at the same time the great reform that the Crown had carried through against all resistances — above all, the general administrative reform of that year, based on the freest self-management — remained completely ineffective, because in view of the pliancy of the State, the question of the moment for the Estates became, suddenly, the question of power.[1] As a century before and a century afterwards, European war was drawing visibly nearer with an inexorable necessity, but no one now took any notice of the external situation. The nobility as an Estate had rarely, but the bourgeoisie as an Estate had never, thought in terms of foreign policy and world-history. Whether the State in its new form would be able to hold its own at all amongst the other States, no one asked. All that mattered was whether it secured men's "rights."
But the bourgeoisie, the class of urban "freedom," strong as its class-feeling remained for generations (in West Europe even beyond 1848), was at no time wholly master of its actions. For, first of all, it became manifest in every critical situation that its unity was a negative unity, only really existent in moments of opposition to something, anything, else — "Tiers État" and "Opposition" are almost synonymous — and that when something constructive of its own had to be done, the interests of the various groups pulled all ways. To be free from something — that, all wanted. But the intellectual desired the State as an actualization of "justice" against the force of historical facts; or the "rights of man"; or freedom of criticism as against the dominant religion. And Money wanted a free path to business success. There were a good many who desired rest and renunciation of historical greatness, or wished this and that tradition and its embodiments, on which physically or spiritually they lived, to be spared. But there was another element, now and henceforth, that had not existed in the conflicts of the Fronde (the English Civil War included) or the first Tyrannis, but this time stood for a power — namely, that which is found in all Civilizations under different contemptuous labels — dregs, canaille, mob, Pöbel — but with the same tremendous connotation. In the great cities, which alone now spoke the decisive words — the open land can at most accept or reject faits accomplis, as our eighteenth century proves[2] — a mass of rootless fragments of population stands outside all social linkages. These do not feel themselves as attached either to an Estate or to a vocational class, nor even to the real working-class, although they are obliged to work.
- ↑ A. Wahl, Vorgeschichte d. franz. Revolution, II (1907); this work is the only presentation of the subject from the world-historical point of view. All Frenchmen, even the most modern, such as Aulard and Sorel, see things from one or another partisan angle. It is materialistic nonsense to talk of economic causes for a Revolution like this. Even the peasantry was better off than in most other countries, and in any case it was not among them that it began. It was amongst the educated that the catastrophe started, the educated of all the classes — in the high nobility and the clergy even sooner than in the higher bourgeoisie, because the course of the first assembly of Notables (1787) had disclosed the possibility of radically reshaping the form of government according to class-desires.
- ↑ Even the highly provincial March Revolution of 1848 in Germany was a purely urban matter; hence the vanishingly small proportion of the population involved as participants.
