The Life and Death of Democracy by Keane John

Author:Keane, John [John Keane]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781847377609
Publisher: Simon & Schuster UK

The Westminster Model

Among the grand paradoxes of the French Revolution is that peoples spared French military assault or occupation tended to be most receptive to its best and boldest democratic claims. It was not that ignorance bred sympathy. The dynamics are better described as a learning process, for what took place in lands not directly touched or conquered outright by the French armies – the otherwise quite different cases of Spanish America and Russia under Alexander I show – was the recognition that the tide was turning in favour of full political equality and, simultaneously, turning against the Jacobin way of doing politics. In the age of poor communications, geographic distance from the Napoleonic armies certainly helped governments to survive, sometimes through reform. So, too, did the sea, which served as a rampart against land-based armies. In nineteenth-century Europe, as in ancient Greece, the Arcadian Law applied: the possibility of democracy in any territory was inversely proportional to the military pressure on its borders. That was a key reason why Britain – fresh from a victory off Cape Trafalgar (21 October 1805) that protected it from French military invasion and ensured that it became the world’s dominant naval power – proved to be the most successful parliamentary democracy, the most consequential example of what George Orwell called a ‘maritime democracy’.

The French events shook the local political system to its foundations, but with surprising effects. Given that Britain and France were at war from 1793, it was difficult for English, Scottish and Irish radicals to declare their open support for the French precedent, at least not without risking the charge of sedition. The support was to come all the same. In England, admiration for the French experiment extended to political leaders like Charles James Fox, influential scientists such as Joseph Priestley, and writers like Tom Paine, whose trumpet blast in defence of the Revolution, Rights of Man (1791–2), outsold any book ever published, including the Bible, and earned him honorary French citizenship and a seat in the National Assembly. William Wordsworth was not alone in his conviction that to experience the new dawn at close range was bliss and heaven. In the soil of cities and the countryside of Britain, radicals planted the tree of democratic liberty, sometimes with astonishing success: in 1797, at Spithead, near the Isle of Wight, even the sailors of the Royal Navy mutinied in solidarity with the new French aims by ordering their officers ashore, running their ships by committee, and demanding (successfully) better wages and working conditions.

For the first time since the civil war of the 1640s, but now on a much larger scale, radical reformers and campaign groups like the Sheffield Corresponding Society (founded in December 1791) and the London Corresponding Society (founded in January 1791) backed universal manhood suffrage. The next year, a circle of Whigs, led by Charles Grey and James Maitland and supported by twenty-eight Members of Parliament, formed a reform group called the Society of the Friends of the People.

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