Read A People's History of the World: From the Stone Age to the New Millennium Online
Authors: Chris Harman
As Edward Countryman rightly stresses in his two excellent books on the revolution, the struggle only advanced because people set up new institutions in opposition to old elites: ‘Between 1774 and the summer of 1776 those committees did in New York what similar bodies would do in Paris between 1789 and 1792 and Russia in 1917’.
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Such agitation was central to the events of 1776. In New York there was bitter hostility to any action against Britain from rich merchants connected to the Atlantic trade, officials dependent on the governor, and some of the great landowners. In Philadelphia the majority in the Pennsylvania Assembly were adamantly opposed to independence. The war against Britain could not succeed without the support of these two cities. But this support could only come as a result of challenges to the old economic and political elites. New, more radical people, mainly from artisan or small trader rather than rich merchant or landowner backgrounds, had to win control of the committees—which, by deciding on what could be imported and exported, exercised enormous influence over the life of the cities.
Pamphlets as weapons
The old upper class political establishments did not simply disappear. They relied on the mental habits of generations to maintain deference to their rule and to blunt resistance to Britain.
Breaking those habits and that deference required both mass agitation and mass propaganda. The mass agitation took the form of argument for the boycott, parades against boycott breakers, the burning of effigies of governors and British ministers, and the ransacking of buildings. The propaganda involved taking on and tearing apart the arguments used to back up the old ways of thinking. In 1776 alone more than 400 pamphlets appeared, as well as scores of newspapers and magazines. But the decisive role was played by a 40 page pamphlet written by a recent British immigrant, Tom Paine.
Paine had arrived in Philadelphia early in 1775 with a letter of recommendation from Benjamin Franklin. He was a typical product of the ‘middling’ layer of artisans and small traders who were beginning to play a central role in political life. In England he had been variously a skilled corset maker, a seaman, an exciseman and an innkeeper. When he arrived in America aged just over 40, he found employment on a newly founded magazine which circulated among similar people. Like his audience, he was an enthusiastic supporter of the boycott, but not yet a revolutionary. He later wrote that ‘attachment to Britain was obstinate and it was at that time treason to speak against it’.
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The events of 1775—especially the increasing harshness of the repression by Britain—changed his mind, until he was convinced of the case for an independent republic. It was this which he presented in his pamphlet
Common Sense
, printed early in 1776.
The pamphlet was written in a popular style, using the language of the artisan and trader rather than that of governors and assemblymen. But it was not simply an agitational work. It sought to provide general arguments to justify the agitational demands. It did so by taking up some of the intellectual ideas which had been circulating for the previous century and a quarter—ideas culled from Hobbes, Locke, Voltaire and, probably, Rousseau—and presenting them in ways the common person could understand. Paine would have come across some of the ideas of the Enlightenment by attending popular scientific lectures and debating clubs in England. Now he translated these ideas into the language of the street and the workshop, insisting that ‘of more worth is one honest man to society than all the crowned ruffians that ever lived’. He scorned George III’s alleged ‘right to rule’, derived from his descent from a ‘French bastard’ leading a gang of ‘banditti’.
Common Sense
had an astounding effect. It sold perhaps 150,000 copies. The Pennsylvania politician Benjamin Rush later told how:
Its effects were sudden and extensive on the American mind. It was read by public men, repeated in clubs, spouted in schools, and delivered, in one instance, instead of a sermon by a clergyman.
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It was one of those points in history when arguments suddenly make people see things differently. The radical movement in Pennsylvania gained impetus and was prepared to take revolutionary measures.
Many of the wealthy merchants and large landowners remained loyal to the monarchy and still influenced sections of the population which had not been drawn into struggle in the previous two years. They won three out of four seats in an election vital for control of the assembly, and it seemed any scheme to win Pennsylvania’s backing for a declaration of independence was doomed. Yet without such backing things would be all but impossible for the other colonies.
The radical supporters of independence saw there was only one option open to them—that which was taken by the New Model Army during the English Revolution and which was to be taken again in the Russian Revolution 150 years later. They had to build an activist movement outside the assembly to overthrow its decision. A meeting of 4,000 called for a convention of delegates to decide on the colony’s future, and the call received the support of the Committee of Privates, made up of representatives of the colony’s militia. The old assembly was suddenly powerless, with no armed force at its disposal. It adjourned on 14 June, never to reconvene, and on 18 June the popular convention met to draw up the most radical constitution yet seen anywhere. This gave the vote to 90 percent of the male population, but denied it to anyone who would not foreswear allegiance to the king. The ground was cleared for the Declaration of Independence by the Continental Congress a few days later.
The founding of the new United States could only happen because the section of Pennsylvania’s population who backed independence took ‘dictatorial’ measures against those intent on clinging to the monarchy.
Civil war within the revolution
The American Revolution is often presented as having been relatively free of bloodshed, consisting of a handful of set piece battles between two regular armies. But in fact the ‘civil war’ element to it meant it was very bloody indeed in some places. The Tryon Valley area of New York was controlled by a powerful Royalist landowning family, the Johnsons, who set out to crush all opposition. ‘By the time the war was over, according to some estimates, 700 buildings had been burnt, 12,000 farms abandoned, hundreds of thousands of bushels of grain destroyed, nearly 400 rebel women made widows and some 2,000 children of revolutionaries orphaned’.
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In areas where the rebel side was stronger, measures had to be taken that infringed people’s normal ‘rights’ if Royalists were to be prevented from giving aid to British forces. So the committees censored Royalist publications, confiscated the land of those who joined the Royalist army and annulled debts to Royalist merchants and financiers; crowds tarred and feathered Royalist judges and ran Tories naked through the streets. New York City was under British occupation for much of the war, and when the rebels returned they organised popular feeling against those who had aided the British. No fewer than 20,000 Royalists left the city with the British ships in 1783.
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The struggle may have begun as a tea party, but it certainly did not end as one.
As the war dragged on and food shortages developed, the committees had to prevent merchants exporting food to Royalist areas and ensure there was food for the mass of people who backed the movement. They imposed heavier taxation on the well off, controlled prices and confiscated the land of traitors. These were necessary measures if the war was to be won. But they were also measures which benefited the poor at the expense of the rich. The revolt necessarily took on a social as well as a national dimension.
It could not have succeeded otherwise. The British strategy was to separate the colonies from one another by seizing New York, cause hardship by blockading coastal trade, and then march powerful armies to seize strategic points and towns. The British expected their mercenary soldiers to defeat the inexperienced militiamen easily, causing a loss of heart once the initial enthusiasm of the revolt wore off. They also expected merchants and landowners to withdraw from the revolt and accede to British rule as their armies enjoyed success.
The strategy was not completely misconceived. There was a falling away of enthusiasm in the rebel armies as hardship grew. There were many collaborators with British rule in New York and, again, when they seized Philadelphia. The rebel armies did spend much of the war retreating before better armed and better disciplined Royalist troops. The bulk of the rebel army had to spend a bitter winter encamped outside occupied Philadelphia. The British strategy was eventually doomed for a single reason—the committees and the agitation had cemented the mass of people to the rebel cause. So long as mass resistance persisted, the rebel army could wear down the Royalist forces by retreating before them and then choosing the time for a surprise attack.
The war was never reducible simply to class questions. In Virginia, the richest planters were happy to involve themselves in the struggle—Washington, a plantation owner, commanded the American army, Jefferson, another slave-owner, wrote the Declaration of Independence. In New York, some landowners and merchants supported the British, but others joined the war against them. Even in Pennsylvania, a wealthy person like Benjamin Franklin could eventually break with his old friends in the local political establishment and become an enthusiast for independence.
What is more, eventual success depended on the ability of these people to forge an alliance with the French monarchy against Britain. French advisers helped Washington direct the rebel army, and the French navy delivered arms and weakened the hold of the British blockade.
Just as there were sections of the upper class which sided with the rebellion, there were many lower and middle class people who did not embrace the struggle for independence. Sometimes this was because they did not feel the tax question intruded on their own interests sufficiently to break with the loyalties they had been brought up to see as sacred. However, sometimes it was because the local figures most identified with the struggle were those at whose hands they had suffered in the past. So in New York state, many tenants supported the British because a hated landlord was against them. Similarly, in parts of North and South Carolina, poor farmers took up arms as Tory guerrillas because of their bitterness against plantation owners who were for independence, leading to bloody reprisals on both sides.
The British even succeeded in getting more support than the revolutionary armies from the two most oppressed groups in North America—the black slaves and the Native Americans. The Royalist governor of Virginia offered freedom to slaves who would fight for the British. A sizeable number did, and left with the British armies at the end of the war.
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By contrast, when Congress suggested in 1779 that blacks in Carolina and Georgia be offered their freedom in return for joining the rebel army, the state governments would not even consider it.
22
This did not mean the whole independence movement was pro-slavery. In New England many radicals regarded slavery as an abomination and many individual blacks fought alongside whites in local militias. Massachusetts and Vermont abolished slavery in 1780, and Philadelphia voted to phase it out. In Maryland, poor whites and blacks talked of making common cause, and even in Virginia some of the planters began to think slavery was an institution they could do without.
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The British also found it easier than the colonists to gain ‘Indian’ allies, since settlers and speculators alike were intent on grabbing territory from them, and some of those most radical in the fight against the British were also most hostile to the native peoples.
Yet the American Revolution was more than just a political break of the colonies from Britain. Out of the turmoil of the war emerged a society which had shaken off features which harked back to a pre-capitalist past. The feudal rights of the great landowners in New York disappeared. The deference of people for the ‘great families’ was shaken. Hundreds of thousands of people in the northern and central colonies were won to ideas of human equality and liberty from oppression which, they could see, should apply to black people as well as white. For many followers of the Enlightenment in Europe, the language of the Declaration of Independence seemed a living fulfilment of their ideals.
The radical forces which had done so much to fortify the revolution did not keep power in their own hands anywhere. In places such as Pennsylvania they were able, for a time, to implement measures which brought real benefit to the middle and lower classes. There were state constitutions which gave all men the vote, annual assemblies, measures to protect farmers against debt and controls on prices. But by the time the states agreed to a Federal Constitution in 1788, forces wedded to the creation of an all-American free market had gained control of the state assemblies. This cleared the ground for economic change on a scale that would have been inconceivable otherwise, but also brought the spread and intensification of new and old forms of oppression and exploitation.
‘Here and today begins a new age in the history of the world,’ wrote Goethe, the foremost representative of the Enlightenment in Germany, in the summer of 1792.
A year previously, the Dutch conservative patrician van Hagen-dorp had seen the way things were going. ‘In all nations’ two great parties were forming, he wrote. One, the party of the church and state, believed in ‘a right government to be exercised by one or several persons over the mass of people, of divine origin and supported by the church’. The other denied any right of government, ‘except that arising from the free consent of all those who submit to it’ and held ‘all persons taking part in government accountable for their actions’.
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What excited Goethe was that these two great ‘parties’ had confronted each other on the field of battle at Valmy, in northern France, and the second party had won. The forces of the French Revolution had defeated the armies of half the monarchies of Europe.
Ten years earlier nothing would have seemed more absurd to most thinking people than the idea of a revolution in France, let alone one that would set all Europe ablaze. The French monarchy had ruled for well over 1,000 years and had enjoyed unchallenged power for 140 years. Louis XIV, the ‘sun king’, and his great palace at Versailles symbolised the consolidation of an enduring ‘absolutism’ which had made France the greatest power in Europe, such had been the inheritance of his successors Louis XV and Louis XVI.
Yet in the summer of 1789 that power had suddenly begun to fall apart. The king had summoned representatives of the three ‘estates’ which made up French society—the clergy, the nobles and the rest of the population, the ‘third estate’—to discuss ways of raising taxes. But the representatives of the third estate had refused either to bow to the nobles or to do what the king told them. They proclaimed themselves a ‘National Assembly’ and, gathering on a tennis court after the king had locked them out of their hall, swore an oath not to disperse until he gave them a constitution. The king responded by summoning 20,000 troops and sacking his chief minister, Necker, supposedly sympathetic to the call for reform.
Chronology of the French Revolution
1787-88:
Aristocrat reaction resists taxes on big estates, king agrees to call Estates-General.
April 1789:
Meeting of Estates-General in Versailles.
June 1789:
Third Estate delegate declare themselves National Assembly.
July 1789:
Parisian crowd storms Bastille.
October 1789:
Women’s march on Versailles, king dragged back to Paris, Lafayette’s national guards begin to dominate city, constitutional monarchy.
July 1790:
Feast of Federation in Paris, celebration of ‘harmony’ between king and people.
Spring 1791:
King tries to flee Paris.
July 1791:
Guards massacre people in Champs de Mars.
August 1791:
Beginning of slave rising in Saint Domingue (Haiti).
September 1791:
Constitution with tight property qualification.
January 1792:
Food riots in Paris.
April 1792:
Girondin government declares war on Austria and Prussia, serious military defeats.
August 1792:
Insurrectionary journée in Paris, arrest of the king, Danton joins government.
September 1792:
Victory at Valmy, election of Convention by male adult suffrage.
January 1793:
Execution of king.
February 1793:
Britain joins war.
Spring 1793:
Advance of invading armies towards Paris, Royalist risings in west of France (Vendée).
May-June 1793:
Insurrection in Paris, Jacobin government led by Robespierre and Danton, civil war.
Summer 1973:
Murder of Marat, end of all feudal payments, Royalists hand Toulon to British.
September 1793:
Journée in Paris, law setting maximum prices, beginning of Terror.
October-December 1793:
Defeat of Royalist and Girondist revolts.
February 1794:
Jacobins end slavery throughout French Empire.
March-April 1794:
Execution first of Hébert, then of Danton, by Jacobins, revolutionary armies successful on all fronts.
June-July 1794:
‘Great Terror’.
July 1794:
‘Thermidor’, execution of Robespierre and other Jacobins.
November-December 1794:
Jacobin club closed, repeal of ‘maximum’ laws for prices.
March-May 1795:
Vicious suppression of last popular rising, 1200 arrests, 36 executions.
September 1795:
New constitution with restricted suffrage, government relies on Bonaparte to suppress royalist rising, real power with five man Directory.
November 1799:
Bonaparte seizes power, becomes ‘first consul’.
1804:
Bonaparte makes himself Emperor Napoleon I.
The delegates of the third estate were all from the respectable middle class, and most from the wealthier parts of it. Half were lawyers, the rest mostly merchants, bankers, businessmen and wealthy middle class landowners. There was not a single artisan or peasant. They were also almost all convinced of the need for a monarchy, albeit a ‘constitutional one’, and for rigid property qualifications in any electoral system. But they were not prepared simply to be crushed, and the arguments in Versailles were creating a ferment among vast numbers of people in Paris who had never thought of politics before. Clubs emerged, initially among well off members of the middle class, at which people discussed what was happening. A host of news sheets and pamphlets appeared. Some 400 representatives of the Parisian middle class met in the city hall and declared themselves the city council, or ‘commune’.
The fall of the Bastille and after
Rumours of a pending military coup stirred the masses of the city as never before. On 12 July crowds from the poorer sections of the city demonstrated, seizing any muskets they could find. Two days later a vast number marched on the symbol of royal domination over the city, the Bastille fortress, 100 feet high and surrounded by an 80 foot moat. This was not just some protest demonstration. Powder for muskets was stored in the building, and innumerable opponents of the regime had been imprisoned there. The crowd was determined to capture it. The defenders opened fire with cannon. Three hours of shooting followed, causing 83 deaths. People dragged out cannon of their own, seized from the
Hotel des Invalides
. After threatening to blow up the fortress and the popular district around it, the commander surrendered the Bastille to the masses. Revolution had taken hold of the capital—an example soon to be followed in town after town across the country.
The fall of the Bastille was the first great turning point in the revolution. The action of the Parisian masses emboldened the National Assembly to decree the abolition of feudalism (although it expected the peasants to pay compensation for the ending of feudal dues) and to pass a ‘declaration of the rights of man’, similar in tone to the American Declaration of Independence. Further mass action thwarted another attempt by the king to stage a military coup. Women from the poorer areas of Paris marched to Versailles, pulling 20,000 armed men behind them. They broke into the palace and forced the king to return with them to Paris, where he would be under popular surveillance.
This was still a long way short of the overthrow of the monarchy. The crowd which attacked the Bastille and the women who marched on Versailles did so very much on their own initiative, prompted by the food shortages hitting poor areas as well as by hatred of the king’s aristocratic friends. But they still accepted the leadership of the official representatives of the third estate—upper middle class men who wanted only limited change. These concentrated the new armed power in Paris in the hands of a National Guard recruited almost exclusively from the better off sections of the middle class. Presiding over it was Lafayette, a former general and aristocrat, whose ‘democratic’ credentials came from acting as an official French adviser in the American War of Independence. Under his leadership the assembly set about framing a constitution which restricted the vote, through a steep property qualification, to so-called active citizens and left the king with the power to delay new laws by two years. People were expected to rejoice at a new order built around the ‘unity’ of the king and the assembly, of the rich and the poor. Many did at first. There was a general feeling of liberation and exaltation when the king, ex-aristocrats, the middle classes and the Parisian masses jointly commemorated the first anniversary of the fall of the Bastille at a great ‘festival of the federation’.
The sense of unity did not last long. The aristocrats bitterly resented the loss of their old privileges, even though they hung on to their wealth. Many were to move abroad, from where they plotted the overthrow of the revolution with those who stayed behind. The king and queen wrote secretly to other monarchs, urging a foreign invasion.
At the same time, there was growing bitterness among the masses of both country and town at the fact that material conditions had not improved. Already, the summer of 1789 had seen a wave of discontent among the peasantry—‘the great fear’—which involved the invasion of aristocratic chateaux and burning of titles to feudal dues. In the cities and market towns there was repeated agitation over food shortages, price rises and unemployment which merged into a hatred for aristocrats and speculators. There was a ferment of ideas, encouraged by a proliferation of newspapers—250 burst into print in the last six months of 1789 alone—and the influence of political clubs where people met to debate what was happening. The best known of these was the Jacobin club in Paris, dominated by a lawyer from the northern town of Arras, Robespierre, and corresponding with scores of other such clubs throughout the country. Another lawyer, Danton, dominated the Cordelier club, which was cheaper to join and so closer to the masses, its members much influenced by the daily newssheet
L’Ami du Peuple
written by Jean Paul Marat.
Yet for more than two years Lafayette’s ‘moderate’ constitutional monarchism dominated the political terrain. An attempt by the king to flee Paris in June 1791 to join counter-revolutionary armies gathering across the border was only thwarted by the prompt action of a village postmaster in summoning the local militia. The dominant faction in the assembly rejected any challenge to the monarchy. ‘The revolution is over,’ they proclaimed and spread the story that the king had been kidnapped. ‘The greatest danger’, said one leader, Barnave, would be ‘the destruction of the monarchy’, for it would mean ‘the destruction of the concept of property’.
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Jean Paul Marat was driven into hiding and a spell in exile in Britain. ‘Le Chapelier’ laws banned unions and strikes. The National Guard opened fire on thousands of people queuing to sign a republican petition in the Champ de Mars—the venue of the Festival of Federation almost 12 months before. Fifty died in a massacre rarely mentioned by those who weep over the subsequent fate of the queen, Marie Antoinette.
Repression could not stop rising popular agitation, however. Food shortages, price rises and unemployment drove the artisans and tradespeople (known as
sans-culottes
because the men wore trousers rather than the breeches of the wealthy classes) as well as the labourers to the point of desperation. January and February 1792 saw food riots in Paris, while in the countryside bands of poor peasants descended on markets to impose price reductions on corn and bread. One of the Jacobins, Hébert, produced a paper
Le Père Duchesne
, specially directed at
sans-culottes
readership. Jacques Roux, a popular priest in one of the poorest quarters, built a group of followers, described by their enemies as the
enragés
(‘madmen’), who articulated the elemental hatred of the poor for the aristocrats and rich. A growing number of
sans-culottes
joined political clubs and flocked to regular ‘section’ meetings held in each part of Paris. A revolutionary women’s organisation led by an ex-actress, Claire Lacombe, built support among those who had participated in the food protests and the march on Versailles.
Repression could not paper over the splits at the top of society either. The king and queen were still plotting with the counter-revolutionary armies abroad. The ‘moderates’ who ran the government fell out among themselves, torn between fear of these plots and fear of the masses below. Within the Jacobin club a group known as the Brissotins (after one of their leaders, Brissot) or Girondins, who saw themselves as less radical than Robespierre and Danton, began to manoeuvre to replace Lafayette in the government.
Each of these rival groupings believed there was a simple solution to their problems—war against the foreign armies that had gathered across France’s northern borders. The king believed war would lead to defeat by foreign troops who would restore his full power. Lafayette believed it would enable him to become a virtual dictator. The Girondins believed they would benefit from a wave of nationalist enthusiasm. The most determined opposition to war came from Robespierre, so often portrayed by historians and popular novelists as a bloodthirsty monster. He argued in the Jacobin club that war would open the door to counter-revolution. But he could not stop the Girondins from agreeing with the king to form a government and then declaring war on Austria and Prussia in April 1792.