Tom Burns Organisation and Social Order

CHAPTER XXI

THE FRENCH REVOLUTION: THE NATION AND THE PEOPLE

Constitutional conflict, fiscal crisis, economic distress among the poor, unreliable troops, a complex structure of privilege, and a hierarchic order of nobility disrupted by the advent of wealthy newcomers - none of these, either of itself or in combination with any or all the others, can be held responsible for the French Revolution.

The kind of radical change represented by the 'great revolutions' - the French, the Russian, and the Chinese - which have served as the criterion for revolutionary action in modern history is usually taken to be a radical change of regime. By regime is meant, here, not simply government but the principles according to which political, economic and social relationships are organised. Revolution according to this generally accepted paradigm is not the only means by which regimes may be radically changed. If the whole topic is considered neutrally, major transformations have in fact been most frequently accomplished from outside a society, by military conquest. Others have come from inside, from sections of the population intent on setting up a separate state of their own in the name of national independence. In addition, there are the classic cases of enforced change of regime by military coup.1 Lastly, there are the ideologically inspired groups grown powerful enough to overthrow the existing regime and substitute one in conformity with their own principles.

The point is that regimes, whether despotic, imperial, monarchic or republican, do not end up by falling. They have to be pushed. In the classic revolutions, the push comes from internal forces, from groups or sections of the population who want to impose a radically different mode of political, social and economic organisation, as in eighteenth-century France and in twentieth-century Russia and China. In these cases, there exists some conception of an alternative form of organisation for the regime which is politically, economically and, above all, socially and morally superior to what is in place. As Karl Griewank puts it, in the 'descriptive or synthetic' definition of revolution which E.J.Hobsbawm quotes approvingly, there has to be "a programmatic idea or ideology, which sets up positive objectives aiming at renovation, further development or the progress of humanity".2

1 S.E.Finer, The Man on Horseback; The Role of the Military in Politics, Pall Mall Press, 1962. 2 K. Griewank, Der neuzeitliche Revolutionsbegriff, Suhrkamp, 1973 (quoted E.J.Hobsbawm, "Revolution", in R.Porter and M. Teich (eds.) Revolution in History, C.U.P., 1986, p. 9)

The 'programmatic idea or ideology' may be either well-ordered and clearly defined, arrived at after long-term discussion and planning, as it was in the Marxist-inspired revolutions of October 1917 and 1945, or relatively incoherent, a miscellany of different notions derived from different sources, as it appeared to be in 1789. So it was also, as far as the February stage went, in Russia, and, for that matter, in the first stage of the revolution in China, which lasted some years after its outbreak in 1911. Only later are positive objectives formulated in the light of the initial constellation of ideas themselves, or some refinement of them, as in France, or else, as in the second stage revolutions in Russia and China, of a preformulated and fully fashioned programmatic idea and set of objectives which is superimposed on what has gone before and carried through by a dominant group.

The initial constellation of ideas in all three revolutions, however miscellaneous they were, have fairly clearly defined origins. In the two later instances, they amounted, in the beginning, to approximations to the conception of liberal democracy formulated in western Europe and North America. For eighteenth-century France, their origins are usually taken to lie in the Enlightenment, which provided what amounted to a general guide for social and political action: "Happiness was the goal to be pursued; reason the means to it and the justification of it."3

There is, though, a problem. The French Revolution, when it happened, was the outcome of a combined movement. Taking the lead was a liberal and educated elite composed of a number of notables and a larger number of professional lawyers and public officials; but what carried the day against the 20,000 troops brought into Paris to quell them was the massive mobilisation of popular protest in Paris, supported by riots and demonstrations in the provincial towns and countryside. The question then poses itself of how a constellation of liberal ideas derived from enlightened opinion could engage the support of a majority of the underprivileged, illiterate and destitute.

Even in England, which was better off in this respect than France, Elizabeth Eisenstein has pointed to the undoubted fact that "Mr. Spectator's club, however open to the casual reader in the coffee house, remained closed to the inhabitants of Gin Lane," and went on to suggest that "one might argue that the first three centuries of printing did more to increase the gap between a preliterate folk and a literate laity."4

This overstates the case and misconstrues the issue, both. Literacy had spread far beyond the readers, or even potential readers, of The Spectator. Revolutions may not start in Gin Lane, but it is a mistake to regard all political or cultural change as initiated in the higher reaches of society and seeping down to the lower levels. Some cultural and political changes which come to affect the whole of a society may be initiated at lower levels and permeate the upper ranks of society. More to the point, changes which begin independently at each level may extend upwards and downwards, and coalesce - or at least effect some accommodation.

3 C.B.A.Behrens, Society, Government and the Enlightement, p. 156 4 E.L.Eisenstein, "On Revolution and the Printed Word", in R.Porter and M.Teich (eds.), Revolution in History, C.U.P., 1986, p. 197

There seem to be two solutions to the problem. They are not unrelated, but they are different in origin and the length of time they took to develop and declare themselves in organised collective action. The first is nationalism. The second is the emergence and growth of a popular cult of protest which learned eventually to articulate demands in political terms and to align them with those of a social and literate elite which had already become politicised.

I

Nationalism made its first entry as a political factor of major importance with the Revolution, and went on to become of equal importance to relationships within states, as well as between them.

'Nationalism' is a word which still defies satisfactory explanation in either causal or interpretative terms, despite the accumulation in recent years of a daunting accumulation of writings. 'Patriotism', being not so clearly political in its reference, has had less attention, although it has much the same connotation. In France, nationalism began in patriotism.

Gellner's definition, which begins his book5 and which Hobsbawm chose to adopt, gives nationalism as "primarily a political principle, which holds that the political and the national unit should be congruent." The prefatory word 'primarily' hints at the offstage presence of a number of secondary principles. In any case, the terms 'political unit' and 'national unit' can be just as problematical as the nationalism they are there to explain.

One thing at least is clear. Old as the term 'nation' is, its meaning and, what is more important, the significance the word carried, changed radically in the last years of the eighteenth century. In the original Latin, 'nation meant no more than 'tribe', or 'people', being applied mostly to non-Roman outsiders, whether provincials or barbarians; applied to fellow-citizens in Rome, it was mildly disparaging: 'stock', or 'breed'. Much the same sense was preserved throughout the Middle Ages and beyond; its most familiar application was to enclaves of foreign merchants, or university students - even to regiments raised in a foreign country.

'Patriotism' was originally even more strictly local in reference and meaning than 'nationalism'. The reference of 'patria' in medieval and early modern times is to birthplace: the part of the countryside or the town in which one was born and grew up to know at first hand, where close relatives lived, where one first made friends, or enemies, or rivals, and where one became embedded in the social, economic, religious and cultural links with others which formed the context of daily life. The significance lies in the attachment of an individual person to a particular territory or population - or to both. 'Heimat, or 'pays', is an essentially local native place. People even from nearby localities were strangers - even 'foreigners' - in many parts of England and Scotland, until quite recently. The attachment is perceived as a two-way affair, reciprocal or mutual; men and

5 E.Gellner, Nations and Nationalism, Blackwell, 1983

women 'belong' to this or that place or community, and the place or community 'belongs' to them.

The changeover from a local to a national reference for the two notions came when a new significance was given to the people as both 'sovereign' and 'one and indivisible'. "The problem before us," as Hobsbawm puts it, " derives from the fact that the modern nation, either as a state or as a body of people aspiring to form a such a state, differs in size, scale and nature from the actual communities with which human beings have identified over most of history, and makes quite different demands on it. It is, in Benedict Anderson's useful phrase, an 'imagined community.'"6

It is important to register the fact that Anderson's communities are 'imagined'; they are not 'imaginary', in the sense of artificial or false communities. They come into being as a consequence of the increase in the possibility of communication between the multiplicity of small communities congregated within a major political unit, by which they are first linked together to form a larger grouping. This larger, 'imagined' community is, to begin with, characteristically cellular. The suggestion is that the feeling of 'belonging' to a small local community comes to be treated as attaching to other, vaguely similar, communities in the same region, or country. [The extrapolation of the 'imagined community' of nation so as to embrace people claiming membership of one particular ethnic or religious-cultural group among others, outside as well as inside a country, came later - not excepting even the Jewish case.] Historically, the attachment comes to acquire a more substantial and practical reality if, or when, a centrally directed system of administration is developed.

Most writers on nationalism see the categorical difference noted by Hobsbawm as one arising from, or engineered by, political motives. In this they are following Weber. Weber's remarks on nationalism are more cautious and tentative (apart from his outright condemnation of bogus justification of it by ethnic identity, national consciousness, or common language) than those of most writers who have followed him. He does nevertheless settle uncompromisingly on political motivation as the determining element. Indeed, it is the establishment of a political unit that he sees as the foundation of ethnic identity itself, let alone nationalism: "it is primarily the political community, no matter how artificially organized, that inspires the belief in common ethnicity."7

But Weber then proceeds, in a somewhat mystifying manner, to reassert the intrinsically interpersonal character of the association formed in such artificially enlarged communities. Association with others in a nationalist movement turns, as it does in the case of all associations involving collective action, he says, into personal relationships. That is to say, the attachments which bind people together in their nation are of the same kind which are rooted in the personal relationships of the everyday face-to-face social interaction of local communities.

6 E.J.Hobsbawm, Nations and Nationalism since 1780, p.46. 7 M.Weber, Economy and Society, p.388.

Logical glides of this kind - causal connections which can be read backwards as well as forwards, palindrome style - are not infrequent in social science, and are sometimes justifiable. But in this one, too many steps are missing. 'Historical inevitability' aside, the question remains unanswered of how the larger 'association involving collective action' comes into being in the first place. It is a question which is particularly pertinent, and acute, when it comes to the emergence of national consciousness.

There is one presumption about the appearance of nationalism on the stage of European history which seems universally agreed. The feelings of the inhabitants of France towards the country and its people up to the latter part of the eighteenth century are taken to be categorically different from what they felt about both after their transformation into a 'nation'.

All the evidence seems to support the speed of the transformation, but it does mask a fundamental distinction. The making of a political association out of constituent elements distributed among the whole people of France was the work of a few years. The transformation of the people into the French nation was accomplished at the same time as they became politicised; they went together. Politicisation seems to have acted as a chemical agent, forming the nation as a precipitate out of a number of ingredients which were being held, as it were, in solution. On the other hand, a lengthy and fairly complicated series of technical developments and cultural change went into creating the historical situation which made this feasible. The short-term and the long-term historical processes involve quite different sets of considerations. That which went into the formation of the political nation in France, complex as it was, has been the subject of intensive scrutiny and debate. The earlier long-drawn-out period of formation which laid the foundations for nationalism has also been analysed and discussed by political, social and cultural historians just as rigorously and at almost as much length. But hardly any interest has been shown in connecting the two.

One great merit of Benedict Anderson's Imagined Communities is that he gives due prominence to the two processes and to the connection between them. He also lists the essential ingredients of the earlier, and lengthier, historical process. His list includes capitalism, the development of printing and the spread of literacy, humanist culture, the Enlightenment, and political unrest. All of them did undoubtedly play their part as 'essential ingredients', but they were hardly as happenstance and indiscriminate a variety of causal agencies as listing them in this fashion seems to imply. Some of them were causally connected, although which of them count as cause and which as effect is by no means self-evident or absolute. There are also some odd omissions, like the disintegration of the cultural unity of Christendom and of the hegemony of the Roman Church, or the resurgence of imperialism - dynastic, military, economic and cultural. It seems sensible nevertheless to follow the line marked out by Anderson, concentrating on the factors which were clearly operative in, if not peculiar to, Western Europe and France. These are complicated enough, without foraging about Asia, South America and Africa, as Anderson does. There is also something to be gained by attending closely to what happened in the first, European, instance, of which in any case the others are to some extent a reflection.

The ability to communicate to a large number of individuals other than by speech in face-to-face meeting was a prerequisite to the growth of nationalism, fundamental to all the other factors Anderson lists. Before the development of printing, handwriting had long been the chief instrument for the dissemination of information, knowledge, and ideas, as well as for the recording of transactions and events. Religious, literary, legal and philosophical writings were spread around the ancient and medieval worlds of literate society by means of hundreds, sometimes thousands, of manuscript copies. Copying manuscripts, in fact, became a principal occupation of the monastic orders. Written commands, instructions, laws and regulations in multiple copies as well as singly had been commonplace in the ancient world. Letter-writing, too, had developed into an artificial means of long-distance conversation. But the ability to communicate by written word had been the preserve of relatively tiny enclaves of the literate: clergy, government officers, lawyers, merchants and the educated members of wealthy households.

All the same, communication in matters of government, diplomacy, war (especially in the more important of such matters) and in intellectual, technical and religious concerns (especially in regard to the more highly charged and consequential of them) was by word of mouth. Speech - talk - is immediate, face-to-face, communication; more important, what is said may be amplified, qualified, even contradicted by the demeanour, facial expression, and gestures with which it is accompanied. Hence, dependence on written communication as well as on intermediaries was strictly limited. Not until the end of the twentieth century could it be argued that much communication and negotiation between sovereign states might just as well be handled by fax machines.

When printing entered in, what had been a system of communication between individuals over long distances - and intervals of time - was transformed into, or rather supplemented by, publishing. One person could address hundreds or thousands of others over the same stretches of space and time.

The consequences have been immensely profound, extensive, long-term, and by now, it seems, so utterly familiar as to be taken for granted - as 'read'. Comment and discussion of the impact of the 'Gutenberg Revolution' has virtually disappeared from political and economic history, and the new schools of social and cultural history have, so far, tended occupy themselves with developments in what seem to be less obvious and therefore more rewarding fields of study. J.R.Hale, in his remarkable little book on Europe at the time of the high Renaissance, remarks that printing houses "were a phenomenon that to some extent numbed social judgment."8 Perhaps the numbness has stayed with us.

It is the consequences directly affecting existing stable, institutionalised organisations which have attracted what attention has been given to the print revolution. The special benefits of the spread of literacy which accrued to government administration and to commercial and industrial systems have all been explored and discussed. They were slow in coming; monarchist regimes, it seems, did not take easily to standardisation. On the other hand, facilities for multiplying a standard religious text did have immediate appeal. The Church seized on the opportunity with enthusiasm and great speed. So did those

8 J.R.Hale, Renaissance Europe: 1480-1520, Fontana, 1971, pp. 189-190.

responsible for the ambitious expansion of systematic education in the new universities and schools opening up in England, Scotland, France, Spain, Germany and Italy.

The same opportunism, speed, and enthusiasm were, however, displayed in other directions. While print offered the possibility of multiplying copies of proclamations, laws, ordinances and regulations simply and speedily, their distribution was for the most part within the administrative and legal system. But the same possibility was also open to those who had no access to the administrative apparatus which ecclesiastical and secular authorities had at their disposal. They published appeals, dissenting or controversial utterances, manifestoes, and texts, and broadcast them widely. To begin with, printing did far more to extend the reach of religious dissent, expedite the mobilisation of political opposition, and enlarge the possibility and speed of social and cultural change than it did to control them.

It so happens that two small displays mounted by the British Museum in the autumn of 1990 provide a neat object lesson of this latter kind of use, one near the earliest and the other near the latest stages of its development. In one were collected specimens of printed handsheets containing extracts from the Bible, simplified and translated into German together with other aids to understanding the main reformist points. These, it seems, were distributed widely as part of the effort made to inform the literate and half-literate mass of common people. The effort, although sustained over a period of decades, met with only moderate success.9 The second display was of a small collection of news bulletins, announcements, appeals and warnings composed on typewriters and word-processors. They had been duplicated, xeroxed or faxed for distribution throughout Moscow (especially in the Metro stations) and elsewhere, by the group organised under Yeltsin in the 'White House' during the days immediately following the coup against the Gorbachev regime in August. The whole operation, accomplished in less than a week, was spectacularly successful.

Extempore systems of mass communication were in neither case, of course, the only means employed to further the cause of a new religious or political movement. And it would be the grossest of errors to see the developments in material technology as the one and only factor. But the development of printing techniques opened up the possibility of equally important developments in social technology, and more important changes in the character and potency of public order and opinion control.

First came a common language for writings that were to be printed and published for a public whose language, written as well as spoken, had contained and allowed for a very large number of lexical variants, different pronunciation, and of personal preferences when it came to spelling. Anderson rightly insists that a common popular language was actually manufactured out of 'a motley crowd of plebeian vernacular' languages. These came to rival and eventually to replace the old international linguistic currency of Latin, now devalued by printing, the Reformation, and world commerce.10 It did take more than

9 See G.Parker, "Success and Failure During the First Century of the Reformation," Past and Present 136, August, 1992, pp. 43-82. 10 B.Anderson, Imagined Communities, ch.5, esp. pp.70-72.

two hundred years, though; the major works of Leibniz, Newton and Spinoza, meant for an international public, were in Latin.

Nor were lexicographers and their new dictionaries the only artificers at work turning national, regional and local vernaculars into a standardised languages for communication in print as well as speech. In place of the Church and the legates and emissaries of the Papal Curia there were the new breed of diplomats, each attended by scores of their countrymen; and the new religious denominations and sects, each of them with its own supply of peripatetic preachers and divines. All were cosmopolitan rather than international in language and culture. The vocabularies of the new vernaculars were expanded immensely by borrowings from the languages of neighbouring countries. And with their adoption by both court and commons, priesthood and laity, knowledge and information about matters which had formerly been the preserve of aristocracy, of the court, the 'masters' of learning, the priesthood, became available to all.

Moreover, utterances which could reach an audience of hundreds or thousands, which were couched in the form of a public address but could be read and passed on and thought over in private, carried a new authority. It resembled, without matching, what had hitherto been a monopoly of the Church, the main source of accepted knowledge - along with religious belief. What the Church purveyed, after as well as before the Reformation and the Renaissance, was instruction - spiritual and moral, in the first instance, although it could be turned to political use. And such instruction was communicated directly, from the pulpit of the church, from the teacher's rostrum in school and college, in the confessional. It was also one-way; objection, discussion, or criticism was not acceptable, although instruction could be met, short of open defiance, by apathy or indifference. On the face of it, none of this applied to the secular, non-governmental, post-Gutenberg system. With a common vocabulary available, in print as well as speech, all kinds of information, including news and gossip, could be disseminated. Forms of discourse could be created which were appropriate for presenting and interpreting different varieties of information. Not that everybody was within reach of what was published, as they had been for what the Church preached. In the mid-seventeenth century, the great majority were illiterate. Still, literacy was spreading. More to the point, acquaintance with literature and contemporary thought was becoming an essential qualification for 'gentility'. No Marshall of France in 1700 could possibly have admitted to illiteracy, as one did a hundred years before.

The relative stability of civil society in the eighteenth century brought the first great move towards the multiplication of consumer goods, and with it a more domestic, house-bound style of life. In their train, newspapers, journals and books - reading matter not so much for the individual as for reading in company with family or friends - were published in ever-increasing numbers.

By the eighteenth century, too, the higher ranks of society and those who were permitted to consort with them had swelled far beyond the confines of the royal court and the houses of the great nobles. Furthermore, a sizeable proportion of the new literate class was engaged, either by direct employment or more loosely in some form of clientage, in what would nowadays be classified as 'service occupations' - administrative, secretarial,

and legal, as well as financial and commercial. Some earned their keep - at least when nothing better offered - as tutors to the sons of the aristocratic and the monied classes. Writers maintained themselves in much the same way by seeking wealthy patrons or collecting pre-publication subscriptions. In all such cases, they gained admittance, if only on sufferance and peripherally, to the social milieux inhabited by 'the great' - the leading figures in imperial, royal and lesser courts - and acceptance in the formations attached to leading politicians, great patrons, and different interest groups.

It was the same enlarged milieux which supplied the growing public for a rapidly increasing volume of the books, newspapers, broadsheets, and pamphlets which assumed a new importance as the medium for the dissemination of ideas, news, information and argument. It was a public not simply of literate, bookish, individuals or families but of a multiplicity of coteries, clubs, social gatherings and casual encounters in which philosophical, scientific, and literary interests, and social, political, commercial and financial affairs might enter in as a topic of conversation. What had now grown into a 'medium of mass communication' could turn such conversation into informed discussion. Linked together in this way, they constituted an 'imagined community' made up of hundreds of groups, different in size and frequency of encounter, as well as having very different memberships in terms of wealth, social standing, and influence.

What distinguished these milieux was their inner cohesion. For an exceptionally important period of time, they saw themselves as members of what had become known in eighteenth century France and England as 'the republic of letters', in acknowledgment of the publishing success of Pierre Bayle's Nouvelle de la Republique des Lettres. Citizens of the 'republic of letters' constituted a public of the comfortably-off and literate who could, above all, afford the time to be informed about public affairs and the attitudes and intentions of leading public figures. They were attuned to the kind of discourse which reading - or hearing talk about - the ideas of Locke, Montesquieu, Diderot, Rousseau, Voltaire and Beaumarchais had made the intellectual currency of the cultural elite of France.

A different set of assumptions applied to membership of the republic of letters from those which had held good for the educated elite, religious and secular, of previous centuries. There was now a sense in which the success of the communication system depended on its provoking argument and critical debate. Indeed, the wide circulation Bayle's journal achieved was related to his open and repeated invitation to his readers to contribute their opinions. And here, the cosmopolitanism that had emerged with the move into the vernacular played a major role in the ease with which censorship could be defied or avoided. Following precedents established far back in the sixteenth century in England and Germany, much of what Frenchmen wrote for Frenchmen to read was printed and published in Holland, southern Germany, Switzerland and even England. Bayle himself, a Huguenot refugee, published his journal in Rotterdam.

II

As a number of historians have pointed out, it is hard to credit so large and international a movement as the Enlightenment and so socially, politically and indeed morally diverse a number of participants in it with anything like an identifiable and distinctive set of political views. All the same, control was in one sense exercised over the form and content of the universe of discourse which the Enlightenment represented. The power inherent in the publications which disseminated the Enlightenment lay (as in the case of all subsequent systems of what we have come to call 'mass communications') not so much in its 'enlightening' (sc. 'instructing' and 'informing') its public as in its control of the agenda of what were matters of public interest and, to a large extent, of private concern. It is largely in this regard that it presents itself as a resource for exploitation by powerful individuals and groups. The factory for what Walter Lippmann called 'the manufacture of consent' was already under construction in the eighteenth century, well before political and economic opportunists began to exploit it for their own advancement or profit.

It was a situation which fertilised the genesis and growth of a new social formation founded on differences in linguistic, academic and literary competence, which broadened later into differences in knowledge of political, cultural and social affairs. Conceived in the print revolution of the fifteenth century, schooled in the culture of late Renaissance humanism, and brought to maturity by the Enlightenment, it emerged in the nineteenth century as Walter Bagehot's 'informed ten thousand' and later as Mosca's 'political class'. These inherited what had been accomplished by the 'lumieres' and the political elite of the revolutionary years (who, after the 'Jacobins' had been combed out or converted, went on to man the administrations set up under Napoleon's brothers, brothers-in-law, and generals to govern his Empire). Consolidated into the 'classe dirigeante', they took over the management of the nation states established in the nineteenth century.

Mastery of printing technology, entrepreneurial opportunism, and the standardisation of vernacular languages were essential, but it was the Enlightenment which created the social organisation required for the instauration of nationalism and the administrative structure of the nation state in the political domain. A central place in this new social organisation was occupied by the relationships fostered by the discussion of the literary novelties, philosophical questions, political affairs and social problems publicised by books and periodicals in the salons, academies, clubs, freemasons and quasi-masonic groups, societies, coteries and in household gatherings.

It was a social milieu replicated in Germany and the Netherlands on a smaller scale, and in England in a more diffuse, less concentrated form. Habermas identifies it as the earliest manifestation of burgerliche Offentlichkeit in modern times: "a forum in which the private people, come together to form a public, readied themselves to compel public authority to legitimate itself before public opinion."11

11 J.Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, [1962] (tr. T.Burger and F.Lawrence) Polity Press, 1989, p. 25.

This is hard to swallow. It is fairly well established that although the range of topics discussed in the literary journals of different countries had much in common, the focus of interest could be, and usually was, very different - at least hindsight has made it so. In Germany, it seems, the major concerns of the Erklarung were art and culture, and the emergent Romantic movement; in France, philosophy - as practised by Diderot and d'Alembert on one hand, Rousseau and Voltaire on the other; in England, the mannered literature of the 'Augustan Age', party politics - and history.12

The implication of Habermas's thesis is that public opinion so formed amounted to a consensus, but this does not necessarily follow. Even accepting his own terms, the public so formed is hardly one readied for concerted action but one for which an agenda may be set. Indeed, consensus is not necessary. Argument and discussion among individuals rarely follows the lines of a Socratic dialogue, ending in assent by one side to the view of the issue presented by the other. What matters is that the 'forum' included bystanders and, especially, readers - the third parties attending (reading about) the discussion. Without going over the debate concerning how (polite) conversation translates into an agenda for political action13, it is nevertheless worth pointing to, first, the strong connection now accepted as existing between a system of mass communications and the formation of public opinion and, secondly, the fairly obvious fact that public opinion exists in political life as a resource which political agents a small minority of people - invoke in support of claims and proposals.

III

Nationalism, for all the prominence it has achieved, is only one of the products of a long process of changes in the values and preferences to which people come to adhere, in established relationships and the cultivation of new ones, and in norms of behaviour they conceive as appropriate. State and society took on their recognisably modern shape as outcomes of lengthy adaptive shifts in social organisation.

The account given of 'social organisation' in the prefatory section of this book ("Preliminaries") offered a formulation based on Raymond Firth (though discounting the distinction he draws between social organisation and social structure as oversimplified), and amplified by Erving Goffman (though discarding his rather offhand identification of the two as simply wrong). Social organisation, according to Firth, has to be thought of as 'the working arrangements of society'. These may 'coincide with and support the structural features of the society, the major principles on which its form depends. But it may vary from the structural principles, and even bear against them in some particulars.

12 Too much should not be made of this, but the major journals were the Tatler, the Spectator and the Rambler; the most popular writings were Pope's translation of Homer, Johnson's Dictionary, and Gibbons' Decline and Fall. (The major philosophers writing in English, after Locke, were Irish and Scottish.) 13 See M.Walzer, "A critique of Philosophical Conversation" and G.Warnke, "Rawls, Habermas and Real Talk: a reply to Walzer", in M.Kelly (ed.) Hermeneutics and Critical Theory in Ethics and Politics, M.I.T. Press, 1990

Ultimately, the social structure may have to give way through a concatenation of organisational acts.'

What has to be borne in mind, nevertheless, as I suggested in that first section, is that the 'concrete realities' out of which social scientists build abstractions like 'social structure' and 'social organisation' are the actions and conduct of people. Both are systems of relationships which are "inferred from the multiplicity of indications incorporated in the way individuals talk among themselves and about each other, behave towards others in different situations, and display or betray feelings towards each other in gesture, demeanour, and facial expression. It is the observer-analyst who assigns all these different components of individual conduct to 'structure' or to 'organisation'."

For Goffman, 'social organisation' is the outcome of the division of social labour which distributes the entirety of the activities which define the existence of a family, a group of friends, a neighbourhood or any other collectivity among the members, and coordinates them. In particular, a person's obligations, and other people's expectations of his behaviour and attitudes, may be seen as deriving from the part he is supposed to play in the activities of the social organisation that incorporates him. Conversely, the actions of each member of an organised collectivity are expressive of what he knows his social place to be in it. The rules of the game for individuals in a socially organised setting see to it that their actions are expressive of what they know their social place to be in it - and, moreover, that they will stick to it.

Clearly, the concept of social organisation is by itself not of much help in explaining social or cultural change, still less in accounting for political or economic change. To put it in crude, headline, terms, while social organisation may be the vehicle of social change, it has to be driven by a motor fired by the creation of new relationships between individuals and groups and the destruction of old ones; changes in social relationships are, in turn, the product of changes in beliefs and values - in ethos; and changes in ethos are made feasible - and desirable - by changes in circumstance, including material and social technology.

This brings us to the Enlightenment of eighteenth-century France as a system of mass communications. Any account of the way in which systems of mass communication operate so as to influence the opinions, attitudes, habits, values and, eventually actions of individuals has to refer back to - indeed, rely largely on - research done over a period of some twenty years from the mid-1930's to the mid-1950's. Paul Lazarsfeld was the central figure in all this, and much of the work of himself and others is conveniently summarised in the book he published, along with Elihu Katz, in 1955.14 The main contention of the book is that the content and presentation of the information disseminated by newspapers, advertising, radio and television (i.e., what are nowadays conventionally grouped together as 'mass communications media') is of little consequence in the shaping of the opinion of individual persons.

14 E.Katz and P.F.Lazarsfeld, Personal Influence: The Part Played by People in the Flow of Mass Communications, Free Press, 1955.

People in general, it seems, look to their fellows before making up their minds about what is an appropriate or acceptable attitude to adopt to a style or an activity, or to any notable turn of events - especially political happenings. And they look especially to particular members of this or that primary group who have shown themselves as most knowledgeable and reliable. 'Mass communications', in short, while the information about what is happening may be available to everyone, serves to reinforce the influence on individual opinion, values, etc. exerted by the primary group as a whole and by leading members of the group. (Primary groups include families, friends, informal groups in workplaces, and also clubs and associations of all kinds within which people are inclined to make up rather closer groups of companions.) There are, to begin with, well-known benefits in conforming with the opinions, attitudes, beliefs and values common to the group; they begin with an individual's acceptance as a member.

What counts in all this is the attractiveness of belonging. Individuals belong to more than one primary group. If one group - a family, for example - is more attractive than, say, a group of companions at school or work, then opinions, values, and the rest will tend to be those of the family. 'Attractiveness', however, is a matter of degree, and the kind of circumstances which figure in the account of social organisation (pp. -----) may alter its direction quite dramatically. People turn to and depend on people they know or who are there with them when they face uncertainty; it is they, after all, who are part of the situation, who most likely either share or are most likely to be aware of the uncertainty. It is their 'social definition' of present realities which is both most pressing and relevant when it comes to making a decision. Out of the interaction of individuals, but indirectly, is created a shared way of looking at things or doing them.

Opinions, values, attitudes and purposes do change. And in the modern world they tend to do so most obviously when outside circumstances - economic, political, religious, social - even ecological - change. It is here that the Personal Influence studies show up their most significant findings. 'Mass communications' plays a major part, since it is from the 'outside world' that information about changed circumstances comes, together with assessments of its implications for the individual person. When it comes to eighteenth century society, one has to take into account the fact that the part played nowadays by workplace conversation, professional, prearranged or chance meetings, telephone and on-line computer messages simply did not exist before the improvement in means of transport and communication registered almost continuously over the past two centuries. Its place was taken by letters and copying. As Charles Rosen recently pointed out (apropos of the fact that Bach's Well-Tempered Keyboard remained unpublished until 1801, having circulated throughout Europe before that in manuscript copies made by Bach's pupils and friends - and their pupils and friends), 'Publication was less essential when so much music - and literature - was available in handwritten copies'.15

The most important change of circumstance affecting most of Western Europe that came with the eighteenth century was the peace and stability that prevailed in the major countries of Western Europe, despite the wars they fought with each other - compared,

15 C.Rosen, reviewing L.Dreyfus, Bach and the Pattern of Invention, New York Review, Vol.X LIV, no.25, 9 Oct. 1997, p. 54.

that is, with the bloodshed and devastation that the Thirty Years War inflicted on Germany and that, to a lesser extent, civil war had brought to France and England during the previous century. The eighteenth century also brought notably quieter political times for England and Germany, and the political troubles of France during Louis XV's reign were hardly of much consequence in the lives of most French people.

Changes in commonly shared values and attitudes to others, in public opinion, and in relationships come not directly from 'mass communications' but from the interpretation, commentary, and contextual information sought by the members of primary groups from those whom they regard as the best informed and trustworthy person to consult or listen to - but in regard to this or that particular sort of information, not generally. In regard to public affairs, it seems, leadership attaches to individuals who are of higher status within the primary group and are regarded as 'gregarious' - i.e., approachable.

Even in contemporary society, in which we think of individual attitudes and opinions as subject largely to whatever is given out by 'mass communications', what counts most, and most of the time, is what goes on between people when they meet and talk together. It is, I think, safe to assume that this would be so a fortiori in the eighteenth century. But opinion leadership then had strong reinforcement from two special sources. So far as public affairs, political and economic, were concerned, information about what was happening in the outside world, and about how that should be evaluated, was available in the first instance to the literate, educated, well-off members of primary groups who composed what saw itself as an intellectual elite.

Elites, intellectual, political, military, social and economic were nothing new, but this one had its special entitlement. The seventeenth and eighteenth centuries witnessed the breakdown of a whole cosmology, of ways of understanding and interpreting the physical and social world which seemed as old as the world itself. But with it, as the actuality and the memory of the disasters, miseries and terrors of war, political dissension, and famine faded, something like a concerted effort was made to construct a new cosmology, with room in it for the new science and 'natural philosophy' as well for philosophical speculation of the kind offered by Descartes, Spinoza, and Leibniz. Both carried with them the conviction that salvation lay in human rationality, and the critical philosophy of Locke, Hume, Montesquieu and the Encyclopaedists extended its scope to political, legal, social and economic institutions. The Enlightenment, built on these foundations, looked forward to the unending betterment of the human condition through institutional reforms undertaken in the light of human reason. They, the enlightened, would do the steering.

The Encyclopedie itself was a clear enough model for demonstrating what the application of reason could achieve. A good deal of the activities of the new cultural elite of the Enlightenment was devoted to what seems to be the relatively mundane task of gathering, sorting, summarising and writing up the miscellaneous deposits of information being accumulated in the active exploration of the world, of its inhabitants and their history, and of its mineral, animal and vegetable contents. As Robert Darnton points out, this had been a task which philosophers and others had taken on themselves ever since Aristotle; Aquinas and Bacon were only the most notable. But not only did the accumulation of knowledge proceed at a vastly accelerated pace with the geographical discoveries and the

scientific revolution of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, it was also increasingly secularised and, above all, impossible to organise in terms of the schemata which were considered adequate in classical or medieval times. Hence the Encyclopedie - a determined attempt to present a coherent account of 'the order and concatenation of human knowledge'. Any systematic account would inevitably impose an arbitary orderliness on what is presented to us. "But how could there not be arbitrariness? Nature presents us only with particular things, infinite in number and without firmly established divisions. Everything shades off into everything else by imperceptible nuances."16

The Encyclopedie was just one example, more influential and concrete than most, of a widespread and perpetually repeated cultural practice which ended not only in classifying but also in compartmentalizing human knowledge. Arbitrary as the classificatory system was - and admittedly so - it did serve the purpose of simplifying the search for particular items, in the way that library classification systems, or the simple alphabetical order of dictionaries serve. But there is a problem. The divisions of knowledge so imposed came to be accepted by later generations as 'making sense' of the multitudinous accumulations of miscellaneous scientific and empirical knowledge, theories, procedures, skills, institutions and so on, as well as aiding access to them. It affected, for better or for worse, the future course of cultural and scientific development in Europe and indeed the whole world.

It was Foucault (and Darnton follows him) who drew attention to the implications. "Pigeon-holing is ... an exercise in power. A subject relegated to the trivium" (grammar, logic, rhetoric) "rather than the quadrivium" (geometry, arithmetic, music, astronomy), or to the 'soft' sciences rather than the 'hard' sciences, may wither on the vine. A miss-shelved book may disappear forever. An enemy defined as less than human may be annihilated. All social action flows through boundaries defined by classification schemes, whether or not they are elaborated as explicitly as library catalogues, organization charts, and university departments."17

The consequences, many of them unfortunate - even dire - are still with us, from the separation of political from economic studies and the distinction between 'science' and 'technology', down to the divergent, even opposing, paths pursued, most of the time, by such closely-related studies as neuro-physiology and psychology. All such distinctions have been perpetually asserted, challenged, and reasserted, differences in method and conceptual apparatus being followed through to the differences in mentality and character held to obtain between their practitioners.

Not that the Encyclopedistes or their fellow taxonomers are to be thought of as exercising dictatorial powers in legislating for the boundaries and divisions of knowledge. Like everyone engaged in systematising information for a relatively uninformed audience since then, they are best regarded as either the creatures or the servants of power. Once the organising principle has been determined, the power resides in the system. Some

16 From the prospectus to the Encyclopedie, quoted R.Darnton in "Philosophers Trim the Tree of Knowledge", The Great Cat Massacre, Penguin Books, 1985, p. 189. 17 R. Darnton, "Philosophers Trim the Tree of Knowledge", The Great Cat Massacre, pp.186-7.

benefit more than others; a few opportunists may exploit it to their own profit; but the system is essentially impersonal, existing independently of the wishes or indeed, most of the time, the awareness of those who compose the agenda and present the content. Simply, it is they who know of, and apply, the 'classification schemes which define', to repeat Darnton's words, 'the boundaries through which all social action flows.'

The picture as a whole is almost too pat a demonstration of how what Stuart Hampshire has called 'the myth of reason' - invented, he suggests, by Plato - has worked. It rests on the parallel drawn in the first book of The Republic between the three divisions of the soul and the three classes of citizens of the polis. Just as man's actions are best guided by reason, the superior part of his soul, so is the state best managed by the intelligent and well-educated class of citizens.

It is generally assumed that Plato's argument was aimed specifically at presenting the superiority of government by an intellectual elite - a true aristocracy - over the democracy which prevailed in Athens at the time. Democracy in that sense hardly came into the reckoning, so far as the enlightened of eighteenth-century France were concerned. If they had any immediate objective in mind, it was the removal - the demolition - of the inefficient, incompetent, corrupt and unjust apparatus of government and civil institutions with which French society was encumbered. But the central intellectual concern was still, as with Plato, the debate over the nature of justice, or, less obscurely, the organising principles which should determine the structure of a just society. The two leading brands of theory at the time saw the solution in some form of social contract: First, agreement among the members of a society that differences of individual self-interest were impossible to settle without an agreement among all the contenders to surrender the power of decision - or rather, of determining the decision-rules - to some superior: a sovereign, an oligarchy, a senate, an elected legislature. Second, settlement could be reached by discussion among rational people who discarded their individual self-interests for the time being in the interest common to all of them of reaching a modus vivendi.

This puts it too crudely, but the appeal to reason is common to both. Only people who acknowledged the superior guidance afforded by reason in their own lives and in others' were capable of reaching agreement about the structure of a just society. An added bonus was that the populace, poor, demoralised, uneducated, illiterate and therefore irrational, had no real part to play in this. On the other hand, there was no reason to doubt that the unenlightened would recognise and welcome the improvements wrought by their betters when they were brought about.

The programme is best illustrated by the central role played in the final stages by the group known as 'the Society of Thirty'. It consisted of a number of wealthy members of the 'old' nobility (those whose titles dated back to before 1500) like Condorcet, Talleyrand and Lafayette, together with distinguished parlementaires like Mirabeau, Sieyes and Duport. Few were bourgeois. What seems to have been common to all of them was a dedication to the principles and values of the Enlightenment, especially as revealed in Diderot's "Encyclopaedia": measuring the worth of institutions by their rationality and utility rather than their age or sanctity; anticlerical in that they opposed the privileges accorded the Church and advocated religious toleration; and addicted to discussion and

debate - in print as much as conversation. "They called themselves 'patriots' which at the time meant 'a lover of liberty'. Who were they? In fact, the composition of the group is not well known at least in part because the patriots constantly represented themselves as the entire nation."18 They were certainly not the nation, nor even the embryo of what was in process of becoming the 'political nation'. But, to begin with, they played an important part in its formation.

What they did was to provide the words and ideas in which the political nation, created at long last in just these few months, articulated its first demands. Of course, there was material enough for them to work on: the hardships of near famine, the desperate straits to which the government's whole system of finance had been reduced, despair at an inequitable - indeed an iniquitous - system of justice, resentment of privilege, mistrust of established authorities. But this merely pushes the question a step further back. How was it possible for a handful of cultivated, principled, politically-minded nobles and others to focus all the various troubles that beset the people of France in a concerted demand for radical constitutional and social change?

The question is not entirely new. The situation which led up to the seventeenth century English Revolution was different, of course, not only in the nature and weightiness of the country's troubles but in the proportion of the population involved, and their sheer numbers. But the problem of disseminating reformist opinion, formulating an appropriate discourse for discussing the situation, and distributing news about what was happening among the many thousands of concerned individuals scattered throughout the country was much the same. In the England of Charles I's time, the solution was readymade. The face-to-face social intercourse native to small communities had already been appropriated to the system of parliamentary representation which covered the whole country.

Members of Parliament were bound to keep in touch with their electors in every county and in hundreds of boroughs whenever they returned to their constituencies. The issues and the terms in which they were discussed in Parliament would be repeated first-hand in gatherings in houses, inns, and market-places. Between whiles the electors would themselves have carried on the discussions and worked towards policy decisions they could support, so that ideas and information flowed into as well as outwards from Westminster and London. And as an important, though not absolutely essential supplement to face-to-face talk, meetings, and correspondence, there were pamphlets, news letters, and other published materials coming out of the printing presses in increasing volume throughout the period.

The system of communication which contributed largely to the creation of a political nation in England in the first half of the century was essentially two-way. In pre-revolutionary France, it was very largely one-way. What made the difference was the widespread adoption of publication as a means of conveying what was intrinsically a replica of spoken utterance over long distances - of a mass communications system, in short.

18 D.M.G.Sutherland, France, 1789-1815: Revolution and Counter-Revolution, Collins, 1985, p.34.

This system was not a single, organised and solidary political entity, or even a self-conscious and coherent movement. It was rather an association on a national scale which answers to Weber's prescription for organised social action as "predominantly rational maxims of purposeful, self-interested action, on the effective operation of which each participant is counting for his own conduct as well as that of others."19 It existed as a cellular mass of small enclaves ('primary groups') in the multiplicity of local communities which made up the whole of France. Every one of them of them had some connection with similar but more influential enclaves in Paris and elsewhere, sometimes with other local enclaves. Connection was very largely by means of correspondence and publications, although increasingly reaffirmed through personal contact. The connections themselves - what was said and reported, written, printed and read - served as channels for the kind of discourse developed in Paris for prompting political action, enlisting supporters, and organising them.

IV

The Enlightenment gave intellectual substance to an increasingly sceptical and critical attitude towards the existing order of things. Nothing escaped: political and legal institutions, governmental authority, even religious teachings. But it was in no sense popular. Indeed, during the eighteenth century, the kind of public concerned with politics had no thought of its being any concern of the 'people', still less of popular participation in political criticism, or of any call for it. Documentary evidence for this turns up in the definitions of le peuple in contemporary dictionaries, where it is identified with the Roman plebs, and in contemporary writings which dwell on the seditious and evil ways of the common people, the 'urban scum'. The picture they draw bears some resemblance, in fact, to that which Le Goff suggests was the view taken by their literate contemporaries of the medieval peasantry, who were dismissed as 'ignorant, cultureless, potentially dangerous, "more animal than man"'. (See above, p. .)

It is not difficult to assemble literary evidence of this kind at any period of history; at the end of the nineteenth century, Gustave LeBon conveyed much the same view, dressed up in the scientistic clothing which had become fashionable. What needs to be done is to turn to the exploration of the ways in which political feelings may be discernible in the only effective means of expressing political criticism of governmental and other authorities open to the illiterate mass of the people - local manifestations, protest movements and riots. This is the strategy followed by Roger Chartier in the paper20 he contributed to the first of three international colloquia concerning the part played by the French Revolution in the formation of the political ideas, attitudes and beliefs of the last two centuries.

While the majority of the population, literate as well as illiterate, could have had no way of apprehending the Enlightenment, or what it stood for, it is also true that the political

19 M.Weber, Economy and Society, p.324. 20 R.Chartier, "Culture populaire et culture politique dans l'Ancien Regime", in The Political Culture of the Ancien Regime, ed. K.M.Baker, Pergamon Press, 1987, pp. 243-258.

feelings and attitudes may be expressed and communicated in other ways than in books and journals which addressed a sophisticated readership. If there was a connection between the Enlightenment and popular revolution, and there undoubtedly was, it is necessary to go deeper, and to consider the ways in which a popular political culture manifested and communicated itself as well as the literature of political criticism and its readers.

The spread of literacy by the eighteenth century meant that the readership of newspapers, journals and books had become large enough to be divided into several different 'publics'. Chartier begins his paper by considering the inventory drawn up in 1789 on behalf of the widow and children of a printer at Troyes. Adopting what he calls a fairly crude criterion, he makes out four distinct sorts of publication, each aimed at a different public: sophisticated; religious; educational; and popular.

Most historians have focused their attention, understandably enough, on the first kind of public: that for the philosophical, literary and political writings labelled the 'Enlightenment'. These do not figure at all in the Troyes printer's inventory. By far the largest category was that for religious publications: bibles, hymnbooks, psalters, lives of saints, and books of religious instruction, which made up nearly half of the total stock of 443,000 books, bound and unbound - far in excess of any of the other categories.

Next came popular fiction and the like: collections of fairy tales, ballads, penny dreadfuls and stories heroic, comic and horrific - the stuff of 'popular literature', and destined for reading aloud at the fireside or in the local tavern rather than in private. In France, it was licensed and its publication in some degree organised during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries under the rubric of the Biblioteque bleue.

'Educational' publications were just as mixed a bag. The basic range stretched from alphabets, primers for arithmetic and spelling and handwriting copybooks to dictionaries, text-books for mathematics and grammar and reprints of the classics. By the eighteenth century this public had expanded to those who, coming within the ambit of the upper of the two economies, sought to profit from the increasing prosperity which expanding trade and industry, harnessed to the new consumerism, brought to merchants and to the more highly skilled crafts and occupations. In England, there was a substantial market in 'teach-yourself' books for grammar, accounting and manual crafts, but there was also a small flood of books of instruction in farming and horticulture, architecture and design. Chippendale, Sheraton, Hepplewhite and Adam made their reputation not so much from the furniture and buildings they made or designed themselves as from the design-books they published, which were bought and put to good use by cabinet-makers and builders all over the country. France must have witnessed much the same kind of development, though perhaps over a rather different range.

For evidence of the existence of a popular political culture, Chartier starts with the seventeenth century which, up to the 1670's, witnessed several waves of local riots and disturbances in protest against the forced billetting of troops, new taxes and more vigorous attempts to exact old ones and to enforce payment of tolls on wine and duties on salt. The pattern had in fact been set in the cahiers de doleances which all parishes were

called upon to submit for the 1614 convocation of the States-General. Complaints were made not against the taxes themselves but against increases in them, against the methods used by tax-collectors and their assessments, against the immunities granted to certain towns, to the bogus claims of noble privilege and of crowds of officials - especially as the increases were specifically for money for protecting everybody in the country against rebel armies. At the same time, the cahiers were addressed to the king as their protector, invoking the charge laid upon him to safeguard all his subjects, high and low, from encroachments on their ancient rights and traditional immunities. Local riots later in the century were characterised by imprecations directed against the officials ("gabelleurs," "maltotiers") and by shouts invoking the protection of the king: "vive le roi sans gabelle", "vive le roi sans maltots". The presumption was that the miscreants who were violating their ancient liberties were also robbing or deceiving the king, the upholder of justice, defender of established custom - and the rightful beneficiary of the taxes they paid.

Other complaints, which figured just as large in the 1614 doleances, concerned the insufficient numbers of clergy, the absence of church services in so many parishes, and other deficiencies in matters of welfare, schooling, and spiritual guidance which it was for the church to provide - all those deprivations which the long-drawn-out religious wars had left in their wake. The implication of these grievances and the tone in which they were expressed was much the same as those concerning oppressive taxes. They looked to the king, in fact, to restore the fabric of Christian observance and to make good the supply of priests, just as they expected him to protect them from the demands of over-zealous tax officers and billetting officers.

As for the absolution of the king from any of the blame attached to the misdeeds of his ministers, this was perfectly in accordance with the tradition by which the king absolved himself from any blame when things went badly wrong by having his principal ministers arraigned at a lit de justice and dismissed from his service, if not condemned and punished. The procedure served Louis XIV well when he came of age to assume the monarchy in his own person. The same image of the king as divinely ordained protector of his people and the church as well as embodiment of the state was formalized and put to increasing use during the reigns of Louis XIV and Louis XV. Frequent public ceremonies incorporating Te Deum services were held in cathedrals and churches throughout the kingdom. Attendance by nobles, notables and common people was obligatory.

By the eighteenth century, though, this probably did more harm than good. Louis XV's reign was a period when religious scepticism and anti-clerical opinion was on the increase, the country's military and diplomatic prowess was demonstrably on the wain, and opposition to the government and to its incessant demands for more money was stiffening and becoming more organised. Chartier takes loyalty to the king as a critical marker of the changing climate of political opinion. A significant demonstration of the change of heart came in 1758 with the outcry raised against the public humiliation and execution of a Parisian gentleman ('sieur') accused of speaking against the government and even the king and his ministers. The substantive evidence against him consisted in the words he used in an argument about the merits of the case against Damiens (executed a couple of years previously for his attempted assassination of Louis XV) among a dozen people seated at dinner in a tavern. After that, there are several reports of affronts to the

king's name and challenges to royal authority, especially notable in criticism and pleas for pardon voiced at public executions. By 1768, when Terray was trying out his scheme for free trade in corn, with fairly catastrophic results, the king was being blamed for the shortages: 'they weren't due to any war, or bad harvests; the fact is that we don't have a king - he's turned into a corn merchant'. The conclusion drawn by Chartier is that by the 1770's the panoply of sanctified royalty was being so often and openly discounted as to reveal it as the make-believe it was. (p.256).

Chartier clinches his argument by comparing the cahiers prepared for the meeting of the States-General of 1789 with those of 1614. In both cases most complaints were about the burden of taxation. In 1614 what was under criticism was not so much the heavier taxes being imposed as the over-zealous efforts of the tax-collectors, which were treated as encroachments on ancient rights and privileges. In 1789, it was the rights, privileges and immunities themselves which were under attack as having been allowed to persist from time immemorial. Not the protection of the king but public opinion was invoked now, and the authorities called upon to take it into account.

The dissident outcries and mutterings which marked the last years of Louis XV's reign had been only the beginning. The worsening of the plight of the urban and rural poor, compounded by the vicissitudes of financial and economic policy-making under Turgot, Necker, de Fleury and Calonne, did not so much turn the tide of popular feeling against the government as broaden the view taken of the reasons for disaffection, and particularise the sources of grievance. By the winter of 1788-9, when the doleances for the States General were being prepared, the voice of popular criticism and protest apparent in them was more strictly pragmatic, concerned with matters which were 'particular and close at hand', to use Tocqueville's phrase for the complaints which filled the cahiers of 1789. It was specific malfunctions, oppressive exactions, corrupt practices, manifest injustice, ill-gotten gains, the inequities of privilege and exemption and undeserved miseries which were under attack, rather than the monarchy and the constitution, the structure of society, the economic system, or the Catholic church, the characteristic targets of Enlightenment writings.

By 1788-9 it had become abundantly clear to the people at large, as well as to notables and bourgeois, that the government of France was losing its own belief as well as that of its citizens in its ability to manage the affairs of the country. New hope and age-old despair combined to make it 'the best of times and the worst of times'.

Long-established loyalties and alliances of interest were breaking down and new sympathies and aspirations were being openly declared in their place. The signs are everywhere: instead of Moliere's caricatures of the extravagances of outsiders and the obsessions of eccentrics, it was Beaumarchais' Marriage of Figaro, with its indictment of the privileged nobility which filled theatres; Voltaire's Candide presented the iniquities and inequities of established societies rather than the delinquent defiance of law and order of Le Sage's Gil Blas; even in painting, while classical themes remained popular, it was themes like David's Belisarius, reduced to beggary by an ungrateful emperor, which attracted attention rather than the nostalgia for a golden age which filled Poussin's canvases. The social order of the ancien regime was coming under unprecedented strain;

social organisation in terms of collusive understandings and relationships, which had been its underpinning, was being eroded - not least by the desperate efforts of the King's ministers to shore it up.

The political culture of the new generation of notables had also undergone a change. New forms of knowledge about economic and administrative affairs and a new pragmatism had entered in, as the proceedings of the Assembly of Notables demonstrated. And the publicity which that affair attracted strengthened the bridges already constructed which connected the different readerships and political cultures. For, separate and unrelated though the four 'publics' which Chartier discriminated may have been, it has to be borne in mind that many of those who wrote, printed, published, or bought one sort of publication might well do the same with others.

Direct evidence of any conjunction between the different publics is in the nature of things hard to come by. But there is plenty of testimony to the proliferation of political flysheets, broadsheets and cartoons, and some indirect evidence about the diffusion of periodical literature to what must have been a miscellaneous public. The number of periodicals and of topics to which they were devoted grew throughout the 1700's. In the 1730's there were 19 journals published in France; there were also 65 journals in French published in Europe as a whole. Fifty years later, there were 73 in France and 167 for the whole of Europe.

Yet it is not - or not only - that the more liberal-minded notables and writers were able to command an ever-widening public, although this was happening. Nor was it that popular protest was on the increase. For it is inconceivable that the constellation of liberal ideas formulated and cultivated among the enlightened well-to-do could ever have appealed to a deprived, illiterate and underprivileged populace sufficiently to have roused them to provide mass support for the reforms they had in mind. Separately and of themselves, the first would have amounted to no more than an undercurrent of dissident talk and writing circulating among what was never more than a minority of the nobility and bourgeoisie, easily kept within bounds or simply ignored; the second would have spent itself, as always, in sporadic outbreaks of demonstrations and rioting, just as easily contained or suppressed by the armed forces at the disposal of the state.

What was happening was that each movement was beginning to impinge on the other and, for the first time, to recognise common - or at least compatible, perhaps complementary - political interests. Complicitous social systems are hardly stable aspects, or emanations, of the social order; they develop, grow and change just as other institutional or systemic elements of society do. In some respects they grow, and change, rather faster than most, because by their nature they exploit their social context and, encroaching on other institutional forms, become parasitic, growing at their expense. There are plenty of signs and signals of this happening in France in the latter part of the eighteenth century. The contrast between the richer and privileged sections of society and the indigent and subordinate sections became stronger and more blatant. While trade and industrial production prospered after 1770, wages fell; the number of impoverished rural workers migrating into towns increased, as did unemployment in them, and industrial disputes; and there were food riots in every year but two between 1764 and 1789.

Attempts at constitutional and fiscal reform embarked on or proposed by Turgot, Necker and Calonne proved to be unacceptable, unworkable, or rendered pointless by war or food shortages. One of the more telling of all the signs and portents was the paradoxical spectacle presented in 1778 of a government which had just repealed all Turgot's liberal reforms going to war on behalf of American colonists who had challenged royal, together with parliamentary, rule.

The increasingly manifest incompetence of government allied to a now vigorous and informed interest in political affairs had induced a demand for better government and a voice in choosing it. Alongside it was an awareness that the complicitous system of the ancien regime had made a travesty of the whole conception of the prevailing social order as a divinely ordained 'great chain of being'. From below, popular protest against oppression and destitution was becoming more and more noisy and violent. Growing recognition that what was wrong in both instances was actually legitimised by law meant mutual realisation of a major political interest common to both upper and lower ranks of society.

This is all-important. There is in practice an immense difference between 'entertaining' a belief and 'adopting' it, either by way of professing it publicly or acting on it. Most people keep open house, much of the time, for a whole assortment of ideas and beliefs, to some of which, sometimes, they may privately admit. Adopting a belief means doing something about it. This can really only happen if others can be found who share it or who can be persuaded, or made, to do so, i.e., if it is accepted by others as at least plausible and, eventually, worth investing time and effort, or risking resources and even their lives. It requires a supporting social structure of believers.

'Structures of belief' which give rise to collective action on a massive scale are the outcome of either the exercise of power or self-interest - including self-preservation. Power, in this connection, may be exercised in any one of its several manifestations. Dennis Wrong's list21 is pertinent here: force (the 'non-violence' of protest movements as well as physical violence, and what he calls 'psychic' force - defamation, abuse, blackmail, degradation and humiliation, excommunication, ostracism); authority (coercion, inducement, legitimate authority, personal authority); persuasion; and manipulation. The history of Christianity, to go no further, is full of examples of the manufacture of structures of belief through the exercise of power in every one of these guises. On the other hand, what we recognise as mass political movements are founded on perceptions of self-interest. It approximates to Weber's prescription for organised social action as "predominantly rational maxims of purposeful, self-interested action, on the effective operation of which each participant is counting for his own conduct as well as that of others."22

21See D.H.Wrong, Power: Its Forms, Bases and Uses Blackwell, 1988, pp.23-4 et seq.. 22 M.Weber, Economy and Society, p.324.

V

Not that it was all plain sailing. The rapprochement signalled by the popular interest aroused by the Assembly of Notables in 1787 and the 'day of tiles' at Grenoble the following year turned out to be premature. Differences between the two movements were also re-emphasised first by contention over the special provisions for the election of delegates from the Third Estate to the States General and then by the public display of the special interests of all three Estates when the contents of the cahiers being prepared for the meeting became known.

Traditionally, the king's purpose in summoning the States-General which met on May 3rd. 1789 (for the first time for 175 years) was to receive its consent to new taxes. Over the centuries it had gained the right to be consulted (but no more than that) about the succession to the throne; it could, on occasion, proffer advice to the king; and lastly, in common with other similar assemblies created in the later Middle Ages in western Europe, its members were entitled to present grievances from their constituents.

Even before the final decision to convene it had been reached, the membership of the States-General had been redefined and its powers radically enlarged in a series of rapid moves. There was to be an electoral assembly for each of the three estates in all 234 constituencies. Assemblies to elect the First Estate were open to all beneficed clergy. Everyone with a claim to inherited nobility was entitled to attend and vote in the noble assemblies. This excluded from the electoral assemblies for the Second Estate all those newly ennobled, i.e., whose status had not yet become fully hereditary. Courtiers and sovereign court magistrates, who assumed that their former dominance would guarantee their election, were heavily outnumbered by 'petty nobles of long lineage, slender means, and little public experience."23

As for the Third Estate, its first victory was won even before the elections. Following the precedent set in 1788 by Dauphine and copied by other pays d'etat who had provincial estates of their own, the numbers of delegates to the Third Estate were doubled.

All Frenchmen over the age of twenty-five registered for tax purposes were entitled to a vote in the elections for the Third Estate. Protestants were included, though not Jews, domestic servants, most of the employees of the large royal or 'privileged' factories, or actors. The franchise was in fact far more comprehensive than it had been for any previous elections - or, for that matter, than it was to be for any subsequent election anywhere in Europe until the twentieth century.

There were, however, special arrangements for elections to the Third Estate. They were to be held in two stages, primary and secondary. The comprehensive franchise applied only to the primary assemblies. These chose two delegates for every hundred households to an electoral college for the constituency, which then elected the delegates destined for the States General itself. Inevitably, the Delegates to the constituency turned out to be

23 W.Doyle, Oxford History of the French Revolution, O.U.P., 1989, p.97.

those who could afford to be there - thus eliminating cottagers, labourers, and most country artisans, who could not.

But they also clarified the situation - for both upper and lower class - movements. As MacPhee's perceptive comment on the Reveillon riots of April, 1789, notes, "Parisian working people were making their own connections between the language of elite politics and their economic grievances."24 By the summer of '89 the whole pile had, so to speak, been doused in kerosene by the near-famine which followed on the bad harvest of 1788. Events in Paris during late June and early July put a match to it.

By mid-June, the States-General were refusing assent to a loan to meet the most pressing needs. When, two days later, the King backed the nobles' demand for the three estates to vote separately (thus denying the Third Estate its majority in terms of number of members), the Third Estate claimed the title of National Assembly since the right to interpret and express the national will belonged to it alone. It proceeded to declare all existing taxes invalid and illegal, since they had been imposed 'without the consent of the nation'. The only sop offered to the King and his ministers, whose desperate search for a solution to the fiscal crisis had set the ball rolling in the first place, was a simultaneous declaration to the effect that taxes were to go on being paid, none the less, until such time as the Assembly was dissolved.

The King's dismissal of Necker - the only popular minister he had ever had, and a bourgeois - was taken as the signal for action. When 20,000 troops were brought into Paris to quell the members of the self-proclaimed National Assembly, the labouring people of Paris mobilised en masse, taking the defiance of the bourgeois deputies as made in their name too. The German mercenaries brought in to replace the troops whose loyalty to the government was suspect, were mobbed the next day. Riots and looting went on throughout the next forty-eight hours, culminating in the storming of the Bastille.

The message was rammed home in the countryside as the news of Necker's dismissal and rumours of the intimidation of the National Assembly spread. A wave of peasant uprisings swept through Normandy and Maine, Flanders, Alsace and Franche-Comte, the Maconnais and Dauphine. Throughout July, bands of villagers and peasants - not all of them poverty-stricken - careered about the countryside sacking chateaux, looting their wine-cellars and granaries, and burning title deeds, charters, and account-books. However spontaneous or disorganised the disorders, skirmishes and outrages of the 'Grande Peur' may have been, they had a meaning and significance it was impossible to misinterpret, especially coming as they did on top of what was happening in Paris. They consummated the politicisation of the French nation initiated by the resurrection of the States-General and the electoral process which determined its make-up.

They also initiated the first performance of what has become the classic repertoire of revolutionary acts.

24 P.McPhee, Social History of France, 1780-1880, Routledge, 1992, p.32.

VI

What fired the French people in the summer of 1789, however, was not so much the 'purposive and self-interested action' inspired by the liberal ideas and aspirations preached by the political elite of Paris but the enthusiasm bred by their mobilisation in crowds for demonstrations, protests, and attacks on those they saw as enemies. There was exhilaration in acting out a leading role in a drama in which distinguished public men, members of the nobility, and even churchmen, were also actors, and which was being watched, and in some measure repeated, by people all over France. Self-consciousness translated easily into a sense of collective identity, of national unity, and so into a political force. Like ethnicity, it is, as Weber pointed out, a source of self-regard (Ehre) available to everyone; in the imagined community of the nation, even the poorest can claim to 'belong'.

And, as Jacques Godechot put it: "From 1789 on, a revolutionary religion came into existence, with its own creed, its own symbolism, its own fanaticism, ceremonies, holy days and liturgical chants."25 Of course, as he goes on to point out, the idea that a kind of quasi-religious fervour is aroused in revolutionary movements - and even in popular disturbances generally - has become something of a cliche of political comment, but Godechot, having invoked Durkheim, takes things rather further.

The seventeenth and eighteenth centuries had seen the breakdown of a whole cosmology - of ways of understanding and interpreting the physical and the social world which seemed as old as the world itself - as well as undermining Christianity as a faith and a system of beliefs. With the Enlightenment, a new cosmology was constructed, with room in it for the new science and 'natural philosophy' as well as for philosophical speculation. Both carried with them the conviction that salvation lay in human rationality, and the critical philosophy of Locke, Hume, Smith and the French encyclopedists extended its scope to political, social and economic institutions. The Enlightenment, built on these foundations, looked forward to the unending betterment of the human condition through institutional reform under the guidance of human reason.

Even so, it was impossible to conceive of a secular state, any more than of a society without religion. The civil religion which Rousseau thought up, consisted of 'the Constitution': the fundamental laws of the land, propounded to the people just as the Ten Commandments had been given to the people of Israel - although the 'fundamental laws' Rousseau seems to have had in mind are akin to the nomoi the Athenians credited to Solon and Cleisthenes rather than to the Ten Commandments. At all events, the Declaration of the Rights of Man occupied precisely this place in the new religion of the Revolution. The oratorical fervours of the National Assembly, the demonstrations and celebrations in Paris and all over the country, the instant celebrity which such diverse figures as Orleans, Sieyes, Necker and Lafayette had bestowed on them, all testify to the tidal wave of spontaneous enthusiasm for a new revolutionary order of liberty, equality and fraternity. So does the almost universal adoption of the new revolutionary symbols.

25 J.Godechot, Les Institutions de la France sous la Republique et l'Empire, P.U.F., 1951, p. 232

The cockade, which made its first appearance in July 1789, soon acquired an almost sacred character: the march on Versailles occurred just after it had been paraded in mockery -'outraged' - at the banquet given by the King's bodyguard. Trees and altars of liberty, civic baptism, and the spectacles and ceremonies of the 'Federations' followed in 1790.

Later on, a provocative anti-clericalism crept in (the first ceremonies had been conducted by priests), and ultimately, of course, the official ceremonial of what had started out as the revolutionary religion petered out in the absurdities of the 'cult of Reason'. But before that happened, revolutionary enthusiasm itself had begun to turn to a new object of devotion: the nation. After changing the character of society through political action, the Revolution went on to cement state and society together in nationalism.26

It is not that the Revolution invented nationalism, or even patriotism. However national consciousness manifests itself, it is not something which is identified with the state, nor does it lend itself to the mobilisation of resources for the state to dispose of.

What the Revolution did - after starting off by proclaiming international brotherhood - was to turn what had been most of the time a familiar mix of sentiments of common traditions, xenophobia, and of simple patriotism into a form of worship. The Revolution put patriotism to use as a political resource, a potent mobilising agency. The licensed self-adulation inherent in patriotism was elevated - diverted - into nationalism, a form of public service.

As early as 1792, the Legislative Assembly was issuing a decree ordering every commune to erect an altar, for ceremonial use at feasts and celebrations, to la Patrie, 'sometimes called autel de la Liberte'.27 This was at the very time when the total resources of the country were being mobilised, and military service became a first duty for all citizens capable of bearing arms.

The nation in fact proved to be a far more potent and durable object of worship than liberty, or 'reason', and a more dependable all-purpose social cement for the new state. Yet by the next year, 1793, the arms were to be used against their fellow-citizens, as well as against invading armies from the north.

26 See articles by A.Soboul and J.Godechot in Actes du colloque patriotisme et nationalisme en Europe a l'epoque de la Revolution et de Napoleon. (Societe des Etudes Robespierristes, 1973) 27 J.Godechot, Institutions de France..., p.233.