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.