The Tennis Court Oath has sometimes been regarded as a defining moment in the drama whereby classes play their successive roles on the stage of world history, for the reason that the social group most closely associated with privilege was the Second Estate, the nobility, while most bourgeois belonged to the Third. But the deep insertion of the eighteenth-century bourgeoisie into the Old Regime system, and the role of the monarchy itself in undermining it, provide reasons to understand things differently. There is no better prism through which to pursue such an understanding than the famous pamphlet that the Abbé Emmanuel Joseph Sieyès published in the spring of 1789, What Is the Third Estate? and the interpretations that historians persist in giving to it. It was Sieyès who proposed the motion that transformed the representatives of the Third Estate into the National Assembly, and his pamphlet was the most important and influential of the many writings justifying the Third’s claims that hit the streets at this moment. The famous answer he gave to his title’s question argued that the estate of commoners was not simply one part of the nation but “the whole” of it, since it included all those whose productive efforts made it “subsist and prosper.” The privileges and exemptions that defined the nobility (but that extended beyond it to non-nobles) contributed nothing to the survival and development of national life, they simply set the Second Estate apart as a foreign body within the country. Thus it was perfectly in order to regard the Third as embracing everything that made French national existence possible, and capable by itself of setting up the body of laws under which it should live. At the root of these claims was a conception of national life that was fundamentally productivist and economic: even in the Middle Ages the Third was the Estate of the laboratores, those who worked; by the eighteenth century the work such people did both in towns and on the land was coming to be seen as “industry” – not in the meaning the word would later acquire, but in the more general sense of industriousness, productive activity.
This vision of the country as an entity that produced itself out of its own labor and the devaluation of nobility that accompanied it made Sieyès the major spokesman for the Revolution in its early, liberal phase, before the onset of more radical actions and demands in 1792–93, a role he would partly fill again in the later period of renewed moderation that followed the dismantling of the Terror in 1794–95. His prominence at these moments is one reason some historians have looked on his pamphlet as part of a program to replace aristocratic with bourgeois leadership. The case has recently been restated by William Sewell, who characterizes Sieyès’s famous pamphlet as “a rhetoric of bourgeois revolution.” Sewell is too savvy a historian not to recognize that such an assertion needs to be carefully qualified. If Sieyès had some bourgeoisie in mind as a revolutionary agent, it cannot have been one in whose existence modern industrialists and entrepreneurs had a significant part, since they were simply too few, as well as too scattered and fragmented, to constitute a political class. If he was seeking to make such an appeal, its objects could only have been those to whom the term bourgeois applied in the variety of meanings it bore in the eighteenth century, some urban and some not, some active outside government and some inside, referring sometimes to all those who did not benefit from the system of privilege and sometimes only those who had acquired a certain position within it (such as the bourgeois du roi). What Sewell believes made so varied a group a candidate for the role he thinks Sieyès had in mind for them was the hierarchical culture and ideology that cast them into an inferior status, making them objects of the “cascade of disdain” that people higher up in the Old Regime social scale regularly directed toward those below them.
There can be no doubt that many bourgeois resented the position in which this put them, but even Sewell admits that this did not dispose them to give heed to Sieyès’s supposed call: “He was unable, in the end, to convince them that they were a bourgeoisie in the sense that their nineteenth-century successors or twentieth-century historians would have recognized. That the eighteenth-century bourgeoisie failed to recognize itself in Sieyès’s political-economic mirror reveals the depth of the gulf – economic, social, cultural, and political – separating it from the bourgeoisie of the nineteenth century.”42 Why then should we even think of him as aiming for such a result, especially since he never expressed himself in these terms, and since most of those who composed the Third Estate, and whose work sustained the country, were not bourgeois at all? Both resentments against the Old Regime and desires for fundamental political change were widely diffused in French society, animated much less by class differences than by the divisive effects of privilege and corruption. Indeed Sieyès wrote a slightly earlier companion piece to What Is the Third Estate?, an Essay on Privilege, in which he blamed the regime of favors, exclusions, and exemptions – not social difference as such – for dividing France into separate nations and making the nobility into a parasite on the true nation of productive citizens.43
To be sure, once the crisis came, the Revolution would be carried on largely by urban-based people, many of them bourgeois by formation and occupation, with some experience in local government or administration. Where else could sufficient numbers of people be found to carry on the reconstruction of the political system on a basis that would be free of the debilitating contradictions and shackles that brought it down? They were not alone in taking up the responsibilities and opportunities the new situation offered, however; despite the emphasis historians have given to the nobles who emigrated, some 40 percent of noble army officers remained in their posts, and participation by former nobles remained significant in all the Revolutionary assemblies, even the radical National Convention of 1792–94.44 Nor did contemporary observers use the term “bourgeois” to describe the Revolution’s supporters. Many labels were applied to them – members of the Third Estate, patriots, democrats, Girondins, Jacobins, sans-culottes – but not bourgeois. As for its enemies, they were almost never labeled “bourgeois” either, save by radicals who attached it as an adjective to the noun aristocrat, creating a typically Old Regime configuration that precisely elided the opposition between the two categories; for most people it was the idle, the selfish, and above all the privileged who were identified with the old order.45 These reasons for abandoning the scenario that makes classes the agents of historical change in the Revolution have been accepted by many (though not all) historians, but I hope broader and stronger grounds for putting it to rest have emerged here. The shadow still cast by the longstanding association between the Revolution and the bourgeoisie obscures what really underlay the crisis of the Old Regime. It was not the rise of a bourgeois class that made France revolutionary at the end of the eighteenth century, but the truncated form of national integration that had evolved over time, in which all kinds of internal divisions were as much solidified as weakened by the monarchy’s attempts to overcome them. The country’s persisting fragmentation made it necessary for the government to take a large part in fostering industrial advance and innovation, since the absence of a national market reduced the incentives for private individuals to engage in it, leaving them to cling to the very order of privilege that stood against efforts at reform, as responses to the state’s attempts to abolish internal tariffs and guilds in the 1760s and 1770s revealed.
Reading Sieyès’s pamphlet as an appeal to the bourgeoisie as a class not only attributes to him a purpose there is no reason to think he harbored, it also stands in the way of recognizing how deeply his thinking was marked by the special features of the Old Regime. Sieyès was a student of economics and a reader of Adam Smith, whose emphasis on the importance of labor division he shared and developed, but in quite a different way. His starting point seems to echo Smith, making labor an important productive force alongside the creative energies inherent in nature, and seeing labor division as essential to what made it so. But Sieyès maintained that his appreciation and understanding of the division of labor predated his reading of Smith (who, to be sure, did not invent the notion), and the acco
unt he gave of it testifies to the divergence in their viewpoints. Whereas Smith began The Wealth of Nations with an analysis of industrial labor division, showing how the output of goods (in the famous case of making pins) could be increased by dividing production into delimited and easily repeatable tasks, Sieyès was chiefly concerned about the social division of labor that allowed people to devote themselves to a single occupation (such as baking), and to exchange their products with others similarly focused. Smith had recognized the importance of this form of labor division too, and like him Sièyes regarded its advance as productive both of freedom, since it replaced direct dependency on one or a few powerful superiors with reciprocal ties to a wide variety of differently situated individuals, and of greater wealth, since people became more efficient when they concentrated on a limited line of work. But the champion of the Third Estate was little concerned about the power of market relations to push the makers of goods toward higher productivity under the pressure of competition. Instead he located the source of well-being in the necessity that “society, independently of the power of nature which produces goods, must have a living force coproductive of wealth, and it is necessary that the elements of that force, united by society, produce more than they would if they remained isolated. The sum of the labors of all citizens forms the living force.”46
What allowed society to combine the efforts of its members in this way was the presence within it of “co-productive” workers, people whose endeavors created connections between isolated producers and made exchanges between them more efficient and fruitful. This group included merchants and haulers, as well as scientists and educators, who added to the social product by improving ways of making it. But particularly important within it were those who did the work of the state, taking on a special role in giving society its vital unity just as bakers and butchers did in supplying food. Their work included providing improved means of communication, roads, canals, and ports that “assuredly make a nation richer than if it were deprived of them.”47 The importance of these means and networks was not quite what it was in Smith’s scenario, however, since when goods were exchanged in the market, their commerce was regulated not by the abstract mechanisms that gave things market prices, but by the “representations” people made of their own and each other’s work. Sewell recognizes that this put a special stamp on Sieyès’s thinking: “His basic paradigm for the economy is a network of voluntary, rational, contractual relations – a network of mutual ‘representations.’” Social existence and the increase in wealth it generates arise not out of the competition that pushes workers to become more efficient and productive, but “from intentional agreements about mutual advantage; economic progress is a consequence of reason, intentionality, and mutual trust.”48 State officials were particularly important in making these exchanges possible, because their work was “representation” in the most emphatic sense, aiding people to see others as workers like themselves with particular needs and interests, and thus making it possible for society to exist as the “network of representations” that gave stability and order to exchanges and made the product of social labor greater than the sum of its individual parts. Sieyès “never fully grasped the significance of Smith’s discovery that the economy could be understood as a self-sufficient system, governed by laws of its own, distinct from those of political science.” His principle was not laisser-faire but its near-opposite faire faire, “cause to be done.”49 Although Sewell maintains that Sieyès’s putting state action in the frame of labor division means that he saw politics in economic terms, it makes better sense to conclude the opposite: that viewing the economy as a “network of representations” in whose construction state officials played a crucial role testifies to the central place that governmental action occupied in shaping his understanding of what made the economy work. Such an account puts him in the line of reformers such as Trudaine and the ponts et chaussées planners and reformers, for whom state action was an essential tool of economic advance. No more than they did he appeal to some bourgeois class as an independent agent of the changes all of them sought.
The bourgeois monarchy and its meanings
This persistence of these older patterns needs to be remembered in order to understand what it meant – and did not mean – that the term “bourgeois” became an important part of the French political vocabulary during the 1820s and 1830s, and that the regime set up in July of 1830, acquired the name “Bourgeois Monarchy.” The term bourgeois was largely absent from public discussion in the early years of the Restoration, when Louis XVIII and his ministers sought to rule France harmoniously, preserving the principles of constitutional government and legal equality introduced after 1789, and avoiding policies that would offend or frighten those who had been active in the Revolution and profited from it. The government was friendly and helpful to nobles who had either fled or withdrawn from public life between 1792 and 1815, but it did not question the property transfers that had taken place through the sale of church and emigré lands. From around 1820, however, the regime began a marked tilt to the right, pressured by a party of “ultras” seeking more one-sided favoritism for aristocrats, and frightened by what seemed to be a resurgence of radical activity, brought home by the assassination of the king’s nephew (and only male heir) the Duke of Berry in 1820. This shift became more marked after Charles X ascended the throne in 1824, instituting defensive and reactionary policies that generated increasing opposition.
It was this turn away from the early Restoration policy of conciliation and social peace on the part of the monarchy, not bourgeois efforts to gain new powers at the expense of aristocrats, that set in motion the developments that would issue in renewed revolution six years later. The critical moment came with the government’s decisions to shut down liberal newspapers and put in place a new electoral law, giving greater weight to rural districts and according a “double vote” to their richest inhabitants, many of them large landowners with aristocratic pedigrees. Liberal political figures organized opposition, supported by writers who now urged the claims of “middle class” and “bourgeois” people in a new way. In earlier debates the liberals (dubbed “doctrinaires” because of their fondness for general principles) had sometimes invoked “middle-class” virtues, but in terms still redolent of Aristotle’s praise of “middling” people as neither powerful enough to oppress others nor weak enough to be easily corrupted. Rather than put forward claims on behalf of any class, they had offered support for what Sara Maza notes was “the Charter’s transcendent, timeless synthesis of the French nation’s different components.” But faced with a government no longer interested in upholding this synthesis, the liberal writers and politicos moved toward presenting themselves as representatives of the non-noble groups the regime was squeezing out of it.50
The case they made for these groups’ importance was based on an account or rather a series of accounts of French history which rooted the opposition between bourgeoisie and aristocracy deep in the past, and presented the bourgeois as having always in some way been champions of national unity and well-being. Like the liberal response to Bourbon politics after 1820, these histories were defensive to begin with, conceived in response to aristocratic writers such as the Count of Montlosier, who (writing in 1814) blamed the Revolution and its violence on the medieval communes that, in alliance with the monarchs, had undermined and eventually destroyed the country’s original aristocratic constitution. Using language inherited from eighteenth-century writers, Montlosier depicted French history as a struggle not just between principles but between different “races,” descendants of the original Franks and Gauls. It was this model that liberal writers, notably Augustin Thierry and François Guizot, took over and inverted, viewing French history as a struggle in which heroic “bourgeois” defenders of freedom and order stood up against violent aristocrats out to consolidate and extend their destructive privileges. The two historians made important contributions to the idea of history as a continuing struggle between c
lasses that Marx would take over a few years later (he acknowledged his debt to them), but they told somewhat different stories. Thierry, a former disciple of Saint-Simon (about whom more in a moment), attributed both political and economic virtues to the Third Estate and the “bourgeois” heroes of his story, using terms that resonated both with Sieyès’s portrayal of the unprivileged as sustainers and promoters of material well-being, and with Saint-Simon’s celebration of l’industrie. Guizot, however, largely saw the Old Regime bourgeoisie through the prism of a different component of it, namely the judges, lawyers, and office holders who, in alliance with the monarchy, had brought order and justice to the country, providing the foundation for national unity. Thierry sometimes gave a place in the story to artisans and poorer town-dwellers, especially where he thought they had joined to resist attacks on civic freedom by bishops and nobles, but Guizot did not hesitate to label such people a “rabble,” regretting that their presence inside towns helped to keep educated and stable bourgeois from achieving the position in national life their virtues merited. Taken together, the two accounts show that from the start the bourgeoisie as a historical actor was a construction, not an actual entity, differing in its composition according to who was appealing to it, and invoked in order to give social and moral justification to a particular political program.51
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