BOURGEOIS REVOLUTIONS
‘Bourgeois
revolution’ is not a term we hear much these days. The gentry and
nobility who led the long English struggle for a constitutionalism to
hem in the Crown – climaxing with the Civil wars of 1640s and more
durably with the 1688 Glorious Revolution – may well have been
capitalist, in so far as their income derived from farming organised
for exchange and profit. Honour, status, and politicking remained
their primary determinants of existence. As for the bourgeoisie
proper, unless engaged in the American trade most merchants supported
the royalists in the Civil Wars. The intentions of the Roundheads in
the English Civil War did not differ so radically from the
aristocrat-led rebels of the Fronde. We can legitimately see the
English Civil Wars as part of a general crisis of the 17th-century
world.
The
French Revolution, in contrast, certainly was made by a bourgeoisie,
but not a particularly capitalist one. Many were tax-farmers,
lawyers, civil servants, and so on, and those few engaged in living
by commerce or industry generally had little time for subversion.
Karl Kautsky, the chief theorist of Marxism in the generation after
Marx and Engels, made just this point in a book published for the
Revolution’s centenary: those pre-1789 French bourgeoisie most
directly engaged in capitalist enterprise were the least likely to be
anti-royalist revolutionaries.
Bourgeois
modernity, therefore, was not usually an outcome of the middle
classes taking over the state. It might be seen as A conflict between
two established social forces. The aristocracy tended to favour a
representative parliamentarianism that would inhibit the executive
state from interfering with the laws, privileges and rights of the
propertied. The crown, for its part, struggled to subordinate
powerful aristocracy, open landed estates to the law of the realm,
and encourage the prosperity of taxable commerce and trade.
What
emerged in 18th-century Britain, after the Glorious Revolution, was a
balance. Parliament limited the power of the crown, and the
aristocracy were enjoined to observe the rule of law. This
constitutional balance protected the productive economy from
arbitrary rent-seeking, which in turn increased the tax-base. As
fiscal instruments arrived at consensually through parliament, the
state’s credit rating benefitted and it was amply financed in its
pursuit of foreign and imperial aims. The executive preserved its
freedom of manoeuvre in international affairs while the aristocracy
continued to dominate governance. As trade, commerce and in time
industry flowered, an urban bourgeoisie proper developed, but it did
not seek to invade the prerogatives of government. They benefitted
from the constitutional balance, knowing that it rested upon the
freedom and prosperity of their pursuits. The tax-credit state in
balance left the bourgeois goose un-plucked, laying its golden ages.
Britain’s
success drew envious looks from the continent. It was no easy thing
to reproduce its success, however, particularly as land borders made
it all the more difficult for governments wary of foreign armies to
sacrifice independence from interfering representative assemblies for
the sake of economic and fiscal strength down the line. The French
Revolution showed what might happen if reform turned into revolution.
Here a bourgeoisie already used to involvement in government (being a
good deal less commercial than its British counterpart) tried to cut
out the aristocracy altogether, but proved inadequate as a genuinely
ruling class and fell under the wheels of Napoleonic militarism.
19th-century
liberalism saw much more clearly the precise function of an
individualistic middle class. The aristocracy had traditionally lived
by bending local and central government to its will, as an instrument
of rent-seeking and fount of status and privilege. The bourgeoisie,
in contrast, lived by myriad trans-societal networks: businessmen via
the market, administrators via the governed territorial state,
professionals via information linkages. They did not wish to seize
upon the executive, as they did not make a living from it as such.
They would support, not seek to displace, a government that left
commerce to fructify.
After
1848, it became clear that the bourgeoisie were destined to be a
foundational rather than a governing class. Revolutions ‘from
above’ were common – Bismarck being the most famous ‘white
revolutionary’ – as governments introduced civil and political
liberties and representative institutions, the better to foster
commercial development and fiscal strength.
