Historical Essays, Essay I.: Revolutions of England.

The situation of civilized men varies and renews itself incessantly. Every century that passes over a people leaves a different mode of life, different interests, different wants from what it found. But in this succession of different states, language does not change so rapidly as things, and it is rare that new facts meet at any given point with new signs which express them. The interests which have just arisen are forced to explain themselves in the idiom of those which have disappeared and are not properly understood; present conditions are disguised beneath the expression given to former conditions, and either deceive or escape observation. Truth, truth is demanded of all who write on law, as if he who undertakes to speak to men about what they are, and what they have to do, had only to will to be truthful. But at every instant we are conquered by conventional formulas, and truth is buried beneath words. It is not astonishing that our ideas in politics should be still imperfectly fixed, when we only find to express them words twenty centuries old.

Sovereignty, submission, government, people, prince, subject, these words, with a few others in use for the last two thousand years, keep our ideas so thoroughly enthralled, that our most varying theories are in fact only words differently arranged. To speak of the sovereignty of the prince, or the sovereignty of the people; to prescribe the submission of the people to the prince, or the prince to the people; to say that subjects are made for governments, or governments for subjects, is always revolving in the same circle though in different directions; this is speculating equally on the supposition that these collected terms still represent something real and necessary, and that the relations which they have expressed subsist in our social state in accordance with our present nature and wants. It is equally a mistake, if the supposition is ungrounded; and this is what we must first examine. As men of the same civilization, we ought all to have but one voice on our civil relations, and on what each of us has the right to require from others. Why then are there so many controversies, quarrels, and social hatreds? It is because we want an exact language, fit to render our particular desires in a manner which should make itself understood by all. Wishes variously expressed appear opposed, when they best accord: the hostility of words is transferred to men. We think we are enemies, when in truth we are brothers, that is to say, yielding to the same interests, and carried away by the same inclinations. Long live the republic! says one; long live the monarchy! says the other; and at these words they cut one another’s throats. Both doubtless meant to say, long live the welfare of mankind! They would have embraced, had they been able to understand one another.

When new wants come to us, instead of studying them, and accounting for them to ourselves, we find it more convenient for our idleness to seize by chance some vague resemblance, between what we seek, what we wish to be, and what others have been before us. Because we feel ourselves driven out of our present condition by a modification of our faculties, because we are drawn forward, we throw ourselves backward. Instead of thinking that we are tending toward a new mode of being, new as the interests that excite us to change, we think ourselves rather called back to a past state from which our species has degenerated. Ancient wisdom, the instinct of primitive times, is loudly invoked, instead of appealing to the enlightenment of the present time, and our own inspirations.

And no one agrees as to the times to which we must look back to find a right spirit and prudence; each has his favourite epoch to which he confines himself; and thence proceed quarrels. What is proclaimed as a necessary law is not the want which torments us, and which others feel also; it is the example we love and that others reject. Let us go twenty centuries back; no, only ten; no, only a few years; this is what the various parties say; but reason says: Be what your nature demands; consult yourselves, and believe only yourselves.

The victorious party in this war of words and authorities, having become sole masters of the territory, constitutes, that is to say, history in hand, reorganizes certain arrangements of men, of which some remains subsist, or which centuries have completely destroyed. These scaffoldings raised up in spite of time, which destroys nothing in vain, no longer find their foundations, and fall down of themselves: this order imposed by violence is soon broken up by men who are not formed of a lifeless substance, flexible in all directions, and obedient to the hands of the artist. When nature has resumed the superiority, and demolished the work of the lawgiver; when we return to this first question, what do we want? we have had experience; have received a caution. But of what profit is experience alone? What will be the use of having learned that good is not where it was sought, if we do not reflect in ourselves to learn where it is? On escaping from one path of error we should fall into another; and this is what happens in revolutions. After long and useless efforts, the weak man accuses necessity, and slumbers in expectation; the strong man reproaches himself and starts up, indignant at not having done enough. He vows to perish in the task; but let him beware; if the labour in which he persists is the same which has already deceived him, he will perish uselessly. Towards the end of the last century we experienced a kind of uneasiness in our social state; by observing ourselves attentively, by interrogating our wants, we might have discovered whence the evil came, and whence the remedy would come. But we never thought of this examination. We were, it was said, in a monarchy; we attacked that word; and then, instead of promising ourselves that our wants should be satisfied, and our faculties have their liberty, we resolved, as our only project, to get rid of a monarchy. We then reasoned thus: “Since a monarchy is very bad for us, the contrary of a monarchy will be very good; now, it is certain that a democracy is, in every respect, the reverse of a monarchy; therefore we want a democracy.”

Scarcely were we settled into a democracy, when we were astonished at being worse off; a second reasoning was obvious, and we did not fail to make it: “If we get no good either by monarchy or democracy, which are two extremes, we must necessarily find it in a middle term, in a system composed of these two systems.” Full of confidence in this syllogism, we hastily organized a mixed system of democracy and monarchy. We soon felt its effect. . . . . Thus the effort of our revolution was made for vain formulas, and almost for a quibble; the sensible, the real interest remained forgotten. Vainly would any one have endeavoured to represent to us the shallowness of the objects we were pursuing; unfortunately history was there, and we could bring that forward to speak for us, and confound reason. We could demonstrate that some nations had found themselves happy under the democratic system, and others under the mixed system. But there were two previous questions over which we passed. Were we of the same nature as those nations? And if so, was it really owing to the social machine in which they were employed as materials, that their well-being resulted? One cry arises from all antiquity: “democracy is the life of society; apart from democracy the civilized man vegetates and becomes extinct.” This unanimous consent, the little figure which has been made in these days by those who could not say, we are members of the sovereignty, all these have led us to regard the discipline of the Romans and Spartans as a sort of law of human nature, the violation of which was followed by an infallible misfortune. All that we desired, all that we wanted, we expected from this discipline. We revived all the rules, all the forms; we laid them down for ourselves, we declared them our imprescriptible right. To conquer our degenerated nature, which submitted with difficulty to these strange practices, we decreed the most terrible of sentences against ourselves, democracy or death.

But what pleased the men of antiquity was the full and free exercise of their active faculties; if they loved their democracy, it was because it favoured this exercise. The faculties and inclinations of these men were far from having any similarity to ours. In circumstances in which their disposition excited them to action, ours demand repose; there, where they did not like to act, activity is necessary to us. Therefore we require to be free in actions, in which they could bear constraint, and we can bear constraint, where they could not bear to be curbed. Therefore their rules of right and wrong, of privileges and duties, their laws of command and prohibition, ought to have been reversed to be applicable to us. Peace and industry were interdicted to them, and they bore it willingly; perhaps we should be willing for war to be interdicted to us. The prohibition to emigrate did not trouble them, they wished to be attached to their native land; we require our steps to be free: for them independence existed only within the limits of their country; out of it were slavery and enemies; whilst with us, oppression may come from our neighbours, and liberty from elsewhere; for us there are friends as well as enemies everywhere. Let a city take all its inhabitants and make them fractions of itself; reduce a man who can act personally, to the state of a passive member of a body which moves, animates, and destroys him at will; if this nullity of existence is not the only state in which he can live, it will be the state in which he will live least. If disposing of what I possess, and regulating its quantity and use, is not the sole means of preserving it for me, it is an encroachment on my existence. To imagine that it is rendering these regulations more supportable, by leaving to each one the power of decreeing them against others by decreeing them against himself, is a most absurd folly, unless in times when despotism is more attractive to men than prosperity.

It was no doubt useful to remind us, that formerly, when, in the name of the state, men were disturbed in the enjoyment of their private life, it was not the welfare of a few families, but a social necessity, which demanded privation and constraint; but at the same time the wants of our present nature ought to have been recognized, restraints which the ancients bore as the lesser evil should not have been inflicted on us, nor ought we to have been duped by this deceitful alliance of words a government which gives liberty.

On the faith of one example, we have vainly awaited liberty from the democratic government; on the faith of another example, we now await it from a mixed government.

For the last hundred and fifty years in England, the people which practises industry, the people which has no patent for living on the work of others, the people civilized after our modernm anner, declares it is happy, and that it owes its happiness to its constitution.

This national voice, the pride with which Englishmen compare their social condition with that of the rest of Europeans, a government lauded by others besides those who live under it; all this necessarily produced a great effect on our minds, still wavering in consequence of an unfortunate experiment.

Public opinion seized on the constitution of the English, as on that of the Romans; and we never thought of inquiring further what the people really meant, when it said that was the cause of its happiness. “The constituted are happy, if we are to believe them; their happiness must be the result of an equal working of all the parts of the constitution; every division must play its part; to insure the same prosperity for ourselves, let us not forget the smallest detail.” It was with this idea that, after regarding tribunes, orators, comitia, ostracism and the agrarian laws, as machines with which to produce the welfare of men in society, we invested peers, county members, a nobility, pensions, and rotten boroughs with the same marvellous property.

There is nothing absolute for the human species either in good or evil. A shipwrecked man, thrown by the sea upon some desert coast, exclaims that he is happy; yet he is naked and hungry: in the same way a nation long restrained in the use of its faculties, finding itself suddenly more free, may proclaim that it is happy; which means nothing then, except that its condition is more bearable. Those would be mistaken who understood thereby that its situation is altogether propitious, that no action exercised over it, troubles, restrains, or displeases it: that it accepts its condition entirely, maintains itself in it with pleasure, and interdicts itself all change.

We enthusiastically admired the instinct with which the English people raised its constitution piece by piece, adding, curtailing, filling up gaps, harmonizing the parts until the systematic perfecting of the whole: we congratulated ourselves on living at a period when this masterpiece of modern wisdom was completed, and ready for imitation; we only inspired to know it, and to transport it amongst us.

But the English have not made their constitution. They never had in view the design of dividing by generations the successive labours which were to complete their organization, finish their social condition, and bring them to the best system. They did not perceive that there were three essential elements which had to be combined without being confounded, namely, monarchy, aristocracy and democracy. It is not true, that by a premeditated design they reared over them a monarchy, and at the same time an aristocracy to oppose it; that they afterwards introduced a dose of democracy, which they increased little by little until it was on an equality with the other two principles, and symmetry was attained. These abstract speculations may delight a few thinkers by profession, but they occupy but little, people who are more material in their interests.

To live, enjoy their work, and exercise freely their faculties and industry, these are the objects of assembled men, and to which the English people, like all others, have endeavoured to attain. The way it has followed has been simple; it was only attacking all obstacles which interfered with its desires; it destroyed what it could. Such is its work, such its success; beyond that, it has no merit.

We must mistrust history. Too frequently the writer, instead of simply relating what passes before his eyes, represents to us what he imagines, and substitutes his ideas for facts, or perverts facts by connecting them with other foreign facts. It can be proved that for seven hundred years, all the minds of England were occupied in reconciling together the king, the peers and the commons, in order to rest afterwards and enjoy the spectacle; it can be proved that this idea proceeded from the Romans, whose institutions they wanted to obtain, and finally, have two consuls in the person of a king, a senate in an upper chamber, and comitia in small in a lower one; it can be proved that they took for models the Germanic barbarians . . .

Every thing may be proved by facts with the help of systems and allusions. Frequently history is nothing but one continuous he, and unfortunately, whilst writers turn it at their pleasure, and make it a clothing for their thoughts, they present it to men as the true rule of action, as the intructress who teaches them how to live, magistra vitæ; it is because they know that they are concealed behind it, and that, in extolling history, it is truly their own cleverness which they are praising.

Without proposing to the French the example of the English nation, without, however, denying that this example is applicable to them; without bringing forward any species of resemblance in the situation of the two nations, but also without condemning the opinion of those who find some connection between them, we will endeavour to describe simply and truthfully the principal revolutions which have changed the condition of men in England. In this narrative we will throw off as much as we are able, all political bias; we will take no notice of the current ideas, or even of the words which are exchanged daily without their truth having been ascertained; finally, we will endeavour always to go back to facts, and let them speak for themselves.

We shall not be astonished if something odd and extraordinary is found in this history: the notions of the events have been so obscured, that truth will probably appear strange. We shall likewise not be astonished if some persons exclaim at our ill-nature. But we warn those who think themselves wounded, that they must lay the blame, not on the narrator, who is not free, and has no choice as to what he must say, but on the events which guide his pen, and of which he is only the interpreter.