The king’s disorder was prognostic of a great convulsion in the European order. In the early summer of 1789 a commotion troubled France. The country was almost bankrupt as a result of its support for the American insurgents, and a series of bad harvests and freezing weather brought low its population. The English already had the upper hand in commerce as a result of their naval supremacy. There seemed to be no other place for the French to turn, except to some general reformation.
At a meeting of the States General at Versailles the commons, or third estate, prevailed over the nobility and the clergy; in the middle of June the deputies declared themselves to be the National Assembly. Louis XVI announced that their meetings were suspended, whereupon they assembled at an indoor tennis court nearby where they swore a solemn oath that they would remain in permanent session ‘until the constitution of the kingdom is established’. ‘We are here by the power of the people’, the comte de Mirabeau stated, ‘and nothing but the power of bayonets shall drive us away.’ This was the defiance that inspired many of those who would become revolutionaries in the months that followed; the National Assembly represented the people, and the people were supreme. Patriotic societies and revolutionary clubs flourished in Paris and elsewhere.
On 14 July the citizens, with the help of the French guards, stormed and captured the Bastille; the head of its governor was carried in celebration through the streets. The crowd had triumphed, and the old regime could not survive the combined will of a populace intent upon change. Another lamentable harvest created the conditions of famine in the capital, and the people were lean and hungry; they were dangerous. It was said that a fourth of the population had been driven to sell everything they owned in order to buy bread, and so a desperate people sought for revenge as well as sustenance. The tax collectors of the state and the seigneurial courts were the villains of the day who were subject to very rough justice. The conditions in the rest of the country were no better. There were continual outbreaks of violence and insurrection. Several French cities followed the example of Paris, and in the surrounding countryside the peasants armed themselves against their former masters.
The king had sensed the overwhelming necessity of change and, in an attempt to placate his subjects, put on the tricoloured cockade and pledged to help in the formation of a new government. Yet it was rumoured that his protestations were not sincere; it was suspected that all the while he was plotting to overthrow the new order and its ‘liberty’. Liberty was the keyword; it could be uttered in support of violence and of murder. It was born in flames. Yet it also had a more benign aspect. In August the newly composed National Assembly issued a ‘declaration of the rights of man’, the first three provisions of which determined that men ‘are born and remain free and equal in rights’ and that these rights included ‘liberty, property, security and resistance to oppression’; the third article confirmed that ‘the principle of all sovereignty resides essentially in the nation’, and not in any single person.
On 5 October many thousands of men and women armed themselves and assembled with the cry ‘To Versailles!’ The citizen militia joined them in attacking the royal palace, at the conclusion of which Louis and the royal family were taken in triumph to Paris. The heads of many of the king’s supporters, impaled on pikes, decorated the path to the city where the king was once more obliged to accede to a new constitution. The ties of history and tradition had been cut through; the sanctions of custom and time were abandoned. This was an ideology based upon rational principle, the reification of ‘the people’ and a fervent devotion to ‘la patrie’ or the fatherland. The clergy were now aliens, and the nobles beyond help; any aristocrats who wished to survive became leaders of the citizens or the citizen militia. It was a new order governed by a commitment to ideals, no less potent for being wholly vague; a vision of reality became more important than the reality itself, and the twin shibboleths of liberty and equality left power in the hands of those who were most ruthless and most determined. Only the perceived will of the nation now mattered.
The news of the events in France astonished the English, who had not anticipated the virtual collapse of the monarchy and the insurgency of the people. Some viewed the events with suspicion and alarm, but many welcomed the apparent defeat of despotism and the restoration of liberty. It was thought to resemble the ‘Glorious Revolution’ of 1688 when the Stuart king, James II, was deposed. It was also widely believed that the French would be too distracted by inner turmoil to pose any threat to English interests and English commerce.
William Pitt remained cautious and maintained a policy of cool neutrality; he wanted peace at all costs in order to sustain prosperity and to curb government expenditure. Bishop Porteous recorded in his diary for July 1789 that ‘This day Mr Pitt dined with me in Fulham. He had just received news of the French Revolution and spoke of it as an event highly favourable to us and indicates a long peace with France. It was a very pleasant day.’ Pitt himself remarked that ‘our neighbours in France seem coming to actual extremes’, a situation which rendered ‘that country an object of compassion even to a rival’. So there was an element of self-satisfaction in the face of the tumult across the Channel.
Charles James Fox, ever the libertarian and for the time being bearer of the Whig standard, reacted very differently. He declared: ‘How much the greatest event it is that ever happened in the world, and how much the best!’ He confirmed his joy when he stated in the Commons that the new constitution of France was ‘the most stupendous and glorious edifice of liberty’. Nothing was to be feared from this newly free country; it would do no more than spread liberty. His enthusiasm was largely shared by the dissenters and nonconformists of England who believed that the king, courtiers and clergy of France were little better than limbs of the devil.
In the New Annual Register for 1789 William Godwin wrote that ‘from hence we are to date a long series of years, in which France and the whole human race are to enter into possession of their liberties’. William Blake composed ‘A Song of Liberty’ to conclude The Marriage of Heaven and Hell (1790–3): ‘Look up! look up! O citizen of London, enlarge thy countenance! . . . Spurning the clouds written with curses, stamps the stony law to dust, loosing the eternal horses from the dens of night, crying: Empire is no more! and now the lion & wolf shall cease.’ In those days, as Lord Cockburn recalled, ‘everything, not this thing or that thing, but literally everything, was soaked in this one event’. The consequences for England itself could not be anticipated in anything but the most general and overoptimistic terms. It was not clear even to the far-sighted, for example, that the revolution would engage the nation in a war that would last a generation, and would fundamentally change the state of domestic politics. France itself passed from monarchy to representative democracy, from arbitrary dictatorship in the name of the people to the basic components of a military state.
The exhilaration survived for a few months yet. On 9 November 1789, a number of politicians met at the London Tavern under the name of ‘The Revolution Society’ where they drew up a congratulatory address to the National Assembly in Paris with the hope that the late events might ‘encourage other nations to assert the inalienable rights of mankind, and thereby introduce a general reformation in the governments of Europe’. There were of course many who did not share these sentiments, and considered them to be pernicious talk of reform for reform’s sake; such sceptics believed that the ancient constitution of England, albeit unwritten, was a greater stay against the dark.
This was the intuitive reaction of Edmund Burke, the Whig statesman who had become more and more alarmed by the revolutionary sentiments of such colleagues as Fox and Sheridan who outbid each other in their fervour for the new order in France. Burke had at first been uncertain. In a letter of 9 August 1789, he described ‘England gazing with astonishment at a French struggle for Liberty and not knowing whether to blame or applaud!’ But in February 1790, he disparaged in the chamber of the Commons ‘the spirit of innovation’ as one �
��well calculated to overturn states, but perfectly unfit to amend them’. This was followed in the same year by a treatise, Reflections on the Revolution in France, that was taken up by all those who feared and distrusted the event.
It was a majestic polemic in which Burke excoriated ‘those children of their country who are prompt rashly to hack that aged parent to pieces and put him into the kettle of magicians in hopes that by their poisonous weeds and wild incantations they may regenerate the paternal constitution’. His animus was directed not only against the Jacobins and the radicals, but also some of the members of his own party. He declared that no nation or movement can rely upon the private stock of reason of any one individual, but must trust the ‘general bank and capital of nations and of ages’. He despised the ‘men of theory’, the intellectuals who thought to lead a revolution with their first principles and rational calculations. He put his faith in historical experience, practical utility and the fund of common knowledge transmitted from generation to generation. He put no faith in a ‘sick man’s dream of government’. He remarked that:
because half a dozen grasshoppers under a fern make the field ring with their importunate chink, whilst thousands of great cattle, reposed beneath the shadow of the British oak, chew the cud and are silent, pray do not imagine that those who make the noise are the only inhabitants of the field; that, of course, they are many in number, or that, after all, they are other than the little shrivelled, meagre, hopping, though loud and troublesome insects of the hour.
George III came up to Burke at a reception and told him that ‘you have been of use to us all, it is a general opinion’.
Thomas Paine, who had already made his mark on behalf of the Americans with Common Sense was now moved to compose a rejoinder to Burke in which he would celebrate the virtues of the revolution. The first part of The Rights of Man was published in pamphlet form in February 1791 with great popular success; it was hailed by the reform societies as an enduring testament to their convictions. Paine himself wrote at a later date that ‘it had the greatest run of any work ever published in the English language. The number of copies circulated in England, Scotland and Ireland, besides translations into foreign languages, was between four and five hundred thousand.’
It had arrived at the opportune time. It provided an explanation and a defence for the great movement of the age. The revolution produced the harsh and strange music, while Paine composed the libretto. He loathed aristocrats and traditional aristocratical government; he characterized Burke’s appeal to custom and history as no more than ‘contending for the authority of the dead over the rights and freedom of the living’; Burke had commiserated with the sufferings of the quondam rulers of France, and in so doing ‘he pities the plumage but forgets the dying bird’. Had he no notion of the millions of starving workers and peasants for whom there was no room in the world? Government should be conducted for ‘the common interest of society, and the common rights of man’. In England, that boasted land of liberty, it had become clear that ‘taxes were not raised to carry on wars, but that wars were raised to carry on taxes’. This was a fundamental hit against William Pitt’s financial and military regime; Paine was asserting that war was part of the system of government. This opened men’s eyes, in a phrase of the period, and immeasurably helped in the popularity of the treatise. At a later date President Andrew Jackson declared that The Rights of Man ‘would be more enduring than all the piles of marble and granite man can erect’.
It soon became clear that most parliamentarians, including the largest number of Whigs, were supporting the arguments of Burke rather than those of Charles James Fox and Thomas Paine. There was a singular confrontation between the two parliamentary protagonists in May 1792; both Burke and Fox were debating the constitutional rights of Canada in the Commons when they began to stray into the dangerous territory of France. Fox was still an ardent supporter of the revolution but Burke now stood up. ‘Fly from the French constitution’, he said.
Fox whispered to him that ‘there is no loss of friends’.
‘Yes,’ Burke replied, ‘there is a loss of friends. I know the price of my conduct. I have done my duty at the price of my friend. Our friendship is at an end.’ At this point, according to those in the chamber, Fox broke down and wept. It was a private example of the divisions within the country itself.
The people of England were now taking sides; the dissenters and reformers in favour of the French revolutionaries were largely opposed by those who supported ‘Church and King’. If we may use Burke’s analogy the grasshoppers were largely outnumbered by the cows, but that was not at all clear at the time. A Catholic Relief Bill was passed in 1791, removing certain legal restrictions from those who practised that faith; it was believed that Catholics, after the anti-clerical terror of the revolution, were now firmly on the government side. Panics about popular insurrection were still commonplace, however, and were in large part responses to the growth and development of ‘reform societies’ who took their inspiration from the revolution in France, from the war for independence in America and from the recent popular agitation associated with ‘Wilkes and Liberty!’ These men could be shopkeepers or artisans, merchants or schoolteachers, dissenting ministers or dissenting businessmen, booksellers or attorneys. Among these ‘middling classes’ there was a vast desire for change.
Their grievances included a demand for parliamentary reform, at a time when only 17 per cent of constituencies were contested and more than 60 per cent were controlled by the patronage of a neighbouring grandee. As Paine stated in The Rights of Man:
The county of Yorkshire, which contains near a million of souls, sends two country members; and so does the county of Rutland, which contains not a hundredth part of that number. The town of old Sarum, which contains not three houses, sends two members; and the town of Manchester, which contains upwards of sixty thousand souls, is not admitted to send any. Is there any principle in these things? Is there anything by which you can trace the marks of freedom, or discover those of wisdom?
He was also directly attacking Edmund Burke’s deference to the traditional order. For many that order was nothing but old corruption writ large.
The first popular reform society, the Sheffield Society for Constitutional Information, was established in 1791; with a predominant membership of cutlers and metal craftsmen it emphasized the connection between the new industrialism and radical discontent. That is why the Sheffield society reprinted 1,600 copies of The Rights of Man. The London Society for Constitutional Information was instituted at the end of the year.
There had already been a sharp and salutary warning, however, for those who believed that reform was inevitable. On 14 July 1791, a ‘Bastille dinner’ was held in Birmingham, at a hotel in Temple Row, in order to celebrate the achievements of the revolution. A hostile crowd, largely made up of labourers and artisans from Birmingham, gathered outside the tavern in threatening numbers; after the diners had precipitately left, the crowd ransacked the premises. They then moved on to the houses and workshops of the most prominent dissenters in the town, notably the library and laboratory of Joseph Priestley. Priestley was one of the eminent members of the Lunar Society who included among their number nonconformists and free-thinkers whose doctrines were beyond the comprehension of the loyalist supporters of ‘Church and King’. Priestley was forced to flee Birmingham and eventually to take refuge in America; the king himself observed that ‘Priestley is the sufferer for the doctrines he and his party have instilled’.
So in the early months of 1792 the country was in an unsettled state, pursued by vague fears and unknown horrors precipitated by the French Revolution. In February the second part of Thomas Paine’s The Rights of Man was published, with its radical notions of social welfare; he suggested that £4 a year be granted to every child under the age of fourteen for the purposes of schooling, and that a remission of taxes should be given to the poor. He also proposed a scheme of old age pensions ‘not of the nature of a charity b
ut of a right’. This was too much for the authorities, who could never conceive such a state of affairs, and three months later a royal proclamation against seditious publications was issued with particular attention paid to Paine.
This was no impediment to the growth of popular reform movements that were committed to promoting their aims by peaceful and constitutional means. The London Society for Constitutional Information, animated by the examples of Sheffield, Manchester, Norwich and Middlesex, proposed a motion denouncing Burke and celebrating the doctrines of Paine. These nascent bodies were organized by John Horne Tooke, an early disciple of John Wilkes as well as a philologist and perpetual activist, to give the impression of a nationwide movement; their membership probably ran into thousands rather than tens of thousands. But they were by no means revolutionaries; their members, who were obliged to pay a subscription, were composed of country gentlemen, peers, MPs and merchants who were intent upon constitutional liberty and an extension of the franchise.
In January 1792 a Piccadilly shoemaker, Thomas Hardy, called a meeting of radical colleagues at the Bell Tavern in Exeter Street, off the Strand, where he proposed a society with a wider provenance and a subscription of a penny a week. It was resolved by the members of this London Corresponding Society that their number and composition be ‘unlimited’. It was soon composed of what Hardy called ‘tradesmen, mechanicks and shopkeepers’; these were butchers and bakers, bricklayers and cordwainers, who had played no previous part in any political movement. At the same time it expressed ‘its abhorrence of tumult and violence’ with its emphasis on reform rather than revolution or anarchy. Its members campaigned for manhood suffrage, annual parliaments and cheaper legal costs.
Revolution, a History of England, Volume 4 Page 35
