Liberty and Property. Ellen Wood
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on the rare occasions when they met on the national plane of the Estates General. They were also divided by corporate hierarchy, above all the division between, on the one hand, the two privileged estates, the nobility and the Church, and, on the other hand, the Third Estate, which encompassed both bourgeoisie – the more prosperous non-privileged classes, often urban notables – and peasantry. The emergence of a representative legislative body in France had to await the Revolution; and one of the most striking differences between England and France is that, in France, even when estates were replaced by a national assembly, important sectors of the dominant classes remained opposed to the Republic. The revolutionary transformation created both a new parliamentary tradition, even a radical republicanism, and at the same time a dangerously anti-parliamentary, anti-republican formation, which persisted well into the twentieth century and explains much that would happen in France in the Second World War.
The French legal system also developed in ways sharply different from the English. Not only was there a long-standing division between the Roman law which survived in the south and the Germanic customary law of the north, but in addition, on the eve of the Revolution there were still approximately 360 different law codes in France, with various seigneurial, local and corporate powers contesting jurisdiction with the monarchy, and customary law challenging the supremacy of state legislation. Although the absolutist state succeeded to a considerable degree in limiting seigneurial and local jurisdiction, jurisdictional conflicts remained a constant feature of the ancien régime and a major preoccupation of French courts. The aristocracy and corporate bodies clung to their autonomy and independence from the national state, while the monarchy continued its efforts to co-opt and integrate them.
When monarchical absolutism gave way to Revolution, the centralizing project of the state continued. The French état légal evolved not as a defence of private rights against public incursions but as a means of asserting the power of the central state against fragmented jurisdictions and independent local powers. This limited the independence of the judiciary, effectively absorbing it into the civil service. It remained for Napoleon to complete the project begun by the Revolution. While the judiciary would regain some of its autonomy in the Fifth Republic of 1958, the historic function of the law in asserting state sovereignty against autonomous jurisdictions remains a powerful legacy.
Relations between central state and landed aristocracy, then, were quite different from the English case. In contrast to the close English partnership between the aristocracy and monarchy, in France the tensions between aristocratic privilege and monarchical power, between different modes of extra-economic exploitation, persisted until the Revolution. At the same time, the aristocracy itself was divided between those with power in the central state and the many who remained dependent on their privileges and local powers; and this division continued to be fluid. The centralizing project of the state can be understood as in large part an attempt to overcome that division by replacing autonomous aristocratic powers with perquisites and privileges deriving from the state – for instance, by granting privileged exemption from royal taxation in place of seigneurial jurisdiction.
As for the bourgeoisie, throughout the ancien régime and beyond, state office would be a favoured career. Notwithstanding the conventional conflation of ‘bourgeois’ with ‘capitalist’, the French bourgeoisie was not in essence capitalist. While France was certainly a major trading nation, the majority of ‘bourgeois’ were urban notables or functionaries of various kinds, office-holders, professionals, intellectuals; and even those engaged in commerce (who might also be inclined to use their wealth to buy ennobling office) were operating on familiar principles of non-capitalist commercial profit-taking.13 When the Revolution came, the revolutionary bourgeoisie – typically consisting precisely of those office-holders, professionals and intellectuals – was less concerned with breaking the shackles impeding the development of capitalism, as is often suggested by the notion of the ‘bourgeois revolution’, than with preserving and enhancing their access to the highest state office, ‘careers open to talent’. It was, indeed, a threat to the access they already enjoyed under the absolutist monarchy that probably more than anything else provoked the bourgeoisie into revolution and a confrontation between bourgeoisie and aristocracy.
Although private property in office was abolished by the Revolution, state office remained a lucrative career, in which office-holders appropriated the surplus labour of peasants through taxation. Even after the Revolution, even after Napoleon, the state continued to serve this economic function for the bourgeoisie. The peasantry, which remained in possession of most land in France, continued to be exploited by extra-economic means, through the medium of state taxation. The Revolution did not radically transform the social property relations between the state and small agricultural producers which had prevailed in absolutist France.
While the Revolution may have been ‘bourgeois’, then, there was little that was ‘capitalist’ about it. If, in its political principles and in its legacies it went far beyond the ‘bourgeois’ impulses that first set it in motion, there remained strong continuities between the ancien régime and the post-revolutionary state. What is so striking about the post-revolutionary period, throughout much of the nineteenth century in France, is the persistence of the tax/office structure, in which appropriation took the form of direct exploitation of peasant producers by the state through taxation. Not only did the economy continue to be based on small-scale agricultural production, but the state continued to relate to that production as a primary exploiter of direct producers through the medium of taxation, for the benefit of office-holders.
One has only to read Marx’s account of nineteenth-century France in the 18th Brumaire to see how persistent this formation was. He speaks of the ‘immense bureaucratic and military organization’, a ‘frightful parasitic body’, in which the ‘material interest of the French bourgeoisie is most intimately imbricated. It is that machine which provides the surplus population with jobs, and makes up through state salaries for what it cannot pocket in the form of profits, interest, rents and fees.’ This bourgeois tradition would continue well into the twentieth century, if not until today, in a culture where state office would remain the highest career, with a tradition of mandarinism, dominated by a hereditary elite of office-holders and their exclusive academies.
Economic development in a capitalist direction was, in France, largely driven from without, in particular by military pressures. After the Revolution, the defeat of Napoleon not only made clear the military advantage that a victorious Britain had gained from the economic growth and wealth created by capitalism but also opened the former Napoleonic empire to the purely economic pressures of British capitalism in unprecedented ways. The state responded to those external imperatives by bringing about a state-led development of the economy. In a sense, the development of capitalism preceded social transformation; and, in contrast to England, capitalist class relations were more a result than a cause of industrialization.
Modern Political Thought?
It is certainly true that the emergence of national states with clear territorial boundaries and a more or less unified sovereign power created conditions for new developments in Western political thought – but perhaps not quite in the ways that Skinner has suggested. It does make sense to identify the rise of territorial states in Europe as a major historical development, a departure from the parcellized sovereignty of previous centuries; but it helps very little to describe these states as ‘modern’ if that label disguises important historical differences, such as those we have already observed between England and France. Is absolutist France more modern because of its elaborate bureaucracy, the sign of a ‘rational’ state? Or should we give the prize to England, because its centralized state, however ‘irrational’ in Weberian terms, has more completely asserted its sovereignty against autonomous powers of various kinds and has largely ceased to be a form of property?
It also makes sense to single out the rise of the ‘market economy’ as a critical development, but what precisely makes a market ‘modern’ as distinct from ‘ancient’? There were vast commercial networks in various parts of the world long before the advent of ‘modernity’, and it is not at all clear that the trade we see in ‘early modern’ Europe is operating on significantly different principles, the age-old practices of buying cheap and selling dear. It cannot be simply a matter of scale, or else why should Europe in the sixteenth century be more modern than India