The Plebeian Experience by Martin Breaugh

Author:Martin Breaugh [Breaugh, Martin]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Columbia University Press
Published: 2007-03-14T16:00:00+00:00

EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY ENGLAND AND THE FRENCH REVOLUTION

By way of explaining the political solidity of the London Corresponding Society as a form of organization, Thompson endeavors to demonstrate how its convictions were forged,16 in particular through contact with two distinct phenomena: the subpolitical beliefs17 of eighteenth-century England and the French Revolution. By underscoring the Englishness of oppositional Jacobinism, Thompson heads off attempts to reduce it to a minor phenomenon of French origin and hence foreign to English political history and tradition. Quite to the contrary, Thompson argues, English Jacobinism (and its forms of political organization) shares in the history of England and was part of an underground tradition too often forgotten by standard historiography. He also emphasizes that popular beliefs are modified by events and current affairs such that they gain undeniable political effectiveness.

Subpolitical popular beliefs tying the eighteenth to the nineteenth century stemmed from the widespread notion of “the Englishman’s ‘birthright,’” an idea deriving from the equation of the “Constitution [with] Liberty.” According to popular thinking, the Constitution granted everyone the enjoyment of certain freedoms. Among them were freedom from foreign control, freedom from absolute power, equality before the law, freedom from arbitrary arrest, freedom to travel, and freedom to sell one’s labor power. According to Thompson, these freedoms “embody and reflect a moral consensus in which authority at times shared, and of which at all times it was bound to take account.” Thompson therefore maintains that the subpolitical attitude of England’s plebs in the eighteenth century was more “anti-absolutist” than prodemocratic, that is, favorable to greater openness of the political sphere in English society. Englishmen thus saw themselves as having few affirmative rights but as nevertheless shielded from the abuse of state power by a set of laws. This rather liberal individualism could, however, turn into political revolt (albeit short-lived) when “free-born Englishmen” felt their basic rights had been violated. The legitimacy of the right to rebel was rooted in the idea that “the Glorious Revolution afforded a constitutional precedent for the right to riot in resistance to oppression.”18 Moreover, in the minds of the English plebs, the Glorious Revolution of 1688 seemed to take precedence over the one of 1640–1642, the first modern revolution. Although the English Jacobins in fact took up the demands put forward in the previous century by the Levellers, this was not an indication that the first English revolution was of central importance for them.19

The recourse to constitutionalism was, according to Thompson, the “central paradox” of the eighteenth century as well as the “‘illusion of the epoch.’” That political theory was imbued at the time with constitutionalism is evidenced by the fact that conservative thinkers and their liberal adversaries alike confined their political conceptualization to the limits established in 1688. The paradox, at least inasmuch as the plebs was concerned, was that this theory allowed the simultaneous establishment of both “a bloody penal code” and “a liberal and, at times, meticulous administration and interpretation of the laws.”20 In other words, while the penal code was

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