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Mediterranean democracy, Year 2Paris, 3-5 September 2015Centre Malher, 9 rue Malher, Paris

RE-IMAGINING THE SOCIAL ORDER 1750-1860

Present – Benoit Agnès (petitions, Franco-British comparative history); Sylvie Aprile (exiles, gender history, cultural transfers); Yavuz Aykan (Ottoman law); Rafe Blaufarb (French ancien regime and revolution); Ambrogio Caiani (France and Italy in Napoleonic era); Edward Castleton (socialism); Vittorio Criscuolo (political and cultural history of Italy between Enlightenment and the Romantic movement); Margaret Crosby-Arnold ( history of diversity); Pierre Delpu; Nicolas Delalande (history of French taxation); Annalien de Dijn (French political thought); Alan Kahan (French political thought); James Livesey (social innovation in the Atlantic world); Renata De Lorenzo ( institutional issues and modernization of the state apparatus in nineteenth century Naples); Luca di Mauro ( the culture of conspiracy in Southern Italy 1799 – 1821; Juan Pan-Montojo ( agricultural policy, history of taxation in Spain); Sergio Sánchez Collantes (democratic tradition and republicanism in Spain); Pablo Sánchez León ( representation of the middle classes, liberal professionals and commerce in Spain 1750-1870); Simon Sarlin; Guy Thomson ( reception of Liberalism and republicanism in nineteenth-century Mexico and Spain); Genevieve Verdo (public power and juridical culture in Argentina); Charles Walton (cultural and intellectual history of the French revolution); Ali Yaycioglu (Ottoman social and political change long nineteenth century)

And Joanna Innes, Maurizio Isabella, Mark Philp, Eduardo Posada Carbo

Apologies: Nuno Monteiro – his work was discussed in absentia

And Marc Aymes, Fabrice Bensimon, Bertrand Binoche, Hugo Bonin, Olivier Bouquet, Walter Bruyère-Ostells, Jordi Canal, Christophe Charle, Laurent Colantonio, Stella Ghervas, Véronique Hébrard, Francois Jarrige, Maxime Kaçi; Philippe Minard; Danilo Raponi; Nathalie Richard; Adrian Shubert; Geerten Waling; Nassia Yakovaki

Day 1Introduction

Joanna Innes briefly outlined the larger project, explaining that the concern was with how ‘democracy’ passed from being a category seen as primarily relevant to the ancient world to one important to an understanding of the modern world, as it had become by the middle of the nineteenth century. She emphasised that the object of the current phase of the project, and of this workshop, was on to explore both commonalities and diversities of experience across the Mediterranean – commonalities both inasmuch as the region participated in larger European developments, and inasmuch as it, or subregions within it, might possess its own local but shared traits. Some speakers in the current workshop would be talking about France. This was a way of making the most of being in Paris; French developments were also influential elsewhere in Europe.

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Introducing the particular concerns of this workshop, she noted that, though we tend to think of democracy in political terms, the word also had social connotations -- though more than one set of connotations, in that it could apply either to a subgroup within society (‘the democracy’ came into vogue as a way of describing the common people in mid eighteenth-century England) or to broader equality across society, to a state of affairs which followed the reduction in power of, or total abolition of traditional aristocracy (so in France, after the abolition of privilege, French society was sometimes said to have become ‘democratic’).

In societies based on privilege, democracy conceived as an alternative social arrangement had potential appeal. But there was lots of room for debate about what such a society might be like. Would it suffice to abolish privilege and forms of difference based on inherited status (including slavery), and to make careers open to talent – but in the context of accepting new hierarchies, based on merit, and ‘natural’ hierarchies of gender or race? Or should there be a more radical push to reduce difference: was it wrong to distinguish between people on the basis even of attained status, or on the basis of sex? If artificial hierarchy was to be abolished, but natural hierarchies were to remain, then what hierarchies were natural? What was natural and what was cultural about sexual or racial difference? How natural was the prevailing division of labour – and what to do about differences in life chances arising from that? How about differences rooted in history, civilisational differences, arising from different individuals having been born into particular societies with particular features or at particular stages of development? If differences were not natural but historical, that didn’t mean that they were easily undone.

This train of thought suggests two main issues for us to think about: what was done in various places (and on what grounds, and by what means?) to clear away privilege – and with what effects. And how did people conceptualise and justify or criticise emergent post-privileged societies?

Of course, not everyone wanted to create a democratic society. Some reacted against the idea, notably in Britain, where the benefits of having an aristocratic society were positively affirmed: British social and political structures continue to be marked by this to the present day. But if monarchy and aristocracy were to be preserved, that didn’t mean they could continue as they were: they too needed re-imagining for changing times. In Lampedusa’s phrase, if everything was to stay the same, everything would have to change.

She said that over the next few days, the object was to consider processes of social change in eighteenth and nineteenth-century France and the Mediterranean from this perspective. It was hoped that participants in the workshop would explore together how and why people consciously sought to reshape society, and with what effects, and how they conceptualised and responded to changes they saw as happening beyond their control, perhaps beyond any human control.

She said that on the handout (reproduced over the following pages) she had presented a set of ideal types, first relating to European polities, then on the back to the Ottoman world – which she thought offered certain loose parallels, but which was also marked by certain important differences.

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Changing social order – European ideal types

Old order:Hereditary nobility, church distinct estate, privileged town govts, mercantile and artisan corporations, (serfdom as status extinct in Mediterranean?)Noble privileges re representation, taxation; exclusive right to certain offices?Feudalism; ways of locking up landholding – entails etc, mortmain

Absolutist reforms – state building:Tie titles more closely to royal officeholding, or reconceptualise as just a matter of royally bestowed honourReduce role of, or eliminate, privileged representative bodies Increase royal power over town governments; rationalise or eliminate mercantile privilege, artisan corpsTap national wealth more effectively; reduce noble privilege in this regard, incl in the form of feudal rightsSubordinate church more effectively to needs of statePromote ‘national education’

Liberal/democratic reforms:Reduce noble status to a matter of title only, or eliminateTie representation and tax liabilities to property (or tax to property and representation to tax)Open careers to talents; reconceptualise ‘aristocracy’ as an elective elite based on talentReconstitute local govt on basis of some mix of appointment and electionMake trade and production freePromote educational opportunityAbolish feudalism; open up entailed or mortmain land to new ownership/usesEliminate clerical privilege, except insofar as functionally supportive of pastoral workRationalise family relationships; help women, through education and otherwise, to play appropriate social roles

Democratic/socialist aspirations:Abolish formal social distinctions; celebrate equality as social principleReduce or eliminate de jure and de facto privileges of wealth and propertyOpen representation at both national and central levels to all; promote accountability to peopleSchools for allDevelop programmes to secure general well being: promote opportunities to work; defend workers against exploitationIncrease opportunities to access landBe open to reconsidering family as basic social unit, role of women in society

IdeologyPrivilege, particular rights - > utility to state -> freedom, respect natural order -> equality

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Considering first the European case, she said that it was a feature of what we might loosely term ‘traditional’ European social orders that the structures of both polity and society were shot through with privilege. Monarchs didn’t just rule: they were distinguished by enormous wealth and top social status. They carried on the work of government in tandem with other people of high status and wealth: nobilities. There were also forms of mercantile and urban privilege. In some places, she said, forms of privilege also structured relations and opportunities at lower social levels: so peasants might be free or unfree, or owe varying kinds of obligations to lords.

There were analogues in the Ottoman world, though there privilege was more strongly tied to state service. There was no real Ottoman equivalent to European nobilities: social status and power were not institutionalised in their own right. By the 1870s, a few Ottoman ideologists argued on that basis that the Ottomans had a long democratic

Changing social order – Ottoman variant on ideal types Old order:Landholdings used to reward state representatives; enslaved Circassians etc may make careers in state serviceMilitary service exclusive to Muslims (including converts); non Muslims pay extra taxMilitary corps (janissaries) possesses a range of privilegesSome privileged status for those who claim descent from prophet (sharif)Judicial and religious systems linkedOther variants of Islam, Christians, Jews may use own religious law for some mattersVarious forms of consultation with local elites; sometimes devolution of power to local communities

Renegotiation of relationships with local elites – state building via reconstruction of local baseDe facto and sometimes de jure power tends to pass into hands of people with local power basesTax-farming – often a base for local powerNew forms of property holding detached from state serviceJanissaries decreasingly militarily effective; tend to become a form of artisan/small trader corporation

Centralising reforms:Janissary order abolishedRe-assertion of power of centrally appointed and mobile governorsAttempts to phase out tax farming, separate out rent and tax elements of peasant duesCreation of new local government bodies and non-religious commercial courts – role of religious judges increasingly circumscribedFormally equal duties and rights regardless of religion, including specific non-Muslim representation on consultative bodies

‘Democratic’ aspirations:Constitution and parliamentary governmentFulfilment of aspiration to equal treatment regardless of religion

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tradition. But certain forms of state service carried in their train certain forms of property right – and developments in tax farming during the eighteenth century led to new kinds of conflation of governmental and social power, as local elites levied both taxes and rents from peasants. The situation was complicated by religious fault-lines, because the Ottoman governing style was basically that of a conquering warrior group, content to let subject populations maintain their own cultures. Religion though was important in the European world too: British Catholics acquired full political rights only in 1829, Jews later still. Those not members of British established churches fought through the nineteenth century for freedom from the obligation to contribute to the support of the national church; they sometimes maintained their own welfare and often their own educational institutions. In France, Protestants enjoyed full political rights from the revolution. Such distinctions were mainly not so visible in the Mediterranean Catholic world, which tended to greater uniformity, though in Spain and Portugal to be a Catholic was a condition of citizenship. Religion operated more importantly as an excluding principle in colonial contexts: thus in French Algeria, and Portuguese India and Africa.

She said that the handout provided a hypothetical ideal-typical model of how social order was re-imagined over time, as old principles of social ordering through privilege were eroded. She suggested that the process began under absolutism, and was then continued and pushed further under liberal regimes. But liberal ideas that natural forms of social inequality were tolerable invited new forms of challenge. Early professedly democratic critiques were most likely to target privilege: formal differences in status; as these were reduced, the nature of democratic critiques also shifted.

She said that she would welcome comments on whether these models worked as ideal types. Even if they did, these patterns of change were unevenly implemented, and according to different chronologies in different places, in patterns to be explored in the course of the workshop. Where, when and how far such changes were implemented wasn’t always determined just by ideology – though changes might be given an ideological gloss, or create a new landscape which itself shaped new ideologies. She suggested that the motor for quite a lot of change was fiscal need, generated especially by wars, already an important feature of the eighteenth-century scene, which the French revolution exacerbated and intensified.

Loss of privilege did not necessarily mean loss of power: this had been shown by many studies, including Arno Mayer’s study of European nobilities, his The persistence of the old regime, and William Sewell’s study of the reshaping of labour associational traditions, Work and revolution in France. Changes in systems of privilege weren’t even always intended to erode the wealth and power of particular groups: sometimes all they aimed to do was to change the bases on which wealth and power were held. And even when the intention was to diminish groups’ or individuals’ wealth or power, those affected often proved quite ingenious at re-imagining themselves, or exploiting new opportunities, so as to resist that intended effect. For example, they might use parliamentary power to ensure that the tax structure was favourable to them. The extent to which changes in formal status were associated with changes in wealth or power – for groups or individual members of groups – varied by time and place, another theme to be explored.

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She said that she thought it was worth developing part of that theme further. An important contribution to the construction of modernised social orders was made precisely by the re-imagining of privilege: both by those who had and those who hadn’t traditionally held it. Nobles, thus, were among those who pressed for the development of representative institutions and opportunities for participation in the exercise of power on the grounds that new analogues for needed for rights their forebears had had and lost. ‘Aristocracies’ have been variously re-imagined: it was sometimes suggested in the early nineteenth century that elected representatives represented a modern form of aristocracy – though this formulation hasn’t endured. Rights and citizenship – once the privileges of a few -- were over a long period in European history re-imagined along more, if not fully universalistic lines: privilege survived into the nineteenth century in new forms, as the privilege of men, or men born in the right place, of the right religion or skin colour.

How people in this period talked about ‘democracy’ was a major concern in the larger project, but was not the primary focus of the current workshop. She said that it would be interesting to see what light participants could shed on how language was used, and especially with what social reference people talked about democracy, but a more pressing concern would be to understand the social landscape, and terminology relating to it, as a thing in itself: as a context for ideas and practices of democracy, a context in which democ was re-imagined, even when the D-word (as she said that her colleague Martin Conway had taken to calling it) wasn’t specifically invoked.

She said that in all polities with which they would be concerned, the fit between legal order and social order was loose. In a European context, monarchs didn’t draw advisors only from the nobility; not all wealthy landowners were nobles, nor all wealthy bourgeois part of the governing elite of towns. Likewise, the real significance of servile status varied. There was often some scope for adjustment, for changes of formal status to match social position, but also people accepted some messiness. Nonetheless formal status traditionally played some part in structuring the way the state related to society. In so far as privilege was abolished, the way that the state related to society therefore had to be rethought. She suggested that the imaginative and practical work involved in that rethinking had been underexplored as a historical topic – perhaps because historians had swallowed the idea that, left to operate naturally, the state would default to base itself on property. Historians might castigate people in the past for distributing rights unequally on the basis of property, but the shift to making property the basis of power was rarely analysed as other than a conservative move. She suggested that in fact it would be appropriate to explore in a more open-minded way the formation of new kind of socio-legal, socio-political or socio-constitutional order: to consider its construction as an imaginative departure.

She suggested that to function, governments needed to have answers to at least four questions:

- Through what kinds of people and on what basis was society to be governed? What kinds of people were to exercise state power, at central or local level?

- Who was going to have what other kinds of political rights – rights to select those who would govern, or to elect representatives for consultative or legislative purposes?

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- Who was going to pay what to support the state?

- Who was to have right or duty to bear arms?

These were old questions, and over the centuries states had repeatedly adjusted their answers to them: there was no one ‘traditional society’. She suggested that nonetheless, by the later eighteenth century, the sense that the old state-society relationship was creaking at the joints was quite common, and ideas swirled around about the need to form a new kind of compact. However, the collapse of the French socio-political order raised these questions in a particularly stark and charged way, and coloured the way in which they were imagined for many decades thereafter. Nonetheless, because it was not just a matter of choice to engage with these questions -- because states had always had to engage with them -- they couldn’t be shirked. As even would-be conservative states had to engage with changing societies, she suggested, they became participants in the process sometimes called modernisation.

‘Citizenship’ was one category used in answering the questions she had listed. This was a category that also brought other distinctions between people into the frame – e.g. between native and foreigner, differently imagined in the different states, because of differing past histories (so Italy and Greece developed what are termed ‘diasporic’ conceptions of citizenship’). Yet citizenship didn’t answer every question, not least because the different questions on the list were often answered differently. A person might be required to serve in army yet not to pay personal taxes; or to pay taxes but not have the right to vote; or have right to vote but not qualify for all public offices. How far one set of rights and duties should entail others was one issue in contention.

Against this background, she outlined a menu of questions for the remainder of the workshop:

- Who wanted to abolish privilege, why, how did they go about it, and with what success? How were their activities viewed?

- What new forms of socio-political and socio-legal order emerged? What processes, conscious and unconscious, shaped their emergence? How were they viewed?

- How did other forms of social change – change driven by demography, economy, the impact of war, other changing social values -- interact with socio-legal and socio-political change: how did they shape them and how were they shaped by them?

- How did people analyse, defend or critique these processes? Who did this, for what audiences, and with what responses?

- How did these processes resemble one another, differ and interact from place to place? This is an issue which I hope we will explore in discussion: it’s one where we all stand to learn from pooling our knowledge and perspectives.

She noted that, as she had framed the agenda, discussion would largely fall within the fields of what were traditionally conceived as governmental and social history, and the history of ideas: she hoped that it might be possible to find interesting ways of bringing these sometimes distinct historiographical discourses together.

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She said in conclusion that there was a further, cultural dimension that she would ideally liked to have had some speakers engage with, but she hadn’t manage to identify anyone to speak directly to it. It might nonetheless figure in discussion. That was at the level of what the English at this period would have termed ‘manners’: that is, how people interacted with one another in everyday life. Clearly, especially in connection with the French revolution, our period saw some very self-conscious experiments in manners: as for example the practice of addressing others as ‘citizen’. She said she was sure that there were other changes, not all so consciously brought about, yet shaped by the choices of multiple social actors. She hoped that it might be possible to adduce some evidence and reflect on these.

Mark Philp said that he wanted to add four further points.

First, he invited attention to the relationship between ‘rights’ and ‘privileges’. He suggested that claims of right were also in a sense claims of privilege. It seemed clear that ‘privilege’ became a negative term, but the parameters of the two terms needed clarification. In the Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen, article 1 stated that ‘Men are born and remain free and equal in rights. Social distinctions can be founded only on the common good.’ This asserted equality, but then recognised distinction. It wasn’t obvious which rights were universal, or in what sense universal. Alison Frank (in ‘The Children of the Desert and the Laws of the Sea: Austria, Great Britain, the Ottoman Empire, and the Mediterranean Slave Trade in the Nineteenth Century’. The American Historical Review 2012) noted that all agreements about the slave trade in this period omitted the Mediterranean; this may have been because in an Ottoman context, being a ‘slave’ could be a privileged status.

Secondly, he thought there was a lot of loose talk in the period about ‘equality’, but we needed to ask Equality in respect to what? He suggested that when privilege was entrenched and functioning, people didn’t imagine democratic alternatives. When it collapsed, what they initially feared was mere chaos. It was only as a new and formally more equal social order emerged that the extent and character of equality became exposed to critique.

Thirdly, he observed that this was a period when views of history were changing; notably it was coming to be supposed that it had an autonomous dynamic. In this context, historical analysis could be undertaken to generate ideas about social possibility – or attention paid to changes that might be needed for history to move forwards.

Fourthly and finally, he wasn’t sure quite what Joanna was suggesting about the relationship between thought and practice. Were the ideal types models of thought, or of practice? He thought maybe the schemes captured some of the terms of an Anglo-French debate, but were insufficiently sensitive to the complexities of practice, eg to issues raised by the distinctive Greek land regime. He meant this by way of encouragement to participants to stress the particular features of national experiences. He also thought we needed a more complex picture of change over time than the scheme suggested.

Discussion:

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Rafe Blaufarb said that he thought France was distinctive in the extent to which change was collapsed into a single moment.

He thought the issue of democracy’s debt to absolutist social projects was worth more attention

Alan Kahan said he liked Joanna’s questions, but thought that the agenda should have been generated from these – that the four questions might be used to generate four ideal types. He was more doubtful about the scheme. There were other elements of liberal thought that should figure, like constitutionalism.

Responding to Mark, he said that he didn’t think Sieyes saw any tension between the two aspects of the article.

Jim Livesey said that up till the 1790s, Athens provided the chief model for democracy. The naturalness or otherwise of that order was not much probed. When the French revolution exposed the fragility of the traditional social order, ‘democracy’ became an ameliorative category. People thought, there must be a natural social order out there somewhere.

Session 1: Ideas

Vittorio Criscuolo, La question de l'égalité dans le mouvement démocratique italien (1792-1802)

Italy was unified in 1861 by the kingdom of Sardinia, supported by moderate forces under the leadership of the Count of Cavour. But the origins of the Risorgimento were democratic: this incontrovertible truth was completely ignored during the celebrations of the 150th anniversary, in 2011. In fact, the ideal of the independence and political unification of Italy was proposed for the first time by groups of democrats inspired by the principles of the French Revolution, who from 1792 were active in various parts of the peninsula.

Italian historians have long debated the nature and programs of these democrats, called by their opponents ‘ Jacobins ‘: were they inspired by the great model of French Jacobinism of 1792-1794 or were they only republicans, committed to acting within the constitution of 1795? This was a hot issue in post-war historiography. We can say now that there was certainly a group that was inspired directly by programs and political action of the year II, but these Jacobins formed only the extreme wing of a democratic camp that included a wide range of positions.

It is important to note that the Italian situation was profoundly different from the French one: for example the conflicts that had marked the French revolution, such as the struggle between Jacobins and Girondins, had no significance or real parallel in the peninsula. That's why it is better to call the Italian patriots ‘democrats’ than ‘ Jacobins ‘.

What were the social programs of this democratic front: Many historians have argued that these patriots wanted especially the independence and unity of the peninsula, and consequently in social terms they were moderate, not aiming at more than equality of rights. We think that this conclusion is contradicted by research carried out in recent

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years. But before developing this analysis it is necessary to clarify some problems of method.

First, we should remember that it is extremely difficult to establish the true extent of revolutionary egalitarianism, because often the more radical positions were silenced or disguised for reasons of prudence or expediency. We could cite many cases of patriots (Custodi for example) who were long considered moderate until texts were foun , generally manuscripts, which proposed a radical reform of property.

Secondly, we maintain that we should not assume an opposition between moderates and radicals and then try to determine which group was the largest. We must instead try to identify the genesis and the principles of the egalitarianism produced by the French Revolution. Suggestive for this purpose is a remark by the Marxist philosopher Antonio Labriola in a letter to Benedetto Croce dated 11 September 1896 :

During the revolution there was, apart from real communism, a form of socialism that followed logically (but only logically) from the egalitarian principle.

This was the socialism that produced babouvism (and then blanquism).

Saint-Just represented the extreme point of this egalitarian democracy.

This socialism, which was an inference from the democratic principle, should be studied in itself, independently from other forms of socialism, religious, economic, or utopian.

The social programmes of the Italian patriots derived directly from the experience of the French revolution and therefore had the same nature. Even for the Italian patriots, the idea of democracy necessarily implied equality. In the political thought of the eighteenth century it was claimed that a democratic republic could not be born and survive without a balanced distribution of wealth. This idea dates back to Rousseau, who said in the Social Contract:

In democracy, since the force of things tends always to destroy equality, the force of legislation should always tend to maintain it’.

Based on these principles, Robespierre said in the National Assembly in 1791:

The excessive inequality of wealth is the source of political inequality; it’s the cause of destruction of freedom.

The social projects of the Italian Democrats were inspired by this same principle. For this reason they were unanimous in the view that it was necessary to go beyond the simple equality of rights to ensure a more balanced distribution of wealth. This is not to deny that there were different positions. The Italian patriots proposed very varied social programmes, ranging from price controls and support to the poor to the very radical projects which questioned the right of ownership. But these positions are best understood different gradations of a program that was inspired by a single guiding principle: the desire to make the democratic regime solid and lasting.

The Neapolitan Giuseppe Abamonti in a draft republican constitution of 1797 (Saggio sulle leggi fondamentali dell’Italia libera) wrote :

We must immediately involve the mass of the nation in our political change, otherwise the republic will be an abortion without life expectancy.

In the same vein Ugo Foscolo wrote in 1798:

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There is no independence where the sovereignty of the people is not guaranteed, and the sovereignty of the people is not guaranteed where there is enormous wealth, and consequently moral corruptio , poverty and oppression.

And the Florentine Girolamo Bocalosi, believing with Montesquieu that the principle of a republic is virtue, wrote in 1798:

A man can be virtuous if he has five jugera of land that give him the necessities of life. But when he has nothing , and because of his job he needs the rich, how can he be virtuous?

The decisive point was belief in the need to subordinate the right of ownership to the right to subsistence. For this reason in 1798 the Neapolitan Matteo Galdi criticized the draft constitution prepared for the Swiss republic by Ochs. In his opinion it was not enough to affirm equality of rights: a democracy must make everyone able effectively to exercise his rights. No constitution merits the name of democratic if it doesn’t make all citizens happy. Every citizen has the right to existence because he has the right to life, consequently he must have the means to survive, implying a property. The law must use every means to spread properties among the largest possible number of citizens.

It should be noted that behind these formulations there was almost always, more or less overtly or covertly, the idea of restricting the right of ownership. Thus a democratic native of Belluno, Giuseppe Fantuzzi, in 1797 :

All citizens of the republic must be property owners, although in different measures. For most of them the possession must be usufructuary. The agricultural property must always belong to the nation and the citizen cannot ever sell it.

Bocalosi defined very clearly the portion of land that the republic should grant to each citizen a republican and inalienable ‘fedecommesso’ .

There is no question then of a Jacobin model or policy of terror: the Italian patriots, because they aspired to establish a democratic republic, considered it necessary to found an egalitarian policy, although they differed in multiple respects. Consequently, even if they did not often say so openly, they preferred the constitution of 1793 to that of 1795 imposed by the Directory and by Bonaparte.

In this regard the Italian patriots, although looking to the model of the French Revolution, were in constant conflict with the Directory and Bonaparte. One might even say that it was precisely the most radical who were the most resolute opponents of French politics in the peninsula.

France was then, and would always be in the nineteenth century, hostile to the unification of the Italian peninsula. The French never gave real independence to the municipalities and to the republics established in the peninsula and maintained de facto a regime of military occupation. Moreover, the Directory and Bonaparte considered many Italian patriots dangerous ‘anarchists’ or Jacobins. Even before Bonaparte gave Venice to Austria with the Treaty of Campoformio (1797), there was an objective conflict between the democrats and the authorities of France. In relation to cultural tradition, the Patriots re-evaluated Italian political thought and defended the Italian language from the intrusiveness of the French language. As regards language and culture , the whole Risorgimento was hostile to French hegemony, from Gioberti and Mazzini up to Pisacane.

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If you want to find real differences within the democratic front you have to consider the question of economic development and liberty of commerce. In this regard, there were two opposing positions. Some thought that, to preserve equality, it was necessary to prevent economic development and restrict trade: Vincenzo Russo wanted to destroy all the ports of the kingdom of Naples in order to create an agricultural society based on perfect equality. These positions are closer to the utopian socialism of the eighteenth century. Others believed that it was impossible to stop economic progress; they thought that the republic should ensure a balanced distribution of wealth in a dynamic and open society. through legislation on the right of inheritance, progressive taxation, and a the limitation of the rights of ownership.

This line of thought left an important legacy to socialist currents. But we must not forget that the socialism of nineteenth century arose from a different root than the egalitarianism produced by the French Revolution . We can define that more exactly as a form of social democracy.

Discussion:

Renata de Lorenzo said that there were many different positions, and it was difficult to make a case for a total change in attitudes in the Napoleonic period. She wondered about the impact of Italian experiences on French views.Vittorio agreed that the people he had been discussing were a small minority, and he agreed that there were many strands in social thought, some influenced by Robespierre, but others more moderate. He thought that Frenchmen who came to Italy were influenced by the violence but also by the political realism that they encountered there. He also noted the influence of natural law on Italian thinking.

Sergio Sanchez Collantes said that by contrast in Spain there was no democratic social movement until the 1840s, though there were radical strands in earlier thought. He said that in Spain, charges of supporting ‘democracy’ was thrown pejoratively at those who were just liberals.Vittorio said that in Italy, by contrast, the terms chiefly used to negative effect were ‘anarchist’ and ‘jacobin’.

Joanna said that it sounded as if the thinkers he had described were offering an essentially moral critique of society. She wondered to what extent they developed practical programmes for social change.Vittorio said that the circumstances made it difficult to develop practical programmes of action, since the masses had been fanaticised by the clergy. The group he had been talking about were marginalised by the authorities; their journals were suspended.

He said that 1789 had precipitated a crisis of conscience, as such thinkers in Italy realised that conditions for the achievement of a more just society did not exist. They sought resources for change in Italian culture, hoping to achieve even more than the French. The desire to distinguish Italian possibilities from French ones continued through Mazzini and Pisacane, both of whom argued that an Italian route to change was needed.

Their patriotic pride extended even to language: they said that Italian was a more beautiful language than French: thus Angeloni, Buonarroti (who celebrated the achievements of Dante), and said the Italian nation must find its own roots. Similarly Melchiorre Gioia.

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Rafe Blaufarb wanted clarification as to whether they described themselves as democrats, republicans or what. Did they make something of Italy’s important republican tradition?Vittorio said both the terms Jacobin and democrat were used by people of themselves, but there was a distinction. Some refused the name Jacobin.

Pablo Sanchez Leon said that Vittorio had portrayed his thinkers as advocating social equality, but there were other ways of thinking about equality, for instance in terms of civil rights. He thought later ideas about equality came less directly out of republicanism, and more from ideas of fraternity. He wanted to know more about the role of the idea of fraternity in Italian discourse.Vittorio said that fraternity was used in the context of relationships – as in fraternal relationships between nations.

He said his chief aim was to suggest that there was a distinct Italian tradition of social thought, which was not the same as the French.

Annalien de Dijn, French Liberalism and the danger of democracy

She said that her talk would focus on early nineteenth-century French liberals and their views on democracy. They offered a new legitimation of democracy as the product of social change: Their argument in a nutshell was that political democracy had become inevitable because French society had become ‘levelled’: a society of equals. This sociological reality needed to be reflected in political institutions.

This was very different from the pro-democratic argument typically deployed in the late eighteenth century, which was essentially normative: it was claimed that democracy was the only kind of government in which people’s natural rights were respected. The new argument derived its force from portraying democracy as ‘inevitable’. We might call it ‘sociological’. It was also particularistic: it could be used to explain why French political institutions should be different from British -- because French history and French society had developed differently.

Where did this sociological legitimation of democracy come from? First from liberal politicians of the Restoration, like Benjamin Constant, Pierre-Paul Royer-Collard, and Francois Guizot. In arguing that political democracy arose from social developments, they built, on the one hand, on the ideas of e.g. Montesquieu -- one of the first political thinkers to argue consistently that a nation’s political institutions needed to be adapted its ‘general spirit’, that is its social and cultural characteristics. However, the sudden popularity of the ‘sociological’ argument also reflected the political context of the Restoration period, when French political debate was conducted by two parties: self-professed liberals and so-called royalists, the latter supporters of the Bourbon dynasty, which had been restored in 1814, though many of them had links to the old nobility; throughout the Restoration, they tried to restore some political power to the old nobility. ‘Liberals’, by contrast, were opposed to this. Their goal was to defend the positive achievements of the Revolution, esp. the abolition of feudalism and the political power of the nobility, against all attempts to turn back the clock. Yet they could no longer rely on the natural rights talk popular during the Revolution; that was now identified with everything that had gone wrong in the Revolution – the utopianism, the illiberalism, the violence. The sociological turn gave liberals a way

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out of this conundrum: it allowed them to argue for democracy without invoking natural rights or making normative claims for it – their line was that democracy is inevitable.

See for instance a speech delivered in 1820 by Pierre-Paul Royer-Collard, an important liberal spokesman, to the Chamber of Deputies. He protested against royalist attempts to give the wealthiest landowners in France more electoral power. It was considered to be one of his best speeches, and was reported widely in the liberal press. He started by making a general, methodological claim about politics: he argued that a political system could not be based on abstractions devised by a scholar in his study. It should truthfully express the interests and moeurs of a society. Yet the royalists’ Electoral Bill was incompatible with the new society that had come into being in France – a society that was characterized by equality. ‘A new society has been founded on the basis of equality’, Royer-Collard declared. Attempts to turn the Chamber of Deputies into an aristocratic body were therefore futile. The royalist Electoral Bill was a coup d’´etat against society ‘Everyone should recognize’, he concluded, ‘that our political soil, for so long the domain of privilege, has been conquered by democracy, no less irrevocably so than the soil of the Gauls was in the past conquered by the Franks’.

Speeches such as this raised the question, what would happen if one tried to impose ‘aristocratic’ political institutions on a ‘democratic’ country? Restoration liberals had an answer: revolution. Long before Marx, these liberals interpreted the French revolution as the result of social change unaccommodated by political change. Thus Guizot in hs Cours d’histoire moderne: ‘The earthquakes we call revolutions are less the symptom of what begins than the declaration of what had already occurred.’

In 1830, these views received spectacular confirmation when the July Revolution ended the Bourbon dynasty, and introduced a new political regime under Louis-Philippe, apparently confirming that the rise of democracy was irreversible. Tocqueville expressed the new dogma most eloquently. ‘It is evident to all alike that a great democratic revolution is going on amongst us… In perusing the pages of our history, we shall scarcely meet with a single great event, in the lapse of seven hundred years, which has not turned to the advantage of equality. The Crusades and the wars of the English decimated the nobles and divided their possessions; the erection of communities introduced an element of democratic liberty into the bosom of feudal monarchy; the invention of fire-arms equalized the villein and the noble on the field of battle; printing opened the same resources to the minds of all classes; the post was organized so as to bring the same information to the door of the poor man's cottage and to the gate of the palace; and Protestantism proclaimed that all men are alike able to find the road to heaven. The discovery of America offered a thousand new paths to fortune, and placed riches and power within the reach of the adventurous and the obscure. If we examine what has happened in France at intervals of fifty years, beginning with the eleventh century, we shall invariably perceive that a twofold revolution has taken place in the state of society. The noble has gone down on the social ladder, and the roturier has gone up; the one descends as the other rises. Every half century brings them nearer to each other, and they will very shortly meet.’ The gradual development of the equality of conditions was conceived as a providential fact: it was universal, durable, and eludes all human interference. This has political implications: The first duty which is at this time imposed upon those who direct our

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affairs is to educate the democracy; to warm its faith, if that be possible; to purify its morals; to direct its energies; to substitute a knowledge of business for its inexperience, and an acquaintance with its true interests for its blind propensities; to adapt its government to time and place, and to modify it in compliance with the occurrences and the actors of the age. A new science of politics is indispensable to a new world.

Perhaps these arguments help to account for the more rapid acceptance of democracy in France than for instance in England?

They also affected how institutions were given shape. In 1814, the French had basically adopted a carbon copy of the English model. The Charter or constitution of 1814 had divided power in France between a hereditary monarch, a hereditary Chamber of Peers and an elective Chamber of Deputies – just like the English mixed constitution. But during the century, the new ‘sociological’ way of reasoning allowed French liberals to reject this model and to argue that France required different institutions, in line with its levelled social condition.

This first became clear is in the debate about bicameralism in France. In 1814, liberal politicians and intellectuals had almost unanimously supported the creation of a hereditary Chamber of Peers modelled on the House of Lords, seen as a mainstay of freedom against mob rule. But during the Restoration, they changed their minds; the hereditary Chamber of Peers was abolished in 1831, when an overwhelming majority of deputies (206 against 86) voted for the abolition of a hereditary peerage. If we look at the arguments used in parliament by opponents of hereditary peerage, it is clear that they were influenced by the sociological turn. They argued repeatedly that a hereditary peerage was contrary to the democratic social condition of France and hence should be abolished.

In the case of the debate about the extension of the suffrage, the picture was more complicated. During the Restoration, when the liberal party was mainly in opposition, the franchise was narrowly conceived: in 1829, there were less than

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90,000 electors to a population of about thirty-two million. After the July Revolution, the franchise was only slightly widened: now, so that 166,000 had the right to vote, still less than 1% of the population. This oligarchic system was defended by liberals who just a few years earlier had championed ‘democracy.’ Guizot in ‘On Democracy in modern societies’ explicitly rejected universal suffrage. His stance was criticized as hypocritical by other such as Tocqueville, who argued that the American system with its near-universal suffrage was the only appropriate one for an equalized nation. The effect of such criticisms is hard to tell. Guizot clearly wasn’t convinced, and continued to argue against universal suffrage for the rest of his life. Yet in 1848 universal suffrage was reintroduced in France, with near unanimous consent. She suggested that the ‘sociological’ defense of democracy helped to achieve this.

To sum up: she hoped she had shown that French liberals developed a powerful new ‘sociological’ legitimation for democracy, a legitimation for democracy. She had suggested this shaped French political institutions, encouraging Frenchmen to abolish the hereditary Chamber of Peers they had copied from the Brits in 1814, and second, more tentatively, to nudge the French towards universal suffrage much sooner than the British.

Discussion:

Maurizio said similar debates took place in Italy but with a slightly different chronology. Italian moderates after 1848 also debated the merits of bicameralism. They argued that it was inevitable that European societies should change, but were anxious to avoid revolution in that context. The moderate Risorgimento responded to that challenge

Nicholas Delalande asked whether these liberals were democrats? Was their argument pro-democracy? Though they were thinking about the phenomenon, that doesn’t mean they were advocating it.Annalien said they didn’t call themselves democrats, but liberals: their primary value was freedom. Yet they did talk about democracy in society as something desirable. Their conception of what this entailed was quite vague. Their usage of course seems strange to us.

Joanna thought it was striking that they used the word democracy to mean social equalisation. It would have been possible to make a similar argument without using that word. She asked whether the antithesis they drew was between democracy and aristocracy? Did they use the word aristocracy critically: did they say the royalists were aristocrats?Ali Yaycioglu also wanted to know how they stood in relation to republicanism.Annalien said they associated republicanism primarily with opposition to monarchy; they favoured monarchy.

Pablo Sanchez Leon said that there were echoes of such debates in Spain too, though they didn’t take quite the same form. It was said that Spain was by custom and tradition already a democracy. They also in short imagined the problem sociologically, but not having had a revolution they could still toy with the notion that aristocracy could be reinstated. The hope was to create some form of mixed

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constitution. It seemed to him that the French were distinctive in their sense of having broken with their past.Annalien said clearly the revolution was important here, but also the 1830 revolution was held to show that the liberals’ diagnosis was right.

Genevieve Verdo said she wasn’t sure if the liberals were opposing aristocracy or the ancien regime. They were clearly not anti-monarchical, so long as monarchies were constitutionalist and not absolutist. She wondered how Bonapartists fit into this landscape? They too favoured equality, but at the same time admired great men.Annalien said that they associated democracy as a political form with rule by the third estate; in that sense, they were defenders of aristocratic rule. After 1830, it became more difficult for them to formulate their position. It was especially in this context that they began to champion the idea that society had democratised. Alletz wrote a book arguing this, which Guizot loved. In the context of a democratic society, he suggested that it was possible to establish a new form of aristocratic government, now implying rule by the bourgeoisie.

Benoit Agnes suggested that ‘democracy’ provided a broad theoretical frame. It was often used polemically – and in that context functioned as a boomerang word, it could return and wallop you.

Alan Kahan denied that Tocqueville favoured universal suffrage in the 1840s. He thought that the liberals were doing two things with the word ‘democracy’: turning it against the old nobility, and trying to appropriate it from the left. He didn’t think they did reject the English pattern: to Guizot, he said, 1830 was the French 1688. In an English context, Macaulay sketched a picture of social change, providing a context for political change.Joanna said that she though a difference in English usage was that, although liberals were prepared to say democracy wasn’t as black as it was painted, they didn’t go out of their way to use the word; rather, it was thrust upon them by Tory accusations in the Reform debate.

Margaret Crosby-Arnold said that it was possible to have a republic with monarchical, and certainly with aristocratic elements. And to have democratic elements didn’t necessarily entail excluding others. The challenge could be seen as one of balancing the parts.Annalien said she was not persuaded that the mixed constitution was a republican form.

Session 2: Ottoman empire, generalAli Yaycioglu, Communities, leadership and empire: The roots of democratic experience in the Ottoman Balkans and Middle East (1750-1820)

He said that a common way of characterising the process of change in the Ottoman Balkans and Middle East was from oriental despotism to enlightened despotism, under the pressure of late eighteenth-century military crisis Fiscal and military reforms provoked protest – and this lead to victory for anti-reformers in 1808, but that proved temporary. In ‘round 2’ Mahmud II succeeded. That, at least is the traditional

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story. Reforms also provoked nationalist revolts. Reforms are sometimes said to have worked in the longer term. From 1908, there was a more democratic trend, but not really a democratic revolution, since it was led by bureaucrats. What emerged was rule by a bureaucratic-military elite. In Turkey the current government claim to represent the people in power for the first time; this is also the rhetoric of the Muslim Brotherhood.

Several traditional paradigms are now being questioned. These include the idea that in the Ottoman world a traditional society faced an enlightened state. There has also emerged the idea of a global age of revolutions – in the work of Chris Bayly, esp Birth of the modern world and Armitage and Subrahmanyam, The age of global revolutions. These historiographical developments have prompted fresh engagement with the period. In contrast to the situation in France, this period has not been seen as pivotal in national history either by later constitutionalists or by national historians. But it does interest historians. It was a period of major change in political culture, in which some institutions totally disappeared, like the janissaries.

It was a period of true fiscal-military crisis. There were many ideas about how to address it, many reform programmes. Some suggested abolishing tax farming, some allowing communities to elect their own managers, who would allocate the tax burden, physiocratic style. Getting rid of the janissaries was among suggested remedies.

In effect, the drift of thought was anti-privilege. Privileges that had been given in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries were abolished (though these privileges were not hereditary).

There was also an anti-democratic tendency. It was said that people on the street think that they know everything, but in fact they are ignorant and should stop interfering. Pamphlets were written about this.

One could see this as a form of enlightenment programme.

Some religious groups had been in coalition with the court and with the janissaries, notably a Sufi order called the Nakshibandis. They now reoriented their commitment to the reform programme. Sermons were preached favouring military reform. It was said that knowledge belonged to the learned. The message was elitist, though not aristocratic.

What was going on in the street meanwhile? The term ‘janissary’ had originally meant new army. It had its roots in the fifteenth century, but by the eighteenth century had become very big. The effect of the military revolution was that the old cavalry system was no longer effective. There was more reliance on the infantry, and new kinds of people were recruited to that, esp young urban immigrants, Muslims, who were given privileges. There were some 200,000 of them. The janissaries were a hybrid institution: a combination of an army, a labour union and a political party. They were the only political group with the power to mobilise people on the street. They could treat their privileges as a form of social right. But they didn’t have a reform programme. They represented a body of public opinion identified with the ancien regime.

The line up was thus: people – pro-privilege; state, reforming, anti-privilege.

Meanwhile new departures in tax collection involved communities electing their own managers, and playing a more active role in organising their own affairs. Local elites

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were not able to make the new positions they achieved hereditary, but they did develop strategies for transmitting them across generations.

A series of challenges to the state – including from the Wahhabi movement, the Serbians, and the Greeks – brought new political actors into the system. Some were involved with the janissaries; some, like the Serbs, were anti-janissary.

A number of foreign observers analysed the train of events. The French engineer Juchereau de Saint Denis (about whom he had written, in French Mediterraneans: transnational and imperial histories, edited by Patricia M.E. Lorcin & Todd Shepard (Lincoln, NE, Nebraska University Press, forthcoming 2014)), said in his account Les revolutions de Constantinople, that the extent of political chaos showed the Montesquieu was wrong; the system was not a despotism. The Austrian ambassador wrote long reports (he was also writing about these).

Of three revolutions in Constantinople 1807-8, the third was the bloodiest, though in this case the sultan was not deposed. Previous events had shown that, though suppressed for a period, the janissaries could survive as a political force. Now it was reform that was suppressed. The nation succeeded in defending its autonomy against the reformers.

Later the janissaries would be destroyed – but by then other forms of participation had begun to be developed.

Discussion:

Maurizio noted that some European observers (eg Leroux in Le Globe) saw the undermining of the janissaries in 1826 as bad for the constitution of the Ottoman empire – perhaps under the influence of Voltaire’s assessment of it, as not a despotic systemAli said that the genealogy of orientalisms was interesting. Thierry, writing about the Merovingian empire, and in that context affirming the Germanic roots of French culture, said the Germans were like Turks: the one put an end to the Roman empire, the other to the Byzantine empire, replacing them with feudalism/a more pluralistic system. But by the late nineteenth century there was only one orientalism

Jim Livesey wanted to hear more about the constitution of the reform community, and in particular about how it interacted with trading cities – if it was the case that Ottoman trade was largely in the hands of non-elites. What was the reformers’ development strategy? Were they aware of how the European economy was organised, behind the privileged trading companies they dealt with – were they aware of European critiques of these companies?Ali said that Greeks and Armenians dominated much foreign trade; they were not totally isolated from Ottoman elites or reform groups. One leader of the coup in 1808 [ie the second revolution?] was an Armenian banker with an interest in Russia. There was some sense that a new approach was needed. There was debate especially about whether a regulated or free economy was better – in the grain trade, the trend was towards freeing trade. (You cited an article; was it this one? Seven Ağir, ‘The Evolution of Grain Policy: The Ottoman Experience’ in Journal of Interdisplinary History 2013). He said that more research on these topics was needed. He didn’t think

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there were clear lines of communication between reformers and provincial elites. The janissaries potentially did have a more extended network.

Joanna asked about the Nakshibandis. Why did they change their position? And what was the relationship between the anti-popular discourse he had mentioned and self-governing local elites – did they use this discourse, or was it also directed against them? (or even both?)Ali said that there was a shift in the mid to late eighteenth century, as religious leaders began to detach themselves from the janissaries. The Nakshibandis followed a particular leader who was anti-janissary – though when the janissaries turned on him, he fled. Some say janissaries and the Sufi order were in effect rivals, though he’s not convinced of this. But when the janissaries were abolished, the goods of their order were given to Nakshibandis, and the janissaries did form a kind of fraternity, calling each other Yabash (comrade).He said that representative systems emerged out of tax farming. Individuals came forward prepared to pay taxes for the community, and to make profit by charging interest to tax payers. Later eighteenth-century bureaucrats wanted to find out in what sense these people – these ‘ayans’ -- represented their communities. They made election a condition of playing this role. These leaders then claimed that they were elected, but there was no way the state could check on that. Sometimes there were local disputes: it became clear that local leaders didn’t have secure community support. State agents had to try to work out where opinion really lay. They might go from house to house to ask people. This raised the question, who speaks for the community?

Mark wondered what people in the Ottoman world made of western aristocracy?Ali said that Bernard Lewis said the French revolution was incomprehensible to the Ottoman world. But in fact, they understood it – and hated it. They thought it was bad to invite the populace to take power. A French Jacobin was serving as a diplomat in Istanbul when Napoleon invaded Egypt. He was taken prisoner. Interestingly, janissaries reportedly said, He is our yabash, and provided protection for him. Down to the end of the Ottoman empire, liberty was not valued as an ideal and there was suspicion towards rights which they thought would destroy the empire. . Among European states, they were most interested in Prussia, Russia and especially Austria. They looked for an autocratic-bureaucratic model. But they did not plan to create an equivalent to a western aristocracy.

Yavuz Aykan asked whether the status of janissaries was ever addressed as a subject of the law. Ali said that janissaries presented themselves as defenders of sharia: that was how they were able to turn their privileges into claims of right. He said that later Mahmud would be cleverer about coopting Islamic law to the state’s ends. One question was whether the state had the right to conscript. The janissaries said no, citing early law. Mahmud however developed a new legal theory justifying the state’s right and duty to do so.

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DAY TWO

Session 3: NobilityRafe Blaufarb, The night of 4th August, 1789

He said the title of this session wasn’t appropriate to his paper, since he would not be focusing on the nobility, but rather on topics only loosely associated with that, in part because he did not see the night of 4th August as anti-noble in character.

His object was to offer a reinterpretation of the Night of August 4th, when the deputies of the National Assembly abolished feudalism, venal office, and other institutions in a cascade of dramatic renunciations. Michael Fitzsimmons says this was the ‘night the Old Regime ended.’ Historians have offered various interpretations. Some see it as a crisis response to the Great Fear - the wave of rural unrest that swept over France in the weeks after the taking of the Bastille. Others focus on individual resentments that led deputies to renounce properties and privileges they themselves did not possess.; yet others see it in terms of class struggle between the rising bourgeoisie and declining feudal nobility. Recently, some have posited a general attack on social privilege of all kinds. All these approaches emphasize social dimensions. He would instead adopt the perspective of early modern French constitutional thought. He suggested that the deputies drew upon political-theoretical and juridical concepts, furnished by a long-running debate over the relationship between property and power. The debate arose in the sixteenth century in the writings of absolutist jurists like Dumoulin and Bodin. The juristic strain thrived until 1789 and beyond (pervading Portalis's preliminary discourse on the Civil Code), but took on additional forms during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. These included the dispute between the Crown and provinces over the extent of royal property right (the so-called directe royale universelle); historical debate over the origins of the fief; attempts by aristocratic publicists like Boulainvilliers and Montesquieu to assert a new political role for the nobility (the so-called thèse nobiliaire), and even the writings of the physiocrats.

When the Night of August 4th is situated in this debate, he suggested that several conclusions emerge. It marked the definitive culmination of the debate over the proper relationship between property and power, the moment when those concepts were finally disentangled from one another. From this initial ‘Great Demarcation,’ a series of distinctions flowed: between public and private, state and society, political and social, sovereignty and property. These conceptual distinctions still define the framework of political modernity.

He outlined his plan: he would

- explore the conflation of power and property during the Old Regime- examine the early attempts of the jurists to distinguish between these concepts

and the legal vocabulary they created to do that- analyze the decree of August 11th, 1789, which gave legal expression to the

renunciations of August 4th, to show how the articles of the decree worked to realize the jurists' constitutional vision of a transformed polity based on the radical separation of power and property.

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- conclude by arguing that the full significance of the Night can only be grasped by situating it within this long-term context of constitutional thinking.

Confusion of property and power

The question of how property and power related was the fundamental constitutional issue of early modern France, because before 1789 they were entangled with one another. Most strikingly, public power was owned as private property. Thus ownership of a seigneurie entailed ownership of the right of justice, which had the legal status of property. It could be bought and sold, it could be gifted and bequeathed, it could be used as collateral for loans, or subdivided into tiny parcels and alienated. Even women and children could own a seigneurie. Or venal office, ownership of which generally conveyed property in a public function. On top of the pile was the Crown itself, transmitted as a kind of entailed succession according to the Salic Law. Public power, from royal sovereignty to village justice, was a form of patrimonial property before 1789. As long as it remained so, elective government could not exist.

Even property in land was infused with power. From the titled estate to the most peasant allotment, all land was linked in a great chain of lordship stretching up to the Crown. Ownership of every piece of land was shared between the person who held the right over the physical property (the seigneurie utile) and the person who held the intangible overlordship (the seigneurie directe). This legal model, called domaine divisé (divided domain), injected an element of formal power into seemingly straightforward property relationships, as the terminology suggests: to own something was to have seigneurie or lordship over it.

Institutions of government and public power similarly often had a proprietary character. Thus the Church, which exercised indispensable public functions. To fund its public mission, it owned a huge proprietary endowment; it was the largest single property-owner in France. Or the monarchy. The sovereign had extensive and varied property rights: the royal domain. According to domanial jurists, it included a universal proprietary right over the entire kingdom, thus giving sovereignty a share in all private property of France.

He said that private property did not exist: all property was public to an extent, while all public functions were private and proprietary. From the imbrications of property and power followed a series of entanglements - between public and private, social and political, the proprietary and the sovereign. The Night of August 4th separated these in ‘ the Great Demarcation’, the conceptual basis of political modernity.

Jurists

The revolutionaries were not the first envision separating power and property were distinct from one another. Their imbrication was the subject of intense scrutiny, critique, and praise from the mid-sixteenth century. 200 years later, the debate was ubiquitous. Thus, we can contrast the Abbe Mey and his friends, who insisted upon the ‘total difference between public power and domain or property’ (Maximes, v.1, 41-3, 1775) and Montesquieu, who saw the private ownership of public power, both as seigneurie and venal office, as a key to moderate government. One thing was clear.

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In the words of the domanial jurist Lefevre de la Planche, ‘the confusion of property with public power is the key to the history of the public law’ of France.’ (Mémoires sur les matières domaniales, v.1, xliiii.

Sixteenth-century legal humanists were the first to place the relationship between property and power at the centre of constitutional reflection. Absolutists, they believed that separating property would enhance monarchical authority. Thus Bodin's distinction between despotic, seigneurial monarchies which took over the goods of their subjects and free royal monarchies where the sovereign did not interfere with private property. For absolutist jurists like Bodin, disentangling property and power promised first, to give the king legal leverage over the overly-independent seigneurs and the increasingly power venal officiers; secondly, to free the king from treating his kingdom as one big fief and ruling as lord of lords. Instead he could rule on the basis of pure, untrammelled sovereign power that would transcend the feudal to reach the base of society. Sixteenth-century jurists did what they could to assert the distinction, notably Dumoulin who redefined the feudal relationship as purely proprietary. But their efforts always reintroduced the confusion they sought to dispel, because the imbrication of power and property characterized language itself: to speak of power one had to use the language of property, and vice-versa.At the heart of linguistic confusion was the word ‘seigneurie,’ the term used to denote both public power and private property. In the first decade of the seventeenth century, the jurist Charles Loyseau finally tackled the linguistic confusion head-on. In his Treatise on Seigneuries, he divided the concept into two types: public and private.

- Public was seigneurie-as-power. It came in two types: o its pure form, sovereignty - legitimate and indivisibleo and its debased, patrimonialized form, puissance publique -- the fruit

of lordly usurpation. - Private seigneurie was property, proprement dit. It too came in two forms:

o seigneurie utile, or actual ownership ando seigneurie directe, the intangible right of overlordship.

The Romans, he noted approvingly, had known neither patrimonialized puissance publique nor seigneurie directe. The tone and content of his analysis suggest that Loyseau would have preferred 1) a clear distinction between public and private seigneurie, between power and property, and 2) abolition of the illegitimate subdivisions of those two categories – the second subcategory in each case. This is what the Night of August 4th sought to effect.

Analysis of the decree

We can see this by analyzing the decree of August 11th, 1789, which gave legislative expression to the promises and renunciations voiced on the night of the 4th. Its 15 substantive articles fall into three categories:

- those seeking to abolish privilege;- those aimed at dismantling the proprietary structure of the Church, the largest

endowed corps vested with public functions- those aimed at separating property and power.

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Of these, this last was the most important, but he would briefly consider the others first. Some historians (notably Fitzsimmons?) have seen the abolition of privilege as the fundamental purpose of the Night, but the decree, does not support this interpretation. Only four of the articles concerned what contemporaries would have understood as privilege: the 10th (against provincial privilege), the 11th (birth-based privilege), the 15th (unmerited Court pensions), and the 9th (tax exemptions) (though the last concerned real estate as well as personal fiscal privilege - because the taille was réelle, fell on noble land, in the southern half of France, and the article specifically abolished the nobility of land). So only 3.5 of the 15 articles concerned privilege – though they were certainly important, since they proclaimed the principle of civic equality and heralded the arrival of the citizen. But they only expressed a part of the decree's program.

Five other articles - the 5th, 8th, 12th, 13th, and 14th - began the transformation of the Church from an independent political corps funded by a massive proprietary endowment into a salaried branch of the state administration, primarily by abolishing the Church's sources of income and expenditure - priestly fees charged for religious ceremonies (article 8), annates sent to Rome (article 12), other dues collected by the clergy (article 13), and, above all, the tithe (article 5). Suppression of the last implied a salaried clergy, and had the potential to transform the Church from a state-within-the-state into a branch of the civil service. But it also had implications national sovereignty, because many jurists and deputies considered it not a property, but a tax – since unlike feudal dues, which were levied on parcels of land dismembered from a lord's domain, the lands subject to the tithe had never been bestowed on their owners by the Church. As a tax, it pertained to sovereignty and could not be the possession of an individual or corporate body. Reconstituting undivided national sovereignty was the aim as much as ending the corporate existence of the Church. Article 14, abolishing the holding of multiple benefices, similarly both rationalized the professional hierarchy of the Church, and ended noble privilege within it: it was a professionally-specific reiteration of the ban on birth-based privileges in article 11.

In sum: 3 articles concerned the abolition of privilege alone and two others (articles 9 and 14) dealt with it partially: say 4 of the decree's articles dealt with privilege. Similarly we can argue that an additional 4 articles dealt with the Church. Thus: 8 of 15 substantive articles dealt with either the abolition of privilege or the Church. Together these articles defined the characteristics of the citizen who would inhabit the new polity: he would be equal to all other citizens and an individual. But the 8 articles on privilege and the proprietary-corporate Church said nothing about the shape of the polity the citizen would inhabit, the stage on which he would play. That was the purpose of the remaining seven.

Placed at the head of the decree, these articles defined the structure of the New Regime. They did so by unifying the hierarchically divided domains of property into a single perfect property -- excluding puissance publique from that new category, and reconcentrating formerly scattered parcels of power into a single, undivided sovereignty. These operations drew a line of demarcation between property and power, between the social and the political. This bifurcated world would be the citizen's new abode.

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2.5 articles abolished the private ownership of public power: articles 4, abolishing seigneurial justice, and article 7, abolishing venality of office. Together, these realized the jurists' old aim, to abolish the public powers of the seigneurs and end the sale of office. With article 5 on the tithe -- returning to the sovereign the monopoly of national fiscality -- these 2.5 articles reconstituted the unity of seigneurie publique (in Loyseau’s scheme) in its only legitimate form - undivided sovereignty.

Similarly, 4.5 articles reunified the hierarchically divided domain of property or, in Loyseau's terms, seigneurie privée: articles 1, 2, 3, 6, and, in part, 9. The decree's first article famously - and quotably - abolished the feudal regime in its entirety. The meaning of this article has often been misunderstood. Many historians treat it as an attack on a specific social group - the nobility. But many non-nobles and corporations owned fiefs; indeed, the largest fief-holder in France was the Church. Rather than mistake feudalism for a special form of property-holding associated with the nobility, we should understand the object of attack as the system of real estate itself, the system called domaine divisé. Many perhaps most divided-domain relationships did not concern fiefs, but formally non-noble parcels of land alienated in exchange for annual ground rent. Although not feudal, these ground rents produced the same hierarchical division of property right as fiefs and censives. And the National Assembly was utterly committed to abolishing them as well, for its real aim was the unification of the divided domains of all property, not just feudal property. This was the point of the much-overlooked article 6 that abolished all non-feudal perpetual ground rents - making it clear that the decree aimed at abolishing divided domain in all its forms, not just its seigneurial and noble ones.

Seen in this light, the seemingly minor articles 2 and 3, abolishing lordly hunting and pigeon-breeding rights, make sense. They were intended to end the hierarchical distinction between lordly property and tenant property: they aimed at making all property equal. This too was the purpose of article 9, which abolished the distinction between noble and non-noble land.

In sum, articles 4, 5, and 7 unified the domain of power by ending the private ownership of parcels of puissance publique, so creating undivided sovereignty. Articles 1, 2, 3, 6, and 9 unified the domain of property, creating perfect property by abolishing the system of divided domain in both its feudal and non-feudal manifestations. The result was to create a new order of independent, individual, undivided property-holding...what Loyseau would have called sieurie. This was the Great Demarcation. From it flowed fundamental distinctions: between state and society, the political, and the social, sovereignty and property, on which the French Revolutionaries - and all their heirs through the present day - built their political order. The Night of August 4th indeed ended the Old Regime, by radically undoing the confusion of power and property upon which it was founded. But it was more than an act of destruction. In enacting this great conceptual disentanglement, it established the set of distinctions upon which political modernity still rests.

Discussion:

Ambrogio Caiani wanted to know when the word propriété came in.

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Rafe said [incorporating his subsequent clarification] that it was already being used and, he thinks increasingly across the eighteenth century, though in rather abstract ways. People might be said to have property in things – indeed, in a very wide range of things, including eg office -- but that didn’t make the things as such property. Land on which one had a form of claim was called heritage and patrimoine. (The word property comes from French proper, meaning exclusive to. Land rights were not exclusive before 1789, so there was a particular reason why land was not as such property). Eventually -- after the French Revolution? -- propriété acquired the double meaning of both "a right in something" and "the something" in which one has a right.

Charles Walton suggested that this account of the night of 4th August in effect reinstated a liberal account of the revolution. But can this help us to understand how it radicalised? He said that at the time, the decree of 11 August was sometimes said to have betrayed the intentions of 4th: people found they had to buy out old claims.Rafe said this wasn’t a betrayal. The old rights were recognised as a form of interest which had to be bought out for the new, perfect property right to take effect. There had been previous such buy-outs.Joanna noted that there British parallels to this: a form of property was abolished – ‘heritable jurisdictions’ in Scotland, or slaves – but still former owners were seen as having the right to be compensated. [Though in fact in both these cases public funds were used to do the buying out].Rafe noted that the National Assembly did say that it would compensate those who lost property in office.

Margaret Crosby-Adams asked what about slavery in the French case?Rafe said it wasn’t affected because slaves were chattels, a different category of property.Margaret wasn’t sure that it was true they were seen as just chattels, since the crown was seen to have a right to interfere between master and slave, and slaves seem to have some measure of claims against their masters. Rafe the strongest rights were in the colonies - the King never asserted his direct right to the colonies or a feudal lordship over them, so that relations in the colonies were more like modern property rights – with property claims more absolute and people less free.

Jim Livesey wasn’t sure if the change described amounted to the generalisation of an old concept, long since sketched eg by Locke, or the introduction of a new one.Rafe said he found it hard to conceptualise like this, but his view was that material existed from which the new category could be constructed. – but that we have to look at what people were doing in terms of this discourse of property and power, not least since this is the language that members of the Assembly were using.

Vittorio proposed a comparison with the Italian situation. There were great differences between the north-central Italy and southern Italy. In the Kingdom of Naples, legislation introduced in 1806 under the reign of Joseph Bonaparte (who was king of Naples 1806-8, before being made king of Spain 1808) was inspired directly by the decrees of 5-11 August 1789 and brought about profound changes in the country, facilitating the emergence of the bourgeois concept of property.Among historians of the French Revolution there was a great debate about the real nature and significance of the feudal system in 1789: was what existed in France

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feudalism, and how significant were feudal rights, in terms of the experience of the peasant? Rafe said that in general burdens were significant – but he was less interested in the countryside than in the town. In towns he thought it made even more of a difference. Thenceforth, a bourgeois could use the faculty of ‘rachat’ to acquire full rights over property over which he had until then held by mere ‘domaine utile’ (a subordinate right, like English copyhold).

Pablo Sanchez Leon said the obvious question was, what drove the measures? Was this a revolt on the part of lawyers, pursuing their obsessions? Or a reflection of the expansion of mobile exchange – in effect an attempt to make property easier to exchange, or more like other vehicles for investment? Rafe said it was hard to identify motivations – partly because of an absence of evidence even about who drafted the 11 August decree – but also he thought there were many levels. We were looking at an impulsive response to massive (especially peasant) unrest, but the form of the response was shaped by an intellectual programme. That in turn could be seen as having been shaped by absolutism – there was a long-standing critique of privilege, by absolutists as much as by democrats, but that did not target just the nobility. There was also a democratic element to the programme, which was compatible with some ideas of Mably. He didn’t think one could identify a social class to whose aspirations it gave effect.Charles Walton suggested that one simple answer was that it promised to facilitate collection of taxes.Rafe said however that abolishing forms of property title wasn’t a necessary means to doing that, and the abolition of the tithe speaks against a concern to tax..Joanna said that, certainly in England, offices construed as property were taxable as real property – so that, whatever other advantages there might be, the effect was to abolish a class of taxable assetsShe said that in Britain, equivalent changes involved an extended process: there were comparable changes but no comparable moment – indeed ground rent survives in some instances as a form of limit to ownership rights. This might be seen in terms of their being a common intellectual programme, but different political contexts.Jim Livesey said that he did not think facilitating tax collection was an issue, but there was an issue about credit: making property rights simpler facilitated the raising of loans.Rafe said that between 4th and 11th August Necker visited the assembly to report that the state was going broke. This created pressure to release of resources that could produce credit, among other things to consideration of seizing church lands.

Nuno Monteiro, Nobility and the political culture of nineteenth century Portugal

He had had to cancel at a late stage. Joanna summarised what he said in his chapter, ‘Nobility, revolution and liberalism: Portugal in the context of the Iberian peninsula’, in Casmirri and Suarez Cortina eds, La Europa de sur en la epoca liberal. Spain, Italy y Portugal . See also his ‘17th and 18th Century Portuguese Nobilities in the European Context’, n.d. dialnet.unirioja.es/descarga/articulo/2777923.pdf, and his Elites E Poder: Entre O Antigo Regime E O Liberalismo, 2003.

In this chapter, Nuno traced a process of change which resulted in the weakening and marginalisation of the Portuguese nobility by the later eighteenth century – in contrast

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to the Spanish case, where sections of the nobility linked to court and government survived among significant political actors, and some southern nobles especially remained great and powerful landowners until the Civil War. He argued that those who supposed there was no social revolution in nineteenth-century Portugal had missed this transformation.

The Portuguese nobility at end of old regime had three components.

- at the base, a large imprecise category of ‘simple nobles’, and ‘cavaleiros’ from usage/custom, including all licentiates and baccalaureates, senior army officers, judges, municipal counsellors, and all those ‘living nobly’. Comprising perhaps 6% of adult males.

- an intermediate category of thousands with coats of arms or by lineage- the first nobility of the court: 100+ households.

These last are the ones who we normally have in mind when we think about the fortunes of the nobility. All the titled nobility lived in Lisbon (unlike in neighbouring monarchies): there was total identification of high nobility with court.

Within the titled nobility, a smaller group still had ‘grandeza’ From 1739, the titles of baron and viscount, which had been rare, no longer carried grandeza.

There was substantial stability in the noble order following the Restoration in 1668. During this period, the noble elite concentrated on maintaining their own position, through intermarriage and maintaining favour at court. This helped to create a barrier between them and the provincial nobility. They held a significant proportion of all ‘full’ property rights (though only had seigneurial jurisdiction over about 11% of their land). They tended to accumulate debts, potentially a threat to their position.

Creations of new titles exploded from the 1790s: only 8 were created 1761-90; then 63 1790-1820; 38 (proportionately more) 1821-32 . But only a few of these titles carried grandeza, and those mainly went to members of old high-noble circles.

1832-4, years of liberal revolution, marked a decisive rupture. Mouzhino da Silveira abolished tithes, crown lands and ‘forais’ [town charters]. These measures were directed against noble beneficiaries of the crown; compensation was offered only to those who hadn’t supported Dom Miguel – but the majority of grandees and of those who had been in chamber of peers 1826-8 had done so. Vinculos (tied lands) were by contrast only formally abolished 1863 – in contrast to Spain where abolished 1836. In Portugal left in place partly as compensation for abolition of comendas [distinctions] and crown lands, and because the high nobility needed some kind of property base if there was to be a chamber of peers with any independence. Various mechanisms for untying particular lands were in use before 1863.

Together with the economic impact of the revolution, the abolitions of 1832 had a radical effect on old noble houses. It appears from the archives of the great houses that the effect on the income of overwhelming majority was catastrophic: it was very much reduced by the 1850s. In case of Marquis of Abrantes, eg, income sources abolished had made up about half his income. Mostly they were already indebted; and depended on crown administrators for protection. In liberal era, this protection disappeared. In contrast to Spain, they were not among the largest taxpayers by the 1860s, in contrast to Spain. A recent study of elite of Lisbon shows from the electoral rolls of 1838 and 1842 that the number of old noble houses among largest taxpayers

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already much reduced. Most palaces had been discarded by 1890. Or see report of council of Evora, the principal district of the Alentejo, where many of leading nobility had estates. In the late eighteenth century, about half of the land was held by the titled nobility; by 1870 only about 20%.

Before 1833, the municipal council of Lisbon was almost always chaired by a grandee,and composed of crown nominees. By contrast 1833-51, no member of the old aristocracy participated. Instead big businessmen made up 40%; proprietors from armigerous families 29%; members of liberal professions and public servants 17%. If one studies the interpenetration of social groups with institutions like Bank of Lisbon and Mercantile Association, he argues that one needs to reevaluate the idea of a bourgeois revolution.

Pedro Talvares de Almeida has studied the Portuguese elite 1851-90, looking at presidents of council, members of council of state, ministers, upper house and deputies. He found that about a third of ministers were from titled families 1834-50, only 8% 1890-1910. Grandees used to be governors of provinces, but there was only one such by 1870 and none by 1878. The chamber of peers was originally aristocratic. Under the charter of 1826, it was so by right. But when it was re-established under the constitutional regime of 1834, only a dozen of its members were from the old high nobility.

Only in the royal household did the old high nobility remain a majority. Pretty well all the surviving ones who had reconciled with the dynasty were there by 1890s. But by this time the court was no longer a site of power - by contrast with the Spanish court of the parallel Restoration era.

What emerged was a new nobility, created by the proliferation of titles. A study of the distribution of noble titles by rank 1855, 86, 1905 shows a great proliferation of viscounts and barons. Such creations declined after 1880s. After 1855, most titles were awarded for military service; many of the rest went to provincial nobility, who at end of ancien regime had had practically no access to monarchy. From the middle of the nineteenth century, more were given to nouveaux riches, not all inhabitants of Lisbon. The decline in titles by end of century suggests that by that date less importance was attached to them. They came to figure among diverse strategies for social competition.

He suggested that the specificity of the Portuguese case lay in the particularly rapid decline of the traditional high nobility in both economic and political power.

Discussion:

Juan Pan-Montojo said that a key source of Portuguese noble incomes were grants of revenues from lands in particular regions. When feudal landholding was abolished, so was this revenue. Much revenue from land depended on the King’s conditional gift. By contrast in Spain, there was a large landed nobility whose holdings were independent of the King.

Rafe asked if these grants[?] were hereditary.

Juan said yes in practice, though they had to be renewed by the king.

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He said that in Spain, nobles remained wealthy, but didn’t have great power. They disappeared from government positions.

Renata de Lorenzo said that many nobles owned other kinds of property alongside their distinctively noble property

Rafe said he wasn’t sure what the category bourgeois meant. Noble property might be commoditised and circulate rapidly; it might consist in a packet of rents, circulating.

Session 4: Merchants and townsPablo Sanchez Leon, Democracy in-corporated in early Spanish liberalism: merchants and the Consulates, 1780-1836

In his reputed memoirs of 1878 [Recuerdos de un anciano], the old moderate liberal Antonio Alcalá Galiano stated: ‘Our contemporaries should get to know that there has never been in Spain or in any other nation or age, a democracy as perfect as our own fatherland in the first days of the upheaval against the French power. It was then the people who governed, the people as it really was’. For his generation – those liberals that shaped Spanish representative government from the 1830s to the 1860s - there was complete agreement that the War of Independence took place in a democratic political context.

In 1840, Alcalá Galiano himself had organized his influential Handbook of Constitutional Law around the concept of ‘democratic monarchy’ applied to the Spanish historical constitution, cross-referenced to the republican constitution of the US. He said America was a democracy in its form of government because ‘there all institutions are entirely and exclusively popular’; but also a society ‘the soul of which is democratic’ because ‘there equality is absolute, complete, and the laws do not recognize any distinction between men whatever their origin’, expressed culturally in that ‘respect for the upper layers of society from the lower ones is difficult to be found’.

Spain, which was for centuries an absolute monarchy with no citizenship rights, was thus according to Alcalá Galiano analogous to the US: even if their constitutions were ‘opposite’, in both ‘the interest and influence of democracy, of the multitude, dominated’. In the case of Spain this had historically been expressed in the opening of offices to lower social ranks. In America ‘equality reigned in society and in the laws; here, in spite of the laws, given the democratic character [índole] of government, [equality] reigned more than in any other European monarchy’. Moderates argued that the liberal experiments of 1808-1814 and 1820-1823 had enhanced these elements of the Spanish cultural and institutional order. But more radical and progressives liberals were also persuaded that in 1812 equality was instituted at the constitutional level, and that a social culture inimical to privilege and tinted with popular and democratic overtones had been given formal recognition. It is true that compared with other nineteenth-century Spanish constitutions, especially 1837 and 1845, Cádiz stands out for its wide electoral base, which allowed a high percentage of male adults to exercise voting rights - balanced by a system of indirect suffrage that reduced the constituency of electors in the second round. But the point is not if we think this was democratic. Rather we should research and reflect on the definition of democracy offered by early liberals, to fully grasp its meaning and subtle semantics. The paper aims to illuminate the institutional and political settings

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established in the context of 1812 in the name of equality, by focusing in particular in the performance of merchants as a collective subject.

The choice of merchants is not random. Focusing on particular groups offers a way to analyse relationships between equality under the law and inequality of status in a modern constitution, or in T.H. Marshall´s formulation, between citizenship and social class. Merchants were especially sensitive to the changes that the French Revolution brought: linked by their economic function to commodity exchange and capital investment, they embodied the emerging values of property and utility, to which they added mobility in assets and wealth distinctive from landownership. Yet for the same reason, they were at the core of moral and philosophical controversies about the status of private interest versus common good in the new social order. Merchants were commoners, that is, part of the non-privileged Third Estate; yet, fractions of them had in most principalities of Europe acquired a singular status, usually via corporate bodies receiving privileges in exchange for contributions to revenue. These included companies of commerce, merchant gilds and especially consulates. In Spain ‘consulates’ gathered in one institution judicial functions –appointing merchants as judges for conflict resolution under merchant law -- administrative and legislation attributes, exercised by the consuls and ‘vocals’ (formally elected from among those inscribed in the so-called matrícula), and taxing capacities, especially involving the collection of the avería, a tribute paid by all merchant members in return for the self-management of consulates.

The role of consulates as corporations justifies starting with the perspective developed of José María Portillo and others on the political and juridical culture of the Cádiz constitution. According to Portillo, Cádiz was distinctive in giving priority to the empowerment and recognition of the collective bases of sovereignty. The text declared the division of powers and established citizenship, but individual rights were subordinated to the attribution of dignity to the so-called ‘Nation of the Catholics’. The constitution embodied a deeply inclusive perception of the political community. According to Portillo this stemmed from both the weight of Catholic political culture and the influence of the Rousseaunian radical Enlightenment, adding democratic overtones. Marta Lorente and Carlos Garriga have further elaborated from the history of law. They define Cádiz as a ‘jurisdictional constitution’ and present early liberal juridical culture as deeply moulded by the experience of the Habsburg monarchy, whose overlapping and combination of jurisdictions provided the backbone of the Spanish Ancien Regime. At base, the Hispanic Monarchy was founded on corporations as jurisdictional units with a degree of self-government, operating within a complex setting of obligations and privileges that guaranteed the functioning of monarchy even under the Bourbon dynasty. The patres conscripti of 1812 maintained the jurisdictional structure inherited from the Old Regime in relation to commerce. It followed that consulates retained their own taxing base that allowed them to make their own policies; this together with their exclusive tribunals made of them a sort of ‘state within the state’. Merchants, a group symbolic of the emerging postabsolutist order, were reaffirmed in their privileged status at the same time that they were for the first time recognized as citizens and members of a sovereign nation founded on civil equality.

Lorente and Garriga see the maintenance of the consulates as an extreme example of endurance and continuity in the jurisdictional culture of the Spanish ancien regime.

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Traditional interpretations of this suggest that, as refugee liberals gathered in Cádiz, for a while the only major port not in the hands of the French, they depended on the loans and investments by the powerful Consulate of the city, in exchange of which they left the consular structure untouched in its essence, and moreover defended protection against free trade demands in relation to imperial trade, especially with colonial America. Surely there was lobbying on the part of wealthy and influential merchants of Cádiz and other port cities during the War of Independence (though not necessarily in the way traditional interpretation would have led one to expect). This social-history explanation offers an alternative to the legal historians’. Did the consulates survive out of cultural inertia, or due to the short-sighted interests of powerful economic actors?

He would instead approach merchants as other than mere free-riders or simple rule-followers, emphasising collective identity-production and reproduction through political processes.

Early nineteenth-century Spain offers the best scenario for understanding the complexities of transforming merchants from subjects incorporated to collective entities into citizens operating in a civil society. A radically different approach was taken in the Bayonne constitution of 1809, applying to parts of Spain under French rule. Consulates were there explicitly derogated as part of an ambitious set of policies that a thorough transformation of the institutional framework of commerce, including by establishing a stock exchange and the erection of an office for registering inventions. By abolishing the consulates, that constitution broke apart the traditional clustering of fiscal, jurisdictional and judicial powers in the merchants corporations. Once divided, they were severally deeply transformed. Merchants not only lost their collective personality but underwent a larger transformation.

The Bayonne solution followed the codification of French commercial law: the Code of Commerce of 1807, in turn building on the Civil Code of 1806, which subordinated merchant law to civil equality. The 1807 legislation recognised commerce as a distinctive social activity needing a particular juridical corpus and procedures, but reshaped it by means of a new, objective and impersonal definition of ‘acts of commerce’. In the future, merchant law would relate to acts of commerce, by whomever undertaken. This inaugurated modern merchant law. Moreover consulates, derogated by the Loi le Chapelier during the Revolution, were not restored.

José Bonaparte, himself a merchant and a legal expert, applied the French Merchant Code to Spain. Spanish commercial legislation was to be codified as relating to acts of commerce, and special tribunals established to handle commercial litigation. There were also to be Juntas de comercio, administrative and consultative in character, in every province. But consulates were abolished. The break with the ancien regime was total. But Bonaparte did more. In Spain he experimented with incorporating merchants into a new constitutional setting based on restricted political rights. The Constitution of Bayonne maintained the traditional estate division of nobility, clergy and commoners - the latter ones to be elected not only from cities, but also from provinces (in the case of America). Moreover the text added two more groups to be represented: university professors and merchants: 15 seats were reserved for professionals of commerce in the renewed Cortes, to be elected from ‘among the individuals of the Juntas de Comercio and from the wealthiest and more credited in

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the kingdom, and will be chosen by the King from a list of 15 members drawn up in each tribunal and junta’.

The system had traditional overtones, but also anticipated solutions in other European liberal constitutions, especially re university teachers, who often had reserved seats in lower chambers, on grounds of their special ‘capacity’. Merchants seem also to have been considered to embody particular capacities. So they were given a form of political power, but on a new basis.

The Cádiz solution was radically different, not necessarily meaning more traditional. Merchants sometimes played a radical role during the War of Independence: thus, the summoning of the Cortes in Cádiz as a single, unitary chamber of representatives of the nation, not following the three-estate system, was due to the intervention of individuals related to commerce: all accounts suggest that the Junta Suprema had decided to call for the Cortes according to the traditional form, but the document was altered first by Luis Calvo de Rozas, a merchant and supplier for the army who acted as secretary of general Palafox, hero of the defence of Zaragoza; and later by José Manuel Quintana, the poet, who, as secretary to the Junta, stamped his signature in the altered document. Quintana had been a public servant working in the Chamber of Commerce in the years prior to the French invasion. These two characters played a crucial role in forcing a system of election in which merchants gained no special role as political citizens.

Once summoned, the Cortes did not derogate the consulados; but nor did it leave them untouched. A commission formed by deputies dedicated to commerce or expert in merchant law was elected to devise an ‘arreglo de consulados’ which we can translate as ‘regulation’. Establishing this commission was the first measure the Cortes took after the proclamation of the Constitution. Members were however slow to finish their task, which they did only just before the return of Ferdinand; he then initiated a quick and thorough backlash that ended with the derogation of the constitution. The project was lost for decades and has only been recovered from archives in recent decades.

The aim of the arreglo was to give ‘stability’ and ‘progress’ to the consulates, by freeing them from impediments and malpractices. The legislators stated that instruments for making commerce work should remain in the consulates; they argued for ‘special tribunals’ because of the need for practical knowledge to solve conflicts. The foreword insisted that the ‘special tribunals of commerce do not privilege their individuals against other citiens, and their institutions are not costly for the public revenue’ (referring to the self-taxing system of the avería, which was also defended). It was suggested that consulates had never been carefully formed, but created by urgency and contingency, leading them to be heterogeneous and full of ‘strange ritualities’. introduced by ‘inexpert judges’ who were not merchants’, such that ‘neither order nor regularity’ reigned in respect of justice, management or taxation. Governing arrangements for consulates followed no standard procedure or system: usually the president of the junta was not a merchant but a letrado, usually not elected but appointed; the number of elected vocales varied as did their role. Early sections of the text were framed in corporate rhetoric: the call seemed to be to rationalize the corporation structure.

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But the document opened an untraditional field when it argued that the main problem ley in ‘the fatal legislation of inscriptions [matrículas] that subvert even their own declared goal’. In their opinion treatment of individuals had become arbitrary, as consuls and vocals discriminated between eligible and non-eligible merchants and also between tax payers and non-payers of the avería. This had implications for fair treatment: ‘The non-inscribed merchant remains excluded from [all] distinctions [of self-government]’, argued the legislators, who went on to outline a vicious circle by which often the most expert and wealthy merchants did not join the consulates, and so did not contribute their expertise; inscription lists were meanwhile reduced, so there was less avería collected and less budget available to the consulates. The legislators thus identified two different problems: on one hand, consuls and vocals did not allow the inscription of certain merchants, but on other, certain merchants avoided the matricula. Worries about free-riding merchants had accompanied consulates since their first establishment. The other one shared by many gilds and corporations who suffered from oligarchic control by exclusive elites. What made the situation distinctive, and allowed legislators to intervene with a reform plan, was that merchants were already paying taxes, that is, the general duties merchants had to pay as taxpayers. According to the legislators, the merchant community, though really ‘all a single body... appears subdivided in two, without alleviation from the most onerous aspects’ [y siendo todos un cuerpo, aparece subdividido en dos, sin aliviarse en lo más oneroso].

The spirit of the reform was that duties should correspond to rights. If all merchants contributed according to their businesses, they should have the same right to election and office holding [Los comerciantes todos, estén o no alistados, contribuyen según los negocios que hacen, y deben competirles la prerrogativa y el trabajo sin diferenciarse], says ‘without any differentiation’,. We are finally entering upon the semantic field of equality: the reform of the consulates aimed to make all members of the corporation equal, ending privilege or hierarchy within the group. This form of equality implied instead of ‘no taxation without representation’ a formula of ‘taxation with full participation’. Here is a first conclusion of this presentation: the world of democracy as understood in Spain in 1812 involved establishing full political participation of all male individuals, but according to their varied collective bases of recognition. The ‘true light and freedom justly desired’ [la luz verdadera y la libertad justamente apetecida], it was said, was that ‘all particularities be erased from the merchantile career’ [lejos de la carrera mercantil toda particularidad]: ‘the career of merchant demands that all duties, aids and distinction be common’ among merchants, with neither ‘hateful preferences nor impediments’ [cargas, auxilios y distinciones pide la carrera que sean comunes (…) no haya aborrecibles preferencias ni coartaciones]. This textual interpretation suggests problems with the classical social and economic history explanation of the maintenance of the consulates: why should the traditional elites in control of the consulates invite competition from other merchants? Weakness, not strength on the part of the traditional consulate elites seems to be demonstrated. The ‘universal regulation’ proposed by the so that ‘public and private interests get their just advantages’ was essentially a system based on the election to all offices by the local merchant community as a whole, supplemented by regulations that guaranteeing circulation in offices: annual renewal of one third of members, and limits on re-election to the same office for three years. Such measures were not new, especially as regards the election of offices, but they were applied now to all the activities, bureaucratic, political, legal and judicial of the consulate, not only

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to consuls and vocals. This provides a good starting point for questioning equally narrow interpretations from the history of law, that see the maintenance of consulates as exemplifying the strength of institutional traditions. For reform often changed traditions. Thus, it abolished traditional matriculas as the basis for inclusion, and also rejected conventional interventions from outside, in the form of appointing non-merchant letrados as judges by any kind of royal or government decree.

This went beyond attempting to remedy problems: the text aimed to reshape the merchant group as a political community. Rather than looking towards the ancien regime, it seemed to echo of ancient systems of citizenship, where all male owners had the chance of rotating from judicial to political offices. The ideal was a self-determined constituency. There was one apparent contradiction: the first article of the arreglo stated that ‘[e]very Spanish citizen from either of the two hemispheres can freely practice commercial activity’. Commercial activity was declared free. But the text quickly qualified this by arguing that in order to allow consulates to function correctly, elections should be held only by and from those who may be called merchants [Comerciantes son los que del gito hacen su profesión y de él viven]: ‘Let the commercial body be one and let it be constituted only by those who adopt the profession’ of merchant [Sea el cuerpo mercantl igual y constituyente en él solo por adoptar la profesión]. Accordingly, it did not extend rights to all involved in acts of commerce. Nor did it codify law, or enact free trade with America.

Agustín de Argüelles, a founding father of 1812, wrote that the Cádiz Constitution ‘allowed any Spaniard to be anything in the country’; this may be taken as the epitome of democracy in that context. But he added: ‘neither rules nor privileges of bodies and institutions may deny him access’. It is not clear whether the arreglo reflected or qualified this assertion, which seems directed against aristocratic derrapages now that the nobility could legally engage in commerce. What is clear is that also for merchants, more was entailed than the definition of individual rights. The reform derogated limitations of access and inequalities that had been produced during the ancien regime, but individual rights were harnessed to duties towards a collective entity. Consulates, freed from external intervention, became a means for the collective representation of merchants in the new constitutional state. No wonder that early liberal merchants did not fight for an exclusive seats in the Cortes.

Were the arreglo merchants really part of a civil society of individuals, when the liberty they gained in 1812 was distinguished according to the sphere in which it was exercised? In the national sphere, they obtained political rights as citizens to electing other citizens as representatives; within the consulates, they obtained rights of political participation and self-election as merchants. They had overcome cleavages among themselves but established a cleavage between their existence as individual citizens and as members of a closed collective minority. So this form of democracy was born in conflict with liberalism.

To understand the rationale behind this complex institutional solution, we must focus on three historical elements that shaped the collective identity of merchants, their corporate representation and their political aims during the eighteenth century.

First: consulates were not a mere tradition inherited from the Old Regime. Originally founded in the early Middle Ages, all pre-Bourbon consulates apart from the

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Consulado de Bilbao stopped functioning through decay during the seventeenth century. Consulates were refounded by an eighteenth-century Bourbon initiative as part of a wider reshaping of the American imperial structure. They were not seen as mere economic instruments but as a means of reorganizing communities of Spanish merchants vis-à-vis the foreign merchants embedded in most maritime ports. For merchants, corporations enhanced their political leverage at the local level vis-à-vis traditional oligarchies of regidores or mayors. Starting with the restoration of the Consulate of Barcelona in 1759, they were reborn -- at the cost of recurrent intervention by central authorities, especially to appoint non-merchant letrados. This explanation has consequences for the interpretation of 1812 as moulded by an ancient-regime juridical culture. The Old Regime tradition of limiting the full self-representation of merchants and their full collective self-management and self-judging was now overthrown. Cadiz in this sense took corporate ideals further.

Secondly, consulates reflected an obsession with certain forms of commerce as the only ones that served the general interest of the nation alongside the particular interest of merchants. Importers were regarded with distrust and tended to be excluded from the matrícula and from offices, they being reserved to wealthy and influential exporters, who soon manifested an oligarchic profile, already widely denounced by the 1770s. In fact, the structure of commerce was changing very quickly: especially in the larger ports and cities, most merchants were importers, often indirectly involved in the buoyant smuggling traffic of luxury textile products from abroad (as studied in the case of by Pedro Tedde de Llorca). Here lay the social and institutional conditions for an internal cleavage in the Spanish merchant community: a minority of wealthy and privileged exporters clung to the corporations while a majority of middlemen survived outside with no collective recognition or institutional support. Any social history worth that name should place this import/export cleavage at the core of its analysis. Elsewehere in Europe, a hierarchy also existed between exclusive, large negociantes and average, retail comerciantes, shaping the social and juridical status of merchants, but in Spain, this led to identity division. In this context, the arreglo expressed a hope of abolishing all distinctions among merchants in favor of an all-encompassing single membership or category. Such a reclassification took longer in other countries, even where the French Code de Commerce was enacted. Interestingly, in reorganizing commerce Cádiz ventured further in terms of social equality.

In spite of the growing division it fostered among Spanish merchants, the consulate system kept expanding; by the 1790s there were over 15 privileged bodies established in towns like Santander, Vigo, Tarragona, Alicante or Málaga. A third element then became manifest that would shape the spirit of the arreglo. As Manuel de Godoy, who had also been a merchant, achieved power at court taxing commercial wealth became the core ingredient of a belated mercantilist policy, based on the goal of regaining for Spain maritime hegemony. As a result commercial wealth became a target for the central administration as never before. This triggered the politicization of the merchant community in the years prior to 1808. As taxation soared, complaints emerged from the ranks of merchants. The crucial year was probably 1803, when several projects to extend the influence of merchants at the court in exchange for revenue contributions were drafted, e.g. by Agustín de Argüelles in his famous Diccionario de Hacienda, which restated old demands for a council of commerce exclusively staffed by merchants and acting as its representative body.

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The War of Independence transformed many importers and retailers who had been involved in smuggling into crucial suppliers of the Spanish guerrillas and army, and thus aided their recognition as virtuous citizens of the newly-founded nation. In this context, the constitutional debates provided for many liberal merchants an opportunity window to try to convet the consulate system into an organization for collective representation, supplementing the Cortes. This is just a hypothesis; to prove or discard it, what is needed is a renewed political history, a focus that has lately been blurred in accounts of the crisis of the Hispanic Monarchy as attention has focussed on constitutional issues.

In any case, the Cádiz solution for commerce would not last, though not because of the changing fortunes of the Constitution of 1812. After 1814 the demand for consulates continued. It was Ferdinand who, under absolutist rule, decreed their abolition, with the Code of Commerce of 1830. Sponsored by the minister Pedro Sainz de Andino, the new legislation provided merchants with a new institutional framework that left no space for privileged bodies, though it was enacted under the ancien regime. Merchants therefore enter the liberal period from 1834 already freed from collective entities and corporations. This assured that nineteenth-century merchants followed a different social and political trajectory from their forebears. Yet issues of collective identity did not disappear, for the 1830 code restated the idea that, living as they did by the exchange of commodities, merchants formed a group defined by a particular ‘social and political reason’ [razón política y social].

Discussion (arising from the abbreviated version of the paper that he presented at the time):

Luca di Mauro said that he had been struck by the definition of a community of merchants: Los comerciantes todos, estén o no alistados, contribuyen según los negocios que hacen, y deben competirles la prerrogativa y el trabajo sin diferenciarse. Pablo had suggested that it was aimed against aristocratic domination, but didn’t it mark a big change in merchant culture? He said that in France distinctions continued to be drawn between big and small merchants.Pablo said he thought the model of Bayonne might be influencing the language here. But it’s true that this emphasis on equality – as opposed to reconstitution of inequality – needs explanation. He thought it was important that, whereas once a marked distinction had been drawn between exporters and importers, now perceptions of the usually smaller-scale importers were improving.

Guy Thomson suggested that this was a very special moment in relation to the loss of empire. He said that most export trade had been handled by merchants dealing with America, whose position was now shaken. As he understood it, the outcome was that they were maintained as clubs, but lost juridical power, so in that sense mattered less, or at least played a different role.Pablo agreed that the shift towards more national trade provided an important contextGuy noted the short-lived reestablishment of the Consulados in Mexico – specifically the Consulado of Puebla - under the 1st Empire of Agustín Iturbide (1821-23) , which attracted smaller scale merchants. It seemed from Pablo’s account, there was no such development in Spain.

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Juan Pan-Montojo said that he had left out of account the consulates of Mexico, basically consisting of Spanish importers; similarly Lima etc.Pablo thought their case demonstrated the limits of equality. As early as 1813, there was a backlash against the rhetoric of free trade. The liberal government turned against the idea that Americans should be treated as common citizens.

Joanna noted that he had said at the start that the project was never or barely implemented. Presumably this meant that they hadn’t had to face the problem of determining who was a merchant by profession.Pablo said it wasn’t clear why it had taken so long to report. The commission was composed of a mix of merchants and legal experts, and at least provides insight into merchant culture in large towns.

Joanna said the timing of the revival of consulates – from the mid eighteenth century – made her think British chambers of commerce, which appeared from the 1780s, might offer some parallel, though they were voluntary and exercised no juridical powers. Guy and Juan said that Spanish ‘chambers of commerce’ dated from the nineteenth century. It was compulsory to belong to one in order to obtain a licence to open a shop.

Guy noted that consulates continued to exist in Latin America: there was one in Guatemala down to the 1840s.Pablo said they disappeared in Spain because abolished, they didn’t collapse. The new framework enacted in 1830 left no space for privileged bodies, though merchants continued to be conceived as a group with special characteristics, and a fully liberal code of commerce was not enacted until 1889. He said that the first modern social movement in Spain took shape in the 1840s when merchants organised nationally to try to get consulates back.

Charles Walton said that Lauren Clay (Vanderbilt) had a new book project focussing on French chambers of commerce. She reported that in 1788/9 merchants asked Necker for special representation in the Estates General, though they didn’t obtain it; they were however given privileged access to deputies. Their motivation was to oppose economic liberalism (in the form of the Eden Treaty [which also provided a spur to mercantile organisation in Britain, though British merchants divided on that issue]). So economic and political liberalism were in tension.

Ali Yaycioglu asked how businesses were organised? Were they family firms? Or partnerships? What were the implications either way?Pablo said that small retailers weren’t allowed to join in elections or take office: the merchant community was hierarchical. In Spain until 1866 merchants weren’t allowed to get involved in the supply of urban foodstuffs: that was managed by local authorities. Riots around this and other issues in 1766 recreated a bad image of food merchants. This distinction apart, the main cleavage was between importers and exporters. Exporters might run family businesses or organise companies; generally smaller importers didn’t have the second option.

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Session 5: Finance – the plan was to take each paper in turn, followed by a brief discussion of points arising from the paper, then to have a more general discussion ranging across the papers

Juan Pan Montojo. Communitarian resistance, social criminality and political rebellion: taxation in Spain, 1845-1897

A new tax system was introduced into Spain in 1845, responding to the need for more revenue after the collapse of the empire and the fall in certain incomes (for example the monarchy’s share of the tithe), and pressure from mounting expenses (wars in America, liberal coups, absolutist resistance to change…). New principles were applied to old taxes. This helps explain the forms of resistance.

Since the later eighteenth century, the government had struggled to make revenues cover expenditure. There were occasional revenue surges, eg from the sale of church property. Not until the 1840s was the level of 800 million reales in a year achieved by that means equalled. Spain and Portugal faced distinctive problems because they had lost empires and the revenues associated with them.

The new tax system introduced in 1845 embodied liberal principles. It embodied the state’s monopoly claim to tax, and to do so according to a universal system. Both direct and indirect taxes were levied. Until 1808, the basic model for reformists had been the single direct tax on land (physiocratic model), but thenceforth, the French mixed model was followed. Tithes were suppressed in favour of a land tax; seigneurial dues disappeared. The net effect was an increase in the fiscal burden.

The most important taxes were, in descending order, the land tax, customs, consumption taxes, the ‘industria’; there were also some colonial revenues, amounting to about 6% of the total.

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Until the 1830s the tax burden tended to decline; from 1845 it increased. The graph of tax revenues per capita that he had provided showed a dip following the 1868 revolution.

Direct taxes were the land tax, industrial tax, and tax on house rent (used as a proxy for income).

The new tax system was not however straightforwardly implemented. The elite agreed that they needed to adapt it to the customs and habits of the population.

- land tax, no cadaster was compiled until the 1980s, so there was no way to establish wealth in land directly. In fact, a quota system was operated. Provincial councils allocated burdens on the basis of declarations.

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- Industria: there was a fixed element, in the form of payment for a licence, and then a proportionate sum. From 1847, those paying this tax decided to organize tax guilds, to negotiate with the authorities

Indirect taxes were the consumption tax (on ‘eating, drinking and burning’), customs, and profits from public monopolies.

- Consumption taxes: outside the capital, it was left to local authorities to decide how to levy this

Much communal resistance ensued. Spanish villagers, the main taxpayers, became expert at hiding the quantity and value of their land. It was estimated that 41.4% of the land was ‘hidden’. Burdens fell unevenly: some villages paid for three times as much as their actual dimensions, others only 5%. Similar problems arose in relation to the consumption tax. One way of allocating this was on the basis of population, but it was argued e.g. that people were moving away, or that they were too poor to drink wine. This had consequences for the census, which was managed by the provinces until 1900. Forestry officials who tried to measure the extent of forests had to go armed with guns. Antonio Guerola, who was governor of several provinces, wrote in his memoirs that there was hostility everywhere. Forms of evasion included smuggling into cities, and over borders.

The consumption tax was the most hated of all. It was described as a tax on poverty. Moreover, collection was intrusive, at city gates. It was increasingly said to be a tax against democracy, or against the people. In 1840 the progressistas and after 1850 the democrats proposed its abolition. Every revolution started with attacks on tax collectors: this was the most popular form of collective action. It was frequent, and highly ritualised, with extensive participation by women, representing their role as housekeepers. They always burned the tax huts at the city gates, and their archives. They might attack a tax farmer or town mayor. Protestors had no alternative discourse, no vision of what a democratic tax system might look like. Those who did try to come up with alternatives tended to favour either the introduction of free trade, which it was hoped would boost customs revenues, or a cheaper state: it was suggested that a republic would be cheaper. Projects of decentralisation linked to this: the aim was to hand power back to municipalities.

In 1868-74, right-wing parties organised themselves as leagues of tax-payers. They argued that there should be no representation without taxation, that people shouldn’t be able to vote unless they paid taxes.

Discussion:

Rafe Blaufarb said that he had found the paper very interesting. He thought something similar applied in the Mediterranean region of France, where there was a Roman law/municipal works tradition; perhaps also in Italy.He said that apparently taxes on bringing alcohol into the city had apparently recently been reintroduced in Paris.He had found similar fights between villages when he was working on taxation in Provence, also indeed between neighbours.Juan said he had found few signs of internal struggle in Spanish villages, except between absentees and residents.

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Sergio Sanchez Collantes said that he thought the hope of suppressing these taxes had been the chief thing leading the people to adhere to democracy – that and conscription.

Pablo Sanchez Leon asked exactly how the relationship between revolt and taxes worked. Was it a matter of constant complaint being fuelled by other grievances? Or by something more specific to the tax context?Juan said it could be either. Small market retailers might take the lead.Pablo also asked, given lack of a convincing alternative, what tended to happen to such taxes post revolutions?Juan said they were usually reintroduced after a few years. The state found that it couldn’t get credit unless it could generate tax revenues, though in 1855 it first tried to bridge the gap by the sale of common lands.

Guy Thomson said that in the case of Malaga, which he had studied, the abolition of consumption taxes lasted for only about three months.Juan said indeed localities could act more quickly than the state. In 1911, state consumos disappeared, but not immediately local ones.Guy noted that monopolies were also unpopular: people would go and recover salt that had been confiscated.

Rafe Blaufarb asked if there were other taxes, such as stamp tax, mortgage tax?Juan said yes, yielding about 20% of total tax revenues (not including monopolies: revenues from monopolies in official statistics were not a net figure because the expenses of monopolies not subtracted). He said the only important form of tax that he’d omitted from his account were monopolies.

Nicolas Delalande, A Democracy of Taxpayers? Taxation in French Republican Thought and Practice in the nineteenth century

Said he would look at how French Republicans conceived of taxation from the late eighteenth century to the late nineteenth century. He would argue that there was no unique and coherent republican vision of the role of taxation, but rather several approaches and sensibilities towards what should be expected from it. He would also show that republican thought had to adapt to practices and circumstances, and could vary as between when Republicans were in opposition and in power.

He said that relations between taxation and democracy were not as simple as we may think. The issue raised challenges for all political groupings, but especially the republicans, who hoped to build a better and fairer society.

Three big issues were at stake :

- how can taxation be legitimized and accepted by the citizenry (political consent)?

- how can taxation be applied without weakening or harming civil society and individuals (civil and administrative equality)?

- how can taxation transform society, if at all ? (social justice and moral aims)

Revolutionaries knew what they disliked, but what they desired for the future was less certain. Some of their ideas:

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First, taxation, to be legitimate, should be based on political consent. This, of course, was not a distinctively French idea; the motto « No Taxation without Representation » was at the core of most liberal revolutions of the time. Their view was that universal suffrage by expressing the general consent of the population should bestow legitimacy on public spending. Yet after the Napoleonic era, with the institution of constitutional monarchy, consent was limited to the enfranchised, a tiny minority of the population. In this context, the budget was seen as an illegitimate tool from which only the bourgeoisie would benefit. Taxpayers had no representation, whereas the rentiers could decide how taxes should be collected with a view to paying the interest they would receive. Republicans presented themselves as defenders of taxpayers against bourgeois rentiers.

Republicans, of course, were in favour of universal suffrage, at least until 1851 and Lous-Napoléon Bonaparte’s coup, and thought that it would quasi-automatically supply legitimacy to taxation. This proved false when dozens of villages opposed the additional taxes that the Second Republic had decided to apply to meet its financial obligations. That was a huge blow to the Republicans, who were faced with a strong popular revolt.

In the Republican tradition, there were mixed and ambiguous views about the nature of the state and the weight of taxation. For most of the nineteenth century, Republicans were not in favour of a strong, active and powerful state, but rather concerned with the implementation of a gouvernement à bon marché (cheap government), as in the British radical tradition.

Second, another concern was with the nature of the state/society relationship. Revolutionaries resented the intrusions that the state had undertaken under the ancien régime (and therefore rejected the taille). At the beginning of the Revolution, there were hopes that taxation could become a voluntary donation made by citizens to the state, and that coercion could thus be avoided. But was it really possible to rely on virtuous citizens ? Would citizens become immediately virtuous with the advent of the Republic ? Or was the Republic needed to promote virtue? Rousseau had seen the paradox; for the law to be obeyed, we need citizens who love the law, but it is the law that is supposed to create these citizens…

The condemnation of « fiscal inquisition » led to the formulation of a project of decentralization, granting local autonomies with the ability to apportion and collect taxes (as in the Ottoman Empire). In a ideal situation, taxes could be levied locally, without much interference from the central state. But this led to serious financial difficulties. In fact, consent to taxation was secured in the nineteenth century thanks not to voluntary participation but to Napoleon III’s creation of a strong, vertical, and well-organized tax administration, with less need to resort to violence There were lots of tensions in the nineteenth century, but during the 1850s and 1860s tax collection became much easier, costing less : Republicans against the Second Empire denounced authoritarianism, but in practice tax collection was more accepted than ever before.

Later, under the 3rd Republic, the idea that the state should abstain from scrutinizing private life and economic affairs became one of the most powerful arguments of moderate republicans against the income tax.

The republican paradox or conundrum was thus: how to pursue equality of conditions without endangering the protection of private life?

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Thirdly, there were many discussion about how far taxation, deprived of its coercive and brutal elements, could be used positively to transform society.

Two positions contrasted :

- on the one hand, liberals pleaded in favour of giving taxation a very limited role, in order to help commerce and industry develop – the revolutionary achievement would be to limit taxation, free production and commerce, and use it only to finance necessary public expenditures ; taxation though legitimate, should be limited, contrasting with the excess of monarchical and imperial regimes.

- on the other hand, jacobins and others had a much more active and transformative view of taxation, which they saw as a powerful tool to produce equality, punish luxury, and improve civic morale. The most extreme version was proposed by le comte de Monthion, who published a book in 1808 in which he presented taxation as a tool to regenerate society and moralize citizens (for instance to promote temperance and fight alcoholism). There were also debates about progressive taxation and its possible use to reduce inequality and promote solidarity. People like Paine, Condorcet and others pleaded for progressive taxes on inheritance, to build a true meritocratic society.

Nineteenth-century republicans were divided on progressive taxation. It became common to denounce the weight and injustice of indirect taxation and defend the creation of an income tax. But creation of a progressive income tax was much more contentious. People like Proudhon, who had strong influence on the left, considered that progressive taxation was a fallacy, something that would comfort the social inequality and order rather than transform it. Of course the « démoc-socs » and later the radicaux were strong proponents of progressive taxation, but they had to face the criticisims of those who compared them to the Jacobins and the Terror. The Republicans had different visions of the French Revolution, and for quite a long time the « Girondin » view was much stronger than often thought. Gambetta, for instance, was unclear about what kind of reform he would implement in his 1869 platform, the programme de Belleville. He pleaded for the abolition of indirect taxes, but did not clearly support progressivity.

To conclude, this historical experience should lead us to be cautious about the relations between taxation and democracy. Not all democratic experiences encourage reinforcement of taxation. Moreover, democracy may not lead to more redistribution. The French debate of the late nineteenth century seems to prove that democracy could limit redistribution, inasmuch as it offered scope to contest the state’s requirements and encroachments.

Discussion:

Edward Castleton asked whether the language of taxation changed under the Bourbon restoration, eg with the return of the émigrés?Nicholas said that the main tension was between taxpayers and rentiers, and the continued through the Second Empire.

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Edward said he was thinking about the kind of thing Mike Sonenscher talked about. What happened when the rentier elite lost their previous legitimacy. Initially they invested mainly in public debt, but in the later nineteenth century increasingly through the stock exchange.Nicholas said that investments in the public debt provided a kind of link with the state, which provided a focus for some debate

Juan Pan-Montojo wondered if fiscality played a part in tensions between the republican left and socialists.

Sergio Sanchez Collantes wanted to develop a comparison with the Spanish case. He said that the Spanish democratic manifesto talked about the need for an equal division of taxes and military service. These issues were also argued about in the press. It was suggested that taxes should fall above all on luxury items.Nicholas said indeed there was much discussion around the issue of what was just. It was argued that some taxes should be proportional, but there was discussion about how that might work. The idea of taxing luxuries went back to the eighteenth century – but of course as a fiscal measure it depended on there being plenty of luxury spending.

Edward Castleton, Taxation and French anti-statist social and economic thought, 1848-1861

He said that he would be looking at anti-statist thought between 1820 and 1880.

Annalien’s paper had not dealt with the topic of capacities: the criteria for holding power – who should rule and what the criteria for rule should be. What examining these reveals is a great deal of class prejudice which coloured liberal thought and helps explain liberals shift to reaction in 1848.

The reevaluation of French liberalism since Furet has carried on especially by Rosanvallon. The limitations of the liberal tradition were starkly shown by 1848, which often shifted liberals towards reaction, as indeed it did even some who were not liberals, like Thiers. It scared people off universal suffrage, and marked a turning point in thinking about equality etc.

There were various ideas about criteria for voting. Some thought these should relate to education: Rémusat favoured that; Guizot favoured property qualifications. The language of capacities was used not just by bourgeois liberals, but also by socialists: thus by Saint Simonians, whose idea of capacities was linked to industrie. Up till 1830 there was little overlap between Saint Simonians and liberals, but then this changed, eg in the case of Dunoyer. Some even shared offices.

He wanted to talk especially about Proudhon, whose manuscripts he was editing, in relation to the origins of anti-statist thought. Proudhon offered a critique of democracy from the left. He coined neologisms such as démocratie industrielle, in his book on stock-exchange speculation. He also wrote about démocratie ouvrière, in the context of endorsing abstention from voting in the elections of 1863-4 (in the early phase of the liberalization of the Second Empire).

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His anti-statism separates him from the republican tradition. He thought that greater participation in government was no solution. He thought it better for producers to create a rich associational life, sharing profits, and providing access to credit.

In 1848, Proudhon wrote about democracy in entirely negative terms, echoing the critique of counterrevolutionaries such as de Maistre and others. In the early twentieth century these ideas were picked up by Action Française types.

Proudhon also did not take a positive view of redistribute taxation – he was against taxation altogether. In 1848 he did briefly endorse the idea of a single tax on capital. In that year he was elected as a Deputy – at which point his position became more strongly anti-political.

In the 1860s, he called for abstention from the political process, – which struck a chord and was influential, as people could not see what they gained by participation. It was picked up on by people in the First International, Bakunin etc. It was argued that those who wanted working-class democracy should withdraw from the political process. This differed from the demo-soc attitudes to the second republic.

Socialist thought developed in relationship with democracy.

Discussion:

Rafe Blaufarb wanted to hear more about Proudhon’s critique of property.Edward said that his declaration that ‘Property is theft!’ dated from 1840. The context was the republican agitation of the late 1830s for the extension of the suffrage. Proudhon tried to shift discussion from the property qualification to property as such. In 1848, he intended to write in defence of Guizot: to say that property qualifications accurately reflected the character of existing society; the republican principle did not connect with real life. But he didn’t publish this. Later he rethought that position, deciding that property as an abstract category had some advantages. He saw the Second Empire as a case of féodalité industrielle, a period of complicity between the state and large monopolies, typified by railway concessions and the stock market.

Charles Walton said he was interested in the term reciprocity, which was invented in the eighteenth century but was used by Proudhon. He thought that republicans were torn between the liberal conception – the idea that government should not involve itself in society, which worked on the basis of natural reciprocity, and an idea that society was a construction requiring the active exercise of will.Edward said that his goal was commutative justice as an alternative to distributive justice. He was an egalitarian market liberal, very moralistic. He favoured mutualism. His disciples in other countries tended to pick up on his hostility to politics but drop the mutualism.

Guy Thomson asked if Proudhon was interested in Spain. Edward said no.Guy said that Pi y Margall was interested in him. Eduardo Posada Carbo said that his book on federalism sometimes attracted attention elsewhere, eg in Colombia. Edward said yes, Pi y Margall translated his book on federalism.

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Guy noted that in 1863-4 both Spanish and Italian Democrats also took up his line on electoral abstention. Edward said that in the case of Italy, Giuseppe Ferrari was a friend of Proudhon’s, though he wasn’t an abstentionist. He said that by that time France was no longer a major international player. How these ideas travelled is another question.

General discussion of finance papers:

Ali Yaycioglu asked Juan about tax farming, which seems to have continued through the nineteenth century. Did tax farmers constitute a pressure group?Juan Pan-Montojo said that in principle it was rejected in Spain, though in fact it did exist.

Gregoire Bron wanted to know the significance of the mobilization of communities around tax issues. Did they nourish regional sentiments, for example in the Basque and Catalan regions?Juan said that he hadn’t gone into the case of the Basque country, which had its own fiscal system. He wasn’t sure what it meant to talk of something as politicizing, but he thought these concerns did help to orient people towards democracyNicholas said that the revolt of the Breton bonnets rouges in 2013 was presented as in some way reenacting a seventeenth-century tax revolt. Memories of such things could endure for a long time, and shape local traditions of action. He said that in the nineteenth century regional identities were based on opposition to Paris: thus in the case of the 1907 revolt of Languedoc. Republicans claimed that it threatened national unity. He said that it was often difficult to characterize what popular movements were about: they were complex; the struggle over their meaning was itself a political struggle.

Charles Walton said he was interested in the formation of a liberal discourse justifying taxes, as by Sieyes and Paine. Analogies were sometimes drawn to investing in a company, as by ‘actionnaires’.Nicholas said those can be found in the nineteenth century too. In 1847, Girard wrote L’impot comme assurance which developed this kind of argument. One can find it in republican rhetoric down to the 1870s. In part the suggestion was that taxation would become less of a problem because people would receive back what they put in.Ali objected that investment and insurance were different.Rafe said that the physiocrats also talked about taxation as a kind of insurance for property rights. They liked to use economic language to think about politics.Renata de Lorenzo said that the link between property rights and the electoral system was bound up with a positive view of taxation.Nicholas said that conceptions of liberal citizenship changed as more universal taxes were developed – though of course even earlier, the population at large did pay indirect taxes.

Edward said it was liberal economists who favoured progressive taxation, not people on the left; thus Germain Garnier [who translated the Wealth of Nations]. Those on the left were wary of treating it as a panacea. Before 1848 people discussed these things – but not after 1848.Nicholas thought such people (as Garnier) were mavericks.Juan said that Garnier was also in favour of Ricardo’s idea of taxing rent.

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Edward thought the question of how taxation might be levied was more open before 1848.

Eduardo was struck that no cadaster was compiled in Spain until the late twentieth century. He wanted to know when this happened in France and Italy?Nicholas said it was begun in 1807 under Napoleon, but finished only in the mid nineteenth century. But with changes in the nature of wealth, there was a sense that new kinds of cadaster were needed, cadasters of fortunes.

Rafe thought that what Nicholas had said was not quite right. It was true that a compilation was begun under Napoleon. But in the pays d’état réelles there were older cadasters: in Provence, dating back as far as 1471, and similarly along the Mediterranean littoral.Juan said in Spain the absence of maps presented an obstacle to the compilation of cadasters.

Joanna asked how liberals justified taxing people who lacked political rights.Nicholas said they didn’t think the question arose, linking rights to direct taxation – though republicans did stress the role of indirect taxes.Juan said he thought the discourse of national duties was called into play.

Session 6: BureaucracyRenata De Lorenzo, Bureaucracy, order and disorder in Napoleonic Italy

Her intention was, through the life story of two Democrats, Vincenzo Cuoco (1770- 1823) and Pietro Custodi (1771 -1842) -- the first belonging to the moderate current, the second to the more intransigent, to provide a psychological key to the political and intellectual maturation of a Italian Democratic-Republican generation, from the triennio repubblicano (1796-1799) to the Restoration era, considering them as figures who were easily misinterpreted. Coming from different geographical regions (Naples in the case of Cuoco, Milan in the case of Custodi), regions which had somewhat different experiences, both men were nonetheless critical of the way in which the French revolution was imposed upon Italy. Initially exiled or marginalized, after Brumaire they became collaborators with the Napoleonic regime, assuming important bureaucratic roles, as a result of their commitment to work, their journalistic experience, their zeal, and their expertise in such fields as education, statistics, economics, etc.. Moving from a position of ‘bureaucratic patriotism’ to identification with ‘patriotic bureaucracy’, without renouncing democratic aspirations, they became totally committed to the Napoleonic order. However, this was compatible, though involving suffering and a sense of compromising on the part of our two protagonists. They found in the Napoleonic bureaucracy a relationship between civil society and the state, public and private political economy, different from when they were men of the revolution. The institutions of the Napoleonic Cisalpine Republic provided for them a context in which it was possible to accomplish the end of the revolution through Napoleon's mediation. However, Cuoco and Custodi were able to maintain some degree of autonomy, "dissidence" and their old hopes, anachronistic though these may have been. They could distinguish themselves from others who had apparently forgotten their democratic past.

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Cuoco had a complicated life. Born in Molise [in the northern part of the kingdom of Naples], he moved to Naples to study jurisprudence in 1787. He was engaged in but survived the bloody aftermath of the Neapolitan Revolution of 1799. For Italians, Brumaire was not the end of the revolution, but a turning point in it. Cuoco thought that he could in some sense continue to pursue his ideals under the Napoleonic regime. He was exile, and went to Paris and Milan, where he worked as a journalist, and urged Italians to develop their knowledge and skills to fit themselves for independence. Returning to Naples in 1806 (when Ferdinand was deposed by Joseph Bonaparte), he took a post in the bureaucracy, and advocated its extension into new fields of activity, notably public education and the making of a provisional cadaster. He was an important figure in the Murattian regime, but retired from politics on Ferdinand’s final restoration, in 1815. He suffered mental health problems and died in the early 1820s. The experience of having been a patriot and carrying those commitments into bureaucratic service was a common one for men of his generation, who remained at some level interested in developing a democratic politics.

Pietro Custodi’s life trajectory showed some similarities. He too trained as a lawyer, graduating in 1795. He responded to the arrival of French troops in Milan with a pamphlet Della sovranità del popolo e dell'eccellenza di uno Stato libero. Opera scritta originalmente in inglese nell'anno 1656. He soon came to think that it was hard to realise his ideals under occupation. He too worked as a journalist, but his writings were too radical for the Napoleonic regime. He thought that circumstances did not permit the immediate implementation of democracy, and that in that context it made sense to collaborate with the Napoleonic bureaucracy, accepting a position in the Police section in 1800. He took a position in the Lombardy Chamber of Finance, later serving under Melzi’s regime in the Ministry of the Interior, in the department of public economy, and in other administrative posts. From 1803 he published a multi-volume collection of the writings of Italian economists, in effect a celebration of the Italian enlightenment tradition. Subsequently, he and others like him were stigmatised by the restored Austrians as ‘democrats’, but needing a salary they might remain in post. Custodi had some hopes of leading a career in Parma, but his ‘democratic’ reputation crippled his chances, and he was dismissed in 1817, thereafter withdrawing from public life.

Men like this may be seen as weathercocks, girouettes, who rotated with the prevailing wind. Aware that they might be seen in this way, they were interested in constructing a vision of Italian history and achievements which might frame their choices. It is worth taking a different approach: seeing them as people who tried to plot a more or less consistent course through a changing institutional environment. Bureaucratic service offered a new semantic field in which to give meaning to patriotism: ‘le patriotisme bureacratique’ is a Bonapartist form. Administration in this context was simultaneously a form of consent and of dissidence; it involved loss of freedom, but made possible the construction of a new order that combined authority with national unity.

These men in fact associated themselves with order, oits temporary appearance, against general disorder. This order was institutionalized in the social space where different cultures were juxtaposed, while maintaining its own identity. In this neutral zone everyone felt safe, without fear of losing their identity. In that way they kept open the possibility of justification in the future.

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They felt themselves to be operating on the periphery of the revolution, participating in a modernising process, but the effect was ‘misunderstanding’, a situation that continues on the basis of an error, extending and renewing its effects in time and postponing the moment of the clarification. This was the final madness of these men, united by a similar bureaucratic commitment. Their ghettoization during the Restoration and their ultimate oscillation between exclusion and persistent desire to participate found an outlet in solitary studies. Tragedy and the exhausting nature of the ‘misunderstanding, which it was difficult, if not dangerous, to try to clarify and resolve, were incarnated in the institutions that it created and in the bureaucrats who went on to be the protagonists of the life of the Italian nation of the nineteenth century.

Discussion:

Juan Pan-Montojo said that comparisons with Spain suggested themselves, that is, with the afrancesados, though they were not seen as democrats: their roots were in absolutism.Renata said that certainly was the label used for Italians. Custodi was a Robespierrist. The historian Antonio de Francesco had salvaged Custodi for democracy. In Italy, the term covered quite a wide range.Maurizio noted that collaboration was differently viewed in the two countries. In Spain, patriots defined themselves against collaborators; not so in Italy.

Juan said that he thought the term ‘empleomanie’ – mania for public office – may have been imported into Spain from Italy.Pablo Sanchez Leon said or possibly from France. He said that by the 1830s conservatives liked to complain that state-building was attracting people away from civil societyRenata said that in Naples the role was seen as important: bureaucrats were seen as agents of change.

Maurizio said that the Napoleonic era created a space for political actors which hadn’t previously existed.

The kind of double consciousness she had described was also very characteristic of members of secret societies.

Vittorio Criscuolo agreed that Custodi was a Jacobin. He still spoke of Robespierre and Saint-Just in 1800, in his newspaper L’Amico della libertà italiana, as a model of republican virtue. Certainly he decided to cooperate with the Napoleonic regime which offered important opportunities for employment and represented a valuable opportunity to modernize administrative, financial and economic structures of Peninsula. But we know that at the same time he was acting in secret societies, continuing his political activity in favour of Italian independence. Between 1796 and 1799, he clashed repeatedly with Bonaparte and with the French authorities as a result of his patriotism, for which he was arrested twice. Even after the end of the revolutionary period, Custodi never abandoned the project of seeking independence and unity for Italy and continued his battle on the cultural level, promoting the study of the history of Italian political and economic thought . This is why the entire second half of his life until his death in 1841 was characterized by repeated clashes with censorship of the Austrian Government.

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Session 7: Fraternity

Margaret Crosby-Arnold, Diversity and revolution in France

She said that French attitudes to racial difference were always at best pragmatically tolerant, and became less tolerant with time.

The French regarded their initial agreement with Toussaint in Saint Domingue as purely pragmatic; equally they saw the use of black troops as a regrettable necessity – they thought they could not tackle Toussaint without black troops – something that the planters would just have to accept. There was a growing use of black and Turkish soldiers in the French army. There was also growing dialogue between colonies and metropole through slaves travelling with masters between the two. Records in Bordeaux show lots of black people arriving in France. Correspondence between Burke and his wife shows colour blindness being associated with democracy. But it is the military that was the real key to diversity.

Slave labour continued to play an important part in the French economy. The British saw an opportunity there, and in January 1793 amended the Navigation Act so as to allow the importation into England of French colonial commodities; later they occupied Saint Domingue. The French realised that they could only maintain a foothold by declaring support for the freeing of the slaves, so in 1794 they announced emancipation.

British concern about possible slave rebellions elsewhere was echoed in the United States, Spain and elsewhere. Emancipation was recognised as an international concern, as was discussed as such at Amiens.

In this context there was a move to roll back what had appeared to be a shift towards greater tolerance for diversity. It seems that the British supported the French expedition to suppress the independence of Saint Domingue. Both countries were looking to impose, and to support each other in imposing, order and subordination on the black population. Both still contemplated the possibility that establishing order might require the extermination a sizeable part of the black population.

The re-institution of slavery may have been a condition for both sides agreeing the Peace of Amiens. Bonaparte’s comments at the time make it clear that the point of disarming blacks was to help the commerce of the empire. Napoleon’s decree of Messidor made it illegal to be black in France: blacks were rounded up and sent to Elba, Corsica etc. Marseilles was chastised for not enforcing the decree with sufficient rigour. People of colour were all rounded up and sent to camps, including Egyptians.

[see also her “From Liberty to Genocide:  Britain, France and Subjugation of People of Color, 1799-1814,” in Los signifcados de la negritude (Editorial Universidad de Costa Rica:  San Jose, 2015) and Hannibals At the Gates:  Diversity, Economic Dislocation and Crisis in Revolutionary and Napoleonic Europe, 1750-1815 (forthcoming, Berghahn, 2015?)]

Discussion:

Ali Yaycioglu asked what made it clear that ‘colour’ was the concern. Margaret said that was clear in the historiography

Rafe Blaufarb asked what motivated Napoleon to initiate deportation.

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Margaret said this was part of a larger programme, also discussed in commissions on the Civil Code. The effect of being deported was to render someone civilly dead. She suggested that there people of old Caribbean planter families in Napoleon’s circle, who influenced these policies. Many people in France had an interest in the colonial trade: the canal system carried these commodities from the Mediterreanean towards Switzerland.

Juan Pan-Montojo said that in Spain ‘people of colour’ was a twentieth-century category. In nineteenth-century Spain that would have been regarded as too binary a category: people distinguished between shades.Margaret said that in French the term’s meaning changed over time. It had once typically referred to free blacks in a colonial setting. She said that Napoleonic law developed the juristic fiction of race.Pablo agreed with Juan that in Spain the terminology was different. There was a consensus on the need to keep blacks out of Spain, but the emphasis was on their African origin, rather than their skin colour as such.

Joanna said that slave revolt in wartime presented contemporaries with complex issues. In Britain, people weren’t sure if they wanted the French to win or lose. Moreover, repression was not the only available option, they also considered increasing discipline, and developing a free black economy Wilberforce, who was still hoping to build public sympathy and put an end to the slave trade, was anxious about the impression Toussaint might make, and fervently hoped that he would show himself a good statesman and humane man.

DAY THREE

Session 8: LabourYavuz Aykan, Law, Work, slavery and fictive kinship in Islamic jurisprudence

He proposed to talk about how one could abstract the category of ‘labour’ in Islamic sources. He wanted to ask, was there in Ottoman jurisprudence a category of work as such, of labour as a commodity, the subject of exchange and contract? When he thought about this, he had realised that he tended to take the category of labour for granted, when in fact it is a construct with a specific history.

He would be looking at labour in the context of slavery. Most research on Ottoman slavery has focussed on the palace or the army. There has been some scholarship on slave markets, and on their role in Ottoman life, but nothing much on slave labour and its contexts (which were often household contexts). He would be looking at the slave mother.

He gave an example of a transaction. At issue was the inheritance of a house. Five children were mentioned, one said to be a ‘minor son’. A slave mother was mentioned; she was not the mother of the other children. It seems that, after the birth of her child, she was regarded as performing two kinds of work. One was ordinary work, which could be used or rented out. One involved care of the child: this was ethical labour, creating kinship ties.

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In the writings of Islamic jurists, emancipation of a slave is a normative act which creates a kinship tie. It was said to be like birth. The former master and slave had a relationship like master and child. But that relationship did not bring with it any right to inherit.

Yet the slave mother, who had apparently been freed, was also held to have rights of inheritance. This was because of the labour she had given to the child. Unlike rentable labour, this form of labour could not be abstracted and made subject to a commercial relationship.

Islamic law posited a distinction between use rights and the intrinsic value of objects. That meant that they could split the labour from the slave – so economies under Ottoman rule had a slave labour market distinct from the slave market. They thus distinguished labour/effort/output-object. Slavery related to the 2nd (effort).

Mukata referred to a slave who pays his/her master for emancipation. Mukata could engage in contracts with others so as to raise income; and the master could not act arbitrarily towards the Mukata. However, his labour power could be rented out, though only with the agreement of the Mukata.

There was an ethic in slave labour that resisted strict commercial exchange; this was linked to kinship. The slave who gives birth to the master’s child underwent a transition in legal status. The law held that when a man impregnated the mother and recognised the child, he no longer owned the essence; she could not be sold or passed on in marriage, and she had a right to inherit.

Manumission played a part in constructing kinship. Three types of kin were recognised – blood (agnatic – through male), affinity (through marriage), manumission– which generated a relation closer to consanguinity; the master could claim the property of a former slave, but not vice versa. But in respect to slave mothers, the labour she gave to the child could not be bought or sold; it could not be part of an economic transaction: through labour on her child she became kin with the slave master.

He suggested that this has implications for how we understand labour relationships in Islamic societies, and provides a basis on which we can begin to think about comparisons. He said that Islamic jurists did not operate outside a wider European world of reference, since they were among other things involved in a dialogue with Roman law, also suggesting a possible basis for comparison.

Discussion:

Margaret Crosby-Arnold said that in the French Code Noir of 1864, the first 9 articles focussed on Catholic education. There was also an early article relating to mothers: if the master married a slave mother, she became as free and equal ‘as anyone else’. If he didn’t marry her, he could be fined, or the mother and children could be taken away from him. She wanted to know if there was any equivalent provision in Ottoman law?Yavuz said the Code of Justinian had some bearing on this [but I’m not sure what]Rafe Blaufarb said these provisions didn’t seem to construct the father as a pater familias in the ordinary way, in that his powers were pretty curtailed.Yavuz said in the Islamic case he did not think it was right to see what was at issue in ethical terms. Law operated rather casuistically, generating answers to problems through interpretation.

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Guy asked if a freed slave has children does the master own their labour?Yavuz said not.Maurizio wanted to know more about the social context. How common was it to recognise slave children?Yavuz said that he had been working on Diyarbarkir and also now Edirne, a district of Istanbul. There were many cases where slaves registered with the judge were noted to be slave mothers. [ie they weren’t emancipated? Or the registration was in the context of emancipation?]

Ali Yaycioglu wanted to know if there were changes during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries in legal practice in relation to emancipation. And did non-Muslim families operate in a different legal framework. He knew they had concubines – Phanariots had many.Yavuz said he hadn’t yet worked on change. Non Muslims also used sharia law.

Joanna also wanted to know how many slaves there were, how large they bulked in the population. Also, was there a relationship in this context equivalent to apprenticeship in Europe– where the individual was not paid and the master owned all his time?Yavuz said that he worked on domestic slavery, but there were also field slaves – but they didn’t have legal personality, and don’t appear in the records.Ali said however you weren’t allowed to kill them.Yavuz said that in Roman law you could use, sell or destroy; but in Islamic law, you could only use and sell.

Sergio Sánchez Collantes, Artisans and workers. The social bases of democratic republicanism in Spain (1848-1860)

He was pleased to have an opportunity to take part in this kind of comparative discussion. His research focussed on the history of republicanism and the democratic tradition in Spain in the nineteenth century, especially its second half. He had worked especially on the Asturias, a small region in the north of Spain notable for its republican and democratic traditions over a long period, though he had more recently enlarged the geographical range of his research, to pursue what he thinks are important questions, marginalised by Spanish historiography. He was now working especially on iconography, and the symbolic universe of democratic republicanism ; on sociability in the largest sense of the term, on women’s political participation, and the diffusion of republican ideas among specific groups of workers.

In mid nineteenth-century Spain, the Democratic Party, founded in 1849, channelled the democratic aspirations of the population, but already in the 1830s there had been organised groups, newspapers and associations defending these ideas. Certainly there was much doctrinal heterogeneity, esp at this time when utopian socialists, such as Cabet and the Fourierists, were still a part of the democratic movement. But there were also common aspirations, largely gathered together in the 1849 manifesto. These included fundamental liberties (of the press, expression, conscience, assembly and association), (male) universal suffrage ; free elementary education ; abolition of slavery and the death penalty ; equity in fiscal and military burdens – that is suppression of conscription and consumption taxes, matters of special concern to the less comfortable classes.

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Who sympathised with these ideas ? Research in recent decades suggests that they attracted members of differing social groups : they have been described as inter-class (not implying, as in French, denying class difference). But different classes were represented on very different scales. There were workers alongside large traders, but the former were the most numerous, followed by the middle classes and the liberal professions. The latter, though less numerous, were distinguished by their activity as leaders of parties, meetings and journals.

He showed an image from a local prosopography from a bit later, 1868, which suggested the strong presence of artisans. It’s a study of the Volunteers for Liberty, a citizen militia, in Gijón, a town in the north of Spain. They defended liberal victories, but were often dominated by republicans – which he has found to be the case here ; he has also been able to establish that many were established sympathisers with the Democratic Party, over preceding decades (the same continuity has been found in other Spanish provinces). 249 inhabitants of the town indicated their trade or profession on joining. Though many social classes were represented, including traders, industrialists and industrial employees, most were from traditional artisan trades : shoemakers, joiners, tailors, hatmakers, blacksmiths, masons etc).

He said that it wasn’t easy to document the social composition of the nascent movement in its earliest years, for lack of documentation. Subscription lists were however suggestive : these were often reproduced in journals. Democratic or republican subscriptions might be for the support of a journal, paying the fine of someone who had been denounced, supporting the families of prisoners or emigrants, or building a statue to a leader. Often not all supporters of these causes were republicans : some lent support to express broader solidarities (as detailed study of particular lists has shown). But by and large they offer some indication of sources of support.

He gave the example of a subscription from the late 50s : a long list of contributors in tens of towns and villages. The occasion was the assassination of Tomás Bru, a democrat from the province of Valencia, killed in October 1858, on the day when election results were checked. His assassination provoked commotion among democrats and served to stimulate organisation. The subscription was designed to support his orphans. Democratic organisers who usually managed such things organise dit ; we know a number of their names and so this gives us an idea of how the party was developing in different provinces. It was first studied by Gutierrez

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Lloret in the 1990s ; since then there have been studies focussing on different provinces. Florencia Peyrou has offered the best overview, in her Tribunos del pueblo. She tells us that between January and July 1859, there were 28,360 subscribers in 346 localities, contributing a total of 200,000 reales. Among them were 1,265 women. She notes that 80% of subscribers contributed less than 10 reales, which suggests their modest position.

In some lists, subscribers gave their occupation (including sometimes women). He showed some images of such lists, to show the kinds of artisans and workers who signed.

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Why did these social groups support the democrats’ social vision ? Which were the ideas which most attracted them? There were certainly differences, as between ‘socialists’ and ‘individualists’ in relation to the role of the state. Democratic leaders used populist rhetoric, designed to appeal to a range of people. A verse by Garrido asks for the support of agricultural, artisanal and factory workers. A common theme is the idea that political change, especially the coming of a republic, will improve the conditions of workers. The reasoning was simple: if fundamental liberties and

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individual rights are secured, including the right to vote, workers will be able to exert political influence, and choose representatives who will promote their interests, challenging unjust relationships between capital and labour, so as to create social harmony. But not everyone believed that state action had the potential to change conditions, hence polemics around this issue.

Slogans such as liberty, equality, justice, people, right began to appeal to people who didn’t entirely understand them, or who put their own meanings on them. Particularly appealing seem to have been arguments against conscription and consumption taxes – burdens which fell particularly heavily on the poor, because it was hard to pay the taxes and they couldn’t afford to find substitutes for their children’s obligation to serve. It made sense to them that taxes should press equally on the rich, and all should equally have to fight. In the press and democratic programmes, there was talk of measures meant to help artisans, such as facilitating credit for those in work ; access to land for agricultural workers. But these ideas weren’t fleshed out in Spain until 1868-73, after the ‘Glorious Revolution’. In 1872, an account of economic and social issues was read out to the Second Assembly of the Democratic-Republican Federalist Party. Issues identified included reducing hours of work ; forbidding children under 9 to enter workshops ; keep pregnant women and the sick from work ; promote construction of cheaper houses ; set up wage councils, and permit peaceful strikes where they did not exist ; enact severe laws on hygiene in lodging houses and workplaces ; reallocate public services between different levels of representative institution (national, regional and local) ; promote savings banks and facilitate credit ; reform laws in favour of sharecroppers and reneter ; create technical schools and popularise primary and secondary education ; rent out unsold national property, giving preference to workers.

He emphasised the theme of association that ran through many of these proposals. This was a respect in which ideology converged on practice. Local research has shown the presence of republicans in many associational and mutualist activities – usually run democratically by elected committees. Through these activities, such people had already had practical experience of democracy.

The leaders’ ideas were often reinterpreted at other levels. Some enquiries undertaken in the 1880s, among workers who defined themselves as republicans, and who belonged to associations whose leaders advocated social harmony, nonetheless expressed hatred of other classes. Republic and democracy were not univocal concepts.

In the diffusion of ideas about democracy, the press played an important part. Already by the late 30s there were titles spreading radical ideas, to the left of progressive liberalism. But such ideas also circulated orally in factories and workshops, in bistros and cafes. The family was doubtless also an influential milieu – witness an interesting account from Oviedo, a town in the north (later the setting of Leopoldo Alas Clarin’s La Regenta) which illustrates the important role of women in these processes, even outside the household. What was in question was memories of 1854 – a progressive moment. The balconies of the mairie exhibited a portrait of Espartero. It was later remembered that, several years later, working women gathered in the square with their young children to show them this portrait. Some of these children later became democratic republicans. Equally people remembered having portraits of leading democrats in their homes as they grew up, and not only Spanish ones. There was a

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sense of a broader European project, represented esp by the Marseillaise. Another example from 1862 : a famous doctor was arrested in a little village in the north of Spain (Noreña) for having offier to some of his friends Garibaldi costumes (red shirt and toque hat). Fetes and celebrations also played their part in the construction of a democratic culture : thus political banquets between 1850 and 60, which brought together democrats and progressistas ; it’s not clear whether artisans and other workers were included in these ; they don’t seem to have been included in those which preceded the revolution of 1868, despite chroniclers having insisted that they were, their presence being symbolically important.

However they came across them, numerous artisans and other workers do seem to have picked up these ideas ; democrats and republicans had considerable influence in these milieux by 1860. Their efforts probably played a part in the politicisation of these classes, even if some turned to alternative ideologies.

Discussion :

Eduardo Posada Carbo was interested that the Democratic programme as he had described it included anti-slavery. He thought that was quite early for that cause to figure, given that it doesn’t seem to have become a significant political issue until the 1860s. He wondered if the Democratic party had any presence in Cuba, to which there continued to be much Spanish emigration.Sergio said that abolitionism did figure as an issue in the press. He didn’t know about Cuba, though he remembered a subscription from there to a democratic journal in peninsular Spain . It was argued that abolition was necessary for the country to regenerate.

Pablo Sanchez Leon said it was important to distinguish between what people want to do and what they do. The first democratic party was born in parliament, by fragmentation within progressive ranks. It wasn’t supported by popular votes – though some of his subscribers may have been people with the right to vote. He wanted to hear more about hierarchy within the party. Also the programme was, he said, just wishful thinking ; it didn’t have much to do with how the party really worked. In practice, the party looked pretty much like the liberal party ; it was also oligarchical ; its members didn’t want social conflict ; they weren’t confrontational.

Mark Philp was interested to know how the language of ‘democracy’ was used in relation to the party. Was it ever charged with being undemocratic in its operations ?

Sergio said he had found it being criticised for excluding women.

To Pablo he said there was another rhetoric and practice question here. They said they wanted social harmony, but the implications of the popular following they mobilised were rather different.

Rafe Blaufarb wanted to follow up on Pablo’s point. He said that in the Jaen list it seemed that employers appeared. This looked like quite a traditional world of work, in which small masters and their workmen might feel identity of interest.Sergio said that we didn’t know very much about workshop relations. We certainly can’t take it for granted that consensus was normal.

Vittorio Criscuolo wondered about the influence of Marx and Saint Simon on Spanish democratic thought.

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Sergio said that in Cadiz and Catalonia there were socialist groups which included women ; they ran a Fourierist journal.

Session 9: Rural society and democracyJames Livesey, Democracy and French rural society: institutions and global history in Languedoc

He would be talking not about democracy but democratisation, which he understood to entail creating the capacity for agency. He would be focussing on the capacity of those who lived in Languedoc to mobilise themselves.

The context was a problem in environmental history. It’s a commonplace of the environmental history of the Mediterranean that the region has suffered a long decline. Adopting a Braudelian perspective, we might want to consider rural societies in moments of crisis, in relation to the environment.

Problems sharpened in the 1780s and 90s, a period of cruel decline. These years saw peasant rebellions in China, Russia and northern Europe. Sonenscher, in Before the Deluge identified as a feature of late eighteenth-century discourse fear of ‘social war’. Smith talked about unnatural unrest, arising from too much extraction to support war. Dominant images of social war were drawn from Roman history. In 1793, it was made a capital crime to propose an ‘agrarian law’.Chris Bayly has captured all this in his model; he suggests that the capacity of the state to get through crisis helps to explain the ‘great divergence’.

French revolutionary historiography hasn’t been concerned with the social order for some time. New work looks rather at change in [looks like ‘in-family lending’ – any idea what you might have said?]. It illuminates new social institutions which made mobilisation possible.

How did the revolution change the peasant household? Unlike artisan households, peasant households weren’t much affected by new opportunities to divorce. Jan de Vries’ idea of an ‘industrious revolution’ is helpful in terms of understanding the complex relationships that existed between market towns and rural areas, in the context of hyper-exploitation of the female labour market. A key work here is Philip T. Hoffmann, Growth in traditional society The French Countryside, 1450-1815 (1997). One might ask, Why become industrious in face of pressure from rent seekers – when what you make is likely to be creamed off? Why innovate rather than resist? He said that French rural consumption was ordinary rather than extraordinary – it didn’t involve the purchase of new consumer goods.

There was a transfer or land towards the peasantry over the nineteenth century, estimated to have been associated with a growth in production of 2% a year – the figure is a very rough estimate, but anyway, there was growth in production. Labour costs were higher than in England throughout the nineteenth century, and there was no significant urban-rural variation, so no wage incentive for peasants to move to towns. The revolution cleared away a lot of rent claims. Peasant France was central to the republican vision, which created some space.

The agricultural province was the unit in which new horizons of opportunity appeared – see Blaufarb, [The politics of fiscal privilege in Provence 1530-1830 (2012)]. This

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was especially clearly the case in the pays d’etat. [Not clear from my notes what made it so]

Who was buying public debt? There were a striking number of humble purchasers, including widows, servants and hospital orderlies. Notaries played a key role in allowing such people to buy into this investment market.

New agricultural machinery was adopted, including new metal ploughs, which cost a fortune. The availability of forges [for maintenance?] was crucial to this development.

So what was the pay-off? Adam Smith envisaged that revolution might come in the form of a struggle between rural masses and urban elites, which would destroy civilisation. But this isn’t what happened in France, as John Markoff’s work shows [The abolition of feudalism : peasants, lords, and legislators in the French Revolution, 1996]. There were such clashes in slave societies. But the provincial framework allowed for change in the French commercial economy from which peasants also benefited.

Discussion:

Ali Yaycioglu wanted to question the urban/rural divide. He said that from what he knew about the Balkans, Russia and Anatolia, this wasn’t sustainable. Rural leaders had some links to the urban context, and there was also agricultural production in ‘urban’ space.

In relation to public debt: there was similar buy-in at a humble level in Ottoman society, though more from urban middle classes.

He also wanted to know whether there were tensions between individualistic and collective values.

Jim welcomed these questions. He said a pessimistic account of peasant society had it that peasants were always indebted, and that in bad times, they therefore always lost land; therefore there was a tension between town and countryside. However, in fact the bourgeoisie didn’t lend money to people in crisis: what they were interested in was partnerships that created productivity.

It was hard to answer the individualism question. Over the long run, individualism corroded traditional elites, and changed the nature of their domination. In 1793, when there were votes on whether to divide commons, decisions do seem to have been made in the light of a conception of community interest.

Joanna noted that in England there were positive attempts in the early nineteenth century to facilitate servants and workers buying into public debt, via deposits in savings banks: that was a central part of the savings bank plan.

She had also been interested in the discourse of ‘social war’, which she had encountered in an early nineteenth-century Irish context. The way forward was seen to be giving ordinary people a chance to ‘better’ themselves – this was the dominant discourse in England, though was also mobilised in thinking about ways forward for Ireland.

Jim said that things did play out differently in different places. He was convinced of the importance of the province as a framework.

Rafe Blaufarb wondered how he fit the declining birthrate in France into his story?

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Jim said he hesitated to posit a causal relationship, though there was some evidence of planning about family formation.

Margaret Crosby-Arnold said she thought that the canal system needed more attention. France had a particularly well developed canal system. What effect did he think this had? Canals also carried passengers, and post, increasing connectedness.Jim said that contemporaries noticed the multiplication of chestnut trees. This was sometimes understood as indicating a subsistence economy, but he said it was better understood as insurance against bad winters, when snow might block the roads. He said that Peter McPhee [not sure which work, but see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_McPhee_%28academic%29] had written very well about this.

Mark Philp asked if Arthur Young was then just blind to all this enterprise in the French countryside?Jim said essentially yes. Allen and O Grada, ‘On the road again with Arthur Young’, [Journal of Economic History 1988] don’t grasp this model of development.

Mark wanted to know more about how the prefectoral system worked.Jim cited a prefect who wrote books saying [?] that the Estates had been great, and had worked in alliance with the intendant to promote local flourishing. [But did things get worse then when estates abolished? Or was there a nineteenth-century analogue?]

Guy Thomson, Mediterranean Democracy: French, Andalucian and Sicilian cases, 1851-1861

‘Politics only leaves the heart empty and draws persecution and impotence upon men. May my example serve all my friends and prevent them from suffering such a heavy fall. Benjamin Laurie, a Montagnard insurgent from Dieulefit in Provence, before being sentenced to transportation to a prison colony in Cayenne at his trial in January 1852 [Ted.W. Margadant, French Peasants in Revolt. The Insurrection of 1851(Princeton. 1979) p.332]

He said he would discuss three territorially extensive, mid nineteenth-century democratic uprisings whose defeat had critical implications for the development of political institutions in each country.

- the ‘Montagnard’ (democratic-republican) uprisings in southern France in response to Louis Napoleon’s coup d’état in December 1851

- the town uprisings in Sicily in April and May 1860 which coincided with the landing of Garibaldi’s ‘Thousand’ and the democratic protests in towns on the slopes of Mount Etna in August of the same year (start of six years of resistance to the new Piedmontese administration, culminating in the Palermo revolt of September 1866).

- the democratic uprising centred in eastern Andalucía in July 1861, known as the Revolution of Loja, Spain’s first citizen as opposed to barracks (pronunciamiento) based popular uprising of the Liberal age [subject of his The Birth of Modern Politics in Spain. Democracy, Association and Revolution, 1854-75 (2009)]

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These uprisings revealed the extent of the diffusion of democratic propaganda, associations and organization to smaller towns, villages and hamlets, in the wake of the 1848 revolutions.

They also serve as prisms for understanding the limits of democratisation at a crucial juncture in nineteenth-century European state-building. Their suppression and ensuing repression signalled the limits of what Paris, Turin and Madrid would allow in terms of political modernisation (politicisation, party formation, diffusion of democratic association life, etc). Repression– states of siege, military tribunals, exemplary executions, the exile of thousands of mostly innocent citizens to overseas prison colonies - was justified in terms of the supposed threat of socialism and social revolution, not in fact at stake; it counted on the collaboration of local elites who feared losing power to new political actors. It instilled collective amnesia, disrupting democratic organisation and deterring popular involvement in politics for a generation, permanently in many towns

He would proceed thematically:

Mid nineteenth-century democracy

All three movements sprang the mid-nineteenth-century revival of democratic ideas and the popular diffusion of democratic forms of association. The 1848 revolutions, however unsuccessful, made democratic ideas fashionable again; by demonstrating their global appeal, removing their negative association with terror and the French Revolution, and, by elevating democracy and universal suffrage as likely and appropriate outcomes in the age of progress. The Montagnards who rose up to challenge Louis Napoleon’s coup in December 1851, the Sicilian town squadre de picciottie1 (squads of lads) that flocked to support Garibaldi’s volunteers in April 1860 and the Andalucian villagers who marched in columns to central rallying points in July 1861 were ordered military demonstrations, more often led by ‘gentlemen’; there was little disorder or damage to property

One Piedmontese volunteer described the squadre:

The Sicilian insurgents come in from all sides by the hundred, some on horseback, some on foot. There is a tremendous confusion and they have bands which play terribly badly. I have seen mountain people armed to the teeth, some with rascally faces and eyes that menace one like the muzzles of pistols. All these men are led by gentlemen whom they obey devoutly. [Giuseppe Cesare Abba, The Diary of One of Garibaldi’s Thousand (Oxford: Oxford University Press), pp.22, 31.]

Although ephemeral, and defenceless in the face of standing armies, the uprisings were products of conspiratorial networks that had succeeded in linking democratic associations organised in towns and villages over extensive mountainous territories.

These territories’ appeal and response to democratic and republican parties and their receptiveness to democratic associational life can be explained a common administrative experience, resulting from the Bourbon revolution in government

1 Municipally based armed bands known as “squadre de picciotti” (squads of lads) participated in all revolutionary attempts from 1820. Although historians such as Hobsbawm and Mack Smith see the squadre as the prototypes for later mafia bands, before the defeat of the last Palermo rebellion in 1866 there is no mistaking their democratic makeup and autonomist sympathies.

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during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries (extended by moderate liberals during the early nineteenth century); centrally appointed departmental prefects, district sub-prefects and municipal mayors; centrally directed although locally controlled liberal property reforms (seigniorial, ecclesiastical and civil disentailment, indirect taxation, etc.); early politicisation, as a consequence of the direct impact of the French Revolution. Local democrats garnered support from losers or relative losers in the liberal property revolution, and from victims of the repression that followed absolutist restorations. In Spain and Sicily, political exiles added an important cosmopolitan and practical component.

Historians to their Janus-faced, reactive/proactive character. Each looked back to a time when all had freer access to forests and commons, when men of all classes possessed arms and answered calls to defend the territory when called upon by elected mayors, and when the local clergy represented and protected the poor. But they also reflected the new age in which former commons and seigniorial domains would be divided equitably, priests would once more serve the people and chide the rich, liberty of conscience would be respected (Protestants participated in the Montagnard and Loja uprisings), mayors would be elected through universal suffrage, citizens rights would be guaranteed by civic militias under elected officers, etc..

Resistance and clandestinity

The democratic organization of these territories was comparatively recent – the Montagnard societies grew in southern France following Paris’s June days in 1848 as cover during the electoral campaigns of 1849; the readiness of Sicily’s squadre in April 1860 was achieved by Republican exile, leader of the 1848 Palermo uprising, Francesco Crispi who, on Mazzini’s orders, had secretly toured the island in 1850-51, 1856, 1859, and 1860 [Denis Mack Smith, Mazzini (Newhaven: Yale University Press, 1994), pp.80, 118, 136]; Andalucía’s democrats became organised in response to repression under the moderate liberal restoration in 1856 . Yet each region had more seasoned conspiratorial histories going back to the early nineteenth century: the federalist movement in France; the cycles of struggle against Bourbon and Neapolitan rule in Sicily; the patriotic struggles in Spain against the French invasion and against absolutist restorations in 1814 and 1823. Repression fostered a culture of clandestinity, which in each region embraced the Italian Carbonari model: terrifying initiation rituals, individual enlistment managed by mutualist associations, territorial organisation into local sections (decurios) commanded by chiefs in market towns who in turn were answerable to regional commissions in larger towns and provincial capitals. In contrast to the Carbonari during the 1810s and 20s, societies in the 1850s and 50s recruited more extensively, both socially and territorially. Carbonari societies took refuge behind front organisations; cercles, sociétés, chambrées and mutual benefit societies. Membership lists were often entrusted to tavern keepers or pharmacies - consideration given workers’ penchant for drink and the fact that such societies provided sickness benefits. Their main purpose was to prepare members for elections and to ensure a central line of command in uprisings, the expected consequence of repression and political exclusion.

Armed citizenship

The choreography of these uprisings – armed columns from 100s of towns and villages in France in December 1851, from towns throughout central and western Sicily in April and May 1860 and from numerous towns and villages in the provinces of Málaga, Córdoba and Granada in July 1861 - reveals a centripetal pattern of rebel

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columns marching from smaller settlements to market towns and administrative capitals (following the same routes that electors would take to the capitals of electoral districts). Rebels wore mostly civilian clothing or occasionally donned militia uniforms (the French National Guard was being demobilised in 1850-51, the Sicilian National Guard was introduced in 1848, in Spain the National Militia had been abolished in 1856 but solidarities, weapons and rankings often survived). Columns were lightly armed, mostly with hunting shotguns, de-commissioned rifle, the occasional piece of light artillery, relics from previous struggles, swords and pikes. Winds bands intoning patriotic and operatic melodies often headed columns. Public buildings were generally handed over without violence and armouries commandeered; the Sicilian squadre were in any case organised by or at least tolerated by incumbent municipal regimes; in southern France and Andalucía many incumbent mayors in smaller towns joined the uprising. Parish priests or their assistants joined columns to a significant degree. Life and property were scrupulously respected. The aim was to present regimes with an irresistible demonstration of civic force.

In Sicily, a more aggressive stance was necessary if the Neapolitan army was to be confronted and defeated. Although the fighting quality of the squadre contributed importantly to Garibaldi’s first victory over the Bourbon army at Calatafimi, in later skirmishes and in the taking of Palermo, it was the civic identity of the squadre - how their presence among Garibaldi’s forces signalled defiant territoriality - which undermined Bourbon morale and will to resist.

The Montagnards in 1851 and Spain’s blacksmith-led rebel democrats ten years later also hoped that the regular army, faced with such a formidable array of armed citizens from an extensive territory, would negotiate mutually acceptable outcomes would be reached. But, Margadant observes:

It was the historic destiny of the Montagnards to prove that armed demonstrations had become an anachronistic form of political dissent in the French provinces by the mid nineteenth century.

As the Chartists had discovered in England during the 1840s.

Generally, outcomes did not meet expectations. In Sicily, the squadre provided recruits for Garibaldi’s volunteers but rebels who returned home to await promised land and tax reforms were disappointed. In August 1860 a concerted attempt by Democrats in an archipelago of towns on the slopes of Mount Etna to revive the mobilisation of April failed to get beyond village riots, harshly suppressed by Garibaldi’s second in command, Nino Bixio, backed by local National Guards established in 1848 to protect the new class of property owners. In Andalucia, columns of volunteers from cities and towns organised by Democrats since the 1850s provided a vital popular dimension to the Glorious Revolution of September 1868. But these ‘Volunteers of Liberty’ - an attempt to reconstitute the National Militia abolished in 1856 but with a more popular composition as a guarantee of the freedom - were soon crushed, in some places, such as at Málaga on 1 January 1869, quite bloodily. Demobilisation of the Volunteers of Liberty, accompanied by the proscription of republicanism in the new Constitution of June 1869, pushed Republicans into a futile national uprising in October 1869.

Each state increased the presence of the regular army in the provinces, vetted and further demobilised National Guards and Militias and extended compulsory military service, or introduced it for the first time as in case of Sicily. The squadre in Sicily

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degenerated into banditry and, some historians have argued, into the mafia. In Spain all that remained by the Bourbon restoration in 1875 was the myth of armed citizenship within a few republican cells within the standing army.

Rural politicisation?

These defeats revealed the limits of a process of political mobilisation in which local democrats had sought to press home the political advantage of having recruited mass support. Historians debate whether their success reflects the development of a ‘modern’ political consciousness. Eugen Weber is dubious:

Historical interpretation (…) falters when it sets standards inappropriate to the time. There was no particular virtue in sharing the often admirable values of Republicans, of Democrats, of Radicals. The peasant’s own sense of why he acted is difficult to discern, but if he marched simply because he was from Poujols, or because his neighbours or patron urged him to – that too would be normal – and perfectly sensible in the circumstances of that time.

He suggests that participation resulted from a combination of peasant pragmatism, local patronage and deference to local notables. As for the uprisings themselves, these were a product not of modern political organisation but of a highly personalised factionalism, found in most small towns where local power was disputed between a few notable families. In Weber’s view, it was the promise by notables to resolve local grievances that attracted popular followings to democratic and republican movements whose aims they could possibly not possibly comprehend. These would enter villagers’ consciousness only later.

In the case of these three uprising, although there is plenty evidence to show that ‘peasants’ took up arms and joined marches because local notables inspired, ordered, threatened or even paid them to do so, it is also evident that secular trends and short term conjunctures, specific to the time and place, played a part: democratic ideology and party organisation, class resentment, democratic sociability and the promise of social reform, and leadership.

Democratic ideology and party organisation

In hindsight these uprisings, which dramatised their presence by taking local power and occupying central places, seem reckless given the military superiority of standing armies. Behind this though lay rebel leaders’ conviction that they were upholding ideas and principles - the ‘social and democratic republic’ in France, ‘democracy’ and ‘national sovereignty’ in Sicily and Spain - which regimes had trampled on and opposing factions mocked. ‘Democracy’ gained appeal from the infusion of democratic propaganda with religious rhetoric and iconography, bestowing upon it messianic and apocalyptic meanings in villages where the clergy was mostly absent, or, in the case of Sicily, opposed to the Neapolitan regime.

Class resentment,

Organisers also knew that they shared with the ordinary people a resentment of local elites that had most benefitted from the liberal property revolution. During the 1830s and 40s these elites had developed a penchant for displaying their wealth and power in carriages, theatres, casinos, circolos di conversazione, etc. Democrats mocked their neo-aristocratic tastes (they were dubbed ‘señoritos’ in southern Spain), resented their hold over local power and lambasted leading clergymen for gravitating towards them.

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Sociability and the promise of social reform

To compete, democratic leaders – doctors, lawyers, veterinarians, pharmacists, estate managers, merchants, artisans, some priests, even paternalist and enlightened old aristocrats – formed republican and democratic committees, established mutual aid societies associations to attract popular support, promoted policies designed to benefit poorer artisans, small traders and manual labourers, established night schools and reading rooms (gabinetes de lectura) to encourage literacy and useful knowledge, and, attended popular cafés and taverns to extend recruitment, to discuss news and to promote party programmes such as abolition of the military draft and sales taxes. When repression required clandestinity, they extended operations, backing agricultural labourers in labour disputes, pressuring councils to moderate rents and prices and to distribute municipal land among the landless. They also took advantage of presence of society members on parish councils to demonstrate their hold over the masses by staging well attended funerals processions for deceased society members and by infiltrating Easter week, Corpus Christi and saints day processions, etc..

Leaders

Add to the influence of local democrat leaders the occasional charismatic figure and the willingness of men to take to arms is easier to comprehend. The Montagnards had inspiring local and regional leaders but in December 1851 national leaders such as Ledru Rollin faced persecution. Sicily’s squadre at first had the perfect combination in the cosmopolitan yet grassroots political organiser Francesco Crispi and the charismatic leader Garibaldi, but then lost both for a distant and repressive Piedmontese monarchy. The Spanish had their own local Garibaldi look-a-likes but for national leaders had to make do with deceased martyrs such as Sixto Cámara or distant heroes such as Garibaldi.

Yet in the decision of ordinary people to rebel it was local bourgeois – doctors, lawyers, notaries, pharmacists, veterinarians, merchants – whose influence was critical. [Margadant, p.151] Repression therefore targeted them. Many though escaped into exile, or received cover from powerful\local families, leaving more popular leaders and entire communities to catch it in the neck.

Pacification

The pacifications and subsequent trials and punishments had common features. Initially the uprisings were reported officially as upsurges of rural anarchy and barbarism deserving exemplary punishment and mass executions. Yet, in France and Spain, governments knew - and the public was soon informed by the press - that the uprisings were primarily defensive reactions to tougher policing, the removal of liberties and the repression of democratic associational life. And in Sicily in August 1861 Garibaldi and Crispi knew that the uprisings in towns around the slopes of Mount Etna -- however out of hand as in the Bronte case studied by Lucy Riall -- were sparked by the refusal of propertied local elites, who overnight had swopped Bourbon for Garibaldino and Savoyard clothing, to relinquish power and deliver on promised social reforms. As Crispi described the rash of uprisings:

In Bronte, Biancavilla, Polizzi, and many other towns, an inevitable insurrection broke out against the old regime against the money-lenders, against the fat borghesia. This was a war of the ‘berets’ against the ‘hats’, a war that has always existed and will continue forever. [Denis Mack Smith, "The Peasants’ Revolt”, p.195.]

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Hence, military commissions and tribunals set up to try the rebels applied calculated albeit draconian punishments, rather than indiscriminate repression or any generalised escarmiento.

In France, army sweeps through insurgent regions arrested thousands of suspects, military tribunals processing 26,884 cases from over 2,000 communes in 82 departments, 10, 000 of whom were transported Algeria and Cayenne and 10,000 confined to police custody. The Montagnard uprising was so extensive that violent clashes were inevitable, and where these resulted in government losses, soldiers and gendarmes occasionally meted out summary executions. But major skirmishes were rare and the death sentence was reserved for a few conspicuous incidents of criminality such as the murder of a prominent bourgeois. In any case Louis Napoleon commuted most executions to transportation but allowed local authorities to decide when prisoners might return from prison colonies in Algeria and Cayenne. Some were still serving out their sentences in 1859, eight years later. The scale of Montagnard deportations is a measure of the greater politicisation of rural France.

In Sicily and Spain, army sweeps through the rebel regions were swift and faced less well organised insurgencies. Montagnard resistance - columns kept on the move in vain attempts to overstretch government forces - required three months to pacify. By contrast, rebels in eastern Andalucía, converged on a single town – Loja - which they fortified and defended against a regular army siege for almost week. (No Montagnard force achieved such a feat which would have been a major propaganda coup against Louis Napoleon). The Loja Revolution unsettled Spain’s Liberal Union and horrified the moderate Liberal opposition. Sicily’s democratic rebels in August 1860 never moved out of their towns. Their aim was to settle local scores; they expected Crispi and Garibaldi to honour their promises.

The pacification of eastern Andalucía closely resembled that of the Montagnards. The initial order for summary executions was toned down, as military commanders observed that a single execution of notable or influential popular leader in each of the main rebel towns had the desired effect. Hence, only 5 of the 300 executions initially recommended were carried out with 1,183 men (387 bachelors, 720 married men and 76 widowers) sent to overseas presidios. For rural peasant societies, this was exile on an unprecedented scale; again a recognition of the depth of politicisation.

In France and Spain smaller towns which had experienced mass Carbonari enlistment suffered disproportionately from the execution of local ring-leaders and from mass deportation. Larger towns – district and departmental capitals - although sites of public executions, suffered less from mass deportations due to protection rebels received from prominent bourgeois.

In Sicily, with the battle against the Bourbon army still at its height, punishments were swifter and more draconian. A military column under Nino Bixio, Garibaldi’s 2nd in command, combed the rebel area, and hastily established military commissions staged 35 public executions of the most prominent leaders in the four principal rebel towns after the briefest of hearings. This had a shattering effect on the attitude of Sicilians towards their new Piedmontese rulers and it was only the beginning. In contrast to France and Spain, state control in Sicily, particularly at the prefectural and departmental levels, was weak, and clandestine networks correspondingly more fragmented. Repression was more drawn out and states of emergencies were deemed necessary until the late 1860s as the democratic movement, abandoned now by Crispi

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and Garibaldi, degenerated into intimidation, assassination and banditry, opening the way for organised crime.

Conclusion

He hoped his comparison of three democratic uprisings had shed some light on new meanings of democracy at mid century. The diffusion of democratic sociability and political organisation in towns and villages away from major cities in remoter mountainous areas presented ostensibly progressive but centralising regimes with a dilemma – which in each case they resolved by meeting uprisings with implacable force, presenting them as blind and barbaric outbursts of rural atavism comprising gullible peasants preyed upon by dangerous agitators, referred to variously as democrats, socialists, republicans, protestants communists, etc... Harsh repression - summary military justice, exemplary executions, mass imprisonment and transportation to overseas prison colonies - was intended to instil fear and to serve as a warning to the masses never again to entertain utopian dreams or follow local gentlemen into battle.

Democratic Socialists in France – clobbered again in 1871 - would have to await the Third Republic before showing their heads in the Socialist party. In Italy Democrats were excluded from national power until 1876, while Democrats in Sicily went underground, re-emerging in the populist Fasci movements of the mid 1890s, only to be harshly repressed by former Sicilian democrat, now president Francesco Crispi. In Spain popular democratic movements endowed ‘La Gloriosa’ in September 1868 with a popular tint but republicanism was promptly proscribed in the monarchist constitution of 1869. Democrats, now renamed federal republicans, experienced repression even during the short lived 1st Republic and cantonalist movements in 1873-4, before the Bourbon restoration once more closed channels of participation and proscribed popular republican associations. The memory of the 1861 Loja Revolution inspired the newly formed socialist party (PSOE) in the early twentieth century as an example to the young of how an inspiring local leader was able to organise and, above all, control, the masses over a wide territory. [El Motín XXXI, No.4, 26 enero 1911, pp.3-4].

Discussion:

Margaret Crosby-Arnold said that what struck her was that an infrastructure that had been mobilised to deal with people of colour survived into this era: thus, use of deportation, militarisation of police. In the meantime though the balance of power had shifted in that associational culture was more robust, and deportation en masse less common than before.

She wondered why the Spanish ended up with a monarch, Amadeo [1870-3].

Guy said that the reasons for that were very practical. Republican though these people might be – the Carbonari oath included a pledge to kill a monarch – yet it was a matter of what was realistically on offer. [Republicanism was proscribed in the new Constitution of June 1869.]

Joanna suggested an Ottoman comparison, with the rural risings in the Lebanon explored by Ussama Makdisi in his book The culture of sectarianism : community, history, and violence in nineteenth-century Ottoman Lebanon (2000). Or see the not entirely convincing comparative analysis of three Ottoman revolts by Aytekin,

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‘Peasant Protest in the Late Ottoman Empire: Moral Economy, Revolt, and the Tanzimat Reforms’ in International Review of Social History 2012. She said that the Tanzimat seemed to play a role in Ottoman rural culture similar to the role played by 1848 in his account.Ali Yaycioglu said that he thought that in the Ottoman context there was a shift. Earlier, local leaders had been able to sell their organisational capacities to the authorities. By this period, that was less possible; there were clearer boundaries between the legal and the illegal. This changed the way in which alliances were formed.Guy said the demobilisation of national militias could be said to have had the same effects.

Sergio Sanchez Collantes shared an anecdote illustrating the circulation of ideas.. In 1862, an Asturian doctor was caught and take to prison for having several Garibaldi's shirts or jackets he had  obtained and wanted to  give as a gift. He also noted that king Amadeo of Savoy was considered to be a progressive king by republicans (for example, he did not like bullfighting).Guy said that something similar could be said for Maximilian in Mexico.Pablo Sanchez Leon said that a journalist said at the time that nobody called him King, they just called him ‘Amadeo’.