arose everywhere out of local, genuine, and specific causes; or, contrariwise, they reflected conditions that were universal throughout the Western world. They were not imported from one country to another. They were not imitated from the French, or at least not imitated blindly. There was one big revolutionary agitation, not simply a French revolution due to purely French causes, and foolishly favored by irresponsible people in other co...