Representative institutions 1776–1876: ideology, estates and interests

Abstract

SUMMARY In the century following the American Revolution, representative institutions played widely differing roles and experienced varying fortunes in the polities of such Western and Central European nations as Britain, France, and Germany, and of the United States. Representative institutions had mediated the revolutions and survived unscathed; but although ‘the people’ had often been invoked, France and America subjected representation to qualifications of various sorts, notably of property; Sieyès, when it came to the crunch, regarded representation as safer than democracy, while Britain's notoriously unrepresentative parliament resisted all movements for reform. Direct popular representation came about gradually as a result of political, demographic and economic changes, assisted, in the United States, by the ultimate individualistic logic implied by the Constitution. The period was also marked by a drive towards national unification without any unified trend towards popular democracy. In Germany the little parliaments of the many small states were satisfied with themselves and had little disposition for any extension of their political base. None of them could stand up to Bismarck, who financed his wars through banks and without recourse to parliamentary votes. In France, the legislature vindicated itself in overthrowing Charles X and establishing the July monarchy; the Orléanist chamber of deputies made itself into the political instrument of bourgeois interests. But it all collapsed during the dictatorship of Louis Napoleon, who undermined representative institutions with the plebiscite. The Union of the United States, which had been brought about by a compromise of interests, was preserved by civil war; only in Britain was the representative system extended by Parliament. However, in Britain during the eighteenth century new economic and professional interests had emerged in national life, demanding their share of political power. This gave rise to the concept of interest representation, which became the unacknowledged theme of reform. The object of liberal reform was not to lay down stepping stones towards democracy but rather to protect these interests, if threatened, against any advance of the industrial masses into the political arena. In Germany the prospect of popular reform was disavowed by the interest of existing institutions in the status quo. Second Empire France and Bismarck's Germany did not look like promising territory for popular representation. However, it became increasingly difficult to ignore the increasingly articulate voice of the masses. The United States, which had gone furthest towards popular democracy (though with many qualifications), was a source of inspiration or apprehension, depending on one's point of view. The record of representative assemblies seldom offered a unified answer to the question of who was to be represented and was always subject to the tortuous vagaries of place and circumstance.