Tom Burns Organisation and Social Order

ChapterXXIII

ENLIGHTENMENT'SHARVEST

Even though it provided the archetypal model for them, the French Revolution was categorically different from later revolutions, in that it simply happened. It was not organised by a set of would-be revolutionaries, as were the major twentieth century revolutions in Russia and China and the lesser ones elsewhere. No programme of essential action had been worked out, no future order of things to be achieved. What the revolutionaries did have, however, was an ideology.

I

The word 'ideology' was coined by the liberal intellectuals of the Institut de France,1, who meant it to stand for the study of ideas in the same way that 'zoology' stood for the study of animals. But the word has been subject to fairly gross abuse since its earliest years. Most of the time, it has been held responsible for generating 'false consciousness' of the kind first attached by marxists to the dupes of capitalism, then by the defenders of the capitalist faith to marxists and, to end with, by political activists of all descriptions to activists of all other descriptions. This familiar latterday usage dates from Napoleon's famous turnaround of 1803. After he became First Consul he denounced the hold over public opinion maintained by the ideologues, even though, as a general of the Republic, he had taken pride in his honorary membership of the Institut de France, and at the time of the coup d'etat of Brumaire he had sought the support of its leading members. Napoleon saw clearly enough that democratic and republican ideas had become an obstacle to what were now his principal objectives and a distraction from the political strategies he saw as necessary to achieve them, instead of a useful aid. But this should not obscure the meaning and significance the word had for its inventors. To begin with, before there was any implication of the recusant Jacobinism and the 'gloomy metaphysics' of Napoleon's diatribe, the word carried two distinct meanings, academic and popular.

1 G.Lichtheim provides a useful short account of the history of the word's usage in The Concept of Ideology and Other Essays, Random House, 1967.

For the men of the Institut, the connection with zoology was not simply analogical, nor did it merely reflect the superior intellectual status accorded to zoology (sc. 'natural history' or biology) at the time. It goes deeper than that. 'Ideology' was meant to serve as a more accurate, 'modern', term for 'metaphysics' and so to replace it as the central concern of philosophy. After Locke, it had become widely accepted that ideas in the mind were formed out of what had entered it by way of sensation - that the only subject-matter with which individual processes of thought could possibly be concerned was what was presented to it by the senses. Condillac had gone further in his 'Sensationalism', which became influential in the second half of the eighteenth century. Some room was allowed for man's spiritual self and his intuitive knowledge of God, but human knowledge, he claimed, was otherwise wholly derived from the sensations received through the five senses. Condillac died in 1780. The Elements d'Ideologie was written by Antoine Destutt de Tracy, a leading figure of the Institut and published over the whole Napoleonic period - from 1801 to 1815. It takes off from Condillac's philosophical system to develop an entire view of knowledge and 'human nature' as a rational construction of the human mind, independent of any divine or extra-human influence or even of social or collective understanding. Religious belief is excluded as a source of knowledge; moral problems are illusory fancies from which nothing can be learned. It is for a natural history of the mind - the truly fundamental science - to discover the way in which ideas are formed. But this first, 'academic', meaning of the word has been long forgotten, together with its philosophical connotations. More to the point, the Institut de France was from its very beginning associated, in the mind of the public and of the government which had set it up (and of Bonaparte), with the outlook and systems of ideas which had been the chief instrument of revolutionary political, social, moral and even spiritual change. The outlook and the ideas had in fact been articulated and given organised form by Condorcet in his Tableau historique des progres de l'esprit humaine, which was written at the height of the Terror. The idea of progress was the chief intellectual (and cultural, spiritual and moral) bequest of the eighteenth century, one that survived as an article of popular faith throughout the nineteenth century and even some years beyond. At its simplest, the idea of progress connects the history of humanity with that of the individual. Condorcet says as much: "Progress is subject to the same general laws that can be observed in the development of the individual, and it is indeed no more than the sum of that development realised in large numbers of individuals joined together in society." It pervades the work of Hegel, the most influential of all eighteenth-century philosophers. It shows through even in some of Kant's writings - indeed, his programmatic sketch for a universal history had been positively chiliastic: "The history of the human species as a whole may be regarded as the unravelling of a hidden plan of nature for accomplishing a perfect state of civil constitution of society." The idea of progress was the inspirational core of the system of political beliefs which constituted the ideology of the Revolution. It was central to the ideology of the Revolution because it was itself revolutionary. It displaced in the public mind the idea of history as a

cyclical movement or as a lengthy process of deterioration from a golden age lost in the distant past. The sanction of the past lost its hold; the idea of progress encouraged a growing number of people to discard a view of the prevailing institutions, social structure, and social order as the embodiment of values which merited allegiance simply because they had endured. It is in stark contrast with Burke's declaration in support of political and social institutions inherited from the past as incorporating the accumulated and collective wisdom of a nation. The twentieth century has done its best to turn the idea of progress into a bad joke. There is perhaps some connection between this and the majority verdict of contemporary historians on the French Revolution as not only almost incidental, or accidental, in Lynn Hunt's words (above, p. 703), but futile and perverse - as Edmund Burke saw it. In which connection it is at least interesting, and perhaps significant, that in the last volume of papers presented to an important international conference on 'The French Revolution and the creation of modern political culture', the first section, amounting to over a fifth of the entire volume, is devoted to the influence of Edmund Burke2. 'Futility' is the most potent of Albert Hirschman's triad of strategies deployed by politicians and writers opposed to the successive reform movements of the last two hundred years.3 The 'perversity' argument construes attempts at betterment by political means as only making things worse. (The third strategy is the 'jeopardy' thesis, by which such attempts actually endanger previous successful reforms.) The 'plus ca change...' motif, as Hirschman points out, has been a prolific generator of critical commentaries on revolution and on reform in general. There has been a tidal wave of them in the 1990's, following on the demise of Stalinist Russia and the exposes of the Maoist regime in China. Most of them raise, at least by implication, the question posed explicitly in the title of a recent essay by a distinguished historian of Russia - "Did the Russian Revolution Have to Happen?"4 Whatever the answer is, it does not consist in pointing to the extremes of wealth and deprivation, of power and subjection, or of privilege and oppression which existed then. Granted that things were more desperate in those times and places than they are here and now, one does not have to look very far to find them matched or outdone. And we carry within us the very sobering remembrance that the poor, the weak, and the deprived have indeed always been with us, notwithstanding the numberless protests, uprisings, rebellions and revolutions which history records. We know only too well that societies can persist for centuries despite the prevalence among their members of gross inequalities in living conditions, of servile or dependent relationships, of feelings of hatred and contempt. And we also know that it is possible for things to be almost as bad - or to get worse - during and after revolutions.

2The French Revolution and the Creation of Modern Political Culture; Volume 3: The Transformation of Political Culture, 1789-1848, ed. F.Furet and M. Ozouf, Pergamon Press, 1989. 3A.O.Hirschman, The Rhetoric of Reaction, Harvard Univ. Pr., 1991. 4 R.Pipes, "Did the Russian Revolution Have to Happen?" The American Scholar, (Spring 1994), pp.229-240.

But one stops short at 'possible'. Whatever validity attaches to the 'futility' and the 'perversity' strategies that Hirschman recounts, any final assessment, negative as well as positive, is always debatable. And the 'jeopardy' strategy is a non-starter, so far as the major revolutions are concerned. They can hardly be charged with endangering previous remedies and reforms; there were none to endanger.

II

This leaves us with what I take to be the true problem presented by the Revolution, one which, rather mystifyingly, seems never to be asked. It has to do with the institutional equipment of the ancien regime. How is it that it took a revolution - The Revolution - to carry out the work of demolition and reconstruction which was so blatantly necessary? Why was it that so little - virtually nothing - was done for centuries to stem the two-fold process of the maladaptation of established organisations to changing circumstance and need and, second, the accretion in those organisations of aims, purposes and functions serving the special interests of powerful individuals and groups? The solution to the problem of the Revolution must lie in the special circumstances which obtained in eighteenth-century France, as against other parts of Western and Central Europe. Monarchic sovereignty had never won out completely against interests5 in any country. Admittedly, the balance of power between the two sides was different in different countries, with Holland and England standing at one extreme (of an admittedly rather narrow range), and Austria and Prussia at the other, but neither side achieved absolute dominance. In every case, moreover, much of what each side sought to attain could only be reached with the other's consent - often amounting to collaboration. More important still, in the present context, is the variety of ways in which that collaboration might be effected. In England and Prussia, different as they were, the limits of monarchic sovereignty and of landowning power and commercial wealth were always ascertainable (subject as they were to constant testing), even if never definitive or final. In France, the limits were forever uncertain, disputable and, indeed, indefinable. Nothing could be guaranteed as the sole responsibility of any one person or group, nothing was solely subject to the authority of any one person or group. In France, every aspect of organised governmental and public activity had its own special set of anomalies, although those of regional and local government were interfused with the complexities of the administration of justice. The constitutional rights claimed by the regional parlements and the estates of the pays d'etat have already been remarked on (above, pp.---). The heterogeneous array of governing bodies, legal systems and jurisdictions can perhaps be lumped together under the heading of the devolution, for convenience's sake and over a number of generations in the distant past, of sovereign powers to subordinate courts and regional assemblies and the subsequent transformation of the whole system of government into a clumsy combination of centralism and federalism. But the parlements and municipal authorities were also involved in the administration of justice. There were even different systems of law in operation in different regions. What 5 See T.Burns, "Sovereignty, Interests and Bureaucracy in the Modern State", British J. of Sociology, Vol. 31, no. 4, !980, pp.491-506.

efforts had been made in the sixteenth century to improve matters had been confined to the reassertion of the king's authority as chief justiciar and the recording of customary law throughout France. Neither then nor later, under Louis XIV, was there any real reduction of the semi-autonomous jurisdictions sustained by the parlements and municipalities. The operating mechanisms which dealt with public finance were of more recent origin but even more complicated. They are best characterised as the outcome of a series of primitive exercises in what is nowadays familiar as 'privatisation': "The Crown practically always relied upon the services of intermediaries to manage its financial business. All financial operations were in the hands of municipal governments, the clergy, provincial estates, tax farms and, most of all, a great many financiers, private or semi-private. These agents and agencies were largely independent and often engaged in profit-making enterprises, and there were very few phases in the management of government funds which could be properly described as public finance."6 Quite apart from the very sizeable organisations created or employed to perform some of the necessary and important functions of government, there were also numbers of state officials far in excess of what obtained in other countries: 46,000 in 1665, the time of Colbert's survey (see above, p.338). This just adds more mystification at first sight, but the air of unreality that the unconscionable number of officials and agents imparts does in fact point to a possible solution to the whole conundrum. It gives the game away. J.H. Bosher's book, although its scope is limited to the one sector of public finance, is arguably the shrewdest of all assessments of the tasks and achievements of the First Republic. He remarks early on in it that it is usual to blame the policy makers who served the Bourbon monarchs. But it simply will not do, he says, to write them all off, with one or two exceptions, as fools or villains. "The system was not theirs to change." The overgrown jungle of quasi-federal organs of government and the privatised agencies which went to make up the systems of government administration, law, and public finance can be read as the obverse of the complicitous social order that obtained in the France of the ancien regime (above, pp.--------) and which shows through as its underside. Together they defied piecemeal reform - as did their later analogues in Czarist (and Stalinist) Russia and imperial China. Wholesale demolition was the only solution - and the idea of progress held out the promise. If it was the idea of progress that outflanked, or undermined, the complicitous social order of the ancien regime and the institutional systems it supported, then the engine of destruction it used was human reason. The men of the Revolution set great store by their dedication to reason: 'Reason alone can make laws obligatory and lasting,' as Mirabeau put it. In the light of reason, virtually the whole institutional apparatus of the ancien regime in France: of central and local government, of public finance, of the dispensation of justice, even of national defence was

6 J.H.Bosher, French Finances, 1770-1795, C.U.P., 1970, p. 4.

quite manifestly ruinously expensive, hopelessly corrupt, manifestly unfair, intolerably burdensome, morally outrageous and politically insupportable. Problems arise, though, when it comes to political action which might remedy the situation. They are perennial problems, which have exercised the minds of philosophers and others since Plato and are still the subject of lively debate today. This is especially the case in France, and not simply because the French are also victims of the anniversary mania that the public relations industry has foisted on the rest of us. For the French Revolution epitomises the ultimate dilemma that confronts the application of reason to politics. In Raymond Aron's words, 'political problems are not moral problems'. While an ethical code - a morality - may be, indeed must be, universal, there is no such thing as a universal politics.7 There is no way in which administrative decisions, political strategies, or judgments, or actions can be predicated on ideas acceptable as correct, true and therefore just by all other reasonable beings.8 Political decisions and judgments have always to be arrived at in terms of a particular situation and one's place in it - in short, with the circumstantial postulate relevant to a particular individual or group at a particular place and time. This applies with even greater force to economic choices and decisions, in which rationality is conscripted into the service of self-interest. The literature dealing with the application of reason to economic problems is even more formidable than that on political reason. It is perhaps a little curious that - so far as I know - there is hardly any overlap between the two bodies of writings concerned with political and economic decisions and reasoning, although there is more than one link between them. Both economic and political rationality have to take account of qualifications, distinctions and limitations which hardly matter to moral reasoning. Uncertainty about the future, for example, puts limitations on the extent to which decisions and judgments of the kind that Kant called 'hypothetical'9 can be arrived at by reason alone. The difference between moral reason and political reasoning is reflected in the distinctions which have been drawn between different sorts of economic rationality by Herbert Simon - between what he called the 'bounded rationality' of men actually engaged in economic (or political, or military, or administrative, etc.) action as against the ultimate or optimal rationality with which theory might credit them.

7 See V. Descombes, "The Philosophy of the French Revolution" in The Barometer of Modern Reason, (tr. S.A.Schwartz), O.U.P., 1993. 8 Attempts like Bernard Williams' to reduce the distance between the two (e.g., his 'fiction of the deliberative community) seem to me to do no more than 'politicise' the exercise of moral judgment. See his Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy, Collins/Fontana, 1985. 9 Kant, like most eighteenth-century thinkers, was convinced that since everything in nature behaved according to laws, so must mankind. In the case of the moral laws which applied to human action, however, the existence of free will meant that something must intervene so as to make the appropriate law operative. That something was reason. Man's will has to be commanded by reason so that his actions accord with the laws of morality. It should be said that Kant does seem to have pointed to the distinction highlighted by Aron and Descombes. In his Metaphysic of Morals published a few years before 1789, he proposes two kinds of command (or 'imperative') dictated by reason and issued by the will: the categorical imperative of his moral theory ('Do so-and-so, regardless of any purpose you want to accomplish, or consequence it may entail') and the hypothetical imperative, relevant to political decisions and action ('Do so-and-so if you want to achieve this kind of result').

Almost all the parcelling out of reason (or 'rationality') into different varieties or grades differentiated according to the extent to which they approximate to or distance themselves from the purity of Kant's metaphysical reason adds yet another dimension to the interpretation of history. (This, not surprisingly, is beginning to show many of the symptoms of over-interpretation that have exercised the minds of students of literature and language in recent years.10) But there is a difference. With interpretations of history that take a political stance - liberal, conservative, marxist, fascist, or whatever - or which look to the longue durée of modernisation, industrialisation or centralisation, or of the spread of militant nationalism, bureaucratic organisation, constitutional democracy and so forth, there is always the central fact of narrative history to fall back on - the interpretation authorised by what happened, by what was said and done at the time, and by knowledge that was available to all contemporaries. But with the deconstruction of rationality something else enters in. For the various logical cases through which the normative 'pure' reason was declined: moral, political, utilitarian, self-interested, and so on: were themselves ordered chronologically during the small span of years occupied by the French Revolution. The descent from the initial steps of 1789 taken in the light of the moral certainties and political innocence of the summer of 1789 to the political rivalries and divisions of the Convention and the tyranny and murderous horrors of the Terror shows up in the simple chronology of the French Revolution with a speed and a precision which is absent in the later major revolutions. Once the Revolution had begun, differences in the circumstantial postulate of different individuals, groups, and social categories reasserted themselves. Reasoned debate turned into opposition and hostility. Confrontation, threats, and attacks created situations which people saw to begin with as thwarting their hopes or endangering their future careers, and in the end as life-threatening. The same declension is discernible, but rather more dimly, in the successive remodellings and reconstructions of the major organised institutional arrangements for which the new state became - or now made itself - responsible after the first exhilarating months of demolition: the administration of justice, local government, army, education, public finance and the constitution of the Republic itself. After 1795, though, an ideological shift, or perhaps simply a change of direction becomes evident. Reason still rules, but less as quasi-divine inspiration and much more openly in favour of, and at the instigation of, the governing class of political leaders, generals, and military and civil administrators. What follows is intended to illustrate the process of 'deconstruction by over-interpretation' as it became manifest in the enactments and policies of the revolutionary and republican governments.

10 See, for example, Umberto Eco, with R.Rorty, J.Culler and C. Brooke-Rose, Interpretation and Over-interpretation (ed. S.Collini), C.U.P., 1992

III

J.M.Thompson prefaced his history of the French Revolution11 with a quotation from a statement made in 1689, in the midst of England's 'Glorious Revolution': "A man in a revolution resolving to do nothing which is not strictly according to established form resembles a man who has lost himself in the wilderness, and who stands crying 'Where is the king's highway? I will walk nowhere but on the king's highway.' In a wilderness a man should take the track which will carry him home. In a revolution we must have recourse to the highest law." For Sir John Maynard, whose words these were, 'the highest law' was 'the safety of the state.' For the members of the National Assembly in June, 1789, it was 'the rights of man.' The Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen was adopted on August 26. Its seventeen articles did not amount to a legislative act; it was simply an assertion of the 'natural and indefeasible' rights of man: liberty, property, safety, and resistance to oppression. It served later as preamble to the 1791 Constitution. Subsequent interpretations of the Declaration vary from seeing it as a panic measure passed to 'pacify' the countryside or as a conspiracy framed by the Bretons' Club, to an orgy of rhetoric which led to a Dutch auction of renunciations of rights and privileges. Whatever the motives and plans of the delegates were, the outcome was of immense political significance. For one thing, sovereignty, according to the third article, resided in the nation. What is more, though the speeches revealed hardly a breath of republicanism, there was no mention of the king or of monarchy. This omission was repaired a couple of weeks later, when it was agreed that the legislative role of the king (still the sole head of executive power, with the unchallenged right to appoint his ministers) was to be limited to a 'suspensive veto'- the ability to delay (for two sessions) giving any legislative act the force of law. The king remained head of the executive, appointing his own ministers. He was to be referred to as the prime representative of the people but at the same time was deprived of any means of exercising authority over them. There was no precedent, no traditional, constitutional or legal authority for any of these or any other resolutions passed by the National Assembly. All of them were eventually accepted - 'sanctioned' - by the king, but they were all initiated and voted through in defiance of the declared instructions or known wishes of the king. While the Declaration of the Rights of Man was simply what it says it is: a statement, the abolition of 'feudalism' some weeks earlier had been taken to have the force of law; it was being given effect in statutes already being drafted. But with the vote on the king's right of veto, made 'suspensive' only as a compromise between royal opposition and popular demand for total exclusion of the king from legislative powers, it was evident that the constitution had effectively been changed. The change was registered - even ratified - by the king's agreeing to order the promulgation of the resolution abolishing 'feudalism'.

11 J.M.Thompson, The French Revolution, Blackwell, (1943) 1985.

Thus, the single most 'revolutionary' accomplishment of the Revolution - the transfer of sovereignty from the king to the people of France - was decided at the very outset.

IV

It is perhaps proper to begin with the problems of the national finances, which in fact provided the occasion which triggered the Revolution itself. Each delegate to the States General called for June, 1789, carried with him a cahier des doleances which every constituency, from the primary level of parish up to the electoral assembly of baillage, had been called upon to prepare. The political concerns which showed up in most cahiers may well have been at parish-pump level at best, but many reflected serious and widespread demand for equality and justice in taxation, the abolition of feudal dues, and the reorganisation of government. None of the grievances they recorded or pleas they presented were in any sense revolutionary, but, collectively, they represented a vast mound of evidence of misery, inequity, injustice, exploitation and abuse. Presentation and discussion of the cahiers took up the first few weeks of the National Assembly, when it was formed. With this kind of mandate, solving the financial problems of the king and his ministers hardly had first claim on the attention of the delegates. This was especially the case after Necker, in his opening speech to the States-General, had gone some way towards minimising the fiscal crisis by giving an estimate of 56 millions for the deficit, instead of the 160 millions it later turned out to be. The contents of the cahiers were of far more immediate concern. These were full of complaints about the inequitable distribution of the burden of taxation, and looked to the total demolition of the old fiscal system. Still, since the whole point of summoning the States-General had been to discuss and help solve the monarchy's financial problems, it did, early on, appoint sixty-five of its members to a Finance Committee, out of which a dozen were chosen to meet and confer regularly with Necker, the Controller-General. By mid-June, however, the States-General were refusing assent to a loan to meet the most pressing needs. Two days later it became the National Assembly, which proceeded to declare all existing taxes invalid and illegal, since they had been imposed 'without the consent of the nation'. The only sop offered to the King and his ministers, whose desperate search for a solution to the fiscal crisis had set the ball rolling in the first place, was a simultaneous declaration to the effect that taxes were to go on being paid, none the less, until such time as the Assembly was dissolved. As the rush of revolutionary events gathered pace during the summer of 1789, the National Assembly found even less time for the financial affairs of the king and his government. On July 11 it resolved to put off all fundamental decisions about the financial system until the principles on which the constitution was to be based were settled. In any case, the facts of the Crown's finances were difficult to get at, let alone master. "Hampered by their own ignorance, the deputies at first hardly knew what questions to ask. 'The fact is that nothing is less familiar to the Assembly than the maze of finance,' Mirabeau wrote to his constituents,"12 and this was in December, 1789. 12 J.Godechot, Les Institutions de la France sous la Republique et l'Empire, p.254.

Nevertheless, all-important decisions which were to shape the future of the French economy (as against solving the immediate fiscal crisis) had already been made. By the end of August, 1789, the Assembly had agreed the text of the seventeen articles of the Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen. Among the 'natural and indefeasible rights of man' was property; man was free to acquire and to possess. By natural extension, the Declaration, ratified in the Constitution of 1791, extended this right to cover what man made and produced, and so on to the right to profit from what he made or produced. Laissez-faire, in this limited sense, written into the first constitution, was never dropped, whatever amendments were made to other articles subsequently, and despite resort to requisitioning. It was not at all intended as a charter for capitalism, commercial or industrial. The whole revolutionary movement of Third Estate, peasants, and urban lower classes, was as profoundly anti-capitalist as it was anti-privilege. But the capitalists denounced by delegates and execrated by the Paris crowds (in 1792 and later years, no less than in 1789) were bankers, financiers, tax-farmers: all those who used their money 'to make money, not things'. The same underlying union of individual liberty and laissez-faire economic principles carried the resolution of March, 1791, which abolished all corporations and, in the following month, forbade associations of workers and declared strikes illegal. In the same vein, internal customs duties were abolished, with the whole territory of France constituting a single national market, and the Compagnie des Indes and other overseas trading companies deprived of their monopoly rights and privileges. This too was double-edged; de-regulation opened up all kinds of opportunities for the merchant entrepreneur as 'interloper'. At the same time, it demolished the defences on which small tradesmen, artisans, and journeymen had relied to keep intruders out just when the market for furnishings and household goods had slumped anyway, and was further depressed by the sale of second-hand articles from abandoned chateaux. Adam Smith was not altogether unknown to the revolutionaries of 1789, but the principles which inspired this programme were political and social, not economic. Import duties were retained for wines, textiles, and manufactures; so were the mercantilist 'navigation acts', whereby colonies were required to trade only with France, and in French ships. The same combination of principles gave peasants individual property rights over their holdings, but thwarted moves to extend them to allow the enclosure of commons and waste land, and to terminate the ancient system by which sowing and harvest were determined by communal decision. The relaxation of both these latter measures towards the end of the 1790's benefitted people with money - urban speculators and richer rather than poorer peasants. Some stop-gap measures proposed by Necker were voted in the autumn of 1789. But by then the tax-farmers had been dismissed, and, for the most part, people simply stopped paying taxes. Even Necker's favourite remedy, borrowing, proved useless; a forced loan (contribution patriotique) and a voluntary subscription (don patriotique) yielded far less than was looked for. Meanwhile, the deficit increased every month; in March, 1790, Necker was talking about a deficit of 294 millions. The Assembly did not get around to creating the promised new system of taxes (now called contributions instead of impots) until 1791. All the emphasis was now on direct taxes, not

only because they were seen as inherently more equitable, but because the salt and tobacco monopolies and the huge and varied mass of local customs duties were regarded as monstrous. (One of the first 'revolutionary acts', even before the storming of the Bastille, was the destruction of the 'barrier' - the wall around Paris which the Farmers-General had built when the octrois were 'rationalised'). These new taxes were to be levied on income from land (contributions foncieres), from rented property (contributions mobilieres), and from business profits (the patente). To begin with, it did look as if the Revolution had solved the financial crisis, if not at a single stroke then at two in swift succession. This came not so much from a direct assault on the country's economic and financial problems as from the demolition of social privilege as part of the eradication of the ancien regime and all its works. It was to this end that the National Assembly applied itself, even before settling down to the business of defining its constitutional authority. Thus, following on the alarming reports of rioting in the provinces, attacks on chateaux, and brigandage, the sitting on August 4th opened with an appeal for the enforcement of the law, coupled with insistence on the continued payment of all established dues and taxes. But the debate which followed turned immediately to a series of recitals of peasant distress. By the end, the Assembly had passed a resolution abolishing 'feudalism'. Serfdom, seigneurial jurisdictions and hunting rights, tax exemptions and tax privileges were all suppressed; taxation was to be on an equal basis for all from the beginning of the next year; civil and military posts were open to all citizens; justice would be administered free of charge. Generosity was, however, tempered by caution; the one clause which, since it concerned the feudal dues which made up a quarter of the income of landlords, did apply directly to the redress of the unfair economic burdens endured by the peasantry at large, made them redeemable by purchase. This proviso about redemption was increasingly ignored, and few efforts were made to collect feudal dues, still less to pay them. Nevertheless, resistance to the abolition of feudal dues by nobles and urban bourgeois who had bought fiefs sparked off the first move made against the Revolution, and provoked armed conflicts and further attacks on chateaux in the winter of 1789-90. This first attempt to deal with the economic crisis did emerge out of a debate which bore on the distress of the poor. The fiscal crisis itself was met head on and 'resolved' in much the same wholesale, but half-baked, fashion by a second major assault on ancien regime property rights - this time the land and buildings of the church. There were precedents for this move from the ancien regime itself, going back as far as the sixteenth century, when the church had been taxed unmercifully; during the past hundred years, the property of Huguenots, first, and then the Jansenists and finally the Jesuits had been seized by the Crown. In any case, the financial affairs of the church presented something of a problem, because tithes were to be abolished along with 'feudal' privileges, according to the resolutions adopted in August, 1789. [Once again, the generosity of August '89 was tempered when it came to turning the resolution about tithes into law. When they got around to it, at the end of 1790, the Assembly (made up of lawyers and landowners, as

Sutherland observes) made over the tithes to landowners, who were authorised to add the appropriate amount to the rents they charged.] In November, 1789, on a motion proposed by Mirabeau, the Assembly declared all ecclesiastical property to be the property of the nation; provision was to be made for church expenditure, including a rise in salary for curés de campagne to a minimum of 1,200 livres (some L60). The intention was to sell the land thus acquired (the royal estates, the most ancient of the state's sources of revenue, had already been taken over) by auction, in stages, and in small lots. Obviously, it would take some time before this vast new national property (different estimates valued the church's possessions at anything from a fifth to a half of all the land and buildings in France) could find purchasers. The first practical use to which the new national property was put was put, however, was as security for what amounted to an issue of some £20 millions of Treasury loan stock. The old system of financial management, which had depended almost entirely on the entrepreneurial services of financiers, tax farmers and 'accountants', had always been unpopular. Bankers were hardly less so, and Necker's proposal for a national bank on joint-stock company lines, on the Bank of England model, was set aside by the Assembly. "The classic Bourbon theory of public credit by private enterprise was pilloried again and again in the National Assembly."13 All debate was swamped by the universal distaste for anything tainted by association with the ancien regime. The acquisition of church property as a national asset provided what seemed - almost literally - a heaven-sent solution. The new national property could be made available as backing for credit. What is more, it was entirely in accordance with Physiocrat orthodoxy that it was real estate which would serve, not bonds and mortgages on future tax revenue. Eventually, they got around to working out a system under which the government issued its own notes, secured by the 'biens nationaux'. These were the famous assignats. Against the eventual sale of nationalised land was set a new system of public credit, nationally owned and operated by government officials. A special caisse was instituted into which the proceeds of the sales of nationalised church lands, together with the new direct taxes on land and income, would be paid. The caisse issued certificates (assignats) which earned 5% interest, and could be realised either through the purchase of nationalised land or in cash out of the receipts from the new taxes and from the auctions of church property, which had been put in the hands of Paris and other municipalities. But the government's financial troubles were by no means over. The L20 millions of new money went some way to relieving the pressure, but it also pointed the way to an obvious and beautifully simple way of meeting expenses. The temptation to repeat the process grew as taxes yielded less and less: in 1790, "the finance minister spent an unhappy summer trying to squeeze revenue out of a people blandly determined to exercise the rights of property-holders without the duties of tax-payers."14 By the end of 1791, assignats of a face value equivalent to L100 millions had been issued. They had by then been declared legal 13 J.F.Bosher, French Finances, 1770 - 1795, C.U.P., 1970, p.264. 14 J.M.Thompson, The French Revolution, Blackwell, (1943) 1985, pp.179-80.

tender in all transactions; municipalities followed suit, and issued their own token coins and paper-money; forgers obliged, too. The consequence was that assignats lost half their value in three years. By 1795, they were worth just over a tenth of their face-value - in some places, a hundredth. The ineptitude of the attempts made to deal with government finances had made things worse, actually fostering the forces making for political disruption. They also bred their own brand of opportunism. Inflation worked its usual ratchet effect on shortages, with peasants refusing to bring produce to markets where they would be paid in assignats. Coins disappeared. Borrowers found their debts immoderately lightened and lenders - not least those who had taken up state loans and found their rentes paid in the new paper money - found themselves impoverished. Estates were bought by outsiders who had somehow managed to find enough money or credit, and in a sizeable number of cases, canny speculators bought chateaux and large estates for less than what they paid for the furniture and parcels of land. Above all, the poor lost out. In a number of areas, notably Brittany and the Vendee, this meant that it was the wealthier landowners who discovered they had a stake in the Revolution, and the poorer peasants who felt it had turned against them. For a time, the revolutionary government of 1793-4 imposed a maximum on prices - and on wages, too, which were being forced up after the war began, but these measures were repealed in 1795, when the worst period of inflation coincided with severe shortages after the bad harvest of the previous year. Neither revolutionary fervour nor constitutional reforms could bring about an end to hardship and deprivation or to the fiscal crisis with which the Revolution had begun. Economic distress and fiscal crisis were inextricably tied together for seven years, renewing themselves with almost catastrophic severity after the onset of war. 1795 proved to be as desperate as 1789. It was indeed at this point that the combination of economic distress and fiscal crisis worked on the divisiveness of the constitutional settlement so as finally to extinguish the revolution they had helped begin. Reduction of the bread ration in March 1795 was met by popular riots in Paris; the manner in which they were dealt with demonstrates how completely the wheel had turned: "Since the amalgamation of forces had returned the army to state control, it was thought possible to use it in conjunction with the National Guard from the western sections of Paris. For the first time since 1789, troops entered Paris and undertook to fight the rebellious people." On May 20, 1795, "the mob overwhelmed the assembly and murdered the representative Feraud." The next day, "the Convention went so far as to preach fraternization. On the 3rd [May 22] the army surrounded the Faubourg St. Antoine, which, starved and unarmed, surrendered the following day without a fight. This is the date which should be taken as the end of the Revolution."15 This may have put an end to the Revolution but did nothing to clear up the financial mess. By the end of December, the Directory suspended payment and abandoned the assignats. The attempt, made early in 1796, to replace them by new mandats (at a 30:1 ratio) was a hopeless failure; they were launched on the same security: the unsold remainder of royal and church lands; it took five months for the value of the mandat to fall as much as the 15 G.Lefebvre, French Revolution, 1793-99, op. cit., pp. 144-5.

assignat had in five years. In the autumn of 1796, the government had perforce to abandon paper money altogether and order a return to coinage. But by then coins had virtually disappeared from public view. The printing machines were ceremonially destroyed in February, but by then 40 billion livres of assignats had been printed, of which 36 billion were still in circulation; coins had virtually disappeared from public view. A great number of those in France and elsewhere who had invested in long-term or funded debt were forced into bankruptcy. Bosher's final pronouncement is worth quoting, but only as an instance - rare in his case - of the way in which rhetoric, especially in its more cliché-ridden form, can betray historical judgment. 'The revolutionary government had originally devised assignats to rid the debt of the irregular, short-term investments held by bankers and financiers. One of the aims of this policy had been to protect the interests of the rentiers whom the government viewed as more legitimate creditors. By using assignats in such large amounts, they had lost the baby with the bathwater but they had saved the republic.'16 It was in fact the army which saved the Republic - and then extinguished it, both in the classic Roman manner - but this a matter best reserved for the next chapter.

V

Law and the administration of justice engaged the attention of the Constituantes as least as much as finance. So far as the constituantes were concerned, the existing apparatus of law, including the judiciary and the system of jurisdictions, was an Augean stable which called for demolition rather than cleansing. There was an appalling tangle of juridical competences, with eight different jurisdictions in Paris alone. The law's delays of other countries were insignificant compared with the slowness and obstruction encountered everywhere in France. Costs alone virtually prohibited any semblance of equality before the law. But it was the criminal law which showed the ancien regime at its worst. Its procedures were utterly barbarous, with torture used on prisoners not only to extract confessions but also to get them to incriminate accomplices, and penalties exacted from the families of convicted criminals. And again, while the infliction of dire penalties on lower class criminals was not unknown in other countries, the extreme indulgence shown to the privileged classes was. There were good reasons why the storming of the Bastille had rather more significance for the people at large than the merely symbolic gesture which later historians have made of it. The entire system of justice had in fact been under sustained attack since before 1760, with Montesquieu and Voltaire among those publicising its abuses and calling for radical changes. By the 1780's, public criticism had developed into an active campaign, with conferences of lawyers meeting to discuss a reform agenda; Robespierre and Marat had 16 J.F.Bosher, French Finances, 1770-1795, p. 275.

been among those whose contributions had won them formal honorific awards at Metz and Berne. Almost half the members of the Constituent Assembly were practising lawyers, or magistrates, or had some professional connection with the law. Reforming zeal, when it came to the legal system, went hand in hand with intimate knowledge and hard experience. The combination of the two perhaps reveals itself most clearly in the sheer novelty of the design for the judiciary. They were, for example, virtually at one in their opposition to 'professional' judges; diplomas from faculties of law were unacceptable as qualifications for appointment to the judiciary. Much of the first year of the Assembly's existence was devoted to formulating proposals in the several committees, debating and amending them in the Assembly, and passing them into law. In accordance with Montesquieu's principle of the 'division of powers' - seemingly - the legal system and the judiciary were to be separated from both legislature and executive. Yet, as Godechot observes, the regard the constituantes had for Montesquieu's principle was limited to its handiness as a weapon to use against the king and the parlements. The king was deprived of his position at the head of the King's Council, which dispensed judgments that affected the whole country and was the ultimate court of appeal. The parlements were abolished. But the new legal system, just like the new administrative structure, incorporated procedures for election to office, and so tended to become politicised at certain levels. There was to be one system of law for the whole country. The administration of justice was made independent of the King and his ministers. It was also freed from its traditional expropriation as a property-right by a privileged class. The parlements, suspended in the autumn of 1789, were abolished without the slightest protest the following year. Going to law was made much less expensive - though not entirely free, as had been hoped. 'Justices of the peace' (after a Dutch rather than an English model), were to be elected for a spell of two years; no professional experience or qualification was required, apart from what was acceptable for election to the general councils of departments and districts. Judges, the next rank up, were also to be elected, but for six years and from among candidates with five years legal experience. The judiciary was there to administer the law. It was never accorded any power to scrutinise or pronounce on the constitutional validity of any piece of legislation passed by the Assembly. This, and the political turn which election gave to the judiciary, and thus to the new legal system, is further evidence of the Assembly's rather cavalier (or opportunistic) use of the 'separation of powers' principle. Civil law was to operate at four fairly distinct levels. In the first instance, it was obligatory for parties to a dispute to seek settlement by conciliation - except in cases affecting 'the nation, the commons, or public order' - at sessions held before a justice of the peace. If it proved impossible to settle the dispute in this way, it would then, where sums of less than fifty francs were involved, be decided by the justice of the peace, as arbitrator.

Arbitration was obligatory for all family disputes; family cases were to be held before a 'family tribunal', made up of four relatives, friends, or neighbours. In this particular instance, lack of experience - though other than legal - did show through. Not surprisingly, few family quarrels were brought before a family tribunal; most people preferred to refer them to a lawyer, and pay him a fee. All in all, nevertheless, and despite the amendments of later years, the new system of justice turned out to be among the more durable as well thoroughgoing of all the reforms accomplished by the Assembly.

VI

The same pronouncement might be made of the treatment of local government; and perhaps fewer qualifications have to be made. The Constituent Assembly did away with the whole of the old framework of royal, provincial and local administration. With it went any local autonomy which provinces, états, or municipalities had possessed, to be replaced by whatever administrative powers and responsibilities were allotted to the new areas of local government. The Assembly set out to create an entirely new, 'rationalised' system, to consist of a hierarchy of departments, districts, cantons and communes. The obstinately defended rights of the provincial parlements, provincial estates and scores of towns had themselves been part and parcel of the ancien regime, to the point of being a major reason for its survival. One strong defence of privilege and particularism had been the sheer ignorance of the royal government about provincial and local administration. Even at the time when the States-General was being convened, government officials were writing to baillages which no longer existed and ignoring others which were alive and well. The France of the ancien regime had been shot through with local and regional loyalties, however much they were essentially adjuncts of privilege. So that while revolutionary fever had spread indiscriminately over the whole country, its symptoms were particular to each town and district, no less than to Paris. The idea of reorganising the whole country into departments more or less equal in size was not especially new: some such proposal had been made thirty-five years previously, and again in 1787, but without much coming of it. Once again, it was the abolition of 'feudal' privileges which performed the same facilitating office for the reorganisation of local administration it did for other aspects of revolutionary reconstruction. 'All special privileges, financial or any other, belonging to provinces, principalities, regions, cantons, towns and communities were abolished for ever'. As the Assembly saw it, a national constitution and public liberty were more advantageous than any of the privileges which some areas may have enjoyed; they had necessarily to be sacrificed so that all parts of France might enjoy the same privileges - 'financial or any other.' It would also, incidentally, simplify the tasks of national administration and work towards closer union.

The principles, strategic plan, and details of the new administrative map of France were all subjected to the fiercest criticism and argued over not only in the Assembly, but in town and country throughout France. A small committee of deputies, with a well-known cartographer whom they co-opted, was appointed to carry out the provisions of the law and to settle all disputes, with dissatisfied parties given the right to appeal to the Assembly. The number of departments, the criteria of territorial division, and the choice of administrative centre were matters settled by discussion between the old authorities and the Assembly's committee. Such discussions were, however, to be conducted on the understanding that the population was to be distributed as evenly as possible among the 83 departments finally agreed upon, while paying due respect to physical boundaries and traditional ties. In the process, the complete uniformity which some had wanted was abandoned, but, in the main, the whole business was carried through sensibly and with reasonable speed. There were to be four levels of local authority: departments, districts (from six up to nine in each department), cantons (electoral districts for elections to departmental and national assemblies), and communes, which were identical with what had been country parishes or towns. Each department was to be administered by a 'general council' of 36, elected by the electoral assembly of each canton. Half the departmental council was to be newly elected every year and to hold their positions for two years.17 When not in session, the work of the general council was to carried on by a standing committee - a 'directory' - of eight council members, who would be paid a salary. It had no authority to legislate for local affairs; its responsibilities were entirely administrative, being concerned with the assessment of tax-liability, prisons, schools, agriculture, roads and bridges, public assistance, administration of justice, health, and the like. For all routine matters (and probably rather more) the councils depended on a corps of officials, most of whom they inherited from the parlements, provincial estates, intendancies, and other provincial and local offices of the ancien regime. Executive government (i.e., the administration subject to the King and his ministers) was also to be represented in each department by a procurator-general responsible directly to the royal ministers. He too, however, was to be elected. Districts also had their general council and directory, and their own procurator-general. Subordinate to the department in all things though they were, the districts, as the 'eyes and hands' (sometimes the fists) of the departmental administration, proved to be effective administrative instruments. They were directly involved in the sale of the property expropriated from the church and the king, in the disposal of the old taxes and dues and the assessment of the new, in recruiting the National Guard later on, and, finally, in mobilisation, requisitioning supplies, and acquiring food and provender after the declaration of war in April, 1792. The next level down, the canton, although designed to constitute merely an electoral area, also served as the judicial district for the new (elected) justice of the peace.

17 J.Godechot, Les Institutions de France sous la Revolution et L'Empire, P.U.F., 1951, p. 98.

Political and administrative activity, however, as concentrated, along with the major concerns of social and economic life, in the towns and villages, each comprising, or at the centre of, what had been a parish and was now a commune. There was the same arrangement for larger communes - municipalities - as at departmental and district level, of general council, with a corps of officials and a procurator-general, but there was also an elected mayor. It was the communes, which included the towns, large and small, which in fact engaged the Assembly's attention first. There was some urgency about displacing the informal 'revolutionary committees' which had taken over control of a large number of towns during the disturbances of July and August, 1789. For a time, these looked set to assume a good deal more autonomy in local affairs than had ever been realised under the old system. The Assembly, alert to possible challenge from these new 'revolutionary communes', passed a decree authorising elections to be held in all towns with over 25,000 inhabitants in December, 1789 - well before the rest of the structure of local government had been fully debated, let alone decided on. The precautionary move justified itself in the elections held in 1790, which returned general councils with much the same social make-up as obtained in the Constituent Assembly itself. The trouble was that the 'sections' - voting districts in the larger towns equivalent to departmental cantons - took it upon themselves to assert their own autonomy, with their own structure of committees and officials, and, what is more, to assume the right to monitor, voice objections and demands, and even participate in meetings of the commune's general council. So it was that a tactical move designed to cancel or forestall any appropriation of the Revolution by the common people or any claim to intermediate autonomy by local authorities turned out to be self-defeating. One other problem showed up very soon but seems to have been treated simply as an oddity and of very marginal importance. Self-administration turned out to be difficult to realise in a sizeable number of rural communes which found themselves with no one able to read or write. The Assembly refused all the proposals submitted by departmental directories to have such communes administered by commissioners: they would have to learn by themselves. And it seems that they did - though very gradually, and with precious little help from the government during the first few years of the Revolution. Above the cut-off point of illiteracy, levels of education were soon found to have an exchange-value in the all-important terms of politics and office-holding. Inevitably, the elected general councils in the departments and the larger municipal communes turned out to be composed mostly of 'notables' (including some nobles), lawyers and other professional men, and the richer citizens - much the same kind of persons, in fact, who formed the Constituent Assembly. Indeed, the kind of income required of candidates under the new law and the two-tier electoral arrangement went some way to ensure this. It was among them, after all, that knowledgeability about legal procedures and urban affairs, experience in speaking before an audience of comparative strangers and, above all, self-confidence and the availability of time to spend on public affairs were to be found.

Despite these initial setbacks and problems, the new local government structure was undoubtedly a vast improvement on what it replaced. It was simple, comprehensible and, above all, uniform - or as near it as seemed possible. Nothing like it had ever been attempted before, yet its main features proved to be extremely durable.

VII

Some significance attaches to the central government's offhand attitude to the handicap that illiteracy imposed on local government in some parts of the country. But "what governments regard as 'appropriate agenda' do change, sometimes rather rapidly; nor can it be maintained that the new agenda necessarily correspond to the emergence of new problems in the world or new techniques for their solution."18 Universal education, which is where the remedy really lay, was not on the political agenda in any country. (It had been on the religious agenda, of course, notably in Scotland, but at a time when church membership meant much more than citizenship.) A right to education was conspicuously absent from the Declaration of the Rights of Man in August, 1789. The Constituent Assembly never concerned itself with education. What gives the whole issue its political significance is that universal primary education did in fact get on the political agenda at the end of 1793 - to be dropped off two years later. But the very same two years saw the start of the sweeping reform and expansion of higher education. Much has been made of this innovatory movement in education, and rightly so, but it does present a rather stark contrast with the abandonment of the educational needs of the generality of people, a contrast which tends to be overlooked. Such historical explanations as there are deal with the two aspects separately. Anti-clericalism is held to account for what happened to primary education. Apart from what went on in the home, education under the ancien regime at primary level entirely, and at other levels mostly, had been in the hands of the church, as it was in most European countries. When, after 1790, increasing numbers of the clergy either became, or were suspected of being, opposed to the revolution, it became more important to protect people from contamination by the Church's teaching than from the positive deprivations that illiteracy might bring. In August, 1792, all teaching under church auspices was forbidden. No move was made to engage replacements, or even to find them. The right to education was eventually included in the later version of the Declaration composed by the Convention. It went on to pass the law of 19 December, 1793 which made primary education (in 'the three R's, in effect) for all children between the ages of six and eight compulsory, and free. In the event, it hardly qualified as even a pious gesture. Teachers were to be paid, but at a ludicrously (or insultingly) low rate (20 livres a year per pupil for men, 15 for women). Just how far the situation had deteriorated was made clear from a survey made in the following year; out of the 557 districts in France, only 32 had opened up the schools required by law.

18 T.Burns, "Sovereignty, Interests and Bureaucracy", British Journal of Sociology, vol. 31, 1980, p. 502.

The Convention put an end to any pretence of providing universal primary education in November, 1794. Primary education was to be made 'available'. There was to be one school for every 1000 of the population - a nonsensical provision which foundered simply because the problem of choosing a location within reach of the infants who were to be the pupils proved insoluble in most districts of France. This was the last attempt at state provision for primary education of any kind under the First Republic. Less than a year later, in the comprehensive law dealing with education in general which was passed the day before the Convention finally dissolved itself, primary education got short shrift. What teachers remained were to collect what fees they could from their pupils; they would not receive any more pay from the government. This see-saw strategy about primary education that the Convention followed becomes rather more comprehensible when one dates the changes: December, 1793, the high tide of revolutionary government - legislation providing for universal primary education; Summer, 1794, just before the fall of the revolutionary government - reports of deficiencies in number of schools in operation; November, 1794, four months after Thermidor - provision for universal primary education dropped in favour of making it 'available' (1 school for every 1000 people); October, 1795, after spring and summer of extreme food shortages marked by major sans-culotte uprisings of Germinal, Prairial and Vendemiaire - remnant of state provision for primary education 'privatised'. Secondary education fared rather better, though the same offhand manner shows itself in the way the government dealt with it. The old church schools, reconstituted as 'free colleges' with 'laicized' teaching staff, had been allowed to continue. Apart from that, nothing much happened until the comprehensive act of 25 October, 1795, although secondary education had been much discussed beforehand; Mirabeau, Talleyrand and Condorcet all submitted proposals to the Committee on Public Education which the Convention had set up. The new legislation allowed the 'free colleges' to continue, but there were in addition to be 'central colleges' for every department, to be located in the administrative centre. These were intended to serve as centres for higher education, too. Whatever was done for secondary education, though, is quite inconsiderable compared with what happened at the higher levels. Above the secondary level, education under the ancien regime had been split between the universities scattered over the whole country, and the institutes of higher learning situated for the most part in Paris. There were twenty-two universities, and teaching at all of them was, once again, largely in the hands of the clergy. They were in a poor state in 1789, and were meant to disappear along with all privileged corporations under the decrees of 4 August 1789, but since there was nothing to take their place so far as higher education was concerned, they were reprieved, and survived, although moribund, until early in 1795. The decision to shut them down in fact was preliminary to the creation of the central colleges, which would cater for secondary and further education. It was the College Royal, and scientific institutes like the Jardin du Roi, the Observatoire, and more recently established establishments like Ecoles des ponts et chausees, mines, languages, engineering etc., that had been the true centres of higher learning under the

ancien regime. Over and above them were the Academie Francaise and the specialist academies for literature, science, painting, etc., serving as a kind of intellectual and professional Senate, their members providing a reservoir of talent available to the Court and the government. Their eminence and international prestige was fully recognised and they were not only given financial support but encouraged to expand. This still left plenty of room for reforming zeal, if only in the search for new names for old institutions. The College Royal became the College de France. The seven former academies were replaced by a comprehensive National Institute for Arts and Sciences. The Jardin du Roi was renamed the Museum of Natural History in 1793, and became the chief centre for the natural sciences. Institutes for the study of oriental languages, archaeology, and music were set up. The old medical faculties, universally unpopular among the 'enlightened', were closed down, and new medical schools set up in Paris, Strasbourg and Montpellier. There was one major failure, and this too was significant. In January, 1795, an Ecole normale (no connection with the 'ecole normale superieure' of later years) was set up in Paris. It was intended to serve as a national establishment for training teachers. Distinguished scholars were engaged to give the courses. There was great enthusiasm. Well over a thousand students, ranging in age from 20 to 80 years, were sent from all over the country; after finishing, they were to return to their districts and disseminate what they had learned. But their education was not up to the standard that attendance required, and the classes were far too heterogeneous for them to make any real progress; most of them left before their courses of study ended in July. With the reformed, amplified and well-funded system of higher education, a second kind of explanation for the educational strategy of the revolutionary governments is routinely invoked. It was the pressing needs of war that provided the driving force behind it all. "It was above all to satisfy these pressures that the Convention created, with no kind of overall plan in mind, the special teaching establishments which for the next twelve years constituted the only institutions of higher education in France."19 Hence, obviously, the jewel in the crown of the educational innovations of the revolutionary years. This was the creation of a national school for public works in 1794, which the following year this became the Ecole Polytechnique, the training ground for civil engineering, with 'postgraduate' schools for artillery, military works, mines, roads and bridges, etc.. established elsewhere in or near Paris. Of course the thousands of well-trained officers, gunners, civil engineers and other technically proficient graduates of the Ecole Polytechnique were of immense importance over the next fifteen years. But it will hardly do to point to the supply of trained manpower for the armed forces, supporting services, and administrative structures of the Napoleonic Empire as the motive for the prodigious expansion of higher education in the years before General Bonaparte appeared on the scene. And the 'pressing obligations' of war apparent throughout 1794 and 1795 had to be - and were in fact - met rather more speedily than by instituting three-year courses of technical training.

19 J.Godechot, Les Institutions...., p.389.

Why, then, this sudden and rather dramatic dedication to the cause of higher education - a cause, moreover, with an application limited fairly strictly to those who had profited sufficiently from the still essentially private systems of primary and secondary education to qualify for admission to the new écoles? It is, I think, significant that the rush of enthusiasm for higher education came at a time when the promise of 'careers open to the talents' was beginning to be seen as realisable in practice. The signs were becoming all too obvious in the resurgence of the 'muscadins', jeunesse dorée, the pomaded and overdressed youngsters who were prepared to take on the sans-culottes and actually formed a 'legislative guard' during the food riots of 1795. Sons of the better-off bourgeoisie, they seem to be identified in the main with the junior administrative and clerical staff being taken on in ever-increasing numbers by the government - the Convention and its committees, the ministries, the army and the supply services. It seems all too clear that the 'enlightenment' that had brought forth the Revolution was strictly for the well-to-do - the 'honnetes gens' - now that the Revolution, as they saw it, was over.

VIII

One could count the reassertion of the role of organised violence in politics as among the principal achievements of the French Revolution. The 'ancien regime' had been ended in the unorganised violence of the 'Paris mob'; organized violence in the shape of the army finished off the Republic. What was responsible - as much as anything - for the transformation of the character and the political role of violence was the new nationalism. To begin with, violence entered in only spasmodically, on occasions when the defence or assertion of popular power seemed to call for it. The mobbing of German mercenaries followed the dismissal of Necker and the spread of rumours of a royalist coup; two days later the Bastille was stormed - with a hundred French guardsmen to man the guns they had brought up, the main body of troops stationed in Paris to maintain order having been withdrawn. In September, the arrival of new troops and their over-exuberant welcome by the officers of the King's Bodyguard turned a Paris bread riot into the march on Versailles. But, as the Assembly exhausted the contents of the cahiers, which did service as the expression of 'the will of the people', as the cahiers themselves were rendered obsolete by events, and as the growing menace of counter-revolution and invasion grew, the emphasis changed. The Assembly, which had begun by transforming the representation of classes into the representation of two hundred and fifty electoral constituencies, went on to claim representation of 'the nation'. Solidarity ('fraternity') translated itself into patriotism, and sovereignty returned to government - to men who, in claiming to speak for the nation, could exercise authority over their fellows. The transition to full sovereignty was slow enough to be imperceptible until the time when sovereign power was itself disputed among those who claimed to speak for the nation, but it did happen.

The conjunction between collective action by 'the people' and violence on which the sovereignty of the people was founded had lasted no more than a couple of years in its pristine revolutionary form. Later, when the connection assumed a more Roman form with the creation of national armies and the mobilisation of national resources, it provided the foundation for a new kind of state and a new kind of imperialism. Its coming was signalled clearly enough in the adoption of Cambon's report at the end of 1792, which authorised the confiscation of all property owned by existing authorities in conquered countries and the establishment of 'revolutionary' government by force. But it was the Revolution which in the first place, as Clausewitz put it, made war once again 'the business of the people'. The other strand of the political use of organised violence (military force, as against revolutionary or rebellious crowds) had entered into the reckoning from the very outset of the Revolution, although in odd, confusing, and even negative ways. In the spring and early summer of 1789, the army had been put to work - as armies had been for centuries - to 'maintain public order' and to guard the transport of food supplies. On a number of occasions the troops proved to be 'unreliable', siding with the townsmen and peasants who were besieging the food trains. Such sympathisers with the common people were easily translated into sympathisers with the Revolution. After July 14, the use of armed forces as an instrument of political power began its transfer from monarchy to people. The changeover was happening not just in Paris but throughout the country in the spring and summer of 1789, and in still irregular but more organized fashion. As more and more regular army troops stationed in garrisons and quartered in the provinces proved - or were suspected of being - unreliable, army leaders advised that troops be kept away from Paris (apart from foreign, mostly German, contingents, whose appearance there tended to provoke more disturbance than ever). On the other hand, town councils were being faced with the growing anarchy which culminated in the 'Grande Peur'. Accordingly, they set about creating their own armed forces. (This was quite legitimate: providing a local guard had meant exemption from the taille, although by the 1780's such local militias existed only nominally20. The 'municipal revolution' in the provinces began with the looting of arsenals; as the movement spread, and France was transformed into a federation of communes, each organised by its revolutionary committee, so did the organisation of local militias or 'revolutionary armies', which by 1790 became the National Guard. In fact, the National Guard embodied much of the spirit of the Revolution. It was the natural rallying point of able-bodied and public-spirited men who responded to its call; its very uniform of red, white and blue was emblematic; the idea of citizens in arms was instinct with the classic virtues - with classic republican virtues, at that. But that was not all; the National Guard also embodied - or reflected in its composition - the leadership role of the bourgeoisie. Its officers were, naturally enough, solid citizens who could afford the time and money needed to learn the soldier's trade and to mount and equip themselves; and among the Guard's first duties, along with quelling hostility to the Revolution, was the maintenance of order and the protection of property. The National Guard was the first formally constituted, nation-wide and durable institution actually created by the Revolution. (The self-appointed National Assembly was meant to be 20 G.Lefebvre, The Great Fear of 1789 Random House ('Vintage Books' edn.), 1973, pp. 47-8.

a temporary affair, kept in being so as to decide on a permanent legislature, after which it was to dissolve itself). It was immensely popular, and its popularity translated it into an army of 'active citizens' - of all independent householders and taxpayers over twenty-five. Membership of the National Guard laid the foundation for the distinction between 'active' and 'passive' citizens which was to figure in the Constitution of 1791, and which did more than anything else to attach the label of 'bourgeois' to the first revolutionary regime. In the first two years of its existence it acted entirely as a local militia. It was, in fact, called out most often on ceremonial occasions and for controlling crowds at peaceful assemblies and demonstrations. But, rather like a modern police force, it was also brought into service to suppress riots, to defend important buildings and houses, and to chase and arrest dissidents and other 'enemies of the people'. After Varennes, though, and with the mounting threat of invasion from the armies assembling to the north, the National Guard was thrust into a new and immensely significant role. On the day after the royal family was brought back from Varennes, the Constituent Assembly set about raising a new army of volunteers from the National Guard which would be organized on entirely new lines, separately from the regular army, and with their own uniform (that of the National Guard, naturally). Volunteers enlisted for one year, in battalions of nine companies, elected their own officers and non-commissioned officers, and were paid twice as much as regulars. Within two months, over a hundred thousand recruits had presented themselves, most of them townspeople - bourgeois and artisans. There was no war until April, 1792, but it was decided that the frontiers should be manned against the threat of invasion. This meant that the National Guard in large measure was withdrawn from Paris and the provincial cities and towns. However, when the Austrian and Prussian forces did begin their ponderous advance neither the regulars nor the volunteers offered much resistance. In the autumn, though, as the Revolution moved into its second phase after the September massacres, things changed. Even as France declared itself a republic, one French army defeated the Prussians at Valmy and crossed the Rhine to occupy Frankfort; another crushed the Austrians at Jemappes in November, and Dumouriez entered Brussels in triumph. The battles were won largely by sheer weight of numbers. The victories were of enormous value to the revolutionary cause. The way they were won was also a lesson of overwhelming importance for the future of war and the creation of the nation-state. Young, half-trained troops, with their revolutionary enthusiasm could (provided that they also had numerical superiority) defeat the best armies that the old European monarchies could put in the field. There was a second lesson of more immediate importance to be learned at the same time: victory in war was critically important in deciding the course of revolutionary events. 1793 rubbed the lesson in. The triumphant close of the 1792 campaign was followed by a display of revolutionary militancy. By December, 1792, the new Convention had made its offer of help to all peoples who wished to recover their liberty. But it also declared its intention of

imposing revolutionary government on occupied territories, despite pleas from a Belgian delegation for independence and a constitution on their own terms. At the same time it ordered the confiscation of the property of all pre-existing authorities, and demanded that the new government cooperate with French commissioners in supplying the French forces. Later came the outright annexation of Belgium and the Rhineland (Nice had already been incorporated into French territory). In both these places, elections to the provinces, which duly voted for annexation, were supervised by French agents. In the first months of 1793, there was a whole series of gestures of defiance against the foreign enemies of the Revolution, starting with declarations of war against England, Holland and then Spain. Rome and Naples, and then the northern Italian states, one by one, broke off relations. France was now faced with the hostility of virtually the whole of Europe, including even the Ottoman Empire; Switzerland, Denmark and Sweden were the only exceptions. Meanwhile, throughout the winter, the volunteers were leaving for home as they completed their year of engagement, and by February, the volunteer army strength was down to 50,000. On top of all this, dissidence, arising from a variety of causes, broke out into armed revolt in the west and south of the country; Dumouriez was driven out of Belgium and Custine from the Rhine; in April, he joined the flood of emigres, many of them officers of the regular army. In Paris, these developments were reflected - shadowed, rather - in crisis after crisis. But the disaster which should have overtaken the Revolution was staved off, partly by a succession of moves by the French aimed at opening negotiations for peace, but mainly because each of the allies found it simpler to leave the war to others or, short of that, impossible to coordinate their own campaigns with theirs. The respite was enough. The allies' score of missed opportunities mounted throughout the summer. In June came a fresh popular uprising, and 'constitutional government' was replaced by 'revolutionary government' under Robespierre and the Committee of Public Safety. In fact, the 'high command' role of the Committee, and of revolutionary government in general, was left undefined until, after much hesitation, and under increasing sans-culotte pressure (and with its own commissioners jumping the gun in the northern provinces), the decree of August 23 ordered the 'levee en masse'. The lesson of 1792, of the supreme importance in battle of superior - overwhelmingly superior - numbers, had not been forgotten. No time had been lost in calling up a second contingent of volunteers early in 1793, but the response had been disappointing, although it had been encouraged this time by some degree of conscription. By the levee en masse of August, however, the new revolutionary government set out to mobilise the whole population of France for war. All unmarried men between eighteen and twenty-five were called up for the army. All other citizens were made subject to employment in war industries and supply services. Requisitioning, price controls, the closing down of all joint-stock companies, forced loans and the consolidation of all state debts followed. During the winter of 1793-4, France assembled an army of almost a million men, and was soon able to equip them. But the creation of a mass army was only part of it. The whole of

France was galvanized into revolutionary consciousness, patriotic enthusiasm - and warlike activity. A victory at Hondschoote as early as September, well before the levee could have had any material effect, and another a month later at Wattignies secured the northern frontier - and saved the Republic. The army itself was reorganised. Amalgamation of the regulars and volunteers, decreed early in 1793 but accomplished only half-heartedly and piecemeal, was pushed through in 1794. Two battalions of volunteers were joined with one of regulars to form a regiment, after which the companies themselves were reconstituted. 'Discipline' (i.e., trial and punishment by court-martial for insubordination, desertion, and other strictly military offences) was re-instituted. Election was retained for corporals, and a restricted form of election for junior officers, but above that, promotion was to be by seniority; army commanders received their appointments from the Convention. Armament and tactics remained unchanged, to begin with, but, as Lefebvre remarks, "tactics depended on the training of the troops", and innovations resulted from their sheer numbers; in these early days, the practice was for the French troops to fight "as skirmishers, utilizing the terrain; then at the favourable moment they charged with bayonets in a more or less confused mass.... "For the first time since antiquity a truly national army marched to war, and for the first time, too, a nation succeeded in arming and feeding great numbers of soldiers."21 It was accomplished by a fresh wave of enthusiasm, but, in the process, the enthusiasm deserted revolution and democracy for nationalism and militarism. With the crowning victory of Fleurus and the reconquest of Belgium, military success spelled the end of revolutionary government. Nationalism and militarism fed on each other. As both thrived, military victory, and military leaders, played an increasing part in the struggle for political power.

21 G.Lefebvre, The French Revolution from 1793 to 1799, Routledge & K.Paul, 1964, p. 98.