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ОглавлениеDominance without Hegemony: The Argument Assessed
As I have noted, Ranajit Guha’s argument regarding the bourgeois paths to power in Europe, and then in India, is foundational to the Subalternist enterprise. It cannot be regarded merely as a component specific to the early years of Subaltern Studies—as a residue of the Subalternists’ immersion in Indian Marxism which was then abandoned in later work. Dominance without Hegemony was released in 1997, very much in the mature phase of the Subalternist project, and its arguments were clearly intended to elaborate the highly compressed declarations of the inaugural volume in the series. In its essentials, the book is entirely faithful to the earlier propositions and thereby upholds a powerful line of continuity across the career of Subaltern Studies. Moreover, in subsequent work Guha has said nothing to suggest a deviation from the book’s conclusions. Finally, his assessment of the “structural fault” separating the Indian bourgeoisie from its early modern predecessors in Europe is endorsed by other leading members of the collective, in particular by Dipesh Chakrabarty in his summation of Subaltern Studies’ theoretical commitments.1 Having elaborated in some detail the structure of Guha’s argument and the evidence he marshals in its defense, we are now positioned to offer an assessment.
In this chapter, I examine the British and French experience in far greater depth than does Guha. His version of the story occurs in highly compressed statements scattered across three essays and always presented in the form of assertion, never as argument. By contrast, I heap attention on the two cases. The level of detail I bring to the subject might strike the reader as incongruous, even excessive, but I would urge that it is warranted. As I suggested in the previous chapter, Guha’s argument about the peculiarity of colonial modernity rests on a deeper claim about the departure of the Indian bourgeois revolution—the struggle for independence from British rule—from the classic experiences of early modern Europe. He does not simply rest his case on a descriptive account of how India was transformed by colonial rule. Instead it is a comparative story about how India’s experience embodied a departure from other experiences, which the current historiography has been unable to capture because it subsumes the Subcontinent into the same general narrative as Europe. In stressing the specificity of the colonial experience, Guha’s argument is essentially and unavoidably contrastive.
A good indication of the contrastive nature of Guha’s argument is that one could accept his factual descriptions of India’s colonial history and the nature of the independence movement, while denying his conclusion that they constituted a historical break from the experience in Europe. Our judgment on whether capital abandoned its universalizing mission depends entirely on our standard for what such a mission entails, and that standard can only be based on our understanding of other, baseline cases. The claim that the bourgeoisie abandoned its mission to transform society cannot be upheld except in comparison to other cases. Without a defensible understanding of the story that forms the comparison, all we know is that something happened in India—that the Indian National Congress came to power, that it had a particular orientation toward the laboring classes, that industrialists had their own views and certain priorities. But for all we know, these facts about India could be the norm. It is perfectly possible that they could be in line with other experiences of state formation or political modernization. Perhaps the Indian experience is just what modernity looks like. If we are to accept Guha’s conclusions regarding the peculiarity of India’s ascent into modernity, we cannot avoid taking a deeper look at the cases that form his baseline: England and France.
I contend that the case Guha builds for the contrast between the classic bourgeois revolutions and the Indian experience is untenable. The episodes he has in mind—the English Civil Wars of 1640–8 and the French Revolution of 1789—were simply not driven by the forces he thinks were at work, nor did they directly produce the consequences he assigns to them. In fine, neither can be defended as a “bourgeois revolution” in the sense that Guha uses the term. The reasons they cannot be so described are different in each case, and so must be addressed each in turn. But in both instances the end point of the analysis is the same.
The significance of this finding is profound, not only for Guha’s argument but for the larger verdict tendered by Subaltern Studies for Indian history and beyond. It turns out that once the two European cases are properly described, the Indian experience no longer appears as a deviation from some classic norm. Indeed, the bourgeoisie’s road to power in the Indian Subcontinent now appears quite consistent with the European experience and settles comfortably into the grooves laid down by them. If this is so, a central plank for the Subalternists’ insistence on a chasm—a “structural fault”—separating the Indian postcolonial formation from Europe will have been dismantled. What this means, and just how significant it might be, is to be explored in the chapters to follow.
The basic facts about the English Revolution are not in dispute. In 1640, the Stuart monarch Charles I convened Parliament for the first time since having dissolved it eleven years earlier. He did so reluctantly, largely in order to raise funds to push back an advancing Scottish army. For much of his reign, Charles had been straining to break free of parliamentary controls on his power. The goal had been to concentrate financial and military initiative in the hands of the monarchy, much as Spain and France were doing across the English Channel. The onset of a new cycle of interstate conflict in the 1620s had made this seem something of an imperative to the Stuarts, who were acutely aware that, on a geopolitical scale, England was still no match for the Catholic powers on the Continent.3 The prospects of following suit, in the direction of an Absolutist monarchy, must have seemed necessary if England were to hold its own against more powerful rivals. The problem was that any attempt to centralize power in this fashion brought the Stuarts into tension with England’s landed classes, who had to agree either to new taxation or to less control over fiscal policy. And the landowners had at their disposal a powerful instrument in the form of the English parliament, an institution largely under their control.
So, when Charles convened Parliament in 1640, after having cast it into the wilderness for eleven years, his agenda unleashed a storm of controversy. Parliament wished to reassert its authority in matters of state, against what it took to be a grasping and incipiently autocratic king, while Charles wished to defend what he took to be his legitimate authority as monarch. The intensity of the conflict between Parliament and king only deepened over the course of the following months, until, in the summer of 1642, civil war broke out. In 1649, after more than seven years of conflict, the New Model Army, under the leadership of Oliver Cromwell, finally won a decisive victory over Royalist forces. It marched triumphantly into London in December 1648, and on January 30, 1649, Charles I was beheaded, the monarchy overturned, and England declared a republic.
For those who have interpreted these events as a bourgeois revolution, the two sides in the war have been taken as representatives of two classes and two antagonistic economic systems. The parliamentary forces, especially the House of Commons, have been viewed as agents of the rising capitalist class, while the royalist side has been viewed as the recalcitrant feudal nobility, standing by the greatest of all feudal lords: the king.4 The victory of Parliament and its New Model Army is naturally presented as the triumph of the bourgeoisie over a decrepit feudal order. This is the interpretation Guha evidently draws on, and apparently regards as so self-evident that he does not feel pressed to offer any evidence on its behalf. His disregard of the matter is curious, for by the late 1980s—the years in which he was developing his initial formulations into the full-fledged essays that comprise Dominance without Hegemony—this interpretation of the English Revolution was almost universally understood as being unsustainable. Even Christopher Hill, perhaps the most illustrious defender of the “bourgeois antifeudal project” view, had beaten a tactical retreat.5 The problem starts with the basic claim that the revolution was launched by a capitalist class to dismantle a feudal political economy.
THE PROBLEM OF FEUDALISM
The fundamental flaw with the view that Guha reproduces is that, by 1640, there was no structural division in the landed class, with a rising capitalist gentry on one side and a refractory feudal nobility on the other. Indeed, by the early decades of the seventeenth century, the English countryside had been largely transformed, so that feudal agrarian relations were a thing of the past all across the kingdom.6 Rural surplus appropriators were, in general, committed to market-dependent forms of production, feudal dues having been replaced by capitalist rent or profits. Hence, there was simply no question of the revolution being antifeudal, since there was quite simply no feudalism to shift away from. The conflict that unfolded and then spiraled into civil war after 1640 took place entirely within a class of agrarian capitalists. The rural magnates that organized Cromwell’s New Model Army as well as those lined up against them on the Royalist side were all capitalists. To be sure, differences in size and status still existed. But these did not map onto divergent modes of surplus appropriation. The war was not waged to install a capitalist order; rather, it was waged over what kind of capitalist order England ought to have.
The issue that brought so much of the landed class to loggerheads with the Stuart monarchy was not the need to transform rural economic relations, but the monarchy’s apparent push toward absolutism. It was a fight over the political order. Over the course of the sixteenth century, the rural gentry had secured its power at the local level. It dominated the Justices of the Peace, the county courts, the religious institutions, and so on, much as the feudal classes had done in medieval times. Now, however, these institutions were turned to the protection of absolute rights in landed property and, through that, the rule of the agrarian bourgeoisie. The Tudor monarchy had, both directly and indirectly, aided the stabilization of gentry rule at the local level. While this did have the effect of underwriting a gradual uptick in rural economic growth, making it possible for England to emerge as perhaps the most dynamic economy in Europe by the turn of the seventeenth century, it also generated a structural dilemma.7 Unlike its rivals on the Continent, the English monarchy had not been able to develop its own apparatus for revenue collection. It relied instead on the domestic landed classes to collect and deliver up its tax revenues.8 This meant that as the pressures of war intensified and the Stuarts felt obliged to ratchet up the intensity of rural taxation, they came into continual conflict with agrarian elites, who viewed this as an encroachment on their own power. What especially rankled was not just the pitch of taxation, but the gentry’s sentiment that their pivotal role in the generation and disbursement of revenue was not matched by a corresponding power within the state. The thrust toward absolutism was thus viewed by the landed classes as an attack on their freedom to rule.9
For the monarchy, the solution to the problem was to reduce its dependence on lordly cooperation in all matters of state, by building new instruments of fiscal and legislative autonomy, centralizing power in the Crown, and reducing the power of Parliament. For the rural lords, the imperative was to reassert their sovereignty as masters of the political nation, to defend the rightful power of Parliament, and in so doing, to beat back the Stuart monarchy’s centralizing ambitions. Their reaction to the centralizing drive did not in any way entail a revolutionary break from, or transformation of, the larger social system. Indeed, the gentry largely understood its mission to be the preservation of the political order from Charles’s grasping hand. After all, this economic and political system served their interests well. They were the only lordly class in Europe to have won absolute property rights in land; they dominated county and parish juridical institutions; they had carried through the Reformation and hegemonized the local Church; and they had real national representation. As long as the national-level institutions could be kept in line with the basic conditions of lordly domination at the local level, the rural gentry’s position would be unassailable for the foreseeable future.10 The lords’ goal was, in effect, reformist: to bring the state back into line with earlier patterns of rule by dismantling the instruments that gave Charles increased power over them. This was not a trivial matter, to be sure. It entailed a direct confrontation with the Crown. But it did not impel them to launch an assault on the social order—since it was their social order.
THE POLITICAL COALITION
If Guha’s characterization of the conflict as antifeudal is misleading, so is his understanding of its political base. In his account, the bourgeoisie launches its confrontation with the feudal state by building a coalition with other classes, including peasants and urban labor—and they agree to its leadership. He takes this consent to have rested on the parliamentary leadership’s construction of a program that represented the authentic interests of popular forces. The central planks of the program were the dismantling of feudal economic restrictions and the expansion of political rights for the lower orders. Guha credits the bourgeoisie for initiating these elements, and this is the basis for his criticism of the Indian capitalist class, in that they refused to promulgate a similar program. But here, too, his presentation steers wide of the facts.
It is true that the revolution unleashed an avalanche of popular initiatives, which, for a while, did expand the political order. This was not, however, because of a bourgeois commitment to cobbling together a broad social coalition. In fact, the intention of parliamentary leaders in 1640 was to keep the social coalition on their side as narrow as possible. What they wanted was to push Charles into accepting their demands for parliamentary and religious reform without having to mobilize popular forces. It was to be an elite pact. Within the House of Commons, gentry support for reform in 1640–1 was widespread, and given Charles’s desperate situation with regard to the invading Scottish forces, a unified opposition was quite effective in pressing its demands. By the summer of 1641, the parliamentary opposition had achieved most of its political objectives by legislative means. Hardly a sword had yet been drawn. If anything, the early and easy success of the parliamentary initiative was evidence that a revolution was unnecessary. There is considerable evidence that the leadership wanted to complement legislative changes with positions for John Pym and a few other MPs on Charles’s Privy Council, the immediate body of advisors on whom the king relied for policy. This was not revolution; it was reform backed by a change in the power elite.
The matter could have perhaps ended there, but for the fact that Charles gave every signal that although he had agreed to the anti-absolutist measures as a temporary expedient, he would likely move to reassert his power once the balance swung back in his favor. That this was a real danger was made clear in the fall of 1641, as evidence mounted that he was plotting a military coup against the parliamentary opposition. Parliamentary forces led by Pym saw little choice but to press for further powers, if only to defend themselves, and so, by the end of 1642, they were demanding greater control over the military as well as ministerial appointments. In addition, and perhaps most important, the opposition began to respond to rapidly building popular pressure in London, which was mobilizing to defend the measures passed during the early phase of the rebellion, and also pushing for greater haste and ambition in the reform process—by force, if need be. London quickly became the center of a powerful mass movement, buoying the spirit and strength of the opposition.11
The entry of the London crowds unalterably changed the character of the conflict. Thus far, Pym and his colleagues had kept it an elite affair, intended to shift the balance from king to Parliament, but with no serious ambitions beyond that. The arrival of the popular classes forced a shift in the rebellion’s entire structure—but the change was double-edged. While it emboldened some parliamentary leaders to press their demands further, their confidence bolstered by the acquisition of a new mass base, the movement also had the effect of diluting support for the rebellion within the ruling class. As long as the “meaner sort” had been kept out of the conflict with Charles, the parameters of the negotiations could be carefully managed, so that the reforms under consideration did not reach beyond the balance between two distinct segments of the ruling class—the monarchy and the landed classes. Now, however, demands made on the leadership by the swelling crowds raced ahead of the leadership’s initial designs.12 A victory by Parliament could thus betoken a deep transformation of the existing religious, political, and social hierarchies.
For much of the parliamentary leadership, such an outcome was beyond the pale. They now had to weigh which outcome was the more detestable—the possibility of Charles’s emerging from the conflict unscathed, though perhaps weaker, or the likely losses in the event that a radical mass movement took power. For most of the aristocrats in Parliament, the prospect of the former was distinctly preferable to the latter. Even while a resuscitated Stuart rule would be obnoxious, it would at least defend lordly dominance over the rabble. As a result, in 1642 a large section of the parliamentary leadership defected from the rebellion. They did not all go over to the Royalist side. In fact, most seem to have settled into an anxious neutrality as the conflict escalated. But there is no doubt that a substantial number preferred to join the Royalist camp against the rising power of the popular forces. Hence, in the summer of 1642, as it became clear that Charles was assembling an armed force to march into London, 302 MPs remained with the opposition to prepare for its defense while 236 MPs left London altogether, most of whom probably joined Charles.13 Whereas the members of Parliament had been almost totally united in the early months of the conflict, they were now almost evenly split. Thus, the London crowds saved Pym and his colleagues from Charles’s military coup, but at the cost of driving other members into the arms of the monarchy.
As for those who remained committed to the parliamentary cause, their willingness to lean on popular forces in its defense did not by any means suggest an embrace of radical demands. Indeed, even though their disdain for “the meaner sort” was less intense than that of the defectors to the Royalist side, opposition leaders still regarded the mass movement as a necessary evil at best. The core strategy of the gentry leadership over the duration of the conflict was to push for victory while simultaneously containing the spread of radicalism. These leaders had never wanted a revolution, had never countenanced taking up arms against the monarchy, and had certainly not intended to unleash the fury of mass radicalism. What they had wanted was to push back the drive to an absolutist state, and they had achieved that goal in 1641. It was Charles’s obstinacy that had forced them to turn to the crowds for support. Now the key was to restore the balance, suitably modified by anti-absolutist legislation.
In the earlier phase of the war with Charles, the preferred route to this end was to reach a settlement with the deposed monarch as quickly as possible. As long as he agreed to the measures passed by Parliament in the early months of the conflict, his return to the throne was the best way to restore order. For months, the parliamentary leadership sent out feelers to the Royalist forces seeking just such a truce—but Charles would have none of it. The war thus continued to its gruesome end as Cromwell finally secured victory in the fall of 1648. Meanwhile, as the opposition gained strength and radical forces extended their influence, gentry support for the opposition grew correspondingly thinner. By the time Cromwell ordered the beheading of Charles, parliamentary power rested on a wafer-thin section of the English ruling class. 14
The relationship of the bourgeois leadership to the laboring classes was thus quite different from Guha’s presentation of it. The opposition leadership had never intended to lead a revolution; what it had hoped for was an elite pact, pushed through on the strength of Parliament’s unity and Charles’s desperation. What turned the conflict into civil war, and then a potential revolution, was the combination of Charles’s recalcitrance and the entrance of the London masses onto the scene. The opposition leadership did accept the support of the mass movement, but only reluctantly, and at the cost of driving more and more sections of the ruling class into the Royalist camp. There was no commitment to fashioning a political program that respected the authentic interests of the laboring classes. On the contrary, the energy of the leadership was directed to finding ways of securing victory while conceding as little as possible to the lower orders.
THE REVOLUTIONARY SETTLEMENT
Guha attributes the genesis of modern political liberalism to the struggle of the bourgeoisie against feudal rule, and traces the genealogy of this liberal culture to the incorporation of subaltern interests into the political program of the revolutionary bourgeoisie. This is the “heroism” he attributes to British capital. At a formal level, his surmise is correct—there was a connection between the revolutionary strategy of British elites and the kind of political order they subsequently constructed. But its substance was rather different from Guha’s understanding of the matter. The continuity between the two phases of their ascent to power—the revolutionary struggle and the construction of the new state—was marked by the landed class’s efforts to constrict the political arena to the greatest extent possible, so that subaltern groups would be frozen out of the emergent political nation. This began in the course of the Civil Wars and accelerated after the Restoration in 1660.15
Civil war unleashed an explosion of popular energy, which found expression above all in a phenomenon relatively new to British political culture—tens of thousands of pamphlets, petitions, magazines, leaflets, and handbills that expressed the aspirations of the popular classes.16 To a certain extent, the landed classes and their elite allies shared in this new discourse. In so violent a struggle, in which each side was trying to muster public support for its position, there was a need to justify the actions taken and for each camp to make the case that its interests were identical with the public interest. In this broadened space for ideological contestation, the elites could not prevent the eruption of popular demands for political rights. It was in this context that groupings such as the Levellers and Diggers came to the fore—groups regarded by many scholars as the first modern proponents of an egalitarian political ideology.17 Radical ideas spread rapidly across the realm, particularly in cities, but their strongest base was probably within the army.
The influence of radical ideas—by which we mean here the demand for political and religious liberalism—was handicapped by two main weaknesses. The first was that their currency remained limited. To be sure, they found a significant mass base in London and other urban centers,18 but outside the cities they found nowhere near the same level of popular support. This made the political balance in England quite different from what obtained in France at the time of its own revolution, where peasants constituted an authentic force for radical change.
The second weakness was that, being the sharp end of the popular movement for inclusion, the spread of radical ideas only further galvanized the sentiment within the landed classes that the optimal course of action was to restore order as soon as possible. Over the course of the Civil Wars, gentry domination of local institutions had been challenged—though by no means eclipsed—by the entrance of new groupings into positions of authority. 19 This was a direct blow to the very order that the gentry had sought to protect from Charles’s encroachments, and for the sake of which it had launched its struggle. The growth of radicalism threatened not only to give ideological license to these developments but to further empower new challengers. The solution that parliamentary forces sought to institutionalize was a new political order that would restore old social hierarchies, minus the drive to an absolutist state—much along the lines of what they thought they had secured in 1641, before Charles began to amass his forces. After the beheading of Charles, the landed classes’ support for Cromwell rested on their confidence that he would stamp out radical ideas but would also respect their own anti-absolutist commitments.20 It would be a mistake to underestimate the importance of the former—namely, the need to eradicate the demands for subaltern political inclusion. Its weight was such that the gentry showed itself willing to revive monarchical rule less than one year after Cromwell’s death, when the Stuarts were restored to the throne in the person of Charles II.21 Clearly, by 1660 the ruling class regarded the need to push back popular forces—to roll back liberal gains—as its most pressing concern.
We must be clear about what was happening. The English Civil Wars had generated a new concept of political legitimacy. Whereas in medieval political doctrine, sovereignty had rested in the monarchy, it now was seen to reside in the nation. This was an epochal shift in the understanding of the political community. But while legitimacy was now transferred to the nation, the groupings or classes that constituted the nation was not yet settled. Gentry strategy after 1649 was to ensure that the popular classes were kept out of the new concept of the nation. As David Loades has concluded,
The bitter ideological strife of the 1640s produced a reaction which lasted many years and was not repeated in the next crisis of 1688–89. At the same time, the aristocracy had received a sharp lesson. “Posterity will say,” a royalist writer had declared in 1649, “that we overthrew the king to subject ourselves to the tyranny of the base rabble.” Thanks to Cromwell, this had not happened, but it had come close enough to constitute an unmistakable warning of the dangers which could follow if the “lower orders” were called in to settle quarrels within the ruling class. The experience was never to be forgotten and was not to be repeated in this country until the eve of the present [i.e., twentieth] century.22
The rebellion had never intended that power devolve beyond members of the ruling class. The time had come to bring the rabble back into line. In this effort to restore order, the landed classes largely succeeded. For a brief moment, from 1689 to the first decade of the next century, political space expanded, as both the electorate and the frequency of elections increased in number.23 But this opening was short-lived. The ascension of George III in 1714 inaugurated a long and suffocating process of political constriction. In essence, the Crown forged a modus vivendi with the bourgeois aristocracy, allowing them to consolidate their power in the localities in exchange for their support of far-reaching financial and administrative reforms.24 It was these reforms that enabled the construction of England’s fiscal-military state, by mid-century the most fearsome military apparatus in the Western world. The flip side of this state-building process, however, was the long-term disenfranchisement of the lower orders. As David Underdown notes, the Restoration unleashed an ongoing constriction of the political nation—not, as Guha suggests, its expansion.25
The most glaring element of the regime’s oligarchic nature was its narrow electoral base. By the time of George III’s ascension, the landed classes had begun a slow strangulation of the political arena, adding one obstacle after another to lower-class participation. Over the course of the eighteenth century, the nascent and increasingly vital electoral arena came under the tightening grip of the Whig oligarchy, only to be followed by decades of Tory hegemony. Expansion of this domain of politics did not occur again until the Reform Act of 1832, and it is sobering to contemplate that by the time it passed, the franchise in England was smaller and narrower than it had been in 1630.26 But the exclusion of the popular classes went far beyond the electoral arena. The entire structure of the political system was punitive. Trade unions did not get legal protection until 1871; indentured labor was a common practice well into the late nineteenth century (as I show in chapter 5); the legal system imposed draconian penalties, even capital punishment, for petty theft.27 The radical promise of 1640, embodied in the demands of groups such as the Levellers and the Quakers, was driven underground by the 1720s, reappearing periodically in bursts of militancy; exported to the Continent, radical ideas took root in France and elsewhere but achieved little institutional anchorage in England, where they originated.28 The enduring political consequence of the English Civil Wars was a bourgeois oligarchy, not a new and expansive political nation.
We can safely conclude that the English Revolution did not substantively resemble Guha’s depiction of it in any of the three dimensions he cites as evidence of the “heroism” of the bourgeoisie—its putative antifeudal, antilandlord objectives; its creation of an inclusive, hegemonic coalition, constructed to recognize and reflect subaltern aspirations; or its creation of a liberal social order after the acquisition of state power. In each of these domains, as we have seen, the actual practice of the English bourgeoisie was at odds with Guha’s portrayal. It was not antifeudal because there was little left of the feudal agrarian structure; it was either indifferent to or contemptuous of subaltern interests in the actual conflict, accommodating them only when absolutely unavoidable; and its political strategy, during the campaign and after, was to exclude the lower order from politics. These facts are very well known. What is remarkable is that Guha seems unaware of them, and even more so, that the historical profession has allowed these misconceptions to pass uncontested.
Guha would seem to be on surer ground in his characterization of the French Revolution than of the English. For most of the twentieth century, the events of 1789 were taken as paradigmatic of the bourgeoisie’s revolutionary capture of power. If any revolution was antifeudal, devoted to liberalism—indeed, was it not inspired by Enlightenment ideas?—and paradigmatically modern in its political discourse, surely it must be the French. But in fact, here too the historiography has not been kind to Guha’s interpretation. To be sure, the revolution did culminate in the end of centuries-old seignorial rule in the agrarian economy, and, in that sense, yes, it was genuinely antifeudal. And true, it also opened up the space for political contestation in the direction of liberalism to a greater extent than any preceding revolution. In these respects, the French Revolution was a decidedly epoch-making event. But while these characteristics of the revolution do make it unarguably significant, closer inspection reveals little to confirm Guha’s specific propositions concerning its significance: namely, that it was led by a rising capitalist class, that this class launched the conflict in order to install a liberal economic and political order, and that it did so by attracting the peasants and workers to its program.
THE REVOLUTION AND THE BOURGEOISIE
The English Revolution could not be antifeudal because it occurred after the transition to capitalism had already been completed. In France, capitalism had barely begun to sprout by 1789. Hence, there was every possibility for the revolution to be antifeudal, and in fact, this was one of its defining characteristics. The problem is that it was not led by actors who in any sense could be described as capitalists.
In some respects, the background to the French Revolution is remarkably reminiscent of the English experience of a century prior. Much as was the case with the Stuarts, the ruling Bourbon dynasty was confronted with a catastrophic imbalance between the military and geopolitical demands being made on the state, on the one hand, and the revenues available to fund them, on the other. In the course of the eighteenth century, France had been locked in almost perpetual conflict with England, the most recent of which—the Seven Years’ War—had resulted in humiliating defeat. The root of the fiscal weakness was an agrarian economy still encased in precapitalist property relations, unlike the more dynamic English agriculture. Backward agriculture, of course, made for a slow-growing revenue base, a situation aggravated by the fact that the French nobility was largely exempt from taxation. Over the centuries, the French state had been able to expand its reach only through the expedient of reaching an accommodation with regional landed magnates, granting them state office and exemptions from taxation in exchange for their political support. Consequently, the flow from an already low revenue base was reduced even further, as monies that could have buoyed the exchequer went instead into the nobility’s coffers. By the end of the century, what had originated as an expedient had turned into a curse. The panoply of exemptions and perquisites had locked the state into perpetual fiscal crisis.29
Faced with a treasury verging on collapse, the Crown had no choice but to push for greater revenue. The most feasible approach was to reconsider the myriad privileges and tax exemptions that had been granted to the nobility over the centuries. But the landed magnates would hardly relinquish their prerogatives without a struggle. Faced with a serious crisis of governance, Louis XVI agreed to convene the Estates-General, a national assembly that brought together representatives of all three orders—the nobility, the clergy, and the so-called Third Estate, the 97 percent of the population that belonged to neither. The twelve hundred delegates were chosen through a national electoral process and converged on Versailles in May 1789. Within days, it was clear there would be no simple way out of the crisis. The delegates found themselves at loggerheads.30
At the heart of the impasse was a divergence of goals among the delegates to the Estates-General. On some basic points regarding the desired direction of reform, opinion did converge. Virtually all the delegates agreed on the need to scale back the arbitrary use of power by the monarchy—in other words, that Bourbon absolutism needed to be dismantled. But beyond this, the vision of the new order fractured. For the nobility, the goal was to pare down the Crown’s powers while retaining as many of their own privileges as possible; their desired new regime would be a constitutional monarchy, but geared to the preservation of noble power and dominance. For representatives of the Third Estate, reform would be pointless if noble privileges were left untouched. Louis XVI certainly had to accept a diminution of his powers, but this would be of little use if not accompanied by more opportunities for professional and social advancement for non-noble moneyed groupings—the strata represented at the convention under the rubric of the Third Estate.31 So, while the latter rallied to the nobility’s call to hem in monarchical arbitrariness, they also raised the cry for equality before the law and an end to noble privilege, thus directly pitting themselves against most of the noble delegates.
What had begun as a call to discuss avenues for fiscal reform rapidly turned into a campaign to dismantle the absolutist state. It is important to stress, however, that almost none of the delegates construed this goal as a call to revolution. There was a commitment to political change, to be sure, but even the most radical of the delegates imagined nothing more drastic than turning France into a constitutional monarchy.32 Certainly, the bourgeois delegates of the Third Estate showed no ex ante commitment to popular sovereignty.33 Much as in the English case, the horizons of even the most refractory elements in the reform coalition were confined to expanding their own power. This amounted to a diminution of arbitrary use of power by the state and an expansion of political space for whichever elite group the delegate happened to represent. For the Third Estate, reform thus meant greater political and social scope for themselves, but with no commitment to greater rights for subaltern groups. Indeed, in the most famous tract to emerge from the Third—Abbé Sieyès, What Is the Third Estate?—there was an explicit rejection of political rights for those without property.34 Nobody came to Versailles in 1789 carrying a program for bourgeois revolution.
If the Third Estate was not revolutionary, neither was it capitalist. For purposes of assessing Guha’s argument, this is perhaps the central point. Of those who represented the Third Estate, from whom would emerge the leaders of the French Revolution, the overwhelming majority had nothing to do with capitalist production. There were 610 representatives of the Third Estate, and only ninety of them had anything to do with commerce. Even here, most of the ninety were petty bourgeois—shopkeepers, merchants, and so on. Only about ten were involved with industrial production, and most of these were from traditional, heavily protected sectors. Even more damaging, those who would later emerge as the Jacobin faction were among the poorest of the delegates, closer to the plebeian world of the Parisian masses than to the glitter of the moneyed classes. The vast majority of the delegates who came representing the Third Estate were people who today would be called the salaried middle class. In fact, of the 610 delegates, some five hundred were associated with the legal profession.35 If the social background of the delegates to Versailles is relevant to the characterization of the revolutionary coalition—and surely it must be—then there is little to warrant labeling it as “bourgeois” in the modern sense of the term.
The lack of correspondence between the use of the word and its current meaning was also true in the larger society. The delegates of the Third Estate were often referred to as “bourgeois” only because their occupations were assimilated within that category. It is well understood in the historiography of the ancien régime that “bourgeois” was a nebulous term, referring not to capitalists per se but to a cluster of occupations that had in common only what they were not: neither peasant nor laborer, these persons belonged to moneyed strata outside the nobility.36 They could be industrialists, merchants, shopkeepers, urban professionals. In fact, the typical bourgeois in eighteenth-century France belong to the last category, simply because of its growing importance in the political economy. Hence, it comes as no surprise that in the contemporary histories of the French Revolution, the leaders were often referred to as bourgeois, since the strata to which they belonged were typically subsumed under that banner.37
Given the task of this book, the French leadership’s middle-class origins is no small matter. Guha repeatedly castigates the Indian bourgeoisie for falling short of the boldness and revolutionary ardor of the “bourgeois” leaders of the French Revolution. Yet the Indian counterparts to the Jacobins, or delegates of the Third Estate more generally, are not the Birlas or Tatas. They are, rather, the middle-class elements of the Congress leadership. It is not semantic nitpicking to say that French predecessors to the Birlas simply did not exist in the late eighteenth century. In comparing the two groups—the French “bourgeoisie” and the Indian bourgeoisie—we are in fact looking at strata in two very different sets of social relations. The Indian bourgeoisie was a class that obtained its income and wealth by commanding the labor of others; the French groupings were either themselves the employees of others, or were independent producers. One group (the Indian) is, in the Marxian framework used by Guha, an exploiting class, while the other (the French) is not. It would therefore be quite astonishing if the Indian capitalists turned out to be as revolutionary as the French lawyers.
Even while the Third Estate was not itself a dominant class, it showed no inclination in the early weeks of the convention to overthrow the monarchy, much less unleash a social revolution. As noted earlier, its basic goals were to turn the absolute monarchy into a constitutional monarchy and to drastically scale back or even abolish the privileges granted to the nobility. Its agenda was thus primarily to increase the political and social space for its own advancement. In the initial weeks of the convention in the summer of 1789, these goals seemed to have been achieved. In June the Third assumed leadership of the three estates represented at Versailles, declaring the formation of the National Assembly. It was joined quickly by the clergy and a plurality of the noble delegates. The newly formed assembly quickly declared that it—not Louis—most directly represented the French nation and could not be dissolved without the nation’s consent. By so doing, it pronounced the death of the absolute monarchy. Once a significant segment of the nobility came over to the National Assembly, Louis had no choice but to concede defeat. In late June, he agreed to recognize the assembly, rescind unpopular taxes, and confer with the Estates-General on future taxation; he also promised freedom of the press and individual liberties.38 The delegates had achieved their goal. Absolutism was dead.
It is important to be clear, however, about what did not change in June 1789. Louis had expressly preserved seignorial rights, and so feudalism had not been abolished; basic liberties had been promised but not yet enumerated; more directly, there had been no extension of the franchise to the workers and peasants. Neither the abolition of feudalism nor the extension of democratic rights to subaltern classes had been demanded by the Third Estate. What they had demanded, and been granted, was greater rights for themselves. What they had garnered, therefore, was an elite pact, much as the English gentry had forged in the winter of 1640–1. And this, really, was all that the vast majority of delegates in the National Assembly had aspired to. There was no call to go further.
THE POLITICAL COALITION
What drove the events in France from being merely an elite pact to being a true revolution was, as in England, the combination of a recalcitrant monarch and the intervention of the popular classes. It was not, as Guha would have it, driven by elites reaching out to producers and soliciting their participation in a social mobilization. It was not, in other words, part of an elite hegemonic strategy, in Guha’s terms. Rather, the subaltern classes forced their concerns onto the elite project—a project that had been based largely on the exclusion of those interests. Further, the representatives of the Third Estate only reluctantly acted on popular demands for inclusion and reversed some of the central legislation as soon as threats from below subsided.
In late June 1789, Louis agreed to recognize the National Assembly as well as a battery of civil liberties. Within days, however, it became clear that this might well be only a temporary concession, as news reached the assembly that he had begun to amass thousands of troops outside Paris and Versailles. He seemed to be preparing a military strike to disperse the National Assembly. It was at this point that the popular classes intervened in Paris, most famously in the capture of the Bastille. France became engulfed in popular uprisings. In urban centers across the country, local committees quickly formed in defense of the National Assembly. Perhaps even more significant was the coalescence of this urban movement with a massive rural uprising that spread across much of the country.
The rural revolts did not come out of the blue. Episodic, though noticeable, unrest had been in evidence since 1775, driven at least in part by a squeeze exerted on the peasantry by landed proprietors.39 The uptick in peasant actions amounted to something of a counterattack against the seignorial regime, remarkably consistent in tempo. Peasant insurgency was further fueled by a failed harvest in 1788-9 and the inevitable deprivations that followed in its wake. Already in early 1789, before the Estates-General had met, peasant actions had begun to escalate, with demands not just for a reduction in seignorial dues but also for the opening of food stockpiles in lordly granaries. There was widespread suspicion that landed proprietors, both secular and ecclesiastical, were hoarding grain. By summer, rumors of grain hoarding mingled with fears of violent migrants and of aristocratic plots against the Third Estate.40 These rumors added yet more fuel to the fires of rural insurrection, and by late July 1789, much of France was gripped by a spiraling peasant revolt.
The immediate effect of the popular intervention was that it once again forced Louis to retreat. He hastily announced the withdrawal of the troops amassed outside Paris, thereby appearing to abdicate power to the National Assembly. The more fundamental consequence of the national uprising, however, was to impel the assembly to more radical measures. In the countryside, peasant actions had taken on an explicitly antiseignorial character, and the months of June and July saw something of a crescendo in the uprising.41 While the delegates to the assembly were overjoyed to have the revolution come to their rescue, their relief gave way to a deepening apprehension as news of the movement’s escalating radicalism surfaced. The initial response from most of the delegates was consternation, bordering on revulsion. But as the days went by and word of the movement’s episodic violence reached them, the apprehension turned to fear and panic.42 By early August, it seemed as though the mass movement might spin out of control.
Up to this point, more than a month after Louis XVI had conceded defeat, little had transpired in the National Assembly. Delegates had agreed in principle on the need for reform but drew back from crafting the needed legislation—partly because of the deep divisions between them and partly because of the sheer overwork of running the new regime. The exploding mass movement shook them out of their torpor. In a matter of days during the first half of August, the assembly issued two sets of declarations that seemed to dismantle the pillars of the social order: the abolition of feudalism and the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen. The first promised to dismantle the entire seignorial regime, and the other to incorporate the laboring classes into the political order.
What are we to make of the promulgation of these revolutionary decrees? Were they evidence of a bourgeoisie finally coming into its own and embracing its historic project, as Guha suggests? Apparently not. Recall that although the delegates were of privileged, moneyed origins, there was virtually no capitalist grouping in the National Assembly. Even if the delegates had come with a fully formed agenda to dismantle the feudal regime, it would be of limited relevance for Guha’s attempted parallels between the “bourgeois” representatives to the Estates-General and the Indian capitalist class. But even if we admit the possibility that there may have been a real capitalist presence in the assembly, the course of events belies any notion that there was an elite, antifeudal and liberal project, or that the delegates reached out to the masses by crafting a program that represented their interests.
In fact, it was the reverse: the popular movement imposed the revolutionary agenda on the delegates. As we have seen, there is no evidence that the Third Estate had any inclination to dissolve feudalism or to extend political rights to laboring classes. They moved in this direction only under pressure from the movement. Possibly the mere fact that the decrees followed a mass rebellion is not conclusive evidence that the latter caused the former. Reform might have been coming anyway, and perhaps only the timing was affected by mass pressure. But even this argument cannot be sustained: consider the actual content of the legislation that followed the issuance of the general decrees, and the continuing association between reform legislation and the popular movement.
Had the delegates been genuinely committed to a revolutionary program, they would certainly have tried to squeeze maximal leverage from the mass pressure. Instead, their strategy was to craft legislation that minimized the blows to the existing power structure. By the fall of 1789, the peasant revolt had subsided somewhat, giving legislators the sense that the immediate threat of violence, too, had subsided. Their reaction was to skew the laws toward the status quo, not against it. When antifeudal legislation finally emerged in March 1790, it was clearly intended to minimize the blow to seignorial power. Both the legal and the financial burden of freedom was placed on the peasants, making it highly difficult for them to wrest free of feudal obligations.43 And, on the political front, when the Rights of Man were translated into actual law, it turned out that the non-propertied would have distinctly fewer rights than their betters. The Assembly refused to allow universal suffrage. A minimal property requirement was mandated for voting rights, and even more demanding preconditions for the right to hold office. In the end, only around 45,000 French men were given the right to hold high office.44 Democratic rights were thus made conditional on being propertied.
The legislation around the abolition of feudalism and the Rights of Man revealed the assembly’s priorities. Its members were committed, much as the English revolutionaries in 1640 had been, primarily to rolling back royal power; their attitude toward popular power was decidedly less enthusiastic, even hostile. It was a force they leaned on only because it was the sole available counter to royal malfeasance. Had they been committed to popular power, they would have used the mobilization of summer 1789 as a means to dismantle the ancien régime. Instead, they tried their best to preserve it, but with greater latitude for the propertied Third Estate. As Albert Soboul incisively summarizes:
The new political institutions had one aim and one aim only, that of ensuring the peaceful, uninterrupted rule of the middle classes in their hour of victory, free from the threat of a counter-revolution and monarchy on the one hand, and of the any attempt of the people on the other.45
The National Assembly’s goal was to strike a fine balance between rolling back the threat of royal counterrevolution while also keeping the subaltern classes out of the political nation. But just as in the English case, no such equilibrium was possible. Above all, there was no direct control over the popular movement. And as mass uprisings erupted across the country, more and more segments of the elite reformist coalition defected to the side of reaction. As their base within the ruling classes contracted, the remaining reform-minded delegates had no choice but to increase their reliance on the mass movement—which only prompted further defections from the reform coalition, forcing it to embrace the revolution.
