Political Order and Political Decay (3 page)

DEMOCRATIC ACCOUNTABILITY

The last of the three sets of institutions to emerge was democratic accountability. The central mechanism of accountability, the parliament, evolved out of the feudal institution of estates, variously known as Cortes, Diet, sovereign court,
zemskiy sobor
, or, in England, Parliament. These institutions represented the elites in society—the upper nobility, gentry, and in some cases the bourgeoisie in independent cities. Under feudal law, monarchs were required to go to these bodies to raise taxes, since they represented the asset-owning elites in the agrarian societies of the time.

Beginning in the late sixteenth century, ambitious monarchs deploying novel theories of absolute sovereignty undertook campaigns to undermine the powers of these estates and to acquire the right to tax their populations directly. In each European country, this struggle played out over the next two centuries. In France and Spain, the monarchy succeeded in reducing the power of the estates, though they remained enmeshed in an existing system of law that continued to limit their ability to simply expropriate the property of their elite subjects. In Poland and Hungary, the estates were victorious over the monarch, creating weak central authorities dominated by rapacious elites that were in time conquered by their neighbors. In Russia, the estates and the elites supporting them were less well established than their Western European counterparts, and law exerted a much weaker influence; as a result, a more robust form of absolutism emerged there.

Only in England was there a relatively even contest between the king and the estates. When the early Stuart kings sought to build absolutist powers, they found themselves blocked by a well-organized and armed Parliament. Many members of this body were, in contrast to the monarchy's high church Anglicanism, Puritan Protestants who believed in a more grassroots form of organization. The parliamentary forces fought a civil war, beheaded King Charles I, and briefly established a parliamentary dictatorship under Oliver Cromwell. This conflict continued through the Restoration and culminated in the Glorious Revolution of 1688–1689, wherein the Stuart dynasty was deposed and a new monarch, William of Orange, agreed to a constitutional settlement embodying the principle of “no taxation without representation.”

Accompanying William and his wife, Mary, from the Netherlands to London was the philosopher John Locke, whose
Second Treatise on Government
enunciated the principle that obedience to rule should rest on the consent of the governed. Locke argued that rights were natural and inhered in human beings qua human beings; governments existed only to protect these rights and could be overturned if they violated them. These principles—no taxation without representation and consent of the governed—would become the rallying cry of the American colonists when they revolted against British authority less than a century later in 1776. Thomas Jefferson incorporated Locke's ideas of natural rights into the American Declaration of Independence, and the idea of popular sovereignty would become the basis of the Constitution that was ratified in 1789.

While these new political orders established the principle of accountability, neither England in 1689 nor the United States in 1789 could be considered a modern democracy. The franchise was restricted in both countries to white male property owners who represented a very small part of the entire population. Neither the Glorious Revolution nor the American Revolution produced anything like a genuine social revolution. The American Revolution was led by a merchant-planter-gentry elite who were jealous of the rights that the British king had infringed. These same elites remained in charge once independence was achieved, and they were the ones who drafted and approved the new country's constitution.

To focus on these limitations, however, is to radically underestimate the political dynamic that the new American order set in train and the galvanizing power of ideas. The Declaration of Independence boldly declared that “All men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights.” The Constitution squarely vested sovereignty not in a king or an amorphous state but rather in “We the People.” These documents did not seek to re-create Britain's hierarchical, class-defined society in North America. While there were many political and social barriers to de facto equality in the United States over the next two centuries, the burden was on anyone claiming special rights or privileges for a particular class to justify how they were compatible with the nation's founding creed. This was one reason why the franchise was expanded to all white males a little more than a generation after ratification of the Constitution, long before any country in Europe was to do so.

The contradictions between founding principles and social reality came to a head in the decades before the Civil War, as southern defenders of their “peculiar institution,” slavery, started to make novel arguments for why exclusion and subjugation of blacks was morally and politically justified. Some used religious arguments, some talked about a “natural” hierarchy among the races, and others defended it on the grounds of democracy itself. Stephen Douglas in his debates with Abraham Lincoln said he cared not whether a people voted slavery up or down, but that their democratic will should prevail.

Lincoln, however, made a decisive counterargument that necessarily harked back to the founding. He said that a country based on the principle of political equality and natural rights could not survive if it tolerated so blatantly contradictory an institution as slavery. As we know, it shamefully took another century after the Civil War and the abolition of slavery before African Americans finally won the political and juridical rights they were promised by the Fourteenth Amendment. But the country eventually came to understand that the equality proclaimed in the Declaration of Independence could not be made compatible with laws making some people second-class citizens.
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Many other social movements emerged in later years that expanded the circle of people bearing natural and hence political rights—workers, women, indigenous peoples, and other formerly marginalized groups. But the basic political order established by the Glorious Revolution and the American Revolution—an executive accountable to a representative legislature and to the whole society more broadly—would prove remarkably durable. No one subsequently argued that the government should not be accountable to “the People”; later debates and conflicts revolved entirely around the question of who counted as a full human being whose dignity was marked by the ability to participate in the democratic political system.

THE FRENCH REVOLUTION

The other great revolution of the late eighteenth century took place in France. Gallons of ink have been spilled describing and interpreting this cataclysmic event, and the descendants of those on opposite sides still have not resolved some of the bitter controversies it aroused.

It may seem surprising, then, that quite a number of observers from Edmund Burke to Alexis de Tocqueville to the historian François Furet have questioned whether the revolution was as consequential as many believed.
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The revolution was originally animated by the “Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen,” which, like the American Declaration of Independence, set forth a view of the universality of human rights grounded in the laws of nature. But the First Republic was short-lived. Like the Bolshevik and Chinese revolutions that were to follow, it established its own revolutionary dynamic of radicalization in which today's left-wingers became tomorrow's counterrevolutionaries, a cycle that led to the Committee of Public Safety and Reign of Terror in which the revolution devoured its own children. This unstable process was brought to an end by external war, the Thermidorian reaction, and finally the coup of 18 Brumaire that brought Napoleon Bonaparte to power in 1799.
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The violence of the revolution and the violence of the counterrevolution engendered a deep polarization in French society that made incremental political reform of a British sort much harder to achieve. The French would experience the July Revolution of 1830, the Revolution of 1848, and then, in the 1870s, occupation by Prussia and the Paris Commune, before a more enduring limited-franchise democracy could be established. By this point, there had been democratic elections under varying restrictive rules in many other European countries, including the archconservative Prussia. France, which had led the way toward democracy in 1789, proved to be something of a laggard. Worse, one of the revolution's legacies was a French left that in the twentieth century was prone to glorify violence and attach itself to totalitarian causes from Stalin's to Mao's.

So the question is reasonably asked, What did the French Revolution achieve? If the answer was not establishment of democracy in France, it did have a great, immediate, and lasting impact in the other institutional domains. First, it led to the development and promulgation in 1804 of Europe's first modern law code, the Civil Code or Code Napoléon. And the second was the creation of a modern administrative state, through which the code was implemented and enforced. Even in the absence of democracy, these constituted major advances that made government less arbitrary, more transparent, and more uniform in its treatment of citizens. Napoleon, looking backward after his defeat at Waterloo, claimed that the Civil Code constituted a greater victory than any he had won on the battlefield, and he was right in many ways.
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French law up to that point was a pastiche of rules that varied from region to region, some inherited from the Roman law, some based on customary law, as well as the countless accretions that had been added over the centuries from ecclesiastical, feudal, commercial, and secular sources. The resulting tangle of laws was often self-contradictory or ambiguous. The Code Napoléon replaced all this with a single modern code that was clear, elegantly written, and extremely compact.

The Code Napoléon cemented many of the gains of the revolution by eliminating from law feudal distinctions of rank and privilege. All citizens henceforth were declared to have equal rights and duties that were clearly laid out
ex ante.
The new Civil Code enshrined modern concepts of property rights: “the right to enjoy and to dispose of one's property in the most absolute fashion, provided that it is not used in a manner prohibited by law.” Land was freed of feudal and customary entails, opening the way for development of a market economy. Seigneurial courts—courts controlled by the local lord, over which peasant grievances had boiled forth during the revolution—were abolished altogether and replaced with a uniform system of civil magistrates. Births and marriages now had to be recorded with civil rather than religious authorities.
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The Code Napoléon was immediately exported to the countries France was then occupying: Belgium, Luxembourg, the German territories west of the Rhine, the Palatinate, Rhenish Prussia, Geneva, Savoy, and Parma. It was subsequently forcibly introduced into Italy, the Netherlands, and the Hanseatic territories. The Civil Code was voluntarily accepted by many of the smaller German states. As we will see in chapter 4, this body of law was to become the inspiration for the reform of the Prussian Code that took place after the defeat by the French at Jena. It was used as a model for countless other civil codes outside Europe, from Senegal to Argentina to Egypt to Japan. While legal codes forcibly imposed on other societies do not have a great record of success, the Code Napoléon did: countries like Italy and the Netherlands that resisted its adoption eventually ended up with laws that were very similar in substance if not in name.
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The second major accomplishment of the revolution was the creation of a modern bureaucratic state, something China had achieved a couple of millennia earlier. The French Old Regime was a curious hybrid. Beginning in the middle of the seventeenth century, centralizing monarchs like Louis XIII and Louis XIV had created a modern system of administrators based on officials known as intendents. Sent from Paris to the provinces, they had no kinship or other ties with the local population and therefore could govern more impersonally. As Alexis de Tocqueville noted, this was the beginning of the modern centralized state in France.
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But the intendents had to operate in parallel with another administrative group, that of venal officeholders. French kings were perpetually short of money to finance their wars and lifestyles. Starting with a major bankruptcy known as the Grand Parti in 1557, the government resorted to increasingly desperate measures to raise money, including the outright sale of public offices to wealthy individuals. Under a system known as the Paulette, introduced in 1604 by Henry IV's minister Sully, these offices could not only be bought but also handed down to children as part of their inheritance. These venal officeholders, of course, had no interest in impersonal public administration or good government; what they wanted was to milk their offices for all they were worth.

Although French governments of the late eighteenth century made two major efforts to eliminate the venal officeholders, both were defeated because this elite group held great power and had too much to lose as a result of reform. The rottenness and unreformability of this system was one of the factors leading to the revolution itself. During that event, all of the venal officeholders were dispossessed of their offices, and in many cases of their heads for good measure. It was only after the decks had been cleared in this purge that a new Conseil d'État could be created in 1799, an institution that would become the pinnacle of a truly modern bureaucratic system.

The new administrative hierarchy would not have worked but for the creation of a more modern educational system designed to support it. The Old Regime had established technical schools in the eighteenth century to train engineers and other specialists. But in 1794 the revolutionary government created a number of Grandes Écoles (schools) such as the École Normale Supérieure and the École Polytechnique for the specific purpose of training civil servants. Such schools, the forerunners of the post–World War II École Nationale d'Administration (ENA), were fed in turn by a system of lycées or elite secondary schools.