This is a survey of modern history from a global perspective. Part One begins with the political and economic revolutions of the late 1700s and tracks the transformation of the world during the 1800s. Part One concludes as these bewildering changes seem to be running beyond the capacity of older institutions to handle them. Throughout the course we try to grasp what is happening and ask: Why? And the answers often turn on very human choices.
Democratic Revolutions
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The Modern World, Part One: Global History from 1760 to 1910
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À partir de la leçon
Democratic Revolutions of the Atlantic World (1760-1800)
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Philip ZelikowWhite Burkett Miller Professor of History
Welcome back. Make yourself comfortable.
Let's talk about democratic revolutions.
But to start with, let's take a closer look at this phrase: the constituted order.
This term, constituted, has to do with a constitution.
Now.
This talk is going to really focus on
beliefs in Europe, especially in Western Europe.
It was
quite common in many countries in Europe for people
to believe that their country, their community, had a constitution.
But when they would talk about a constitution or constituted order,
they're not talking about the kind of constitution that Americans think of:
a written document that formally lays down how the government should be organized.
That's not what they mean by this term. When they talk about the
constituted order or the constitution, they're talking
about the accumulations of privileges, of liberties, of customary
protections in which everybody in society has their place.
Merchants have a place and particular privileges.
Craftsmen organized in guilds have a place.
Nobles have certain protections that maybe came
from something that the king said to them
100 years ago. That complicated scheme of
custom and
tradition, and everybody's place, and liberties:
that's what they mean by the constituted order.
And that's kind of the status quo of
European society in the mid- 1700s.
To understand the term constituted order,
there's another term that's worth understanding:
despotism. Or its synonym might be: tyranny.
And to someone in the middle of the 1700s, you might have an absolute monarch but
that didn't mean you lived in a despotism or that you lived with a tyrant.
Despotism or tyranny meant that there's a
ruler and an unprotected subject,
[NOISE]
in which the ruler just simply told everybody
what to do and no one had any protections.
People in the 1700s in most European communities
actually thought they had all kinds of inherited protections.
And these protections were claimed by intermediaries.
Who were these intermediaries?
Oh they could be a city council of notable fellows.
They could be what the French would call a parlement,
which could be another group of nobles and
priests who are assembled from a particular region.
There could be a parlement of Paris.
There could be a parlement in this province or that province.
So you go all
over Europe, and you find all kinds
of intermediary groups that have governance roles,
have roles in administering the courts.
They do so on behalf of the king,
but they also represent local privileges, local liberties,
these customs and traditions that made up the constituted order.
Now, it's worth going through
all this explanation about the constituted order
because if you don't understand what terms like
�constitution� or �despotism� meant to someone in say, 1770,
it's worth taking some time to explain terms like the constituted order.
Because, if you think of the democratic revolutions as just the
common people rising up against an
absolute king, these revolutions won't make
sense to you when you get into the details.
Focus on these intermediaries.
Who populates these intermediaries?
Who makes up these very powerful councils, and
parlements,
and courts that are in the intermediate level.
Well, they're made up of nobles. And increasingly
in the 1700s, there's a group of people distinguished by birth as nobles
who get to hold these particular kinds of positions.
They pass them on to their children; they pass them on to their grandchildren;
they have all kinds of special exemptions, including from taxes.
Then there are priests. Then there are few very wealthy people.
Because one of the ways in which the monarch raises money is they sell offices;
and a few wealthy people can buy one of these offices;
and then they can pass that office even down to their children; and
maybe, if they're lucky, one of those
children or grandchildren will eventually themselves be
elevated to the nobility because their grandfather was able to
purchase a powerful office. This sense of an exclusive club of
birth, wealth, privilege creates a ruling class which we can call an
Aristocracy, and this is a term that comes into use in the late 1700s.
So the big clashes that are emerging in the middle of the 1700s,
the 1760s, the 1770s, actually feature the king, who
often is representing the general welfare of all the people
and might even be an enlightened reformer trying
to raise money for his fiscal-military state.
And he's running up against a parliament or some
other intermediary not made up of the common people
but made up of the nobles, who do not
want to pay these additional taxes, who do not want
to sacrifice for the general welfare.
So the king is claiming to act on behalf of all the people, and the nobles are
claiming you can't take away my privileges; I'm fighting for my liberty.
The traditional constitutional order of things.
I'm fighting on behalf of protecting you against despotism.
That's the kind of clash that prefigures the great battles of the late 1700s.
These arguments that come out of the Commercial and Military Revolutions
posing the new fiscal-military state dominated by the king,
insatiable for revenue, against the traditional liberties and privileges
of the aristocracy are what set the stage for
democratic revolutions. Understood perhaps in a different way.
These democratic revolutions, by the way, aren't just taking place in America.
Not just taking place in France.
They're coming up all over Europe.
Places like Geneva in 1768 or Sweden in the early 1770s.
On and on.
In fact, the ideas about these democratic revolutions
are going back and forth across the Atlantic Ocean.
The sense that this is a period of democratic revolutions in an Atlantic
world was pioneered mainly by two
historians, one a Frenchman named Jacques Godechot.
But especially an American historian, at Princeton, named Robert Palmer.
Now Palmer's popularization of the idea of the democratic
revolutions, from books and articles he wrote during the 1950s,
have gotten a pretty big historical backlash, partly people say:
democratic revolutions, I don't know, because it seems too narrow.
Why it doesn't pick up those commercial
revolutions that we were talking about, or it
doesn't pick up some of these geopolitical changes.
Palmer didn't seem to care enough about the situation of slaves and anti-slavery.
Also, democratic revolutions sounds too
triumphal, sounds too self-satisfied.
As if Palmer's trying to claim that the American and French Revolutions
are really the birthplace of progress, and it's a lot more complicated than that.
I understand the reaction and the backlash, and indeed the Palmer argument needs
to be complemented with a lot of other things that we've been discussing.
Let's actually go back and read Palmer and see what he was trying to say.
Alright, here's a long quote from early in
Palmer's book on the age of the democratic revolution.
I want to spend a little bit of time just noticing the detail of his argument.
He says he's attempting to deal with western civilization as a whole.
Indeed, you can zoom in on the Atlantic civilization.
Which is closer to reality in the 18th century, even
than it was in the 20th, when he was writing.
And his argument is that this whole
civilization was swept, in the last four decades,
by a simple revolutionary movement that was essentially
democratic, small �d� democratic.
Now, what does he mean by a democratic revolution?
Not primarily the sense of a later day in which universal
rights to vote become a chief criterion of democracy.
Nor that sense also of a later day, in which both Soviet and Western-type states
would call themselves democratic. He's not saying that.
What he is saying is that between 1760 and 1800, there's an explosion of feeling
for a kind of equality, a discomfort with
older forms of social stratification and formal rank.
In other words, a revolution against aristocracy.
It was against the possession of government, or any public power,
by any established, and here are key words, privileged, closed,
or self-recruiting group of men, exclusive by wealth and birth.
No one could exercise coercive authority simply
by asserting their own right, their status, or
the right of history in the sense of custom and inheritance.
It emphasized, in his terms, the delegation of authority and
the removability of officials. Because in
practice, none of the older institutions had recognized that.
To boil it down even more tightly, Palmer explains, the democratic revolutionary
movement came into play when persons systematically excluded
from these constituted bodies, and not
merely content that a parliament be independent,
attempted to open up their membership.
Literally to make it more inclusive, more democratic.
Change the basis of authority.
Remember what I said about last time, authority can come from you.
Maybe even from everyone.
And representation, reconstitute them, or obtain a wholly
new constitution in which you redefine the nature of the state.
That's what makes this a democratic revolution.
So what is the
democratic revolution focusing on?
It's focusing on privileges and the defense of privileges.
Privileges with our freedoms, our liberties as traditionally honored.
For instance, the nobility is claiming: we have
a privilege not to be taxed in certain
ways, and you the king cannot take away
our privilege just by assertion of royal decree.
But privileges are exercised by citizens.
If you look up the meaning of the
term, citizens, these would be inhabitants of a city
who had the privileges of the city.
Like, for example, the right to be able to live in the city or the town.
Who are the citizens?
Actually, in the 1760s and 1770s, very few people are citizens.
Very few people actually enjoy the privileges of citizenship,
the liberties that are being fought for.
The big argument of the last part of the 1700s is this one:
Who are the citizens?
And with that are arguments over who has
to put up the revenue to support the state?
Who pays the taxes?
The citizens pay the taxes, but then they have the privileges that should
go with the payment of taxes as partners in the governance of the state.
So, for instance, there's going to be a huge fight in France,
between about 1770 and 1774, between
the king, Louis XV, versus the
intermediaries of the constituted
Order: the parlements, in other
words, the nobility. What's the fight over?
Mainly it's about money.
Louis XV wants to raise a lot more money, because he's just come out of a big war
with Britain, the Seven Years� War; he needs a
lot more money to build up his fiscal- military state.
He wants it from the people from whom he collects taxes, the nobles.
The nobles are saying, you can't force us to pay these taxes.
We have our rights and privileges. Which you have to respect because that's
part of the constituted order. You need to respect our
liberties, the nobles claim. And,
indeed in 1774, the nobles win this fight.
Louis XV dies, and he is replaced by a man who will be hailed as the �restorer
of French liberty.� Who is this Restorer of French Liberty?
Why it's the new young king,
Louis the XVI, who gives up the fight against the nobility, gives up the
attempt to collect those taxes from them, and restores their privileges.
So in 1774, this is the man who is the symbol of the restorer of French liberty,
the savior of privilege, the new king, Louis the XVI.
So these arguments over the constituted order: who are the intermediaries?
Who has the rights to levy taxes that will be paid by citizens?
At the same time these arguments are
happening in France, these arguments are also happening
on the other side of the Atlantic Ocean, in the British colonies of North America.
And as those arguments explode into violence in 1775, that's the subject
we're going to turn to in our next talk. See you then.
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