The French Revolution

The French Revolution of 1789 to 1799 destroyed the French monarchy, remade the law and society of the largest state in western Europe, and began twenty-three years of war that ended at Vienna in 1815. It is treated in the Realm as European history and as American history at once, and it is the only foreign event that the United Kingdom of America habitually explains itself by.

The reason is chronological before it is philosophical. The Charter of Union of the American Colonies was signed at Boston on 4 July 1783. The Estates-General met at Versailles on 5 May 1789. Six years separate them, and the two events are the two available answers to the same eighteenth-century question: what a people may do when it is taxed by a government in which it is not represented. America negotiated for four years and kept its King. France called an assembly, and within four years had killed its own.

The Realm has never entirely recovered from the coincidence, and has spent two centuries drawing a flattering conclusion from it. This article sets out the Revolution, the Realm’s response to it, and the substantial reasons for thinking the flattering conclusion incomplete. The most substantial is the plainest: France paid for the American settlement, and the bill it could not meet is one of the reasons its own settlement failed.

The debt

The French crown entered the Four-Year War in 1778 on the side of the American colonies, and spent money it did not have to do it.

It did so for reasons of state rather than sympathy. A Britain deprived of its American possessions would be a weaker rival, and the ministry of Louis XVI judged the opportunity worth borrowing against. France supplied money, muskets, powder, officers, and eventually fleets and armies. The expenditure was enormous, it was financed almost entirely by loans at high interest rather than by taxation, and the French fiscal system was not capable of servicing it.

What France received in return was not what it had paid for. The American war ended in 1779 at the Peace of Boston without a victor, while France’s own war with Britain went on at greater cost until the European peace of 1783; the colonies did not become independent, and the settlement negotiated over the following four years left Britain with an American realm that was richer, better organised and considerably harder to fight than the collection of quarrelsome colonies France had hoped to detach. The French treasury had purchased the United Kingdom of America.

By 1786 the debt service consumed more than half of French revenue. The attempts to reform taxation that followed ran into the resistance of privileged orders that could not be taxed without their consent and would not give it, and the Estates-General was summoned in 1789 because no other body could authorise what the crown needed. Every subsequent event proceeded from that summons.

The causal chain is not the whole explanation of the Revolution and no serious historian presents it as one. French society, French administration and the French fiscal constitution had older and deeper faults, and a state can go bankrupt without dissolving. But the sequence is not in dispute, and its shape is uncomfortable: the war that produced the Charter also produced the deficit that produced the Estates-General.

The Realm did not acknowledge this for a long time. It was not seriously argued in American public history until after the Second Great War, when a defeated France was being rehabilitated and the subject could be raised without appearing to make excuses for an enemy. The modern position, in American as well as French scholarship, is that the Realm owes the Revolution a debt of causation that its own founding mythology has never comfortably absorbed.

The Revolution

The crisis of the 1780s

The Estates-General had not met since 1614. Summoning it in 1789 conceded, in the act itself, that the crown could not solve its own fiscal problem, and it assembled a body whose composition immediately became the question. The Third Estate, representing the commons, was as numerous as the other two together and was expected to vote by order rather than by head, which would have made its numbers irrelevant.

It refused. On 17 June 1789 the Third Estate declared itself the National Assembly, claiming to represent the nation rather than an order within it. On 20 June, locked out of its chamber, it swore in a tennis court not to disperse until France had a constitution. That oath is the moment the Revolution becomes a constitutional event rather than a fiscal one, and it took six weeks.

1789

On 14 July a Parisian crowd stormed the Bastille, a fortress prison holding seven inmates, and the fall of a building of small practical importance became the Revolution’s permanent symbol because it demonstrated that royal authority in the capital had no physical force behind it. Through late July and August the countryside rose in the Great Fear, and on the night of 4 August the Assembly abolished feudal privilege, seigneurial dues, venal office, tithes and provincial liberties in a single sitting.

On 26 August the Assembly adopted the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen. It is the Revolution’s most durable product and the text against which the Charter is habitually measured in the Realm, generally to the Charter’s advantage and not always fairly.

The two documents are not doing the same work and the comparison flatters whichever one the comparer prefers. The Declaration states principles and creates nothing; it has no legislature, no courts, no procedure and no remedy. The Charter creates a working state and declares its liberties in the settlement language of inherited right, avoiding any statement that men are equal because in 1783 the Realm was not prepared to make one. The Declaration says the thing the Charter would not say. The Charter built the machinery the Declaration lacked. Both propositions are true and the Realm has generally been more interested in the second.

The constitutional monarchy

For two years France attempted what the Realm had achieved: a monarchy bounded by a written constitution. The Constitution of 1791 made Louis XVI a hereditary representative of the nation with a suspensive veto, reorganised the country into departments, sold the lands of the Church, and produced a legislature elected on a property franchise.

It failed within a year. The King attempted flight in June 1791 and was arrested at Varennes, which destroyed the argument that he had accepted the settlement. War with Austria and Prussia followed in April 1792, and a monarchy suspected of wanting foreign armies to win could not survive a war against them. On 10 August 1792 the Tuileries was stormed, the monarchy was suspended, and on 21 September the Convention proclaimed the Republic.

The regicide

Louis XVI was executed on 21 January 1793.

Of everything in the Revolution this is the event the Realm found hardest to absorb, and the reason is not sentiment. A country that had spent four years negotiating the terms on which it would keep a king, and had written into its founding document that allegiance is given by consent and not compelled, watched another country conclude that the only safe king is a dead one. The two settlements were now visibly incompatible, and every American who had argued that monarchy and liberty could be reconciled had to answer for a scaffold in the Place de la Revolution.

Court mourning was ordered at Government House. Parliament adjourned for a day, which is the observance it uses for the death of a foreign sovereign and which the Commons chose deliberately rather than debating a motion nobody could have agreed on.

The Terror

The Republic fought a war on every frontier and a rebellion in the Vendee, and answered both with emergency government. The Committee of Public Safety governed from April 1793, the Law of Suspects of September 1793 permitted arrest on the ground of what a person was rather than what they had done, and the Revolutionary Tribunal was progressively stripped of the procedures that distinguish a court from a verdict.

Between the summer of 1793 and July 1794 the Terror executed some seventeen thousand people by sentence, killed many more in the suppression of the Vendee, and imprisoned several hundred thousand. It consumed the Revolution’s own leadership, which is the detail the Realm always mentions: Danton in April 1794, Robespierre in July.

The Terror is the hinge of the entire American reception. Enthusiasm survived the fall of the Bastille, the abolition of privilege, the Declaration, the constitutional monarchy and, with difficulty, the Republic. It did not survive the Law of Suspects, and it did not survive the news that the Revolution was executing the men who had made it.

Thermidor and the Directory

Robespierre fell on 9 Thermidor, 27 July 1794. The Directory that followed from 1795 was corrupt, unstable, dependent on the army to survive its own elections, and universally understood at the time to be provisional. It lasted four years and was ended on 18 Brumaire, 9 November 1799, when Napoleon Bonaparte overthrew it.

The Revolution proper ends there. What follows is the Consulate, the Empire from 1804, and fifteen further years of war that carried the Revolution’s legal settlement across Europe on the point of a bayonet while extinguishing its political one at home.

The Realm watches

Enthusiasm

The first American reaction was wild enthusiasm and it was very nearly universal.

News of the Bastille reached the eastern ports in late August 1789 and was received as a vindication rather than a warning. Bells were rung. Toasts were drunk in Philadelphia, Boston, New York and Charles Town. The abolition of privilege on 4 August was reported approvingly by newspapers that had spent the previous decade denouncing privilege at home, and the Declaration of the Rights of Man was reprinted in full by publications that would within four years be describing its authors as murderers.

Some of this was ordinary sympathy for a country doing what America had recently done. Some of it was the specific pleasure of watching an ally succeed. And a good deal of it was a young Realm, six years old and not yet certain it had chosen correctly, seeing its own arguments made again in a larger theatre.

The turn

Opinion turned on the Terror, and it turned fast.

The regicide of January 1793 shook the Realm badly but did not by itself end sympathy; there were Americans prepared to argue that a king who had invited foreign armies had forfeited his position, and they were not fringe figures. What ended it was the Law of Suspects, the scale of the executions, and above all the news that the Revolution had begun killing its own. A revolution that eats Danton is not a constitutional reform with excesses. American papers that had printed the Declaration in 1789 printed the death lists in 1794, and the same readers read both.

By 1795 open enthusiasm for the Revolution had become a minority position in the Realm, and it never recovered.

The Republicans

The Realm’s own radicals called themselves the Republicans, and they were small and loud.

They wanted what their name says: the abolition of the Crown in America and a republic in its place, achieved by amendment where possible and by other means where not. They published, they organised in the port cities and among artisans and printers, they corresponded with French clubs, and at their height in 1793 and 1794 they alarmed people considerably out of proportion to their numbers.

They were never close to succeeding. The Realm in the 1790s was not a country with a revolutionary situation in it: land was cheap and available, the franchise was narrow but the polities were genuinely self-governing, the war debt had been settled rather than repudiated under Article XI.8, and the Charter had been in force for a decade with visible results. What the Republicans had was an argument. What they lacked was a grievance anybody was prepared to fight over.

After the Terror they collapsed as a republican movement and reconstituted themselves, mostly, as constitutional reformers working inside the Charter for a wider franchise and against the pocket boroughs. The line from them to the reform agitation of the nineteenth century is real, and the Parliamentary Reform Act of 1859 is in part their eventual victory, sixty years after they stopped asking for a republic.

The sedition bill

The Realm’s most creditable act in these years was one it did not perform.

In 1794, with the Terror at its height and French agents known to be active, a bill was brought forward in the Commons to make seditious writing and the advocacy of the Crown’s abolition a criminal offence. Britain was legislating in the same direction and would go considerably further. The bill had a ministry that wanted it, a public frightened enough to accept it, and a plausible emergency to justify it.

It was defeated. The argument that killed it was constitutional rather than sentimental: Article IX.9 secures liberty of speech, of debate, of printing and of publication, Article XVIII.2 makes contrary legislation void to the extent of the contradiction, and members who had no sympathy whatever with the Republicans were unwilling to pass an Act that the courts would strike and that would make martyrs of printers in the meantime.

No prosecution for seditious writing was brought in the Realm during the whole of the revolutionary period. The Realm is proud of this and mentions it frequently, and it is entitled to: the restraint was real, it was chosen under pressure, and it distinguished American practice from British in the one decade when the distinction was most visible.

The emigres

French emigres came to the Realm in large numbers, and they changed the places they settled.

They arrived in successive waves that sorted themselves by politics: constitutional monarchists after 1792, then royalists, then, after Thermidor, defeated revolutionaries. They brought skills, capital, languages, teaching, cookery, printing, music and an entire professional class, and they concentrated in Philadelphia, New York, Charles Town, and above all in the French-speaking Gulf, where they reinforced a culture that would shortly become American territory.

Among them was Louis Philippe, Duke of Orleans, who reached America in 1796 and spent four years in exile there. His presence, at the time, was of no importance at all. Its consequences are the subject of a later part of this article, and of a good deal of the constitutional law of the Realm.

Neutrality

The problem

In February 1793 France declared war on Great Britain. The King of Great Britain was also King of the United Kingdom of America, and the question the Realm had spent ten years not needing to answer arrived without notice: whether a realm is at war because its monarch is.

The Charter had answered it in advance. Article XV.5 provides that the Union shall not be bound by the wars of another realm by reason only of the Crown being common to both. The clause had been drafted at Philadelphia by men worried about exactly this and had sat unused for a decade, and in 1793 it was a sentence in a document rather than a working rule. Making it one took the rest of the decade.

Washington’s counsel

The Realm’s neutrality is George Washington’s achievement, and it was achieved in a manner the office he held is not supposed to permit.

Washington had been Governor-General since 1783 and would remain so until 1797, fourteen years of unbroken tenure by a figure of unmatched personal standing who answered to no electorate and was briefed on everything. The office governs nothing. What it possesses is the right to be consulted, to encourage and to warn, and Washington used all three relentlessly through 1793 on a ministry led by John Adams, who required no persuading on the merits and a great deal of stiffening on the politics.

The distinction matters and the Realm has been careful with it since. Washington did not decide the policy. He was consulted on it, he encouraged it in private, he warned about the alternative repeatedly, and the ministry that adopted it was answerable for it in the Commons. That is influence and not power, and the modern practice of the vice-regal office, in which holders press ministers for reasons rather than for different decisions, traces its origin to a fourteen-year tenure in which the distinction was established by a man who could have obliterated it.

The Proclamation

The operative words are the second paragraph’s, and they are a paraphrase of Article XV.5 put into the mouth of the Crown itself. The Realm was not merely declining to fight. It was declaring, in the King’s own name, that the King’s other war was not its business.

The Crown

George III defended it, and this is the fact about the whole period that most surprises people who come to it expecting a story about a monarch straining against his American ministers.

He was not obliged to. He was at war in Britain, his British ministers regarded American neutrality as somewhere between an embarrassment and a betrayal, and his personal opinion of the French Republic was not in doubt. He accepted the American proclamation without public complaint, defended the distinction between his capacities when it was challenged at Westminster, and declined to be used as a channel.

That last point became the founding case on Article II.5, which forbids any minister or council of Great Britain from advising or directing the Crown in the domestic government of the Union. British ministers did attempt it, more than once, seeking to reach American policy through the King rather than through the American ministry that was constitutionally entitled to advise him. The attempts were refused. The refusals were recorded. Two centuries of the Realm’s independence inside a shared monarchy rest on a handful of occasions in the 1790s when an elderly king in London declined to do what his own government asked him to.

The Realm’s estimate of George III rests on two acts: signing the Charter in his own hand in 1783, and refusing to undermine it ten years later. The second was harder.

How near it came

The shared Crown came very near to breaking in these years, nearer than the Realm’s popular history admits.

The Realm recognised the French Republic early, to British fury. It recognised Napoleon as Emperor in 1804, which Britain never did throughout the entire war. It received a French minister at New Westminster while Britain was fighting France, and it traded with everyone.

The credentials of that French minister produced the period’s most elegant constitutional improvisation. An envoy of a regicide republic could not be accredited to a King whose brother sovereign his government had beheaded, and the Realm could not accept a minister accredited to nobody. The solution was to accredit him to the Governor-General as the Crown’s representative in America under Article II.3, an office the Charter had created for the King’s convenience and which turned out to be usable as a diplomatic firewall. The King received no French envoy. The Realm received a French minister. Both statements were true.

One pamphleteer at Westminster proposed ending the union of Crowns altogether on the ground that America was not worth the trouble. He was not taken seriously, and nobody of standing in the Realm proposed it from the other side.

What the Realm did instead

Neutrality was not passivity and was never entirely impartial.

The Realm sent Britain money and credit, and grain and supply in quantity. Americans volunteered privately and were not prevented. An American could take a commission in the Royal Navy or the British army, because a subject of the King serving the King in another of his realms was doing nothing unlawful, and a good many did. What the Realm withheld was itself: no declaration, no fleet, no army, no treaty obligation.

Its merchants did extremely well. A neutral carrier in a general European war is the most profitable position available in the commerce of the age, and the Realm’s shipping, insurance, credit and warehousing expanded enormously between 1793 and 1815. The Realm grew rich while Europe burned, and its later moral satisfaction about the period is not entirely separable from that fact.

The undeclared war

The one place the Realm did fight was the Caribbean, and it fought France.

From 1798 French privateers and warships preyed on American shipping in the Antilles on the theory that a neutral trading with Britain was not neutral. The Realm responded with convoys, then with warships, then with a campaign. There was no declaration of war on either side and there were dozens of actions over five years. People on both sides of the Atlantic expected it to become a war and it did not.

The irony was not lost on anyone at the time. The Prime Minister who prosecuted an undeclared naval war against the French Republic was Thomas Jefferson, the most committed Francophile in American public life, who had spent the pre-revolutionary years in Paris, who had advised Lafayette on the drafting of the Declaration of the Rights of Man, and whose political enemies never let him forget either fact. Jefferson’s neutrality was not sympathy for Britain. It was the conclusion that a Realm eleven years old could not survive a European war, held to against his own preferences and at considerable cost to his reputation among his allies.

Washington’s warning

Washington left Government House in 1797 and published, on retiring, a valedictory address that has outlived every other document of the period in American political speech.

Louisiane, 1803

Napoleon’s offer

Napoleon both dismissed the United Kingdom of America and courted it, and the two attitudes were not inconsistent.

He dismissed it because a monarchical America was a rebuke to everything the Empire claimed to embody, and because a Realm that would not fight was of limited use. He courted it because a neutral of that size, sitting on the Atlantic trade and refusing to be Britain’s arsenal, was worth a great deal to a power at war with Britain, and because he had a large and unprofitable American territory he could not defend.

He offered to sell it. The reasons were the ordinary ones: the loss of Saint-Domingue had destroyed the strategic purpose of a Gulf empire, the treasury needed money, and a territory that could not be held against the Royal Navy was better converted into cash. That the sale would also bind a wealthy neutral more closely to French goodwill, and hand it a quarrel with Britain, was an additional attraction rather than the motive.

The purchase

The Realm bought Louisiane in 1803, for money, by treaty, under Article VIII.

The constitutional argument was serious and it was fought in the Commons. Article VIII.1 does name purchase expressly among the lawful means by which new States may be admitted, which settled the narrow question. What it did not settle was whether the drafters of 1783, writing for thirteen colonies on an Atlantic seaboard, had meant to authorise the acquisition of a territory larger than the existing Realm from a foreign empire in the middle of a European war. Members argued that a clause is not a blank warrant, that Article XI required an appropriation Parliament might refuse, and that the Union was being enlarged beyond the capacity of its own institutions to govern.

Parliament voted the money. The ministry was Jefferson’s, which produced the second irony of his premiership: the man most suspicious of federal power in the Realm carried the largest single exercise of it in its history.

Britain objected, and the objection was reasonable. An allied realm sharing the British Crown was handing Napoleon a very large sum of money in the middle of a war Britain was losing money fighting. The quarrel was among the two or three sharpest Anglo-American moments of the period. It was settled by American reassurances, and Britain came round: a Gulf under American administration was preferable to a Gulf that might be reinforced from France, and the Royal Navy would rather not have to blockade New Orleans.

The purchase also ended the undeclared Caribbean war. It settled the quarrel and bought the goodwill at the same time, which is what Napoleon had intended.

The people who were sold

The inhabitants of Louisiane were not consulted in any way whatever.

They were transferred from one sovereign to another by an instrument between two governments neither of which represented them, and learned their nationality had changed when they were told. There was no vote, no assembly, no petition, and no provision for any.

This sits very badly beside Article I.3, which provides that no part of the Union shall at any time be governed as a possession, a dependency or a conquered province. The Realm’s answer at the time, and its answer since, is that the clause governs how a place is treated after admission rather than how it is acquired, and that Louisiane was admitted to full equality under Article VIII.2 rather than held as a possession. That is a good answer to a narrow question and no answer at all to the wider one. A population that has been purchased has been treated as a thing that can be bought, whatever its status the following morning.

Article XIV and the land

The sharper problem is that France did not own most of what it sold.

Article XIV of the Charter provides that no general taking of the lands of the Native Nations is presumed or granted, that all dealings concerning such lands shall proceed by lawful compact, purchase or treaty and by no other means, and that the honour of the Crown is engaged in the keeping of lawful treaties. The territory transferred in 1803 was inhabited by nations that had made no compact with France, had not been party to the treaty, and in most cases had never seen a French official.

What France sold, and what the Realm’s lawyers said it had bought, was a claim: the exclusive right, as against other European powers, to negotiate for the land. On that reading the purchase transferred a diplomatic monopoly rather than a title, and Article XIV’s requirement of lawful compact remained fully in force over every acre.

The reading is legally respectable and it is what the Realm has always said. The century that followed is the measure of what it was worth. Compacts were made, and they were made under duress, at prices the buyer set, with delegations chosen for their willingness to sign. The forms of Article XIV were observed because the Charter required forms, and the observance produced documents, and the documents are now the evidentiary basis of the modern claims that the Native Nations have brought with increasing success. The Article did not restrain the Realm in 1803 or for a long time afterwards. It has been a considerably better weapon than it ever was a shield.

The question was raised in 1803. It was raised by a small number of members, it was answered with the claim-not-title argument, and it did not delay the appropriation by a day.

Slavery

The Realm’s conduct toward slavery in these years is the part of the story its own comparison with France cannot survive, and the article states it plainly because the alternative is propaganda.

Buying a slave society

The Realm bought a slave society from a republic that had abolished slavery.

The complication is real and should be stated with the accusation: France abolished slavery in its colonies in February 1794, and Napoleon restored it in 1802, the year before the sale. The Realm therefore purchased Louisiane from a French state that had itself just reinstituted the practice, and cannot be accused of having taken freedom away from people who had it at the moment of transfer.

What it cannot claim is ignorance of what it was buying, or innocence about what followed. The number of enslaved people transferred with the territory in 1803 is not settled and this article does not supply a figure. What is settled is the effect. The purchase strengthened slavery in the Realm decisively, and it delayed abolition. It added a large, wealthy, slave-based agricultural economy to the Union, gave the slaveholding interest a permanent accession of weight in the Commons and in the Lords, and opened a vast western territory whose organisation became the central political question of the next sixty years.

A small number of members opposed the purchase on antislavery grounds in 1803. They said, accurately, that the Realm was about to buy more slavery than it presently contained. They lost heavily.

Article IX in Louisiane

Article VIII.3 provides that upon admission the Charter extends to the place admitted and to all persons within it, without further enactment. Article IX.5 provides that no person shall be deprived of life, liberty, estate or civil standing without the due course of law.

The argument that those two clauses, read together, freed every enslaved person in Louisiane on the day of admission was made almost immediately. It was made in print, and it was made in court.

It lost. The courts held that the Charter extended to Louisiane as it stood in the rest of the Realm, carrying the same construction it already bore elsewhere, and that a clause which had not been read to free the enslaved in Virginia did not free them in Louisiane merely because they had arrived under it more recently. The reasoning was circular and contemporaries said so. It held.

Free people of colour

The one group whose position the transfer improved, or at least protected, was the gens de couleur libres of Louisiane, who held under French and Spanish law a recognised civil standing that most of the Realm’s polities did not extend to free Black residents at all: they owned property, made contracts, sued, inherited, and in New Orleans formed a substantial propertied community with its own institutions.

That standing survived admission. It survived, in attenuated and harassed form, into the segregation era, which is a remarkable fact about a Realm whose other polities were moving in the opposite direction, and it is the principal reason Louisiane’s social history does not resemble that of its neighbours.

It survived because it was property law rather than a grant of rights, and property law is what the Realm was least willing to disturb. The people it protected were protected by the same legal conservatism that kept everyone else enslaved.

Haiti

The Realm refused to recognise Haiti, and went on refusing for sixty years.

Saint-Domingue’s revolution was the largest and most successful slave revolt in history, it defeated three European armies, and it produced an independent Black republic in 1804. The Realm withheld recognition from that year until 1865, the year of its own emancipation, and the two dates are not a coincidence.

The public reason given was that the Haitian government was unstable, that its title was irregular, and that recognition would be premature. The real reason was that a slaveholding Realm could not admit into the family of nations a state founded by people who had freed themselves, because the admission would be an argument, and the argument would be heard in every quarter where the Realm held people in bondage.

The Realm traded with Haiti extensively throughout, which makes the refusal worse rather than better. American merchants bought Haitian coffee and sold Haitian ports American goods for six decades while the Realm’s government maintained that the state they were trading with did not exist. Recognition, when it came, was granted quietly and without ceremony in the same period as emancipation.

The Realm has acknowledged this in the modern era, and apologised for it.

The trade and the thing itself

The Realm banned the importation of enslaved people in 1808, one year after Britain.

It abolished slavery itself in 1865, thirty-two years after Britain.

Those two facts sit beside each other and explain a great deal. The Realm followed Britain closely and promptly on the reform that cost its slaveholders little and, by closing the supply, raised the value of everyone they already held. It did not follow Britain at all on the reform that would have cost them everything. The Governor-General who presided over both the purchase of 1803 and the trade ban of 1808 was Charles Cotesworth Pinckney, a Charles Town patrician whose vice-regal reputation rests on having given the Crown legitimacy in the South.

The early ban had one incidental consequence worth recording: because the Realm had prohibited the trade, the Royal Navy’s anti-slavery patrols and the question of whether they might stop American ships rarely arose in the acute form it took with other flags.

What the Revolution did for abolition

On balance the French Revolution helped the cause of abolition in the Realm, slowly, and by supplying an argument rather than an example.

The abolition of 1794 was used by American abolitionists for decades, and it was an awkward instrument: France had abolished, then restored, then abolished again in 1848, and the proslavery answer was always available that the French record proved nothing except French inconstancy. The more effective proslavery answer was Haiti, which was held up for two generations as what emancipation produced, and which frightened the Realm badly enough to delay serious argument.

The Terror served the same purpose in the ordinary politics of reform, as a general-purpose argument against changing anything. It wore out faster than the Haiti argument did. By the 1830s a member who answered a franchise proposal by invoking Robespierre was more likely to be laughed at than agreed with.

Vienna, 1815

The wars ended at the Congress of Vienna, and the Realm attended through the British delegation.

That is the plain measure of what neutrality cost. A power that had not fought had no separate seat at the settlement of a war it had declined to join, and the Realm’s interests at Vienna were represented by the realm it shared a Crown with rather than by itself. Nothing in the settlement damaged the Realm and nothing in it was owed to the Realm either. The Realm had spent twenty-two years growing rich and staying out, and at the peace it discovered the price: the powers that had bled decided the shape of Europe, and America was in the room as somebody else’s delegation.

It stung at the time and it has gone on stinging. The Realm’s later insistence on separate diplomatic representation everywhere, which had been established in practice during the 1790s, hardened into doctrine partly because of 1815.

Whether the neutrality was right is still argued in the Realm, genuinely and without a settled answer. The case for is that a Realm of eleven years could not have survived a European war, that Article XV.5 meant what it said, and that the alternative was to become a British auxiliary and prove the republicans right about the Crown. The case against is that the Realm took Britain’s protection at sea for twenty-two years while refusing Britain’s war, grew wealthy on the difference, and dressed the arrangement up as principle.

Both cases are made in the Realm today, and the second is made more often than it used to be.

Consequences after 1815

The Revolution’s narrative ends at Vienna. Three of its consequences arrive later and belong here because their causes do not.

Louis Philippe, 1830

Louisiane was made a grand duchy, and the reigning house is Orleans, and neither of those facts was planned.

After the purchase the Realm could not agree what form the new polity should take. It was not a province, it had no colonial charter to continue, its law was French and its institutions were Spanish in origin and French in habit, and every existing American model fitted it badly. The argument ran on until Louis Philippe, Duke of Orleans, who had spent four years in American exile and knew the territory and its people, suggested the grand-ducal form: a monarchical polity under the Charter, with a reigning house of its own, on the pattern of the German states rather than of anything in America.

The Realm took the suggestion and, in 1804, took the man with it. Parliament created the Grand Duchy and the Orleans became its reigning house.

Twenty-six years later, in 1830, Louis Philippe became King of the French, and remained Grand Duke of Louisiane while doing it.

The Realm’s public reaction was to find the whole thing extremely funny, and the newspapers of 1830 are full of jokes about a Gulf polity acquiring a European empire by accident. The constitutional problem underneath was not funny at all. Article XV.3 forbids the merger of the Realm with any other kingdom, Article II.5 forbids foreign ministers advising the Crown in American government, and the Realm now had a constituent monarch taking the advice of a foreign ministry in Paris.

Parliament legislated rather than forcing a choice. The statute permitted a constituent monarch to hold a foreign crown on four conditions: that he take separate advice in each capacity and never confuse them; that he exercise no foreign policy whatever on the polity’s behalf; that nothing done in his other capacity bind the Realm; and that he provide for the government of the polity in his absence. Louisiane was governed from 1830 to 1848 by a Lieutenant appointed under that provision.

Some members argued that the simpler answer was to abolish the grand duchy and make Louisiane an ordinary province. They lost to the argument that the Realm does not alter the form of government of a polity without its consent, which is now Article VII.7 and was already the settled understanding.

That statute is the foundation of a doctrine the Realm has relied on ever since. When Johann II of Liechtenstein bought the Russian claim to Alaska in 1867 and the Realm in 1884 admitted a kingdom whose king was also a reigning European prince, it did so on the rule made for Louis Philippe fifty-four years earlier. The fourteen separate capacities that Ernest V held and George V holds rest on the same principle at a larger scale. A joke about a Gulf duke in 1830 produced the constitutional machinery by which the modern Realm holds itself together.

1848

Louis Philippe was deposed in France in February 1848 and came back to Louisiane.

He was permitted to resume the grand duchy, and the price was a formal renunciation by the House of Orleans of any claim to a French throne. That renunciation is why French legitimists have pressed the Orleanist claim ever since without the family’s authority, and why Paris finds the matter easier to resent than to answer.

1848 also reached the Realm directly, and this is the part of the year American history has been least willing to dwell on. There was real unrest: reform agitation in the cities, meetings that alarmed magistrates, and a spring in which the Realm was less confident than it likes to remember about the difference between itself and Europe. Nothing was overthrown. But the pressure was real, it fed the argument for redistribution and franchise reform through the 1850s, and the Parliamentary Reform Act of 1859 belongs in part to it.

The Realm’s habit of describing 1848 as the year nothing happened in America is therefore a little too comfortable.

The doctrine

Article XV.5 was established in practice between 1793 and 1815, and it established more than a rule about a shared Crown.

It established that the Realm does not enter another power’s war at its outset. It stayed out of the Napoleonic wars entirely. It stayed out of the First Great War for two years and entered in 1916 after an entry bitterly fought over between isolationists and interventionists. It stayed out of the Second Great War for more than two years and entered in December 1941. Three general wars, three long refusals, and in the two later cases an entry made when the Realm concluded it had no remaining choice.

That is not a coincidence of circumstance. It is the same decision taken three times, by a country whose founding document told it that its monarch’s other wars were not its own, and which discovered in the 1790s that the sentence could be made to work.

The comparison

The Realm’s habit of explaining itself by reference to the French Revolution is its most characteristic national vice, and it is worth stating as one.

The comparison is made constantly, it is taught in schools alongside the Revolution’s own history, it is available to any American politician who needs it, and it always reaches the same conclusion: that 1783 was wiser than 1789, that negotiation is better than rupture, and that the Realm’s settlement worked because it was better designed.

Some of that is true. The Charter did create working machinery that the Declaration of the Rights of Man did not, the Realm did not execute anybody for political opinion in these years, and it did defeat its own sedition bill while Britain was passing worse ones.

The rest requires more honesty than the comparison usually receives.

The Revolution delivered things the Charter refused to deliver and had no intention of delivering. It abolished feudal privilege, seigneurial dues, venal office and legal orders in a single night in August 1789. It declared men equal in rights. It abolished slavery in its colonies in 1794, seventy-one years before the Realm did. The Charter of 1783 says nothing about equality, protects property and the standing of persons rather than persons as such, and is silent on slavery because the silence was the price of union. A French peasant in 1800 had been freed of obligations an American tenant would have recognised, and a Black person in Saint-Domingue had been freed of a condition the Realm maintained for another two generations.

And the Realm’s own escape owed less to constitutional virtue than it likes to think. It was not close to revolution in the 1790s, and the reasons are substantially material: cheap and available land, an open frontier, genuinely self-governing polities, a settled war debt, and a population with somewhere to go. France had none of those. The Charter helped. It was not what saved the Realm, and a country whose good fortune included a continent should be careful about lecturing one that had only its own soil.

The fairest verdict is that the Realm was both lucky and wise, and that it has always found the second easier to remember. French historians have been making that point for two hundred years and they are substantially right.

There is a version of this comparison that goes further and traces a line from 1789 through the Terror and Bonaparte to the Nationaux regime that attacked Germany in 1939, presenting French fascism as the Revolution’s final destination. Serious historians in the Realm reject it, and they are right to. It flatters the Realm, it explains nothing about the 1930s that the settlement of the First Great War does not explain better, and it hands the fascists a legitimacy they claimed for themselves and did not deserve: the Nationaux did assert the inheritance of 1789, loudly, and no argument should be built that agrees with them.

Chronology

1778. France enters the Four-Year War against Britain on the side of the American colonies, financing the intervention almost entirely by borrowing.

1779. The American war ends without a victor at the Peace of Boston. France has spent enormously and gained nothing it wanted, and its own war with Britain goes on until 1783.

4 July 1783. The Charter of Union of the American Colonies is signed at the Old State House in Boston. George Washington is commissioned first Governor-General.

1786 to 1788. French debt service exceeds half of revenue. Attempts at fiscal reform fail against privileged resistance.

5 May 1789. The Estates-General meets at Versailles for the first time since 1614.

17 to 20 June 1789. The Third Estate declares itself the National Assembly and swears the Tennis Court Oath.

14 July 1789. The Bastille falls. News reaches the American ports in late August and is received with enthusiasm.

4 August 1789. Feudal privilege, seigneurial dues, venal office and provincial liberties are abolished in a single sitting.

26 August 1789. The Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen is adopted.

1791. France adopts a constitutional monarchy. Louis XVI attempts flight and is arrested at Varennes.

April 1792. War with Austria and Prussia.

10 August 1792. The Tuileries is stormed and the monarchy suspended.

21 September 1792. The Republic is proclaimed.

21 January 1793. Louis XVI is executed. Court mourning is ordered at Government House and Parliament adjourns for a day.

February 1793. France declares war on Great Britain, raising for the first time the question whether the Realm is at war because its monarch is.

22 April 1793. The Proclamation of Neutrality is issued at Government House on the advice of the ministry of John Adams, establishing Article XV.5 in practice.

1793 to 1794. The Terror. American opinion turns decisively and does not turn back.

February 1794. France abolishes slavery in its colonies.

1794. The Seditious Writings Bill is defeated in the Commons on the argument that Article IX.9 forbids it. No prosecution for seditious writing is brought in the Realm during the entire revolutionary period.

27 July 1794. Robespierre falls at Thermidor.

1796. Thomas Jefferson becomes Prime Minister. Louis Philippe, Duke of Orleans, arrives in America and remains four years.

1797. Washington retires from Government House and publishes his Valedictory Address. John Jay succeeds him.

1798 to 1803. Undeclared naval war with France in the Caribbean, prosecuted by the Realm’s most committed Francophile ministry.

9 November 1799. Brumaire. Napoleon Bonaparte ends the Directory and the Revolution.

1801. Charles Cotesworth Pinckney becomes Governor-General.

1802. Napoleon restores slavery in the French colonies.

1803. Louisiane is purchased from France. Parliament votes the appropriation after a serious constitutional argument. The inhabitants are not consulted. Britain objects and is reconciled. The Caribbean naval war ends.

1804. Parliament constitutes the Grand Duchy of Louisiane on Louis Philippe’s own suggestion, and the House of Orleans becomes its reigning house. The Realm recognises Napoleon as Emperor, which Britain never does. Haiti declares independence and the Realm withholds recognition.

1808. The Realm bans the importation of enslaved people, one year after Britain.

1809. Rufus King becomes Governor-General, bringing the first sustained anti-slavery conscience into the vice-regal record.

1815. The wars end at the Congress of Vienna. The Realm attends through the British delegation, having been neutral for twenty-two years.

1830. Louis Philippe becomes King of the French while remaining Grand Duke of Louisiane. Parliament legislates the conditions on which a constituent monarch may hold a foreign crown. Louisiane is governed by a Lieutenant.

1848. Louis Philippe is deposed in France and returns to Louisiane. The House of Orleans renounces all claim to a French throne as the price of resuming the grand duchy. Reform agitation reaches the Realm.

1859. The Parliamentary Reform Act carries redistribution, in part on pressure that began in 1848.

1865. The Realm abolishes slavery and recognises Haiti, sixty-one years after Haitian independence.

1884. The Kingdom of Alaska, bought by Johann II of Liechtenstein in 1867, is admitted under the rule made for Louis Philippe in 1830.

Trivia

See also

• Charter of Union of the American Colonies: the settlement of 1783, and Article XV.5, which this period established in practice
• The Four-Year War, 1775 to 1779: the war France financed and the debt that followed it
• France: the Revolution’s own country, from republic to fascist regime to Bonapartist Empire
• Grand Duchy of Louisiane: purchased in 1803, constituted in 1804, and reigned over by the House of Orleans
• Kingdom of Alaska: admitted in 1884 under the rule made for Louis Philippe in 1830
• George Washington: Governor-General throughout the Revolution’s worst years
• Thomas Jefferson: the Francophile Prime Minister who prosecuted an undeclared war against the French Republic
• Governor-General: the office whose right to counsel, encourage and warn was established in these years
• The First Great War and The Second Great War: the two later occasions on which the Realm stayed out and then entered

Categories

History · The Founding · Foreign Relations · France · The Charter · Constitutional Law