the English nation is the only one on earth which has succeeded in controlling the power
of kings by resisting them and which, by dint of continuous effort, finally established
a form of sound government where the prince, possessing the power necessary to do
good, has his hands tied when it is a question of doing bad, where the nobility have
authority without being insolent and without having vassals, where the people participate
in government without producing confusion.6
This led Voltaire to reflect upon the comparative merits and utility of the ‘pow-
dered’ aristocrat ‘who knows precisely at what time the king rises and at what hour
he goes to bed’ and the trader who ‘enriches his country, sends orders to the island
1 Daniel Roche, France in the Enlightenment (Cambridge, Mass., 1998), 140.
2 Voltaire, Lettres philosophiques (1986).
3 Ibid. 75.
4 Ibid. 54.
5 Ibid. 60–1.
6 Ibid. 66.
148
Commerce, Usurpation, and Democracy
of Surate and to Cairo from his office, and contributes to the happiness of the
world’.7 Accordingly, when Voltaire discussed the great figures of English life, he
focused upon Francis Bacon, John Locke, Isaac Newton, and William Shakespeare,
reflecting at the same time upon the number of aristocrats in England who were
well-known writers and who took pride from ‘their works rather than their name’.
Voltaire offered neither a systematic treatise on England nor on the nature of
commerce but his brief sketches nevertheless gave prominence to a set of themes
which were to grow in importance as the eighteenth century developed. In particular,
by associating commerce with liberty and also with England he not only provided, for
those who wished to hear it, a telling critique of French society and manners––
deemed still to be in the grip of religious fanaticism and arbitrary power––but also the
contours of an alternative vision or model by the side of which France could be both
judged and reformed.
The starting point of this debate was an interpretation of the English Revolution
of 1688. Pierre Jurieu and Bossuet had clashed swords on this, the former strongly
supporting the cause of William of Orange and the benefits that his reign was
bringing to the English people.8 Here the Glorious Revolution was accredited with
two principal achievements. First was the recognition that a particular set of
institutional arrangements was conducive––indeed indispensable––for the preser-
vation of political liberty. This set of arrangements was the separation and balance
of powers. Second was religious toleration. The importance of the last went far
beyond that of a purely religious controversy. Implicit in the recognition of
religious diversity was the acceptance that the extent of government action ought
to be limited, that it should be defined by law, and, consequently, that it did not
extend over the entire range of an individual’s activities. The corollary was that
there were a whole range of duties and actions which were best left either to
individuals or to groups of individuals. Of these activities, one of the most
important was trade.
Both Anglophilia and Anglophobia flourished in eighteenth-century France and
continued to do so until well into the nineteenth century.9 Typical of the spirit and
tone of the latter was Joseph Fiévée’s, Lettres sur l’Angleterre et Réflexions sur la
philosophie du XVIIIe siècle, published in 1802, the year Britain and France signed
the Treaty of Amiens. ‘In England’, he began, ‘the words peace and commerce are what
the words peace and glory are in France.’10 In England everything––dress, manners, the
arts––was cheap and vulgar and there was little evidence of good taste. ‘The English’,
Fiévée remarked, ‘are the least civilized nation in Europe’, and this, he avowed,
7 Voltaire, Lettres philosophiques (1986), 76.
8 Pierre Jurieu, ‘Justification du Prince d’Orange et de la Nation Anglaise’, Lettres pastorales XVI–
XVII–XVIII (Caen, 1991), 409–32.
9 See Theodore Zeldin, ‘English Ideals in French Politics during the Nineteenth Century’,
Historical Journal, 1 (1959), 40–58; Frances Acomb, Anglophobia in France 1763–89 (New York,
1980); and Josephine Grieder, Anglomania in France, 1740–1789: Fact, Fiction and Political Discourse
(Geneva, 1985).
10 Fiévée, Lettres sur l’Angleterre (1802), 48.
Commerce, Usurpation, and Democracy
149
followed from ‘the great regard which they have for money’.11 It also helped to
explain why the English male did not enjoy the company of women. Similarly, Fiévée
set little store by England’s much-vaunted religious toleration. If England was
a country where ‘all religious extravagances are permitted’, to be a Catholic was ‘to
be much less than a man’. As for the supposed liberty which flowed from the
English system of government, Fiévée saw only corruption and oppression.
‘In England’, he commented, ‘there are three types of election; those that you buy,
those that you give away, and those that are contested by the use of reputation and
money.’12 Worse still was the ‘agitation of the rabble’.
Why did it matter that the beneficial consequences of England’s commerce and
constitutional settlement should be contested? First, it was Fiévée’s view that the
philosophes, inspired by a hatred of their own country, had embraced ‘anglomania’,
and that this had been one of the causes of the Revolution of 1789. Next, he believed
that it was simply mistaken for one country to try to imitate another, and that this
was especially so in the case of England and France where their guiding ethos––
commerce for one, and glory for the other––were so diametrically opposed. ‘The
English’, Fiévée concluded, ‘like all peoples, are what their position, the centuries,
and events have decided that they should be. To resemble them would require two
impossible things: first, to cease to be ourselves, then to become them.’13
There was some justification in Fiévée’s complaints. Throughout the eighteenth
century the philosophes frequently cited England, its institutions, and its history,
to illustrate what, in their opinion, were defects in France and had done so to a
receptive public. To that extent, the Anglophiles came to be seen as dangerous
subversives intent on destroying the fabric of French society and culture. There
was, then, a serious political point to questioning whether England quite lived up
to the glowing picture of it being purveyed, possibly out of ignorance or malice, by
its admirers. Clearly, much of this discussion––as Fiévée himself recognized––was
grounded in the long-standing economic, dynastic, and military rivalry which
existed between the two countries but, that aside, there was some merit in posing
the question of whether one country could usefully copy another. This was to be a
question repeatedly asked, even by England’s most enthusiastic admirers.
Such was the general awareness of France’s decline relative to Britain that a
wholesale rejection of the English example was comparatively rare. Once the
animosity engendered by the Seven Years War had subsided there was a resurgence
of Anglophilia in the highest government circles, most notably in the policies
advocated by Jacques Necker, recalled to ministerial office in 1788.14 As we have
seen, defenders of moderate reform in 1789 came to see the English model of
limited monarchy––made known to them principally through Jean Delolme’s
11 Ibid. 193.
12 Ibid. 128.
13 Ibid. 232.
14 See Jacques Necker, Du pouvoir exécutif dans les grands États (1802). Necker returned to these
questions in Dernières vues de politique et de finance, offertes à la Nation Française (1802), 266–363,
specifically exploring the comparison between ‘une Monarchie héréditaire et tempérée’, based upon the
English ‘model’, and a ‘République une et indivisible’.
150
Commerce, Usurpation, and Democracy
La Constitution de l’Angleterre of 1771––as a means of providing good government,
extending the liberties of individuals, and of preserving public order. Their short-
lived political supremacy handed power back to the Anglophobes, reaching its
zenith with the ascent of the Jacobins.
Given their predilection to equate wealth with corruption, there was little to
indicate that Robespierre and his colleagues would view England with anything
but profound contempt or as being incapable of displaying the qualities required
of republican virtue.15 Indeed, in Jacobin discourse England was frequently cast as
the new Carthage, as a maritime and trading power lacking the capacity for virtue
displayed by both classical Rome and contemporary France.16 This sentiment only
intensified as Robespierre’s obsession with internal opposition was extended to
include ‘the English faction’. France, he believed, was ‘infested with the agents of
England’. ‘I hate the English as a people’, Robespierre declared, and did so for the
simple reason that there was nothing more despicable than a nation of slaves
prepared to live under the rule of tyrants and despots.17 England was no more
than a ‘contemptible meteor’ which would disappear before the ‘republican star’.
France, and not an ‘odious’ and ‘proud’ England, was ‘the last hope of the friends of
humanity’.
The debate over England continued after the Restoration of the monarchy in
1814. On both sides of the argument there was agreement on one thing at least:
England was the country of aristocracy, and thus of inequality. For example, in 1825
Auguste de Staël, son of Germaine de Staël, published his Lettres sur l’Angleterre and
there listed the following aristocratic features of English life: ‘The unequal division of
property, primogeniture, an hereditary peerage, electoral influence, the distinction of
ranks, honorific prerogatives, bodies possessing privileges’.18 For his part, Benjamin
Constant described England as ‘a vast, opulent and vigorous aristocracy’.
The precise character of this aristocracy also received much attention, but the
view of England’s admirers was that its aristocracy was open to all talents and that
their privileges were acknowledged by the English people as being indispensable to
the preservation of English liberty. ‘There has never existed in the world’, wrote
Charles de Montalembert, ‘a government where the access to power, influence and
prestige has been as easy and as assured as in England’. Similarly, for Montalembert
England’s inheritance laws were at once ‘the consequence and guarantee’ of its
liberty.19 For such enthusiasts, the challenge for France was that of recreating a new
aristocracy upon similar lines and of appropriating the principal advantages of the
English system.
For England’s critics, by contrast, the influence of its aristocracy was something
to be regretted and the political, economic, and social inequalities flowing from it
15 See Sophie Wahnich, L’Impossible Citoyen: L’Étranger dans le discours de la Révolution française
(1997), 243–346.
16 See Norman Hampson, The Perfidy of Albion: French Perceptions of England during the French
Revolution (Houndmills, 1998).
17 Œuvres de Maximilien Robespierre, x. Discours 27 juillet 1793–27 juillet 1794 (1967), 348–50.
18 Auguste de Staël-Holstein, Lettres sur l’Angleterre (1825), 151–2.
19 Charles de Montalembert, De l’Avenir politique de l’Angleterre (1857).
Commerce, Usurpation, and Democracy
151
were at once a crime and a source of weakness. Moreover, with the advent of
Britain’s industrial revolution, the theme of aristocracy was transposed to this new
setting. In Flora Tristan’s Promenades de Londres, first published in 1842, we read, for
example, that ‘the greater proportion of workers lack clothing, a bed, furniture, a fire,
and sufficient food’.20 The cause of this parlous condition was the English aristocracy.
‘Do you understand’, she asked her readers, ‘how a handful of aristocrats, lords,
baronets, bishops, landed proprietors, and all manner of sinecurists, how this handful
of privileged people can coerce, torture and starve a nation of twenty six million
people?’21 In England, she continued, the people suffered under the yoke of the
‘pitiless egoism, revolting hypocrisy, and monstrous excess of this English oligarchy’.
It was ‘the most barbarous and the most frightful of all tyrannies’.22 Tristan was by no
means alone in travelling across the Channel in order to discover the secrets of
the new industrial system that was there emerging. Equally representative of this
strand of thought was Eugène Buret’s De la misère des classes laborieuses en Angleterre
et en France.23 What Buret saw was a country that combined extreme opulence with
profound poverty, ‘the liberty of the rich and the strong’ by the side of ‘the servitude
of the poor and the weak’.24 ‘France’, he wrote, ‘is poor, but England is miserable.’
France was wrong to envy England’s wealth and power, as it was on a road that would
lead either to ‘inevitable ruin or to the most radical and perhaps most terrible of
revolutions’.25 In general the diagnosis was a far from positive one. For many of
the visitors to Britain’s new industrial cities the arrival of the machine age was
synonymous with poverty, criminality, and prostitution.
The surprise is that versions of these very criticisms were to be found in the writings
of authors who might otherwise have been imagined to be broadly favourable to the
English model. For example, Jean-Baptiste Say, author of De l’Angleterre et les Anglais
of 1816, was far from convinced of the supposed merits of English commercial power
or that this power would endure. As a consequence of the excessive taxation and
borrowing required to defeat Napoleon Bonaparte, he contended, the cost of British
industrial and agricultural products was exorbitant, such that even a decent hard-
working family was frequently obliged to resort to public charity. To survive, all but
the very rich were condemned to arduous toil and competition with their fellows. In
such a situation, the rich thought only of getting richer, and so much so that Say feared
that the country of Bacon, Newton, and Locke was taking rapid steps towa
rds
barbarism. ‘The greatest disgrace in France’, Say wrote, ‘is to lack courage; in England
it is to lack guineas.’26 Corrupted by its politicians and debased by its material and
social inequality, England was no model for France.27
20 Flora Tristan, Promenades dans Londres, ou L’aristocratie et les prolétaires anglais (1978), 112.
21 Ibid. 47.
22 Ibid. 312.
23 Eugène Buret, De la misère des classes laborieuses en Angleterre et en France (1840), i, p. ii.
24 Ibid. 19.
25 Ibid. ii. 475.
26 Say, De l’Angleterre (1816), 22.
27 See Jean-Paul Bertaud, Alan Forrest, and Annie Jourdan, Napoléon, le monde et les Anglais (2004),
90–101.
152
Commerce, Usurpation, and Democracy
But this increasingly became a difficult position to sustain. In the guise of the
new doctrine of ‘industrialism’, liberal economists in France became strong advo-
cates of the wealth-creating power of commerce.28 The key to wealth, they
perceived, was through capital accumulation and in this a central role was allotted
to the entrepreneur, to the market, and to free trade. No economy gave better proof
of this than that of England. Moreover, given that France had again been subject to
military defeat at the hands of England, that under the Empire she had once more
found herself in the grip of arbitrary power, and that in 1815, 1830, and 1848
France was required to find another set of governmental institutions, it was not to
be unexpected that a good number of French writers should for a further time cast
an envious and inquiring eye towards the other side of the Channel.
I I
To properly understand this disposition we should return to the eighteenth century
and in particular to Montesquieu. He was not the first to use the term ‘despotism’
in France.29 It had been widely used by aristocratic as well as Protestant opponents
of Louis XIV. As a system of government rather than as a description of a form of
personal rule it had been given wide currency by Pierre Bayle and others such as
Fénelon and Boulainvilliers, to the point that even before Montesquieu was to place
the concept of despotism at the heart of De l’Esprit des lois there existed a broad
understanding of despotism as a form of arbitrary rule by a single sovereign power
Revolution and the Republic Page 32
