Social conflicts that led to
bourgeois revolutions in England and France
The major aim of the paper below is to point out some of the major
aspects that belong to Barrington Moores work Social Origins of Dictatorship
and Democracy with regard to the social changes and most of all social
conflicts that eventually led to the conversion of societies from agrarian to
modern industrial ones. The essay is entirely based on Barrington Moores
up-mentioned work for it is extremely well focused on the subject offering
valuable pieces of information related to the issue concerning the
metamorphosis of agrarian societies into industrial ones and emphasizing on the
principal conflicting forces that made it possible.
The paper below can be said to be structured in three main parts. The
first one, which strongly resembles an introductory part, refers to an analysis
of Moores most significant statements with
regard to the way in which social conflicts lead to important changes within
societies, consequently this first part is actually an attempt to summarize the
main views of Moore
concerning the causes of the advent of modern democratic industrial societies.
The following three parts refer to specifically to the examples provided by the
author relating to the issues presented in the first fraction of the paper, thus
in the second part the case of England
will be analyzed, and in the second part
that of France.
Barrington Moore considers that there is a pattern that characterizes the
advent of modern society and that the foremost historical conditions that make
possible the passing from agrarian societies which he define as being states
where a large majority of the population lives off the land to
a modern industrial has as its peak revolution. The author main interest is the
role played by the landed upper classes and that of the peasantry, at a lower
level in the revolution process and, at a higher level, of general process of
the transformation of society. Thus Moore
believes that there are three main historical routes from the preindustrial to
the modern world . Accordingly,
the first and the second routes are opened by the bourgeois revolutions and
the third one is opened by peasant revolutions. Obviously these three routes
have astonishing different results. Thus, according to Moore the bourgeois revolutions lead to
capitalist democracy, the abortive bourgeois revolutions lead to fascism, and
the peasant revolutions lead to communism. The main examples the author offers
in order to sustain his up- mentioned theory are: for the first route the
development of democratic and capitalist societies in England, France and the
United States of America; for the second route the primary example are, of
course, Germany and Japan, and finally for the second route Moore presents the
case of China and that of Russia. the paper below deals only with presenting
and analyzing the major characteristics of the first route and it is focused on
Engalnd and France.
The first country that managed to make a step forward from the
preindustrial society to the modern one was England. Unlike France, English industrialization
process - that began somewhere around 1750 was peaceful; this was probably
because of the gradual evolution of constitutional and parliamentary
institutions in the century prior to this year. Nevertheless England had its
share of violent struggles embodied in the Civil War that had at its basis a
series of social conflicts having their origins in a complex process of change
that began several centuries earlier when a modern and secular society was
slowly pushing its way up through the vigorous and much tangled overgrowth of
the feudal and ecclesiastical order .
In this process the most important role was held by the upper class. There are,
of course, several features and factors that characterize the English
development as a modern democratic society, the Wars of the Roses (1455-14850
led to the enabling of the Tudor dynasty, thus the Tudor peace combined with
the continuing stimulus of the wool trade generated a social atmosphere that
stimulated the growth of a commercial and even capitalist outlook in the
countryside. Related to this aspect Tawney asserts: the Tudor discipline, with
its stern prohibition of livery and maintenance, its administrative
jurisdictions and tireless bureaucracy, had put down private warfare with a
heavy hand, and by drawing the teeth to feudalism had made the command of money
more important than the command of men .
In this sense it is marked the transition from the medieval conception of land
(the basis of political functions and obligations) to the modern view of it (an
income-yielding investment), thus landholding tending to become commercialized.
Another important role in the advent of modern England is held by the political
and most of all religious considerations of Henry VIII. It is suggested that
Henry VIIIs confiscation of the monasteries in 1536 and 1539 have helped to
promote new, and commercially minded landowners at the expanse of the older
aristocracy and its centrifugal traditions .
But the major contribution Henry VIII had was to forever damage the role of the
church in British society. It is interesting, but in the same time extremely
important to notice that long before Adam Smith groups of Englishmen living in
the countryside began to adopt the economic individualism ideology.
What had probably the most significant role in the destruction of the
peasantry eliminating them as a factor from British political life, and the
strengthening of the larger landlords was the enclosure movement. The term
enclosure has had a variety of meanings; during the sixteenth century the
most significant was encroachments made by lords of manors or their farmers
upon the land over which the manorial population had common rights or which lay
in the open arable fields .
Another meaning of the enclosures in England was: mutual agreements to
consolidate plots and abandon the system of strips in the open field. The chief
force behind peasant enclosures were the yeomen, who from the economic
standpoint were: a group of ambitious, aggressive, small capitalists, aware
that they had not enough surplus to take great risks, mindful that the grain is
often as much in the saving as in the spending, but determined to take
advantage of every opportunity, whatever its origin, for increasing their
profits .
The yeomen had as major purpose to overcome the traditional agricultural
routines and to reach new techniques in the hope of profit. Thus, it was the
yeoman together with the landed upper classes the ones that promoted agrarian
capitalism.
The Civil war was mainly due to the defective Stuart agrarian policy that
favored the amplification of the conflict between the landed upper class and yeomen
on one side and the royal attempts to preserve the old order. There are critics
that consider the English Civil War a bourgeois revolution, nevertheless it is
important to stress the fact that the conflict did not have as a result the
taking of political power by the bourgeoisie. As a matter of fact the political
power remained in the hands of the upper classes in the countryside not only
during the eighteenth century but even after the Reform bill of 1832. the
aristocratic class survived, but in a new form, for money rather than birth was
now its basis. Thus, in the economics the Civil War did not produce any massive
transfer of landed property from one group or class to another. Nonetheless, it
is very important to state that the Puritan Revolution had major consequences
in the are of law and social relationships. Moore underlines the fact that:
through breaking the power of the king, the Civil War swept away the main
barrier to the enclosing landlord and simultaneously prepared England for rule
by a <committee of landlords>, a reasonably accurate if unflattering
designation of Parliament in the eighteen century .
The age of peaceful transformation within British society was the
nineteenth century as parliamentary democracy established itself firmly. The existence
of Parliament meant that within that society there was a flexible institution
that assured the peaceful solving of conflicts among groups with that had
conflicting interests among themselves. The Parliament also meant that the
English political society was characterized by democracy, thus capitalism could
spread out. Indeed it did, industrial capitalism spread out peacefully with few
exceptions. By the end of the nineteenth century agrarian interests were
attacked by the liberals mainly because the English upper strata had largely
ceased to be agrarian for the economic base had shifted to industry and trade. England
is to be considered an example when talking about the advent of modern
industrial society from an agrarian one not only because it is the first
country to do so but also because of the interesting processes that eventually
led to this advent.
Unlike England, France
did not enter the modern world through the independence of landed upper class,
but on the contrary, the French nobility, or more specifically its leading
sector, became a decorative appanage of the King .
In contrast with English nobles, the French were not characterized by a
capitalist way of thinking. A pure evidence for that is the fact that during the
eighteenth century the French nobility lived very largely from dues collected
in kind or in cash from their peasants. Another factor stretching a major
difference between the English society and the French one is the important role
that the church always had in France.
To briefly sum up the major difference between the two pre-Revolutionary
societies is simply to notice the fact that France did not have a strong
capitalist tradition before the revolution this is why the Revolution
overwhelmed the nobility. Nevertheless together with the urbanization process,
the bourgeoisie class started to appear. Thus the principal factors that
created the economic relationships were capitalist influences coming out from
the towns and the monarchys long efforts to control the nobility. As in England
the response to the new world of commerce and industry was also held by a
substantial fusion between the landed upper classes and the bourgeoisie. Moore
correctly underlined that if these abstract variables, king, nobility, and
bourgeoisie, were the same in both countries, their qualitative character and relationship to each other were very
different . While
in England the fusion
between countryside and town was mainly directed against the king, in France
the fusion took place through the crown with very different political and
social consequences.
The true impulse for the advent of a modern society in France was given by Louis XIV
through a unified state and habits of precision and obedience coming from the
royal bureaucracy rather than from the bourgeoisie. At the height of absolutism
the contradictions and paradoxes of the system become visible. In France
it was the sale of offices that created a mixture of commercial and
precommercial institutions and was also an attempt to reconcile them. The sale
of offices was considered to be the manna that never fails
for it was at the root of the kings independence of the aristocracy, of any
effective control by a parliament, thus it favored the maintenance of royal
absolutism. In the earlier stages of the growth of monarchy, the sale of
offices had helped to make from the bourgeoisie an ally of the monarch against
feudalism, but eventually this issue imparted feudal characteristics to the bourgeoisie.
Therefore, by giving bourgeois commoners a title of nobility and then making
it impossible to supervise their activities closely, the sale of offices helped
to build up a sense of corporate identity, immunity from outside influences,
and <espprit de corps> .
Nevertheless it is obvious that the monarchy deprived the landed upper classes
of political responsibility and made the bourgeois follow their own interests.
During the second half of the eighteenth the French countryside
experienced a limited enclosure movement as agriculture was penetrated by
commercial and capitalist practices by feudal methods. It is important to be
stated that feudal arrangements combined with those of royal absolutism
constituted the political mechanisms through which the French landed
aristocracy extracted an economic surplus from the peasants. Even though this
capitalist penetration was limited and accordingly it failed to eliminate the
peasantry, it came in such a way as to increase very sharply peasant hostility
to the <ancient regime>. Peasants did not accept this attempt of
agricultural revival and neither did they agreed with enclosures, in this sense
their reluctance towards the monarch was amplified. Moore observes that capitalism was seeping
into the French countryside by every possible cranny, in the form of feudalism
through the seigniorial reaction, in the form of an attack on feudalism, and
under the banner of progress and reason through the officially sponsored
enclosure movement .
The French Revolution reveals the fact that French society broke apart
from above as the monarchy became unable to cope with the institutional and
personal interests that led to the revolution in the first place. One of the main aspects that has a major
relevance when discussing about the Revolution is the growth in number of
landless people and of small property owners, accordingly two of the major
demands among the poorer peasants was more land, and secondly they wanted to
preserve the specific customs of the village community that served their own
interests. This aspect is very important for it shows that the French society
was extremely divided. The bourgeois did not want to preserve the old customs
and attacked the privileges of the nobility. The French Revolution can be
characterized as a very violent one; full scale peasant violence frightened the
bourgeoisie and threw them into the arms of the nobility. Moore asserts that the peasantry was the
arbiter of the Revolution but it was not its chief propelling force. The feudal
system was indeed destroyed by the Revolution not immediately but in the
afterwards more radical forms of it. After the first stage of the Revolution
was over, the second one began. The leaders of the Gironde
in which commercial and shipping interests were represented sought war.
Afterwards a major conflict arose between Robespierre and his sustainers on one
side and the bourgeoisie on the other. These were rough periods for French
society, nevertheless the Revolution in its early phases were a huge step
towards modern society having a huge ideological impact on the international
sphere but nonetheless on the national sphere also. Some critics even assert
that the social instability that characterized the period of the revolution
actually influenced the appearance of the parliamentary democracy. Moore emphasizes the fact
that the Revolution mortally wounded the whole interlocking complex of
aristocratic privilege: monarchy, landed aristocracy, and seigniorial rights, a
complex that constituted the <anciene regime> .
Both in the case of England
and also in the case of France
the revolutions had as their foundation major conflicts within the classes
belonging to the society of that time. In England the landed upper class and
the bourgeoisie were against the old regime, thus against the power of the
monarchy too. Nevertheless the most important conflict that led to the rise of
modern society was the destruction of peasantry. In France on the other side, the
monarchic force was far stronger and it was through the reforms implemented by
the king rather than from the bourgeois movement that the advent of modern
society began. The revolutionary process was extremely more violent in France
and it put out a series of major social conflicts: between the bourgeois and
the peasantry in the first place, between the bourgeois and the old rule,
between the peasants and the nobility. The faith of the peasantry was not as
bad as in England,
for that time being, of course. This multitude of social conflicts probably
also had a major importance in these two countries becoming democracies.
