Concepts of Revolution in England and France in the Eighteenth Century

Abstract

Concepts of Revolution in England and Erance in the Eighteenth Century PETER MATHIAS It is a well-tried fact that foreign observers bring perceptions and insight to the understanding of countries other than their own which defy indigenous commentators. James Bryce sought to explain the American Commonwealth for European readers—and found the book's reception in the United States "equally gratifying and unexpected." There was Denis Brogan more recently, interpreting us both to each other. Such perceptions by the external eye have not been sharpened by the salt spray of the Atlantic voyage alone: the Channel has always offered a fascinating series of such alternative perspectives between England and France. Voltaire and Burke projected visions of their own political hopes and fears through the commentaries they made upon their neighbours. Faujas de St. Fond reported more perceptively upon the stirrings of the factory system in Lancashire in the 1780s than any local English traveller. Arthur Young's travels in France (in the same decade) produced descriptions unmatched by contemporary French observers. The list continues through de Saussure, Gabriel Jars (in that splendidly titled journal of a tour Voyages Metallurgiques), Tocqueville , Taine, and Faucher—to take only the most celebrated before the mid-nineteenth century; and on the whole the French travellers to England observed rather better (or wrote and published rather more effectively) than the equivalent English travellers in France. So it has also proved with observations and insight mediated through historical scholarship. Elie Halevy is still honored as one of the most 29 30 / MATHIAS profound political and intellectual historians of the nineteenth-century English scene in his own generation. Paul Mantoux enjoys equivalent status in the historiography of the British Industrial Revolution. Sir Denis Brogan, in his second mediation, and Sir John Clapham main­ tained this tradition on the English side. In our own generation—it would be invidious to seek a definitive list—there are such French scholars as Francois Crouzet and Francois Bedarida and such British scholars as Richard Cobb, Theodore Zeldin, Olwen Hufton, John McManners and Patrick O'Brien. Most travellers, if not the historians, compare, either more or less explicitly and with greater or lesser self-consciousness, the subject of their observations to their own country, often using the comparison to create a critique of their own institutions, their own government's policy, or their own cultural values. Their native country provides the reference point. Comparisons are made to point a moral for their own countrymen. We often learn, through the reflecting mirror of these observations, as much about their own country and their own values as about the ostensible object of their descriptions in a value-neutral way. Thus are our neighbors made the stalking-horses for a self-critique. From such mirror images of each other, the stereotypes of historical interpretation concerning France and Britain in the eighteenth cen­ tury were born and have enjoyed astonishing survival powers, de­ spite, and in a few cases because of, the perceptions of the greatest of contemporary observers and latter-day historians. This text con­ siders some of these interlocking views, which have conditioned so much historiography, not only at the more popular and textbook lev­ els of academic sophistication. Such reciprocities, multi-faceted, in­ terlocking, mutually dependent in many subtle ways, demand much more intricate exploration than can be offered in a short article. How­ ever, many interpretations converge upon the images of national strength projected by the two nations in the eighteenth century and consolidated subsequently in the aspic of historiography; and such views about national strength combine, and sometimes confuse, the political with the economic, the public and the private weal. Images of the strengths and weaknesses of the French ancien regime are closely related to interpretations of the French Revolution; those of the Brit­ ish state to interpretations of the Industrial Revolution. This provides a pretext, if not a justification, for entitling such an exploration of comparisons: concepts of revolution in the eighteenth century. The first antithesis to be considered is the general presumption that, as a state, in the essential matter of deploying governmental Concepts of Revolution in England and France I 31 power and authority, France in the...