under the direction of the chancellor, the controller-general of finances, and the secretaries of state for the royal household, foreign affairs, war, and marine at Paris. Together with a varying number of influential men who held no portfolio, these six ministers composed a Royal Council, of some forty members in 1789, which was in some respects more truly the center of power than the king himself. The members of the administrative hierarchy could rarely be controlled or called to account by the people, and local self-government was rather a tradition than a fact.2

Third, the Estates General, which, speaking broadly, grew up in France contemporaneously with the rise of the English Parliament, had failed to win for itself any such position as had been arrived at by its counterpart beyond the Channel. In the first place, it had never outgrown the medieval type of assembly organized on the basis of "estates," or orders, with separate interests and distinct traditions. It sat and deliberated. in three separate bodies, or chambers, one representing the nobility, one the clergy, and a third the tiers état, " third estate," or bourgeois, middle class. The first two estates usually agreed on proposals submitted to them, and could always outvote the tiers état. In the second place, whereas the English Parliament met as a rule once a year in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, and on an average at least once every five or six years under the Tudors and Stuarts, the Estates General in France was summoned at extremely irregular intervals, which grew gradually longer, until after 1614 it was summoned no more at all until financial necessity forced the government's hand in 1789. Finally, the assembly never became anything more than a body of men who were agents in relation to their constituents, petitioners in relation to the king, with no general, independent powers, either fiscal or legislative. Regional "estates" survived in Burgundy, Brittany, and Languedoc, and a few other provinces in 1789, but they were hardly more than subsidiary administrative agencies.

Fourth, the entire political system was based on inequality and privilege. The government was notoriously arbitrary and capricious, and it not only "incessantly changed particular regulations or particular laws," as de Tocqueville tells us, but applied a given law in no general or uniform manner to all indi

1 Dupriez, Les ministres, II, 249–253; P. Boiteau d'Ambly, L'état de la France en 1789 (Paris, 1861), 111-143.

2 See p. 466.

viduals. There were no certain guarantees of personal freedom; under a lettre de cachet, or "sealed letter," any one might be arrested summarily and held in prison until it suited the convenience of the authorities to inquire into the merits of his case. In return for a small collective don gratuit (which sometimes was not actually paid), the clergy as a class was exempt from taxation. The nobles paid only such nominal taxes as they bargained with the officials to pay; and both they and the clergy enjoyed many other privileges, including a monopoly of high offices and honors and the feudal, customary right of exploiting the peasantry.1

Growth of Political Liberalism in the Eighteenth Century. The government of the Bourbon kings was thus autocratic, wasteful, corrupt, and burdensome; and in 1789 a tide of protest which had long been rising swept over the head of the luckless Louis XVI and engulfed the whole order of things of which he was a part. This prótest came fundamentally from the great body of the people, and especially from the intelligent, ambitious, and well-to-do bourgeoisie, which supplied most of the constructive statesmanship of the Revolution. It found most lucid and forceful expression, however, in the writings of a remarkable group of critics, essayists, dramatists, and novelists, known collectively as the philosophes. Beginning with the light satire of Montesquieu's Lettres Persanes (1721), this literary and philosophic appraisal of the existing state of things, - in government, law, the Church, education, economic organization, and practically everything else advanced by stages to the bitter denunciations of Voltaire in the "Philosophic Dictionary" (1764) and the "Essay on Republican Ideas " (1765). Criticism was not merely destructive; the underlying aim was the reorganization of society, including government, on the rules of reason and natural justice. In the political field the new thought took, indeed, widely different forms. Voltaire and the Physiocrats, sprung from the privileged classes and careless of political rights, would perpetuate the absolute power of the king, insisting only that the prince use his authority to

1 The state of government before the Revolution is more fully described in Cambridge Modern History, VIII, Chap. ii, and E. J. Lowell, The Eve of the French Revolution (Boston, 1892), Chaps. i, îì, viii. Important French works include A. de Tocqueville, L'Ancien régime (Paris, 1856), trans. by H. Reeve under the title State of Society in France before the Revolution of 1789 and the Causes which led to that Event (new ed., Oxford, 1894), and H. A. Taine, Les origines de la France contemporaine: L'Ancien régime (Paris, 1876), trans. by J. Durand as The Ancient Régime (New York, 1876).

accomplish desirable social and economic reforms. Montesquieu, believing that the merit of the English system of government arose from a division of powers among substantially independent executive, legislative, and judicial authorities, and failing to perceive that the fast-developing cabinet system was creating exactly the opposite situation, denounced despotism and argued for a separation of powers, yet considered strong monarchy a necessary and desirable feature of government in a large country such as France. The more plebeian and radicalminded Rousseau, starting with the concept of a primeval state of nature in which men led a care-free, non-social existence, and assuming that government was originally the product of voluntary contract, developed the doctrine that sovereignty resides only in the body politic, that law is the expression of the public will, that government is established by the sovereign people as its agent to execute the law, that the ideal state would be one in which all functions of government were discharged by the people acting directly, and that where, as in large states, some scheme of delegation of authority becomes necessary, the basis of representation should be men considered as individuals, not classes or interests as in England.2

The writings of the philosophers were important rather as expressing what great numbers of French people were thinking and feeling than as propounding views that were original or novel. Every cardinal doctrine-limited monarchy, separation of powers, and even popular sovereignty had been voiced by political thinkers now and again from Aristotle onwards. More immediately, the French eighteenth century political philosophy was drawn mainly from England. For hundreds of years the English constitution developed without attracting much attention from continental Europe. Its characteristics and advantages were early set forth in English books that were not unknown to scholars on the other side of the Channel, and the French writers who in the sixteenth century made a notable effort to introduce the principles of political liberty in their country explicitly invoked English experience and example. But

1 De l'esprit de lois, published at Geneva in 1748. On Montesquieu's political thought see Dunning, Political Theories from Luther to Montesquieu, Chap. xii. 2 Le contrat social, published at Amsterdam in 1762. See Dunning, "The Political Theories of Jean Jacques Rousseau," in Polit. Sci. Quar., Sept., 1909.

Notably Sir John Fortescue's De laudibus legum Angliae, published early in the sixteenth century (see p. 26), and Thomas Smith's De republica Anglorum libri tres, published in 1630.

The so-called Monarchomachs. See Dunning, "The Monarchomachs," in Polit. Sci. Quar., June, 1904.

late in the century Jean Bodin, who knew more about the English government than any of his contemporaries, pronounced the system bad as being "mixed," and restated the argument for absolutism in a form which held general support for upwards of two hundred years.1

The eighteenth century brought a different attitude. The philosophic spirit, as carried into the field of political science, led to a general inquiry into the governments and laws both of antiquity and of the contemporary world. Some of the reformers, as Rousseau and Mably, found their models in the ancient Greek and Roman republics. But most of them drew heavily upon England for ideas, and even for institutional forms. Montesquieu considered that England, through a happy combination of circumstances, had largely solved the problem of political liberty, and he expounded what he conceived to be the fundamental feature of the English constitution, i.e., the separation of executive, legislative, and judicial powers, with a view to influencing reconstruction in France on similar lines. Voltaire lived in England three years and in his writings continually referred admiringly to English life and institutions. Montesquieu, Rousseau, and in fact every French writer who dealt extensively or systematically with political matters, drew heavily upon John Locke, whose Two Treatises of Government, published in 1689, embodied the most scientific defense of the English Revolution - and therefore of the English constitution in its modern, liberalized form ever made. The social contract, government with limited authority, separation of powers, popular sovereignty, the right of resistance to tyranny, inalienable individual rights to life, liberty, and property these are all in Locke, and all were taken over and amplified by the French school. Shortly before the Revolution, French knowledge of and interest in English political principles and usages were yet farther increased by de Lolme's Constitution de l'Angleterre, published in 1771, and by Blackstone's Commentaries on the Laws of England, published in 1765, and soon circulated widely across the Channel in French translation.3

1 De republica libri sex, published in 1576. See Dunning, Political Theories from Luther to Montesquieu, Chap. iii.

2 The political theory underlying the American Revolution was also derived mainly from Locke and other English liberals. It was confirmed and strengthened by French influences, but it was mainly of English origin. See C. E. Merriam, History of American Political Theories (New York, 1903), 88-95.

3 French political thought in the eighteenth century is fully described in P. Janet, Histoire de la science politique dans ses rapports avec la morale (3d ed., Paris, 1887), II, 263-512, 635–692. A good brief survey is J. H. Reed, "Constitutional Theories

Political Character of the Revolution. Two currents of liberalism, one French and the other English, thus flowed together in the second half of the eighteenth century, and the ever-swelling stream beat upon the retaining walls of tradition, privilege, and absolutism until at length they could withstand the pressure no longer. The old régime in France collapsed; a new order arose, which, notwithstanding long unsettlement and many sharp reverses, eventually established itself securely; the new principles, "by a mighty and irresistible contagion," as a French writer puts it, won the greater part of the nations of Europe and America, which gradually modeled, or remodeled, their constitutions on the same fundamental pattern; and thus was constituted the common fund of principles and institutions in the western world which represents modern liberty.1

Only three or four of the most fundamental contributions of the Revolution itself can here be mentioned. The first was a body of general political principles, drawn mainly from the philosophical sources that have been indicated, and set forth with great clarity and force in the first part of the "Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen," adopted by the National Assembly on August 26, 1789. A few of these principles were: (1) men are born free and remain free and equal in rights; (2) the aim of all political association is the preservation of the natural and imprescriptible rights of man, namely, liberty, property, security, and resistance to oppression; (3) sovereignty resides in the nation, and no body or individual may wield any authority that does not proceed directly from the nation; (4) liberty consists in the freedom to do everything which injures no one else; (5) law is the expression of the public will, and every person has a right to participate, personally or through his representative, in making it; (6) law must be the same for all, whether it protects or punishes.2 A second, and closely related, contribution was a comprehensive and authoriin France in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries," in Polit. Sci. Quar., Dec., 1906. 1 A. Esmein, Éléments de droit constitutionnel français et comparé (4th ed., Paris, 1906), 42.

2 This Declaration, framed in response to popular demand as voiced in the cahiers, was eventually incorporated in the constitution of 1791. The text, in English translation, is printed in F. M. Anderson, Constitutions and other Select Documents Illustrative of the History of France, 1789-1907 (2d ed., Minneapolis, 1908), 59-61. See J. H. Robinson, "The French Declaration of the Rights of Man,' in Pol. Sci. Quar., Dec., 1899; G. Jellinek, Die Erklärung der Menschen- und Burgerrechte (2d ed., Leipzig, 1904), trans. by M. Farrand under the title The Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen New Yo k, 1901); and V. Marcaggi, Les origines de la déclaration des droits de l'homme en 1789.