2

Democracy’s Second Coming

AS IT ENTERED THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY, democracy was still very much a pariah word. Only the most insouciant and incorrigible dissidents, like John Toland or Alberto Radicati di Passerano,1 could take their political stand upon it, even clandestinely or amongst intimates. Anyone who chose to do so placed themselves far beyond the borders of political life, at the outer fringes of the intellectual lives of virtually all their contemporaries. Yet, within a century, something had changed decisively. We can pin down with some confidence where the change first became apparent. What is harder to judge is what caused it to occur.

What brought democracy back to political life, late in the eighteenth century, was two great political crises on either side of the North Atlantic. The first arose in the mid-1760s amongst the set of British colonies in North America which had never fallen under French rule; the second, some two decades later, in metropolitan France itself. The two settings could scarcely have been more different. The thirteen British colonies which chose to revolt formed as fluid a society and as dynamic an economic milieu as any in the world, opening out on to a vast and still largely unknown (if far from uninhabited) landscape.² Ancien régime France (as it soon came to be called) was the proudest and most self-consciously civilized state in continental Europe, locked in a century-long struggle with England for world mastery. It was the epitome of absolute monarchy, the formidable heritage of the Sun King Louis XIV; but its haughty rulers found themselves challenged increasingly by an assertive society, ever more suspicious of their political intentions and ever less reconciled to their own effective exclusion from political choice. In America’s War of Independence, France threw its military and diplomatic weight behind the revolting colonies. For a time these two arenas meshed, leaving by its close a new nation and a high water mark for France’s naval and military triumph, but also a burden of governmental debt which neither the organization of France’s economy nor the structure of its state was equipped to handle. Six years after the war ended, France too found itself in revolution, a domestic struggle so drastic that it gave the world a new and uniquely disruptive political conception—the modern idea of revolution itself—that spilled irresistibly across the continent of Europe and beyond.

The two crises differed in their causes, their rhythms, and their outcomes; but each has marked the history of democracy ever since in indelible ways. The term democracy played no role at all in initiating the crisis of the North American colonies, and no positive role in defining the political structures that brought it to its strikingly durable close. Where it featured at all in the language of America’s political leaders in the course of their great struggle, it did so most consistently and prominently as the familiar name for a negative model, drawn from the experience of Athens, of an outcome which they must at all costs avoid. Only in retrospect, as America’s new constitution was put to work and the new nation went on its way, did the perspective alter sharply. When it did so, the familiar practices of England’s own representative government, above all the election of a key body of its legislators (in North America, usually on a far broader franchise than in most English parliamentary constituencies), found themselves rechristened in the language of the ancient world. Once they had been so, Americans began to see themselves, in the mirror of their protracted colonial past, as having long been democrats already without knowing it. The classic rendering of that picture was given not by an American author but by a young French aristocrat, Alexis de Tocqueville, writing some half a century after America’s independence, and explaining the Americans not merely to his fellow countrymen and European contemporaries but also to themselves, more insinuatingly than anyone else has ever done before or since.3 The key to America’s experience as Tocqueville saw it was also the source of its exemplary force in due course for every other future human society across the globe, the pervasiveness throughout its ways of life and forms of awareness of the brooding presence of democracy itself. In Tocqueville’s book Democracy in America,⁴ we find for the first time the recognition that democracy is the key to the distinctiveness of modern political experience and that anyone who hopes to grasp the character of that experience must focus on and take in just what it is that democracy implies.

America’s Revolution was an anxious response to a widely perceived threat to liberties long enjoyed, the very liberties which, as time went by, were to form the evidence for its protracted democratic past.⁵ Once those liberties had been successfully defended, or won back by force of arms, the constitutional order which the Americans constructed to secure them in future came in retrospect to seem a uniquely clear-sighted exercise in thinking through the requirements for political liberty and implementing the conclusions of this remarkably public process of deliberation. Nothing quite like it had ever occurred before; and no subsequent episode in constitution making has fully matched the acumen in diagnosis shown by the new nation’s political leaders, still less the remarkable longevity of the remedies on which they settled. Ninety years later William Ewart Gladstone, Queen Victoria’s great and infuriating Prime Minister, described the product of their efforts as ‘the most wonderful work ever struck off at a given time by the brain and purpose of man’.⁶ In the aftermath of America’s savage Civil War, the grimmest evidence of the limits to diagnosis and to remedy, this was a generous assessment. But it scarcely conveyed the levels of effort, the range of participants, or the fluster and animosity of the process of decision making which had made it possible.

The Constitution was initially drafted in a secret Convention held in the city of Philadelphia between May and September 1787, through an elaborate process of manoeuvre and bargaining.7 The resulting draft was first made public on 17 September 1787, and put to the twelve State ratifying Conventions, for their approval or subsequent emendation. For the next ten months it was debated publicly State by State. By July of the following year, all but North Carolina and Rhode Island had duly chosen to ratify it. During the opening session of the First Congress which met under its auspices, between March and September 1789, as Revolution accelerated in France, two fundamental elements were added to it. A Bill of Rights, the first ten Amendments to the Constitution, drafted by James Madison on the basis of scores of recommendations from the individual State Conventions, was sent back to the States for their approval; and a Judiciary Act, creating the Federal court system, and endowing it with the requisite powers, was passed by the Senate.⁸

The most intense phase in this process followed the initial publication of the Constitution. It involved not merely the 1,500 delegates to the State ratifying Conventions, who worked over its entire text, but a volume of public and private discussion, in pulpit, newspaper press, and personal correspondence, which reached across the entire nation.⁹ Through this hubbub of assessment and argument, one text in particular now looms with extraordinary authority. It appeared at the time as a series of anonymous newspaper articles by three already prominent political figures, James Madison, Alexander Hamilton, and John Jay. Hastily written week by week, and barely co-ordinated between the three authors, whose views differed appreciably from one another, it intervened boldly and effectively in the ratification debate. The case which the Federalist made for the merits of the new system of government, while it failed to convince a great many amongst its immediate audience,¹⁰ rapidly became the barely disputed rationale for the basis of America’s Republic ever since. It was a case for the need for, but also for the safety of, a strong central government, which could raise revenues, control naval and military forces, and sign treaties with foreign powers like any other state, but do so in a way which posed no threat to the personal liberties which the Americans had won back at such peril from their former colonial masters.

The case for America’s Revolution had been exaggeratedly simple: that unrestricted power was a mortal threat to personal liberty, and that Britain’s imperial government was moving deliberately and with some energy to dismantle all restrictions upon its power. More than half of the Federalist was written by Alexander Hamilton,11 one of the most economically sophisticated of America’s leaders and uniquely sensitive to the commercial and strategic threats and opportunities which it was sure to face in the centuries to come. But the essays which have given the Federalist its unique authority were not written by Hamilton. Their author was the shy, diligent, unabrasive elder son of a Virginia planter, thirty-six years of age as the Constitutional Convention opened in Philadelphia, James Madison. By May 1787¹² Madison had played an active part in America’s struggle against Britain and in the tangled politics of the new nation for over eleven years. He brought to the Federal Convention an elaborate set of proposals on how the American Confederation, with its single-chamber Congress, could be reconstructed as three independent branches of government, with a two-House legislature with distinct responsibilities, elected on contrasting bases of representation.¹³ The first delegate to reach Philadelphia from out of State¹⁴ and one of the very few present on the day when the Convention was due to begin, Madison, together with his colleagues from the Virginia delegation, seized the opportunity of this forced interlude to draft a fifteen-point Plan of Government around which all subsequent debate revolved. Characteristically, he also set himself, once the Convention formally opened, to the enduring gratitude of historians, to take a full record of its debates.¹⁵ His main purpose in doing so was to ensure his own grasp of an extraordinarily complicated and consequential agenda. The Plan of Government was not the work of Madison alone; and the constitutional draft which emerged from the Convention’s deliberations clashed in places with some of his strong convictions. But in his steady, patient, unhistrionic, and wonderfully thoughtful way he did more than anyone to give it its ultimate shape.

The central purpose of that shape he set out and defended with exemplary clarity in the most celebrated of all the Federalist Papers, number 10, echoing the arguments of a letter composed a month earlier to his fellow Virginian and close friend, Thomas Jefferson, drafter of the Declaration of Independence. The tenth Federalist sets out a remedy for the violence of faction, the key weakness of popular governments16 and source of the ‘instability, injustice and confusion’ which plague their public councils, ‘the mortal diseases under which popular governments have everywhere perished’ and ‘the favourite and fruitful topics’ of the adversaries to liberty. Faction cannot be eliminated except by eliminating liberty itself. Its latent causes are ‘sown in the nature of man’, in the variations in human faculties, the contrasts in the ownership of property, and the consequent divisions of society into different interests and parties. The sources of party identification are endlessly variable; but the most potent and consistent of them is the ‘various and unequal division of property’.¹⁷ The propertied and those without property ‘have ever formed distinct interests in society’. (The immediate back-cloth to this perception in 1787 was the issue of whether to honour or repudiate the vast debts, always to individual creditors, which every American State had run up in the course of winning its independence.) How were these sharply opposed interests to be balanced justly against one another?

The causes of faction, Madison was very sure, cannot be removed. All that could reasonably be hoped for was to control its effects.¹⁸ A minority faction could provoke endless trouble; but within a republican government it ought never to find an opportunity to impose itself through the law. Where a faction forms a majority, however, popular governments give it every opportunity to sacrifice both the rights of minorities and the public good to its own passions and interests.19 The key challenge to popular government was to secure both public good and private rights against the threat of a factious majority, without at the same time sacrificing the spirit and form of popular government. A ‘pure Democracy’, Madison insisted,

a Society, consisting of a small number of citizens, who assemble and administer the Government in person, can admit of no cure for the mischiefs of faction. A common passion or interest will, in almost every case, be felt by a majority of the whole; a communication and concert results from the form of Government itself; and there is nothing to check the inducements to sacrifice the weaker party, or an obnoxious individual.²⁰

That is why such democracies have always been so turbulent and contentious, have always proved incompatible with personal security or property rights, and ‘have in general been as short in their lives, as they have been violent in their deaths’. Theoretical partisans of democracy, accordingly, have had to presume, in Madison’s view absurdly, that reducing men to perfect political equality would at the same time render them perfectly equal in their possessions and uniform and harmonious in their opinions and passions.

In place of that perilous project of levelling and homogenization, Madison offered a different model which promised to provide a cure for the ills of democracy: ‘a Republic, by which I mean a Government in which the scheme of representation takes place’. A Republic in Madison’s sense differed from a pure Democracy in several ways. ‘The two great points of difference between a Democracy and a Republic are, first, the delegation of the Government, in the latter, to a small number of citizens: secondly, the greater number of citizens, and greater sphere of country, over which the latter may be extended.’ The Union of American States covered a vast territory and took in a very substantial population. It required a scheme of government which could encompass both in a way that ‘Democratic Government’ plainly could not. It was compelled to choose, therefore, a relatively small number of representatives to act on behalf of a very large number of citizens; and this very selectivity, Madison optimistically assumed, would ensure the quality of the representative so chosen. The scale of its territory and the size of its citizen body would create a wider variety of parties and interests, and lessen the risk of majority coalitions intent on encroaching on the rights of other citizens. Even where such coalitions did arise, the need to operate politically on a far larger stage would itself impede the co-ordination of surreptitious and plainly disreputable policies. Religious bigotry, ‘a rage for paper money, for an abolition of debts, for an equal division of property, or for any other improper or wicked project’ are far less likely ‘to pervade the whole body of the Union’ than they are to infect a particular State, just as they are more likely to taint a particular county or district than an entire State.21

The extent and structure of the Union, therefore, could and would provide ‘a Republican remedy for the diseases most incident to Republican Government.’²²

Three and half months later, in Federalist 63, Madison returned to this judgment, qualified one aspect of it, but reaffirmed its central element. The principle of Representation formed the pivot of the American Republic.²³ There were elements of representation even in the purest of Greek democracies, in the election of public officials who held executive power.²⁴ ‘The true distinction between these communities and the American Government’ was ‘the total exclusion of the people in their collective capacity from any share’ in it,²⁵ not the comprehensive exclusion of popular representatives from the administration of the polis. Successful representative government would have been impracticable in these small and all too intimate communities. But on the scale of the American Union, the evident need for it could and would provide it with enough political support for it to operate with sufficient calm and for long enough to make its solid advantages very clearly apparent.

Even though we use the term democracy so differently today, the force of Madison’s insistence on the total exclusion of the people in their collective capacity from any share in the American Government still comes as something of a shock. For Madison himself, however, it was the clearest evidence how unlike the democratic city states of classical Greece the new state which he was struggling to defend really was, and the proof that it, unlike them, was not a democracy at all. In his vocabulary, as in Plato’s or Aristotle’s, a people totally excluded in their collective capacity from the government of their community could not conceivably be thought to rule it directly themselves. What controlled it in the end was the will of the majority of its citizens. But immediate control over it rested somewhere quite different. Whatever else the new American state might or might not be called, it could not properly be termed a democracy.

A representative government differed decisively from a democracy not in the fundamental structure of authority which underlay it, but in the institutional mechanisms which directed its course and helped to keep it in being over time. These depended for their effect not solely on the legal precision with which they had been defined (‘parchment barriers against the encroaching spirit of power’),26 but also and more decisively on the practical relations between them and the political energies on which they could hope to draw. In a democracy, ‘where a multitude of people exercise in person the legislative functions, and are continually exposed by their incapacity for regular deliberation and concerted measures to the ambitious intrigues of the executive magistrates’, the threat of tyranny might come principally from the executive. But in America, the principal threat came from the legislature, the threat, as Jefferson had put it in his Notes on the State of Virginia three years earlier, of ‘elective despotism’.²⁷

As the Americans moved towards Revolution in 1774, John Jay, a young New York aristocrat, and in due course co-author of the Federalist and future Secretary of State, described them with pardonable exaggeration as ‘the first people whom heaven has favoured with an opportunity of deliberating upon and choosing forms of government under which they should live’.²⁸ At this stage the opportunity seemed exhilarating, and the risks associated with it (in stark contrast to those of defying the British) relatively negligible. If the term democracy carried no particular inspiration, it held little or no immediate menace. Even such a hardened political sceptic as John Adams felt confident that ‘a democratic despotism is a contradiction in terms’.29 The new State constitutions redrew the boundaries of electoral districts to make them more equal, insisted on annual elections, widened the suffrage, imposed residential requirements on electors and representatives alike, and empowered constituents to instruct their representatives.³⁰ In doing so, they reinforced and sharpened a key contrast between American and British experiences of political representation, with the Old World emphasis on historical continuity, the sovereign unity of a single community, and the symbolic and virtual character of the links between represented and representer discarded firmly for an insistence on actuality, choice, consent, and an ever fuller and more equal participation.³¹

In the immediate aftermath of the Constitutional Convention this process of deliberation and choice was still very much in train; and there were no surviving public advocates of a less participatory or egalitarian basis on which to approach it. What had become drastically more salient were the risks of failing to reach a firm conclusion, and the substantial contribution which democracy itself could and almost certainly would make to aggravating those risks.

At this stage the Americans had in essence four options. They might have chosen to repudiate the most democratic elements in their new state, the uniquely prominent place which it gave its free male population for wide popular participation in conditions of near political equality in framing and taking public decisions. In continental Europe, even a century later, there were still many prominent (and sometimes powerful) defenders of this response; and between the two World Wars, in Europe and also in Japan, Fascist governments sought to implement some aspects of it, with devastating consequences at home and abroad. But in America, with the defeated Loyalists fled to Canada or across the Atlantic, it had no surviving public advocates.

They might also, as Madison noted, have chosen instead to press the principle of political equality (still confined to males, and still juxtaposed with little apology to a very substantial slave population) boldly forward, so that it clashed with and overrode the claims of property, abolished debt, redistributed large land holdings, and remade a society to be equal all through. Here too, at this point, there seem to have been no advocates amongst the Americans for this more drastic, and potentially equally destructive, alternative.

More realistically perhaps, they might also very readily have failed to choose at all, recoiling from any strengthening of the central power of America’s new state for fear that this must re-create the alien and always potentially tyrannical structure from which they had just escaped at such a high cost. In effect this would have been the immediate practical upshot of the victory of the Antifederalists, a passive acceptance of the existing forms of government, as these had already emerged under the Articles of Confederation, with no effective over-arching structure between the individual State governments.

The option they chose, in broad outline the option which Madison and his fellow authors pressed upon them, was embodied in the new Constitution, as this survived the ordeal of ratification and amendment, and then of implementation in Washington’s first Presidency. That option gave the Americans, and in due course the world, a great deal. It failed to reconcile a regime of political liberty (at least for men) with the widespread ownership of slaves, a reconciliation effected only partially even three-quarters of a century later in the convulsions of Civil War. Even today there is as little agreement as ever over how far that reconciliation has since been carried, or what hope remains that it will ever be completed. What is certain is that the option taken in 1787 has conspicuously failed to eliminate the egalitarian impulse from America’s continuing political imagination. But it has given that impulse a distinctive cast, rendering it far less vital, insistent, or prominent an element within the American imagination than it has proved in most other societies across the globe over the following two centuries. It secured the new Republic extremely effectively, and, as we now know, for a very long time. In doing so, it turned the United States into the most politically definite, the best consolidated, and the most politically self-confident society on earth. It also, over time and to the vast prospective gratification of its raffish and impatient Secretary of the Treasury, Alexander Hamilton, opened the way for it to become overwhelmingly the most powerful state in human history.

When Madison looked back on the making of the Constitution in his old age,32 evoking ‘the distracted condition of affairs at home, and the utter want of respect abroad’ which surrounded its birth, he still saw every reason for pride in ‘a constitution which has brought such a happy order out of so gloomy a chaos’. No human government could eliminate the risk of the abuse of power. But America’s federal republic, on the evidence of over a third of a century, had cut those risks to a bare minimum.³³ It had not done so by embracing the claims of democracy without reservation; and Madison himself shows little sign of warming to the term in later life. But he did recognize how deep the inroads of the new conception of democracy now were, and how futile it was to resist them openly. By the early 1820s, property qualifications for the suffrage, which had seemed so obviously benign at the time of the Convention, had become a pointless anachronism.³⁴ A more obdurate conservative like Chancellor James Kent of New York might still not hesitate to argue overtly for their key role in taming ‘the evil genius of democracy’.³⁵ But for Madison by this point, where a propertyless majority threatened a propertied minority, this was not a danger which could appropriately be handled by excluding that majority from the franchise. To exclude a majority from the suffrage ‘violates the vital principle of free government, that those who are to be bound by laws ought to have a voice in making them’.³⁶ It also establishes a basis for governing which was certain in practice to destroy any free government: ‘it would engage the numerical and physical force in a constant struggle against the public authority, unless kept down by a standing army, fatal to all parties’.37 Instead, Madison placed his hopes, over and above the internal restraints of the Constitution he had done so much to create, on the ameliorative impact of education. In its sobriety, his conclusion had much in common with the verdict, delivered fifteen years earlier by the prominent architect Benjamin Latrobe, in a letter to Jefferson’s Italian friend Philip Mazzei: ‘After the adoption of the federal constitution, the extension of the right of Suffrage in all the states to the majority of the adult male citizens, planted a germ which has gradually evolved, and has spread actual and practical democracy and political equality over the whole union.’³⁸ The results were undoubtedly impressive: ‘the greatest sum of happiness that perhaps any nation ever enjoyed’. But they did have their costs: ‘our state legislature does not have one individual of superior talents. The fact is, that superior talents actually excite distrust’. This general erosion of deference and social distinction had ‘solid and general advantages’; but ‘to a cultivated mind, to a man of letters, to a lover of the arts’, he noted frankly to his equally fastidious correspondent, ‘it presents a very unpleasant picture’.³⁹ Henry James was waiting in the wings.

What presented this distasteful picture was a democratic politics become wholly routine, an entire way of political life, with its own logic and its own all too pervasive culture. Once become in this way a matter of routine, democracy might still be threatened by the bitter struggle between South and North over slavery, or perhaps even by the depths of the Great Depression almost seventy years later, seismic pressures on the foundations of the social order or the economy which sustained it. But, within politics itself, democracy had come to dominate the landscape. It faced no surviving rivals and was seldom under much pressure to reflect on its own nature, let alone defend itself against a real challenge to its ascendancy. For Americans, from then on, it filled the horizon of politics; and anyone who chose to reject it publicly simply rendered themselves politically impotent. In America, the battle for democracy, as Americans had come to understand it, was won effectively by default, even if much of its substance had been won much earlier and with much effort under very different names.

It was in Europe, late in the eighteenth century, that the term first figures in the speech of political actors, struggling to transform a state, and seeking to explain the basis on which they were planning their strategies and coming to understand the implications of their goals. In this guise it made its initial entry, sporadically and very much on the margins, in the Patriot Revolt which revitalized the faded political life of the Dutch Republic in the 1780s. At the outset this revolt was diffuse in its goals and more than a little confused in its political strategies.40 But between 1785 and 1787 a number of the Patriot leaders at times shook themselves free of the hallowed squabbles between the wealthy urban oligarchs and the House of Orange, which reached back to the origins of the United Netherlands, and set out a novel and consciously egalitarian political platform.

The institutional key to the most radical aspects of their challenge lay in the urban popular militias of the Dutch Provinces, the Free Corps⁴¹ which met in regular assemblies from December 1784 onwards, usually in Utrecht.⁴² As the far from egalitarian Patriot leader, Baron Joan Derk van der Capellen tot den Pol, noted: ‘Liberty and unarmed people stand in direct contradiction’;⁴³ and by December 1784 the Patriot movement had taken up arms. At the peak of the movement, a delegate of the Delft Free Corps proclaimed ringingly:

The Burgher, dear comrades, no longer wanders in the shadows. He can show himself fearlessly in the light of our fiercely breaking dawn. The Sun of his freedom and Happiness shines more strongly from hour to hour, and we can assure you on the most powerful grounds that before she reaches her zenith there will be no more Tyrants of the People to be found in this land. The Armed Freedom will blot out their very name.44

The Provinces of the Dutch Republic split bitterly between Patriot and Orange parties. By 1787, suppressing the Patriot movement required the intervention of a Prussian army, despatched to rescue Princess Wilhelmina of Orange, a Hohenzollern princess who had had the temerity to set out to travel to the Hague to raise the Orange flag and the misfortune to be apprehended en route by the Gouda Free Corps, and treated brusquely and with some indelicacy by her irritated captors.⁴⁵ By September 1787, the Prussian forces, under the command of the Duke of Brunswick, had restored the rule of the Stadholder at the Hague; and by 10 October, the last bastion of Patriot resistance, the city of Amsterdam, surrendered to him.

The Patriot movement did not at any point define itself as a movement for democracy. Its goal, in so far as it had a coherent and common one, was to establish a constitutional order for the Dutch Provinces which represented their inhabitants at large, and freed them from the control of a potentially oppressive Orange monarchy, or a wealthy and entrenched urban oligarchy, equally intent on usurping the people’s powers.

In seeking to define a less oppressive and more appropriate form of representation for the Dutch nation, the Free Corps leadership found themselves on at least two occasions adopting a position which it was entirely natural to describe as democratic. The third Free Corps assembly, held in June 1785 in Utrecht, drew up an act of Association,⁴⁶ pledging its participants to defend a true Republican constitution to the last drop of their blood, to restore the lost rights of the burghers, and to strive for a ‘People’s government by representation [Volksregierung bij representatie]’. A few weeks later, a Free Corps assembly in the Province of Holland adopted a still more revolutionary manifesto, the Leiden Draft. Its preamble stated boldly that ‘The citizens of a State, above all of a Republic founded on Liberty, confer this on each of them, head for head…. Liberty is an inalienable right, adhering to all burghers of the Netherlands commonwealth. No power on earth, much less any power derived truly from the people … can challenge or obstruct the enjoyment of this liberty.’ Its Articles affirmed the sovereignty of the People, the responsibility of elected representatives to their electors, the absolute right of free speech as foundation for a free constitution, and the denominationally impartial admission of all citizens to the militia (the effective coercive guarantee of their continuing freedom). Taken together, they formed a compelling expression of ‘the ideas of a Republican popular sovereignty’.47

In the aftermath of its military suppression, the Patriot movement was soon caught up inextricably in the international political and military maelstrom of France’s great Revolution. As it disappeared into this swirling chaos, its presumptive heir, the Batavian Republic of 1795–1805, shed any trace of national autonomy and came to seem a mere puppet of the French state in the latter’s rapid metamorphoses. At its nadir, the Emperor Napoleon was rude enough to describe the Netherlands as an alluvium washed down by ‘the principal rivers of my empire’.⁴⁸ But the Dutch themselves naturally retained a keener interest in their domestic disagreements. As they strove to define these more clearly, they found themselves increasingly attracted to a vocabulary drawn largely from Paris. In the course of these efforts, democracy and democrat won an unprecedented prominence in Dutch political programmes and identities. By 1795 Amsterdam boasted a leading newspaper, De Democraten, and a political club whose goal was the winning of a ‘democratisch systema’. By 1797 France’s own Directory was assuring its Holland agent that what the Dutch wished for was a ‘free and democratic constitution’. In January of the next year, a third of the members of the Dutch Constituent Assembly duly signed a petition for ‘a democratic representative constitution’; and in the succeeding month a committee of the same assembly unwisely boasted to the French agent that the Dutch were ‘capable of a greater measure of democracy than would be suitable to the French’.49 By this point, aristocrats had long surrendered the centre of the stage. But in Holland, as in France itself, it had been Aristocrats who first served to define a political grouping, well before Democrats could come to do so. In 1786 Gijsbert Karel van Hogendorp, a long-term partisan of the House of Orange, described his country in French to a correspondent as troubled by a cabal, which people say ‘is divided into aristocrats and democrats’.⁵⁰ Van Hogendorp himself was certainly by Dutch standards very much an aristocrat, even before he became Pensionary of Rotterdam in 1787. He moved in elevated circles; and it was his son who provided the immediate stimulus to Princess Wilhelmina’s ill-judged escapade.⁵¹ He was also a practised caballer in his own right, and was still intriguing vigorously on behalf of the Orange cause at the time of the Orange restoration a quarter of a century later.⁵² But in 1786 his perspective on Dutch factional squabbles still aspired to be external, detached, cosmopolitan, and sophisticated: a painstaking exercise in political judgment. It was not itself a political act; nor was it cast in terms intended as either domestic or distinctively Dutch.

The first setting in which the term democrat does appear incontestably as a pole of domestic political affiliation in Europe’s (or the world’s) modern history was not in one of the more advanced states, economies, or societies of the continent (in Holland, France, or Britain), but in what is now Belgium and was then the Austrian Netherlands. The provinces of the Austrian Netherlands, all subject to the Austrian Emperor, formed the southern half of the Low Countries which Spain contrived to reconquer after the sixteenth-century Revolt of the Netherlands. As a result of that reconquest, and in drastic contrast to the Provinces which got away, it was still solidly Catholic, and effectively excluded from international commerce by the closing of the river Scheldt to seagoing traffic, enforced by the terms of Dutch independence. Within it, the Church dominated political and economic life to a remarkable (and somewhat stifling) degree, making it a virtual ‘museum of medieval corporate liberties’.⁵³ The Dutch Patriot refugees who fled across its borders in 1787, as the Duke of Brunswick reimposed order, found it ‘backward, superstitious, priestridden and oligarchic’.54 Belgium’s awakening from its political slumbers came very much from the outside, and in response to the spirited reform initiatives of the Emperor Joseph II, the archetype of the Enlightened Despot. Joseph first set himself, with characteristic vigour, thoroughness, and lack of tact, to reform the penal law by abolishing torture, to rationalize the activities of the Church (dissolving a number of religious houses, regulating pilgrimages and the timing of popular festivities), challenging the guild monopolies, deregulating the terms on which masters could employ labour, and opening up public offices to non-Catholics.⁵⁵ In 1787, he went on, more drastically, to reorganize the entire administrative and judicial system of the Provinces. This was seen across Belgium, accurately enough, as an assault on the old order, and duly resented as such. The nobles of Alost, unabashed aristocrats to a man, complained forcefully that ‘Our right to judge is our property, Lord Emperor. We do not hold it by grace, but have received it from our fathers and bought it with blood and gold. It should not be taken from us against our will.’⁵⁶ The lawyers of Brussels, less grandly but no less cogently, remonstrated that they had paid good money to secure the positions they held, and done so, and laboured to acquire the knowledge needed to discharge their responsibilities, in the confident expectation of supporting their wives and children on the proceeds.⁵⁷ Their rights to do so rested on the historical foundation stone of the Province’s liberties, the celebrated Joyeuse Entrée, issued by the Duke of Brabant over four centuries earlier in 1355.

Late in 1788 the Estates of Brabant and Hainault refused to pay taxes to the Emperor, and Joseph II responded by repudiating, over four centuries since its initial proclamation, the Joyeuse Entrée.⁵⁸ The two main leaders of the revolt, Van der Noot and Vonck, were each Brussels lawyers. Van der Noot was wealthy and at least related to the aristocracy; Vonck, the son of an appreciably poorer farmer. Van der Noot assailed the Austrians in an incendiary pamphlet, but promptly fled abroad and busied himself with unavailing efforts to persuade the House of Orange to intervene and reunite the Netherlands. Vonck drew the moral of Brunswick’s brisk suppression of the Dutch Patriots, and set himself instead, along with a group of Brussels friends, to organize a secret society Pro Aris et Focis (For Altars and Hearths), to co-ordinate groups of youthful volunteers to travel abroad for military training, and link these to a clandestine network of sympathizers within Belgium itself. Vonck attracted many followers across the entire range of Belgian society, from the abbots of the wealthiest monasteries to the grandest of the secular nobility.

On 18 June 1789 Joseph responded by dissolving the Estates of Brabant and annulling the Joyeuse Entrée. By this time France’s own Revolution was well on its way and the Estates General had begun to meet in Versailles.59 Only the day before, the representatives of the Third Estate proclaimed themselves the National Assembly.⁶⁰ In August, Revolution broke out too in the Prince-Bishopric of Liège,⁶¹ and young Vonckists flooded across the frontier to prepare themselves for the armed struggle. In practice, little struggle was required, since the Austrian authorities gave up without a fight in one province after another. The network of urban revolutionary committees which Vonck had established set itself to reconstruct the patchwork of medieval liberties as a single sovereign national government. Vonck’s allies in this task ‘were called Vonckists by their enemies, but democrats by themselves’.⁶² These enemies, unsurprisingly, included not only the earlier followers of Van der Noot, but also most of the major beneficiaries of the established order, with the great Abbot of Tongerloo now prominent within their ranks:⁶³ ‘The abbots as a group represent the secular and regular clergy, and indeed they represent the whole rural country as well, being the largest landowners; and, finally, usage has always been this way, and should remain so, since it is constitutional, and the Constitution cannot be changed.’⁶⁴

It was an unequal fight. The Vonckists found themselves tarred with the menace of France’s Revolution, especially after March 1790, when many of their leaders were arrested, and the remainder, with numerous of their followers, found themselves forced to flee into exile in France itself. They also found themselves portrayed, not entirely erroneously, as catspaws of the new Austrian Emperor Leopold II, whose reform plans, if less draconic in style than those of Joseph II, were every bit as out of sympathy with the hallowed customs and whimsical privileges of Brabant. Neither alignment was reassuring to the foreign champions of the other; but the two together, however inconsistent the combination, were more than enough to unite a large majority of the Belgians against the Democrats. In June 1790, in a rehearsal for the bloodily suppressed counter-revolutionary rising in the Vendée three years later,65 the parish priests of rural Brabant roused their devout peasant congregations by the thousands, and marched threateningly, week after week, into the centre of Brussels, carrying the insignia of their threatened faith, and brandishing an unnerving array of agricultural weaponry.⁶⁶ Vonck himself, who came from just such a parish, had never thought it wise to adopt a public programme for the democratic reconstruction of Belgium as a state. His followers did not see themselves as democrats, because they had chosen from the outset to pursue a clearer and more extreme version of France’s national reconstruction. They did so because the immediate enemy they faced was a far denser and an even more arbitrary array of aristocratic privileges than those of France’s first two Estates, and because this enemy was backed by much wider popular support than their French equivalents proved able to draw on. In Belgium, as in Algeria a little over two hundred years later,⁶⁷ a democratic outcome chosen by a majority of the adult inhabitants would certainly not have meant the establishment and consolidation of a secular and democratic republic. The pays réel, given the opportunity, would have voted any such democracy down without a moment’s hesitation. No one thinking through the implications of the Vonckist movement and its fate in retrospect could possibly have inferred from it that the cause of democracy was destined to sweep the world.

To see why democracy faced that future, we certainly need to bear in mind its fate in North America over the next century, and the majestic rise of America’s economy under its aegis. But, beyond the Americas, the impact of these experiences on the politics of other countries was still quite modest until the First World War, and did not really come into its own until the aftermath of the Second. Before then, democracy’s unsteady dispersion across the world was no testimony to American power, and not much even to the force of American example. If anything, it testified, rather, to one of two things. It might be evidence of the intrinsic power of democracy itself as an idea (odd for a political term which had not even begun its life as a conception of the politically desirable, and which had long served to label the quite evidently politically undesirable). More plausibly, but still quite puzzlingly, it might instead be testimony to the force of another and far more obtrusively ambiguous historical example, the awesome Revolution which overwhelmed France.

What happened in France in the few short years between 1788 and 1794 changed the structure of political possibilities for human communities across the world almost beyond recognition. It did so, for reasons we still very vaguely comprehend, both radically and permanently. Even when it was over, with Robespierre’s overthrow in Thermidor in 1794, or Napoleon’s rise in Brumaire 1798, or on the plains of Waterloo, quite close to Brussels, in 1815 when Napoleon fell for the last time, it left a different conception of what politics meant, a new vision of how societies can or must organize themselves politically, and a transformed sense of the scale of threat which their own political life can pose to any society and all within their reach. It was within this new conception that democracy forced itself, slowly but inexorably, upon one community after another. It made these inroads, once again, not through its prominence in the speech of the Revolution’s leading actors, or through the names adopted to pick out political groupings, factions, or institutions. Those names—Jacobins, Girondins, the Mountain, the Left—all had their own history. Some, in due course, cast lengthy shadows over distant corners of the world. But none of them ever competed, even momentarily, for the role of world-wide basis for political legitimacy; and none ever offered a comparably firm standard for political authority to live up to. The democratic legacy of the Revolution was very much the product of its intense and often devastating political struggles. But it was no echo of its public symbols,68 nor of the language in which those struggles were openly conducted. Only at a handful of points was the category of democracy deployed explicitly to define what was at stake within them, and even then only once at the storm centre of the struggle itself. Only in retrospect, as the most detached and analytical categories through which Europeans had striven for centuries to grasp what politics means and why it operates as it does were set to work to fathom just what the Revolution as a whole really had meant, did democracy slowly begin to emerge as its central issue, and do so in its own right and under its own name.

At this point, it linked back to one of the most intriguing visions of France’s political predicament earlier in the century, the Considérations sur le gouvernement ancien et présent de la France.⁶⁹ The Considérations was the work of a prominent aristocrat, René-Louis de Voyer de Paulmy, Marquis d’Argenson. D’Argenson came from a long line of royal officials, and his father had been the Paris chief of police.⁷⁰ He served himself in several elevated positions, most notably as Minister of Foreign Affairs. But he was too brusque and too independent to be a practised courtier; and in many of his loyalties and much of his social imagination he was a traitor to his order. The Considérations was first published, anonymously and from a highly imperfect manuscript, in 1764.⁷¹ It set out a plan for the political reconstruction of France which D’Argenson had already advanced as early as 1737, and which he for long hoped to persuade the King to permit him to carry out himself in the role of First Minister. In manuscript form, and subsequently in print, it had, as his son boasted in a Preface to the greatly augmented second edition twenty years later, left its mark on most of the great French political works from the middle of the century onwards: the Physiocrats, Quesnay, Mirabeau, Montesquieu, Turgot, Rousseau, Mably.72

D’Argenson’s plan was a striking expression of the thèse royale, the perspective on French government, economy, and society which saw in an enlightened monarchical reform the best hope for reshaping and rationalizing France as a state and society, and serving the interests of its people as a whole.⁷³ But D’Argenson approached the task of reform, as the title of his manuscript made clear,⁷⁴ not by seeking merely to restructure the royal administration, but by asking himself ‘how far democracy could be admitted into monarchical government’. This was scarcely the sort of question calculated to win cheap popularity at the court of Versailles. In later decades, as the royal government clashed with its principal constitutional courts, the Parlements, D’Argenson at points modified the sharpness with which he sought to exclude the aristocracy from the strategic niches which enabled them to obstruct royal power.⁷⁵ But what marked him out throughout his political life was the extent to which he believed it essential to introduce democratic procedures and institutions into the way in which France was governed. What made these procedures indispensable, in his eyes, was less the difficulty of enforcing the common good through a purely monarchical structure of power, or any prospective divergence between the interests of the monarch and those of his people, than the sheer difficulty of locating what the common good was in the first place. For this latter task, democratic institutions and procedures enjoyed unique advantages. He put this point with particular clarity in his (equally unsuccessful) submission for the Academy of Dijon’s 1754 prize competition which elicited Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Discours sur les origines de l’inégalité parmi les hommes. Nature

is divine and dictates to us only laws which are easy to execute. But you must listen to her to follow her; she makes herself heard only among equal citizens and friends. In these conditions, contradictory interests control and conciliate themselves, sharpness softens, difficulties are levelled [s’aplanissent] by what is evident, and the common good discovered. It is thus from equality alone that good laws come to us. It is through the assembly of men equal among themselves that their implementation [manutention] can be assured.76

In the Plan of the New Administration which D’Argenson proposed for France,⁷⁷ the public good, the supreme law, was to guide a well-organized monarchy, with the aid of a well-understood democracy which in no way encroaches upon royal authority.⁷⁸ This left very little room (and no need whatever) for an intermediary power between king and people.⁷⁹ D’Argenson argued that the sole inconvenience of democratic authority was that it was too divided to make itself obeyed. It must therefore be regulated and directed by a single spirit which bears upon the entire body of the state but has no interest aside from the general interest. Such was the role of royal authority.

The role of democracy was to enlighten the sovereign, who, as all French monarchists stoutly maintained, had no interest of his own apart from those of his people, and so no motive for betraying them,⁸⁰ but who could all too readily fail to ascertain what their interests were. Any sovereign therefore needed the help of his subjects to identify which of their interests were truly common, just as urgently as the people in their turn needed to be aware of one another’s judgments to distinguish particular interests from the general good. Nowhere did the monarch need this aid more urgently than in the assessment of the level and distribution of taxation, an ever more contentious issue as the costs of global military and naval conflict mounted inexorably, and the government’s debts rose precipitously along with them.⁸¹ Under D’Argenson’s Plan, the administrators who set the tax levels in every district of France must be chosen from then on from men who resided and owned property within the district, by majority vote and through secret ballot.⁸² They were to be subject annually to renewal or replacement at elected Assemblies of the district. Besides offering a belated political basis on which to meet France’s spiralling fiscal crisis, this democratic choice of administrators would also help to intensify French agriculture, ensuring that all land was cultivated by its owners.83

In itself, D’Argenson’s conception of democracy was conventional enough: ‘Democracy is popular Government, in which the whole people shares equally, with no distinction between nobles and commoners.’⁸⁴ He distinguished in the classic fashion between true and false democracy:

False Democracy rapidly falls into Anarchy. It is the Government of the multitude, as when a People revolts. Then the insolent People scorns the Laws and reason. Its tyrannical Despotism shows itself in the violence of its movements, and by the uncertainty of its Deliberations.

True Democracy acts through Deputies, and these Deputies are authorized by the election of the People. The mission of those chosen by the People and the authority which supports them constitute the public power. Their duty is to insist on the interests of the greatest number of citizens to protect them from the greatest evils and secure them the greatest goods.⁸⁵

On the first appearance of his book in 1764, D’Argenson notes at this point that a democracy of this kind was, or should have been, the Government of the United Provinces. By 1784 he (or more probably his son) felt free to replace this assessment by the bold claim that the only true Democratic States in Europe at the time were the popular cantons of Switzerland.⁸⁶

D’Argenson was an unabashed monarchist. He fully accepted the French monarchy’s exclusive commitment to the Catholic Church, whatever his reservations may have been over the manner and timing of Louis XIV’s Revocation of the Edict of Nantes and subsequent persecution of the Huguenots. For him democracy was a valuable adjunct to the monarchy, not its rival or potential replacement. But he differed sharply for most of his life from theorists of mixed government, then or earlier, who saw the political aftermath of European feudalism as a system of government uniting monarchical, aristocratic, and democratic elements in careful balance against one another, and savoured, to varying degrees, the restraining influence on royal wilfulness of the intermediary powers of the aristocracy. In France this meant above all the noblesse de robe, who staffed the French constitutional courts and saw themselves as the dedicated custodians of the laws.87 For D’Argenson the crying need of the French monarchy was not restraint but guidance; and neither aristocracy nor Church had the least capacity to provide that guidance in a dependable form.

D’Argenson was a frustrated monarchical reformer, who feared that a French monarchy left unreformed must collapse in chaos in the relatively near future. Although he had been dead for many years by the time that it did, his picture of its fundamental flaws was notably acute, and his sense of what was likeliest to hasten its end uncommonly prescient:⁸⁸

If ever the nation were to recover its will and its rights, it would not fail to establish a universal national assembly [une Assemblée nationale universelle], dangerous to royal authority in quite a different way. It would make it necessary and always in being. It would compose it of great lords, deputies of each province and of the towns. It would imitate in every respect the Parliament of England. The nation would reserve legislation to it and would give the king only a provisional (provisoire) right to implement it.

What broke the monarchy in the end was its own political clumsiness and bad luck, a wholly unpredictable succession of maladroit Ministers, failures of nerve, vagaries of judgment, and sheer mishaps. But what placed it within reach of catastrophe was less any special infirmity in the person of the reigning monarch, or even the acute unpopularity of his Austrian wife, than the obstinacy, conceit, and ruthlessness of D’Argenson’s key adversary, the French nobility, the order from which he came. France’s Revolution was a revolution against aristocracy well before it turned against the incumbent monarch. As far as we know, none of its prominent native actors89 was a convinced democrat (either in their own vocabulary or in ours) until well after it had unmistakably broken out. Even those who did most to foment it, like the Abbé Sieyes himself,⁹⁰ for long championed its democratic elements solely as complements to the continuing and effective authority of its monarchical government.

As with the making of America’s Constitution, what drove the reconstruction of the French state was the crippling burden of war debt, and the political challenge of finding a basis on which to discharge it without openly repudiating it. In America what this principally required was the design of a system of government safe from capture by irresponsible enemies of property, a firm barrier to democracy’s most notorious weakness, or to what D’Argenson called ‘False Democracy’.⁹¹ But in France the immediate obstacle to handling the debt effectively was the very partial and obstructed fiscal reach of the royal government and the elaborate tissue of exemptions, province by province and order by order, which served to limit it. All these exemptions were a matter of law, in most cases law of many centuries’ standing. As they faced a government forced to live ever more desperately beyond its means, every one of them was a kind of privilege, a special form of legal immunity, or private legal right to elude the law as it bore on other French men or women. France was not a single kingdom, with one law for all its subjects. It was a vast archipelago of overlapping jurisdictions and endlessly differentiated statuses, all fiercely defended, and all at least pretending to centuries of antiquity. It defied systematic comprehension, let alone coherent excuse, every bit as obdurately as the customs of Brabant had defied Austria’s reforming Emperors.

The two most prominent blocs of privilege belonged to the Church and the nobility, the First and Second of the three Estates, who, in the understanding of virtually all France’s population who interested themselves in such questions, made up the French Nation. Neither Church nor nobility was ranged solidly against the interests of the royal government, let alone the French Nation. Between the year of America’s Independence and 1789, each provided leading Ministers who struggled to persuade their recalcitrant fellows to surrender at least some of their tax privileges in order to bring the debt back under control. But Church and nobility both firmly refused, in one setting after another, to comply with these proposals.

The Ministers, noble or ecclesiastical (or in one case both), soon fell; and by August 1788, France’s increasingly anxious King, Louis XVI, found himself forced to turn once more to a Minister who was neither a noble nor a Prince of the Church, indeed not even a French subject, the Genevan Protestant banker Jacques Necker.92 More disconcertingly still, and even before his hapless Minister Loménie de Brienne had handed in his resignation, Louis found himself compelled to agree to summon the Estates General of France, for the first time for a full century and three-quarters. Brienne himself epitomized the political limitations of the ancien régime at the end of its tether. Archbishop of Toulouse at the time of his appointment, he had had the conspicuously poor taste to take advantage of his position to arrange for his own transfer to the considerably more remunerative Archbishopric of Sens; and his tactless and indecisive handling of the Provincial Estates greatly aggravated suspicion of the royal government throughout France.

Because it had not met for such an immense span of time, no one knew quite how to summon the Estates General, even once the decision had been taken; and no one could be certain quite how its members were to be selected, let alone what they would be commissioned to concede or demand. No one even knew what forms it would meet in once its members did duly assemble. Brienne himself belatedly recognized the need to fix the procedures for the election of its members, invited evidence and opinions on how it had last been, or should now be, constituted, and lifted the censorship, so that the answers could be properly considered. The result was overwhelming.

Throughout France, in the months from July onwards, busy archival research in one place after another probed into the question of how things had been done back in the distant days of 1614, with varying and confusing results. Every rank in French society was to be invited to take part in one forum or another, whether, like the grander aristocracy or the bishops, in the select company of their peers and with some hope of commanding attention for their views, or in the local rural assemblies in which even those of the peasantry with the nerve to take it were to be given their brief say, and permitted to cast their votes, before the outcome was filtered upwards. In each setting, lists of grievances (cahiers de doléances) were drawn up, as preconditions to the acceptance of any fresh taxes needed to refloat the French Treasury, or bargaining counters in the allocation of the new tax burden amongst different groups of the population.93

Amidst all this excitement, and the spontaneous optimism which it both prompted and reinforced, one particular public decision sharpened the inchoate contours of social and political interest and redefined suddenly the muddled struggle between nation and royal government as an open confrontation between the Third Estate and its two privileged counterparts. One of Necker’s opening acts as First Minister was to reconvene in September 1788 the Parlement of Paris, the principal institutional challenger to royal authority in recent decades, summarily evicted only four months earlier from its ancient role of registering the public law of France and all royal edicts which covered the whole kingdom, in favour of a judicial body appointed by the King himself. Only two days after its triumphant return to Paris, the Parlement gave its decisive verdict on how the Estates General must meet: in the forms of 1614, as three distinct Orders, and with the Third Estate having no more and no fewer representatives than each of the other two. Two months later Necker reconvened the Assembly of Notables to see if they could be persuaded to reverse this outcome, with equally little success, and was able to secure a doubling in the number of Third Estate representatives only by a decree of the Royal Council at the end of December.

By this time the damage was well and truly done.

The Parlement’s decision ensured that the population of France would be forced, as never before, to choose between the accumulated routines of its long past and a vital attempt to redefine itself, through political choice, as a single national community fully equipped to assume responsibility for its own security and destiny. Many able and well-placed figures throughout France held huge stakes in that past. Like the monarch himself, every French subject was deeply inured to seeing in it the source and basis of much of what made life worth living, and the ground of every practically serviceable right which they were fortunate enough to enjoy. But very many of them had also come to have at least a shadowy awareness that this way of viewing their lives over time made imperfect sense, and that it had a certain obvious shabbiness and absurdity to it. The crushing burden of the debt, the manoeuvres of the old regime’s beneficiaries to shirk responsibility for meeting it, and the debilitating squabbles over who was most to blame for the steady worsening in the predicament of both government and nation focused on the nobility, the Church, and eventually on the Monarch himself, an unprecedented weight of ideological odium. In the end all three buckled beneath it. For the next five years, through turbulent political exploration and struggles, intense legislative deliberation and enactment, and bitter civil and international warfare, the French nation set out to endow itself with a new legal identity. It also set itself to design and implement a fresh set of institutions through which to live together without either ignominy or absurdity, and on a basis which guaranteed liberty and security to all its citizens. It remains almost as hard to see that convulsive effort clearly and calmly today as contemporaries found it at the time. The attempt to reconstitute France as a society and a state through political action was often nightmarish in its consequences, and as cruel, hypocritical, muddled, and disorientating as the very worst abysses of the ancien régime. It ended, on its own terms, in failure: military dictatorship, a parvenu empire, and, a quarter of a century later, in the reluctant restoration of the dynastic monarchy. Before it had done so, it devastated the continent of Europe and ruined the lives of countless millions of its inhabitants. (Think of the imagery of Goya’s Disasters of War.)94

But the same attempt to reconstitute France through political action also in due course defined a new universe of political and legal practices for every other human society across the globe, with the single and glaring exception of the United States of America. Many of those societies have yet to be forced to submit to its requirements. But none of them, not even Britain, France’s global military, political, and economic rival, which did most of all to bring the Revolution to its exhausted close, has since been able consistently to ignore it.

Given the depth of the nightmare, and the awesome impact of the Revolution’s blood-stained wars, some of the models drawn from it, inevitably, were negative rather than positive—precedents to avoid or catastrophes to insure against at virtually any expense. Revolution and counter-revolution were born together, and have proved, as Edmund Burke promptly warned,⁹⁵ practically inseparable ever since. It is hard to tell whether the unintended consequences of the attempt to reorganize a society rationally for the benefit of its members have had any shallower an impact than the more edifying of the political goals which its leaders adopted and pursued in their uniquely conspicuous setting. The harms which it perpetrated over time did not stem solely from excess of audacity on the part of its partisans. They issued just as forcibly from the galvanizing effects of that audacity on its more obdurate enemies, and on the political entrepreneurs who traded in their fears. If Robespierre and the Terror looked forward to Joseph Stalin and Mao Zedong and the vast famines which each unleashed, they also gave the cue for the extremities of struggles to arrest or reverse the threat of revolution for more than two centuries to come, to Fascism, the Third Reich, and perhaps even truly Islamic revolution.

One figure did more than anyone else to draw the battle lines and unleash the Revolution. Emmanuel Joseph Sieyes was a surprising candidate for the role, and in many ways ill-equipped to finish what he had started.96 He was not one of the Revolution’s great orators like Mirabeau or Danton, who could hold sway over the Assembly for a time by the sheer power of their words; nor did he have Robespierre’s gift of assurance in arranging to have his political enemies killed. Forty years old when the Estates General was summoned, Sieyes had earned his living from within three years of his ordination by serving as secretary, first to the Bishop of Tréguier in Brittany, and then, following his patron’s fortunate posting in 1780, to the far wealthier and less secluded see of Chartres, with its majestic cathedral and ready access to Parisian intellectual and political circles.⁹⁷ Once in Chartres, Sieyes became in turn vicar-general of the diocese, a canon of the Cathedral and in 1788 Chancellor of the Chapter. He also began to make his mark in a variety of the Church’s representative bodies.

In 1788, under the pressure of events, he wrote in quick succession three striking pamphlets. The first to be composed (though last to be published) was a relatively cool and systematic analysis of how the Estates General could now best set about rescuing France from the deep quagmire of its political past: Views of the Executive Means Available to the Representatives of France in 1789. It drew extensively on the many years of careful reading and hard thinking which Sieyes had devoted to working out the political needs and opportunities of the highly commercialized society which France, like Britain, had long been. Behind it lay close study of what he called ‘social mechanics’:⁹⁸ the contribution of some of the most powerful economic, social, and political thinkers of eighteenth-century Europe, and most decisively of all of Adam Smith. Sieyes’s key insight was the shaping influence throughout this novel kind of society of a radical division of labour, guided above all by the single criterion of effectiveness.

This was not in itself an evidently democratic line of thought. Indeed, for Plato, over two thousand years earlier, it had served as the central ground for rejecting democracy en bloc for its brazen indifference to the demands of justice: ‘distributing a certain equality to equals and unequals alike’.99 But for Sieyes, far from flouting these demands, a political order could be dependably just or effective, if and only if it viewed and treated the human beings who made it up as equal bearers of rights, and organized itself to protect and benefit every one of them. Sieyes was as alert as Adam Smith¹⁰⁰ to the need for authority in any human community; but, like Smith, he believed that a state could hold its authority legitimately only by dint of meeting the needs of its own subjects. This did not make him a democrat, any more than it made Smith one. For Sieyes, democracy was neither a rhetorical rallying cry, nor a favoured political paradigm. (Neither, given its long history, could it have been one of his characteristic neologisms, deployed, like the interminable coinages of Jeremy Bentham, to pin down the shadowy worlds of politics and law with new clarity and precision, if seldom widely taken up by anyone else.) But, if Sieyes was no democrat, he was no simple enemy of democracy. Even in Views of the Executive Means he insisted robustly, as D’Argenson had done before him, on the need for every legislature to be refreshed by the democratic spirit,¹⁰¹ and on the consequent need to minimize the number of levels which separated the inhabitants of the local communities who made up the nation from the successively elected representatives who would in due course legislate on their behalf. It was the scale of France as a society which necessitated an elaborate structure of representation: ‘In a community made up of a small number of citizens, they themselves will be able to form the legislative assembly. Here there will be no representation, but the thing itself.’¹⁰² Representation serves efficiency; but it also carries great dangers:

every human association has to have a common aim and public functions. To carry out these functions it is necessary to detach a certain number of members of the association from the great mass of citizens. The more a society advances in the arts of trade and production, the more we see that the work connected to public functions should, like private employments, be carried out less expensively and more effectively by men who make it their exclusive occupation.103

Sieyes plainly viewed public administration as a thoroughly worthy employment for the talented; but it is less obvious that he had any clear conception of what a career in electoral politics was likely to involve. One point which he certainly did grasp, however, was that those who carry out this work, in whatever form, readily develop an interest of their own, which may be sharply at odds with those of their fellows. They come to see their role as a right and an item of property, and no longer as a duty to others. When they do, they dissolve the bonds of political community and establish a form of political servitude.¹⁰⁴ France as it was in 1788 was less ‘a nation organized as a political body’ than ‘an immense flock of people scattered over a surface of twenty-five thousand square leagues’. To turn it into a politically organized nation, what it needed was not to probe into its murky and benighted past.¹⁰⁵ It was to heed the lessons of reason, draw boldly on the recent findings of social mechanics, and endow itself, all too belatedly, with a sound constitution, the sole means which could guarantee citizens the enjoyment of their natural and social rights, consolidate the elements in their common life which worked for the better, and ‘progressively extinguish all that has been done for the bad’.¹⁰⁶ In the remainder of his pamphlet Sieyes set out carefully just how the Estates General must view and organize itself to provide France at long last with that constitution, and do so without allowing itself to be sucked back into the political whirlpool of the debt which had prompted its summons in the first place.

Unlike the Views of the Executive Means, the first of Sieyes’s pamphlets to reach the public, in November 1788, the Essay on Privileges, was an immediate response to the Parlement of Paris’s fateful September decision and an open call to arms. In his bitter tirade against the claims of privilege,107 Sieyes broke openly with the nobility of France as an order and set himself to demolish the entire edifice of conceit and pretension which held its world together. The very idea of privilege (the basis on which the first two Estates held their formidable powers of political obstruction) was lethal to any good or happy society. The essence of privilege is to place its possessor ‘beyond the boundaries of common right’,¹⁰⁸ either an exemption from the prohibitions on wrong action which face every other citizen,¹⁰⁹ or the gift of an exclusive right to do what the laws would otherwise leave open to anyone. ‘All privileges … from the very nature of things, are unjust, odious, and contrary to the supreme end of every political society.’ Not only was privilege deeply wrong in itself, it was also profoundly corrupting of all who benefited from it. Privilege was not an honourable quest to earn the admiration of fellow members of society; it was a constant spur to insolence and vanity: ‘You ask less to be distinguished by your fellow citizens, than you seek to be distinguished from your fellow citizens.’¹¹⁰ It was a secret sentiment and an unnatural appetite, ‘so full of vanity, and yet so mean in itself’, that all who feel it seek to cloak it in feigned concern for public interest. The idea of country, in the heart of the privileged, ‘shrinks to the caste to which they belong’. They come to seem to themselves ‘another species of beings’.¹¹¹ This apparently exaggerated opinion, while in no way implied in the idea of privilege itself, ‘insensibly becomes its natural consequence, and in the end establishes itself in all minds’. The effects were ludicrous, turning the imaginations of the nobility endlessly back towards a distant and ever more practically irrelevant past. They were also intensely pernicious, fomenting an esprit de corps and a relentless party spirit within their ranks.¹¹² The inheritance of privilege broke any possible link to desert,¹¹³ and left its presumed beneficiaries to a life of intrigue and mendicity, of ‘privileged beggary’, at the expense of their fellow citizens.¹¹⁴ It nurtured also in the scions of the nobility formidable skills in this ignominious competition for self-advancement. The inevitable result was to spread the corrupting example—‘the honourable and virtuous desire of living in idleness and at the expense of the public’115—throughout society.

The third, and far the most famous, of Sieyes’s trio of pamphlets appeared next, in January 1789, turning this tirade into an open programme of revolution, and handing on to the young Karl Marx half a century later the classic formula for revolutionary consciousness.¹¹⁶ We do not really know quite what gave this forty-year-old cleric his visceral hatred of aristocratic pretension. It may have reached back to his childhood as son of a minor royal official in the modest Provence township of Fréjus. It may have been nurtured later, in the course of his reluctant training for the priesthood in the Parisian seminary of Saint Sulpice, a career for which many besides Sieyes himself subsequently noticed his drastic lack of vocation. (As a boy he strongly preferred the prospect of life as an artillery officer or mining engineer.) What we do know is that, when he came to express it definitively in public early in 1789, the resulting text lit a fuse which raced across France. A year earlier, no one would have been likely to find ‘What is the Third Estate?’ evocative as a title, or even especially stimulating as a question. By January 1789 the summoning of the Estates General had made it the political question of the hour.

It was Sieyes’s answer to that question which turned political crisis into Revolution. As they entered 1789 the first two Estates were still very much the fair sisters, pride and glory of a long and singularly self-assured history.¹¹⁷ The Third Estate was at most their drabber and more nebulous adjunct, the Cinderella of France, with its claim even to belong to the same family eminently in doubt.¹¹⁸ Both the first two Estates had a conscious solidarity, a sense of collective identity, a commitment to that identity, and a confidence in its own power, dignity, and worth. To enquire ‘What is the First Estate?’ was to ask how to see and understand Christianity itself, and the Church which embodied and interpreted it on earth. In France at least, that Church was well organized to answer the question on its own behalf, and free to draw on the resources of a long history of self-consciously continuous thought and devotion and a practised fluency in political self-assertion. To enquire what the Second Estate was was to ask how to view Nobility, again a question with many centuries of rhetorical effort devoted to working up flattering answers, if for the most part on the basis of distinctly less strenuous intellectual exertion. In his Essay on Privileges, already, Sieyes had highlighted the imaginative fragility of this carefully cultivated tradition of self-regard. In What Is the Third Estate? he turned the tables decisively on his smug and overbearing antagonists, and set out a quite new basis for political authority in what was already a very old state. He began, notoriously, by giving an astonishing answer to his title question. The Third Estate, he proclaimed brashly, is ‘Everything’.119 Up to then, in the existing political order of France, it had been ‘Nothing’. It had carried no political weight, and received no formal recognition. The King’s Ministers and the Privileged Orders had acted in its name and on its behalf, if at least presumptively for its benefit. In doing so, they had not been, as they fondly imagined, displaying a generous and attentive paternalism. They had simply usurped powers which legitimately belonged to it, and robbed it of the place which was its rightful due.¹²⁰

To survive and prosper, a nation requires private employments and public services.¹²¹ It must work the land, manufacture everything which its inhabitants require, and distribute these products to their eventual consumers. It also requires a huge variety of personal services from the loftiest to the most menial.¹²² At present all the most rewarding and honorific of these services are monopolized by the first two Estates. But there is not a single one of them which could not perfectly well be provided by the Third. Already the latter carries out all the really hard work, while receiving virtually none of the honour. The Third Estate contains ‘everything needed to form a complete nation’¹²³ It is ‘Everything; but an everything that is fettered and oppressed. What would it be without the privileged order? Everything; but an everything that would be free and flourishing. Nothing can go well without the Third Estate, but everything would go a great deal better without the two others.’ The exclusion of the Third Estate from every post which carries honour is ‘a social crime’ against it.124 It reflects a ‘state of servitude’,¹²⁵ which, however long it may have lasted, can only have arisen in the first place from conquest and can no longer be sustained against a people which ‘is strong enough today not to let itself be conquered’.¹²⁶

They may try in vain to shut their eyes to the revolution which time and the force of things has brought about: it is real for all that. There was once a time when the Third Estate were serfs and the nobility was everything. Now the Third Estate is everything and nobility is only a word. But beneath this word, a new and intolerable aristocracy has slid in, and the People has every reason not to want any aristocrats.¹²⁷

The political consequences are clear. The nobility has separated itself from the rest of the nation and made itself a people apart.¹²⁸ Its insistence on exercising its political rights on its own has made it ‘foreign to the Nation by virtue of its principle, because its mandate did not come from the people, and second, by virtue of its object, since this consists in defending, not the general interest, but particular interest’.¹²⁹ The aristocracy monopolize high office in army, Church, and magistracy. They form a caste which dominates every branch of the executive power. They side instinctively with one another against the entire remainder of the nation. Their usurpation is total. Truly they reign.¹³⁰

The battle lines are sharply defined and already foreshadow civil war: ‘the Privileged show themselves no less enemies of the common order than the English are of the French in times of war.’¹³¹ By excluding themselves from the common ranks of citizens and insisting on their privileges, they have forfeited the political rights which only citizenship can carry, and made themselves ‘enemies by estate of the common order’.¹³² They form a caste which clings to the real nation like the vegetable parasites ‘which can live only on the sap of the plants that they impoverish and blight’.¹³³

‘No aristocracy’, therefore, must be the rallying cry for all true friends of the nation.134 But the enemies of aristocracy are in no sense democrats. We ‘will repeat “No democracy” with them and against them … representatives are not democrats; … since real democracy is impossible amongst such a large population, it is foolish to presume it or to appear to fear it’. What is all too possible is a ‘false democracy’ in which a caste of birth, independently of any popular mandate, claims the powers which the body of citizens would exercise in a real democracy. ‘This false democracy, with all the ills which it trails in its wake, exists in the country which is said and believed to be monarchical, but where a privileged caste has assigned to itself the monopoly of government, power and place.’ For Sieyes, his immediate political antagonist, the Second Estate, fighting tooth and nail as a single agent to preserve their privileges, forms a ‘feudal democracy’.¹³⁵

For Sieyes, democracy as such could pose no real threat in France, however deep its crisis, since it was simply impracticable. In a country as large as France, the demos could never assemble together to shape itself into an effective political agent. To act at all, it must be represented. A select and separate group, small enough to co-operate effectively and be capable of action, must act on its behalf. But, to act with its authority, that group must first be chosen by it.

As 1789 dawned, the aristocracy of France still had the presumption to claim the authority of the French people, and the coherence and solidarity to abuse that claim to press their own private interests. Sieyes was very sure that their time was gone: ‘During the long night of feudal barbarism, it was possible to destroy the true relations between men, to turn all concepts upside down, and to corrupt all justice; but as day dawns, so gothic absurdities must fly and the remnants of ancient ferocity collapse and disappear. This is quite certain.’

Even in What Is the Third Estate?, however, he was sometimes less confident of what exactly would replace it: Shall

we merely be substituting one evil for another, or will social order, in all its beauty, take the place of former chaos? Will the changes we are about to experience be the bitter fruit of a civil war, disastrous in all respects for the three orders and profitable only to ministerial power; or will they be the natural, anticipated and well-controlled consequence of a simple and just outlook, of a happy co-operation favoured by the weight of circumstances, and sincerely promoted by all the classes concerned?136

History’s answer was not the one for which he hoped, though not until Napoleon seized power did the profits in any sense accrue to those who currently wielded executive power.

From the opening months of 1789 France entered a state of barely suppressed civil war, setting the monarchy and its agents ever more intractably at odds with the people at large, and aligning it ever more fatally with the residues of the long night of feudal barbarism. The result was a cauldron of fears, threats, and counter-threats in which any prospect of the simplest and justest of political conceptions achieving clearly intended and well-controlled consequences vanished without trace. When democracy re-emerged from those years of blood and confusion it had gained nothing in plausibility as a practical model of how France could hope to govern itself in peace, prosperity, and good order. What it lost definitively was its reassuring air of practical irrelevance. As it won fresh friends across a Europe ravaged by decades of war, even those most troubled by its new prominence came to see in it a potently destructive ghost that must be laid to rest, not a simple phantasm which could safely be ignored.

In most settings beyond France itself (in Belgium, Holland, Italy, even Germany or Poland), ‘Democracy’ served simply to label contending political factions.¹³⁷ Even in France it was seldom employed to define the terms of political struggle with much precision, let alone clarify the goals of competing parties or the strategy of key political actors. But three figures of some importance did, at one point or another, do their best to show just why the momentum of the Revolution carried it insistently towards democracy, and why some version of democracy was an appropriate destination, and not an inevitable disaster or a clear disgrace. Two of them are familiar heroes of the Democratic Revolution: the flamboyant English artisan (and former staymaker) Tom Paine, whose pamphlet Common Sense had come close to launching America’s open struggle for independence, and Maximilien Robespierre, the formidably self-righteous Arras lawyer who became the Svengali of the Jacobin Terror. The third was more surprising: the central Italian Bishop of Imola, Cardinal Barnaba Chiaramonti, in his Christmas Eve homily in 1797, a mere two years before his elevation to the Papacy as Pius VII. The Bishop’s message was far from a call to arms. What it affirmed, in effect, was an historically somewhat premature version of Christian Democracy. Democratic government ‘among us’ was in no way inconsistent with the Gospel. It required all the sublime virtues which only the school of Jesus could teach: ‘The moral virtues, which are nothing other than the love of order, will make us democrats, partisans of a democracy in the true sense.’ It would preserve ‘equality in its rightful meaning’, equality before the law, with all due recognition for the marked differences between the roles of different individuals in a society. Its goal was to join hearts together in gracious fraternity. No devout Catholic need fear a tension between democracy and their religious duties: ‘Yes, my dear brethren, be good Christians, and you will be the best of democrats.’138

Paine’s position was more forensic. It appeared in the second part of his very widely circulated defence of the Revolution’s goals against the criticisms of Edmund Burke, The Rights of Man. Paine presented the Revolution’s political outcome as a triumph, not for simple democracy, but for ‘the representative system’. That system retained ‘Democracy as the ground’ and rejected the corrupt systems of Monarchy and Aristocracy.

Simple Democracy was society governing itself without the aid of secondary means. By ingrafting representation upon Democracy, we arrive at a system of Government capable of embracing and confederating all the various interests and every extent of territory and population; and that also with advantages as much superior to hereditary Government, as the Republic of Letters is to hereditary literature.

For Paine, America’s new government was best seen as ‘representation ingrafted upon Democracy’. This novel creation united all the advantages of a simple democracy; but it also avoided most, if not all, of its notorious disadvantages. ‘What Athens was in miniature, America will be in magnitude. The one was the wonder of the ancient world; the other is becoming the admiration, the model of the present.’ It was the simplest, most intelligible, and most practically attractive form of government, avoiding Monarchy’s ineliminable exposure to the risks of ignorance and insecurity in every heir to the throne, and simple Democracy’s all too obvious inconvenience. It could be applied over any scale of territory, and across the most profound divisions of interest; and it can be applied at once. ‘France, great and populous as it is, is but a spot in the capaciousness of the system. It is preferable to simple Democracy even in small territories.’139 The Rights of Man was Paine’s attempt to defend France’s Revolution, not only through its own informing political values, the Droits de l’Homme, but also through the reassuring precedent of America’s relative domestic peace as an independent state. It saw in representation, as Sieyes and Madison had each done before it, an effective system for designing and organizing a form of government accountable over time to the governed and dependably committed to serving their interests. It firmly refused to see in the representative system the slightest element of regrettable concession to political, economic, or geographical realities at democracy’s expense.

In the Bishop of Imola’s homily, democracy scarcely features as a load-bearing element in any serious attempt to understand politics. Even in Paine’s writings or speeches its appearance signals more a relaxation than a tautening in intellectual attention. But with Maximilien Robespierre, for the first time in modern history, democracy at last appears not merely as a passing expression of political taste but as an organizing conception of an entire vision of politics. In due course Robespierre was to become an unnerving figure even to the man who did most to launch the Revolution. (‘If M. Robespierre asks for me’, Sieyes warned his Brussels housekeeper forty years later from the depths of flu, in muddled geriatric reminiscence of the year of Terror, ‘tell him, I’m out.’)140 By that time Robespierre himself had been dead for well over three decades; but in the five short years between 1789 and 1794 he set his intensely personal stamp permanently upon the entire Revolution, defining its main goals with unique authority, and identifying himself ineffaceably with some of its greatest achievements and many of its most odious political techniques.

At the core of Robespierre’s conception of politics lay a fiercely egalitarian and activist understanding of the rights of man, which set him at odds from the outset with even the remarkably broad franchise (all twenty-five-year-old male inhabitants, native born or naturalized, who appeared on the tax rolls) under which the Third Estate deputies were elected to the Estates General.¹⁴¹ In October 1789, after the Third Estate deputies had transformed themselves boldly into the National Assembly and passed the Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen, the Assembly turned to consider the September recommendations of its Constitutional Committee on the future bounds of the franchise. The Committee, largely on Sieyes’s prompting, had already distinguished sharply between two types of citizen: active citizens who pay taxes and ‘are the only real stakeholders in the great social enterprise’, and the sole full members of the association, and passive citizens (‘women, at least under current circumstances, children, foreigners, and those who make no fiscal contribution to the state’).¹⁴² Passive citizens are fully entitled to the protection of their person, property, and freedom. But only active citizens have the right to take an active part in the election of public officials. The Committee’s proposals restricted the franchise to adult male residents of twenty-five or older, duly qualified by birth or naturalization, who paid taxes of at least three days’ local wages.143 The resulting restriction was criticized by one or two speakers in the Assembly itself (the Abbé Grégoire and the Physiocrat Dupont de Nemours), and assailed in Camille Desmoulins’s crusading newspaper Les Révolutions de France et de Brabant. But it was left to Robespierre to mount a full-scale attack upon it in the Assembly. The proposal to confine the franchise in this way, he claimed in his opening speech on the matter, clashed directly with three separate Articles in the Declaration of the Rights of Man.

All citizens, no matter who they are, have the right to aspire to every degree of representation. Anything less would be out of keeping with your declaration of rights, to which every privilege, every distinction and every exception must yield. The constitution has established that sovereignty resides in the People, in every member of the populace. Each individual therefore has the right to a say in the laws by which he is governed and in the choice of the administration which belongs to him. Otherwise it is not true to say that all men are equal in rights, that all men are citizens.¹⁴⁴

‘A man is by definition a citizen,’ he went on the next day. ‘No one can take away this right which is inseparable from his existence here on earth.’¹⁴⁵ Two years later, in the final debate on the Constitution, he rejected the very idea of passive citizenship, ‘an insidious and barbarous expression, which defiles both our laws and our language’.¹⁴⁶

In February 1794, a few months before his death and at the height of the Terror, he linked this view finally with democracy itself, in the Report which he drafted to the Convention on behalf of the Committee of Public Safety on the ‘Principles of Political Morality which must guide the National Convention in the Internal Administration of the Republic’. His ambitions were characteristically lofty, and expressed with more than a touch of bombast.

‘We wish in a word, to fulfil the will [les voeux] of nature, to accomplish the destiny of humanity, to keep the promises of philosophy, to absolve providence of the long reign of crime and tyranny.’ Let France, for so long a country of slaves, eclipse ‘the glory of all previous free peoples, and become a model for all nations, the terror of oppressors, the consolation for the oppressed, the ornament of the universe, and, sealing our work with our blood, may we see at least the dawn of universal felicity.’147

The sole form of government which could realize these prodigies was

democratic or republican: these two words are synonymous, despite the vulgar abuse of language, for aristocracy is no more the republic than monarchy is. Democracy is not a state in which the people, continuously assembled, regulates by itself all public affairs, still less one in which a hundred thousand fractions of the people, by isolated, precipitate and contradictory measures, would decide the destiny of the entire society. Such a government has never existed and if it ever did, all it could do would be to return the people to despotism.

Democracy is a state in which the sovereign people, guided by laws which are its own work, does by itself all it can do well, and by delegates all that it could not.

It is therefore in the principle of democratic government that you must look for the rules of your political conduct.

To found and consolidate democracy amongst us, to reach the peaceful reign of constitutional laws, we must end the war of liberty against tyranny and pass happily through the storms of the Revolution.

This is the goal of the revolutionary system.

The fundamental principle of democratic or popular government, the essential ressort which sustains it and makes it move, is virtue, the public virtue which worked such miracles in Greece and Rome and which would produce even more startling ones in republican France—the love of country and its laws.

Since the essence of the Republic or democracy is equality, the love of country necessarily embraces the love of equality.148 It therefore presupposes or produces all virtues, [NB two possibilities with sharply diverging practical implications] since all are simply expressions of the force of soul which enables a person to prefer the public interest to all particular interests.

Not only is virtue the soul of democracy, it can only exist inside this form of government. In a monarchy the sole individual who can truly love his country (patrie), and hence has no need for virtue, is the monarch himself, since only he truly has a country or is the sovereign, at least in fact. In effect he occupies the place of the people, and so supplants it. To have a country one must be a citizen, and share in its sovereignty. Only in a democracy is the state truly the country of all who form it, and can it rely on as many interested defenders of its cause as it numbers citizens. This is what makes free peoples superior to others.¹⁴⁹

The French are the first people in the world who have established true democracy, summoning all men to equality and the full rights of citizenship. This is the real reason why all the tyrants leagued against the Republic will be conquered in the end.

‘Republican virtue is as necessary in the government as in the people at large. If it fails in the government alone, there is still the people to appeal to. Only when the latter is corrupted, is liberty truly lost. Happily the people is naturally virtuous. A nation becomes truly corrupt only when it passes from democracy to aristocracy or monarchy.’¹⁵⁰

In peacetime, popular government relies upon virtue. In revolution, it must ‘rely simultaneously on virtue and terror: virtue, without which terror is deadly, terror without which virtue is impotent’.¹⁵¹ Terror ‘is merely prompt, severe and inflexible justice. Hence it is itself an emanation of justice, less a particular principle than a consequence of the general principle of democracy applied to the country’s most pressing need.’152

The revolutionary government (Robespierre and his associates) was the ‘despotism of liberty against tyranny’: a grim indivisible war,¹⁵³ in which any faltering or holding back must simply increase the strength of the Republic’s enemies and divide and weaken its friends.¹⁵⁴

In this nightmarish struggle, the sole remedy was the ressort général (the panacea) of the Republic, virtue.

‘Democracy perishes by two excesses, the aristocracy of those who govern, or the contempt of the people for the authorities which it has itself established, a contempt in which each faction or individual reaches out for the public power, and reduces the people, through the resulting chaos, to nullity, or the power of a single man.’¹⁵⁵

In this great and terrible address the Revolution comes into clear view, rending itself to pieces. But already, mere months before it completed the task of self-destruction, it had inscribed this old, battle-scarred, but for so long also oddly scholastic, term ineffaceably upon its standard, handing it on without apology to fellow humans across the world and far into the future. It was Robespierre above all who brought democracy back to life as a focus of political allegiance: no longer merely an elusive or blatantly implausible form of government, but a glowing and perhaps in the long run all but irresistible pole of attraction and source of power.