France and the Age of Revolution by William Doyle

Author:William Doyle
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Published: 2015-08-14T16:00:00+00:00

Lafayette by Jean-Antoine Houdon, courtesy of the Virginia General Assembly

CHAPTER 9

The American Revolution and the European Nobility

There are many ways of defining the American Revolution, as there are of defining the French one, or any other. Gallons of ink have been spilled in elaborating such definitions, and in arguing about them. But, unlike the French Revolution and many another, there is at least no disagreement about what the American Revolution was at the outset. It was the renunciation of a king. Nothing so clear-cut marks the beginning of the French Revolution; and the nearest equivalent, the seizure of national sovereignty by a self-styled National Assembly on 17 June 1789, is often drowned in the narrative of so many other momentous events. The 14th July is the date commemorated today, even though the importance of what happened on that day is more symbolic than substantial. But with 4 July 1776 there can be no ambiguity. Renouncing allegiance to George III was an unequivocal act. Congress was declaring a republic.

That was a revolution in itself. The only remotely comparable precedent in European consciousness was the Dutch Republic’s renunciation of Philip II of Spain in the sixteenth century. But of course this revolutionary act was only a beginning. What did not having a king imply? It took half a generation for the Americans to work out the basic implications, and this process (most historians would agree) constitutes the true American Revolution, which certainly did not end when George III accepted their claim to independence in 1783. Few aspects of political, social, spiritual, or economic organisation went undebated during the first quarter century of the American Republic; and what emerged as consensual about republican life was often the result of bitterly contested choices.1 One thing, however, seems to have been consensual throughout, a principle of republican life which nobody ever tried, or at least explicitly dared, to contest: the republic would have no nobility.

It was implicit in the Declaration of Independence itself, with its assertion of the self-evident truth that ‘all men are created equal’. A year later, in their first attempt at a federal constitution, the Articles of Confederation, the states agreed, seemingly without debate, in Article VI that ‘the United States in Congress assembled, nor any one of them’ should ‘not grant any title of nobility’.2 Ten years after that, the same provision passed undiscussed into the Federal Constitution, under Section IX, which stated: ‘No title of nobility shall be granted by the United States; and no person holding any office of profit or trust under them shall, without the consent of the Congress, accept of any present, emolument, office or title, of any kind whatever, from any king, prince, or foreign State.’ Section X went on to forbid any of the individual states from granting any title of nobility either. This provision, said James Madison in that great defence of the new constitution The Federalist (No 44), needed no comment. And ‘Nothing’ wrote Alexander Hamilton in No 88, ‘need be said to illustrate the importance of the prohibition of titles of nobility.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.