Imperial Republics: Revolution, War and Territorial Expansion from the English Civil War to the French Revolution 9781442695863

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IMPERIAL REPUBLICS: REVOLUTION, WAR, AND TERRITORIAL EXPANSION FROM THE ENGLISH CIVIL WAR TO THE FRENCH REVOLUTION

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EDWARD G. ANDREW

Imperial Republics Revolution, War, and Territorial Expansion from the English Civil War to the French Revolution

UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO PRESS Toronto Buffalo London

© University of Toronto Press 2011 Toronto Buffalo London www.utppublishing.com  Printed in Canada  ISBN 978-1-4426-4331-4

Printed on acid-free, 100% post-consumer recycled paper with vegetable-based inks. ________________________________________________________________ Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication Andrew, Edward, 1941– Imperial republics : revolution, war, and territorial expansion from the English Civil War to the French Revolution/Edward G. Andrew. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-1-4426-4331-4 1. France – History – Revolution, 1789–1799. 2. Great Britain – History – Civil War, 1642–1649. 3. United States – History – Revolution, 1775–1783.  4. France – Intellectual life – 18th century. 5. Great Britain – Intellectual life – 17th century. 6. United States – Intellectual life – 18th century.  7. Political science – Rome – History. 8. Republicanism – Rome – History. 9. Imperialism. I. Title. JC421.A53 2011  321.8'6  C2011-903139-6 ________________________________________________________________ This book has been published with the help of a grant from the Canadian Federation for the Humanities and Social Sciences, through the Aid to Scholarly Publications Program, using funds provided by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. University of Toronto Press acknowledges the financial assistance to its publishing program of the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council.

University of Toronto Press acknowledges the financial support of the Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund for its publishing activities.

Contents

Acknowledgments vii Preface ix Introduction: Rome in the Eighteenth Century 3 1 Machiavelli on Imperial Republics 18 2 Republicanism and the English Civil War 27 3 Catonic Virtue, Sweet Commerce, and Imperial Rivalry 49 4 From Colony to Nation to Empire 71 5 From Caesar to Brutus to Augustus 98 6 Le Royaume and La Patrie: Rome in Eighteenth-Century France 116 7 The Role of Brutus in the French Revolution 140 8 Imperial Pride and Anxiety: Gibbon’s Roman Empire and Ferguson’s Roman Republic 167 Conclusion 178 Index 183

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Acknowledgments

I would like to thank the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council for affording me the opportunity to do research for this book and to fund excellent research assistants, Sophie Bourgault, Robert Sparling, Larissa Atkison and Katie Edwards, who were invaluable in finding useful sources of information and providing helpful ideas. Larissa Atkison prepared the index. Also I would like to thank Ronnie Beiner, Ryan Balot, Leah Bradshaw, Sankar Muthu, Simon Kow, Geoffrey Kellow, and other participants at the meetings of the Canadian Political Science Association, where earlier versions of the ideas raised in this book were first aired; Daniel Quinlan and the anonymous reviewers for the University of Toronto Press for useful suggestions in clarifying my argument; and, above all, to Donna Trembowelski Andrew for reading and editing this book, despite her manifest distaste for its contents.

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Preface

The title of this book perhaps needs some explanation. Imperialism and republicanism are o en taken to be antithetical. We usually think of empires as vast areas of land acquired by military conquerors, such as Cyrus, Alexander, or Genghis Khan, and maintained by emperors, such as in the Hi ite, Han, Mogul or Inca empires. But the Roman Republic conquered other peoples and ruled extensive areas around the Mediterranean Sea, and it was precisely the Roman Republic that served as a model polity for many thinkers of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Republicanism is usually understood in terms of self-rule or autonomy,1 while empires are understood as being characterized by externally imposed rule or the subjection of one populated territory by a more powerful nation. Republican citizens make laws for themselves, at least in theory;2 imperial powers give laws to subject provinces. Philip Pe it’s influential Republicanism: A Theory of Freedom and Government holds republicanism and imperialism to be opposed; empires make laws for conquered nations to which the metropolis is not subject, whereas republics are governed by the empire of law condition,

1 Richard Dagger, Civic Virtues: Rights, Citizenship and Republican Liberalism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), 13–17, 31–9, 62–7, 120–30. 2 In ancient republics, citizens made laws in popular assemblies; in modern republics, elected representatives are thought to make laws. However, as John Stuart Mill wrote, in Considerations on Representative Government (chapter 5), representatives may debate the merits of legislation but bills are dra ed by legal experts to ensure coherence with precedent law and to prevent unforeseen difficulties and court challenges.

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namely, that those who make the laws are also subject to them.3 Pe it’s doctrine that republicanism and imperialism are incompatible has been applied to international relations by James Bohman.4 Mortimer Sellers also considers republics and empires to be incompatible: empires are to international relations as despotisms are to national government of states.5 Martin van Gelderen and Quentin Skinner, in the preface to Republicanism: A Shared European Heritage, wrote that the acquisition of an overseas empire might undermine the conditions of virtuous citizenship at home.6 David Armitage wrote that republicanism and imperialism are incompatible or ‘ultimately irreconcilable,’7 or, at least that ‘republicanism and empire were never entirely happy bedfellows.’8 However, Armitage recognized that ‘British republicans, in particular, a empted to reconcile the convergent, but antagonistic, claims of empire and liberty’ from the Elizabethan era through the eighteenth century.9 The leading philosopher of the eighteenth century, Immanuel Kant, declared that all persons must ‘strive for a constitution which would be incapable of bellicosity, i.e., a republican one.’10 The most popular writer at the time of the American and French republican revolutions, Thomas Paine, saw empires and republics as antithetical; he equated monarchy with war, conquest and high taxes and republics with peace,  3 Philip Pe it, Republicanism: A Theory of Freedom and Government (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), 13, 112–13, 149, 166, 171–5.  4 James Bohman, Democracy across Borders: From Demos to Demoi (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2007); ‘Nondomination and Transnational Democracy,’ in Cécile Laborde and John Maynor, Republicanism and Political Theory (Oxford: Blackwell, 2008).  5 Mortimer N.S. Sellers, Republican Principles in International Law: The Fundamental Requirements of a Just World Order (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), 157–8.  6 Republicanism: A Shared European Heritage, ed. Martin van Gelderen and Quentin Skinner (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), vol. 1: 5. One may wonder if the trans-historical shared European heritage is compatible with Skinner’s emphasis that political ideas must be understood in their historical context. The equation of empires with overseas conquests is contentious; it assumes that the conquest of contiguous land areas, say Wales and Scotland by England, or Burgundy, Bri any, and Provence by France, or American continental expansion, is nation-building, not imperialism.  7 David Armitage, ‘Empire and Liberty: A Republican Dilemma,’ in van Gelderen and Skinner, eds., Republicanism, 1: 29.  8 David Armitage, Greater Britain, 1516–1776 (Aldershot, Hampshire: Ashgate, 2004), x.  9 Armitage, ‘Empire and Liberty,’ 35. 10 Kant’s Political Writings, ed. Hans Reiss (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970), 184.

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commerce, and low taxes.11 In the republican future, Paine thought, there will be no need of navies to protect commerce.12 Biancamaria Fontana declared: ‘In the American debates, as in the French Assembly, the new regime had proclaimed its vision of a future world in which commerce, exchange and the universal values of equality and liberty would bind all nations, replacing the struggle of hostile empires with a peaceful league of free nations.’13 Jeremy Jennings and Iseult Honahan seem to distinguish the imperialist French Revolution from the antiimperialist American Revolution: ‘In the name of the universal principles of the Republic, France set out to build itself an overseas empire. America, on the other hand, nominally turned its back upon such practices, casting itself as an anti-imperial power. Both republics, however, have seen themselves as beacons of light and examples to the world as a whole.’14 Ellis Sandoz asserts that ‘jingoism and imperialism are excesses, deformations’ of American republicanism.15 Imperial Republics will demonstrate that the historical evidence of the English Civil War, the American and French Revolutions proves false the antithesis of republic and empire, and the expansionary Roman Republic was the model for most republicans during the seventeenth and particularly the eighteenth centuries. This book explores the Roman imagery of the political thinkers involved in the English Civil War of the mid-seventeenth century and the American and French Revolutions towards the end of the eighteenth century. Mortimer Sellers correctly wrote of the American revolutionaries: ‘when Americans used the word “republic” they thought of Rome. To the extent that the United States constitution was self-consciously “republican,” Roman models predominated.’16 Since Sellers sees both the Roman and American republics as models of excellence, he did

11 Thomas Paine, The Rights of Man (Dublin: G. Burnet et al., 1791), 69–70; Thomas Paine, The Rights of Man. Part the Second (London: J. Jordan, 1792), vi, 4–5, 16–19, 77–84, 112–17, 158–66. 12 Paine, The Rights of Man. Part the Second, 90, 165. 13 Biancamaria Fontana, Introduction to The Invention of the Modern Republic (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 4. 14 Jeremy Jennings and Iseult Honahan, Republicanism in Theory and Practice (London: Routledge, 2005), 9. 15 Ellis Sandoz, Republicanism, Religion and the Soul of America (Columbus: University of Missouri Press, 2006), 108. 16 M.N.S. Sellers, American Republicanism: Roman Ideology in the United States Constitution (London: Macmillan, 1994), 7.

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not a empt to explain why Rome was the model republic, rather than Athens, Sparta, Venice, or Florence. Imperial Republics proposes to understand neo-Romanism in terms of the imperial or expansionary character of the revolutions of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. That is, revolutionary republicans donned the garb of Roman senators who had led the Roman Republic to a vast empire. In The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoleon, Karl Marx wrote that ‘unheroic as bourgeois society is, it nevertheless took heroism, sacrifice, terror, civil war and ba les of peoples to bring it into being. And in the classically austere traditions of the Roman Republic its gladiators found the ideals and art forms, the self-deceptions that they needed in order to conceal from themselves the bourgeois limitations of the content of their struggles and to keep their enthusiasms on the high plane of the great historical tragedy.’17 Marx’s statement is not to be immediately dismissed since, as we shall see, both participants in the American and French Revolutions and scholars of our day portrayed immediate concerns about customs duties and taxes escalating into more dramatic issues of neo-Roman liberty; donning the toga of Roman republican heroes enabled the revolutionaries to rise to the level of the events in which history had cast them. Bernard Bailyn asserted of the American revolutionaries: ‘The classics of the ancient world are everywhere in the literature of the Revolution, but they are everywhere illustrative, not determinative of thought.’18 Yet there are serious flaws in Marx’s analysis and, as we shall see later, in Bailyn’s. First, the French (and American) revolutionaries were not Marxists and hence did not see their aspirations to eliminate aristocratic and clerical exemptions from taxation, to create a property-owning democracy, and to expand their territory as ‘bourgeois limitations.’ Marx saw this Roman rhetoric as delusional, not as historical selfunderstanding. Second, Marx did not provide a materialist account of revolutionary commitment and thus did not provide grounds why materialists should abandon a Hobbesian ethos of comfortable selfpreservation, a self-consciously anti-revolutionary, anti-romantic, and anti-heroic creed. Without ideals and idealism, why should one sacrifice one’s life, and kill others, for some notion of republican liberty? 17 Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Selected Works (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1968), 98. 18 Bernard Bailyn, The Intellectual Origins of the American Revolution (Cambridge, MA: Belnap Press, 1967), 26.

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The most profound thinker of the English-speaking world warned his readers during the English Civil War of the danger of assuming Roman persona but also indicated that human beings are nothing other than the roles they assume.19 Hobbes thus helps us overcome the delusion of the Marxian a ribution of false consciousness to eighteenth-century revolutionaries; one cannot make a sharp distinction between the civic roles revolutionaries adopted and the bourgeois interests that really animated them. The fact that revolutionaries sacrificed their lives, and the lives of their opponents, is a reality, not an illusion. Hannah Arendt presented at least one side of the motives of eighteenth-century revolutionaries when she claimed that ‘they were inspired and guided to an extraordinary degree by the example of Roman antiquity,’ without which ‘none of the men of the revolutions on either side of the Atlantic would have possessed the courage for what turned out to be unprecedented action.’20 The roles people assume in their lives as revolutionaries are as real as, or no more ideological than, the roles they play out in their mundane round. Arendt recognized that securing property rights, and obtaining elected representatives to consent to taxation, were motives to the American Revolution, but she claimed the slogan of ‘no taxation without representation . . . certainly could not appeal by virtue of its charms.’21 One might add to Arendt’s account that women on both sides of the Atlantic espoused Roman republicanism: following the influential English Whig historian Catherine Macaulay,22 who identified virtuous women with republicanism and ‘loose vicious women’ with monarchy, Mercy Otis Warren adopted the name of Marcia the wife of Cato, and Abigail Adams, Portia, the wife of Brutus, enacting the roles of Roman matrons

19 Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, ed. C.B. Macpherson (New York: Penguin Books, 1984), chap. 16. Hobbes distinguished a natural person, who is the author of his own act, from an artificial person, who is not the author of his actions. ‘The word Person . . . signifies the disguise, or outward appearance of a man, counterfeited on the Stage . . . and in common conversation.’ 20 Hannah Arendt, On Revolution (New York: Viking Press, 1969), 196–7. 21 Ibid., 26. 22 Catherine Macaulay was one of the most widely read British historians of the eighteenth century until her marriage in 1778 to a younger man, William Graham, when her popularity waned immediately in Britain, but her Whiggish account of English history remained popular in America.

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or partners of their virtuous husbands, James Warren and John Adams.23 French women assumed more radical Roman roles, as we shall see in our account of the French Revolution. Bailyn’s view that Roman poses were illustrative not determinative of the motives of the American revolutionaries seems to assume a false polarity, either a classical republicanism or an enlightened liberalism. However, Trenchard and Gordon’s Cato’s Le ers, which Bailyn considered the most important source for American republicanism and was more widely cited in pamphlet literature than Locke and Montesquieu,24 combined neoclassical Machiavellian republicanism with Lockeian liberalism. Algernon Sidney, whose republicanism was deeply admired by John Adams and Thomas Jefferson, combined classical and neo-Machiavellian republicanism and Lockeian liberalism.25 Paul Rahe and Joyce Appleby have rightly characterized the American Revolution as combining classical republicanism and enlightened liberalism.26 Moreover, Bailyn did not indicate what the classical references illustrated. Were the Roman illustrations supposed to indicate an underlying disposition to bicameral legislatures, the veto power of the presidency, the senate’s role in foreign policy, martial discipline, or territorial expansion? Bailyn did not tell us what these Roman references illustrated and le the erroneous impression that they were merely educated embellishments on a structure of thought arising from the liberal Enlightenment. Nor did he distinguish Greek from Roman allusions or a empt to explain what was signified by widespread eighteenthcentury ranking of Rome, then Sparta, and below them, Athens. Paul Rahe’s impressive study of ancient and modern republics compared the American Republic to those of Athens and Sparta, not of Rome, and thus overstated the difference between ancient and modern republics

23 Caroline Winterer, Mirrors of Antiquity: American Women and the Classical Tradition, 1750–1900 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2007), 2, 41–2, 44, 46, 50. 24 Bailyn, Intellectual Origins, 36; Bernard Bailyn, ‘Political Experience and Enlightenment Ideas in Eighteenth-Century America,’ American Historical Review 67 (1962): 344. 25 Vickie B. Sullivan, Machiavelli, Hobbes and the Formation of a Liberal Republic (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 199–226. 26 Joyce Appleby, Liberalism and Republicanism in the Historical Imagination (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992); Paul Rahe, Republics Ancient and Modern: Classical Republicanism and the American Revolution (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1992).

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and missed an opportunity to show how the Roman Republic bridged the gulf between Greek city-states and modern republics. Eric Nelson’s bold The Greek Tradition in Republican Thought distinguished Greek political thought and practice, which justified property redistribution if it strengthened the civic body, prevented revolution and enabled political participation, from the Roman (patrician) tradition, which held that a primary function of the state was to secure private property.27 Cicero’s view that the chief function of the state is to protect private property28 was much closer to Locke than Plato’s and Aristotle’s positions on property in relation to the polity and helps to account for the merging of classical republicanism in the American Revolution and the first years of the French Revolution. Stephen Botein has demonstrated Cicero’s centrality to early American legal thought.29 Cicero voiced the senatorial opposition to the Roman agrarian and Licinian laws, which were designed to limit the acquisition of public lands by the patricians and distribute them to the plebeians.30 It is a 27 Eric Nelson, The Greek Tradition in Republican Thought (Cambridge, 2004). For a detailed critique of this stimulating book, see Craig B. Champion, ‘Classical Republicans: Greek and Roman, Ancient and Modern,’ Polis: The Journal of Greek Political Thought 23 (2006): 385–437. 28 M. Tulli Ciceronis, De Officius (Amsterdam: A.M. Hakkert, 1966), 87, 89, 92. 29 Stephen Botein, ‘Cicero as a Role Model for Early American Lawyers: A Case Study in Classical Influence,’ The Classical Journal 73 (1978): 313–21. 30 The origin of the Roman agrarian laws are more a ma er of legend than fact, since the invasion of the Gauls in the early fourth century .c. destroyed all early records of Rome. However, Livy’s Early History of Rome (2: 30–44) provided Machiavelli and the neo-Machiavellians with their account of the agrarian laws, the a empts to limit patrician appropriation of the ager publicus (public land, initially the land le by the Etruscan kings and later land acquired by conquest). Disputes over the agrarian laws arose from the beginning of the Roman Republic and lasted until its demise. Despite the withdrawal of the plebeians from warfare to the Sacred Mount to protest their exclusion from land and public offices, patricians, such as Coriolanus and Menenius Agrippa (whose imagery of the senate as the belly of the Roman body on which the limbs depended), wished to keep the public land and its fruits as a monopoly of the patricians. When the consul Spurius Cassius proposed that public land be allocated to the plebeians, he was murdered by the senate around 486 .c., but his proposal was so a ractive to the plebeians that in the following generation, it was passed into law, which the patrician Livy asserted was the source of serious disturbances in Rome. The Licinian laws, named for the plebeian tribune Gaius Licinius Stolo, were enacted in 367 .c. and limited the use patricians could make of common pasture and ownership through grants or purchase of the ager publicus to 500 jugera (or 320 acres). The Licinian laws, which the Gracchi a empted to revive late in the republic, were routinely flouted by the patricians, who used their clients and

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central theme of this book that the flaunting of the agrarian laws by the patricians and the murdering of all proponents of agrarian equality from Spurius Cassius in the early fi h century .c. to Tiberius and Gaius Gracchus a er the defeat of Carthage, was the source of the imperial dynamic in the Roman Republic; the plebeians’ hunger for land motivated them to follow the senate’s initiative and consular leadership to fight in foreign wars because they were deprived of land at home. This theme is developed in chapter 1 in contrasting Aristotle’s Athens based on the farmer-soldier with Machiavelli’s imperial Roman Republic, based on land-hungry plebeians. Machiavelli, as we shall see, distinguished conservative republics, such as Sparta and Venice, from imperial republics, such as Rome, and neo-Machiavellian republicans, such as Algernon Sidney, thought that the ‘Venetians’ too great inclination for Peace is accounted to be a mortal error in their Constitution.’31 American constitutionalists, such as John Adams and Thomas Jefferson as stated above, greatly admired Sidney’s republican doctrine. The point is that Venice was a republic that safeguarded the wealth of the oligarchs but was not expansionist and thus was not a model for English, American, and French republicans. By liberalism, I mean a doctrine centred on individual rights, the right to life, liberty, property, and the toleration of religious beliefs and practices that do not harm anyone else. By republicanism, I mean a doctrine centred on civic virtues, the martial virtues of courage and discipline, and the civic virtues of prudence, moderation, and justice. Plato, Aristotle, and Cicero presented the polis or the respublica as schools of virtue and sites where these martial and civic virtues can be exercised and developed. Machiavelli employed the language of virtues rather than rights, Montesquieu thought virtue was the principle of republics (as distinct from honour for monarchies and fear for despotisms), Rousseau distinguished the virtue of the citoyen from the interests of the bourgeois, Mary Wollstonecra contrasted British selfish property interests with ‘that enthusiastic flame which in Greece and Rome consumed every sordid passion,’32 and Maximilien Robespierre enforced a

freedmen to purchase the land in their names. With respect to plebeian land hunger as a motive for Roman imperialism, see William V. Harris, War and Imperialism in Republican Rome, 327–70 .c. (Oxford: Clarendon, 1979), 60–4. 31 Algernon Sidney, Discourses Concerning Government (London: J. Darby, 1704), 144. 32 Mary Wollstonecra , A Vindication of the Rights of Men, in Political Writings, ed. J. Todd (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1993), 13.

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draconian ‘Reign of Virtue’ for wartime emergency, and thus tarnished the vocabulary of virtue in political discourse. Liberal rights are claims against the polity; republican virtues are contributions to the polity. The names of Brutus and Cato became the most popular representatives of republican virtue, in part because both names described the virtues of two men – Lucius Junius Brutus, the legendary founder of the Roman Republic who killed his two sons to prevent a reversion to monarchy, and Marcus Junius Brutus, ‘the noblest Roman of them all,’ the senator who led the conspiracy against Julius Caesar at the end of republic and Marcus Porcius Cato (the elder), notable for ending his speeches in the senate with the demand that Rome’s rival, Carthage, be destroyed and Marcus Porcius Cato Utencensis (the Younger), a senator who chose death over submission to Caesar. Cato the Younger was the hero of Addison’s Cato, which George Washington had performed in the dreadful winter at Valley Forge, while Cato’s Le ers celebrates the virtues of both Cato the Elder and Cato the Younger. Adam Smith illustrated the difference between liberalism and republicanism when he deprecated Cato the Elder as expressing ‘the savage patriotism of a strong but coarse mind, enraged almost to madness against a foreign nation from which his own had suffered so much. The more humane sentence with which Scipio Nasica is said to have concluded all his speeches, “It is my opinion likewise that Carthage ought not to be destroyed,” was the liberal expression of a more enlarged and enlightened mind.’33 As with most eighteenth-century Britons and Frenchmen, Rome and Carthage stood for Britain and France. Liberalism tended and tends to be both more individualist and more cosmopolitan than republicanism, and particularly the imperial republicanism, which is the subject of this study and to which Smith was opposed. Republics are composed of aristocracies and democracies, and are distinct from monarchies. One sense of republican is thus an opponent of monarchy. However, contemporary republican theorists, such as Quentin Skinner, Philip Pe it, and Maurizio Viroli do not define republicanism as such but insist that the distinctive feature of republicanism is its understanding of freedom as the antithesis of slavery; a free man is not just unconstrained, without doors closed to his or her mobility as liberal theory has it, but is independent of a master or

33 Adam Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments, ed. D.D. Raphael and A.L. Macfie (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 1982), 228–9.

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an imperial power, or the arbitrary will of another.34 A slave or subject of a despot may be able to move around but may never be free of the possibility that this freedom may be arbitrarily arrested. A difficulty with this definition is that it does not distinguish republicans from constitutional monarchists, who are also averse to arbitrary government.35 Skinner, Pe it, and Viroli do not indicate whether there is more freedom in republics, such as the United States, France, and Germany, or in constitutional monarchies, such as Britain, Canada, Holland, or Sweden. Moreover, within the history of political thought, many of the individuals routinely described as republicans, such as Trenchard, Gordon, and Montesquieu, described themselves as monarchists, opposed to despotism, as indeed were the Calvinist Monarchomachs, such as François Hotman, George Buchanan, and the author of Vindiciae contra Tyrannos. This study will not a empt to ascertain who is and who is not a true republican, which is more properly the office of republican theorists, but will accept the loose signification of republican in the scholarly literature, namely, those opposed to monarchy, those disposed to consider monarchy more arbitrary than polyarchy, those who voice notions of patriotic virtue, and those who consider liberty not merely as constraints on mobility but as non-dependence, not being a slave. In distinguishing republicanism from liberalism, I state the characteristic feature of the former was a language of virtues, and of the la er, a language of rights. The martial virtue of courage is essential to stand up to monarchs or arbitrary rulers, not to kneel down as servile subjects, especially in revolutionary opponents of monarchy. In chapter 6, we shall show how patriotic virtue came to replace loyal service to the realm in the minds of eighteenth-century French men and women. Republics may be aristocratic, democratic, or a mixture of democratic and aristocratic elements. Rome was the model of the eighteenth-century republic because it was recognized to be aristocratic, or a mixture of aristocratic and democratic elements that retained authority to direct

34 Maurizio Viroli, Republicanism, trans. Antony Shugaar (New York: Hill and Wang, 2002), 8–9; Philip Pe it, Republicanism (Oxford: Clarendon, 1997); Philip Pe it, ‘Keeping Republican Freedom Simple: On a Difference with Quentin Skinner,’ Political Theory 30 (2002): 339–56; Quentin Skinner, Liberty before Liberalism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998); Republicanism: A Shared European Heritage, ed. van Gelderen and Skinner, 2: 9–28. 35 Pe it, in ‘Keeping Republican Freedom Simple,’ 340, criticized Skinner’s ‘neoRoman’ conception of freedom for permi ing freedom in constitutional monarchies.

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public policy in its aristocratic senate. Mixed government was not understood in the Aristotelian sense of a mixture of rich and poor but in the sense of polyarchy or a separation of legislative, executive, and judicial powers of government. John Adams, James Madison, and Alexander Hamilton insisted that republics were not democracies; republics were based on representatives and excluded the direct participation of the people in public policy. Athens, for the eighteenth century, represented anarchic democracy, while Rome was the model republic. Abbé Sieyès thought representative government an example of Adam Smith’s principle of the efficiency of the division of labour,36 whereas Rousseau thought representative government meant that we pay taxes so that others do our thinking and fighting for us. John Adams, who wrote voluminously and intelligently on republics but was perplexed by the relationship of republics and democracies, declared: ‘There is not a more unintelligible word in the English language than republicanism.’37 As indicated above, I do not think contemporary theorists of republicanism, who profess to provide a more egalitarian or democratic doctrinal alternative to liberalism, have rendered the concept more intelligible, as the subsequent account will demonstrate. The English Civil War, the American and French Revolutions were all expansionary movements and thus the title, Imperial Republics, indicates the main theme of this book. By empire and imperialism, I mean not territory ruled by an emperor (as in the antithesis of the Roman Republic and the Roman Empire) but territorial expansion over peoples inhabiting the subjugated territories. Rome was not only a model republic but also a model imperialist, and it is largely for this reason that eighteenth-century men and women cast themselves as Romans (and o en their enemies as Carthaginians) in this era of intense imperial rivalries, which were both the se ing and cause of the American and French Revolutions. This book is a history of political thought, combining the literature on empires provided by historians with that on republics, which has been largely the province of political scientists. Imperial Republics cannot claim to be a work of intellectual history in the manner of Bernard Bailyn’s 36 Emmanuel Joseph Sieyès, Political Writings, ed. Michael Sonenscher (Indianapolis: Hacke , 2003), xxviii–xxix, 47. Sieyès did not include Smith’s account of how the division of labour stunts the growth of human faculties. 37 Cited in David Wooton, Republicanism, Liberty and Commercial Society 1649–1776 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1993), 1.

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The Intellectual Origins of the American Revolution since I do not examine pamphlet literature, except in the case of the series of bloody uprisings against Cardinal Mazarin during the minority of Louis XIV and contemporaneous with the English Civil War, known as the Fronde.38 I also examine the poetry, drama, and the art of the period from 1640 to 1815 not as a cultural historian but in order to situate political thought in a historical context. The geographical limit to my examination of imperial republics is limited to Britain, France, and America, with the focus on the imperial contestations between Britain and France that explain both the American and French Revolutions. After a general introduction to the role of Rome in eighteenthcentury political thought, the first chapter will examine Aristotelian anti-imperialism and Machiavellian imperialism and indicate why the la er, rather than the former, was espoused by eighteenth-century thinkers. Chapter 2 analyses the thought and practice of the English Civil War, the parliamentary supremacy, and the Protectorate in order to demonstrate the imperialist character of English republicanism. Chapter 3 explores how the language of virtue, and its embodiment in an image of Cato (combining the elder Cato, the imperialist, and the younger Cato, the republican martyr), became popular in Whig country houses and with colonial interests, and then crossed the Atlantic to inspire American patriots. Chapter 4 shows how the American War of Independence was the product of imperial wars where ideas of independence only emerged a er Britain had bested its imperial rivals in America. The moral of my story is that imperial victories tend to be losses: that the British victory over the French in the new world lost them America, and that the French victory over the British in America drained the resources of the ancien régime, forcing the Convocation of the Estates-General, the prelude to the French Revolution. Chapter 5 38 The Fronde was a series of violent contestations with the centralizing state, beginning with the Fronde of the jurists of the Paris parlement in 1648, and later espoused by the princes and princesses of the blood a year later, with strong popular participation by l’Ormée around Bordeaux in 1651. Despite important historical studies by Hubert Carrier and others, no political theorist besides Simone Weil has written positively of the Fronde. Montesquieu, who might well have supported the Frondeurs’ aim to decentralize power, maintained, as we shall see, a ‘heavy silence’ on the Fronde, with most holding with Voltaire that it was a comic tragedy. Since there were no contemporary books, besides Cardinal Retz’s Mémoires, justifying the Fronde, I examined a number of the pamphlets wri en during the Fronde to obtain a sense of the shi ing allusions during this republican rebellion or failed revolution.

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goes back in time to explore the emergence of neo-Romanism in French thought; it analyses the role of imperial Rome in monarchical legitimation, the emergence of Roman republican themes in Huguenot Monarchomachs, and later in the rebellions during the minorities of Louis XIII and Louis XIV, most notably during the Fronde (1648–53), and then the restoration of Louis XIV as Augustus Caesar. Chapter 6 examines how the French royaume was superseded by a notion of la patrie in the eighteenth century in the context of Anglo-French imperial rivalry. Chapter 7 analyses the variety of Brutuses in the French Revolution, from its liberal and aristocratic outset, through the hundreds of Brutuses calling for the head of Louis XIV, the Reign of Terror, the imperialist Directorate, to Napoleon’s Empire. Chapter 8 examines the use of Rome to express Britons’ pride and anxiety about maintaining liberty at home with domination abroad, exemplified in the work of Edward Gibbon and Adam Ferguson. A concluding chapter gathers together the various uses of neo-Romanism in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The point of Imperial Republics is to complement the existing literature on republicanism with an emphasis on imperialism, and to demonstrate that republicanism and imperialism are not antithetical, as is o en assumed. It also indicates that eighteenth-century neo-Romanism was patrician or anti-democratic, contrary to the contemporary theoretical literature on republicanism, in which Philip Pe it, Quentin Skinner, and Maurizio Viroli a empt to add an egalitarian dimension to liberalism. Imperial Republics, then, a empts to bring political theory closer to history than is evident in ‘the historical school’ of political theory.

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IMPERIAL REPUBLICS: REVOLUTION, WAR, AND TERRITORIAL EXPANSION FROM THE ENGLISH CIVIL WAR TO THE FRENCH REVOLUTION

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Introduction: Rome in the Eighteenth Century

J.G.A. Pocock wrote that ‘Rome is a past world ever present . . . in the thoughts of Europeans both medieval and modern.’1 I wish to examine the ways in which Rome presented itself to, and was represented by, French, British, and American writers of the seventeenth and especially the eighteenth century. Pocock’s monumental The Machiavellian Moment: Florentine Political Thought and the Atlantic Republican Tradition showed how the Roman Republic, interpreted by Machiavelli and his followers, helped to create an intellectual climate by which subjects of ecclesiastical and civil authorities could become republican citizens bound only by the laws to which they have given their assent. However, as Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri have stated, ‘This republican Rome was not the only Rome that fascinated Machiavelli and the Atlantic republicans.’2 In an era of imperial rivalry when France and Britain were almost constantly at war, Rome was a model for eighteenthcentury monarchists as well as republicans. This study will examine Rome as a model imperialist to complement, rather than replace, Rome as the model republic. As David Armitage wrote: ‘From early modern theories of empire, all roads lead to Rome, and from Rome to Troy.’3 Armitage, as we saw in the Preface, thought that republicanism

1 J.G.A. Pocock, The Ancient Constitution and the Feudal Law (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1957), 3. 2 Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000), 163. 3 David Armitage, ‘Introduction,’ Theories of Empire 1450–1800 (Aldershot, Hampshire: Ashgate, 1998), xv. Armitage did not indicate why the road led back from Rome to Troy, but perhaps he had in mind Jacob Hildebrand’s epic poem Brutus the Trojan:

4 Imperial Republics

and imperialism are incompatible, despite efforts to marry these strange bedfellows. However strained or strange republican theorists find the yoking together of republicanism and imperialism, Rome was an imperial republic. However, in saying this, I am not restricting the words ‘empire’ and ‘imperialism’ to ‘territory ruled by an emperor’ and ‘the policy of expanding the emperor’s reach,’ as Diderot and D’Alembert’s Encyclopédie did.4 Empire and republic are compatible, and it is precisely in their conjunction that Rome was so a ractive to many eighteenth-century thinkers. By imperialism, I mean here territorial expansion and domination over people not yet integrated or incorporated by the imperial power.5 Machiavelli’s Discourses on Livy (I.5–6) made a fundamental dichotomy between imperial republics, such as Rome, and conservative republics, such as Sparta and Venice; he concluded that, since republics are either increasing or declining in power, the conservative republics are impractical and thus ‘it is necessary to follow the Roman order and not that of the other republics.’6 The question that this book addresses is: why was Rome the model republic for thinkers of the eighteenth century? Our hypothesis is that republican Rome was espoused, not in spite of its imperialism (although anxieties about maintaining freedom at home and domination abroad were

Founder of the British Empire (London: William Lewis, 1735). The poem begins: ‘I sing the Founder of the British Throne / Renowned Brutus, of the Race of Troy.’ Another mythic founder of Britain was Aeneas. 4 Encylopédie, ou Dictionnaire raisonné des sciences, des arts et des métiers (Neufchastel: Samuel Faulche, 1765), t. 5, 582. 5 Following Machiavelli’s view in chapter 3 of The Prince that successful imperialism is praiseworthy and unsuccessful imperialism is contemptible, I suggest that successful imperialism is not seen as imperialism but as nation-building or continental expansion. Neither the people dominating nor those being dominated are homogeneous and static groups, and thus a people formerly dominated by an alien power may come to see themselves as Romans, French, British, or American. That is, imperialism is only seen as imperialism by subject peoples to the extent that they do not identify with the dominant power. Machiavelli admired the Romans for enabling conquered peoples to come to Rome, adopt Roman laws and manners, and acquire the benefits of Roman citizenship. The recent victory of President Obama may have helped to confirm African-Americans’ identity as Americans, no longer as victims of American imperialism, as they are described in Andy Doolen’s Fugitive Empire: Locating Early American Imperialism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2005). 6 Niccolò Machiavelli, Discourses on Livy, trans. Harvey C. Mansfield and Nathan Tarcov (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 23.

Introduction: Rome in the Eighteenth Century 5

o en voiced)7 but precisely because of its successful imperialism, and, contrary to present-day republican doctrine, for its inequality rather than equality, for its patrician rather than plebeian character, with an authoritative role for a senate in foreign relations. Maurizio Viroli’s Republicanism asserted that the first republics without slaves were the Italian city-states (Florence, Venice, Genoa, Pisa, Lucca, and Sienna) or, more accurately, claimed that these cities ‘did not base their economic and social life on slavery.’8 Yet no thinker of the eighteenth century espoused any of these republics as models to be imitated. Montesquieu described some of them, especially Venice, in De l’Esprit des lois, as did Hume in his Essays, although not with the detailed a ention of Jean Bodin’s Methodus ad facilem historiarum cognitionem (1565) or Les Six Livres de la République (1576). In an age of nationstates and imperial rivalries between them, Italian city-states appeared, as Alexander Hamilton put it, ‘pe y.’9 Republican theory, according to Viroli, was revived by Anglo-American academics ‘at the end of the twentieth century.’10 As we stated in the Preface, Viroli followed Quentin Skinner and Philip Pe it in characterizing the distinctive feature of republicanism is its definition of freedom as the antithesis of slavery; a free man is not dependent on a master or an imperial power, on the arbitrary will of another. Republican freedom or liberty as non-dependence is distinct from Hobbesian freedom as absence of external restraints (chains, prisons); a master, despot, or imperial power may abstain from restraining his or its subjects, but it could do so, and thus, according to republican theory, anyone subject to the arbitrary will of another is unfree. We might ask if Hobbesian liberty gets its vividness from the chains or enclosed walls that restrain it, does republican liberty (not being a slave) presuppose the existence of

 7 David Hume’s comparison of his cancerous stomach with the swollen growth of London, parasitic on trade with the American colonies, and his recommendation to excise the colonies in order to arrest this cancerous growth, is a vivid example of this anxiety, which also manifested itself in the histories and theories of Mably, Montesquieu, Smith, Gibbon, and Ferguson, which we shall examine in subsequent chapters.  8 Maurizio Viroli, Republicanism, trans. Antony Shugaar (New York: Hill and Wang, 2002), 3, 25.  9 Viroli quotes Hamilton’s rejection (in Federalist no. 9) of the pe y Italian city-states in Republicanism, 111. 10 Ibid., 21. Viroli suggests that republicanism revived with the apparent death of socialism.

6 Imperial Republics

slavery (and imperialism) as the vivid antithesis of the free republican? Edmund Burke’s great speech Moving Resolutions for Conciliation with the Colonies indicated that, although American demands for liberty arose from religious dissenters in New England, the demand for liberty was much stronger in the south because of slavery, despite the fact that the Church of England is well established there: There is however a circumstance a ending these Colonies which in my opinion, fully counterbalances this difference, and makes the spirit of liberty still more high and haughty than in those to the Northward. It is that in Virginia and the Carolinas that have a vast multitude of slaves. Where this is the case in any part of the world, those who are free are the most proud of their freedom. Freedom is to them not only an enjoyment, but a kind of rank and privilege. Not seeing there, that freedom, as in countries where it is a common blessing, and as broad and general as the air, may be united with much abject toil, with great misery, with all the exterior of servitude, Liberty looks among them something that is more noble and liberal.11

Burke’s speech is impressive because he is not a friend of slavery. Nor was he scoring polemical points, as Hume was in denouncing republicans, particularly those who admired the ancient republics and ‘brand all submission to the government of a single person with the harsh denomination of slavery’ while ignoring ‘real slavery.’12 Nor was he moralizing, as his contemporary, Samuel Johnson, was in his sharp dictum that ‘we hear the loudest yelps for liberty among the drivers of negroes.’13 Burke was just registering a hard fact of nature, one that was unpalatable to those who thought the Americans would be cowed by imperial authority, namely, that where free men are surrounded by slaves, republican liberty is most cherished. Adam Smith, although he welcomed American independence insofar as Americans would

11 Edmund Burke, Speech of Edmund Burke, Esq on Moving His Resolutions for Conciliation with the Colonies (London: J. Dodsley, 1775), 32. See also Christopher Leslie Brown, Moral Capital: Foundations of British Abolitionism (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006). 12 David Hume, ‘Of the Populousness of Ancient Nations,’ in Essays Moral, Political and Literary, ed. Eugene F. Miller (Indianapolis: Liberty Classics, 1987), 383. 13 Samuel Johnson, ‘Taxation No Tyranny,’ in The Political Writings of Dr. Johnson: A Selection, ed. J.P. Hardy (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1968).

Introduction: Rome in the Eighteenth Century 7

contribute to continental defence, feared that the American republic would be more likely to retain the abhorrent practice of slavery than might occur under the British Crown.14 I introduce Burke’s speech not to assert that republicans are a ached to slavery – some of the American revolutionaries and most of the French revolutionaries were opposed to the practice – but just to counter Viroli’s proposal that the Italian city-states were more fi ing models of republicanism than Rome and those in Greece, and to suggest why the republican notion of freedom as not being a slave fell into disuse when slavery was on the wane in the nineteenth century until it was revived in the middle of the twentieth century by Hannah Arendt and J.G.A. Pocock, or as Viroli said ‘at the end of the twentieth century.’15 The republics to which eighteenth-century republicans adverted were Rome, Sparta, and Athens in that order of rank.16 When Jean-Jacques Rousseau berated his fellow Genevans as bourgeois, not citoyens – ‘You are neither Romans, nor Spartans; you are not even Athenians’17 – he was in step with his century’s system of ranking. François Hartog noted that for most men of the eighteenth century Rome connoted liberty, Sparta equality, and Athens anarchy.18 Perhaps grandeur could be added to liberty as one of Rome’s connotations. Pierre Victurnien 14 See Donald Winch, Classical Political Economy and the Colonies (London: G. Bell and Sons, 1965), 14–17; Samuel Fleischacker, On Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations: A Philosophical Companion (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004), 241, 247. 15 Quentin Skinner’s Liberty before Liberalism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998) provided an account of the manner in which the republican notion of liberty (not being a slave) becomes eclipsed by liberal ideology (laissez-faire and the idea of liberty as absence of barriers) but did not connect the decline of liberty conceived as not being a slave with liberal abolitionism. Perhaps it would be a cheap shot to say that John Wilkes Booth’s u erance, sic semper tyrannis, when shooting Abraham Lincoln was the death knell of the ‘neo-Roman’ conception of liberty. Booth, an actor who had played in Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar, was repeating the alleged exclamation of Marcus Junius Brutus when killing Caesar. However, it could serve to illustrate the difference between liberal and republican notions of liberty. Sic semper tyrannis was inscribed on the seal of the Commonwealth of Virginia in 1776. 16 Peter N. Miller, Defining the Common Good: Empire, Religion and Philosophy in Eighteenth-Century Britain (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 120. 17 Jean-Jacques Rousseau, 9th Le er from the Mountain in The Collected Writings of Rousseau [herea er CWR], ed. Christopher Kelly and Eve Grace (Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 2001), vol. 9: 292. 18 François Hartog, ‘La Révolution française et l’Antiquité,’ in Situations de la democratie, ed. M. Gauchet, P. Manent, and P. Rosenvallon (Paris: Hautes Études-Gallimard-Le Seuil, 1993), 30–1.

8 Imperial Republics

Verniaud became a republican a er Louis XVI’s flight to Varennes and asked himself what kind of republic France should be: ‘An egalitarian republic like that of Sparta? Conquering like Rome? Devoted to agriculture and business like that of William Penn?’19 Elizabeth Rawson’s The Spartan Tradition in European Thought correctly stated: ‘Only Rome, sometimes as a republic and sometimes as an empire, has exerted greater a raction’ for Europeans, but her view that liberal democrats ‘generally tended to idealize Sparta’s great rival, democratic Athens’ ignored American revolutionaries such as James Madison, Alexander Hamilton, and Samuel Adams.20 Samuel Adams wrote to Thomas Young on 17 October 1774: ‘I think our Countrymen discover the Spirit of Rome or Sparta.’21 Hamilton thought Rome and Sparta superior to Athens because tribunes and ephors were representatives, whereas in Athens, ‘the people themselves deliberated’ and thus ‘never possessed one feature of good government. Their very character was tyranny; their figure deformity: When they assembled, the field of debate presented an ungovernable mob, not only incapable of deliberation, but prepared

19 ‘Une république égalitaire comme celle de Sparte? Conquérante comme Rome? Vouée à l’agriculture et au négoce comme celle de Guillaume Penn?’ Jacques Bouineau, Les Toges du pouvoir ou la révolution de la droit antique 1789–1799 (Toulouse: Association des Publications de l’Université de Toulouse-le Mirail et Éditions Eché, 1986), 277. 20 Elizabeth Rawson, The Spartan Tradition in European Thought (Oxford: Clarendon, 1969), 1. Rawson says that ‘indubitably’ Rome was the model for eighteenth-century Frenchmen and women (268), briefly touches on the Federalist in an appendix (368), but states that Sparta had greatest appeal for conservative Southern slave owners (369–70). Catherine Volpilhac-Auger, Tacite en France de Montesquieu à Chateaubriand (Oxford: Voltaire Foundation, 1993), 552, agrees with the ranking of Romans first and Spartans second. Pierre Vidal-Naquet, Politics Ancient and Modern, trans. Janet Lloyd (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1995), 8, claims that Athens symbolized commercial freedom rather than democracy, whereas Sparta symbolized civic virtue, severity, and equality, but Chantal Grell, Le Dix-Huitième Siècle et l’antiquité en France 1680–1789 (Oxford: Voltaire Foundation, 1995), 495–500, correctly indicates that eighteenth-century thinkers criticized the anarchic character of Athenian democracy. Carthage was widely seen as a commercial republic, like Athens, but was not deprecated by the zealots for Sparta and Rome, as Athens was. Vidal-Naquet also does not explain why Montesquieu, a champion of commerce, opposed Athens for its lack of a senate and safeguards for the property of the wealthy. 21 The Writings of Samuel Adams, ed. Harry Alonzo Cushing (New York: Octagon, 1968), vol. 3: 163,

Introduction: Rome in the Eighteenth Century 9

for every enormity.’22 James Madison was pithier in Federalist 55: ‘Had every Athenian citizen been a Socrates; every Athenian assembly would still have been a mob.’23 The only thinker of the eighteenth century to espouse Aristotle’s view of the collective prudence and integrity of the many poor was the radical John Thelwall, arrested for sedition or supporting the French Revolution, who wrote: ‘A kind of Socratic spirit inevitably develops wherever large groups of men assemble.’24 Even Thelwall’s friend, Thomas Hardy, the head of the London Corresponding Society, also arrested and acqui ed for seditious conspiracy, thought Athens ‘a nest of factions, conspiracies and violence’ where there was no rule of law or respect for individual rights.25 Thomas Paine was exceptional in asserting that Athens was the most admirable regime in antiquity: ‘What Athens was in miniature, America will be in magnitude.’ However, Paine’s qualification that Athens needed modern representative government brought him closer to other eighteenth-century republicans: ‘Athens, by representation, would have outrivalled her own democracy.’26 Paine’s view that representative government would have improved Athenian democracy brought him closer to the proponents of the Roman Republic than Thelwall’s championship of the collective wisdom of the many poor. Athens had a be er reputation in the seventeenth century than it had in the eighteenth. Hugo Grotius thought the Roman Republic too oligarchic as a model for the United Provinces, which, like Athens, were

22 The Papers of Alexander Hamilton, ed. Harold C. Syre and Jacob E. Cooke (New York: Columbia University Press, 1961), vol. 5: 30. 23 Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, and John Jay, The Federalist, ed. Jacob E. Cooke (New York: Meridian Books, 1965), 374. 24 John Thelwall, The Rights of Nature, against the Usurpations of Establishments: A Series of Le ers to the People of Great Britain, Occasioned by the Recent Effusions of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke (London: H.D. Symonds, 1796), pt. 1: 22: ‘Now, though every workshop cannot have a Socrates within the pale of its own society, nor even a manufacturing town a man of such wisdom, virtue, and opportunities to instruct them, yet a sort of Socratic spirit will necessarily grow up, wherever large bodies of men assemble. Each brings, as it were, into the common bank his mite of information, and pu ing it into a sort of circulating usuance, each contributor has the advantage of a large interest, without any diminution of capital.’ 25 Thomas Hardy, The Patriot: Addressed to the People, on the Present State of Affairs in Britain and in France (Edinburgh: J. Dickson, 1793), 49–54. 26 Thomas Paine, Rights of Man, Part 2 (London: J. Jordan, 1792), 33–4.

10 Imperial Republics

a commercial democracy.27 John Milton and Marchamont Nedham favoured a unicameralist legislature like the Athenian assembly, without a Roman senate or House of Lords.28 Nedham wrote, in The Excellencie of a Free State (1656), that Solon introduced the court of Areopagus but le the power of legislation in the popular assemblies; ‘so that avoiding kingly tyranny on the one side, and senatical encroachments on the other, he is celebrated by all posterity, as the man that hath le the pa ern of a free state for all the world to follow.’ Rome never became free; Brutus merely changed kingly into senatorial tyranny.29 Nedham a ributed the decline of the Roman Republic to senatorial intransigence with respect to the agrarian laws that mandated sharing land with plebeians, in contrast to eighteenth-century thinkers, such as John Trenchard, Thomas Gordon, Baron de Montesquieu, David Hume, and Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who a ributed the decline to tribunal ambition and imprudence.30 The reaction to the English Civil War engendered a conservative cast to the age of Enlightenment, including some of its most republican thinkers.31 While both British and French thinkers of the eighteenth century favoured maritime empires of trade over land-based empires of conquest (since sailors are both cheaper and less likely to oppress civilians than soldiers), Athens’ maritime empire was rarely praised over Rome’s land-based conquests. To be sure, various thinkers pointed out that Athenian colonies were legislatively autonomous, while Roman provinces were governed by Rome. James Abercrombie made this distinction in An Examination of the Acts of Parliament Relative to the Trade and Government of our American Colonies (1752) and ‘De Jure et Gubernatione 27 Richard Tuck, Philosophy and Government 1572–1651 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 161. 28 Skinner, Liberty before Liberalism, 33–5. 29 Marchamont Nedham, The Excellencie of a Free State (London: A. Millar and T. Cadell, 1767), xvi–xviii. 30 Ibid., 126. Monarchists such as William Guthrie, Voltaire, Giamba ista Vico, Nathaniel Hooke, Jean-Louis de Lolme, and the eccentric adventurer Edward Wortley Montagu shared Nedham’s view that the Roman Republic declined because the senators refused to obey the agrarian laws and share land with plebeians, but those of republican proclivities tended to identify the Roman Republic with senatorial authority. 31 J.G.A. Pocock, ’Clergy and Commerce: The Conservative Enlightenment in England,’ in L’Età dei lumi: studi storici sul Se ecento europeo in onore di Franco Venturi, ed. R. Ajello, M. Firpo, L. Guerci, and G. Ricuperati (Napoli: Jovene, 1985), vol. 2: 526; Philip Ayres, Classical Culture and the Idea of Rome in Eighteenth-Century England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), xiii.

Introduction: Rome in the Eighteenth Century 11

Coloniarium,’ or an Inquiry into the Nature, and Rights of Colonies, Ancient and Modern (1774),32 as well as Mably in Observations sur les Grecs (1749), and Montesquieu in De l’Esprit des lois (8.16, 10.3, 11.17-19, 23.17). However, Adam Smith, in his Wealth of Nations (IV.vii.1–2), was unusual in recommending that Britain not treat the American colonies as Roman provinces but rather as Greek colonies, emancipated from the mother country.33 Although Trenchard and Gordon insisted that commercial intercourse should not be forced if it is to bear fruit, they recognized that the principles of free trade can only operate where the colonies produce different goods than those of the mother country, as in the West Indies and the Southern States, and declared Ireland and Northern states to be more like Roman provinces than Greek colonies (insofar as the goods, such as the wool produced in Ireland could impair the trade of the mother country).34 Abercrombie, William Barron, and Antony Stokes distinguished between autonomous Greek colonies and subject Roman provinces but thought the Roman model appropriate to the relationship between Britain and America.35 While the Americans thought the Greek, rather than the Roman, model for colonies was appropriate, they, like the British and French, tended to see themselves as more Roman than Greek, inscribing their money with Latin mo oes and symbols, calling themselves Roman names, like Publius, the pseudonymous author of the Federalist Papers, and even the li le creek flowing through Washington was called the Tiber River.

32 See Magna Carta for the Americas, ed. Jack P. Greene, Charles F. Mullet, and Edward C. Papenfuse (Philadelphia: The American Philosophical Society, 1986), which contains both of Abercrombie’s works. 33 Adam Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations (London: T. Strahan and T. Cadell, 1776), vol. 2: 146, 160, 193, 231–3. Samuel Estwick, A Le er to the Reverend Josiah Tucker (London: J. Almon, 1776), 93–4, also thought the Americas should be treated as Greek colonies, not Roman provinces. 34 John Trenchard and Thomas Gordon, Cato’s Le ers: Or, Essays on Liberty, Civil and Religious, and Other Important Subjects, ed. Ronald Hamowy (Indianapolis: Liberty Press, 1995), no. 106. 35 Jack P. Greene, Periphery and Center: Constitutional Development in the Extended Politics of the British Empire and the United States, 1607–1788 (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1986), 9–10, 60–2; Abercrombie, Examination, 68–70, and De Jure, 201–4, 222, 230–40, 249, 265, 275; William Barron, History of the Colonization of the Free States of Antiquity, Applied to the Present Contest between Great Britain and Her American Colonies (London: T. Cadell, 1777), 32, 45, 85, 92–4, 120–1; Anthony Stokes, A View of the Constitution of the British Colonies in North America and the West Indies, at the time the Civil War Broke Out on the Continent of America (London: B. White, 1783), 2–3, 11–12.

12 Imperial Republics

Although Montesquieu championed maritime empires of trade over empires of conquest,36 he compared Athens with England as commercial empires and rulers of the waves, asserting that in Athens, ‘the rich were in a state of oppression,’ while wealthy Englishmen were lightly taxed. Montesquieu thought the non-commercial Romans carved out ‘the most durable empire in the world’ founded on virtue rather than trade.37 Montesquieu may have meant that Athenian democracy had the practice of ostracism, or banishing notable citizens thought to be a threat to democracy, whereas Rome did not. Or he may have referred to the fact that the Athenian rich were taxed more heavily than the poor citizens – their liturgies or public service obligated the wealthy to provide and captain triremes (three banked warships) for the Athenian navy and to train and outfit choruses for religious festivals and theatre 38 – whereas in Rome, ‘the burden fell solely upon the commercial and plebeian orders, for senators, who comprised the landowning aristocracy, paid no direct taxes.’39 The parallel between the Roman and French system of taxation, and their antithesis to the Athenian practice of progressive taxation may well have been a salient factor in eighteenth-century Romanophilia and Athenaphobia.40 However, far more common than the comparison of Britain with Athens was the comparison of France’s imperial rival with Carthage, which, following the sage counsel of Cato the Elder, must be destroyed;41 Britain will not destroy herself, as Athens allegedly did, by oppressing the rich. In casting Britain as Carthage, Frenchmen of course saw themselves as imperial Romans. Diderot and Raynal’s Histoire des deux Indes anticipated that France as the new Rome would best the commercial

36 Charles de Secondat, baron de Montesquieu, L’Esprit des lois (Paris: Librarie Larousse, 1969), 21.21. 37 Ibid, 19.25, 21.7. 38 Carolyn Webber and Aaron Wildavsky, A History of Taxation and Expenditure in the Western World (New York: Simon and Shuster, 1986), 101–3, 108; Ma hew R. Christ, The Bad Citizen in Classical Athens (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 143, 153. 39 Webber and Wildavsky, History of Taxation, 109. 40 The central aim of Robert Walpole’s stabilization of British politics in the ‘Augustan age’ was to lower the land tax and to shi the burden of taxation from landowners to excise taxes on consumers. Thomas Paine, one of the few eighteenth-century thinkers to prefer Athenian democracy to Roman republicanism, was also one of the few to advocate progressive taxation in the second part of his Rights of Man. 41 Bourneau, Les Toges du pouvoir, 90.

Introduction: Rome in the Eighteenth Century 13

Carthaginians/English and establish a republican empire based on the French language. Rome was ‘the most extensive and civilized empire of the universe,’42 but the Romans did not rule long enough to civilize Britain.43 Diderot and Raynal provided their compatriots with good advice; namely, not to look to short-term imperial rivalry and win American independence for the British colonies; the Americans, they thought, would be more effective in prosecuting the imperial interests of the English-speaking peoples vis-à-vis the French and Spaniards than the British would be.44 The ideal of Roman citizenship provided an alternative to Christian ideals, a new sense of service and sacrifice, of futurity in this world replacing the heavenly abode of Christians. In 1701, Richard Steele lamented that Machiavelli had apparently persuaded his contemporaries that Christianity is a religion fit for slaves, whereas it is ‘the Check and Bridle of Tyranny.’ The Christian conscience is the ballast of our ship of life counterbalancing the Roman sails of ambition and fame. Steele poignantly asked: ‘Why is it that the Heathen struts and the Christian sneaks in our Imagination?’45 Fourteen years later, Steele’s collaborator on The Spectator, Joseph Addison, wrote his immensely popular play Cato: A Tragedy in which the hero kills himself rather than be beholden to Caesar, the man who put an end to Cato’s beloved patria.46 Addison’s Cato was performed, at George Washington’s request, to inspire his followers with republican spirit in those cold and dark days. Washington’s le ers to his generals were spiced with quotations from Addison, and American patriots took their most famous lines from Cato. Patrick Henry’s ‘Give me liberty or give me death’ paraphrases

42 Guillaume-Thomas Raynal, A Philosophical and Political History of the Se lements and Trade of the Europeans in the East and West Indies, trans. J. Justamond (London: T. Cadell, 1776), vol. 5: 468. 43 Ibid, 1: 303. Interestingly, Catherine Volpilhac-Auger, Tacite en France, 436, indicates that all the histories of England wri en by Frenchmen (Rapin de Thoyras in 1749, Millot in 1769, Targe in 1771, Laboreau in 1776, Champigny in 1777, Guyot in 1784, Boulard in 1788) indicated that Britons were civilized by the Romans. 44 Raynal, Philosophical and Political History, 5: 394–5. 45 Richard Steele, The Christian Hero: An rgument Proving That No principles But Those of religion Are Sufficient to Make a great man, 4th ed. (London: Jacob Tonson, 1709), 3, 57, 59. 46 While many of Addison’s contemporaries agreed with Steele that suicide is unChristian, Dante placed Cato in Purgatory, rather than hell with all the other suicides, because his suicide served freedom.

14 Imperial Republics

Cato (II.4, line 80) and Nathan Hale’s ‘I regret that I have only one life to lose for my country’ derives from Cato (IV.4, line 82).47 Men educated in classical literature, like John Adams, could directly cite Horace in 1774: ‘Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori.’ Shortly a er the American retreat from Canada in 1776, Adams declared: ‘Flight was unknown to the Romans . . . I wish it was to the Americans.’48 Patriotic love replaced Christian charity in the age of Enlightenment. In the entry patrie in Diderot and D’Alembert’s Encyclopédie, they celebrated patriotic virtue, the love of the laws and well-being of the state, so common in ancient republics and so uncommon in modern states; ‘Brutus, to conserve his fatherland (patrie), had to cut off the heads of his sons, and this action would appear unnatural (dénaturée) only to feeble souls. Without the death of these two traitors, Brutus’ fatherland would have died in its cradle.’49 The Christian God so loved the world that he gave his only bego en Son to redeem the world with Christian charity, but Brutus sacrificed both bego en sons for his patrie and the brutal justice that sustains it. Jacques-Louis David bodied this sentiment forth in his powerful tableau Lictors Returning to Brutus the Bodies of His Sons, which together with his Oath of the Horatii served as backdrops to the French Revolution.50 Thomas Jefferson, writing to William Stevens Smith from Paris on 13 November 1787 (justifying Shay’s Rebellion, which Madison and Hamilton condemned) declared: ‘The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and

47 Joseph Addison, Cato: A Tragedy, and Selected Essays, ed. Christine Dunn Henderson and Mark E. Yellin (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 2004), viii. 48 Carl J. Richard, The Founders and the Classics: Greece, Rome and the American Enlightenment (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1994), 31, 67. 49 Encylopédie, ou Dictionnaire raisonné des sciences, des arts et des métiers (Neufchastel: Samuel Faulche, 1765), t. 12, 178–9. Rousseau believed that the love of one’s patrie was the source of all virtue: Discourse on Political Economy, in Jean-Jacques Rousseau, The Basic Political Writings, trans. Donald A. Cress (Indianapolis: Hacke , 1987), 122–3. He wrote, in Constitutional Project for Corsica, in CWR, 11: 152, that ‘the best motive force of a government is love of la patrie and this love is cultivated along with the fields.’ Rousseau was by no means alone in linking agriculture with love of la patrie. See John Shovlin, The Political Economy of Virtue: Luxury, Patriotism and the Origins of the French Revolution (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2006), chap. 3. 50 Lynn Hunt, The Family Romance of the French Revolution (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992), 37–8. David, who became a Jacobin and orchestrated revolutionary festivals on the model of Roman triumphs, made his peace with the Directory with his dramatic The Sabine Women Enforcing Peace by Running between the Combatants.

Introduction: Rome in the Eighteenth Century 15

tyrants. It is it’s [sic] natural manure.’51 Six years later, presiding over the fate of Louis XVI and calling for his death, Bertrand Barère de Vieuzac declared: ‘The tree of liberty, said an ancient author, flourishes when it is irrigated with the blood of every kind of tyrant.’52 Barère indicated that his new faith was to be ‘la religion de la patrie’; like Catholicism, it was to be an international religion with French replacing Latin as the lingua franca of its communicants.53 Republican revolutions have been expansionary; they used patriotic or, as Maurizio Viroli would have it, nationalist 54 neo-Roman imagery on behalf of their expansionary republics. Edmund Burke wrote that French republican politicians had the ‘taste for that sort of over-ruling influence which prepared empire or supplied the place of it. They

51 The Papers of Thomas Jefferson, ed. Julian P. Boyd (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1955), vol. 12: 356. 52 Archives parlementaires de 1787 à 1860: Premier série (1787 à 1799) (Nedelen, Lichtenstein: Kraus-Thompson reprint, 1969), t. 57, 368; ‘L’arbre de la liberté, a dit un auteur ancien, croit lorsqu’il est arrosé du sang de toute espèce de tyrans.’ Conor Cruise O’Brien, The Long Affair: Thomas Jefferson and the French Revolution (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), 66–7, indicates that Thomas Macaulay was the first to lament that Barère should have indicated his ancient source. It is possible that Jefferson dropped in conversation in Paris what he wrote privately to a friend, and Barère picked it up second- or third-hand, a ributing the source to an ancient author to add dignity to the statement. However, Barère had a fuller classical education than Jefferson, and thus it is possible that Jefferson derived his image from Barère. Perhaps Barère referred to the legend of Marcus Curtius, mentioned by various ancient authors, who threw himself into an ill-omened chasm in Rome, on the site of which sacred fig and/or olive trees were planted and piously watered to ensure the health of the Roman Republic. Barère declared: ‘Je regarde ceux qui consacreront aux travaux de ce comité dans les terribles circonstances où nous nous trouvons comme de nouveaux Curtius se dévouant pour leur pays.’ Cited in Jean-Pierre Thomas, Bertrand Barère: La voix de la Révolution (Paris: Desjonquères, 1989), 120. In context, Jefferson’s statement is less chilling than Barère’s, since his was a retrospective justification of Daniel Shays’ rebellion and Barère’s is prospective. The republican symbol of liberty trees is ably discussed (although without reference to Jefferson or Barère) by J. David Hardin, ‘Liberty Caps and Liberty Trees,’ Past and Present 146 (1995): 66–102. 53 Leo Gershoy, ‘Barère, Champion of Nationalism in the French Revolution,’ Political Science Quarterly 42 (1927): 423–7. 54 Maurizio Viroli, For Love of Country: An Essay on Patriotism and Nationalism (Oxford: Clarendon, 1999), distinguished patriotism, a defensive solidarity rooted in particular traditions, from nationalism, a rootless and aggressive loyalty, based either on alleged blood ties or on abstract universal principles. However useful the distinction is, it is not applicable, in my opinion, to either Jefferson or Barère.

16 Imperial Republics

had continually in their hands the observations of Machiavel on Livy. They had Montesquieu’s Grandeur et Décadence des Romains as a manual; and they compared with mortification the systematic proceedings of a Roman senate with the fluctuations of a Monarchy. They observed the very small additions of territory which all the powers of France, actuated by all the ambition of France, had acquired in two centuries. The Romans had frequently acquired more in a year.’55 Certainly the French Republic was not unique in its imperial policy; the English Commonwealth pursued a more martial foreign policy than the Stuart monarchy had. The Navigation Act of 1651 and the Anglo-Dutch War made the English rulers of the waves. When Charles II was restored to power, he had ten times as many ships in England’s navy than his father had twenty years before.56 The conquest of Scotland and Ireland by parliamentary armies began to turn England into Great Britain. During the Rump Parliament and Cromwell’s Protectorate, Britain acquired the Channel Islands, the Scillies, and the Isle of Man, acquired Acadia from the French, secured Rula Run, an island at the centre of the East Indian trade, formerly in the hands of the Dutch a er they had supplanted the Portuguese, and made inroads into Spanish America with the acquisition of the Barbados, St Christopher’s, and Jamaica. The overtly imperialist character of Harrington’s Oceana, the leading theoretical work of the English Commonwealth to be discussed in chapter 2, reflected the pride many Englishmen took in Cromwell’s accomplishments. Montesquieu recognized that republicans make the most formidable imperialists. In his account of the grandeur of republican Rome, Montesquieu noted: ‘England was never so respected as under Cromwell, a er the wars of the Long Parliament.’57 The American Revolution was more expansionary than colonial America, and began with an invasion to liberate Quebec from the English. Jefferson, Hamilton, and Madison asserted that the ‘fundamental rule of governments’ and a basic desire of all peoples, whether republicans or monarchists, is to extend their terri-

55 Edmund Burke, Thoughts on the Prospect of a Regicide Peace, in a Series of Le ers (London: J. Owen, 1796), 111–12. 56 Ronald Findlay and Kevin H. O’Rourke, Power and Plenty: Trade, War, and the World Economy in the Second Millennium (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007), 242. 57 Charles de Secondat, baron de Montesquieu, Considerations on the Causes of the Greatness of the Romans and Their Decline, ed. David Lowenthal (Indianapolis, 1999), 107.

Introduction: Rome in the Eighteenth Century 17

tories.58 In a le er of 27 April 1809, Thomas Jefferson advised James Madison to annex Cuba and Canada to create ‘an empire for liberty’: ‘I am persuaded no constitution was ever before so well calculated as ours for extensive empire and self-government.’59 Madison failed to annex the la er in the war of 1812–14. To Thomas Short on 4 August 1820, Jefferson wrote: ‘The day is not distant, when we may formally require a meridian of partition through the ocean, on the hither side of which no European gun shall ever be heard, nor an American on the other.’ Anticipating the Monroe Doctrine, Jefferson continued: ‘I hope no American patriot will ever lose sight of the essential policy of interdicting the seas and territories of both Americas, the ferocious and sanguinary contests of Europe.’60 We shall see how the model of the Roman Republic justified revolutionary expansion in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. But let us begin with an examination of Aristotle’s anti-imperial republicanism and Machiavelli’s imperial republicanism.

58 Marc Egnal, A Mighty Empire: The Origins of the American Revolution (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1988); Robert W. Tucker and David C. Hendrickson, Empire of Liberty: The Statecra of Thomas Jefferson (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990); Esmond Wright, An Empire for Liberty: From Washington to Lincoln (Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, 1995); Karl-Friedrich Walling, Republican Empire: Alexander Hamilton on War and Free Government (Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, 1999); Peter S. Onuf, Jefferson’s Empire: The Language of American Nationhood (Charlo esville: University Press of Virginia, 2000); Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, and John Jay, The Federalist, 32–3, 35–6, 38–9, 85–7, 537. 59 The Republic of Le ers: The Correspondence between Thomas Jefferson and James Madison 1776–1826, ed. James Morton Smith (New York: Norton, 1995), vol. 3: 1586. 60 Thomas Jefferson, Political Writings, ed. Joyce Appleby and Terence Ball (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 405.

1 Machiavelli on Imperial Republics

Machiavelli was a major source of neo-Roman republicanism from the sixteenth through the eighteenth centuries. His interpretation of the patrician Livy’s account of early republican Rome was a staple feature of republican thought during the English Civil War and the American and French Revolutions. John Adams thought Machiavelli the source of English principles of liberty, descending from John Ponet, through John Milton, James Harrington, and Algernon Sidney. Adams also opined that ‘Montesquieu borrowed the best part of his book from Machiavelli without acknowledging the quotation.’ Machiavelli, for Adams, ‘was the great restorer of true politics,’ and thus ‘the world is so much indebted [to Machiavelli] for revival of reason in ma ers of government.’1 A half-century a er Machiavelli wrote, Jean Bodin, the theorist of absolute and undivided sovereignty, deplored (more for his immorality than his republicanism) the fact that Machiavelli’s sayings ‘are on the lips of everyone.’2 While republicans of the English Civil War admired Machiavelli, in France the Frondeur republicans associated Machiavellian immorality with the Italian Cardinal Jules Mazarin, the chief minister during the minority of Louis XIV. Machiavelli rarely referred to Aristotle but his celebration of the Roman Republic stood in sharp contrast to Aristotle’s ideal of the selfsufficient polis in many ways that are significant for our study of imperialism and republicanism in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. 1 John Adams, A Defence of the Constitution of the Government of the United States of America (London: J. Stockdale, 1794), vol. 1: 325; vol. 2: 114; vol. 3: 210. 2 Jean Bodin, Method for the Easy Comprehension of History [1565], trans. Beatrice Reynolds (New York: Columbia University Press, 1945), 153.

Machiavelli on Imperial Republics 19

Machiavelli admired Polybius, who applied Aristotle’s thoughts on mixed constitutions in his analysis of the Roman Republic, and thus Machiavelli’s Rome might be said to be Aristotle’s polity at third hand, or Machiavelli’s interpretation of Polybius’s interpretation of Aristotle. The seventeenth- and eighteenth-century doctrines of the separation of powers were (mis)applications of the Aristotelian and Polybian teaching on mixed constitutions, coupled to Machiavelli’s view that contained class conflict was the source of expansion in the Roman Republic. Whereas Aristotle saw the mixed constitution to promote class harmony by integrating functions for both the rich and poor within the polity, Machiavelli thought the idea of a common good uniting rich and poor utopian, except on imperial campaigns in pursuit of booty and glory. Machiavelli supported the senatorial class violating the agrarian laws that mandated sharing of conquered lands so that plebeians would be induced into further conquests, whereas Aristotle thought the farmersoldier was the basis of the most stable republic. Aristotelian Anti-Imperialism and Machiavellian Imperialism Aristotle thought that imperial states were tyrannical and maintained that a civic life is only possible in a self-sufficient state, one that lives off its own economic, military, and cultural resources.3 Not only are imperial states unjust to those they conquer, but also imperial policy distorts the internal arrangements of a state, transforming persuasive relationships between statesmen and citizens into the command relationships of a garrison state (Pol 1333a–1334a). Greek colonies, as distinct from Roman provinces, were autonomous from the mother country. Moreover, there were no Athenian equivalents of Roman triumphs, humiliating captives in processions through Rome, as there were no Roman equivalents of Aeschylus’s The Persians, extolling the nobility of those defeated in ba le. A er the Athenian naval victory over the Persians at Salamis, and the Spartans’ withdrawal from the conflict with Persia, Athens led the Delian League from 478 .c., when most members chose to give taxes or tribute, rather than soldiers and ships, to the League. But when Pericles moved the treasury from Delos to

3 Aristotle, The Politics, ed. and trans. Ernest Barker (London: Oxford University Press, 1958), 1324a.

20 Imperial Republics

Athens in 454 .c., Athens appeared to be an empire subjecting its allies to its own interests, as well as engendering fear from its Spartan and Peloponnesian rivals and occasioning the Peloponnesian War, which began a decade later and ended in 404 b.c. with the defeat of Athens. As distinct from Cicero,4 Aristotle (Pol, 1280a) rejected the view that the end of political life was to secure private property, and hence that the share of political offices and honours should be proportionate to citizens’ share of property. Eric Nelson’s The Greek Tradition in Republican Thought sharply distinguishes the Greek from the Roman republican traditions and portrays Machiavelli as partially captive of partisans of the Roman senate, such as Livy and Tacitus, and their view of the inviolability of property holdings, as distinct from the Greek view that redistribution is justified if it strengthens the civic body. In Nelson’s view, Machiavelli’s approach to the agrarian and Licinian laws ‘represents a substantial shi away from the standard Roman and neo-Roman approach’ without espousing the Greek approach.5 Property, according to Aristotle, is a means to an end and, as a means, is limited by the end it serves, namely, the exercise of persuasive speech in public life. Peace and the enjoyment of leisure are the objectives of politics. Vickie Sullivan correctly juxtaposed Aristotle and Machiavelli on the issue of a bellicose or pacific foreign policy; whereas Aristotle thought Sparta too warlike, Machiavelli thought Sparta insufficiently warlike.6 Politics, for Aristotle, is a leisure activity to the extent that it aims at the internal cultivation of its citizens rather than their external aggrandizement, at culture or education rather than wealth and power, the twin goals of an imperial state. J.G.A. Pocock stated that, for Aristotle, ‘the polis was a kind of ongoing potlatch in which citizens emancipated themselves from their possessions in order to meet face-to-face in a political life that was an end

4 M. Tulli Ciceronis, De Officius (Amsterdam: A.M. Hakkert, 1966), 87, 89, 92. 5 Eric Nelson, The Greek Tradition in Republican Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 85. Where I would differ from Nelson pertains to his view that ‘the Greek tradition’ successfully held its own against the ‘Roman and neoRoman’ views of the sanctity of private property and of the authoritative role of a senatorial class throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Also, I would emphasize that the Roman (or at least senatorial) tradition of non-distribution was central to the imperial dynamic of republican Rome. 6 Vickie B. Sullivan, Machiavelli, Hobbes and the Formation of a Liberal Republicanism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 212–13.

Machiavelli on Imperial Republics 21

in itself.’7 Since revolutionary breakdowns of the political body usually turn on the question of property – extreme polarization of wealth renders precarious the politics of persuasion rather than coercion, of reasoned speech and negotiation rather than the armed force of numbers or wealth – Aristotle recommended redistribution of land to create a class of farmers who would be too busy for frequent a endance at popular assemblies, rather than monetary relief for the poor, which would not only be a drain on public finances but also would enable the propertyless poor to a end the assembly (Pol, 1318b–1320b). The farmer-soldier was the backbone of the most stable regime, the middleclass democracy or polity. The outdoor life of the farmer provided a good preparation for the defence of the polis, whereas the landless labourers and oarsmen of the Athenian navy were apt to support imperial ventures. Aristotle (Pol, 1293b –1296b) favoured mixed constitutions where the rich should serve in individual magistracies (because rich individuals are more likely to be loyal to the existing regime in which they have prospered, more likely to be educated or qualified for public life, and less likely to be tempted to abuse their office by accepting bribes) and the poor serve in collective bodies (the council, the assembly, and the juries). The collective prudence and integrity of the many poor exceeds that of the few rich and thus it is fi ing that those who are individually superior in virtue should be subject to individuals who are individually inferior but collectively superior to the wealthy few; ‘It is therefore just and proper that the people, from which the assembly, the council, and the court are constituted, should be sovereign on issues more important than those assigned to the be er sort of citizens’ (1282b). Machiavelli’s Discourses on Livy 8 frequently mention Athens, but Athens is not included in the fundamental dichotomy between imperial republics, such as Rome, and conservative republics, such as Sparta and Venice (DL, 17–23). In Machiavelli’s view, Athens’s greatness was shortlived (DL, 13, 129) relative to Rome, Sparta, and Venice; Athens was prey to tyranny as Rome was not (DL, 13, 64–6, 118, 230, 233); Athens’s military relied on wealth to purchase arms and naval support (DL, 149), 7 J.G.A. Pocock, ‘The Ideal of Citizenship since Classical Times,’ in Theorizing Citizenship, ed. Ronald Beiner (Albany: SUNY Press, 1995), 35. 8 Niccolò Machiavelli, Discourses on Livy, trans. Harvey Mansfield and Nathan Tarcov (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996). All page references and quotations from Machiavelli’s Discourses are taken from Mansfield and Tarcov’s translation.

22 Imperial Republics

as well as fortifications (DL,189) as Sparta did not; Sparta and Athens established independent colonies or subjected other states to them, an unsuccessful policy compared to the imperial Romans, who created dependent allies (DL, 136–7) and who encouraged conquered peoples to se le in Rome, thus swelling the martial power of Rome relative to Greek cities (DL, 134); and the Athenian demos was imprudent in its foreign policy compared to the Roman senate (DL, 107, 255), even choosing justice and honour over the state’s interest (DL, 120–1). Machiavelli only referred to Aristotle in passing and did not comment on Aristotle’s view of the farmer-soldier as the basis of an anti-imperial republic. Though Machiavelli presented Sparta and Venice as exemplars of anti-imperial republics, they might be be er described as unsuccessfully imperial republics. Rather than citizens who combined agriculture and defence, Spartan citizens were exempted from agriculture, which was the task of the enslaved Helots, to devote themselves full-time to warfare. Whereas, for Aristotle, Sparta was an imperial state, Machiavelli (DL, 134) indicated that Sparta could only put 20,000 citizens in ba le because of Lycurgus’s prohibition of foreigners, whereas Rome could arm 280,000 men. Successful imperial republics arm their plebeians, unlike the conservative republics of Sparta and Venice. Machiavelli began his contrast between Rome and conservative republics by saying that if one wants to create an empire (DL, 18), indeed ‘a great empire’ [un grande imperio] (DL, 21), imitate Rome and arm the plebeians, and if one wishes simply to maintain the state, arm the nobles as Sparta and Venice did. Then he indicated that republics either expand or decline, and so the conservative policy is impractical. Therefore, Machiavelli (DL, 23) concluded: ‘I believe that it is necessary to follow the Roman order and not that of the other republics . . . and to tolerate the enmities that arise between people and the Senate, taking them as an inconvenience necessary to arrive at Roman greatness.’ In contrast to Aristotle’s aim of class harmony, Machiavelli emphasizes the positive features of class conflict. It is in the context of this difference that we may assess Machiavelli’s ambiguous account of the Roman agrarian laws. Machiavelli (DL, 8) began the Discourses (I.1) by asserting that a great nation must be se led in a sufficiently fertile place to support a large population, but the laws should compel citizens to avoid idleness and be industrious: ‘As to the idleness that the site may bring, the laws should be ordered to constrain it by imposing such necessities as the site does not provide.’ Machiavelli never discussed the Aristotelian view (1958, 1333a–1334a) that leisure is the condition of both philosophy

Machiavelli on Imperial Republics 23

and citizenship, and that peace and leisure are the chief goals to be secured by statesmen. Since, according to Machiavelli (DL, 15), ‘hunger and poverty make men industrious,’ the enforcement of an agrarian law would diminish soldiers’ desire to live by plunder and thus the imperial character of the Roman Republic. Thus Machiavelli (DL, 78) supported senatorial strategies to block agrarian laws by making war whenever plebeian agitation for land arose, by bribing tribunes to block the efforts of their colleagues, or by establishing colonies far from Rome, such as Anzio, while violently opposing plebeian demands to be se led in Veii, on fertile land close to Rome. On the senate’s success in blocking plebeian se lements in Veii, Machiavelli (DL, 105–6) wrote: ‘This thing appeared to the Senate and the wisest Romans so useless that they freely said they would suffer death than consent to such a decision.’ Machiavelli (DL, 210, 237) supported the senate’s murdering of Spurius Cassius and Manlius Capitolinus for a empting to ease the lives of the plebeians. The early expansion of Rome was fuelled by soldiers’ desire for war booty, but as wars moved farther from Rome, soldiers received pay instead of booty, which went to the public treasury and relieved the rich from taxation (DL, 141–2). Republican Rome was the model imperialist: ‘For if there has never been a republic that has made the profits [ fa i i profi i] that Rome did, this arose from there never having been a republic that has been organized so as to acquire as did Rome’ (DL, 126). As we have seen, Machiavelli thought citizens must remain poor and the public treasury rich; wealth corrupts the possessor and enables him to corrupt others (DL, 255). He did not indicate that it was precisely the failure to implement the agrarian and Licinian laws that polarized Rome and fostered great fortunes. Machiavelli celebrated the virtue of the poor patrician Cincinnatus, coming from the plough and returning to it a er saving Rome; Cincinnatus’s example indicated ‘the honor that was paid in Rome to poverty’ (DL, 270–1). Machiavelli did not mention that Cincinnatus’s reduction to working a few acres with a few slaves was the result of paying a heavy fine for the violent and ambitious conduct of his son; as Harvey Mansfield noted,9 Cincinnatus was hardly a model of the voluntary poverty of the ancient Romans that Machiavelli celebrated, and the senate’s comportment with respect to the agrarian law also casts doubt on Machiavelli’s ideal of honourable poverty.

9 Harvey Mansfield Jr., Machiavelli’s New Modes and Orders: A Study of the Discourses on Livy (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1979), 388–9.

24 Imperial Republics

Machiavelli (DL, 269) wrote that ‘two things were the cause of the dissolution of that republic: one was the contentions that arose from the Agrarian law; the other, the prolongation of commands.’ As the republican empire extended beyond Italy, the annual election of consuls to lead the Roman legions was replaced by longer commands, and the professional soldiers, Machiavelli and his followers thought, began to show allegiance to their military commanders rather than to the republic itself. Harrington and Montesquieu followed Machiavelli in assigning these two causes to the fall of the Roman Republic, but neither of them saw senatorial refusal to obey the agrarian law to be the reason for the professionalization of the military, the longer commands, and the loyalty of soldiers to their commanders rather than to the republic. Machiavelli seemed to think the fall of the republic was the necessary price to pay for its glorious rise; ‘contention over the Agrarian law took three hundred years to make Rome servile’ (DL, 80) and its greedy senators led its armies to their glorious empire. Aristotle and Machiavelli in the Eighteenth Century In an age of imperial rivalry, when Britain and France were almost constantly at war, Machiavellian doctrine held sway over Aristotelian thought. There was a deafening silence with respect to Aristotle’s view of the collective prudence and integrity of the many poor. The sharpest inversion of Aristotle was perhaps James Madison’s statement: ‘Had every Athenian citizen been a Socrates, every Athenian assembly would still have been a mob.’10 Aristotle’s constitutional mixture of rich and poor was quite distinct from Montesquieu’s and Madison’s separation of powers, which had no role for poor citizens in the legislative, executive, or judicial branches of government. The Machiavellian arts of war and expansion were more widely esteemed than the Aristotelian arts of peace and leisure. Alexander Hamilton, in Federalist, nos. 6 and 7, made clear that territorial expansion is a perpetual aim of all states, including commercial republics. Even the anti-imperialist Jean-Jacques Rousseau advertised his championship of Roman civil religion in terms of Machiavellian imperialism: ‘To my way of thinking, the oath taken by Fabius’ soldiers was a fine one. They did not swear to die or to win; they

10 Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, and John Jay, The Federalist, ed. Jacob E. Cooke (Cleveland: Meridian Books, 1965), 374.

Machiavelli on Imperial Republics 25

swore to return victorious.’11 Gabriel de Mably, who, as we shall see, had an anti-imperial reputation, declared: ‘There is no people, whatever moderation it affects, that does not wish to extend its territory and subjugate its neighbours; for nothing fla ers so agreeably all the passions of the human heart as conquest.’12 Eighteenth-century thinkers tended to favour naval empires of trade over land-based empires of conquest because the profits of trade more than offset the costs of empire, because empires of trade allegedly promoted peace and prosperity rather than war and misery, and because sailors were less likely to oppress civilians than the soldiers of a landbased empire. The merchant-marine played the role in empires of trade that the farmer-soldier played in Aristotle’s self-sufficient polis and merchants and sailors in Athens’s naval empire. However, Athens’s naval empire was never a model for proponents of empires of trade, since Athenian sailors were citizens and British and French sailors were o en closer to the slaves on Roman galleys than free citizens,13 cherished precisely because they were not a threat to the propertied as agents of royal repression in continental armies and Athenian sailors were held to be. As Montesquieu indicated, in Athens, the rich were oppressed by the oarsmen of the Athenian navy.14 We shall see, in chapters 3 and 6, that the French and English distinction between empires of trade (the

11 Jean-Jacques Rousseau, The Basic Political Writings, trans. Donald A. Cress (Indianapolis: Hacke , 1987), 225. 12 Gabriel de Mably, Observations sur l’histoire de la Grèce, in Oeuvres complètes de l’abbé de Mably (Lyon: J.B. Dolamolliere, 1792), 188; Observations sur les Romains, in Oeuvres complètes de l’abbé de Mably (Paris: Volland, 1790), t. 4, 375. Johnson Kent Wright, A Classical Republican in Eighteenth-Century France: The Political Thought of Mably (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997), 46, states that Mably’s ‘preference for the Spartan renunciation of imperial expansion is unmistakable.’ Nevertheless, his assertion that all countries desire conquest (are would-be avatars of Rome) suggest greater ambiguity than Wright claims. 13 Nicolas Rogers, ‘Vagrancy, Impressment and the Regulation of Labour in Eighteenth-Century Britain,’ in Unfree Labour in the Development of the Atlantic World, ed. Paul E. Lovejoy and Nicolas Rogers (Ilford, Essex: Frank Cass, 1994), 102–13; Douglas Hay and Nicolas Rogers, Eighteenth-Century Society: Shu les and Swords (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), 155–8; Nicolas Rogers, The Press Gang: Naval Impressment and Its Opponents in Georgian Britain (London: Continuum, 2007). 14 Charles de Secondat, baron de Montesquieu, The Spirit of the Laws, trans. Anne M. Cohler, Basia C. Miller, and Harold S. Stone (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 363.

26 Imperial Republics

British and French) and empires of conquest (Roman, Spanish, and Portuguese) was highly questionable. Although several voices, such as that of James Oglethorpe discussed in chapter 4, were raised against the practice of naval impressment (the conscription of labourers into the navy by press gangs), the temporary enslavement of the poor was deemed so vital to Britain’s aspiration to rule the waves that an Englishman’s birthright to be free from compulsory labour was waived in the interests of empire.15 In his typically robust manner, Samuel Johnson compared the lives of sailors and prisoners: ‘No man will be a sailor who has contrivance enough to get himself into jail; for being in a ship is being in a jail with the chance of being drowned . . . A man in jail has more room, be er food and commonly be er company.’16 Empire was to profit wealthy citizens, like the Romans, not the poor citizens, like the Athenians. Despite their commercial and maritime empires, the British and French saw Rome and not Athens as the model of their imperial aspirations and anxieties, and Machiavelli rather than Aristotle as their preceptor.

15 Rogers, Press Gang, 81–126. 16 James Boswell, Boswell’s Life of Johnson, ed. G.B. Hill and L.F. Powell (Oxford: Clarendon, 1934–50), vol. 2: 438.

2 Republicanism and the English Civil War

In this chapter, I shall show why Thomas Hobbes, an anti-imperialist, opposed the use of ancient republics as model polities, and then consider which kinds of people Hobbes thought were a racted to Athens, which to Sparta, and which to Rome. We shall then examine the republican thinkers during the English Civil War, indicate why Athens was a model for John Milton and Marchamont Nedham, and then indicate why Rome became the model for the neo-Machiavellian imperialists James Harrington and Algernon Sidney. Hobbes’s Opposition to Imperial Republicanism Thomas Hobbes thought the schools and universities that taught students to read Greek and Roman writers were one of the leading reasons for the English Civil War; specifically, the ancient writers tended to think kingship was tyranny. In De Cive, Leviathan, and Behemoth, Hobbes lamented that ancient writers compared kings to ravenous wolves. What is rarely noted by contemporary scholars is that Hobbes’s opposition to Marcus Cato the censor, and other anti-monarchical Romans, is an opposition to imperialism.1 A er citing Cato, who thought that kings should be considered predatory animals and who always ended his orations with Delenda est Carthago, Hobbes asked: ‘But what sort of animal was the Roman People? By the agency of citizens who took the names Africanus, Asiaticus, Macedonicus, Achaicus and so on from the

1 Istvan Hont, Jealousy of Trade: International Competition and the Nation-State in Historical Perspective (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005), 18–22.

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nations they had robbed, that people plundered all the world. So the words of Pontius Telesinus are no less wise than Cato’s,’ namely, ‘that Rome itself must be destroyed.’2 However, Quentin Skinner overlooks Hobbes’s anti-imperialism in his selective account of Hobbes’s political philosophy.3 Skinner is so commi ed to the view that Hobbes’s conception of liberty as the absence of external restraints to motion is the antithesis to republican notions of liberty as non-domination that he assimilates Hobbes’s opposition to the metaphysics of free will to his a ack on republican liberty.4 Skinner does not relate Hobbes’s determinism to his opposition to retributive justice in this world and the next (‘the dark doctrine of eternal torments’) or to his deprecation of Archbishop Laud and Arminianism in Behemoth for needlessly provoking Calvinists in parliament with metaphysical controversies about freedom of the will. Skinner never mentions Laud or Arminianism in his a empt ‘to bring Hobbes down from the philosophical heights’ to the solid ground of history.5 By his failure to understand Hobbes’s opposition to Arminianism and the religious controversies of the English Civil War, Skinner violates his first precept that political theories are to be understood in their historical context.6 Hobbes combined philosophy and history in a manner that the leading practitioner of the historical school of political philosophy did not. Skinner understands Hobbes as a monarchical ideologue because he did not understand liberty as not being a slave. Istvan Hont more accurately understood Hobbes to be a leading theorist of representative government.7 In short, Hobbes’s opposition to classical republicanism was support for representative government. Although Hobbes tended to favour monarchies because he thought prudent deliberation more likely in small councils than large assemblies, he was not opposed to other forms of representatives than monarchical representatives. He wrote (De Cive, x.15): ‘if in a Democracy the people should choose to concentrate 2 Thomas Hobbes, On the Citizen, ed. and trans. Richard Tuck and Michael Silverthorne (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 3. 3 Quentin Skinner, Hobbes and Republican Liberty (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008). 4 Ibid, 25 –34. 5 Ibid, xvi. 6 A similar point was made by Aaron Garre in his review of Skinner’s earlier book on Hobbes, Reason and Rhetoric in the Philosophy of Hobbes (1996). See The Philosophic Review 108 (1999): 288–90. 7 Hont, Jealousy of Trade, 489.

Republicanism and the English Civil War 29

deliberations about war and peace and legislation in the hands of just one man or a small number of men, and were happy to appoint magistrates and public ministers, i.e., to have the authority without executive power, then it must be admi ed that Democracy and Monarchy would be equal in this ma er.’ Virtually, all eighteenth-century thinkers, as we shall see, espoused Hobbes’s preference for representative government over Athenian democracy. Rousseau, who opposed representative government, also opposed Athenian direct democracy, preferring Roman aristocratic government and popular sovereignty, or the case where a senate applies the laws passed directly by the entire civic body. Hobbes also thought that the idea of mixed sovereignty, derived from the tense relationship between the Roman senate and people, fed parliamentary ambitions to wrest sovereignty from the crown. Hobbes thought the democratic factions favoured Athens, the oligarchic factions, Sparta and the proponents of mixed sovereignty, Rome.8 ‘I think I may truly say, that there was never any thing so dearly bought, as these western parts have bought the learning of the Greek and Latin tongues.’9 In Behemoth, Hobbes claimed: ‘The Universities have been to this nation, as the wooden horse was to the Trojans.’10 That is, the universities introduced the Greeks (and Romans) into England with the same effect as on Troy. Hobbes’s sombre reflection will cast its shadow over our accounts of the English Civil War, and later of the American and French revolutions. John Milton: Student of Antiquity and Machiavelli One such student of antiquity was the republican, John Milton. David Armitage has praised Milton as a ‘poet against empire’ and holds that his anti-imperialism is integral to Milton’s republican commitments.11 Armitage’s conclusion that republicanism and imperialism are antithetical12 requires qualification. First of all, Armitage did not  8 Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, ed. Michael Oakesho (Oxford: Blackwell, 1946), chap. 29.  9 Ibid., chap. 21. 10 Thomas Hobbes, Behemoth; Or, the Long Parliament, ed. Stephen Holmes (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990), 40. 11 David Armitage, ‘John Milton: Poet against Empire,’ in Milton and Republicanism, ed. David Armitage, Armand Hiny, and Quentin Skinner (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 206–25, especially 224–5. 12 See also David Armitage, ‘Empire and Liberty: A Republican Dilemma,’ in Republicanism: A Shared European Heritage, ed. Martin van Gelderen and Quentin

30 Imperial Republics

examine Milton’s prose works, which indicate that Milton admired the expansionary republicanism Machiavelli advocated,13 as did his republican contemporaries James Harrington and Algernon Sidney, whose writings will be examined later in this chapter. The difference in genre between Milton the poetic anti-imperialist and Milton the prosaic imperialist is problematic. The anti-imperialist poetry of Paradise Regained was published eight years a er the Restoration of Charles II, whereas the imperialist prose was mostly wri en during the Commonwealth, and was wri en for those commi ed to Milton’s political and religious views. While there is reason to think, as we shall see, that Milton had not abandoned his republicanism during the Restoration when he wrote his anti-imperialist poetry, his poetry was wri en for readers not commi ed to his political theology. In short, whereas Armitage thinks Milton’s republicanism accounts for his anti-imperialism, I shall argue that the imperialism of Milton’s prose writings are integral to his republicanism and what Jonathan Sco calls Milton’s ‘Christian humanism’14 (as distinct from his militant Protestantism) accounts for his pacific anti-imperialism. Moreover, like his republican friend Marchamont Nedham, Milton was a Hellenophile and was less overtly imperialist than the neo-Machiavellian Romanophiles James Harrington and Algernon Sidney. Milton wrote to Leonard Philaris on 28 September 1654: ‘I have been from boyhood a worshipper of all things Greek and of your Athens first and foremost.’15 My argument is that Milton, as a republican and Protestant militant, was imperialist, but Milton, as a Christian and lover of Athens, was antiimperialist. Paradise Regained, as well as presenting imperialism as Satanic, presents all classical lore to be Satanic, whereas in his prose works of the same period, he commends classical learning.16 If his prose works demonstrate that he did not regard classical learning to be Satanic, we may conclude that differences of genre are significant. Milton’s poetry, wri en with the power of plain English, appealed to the Christian Skinner (Cambridge: University Press, 2002), vol. 1: 29; and David Armitage, Greater Britain, 1516–1776 (Aldershot, Hampshire: Ashgate, 2004), x. 13 There are about forty positive references to Machiavelli’s Discourses and Art of War in Milton’s Commonplace Book, trans. Ruth Mohl, in Complete Prose Works, ed. Don M. Wolfe (London: Yale University Press, 1953–82), vol. 1: passim. 14 Jonathan Sco , Commonwealth Principles: Republican Writing of the English Revolution (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 215. 15 Milton, Complete Prose Works, 4: 868. 16 See A Fuller Course in the Art of Logic (1671) in Complete Prose Works, vol. 8.

Republicanism and the English Civil War 31

sensibilities of common readers, as distinct from the particular (republican, Calvinist, and/or educated) readers of his prose. In Paradise Regained (IV. 318), Satan urges Jesus to become famous and use pagan wisdom to extend his empire on earth and commends (IV. 237–9) ‘Athens the eye of Greece, Mother of Arts / And Eloquence, native to famous wits / Or hospitable, in her sweet recess’ to Plato’s Academy and Aristotle’s Lyceum, which ‘bred / Great Alexander to subdue the world’ (IV. 248–9). Satan concludes (IV. 280–1) by asserting that Greek philosophy ‘will render thee a King compleat / Within thy self, much more with Empire joined.’ Jesus responds that Greek philosophy is ‘li le else but dreams, / Conjectures, fancies, built on nothing firm’ and elaborates (IV. 350–61): Thir orators thou then extoll’st, as those The top of Eloquence, Statists indeed And Lovers of thir Country, as may seem; But herein to our Prophets far beneath, As men divinely taught, and be er teaching The solid rules of Civil Government In thir majestic unaffected stile Then all the Oratory of Greece and Rome. In them is plainest taught, and easiest leant, What makes a Nation happy, and keeps it so, What ruins Kingdoms, and lays Cities flat; These only with our law best form a king.17

In his prose writings, Milton admired the expansionary republicanism Machiavelli advocated, as did his contemporaries, such as Marchamont Nedham, Algernon Sidney, James Harrington, and Thomas Scot, who boasted, a er England had bested the Stuarts, the Scots, Irish, and Dutch (and the French and Spaniards were seeking alliances with the warlike English): ‘We never bid fairer for being masters of the whole world.’18 Milton wrote with pride at the end of the commonwealth of ‘a Parliament that conquered both Ireland, Scotland, & all their enemies in England.’19

17 John Milton, Paradise Regained, Samson Agonistes (Menston: The Scolar Press, 1968), facsimile of 1671 edition. 18 Cited by Bruce McLeod, ‘The “Lordly Eye”: Milton and the Strategic Geography of Empire,’ in Milton and the Imperial Vision, ed. B. Chandra and E. Sauer (Pi sburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1999), 63. 19 Milton, Complete Prose Works, 7: 480.

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Milton’s militant Protestantism was doubtless a major factor in espousing England’s bloody ‘civilizing Conquest’ of Ireland, but the civilizing mission includes the more rational English methods of ploughing fields; the Irish ‘preferre their own absurd and savage Customes before the convincing evidence of reason and demonstration: a testimony of their true Barbarism and obdurate willfulnesse’ to ‘the ingenuity of other Nations.’20 Doubtless, Milton’s anti-Catholicism was a strong factor in his assessment of ‘the villainous and savage scum of Ireland,’ but, as Willy Maley has noted in his depiction of Milton as a ‘colonial republican,’ Milton thought them no more barbaric than the ‘High-land theeves and Red-shanks’ or Scots Presbyterians sent to colonize Belfast.21 Milton thought Cromwell and Fairfax heroes or ‘liberating Brutuses’ who ‘rule with wisdom three powerful nations, to desire to lead their people from base customs to a be er standard of morality and discipline than before.’22 Milton, as Latin Secretary to the Council of State and salaried civil servant, maintained a discreet silence about the Navigation Act of 1651 and the Anglo-Dutch War whereby the English wrested supremacy of the seas from their Calvinist rivals. In 1651, Milton cited Cicero’s Philippics with a robust justification of war for republican liberty: ‘What be er cause for war is there than to ward off slavery, that condition which is more wretched even though the master may not be cruel, for he has the power to be if he wishes?’23 Moreover,

20 Ibid., 3: 304. 21 Willy Maley, ‘Milton and “the Complication of Interests” in Early Modern Ireland,’ in Chandra and Sauer, eds., Milton and the Imperial Vision, 162. 22 Milton, Complete Prose Works, 4: 668, 674, 682. 23 Ibid., 352. Milton may not have had the Dutch in mind in his Defence of the People of England; his specific target was Salmasius, and may have been a retrospective justification of the Civil War and the execution of Charles I. Cicero’s statement, and Milton’s endorsement of it, seems to me a particularly vivid example of what Skinner, Viroli, and Pe it mean by republican liberty, as distinct from Hobbes’s absence of external impediments to motion; it is not just actual oppression, but the possibility of it, that constitutes a condition of slavery or unfreedom. Even if not oppressed, subjects of a king, according to republican doctrine, experience the omnipresent possibility of arbitrary arrest and enslavement. In the second Anglo-Dutch War, the first Earl of Sha esbury’s Delenda est Carthago (1673) used the slavery or war argument, claiming that the sceptred isle would be enslaved by the Dutch if their fleet were not completely destroyed. That is, republican liberty, which judges freedom in terms of possible, as well as actual, enslavement, could be used to justify pre-emptive strikes against imperial rivals as well as tyrants. Hobbes thought the possibility of arbitrary governmental oppression was as great in republics (for

Republicanism and the English Civil War 33

he envisioned ‘from on high far flung regions and territories across the sea, faces numberless and unknown’ who will receive ‘a product from my own country . . . the renewed cultivation of freedom and civic life that I disseminate throughout cities, kingdoms and nations.’24 During the Rump Parliament and Cromwell’s Protectorate, Britain not only conquered Scotland and Ireland, but also acquired the islands surrounding Britain, and made overseas incursions into the Dutch, Portuguese, and Spanish empires. Milton asked rhetorically in 1654: ‘For who does not consider the glorious achievements of his country as his own?’25 In a youthful essay, Milton wrote that the Romans were ‘masters of the world in ancient times’ and a ributes this mastery to passing Jupiter’s test ‘whether the Romans were the only nation worthy to be the vice-regents of supreme Jove on earth.’26 To be sure, in his History of Britain, wri en three decades a erwards, Milton denounced the dictator Caesar for enslaving Britons and raping their women; rather than a civilizing mission, as most eighteenth-century thinkers were to have it, the Romans introduce the Britons to ‘the incitements also and materials of Vice, and voluptuous life, proud Buildings, Baths, and the elegance of Banqueting; which the foolisher sort call’d civilitie, but it was indeed a secret Art to prepare them for bondage.’27 Nevertheless, the Romans ‘beate us into some civilitie,’ a view that Sharon Achinstein thought Milton used to justify the English beating the barbarous Celts into ‘some civilitie.’28 As Milton indicated on the title page of many of his works, he was (in W.S. Gilbert’s sense) an Englishman. But he was also a Christian. As he wrote in his Commonplace Book (1639– 40, at the time of his most Machiavellian intoxication) under the heading ove of country: ‘This virtue should be sought by philosophers cautiously. For a blind and carnal love of country should not carry us off to plundering and bloodshed and hatred of neighboring countries, so that we can example, the system of ostracism in Athenian democracy or anonymous accusations in the Venetian oligarchy) than in a legitimate monarchy, that is, where the king ‘commands the people in general never but by a precedent law, and as a politic, not a natural person’ (Behemoth, 51). Hobbes also thought republics more imperialist than monarchies (Behemoth, 174–5, 185–6; On the Citizen, 3– 4, 150). 24 Milton, Complete Prose Works, 4: 554–6; McLeod, ‘Lordly Eye,’ 55–6. 25 Milton, Complete Prose Works, 4: 550. 26 Ibid., 1: 257. 27 Ibid., 5: 41, 85. 28 Sharon Achinstein, ‘Imperial Dialectic: Milton and Conquered Peoples,’ in Chandra and Sauer, eds., Milton and the Imperial Vision, 76–9.

34 Imperial Republics

enrich our country in power, wealth, or glory; for so did the pagans act. It behooves Christians, however, to cultivate peace among themselves and not seek the property of others.’29 Thus it is not surprising that Milton, in Paradise Regained (III. 44–56), thought Jesus opposed to Satan’s offer of empire: Thou neither dost perswade me to seek wealth For Empires sake, nor Empire to affect For glories sake by all thy argument. For what is glory but the blaze of fame, The people’s praise, if always praise unmixt? And what the people but a herd confus’d, A miscellaneous rabble, who extol Things vulgar, & well weigh’d, scarce worth the praise, They praise and they admire they know not what; And know not whom, but as one leads the other; And what delight to be by such extoll’d, To live upon thir tongues and be thir talk, Of whom to be disprais’d were no small praise.

The saviour of all but the ‘miscellaneous rabble’ admonishes Satan (III. 71–88): They err who count it glorious to subdue By conquest far and wide, to over-run Large Countries, and in the field great Ba els win, Great Cities by assault: what do these Worthies, But rob and spoil, burn, slaughter and enslave, Peaceable Nations, neighbouring, or remote, Made Captive, yet deserving freedom more Than those thir Conquerors, who leave behind Nothing but ruin wherefoe’re they rove, And all the flourishing works of peace destroy, Then swell with pride, and must be titl’d Gods, Great Benefactors of mankind, Deliverers, One is the Son of Jove, of Mars the other, Till Conqueror Death discovers them scarce men,

29 Milton, Complete Prose Works, 1: 422.

Republicanism and the English Civil War 35 Rowling in brutish vices, and deform’d, Violent or shameful death thir due reward.

Certainly, some powerful anti-imperialist poetry! In Paradise Regained (IV. 133–7), he seemed to distinguish the early Roman Republic from the later Empire: the early Romans ‘who were once just / Frugal and Mild, and temperate, conquer’d well / But govern ill the Nations under yoke, / Peeling thir Provinces, exhausting all/ By Lust and rapine.’ Milton here anticipated an important eighteenth-century theme, namely, how to remain free and virtuous at home while acquiring luxurious world dominion. Most eighteenth-century thinkers admired the greatness of the imperial Roman Republic, but perhaps Milton’s support of empire was held in check by his Christianity and his desire for Athenian wisdom rather than Roman power. In Paradise Regained, Jesus does not provide explicit counsel on the possibility of making peace with the Irish or Spanish, who are subject to ‘Popish Thraldom’ or those who Milton thought had betrayed Jesus’s gospel of freedom. Milton maintained throughout his life that ‘Popery is the only or the greatest Heresie’ and ‘the obstinate Papist, the only Heretick.’30 Thus, the pacific anti-imperialism of Paradise Regained was at odds with Milton’s militant Protestantism. To what extent was the anti-imperialism of Paradise Regained a critique of the imperialist policies of the Commonwealth and his own participation in them? Had his republican passions been spent when he wrote his great poems in the Restoration? Cedric Brown has made a strong case that Milton’s republican commitments persisted during the Restoration and his prose works advocating a divinely ordained elite republic are echoed in lines of Paradise Lost (XII. 225– 6) when the Hebrews fleeing Egypt, ‘their great senate choose / Through the twelve tribes, to rule by laws ordained.’31 The apparent tensions between Milton’s prose and poetic works can be harmonized by seeing that a senate of godly men was a divinely appointed institution to replace kings, priests, and prelates, and that Christians do not turn the cheek to Satanic empires but defend themselves and God’s law from papal 30 Of True Religion (1673), in Complete Prose Works, 8: 421. Similar statements can be found in Reason of Church Government (1642) and Areopagitica (1644). 31 Cedric C. Brown, ‘Great Senates and Godly Education: Politics and Cultural Renewal in Some Pre- and Post-revolutionary Texts of Milton,’ in Armitage, Hiny, and Skinner, eds., Milton and Republicanism, 46–50.

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imperialism and other enemies to godly government. Jonathan Sco wrote: ‘What Milton opposed was an empire of power, in place of one of justice.’32 This section has served to question David Armitage’s assertion that Milton’s anti-imperialism arose from his republicanism and to argue, conversely, that the imperial elements of Milton’s thought were a ributable to classical republicanism, or the neo-Roman sense of liberty exacerbated by Milton’s fear of ‘Popish Thraldom,’ and the anti-imperialist elements of Milton’s prose and poetry arose from a Christian opposition to pagan glorification of conquest. Marchamont Nedham: Athenian Democracy with No ‘Senatical Incroachments’ Although the most thoughtful republican theorist of the Commonwealth, James Harrington, advocated the expansionary republicanism of Machiavelli that was modelled on republican Rome, a number of thinkers during the English Civil War preferred Athens to Rome and were critical of the Roman Republic’s oppressive oligarchy. Henry Parker’s Jus Populi (1644) asserts that, a er the kings were expelled from Rome, ‘Patritians affecting an Aristocraticall form, and seeking to exclude the Plebeians from communion in government, they interbroyled the whole State in continual warres, and contestations for many ages together.’ The plebeian backlash to patrician oppression led to an exclusion of patricians from the comitia tribunata with the result of a ‘corrupted Democracie.’ Both monarchy and aristocracy, Parker thought, are derivative of democracy, ‘which though it be not the best, and most exact form for all nations and Empires at all times, yet it is the most natural, and primarily authenticall; and for some times, and places the most beneficiall.’33 In Vox plebis (1646), a Leveller author wrote that the Roman nobility imposed ‘greater tyranny then the Tarquins had done.’ The author equated the Roman Senate with the British House of Lords, the People with the House of Commons, and the Tribunes of the People with

32 Sco , Commonwealth Principles, 218. 33 Henry Parker, Jus Populi, Or discourse wherein Clear Satisfaction Is Given, as well Concerning the Rights of Subiects, as the Right of Princes (London: Robert Bostock, 1644), 60–1. On Parker, see Richard Tuck, Philosophy and Government 1572–1651 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 204, 231–2.

Republicanism and the English Civil War 37

the jurymen who resisted monarchical and aristocratic domination.34 The Leveller John Streater thought Athenian tragedy might inspire artisans to ‘great and bold undertakings.’35 Milton’s friend, Marchamont Nedham, as a journalist without a steady patron, had a chequered political career, supported parliament from 1642 to 1646, switched his support to the king in 1648, betrayed him in 1649–50, supported the Rump Parliament from 1650 until Cromwell dissolved it in 1653, supported Cromwell, while referring to the future Charles II as ‘young Tarquin,’ but lauded the return of Charles II in 1660–1, and like Milton, paid for a pardon to avoid prosecution during the Restoration.36 Nedham, like Milton, looked to both democratic Athens and republican Rome as models of political judgment but favoured Athens over Rome. Nedham’s The Excellencie of a Free State (1656) championed Athens for showing that free states are ‘serious, abstemious, severe’ and that property is secure, the very features of Athens that eighteenth-century thinkers, such as Trenchard and Gordon, Montesquieu, Madison, Hamilton, and De Staël thought to be lacking.37 Unlike these eighteenth-century thinkers, and his contemporary, James Harrington, Nedham thought the Roman senate oppressive, blamed the clash of the orders on the patricians, and specifically on the senators for blocking the agrarian laws for sharing and dividing land.38 Nedham thought the Athenian practice of ostracism less of a threat to a republic than the alternative of submi ing to patrician oppression.39 Nedham wrote that Solon introduced the court

34 Vox plebis, or The People’s Out-Cry against Oppression, Injustice, and Tyranny (London: n.p., 1646), 3, 58–9. 35 Nigel Smith, ‘Popular Republicanism in the 1650s: John Streater’s “Heroick Mechanicks,”’ in Armitage, Hiny, and Skinner, eds., Milton and Republicanism, 151. 36 Blair Worden, ‘Marchamont Nedham and the Beginnings of English Republicanism,’ in Republicanism, Liberty and Commercial Society, 1649–1776, ed. David Woo on (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1994), 45–81; Blair Worden, ‘Milton and Marchamont Nedham,’ and Thomas N. Corns, ‘Milton and the Characteristics of a Free Commonwealth’ in Armitage, Hiny, and Skinner, eds., Milton and Republianism, 25– 42, 156–80. 37 Marchamont Nedham, The Excellencie of a Free State (London: A. Millar and T. Cadell, 1767), 23, 52. 38 Ibid., xviii, xxii, 53, 58–9, 63, 99–100, 126. Interestingly, monarchists such as Voltaire, Giamba ista Vico, Nathaniel Hooke, and Jean-Louis de Lolme supported Nedham’s view that intransigent senators were responsible for the decline of the Roman Republic, whereas the republican thinkers blamed popular or tribunal ambition for its decline. 39 Ibid., 71.

38 Imperial Republics

of Areopagus but le the power of legislation in ‘popular assemblies; so that avoiding kingly tyranny on the one side, and senatical incroachments on the other; he is celebrated by all posterity, as the man that hath le the pa ern of a free-state for all the world to follow.’40 Rome was never free outside ‘the walls of a standing senate’ because ‘Brutus cheated them with a mere shadow and pretend of liberty.’ In Rome ‘by the cra y contrivances of the grandifying parties . . . only the name king was expelled, but not the thing; the power and interest of kingship was still retained in the senate, and engrossed by the consuls’ and ‘as soon as the senate was in the saddle,’ the senators established ‘an arbitrary, hereditary, unaccountable power in themselves.’41 Nedham applauded the abolition of the House of Lords, as he denounced the Roman senators. Morover, he praised Rome’s rival Carthage as a free and courageous city; like Athens, Carthage was more democratic than Rome.42 Later in the century and throughout the eighteenth century, Harrington’s Romanophilia replaced Nedham’s Romanophobia, as counter-reactions to the egalitarianism or levelling tendencies in the English Civil War became an almost standard feature of the conservative Enlightenment. Harrington and Sidney followed Machiavelli in praising the imperial character of the Roman Republic, but, as Vickie B. Sullivan noted, ‘empire does not figure as one of Nedham’s overarching conclusions, a lodestar of his other principles.’ Although he did not oppose empire on principle, he was not a jingoist like Harrington.43 Thus the least imperialist of the Commonwealth republicans, Milton and Nedham were Athenaphiles, not neo-Machiavellian Romanophiles. Henry Neville’s Plato Redivivius (1681) and Algernon Sidney’s Discourses Concerning Government (wri en about the same time but first published in 1698) followed Harrington in seeing Rome, rather than Athens, as a model republic, but, like Nedham, Neville blamed the patricians for violating the agrarian and Licinian law limiting land holdings to 500 acres and undermining the republic.44 The patrician republican Algernon

40 Ibid., xvi. 41 Ibid., xvii–xviii, 99–100. 42 Ibid., 25. 43 Vickie B. Sullivan, Machiavelli, Hobbes and the Formation of a Liberal Republicanism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 135–7. 44 Two English Republican Tracts: Plato Dedivivius (1681) by Henry Neville and An Essay upon the Constitution of the Roman Government (1699) by Walter Moyle, ed. Caroline Robbins (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1969), 97–9, 133.

Republicanism and the English Civil War 39

Sidney did not discuss the Roman agrarian laws other than to say the senators were right to have killed the proponents of agrarian reform, such as Spurius Maelius, Spurius Cassius, and Manlius Capitolinus, as would-be Caesars.45 A Defence of Liberty and Property Giving an Account of the Contest between the Lords and Commons of Athens (1705) was a late comparison of Athens and England, calling for the Commons to stand up against judicial usurpations of the House of Lords. The standard of Athens, as Hobbes noted, was raised by the more democratic elements in English republicanism; that of Rome, by the oligarchic elements. James Harrington’s Dream of Oceanic Empire James Harrington was the most interesting republican theorist of the Commonwealth. His intellectual stature approaches that of Hobbes; his influence as a republican theorist has been properly emphasized by J.G.A. Pocock, Samuel Beer, and other scholars.46 He was also a strong advocate of English imperialism. As a follower of Machiavelli, Harrington distinguished conservative commonwealths, such as Sparta and Venice, and imperialist ‘commonwealths for increase,’ such as Rome and Oceana (England). Harrington dedicated The Commonwealth of Oceana (1656) to Oliver Cromwell, who had expanded England’s empire against her Dutch, Spanish, and French rivals in the English Channel, in Acadia, the Caribbean, and Asia. Harrington’s Oceana advocated imperialism: ‘The sea giveth law to the growth of Venice, but

45 Algernon Sidney, Discourses Concerning Government (London: J. Darby, 1704), 102, 125, 153. 46 J.G.A. Pocock, The Machiavellian Moment: Florentine Political Thought and the Atlantic Republican Tradition (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1975), and Samuel Beer, To Make a Nation: The Rediscovery of American Federalism (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 1993), have established the importance of Harrington’s thought to American republicanism. More contentiously, Harrington has been claimed as a significant influence on Abbé Sieyès and French republicanism. See J.H. Clapham, The Abbé Sieyès (London: P.S. King, 1912), 31–2, 109, 174, 264–5; Sven Bodvar Liljegren, A French Dra Constitution of 1792 Modelled on James Harrington’s Oceana (Lund: Glieup, 1932); Thomas Hafen, Staat, Gesellscha und Bürger in Denken von Emmanuel Joseph Sieyes (Bern: Haupt, 1994), 38, 146, 167, 197–223, 327; Alois Ri in, Emmanuel Joseph Sieyes und die Französische Revolution (Bern: Stämpfi Verlag, 2001), 213. Michael Sonenscher, Sans-Culo es: An Eighteenth-Century Emblem in the French Revolution (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008), 42–5, is somewhat more sceptical about Harrington’s influence on Montesquieu and Sieyès.

40 Imperial Republics

the growth of Oceana giveth the law unto the sea.’47 When Charles II was restored to power, he had ten times as many ships in England’s navy than his father had twenty years before,48 a somewhat ironic fact, since parliamentary grievances with Charles I arose over ‘ship money,’ the king’s a empt to extend taxation for the Royal Navy from coastal towns to inland counties. Montesquieu wrote: ‘England was never so respected as under Cromwell, a er the wars of the Long Parliament.’49 Maurice Ashley agreed with Montesquieu that British prestige abroad was greater during the Commonwealth than it had been under the Stuarts and would be a er the Restoration: ‘Cromwell made England into a great power, feared and admired by her European neighbors.’50 In Edmund Waller’s poem ‘Upon the Late Storme and of the Death of His Highness (the Lord Protector) Ensuing the Same’ (1659), lines 6-7 read: ‘So Romulus was lost / New Rome in such a tempest lost her king.’ Lines 14–28 list his imperial achievements:51 Our dying hero from the continent Ravished whole towns; and forts from Spaniards rest; As his last legacy to Britain le . The ocean, which so long our hopes confined, Could give no limits to his vaster mind. Our bounds’ enlargement was his latest toil, Nor hath he le us prisoners to our isle; Under the tropic is our language spoke, And part of Flanders hath received our yoke. From civil broils he did us disengage, Found nobler objects for our martial rage, And, with wise conduct, to his country showed Their ancient way of conquering abroad. Ungrateful then! If we no tears allow To him, that gave us peace and empire too. 47 James Harrington, The Commonwealth of Oceana and A System of Politics, ed. J.G.A. Pocock (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 7. 48 Ronald Findlay and Kevin H. O’Rourke, Power and Plenty: Trade, War, and the World Economy in the Second Millennium (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007), 242. 49 Charles de Secondat, baron de Montesquieu, Considerations on the Causes of the Greatness of the Romans and Their Decline, ed. David Lowenthal (Indianapolis: Hacke , 1999), 107. 50 Maurice Ashley, ed., Cromwell (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1969), 4–5. 51 The Poems of Edmund Waller, ed. G.T. Drury (London: Spence and Bullen, 1893), 162–3.

Republicanism and the English Civil War 41

Andrew Marvell wrote ‘A Poem upon the Death of Oliver Cromwell, eulogizing the Lord Protector as an apt follower of the Roman god of war.’ Lines 277–80 read: Thee many ages hence in martial verse Shall th’English souldier ere he charge rehearse Singing of thee, influme themselves to fight, And with the name of Cromwell, armyes fright.52

Harrington put the imperialist spirit of the poets into prose. As a foundation for his vision of an imperialist England, Harrington laid down as a fundamental axiom in The Commonwealth of Oceana and The Art of Lawgiving (1659) that political and legal institutions must accord with the kinds and amounts of property or the polity will be unstable.53 Before Henry VII weakened the nobility by breaking up the system of feudal retainers, and centralizing the army and judicature, and Henry VIII continued the process by selling off monastic lands, the nobility and clergy held at least four times the amount of land as did the people.54 Since that time, the balance of property came into the hands of the people and the gentry, thus enabling republican government. Previously, the aristocracy relied on the crown to preserve its lands, but since the Tudors the Lords and the Commons have been able to make common cause against the crown. To prevent the nobility from allying itself with royalty rather than gentry, an agrarian law must prevent the concentration of land in the hands of the nobility, as happened in the late Roman Republic when wealthy men outfi ed armies and retained magistracies indefinitely, which were hitherto held for fixed periods. The polarization of wealth and the prolongation of military command, Harrington thought, occasioned the instability in the century before Caesar and Augustus assumed rule. ‘Monarchy requires of the standard of property, that it be vast and great . . . but popular government requires, that the standard be moderate, and that its agrarian [laws] prevent accumulation.’55 The Roman Republic fell because the agrarian and Licinian laws were disregarded by the Roman nobility. Oceana

52 Andrew Marvell, Miscellaneous Poems (London: Robert Boulter, 1681), 151. 53 Harrington, Commonwealth of Oceana, 11, 13–14; James Harrington, The Art of Lawgiving, in The Oceana and Other Works of James Harrington, with an Account of His Life by John Toland (London: T. Becket et al., 1771), 363–4. 54 Harrington, Art of Lawgiving, 364. 55 Ibid., 367.

42 Imperial Republics

can avoid the same fate if it imposes an agrarian law and maintains rotation in political office. Anticipating the language Marx was to use three centuries later, Harrington wrote that the legal and political superstructure must be based on a suitable agrarian law.56 Harrington claimed that an agrarian law was mandated ‘by God himself, who divided the land of Canaan unto his people by lots,’ but to do this, ‘the Canaanists must first have bin totally rooted out of the land of Canaan.’57 The Roman agrarian law was also founded upon conquered lands. If the Hebrews and Romans used conquered lands to implement their agrarian laws, and the land is already held in Oceana, how then is an agrarian law to be implemented in Oceana? Harrington recognized that ‘agrarian laws of all others have been the greatest bugbears’ and lists five objections: first, it is unnecessary because the Venetian Republic did not have an agrarian law and Aristotle derided Phaleus’s proposal to equalize all land holdings; second, implementing an agrarian law may be dangerous since Machiavelli stated that contention about the agrarian law caused the destruction of the republic; third, it does not necessarily maintain a republic since the Hebrews chose a king for themselves; fourth, it would be destructive of families and noble lineages; and fi h, it would destroy industry. Against these objections, Harrington responded that Aristotle proposed land regulation to prevent the polarization that causes revolutions, that Venice sucks the people dry, that the Swiss and Dutch who have ‘an implicit agrarian’ [law] are industrious, that the Gracchic agrarian reform was too late to prevent the corruption of the republic.58 The main problem is that land is already held in large estates, although with Oceana’s domination of Panopea (Ireland) and Marpesia (Scotland), opportunities for land distribution arise and ‘there be other plantations, and the commonwealth will have more. Who knoweth how far the arms of our agrarian [law] may extend themselves?’59 Oceana’s expansion will be unlimited because the agrarian law will be put into effect in her provinces, whereas the nobility in Roman provinces had the opportunity to amass unlimited wealth and buy estates and corrupt clients in Rome. Harrington wrote: ‘the acquisition of provinces devour’d the commonwealth of Rome, that, she not being sufficiently fortified by agrarian laws, 56 Ibid., 370; Commonwealth of Oceana, 33. 57 Commonwealth of Oceana, 13; Art of Lawgiving, 384. 58 Commonwealth of Oceana, 101–6. 59 Ibid., 109–10.

Republicanism and the English Civil War 43

the nobility, thro’ the spoil of provinces, came to eat the people out of their popular balance or lands in Italy by purchases; and the lands that had been in the hands of the many, coming into the hands of the few, of natural and necessary consequence there follows monarchy.’60 A curious feature of Harrington’s emphasis on agrarian laws as the guarantor of republics is that he not only followed Machiavelli in thinking the admirable efforts of Tiberius and Gaius Gracchus were too late to save the republic61 but also that the senate was right to murder earlier proponents of the agrarian law, such as Spurius Cassius, Spurius Maelius, and Manlius Capitolinus, as too ambitious for republics.62 Within Oceana, Harrington did not recommend confiscation of land as a means to implement the agrarian law but rather partible inheritance for those with estates worth more than 5,000 pounds per annum, and restrictions on primogeniture for those with estates above 2,000 pounds yearly. The goal is for Oceana to be divided into 5,000 lots earning incomes of 2,000 pounds yearly. In Panopea, the lots are to be the same size or worth, but in Marpesia (Scotland), the lots are to be one-quarter the size of those in Oceana and Panopea.63 Harrington thought the Marpesian aristocracy must be crushed because Scots are blindly loyal to their clan chie ains, and feudal loyalty is incompatible with a commonwealth.64 Inhabitants of Oceana can learn from the mistakes of the ancient republics. Harrington wrote that ‘the people [ate] the nobility in Athens, and the nobility the people in Rome.’65 What Oceana needs is not a pure democracy or a pure aristocracy but a balance between the nobility and gentry on the one side and the commons on the other. ‘Athens . . . was plainly lost through the want of a good aristocracy’ and the democratic city had the ‘assembly of the people resolving and too o en debating – which was the ruin of it.’66 Rome was a model of balance between nobles and commons, where the senate had the authority to debate and initiate policy and legislation, the people assembled by centuries or tribes had the power to decide or resolve policy and legislation by a vote without deliberation or debate, and the magistrates had the power to execute

60 Art of Lawgiving, 427. 61 Commonwealth of Oceana, 36–7. 62 Ibid., 13, 172, 190. 63 Ibid., 101, 109–10. 64 Ibid., 230. 65 Ibid., 12. 66 Ibid., 29, 136.

44 Imperial Republics

the laws passed by the people. The Athenian senate was selected by lot, and changed yearly; the Roman senate excluded the plebeians, and when magistracies were open to plebeians, conflict over agrarian laws ensued, and the rapacious senators undermined the landed basis of a republic; a proper senate would be elected by the people, would rotate only one-third of its senators yearly, avoiding the incompetence of Athenian senators and the close-mindedness of the Roman senate. The Roman Republic fell because magistrates ceased regular rotation, and because plebeians were excluded from the senate and some magistracies. If the Roman senate and magistracies had been open to able plebeians, the ‘natural aristocracy,’ the elect or elected, the Romans ‘had rendered that commonwealth unmoveable.’67 Harrington’s model government is based on a division of labour between deliberation and decision; like Hobbes, Harrington thought the people in large assemblies are not suitable for debate but they are capable of determining whether policies put to them are fair. One person is to cut the cake and the other is to decide which piece she wants. Harrington differed primarily from Hobbes, who thought sovereignty had to be vested in one person or one assembly. Harrington thought sovereignty could and should be divided between senators and plebs. Perhaps Harrington’s insistence that prudent deliberation requires senatorial authority or initiative partly explains his acceptance of the severity with which Roman senators dispatched proponents of land distribution, while he also insisted that the agrarian law was the very basis of republican government. Harrington thought the Roman Republic would have lasted indefinitely had the agrarian law been maintained and a proper election and rotation of offices instituted. Oceana cannot only copy but also be er Rome in having ‘the empire of the world.’ Harrington cites Cicero’s De Officiis to justify England’s civilizing mission: ‘We have rather undertaken the patronage than the empire of the world.’ Oceana, like Rome, is to hold the empire of the world; ‘if the empire of a commonwealth be patronage, to ask whether it be lawful for a commonwealth to aspire unto the empire of the world is to ask whether it be lawful for her to do her duty, or to put the world into a be er condition than before.’68 Subject peoples, and the armies that conquer them, are to be given lands, magistrates, and laws of their own, limited only by the stipulations of

67 Ibid., 37–8. 68 Ibid., 221, 227.

Republicanism and the English Civil War 45

the agrarian laws; namely, that estates are to have a maximum worth of 2000 pounds, except in Scotland, where the maximum is 500 pounds. A rightly ordered commonwealth may ‘be as immortal, or long-lived, as the world.’ Rejecting Milton and espousing Hobbes, Harrington wrote that ‘the citizen may be sinful and yet the commonwealth be perfect.’ Quoting Virgil’s Aeneid, I, 287 – ‘Imperium Oceano famamque terminet astris’ – Harrington made clear that the Oceanic empire of England will have no limit in this world.69 Algernon Sidney: ‘England’s Cato’ Algernon Sidney is renowned as a republican martyr. He served in the Parliamentary cause, was wounded at Marston Moor in 1644, and served in parliament until he ran afoul of Oliver Cromwell, whom he regarded as a tyrant. During the Restoration, he joined in the a empt to exclude the Catholic James, Duke of York, from succession to the throne, and was implicated in the Rye House Plot to kill James and Charles II in 1683. Evidence to secure Sidney’s conviction was scanty, and George Jeffreys, ‘the Hanging Judge,’ ruled that Sidney’s Discourses on Government be used in evidence against him. He met Jeffreys’s death sentence with equanimity, and like Cato of Utica, was enrolled in the canon of republican martyrs. John Adams and Thomas Jefferson thought Sidney a major republican thinker and Jean-Jacques Rousseau cited Sidney favourably and used his translation of Tacitus. J.G.A. Pocock has cast doubt on Sidney’s stature as a political theorist,70 but Jonathan Sco considered the tensions in Sidney’s thought do not detract from his importance as a political thinker.71 Sidney was a follower of Machiavelli and an ardent admirer of the imperial Roman Republic. Sidney followed Machiavelli in deprecating the oligarchic republic of Venice as anti-imperialist: ‘the too great inclinations of the Venetians for peace is . . . a mortal error in their constitution.’72 Vickie

69 Ibid., 217–18. 70 J.G.A. Pocock, ‘England’s Cato: The Virtues and Fortunes of Algernon Sidney,’ The Historical Journal 37 (1994): 915–35. 71 Jonathan Sco , Algernon Sidney and the Restoration Crisis, 1677–1683 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 210–13, 350–9. 72 Algernon Sidney, Discourses Concerning Government (London: J. Darby, 1704), 144; Jonathan Sco , Algernon Sidney and the English Republic, 1623–1677 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 32.

46 Imperial Republics

Sullivan indicated that Sidney differed from Nedham in that ‘Sidney displays no such hesitation, adopting a Machiavellian pose from the start by defending the unsavory aspects of the bellicose city precisely because they foster its ability to make war.’73 Rome’s empire, Sidney asserted, began with the overthrow of the Tarquins and declined when the Emperors assumed power.74 Under the Tarquins, Roman dominion ‘hardly extended so far as from London to Hounslow: But in more than three hundred years a er they recovered their liberty, they had subdu’d all the warlike Nations of Italy’ and then conquered most of Europe. No kingdom ever had such a stable empire.75 Following Machiavelli’s preference for Rome over Sparta, Sidney claimed that experience demonstrates that ‘it is be er [for a nation] to aim at conquest, rather than simply stand upon their own defence.’76 Jonathan Sco wrote that ‘for Sidney, as for Machiavelli, a republic for warfare and expansion was the best constitution of all, and the example of Rome was preeminent’; but, as with the Machiavellian Harrington, Sidney’s imperial republicanism was unlimited, not limited by a cyclical view of history.77 Sidney was clear that Athens was less stable than Rome or Sparta because the Athenian people overbalanced the nobility.78 Athenian thinkers such as Xenophon, Plato, and Aristotle, as well as Roman thinkers, such as ‘Livy, Tacitus, Cicero and others,’ were proponents of aristocracy.79 Sidney did not follow Harrington in commending the Roman agrarian laws as essential to the maintenance of a republic, but he followed Machiavelli and Harrington in commending the senatorial murders of advocates of agrarian reform as would-be Caesars.80

73 Sullivan, Machiavelli, Hobbes and the Formation of Liberal Republicanism, 206. 74 Sidney, Discourse Concerning Government, 99–101, 108–9. Sidney thought that, although the empire suffered under the emperors, the decline was ‘a li le allay’d and moderated by the virtues of Antoninus and M. Aurelius’ (320). 75 Ibid., 100. Although Sidney did not publish during the Commonwealth, he retrospectively celebrated its glorious imperialism on land and sea, and a ributed its expansion to a world power to republican liberty. See Jonathan Sco , Algernon Sidney and the English Republic, 1623–1677 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 103 –5. 76 Ibid., 143. 77 Sco , Algernon Sidney and the English Republic, 32–3. 78 Ibid., 123, 216. 79 Ibid., 133. 80 Ibid., 102, 104, 125, 153.

Republicanism and the English Civil War 47

Algernon Sidney then adhered to the Machiavellian imperialism of the Commonwealth but stripped it of its egalitarianism, advocated by Nedham, Neville, and Harrington. The English Civil War evolved from a model of Athenian democracy to Roman aristocracy. The Commonwealth’s Imperial Legacy The Restoration parliament carried on Harrington’s Roman and imperial vision for England. Charles II’s reign was subsidized by Louis XIV, who was not without Augustan imperial aspirations, and Anthony Ashley Cooper, the first Earl of Sha esbury, first minister to Charles and soon to spearhead anti-popery in the effort to exclude the Catholic James II from the Crown of England, spoke in Parliament in 1673, demanding Delenda est Carthago. Carthage was not France, with whom England was at war for more than half of the long eighteenth century, from the Glorious Revolution, when William of Orange replaced James II as king, to the end of the Napoleonic wars.81 Rather, ‘the States of Holland are England’s Eternal Enemy, both by Interest and Inclination.’ We are ‘their only Competitor for Trade and Power at Sea, and who stand in their way to an Universal Empire as great as Rome.’ Sha esbury, as vehement an anti-Papist as Milton, was sensitive to the view that Louis XIV was paying to have England’s fellow Protestants destroyed in the Second Anglo-Dutch War. Sha esbury dismissed ‘that Calumny concerning the Papists, that no reasonable Scruple can be made by any good Man.’ Sha esbury explained: ‘Joint interests have o en Secur’d the Peace of differing Religions, but agreeing Professions have hardly an Example of preserving the Peace of different Interests.’ Rather, King Charles aimed to secure ‘the dominion and Property of his own Seas’ and reapportion the East Indies, to which the ‘Carthaginian party’ supporting the Dutch government is opposed, and thus ‘delenda est Carthago.’ Sha esbury concluded: When you consider we are an Island, ’tis not Riches nor Greatness we contend for, yet those must a end the success; but ‘tis our very Beings are in Question; we fight pro aris & focis, in this war, we are no longer Freemen, being Islanders and Neighbours, if they Master us at Sea: There is not so

81 J.R. Seeley, The Expansion of England (1881–82), ed. John Gross (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1971), 21; Findlay and O’Rourke, Power and Plenty, 247.

48 Imperial Republics Lawful and Commendable a Jealousie in the World, as an English Man’s, of the growing Greatness of any Prince or State at Sea; if you permit the Sea, our British Wife to be Ravish’d, an Eternal Mark of Infamy will stick upon us.’82

England’s insularity is no longer to be seen as a defence against invasion but, under the slimmest pretext of self-defence, becomes an occasion for oceanic conquest. The republican imperialism of the Commonwealth, carried on by the Whigs such as Sha esbury and Sidney during the Restoration, presented, a er the Glorious Revolution of 1688, vistas of neo-Roman imperialism. The Athenian egalitarianism of Nedham and the Levellers gave way to the cult of Cato, and the admiration of his senatorial class, in the Whig thinkers of the Augustan age.

82 Sha esbury, Anthony Ashley Cooper, Earl of, Delenda est Carthago, or the Lord Chancellor Sha esbury’s Speeches in Parliament about the Second War with the Dutch in 1672, and 1673 (London: J. Baker, 1712), 3–4, 6–7, 11–12, 14.

3 Catonic Virtue, Sweet Commerce, and Imperial Rivalry

In this chapter, I wish to show why republican Rome continued to play a significant role in monarchical Britain of the Augustan age. Although a frequent trope on both sides of the English Channel was the antithesis of war and commerce, with Rome portrayed as an anticommercial warlike republic1 and the French and English empires of trade as pacific, mercantile rivalries outweighed the alleged pacifying effect of commerce. England and France were at war for more than half the years from the Glorious Revolution to the conclusion of the Napoleonic wars in 1815. While John Dryden identified the Dutch as the Carthaginians, the enemy of republican Rome in Annus Mirabilis

1 Modern scholarship indicates that republican Rome had flourishing commerce, and thus the contrast with the allegedly pacific British and French empires of trade was overdrawn, to say the least. Roman patricians like Cato the Elder enriched themselves by viniculture, the wine and slave trade; by the second century b.c., commerce ‘became the most prominent and desired means of amassing wealth.’ Cicero’s wife, Terentia, like Montesquieu’s wife, conducted most of their family’s commercial affairs, and sons, slaves, clients, and freedmen conducted much of the patricians’ business affairs. Senators invested in lead mining, ports, shipping, po eries, and building industry (sources of wealth the emperors took over). See Aaron Kirschenbaum, Sons, Slaves and Freedmen in Roman Commerce (Jerusalem: Magnes Press, 1987), especially 90; Also John H. D’Arms, Commerce and Social Standing in Ancient Rome (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1981), especially, 65, 151; Jean Paul Morel, ‘Early Rome and Italy,’ in The Cambridge Economic History of the Greco-Roman World, ed. Walter Scheidel, Ian Morris, and Richard Saller (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 487–510; D. Brendan Nagle, Ancient Rome: A History (Cornwall-on-Hudson, NY: Sloan Publishing, 2010), 11, graphs the explosion of commerce from the fourth century b.c., which reached its apex in the last years of the Roman Republic.

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(1666),2 and Sha esbury had identified Holland as the Carthage that must be destroyed six years later, in the eighteenth century, the parts of Rome and Carthage were played by France and England. From the time of the Seven Years’ War through the French Revolution, it became a commonplace in France that the commercial English were the Carthage that must be destroyed: ‘Many observers draped themselves in the toga of Cato to predict the destruction of the new avatar of the ancient city.’3 However, the English were not deprived of those who draped themselves in the toga of Cato. Joseph Addison’s Cato depicted the heroic death of Cato the Younger, Cato of Utica, who killed himself, rather than live ignominiously under Caesar, and John Trenchard and Thomas Gordon’s Cato’s Letters brought together the elder Cato, the censorious imperialist, and the younger Cato, the patriotic republican.4

2 Cited in Philip Ayres, Classical Culture and the Idea of Rome in Eighteenth-Century England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 3. 3 Edmond Dziembowski, Un Nouveau Patriotisme français, 1750–1770: La France face à la puissance anglaise à l’époque de la guerre de Sept Ans (Oxford: Voltaire Foundation, 1998), 245: ‘Bien des observateurs se drapent dans la toge de Caton pour prédire la destruction du nouvel avatar de l’antique cité’; also 61, 84–5, 183–9, 231–9, 495; but 411–13 for representations of the French as Romans beleaguered by the bloody and perfidious Carthaginians. 4 Ronald Hamowy, the editor of the Liberty Press edition of Cato’s Le ers, or Essays on Liberty, Civil and Religious, and Other Important Subjects (Indianapolis: Liberty Press, 1995), incorrectly identifies Cato as Cato the Younger (xx, xxxvii, 387), when Gordon’s preface compares John Trenchard to Cato the Elder (33) and the index lists seven references to Cato the Elder and one to Cato the Younger (998). The index is incorrect however; le ers 39, 56, 99, 103 refer to Cato the Younger, le ers 71 and 131 to Cato the Elder, and le er 23 to both Catos. Hamowy’s omission of the censorial imperialist is consistent with his interpretation of Trenchard and Gordon as exponents of laissezfaire (xxxi–xxxii), rather than mercantile imperialists. To be sure, le er 91 concludes with the assertion: ‘Monopolies are equally dangerous in Trade, in Politicks, in Religion: A free Trade, a free Government, and a free Liberty of Conscience, are the Rights and Blessings of Mankind.’ However, the first le er begins with a vigourous call to defend Gibraltar militarily, repeated o en throughout the le ers, and le er 106 ‘Of Colonies’ portrays Ireland as a subject Roman province rather than an independent Greek colony, defending the prohibition of competing commodities, such as wool and livestock. Trade, in Trenchard and Gordon’s view, should only be unimpaired when the products of countries do not compete, as with the American South and Britain. John Locke, Charles Davenant, and Sir William Pe y advocated closure of the woolen industry in Ireland before Trenchard and Gordon, and Jean-François Melon’s widely read A Political Essay on Commerce may have persuaded Montesquieu to accept the legitimacy of Ireland being ‘enslaved’ and its commerce suppressed by England. See Istvan Hont, Jealousy of Trade: International Competition and the

Catonic Virtue, Sweet Commerce, and Imperial Rivalry 51

Addison’s Cato: A Tragedy (1713) and Trenchard and Gordon’s Cato’s Le ers (1720–1) introduced Roman republicanism to American republicans at second hand. George Washington wrote Benedict Arnold commending his heroism in his unsuccessful assault on Quebec in 1775, citing Addison’s Cato (I.ii, 44–5): ‘It is not in the power of any man to command success; but you have done more – you have deserved it.’ Moreover, Cato provided patriots, such as Patrick Henry and Nathan Hale, with their most memorable lines and, as indicated in the introduction, Washington had Addison’s Cato performed in the cold drear winter at Valley Forge.5 Cato’s Le ers, according to Bernard Bailyn, were more important ideological sources of the American Revolution than Locke or Montesquieu.6 Quentin Skinner and other republican theorists consider Trenchard and Gordon, as well as Locke, to be republicans,7 despite the fact that Locke never claimed to be a republican and Trenchard and Gordon denied being republicans. This chapter a empts to explain Nation-State in Historical Perspective (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005), 30–1, 58–9, 213, 224, 232, 239; Charles de Secondat, baron de Montesquieu, The Spirit of the Laws, trans. Anne M. Cohler, Basia C. Miller, and Harold S. Stone (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 329. 5 Forrest McDonald’s Foreword to Joseph Addison, Cato: A Tragedy and Selected Essays, ed. Christine Dunn Henderson and Mark E. Yellin (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 2004), viii. 6 Bernard Bailyn, The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 1992), 36. Ronald Hamowy also stressed the importance of Trenchard and Gordon to American republicans in his introduction to Cato’s Le ers, xxxvi. Catherine Volpilhac-Auger, Tacite en France de Montesquieu à Chateaubriand (Oxford: Voltaire Foundation, 1993), 45, 75, 415, 432–3, 469–74, indicates that Trenchard and Gordon were important intellectual sources of the French Revolution. Baron D’Holbach translated Trenchard and Gordon in 1767, and Gordon’s The Works of Tacitus: With Political Discourses on That Author was translated by P. Daudé in 1742 and 1751. 7 Quentin Skinner, ‘Freedom as the Absence of Arbitrary Power,’ in Republicanism and Political Theory, ed. Cécile Laborde and John Maynor (Oxford: Blackwell, 2008), 85; M.N.S. Sellers, American Republicanism: Roman Ideology in the United States Constitution (London: Macmillan, 1994), 105–17, 134. Montesquieu has o en been described as a republican thinker, despite his insistence that the patriotic virtue essential to republics is no longer possible in commercial societies. For Trenchard and Gordon’s denial of republican beliefs, see Cato’s Le ers, 13–15. To be sure, there may have been political reasons for Trenchard and Gordon’s repudiation of republicanism, as well as Montesquieu’s, and thus I do not dispute the claim that these thinkers were neoRoman republicans. However, Locke’s politics are as devoid of Roman allusions as they are of republican claims, and thus I find Skinner’s and Sellers’s enrolment of Locke in the neo-Roman republican camp unwarranted.

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how Roman republicanism was kept alive in Augustan Britain until it crossed the Atlantic and took root in colonial America. Mercantile Rivalry During the late seventeenth century, Louis XIV’s able finance minister, Jean-Baptiste Colbert, built up the infrastructure of commerce, roads, canals, ports, and a navy to complement France’s agricultural economy and to compete in the Americas and the East Indies with France’s rivals. Colbert wrote Louis in 1669: ‘Commerce is a perpetual and peaceful war of wit and energy among all nations.’8 The duality of war and peace, associated with commerce, was to pervade the eighteenth century. But, in the seventeenth century, Montesquieu’s and Smith’s doctrines of the so ening and pacific effects of ‘le doux commerce’ had not come into prominence. Sha esbury, as we have seen, carried on the bellicose policy of the Commonwealth, which in its turn responded to the warlike policy of the Dutch, who had replaced the Portuguese as the primary carriers of the spice trade. Early in the seventeenth century, Jan Pieterszoon Coen, the governor general of the Vereenigde Oost-Indische Compagnie, declared: ‘We cannot make war without trade nor trade without war.’9 The Dutch East Indies Company sold nutmeg produced in the Bandas in Europe for 840 times the purchase price. When the English East Indies Company a empted to break the Dutch monopoly of the nutmeg trade, Coen killed all the English and the Bandanese – not just those who traded with the English – and replaced them with imported slaves. Coen later murdered all officials of the English East Indies Company at Amboyna, together with their Japanese employees, in order to secure the clove trade, and then took Jakarta militarily. Coen’s efforts to establish a lucrative slave trade were blocked when Hindu rulers told him that slavery was a sin in the eyes of the gods.10 Certainly, the English did not have a monopoly on Calvinist hypocrisy, and the murders at Amboyna were cited as one of the grounds of the first Anglo-Dutch War. The VOC or Dutch East Indies Company was a privately owned corporation; its activities were not coordinated by a centralized state that could set priorities between competing mercantile interests in the East and West Indies, defend their colonial  8 Cited in Hont, Jealousy of Trade, 23.  9 Ronald Findlay and Kevin H. O’Rourke, Power and Plenty: Trade, War, and the World Economy in the Second Millennium (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007), 178. 10 Ibid., 179–80.

Catonic Virtue, Sweet Commerce, and Imperial Rivalry 53

interests in the Americas, or use legislation comparable to the English Navigation Acts of 1651 or the Corn Laws of 1689 to encourage a merchant marine.11 Now what accounts for Catonic virtue in ‘the Augustan age’ following the Glorious Revolution? Virtue, as the 3rd Earl of Sha esbury wrote repeatedly, is an aspect of the social nature of men; it does not require supernatural sanctions but arises from the sensus communis, a natural sense of right and wrong born from human sociability. Sha esbury wrote: ‘creatures who by their particular economy are fi ed to the strictest society and rule of common good, the most unnatural of all affections are those which separate from this community and the most truly natural, generous and noble are those which tend towards public service and the interests of society at large.’12 Civic virtues are contributions to one’s polity; rights are claims against the polity. Sha esbury’s language of virtue was a sociable alternative to what he took to be the egotism of Hobbes’s, Locke’s and Mandeville’s thought, and the solitude of Pilgrim’s Progress, of the Puritan path of virtue, and of Milton’s conscience or individual judgments of what God decrees to be right and wrong. The language of virtue criticized the indulgence of Charles II’s court without going to the extreme sanctity of the Presbyterian parliament and the godliness of Cromwell’s Protectorate, and justified the fears for liberty and property concerned with James II’s Catholicism. But why did Sha esbury, and so many of his contemporaries, look to pagan antiquity, and particularly to republican Rome, for their models of noble virtue, when across the channel, Henri, comte de Boulainvilliers, looked to the German woods, and not to Greece or Rome, for the source of aristocratic culture, and Frankish and English liberty.13 Voltaire found it bizarre that ‘English

11 Liah Greenfield, The Spirit of Capitalism: Nationalism and Economic Growth (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 91–104; David Ormrod, The Rise of Commercial Empires: England and the Netherlands in the Age of Mercantilism, 1650–1770 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 344–51. 12 Anthony Ashley Cooper, Third Earl of Sha esbury, Characteristics of Men, Manners, Opinions, Times, ed. Lawrence E. Klein (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 432; emphasis in original. Sha esbury’s emphasis on the sociable affections was central to the Francis Hutcheson and the Sco ish Enlightenment, and the translation of Sha esbury’s Inquiry concerning Virtue or Merit was the first work of Denis Diderot, who doubtless found a ractive Sha esbury view (209) that ‘religious conscience supposes moral or natural conscience.’ 13 Henri, comte de Boulainvilliers’s Histoire de l’ancien gouvernement de la France was published posthumously (La Haye, 1727), t.1, 26–34, 43–6.

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members of Parliament love to compare themselves to the ancient Romans as much as they can.’14 Linda Colley wrote: ‘Classical literature was highly congenial because the kind of patriotic achievement it celebrated was a highly specific one. The heroes of Homer, Cicero and Plutarch were emphatically men of rank and title. As such they reminded Britain’s elite of its duty to serve and fight, but in addition, affirmed its superior qualifications to do so.’15 In a period when Britain was at war with France for more than half the years, a rights-based ethic, founded on the right of self-preservation, which cannot yield the duty to die for one’s country, needed to be complemented by an ethos of patriotic virtue and service, no ma er how self-serving the cult of serving the nation was. John Brewer wrote: ‘The long-standing provision for younger sons through appointment to a clerical living was now supplemented by a commission in the standing army or navy, or by appointment to government office.’ The expansion of the fiscal-military state since the Glorious Revolution expanded the positions open to the landed classes (who also paid almost half of state revenues through the land tax for the quarter century a er the Glorious Revolution until indirect taxation, especially the excise, produced the bulk of government revenues). ‘By 1714 there were c. 4000 commissioned officers in the army and about 1000 in the navy. [Geoffrey] Holmes estimates that by 1725 there were 2700 posts in the central offices of government in London; by 1760, there were to be over 16,000 civilian administrators overall.’16 In J.H. Eliot’s assessment, ‘high office constituted a form of outdoor relief for hard-pressed members of the aristocracy.’17 Patriotic virtue, and a culture of service rather than self-interest, suited the landed interest. We may find a clue to the question about the lure of antiquity in the lament of Richard Steele, Addison’s partner in The Spectator: ‘Why is it that the Heathen struts, and the Christian sneaks in our Imagination?’ Steele went on to argue that fame and conscience are the two springs of human action but few are ‘so Profligate and Abandoned, as not to prefer 14 Voltaire, Le res écrits de Londres sur les Anglois, et autres sujets (Basle: n.p., 1734), 49: ‘les membres du Parlement d’Angleterre aiment à se comparer aux anciens Romains autant qu’ils le peuvent.’ 15 Linda Colley, Britons: Forging the Nation 1707–1837 (London: Yale University Press, 1992), 168. 16 John Brewer, Sinews of Power: War, Money and the English State, 1688–1783 (London: Unwin Hyman, 1989), 205. 17 J.H. Eliot, Empires of the Atlantic World: Britain and Spain in America 1492–1830 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006), 137.

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the One to the Other.’18 The virtues of the patriotic Roman seemed an enlightened alternative to Christian virtue; the qualities serving one’s country was a this-worldly option, distinct from the poverty, humility, and charity that provide access to the heavenly city.19 Our purpose here is to analyse how Catonic virtue held sway in Whig country houses and English villas of the Augustan age.20 Ian Donaldson noted that Roman imagery and the language of virtue were tamed and made more congenial to monarchy a er the Glorious Revolution.21 Gilbert Burnet likened the reigns of Charles II and James II to the tyrannies of Tiberius and Domitian in A Sermon Preached at the Coronation of William III and Mary II (1689).22 Even Tories, like Jonathan Swi , used Roman examples to illu-

18 Richard Steele, The Christian Hero: An rgument proving that no principles but those of religion are sufficient to make a great man (1701), 4th ed. (London: Jacob Tonson, 1709), 3, 55. However, I have argued in Conscience and Its Critics: Protestant Conscience, Enlightenment Reason and Modern Subjectivity (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2001), chaps. 5–8, that the divine inner monitor was replaced in the French and Sco ish Enlightenments by social approbation or censure, and many philosophers and philosophes thought the desire for fame or glory animated the noblest ambitions. 19 Chevalier de Jaucourt’s entry patrie in Denis Diderot et Jean d’Alembert, Encyclopédie, ou Dictionnaire raisonné des sciences, des arts et des métiers (Neufchastel: Samuel Faulche, 1765), t. 12, 178–9, reads: ‘Les Grecs & les Romains ne connoisssent rien si aimable & si sacré que la patrie.’ La patrie, as religion, continues: ‘Brutus pour conserver sa patrie, fit couper la tête à ses fils, & ce e action ne paroitra dénaturée qu’ aux ames foibles. Sans la mort des deux traitres, la patrie de Brutus expiroit au berceau.’ Jaucourt took the lines, as we shall see in chapter 6, from Abbé Coyer’s Dissertation sur le vieux mot e patrie. If God so loved the world that he gave his only son so that humans could live eternally, Brutus sacrificed two sons for his patrie, Rome, ‘the eternal city.’ Liah Greenfield, Spirit of Capitalism, 2, asserts that nationalism emerged in England in the sixteenth century and France in the eighteenth century. I would qualify that assertion but would maintain that patriotism and patriotic virtue flourished on both sides of the channel from the imperial rivalry and warfare of the eighteenth century. 20 William L. MacDonald and John A. Pinto, Hadrian’s Villa (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995), 280–5, indicate how the landed gentry imitated the villas, gardens, and temples of antiquity as Pope and Dryden followed Horace and Virgil. Ayres, Classical Culture, chap. 4, and especially, 63–4, 78–82, has ably chronicled the Whig taste for Palladian architecture and the emerging fashion among the gentry and aristocracy for Roman busts of themselves, a practice previously restricted to royalty. 21 Ian Donaldson, The Rapes of Lucretia: A Myth and Its Transformation (Oxford: Clarendon, 1982), 114. 22 Ayres, Classical Culture, 175.

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minate English history; Charles I as Tarquinius Priscus, James II as Tarquinius Superbus, and Oliver Cromwell not as Brutus but as Servius Tullius, ‘a stranger, and of mean Extraction, was chosen Protector of the Kingdom, by the People, without the Consent of the Senate.’23 Philip Ayres has examined ‘the propensity of the English aristocracy and gentry to imagine themselves as virtuous Romans’ following the revolutionary se lement of 1688–9. The Whig oligarchy sought to dignify itself ‘through association with an idealized image of republican Rome’ and to close off ‘the possibility of any more thorough-going revolution.’ That is, the Whig oligarchies reacted against the Puritan sensibility of the English Civil War and a few of ‘the cultural elite came to believe they shared more ground with philosophers like Cicero than the creedal variety of Christianity.’24 Addison wrote in Freeholder, no. 29: ‘how odious commonwealth principles are to the English nation.’25 Liberty and property must be joined. Addison wrote: ‘One is apt to suspect, that the passion for liberty, which appears in a grub-street patriot, arises only from the apprehension of a goal; and that, whatever he may pretend, he does not write to secure, but to get something of his own. Should the government be overturned, he has nothing to lose but an old standish.’26 Before the Glorious Revolution, Nathaniel Lee’s Lucius Junius Brutus was banned in December of 1680 for portraying the Whig cause (Protestantism, no royal prerogatives, encouragement to trade and industry, empire) as Roman republicanism, but, a er 1688, the Whigs had a Protestant king and Parliament controlled the purse strings, and Lee’s Brutus was frequently printed and staged.27 Lee’s Brutus was an imperial republican: ‘‘tis on these Foundations/ That Rome shall build her Empire to the stars.’28 Philip Stanhope, Lord Chesterfield also equated the Whigs with Roman republicans: ‘Had all the Roman Patriots been as much Whigs as Cato, Julius Caesar and his Tories would never have had an opportunity to subvert their Libertys.’29

23 Ibid., 112–13. 24 Ibid., xiii, xv. 25 Addison, Cato: A Tragedy and Selected Essays, 237. 26 Freeholder, no. 1, in Cato: A Tragedy and Selected Essays, 198. A standish is an inkpot. With Baron Somers as patron, Addison rose well above grub-street to become a popularizer of Locke and Whig ideology. 27 Donaldson, Rapes of Lucretia, 113. 28 Nathaniel Lee, Lucius Junius Brutus (London: J. Tonson, 1708), 67–8. 29 Observator (27 January 1711), cited in Ayres, Classical Culture, 14.

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In 1699, Walter Moyle’s Democracy Vindicated: An Essay on the Constitution and Government of the Roman State declared that ‘the Romans, during the equality of the commonwealth, subdued the universe.’ Moyle listed the usefulness of colonies to the Roman Republic: ‘1. To enlarge their empire. 2. To defend their borders against a revolt of their allies. 3. To multiply their people. 4. To transport their poor citizens. 5. To prevent sedition. 6. To reward their Veterans.’ Although an egalitarian and in favour of a proper balance of land amongst the commons, Moyle opposed land redistribution and the Gracchi’s a empt to enforce the agrarian law.30 In 1700, John Toland’s dedication to his edition of The Oceana and Other Works of James Harrington declared that ‘London . . . well deserves the name of a New Rome in the West, and, like the old one, to become the Soverain Mistress of the universe.’31 Harrington’s Ciceronian sentiment that Oceana assumes the patronage rather than the empire of the world found an echo in Addison’s Cato. Through the mouth of the powerful and courageous Numidian, Juba, Addison asserted (I.iv, 30–8): A Roman soul is bent on higher views: To civilize the rude, unpolished world, And lay it under the restraint of laws; To make men mild, and sociable to man; To cultivate the wild, licentious savage With wisdom, discipline, and liberal arts – The embellishments of life; virtues like these Make human nature shine, reform the soul, And break our fierce barbarians into men.

The solemn complement to the politeness and polish of country villas,32 and the London mercantile interests that furnish them, were 30 Walter Moyle, Democracy Vindicated: An Essay on the Constitution and Government of the Roman State, ed. John Thelwall (London: J. Smith, 1796), 20, 32, 35. Moyle’s editor, John Thelwall, noted to Moyle’s support of world conquest that war is brutal, to Moyle’s support of the utility of colonies that he opposed colonies, whatever their alleged usefulness, and noted the patrician or senatorial bias of Moyle’s republicanism in his opposition to the Gracchic reforms and enforcing the agrarian law. 31 The Oceana and Other Works of James Harrington Esq: Collected, Methodiz’d, and Review’d, with an Exact Account of His Life Prefix’d, by John Toland (London: Printed for the booksellers of London and Westminster, 1700), iv. 32 See Lawrence E. Klein, Sha esbury and the Culture of Politeness: Moral Discourse and Cultural Politics in Early Eighteenth-Century England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994).

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the wild savages and fierce barbarians at the periphery of the empire, and the savage and fierce manner in which they were brought to heel by the civilizing mission of the new Rome of the west. Sir John Clerk, a commissioner for the treaty uniting England with Scotland in 1707, wrote to a friend: ‘It is a reproach to a nation [Scotland] to have resisted the humanity which the Romans laboured to introduce.’ His correspondent, Roger Hale, agreed that indeed it was a great misfortune since Romans ‘tended onely to the civilizing and improving their manners,’ curbing ‘their wild and savage way of life, instructing them in arts and sciences, and looking upon them as fellow citizens and freemen of Rome, the common mother of all that had the happynesse to fall under her subjugation.’33 It goes without saying that the parts of Britain civilized by the Romans must carry on the work of civilizing those who had foolishly resisted the Romans. Cato in Augustan Britain Although the cult of Rome was in full swing, Addison correctly anticipated Christian outrage for the glorification of suicide of the patriotic Roman, and persuaded the Catholic Tory, Alexander Pope, to write the prologue (17–18); ‘Virtue confest in human shape he draws, / What Plato thought, and godlike Cato was.’ Suicide, for Christians, is a mortal sin, but in Dante’s Purgatorio, Cato is only in limbo because he killed himself for freedom.34 Pope seems to have done Dante one be er by presenting Cato as the embodiment of godlike virtue. Addison presented his hero lamenting that the product of republican virtue should be harvested by Caesar (IV.iv.98–9): ‘Whate’er the Roman virtue has subdued, / The sun’s whole course, the day and the year, are Caesar’s.’ The sun never sets on the Roman and British empires. Rome, Cato said (IV.iv.93–4) ‘humbled the proud tyrants of the earth, / And set the nations free.’ A free and conquering people will liberate the conquered nations. Cato’s rigour and severity

33 Cited in Ayres, Classical Culture, 100. 34 Curiously, Napoleon Bonaparte’s assessment of Cato’s suicide is somewhat more negative than Dante’s: ‘His death was the weakness of a great soul, the error of a Stoic, a stain upon his life.’ Cited in Donaldson, Rapes of Lucretia, 148. Saint Augustine, in Civitas Dei, cogently questioned, if Cato’s suicide was more than sinful pagan pride, why did he commend his son to accept Caesar’s mercy? Augustine had similar sensible reflections about pride in the myth of Lucretia’s suicide, which, according to legend, occasioned Brutus’s killing of Tarquin.

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(III.v.67) ‘commands obedience, and gives force to laws.’ Addison complemented Pope’s description of Cato’s godlike virtue (V.iv.117–19): ‘Cato is stern, and awful as a god, / He knows not how to wink at human frailty, / Or pardon weakness that he never felt.’ Frail human beings depend upon the crutch of Christian communion to stand upright; Catonic virtue is for strong men. Philip Ayres asserted that ‘philoromanism was propagated in England as an intentional contrast to Roman Catholicism.’35 Certainly the authors of Cato’s Le ers contrasted Roman republicanism and Roman Catholicism; the la er, Trenchard and Gordon tirelessly insisted,36 was the greatest threat to liberty and property Englishmen faced: ‘Popery is the most dreadful machine, the utmost stretch of human politics, that was ever invented amongst men, to aggrandize and enrich the clergy, to oppress and enslave the laity.’37 Republican Rome, on the other hand, was ‘the Nurse of Heroes, the Mistress of Nations, the Glory of Empires, and the Source, the Standard, and Pa ern of Virtue and Knowledge.’ Rome ‘commanded a willing Subjection from the numerous Nations, who readily acknowledged its superior Genius and natural Right to Empire.’38 The Roman Republic was ‘the noblest state that ever adorned the worldly Theatre,’ but when its virtue became corrupted, it degenerated into despotism; ‘Roman Virtue and . . . Roman Liberty expired together.’39 ‘The Romans, enjoying . . . Liberty, and animated by it, vanquished all the enslaved Nations of the known World,’ but, once they had lost their liberty, they could not defend themselves against Roman tyrants and barbarian invaders.40 Trenchard and Gordon used Roman examples to press for their censorious admonition of the directors of the Tory South Sea Company, a rival to the Whig Bank of England, which floated stocks in order to finance public debt in England, much as the contemporaneous efforts of John Law’s Mississippi scheme to amortize public debt in France a empted. When the bubbles burst in England and in France, credit crises called into question the new financial instruments of the commercial revolution. Trenchard and Gordon called for the death penalty for the directors of the company (who had

35 Ayres, Classical Culture, 153. 36 Cato’s Le ers, 68, 101, 221–2, 250 –1, 275– 6, 274, 320–1, 341–2, 345–6, 470, 582, 869–70, 883, 889, 897–903, 967–8, 979–80. 37 Ibid., 897. 38 Ibid., 128. 39 Ibid., 131,195. 40 Ibid., 236–7, 453.

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floated stock prices in the South Sea Bubble, and provided inside information to their friends in government and the royal family and got out profitably just before the bubble burst) with the severity of both Catos by asserting that if Marius and Sulla had been hanged, then Caesar would not have been able to enslave Rome.41 Trenchard and Gordon’s admiration for Rome stood in contrast to Milton’s and Nedham’s admiration for Athens. Pericles ruined Athens by breaking ‘the Power of the Areopagus, the Senate of Athens, a Court of Magistrates that balanced the Power of the Populace; who, being set free from that Restraint, ran into all manner of Licentiousness and Corruption.’42 Athenian equality undermines ‘all Reverence and Awe, two checks indispensable in society.’43 Andrew Michael Ramsay’s The Travels of Cyrus (1727) agreed with Cato that Athens’s ‘Government is too popular and tumultuous’ and Spartan equality and community of goods are contrary to nature, while republican Rome is worthy of a world empire: A mighty Empire is rising in Italy, which will one Day become Master of the World: its Form of Government is like that established at Crete by Minos. The Genius of the People is as warlike as that of the Spartans. The generous love of their Country, the Esteem of personal Poverty, in order to augment the publick Treasure, the noble and disinterested Sentiments which prevail among the Citizens, their Contempt of Pleasure, and their ardent Zeal for Liberty, render them fit to conquer the whole World.44

Trenchard and Gordon thought that the Roman senatorial class, in the healthy days of the republic, had a monopoly of magistracies ‘till Commoners had got Estates equal to the Nobility; and then the Balance of Property turning to the people, they carried all before them.’45 We note a central Harringtonian principle that political power follows from ownership of property, although their account of the decline of Rome differed from Harrington’s view that the neglect of the agrarian laws was responsible for the death of the Roman Republic.

41 Ibid., 42. 42 Ibid., 295–6; also 555 and 790 assert that Pericles ruined Athens as Caesar ruined Rome. 43 Ibid., 294. 44 Andrew Michael, Chevalier Ramsay, The Travels of Cyrus in Two Volumes (London: T. Woodward and J. Peele, 1727–8), vol. 1: 50, 55. 45 Catos’ Le ers, 608.

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Monarchists and Republicans on Roman Agrarian Laws Trenchard and Gordon seemed closer to Montesquieu’s view that civil disruption was exacerbated when new wealth replaced the old senatorial class and gross inequalities of wealth began than to Harrington’s view that the neglect of the agrarian laws occasioned the decline of the Roman Republic.46 However, they followed Harrington in writing: ‘A free people are kept so, by no other means than an equal distribution of property.’47 They elaborated: ‘Liberty can never exist without equality, nor equality be long preserved without an agrarian law’ and added that ‘if the Romans had well observed the agrarian law,’ Caesar could never have established his tyranny.48 Gordon, in The Works of Tacitus, praised the ‘Agrarian Law, a Law so necessary to the State, so necessary to preserve equality among Citizens, without which they could not be long free.’49 Yet Trenchard and Gordon so identified the Roman senate with the republic that they, like Harrington, justified the senate ordering the death of those supporting equality or the agrarian law as would-be Cromwells.50 Although Sallust thought the Gracchi ‘a empted to recover to the people their ancient liberties, and to expose to view the iniquity and encroachment of a few domineering grandees,’51 Gordon wrote that he translated Sallust ‘on purpose to supply the Defects of Sallust.’52 Specifically, Gordon thought Sallust misjudged the Gracchi, who were ‘aiming avowedly at the Abasement, probably the Destruction, of the Senate, as well as the Relief of the poor Plebeians.’ In reality, Gordon thought, ‘the Gracchi breathed the true spirit of the Tribunal Power, ever turbulent and aspiring, ever producing popular

46 Charles de Secondat, baron de Montesquieu, Considerations on the Causes of the Greatness of the Romans and Their Decline, ed. David Lowenthal (Indianapolis: Hacke , 1999), 85. 47 Cato’s Le ers, 44. 48 Ibid., 253. 49 Thomas Gordon, The Works of Tacitus: With Political Discourses upon That Author. (Dublin: J. Williams et al., 1777–8), 5th ed. [1st ed. 1728–31], vol. 5: 168–9. 50 Ibid., 89–91, 296, 822; Thomas Gordon, The Works of Sallust, Translated into English. With Political Discourses on That Author. To Which Is Added, a Translation of Cicero’s Four Orations against Cataline. (London: T. Woodward and J. Peele, 1744), 33, compared Spurius Maelius to Cromwell and, 76–9, added Manlius Capitolinus, Spurius Cassius, Tiberius, and Gaius Gracchus to the list of would-be Cromwells. 51 Thomas Gordon, The Works of Sallust (Glasgow: Robert Urie, 1762), 167. 52 The Works of Sallust, Translated into English. With Political Discourses on That Author, v.

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tyrants.’ They aimed to cripple the state: ‘The Senate, the great Council, one of the two Limbs of the State, was to be lopped off, or laid aside, or rendered intirely useless, and the State itself to be disabled and mutilated, and consequently the Constitution changed, to make Way, not for a popular Government, but for the furious and unnatural Sway of a few Demagogues, naturally and necessarily ending in the tyranny of One.’53 Political balance required the authority of the Roman senate: ‘In Rome, for a great while, no Ordinance of the People could pass, without the Authority and Sanction of the Senate, a most reasonable Restraint, to keep popular Passion and Folly from gaining the force and Terror of Law. A erwards, by the Violence of popular Faction, this wise Precaution was lost; and the People could make Laws, without the Senate: but the Senate none, without the Consent of the People.’54 Cato’s Ciceronian, Machiavellian, and Harringtonian views about tribunal ambition with respect to the agrarian laws did not go unchallenged. William Guthrie thought Cicero ‘though an excellent Senator, was an indifferent patriot: and although always an advocate for the Government, he seems o en to have lost sight of the Constitution’ because the people ‘had not only a natural but a positive right to the benefit of the Agrarian Laws.’55 The Jacobite exile Nathaniel Hooke agreed with Guthrie against Cato’s ‘republican’ interpretation of the agrarian laws, and described Spurius Cassius, the first proponent of their enforcement, as follows: ‘This eminent Senator, who had been thrice Consul, and honoured with two triumphs, was cast headlong from the Tarpeian Rock: and the Patricians had the satisfaction of destroying by the hands of the Plebeians a determined champion for the Plebeian cause.’ Hooke’s view is that the charges against Spurius Cassius, Spurius Maelius, and Manlius Capitolinus of ambitions to kingship early in the republic, and against Tiberius and Gaius Gracchus late in the republic, were false: ‘Cassius was neither publicly nor privately convicted of aiming at the tyranny, but was murdered by the Nobles either secretly, or by a mob 53 Ibid., 79, 81, 83. 54 Ibid., 165. 55 William Guthrie, Preface to The Orations of Cicero, Translated into English, trans. William Guthrie (London: T. Waller, 1743), ix. Guthrie is described as ‘a hack Tory writer from Grub Street’ by Stephen Botein, ‘Cicero as Role Model for Early American Lawyers: A Case Study in Classical “Influence,”’ The Classical Journal 73 (1978): 315. Since this description does not accord with The Dictionary of National Biography’s entry for William Guthrie, I assume the ‘hack Tory’ signifies an antithetical assessment of Cicero from that of early American lawyers.

Catonic Virtue, Sweet Commerce, and Imperial Rivalry 63

which they excited to do it, in revenge for his honest a empt to strip them of their usurpations.’ Hooke could not understand why Abbé Vertot (whose work we shall examine in chapter 6) ‘always speaks of the resumption of the lands as a thing impractible; or as not to be executed without ruining the Senate and all the great men: objections never made by those who opposed the AGRARIAN LAW.’ Tiberius Gracchus, ‘the most accomplished patriot that ever Rome produced,’ aimed to produce measures to secure ‘that equality so necessary in a free state.’ There were no grounds for Cicero charging Tiberius with sedition; he had consulted ‘some of the most virtuous and respectable men in Rome and had their approbation.’ Moreover, ‘Gracchus’s view was not to make poor men rich, but to strengthen the Republic by an increase of useful numbers, upon which the safety and welfare of Italy depended.’ Hooke concluded with a pointed jab at the Whig landed interests: Liberty and the Republic are cant-words, where the bulk of the people have no property, nor the privilege of living by their labour. Did our laws allow of any slavery in this island, and should the landed gentlemen, the proprietors of large estates, in order to make the most of them, take them out of the hands of their tenants, and import Negroes to cultivate the farms; so that the British husbandmen and labourers, far from having any encouragement to marry, had no means to subsist: Would an universal practice of this sort be called particular acts of justice?56

The Tory Edward Gibbon also blamed the avaricious patricians for the decline of the Roman Republic. Gibbon wrote: The lands of Italy, which had been originally divided among the families of free and indigent proprietors, were insensibly purchased or usurped by the avarice of the nobles; and in the age which preceded the fall of the republic, it was computed that only two thousand citizens were possessed of any independent suffrage.57

56 Nathaniel Hooke, The Roman History, from the Building of Rome to the Ruin of the Commonwealth, 5th ed. [1st ed. 1738] (Dublin: William Watson, 1767–72), vol. 2: 13–22, 62; vol. 4: 344–5, 347, 364, 367, 369. 57 Edward Gibbon, The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (New York: Alfred Knopf, 1993), vol. 3: 265–6. It is a notable fact that monarchists such as Hooke, Guthrie, Voltaire, Vico, De Lolme, and Gibbon thought patrician intransigence about the agrarian law responsible for the demise of the Roman Republic, while ‘republicans’

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The highly eccentric Edward Wortley Montagu’s Reflections on the Rise and Fall of the Ancient Republicks Adapted to the Present State of Great Britain (1759) also castigated the ‘aristocratic tyranny’ of the Roman Republic, and denounced the murders of the proponents of land distribution. Wortley Montagu asserted that civil strife was normally blamed on the ‘turbulent and seditious temper of the tribunes’ but really arose ‘from the avarice and injustice of the Patricians.’ He anticipated Adam Smith in thinking that Roman conquests and imperialism resulted from the failure of the patricians to abide by the agrarian law, depriving plebeians of the means to live near Rome.58 Wortley Montagu thought Britain more closely resembled Carthage than Rome ‘both in her commerce, opulence, sovereignty of the sea, and her method of carrying on land wars by foreign mercenaries.’ The greatest men of Carthage never thought it beneath them to acquire wealth and, like the English, were warlike, affording ‘undeniable proof that those qualities are by no means incompatible to the same people.’ Contrary to ‘the sententious Montesquieu,’ the wealth of Carthage and the poverty of Rome were not disadvantageous to Carthage. The weakness of the Carthaginians and British was their lack of a national militia and their partisan divisions: the Carthaginians, lacking a militia, were terrified by a small troop led by Agathocles just as ‘the panick which, in the late rebellion [of the Young Pretender in 1745], struck the much larger, and more populous city of London, at the approach of a poor handful of Highlanders, as much inferior even to the small army of Agathocles in number, as they were in arms and discipline.’ The Romans, ‘the most formidable and rapacious people at that time in Europe,’ are like the modern French. Indeed, the Carthaginians, like the Romans, were criminal in their imperialism, as the British are with their colonies in America, but like ‘all those splendid conquests which shine so much in history, in their true colours, they will appear nothing more than fraud and robbery, gilded such as Cicero, Machiavelli, Harrington, Trenchard, Gordon, Montesquieu, and Rousseau thought plebeian and tribunal ambition destroyed, or at least unse led, the republic. I place republicans in quotation marks for reasons advanced in footnote 7 of this chapter. Modern scholarship tends to agree with Hooke that Spurius Cassius, Spurius Maelius, Manlius Capitolinus, Tiberius, and Gaius Gracchus were unjustly held to have monarchical ambitions. See A.W. Linto , Violence in Republican Rome (Oxford: Clarendon, 1968), 55–7, 177; Andrew Linto , The Constitution of the Roman Republic (Oxford: Clarendon, 1999), 35–6. 58 Edward Wortley Montagu, Reflections on the Rise and Fall of the Ancient Republicks Adapted to the Present State of Great Britain (Philadelphia: C.P. Wayne, 1806), 218–21.

Catonic Virtue, Sweet Commerce, and Imperial Rivalry 65

over with pompous appellations. Did not every nation that makes a figure rise to empire upon the ruin of their neighbours?’59 Wortley Montagu was eccentric not only in his personal life but in his published belief that Roman senators were criminals for murdering proponents of agrarian laws, for likening Britain to Carthage, as French writers did, rather than Rome, and for deprecating British imperialism. Roman Provinces and Greek Colonies One reason for the popularity of Cato’s Le ers in America is that Trenchard and Gordon contrasted Greek colonies, which were legislatively autonomous, with Roman provinces, and recommended an empire of trade for the Americas but advocated subjecting Ireland to the status of a Roman province.60  The distinction between Roman provinces, acquired by conquest and administered by Rome, and Greek colonies, se led by those who have le the mother country and are no longer subject to the laws and taxes of the metropole, became a staple intellectual commodity throughout the century; the distinction appeared in James Abercrombie’s An Examination of the Acts of Parliament Relative to the Trade and Government of the American Colonies (1752) as well as his ‘De Jure et Gubernatione Coloniarum,’ or An Inquiry into the Nature, and Rights of Colonies, Ancient and Modern (1774), Samuel Estwick’s A Le er to the Reverend Josiah Tucker, D. D. . . . in which the Present War against America Is Shewn to Be the Effect . . . of a Fixed Plan of Administration, Founded in System (1776), Adam Smith’s An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations (1776), William Barron’s History of the Colonization of the Free States of Antiquity, Applied to the Present Contest between Great Britain and Her American colonies (1777), and Anthony Stokes’s A View of the Constitution of the British Colonies in North America and the West Indies, at the Time the Civil War Broke Out on the Continent of America (1783). Smith alone of these writers thought the Greek model of independence for the colonies desirable but recognized that ‘in their dependency on the mother state, they resemble those of antient Rome’ and recommended removing the chartered monopolies, reviewing the utility of the Navigation Acts since they impair the freedom of trade, expanding trade and economic dependency between the 59 Ibid., 146, 151–3, 160, 162, 292, 306. John Adams was later to compare America to Carthage, rather than Rome, because of its commercial interests. 60 Cato’s Le ers, 747–53.

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colonies and Britain, while reducing political dependency, and providing American representation in the British parliament.61 Samuel Estwick, while opposed to the Reverend Josiah Tucker’s view that the liberation of the American colonies would be good for Britain, thought that a commercial colony differs both from Greek independent colonies and Roman dependent provinces and recommended strengthening the commercial ties between Britain and America.62 Anthony Stokes asserted that ‘Colony or Plantation does not import a conquest, but rather the contrary.’ However, he went on to state that ‘the British American Plantations are principally conquered or ceded countries, having been obtained in the last century by right of conquest . . . or by treaties.’63 James Abercrombie said that, although the Romans ‘had no great view to Trade, through their Colonies. Yet, their form of Colonie Government Especially, during the Republican State of Rome, comes the nearest to that of ours.’ Abercrombie thought that ‘the Grecians did not always . . . understand, the Condition of Slaves, as a Commodity in Traffick, as we do’; rather than understanding slaves to be a commodity, Greeks understood slavery to be a condition of subjection to monarchy. Although the Romans shared the Greek view of slavery as subjection to monarchy, they had a more flourishing slave trade than the Greeks. Abercrombie thought the ‘surprising similarity’ of the colonies in British North America to the ‘Regimen of Roman Colonys, during the Republick’ derived from the fact that they were conquered like the Roman conquest of Greece and Macedonia, ‘declaring to the conquered, that the Romans conquered not to enslave, which did not become the Dignity, and Magnanimity of the Romans, but to share, with the conquered people, the Happiness of Roman Subjects, under Roman Government and Laws.’ However, the Roman, like the British, had the right to control taxation in their provinces.64 William Barron was clear 61 Adam Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations (London: T. Strahan and T. Cadell, 1776), bk. 4, ch. 7, vol. 2, 146, 149, 160, 180, 189, 193, 214, 234. 62 Samuel Estwick, A Le er to the Reverend Josiah Tucker, D. D. . . . in which the Present War against America Is Shewn to Be the Effect . . . of a Fixed Plan of Administration, Founded in System (London: J. Almon, 1776), 5, 92–3, 123. 63 Anthony Stokes, A View of the Constitution of the British Colonies in North America and the West Indies, at the Time the Civil War Broke Out on the Continent of America (London: B. White, 1783), 2–3, 11–12. 64 James Abercrombie, An Examination of the Acts of Parliament Relative to the Trade and Government of the American Colonies (1752) and his ‘De Jure et Gubernatione

Catonic Virtue, Sweet Commerce, and Imperial Rivalry 67

that ‘a Roman colony was an exact model of an early American colony’; both were subject to the jurisdiction of the mother country and obliged to provide money and troops to the mother country. ‘Of all the states of antiquity, the Romans exercised the most extensive authority over their colonies.’65 Trenchard and Gordon’s Greek colonies merge into empires of trade, based on mutual interest and absence of coercion. However, they were adamant on holding Gibraltar militarily to keep British shipping dominant in the Mediterranean and were clear that British colonies in the Caribbean and in the American south were based on slave labour. Free trade is only advantageous to the mother country when the colonies produce goods that cannot be produced in the mother country; the produce of Ireland and the northern American colonies compete with those of England and are subject to restrictions by the mother country. Following their elucidation of Lockeian political doctrine, Trenchard and Gordon write: ‘In Government there is no such Relation as Lord and Slave, lawless Will and blind Submission; nor ought to be among Men: But the only Relation is that of Father and Children, Patron and Client, Protection and Allegiance, Benefaction and Gratitude, mutual Affection and mutual Assistance.’66 As with Locke, Trenchard and Gordon’s opposition to slavery did not include the cargo in the slave trade. Mercantile interests supersede principles of liberty. The New Rome from Walpole to PiĴ Trenchard and Gordon did not succeed with their Catonian recommendation to hang the directors of the South Sea Company, or even to

Coloniarum,’ or An Inquiry into the Nature, and Rights of Colonies, Ancient and Modern (1774) in Magna Carta for America, ed. Jack P. Greene, Charles F. Mullet, and Edward C. Papenfuse, Jr. (Philadelphia: The American Philosophical Society, 1986), 68, 202, 204, 230–40, 265. Abercrombie also noted a difference between British and Greek colonies; the British in Ireland and America were motivated by a desire to impose a true interpretation of Christianity on the heathen Irish and Amerindians (198–9), whereas the Greeks did not impose religious practice on their colonies. The editors’ title to Abercrombie’s works indicates that Americans read Abercrombie as Greeks, while the British, as Abercrombie intended, as Romans. 65 William Barron’s History of the Colonization of the Free States of Antiquity, Applied to the Present Contest between Great Britain and Her American Colonies (London: T. Cadell, 1777), 92–4, 135. 66 Ibid., 415–16.

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expose the extent of government and royal involvement in the Bubble that enriched a few and impoverished many more. The ‘skreen-master general,’ Robert Walpole, brought political stability to England for two decades of Whig government by covering over governmental and royal profiteering in the South Sea Bubble, and by keeping land taxes low to satisfy the Country interests. Moreover, he purchased the allegiance of radical Whigs, such as Thomas Gordon, who no longer used his classical lore to criticize government but celebrated the senatorial champion Tacitus’s denunciation of Roman emperors and denounced the plebeian Sallust.67 Tories, such as Henry St John, Viscount Bolingbroke, identified himself as Brutus, Cassius, and Cato, while casting Walpole as Caesar,68 while David Hume expressed the same sentiments in a more moderate and less classical fashion.69 However, by the end of the 1730s, mercantile interests, under slogans of Trade, Liberty, and Empire, opposed Walpole, singing the praises of Admiral Vernon’s victory at Porto Bello in the War of Jenkins’s Ear. Traders heartily sang out James Thompson’s Rule Britannia; liberty at home and domination abroad depended on Britain ruling the waves. By the early 1740s, supporters of Walpole’s policy of low taxes became outnumbered by supporters of imperial expansion, and thus he lost the confidence of the House of Commons. Colonial mercantile interests in an expanded navy came to be seen as the national interest.70 The city of London swelled in size during the eighteenth century at the centre of the colonial trade. David Hume’s later analogy that the cancerous stomach of London’s colonial interests was controlling the 67 Gordon, The Works of Tacitus, is dedicated to Robert Walpole: ‘Be pleased to be the Patron of a Book which under your Patronage was composed. It is natural and common for men who possess Le ers to seek the countenance and protection of Men in Power, and from such of them as to greatness of fortune were happy enough to join greatness of mind, they have not sought in vain.’ A er denouncing the Roman emperors, Gordon, vol. 4: 294–5, has a section entitled ‘The Excellency of a Limited Monarchy, Especially Our Own,’ which holds that British monarchs reign by defending property and laws. We might recall Cato’s distinction between an illegitimate master-slave relationship from a legitimate patron-client relationship, since the various editions of Gordon’s The Works of Tacitus and The Works of Sallust sought the patronage of many noble and royal personages. 68 Ayres, Classical Culture, 50. 69 David Hume, Essays Moral, Political and Literary, ed. Eugene F. Miller (Indianapolis: Liberty Press, 1985), 576. 70 Kathleen Wilson, The Sense of the People: Politics, Culture and Imperialism in England, 1715–1785 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 136, 141, 158–65.

Catonic Virtue, Sweet Commerce, and Imperial Rivalry 69

fate of the British body politic seemed appropriate. Various voices expressed the anxieties of empire. Laurence Echard wrote that, a er the death of Trajan, the Roman Empire ‘began to sink by the Unwieldiness of its Bulk and the Vastness of its own weight,’ a theme that Edward Gibbon and other writers were later to take up.71 Various thinkers, such as Smith, Hume, Burke, Price, and Bentham, and romantic poets, such as Byron, Shelley, and Blake, feared that the British Empire was corrupting British character or transforming the virtues of republican Rome into the decadence of imperial Rome.72 However, these voices were more than balanced by accounts such as that of William Russell, wri en a er the American War of Independence, of our ‘great and flourishing’ empire compared to that of Rome, ‘the immense prospects of commercial advantage, as well as future empire,’ ‘our splendid conquests,’ and Britain’s ‘empire of the waves.’73 P.J. Marshall wrote of Britons’ reactions to the growth of the British Empire: ‘The yardstick by which these changes were measured by all educated British people, whatever their political views, was the history of Rome.’74 In 1778, the cenotaph in the Guildhall of London portrayed Lord Chatham, once ‘the Great Commoner, William Pi , Britain’s victorious leader in the Seven Years War (1756–63) in Roman robes, covered in the cap of victory, and announcing his era as characterized ‘by a conquest made

71 Laurence Echard, The Roman History, from the Se lement of Its Empire by Augustus Caesar, to the Removal of the Imperial Seat by Constantine the Great (London: J. Bonwick et al., 1713), 284; see also Gibbon, Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, 1: 9–10; Richard Champion, Comparative Reflections on the Past and Present Political, Commercial and Civil State of Great Britain (London: J. Debre , 1787), le er 14, ‘The Manners of Rome and London Compared’; a correspondent to the Morning Chronicle (31 July 1781) bemoans the effeminacy of the Romans who fell to the barbarians. 72 Nigel Leask, British Romantic Writers and the East: Anxieties of Empire (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), 16–17, 79, 228; Jeremy Black, A Subject of Taste: Culture in Eighteenth-Century England (London: Hambleton, 2005), 229; Jennifer Pi s, A Turn to Empire: The Rise of Imperial Liberalism in Britain and France (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005), discussed Smith’s, Burke’s, and Bentham’s opposition to empire but did not link anxiety about the British Empire to parallels with Rome. 73 William Russell, The History of Modern Europe. With an Account of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, and a View of the Progress of Society (London: J. Robinson et al., 1786), vol. 5: 399, 449, 459, 498. 74 P.J. Marshall, ‘A Free though Conquering People’: Eighteenth-Century Britain and Its Empire (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2003).

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by arms and generosity in every part of the globe – and by commerce, for the first time, united with, and made to flourish by war.’75 William of Orange’s assumption of the British Crown in the Glorious Revolution fostered the growth of Britain’s fiscal-military state, arising from the wars in Ireland and on the continent and their financing through banking and credit institutions brought from the Netherlands. Only a er the Bank of England was established in 1694 could the crown raise revenues without farming out the tax collection to private individuals, as the French did throughout the eighteenth century and Prussia came to do with the aid of French philosophes. John Brewer argued that the fiscal-military state developed on the backs of the plebeian consumers and lowly excise men, who provided a more efficient system of tax collection than continental monarchies by frequent moving from one locale to another to prevent collusion between traders and officials.76 England’s taxation was high, but the more professionalized system of tax collection was less resented than the French tax farmers or impôteurs. Niaill Ferguson asserted: ‘One of the great puzzles of the 1780s is therefore why it was in France – where taxes were much lighter and less regressive – rather than in Britain that political revolution finally came about in the 1780s.’77 If Machiavelli thought Rome acquired an empire by keeping plebeians poor, proverbially the sun never set on the British Empire and the wages never rose. A Machiavellian might indicate that British plebeians obtained a share of the glory of Britain’s empire in return for the high taxes imposed upon them. We might add another question to Ferguson’s: why did revolution come first in the 1770s to the richest and least taxed part of the British Empire? Partly as a result of its system of tax collection to fund her navy, Britain came to be the most powerful state in Europe. When the Spanish and French came to the aid of the Americans, the ‘new Rome of the west’ was badly bruised and bowed in the 1780s, but not yet bested. The French crown beggared itself in defeating its imperial rival and liberating the United States from the British Empire, but the British were able to stand the tide of French revolutionary expansion.

75 Wilson, The Sense of the People, 204. 76 Brewer, Sinews of Power, 67–8, 101–2, 110. 77 Niaill Ferguson, Empire: The Rise and Demise of the British World Order and the Lessons for Global Power (New York: Basic Books, 2004), 39.

4 From Colony to Nation to Empire

This chapter serves to show how the United States was the product of European imperial rivalries, and why colonial America was loyal to Britain until the British had defeated its imperial rivals. It elaborates how the only experiment in America to implement a modern version of Roman agrarian laws was a empted by the Tory colonial governor of Georgia, James Oglethorpe, and then shows how the senatorial version of the Roman Republic served as a model for American revolutionaries. Finally, this chapter demonstrates how the idea of empire, which had negative connotations before the Revolution, acquired positive connotations a er the French and Americans gained the upper hand on the British during the War of Independence. E pluribus unum John Jay, in Federalist no. 2, thanked Providence for giving America ‘this one connected country, to one united people, a people descended from the same ancestors, speaking the same language, professing the same religion, a ached to the same principles of government, very similar in their manners and customs.’1 It is unclear the extent to which Jay thought he was registering an alleged fact or advocating a White Anglo-Saxon Protestant ideal. Jay wrote, at the time of the Quebec Act of 1774, which granted religious freedom to Catholic Canadiens, that Britain had established ‘a religion that has deluged your island in blood and spread impiety, bigotry, persecution, murder in every part of the

1 Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, and John Jay, The Federalist, ed. Jacob E. Cooke (Cleveland: Meridian Books,1965), 9.

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world.’2 The colony of Maryland, founded as a refuge for Catholics by Lord Baltimore in 1634, rescinded the franchise for Catholics following the Glorious Revolution. Anti-Catholic bigotry was fanned by imperial rivalries against the French and the Spanish during the eighteenth century. In Plain Truth (1747), Benjamin Franklin, fearing French and Spanish incursions into Pennsylvania and the failure of the Quakers to fight the Indians in the back country, called upon his fellow Britons to recall the Glorious Revolution, when the British ‘made so glorious a stand for our Religion and our Liberties, when invaded by a powerful French army, join’d by Irish Catholicks, under a bigoted Popish King.’3 The Quebec Act of 1774 was one of the rallying cries behind American claims for independence from British oppression. In his Remarks on the Quebec Bill (1775), Alexander Hamilton wrote: ‘Arbitrary power, and its great engine the Popish Religion, are, to all intents and purposes, established in that province.’ Hamilton feared that ‘we may see an inquisition erected in Canada, and priestly tyranny may hitherto find as propitious a soil, in America as it ever has in Spain or Portugal.’4 Besides Catholics, clearly Amerindians and African Americans were not part of Jay’s united people constituting the American nation. Nor did it include the ancestors of the Europeans, other than the English, who had a empted to exploit the natural and human resources of America and Africa, the Spanish, the Portuguese, the French, the Dutch, the Swedes, in short, all the imperial powers of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Jay’s united people, the constituting power of the American constitution, was constituted by Britain’s supremacy over her imperial rivals, emerged in embryonic form a er the defeat of France in 1763, and was born with the help of the Dutch, Spanish, and French navies, as well as French armies at decisive ba les such as Yorktown. European Colonies in the Americas Two Italian explorers, whose names have been anglicized as Christopher Columbus and John Cabot, explored central and northern America in the

2 Cited in Gustav Lanctot, Le Canada et la Révolution Américaine (Montreal: Beauchemin, 1965), 36. 3 Benjamin Franklin, The Autobiography and Other Writings on Politics, Economics, and Virtue, ed. Alan Houston (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 191. 4 The Papers of Alexander Hamilton, ed. Harold C. Syre and Jacob E. Cooke (New York: Columbia University Press, 1961), vol. 1: 166, 168.

From Colony to Nation to Empire 73

fi eenth century. Their voyages laid the basis for the claims of Spain to Central and South America and of England to North America. Yet there were many other claimants to the West Indies and the Americas. The papal division of 1493 granted the Portuguese the East Indies and Brazil, while the Spanish were granted the West Indies and the Americas, excluding Brazil. The Dutch, French, English, and Swedes were far from considering the papal grant authoritative and established colonies in the New World. Sweden was an important European power during the first half of the seventeenth century, and its New Sweden Company established a colony in Delaware in 1637 to trade with the Indian nations for furs and tobacco in competition with other Europeans; Nya Sverige (New Sweden) lasted for eighteen years until its se lement at Fort Christina (now Wilmington, Delaware) surrendered to the Dutch in 1655. NieuwNederland (New Netherland) was established a er Henry Hudson, who had previously been unsuccessful in finding a north-west passage to Asia, was hired by the Dutch East Indies Company in 1609 to find a passage through North America to the East Indies. Hudson was 5,000 miles off course when he sailed up the river that bears his name.5 When the Hudson River became too shallow for further exploration, he returned and reported to the Dutch East Indies Company of the rich lands bordering the river for se lement and potential trade with the Amerindians. In 1614, the New Netherland Company was formed, and seven years later, the Dutch West Indies Company was established. The port of New Amsterdam (now New York) was well placed to conduct piracy expeditions against the Spanish galleons bringing gold and silver from the New World to Spain.6 New Netherland was primarily a trading colony that brought profits back to Amsterdam, leaving relatively few merchants and farmers in the new se lement.7 The year before Pieter Stuyvesant with the militia and soldiers of the Dutch West Indies Company expelled the Swedes from Delaware, the Dutch West Indies Company lost New Holland or Brazil – the Dutch had wrested much of the valuable sugar plantations in Brazil from the Portuguese in 1620 – to the Portuguese 5 Oliver Rich, Holland on the Hudson: An Economic and Social History of Dutch New York (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1986), 24. 6 Thomas A. Janvier, The Dutch Founding of New York (New York: Ira J. Friedman, 1967), 60–5. 7 Rich, Holland on the Hudson, 115, 212–13.

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at Pernambuco. During the Second Anglo-Dutch War, when Lord Shaftesbury called for Carthage to be destroyed, New Netherland became New York (named a er the Duke of York and Albany, later to be James II, the Catholic king dethroned by William of Orange). Oliver Rich wrote: ‘New York underwent a violent and (by at least one interpretation) politically violent anglicization in the two decades a er the surrender of New Netherland. Nonetheless, the anglicization of New York was surprisingly rapid, particularly in commerce and trade; in less than one generation the ethnic Dutch merchant establishment was supplanted.’8 The language and architecture of the Dutch in the Hudson valley took longer to erase.9 The expulsion of Dutch shipping from New York was an enormous boost to the economy of New England. Shipbuilding was encouraged in the colonies by the Navigation Act, and ship-owners profited by taking over Dutch privateering against the Spanish, by smuggling, as well as by trade within the terms of the Navigation Act.10 Nouvelle France, or New France, was the primary rival of New England in North America. Quebec was successfully se led in 1608, but other se lements in the Canadian Maritime provinces were contested regularly by the English during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, as were its se lements in Florida, Alabama, and Louisiana contested by the Spanish during this period. In 1712, New France extended from Newfoundland to the Rocky Mountains, from Labrador through Louisiana to the Caribbean. New England remained loyal to Britain while New France was a threat. But a er Quebec had fallen to the English, loyalty to the British Empire seemed to hamper American commercial interests and continental expansion.

 8 Ibid., 266. In my boyhood, a popular song, ‘Constantinople,’ contained the lines: ‘Even old New York / Was once New Amsterdam / Why they changed it I can’t say / People just liked it be er that way.’ While ignorant of history, I sensed that changing the names of Constantinople to Istanbul, and New Amsterdam to New York, was not simply a ma er of popular preference.  9 See Joseph Manca, ‘Erasing the Dutch: The Critical Reception of the Hudson Valley Dutch Architecture, 1670–1840,’ and Judith Richardson, ‘The Ghosting of the Hudson Valley Dutch,’ in Going Dutch: The Dutch Presence in America, 1609–2009, ed. Joyce D. Goodfriend, Benjamin Schmidt, and Anne e Sto (Leiden: Brill, 2008), 59–84, 87–107. 10 Curtis P. Ne els, ‘British Mercantilism and the Economic Development of the Thirteen Colonies,’ in The Reinterpretation of the American Revolution 1763–1789, ed. Jack P. Greene (New York: Harper and Row, 1968), 82–5.

From Colony to Nation to Empire 75

The Southern Colonies and the AĴempt to Impose Agrarian Equality in Georgia Britain’s southern colonies, Maryland, Virginia, and the Carolinas, had extremely profitable plantation economies, producing silk, rice, co on, tobacco, and other commodities that could not be produced in Britain, while they consumed the human cargo of the slave trade, as well as British manufactured goods. However, these colonies were threatened by French missions and traders in the backwoods, Spanish missions and traders on the coast, and the various Amerindian nations wooed by both the French and Spanish. The province of Georgia was established to provide a buffer between the Carolinas to prevent runaway slaves reaching Florida, to provide defence against Amerindian warriors, and to take trade with indigenous nations away from the French. In the effort to best the Spanish and French, the only serious practical a empt to establish social equality, or the agrarian law that republican theory espoused, was made by the Trustees of Georgia and particularly by James Edward Oglethorpe, ‘America’s least known founding father.’11 It is perhaps ironic that the only a empt to establish the agrarian laws that James Harrington thought essential to republican regimes was made by a Tory colonial governor. Although Oglethorpe was a shareholder in the Royal Africa Company for a year before coming to America, his observation of the condition of slaves in the Carolinas made him adamant that slavery was not permissible in Georgia. Oglethorpe wrote that ‘if we allow slaves, we act against the very Principles by which we have associated together, which was to relieve the distressed.’12 Moreover, introducing slaves into Georgia would ‘occasion the misery of thousands in Africa.’13 Oglethorpe’s concern was

11 Phinizy Spalding and Harvey H. Jackson, ‘Introduction’ to Oglethorpe in Perspective: Georgia’s Founder a er Two Hundred Years (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1989), 3. 12 The Trustees of Georgia intended to free those incarcerated in debtors’ prisons and se le them on fi y acres that they would have to work themselves. Oglethorpe was active in prison reform before coming to America. His hatred of slavery is manifest in The Sailors Advocate (1728), a pamphlet against the impressment of sailors (coercive incarceration on shipboard) that went through seven editions in fi y years but failed to halt this infamous practice that ensured that Britain ruled the waves. See Rodney M. Baine, ed., The Publications of James Edward Oglethorpe (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1994), 7–43. 13 Phinizy Spalding, Oglethorpe in America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1977), 50; Be y Wood, ‘James Edward Oglethorpe, Race, and Slavery: A Reassessment,’ in Oglethorpe in Perspective, 68, 76–8.

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not only with the oppression and injustice towards black slaves but also its effect on white se lers, namely that labour would only be considered as something fit for slaves, that idleness would beget drunkenness, land speculation, and litigiousness (vices he observed in the Carolinas). Not only was liquor, Oglethorpe thought, debilitating to white se lers, but also the sales of liquor by unscrupulous traders who were alleged to have seduced/raped the wives of the warriors occasioned the Yamasee War in which 90 per cent of the traders and hundreds of white Carolinians were killed in 1715–17, almost eliminating the South Carolina colony by the combined a ack of the Yamasee, Creek, Chickasaw, Catawba, Shawnee, and other Amerindian nations.14 Oglethorpe’s a empt to ban the liquor trade and his desire to give Amerindians status as witnesses in colonial courts15 were efforts to woo warlike nations into the British camp, as well as to evince sympathy for the Amerindian suffering at European hands. To some Chickasaw warriors who had heard that Oglethorpe had Indian blood, he replied that he was only ‘an Indian in my heart.’16 Oglethorpe had a deep affection for the Yamacraw chief Tomochichi and his heir, Toonahowi (both of whom he took to London, dogged by a Spanish spy, to meet the king, queen, Archbishop of Canterbury, and other dignitaries). The Muscogee (the Creeks to the English) had a larger number of tribes than any other Indian nation in America and contested the southern marshes with the Chocktaws and Chickasaws in the west and the Cherokees in the north.17 Oglethorpe followed Tomachichi’s advice and, although ill, took a long trip to Chatahoochee in hopes of uniting the Muscogee/Creek and enticing their support away from the Spanish and

14 David Lee Russell, Oglethorpe and Colonial Georgia: A History (Jefferson, NC: McFarlane, 2006), 2. 15 Spalding, Oglethorpe in America, 95. 16 Ibid., 87; Peter Wood, ‘Circles in the Sand,’ in Oglethorpe in Perspective, 16; Helen Todd, Tomochichi: Indian Friend of the Georgia Colony (Atlanta: Cherokee, 1977), 54. Oglethorpe’s Spartan lifestyle and noble bearing enabled many Creeks and Chickasaws to believe his claim to have an inner affinity with them. Oglethorpe wrote in 1739: ‘The Indians are a manly well-shaped race . . . They are a generous good-hearted people, very humane to strangers; patient of want and pain; slow to anger, and not easily provoked; but when they are thoroughly incensed, they are implacable; very quick of apprehension, and gay of temper. Their publick conferences shew them to be men of genius, and they have a natural eloquence, they never having the use of le ers. They love eating, and the English have taught many of them to drink strong liquors, which, when they do, they are miserable sights.’ 17 Todd, Tomochichi, 2–3.

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French.18 Oglethorpe’s peace treaty with the Creek, Cherokee, Chocktaw, and Chickasaw nations in 1739 (the year he buried Tomochichi with full military honours), helped secure Georgia from Spain and also France.19 Phinizy Spalding described Oglethorpe’s efforts as ‘an astonishing achievement’ and claimed that ‘largely as a result of Oglethorpe’s policies, Georgia was spared, almost alone among southern colonies, a major internal Indian war during the formative years.’20 Shortly a er Oglethorpe had convinced sceptical Chickasaw warriors of the merits of British powder and shot, Oglethorpe’s French counterpart, Jean-Baptiste Lemoyne, Sieur de Bienville’s combined operation against the Chickasaws from Illinois and Louisiana suffered ‘a humiliating and expensive defeat.’21 At the outbreak of the War of Jenkins’s Ear,22 General Oglethorpe led his Georgia militia, Creek allies, and troops slowly and reluctantly sent from South Carolina into Florida, took some minor Spanish forts but failed to take St Augustine. In the Spanish countera ack, Oglethorpe inspired his troops23 to a decisive victory at Bloody Marsh,24 a victory

18 Ibid., 131–4; Stephen C. Hahn, The Invention of the Creek Nation, 1670–1763 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2004), 179. 19 Trevor Richard Reese, Colonial Georgia: A Study in British Imperial Policy in the Eighteenth Century (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1963), 108–9. 20 Spalding, Oglethorpe in America, 93, 97. 21 Wood, ‘Circles in the Sand,’ 17. 22 So named because Jenkins brought his shrivelled ear to the House of Commons, claiming Spaniards had unjustly mutilated him, but the war arose over conflict regarding the asiento de negros, whereby the English, at the Peace of Utrecht in 1713, had acquired a monopoly to supply Africans to Spanish colonies. In 1739, the Spanish offered slaves freedom if they came to Florida, stimulating Carolinian fears of a Black-Red alliance and race war a er a slave rebellion in 1739. For the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century background to Spanish claims to Georgia and the Carolinas, see John E. Worth, The Struggle for the Georgia Coast (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2007). 23 Phinizy Spalding, in Oglethorpe in America, 148, wrote: ‘There was no questioning of Oglethorpe’s honesty when he said he would die, if need be, for his colony. This was the sort of spirit that imbued his men too. They were willing to go down by their commander’s side.’ For a contemporary account of Oglethorpe’s inspiration, see Johannes Agustus Urlsperger, About the Excellence of the Georgian English Colony in Comparison with Other Colonies (1747), trans. from Latin by Theodora H. Miller (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 2008), 117. 24 Amos Aschbach E inger, James Edward Oglethorpe: Imperial Idealist (Oxford: Clarendon, 1936), 245, stated that the Ba le of Bloody Marsh ‘was the decisive ba le, as decisive for Spain as two decades later the Plains of Abraham proved for France, or Yorkton two decades later for Britain.’

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that was the undoing of the colony Oglethorpe founded. With the southern frontier secure against the Spanish, the chief argument Oglethorpe had used against the proponents of slavery in Georgia was removed.25 Oglethorpe’s Georgia was the antithesis of Sha esbury’s and Locke’s Carolina;26 early Georgia was based on yeoman farmers with a maximum of fi y acres of inalienable land, leased subject to the supervision of the trustees, not large freehold tenure and slave-based plantations. In Carolina, Oglethorpe ‘recognized the intimate relationship between large grants, land speculation, slavery and staple crops.’27 Georgian discontent with its trustees’ system of land tenure and prohibition of slavery grew in volume but was contained, given fears of slave uprisings, and the menace of French and Spanish support for renewed wars by Indian nations, but two years a er the Treaty of Aix-la-Chapelle (1748) was concluded in Britain’s favour, the ban on Negro slaves in Georgia was repealed. Trevor Reese wrote: Prosperity and progress in America were coming more and more to depend on capitalism, and conditions favored large enterprise and the concentration of property in few hands. It followed that Georgia could not prosper as long as the restrictions on landholding remained. They rendered impossible the establishment of a plantation system, especially a er the use of Negro slaves was prohibited in 1735.28

A er Oglethorpe le Georgia, restrictions on land tenure were relaxed; land became alienable and Georgia began to develop a plantation aristocracy comparable to the other southern colonies. Lockeian liber25 Wood, ‘Oglethorpe, Race and Slavery,’ 77. 26 Locke, who dra ed The Fundamental Constitutions of the Carolinas for Sha esbury, advocated slavery, as he did in his Instructions to Governor Nicholson [of Virginia] and chapter 4 of The Second Treatise of Government, as well as large freehold tenures. Chapter 5 of The Second Treatise of Government justified large and unequal land holdings. Spalding and Jackson’s description (Oglethorpe in Perspective, 2) of Oglethorpe, the Tory, with Jacobite leanings, as someone ‘who probably resembled most closely the concept of a seventeenth-century English liberal than anything else,’ is puzzling, given the antithetical views of Locke or Sha esbury, the seventeenth-century liberals, and Oglethorpe on property and slavery. 27 Rodney M. Baine and Phinizy Spalding, ‘Introduction’ to James Edward Oglethorpe, Some Account of the Design of the Trustees for Establishing Colonys in America (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1990), xvii. 28 Reese, Colonial Georgia, 43.

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alism triumphed over Oglethorpe’s patriarchal effort to establish the agrarian equality Harrington, Trenchard and Gordon, Montesquieu, and Jefferson thought essential to republican regimes. Benjamin Franklin and Imperial Union While the southern flank of America was being wrested from the Spanish and the French, New Englanders were helping the mother country take the fortress of Louisburg on Cape Breton from the French. Benjamin Franklin rejoiced at the New Englanders’ participation in the British Empire, and in Plain Truth (1747) he counselled the non-pacifist subjects of the Quaker State to be on guard against Amerindians, French, and Spanish privateers. ‘Persons, Fortunes, Wives and Daughters, shall be subject to the wanton and unbridled Rage, Rapine and Lust, of Negroes, Mula toes, and others.’29 The epigraph to Plain Truth is from Sallust quoting Cato to be prepared to deal with enemies. Franklin admired Addison’s Cato and Trenchard and Gordon’s Cato’s Le ers and came to think Cato the greatest model of virtue.30 Virtue proverbially is its own reward, but Franklin, in writing of Cato, declared that virtue pays dividends: ‘Virtue alone is sufficient to make a Man Great, Glorious and Happy.’31 In the course of the American Revolution, Catonic virtue destroyed the moral aristocracy of America; the Quakers were the only group in America to treat Amerindians and African Americans as friends, not enemies, but their unwillingness to wage war on Indians and others earned them the enmity of Franklin and, more violently, the Paxton Boys.32 Both before and during the Revolution, Quakers were beggared, if not tarred and feathered, for pacifism or they

29 Franklin, The Autobiography and Other Writings, 187–8. 30 Douglass Anderson, The Radical Enlightenments of Benjamin Franklin (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997), xiv, 71–2; Alan Houston, Benjamin Franklin and the Politics of Improvement (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008), 63, 80. 31 The Papers of Benjamin Franklin, ed. Leonard W. Laboree et al. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1960), vol. 1: 119. 32 The Paxton Boys were Scots-Irish frontiersmen who slaughtered friendly Indians both before and a er the Indians were taken into protective custody. They were never punished for their brutal crime because many Pennsylvanians agreed with Franklin that the Quaker-dominated government was not active enough on the settlers’ behalf. An admiring biographer, Houston, in Benjamin Franklin and the Politics of Improvement, 105) writes: ‘The Paxton Boys were an eerie reflection of Franklin’s original Association. Both were popular self-defense units.’

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abandoned their pacifist principles when pressured to support the War for Independence.33 In Observations Concerning the Increase of Mankind, Peopling of Countries, &c (1751), Franklin saw himself as an ardent imperialist, although he thought the centre of the British Empire might shi across the Atlantic as the English race fills up the vast tracts of land now being used by Indian hunters to support a few dependents. ‘What an Accession of Power to the British Empire by Sea as by Land!’ Franklin recommended that the tawny races, which included everyone except the English and the Saxons, should be denied entry to America. Although the Saxons, as well as the English, are white, Germans are swarthy: ‘Why should Pennsylvania, founded by the English, become a Colony of Aliens, who will shortly be so numerous as to Germanize us instead of our Anglifying them, and will never adopt our Language or Customs, any more than they can acquire our Complexion.’34 Franklin later modified his racist views on Africans and Germans but may never have lost his a achment to the British Empire. Franklin remarked on 9 February 1789 that if the British government had accepted his Albany Plan of Union for the colonies against the French and Indians, there would have been no separation of the colonies from the mother country for at least another century: ‘nor the Mischiefs suffered on both sides [that] have occurred’ and ‘the different Parts of the Empire might still have remained in Peace and Union.’35 Franklin apparently forgot that the colonies rejected his Albany Plan before the British government dropped it.36 Franklin’s plan37 called for the colonies to support one another when a acked by the French or Indians, to ban all private traders with the Indian nations because the

33 See the appendix to the former Quaker Tom Paine’s Common Sense (Philadephia: J. Almon, 1776) for an example of moral pressure being brought to bear on Quakers who remained neutral in the war between the colonies and Britain and, more generally, Arthur J. Mekeel, The Quakers and the American Revolution (New York: Sessions Book Trust, 1996). 34 Franklin, The Autobiography and Other Writings on Politics, Economics, and Virtue, 220–1. 35 Ibid., 255. 36 Houston, Benjamin Franklin, 170; John C. Miller, Origins of the American Revolution (London: Oxford University Press, 1965), 43. 37 Join or Die (236–7) and Reasons and Motives for the Albany Plan of Union (238–55) in Franklin, The Autobiography and Other Writings on Politics, Economics, and Virtue, 236–55.

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traders cheat them when drunk, to encourage the crown to purchase land, since it is cheaper than trying to take it by force or to allow land speculators to buy it, to establish forts to disrupt the French communication system between Canada and Louisiana, rather than relying on the Royal Navy. The union was to be part of the British Empire. Franklin wanted the American colonies to be represented in the British parliament as counties were, and to be as integrated in Great Britain as Wales and Scotland were.38 Gordon Wood’s thesis that Franklin, ‘a true-blue Englishman’ and a ‘thoroughgoing imperialist and royalist,’ became Americanized in the course of the War of Independence is questionable. Wood correctly asserted: ‘To Franklin the rise of the British Empire was the greatest phenomenon of the eighteenth century, and with his ever growing ambition he wanted very much to be part of it.’39 Wood’s thesis is questionable because he seems to assume that one cannot be a British American; one is either for Britain or America, resisting British imperialism or toadying to it. Indeed, from 1776 to 1783, it was difficult to be a British American, and Franklin sided with the American revolutionaries against the Loyalists. But, both before and a er the War of Independence, Franklin was both a proud American and a loyal Briton. Franklin was both an American patriot and a British imperialist in the 1740s and the 1760s. In 1760, Franklin wrote that the British Empire would be strengthened ‘when it is in our power to remove’ the French from Canada as they were a generation before expelled from Acadia. ‘Canada in the hands of France has always stunted the growth of our Colonies’ but ‘with Canada in our possession, our people in America will increase amazingly.’40 Franklin foresaw the centre of gravity shi ing from England to America with population growth in the colonies, opposed any a empts to make America a dumping ground for British convicts, resisted British restraints on trade in America, wanted Americans to raise their own taxes and legislate for themselves on internal ma ers, and wanted American representatives in the British parliament to voice American concerns in foreign policy. Franklin’s racism and insistence on the primacy of the English language did not distinguish 38 Ibid., 261–2. 39 Gordon Wood, The Americanization of Benjamin Franklin (New York: Penguin, 2004), 71–2, 91. 40 Benjamin Franklin, The Interest of Great Britain Considered with Regard to Her Colonies and the Acquisitions of Canada and Guadaloupe (Boston: B. Mecom, 1760), 17, 21, 25.

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him from some other American patriots. Indeed, Franklin’s ceasing to own slaves in 1782 and post-revolutionary opposition to slavery might have been a ributable to his favourable reception in France, and his French friends,’ such as Condorcet’s, opposition to slavery, rather than to Franklin’s ‘Americanization.’41 Thomas Jefferson refused Condorcet’s offer to join the Société des Amis des Noirs; Jefferson told Condorcet that all enlightened people oppose slavery and that it will shortly die out, and at the same time informed American friends that they should only bring to France slaves who were too young to claim their liberty.42 Was Jefferson less Americanized than his old compatriot? If it is questionable that Franklin’s adherence to the British Empire was incompatible with being an American patriot, it is also questionable that he became ‘Americanized’ during the War of Independence. In 1785, Franklin wrote: ‘The ancient system of the British empire was a happy one, by which the colonies were allowed to govern and tax themselves.’43 His post-revolutionary opposition to bicameral legislatures, eagles as symbols of American empire, and payment for the executive branch of government were out of step with American elites as was his support for British a empts to raise taxes in America a er the Seven Years’ War (1756–63). Whereas most Americans saw the British redcoats and bluecoats (army and navy) as friends until the French were defeated, taxation to support the redcoats was unnecessary when the colonies, as one columnist put it, were menaced by the ‘formidable power of the Scatacook Indians, a warlike tribe of near thirty fighting men, situated on the western border of the Connecticut.’44 At the time of Pontiac’s rebellion

41 In his writing on the Somerse Case (1772), Franklin called for the abolition of the slave trade, but various American patriots wanted to blame the British for the slave trade and called for its abolition but not slavery itself – slaves could be reproduced within America. Of the American Founding Fathers, Washington emancipated his slaves upon his death, whereas most southern American patriots did not. For an excellent account of British and American a empts to one-up the other morally, and the resulting setback to African Americans of the American Revolution, see Christopher Leslie Brown, Moral Capital: Foundations of British Abolitionism (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996). 42 William Howard Adams, The Paris Years of Thomas Jefferson (London: Yale University Press, 1997), 137–9; of his two hundred slaves, Jefferson brought only James and Sally Hemings to Paris. 43 Houston, Benjamin Franklin, 152. 44 Cited in Miller, Origins of the American Revolution, 77.

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of 1763, when many Indian nations that traded with the French ravaged western American se lements, the British could not get the seaboard colonies to contribute revenues to counter Pontiac’s offensive.45 The British pacified Pontiac by providing Indian territory to the west of the colonies and east of the Mississippi but covering what is now western New York, Pennsylvania, Virginia, North Carolina, Georgia, and all of Florida. The British colonies were not sufficiently united to fund continental expansion; the unity of the United States was the product of the War of Independence. Taxation, Representation, and the Quebec Act The ri between Britain and America began a er the Seven Years’ War, when successive British governments wanted the American colonies to help raise revenue to pay off war debts and maintain a military presence in America. The colonists, the least taxed and richest part of the British Empire,46 were reluctant to be taxed. Benjamin Franklin was out of step with his compatriots when he advised the British that Americans would accept the Stamp Act, which was in force in Britain, Nova Scotia, Canada, the West Indies, Georgia, and Florida. Franklin also supported William Pi ’s distinction between impermissible internal taxes, such as the tax on legal stamps, and permissible external taxes (port duties), and told the British parliament that the colonies would accept low duties on imported goods, such as molasses and tea.47 A marble statue of William Pi , a ired in a toga, was erected on Wall Street. However, in America, the Lockeian proviso that taxation is impermissible without the consent of the person taxed (as in the House of Lords) or his representative (as in the House of Commons) grew and became widespread throughout the colonies. To be sure, few pay taxes voluntarily,48 and Locke never justified equating an individual’s own

45 Ibid., 49. 46 Dall F. Forsythe, Taxation and Political Change in the Young Nation, 1781–1823 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1977), 12; Robert A. Becker, Revolution, Reform and the Politics of American Taxation, 1763–1783 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1980), 13–14, 33–5, 69–71. 47 Wood, Americanization of Benjamin Franklin, 111, 119. 48 Franklin (Autobiography and Other Writings, 324) was appalled at the unwillingness of Americans to pay taxes to their elected representatives a er the American Revolution, and departed from his Lockeian doctrine in calling for the state’s right to

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consent to taxation with that of a majority of elected representatives.49 Franklin’s view was that the British parliament could apply the maxim of ‘no taxation without representation’ by imperial federation or by expanding its numbers to include representatives from the colonies. However, many colonials thought that their representatives would be outvoted by the majority of British members of the House of Commons, and many in Britain thought America should be governed as Rome ruled its provinces.50 Franklin’s alternative, that the colonial assemblies would raise the taxes stipulated by the British parliament, was unacceptable to most of his compatriots, who could see li le difference between the British parliament directly levying taxes on Americans and requiring the colonial assemblies to impose taxes on their constituents to serve the goals of the British Empire.51 If the ri between Britain and America concerned taxation at the successful conclusion of the Seven Years’ War against France, the issue of taxation escalated into an issue of liberty. Specifically, the Roman notion of libertas, or the condition of not being a slave, conveyed the American elite’s sense of not being subject to British rule. Judith Shklar found ironic the fact that ‘from the first the most radical claims for freedom and political equality were played out in counterpoint to cha el slavery.’52 Mortimer Sellers rightly understood that slavery is integral to Roman liberty; he wrote: ‘“Libertas” as political freedom arose as a natural metaphor in a slave society.’53 Edmund Burke’s magnificent speech on reconciliation with the colonies indicated that the desire for liberty in tax citizens, to regulate inheritance and trade, ‘and even of limiting the Quantity and Uses’ of property. 49 C.B. Macpherson’s claim in The Political Theory of Possessive Individualism (Oxford: Clarendon, 1962), 252–5, that Locke assumed that the class interest of the propertied to protect their property from the propertyless overrode individual differences with respect to taxation seems partly right, but the landed and mercantile interests had diverging views on expanding empire versus low land tax, which led to the fall of Robert Walpole’s ministry a er two decades of political stability. 50 Wood, Americanization of Benjamin Franklin, 116. 51 Miller, Origins of the American Revolution, 238. 52 Judith Shklar, American Citizenship: The Quest for Inclusion (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1991), 1. 53 M.N.S. Sellers, American Republicanism: Roman Ideology in the United States Constitution (London: Macmillan, 1994), 97. In The Sacred Fire of Liberty: Republicanism, Liberalism and the Law (New York: New York University Press, 1998), 73, Sellers asserts that republican ideas of liberty derive from the Roman idea of free citizens not being slaves.

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New England derived from the tradition of religious dissenters but that the strongest desire for liberty existed in the southern plantation economies, where the presence of many black slaves made liberty a privilege, an honour, and a property worth dying for.54 The marquis FrançoisJean de Chastellux agreed with Burke that slavery gave southerners an aristocratic sense of pride that fosters a republican spirit.55 Adam Smith observed that, in Rome, ‘the freedom of the free was the cause of the great oppression of the slaves’ and pointed out that the virtuous Cato did not have the slightest humanity to servants and turned ‘out the old and diseased slaves to die, as we would a dying horse.’ Smith concluded: ‘The authority of masters over the slaves is therefore unbounded in all republican governments.’56 This correlation between republican freedom and cha el slavery is ignored by recent republican theorists who lament the decline of the neo-Roman conception of liberty – not being a slave – in nineteenth-century liberal doctrine.57 Nor do they examine how the republican notion of freedom as not being a slave was readily converted into liberal commercial freedom from governmental interference. Patrick Henry invoked the chains on his slaves to argue for unfettered commerce: ‘Why should we fe er commerce? If a man is in chains, he droops and bows to the earth because his spirits are broken . . . but let

54 Edmund Burke, Speech on Moving His Resolutions for Conciliation with the Colonies (London: J. Dodsley, 1775), 32. James Madison proudly announced, in Federalist no. 52, that ‘Virginia was the colony which stood first in resisting the parliamentary usurpations of Great Britain; it was the first also in espousing by public act the resolution independence.’ 55 François-Jean de Chastellux, Voyages dans L’Amérique septentrionale dans les années 1780, 1781 et 1782 (Paris: Tallendier, 1980), 355. 56 Adam Smith, Lectures on Jurisprudence, ed. R.L. Meek, D.D. Raphael and P.G. Stein (Oxford: Clarendon, 1978), 181–2. 57 Quentin Skinner’s Liberty before Liberalism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998) provided an account of the manner in which the republican notion of liberty (not being a slave) becomes eclipsed by liberal ideology (laissez-faire and the idea of liberty as absence of barriers) but did not connect the decline of liberty conceived as not being a slave with liberal abolitionism. John Wilkes Booth, having played Marcus Junius Brutus, enacted the neo-Roman conception of liberty by killing Abraham Lincoln with the words ‘sic semper tyrannis.’ Maurizio Viroli and Paul Petit, who champion a republican notion of liberty as not being dependent upon arbitrary power, also do not acknowledge that libertas – not being a slave or subject to an imperial power – presupposes slavery and imperialism.

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him twist the fe ers from his legs and he will stand erect . . . Fe er not commerce, let her be free as the air.’58 Hannah Arendt suggested why the dispute over taxation clothed itself in Roman togas: Taxes are neither as dramatic, nor a ractive an issue as Roman liberty.59 American women, as well as men, took on the heroic poses of the Roman Republic.60 Death and taxes may be inevitable but people will not fight and die for rising taxes, unless the issue is cast as a ma er of liberty or slavery. The paper money issued during the revolution bore the Latin mo o, libertas carior auro (liberty is dearer than gold or money).61 The factor that facilitated the transformation of the Lockeian issue of taxation into an issue of libertas or servitus was the Quebec Act of 1774, which confirmed the terms of the capitulation of the French to the English at Quebec (1759) and Montreal (1760), guaranteeing the Canadiens their religion and their property.62 The Quebec Act, according to Gustave Lanctot, ‘granted to a small population different in race, religion and language, a policy unprecedented in this age of totalitarian national unitarianism.’63 However, Thomas Jefferson twisted the Quebec Act’s principle of toleration for Catholics into tyrannical intolerance for Americans.64 Anti-Catholicism informed the political thought of Milton, Sidney, Sha esbury, Locke, Trenchard, and Gordon. We shall see in subsequent chapters on French political thought that

58 Cited in Joyce Appleby, Capitalism and a New Social Order: The Republican Vision of the 1790s (New York: New York University Press, 1984), 184. 59 Ibid., 26. 60 Caroline Winterer, Mirrors of Antiquity: American Women and the Classical Tradition, 1750–1900 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2007), 2. 61 Sellers, American Republicanism, 11. 62 I do not mean to suggest that there is a fundamental antithesis between Lockeian liberalism and neo-Roman republicanism. I think Paul Rahe’s Republics Ancient and Modern: Classical Republicanism and the American Revolution (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1992), and Joyce Appelby, Liberalism and Republicanism in the Historical Imagination (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992) and Mark Hulliung, Citizens and Citoyens: Republicans and Liberals in America and France (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002), are right in claiming that the American Revolution combined Lockeian liberalism and classical republicanism. 63 Lanctot, Canada et la Révolution Américaine, 87. The Quebec Act ‘accordait à une petite population de race, de religion et de langue différentes, politique inouie à ce e époque d’unitairisme national et totalitaire.’ 64 Francis Jennings, The Creation of America: Through Revolution to Empire (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 169.

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the ideal of republican Rome was juxtaposed to Roman Catholicism, as liberty to slavery. The fanatical barrage of anti-popery missives wri en under such pseudonyms as Scipio, Britannicus, Caius, Cato, Tertius Cato, Valerius Poplicola, and Junius Americanus65 indicates that donning the toga was connected to anti-Catholicism, in addition to the advocacy of military preparedness, courage and discipline, republican government, and territorial expansion. The Romanophile John Adams wrote that the Quebec Act showed ‘that we have no security against them [the British] for our Religion, any more than for our Property.’66 The strongly anti-Catholic Samuel Adams, ‘the American Cato,’ who frequently wrote articles for the Boston Gaze e under the pseudonym Valerius Poplicola, wrote to Thomas Young on 17 October 1774: ‘I think our Countrymen discover the Spirit of Rome or Sparta.’67 In 1775, prior to the American invasion of Quebec, Adams addressed the inhabitants of Quebec, asserting that ‘at the late Continental Congress, the Quebec Bill was considerd [sic] then not only as an intollerable [sic] Injury to the Subjects in that Province but a capital Grievance on all.’68 An estimated half of the pseudonyms of revolutionary writers derived from Rome.69 Perhaps Charles Metzger overstated the purely sectarian aspect of opposition to the Quebec Act, since the province of Quebec extended into the Ohio Valley and west to the Mississippi River. Washington, Franklin, Jefferson, Henry, and Hamilton had interests in western land speculation. Franklin held the Quebec Bill to be the most hostile act of the British parliament.70 Although Metzger wrote that Hamilton’s 65 See Charles H. Metzger, The Quebec Act: A Primary Cause of the American Revolution (New York: The United States Catholic Historical Society, 1936), 22, 47, 52, 75 and passim. For another account of the anti-Catholic response to the Quebec Act, see George M. Wrong, Canada and the American Revolution: The Disruption of the First British Empire (New York: Cooper Square, 1968), 247–64. Gary Wills’s view that the secular ideology of the American revolutionaries required the play-acting of the Romans under-emphasized the Protestant dimension of neo-Romanism. Cincinnatus: George Washington and the Enlightenment (New York: Doubleday, 1984), 132. 66 John Adams, History of the Dispute with America: From Its Origin in 1754 (London: J. Stockdale, 1784), 39. 67 The Writings of Samuel Adams, ed. Harry Alonzo Cushing (New York: Octagon, 1968), vol. 3: 163. 68 John McWilliams, New England’s Crises and Cultural Memory: Literature, Politics, History, Religion 1620–1860 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), vol. 3: 185. 69 Sellers, American Republicanism, 8. 70 Metzger, The Quebec Act, 117.

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Remarks on the Quebec Bill contain ‘not one word about Western lands as such,’71 Hamilton worried about the ‘annexing such a boundless extent of territory to the old’ and ‘added the immense tract of Country that surrounds all these Colonies,’ which would have the effect of discouraging Protestant soldiers from se ling and thus ‘the province will be se led and inhabited by none, but papists.’72 The New York Journal or General Advertiser on 20 July 1775 declared: ‘The finger of God points out a mighty Empire to your sons: the Savages of the wilderness were never expelled to make room in this, the best part of the Continent, for idolaters and slaves.’73 Republican liberty, empire, and anti-Catholicism converged in the neo-Romanism of the American Revolution. Novus ordo seclorum: Rome in the American Revolution The great seal of the United States in 1776 proclaimed in Latin that America was initiating a new order of the ages; novus ordo seclorum integrated the new and the old with its neo-Romanism. As Carl Richard observed, the American founders a ached the word ‘Capitol’ to their congressional building, senate to the upper chamber of their legislature, the Roman eagle as their national bird, placed Latin mo oes on their currency and seals, and even renamed a tiny creek in Washington the Tiber.74 Joseph Warren mounted his Boston pulpit in 1775 dressed in a toga to denounce the British. As George Washington le his family for the army, he said: ‘My life is gra ed onto the fate of Rome.’75 Washington became known as Cincinnatus and was the inspiration for the Society of the Cincinnati, composed of officers of the Revolutionary War who wished to become an hereditary elite but were blocked by Washington, Jefferson, and Franklin, who opposed the emergence of a hereditary aristocracy in America.76 Jefferson thought America was the 71 Ibid., 200. 72 The Papers of Alexander Hamilton, vol. 1: 174–5. 73 Cited in Miller, Origins of the American Revolution, 375. 74 Carl Richard, The Founders and the Classics: Greece, Rome, and the American Enlightenment (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1994), 50. 75 Wills, Cincinnatus, 187. 76 Ibid., 138–40; fearing that the Society of the Cincinnati would become an hereditary aristocracy, in opinion if not by law, Mirabeau thought if Americans recognize the order of Cincinnati, there would be no citizens, just patricians and plebeians, found its insignia of a bald eagle of gold reminiscent of the Roman senate, and insisted that all ills in ancient Rome were caused by the patricians. See Gabriel-Honoré de

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first nation based on virtue, not force, ‘since the days of the Roman republic.’77 A er the unsuccessful invasion of Quebec in 1775, John Adams declared: ‘Flight was unknown to the Romans . . . I wish it were to the Americans.’78 Adams’s A Defence of the Constitutions of the United States of America (1787) asserted that ‘the Roman constitution formed the noblest people, and the greatest power, that ever existed.’79 He contrasted the aristocratic republic of Rome and the democratic republic of Carthage and thought the commercial Carthaginians most like the Americans.80 While a friend to commerce, Adams thought commercial interests could undermine patriotic pride and a sense of honourable service to the republic. Adams’s Discourses on Davila (1776) asserted that the Romans understood the human heart be er than all other peoples and ‘made a be er use of the passion for consideration, congratulation and distinction.’ Whereas commercial democracies have only money to distinguish one’s class or social value, the Romans had distinctive clothing, insignia, and ceremonies to indicate ‘their rank, station and importance in the state.’81 Imitation of Rome would thus counter the overwhelming passion for wealth in the New World. In likening Carthage to America, Adams did not favour democracy; he declared: ‘I was always for a free republic, not a democracy, which is as arbitrary, tyrannical, bloody, cruel, and intolerable a government as that of Phaleris with his bull is represented to have been.’82 Adams opposed

Rique i, comte de Mirabeau, Considerations on the Order of Cincinnatus (London: J. Johnson, 1785), 9–10, 25, 38, 71, 131. 77 Cited in Richard, The Founders and the Classics, 75. 78 Cited in ibid., 67. Thomas Paine, who, unlike Adams, tended to see Rome as a negative model, wrote, in the third edition of Common Sense (London: J. Almon, 1776), 11, that American troops ‘have displayed but few marks of Roman or Spartan enthusiasm’ as manifest in ‘the inauspicious affair of Quebec.’ 79 John Adams, A Defence of the Constitutions of the United States of America (London: John Stockdale, 1794), vol. 1: 175. Adams thought Rome was synonymous with patriotism and public virtue and despised Robert Walpole, who deprecated the Roman ideal of patriotic virtue, as a man who undermined the morals and liberties of Britons. See John Adams, The Flowers of Modern History; Comprehending, on a New Plan, the Most Remarkable Revolutions and Events (London: n.p., 1796), 266–7. 80 Adams, A Defence, 1: 210–14. 81 The Portable John Adams, ed. John Patrick Diggins (New York: Penguin, 2004), 350–1. 82 Cited in Esmond Wright, An Empire for Liberty: From Washington to Lincoln (Oxford: Blackwell, 1995), 52. Phaleris was a Sicilian tyrant who had constructed a brazen bull in which he burnt his enemies, whose screams sounded as the bellowing of an enraged bull.

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the Roman agrarian law or land redistribution with the fierceness of a Roman senator.83 Adams was galled at charges of oligarchic tendencies levied against him by slave owners such as Thomas Jefferson and John Taylor. However, like Madison and Hamilton, Adams distinguished republics from democracies and favoured the former to the la er.84 If the image of Rome was used to inspire Americans to risk their lives and kill Britons, it was also used in the immense task of uniting or federating the thirteen colonies into the United States. Republican Rome was a positive model, and democratic Athens a negative model, for two reasons: Rome had a senate, which protected the rich from the poor, whereas Athens, a er the abolition of the aristocratic court of the Areopagus, preyed upon the rich; second, Rome was successful in empire-building, while Athens was not.85 William Everdell wrote that, for the Americans, ‘it is the Roman Republic and not the Athenian that has become the classical example of the seductions of empire and the effects of an aggressive foreign policy on republican institutions.’86 Mortimer Sellers rightly emphasized the role of senatorial authority in expansionist statesmanship: ‘The Roman example gave Americans courage to a empt a balanced continental republic, and the conviction 83 Adams, A Defence, 1: 342–4. 84 Adams was a central figure for those, such as Hannah Arendt, J.G.A. Pocock, and Mortimer Sellers, who saw the American constitution as modelled on republican Rome. Hannah Arendt, On Revolution (New York: Viking, 1965), 178, wrote that ‘the principle of potestas in populo is capable of inspiring a form of government only if one adds, as the Romans did, auctoritas in senatu.’ Sellers, American Republicanism, 244, wrote that ‘Americans took this republican principle further and demanded the “firm barrier” of a senate against the “tyranny” and “deformity” of democracy.’ Adams was the most widely cited authority for the Federalists as Montesquieu was for the anti-Federalists (Sellers, American Republicanism, 164). Indeed, ‘Adams was the most widely read man in . . . British North America,’ according to Richard Alan Ryerson, ‘John Adams, Republican Monarchist,’ in Empire and Nation: The American Revolution in the Atlantic World, ed. Eliza H. Gould and Peter S. Onuf (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005), 88. Gordon Wood (Americanization, 165 ) indicates that Adams’s writings had most influence on the constitution of most American states, with the exception of Pennsylvania. 85 An alternative democratic model to Athens was the Saxon Wi enagemot, championed by Demophilus, in The Genuine Principles of the Ancient Saxon, or English Constitution (Philadelphia: Robert Bell, 1776). Demophilus (Greek for friend of the people) is the antithesis of the Federalists’ neo-Romanism and championship of a senate overseeing popular representatives; Demophilus supported unicameral legislatures and annual elections. 86 Wiiliam R. Everdell, The End of Kings: A History of Republics and Republicans (New York: Free Press, 1983), 44.

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that senatorial authority should predominate.’87 Madison, in Federalist no. 63, asserts that ‘history informs us of no long lived republic which had not a senate’ and claims that the Athenians would have escaped ‘bi er anguish’ if they had had a senate as a ‘safeguard against the tyranny of their own passions.’ Athenian democracy, even if its assembly was composed of wise men, would still have been a thoughtless mob, and thus the American republic, through representative government, consists ‘in the total exclusion of the people [Madison’s emphasis]’ from legislation and public policy. Alexander Hamilton concurred in judging Athenian democracy to be anarchic and tyrannical. Sparta and Rome were exceptions to Hamilton’s rule that ancient republics were ungovernable, with the ephors and tribunes serving as popular representatives, and thrived until the tribunes usurped the authority of the senate.88 Rome served, for Hamilton in Federalist no. 34, as a model for American bicameral legislatures: ‘the Roman republic a ained to the utmost height of human greatness’ while the comitia centuriata and the comitia tribunata both served as legislative assemblies, the former serving the interests of the patricians, and the la er, of the plebeians.89 The rebellion of poor farmers led by Daniel Shays in 1786 against the bankers foreclosing on the veterans of the American War of Independence proved a ‘godsend’ to the Federalists,90 portraying him as Roman senators saw Tiberius Gracchus. Both Madison and Hamilton saw the American Senate as modelled on the Roman Senate; it was to protect private property from democratic majorities and survived for more than a century as a legislative and advisory body chosen by state legislatures rather than popular elections. For example, one of Alexander Hamilton’s pseudonyms was ‘Metullus,’ named a er Quintus Metullus, a senator who opposed Tiberius Gracchus’s agrarian reforms.91 Thomas Jefferson was alone among the founding fathers to give qualified support to Shays and his followers.92 The smuggler Samuel Adams, who, disguised as an Indian, poured thousands of pounds of East Indian tea 87 Sellers, American Republicanism, 6. 88 The Papers of Alexander Hamilton, 5: 39. 89 Hamilton, Madison, and Jay, The Federalist, 209–10. 90 Rahe, Republics Ancient and Modern, 37. 91 Richard, Founders and Classics, 41. 92 Jefferson’s defence of Daniel Shays, wri en in a le er to William Stephens Smith on 13 November 1787, contains the famous or infamous lines: ‘The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants. It is it’s [sic] natural manure.’

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with a duty of a penny a pound into Boston harbour because his illegal suppliers of tea could not compete with the low duties on tea imported through the Navigation Acts, wrote of Daniel Shays: ‘Rebellion against a king may be pardoned or lightly punished, but the man who dares to rebel against the laws of a republic ought to suffer death.’93 Martial norms change as a former colony becomes an imperial republic. In 1755, John Adams wrote that as Rome grew from an insignificant village to ‘a stupendous height, and exceed’d in Arts and Arms all the nations that preceded it,’ so America might soon become ‘the greatest seat of Empire.’94 Adams later wrote, in A Defence of the Constitutions of the United States of America (1787), that the Romans were ‘the greatest power that ever existed.’ Indeed, ‘it is impossible to invent a more perfect system’ than the Roman balance of powers as described by Polybius.95 James Harrington, whom Adams greatly admired, thought the reason for Rome’s greater success at imperialism than Athens was the dominance of the nobility in the former and the people in the la er.96 Adams’s comparison of the Americans with the Carthaginians rather than the Romans ‘may lead us to doubt the universality of that doctrine, that commerce corrupts manners.’97 The American commercial republic, unlike Athens’s democracy, would be able to expand because of its representative institutions. George Washington first dreamed of military glory by reading Caesar’s Commentaries but, by the time of the revolution, had abandoned Caesar as model for the dictator Cincinnatus.98 Executive command should be singular. According to James Madison, Athenian imperialism was 93 Cited in Richard, Founders and Classics, 133. Adams’s and Hancock’s profession as smugglers of tea, and their leadership in the Boston tea party, was the reason why John C. Miller (Origins, 340, 346–8) amended Samuel Johnson in writing that smugglers, not slave drivers, were the loudest yelpers for liberty. J. Hector St John de Crèvecoeur, an opponent of the American Revolution, writing six years before Shays Rebellion, wrote that farmers, such as himself, were victims of commercial elites who fomented revolution. ‘The property of farmers is not like that of merchants; and absolute poverty is worse than death.’ See Crèvecoeur’s Le er from an American Farmer (London: T. Davies and Lockyer Davis, 1782), 276–7, 283–4. 94 Cited in Richard, Founders and Classics, 77–8. 95 Adams, A Defence, 1: 175. 96 Ibid., 162. 97 Ibid., 212. 98 Richard, Founders and Classics, 94. Cincinnatus executed agrarian reformers, such as Spurius Maelius and Manlius Capitolinus, but Washington may not have known this. Washington’s legend as Cincinnatus is that of a poor farmer reluctantly abandoning his farm to his few slaves and saving the republic.

From Colony to Nation to Empire 93

hampered by its democracy since executive command was dispersed among ten elected generals (Federalist no. 38). Alexander Hamilton admired the Roman practice of dividing the functions of the consuls, one governing the city of Rome and the other commanding the legions in distant provinces; whenever there was discord at home, the Roman senate installed a dictator until the ambitious populace was subdued (Federalist no. 70). Thus executive power should be concentrated in one man, the supreme commander of the armed forces, who would consult with, and accept the advice of, the senate. The Empire of Liberty As the Americans and their allies got the upper hand in the war with Britain, the negative idea of empire as military oppression was transformed into a positive idea of extending the liberties for which Americans fought into new territories.99 For the American Founders the word ‘empire’ had different connotations, but one of the connotations common to all meant territorial expansion.100 Jedediah Morse’s extremely popular The American Geography or a View of the Present Situation of the United States (1789) bemoaned that hitherto writers on American geography were Europeans but announced that ‘since the United States has become an independent nation, and has risen into empire, it would be reproachful for them to suffer this ignorance to

 99 See Norbert Kilian, ‘New Wine in Old Skins? American Definitions of Empire and the Emergence of a New Concept,’ in Theories of Empire, 1450–1800, ed. David Armitage (Aldershot: Ashgate, 1988), 307. Kilian wrote that Americans ‘began to talk about a rising American empire as soon as independence seemed inevitable.’ Many Americans referred to an American empire before that time, but the connotations of empire changed as the British Empire seemed vulnerable. 100 Kilian, ‘New Wine,’ 320, noted that empire connoted ‘territorial expansion, republican ideals, the idea of God’s chosen people, progress in the arts and sciences, and an equal rank of the United States in the international community of nations.’ See also Marc Egnal, A Mighty Empire: The Origins of the American Revolution (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1988); Robert W. Tucker and David C. Henrickson, Empire of Liberty: The Statecra of Thomas Jefferson (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990); Wright, An Empire for Liberty; Karl-Friedrich Walling, Republican Empire: Alexander Hamilton on War and Free Government (Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, 1999); Peter S. Onuf, Jefferson’s Empire: The Language of American Nationhood (Charlo esville: University Press of Virginia, 2000); and Gould and Onuf, eds., Empire and Nation, for other statements of the plasticity of the idea of American empire.

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continue.’ Morse’s map presents the United States from coast to coast, with no indication of the Canadas, and with a barely sketched location of Spanish and Amerindian possessions.101 Joyce Appleby interpreted Jefferson’s transformation of the Lockeian trinity of ‘life, liberty and property’ to the ‘life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness’ in the Declaration of Independence to mean that governments ‘did not exist to protect property but rather to promote access to property.’102 Appleby’s bold interpretation accords with Peter Onuf’s view that Jefferson was the most imperialist of the American founding fathers and that ‘the whole point’ of the American Revolution ‘was to preempt the claims of a “foreign” [the British as well as the French, Spanish, Indians, and Africans] people to the American patrimony.’103 Jefferson agreed with Hamilton and Madison that the ‘fundamental rule of governments’ and a basic desire of all peoples, whether republicans or monarchists, is to extend their territories.104 Jefferson differed from the Federalists with respect to the usefulness of applying Roman political history to America, but part of his scepticism arose from his apprehension that Americans had to fear race mixture with the emancipation of slaves and the Romans did not fear race mixture in their freedmen.105 Although he did not emancipate his own slaves, Jefferson wrote that he favoured emancipation, but probably followed by their repatriation to Africa or deportation to the Caribbean.106 Jefferson wanted the uniformity of race and language that Jay advocated in Federalist no. 2 to be spread over North America; as he wrote to James Monroe on 24 November 1801, continental expansion should be comprised of ‘a people speaking the same language, governed in similar forms, and by similar law; nor can we contemplate with satisfaction either blot or mixture of that surface.’107 In addition,

101 John Rennie Short, Representing the Republic: Mapping the United States 1600–1900 (London: Reaktion Books, 2001), 112–13. 102 Appelby, Liberalism and Republicanism, 304. 103 Onuf, Jefferson’s Empire, 164; also, 1, 178–82. 104 Tucker and Hendrickson, Empire of Liberty, 17; Hamilton, Madison, and Jay, The Federalist, 32–3, 35–6, 38–9, 85–7, 537. 105 Thomas Jefferson, Notes on the State of Virginia [1785] (Baltimore: W. Perkin, 1800), 131–2, 147. 106 Ibid., 164; Thomas Jefferson, A Summary View of the Rights of British America (London: G. Kearsley, 1774), 29; Peter S. Onuf and Leonard J. Sadosky, Jeffersonian America (Oxford: Blackwell, 2002), 152–3. 107 Cited in Tucker and Hendrickson, Empire of Liberty, 160.

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Jefferson advocated that America annex Canada and Cuba.108 Although Jefferson was almost alone in gratefully supporting France for their vital assistance in the War of Independence, his most morally disgraceful position – namely, his support for Napoleonic France over ‘the cannibal republic,’ that is, the liberated slaves of Saint-Domingue under the leadership of Toussaint L’Ouverture – accounted for his greatest achievement as American president. It was only because the slaves successfully resisted Napoleon’s effort to reacquire Saint-Domingue that France was unable to send ships and soldiers to rearm New Orleans and hold Louisiana.109 Jefferson’s Louisiana Purchase created his reputation as a man who could acquire territory without force of arms or combine liberty and empire. While the administration of John Adams had recognized the slave revolution in Saint-Domingue (Haiti) and encouraged trade relationships – Toussaint L’Ouverture, the slave leader wanted to continue an export economy based on the sugar formerly produced on slave plantations – Jefferson, when he assumed the American presidency in 1800, blockaded Haitian exports, wanting to starve Saint-Domingue into submission and thus prevent the spillover effect of slave rebellions into the southern United States. Even a er Spain ceded Louisiana to France in 1800, Jefferson proposed a joint U.S.-France alliance against 108 Ibid., 162; in a le er of 27 April 1809 – The Republic of Le ers: The Correspondence between Thomas Jefferson and James Madison 1776–1826, ed. James Morton Smith (New York, 1995), vol. 3: 1586 – Thomas Jefferson advised James Madison to annex Cuba and Canada to create ‘an empire for liberty’: ‘I am persuaded no constitution was ever before so well calculated as ours for extensive empire and selfgovernment.’ Madison failed to annex the la er in the war of 1812–14. 109 Louisiana was a French colony until 1762, when it was ceded to Spain, a er the British defeat of France in the Seven Years’ War, until 1800, when Napoleon reasserted control over Louisiana from the Spanish. Since the French could not rearm Louisiana because of the heroic resistance of the Haitians, they entered into negotiations for the sale of the immense amount of land in the Mississippi basin up to the Great Lakes, in hopes of creating conflict between America and Britain over the Great Lakes, weakening Britain for France’s projected invasion of England in 1803, and ultimately restoring France’s colonies in the Americas. Jefferson’s motives, like Napoleon’s, were mixed; he wanted unimpeded trade along the Mississippi and absence of foreign barriers to western expansion, but was uncertain of the constitutionality of the federal government buying land, and France’s title to it. However, the Louisiana Purchase doubled the size of the United States for a few cents an acre, probably the best real estate buy ever made. For the sources of the view that the resistance of the former slaves of Saint-Domingue made possible the Louisiana Purchase, see footnote 111.

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Toussaint and ‘the cannibal republic.’110 In 1802, a er Jefferson realized that Napoleon’s objective was to arm New Orleans, Jefferson reversed his policy and allowed the blockade of Saint-Domingue to be broken. But Alexander Hamilton, Jefferson’s main political rival, was certainly right in asserting that the Louisiana Purchase was only possible because of the heroic resistance to Napoleon’s armies and navies by the black inhabitants of Saint-Domingue, who fiercely resisted Napoleonic efforts to re-enslave them.111 Jefferson wrote to John Adams that the Roman Empire was violent and oppressive, whereas the American empire would be free and republican: ‘The establishment of another Roman empire, spreading vassalage and depravity over the face of the earth is not, I hope, within the purpose of heaven.’112 However, there are various reasons why we might question the opposition between a violent and oppressive empire and Jefferson’s empire of liberty. The la er excluded Blacks and Amerindians from citizenship.113 Jefferson also thought that the freedom of trade ‘might yet require force of arms,’114 and American commerce made it ‘necessary for us to take a share in the occupation of the ocean,’ which ‘must be paid for by frequent war.’115 Jefferson supported Madison’s invasion of Canada in 1812 and anticipated the Monroe Doctrine in a le er to Thomas Short in 1820 when he commended partitioning the globe into two hemispheres, forbidding Europeans in the Americas.116 The incorporation of Spanish- and French-speaking peoples, as well as the Loyalists in Upper Canada, into an American empire might indeed require force of arms, and might even be as violent and oppressive as the imperial Roman Republic in its effort to extend its territory.

110 Tim Ma hewson, ‘Jefferson and Haiti,’ The Journal of History 41 (1995): 246. 111 Tucker and Hendrickson, Empire of Liberty, 91, 106–7, 129; Malick W. Ghachem, ‘The “Trap” of Representation: Sovereignty, Slavery and the Road to the Haitian Revolution,’ Historical Refections/Réflexions Historiques 29 (2003): 123–44; Robin Blackburn, ‘Haiti: Slavery and the Age of the Democratic Revolution,’ The William and Mary Quarterly 63 (2006): 643–73; O’Brien, The Long Affair, 289. 112 Rahe, Republics Ancient and Modern, 744–5. 113 Onuf and Sadosky, Jeffersonian America, 42; Tucker and Hendrickson, Empire of Liberty, 160. 114 Tucker and Hendrickson, Empire of Liberty, 31. 115 Cited in Onuf and Sadosky, Jeffersonian America, 183–4. 116 Thomas Jefferson, Political Writings, ed. Joyce Appleby and Terence Ball (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 405.

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To conclude this chapter on the birth of the nation, the American Republic was the product of imperial rivalries, formed a nation from thirteen British colonies, and, as Diderot and Raynal foretold in 1780, carried on the imperialism of English-speaking peoples more effectively against the French and Spanish than the British could have done. With the virtue of hindsight, we can see that Louis XVI lost his head in 1778 when he allied with the Americans against the British; the war debts he amassed in defeating the British materially helped him to lose his throne. The birth of the American nation has been told with a sense of Greek tragedy, or the hubris of imperial ambitions and the nemesis of success. All victories are losses. Oglethorpe’s victory over the Spanish put paid to his vision of an egalitarian and slave-free Georgia. The British victory over the French in the Seven Years’ War ended American loyalty to the British Empire. We can perhaps look back to Rome’s victory over Carthage and forward to America’s victory over the Russian empire in Afghanistan as other instances of nemesis.117 The French victory over the British at Yorktown terminated the ancien régime. We shall now turn to French neo-Romanism leading up to the French Revolution.

117 Chalmers Johnson, Nemesis: The Last Days of the American Republic (New York: Henry Holt, 2006), has a fine comparative account of the limits to empire, and specifically of the costs of the American victory over the Russians in Afghanistan, based on a tragic Greek world view. However, his antithesis of republic and empire overlooks the expansionism of the early American republic and is based on the constitutional difference between polyarchy and despotism. American presidents, since 1973 (when the CIA became responsible only to the president and when conscription was abolished), have become like Caesar, unchecked by a senate, tribunes, and popular assemblies in the Roman case, or Congress and the Supreme court in the American case.

5 From Caesar to Brutus to Augustus

The French Crown and the Monarchomachs We have examined the phenomena of revolutionary expansion in the English-speaking world from the English Civil War to the American Revolution. We shall now explore the emergence of neo-Roman republicanism in France. This chapter will explore the roots of neo-Romanism in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, leading up to the failed revolution, known as the Fronde, which was contemporaneous with the English Civil War. We shall show how the crown used the imagery of Caesar, how opponents of the crown used the imagery of Brutus and Cato, and how Louis XIV emerged triumphant as Augustus Caesar from the failure of the Frondeurs to curtail absolute monarchy. The language of the Roman Empire was ubiquitous as legitimation of monarchies prior to the seventeenth century. Russian tsars and German kaisers derived their ancestry from the Caesars. Ivan the Terrible, crowned tsar in 1547, ‘claimed to be the heir of the Byzantine emperors and head of the “third Rome.”’1 John Ponet (1556) referred to a common (and in his view devilish) saying: ‘All things be the kaisers, all things be the kings, all things be the princes.’2 J.S. Richardson wrote: ‘From Charlemagne to the Tsars, from British imperialism to Italian Fascism, the language and symbols of the Roman republic and the 1 Ronald Findlay and Kevin H. O’ Rourke, Power and Plenty: Trade, War, and the World Economy of the Second Millennium (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007), 187. 2 John Ponet, A Short Treatise of Politike Power (1556), in Winthrop S. Hudson, John Ponet (1516?–1556): Advocate of Limited Monarchy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1942), 85.

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Roman emperors have been essential elements in the self-expression of imperial powers.’3 Papal jurists used Roman law to justify centralized authority from the eleventh century, and, in the Christian reconquest of Spain, the Castilian crown used Roman law and its concept of imperium to bu ress royal sovereignty.4 The pamphlet literature of the early seventeenth century constantly compared French kings to Roman emperors.5 Hubert Carrier wrote that the general a itude of the French in the seventeenth century to their king (despite various rebellions including the series of rebellions known as the Fronde) was expressed in the maxim ‘Ab Jove principium.’6 Let us begin in sixteenth-century France, when Roman symbolism ceased to be a monopoly of the kings, tsars, and kaisers of the Holy Roman Empire and began to be used against absolute monarchy in the later religious wars by Huguenot Monarchomachs7 and neo-Stoic humanists.8 In France, classical studies and works by Greek and Latin authors were fewer in number than religious and theological books until 1525, when humanist studies expanded relative to works of piety.9 Claude de Seyssel’s La Grant Monarchie de France (1515) used Appian’s History of the Civil Wars to argue that monarchy is be er than republics at containing civil dissensions. Seyssel called parlements ‘a true Roman

3 J.S. Richardson, ‘Imperium Romanorum: Empire and the Language of Power,’ in Theories of Empire 1450–1800, ed. David Armitage (Aldershot, Hampshire: Ashgate, 1998), 1. 4 Harold J. Berman, Law and Revolution: The Formation of the Western Legal Tradition (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1983); I.A.A. Thompson, ‘Castile: Polity, Fiscality and Fiscal Crisis,’ in Fiscal Crisis, Liberty and Representative Government 1450 –1789, ed. Philip T. Hoffman and Kathryn Norberg (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1994), 142–3. 5 Hélène Puccini, ‘La Vision de l’état dans la li érature pamphlétaire au moment des États-Généraux de 1614,’ in L’État baroque: Regards sur la pensée politique de la France du premier XVIIe siècle [1610–1652], ed. Henry Méchoulan et Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie (Paris: Vrin, 1985), 155. 6 Hubert Carrier, Le Labyrinthe de l’état: Essai sur le débat politique en France au temps de la Fronde [1648–1653] (Paris: Honoré Champion, 2004), 23. 7 The word Monarchomaques derives from the Greek (monarchos and makhomai, to fight), hence an opponent of monarchy. The Huguenots presented themselves as opponents of absolute monarchy, but royalists maintained that the term connoted tyrannicide. 8 J.H.M. Salmon, Renaissance and Revolt: Essays in the Intellectual and Social History of Early Modern France (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 12. 9 Robert Mandrou, Introduction to Modern France 1500–1640, trans. R.E. Hallmark (London: Edward Arnold, 1975), 177.

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senate’ that both advise and limit the monarch.10 The jurists, schooled in Roman law, who comprised the parlements, were called, and called themselves, Roman senators; but the parlements of the sixteenth century sided with the crown and opposed the claims of the Estates-General that its consent was essential for taxation and law.11 François Hotman described these jurists in the parlements not as senators but as ‘pe yfoggers and robed vultures,’ ‘sycophants and fla erers of royalty.’12 Republican ideas emerged from humanist neo-Stoicism. Michel de Montaigne’s Essais quietly commended the Roman Republic and republican heroes. Cato the Younger ‘was truly a model ( patron) which nature chose to show the extent to which human virtue and fortitude can a ain.’ Rome was great when its generals submi ed to its senate. Dion Cassius’s ‘sense of Roman ma ers was so diseased that he dared to support the cause of Julius Caesar against Pompey, and that of Antony against Cicero.’ Power so corrupted Caesar that he vainly boasted of having ‘rendered this great Roman Republic a name without form or body’ and that his word must serve as law, that he was superior to the senate and let himself be adored and honoured as divine.13 Montaigne’s friend, Estienne de la Boëtie, had a republican cast of thought in his Discours de la servitude voluntaire (1548). La Boëtie thought that in all countries on earth, subjection is bi er and liberty sweet, that Brutus and Cassius were admirable because Caesar’s humanity was worse than a tyrant’s cruelty since its poisoned honey enervated the Romans and sweetened their servitude.14 However, from the 1560s, aristocratic Calvinist resistance movements in France, the Netherlands, and Scotland issued forth notable political literature, particularly François Hotman’s Franco-Gallia (1573), first published in the year following the Saint Bartholomew’s Massacre, when thousands of Huguenots were slaughtered by proponents of the Catholic League. Vindiciae contra Tyrannos (1579) and George Buchanan’s De Jure Regni Apud Scotus (1579) were wri en to justify the deposition

10 Nannerl O. Keohane, Philosophy and the State in France: The Renaissance to the Enlightenment (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980), 32, 35. 11 Ibid., 49, 57. 12 François Hotman, Francogallia, Latin text by Ralph Giesey, trans. J.H.M. Salmon (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1972), 513, 521. 13 Michel Eyquem, seigneur de Montaigne, Les Essais de Michel de Montaigne, ed. Pierre Villey (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1965), t. 1, 231, 686–7, 722, 733. 14 Discours de la servitude voluntaire, in Oeuvres complètes d’Estienne de la Boétie, ed. Paul Bonnefon (Paris: J. Rouam, 1892), 28, 31, 38–9.

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of Mary, Queen of Scots. In 1581, Dutch Calvinists deposed Philip II of Spain for misconduct or for levying taxes without their assent.15 Hotman’s thesis is that the Gauls were a free people, particularly in those regions ‘ruled by a council of nobles’ but also under elective kingships. The Franks were also a people that selected their kings and limited their power by their ‘senators and nobility.’ The Gauls initially hired the Franks as mercenaries and entered France to fight with the Gauls against the Romans. The Franks and Gauls were natural aristocrats who took care that ‘judgment of an inexperienced and vulgar multitude . . . incapable of judging anything wisely’ did not dominate the councils of the king. Hotman maintained that ‘a kingdom has its true and certain sources of wisdom in its senators and nobility.’ However, Rome, ‘the Great Beast, to use the word of Scripture,’ conquered Gaul and imposed Roman despotism upon France. Gaul was the first to rebel against the tyranny of Tiberius and Nero, and since that time, the Gauls and the Franks have been unwilling to tolerate any tyrannical conduct from their kings.16 Hotman’s Calvinist hostility to Rome as a symbol of oppression stands in contrast to Vindiciae contra Tyrannos, wri en either by Phillipe de Plessis Mornay or Hubert Longuet, under the pseudonym of Stephanos Junius Brutus. Stephanos is Greek for crowned, while Junius Brutus could refer to Lucius Junius Brutus, the legendary founder of the Roman Republic who vanquished the tyrannical Tarquin and killed his sons, who aspired to restore the monarchy, or Marcus Junius Brutus, who killed Julius Caesar at the end of the Roman Republic. In the eighteenth century, the name Brutus became wildly popular as it did double duty for both republican heroes as it did for Mornay or Longuet, somewhat as the name Cato in Le Caton François (1652) and Cato’s Le ers (1720) combined the virtues of the elder Cato, the censor and austere moralist who ended his speeches with the imperialist demand that Carthage be destroyed, and Cato of Utica, who would not accept Caesar’s clemency and killed himself when he thought his beloved republic could not be saved. Vindicicae contra Tyrannos elucidated its title and pseudonym by claiming that Tarquin and Caesar were tyrants because they were not chosen by the senate and people of Rome.17 Early Roman kings, like their Gallic 15 Augustus J. Veenendaal Jr., ‘Fiscal Crises and Constitutional Authority in the Netherlands,’ in Hoffman and Norberg, eds., Fiscal Crisis, 106–7. 16 Hotman, Francogallia, 173, 179, 205, 221, 235, 307, 401–3, 441, 459. 17 Junius Brutus, Vindiciae contra Tyrranos: A Defence of Liberty against Tyrants (London: Ma hew Simmons and Robert Ibbitson, 1647), 49.

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and Frankish counterparts, were elected. ‘No man can justly reprehend Brutus, Cassius, and the rest, who killed Caesar, before his tyrannical authoritie had taken any firm rooting.’ Vindiciae supported the senatorial cause, including the execution of plebeian champions, such as Manlius Capitolinus, a theme we saw repeated among English republicans and, we shall see, was repeated by French republicans throughout the eighteenth century. ‘But Rome is there, according to the saying of Pompey, where the Senate is, and the Senate is where there is obedience to the Laws, love of libertie, and studious carefulnesse for the Countries preservation.’18 Thus, if Francogallia saw Rome to be the Great Beast confronting Geneva, Vindiciae presented republican Rome to be on the side of Geneva and imperial Rome blended into the oppressive Catholic Church. George Buchanan, like the French thinkers, thought his people traditionally had elective kingships and cited classical authorities limiting kings by law, and popular institutions, such as the Roman tribunes and the Spartan ephors.19 Bodin on Sovereignty: Monarchies and Republics Jean Bodin, the most notable French political theorist of the sixteenth century, was a Politique, one who did not side with either the Catholic League or the Huguenots, a person who championed the sovereignty of the state above the claims of either party in France’s religious wars, one reputed to be more concerned with civil order than doctrinal truth. Bodin might be said to be a forerunner of Thomas Hobbes because he championed the authority of the state over competing religious authorities, and because he preferred monarchical to republican government. However, unlike Hobbes, he saw many positive features in the Roman Republic; it was ‘the most flourishing and best ordered state of any,’ a ributable in part to the fact ‘no god was ever received in Rome without the Senate’s warrant.’20 The Roman Republic was to be praised for its civil religion, placing religion in the hands of the state.

18 Ibid., 115–16, 119. 19 George Buchanan, De Jure Regni Apud Scotus (1579), trans. Duncan H. MacNeill, The Art and Science of Government among the Scots (Glasgow: William MacLellan, 1964), 33, 58, 65, 88. 20 Jean Bodin, Les Six Livres de la république (Paris: Fayard, 1986), III.i, t. 3, 37. Richard Knolles’s 1606 translation was entitled The Six Bookes of a Common-weale, but subsequent translations by M.J. Tooley of Bodin’s Six Books of the Commonwealth

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Since Bodin was a monarchist, in his Les Six Livres de la République (1576), the term république refers to states generally rather than democracies or aristocracies specifically, or, more accurately, states other than despotisms and tyrannies where the private interest of the ruler or ruling class takes precedence over the common interest. In this respect, Bodin followed the practice of Roman emperors, from Augustus to Hadrian and Valens, who referred to common concerns of the Roman Empire as rei publicae.21 Although Bodin thought the historical record established the superiority of monarchical sovereigns to aristocratic or popular sovereignty,22 he spoke warmly of the Roman Republic and referred to Julius Caesar as a ‘tyrant’ and a ‘dictator.’23 Six Livres begins with a statement of the importance of raising children with good moeurs. The ancients excelled at this practice; the Spartans raised their children to be courageous, the Romans, to be just. Bodin wrote that ‘the Roman Republic flourished in justice, and surpassed that of Sparta, because the Romans had not only magnanimity but also true justice as the objective of all their actions.’24 The Roman Republic ‘was the most illustrious of any state’ in the extent of its empire;25 the martial discipline essential to imperial expansion was fostered by a father’s power of life and death over his children. ‘Now paternal power having been li le by li le weakened with the decline of the Roman Empire, soon a er also ancient virtue and all the splendour of their Republic vanished, and in place of piety and good morals [moeurs], a million vices and misfortunes

(Oxford: Blackwell, 1955) and Julian H. Franklin, Of Sovereignty: Four Chapters from The Six Books of the Commonwealth (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), have been abridged. I shall indicate the book and chapter numbers for those with access to the Knolles, Tooley, or Franklin translations, as well as the volume and page of the Fayard edition of Bodin. 21 Res Gestae Divi Augusti: The Achievements of the Divine Augustus, ed. P.A. Brunt and J.M. Moore (London: Oxford University Press, 1967); Mary T. Boatwright, Hadrian and the Cities of the Roman Empire (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000), 74–5; Arnold Hugh Martin Jones, The Later Roman Empire, 284–602 (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1964), 815–16. 22 Six Livres, IV.i, VI.iv; t. 4, 18; t. 6, 180–1; Jean Bodin, Method for the Easy Comprehension of History, trans. by Beatrice Reynolds of Methodus ad facilem historiarum cognitionem (New York: Octagon Books, 1966), 252–3, 270–1. 23 Six Livres, II.v, t. 2, 82–3. 24 Ibid., I.i, t. 1, 37. 25 Ibid., I.ii, t. 1, 43.

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followed from it.’26 Although a monarchist, Bodin associated the Roman Republic with virtue and the Roman Empire with vice. Although Bodin claimed that the Roman senate had less authority than the privy councils of European monarchies, he was clear that the Roman Republic was great because of its senate, and its decline began at the time of the Gracchi, when ‘the dregs of the population,’ ‘the plebs, that is, the lowest throngs, were enabled to order what should be law.’27 The Athenians were even more democratic a er Pericles abolished the aristocratic Areopagus when the plebs held legislative power, magistracies were chosen by lot, payment for public office was instituted, and ‘what was even worse,’ voting by a show of hands was implemented.28 Although Bodin usually referred to Rome as a popular or democratic state, even under its kings, he sometimes referred to the Roman Republic as an oligarchy, prior to its licentious descent into ‘the anarchy of its turbulent plebs.’29 Bodin’s view was that Rome was exemplary because it combined popular sovereignty with aristocratic government,30 which was later to be Rousseau’s ideal, whereas Athens had democratic sovereignty and democratic government, which Rousseau thought fit only for gods. Sometimes Bodin a ributed Rome’s flowering and good order to the sovereign powers of the Roman senate31 and sometimes to its aristocratic censors.32 Bodin thought large aristocratic republics more stable than small democratic republics,33 a view Hume and the Federalists were to espouse later. Bodin thought there was much greater opportunity to develop virtue in republics than in monarchies, where the opportunity of acquiring honour and glory are curtailed by kings: ‘It is why the Republic of Rome had more great generals, wise senators, eloquent orators, and knowledgable jurisconsults, than other barbarian, Greek or Latin states [Républiques].’34 Republican Romans were model imperialists; they ‘filled the earth with their colonies, with an immortal glory for

26 Ibid., I.iv, t. 1, 70. 27 Bodin, Method, 179, 184. 28 Ibid., 193. 29 Ibid., 237; for his view that the people had sovereign power under the early kings, see 191. 30 Six Livres, II.v; t. 2, 121. 31 Ibid., III.i, t. 3, 36–7; IV.iv; IV.vi, t. 4, 136, 178. 32 Ibid., IV.v, t. 4, 142. 33 Ibid., IV.i, t. 4, 39, 49–51. 34 Ibid., V.iv, t. 5, 101.

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their justice, wisdom and power.’35 The imperial republic was a model for monarchists as well as republicans, for expanding nation-states, and for the prospect of overseas colonies. Bodin favoured monarchy over aristocracy and democracy because monarchs can best limit class conflict between rich and poor, as well as the religious conflict between Huguenots and the Catholic League. The ancient republics were less sha ered by religious strife than states of the sixteenth century but they were more wracked by class conflict. Following Aristotle, Bodin thought that the conflict between the many and the few or between democrats and aristocrats was fundamentally a struggle between rich and poor. A mixed constitution, Bodin thought, was impossible – both the rule of the rich over the poor and the rule of the poor over the rich. Aristotle’s mixed constitution, Bodin claimed, was inherently unstable and apt to tilt to oppressive oligarchies or, more likely, mob rule followed by tyranny. Bodin thought ‘a licentious anarchy is worse than the most powerful tyranny in the world.’36 Bodin wrote: ‘Wisdom for ruling is the natural capacity of very few. What [is] stupider than the plebs? What more immoderate? When they have been stirred up against good people, what more hysterical? Rightly Livy said, “The nature of the multitude is such that it either serves meekly or rules insolently.”’37 Bodin’s central idea is that sovereignty must be absolute, perpetual, and undivided. He recognized that his rejection of mixed sovereignty ran counter to the political theory of Aristotle and Polybius, and apparently contrary to Greek and Roman political practice. Because of the different functions of the councils or senates and the popular assemblies, the individual magistracies and popular courts, the Greeks and Romans ‘called the characteristic feature of a republic to be composed of both aristocratic lordship and a popular state. I reply that there is indeed some semblance of reality in this a ribution but nevertheless in effect it was a true popular state.’38 Bodin asserted, although he knew that history substantially qualified his theory of unmixed sovereignty, that the Roman senate had a purely consultative role; the comitia centuriata and then the comitia tribunata gave the law to Rome, or had the right of command, which is the mark of sovereignty, just as the Paris parlement 35 Ibid., VI.ii, t. 6, 49. 36 Ibid., preface, t. 1, 14. 37 Bodin, Method, 269. 38 Ibid., II.i, t. 2, 27.

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and the English parliament had an advisory role in relation to royal law or the king’s command. Julian Franklin wrote: ‘In the classical period of the Roman Republic the people, in comitia centuriata, could not act upon a legislative proposal without the Senate’s approval. Bodin is aware of this, and even approves of it as a check on the license of the people, while yet maintaining that the Roman Republic was a pure democracy.’39 Moreover, Bodin was quite aware that the weighted voting of the comitia centuriata le the power of legislation in the hands of the patricians and knights and excluded the vast majority of citizens. Indeed, Bodin admired the Roman Republic precisely because it was aristocratically governed by its senate, which had the power to dispose finances, to authorize religious practices, to appoint provincial governors, and to award honours, which are ‘the great points of sovereignty [majesté].’40 Thus, while Bodin was a monarchist, his admiration for the aristocratic and imperial Romans and contempt for the democratic Athenians anticipated many of the republican themes of the eighteenth century. Noble Opposition to Absolute Monarchy: The Fronde The Edict of Nantes (1585), which extended toleration to Huguenots while retaining Catholicism as the official state religion, moderated religious conflict in France. However, Henri IV, an ex-Huguenot who thought Paris well worth a mass, was killed in 1610. On 18 July 1610, Henri de Bourbon, prince de Condé and father to the Grand Condé, who was a key participant in the Fronde a generation later, wrote: ‘The time of kings is over and that of princes and the great begins.’41 We might ask here whether the prince de Condé’s advocacy of the rule of princes of the blood and a few of the old aristocracy (des Grands) is a republican sentiment. We would perhaps want to know more about how the rule of law would be made consistent with aristocratic privilege and local custom, but I do not think the small number of princes and grandees precludes Condé’s sentiment from being republican. Popular uprisings

39 Julian Franklin, ‘Jean Bodin and the End of Medieval Constitutionalism,’ in Jean Bodin: Verhandlungen der internationalen Bodin Tagung in München, ed. Horst Denzer (München: C.H. Beck, 1973), 164. 40 Bodin, Six Livres, III.i, t. 3, 36–7. 41 ‘Le temps des rois est fini, celui des princes et des Grands commence.’ Cited in Joïe Corne e, ‘L’État baroque dans la France du premier XVIIe siècle: une approche par la chronologie,’ in Méchoulan and Ladurie eds., L’État baroque, 461.

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from the time of the Fronde to the French Revolution were led by aristocrats. Perhaps we are inclined to reserve the term republican to aristocratic initiatives that are supported by popular movements. However, David Hume described Henri, comte de Boulainvilliers – who championed aristocratic privilege on the grounds that the free Franks had conquered and enserfed the Romano-Gauls and hence were not subject, as their Gallic inferiors were, to taxes and legal obligations other than military service – as a ‘noted republican.’42 Indeed, Hume’s ‘Idea of a Perfect Commonwealth’ advocated raising the property qualification for the franchise (that already excluded over 90 per cent of the British population from voting) from £2 per annum to £200.43 Montesquieu, another admirer of Henri de Boulainvilliers, shared the comte’s distaste for common people. Montesquieu wrote: ‘The inferior people are the most insolent tyrant that one could have’ and ‘there is nothing worse than a free populace.’44 The American and French revolutions brought more democratic ideas to republicanism, but John Adams, James Madison, and Alexander Hamilton distinguished republics from democracies and thought the aristocratic Roman Republic a more fi ing model for America than democratic Athens. Claude Mossé wrote that in the constitutional debates of 1791, the Athenian model of counting by numbers rather than by wealth was rejected by the nobility of France: ‘If Athens served to repel, Rome in return furnished not only a constitutional model adaptable to the realities of France but equally a juridical arsenal on which the deputies could draw, and they made sure to do so.’45 The fact that republicanism and democracy have been locked in relationships of a raction and repulsion may have been one of the reasons that Adams found republicanism indefinable.

42 Henri, comte de Boulainvilliers, Histoire de l’ancien gouvernement de la France (La Haye, 1727), t. 1, 25–6, 30–3, 40, 43, 46, 65–6, 242–5; David Hume, Political Essays, ed. Knud Haakonssen (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 200. 43 Hume, Political Essays, 231. 44 ‘Le bas peuple, qui est le tyran le plus insolent que l’on puisse avoir . . . Ils sont en quelque façon libres et par conséquent insolents; car il n’y a rien pis que la populace libre.’ Cited in Joseph Didier, Montesquieu et la tradition politique anglaise en France (Paris: Victor Lecoffre, 1909), 139. 45 Claude Mossé, L’Antiquité dans la révolution française (Paris: Albin Michel,1989), 72: ‘Si Athènes servait de repoussoir, Rome en revanche fournissait non seulement un modèle constitutionel adaptables aux realités de la France, mais également un arsenal juridique, où les deputés pouvaient puiser, et ils ne s’en firent pas faute.’

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A er the death of Henri IV, Marie de’ Medici became regent during the minority of Louis XIII. Royalist pamphlets and those of a republican hue, largely directed at the regent, abounded, as they were later to flower during the minority of Louis XIV, directed at Anne of Austria and particularly at her first minister, Cardinal Mazarin.46 The grievances of the prince de Condé were aired at the last meeting before the French Revolution of the Estates-General in 1614.47 A few years later, Condé was imprisoned, despite outrage by his friends among les Grands, and Louis XIII weathered opposition from the nobility, especially with respect to his policy of selling administrative offices (the number of which increased tenfold between the mid-sixteenth century and the mid-seventeenth century).48 The aristocratic opposition was compounded by Huguenot opposition to the established state religion among the Charante nobility. In 1620, La Mercuriale, an address to the Huguenot assembly in Loudon, voiced republican sentiments in advocating a constitutional monarchy that secures popular liberty, or royalty limited by law and aristocratic counsel; even Jupiter himself, La Mercuriale claimed, never threw his thunderbolts without taking counsel beforehand.49 In the second half of Louis’s reign, Armand Jean du Plessis, Cardinal Richelieu, continued the royal policy of state centralism with intendants, o en selected from the jurists of the Paris parlement, overseeing aristocratic provincial governors, and limited the political and military privileges of the Huguenots while confirming their right to religious practice. Richelieu embarked on a policy of royal patronage for artists and writers to adorn the crown of France. When the Jansenist movement within French Catholicism threatened Richelieu’s conception of the unity of the realm, he commissioned the sceptic François La Mothe le Voyer to write La Vertu de payens to counter the Jansenist claim that virtue was impossible without Christian grace; the virtues of Roman republicans were presented to France, thanks to the king’s

46 Puccini, ‘L’État sur la place publique: pamphlets et libelles dans la première moitié du XVIIe siècle: une approche par la chronologie,’ in Méchoulan et Ladurie, eds., L’État baroque, 289–300. 47 The Estates-General was summoned during the Fronde (1649 and 1651) but never met. 48 Daniel Roche, Les Républicains des le res: gens de culture et lumières au XVIIIe siècle (Paris: Fayard, 1998), 232. 49 La Mercuriale (Paris: s.n., 1720), C27285 in La Bibiliothèque Mazarine, 17–18.

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chief minister.50 With the death of Richelieu in 1642 and Louis XIII the following year when his heir was five years old, Louis XIV’s mother, Anne of Austria, and her minister, Jules, Cardinal Mazarin, came to power in a decade in which Europe was in ferment. The English Civil War, republican movements in the Netherlands, tax revolts in Portugal and Catalonia against Castilian domination, and the violent revolt of Naples against Spain in 1647 brought Parisian rioters onto the street, shouting ‘Napoli, Napoli.’51 The Fronde (1648–53) was a series of violent rebellions or unsuccessful revolutions, o en distinguished as the Fronde of the jurists of the Paris parlement (1648–9), the Fronde of the princes and nobles (1650–3), and the popular Fronde (1651–3) of l’Ormée in the Gironde around Bordeaux. The Fronde was so named for the slingshots, which threw stones breaking the windows of the residence of Cardinal Mazarin; the Frondeurs cast themselves as li le David up against the Goliath, Mazarin.52 Mazarin was frequently compared by xenophobes to his compatriot Machiavelli, the immoral counsellor of princes, not the republican Machiavelli noted by English republicans.53 Roman history was applied to the grievances of the judges in the Paris parlement, by the educated supporters of the princes of the blood, Frondeurs saw themselves as heroes of the Roman Republic, Mazarinades were wri en in Latin, and even the lower-class members of l’Ormée rallied behind the

50 J.H.M. Salmon, Cardinal de Retz: The Anatomy of a Conspirator (London: Weidenfeld and Nicholson, 1969), 23. 51 Denis Richer, ‘Où situer la Fronde parmi les Troubles Européens des années 1640–50?’ in La Fronde en questions, ed. Roger Duchêne and Pierre Ronzeaud (Aix-enProvence: Publications de l’Université de Provence, 1989), 123–30; A. Lloyd Moote, The Revolt of the Judges: The Parlement of Paris and the Fronde (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1971), 74, 112. 52 Hubert Carrier, Les Muses guerrières: Les Mazarinades et la vie li éraire au milieu du XVIIe siècle (Paris: Klinksieck, 1996), 210. Carrier indicated that Frondeurs also saw themselves as Cato calling for the destruction of Mazarin as Carthage. One of the most powerful Mazarinades was Le Caton français, which threatened the life of the thirteen-year-old Louis XIV and which denounced as the greatest crime the buying and selling of justice. See Carrier, Labyrinthe de l’état, 46, 332. 53 Carrier, Les Muses guerrières, 544; Carrier, Labyrinthe de l’état, 171; Joïe Corne e cited Cathéchisme de la cour (1652) in his ‘Fiction et réalité de l’état baroque,’ in Méchoulan et Ladurie, L’État baroque, 47: ‘1. Je crois au Roi pour mon intérêt est tout-puissant à faire agir les choses. 2. Et au Mazarin, son unique favori. 3. Qui a été conçu de l’esprit de Machiavel, est né du cardinal de Richelieu.’

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cry of ‘vox populi, vox dei.’54 The Fronde failed in its varied objectives of limiting royal absolutism; its failure, a ributable to the widely divergent views and interests of the judges, the princes and grandees, and the populist Ormée, accentuated despotic centralism when Louis XIV came of age in the closing years of the Fronde, assisted by his able finance minister, Jean-Baptiste Colbert. Fi ingly, Louis XIV styled himself as Augustus Caesar, having defeated the Roman senate and Republic; in 1662, Le Roi Soleil dressed as a Roman emperor led a carrousel dressed as an emperor.55 Chantal Grell wrote that the memory of the Roman emperors was an obsession of Louis and Colbert, but Louis also took on the mantle of Alexander the Great because Jean Racine and Charles de Monquetel de Saint-Denis, seigneur de Saint-Evremond, had presented Alexander as heroic and the grand Condé had the reputation of ‘le nouvel Alexandre.’56 Saint-Evremond had served under Condé, and following Louis’s appropriation from Condé of Alexander’s greatness, Saint-Evremond championed Julius Caesar’s noble victory over the Gauls. Grell sardonically noted: ‘To an epoch when one regarded this conquest had brought all the benefits of civilization to a population still plunged in ignorance and barbarism, it was clear that Caesar’s wars should be assessed without severity.’57 If the British Enlightenment was a conservative reaction to the English Civil War, the French Enlightenment was timid as a result of the Fronde; fearful of what Voltaire considered the bloody commedia buffa of the Fronde, its levity contrasted with the gravity of the English 54 Ibid., 510; Carrier, Labyrinthe de l’état, 92, 252, 528–9; Orest Ranum, The Fronde: A French Rebellion 1648–1652 (New York: Norton, 1993), 50, 79, 98, 102, 181, 251. Moote, Revolt of the Judges, 26, indicated that there was a much larger percentage of lowerorder participation in the Fronde than in the English Civil War, despite the caricature of the Fronde as an aristocratic Jacquerie. 55 Keohane, Philosophy and the State in France, 239; Mark Bannister, Condé in Context: Ideological Change in Seventeenth-Century France (Oxford: European Humanities Research Centre, 2000), 162. 56 Chantal Grell, Le Dix-Huitième Siècle et l’antiquité en France 1680–1789 (Oxford: Voltaire Foundation, 1995), 111, 326–7, 659. Saint-Evremond criticized Racine’s Alexandre for failing to distinguish between a Roman consul and an Oriental prince, between the rule of law and the dominion of slaves, and between republican Romans and the fla erers of Tiberius’s court. 57 Ibid., 1114: ‘À une époque où l’on estimait que ce e conquête avait apporté tous les bienfaits de la civilisation à une population plongée encore dans l’ignorance et la barbarie, il était évident que les guerres de César devaient être considérés sans séverité.’

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revolutionaries and the ‘heavy silence’ or caution of Montesquieu with respect to the Frondeurs’ efforts to create intermediary powers (municipal self-government, local parlements to try cases according to local custom, regional governors rather than royally appointed intendants, an increased role for the noblesse de l’épée in political and military posts) to limit centralized despotism.58 No major political theorist, except Simone Weil, writing during the resistance to the German occupation of France, championed the Frondeurs’ a empt to re-establish a multiplicity of life-giving roots (France’s regional differences, its local customs and forms of government, and its varieties of religious practice) to a nation uprooted by a monolithic state from its life-giving heritage. Weil thought Cardinal Richelieu had created a state that ‘kills, suppresses everything that may be loved; so one is forced to love it, because there is nothing else.’ French patriotism became a Roman cult of imperium and the French became servile, adoring servants of a dominating state during the reigns of Louis XIII and Louis XIV. ‘During the Fronde and under Mazarin, France, in spite of the general distress, was morally able to breathe.’59 History, Weil felt, was o en an autopsy wri en at the behest of murderous victors, and, while she sided with losers, historians have concluded that the Fronde was a pointless disaster.60 To be sure, the great nobles were humbled as a political force by the end of the Fronde and, concomitantly, the aristocratic code of honour, liberality, and glory declined.61 However, the Paris parlement and the noblesse de la robe acquired prestige for their role in the revolution,62 and they 58 Marc Serge Rivière, ‘Voltaire’s Slanted Vision of the Fronde as Commedia Buffa in Le Siècle de Louis XIV,’ in Culture and Conflict in Seventeenth-Century France and Ireland, ed. Sarah A. Stacey (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2004), 257–70; Jean Ehrard, ‘Montesquieu et la Fronde,’ in Duchêne and Ronzeaud, eds., La Fronde en questions, 401–11. 59 Simone Weil, The Need for Roots: Prelude to a Declaration of Duties towards Mankind, trans. Arthur Wills (London: Routledge, 2002), 110, 114, 116–17. 60 Wendy Gibson, A Tragic Farce: The Fronde (1648–1653) (Exeter: Elm Bank, 1998); Carrier, Labyrinthe de l’état, 167. Michael Clodfelter, Warfare and Armed Conflicts: A Statistical Reference of Casualty and Other Figures (London: McFarland, 2002), 40, estimates that ‘over 50,000 Frenchmen died in the Wars of the Fronde.’ 61 Richard Bonney, Political Change in France under Richelieu and Mazarin 1624–1661 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1978), 441; Bannister, Condé in Context, 2–3; Ranum, The Fronde, 346, indicated that the Fronde brought an end to the employment of noble gars d’armes and resulted in the emergence of a professional standing army. 62 Moote, Revolt of the Judges, 368.

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were the group that considered themselves, and were considered by supporters of the grand Condé, to be Roman senators, Ciceros, Catos, and Scipios. Later Montesquieu wrote that the president of the Paris parlement, Mathieu Molé, had the stature of a Roman.63 Orest Ranum declared: The Parlement was, according to historical metaphor, the ancient Roman senate, a governing body that had been passed on to the French, who had adopted its functions and duties. Roman senators had marched in the legions. For some of the judges in the Parlement, the chance to prove themselves in war not only coincided with their social aspirations to join the nobility of the sword, but confirmed the idea of the virtuous parlementaire.64

The jurists in parlement, responding to unrest on the streets of Paris, ceased to be Hotman’s ‘sycophants and fla erers of royalty,’ passively recording royal edicts while blocking the convocation of the EstatesGeneral, and took on a role opposing Cardinal Mazarin. The co-adjutor of Paris, Jean-François Paul de Gondi, later Cardinal de Retz, identified himself with popular unrest and the parlement, and was a powerful Frondeur, while denouncing disobedience in others, supporting the exiled Stuarts in Paris, and distancing himself from Cromwell.65 Cardinal de Retz’s Mémoires of Mazarin and the Fronde were spiced with allusions to the Roman Republic, its annihilation by Caesar and consolidation by Augustus (Richelieu) and descent into the tyranny of Tiberius (Mazarin) but did not, despite his reputation as a republican, directly espouse republicanism.66 The successful general, and second to the throne, the grand Condé,67 was used to crush the Paris uprising, the parlement, and the co-adjutor in 1649, but, failing in his bid to be

63 Carrier, Labyrinthe de l’état, 528–9, 535, 538; Ehrard, ‘Montesquieu et la Fronde,’ in Duchêne and Ronzeaud, eds., La Fronde en questions, 402. 64 Ranum, The Fronde, 181; Geoffrey Treasure, Mazarin: The Crisis of Absolutism in France (London: Routledge, 1995), 115, stressed the theatricality of the Roman gestures, with the parlementaires playing up to a Parisian audience. 65 Salmon, Cardinal de Retz, 83–6, 157–8. 66 Cardinal de Retz, Mémoires, ed. Simone Bertier (Paris: Garnier, 1987), t. 1, 184, 191–2, 265, 283–7, 315; t. 2, 20; Boris Porchnev, Les Soulèvements populaires en France au XVIIe siècle (Paris: Flammarion, 1972), 338–9, reported Retz’s reputation as a republican. 67 So named for his victories over the Spanish, and likened in contemporary literature to Caesar, Alexander, and Cyrus but also, fi ingly, to Coriolanus. See Bannister, Condé in Context, 33, 94, 98, 105, 146, 188.

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regent until Louis XIV turned twenty five and his a empt to convoke the Estates-General, Condé led the second Fronde in 1650, the Fronde of the princes, supported by many nobles68 and military leaders, including Henri Turenne. Although called the Fronde of the princes, various princesses and noblewomen, such as la Grande Mademoiselle, duchesse de Montpensier, who led her own troops into ba le, la princesse de Condé, la duchesse de Longueville, la duchesse de Chevreuse, and la marquise de Rambouillet, played a large role in the Fronde.69 A republican legacy of the Fronde of the princes was Antoine Soreau’s translation, Le res de Brutus et de Cicéron, (1663) dedicated to Marguerite de Lorraine, wife of Gaston de France, Duc d’Orléans, imprisoned during the Fronde, and mother-in-law to the formidable Grande Mademoiselle. Soreau’s translation was used in republican literature of the eighteenth century on both sides of the channel, including Trenchard and Gordon’s Cato’s Le ers. A subsequent revolt in 1651, led by Condé, was defeated by forces of the crown and Mazarin, led by the now loyal Turenne. The third or popular Fronde, l’Ormée, was composed largely of peasants and wage labourers, o en retired from the army, and more markedly republican and radical in outlook than the Fronde of the jurists and that of the nobles.70 The Ormée aimed to eliminate the venality of office holdings and, perhaps, the parlements.71 The Ormistes had their traditions of mutual aid and selfhelp deriving from the guilds, made decisions in popular assemblies, and proposed a system of public works to employ the poor and repair war damage.72 The Ormée was internally divided between Catholics and Huguenots, some who favoured collaboration with Spain and a few 68 Sophie Vergnes, ‘The Princesse de Condé at the Head of the Fronde des Princes: Modern Amazon or Femme Prétexte?’ French History 22 (2008): 406–24. 69 Jeanine Delpech, L’Âme de la Fronde: Madame de Longueville (Paris: Fayard, 1957). 70 Carrier, Labyrinthe de l’état, 104–8, 115, 118, 147–9; Porchnev, Soulèvements populaires, 338–9; Sal Alexander Westrich, The Ormée of Bordeaux: A Revolution during the Fronde (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1972); Keohane, Philosophy and the State, 217. However, Philip Knachel, England and the Fronde: The Impact of the English Civil War and Revolution in France (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1967), indicated that the Ormée was more repelled than inspired by English republicanism. Porchnev, Soulèvements populaires, 40, a er examining a series of popular uprisings from 1623 to 1648 and 1653 to 1676, concluded that the popular masses were not mobilized by aristocratic Frondeurs. The aristocratic Frondeurs were anti-despotic, rather than antimonarchical, whereas many of the popular Frondeurs wanted the abolition of monarchy, although not by means of the English regicides. 71 Ranum, Fronde, 263–5. 72 Carrier, Labyrinthe de l’état, 595–8; Keohane, Philosophy and the State, 209.

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with England, some who supported Condé and others who did not. The Fronde’s unity in hating the centralized state, its system of farming taxes, and its personification in the foreigner Mazarin was more than offset by its diversity of interests, ambitions, and outlooks among the Fronde of the jurists, of the nobles, and of the lower orders. The Fronde did not produce any political philosophers, other than Thomas Hobbes, who prided himself on being the first to flee the English Civil War and who wrote his great work of political philosophy while in Paris, doubtless reinforced in his view that civil war is the summum malum by his experience of the Fronde. Hobbes returned to England in 1651, the year of the publication of Leviathan, discouraged by les dévots in Paris for his religious views and encouraged by Cromwell’s policy of religious toleration (disestablishment of the Church of England or independence of congregations from Presbyterian uniformity). The Fronde did not produce republican thinkers, like John Milton, Marchamont Nedham, James Harrington, or Algernon Sidney, but the 1650s saw a spike in the number of books wri en on Roman themes and translations from Latin,73 as well as republican placards, pamphlets, and posters. The Bordeaux parlement, according to a contemporary account, ‘think themselves to be senators of ancient Rome, Publicolas and Brutuses, enemies to royalty and founders of republics.’74 Les Cauteles de la Paix (1652) recommended severe punishments for those, like Mazarin, who aspired to tyranny. The republican Romans meted out death to enemies of the republic even if they had previously saved the country, as Manlius Capitolinus had done before being thrown from the Tarpeian Rock, and as ‘the divine Brutus’ had done when he condemned his sons to death for siding with the Tarquins; ‘we are certainly far from having this heroic Roman virtue. We take glory in living as slaves and only have respect for those who never do us anything but evil.’75 Les Cauteles denounced Mazarin’s abuse of money for his partisans, and followed the flag of the princes against Mazarin’s tyranny even if it required ‘the most glorious death, for we are not born for ourselves but owe our lives to our Patrie’; it commended a Roman army, which enrolls commoners as soldiers, led by an aristocratic cavalry, to prosecute a more success-

73 Grell, Le Dix-Huitième siècle et l’antiquité en France 1680–1789, 290–1. 74 Cited in Carrier, Labyrinthe de l’état, 92: ‘pensent être sénateurs d’une ancienne Rome, des Publicoles et des Brutes, ennemis de la royauté et fondateurs de républiques.’ 75 Les Cauteles de la Paix, listed M12711 in la Bibiothèque Mazarine, 6: ‘Nous sommes bien loing de ce e vertu Heroïque des Romains. Nous faisons gloire de vivre en Esclaves & n’avons du respect que pour ce qui ne nous ont jamais fait que du mal.’

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ful war against Spain than Mazarin’s troops had done.76 Aristocratic Mazarinades, such as Les Curieuses Recherches faites sur la vie de Iules Cesar pour monstrer les conformitez de Mazarin, avec les vices de ce Romain (1652), a er comparing the sexual vices of Caesar to ‘Jules moderne,’ compared their political situation and ambitions: ‘Caesar collided with the senate of Rome; and Mazarin with the Parlement of France.’ Moreover, ‘Caesar reinstated the power of the tribunes to embolden them to strike at the authority of the senate, and Mazarin confirmed the establishment of Intendants in the provinces for the same effect.’77 La Guide au Chemin de la Liberté faisant voir (1652) argued that the French are wrongly enslaved by a monarchy erected on the ruins of the Roman Empire; its army is composed of servile subjects rather than the free citizens of the Roman Republic; the road to liberty consists in abandoning the servile status of Mazarin’s tyranny and following Condé, who will rule under law and with justice. The French do not want to be like those frogs who prayed to Jupiter for a king and received a block of wood in guise of a king, but a er the frogs scorned it, Jupiter provided a stork who devoured all the frogs; Condé is neither a blockhead, nor a devouring stork.78 Le Caton François (1652), a more demotic Mazarinade, called upon a French Cato, and not the princes of the blood, to chasten the ills of state, particularly Mazarin, the godfather of Louis XIV since Mazarin named Louis ‘Augustus, the God-given’ (Auguste Dieu donné). It is idolatry to worship kings, as Scripture enjoins and as is confirmed by the experience of the Roman Republic. Le Caton François, together with the more aristocratic Mazarinades, brought forth a new idol of la Patrie, which together with its Roman imagery became an explosive mixture in the subsequent century: ‘Let us remember that nothing is so glorious as to die for one’s country (Patrie).’79

76 Ibid., 11, 22–3: ‘Quand mesme nous devrions mourir pourrions nous trouver une mort plus glorieuse, nous ne sommes pas nés pour nous mesmes, nous devons la vie a nostre Patrie.’ 77 Les Curieuses Recherches faites sur la vie de Iules Cesar pour monstrer les conformitez de Mazarin, avec les vices de ce Romain, listed M12711 in la Bibiothèque Mazarine, 4: ‘Cesar fut choqué par le Senat de Rome; et Mazarin par le Parlement de France’; 8: ‘Cesar restablit la puissance des Tribunes à Rome pour se servir de leur audace à choquer l’authorité du Senat, et Mazarin ayant confirmé l’establissement des Intendans dans les Provinces pour le mesme effet.’ 78 La Guide au Chemin de la Liberté faisant voir, listed M12995 in la Bibiothèque Mazarine, 7, 17–18, 20, 22–3. 79 Le Caton François, listed M10711 in la Bibiothèque Mazarine, 5, 8, 10, 16, 22: ‘Souvenons nous qu’il n’est rien de si glorieux que de mourir pour sa Patrie.’

6 Le Royaume and La Patrie: Rome in Eighteenth-Century France

Royal Patronage and Histories of the Roman Republic In the a ermath of the Fronde, Jean-Baptiste Colbert persuaded Louis XIV to provide royal patronage to men of le ers.1 Jean-François Méjanès asserted that the first generations of royal pensioners ‘seem to have scrupulously respected the hierarchy of genres’ within the world of letters and considered ‘history to be the noblest genre.’2 Clients of royal patronage trumpeted the virtues of republican Rome, while at the same time maintaining the higher virtues of Christianity and the political arrangements a endant on true faith. Patriotic virtue was the motive of the ancient Romans that enabled them to make Rome ‘the Capital of the world,’3 according to the Jesuit Abbé, René Aubert de Vertot’s Histoire des révolutions arrivées dans le gouvernement de la République Romaine (1719) and the Jesuit fathers François Catrou’s and Pierre-Julien Rouillé’s Histoire romaine depuis la fondation de Rome (1725). In their dedication to the king, Catrou and Rouillé delicately balanced Jesuit internationalism and French nationalism: ‘The French then became the defenders of

1 John Lough, Writer and Public in France from the Middle Ages to the Present Day (Oxford: Clarendon, 1978), 102–7. 2 Jean-François Méjanès, ‘Les Pensionnaires de l’Académie de France à Rome et l’antiquité,’ in La Fascination de l’antique 1700–1770: Rome découverte, Rome inventée, ed. François de Polignac et Joselita Raspi Serra (Paris: Somogy, 1998), 96; also Chantal Grell, Le Dix-Huitième Siècle et l’antiquité en France 1680–1789 (Oxford: Voltaire Foundation, 1995), 107–9. 3 René Aubert, Abbé de Vertot, Histoire des révolutions arrivées dans le gouvernement de la République Romaine (Paris: Nijon, Didot et Quillau, 1734), 4.

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Christian Rome, as the Gauls had been the destroyers of a Rome that was still pagan.’ They assured Louis XV that their history will show ‘that a monarchical state, always preferable to a popular state, can join the advantages of a republic to that of a monarchy.’ The advantage of a republic is the presence of patriotic virtue. ‘Could one not say that the love of the Romans for their patrie4 helped to render them invincible? The basis of Roman armies was composed of Roman citizens.’ It was this patriotic sentiment that made ‘each citizen of Rome believe himself to be equal or superior to the most powerful monarchs. Hence this esteem for the patrie. Hence these superhuman efforts to safeguard its glory and extend its dominions.’5 If Louis XV had read the dedication, one might suspect that he would have been of two minds about Roman citizens thinking themselves superior to the most powerful monarchs of the world, even if their qualities would have enabled him to carry on his father’s expansion of the borders of France. Abbé de Vertot’s Discours préliminaire to his Histoire des révolutions arrivées dans le gouvernement de la République Romaine begins: ‘The love of liberty has been the prime objective of the Romans in the establishment of the republic and the cause or pretext of the revolutions the history of which we have undertaken to write. It was this love that made Romans proscribe royalty, lessen the authority of the consulate, and suspended the title of consul on different occasions. The same people . . . under

4 I have le patrie, rather than translating it as country, because patriotic citizens inhabit a patrie, whereas paysans inhabit a country (pays), and loyal subjects a royaume. Polity or state might be be er than country or land but neither generates the warmth of patrie, or even country or land. Patrie (from pater) seemed in eighteenth-century France to be almost as aggressive as Vatersland (Fatherland); although many motherly and nursing qualities are associated with patrie, it does not bear the connotations of a motherland, to whose defence one rushes but who is less prone to a ack, despite the imperialism of tsars, tsarinas, and commissars in the name of the motherland. 5 François Catrou and Pierre-Julien Rouillé, Histoire Romaine depuis la fondation de Rome (Paris: J. Rollin, J.-B. Delespine et J.-B. Coignard, 1725), ii, iv, xxxv. ‘Les François devinrent ensuite les protecteurs de Rome chrêtienne, comme les Gaulois avoient été les destructeurs de Rome encore payenne.’ To be sure, ‘qu’un Etat Monarchiques, toûjours préférable à un Etat Populaire, peut joindre les avantages d’une Republique, aux avantages de la Monarchie.’ ‘Ne pourroit – on pas dire, que l’amour des Romains pour leur patrie, contribua à les rendre invincible? Le fond des armées Romains étoit composé de Citoyens Romains.’ This patriotic sentiment was based on the fact that ‘tout Citoyen de Rome, se croyoit égal, ou supérieur, aux plus puissans Monarches. De-là ce e estime pour la patrie. De-là ces efforts plus qu’ humains, pour en conserver la gloire, & pour en étendre la domination.’

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the pretext of a ending to the maintenance of liberty gradually set up laws as guardians and as overseers of the senate and nobility.’ Vertot’s Histoire was the story of a rise of a patriotic people whose virtue was safeguarded by poverty and equality until the a ermath of the Punic Wars, when luxury and decadence corroded the moral fabric of the republic.6 Rome was destined to win its wars with Carthage because ‘all Carthaginian citizens were merchants’ and thus ‘scorned the profession of arms,’ whereas ‘Rome on the contrary nursed in its breast an admirable militia. All the citizens were soldiers.’7 Vertot followed the Machiavellian tradition (as we saw with Harrington and Trenchard and Gordon) of founding republicanism on equality but also of praising Rome’s senate for killing proponents of land distribution as ambitious and seditious, from Spurius Cassius, Spurius Maelius, Marcus Manlius Capitolinus to Tiberius and Gaius Gracchus.8 However, Vertot disapproved of the senators who conspired with Brutus to kill Caesar: ‘They were not the ancient Romans who preferred liberty to life.’9 While approving of older Roman republicans, Vertot could not approve of the regicides that killed Caesar. The Jansenist Charles Rollin’s Histoire Romaine depuis la fondation de Rome jusqu’à la bataille d’Actium: C’est-à-dire jusqu’à la fin de la République (1738) was translated into English the following year and was widely read in Britain and America, as well as France. Harold Parker found

6 Vertot, Histoire des révolutions, t. 3, 177–8: ‘L’amour de la liberté a été le premier objet des Romains dans l’établissement de la République, & la cause ou le prétexte des Révolutions dont nous entreprenons d’écrire l’Histoire. Ce fut cet amour qui fit proscrire la Royauté, qui diminua l’autorité du Consolat, & qui en suspendit le titre en différentes occasions. Le peuple même . . . sous prétexte de veiller à la conservation de la liberté, s’erigent insensiblement en Tuteurs des Loix, & en Inspecteurs du Senat & de la Noblesse.’ 7 Ibid., t. 2, 314–15. In Carthage, ‘tous les citoyens étoient Marchands’ and ‘ils méprissoient la profession des armes.’ ‘Rome au contraire nourissait dans son sein une milice admirable. Tous les citoyens étoient soldats.’ 8 Ibid., t. 1, 142–263; Spurius Cassius was ‘dévoré d’ambition, il osa aspirer à la Royauté’ (142), and aimed ‘ruiner d’un coup le Senat & la principale Noblesse’ (149); t. 2, 139–43 on seditious Spurius Maelius; t. 2, 251–65 on the evil designs of Manlius Capitolinus for land redistribution; t. 2, 343–417 for the Gracchi’s reforms and their fate; t. 3, 24–30 recounted Livius Drusus’s murder to prevent his vain a empt to reintroduce the Gracchic reforms and extend citizenship to Rome’s allies; t. 3, 193–214 celebrated Cicero’s oratory thwarting the ambitious tribune Publius Servilius Rullus’s proposed law on land redistribution. 9 Ibid., t. 3, 308. ‘Ce n’étoit plus ces anciens Romains, Qui préferoient la liberté à la vie.’

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Rollin’s and Vertot’s histories to be widely read by French revolutionaries, and Rollin was the French author, next to Montesquieu, who was most commonly cited in the speeches and writings of the American revolutionaries.10 Rollin declared: ‘When a man a entively considers from what point the Roman power arose and to what height it arrived, he is seized with astonishment, and dazzled with the lustre and greatness of events, and still more so with the causes which contributed to form that vast and superb empire.’11 Rollin maintained that the principles of Roman policy were established under the kings; Romans were ‘always animated by the same spirit; always eager to conquer and rule.’ Their empire was not gained by force, by the conquest of slaves, but by friendship and voluntary alliance.12 The essential character of the Romans arose from their love of liberty and patrie, their unwillingness to bow to any man but only to the laws, and their ‘desire for glory and thirst for dominion.’ Roman mores were based on religion: ‘Happy, if with such dispositions, they had known the true God!’ If eighteenth-century Britons used republican Rome on behalf of their civilizing missions, their French contemporaries did as well. Rollin wrote that Greece, Asia Minor, Syria, Egypt, and the other provinces of the Romans ‘were never happier than under their dominion.’13 French historians of the eighteenth century were unanimous that the Romans had civilized Britain,14 whereas British historians were divided on the ma er.15

10 Harold T. Parker, The Cult of Antiquity and the French Revolutionaries: A Study in the Development of the Revolutionary Spirit (New York: Octagon Books, 1965), 16–19. 11 Charles Rollin and Jean-Baptiste Louis Crevier, The Roman History from the Foundations of Rome to the Ba le of Actium: That Is, to the End of the Commonwealth, Translated from French in 16 Volumes (London: P. and J. Knapton, 1739–50), vol. 1: i. We might note that Rollin (vol. 1: 141), when referring to Tarquinius Superbus, wrote ‘which word, in the Latin tongue, joins the idea of cruelty to that of pride,’ in our assessment of ‘that vast and superb empire.’ 12 Ibid., 1: i–iii. 13 Ibid., 1: viii–xii. 14 Catherine Volpilhac-Auger, Tacite en France de Montesquieu à Chateaubriand (Oxford: Voltaire Foundation, 1993), 436, 442. 15 Edmund Burke, Jeremy Bentham, and Edward Gibbon tended to emphasize the civilizing effect of Roman occupation of Britain; John Millar and Adam Ferguson were inclined to stress the oppressive yoke of the Romans; while Adam Smith and David Hume balanced the civilizing and oppressive features of the Roman conquest of Britain.

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Rollin thought the Roman senate was the wisest of all deliberative bodies and inspired the Roman people with martial ardour.16 A er citing Saint Augustine declaring Roman virtues to be vainglorious, Rollin added that ‘however sinful their virtues might be, God was pleased not to suffer them to go entirely unrewarded.’ Indeed, Roman imperialism could be said to be providential since Rome became ‘the center of religion, and capital of the Christian world.’17 Rollin, like Vertot, thought the agrarian laws appeared equitable but were impractical to enforce; it was too difficult to distinguish ancestral lands belonging to a patrician family from those that were acquired recently. He seemed to think the murder of Manlius Capitolinus unjust not because he advocated implementing the agrarian laws but because he advocated the relief of debtors from slavery.18 Rollin thought there was nothing as horrifying in pagan antiquity as enslaving debtors who were unable to pay their debts, although he noted that Livy approved of the practice to maintain public credit and Cicero also favoured the practice to uphold the rights of private property.19 Like Vertot, Rollin juxtaposed the commercial Carthaginians to the non-commercial Romans.20 Rollin found the cause of the Gracchi to be highly culpable, although he initially distinguished the ‘mild, moderate and polite’ Tiberius from his ‘rough, violent, passionate’ brother, Gaius Gracchus. Tiberius’s proposal for land distribution was moderate, leaving the patricians with their ancestral lands and compensating them for the newly acquired lands they had illegally seized during the Punic Wars. Tiberius’s aim was for poor plebeians, rather than slaves, to work the land. However, the patricians claimed that ‘these lands were estates, which had been in their families from immemorial time, had planted them, and the tombs of their forefathers were upon them,’ or they were apportioned to family members, or money had been borrowed on the security of lands or had been mortgaged for payment of debts. The patricians did not explain that slaves had to work the land since plebeians were far afield in the legions. (One might wonder how the patricians avoided commerce, as Rollin claimed, when they were involved in the buying and selling of slaves, the lending of money, the rent of land, and the 16 Rollin and Crevier, Roman History, 1: xviii–xix, xxvi. 17 Ibid., xlvi–xlvii. 18 Ibid., 2: 346–60. 19 Ibid., 3: 38, 39, 45–46. 20 Ibid., 5: 12–13.

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marketing of produce of the slave-based latifundia, which could hardly have been for household consumption.) Rollin wrote that the senate prevailed on one of the ten tribunes to block Tiberius’s proposal, and then Tiberius proposed that the lands illegally acquired be forfeited without compensation, and so the senators had Tiberius and hundreds of his followers killed without trial. ‘The Great certainly had right on their side. The enterprise of Tiberius was culpable in itself. It was never allowable to deprive the actual possessors and the most illustrious of one half . . . of their fortunes’; prescription or long possession trumps injustice in acquisition for ‘prescription has been termed the patron of mankind.’21 Gaius Gracchus’s ‘plan was entirely to change the form of government of Rome, to make it degenerate into a mere democracy, and to deprive the senate of the principal rank and authority.’ The senate blocked Gaius ‘for the good of the state, as cannot be denied, that the principal authority of government should remain in the hands of that august body, rather than be abandoned to the caprice of the multitude, the end which the Senate proposed . . . was good and laudable; though the means they employed were below their dignity.’22 Thousands of supporters of agrarian reform, together with Gaius, were murdered. Apparently forge ing the fates of Spurius Cassius, Spurius Maelius, and Manlius Capitolinus, Rollin thought that the senate used violence against the Gracchi for the first time, and thus ‘the Senate, on this occasion, degenerates in a strange manner from the mildness and wise condescension, that in former times had reflected so much honour upon it in civil discussions.’ Rollin’s conclusion was: ‘Though equity had been the motive of Tiberius in his scheme of the agrarian law, how shall we excuse his, and his brother’s inveteracy, for depressing the senate, which was the soul of the Commonwealth, and of depriving that august body of its valuable and legitimate rights.’23 Support for the senate as the soul or head of the Roman Republic was a common theme throughout the eighteenth century, although some opponents of the landed interest in

21 Ibid., 9: 6, 11–12, 14, 27–30. 22 Ibid., 61, 64. 23 Ibid., 3, 80. Rollin maintained that the senate remained a bastion of the pagan religion and was an implacable foe of Christianity during the reign of the emperors, but the Christian emperors Constantine and Theodosius halted the senate’s persecution of Christians (16: 130), and thus his enlightened readers may well have seen the senate as the soul of pagan Rome in an even more exalted light than Rollin.

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Britain and France were sceptical of the claims of Roman senators about the agrarian laws. History and Political Theory Catherine Volpilhac-Auger indicated that Thomas Gordon’s translation of Tacitus, translated in 1742 by P. Daudé into French, was central to les lumières, especially Diderot, D’Holbach, and Desmoulins, while Rousseau obtained his Tacitus from Algernon Sidney.24 History and political thought converged in eighteenth-century France. René-Louis de Voyer, Marquis d’Argenson’s Considérations sur le gouvernement de la France (wri en and circulated in the 1730s but published posthumously in 1764) used Roman examples to understand and reform government in France; the work received the highest of praise in Rousseau’s Du Contrat social. D’Argenson wrote: ‘Ignorant Rome vanquished the world; she became the Capital of the Universe; she provided the most heroic examples of virtue.’ According to D’Argenson, the English think they have drawn from the Romans its best features (mixed government – monarch/consuls; lords/senators; commons/people) and corrected its faults but, in reality, the English are like the commercial Carthaginians, who use mercenary and auxiliary armies and are venal in their politics. The spirit of war and commerce are opposed, and thus D’Argenson was confident that the real Romans of the eighteenth century would best their imperial rivals.25 D’Argenson proposed strong monarchical authority, coupled to more democratic assemblies than either the British parliament or the French Estates-General.26 Another proponent of la thèse royale was Voltaire, who le France a er an affray with his social superiors. Voltaire’s Le res écrites de Londres sur les Anglois, et autres sujets provided an alternative account of the fall of the Roman Republic than was provided by the genteel republicans, or followers of Machiavelli. With his customary clarity, Voltaire cut through the lengthy accounts of Catrou and Rouillé, Vertot and Rollin: ‘The senate of Rome that had the unjust and punishable pride in wanting to

24 Volpilhac-Auger, Tacite en France, 4–5, 41–2, 56–7, 232, 433, 528, 574. 25 René-Louis de Voyer, Marquis d’Argenson, Considérations sur le gouvernement de la France (Amsterdam: n.p., 1784), 20, 25–6, 38–40. ‘Rome ignorante a vaincu le Monde; elle est devenue la Capitale de l’Univers; elle a donné des examples héroique de vertu.’ 26 Ibid., 286–7, 292–5.

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share nothing with the plebeians, knew only how to extend the government in secret by occupying the plebs constantly in foreign wars; they regarded the people as a ferocious beast that one must unleash on their neighbours for fear of devouring their masters.’27 Claudine-Alexandrine Guérin, Marquise de Tencin, annually provided her favourite protégés at her salon with a pair of culo es. Michael Sonenscher has traced the fascinating story of those who did not receive Madame de Tencin’s favour (‘sans culo es’) throughout the eighteenth century and became the Greco-Romans (who wore no culo es) or heroic revolutionaries.28 Her salon established the superiority of Roman to Greek literature and politics. Madame de Tencin’s ami intime, Bernard Le Bouyer de Fontenelle, thought the Romans fared be er than the Greeks in the ba le of ancients and moderns, for the Romans were moderns to the Greeks and built on their achievements. Fontenelle thought that there was not just a cultural and linguistic continuity between Rome and France, but that, except in the

27 Voltaire, Le res écrites de Londres sur les Anglois, et autres sujets (Basle: n.p., 1734), 52. ‘Le Senat de Rome qui avoit l’injuste & punissable orgueil de ne vouloir rien partager avec les Plébéiens, ne connoissent d’autre secret pour les éloigner du gouvernement que de les occuper toujours dans les guerres étrangers, ils regardoient le peuple comme un beste feroce qu’il falloit lacher sur leur voisins de peur quelle ne devorât ses maitres.’ Monarchists, such as Giamba ista Vico, The New Science, trans. Thomas Goddard Bergin and Max Harold Frisch (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1968), 24, 54–7, 216, and Jean Louis de Lolme, The Constitution of England, ed. David Lieberman (Indianapolis: Liberty Press, 2007), 180–1, 188–9, 225, 233, 253, also blamed senatorial intransigence, rather than tribunal or popular ambition, for the breakdown of the Roman Republic into civil war. No republican, despite the common insistence on the necessity of agrarian laws to maintain republican virtue, wrote with such clarity about patrician-plebeian relationships. Even Machiavelli, who normally wrote with brutal clarity and without cant, merely suggested but did not affirm Voltaire’s view of the manipulation of the plebs by the senate. Adam Smith (Wealth of Nations, bk. 4, chap. 7) accepted Voltaire’s view of the imperialist dynamic of the Roman Republic. 28 Michael Sonenscher, Sans-Culo es: An Eighteenth-Century Emblem in the French Revolution (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008). Voltaire, although imprisoned with Mme de Tencin, never received her culo es, although he sought her support, via Émilie du Châtelet, to obtain entrance in the Académie Française. Mme de Tencin was imprisoned because one of her lovers, who commi ed suicide publicly, le documents implicating her in John Law’s Mississippi Scheme, while Voltaire was imprisoned for not accepting quietly flogging at the bequest of the chevalier de Rohan. Voltaire rather ca ily intimated that Mme de Tencin’s salon was an a empt to let her spirit shine as her beauty faded.

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field of tragedy, in every other field of literature and oratory, Romans were superior to Greeks.29 Mme de Tencin referred to another of her favourites, Charles-Louis de Secondat, baron de Montesquieu, as ‘my li le Roman.’30 Montesquieu indicated why the Athenian polis never achieved the grandeur of the Roman republic. The Athenians, like the Carthaginians, were too democratic; the people decided everything in their popular assemblies, whereas the Romans le policy in the hands of their senate. Montesquieu wrote: ‘The people are not at all appropriate for such discussions; this forms one of the great drawbacks of democracy.’31 While Montesquieu favored a maritime empire of trade to land-based empires of conquest, in Athens’s maritime empire, ‘the common people distributed the public revenues to themselves while the rich were oppressed.’32 The Roman Republic by contrast, enriched the public treasury and kept its citizens poor. Direct democracy, as distinct from representative government, was the fatal flaw of Athens and Carthage, which the Romans escaped because of the senate’s authority or right of initiative in foreign and domestic policy.33 Montesquieu’s Considérations sur les causes de la grandeur des Romains et de leur décadence (1734) indicated the necessity of social equality in republican regimes; a healthy republic is based on farmer-soldiers, but once soldiers were paid, corruption set in, the rich bought up the

29 Bernard Le Bouyer de Fontenelle, Une Digression sur les anciens et les modernes (1688), in Poesies Pastorales (La Haye: Gosse & Neaulme, 1728), 151–9. This preposterous judgment about the superiority of Roman to Greek philosophy, history, and poetry was common in eighteenth-century France (see Grell, Le Dix-Huitième Siècle et l’antiquité, 431–2); Anne-Louise-Germaine de Staël, De la Li érature [1799] (Genève: Droz, 1959), 10, 81, 91–9, 104–13, even eliminated Fontenelle’s exception of Greek tragedy from her catalogue of Rome’s superiority in all forms of literature. 30 Jean Sareil, Les Tencin (Genève: Libraire Droz, 1969), 395–6. 31 Charles de Secondat, baron de Montesquieu, The Spirit of the Laws, trans. Anne M. Cohler, Basia C. Miller, and Harold S. Stone (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 159; compare with his contrast between Rome and Carthage in his Considerations on the Causes of the Greatness of the Romans and Their Decline, ed. David Lowenthal (Indianapolis: Hacke , 1999), 45: ‘In Rome, governed by laws, the people allowed the senate to direct public affairs. In Carthage, governed by abuses, the people wanted to do everything themselves.’ 32 Montesquieu, Spirit of the Laws, 363. 33 Ibid., 159– 60; Montesquieu detested modern republics such as Holland, ‘le tyran le plus insolent que l’on puisse avoir,’ and generalized that ‘il n’y a rien de pis que la populace libre.’ Cited in Joseph Didier, Montesquieu et la tradition politique anglaise en France (Paris: Victor Lecoffre, 1909), 139– 40.

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conquered lands, and the plebeians were le landless.34 However, he thought efforts to implement the agrarian and Licinian laws were impractical and championed a wealthy senatorial class as authoritative policymakers for expanding or imperial republics.35 Rome’s decline was a ributable not to senatorial intransigence about implementing the agrarian laws but to tribunal ambition, coupled with popular hatred of senators, who were able to thwart the tribunes by various pretexts including ‘the creation of dictators, the occupations of a new war,’ but once the armies fought far from Rome, the people rallied behind popular champions, and ‘all the wisdom of the senate was useless and the republic was lost.’36 Montesquieu also unreflectively reproduced Vertot and Rollin’s view of the Romans as a people without commerce and the Punic Wars as a contest between wealth and virtue.37 In De l’esprit des lois (1748), Montesquieu again tied republicanism to equality38 but perceived an indispensable role for the senate in imperial policy.39 Like Harrington, and Machiavelli before him, Montesquieu had difficulty balancing his view that social equality is essential for republics and that a wealthy senatorial class is necessary to lead them. The abbés Gabriel Bonnot de Mably and Jean-Jacques Barthélemy, two of the most widely read authors of the eighteenth century, continued the tradition of deprecating democratic Athens while celebrating

34 Montesquieu, Considerations, 27, 39–41. 35 Ibid., 44–5, 67, 84–5, 91. 36 Ibid., 84–5, 91–2. 37 Ibid., 27, 44, 98–9. Plutarch’s Life of Cato the Censor should have informed Montesquieu, his predecessors and followers, that the Roman patricians were not innocent of sordid commercial transactions. Jean-François Melon’s A Political Essay on Commerce, trans. David Bindon (Dublin: T. Woodward, 1739), wri en between Considerations and Spirit of the Laws, and perhaps the source of Montesquieu’s view of ‘le doux commerce’ in the la er work, wrote (136): ‘Conquest without commerce will lead to the rapid fall of the Conquering States.’ Melon added (137) that it was accidental that the Romans bested the Carthaginians, and not, as Montesquieu thought, inherent in their form of government: ‘If the Frontiers of the Carthaginians, had been fortified . . . the Romans would have been no more to them, in the first Punick War, than a Gang of Bandi i.’ Modern scholarship indicates that Roman patricians by the second century .c. enriched themselves by commercial activities. See footnote 1 of chapter 3. 38 Montesquieu, Spirit of the Laws, xli, 436. 39 Ibid., 12–13, 159, 182, 510.

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the more aristocratic Roman and Spartan republics.40 In his Observations sur les Grecs (1749) and Observations sur l’histoire de la Grèce (1766), Mably deprecated Solon for liberating the Athenian people from the authority of the Areopagus, from laws and magistrates,41 and Pericles multiplied the vices of Athens; the popular passion for philosophy and the fine arts led Athenians to bestow greater esteem on philosophers and tragedians than on generals and magistrates.42 Mably declaimed against Athenian democracy: ‘Was it not to confer an all-powerful magistracy on an ignorant and flighty multitude, always envious of the fortune of the rich, always a dupe of some schemer, and always ruled by the most turbulent citizens or those most adept at fla ering their vices? Was it not, under the name of democracy, to establish total anarchy? . . . It soon became necessary to oppose the authority of popular judgments to the authority of the laws, and the door was opened to all possible abuses.’43 Barthélemy’s Voyage du jeune Anacharsis en Grèce blamed Athenian anarchy on Pericles, who eliminated the checks Solon wisely placed on ‘a light and ignorant multitude that forgets its own deliberations and determinations’; indeed, ‘an ignorant and furious populace’ replaced the Areopagus and aristocratic senate with popular courts, a council selected by lot, and cultivating a taste for luxury and the arts. Barthélemy deprecated not only Athenian politics but also philosophy. Plato was not animated by a love of wisdom, but, rather, ‘the love

40 I include Barthélemy with Bonnot de Mably because he began his Voyage du jeune Anacharsis en Grèce in 1757, contemporaneous with Mably’s central works, although Barthélemy’s work was not published until 1787. Mably wrote that Rome was a successful imperial republic and Sparta a long-lived egalitarian and anti-imperial republic. Johnson Kent Wright, A Classical Republican in Eighteenth-Century France: The Political Thought of Mably (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997), 46, wrote that Mably’s ‘preference for the Spartan renunciation of empire is unmistakable.’ I think Mably was more shaded in his judgments between Rome and Sparta, but he clearly preferred both to Athens. 41 Gabriel Bonnot de Mably, Observations sur l’histoire de la Grèce, in Oeuvres complètes de l’abbé de Mably (Paris: Volland, 1790), t. 4, 53; Observations on the Greeks (London: Lynn, 1776), 78. 42 Mably, Observations sur l’histoire de la Grèce, 65; Observations on the Greeks, 102. 43 Mably, Observations sur l’histoire de la Grèce, 54: ‘N’étoit-ce pas conférer une magistrature toute-puisante à une multitude ignorante, volage, jalouse de la fortune des riches, toujours dupe de quelqu’intrigant, et toujours gouvernée par les citoyens les plus inquiets ou les plus adroits à fla er ses vices? N’étoit – ce pas, sous le nom de la démocratie, établir une véritable anarchie? . . . À l’autorité des loix, on devoit bientôt opposer l’autorité des jugemens du peuple; et la porte étoit ouverte à tous les abus.’

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of glory or celebrity seemed to me to be his first, or rather his only passion.’44 Mably’s early work, Parallèle des Romains et des Français, par rapport au gouvernement (1740) aimed to find the causes of the internal tranquility of states and also the causes that make them awesome (redoutable) to other states.45 Following Montesquieu’s Considérations, Mably thought that the Roman Republic, a er subjugating the world, collapsed into monarchy. Caesar carried on republican imperialism ‘not only for the glory and security of Romans, but even for the general happiness of humans.’ Johnson Kent Wright argued that, in his Entretiens de Phocion (1763), Mably continued his deprecation of Athens but called for a defensive love of country so that patriotic virtue does not conflict with the love of humanity.46 Nevertheless, in Parallèle des Romains et des Français and Observations sur les Romains (1751), Mably associated Rome with grandeur, with France, and with imperial civilizing missions.47 Greek colonies were useless to the mother country, whereas Roman provinces helped Rome as she ‘marched to universal monarchy.’48 Mably was emphatic that equality is the ‘only solid foundation of liberty.’49 He thought Rome more egalitarian during the early kings, when plebeians had authority in the comitia curiata than a er Servius Tullius introduced the comitia centuriata, and Rome became more oligarchic in the early days of the republic with the unfe ered rule of the consuls and senate, until the tribunes were introduced to check patrician power. When the tribunes succeeded in assembling people in the comitia tribunata, they ‘changed the whole form of government; for a er the people had again taken possession of that sovereignty, Rome began to exhibit the pa ern of a perfect commonwealth.’50 Rome and Sparta

44 Jean-Jacques Barthélemy, Voyage du jeune Anacharsis en Grèce, in Oeuvres complètes (Paris: A. Belin, 1821–2), t. 1, 100, 107–9, 125–6, 188–9. 45 Gabriel Bonnot de Mably, Parallèle des Romains et des Français, par rapport au gouvernement (Paris: Didot, 1740), viii. When Mably referred to the imperialism of the republic and of Caesar –’pas seulement pour la gloire et la sûreté des romains, mais même pour le bonheur général des hommes’ – he suggested that French expansion would benefit not only France but also humanity. 46 Johnson Kent Wright, ‘Conversations with Phocion: The Political Thought of Mably,’ History of Political Thought, 13 (1992): 403–4. 47 Gabriel Bonnot de Mably, Observations on the Romans (London: n.p., 1751), 122. 48 Mably, Observations sur l’histoire de la Grèce, 12, 203. 49 Mably, Observations on the Romans, 4; Mably, Parallèle des Romains et des Français, 53. 50 Mably, Observations on the Romans, 18.

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were Mably’s ideal regimes because they were based on poverty and civic equality. Sparta seemed to be superior to Rome, as Johnson Kent Wright asserts, because it did not have imperial ambitions. Spartans, Mably wrote, ‘neither wanted to acquire great riches nor make themselves formidable by their exploits; they only aspired to an obscure happiness, probably the only kind for which humans were made.’51 On the other hand, Mably noted with respect to the Romans: ‘There is no nation [peuple], whatever moderation it affects, but has an inclination to extend its territories, and subdue its neighbours; for nothing flatters [ fla e plus agréablement] every passion of the human heart so much as conquests.’52 Mably may have been lamenting original sin, rather than endorsing the Machiavellian preference for expanding republics (Rome) over conservative republics (Sparta, Venice). However, I think it more of an open question whether Mably thought we should pursue the obscure happiness for which we are made, as his Spartans did, or the glorious imperialism of the Romans that fla ers most agreeably every human passion. The odd, but all too common, feature of Mably’s egalitarianism is that he supported the Roman senate’s murder of proponents of the agrarian laws from Spurius Cassius to the Gracchi.53 To be sure, he followed Montesquieu in distinguishing a new nobility of wealth from the old patricians of the senate. The Roman nobles ‘owed their origin to corruption, and whose grandeur . . . had been acquired by stealth, were, in order to protect their pretended rights, obliged to make use of force, instead of a just title. Hence it was, that they acted with such violence, that the senate, notwithstanding their opposition to the demands of the people, appeared only to perform the office of mediators between the Patricians and the tribunes.’ Mably’s beloved senate, in this account, was absolved of directing the murders of the proponents of agrarian reform by casting them in the role of ineffective mediators in the clash of the orders. Tiberius Gracchus had ‘the rash design of seizing the estates of the rich.’ He must have been ‘blind as not to perceive, that the rich would sooner see the state go to wreck, than be deprived of their riches.’ His brother

51 Mably, Observations sur l’histoire de la Grèce, 188. Les Spartiates ‘ne vouloient ni acquérir de grandes richesses, ni se rendre redoutables par leur exploits; ils n’aspiroient qu’à un bonheur obscur, le seul vraisemblablement pour lequel les hommes soient faits.’ 52 Mably, Observations on the Romans, 123. 53 Ibid., 14, 44.

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Gaius ‘continued to act the dangerous part of protector of the people; but being accounted only a disturber of public tranquility, it was not difficult to overpower him.’54 It would appear that, for Mably, equality is an ideal but is not one for which one should disturb the public tranquillity. Mably wrote to Marie Charlo e Saladin on 11 January 1765 saying that Rousseau was a Deist, not a Christian, and was a conspirator intent on destroying his native city, which had banished him for infidelity. Mably asked rhetorically: ‘Is he a Gracchus?’ When Rousseau got access to Mably’s le er, he wrote to his formerly warm acquaintance, asking Mably if he were indeed the author of the le er. Mably responded that he sympathized with Rousseau’s misfortunes and compared his trials to those of Socrates but then added ‘but allow me to tell you that Socrates did not excite sedition at Athens in order to revenge himself on his judges.’55 Rousseau shared Mably’s ranking of Rome and Sparta above Athens. Rousseau wrote to Archbishop Beaumont that ‘Sparta and Rome . . . were prodigies of the moral kind.’56 In his Ninth Letter from the Mountain, Rousseau berated his Genevan compatriots for being self-interested bourgeois, not publicly spirited citizens: ‘You are not Romans, nor Spartans; you are not even Athenians.’57 Indeed, it was partly Rousseau’s admiration for the pagan Spartans and Romans in chapter eight of book four of Du Contrat social, the chapter that both Catholics and Calvinists found heretical, that got him into trouble in France and Geneva; Rousseau juxtaposed the cross and the eagle: ‘Suppose your Christian republic is face to face with Sparta or Rome. The pious Christians will be beaten, crushed and destroyed before they realize where they are, or else they will owe their safety only to the scorn their enemies will conceive for them.’ Rousseau also shared Mably’s social egalitarianism but followed Machiavelli’s respect for the Roman

54 Ibid., 44, 48. 55 Correspondance complète de Jean Jacques Rousseau, ed. R.A. Leigh (Banbury: Voltaire Foundation, 1975), [le ers no. 3867 and 4014] 87, ‘Est-ce un Gracchus?’ 355, ‘mais, perme ez moi de vous le dire, pour se venger de ses juges, Socrate ne tenta pas d’exciter une sédition à Athènes.’ 56 The Collected Writings of Rousseau, ed. Christopher Kelly and Eve Grace (Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 2001), vol. 9: 68. 57 Ibid., 292.

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senate58 and disrespect for the Gracchi. In his Plan for a Constitution for Corsica, Rousseau wrote: The Romans saw the necessity of agrarian laws when it was no longer time to establish them, and, for lack of a distinction I have just made, they finally destroyed the Republic by a means that ought to have preserved it: the Gracchi wanted to deprive the Patricians of their lands; it would have been necessary to prevent them from acquiring them. It is true that a erwards these same Patricians acquired more in spite of the law, but this is because the evil was deep-rooted when it passed and it was too late to remedy it.59

In his Considerations on the Government of Poland and on Its Planned Reformation, Rousseau looked to the Romans and Spartans for examples of patriotic virtue. Rousseau thought that ‘it is necessary to seize the occasion of the present event to raise souls to the pitch of ancient souls.’ The heroic souls of the ancients seem to us ‘as exaggerations of history.’ Cultivating patriotism ‘is the art of ennobling souls’ and ancient founders, such as Moses, Lycurgus and Numa, ‘knew how to raise up souls and inflame them at need with a truly heroic zeal.’60 In Discourse on Political Economy, Rousseau declared that the love of one’s patrie was the source of all virtue.61 In his Plan for a Constitution for Corsica, Rousseau asserted that ‘the best motive force of a government is love of la patrie and this love is cultivated along with the fields.’62 Rousseau was by no means alone in linking agriculture with love of la patrie, as John Shovlin has demonstrated.63 58 Rousseau followed Harrington in advocating aristocratic government (SC, III.5, IV.2) and popular sovereignty; the people need a wise senate to propose laws for the people to accept or reject without deliberating; the power of the people to propose new laws ‘finally ruined Athens.’ See Jean-Jacques Rousseau, The Basic Political Writings, trans. Donald A. Cress (Indianapolis: Hacke , 1987), 28. 59 The Collected Writings of Rousseau, ed. Christopher Kelly (Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 2005), vol. 11: 153. 60 Ibid., 171, 175–6, 205. 61 Rousseau, Basic Political Writings, 122–3. 62 Collected Writings of Rousseau, 11: 153. 63 John Shovlin, The Political Economy of Virtue: Luxury, Patriotism and the Origins of the French Revolution (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2006), chaps. 2–3, cites a number of Rousseau’s contemporaries who thought Roman patriotism and agriculture declined together and recommended an agrarian economy as best suited to promote patriotic virtue.

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Rousseau shared Mably’s admiration for Sparta as well as Rome,64 but Book 4 of The Social Contract championed Roman political practices, and even in chapter 8, where Rousseau praised both the martial spirit of Spartans and Romans, he seemed to favour Roman conquest: ‘The oath taken by the soldiers of Fabius was a noble one; they did not swear to die or to conquer; they swore to return as victors and kept their oath.’ Rousseau and Mably may have been the most anti-imperialist of eighteenth-century French writers,65 but their emphasis on patriotic virtue made it difficult for their contemporaries to distinguish defensive patriotism from offensive nationalism. The best defence against the Carthaginian/English might be a good offence. To be sure, patriotism was linked to commerce as well as to agriculture. Jean-François Melon’s A Political Essay on Commerce and Montesquieu’s Spirit of the Laws championed empires of trade, as distinct from empires of conquest. Melon highlighted Colbert’s ‘wonderful improvement of the Navy; for creating of trading companies; for the Encouragement of Colonies; for the many excellent Ordinances made in Relation to foreign and domestic trade . . . laid a more solid Foundation for the future Grandeur of the French Nation, than could be framed by all the military Atchievements of their Monarch.’66 However, Melon’s distinction between Louis XIV the conqueror and Colbert the trader became less clear when he insisted that, when nations have competing commodities, military power, by ‘the natural and primitive Right of Nations,’ is essential to establish pa erns of trade beneficial to the dominant nation,67 and that subduing savage nations, and importing 64 Norman Hampson, ‘The Heavenly City of the French Revolutionaries,’ in Rewriting the French Revolution, ed. Colin Lucas (Oxford: Clarendon, 1991), 50, wrote that ‘Rousseau’s political significance only became significant a er 1789. It was scarcely visible in the pre-revolutionary “Roman” posturing that came naturally to a classically-educated society. In a rough and ready way, one can say that all opponents of the monarchy adopted Roman poses, whereas Rousseau was more concerned with the kind of transformation of society that he believed to have occurred in Sparta. Parlementaires had fancied themselves to be patricians and talked about the patrie instead of the royaume. The diarist Barbier described them admiringly as véritables Romains. Voltaire glorified Brutus and Montesquieu had himself painted in a toga.’ 65 Wright, A Classical Republican in Eighteenth-Century France, 46; Edmond Dziembowski, Un Nouveau Patriotisme français, 1750–1770: La France face à la puissance anglaise à l’époque de la guerre de Sept Ans (Oxford: Voltaire Foundation, 1998), 253. 66 Melon, Political Essay on Commerce, iv. 67 Ibid., 2–3.

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slave labour, are integral to empires of trade: ‘Colonies are necessary to the Nation, and Slaves to the Colonies.’68 Montesquieu followed Melon in distinguishing empires of trade from empires of conquest69 but supported England’s having ‘crushed’ Ireland’s wool trade ‘by the right of nations’70 and thought slave labour necessary for the ‘admirable’ French colonies in the Antilles.71 Jean d’Alembert subscribed to Montesquieu’s view that slavery is necessary in warm climates.72 Moreover, the entry colonie in Diderot and D’Alembert’s Encyclopédie distinguishes kinds of colonies; the fi h are commercial colonies ‘that enrich the metropole.’ From the fact that colonies serve to enrich the metropole, it follows that commerce must be exclusive and the metropole must provide military protection to sustain its monopoly of trade in the colony. Moreover, with the discovery of America, ‘it was necessary to conquer lands, and chase away the old inhabitants of them in order to transport there new se lers.’73 One of the most emphatic arguments for the virtues of patriotism was made by Abbé Gabriel François Coyer in his Dissertation sur le vieux mot DE PATRIE. Coyer asserted that no one understood the word patrie and wondered if there were something base or harsh (dur) that accounts for its elimination from the French language.74 Coyer was certainly exaggerating, although Voltaire’s Dictionnaire philosophique (1765),

68 Ibid., 82. 69 Montesquieu, Spirit of the Laws, 328, 391. 70 Ibid., 329. 71 Ibid., 251, 392. J. Saintoyant, La Colonisation française sous l’ancien régime (du Xe siècle à 1789) (Paris: La Renaissance du Livre, 1929), t. 2, 428–30, pointed out that, following John Law’s Mississippi scheme, Montesquieu, in his Persian Le ers, thought colonies weakened the mother country but changed his mind as a result of the prosperity brought to France from the Antilles. Catherine Larrère, ‘Montesquieu and Liberalism: The Question of Pluralism,’ in Montesquieu and His Legacy, ed. R.E. Kingston (Albany: SUNY Press, 2009), 290, discusses the tension between Montesquieu’s distaste for slavery with his recognition that in hot climates men will not work unless forced to do so. 72 See Jean d’Alembert’s introduction to Charles de Secondat, Baron de Montesquieu, The Spirit of the Laws (with D’Alembert’s Analysis), trans. Thomas Nugent and J.V. Prichard (London: G. Bell and Sons, 1914), xxxv–xxxvi. 73 Encylopédie, ou Dictionnaire raisonné des sciences, des arts et des métiers (Neufchastel: Samuel Faulche, 1765), t. 3, 649–50: ‘Il étoit nécessaire de conquérir les terres, & d’en chasser les anciens habitans, pour y en transporter de nouveaux.’ 74 Gabriel François Coyer, Bagatelles morales et dissertations (London: Knoch and Eslinger, 1755), 204.

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under patrie, debunked the notion, asserting that patriotism is merely extended amour-propre, that selfish men claim that love of country drove them to fulfil their ambitions, and that a good patriot is one who aims to ruin his neighbours, as Cato did.75 Coyer asserted that soldiers say they serve the king, rather than serving the patrie. Colbert was entirely mistaken when he believed that ‘Royaume & Patrie signify the same thing.’ Thus, Coyer noted, everyone today speaks of ‘the realm, the state, France, and never the patrie’ (le Royaume, l’État, la France, & jamais la Patrie), although Montesquieu ‘was animated by the patriotic fire that heated [echauffa] Rome and Athens.’76 The Romans, who conquered the world ‘by their victories and their virtues,’ held that royaume signified ‘a tyrant and slaves.’ One’s country of birth does not have the emotional warmth of one’s patrie; certainly the Gracchi (who gave their lives for the ‘bonheur du peuple’) or Scipio would not have considered the Rome of Caligula their patrie.77 ‘Brutus, it is true, beheaded his sons, but this action only seemed unnatural to weak souls; without

75 Voltaire, Dictionnaire philosophique, ou la raison par alphabet (Londres [Genève?], 1770), t. 2, 75–8. Voltaire’s entry, patrie, concluded: ‘Il est triste que souvent pour être bon patriote on soit l’ennemi du reste des hommes. L’ancien Caton, ce bon citoyen, disait toûjours en opinant au Sénat, Tel est mon avis, & qu’on ruine Carthage. Etre bon patriote, c’est souhaiter que sa ville s’enrichisse par le commerce, & soit puissante par les armes. Il est clair qu’un pays ne peut gagner sans qu’un autre perde, & qu’il ne peut vaincre sans faire des malhereux.  Telle est donc la condition humaine, que souhaiter la grandeur de son pays c’est souhaiter du mal à ses voisins. Celui qui voudrait que sa patrie ne fût jamais ni plus grande, ni plus petite, ni plus riche, ni plus pauvre, serait le citoyen de l’univers.’  Despite his pokes at the idea of patrie, Voltaire got himself into the Académie Française by writing a jingoistic poem on the ba le of Fontenoy in which the French claimed victory against the English, despite the much higher casualties on the French side. Although a monarchist, he emulated the success of Addison’s Cato by writing a tragedy, Le Brutus de M. de Voltaire (1731), which begins with the founder of the Roman Republic declaiming, ‘Destructeurs des Tirans, vous qui n’avez pour Rois / Que les Dieux de Numa, vos Vertus, & nos Loix,’ and which explored, through Brutus’s son Titus, the conflict between the love of country and the love of a woman who led him to betray patria and republican liberty. Voltaire deprecated Roman conquests in Le ers Concerning the English Nation (1733) but, in A Treatise on Religious Toleration (1764), celebrated Roman conquests as governing and civilizing subject peoples but not changing their religions. 76 Coyer, Bagatelles, 207–8, 224. 77 Ibid., 208, 219.

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the death of the two traitors, the patrie would have died in its cradle.’78 The Chevalier de Jaucourt borrowed heavily from Coyer in his entry Patrie in L’Encylopédie, while removing Coyer’s bold declaration that a Patrie cannot exist within a Royaume. Jaucourt wrote: ‘The Greeks and Romans knew nothing as lovable and sacred as the patrie.’ The youth who thought it beautiful and fi ing to die for one’s patrie, the Spartan women who overcame their grief for the loss of sons and husbands were animated by patriotic fervour, and ‘Brutus, in order to preserve his patrie, beheaded his sons, and this action only seemed unnatural to weak souls. Without the death of these two traitors, Brutus’s patrie would have died in its cradle.’79 For the Christian, God so loved the world that he sacrificed his only son to save it; for the patriote, Brutus sacrificed both his sons for his patrie. Jacques Bouineau’s observation about the French revolutionaries was also valid for les lumières: ‘La Patrie is to the political theory of revolutionaries what Jesus Christ is to God for Christians; the visible and bodily part of a transcendent principle.’80 Abbé Coyer aimed to press French nobles into the service of la patrie by engaging them in commerce. The prejudice against commerce, to which even Montesquieu was prey, derived from the Romans, who classified commerce as servile and shameful.81 Coyer argued that the Italian, Danish, Dutch, and English nobility engage in commerce, while the German, Polish, and French nobility think it beneath them. ‘Let us leave this usage to Poland and Barbarians.’82 Anticipating one objection, Coyer insisted that the interests of agriculture and commerce 78 Ibid., 209: ‘Brutus, il est vrai, fit couper la tête à ses fils; mais ce e action ne paroit dénaturée qu’aux ames foibles; sans la mort des deux traîtres, la patrie expiroit au berceau.’ 79 Encylopédie, t. 12, 178–9: ‘Les Grecs & les Romains ne connoissent rien de si aimable & de si sacré que la patrie.’ ‘Brutus, pour conserver sa patrie, fit couper la tête à ses fils, & ce e action ne paroitra dénaturée qu’aux ames foibles. Sans la mort des deux traîtres, la patrie de Brutus expiroit au berceau.’ 80 Jacques Bouineau, Les Toges du pouvoir ou la révolution de la droit antiques 1789–1799 (Toulouse: Association des Publications de l’Université de Toulouse-le-Mirail et Éditions Eché, 1986), 147: ‘La Patrie est à la théorie politique des révolutionaires ce que Jésus-Christ est à Dieu pour les chrétiens: la partie visible et incarnée d’un principe transendant.’ 81 Gabriel François Coyer, La Noblesse commerçante (Londres: Duchesne, 1756), 114, 118, 125. Coyer cited Montesquieu’s assertion that commerce would destroy the French nobility but emphasized that Montesquieu did not say that commerce would dishonour the nobility. 82 Ibid., 129, 169.

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belong together. Before Henry VIII, England had to import grain; a er Cromwell, England exported grain. Cromwell’s eyes ‘were fixed on commerce as on the tree of life, showing it in all the branches of the sea and on earth. Nobles and commons, all a ached themselves to it’ and thus, like Holland, increased in power relative to France.83 Coyer’s commercial nobility would also have a vital military role: ‘We have need of our Scipios since there are Carthaginians.’ But France should become a nation that trades like Carthaginians and thinks like conquering Romans.84 If the French nobility took up commerce, they would become richer, have more children, give their wives a decent standard of living, and educate their sons properly. Coyer reminded the nobility that ‘the patrie waits for your services’ and recommended: ‘Become by commerce tutelary gods for your wives and children. Become for the Patrie those who nurse and cherish lands, the life of arts, the prop of population, the support of our navy, the soul of our colonies, the nerve of the state, and the instruments of public fortune.’85 Responding to Coyer, Philippe-Auguste de Sainte-Foix, chevalier d’Arcq’s La Noblesse militaire, ou le patriote français (1756), asserted that Carthage had coffers filled with gold but no soldiers.86 Edmond Dziembowski observed that the apogee of French patriotism was reached during the Seven Years’ War and took the form of Rome/France versus Carthage/England, in part in reaction to the perceived ethos of cosmopolitanism and self-interest of les philosophes.87 Charles-Pierre Colardeau’s poem, Le Patriotisme, declared: ‘Rome n’a point tremblé au succès de Carthage.’ A host of prose writers also equated perfidious Albion with Carthage and the patriotic Romans with the French. Dziembowski wrote: ‘Observers draped themselves well in Cato’s toga to predict the destruction of the new avatar of the ancient city. Vivant de Mésargues, Maubert de Gouvest, Damiens de Gomicourt, Lefevre de Beauvray, Basset de La Marelle, l’abbé Millot, all were unanimous: 83 Ibid., 61–5. 84 Ibid., 27, 107. 85 Ibid., 214–15: ‘Devenez par le Commerce des dieux tutélaires pour vos femmes & vos enfans. Devenez pour la Patrie les nourriciers des terres, la vie des Arts, le soutien de la population, l’appui de notre Marine, l’âme de nos Colonies, le nerf de l’État, les instrumens de la fortune publique.’ 86 Dziembowski, Un Nouveau Patriotisme français, 109–10. 87 Ibid., 127, refers to Palissot’s Les Philosophes (1760), and 332–3 to Rousseau’s Discourses, Social Contract, and Emile, which a ack the elite cosmopolitanism and self-interest of Voltaire, Helvétius, and D’Holbach’s coterie.

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the rivalry between France and England appeared as the repetition of the war between the two great powers of antiquity.’88 Although comparisons of England and Carthage continued a er the Seven Years’ War, there came a recognition that the Carthaginian English could fight. Voltaire, in his Discours aux Welches (1764), told his compatriots: ‘try to imitate them – if you can.’89 A decade later, Abbé Galiani agreed with Coyer that the commercial spirit does not undermine martial virtue. England ‘is at the same time farmer, manufacturer, soldier and merchant.’ Galiani asserted: ‘England has no need of fortresses. Its ramparts are its ships, and its armed forces sailors.’90 Abbé Raynal’s patron, the Duc de Choiseul, commissioned him to write École militaire (1762) to promote patriotic sentiments. Raynal envisaged writing as a government publicist a history of the wars between France and England before he turned to the subject of the commerce with the two Indies.91 Guillaume-Thomas Raynal’s Histoire philosophique et politique des établissements & du commerce des Européens dans les deux Indes (1770) with additions by Denis Diderot in 1780 indicated that France could beat her imperial rival by imitating her. Raynal and Diderot’s Histoire des deux Indes has wrongly been taken to be antiimperialist in doctrine.92 To be sure, Raynal castigated Spain’s and Portugal’s empires of conquest, criticizing the cruelty in conquering, decimating, and exploiting the subjugated peoples, and in introducing slaves to replace the labour of the murdered native populations. However, Raynal accepted Montesquieu’s justification of slavery and its place in the French colonies in the Antilles.93 Raynal and Diderot 88 Ibid., 245: ‘Bien des observateurs se drapent dans la toge de Caton pour prédire la destruction du nouvel avatar de l’antique cité. Vivant de Mésargues, Maubert de Gouvest, Damiens de Gomicourt, Lefevre de Beauvray, Basset de La Marelle, l’abbé Millot, tous sont unanimes: la rivalité entre la France et l’Angleterre apparaît comme la répétition de la lu e entre les deux grandes puissances de l’Antiquité.’ 89 Voltaire’s ‘tâchez de l’imiter, si vous pouvez’ cited in Dziembowski, Un Nouveau Patriotisme français, 262. 90 Fernando Galiani, Dialogues sur le commerce des bleds, ed. Philip Koch (Frankfurt: Klostermann, 1968), 95–6: L’Angleterre ‘est a la fois Agricole, Manufacturier, Guerrier, Commercant.’ ‘L’Angleterre n’a point de forteresses. Ses murailles sont ses vaisseaux, et sa troupe les matelots.’ 91 Dziembowski, Un Nouveau Patriotisme français, 451–2. 92 See Sankar Muthu, Enlightenment against Empire (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003). 93 GuillaumeThomas Raynal, Essai sur l’administration de St. Dominique [1785] (Port-auPrince: De l’imprimerie de Mozard, 1790), viii–ix.

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wanted an empire of trade like England’s or, more specifically, to end England’s dominance over the waves. Britain had defeated the French navy in the Seven Years’ War (1756– 63) but France rebuilt its navy in the 1770s to more than hold its own against the British in the American War of Independence.94 Raynal wrote: ‘Philosophers of all nations, friends of mankind, forgive a French writer if at this period he urges his countrymen to build ships. His only view is to promote the tranquility of the earth, by wishing to see that equilibrium established in the common of the seas, which now preserves the security of the continent.’95 Raynal wished to establish a French empire of trade, which, like the British and Roman empires, may be mutually beneficial to both conquerors and conquered. The French will have to learn from the English. ‘It is in the merchant service that a nation learns to be formidable at sea. All sailors are naturally soldiers . . . A military marine can only be trained up at sea. The trading navy is the school, and commerce is the nursery and support of it.’ Raynal both distinguished empires of conquest and empires of trade, and also collapsed that distinction. He wrote: ‘By commerce, the conquering people necessarily introduced industry into the country, which they would not have conquered if it had been there already, or which they would not keep if they had brought it along with them. Upon these principles England hath founded her commerce and her empire, and mutually extended one by the other.’96 Raynal proclaimed the civilizing mission of commerce: ‘The commercial states have civilized all others.’97 Diderot added the following paean to the civilizing mission of commerce: ‘There, finally, seeing at my feet these beautiful countries where the sciences and arts flourish where once barbarism had so long kept in the shade, I ask myself: who is it who dug these canals? Who drained these plains? Who built these cities? Who gathered together, dressed and civilized these peoples? And then the voices of all enlightened men among them answered: It is commerce, it is commerce.’98 94 James C. Riley, The Seven Years War the Old Regime in France: The Economic and Financial Toll (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1986), 80–1. 95 Guillaume-Thomas Raynal, A Philosophical and Political History of the Se lements and Trade of the Europeans in the East and West Indies, trans. J. Justamond (London: T. Cadell, 1776), vol. 4: 412. 96 Ibid., 3: 556; 4: 470. 97 Ibid., 1: 2. 98 Raynal and Diderot, Histoire philosophique et politique des établissements & du commerce des Européens dans les deux Indes (Genève: Pellet, 1780), 3: ‘C’est-là enfin que, voyant à

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Despite Raynal and Diderot’s celebration of commerce, the English are mere Carthaginians. ‘Their ambition is gain, as that of the Romans was empire. They do not properly seek to extend their dominions, but their colonies. Commerce is the sole object of the wars they are engaged in, and the desire of engrossing it all to themselves, has made them perform many great actions, and commit the most flagrant acts of injustice.’ Rome was ‘the most extensive and civilized empire of the universe.’ However, ‘the Roman empire was not sufficiently durable . . . to improve the industry of the Britons.’99 The new Romans are the French, although they will have to learn from the English the principles of colonial self-government. With an expanded navy and merchant marine, France will be able to impose a lingua franca on the world. ‘The French language holds the superiority in prose; if it is not the Language of the Gods, it is, at least, that of reason and truth.’ As befits a man of le ers, Raynal asserted: ‘Literature has formed a kind of empire which prepares the way for making Europe to be considered as one single republican power.’100 J.G.A. Pocock correctly described Histoire des deux Indes as a ‘powerful, visionary but ultimately incoherent history.’101 History and philosophy, to be coherent, are retrospective, but the strength of Raynal’s and Diderot’s efforts was prospective. In astonishingly good advice to their compatriots, they advise the French (and the Spanish) not to assist the Americans in obtaining independence from Britain, for an independent America will devour French and Spanish possessions in the Americas.102 In addition to America becoming a more effective imperial centre against France and Spain, independence will not be advantageous to America and will set back the abolitionist movement.103 The costs of France’s liberation of America from British colonial

    mes pieds ces belles contrées où fleurissent les sciences & les arts, & que les ténèbres de la barbarie avoient si long-tems occupées, je me suis demandé: qui est-ce qui a cruisé ces canaux? qui est-ce qui a desséché ces plaines? qui est-ce qui a fondé ces villes? qui est-ce qui a rassemblé, vête, civilisé ces peuples? & qu’alors toutes les voix des hommes éclairés qui font parmi elles m’ont répondu: c’est le commerce, c’est le commerce.’  99 Raynal, Philosophical and Political History, 3: 78; 5: 468; 1: 303. 100 Ibid., 5: 577, 592. 101 J.G.A. Pocock, Barbarism, Savages and Empires, vol. 4 of Barbarism and Religion (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 328. 102 Ibid., 5: 395–6. 103 Ibid., 345–7, 392–4; Christopher Leslie Brown, Moral Capital: Foundations of British Abolitionism (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006), discusses the

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rule did not just have the anticipated effects that Raynal foresaw but also created the fiscal crisis that precipitated the French Revolution. Patriotism was to be the centripetal force holding in the centrifugal forces unleashed by the French Revolution. The veneration of la patrie had been nurtured by the imperialist wars of the eighteenth century and by writers’ reflections upon the most appropriate way to put the Carthaginian/English in their proper place. Rome was celebrated by monarchists for its successful imperialism and by republicans as the model of an imperial republic.

complicated ways in which the driving forces of the abolitionist movement passed from America to England a er the American War of Independence.

7 The Role of Brutus in the French Revolution

Illiberal Republicanism and the Agrarian Law in the French Revolution Daniel Mornet wrote that, a er the American Revolution, the French became hostile to the British form of government.1 To be sure, in the nineteenth century, liberal anglophiles, such as Germaine de Staël and Benjamin Constant, were politically opposed to republican anglophobes,2 but eighteenth-century anglophiles who arguably could be called liberals, such as Voltaire and Montesquieu, and French patriots, such as Abbés Coyer and Raynal, who wished to emulate British commercial and naval supremacy in order to best their rivals, were highly regarded during the French Revolution. It might be tempting to follow Dominique-Joseph Garat and separate the French revolutionaries into moderates, such as Garat, who followed Locke and Montesquieu, and radicals, such as Maximilien Robespierre, who were allegedly inspired by Rousseau.3 However, some of the leading republican firebrands of the revolution, such as Jean-Paul Marat, Louis-Antoine Saint-Just, Maximilien Robespierre, and Camille Desmoulins, admired Voltaire

1 Daniel Mornet, Les Origines intellectuelles de la Révolution Française (1715–1787) (Paris: A. Colin, 1954), 399. 2 Roger Henry Soltau, French Political Thought in the 19th Century (New York: Russell and Russell, 1959), xxiv–xxv, 35, 93–128. 3 Dominique-Joseph Garat, Mémoires sur la Révolution, ou Exposé de ma conduite dans les affaires et dans les fonctions publiques (Paris: J.J. Smits, 1795), 50, 210, 215.

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and Montesquieu,4 and thus the bifurcation of liberal constitutionalism and republican egalitarianism was not apparent at the outset of the French Revolution. Indeed, none of the French revolutionaries sounded as inflammatory in 1790 as Edmund Burke, who described the ancien régime as ‘nothing be er than painted and gilded tyranny; in religion, an hard stern intolerance, the fit companion and auxiliary to the despotic tyranny which prevailed in its government.’5 In Esprit de la Révolution et de la Constitution de France (1791), SaintJust advocated a mixed constitution and denounced a pure democracy as ‘excessive [outrée] liberty’; the French Revolution will be unlike the English Civil War because it aims at ‘moderated liberty’ and ‘equality of rights,’ not a violent class war between the aristocracy and commons.6 Responding to the violence a er the storming of the Bastille when the crowd carried the heads of slain officials triumphantly on pikestaffs, Saint-Just declared: ‘Let revolutionists be Romans, not Tartars.’7 By contrast, in reaction to the same events, Madame de Roland thought violence directed against the aristocracy essential to the success of the French Revolution; she wrote to her friend Louis Bosc D’Antic in July

4 Albert Soboul, ‘L’Audience des lumières sous la révolution: Jean-Jacques Rousseau et les classes populaires,’ in Utopie et institutions au XVIIIe siècle: le pragmatisme des lumières, ed. Pierre Francastel (Paris: Mouton, 1963), 290; Monique Ipotesi, Saint-Just et l’antiquité (Paris: Nizet, 1984), 47–9; Jacques Bouineau, Les Toges du pouvoir ou la révolution de la droit antique 1789–1799 (Toulouse: Association des Publications de l’Université de Toulouse-le Mirail et Éditions Eché, 1986), 182; Norman Hampson, Saint-Just (Oxford: Blackwell, 1991), 43; Jean Matrat, Robespierre ou la tyrannie de la majorité (Paris: Hache e, 1971), 17; Ruth Scurr, Fatal Purity: Robespierre and the French Revolution (London: Cha o and Windus, 2006), 41, 61, 136, 223; while Matrat and Schurr thought both Montesquieu and Rousseau inspired Robespierre, Marissa Linton, ‘Robespierre’s Political Principles,’ in Robespierre, ed. Colin Haydon and William Doyle (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 41, wrote: ‘In terms of specifically political ideas, particularly about the nature and basis of the different forms of government, Robespierre owed a much greater debt to Montesquieu than Rousseau.’ Camille Desmoulins, Oeuvres, ed. Jules Claretier (Paris: BibliothèqueCharpentier, 1906), t. 1, 94. 5 Edmund Burke, Substance of the Speech of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, in the Debate on the Army Estimates, on Tuesday, the 9th Day of February, 1790 (Dublin: P. Byrne, 1790), 7. 6 Louis-Antoine Saint-Just, Oeuvres complètes, ed. Michel Duval (Paris: Gérard Lebovici, 1984), t. 1, 286–8. 7 Oeuvres complètes de Louis-Antoine de Saint-Just, ed. Anne Kupiec and Miguel Abensour (Paris: Gallimard, 2004), 820: ‘Que les hommes révolutionnaires soient des Romains, et non point des Tartares.’

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1789: ‘If the National Assembly does not put two illustrious heads on trial, or our noble Deciuses do not kill them, you are all screwed.’8 Indeed, republicanism in its various forms was very much a product of times and circumstances (bad harvests in 1789, and 1792–4, good harvests in 1790–1; perceived external threats in 1789 and real external enemies in 1792–4) rather than fixed ideological differences between liberals and ‘totalitarian democrats,’ between libertarian Girondins and egalitarian Jacobins, between those who eschewed violence and those who embraced it. Despite the powerful painting of Brutus in 1789 by Jacques-Louis David, which bodied forth the idea of patriotism earlier expounded by Abbé Coyer and Chevalier de Jaucourt in L’Encyclopédie, the production of Voltaire’s Brutus in 1790, and the subsequent naming of boys and renaming towns as Brutus,9 few Frenchmen were republicans until Louis XVI’s unsuccessful a empt to flee France in June 1791, when he was arrested at Varennes. Patrice Gueniffey asserted: ‘At the beginning of the revolution, no one, or almost no one, seriously believed that France could one day cease to be a monarchy.’10 Emmanuel Joseph Sieyès, whose Qu’est-ce que le tiers état was the most explosive indictment of the ancien régime, and Maximilien Robespierre, known as ‘the Roman’ at collège Louis-le-Grand11 and who later came to associate republican virtue with terror in public opinion, favoured constitutional monarchy (an executive subject to representative legislatures)

 8 Le res de Madame Roland, ed. Claude Perroud (Paris: Imprimerie Nationale, 1913), t. 2, 53: ‘Si l’Assemblée nationale ne fait pas en règle le procès de deux têtes illustres, ou que de générux Décius ne les aba ent, vous êtes tous f . . .’ Decius refers to Decimus Brutus, one of Caesar’s assassins, who was commonly called Decius.  9 Claude Mossé, L’Antiquité dans la Révolution française (Paris: Albin Michel,1989), 134–5; Denise Amy Baxter, ‘Two Brutuses: Violence, Virtue, and Politics in the Visual Culture of the French Revolution,’ Eighteenth-Century Life 30 (2006): 51–5; Bouineau, Les Toges du pouvoir, 50–2; Pierre Vidal-Nacquet, Politics Ancient and Modern, trans. Janet Lloyd (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1995), 144–8; and Serge Bianchi, La Révolution culturelle de l’an II: Élites et peuple (1789–1799) (Paris: Aubier, 1982), 231, indicate a spike in the naming of boys Brutus, and Brutus’s appearance on playing cards and porcelain, during the trial and execution of Louis XVI. 10 Patrice Gueniffey, ‘Cordeliers and Girondins: The Prehistory of the Republic?’ in The Invention of the Modern Republic, ed. Biancamaria Fontana (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 86; also Pasquale Pasquino, ‘The Constitutional Republicanism of Emmanuel Sieyès,’ in Fontana, ed., Invention, 116. 11 David P. Jordan, ‘The Robespierre Problem,’ in Haydon and Doyle, ed., Robespierre, 19.

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before the king’s flight to Varennes.12 Bertrand Barère de Vieuzac was a monarchist in the early days of the revolution before he dramatically pronounced a death sentence on Louis XVI, in front of a statue of Brutus, asserting that tyrants must die.13 Gueniffey made the cogent argument that the French Revolution did not produce a constitutional republic because, before the flight to Varennes, no one thought of a republican constitution, and a er the king’s return, which was fictitiously considered a kidnapping not an escape, the problem became what to do with this specific king, not with kingship per se; small consideration was given to representative institutions to stand in for Rousseau’s people or the French nation, and many differed with abbé Sieyès’s desire for a strong executive, preferring an elective council ‘deprived of political prerogatives, financial means, and the use of public force.’14 In the course of showing how Enlightenment ideas filtered down to the popular masses in the songs and placards of the French Revolution, Albert Soboul distinguished the aristocratic revolution of 1787–9, from the liberal revolution of 1789–91, the democratic egalitarianism of 1793–4, the oligarchic Directory of 1794–9, and Napoleon’s coup d’état in 1799 and empire from 1804 to 1814.15 Soboul’s categorization tends to ignore peasant participation in the French Revolution, which was perhaps more democratic than liberal, but which dated from 1789, and does not explain how the poor peasants persistently demanded an agrarian

12 Emmanuel Joseph Sieyès, Political Writings, ed. and trans. Michael Sonenscher (Indianapolis: Hacke t, 2003), xxvi–xxvii, 166–73; Maximilien Robespierre, Oeuvres (Paris: E. Laroux, 1910–67), t. 7, 551–2. It is notable that Robespierre remained indifferent to monarchy or republics even a er Louis XVI’s flight to Varennes. Robespierre wrote: ‘République? Monarchie? Mots inventés par les diplomates.’ Cited by Albert Olivier, Saint-Just et la force des choses (Paris: Gallimard, 1954), 111. Robespierre’s apparent indifference to republicanism can be understood in terms of his political opposition to the Girondist Brissot’s a achment to ‘la conception d’une république aristocratique de type américain.’ Robespierre asked Jacques-Pierre Brissot de Warville: ‘Est-ce dans les mots de république ou de monarchie qui réside la solution du grand problème social?’ See Maximilien Robespierre, Textes choisis, ed. Jean Poperen (Paris: Éditions Sociales, 1956), t. 1, 26–7. 13 Robert Launay, Barère de Vieuzac: (L’Anacréon de la Guillotine) (Paris: Jules Tallandier, 1929), 65, 118–20; Jean-Pierre Thomas, Bertrand Barère: La Voix de la révolution (Paris: Desjonquères, 1989), 109. 14 Gueniffey, ‘Cordeliers and Girondins,’ 94–103. 15 Soboul, ‘L’Audience des lumières,’ 289.

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law for a decade from 1789.16 What peasants, sans-culo es, and political representatives meant by an agrarian law is a ma er of some dispute.17 Roman imagery pervaded all stages of the French Revolution, while Spartan imagery competed with it during the egalitarian Convention of 1793–4 but went into decline during the Directory. R.B. Rose and P.M. Jones distinguish the Roman from the Spartan versions of the agrarian law; the Roman version was a moderate restriction on the right of proprietors to engross common land and an effort to make the common available to the landless, transforming waste into arable land, while the Spartan version entailed a forced equalization of property holdings under the aegis of the state.18 Indeed, the Roman and Spartan versions were o en confused since Plutarch had paired the Lives of the Gracchi with those of the egalitarian kings of Sparta, Agis, and Cleomenes. An avid reader of Plutarch, Madame de Roland, awaiting death at the hands of the Jacobins with the Stoicism of her beloved Romans, wrote: ‘In my reading, I was impassioned for the reformers of inequality; I was Agis and Cleomenes at Sparta, I was Gracchus at Rome, and as Cornelia, I would have reproached my sons for permi ing

16 The democratic character of the heterogeneous class of peasants (owners, sharecroppers, tenants, and agricultural wage labourers) has been emphasized by Georges Lefebvre, but also their illiberal character (a achment to custom rather than profitable calculation; inclusive collective rights in pasture, woodcu ing, and gleaning rather than exclusive private property; anti-Semitism; an orientation to the past and to tradition rather than an orientation to the future or capitalist progress), in The Coming of the French Revolution, trans. R.R. Palmer (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1954). P.M. Jones, The Peasantry in the French Revolution (Cambridge: Cambridge university Press, 1988) also emphasized the difference between the outlook of the liberal bourgeoisie and the widely varied interests, regional cultures, and economic situations of the peasantry but concurs with Lefebvre’s assessment of their centrality in France’s democratization. High grain prices and low agricultural wages, as well as enclosures versus customary rights to cut wood, graze livestock, and glean stubble, separated rich peasants from small-holding or landless peasants, despite their common interest in abolishing the seigneurial system. Hence, Jones argued (31) poor peasants repeatedly demanded ‘some kind of “agrarian law” limiting the size of farms,’ while their more successful compatriots resisted it. 17 See R.B. Rose, ‘The “Red Scare” of the 1790s: The French Revolution and the “Agrarian Law,”’ Past & Present 103 (1984): 113–30; P.M. Jones, ‘The “Agrarian Law”: Schemes for Land Distribution during the French Revolution,’ Past & Present 133 (1991): 96–133; John Shovlin, The Political Economy of Virtue: Luxury, Patriotism, and the Origins of the French Revolution (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2007), ch. 6, ‘The Agrarian Law and the Republican Farmer.’ 18 Rose, ‘The “Red Scare” of the 1790s,’ 116; Jones, ‘The “Agrarian law,”’ 99.

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me to be called only the mother-in-law of Scipio; I withdrew with the plebeians to the Aventine, and I would have voted for the tribunes. Today experience has taught me to weigh everything with impartiality, and I see in the enterprise of the Gracchi and the conduct of the tribunes wrongs and evils by which I was never sufficiently struck.’19 Madame Roland’s husband, Jean-Marie Roland de la Platière, and other Girondins advocated limits to land holdings and free distribution of émigré lands to soldiers, which John Shovlin found remarkably similar to the proposals of Tiberius Gracchus.20 However, the ransacking of châteaux and the destruction of manorial records and seizure of aristocratic lands by armed peasants, as well as the refusal to pay indirect taxes and tithes, which broke the back of the ancien régime, cannot be said to be either a Spartan or Roman version of the agrarian law (which is granted lawfully from above rather than seized lawlessly from below). In 1790–1, the urban poor cleared waste land and common land for cultivation and possession. Both Girondins and Jacobins aimed to establish both the rule of law and a property-owning democracy, although Robespierre thought the right to life trumped the right to private property, and was willing to accede to the revolutionary Paris sections and put price ceilings on necessities (for which he was a acked by his political opponents).21 Sales of church lands went to those who could pay for them, although peasant villageois were o en successful in banding together, sometimes in popular uprisings, to block urban bourgeois from buying them and enabling local peasants to purchase them collectively. In 1792, war began and émigré estates were confiscated. In the same year, laws allowing the enclosure of timber lands were repealed, allowing peasants access to wood lots and grazing areas that had been enclosed from common use. In early March of 1793, a

19 Mémoire de Madame Roland, ed. Paul de Roux (Paris: Mercure de France, 1966), 271: ‘Aussi, dans mes lectures, je me passionnais pour les réformateurs de l’inégalité; j’étais Agis et Cléomène à Sparte, j’étais Gracque à Rome, et comme Cornélie, j’aurais réproché à mes fils qu’on m’appelait que la belle – mère de Scipion; je m’étais retirée avec le peuple sur le mont Aventin, et j’aurais voté pour le tribunes. Aujourd’hui que l’expérience m’a pris à tout peser avec impartialité, je vois dans l’entreprise des Gracques et dans la conduite des tribunes des torts et des maux don’t je n’étais point assez frappée.’ 20 Shovlin, Political Economy of Virtue, 202. 21 Morris Slavin, The Making of an Insurrection: Paris Sections and the Gironde (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1986), 4; Jones, ‘The “Agrarian Law,”’ 99, described the agrarian law as ‘the bourgeois Great Fear.’

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law was passed eliminating primogeniture and ensuring the equal partition of family property, and on 13 September 1793, the Convention decreed the use, not the title, of émigré lands be given to the landless poor.22 Partition of royal parks, commons, and émigré lands varied from region to region. Émigré estates were sold in small lots. The most politically radical23 regions were Picardy and the Île de France, close to Paris, where the Montagnard Convention24 supported the demand of poor peasants for the seizure and subdivision of land. On 18 March 1793, Bertrand Barère proposed the death penalty to be imposed on those advocating an agrarian law, but the decree was passed without specification of what constituted the punishable offense.25 In spite of the death penalty for advocating the ‘agrarian law,’ partageurs continued to ban engrossment of lands in large regions of France.26 The repartition of lands had mixed results; the urban poor o en lacked the skills to make efficient use of land, cultivation of small plots jeopardized the grazing of livestock, and subsistence agriculture limited grain on the market, engendering draconian Jacobin measures against hoarding and speculation in grain. However, the redistribution of land was sufficiently popular that the Directory did not revoke existing partages, but further redistribution was ended by 1796.27 Brutus and Brutality Antoine-Pierre-Joseph Barnave stated in 1790 that the French Revolution had nothing to do with ancient republics since they were based on slavery and lacked representative government,28 and, recently, Chantal Grell observed that, while antiquity was omnipresent in the arts, le ers, language, and fashions of the revolutionary period, it was

22 Jones, Peasantry in the French Revolution, 159, 211. 23 Rose, ‘The “Red Scare,”’ 125, described demands for the agrarian law as ‘politically radical and economically reactionary,’ tending towards subsistence agriculture rather than production for the market. 24 The Montagnards, from the French for Mountain, were radical Jacobins who sat on the highest seats of the National Convention and usually gave their vigourous support to proposals of Georges-Jacques Danton and Maximilien Robespierre. 25 Rose, ‘The “Red Scare,” ’ 113; Jones, ‘The “Agrarian Law,” ’ 106. 26 Jones, Peasantry in the French Revolution, 162–3. 27 Jones, ‘The “Agrarian Law,” ’ 126. 28 Cited in Vidal-Naquet, Politics Ancient and Modern, 152.

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strangely absent from the great political debates of the 1780s.29 Perhaps, as Hannah Arendt said of the American Revolution, the primary issue may have been about taxation, but the issue might not have mobilized enough support without reference to the Roman Republic. Camille Desmoulins compared the origin of the French Revolution to that of the early Roman Republic, when the death of Verginia, who refused to be married to the patrician Appius, mobilized all Roman plebeians to overthrow the decemviri (451–49 .c.). Desmoulins claimed that the re-establishment of the Roman Republic was due to the fact that all plebeians could see themselves as fathers, so the French deficit made all French citizens see themselves as taxpayers.30 Ideas of Roman liberty and conquest were the poetry of republican revolution, while taxation, property rights, and commercial expansion were the prosaic realities. Mona Ozouf accounted for the Romanization of the French Revolution in Arendtian terms: ‘Legendary antiquity helped the men of the Revolution, therefore, to rise to the level of the events which they were living.’31 Contrary to Grell, Claude Mossé indicated that the Assemblée des Notables in 1787 and the convocation of the États Généraux in 1789 led to reflections on the ancient republics; the nobility in particular were repelled by Athenian democracy and were a racted by the Roman model of an authoritative senate and the weighted voting in the comitia centuriata and the comitia tribunata.32 Mossé wrote: ‘The Roman civitas offered at the source a dual aspect that affirmed more clearly than the Greek politeia the distinction between those who were full citizens by law and those who were citizens sine suffragio, that is, without participation in this first form of political life, which was the appointment of 29 Chantal Grell, Le Dix-Huitième Siècle et l’antiquité en France 1680–1789 (Oxford: Voltaire Foundation, 1995), 1179: ‘Ni Sparte, ni Athènes, ni Rome n’inspirèrent les hommes qui, en 1789, renversèrent l’Ancien Régime . . . D’une part, l’antiquité est omniprésente dans les arts, le langage, les modes, mais elle est, en même temps, paradoxalement absente dans les réflexions et les grands débats politiques.’ 30 Desmoulins, Oeuvres, t. 1, 79. Livy compared the death of Verginia to the rape of Lucretia as the occasions for the establishment of the Roman Republic. According to legend, Verginia was killed by her plebeian father Verginius rather than having her married to the leading decemvir, Appius, a patrician, and this action inspired plebeians to overthrow the decemvi (the ten men who were supposed to set up a new code of laws acceptable to both patricians and plebeians but who installed an oppressive patrician dictatorship). 31 Mona Ozouf, Festivals and the French Revolution, trans. Alan Sheridan (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988), 273. 32 Mossé, L’Antiquité dans la Révolution française, 68–72.

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magistrates . . . The distinction between the two modes of expression of the popular will, direct or through intermediary groups, will meet again on the dawn of the Revolution in the debate on voting by order or voting by head.’33 The aristocrats who fought for American independence from Britain were not notably democratic; Gilbert du Motier, marquis de Lafaye e, stated that the purpose of the French Revolution was ‘to establish the executive power of the monarchy, the predominance of the nobles, and the rights of property.’34 However, some aristocrats, such as Gabriel-Honoré de Rique i, comte de Mirabeau, presented themselves as friends of the people. For most aristocrats, the term ‘people’ signifies what the Romans understood ‘by the Latin plebs, thus supposing orders, and differences of rank’; to prevent that, Mirabeau explained to the Estates-General on 13 June 1789 that we should employ the term ‘people’ in the ‘sense of the Latin populus [which] signifies the nation,’ and thus we should refer to the legislative branch of government as the national assembly, rather than as representatives of the French people.35 As an aristocratic friend of the people, Mirabeau presented himself as a combination of the Gracchi and Marius in his response to the nobility and clergy on 3 February 1789: In every country, in all ages, the aristocrats have implacably pursued the friends of the people; and if, by some unknown combination of fortune, such a one arose from his own order, it was always he who was struck down, as they were eager to inspire terror by the choice of their victim. Thus perished the last of the Gracchi by the hands of the patricians; but when he had been struck a mortal blow, he called the avenging gods to witness, by throwing dust towards the heavens; and from that dust Marius

33 Ibid., 36–7: ‘la civitas romaine présentait à l’origine un double visage qui affirmait plus clairement que dans la politeia grecque la distinction entre ceux qui étaient citoyens en plein droit and ceux qui étaient citoyens sine suffragio, c’est-à-dire sans participation à ce e forme première de vie politique qu’était la désignation des magistrates . . . La distinction entre les deux modes d’expression de la volunté populaire, direct ou à travers des groupes intermédiaires, se retrouvera à la veille de la Révolution dans le débat sur le vote par ordre ou le vote par tête.’ 34 D.M.G. Sutherland, The French Revolution and Empire: The Quest for a Civic Order (Oxford: Blackwell, 2002), 28. 35 Gabriel-Honoré de Rique i, Oeuvres de Mirabeau, ed. Joseph Mérilhou (Paris: Didier, 1834), t. 1, 105, 112.

The Role of Brutus in the French Revolution 149 was born, Marius, less great for having exterminated the Cimbians than for having beaten and abased the aristocracy of the Roman nobility.36

Soboul’s liberal period of 1789–91 was dominated by Roman discourse in the speeches of both nobles and commons;37 Cicero, as a novus homo who became a senator and emphasized that the prime purpose of the state is to protect private property, was the most popular model for orators, particularly among middle-class professionals.38 Pierre Victurnien Vergniaud asked the crucial question of whether France wished to be an egalitarian republic like Sparta or a conquering republic like Rome.39 The liberal Girondists waged war against France’s enemies, whereas the egalitarian Jacobins initially opposed war until France seemed to gain the upper hand against their counter-revolutionary foes. Saint-Just initially thought Rome’s conquests undermined republican principles: ‘When I think . . . that liberty always lost its principles in order to conquer, that Rome died a er Cato and that the excess of power produced monsters more terrible and proud than the Tarquins, sorrow afflicts my heart and stops my pen.’40 The Girondist leader Jean-Pierre Brissot de Warville thought war was forced on France by counter-revolutionary 36 Ibid., 26. ‘Dans tous les pays, dans tous les âges, les aristocrates ont implacablement pursuivi les amis du peuple; et si, par je ne sais quelle combinaison de la fortune, il s’en est élevé quelqu’un dans leur sein, c’est celui-là surtout qu’ils ont frappé, avides qu’ils étaient d’inspirer la terreur par le choix de la victime. Ainsi périt le denier des Gracques de la main des patriciens; mais, a eint du coup mortel, il lança de la poussière vers le ciel, en a estant les dieux vengeurs; et de ce e poussière naquit Marius, Marius, moins grand pour avoir exterminé les Cimbres que pour avoir aba u dans Rome l’aristocratie de la noblesse.’ 37 Bouineau, Toges du pouvoir, 29–30, 85, 143. 38 Simon Schama, Citizens: A Chronicle of the French Revolution (New York: Vintage Books, 1989), 168–9; Mossé, L’Antiquité dans la Révolution française, 61; Bouineau, Toges du pouvoir, 158–9, 164, 266; Michael Sonnenscher, Before the Deluge: Public Debt, Inequality and the Intellectual Origins of the French Revolution (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007), 193, indicates that Mirabeau thought Cicero’s De Officiis, which asserts the prime duty of the state is to safeguard private property, was ‘the best work ever to come from human hands.’ 39 Vergniaud, cited in Bouineau, Toges du pouvoir, 277: ‘Nous voulons une république mais quelle république? Une république égalitaire comme celle de Sparte? Conquérante comme Rome?’ 40 Saint-Just, Oeuvres complètes, 457: ‘quand je pense . . . que la liberté perdit toujours ses principes pour conquérir, que Rome mourut après Caton et que l’excès de la puissance produisit des monstres plus terribles et plus superbe que les Tarquins, le douleur déchire mon coeur et arrête ma plume.’

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machinations orchestrated in London. In 1791, Brissot wrote: ‘It is true, that if foreigners league together to a ack us, they may conquer at first, but Rome, when a acked by Hannibal suffered four defeats; she did not despair, nay, she triumphed.’41 The Girondist François Nicolas Léonard Buzot aimed to establish French military discipline on the Roman model.42 Bertrand Barère, initially a Girondist before joining the Jacobins, repeatedly cited the enmity of Rome (France) and Carthage (England) to sound the war trumpets.43 The imperial rivalry between France and England led Camille Desmoulins to land a low blow on the Girondin Brissot’s opposition to slavery; although the Jacobins were also opposed to slavery, Desmoulins alleged that Brissot’s opposition to slavery aimed to undermine French commerce to the advantage of Britain.44 The Jacobin idea of the ‘one and indivisible’ patrie was modelled on Rome; Saint-Just described the eighty-five départements as eighty-five tribes in the Roman sense, as parts of a whole, to oppose Girondin support for regional representation and decentralized or federal institutions45 and used an updated version of Roman legions in his military leadership against France’s enemies.46 Revolutionary festivals, initially held at the Champs de Mars and usually of a martial character, were modelled on the Roman triumph, although Camille Desmoulins lamented ‘the absence of what for the Romans had been a particular pleasure,’ namely, the absence of those ‘chained behind the consul’s chariot.’47 The Greeks did not have these triumphal celebrations of the

41 Jean-Pierre de Warville, A Discourse upon the Question, Whether the King Shall Be Tried? (Boston: Belknap and Young, 1791), 26. 42 Bouineau, Toges du pouvoir, 156. 43 Ibid., 47, 90; Mossé, L’Antiquité dans la Révolution française, 61; Edmond Dziembowski, Un Nouveau Patriotisme français, 1750–1770; La France face à la puissance anglaise à l’époque de la guerre de Sept Ans (Oxford: Voltaire Foundation, 1998), 495. 44 Desmoulins, Oeuvres, t. 1, 279–82. The reason why the charge was unfair is that Brissot, in his travels to America, was a strong proponent of the abolition of slavery in British colonies, and also that Robespierre and Saint-Just wanted to free Blacks, providing former slaves with land and agricultural tools. 45 Hampson, Saint-Just, 109. The Roman tribes were political divisions that were not based on blood or customary ties, as were the Roman clans or gentes. 46 Olivier, Saint-Just et la force des choses, 253. 47 Ozouf, Festivals and the French Revolution, 39, 53, 59. Ozouf (9) explained the centrality of festivals to republican or Rousseauian doctrine (republican virtue as obedience to self-made law) as follows: ‘The festival was an indispensable complement to the legislative system, for although the legislator makes laws for the people, festivals make people for the laws.’

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abasement of their conquered opponents. The Jacobin François Nicolas Billaud-Varenne called on France’s ‘sublime destiny,’ which ‘is reserved to efface the glory even of the Romans. Your valour will make you, as they, triumph over the European powers that are sworn to oppose liberty.’48 In this war, according to Edmund Burke, Machiavelli’s and Montesquieu’s Roman model came to the fore because Machiavelli’s and Montesquieu’s Rome represented conquest and rapid territorial acquisition.49 The French Revolution became an imperial republic like Rome, but the Jacobins assumed power in 1793 and imposed a serious of draconian war measures acts, known as ‘the Reign of Terror,’50 including incursions on private property that recalled Sparta. Vergniaud, who juxtaposed conquering Rome and egalitarian Sparta, was one of the many sentenced to death under the Jacobin reign of terror. A er Robespierre and Saint Just had themselves been guillotined, the Directory elevated Roman liberty above Spartan equality and Athenian anarchy.51 Whereas the Constitution of 1793 referred to ‘the sovereignty of the people,’ the Constitution of 1795 stated ‘the universality of French citizens is the sovereign’; that is, the sovereign French citizens excluded some of the people who were sovereign in 1793, namely, the propertyless poor who ceased to be a vital component of the sovereign nation.52 At the same time, representations of Brutus on stage or in the plastic arts were

48 Cited in Mossé, L’Antiquité dans la Révolution française, 104. 49 Edmund Burke, Thoughts on the Prospect of a Regicide Peace, in a Series of Le ers (London: J. Owen, 1796), 111–12. 50 ‘The Reign of Terror’ normally refers to the Jacobin killing of real or suspected counter-revolutionaries in 1793–4, not to the ‘White Terror’ or the killing of Jacobins by the Directory from 1795 to 1797, or to ‘the Great Fear’ of 1789, when peasants thought roving bands of the propertyless poor were counter-revolutionary agents of aristocrats and foreigners. The death count in ‘the Reign of Terror’ is greater than the ‘White Terror’ if one includes the deaths in war and summary executions of counterrevolutionaries in the Vendée who tried to facilitate an English landing in Bri any. But if one includes only the execution or murder of political enemies or ‘suspects,’ the counter-revolutionary or White Terror was as homicidal as the Jacobin reign of terror. See Jones, Peasantry in the French Revolution, 247. 51 François Hartog, ‘La Révolution française et l’antiquité,’ in Situations de la démocratie, ed. M. Gauchet, P. Manent, et P. Rosanvallon (Paris: Hautes-Études-Gallimard-Le Seuil, 1993), 30–1: ‘on célèbre la liberté romaine et l’égalité spartiate. On préfère Lycurge à Solon, l’eunomia spartiate à l’anarchie athénienne.’ 52 Andrew Jainchill, Reimagining Politics a er the Terror: The Republican Origins of French Liberalism (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2008), 18.

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banned since Brutus ‘had come to symbolize the Jacobins, the Terror, and Robespierre.’53 While the two Brutuses, the founder of the Roman Republic and the killer of Caesar, may have been banned, Roman imagery was still employed for political purposes. Jacques-Louis David’s The Sabine Women Enforcing Peace by Running between the Combatants (1799), which aimed to unify the French nation against foreign enemies, replaced the brutal virtue of his The Lictors Bring to Brutus the Bodies of His Sons (1789). Cicero, who had preached the sanctity of private property, was elevated in status as Brutus and the Gracchi were demoted; possessive individualism replaced egalitarian republicanism and Cartesian rationalism. Jacques Bouineau claimed that individual identity came to be associated with possessions in the late 1790s: ‘Possideo ergo sum.’54 A er the fall of Robespierre, Louis de Fontanes declared, in a speech at the opening of the republic’s state schools: ‘Narrow minds will no longer seek to apply the laws of Crete and Lacedaemonia to that immense republic that has no model, and which possesses the warrior virtues of Rome, the arts of Athens, and the trade of Carthage at the same time.’55 In October 1794, Pierre-Louis Ginguené asked: ‘Do you want to make republicans? Make your young read Titus Livy, Sallust, Tacitus, Plutarch, etc.’56 In 1794–5, France conquered the Low Countries, in 1795, established the Batavian republic, and in 1798, created the Roman Republic. By 1799, France had established eight sister republics in Holland, Belgium, Germany, Switzerland, and Italy. Jacques Bouineau wrote that revolutionary France, ‘convinced of her due right, certain that she is this “Great Nation” that must enlighten the universe, considers her expansion as a benefit in regard to those favoured by extending the revolution.’57 Emmanuel Joseph Sieyès thought a federative system, based on Machiavelli’s and Harrington’s espousal of the unequal leagues Rome established over the vanquished, would be ‘the best use of our conquests.’58 Joseph Hofmann, in Des Nouvelles limites de la République française (1795), wrote: ‘If Rome had “a representative 53 Baxter, ‘Two Brutuses,’ 68. 54 Bouineau, Toges du pouvoir, 158–9, 165. 55 Cited in Michael Sonenscher, Sans-Culo es: An Eighteenth-Century Emblem in the French Revolution (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008), 411. 56 Cited in Jainchill, Reimagining Politics a er the Terror, 8, 72. 57 Bouineau, Toges du pouvoir, 147. ‘La France de la Révolution, convaincue de son bon droit, certaine qu’elle est ce e “Grande Nation” qui doit éclairer l’univers, considère son expansion comme un bienfait à l’égard de ceux qui en bénéficiént.’ 58 Cited in Jainchill, Reimagining Politics a er the Terror, 187.

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government,” the Roman Empire would still exist today.’59 In 1797, two years before his coup d’état, Napoleon Bonaparte declared that ‘if the Roman people had made the same use of force as the French, the Roman eagles would still be on the Capitol, and eighteen centuries of slavery and tyranny would not have dishonoured the human species.’60 As Pierre Vidal-Nacquet wrote: ‘One reason why, in France, the “Republic” was followed by the “Empire” was that the image of Rome proved more formative than that of Athens or even Sparta.’61 William Everdell concurred that for the French as for the Americans, ‘the Roman Republic and not the Athenian . . . has become the classical example of the seductions of empire and the effects of an aggressive foreign policy on republican institutions.’62 Napoleon Bonaparte extended the expansionary impetus of the French Revolution in his a empt to reacquire Saint-Domingue from the liberated slaves and with his incursions into Egypt and Syria in 1799. Patricia Lorcin wrote: ‘If the Napoleonic expedition was an initial step in creating the association between imperial France and imperial Rome in Africa, the educational background of the officers and scholars encouraged the link.’63 France’s foreign minister, Talleyrand, instructed the Directory on 14 February 1798: ‘Egypt was a province of the Roman Republic: it must become a province of the French Republic. Rome’s conquest belonged to the decay of that great country; France’s will belong to the period of her prosperity. The Romans robbed Egypt of kings illustrious in the arts and sciences, etc.; the French will rid her of the most atrocious tyrants who have ever existed.’64 Napoleon saw his campaigns in Syria and Egypt to be just the first step in bringing

59 Ibid., 161. 60 Cited in Bouineau, Toges du pouvoir, 196: ‘Si le peuple romain eût fait le même usage de la force que le peuple français, les aigles romaines seraient encore sur le Capitole, et dix-huit siècles d’esclavage et de tyrannie n’auraient pas déshonoré l’espèce humaine.’ 61 Vidal-Nacquet, Politics Ancient and Modern, 8; also, 74, 175. 62 William Everdell, The End of Kings: A History of Republics and Republicans (New York: Free Press, 1983), 44. 63 Patricia Lorcin, ‘Rome and France in Africa: Recovering Algeria’s Latin Past,’ French Historical Studies 25 (2002): 298. 64 Cited in François Charles-Roux, Bonaparte: Governor of Egypt, trans. E.W. Dickes (London: Methuen, 1937), 2, and in Henry Laurens, L’Expédition d’Égypte, 1798–1801 (Paris: A. Colin, 1989), 29.

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French civilization to India and the interior of Africa.65 Alice Conklin wrote that the French Revolution ‘helped transform the Enlightenment belief that barbarians could be civilized into the imperial doctrine that France should be civilizing fe ered and depraved people everywhere. This transformation was already complete by the time of France’s first post-revolutionary colonial enterprise: Napoleon’s expedition to Egypt in 1799.’66 The French Revolution, like the English Revolution of the midseventeenth century and the American Revolution, was expansionary, and Machiavellian neo-Romanism fi ed the exigencies of the imperial rivalries of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The champions of the French Revolution did not espouse Athens as a model, as Marchamont Nedham and John Milton had done, although its enemies, such as Edmund Burke, described the French Revolution as the spirit of Athens grown wild.67 Athenian democracy was universally denounced 65 Napoléon Bonaparte, Campagnes d’Égypte et de Syrie, ed. Henry Laurens (Paris: Imprimerie nationale, 1998), 95: ‘plusiers grandes nations seraient appelées à jouir des bienfaits des arts, des sciences, de la religion du vrai Dieu, car c’est par l’Égypte que les peuples du centre de l’Afrique doivent recevoir la lumière et le bonheur.’ Maria Louisa Ortega, ‘La “Régénération” de l’Égypte: le discours confronté au terrain,’ in L’expédition d’Égypte, une entreprise des Lumières, 1798–1801, ed. Patrice Bret (Paris: Hache e, 1998), 93–4, argues that the revolutionary project of regeneration, the pretext for the conquest of Egypt, involved bringing the arts and sciences back to their place of origin, liberating the Egyptians from the Mameluke and O oman despotisms, and enlightening them in French thought and culture. Alyssa Goldstein Sepinwall, The Abbé Grégoire and the French Revolution: The Making of Modern Universalism (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005), 151–5, suggests that the seeds of nineteenth-century ideas of a mission civilisatrice derived partly from Grégoire and his fellow members of la Société des Amis des Noirs et des Colonies to improve and instruct former slaves in France’s colonies. Grégoire ‘enthusiastically promoted the new “philanthropic colonization”’ and praised Napoleon’s conquest of Egypt ‘as necessary to the rebirth of the Orient’ (154). Nicolas Bancel, Pascal Blanchard, and Françoise Vergès, La République coloniale: Essai sur une utopie (Paris: Albin Michel, 2003), 68, wrote: ‘La mission civilisatrice française est un mélange d’emprunts à la mission chrétienne que la France, fille aînée de l’Église, se doit d’accomplir, et à la mission de la Révolution française d’apporter le bonheur au monde.’ 66 Alice Conklin, A Mission to Civilize: The Republican Idea of Empire in France and West Africa, 1895–1930 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997), 17. 67 Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France (London: J. Dodsley, 1791), 304. In Le re de M. Burke, membre du parlement d’Angleterre, aux françois (Paris: s.n., 1790), 8, 10, 12, 24, Burke warned the French against using Athens as a model republic, and in Three Memorials on French Affairs (London: Rivington, 1797), 12, Burke portrayed

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as anarchy, although thinkers such as Voltaire, Diderot, D’Holbach, and Condorcet admired the arts and philosophy of Athens. Egalitarians, such as Robespierre and Saint-Just, followed Rousseau and Mably in favouring Sparta over Athens.68 François-Noël ‘Gracchus’ Babeuf, the egalitarian revolutionary, honoured Robespierre and Saint-Just by calling them the ‘premier Gracques,’ while considering himself and his followers as ‘le second Gracques.’69 Camille Desmoulins championed Athenian freedom of speech, particularly when threatened by his former friend Robespierre, but Rome was the predominant model for Robespierre, Saint-Just, and Desmoulins. Curiously, Robespierre’s Jacobin ally, Jacques Nicolas Billaud-Varenne, in an effort to escape punishment denounced Robespierre as ‘that Scoundrel Pericles.’70 Jacobins o en thought of Pericles as a dangerous aristocrat and ‘liberticide.’71 If Athenians were widely perceived as anarchistic throughout the eighteenth century, especially in the a ermath of the American Revolution, as too democratic by the aristocratic initiators of the French Revolution, they were considered too aristocratic by the Jacobins. However, in the course of the French Revolution, some came to think that any ancient city was not a useful model for any modern nation, a theme taken up in the nineteenth century by Benjamin Constant’s De la Liberté des anciens comparée à celle des modernes (1819) and Numa Denis Fustel de Coulanges’ La Cité antique (1864). In 1795, Constantin-François de Chasseboeuf, comte de Volney, denounced the ridiculous veneration of antiquity, beginning in the early eighteenth century when Livy replaced the Bible as the authoritative religion for the French.72 The religion of republican Rome was dangerous in modern times. Brutus and Patriotic Virtue We examined, in the previous chapter, how the idea of serving ‘la patrie’ replaced the service to God and king. A religion demands

France as Athens in the Peloponnesian War – ‘the head and se led ally of all democratic factions.’ 68 Bouineau, Toges du pouvoir, 275; Vidal-Nacquet, Politics Ancient and Modern, 71. 69 Bouineau, Toges du pouvoir, 112. 70 Hampson, Saint-Just, 211. 71 Bouineau, Toges du pouvoir, 106. 72 Constantin-François de Chasseboeuf, comte de Volney, ‘Leçons d’histoire, prononcées à l’École Normale,’ in Oeuvres (Paris: Fayard, 1989), t. 1, 602.

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sacrifices, as Brutus sacrificed his sons to la patrie. Volney was reacting to Robespierre’s view that ‘My life belongs to la patrie’ and his view that virtue is the soul of the republic. Robespierre declared: ‘It is virtue; I am talking about the public virtue that worked such prodigies in Greece and Rome, and that should produce more astonishing ones in republican France: that virtue is none other than love of la patrie and is laws.’73 Saint-Just thought that ‘the indifference to la patrie and the love of oneself is the source of all evil; the indifference toward oneself and the love of la patrie is the source of all good.’74 Although Saint-Just had been a proponent of the liberal right to private property in the early days of the Revolution, he thought the conditions of warfare and food shortages demanded that the needs of la patrie supersede the rights of property, and that proprietorial interests undermined patriotic virtue.75 Property is not the only individual right to fall victim to la patrie. SaintJust declared: ‘There is something terrible in the sacred love of la patrie; it is so very exclusive that it sacrifices all to the public interest without pity, without horror, without human respect; it hurled Manlius; it sacrificed private affections; it drew Regulus to Carthage, threw a Roman into an abyss, and put Marat in the Pantheon, a victim of his own devotion to la patrie.’76 Bertrand Barère, who advocated ‘la religion de la patrie’ to be taught at L’École de Mars,77 stood before a statue of Brutus and pronounced

73 Maximilien Robespierre, Virtue and Terror, ed. Slavoj Žižek and Jean Ducange, trans. John Howe (London: Verso, 2007), xvii, 111. I have le Howe’s translation of patrie as homeland in the original for consistency. 74 Ibid., 307: ‘l’indifférence pour la patrie et l’amour de soi-même est la source de tout mal; l’indifférence pour soi-même et l’amour de la patrie est la source de tout bien.’ 75 Ibid., 303: ‘la propriété rend l’homme soigneux; elle a ache les cours ingrats à la patrie.’ 76 Oeuvres complètes de Antoine-Louis de Saint-Just, 706. ‘Il y a quelque chose de terrible dans l’amour sacré de la patrie; il est tellement exclusif qu’il immole tout sans pitié, sans frayeur, sans respect humain, à l’intérêt public; il précipite Manlius; il immole ses affections privées; il entraîne Regulus à Carthage, je e un Romain dans un abîme, et met Marat au Panthéon, victime de son dévouement.’ Manlius, a celebrated general, was thrown from the Tarpeian rock for advocating agrarian reform, an alleged indication of ambition; Regulus was another celebrated general who voluntarily brought an unfavourable treaty to Carthage, where he was killed; and the Roman who jumped into an abyss may well have been Martius Curtius (to whom Bertrand Barère referred when discussing the religion of la patrie). 77 Leo Gershoy, ‘Barère, Champion of Nationalism in the French Revolution,’ Political Science Quarterly 42 (1927): 427.

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judgment on Louis XVI, apparently repeating Jefferson’s famous lines about the tree of liberty needing to be manured with the blood of patriots and tyrants: ‘The tree of liberty, said an ancient author, grows when it is watered with the blood of all kind of tyrants.’78 The ancient author has not been identified, but there are numerous ancient sources for the legend of Martius Curtius leaping into an abyss that would only be closed, according to priests, by the worthiest of gi s. A er the gi of Curtius’s life, a sacred fig tree grew that ensured the prosperity of the Roman Republic. Barère reported to the Commi ee of Public Safety that France needs some ‘new Curtiuses devoted to their country (pays).’79 While it is possible that Barère borrowed Jefferson’s image and added the ancient author to dignify his chilling statement, it is also possible that Jefferson, who conversed with Barère in Paris, got his image from Barère, who had a more extensive education in classical literature.80 From Barère’s brutal invocation of Martius Curtius, we return to symbolism of the statue of Brutus before which Barère u ered the chilling words about the tree of liberty needing the blood of tyrants and martyrs. The invocation of Brutus was all too common during the trial of Louis XVI. Jean-Baptiste Louvet de Couvrai donned the toga of Brutus to demand the king’s head.81 Camille Desmoulins, addressing his Discours dans le procès de Louis XVI sur la question de l’appel au peuple to the 740 Brutuses in the National Convention deciding the fate of Louis and specifying those recalcitrant to impose the death penalty, declared: ‘It is the vile blood of slaves and not that of Brutus, which flows through our veins.’ Cato held a king to be ‘a cannibal biped,’ and Louis XVI was simultaneously Caesar and Cataline.82 In his Opinion sur le jugement de Louis XVI, Desmoulins referred to the founder of the Roman Republic

78 Archives parlementaires de 1787 à 1860: Premier série (1787 à 1799) (Nedelen, Lichtenstein: Kraus-Thompson reprint, 1969 of Paris, 1900), t. 57, 368. 79 Cited in Jean-Pierre Thomas, Bertrand Barère: La Voix de la Révolution (Paris: Desjonquères, 1989), 120. 80 Thomas, Bertrand Barère: La Voix de la Révolution, and Conor Cruise O’Brien, The Long Affair: Thomas Jefferson and the French Revolution, 1785–1800 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), 66–7, indicate that Jefferson and Barère met and talked in Parisian salons. The suggestion that Jefferson may have learned of the patriot Martius Curtius from Barère is mine (as is the identification of the Roman to whom Saint-Just referred who threw himself into an abyss to save his country). 81 Scurr, Fatal Purity, 119. 82 Desmoulins, Oeuvres, t. 2, 92–3, 95.

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who sacrificed his sons for liberty when he compared Louis XVI as either Tarquin or Caesar,83 perhaps because the murder of Caesar did not have the fortunate effect on the Roman Republic that Brutus and his senatorial conspirators had hoped. As the name Cato served to combine the virtues of the elder and younger Cato, the name Brutus combined the qualities of the founder of the republic and the noble killer who a empted to preserve the republic from Caesar’s ambition. According to Desmoulins, the qualities of Brutus and Cato are precisely what the imperial rivals fear, and clemency to Louis XVI serves the aims of William Pi : ‘many men that Pi calls cruel and inflexible, as one called Brutus, as one called Cato, that is uncompromising (intraitables) and incorruptible.’84 Maximilien Robespierre came to embody the brutal Catonic virtues, as Desmoulins was soon to discover. However, Desmoulins, just before being executed at the behest of his old friend Robespierre, wrote to his wife: ‘But console yourself, distraught widow! The epitaph of your poor Camille is most glorious [what Dionysius of Syracuse said, ‘tyranny is a beautiful epitaph]: it is that of Brutus and Cato the tyrannicides.’85 Robespierre used both Brutuses from the trial of Louis XVI through the reign of terror. He asked the rhetorical question, ‘Was Tarquin called to judgment?’ but, a er the death of Louis XVI, reflected that if the French Revolution were to fail, Brutus’s murder of Caesar would be a blasphemy.86 Caesar must be murdered again and again. ‘What does it ma er that Brutus has killed the tyrant? Tyranny lives on in human hearts and Rome exists only in Brutus.’87 Terror is the reign of Brutal virtue. ‘Terror is nothing but prompt, severe, inflexible justice; it is therefore an emanation of virtue’ or an application of republican virtue in time of war.88 Rebel stooges of the English commend ‘Caesar’s clemency’ but patriots need ‘Brutus’s firmness as a model.’89

83 Ibid., 127. 84 Ibid., 104. 85 Ibid., 380. 86 Oeuvres de Maximilien Robespierre, t. 9, 124; ‘Tarquin, fût-il appelé en jugement?’; t. 10, 180, 230. 87 Ibid., t. 10, 355: ‘Qu’importe que Brutus eut tué le tyran? La tyrannie vit encore dans les soeurs, et Rome n’existe plus que dans Brutus.’ 88 Ibid., 357: ‘La terreur n’est autre chose que la justice prompte, sévère, inflexible; elle est donc une émanation de la vertu’ applicable in conditions of war. 89 Ibid., 361: ‘la fermeté de Brutus’ is juxtaposed to ‘la clémence de César.’

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Saint-Just imagined himself to be Brutus during the trial of Louis XVI; he wrote to his friend Jean-Louis-Marie Villain Daubigny in July of 1792 from provincial Blérancourt: ‘Oh, God! Must Brutus languish forgo en far from Rome! My course is however set: if Brutus does not kill others, he will kill himself.’90 Like Desmoulins and Robespierre, Saint-Just merged the two Brutuses into one republican hero. In his Discours sur le jugement de Louis XVI, Saint-Just declared that Caesar was killed by the senate ‘without any law but the liberty of Rome’ and also that there were no laws of Numa to judge Tarquin to justify Brutus chasing the Tarquins from Rome to establish republican liberty, as there were no laws to justify the beheading of Charles I in the English Civil War, and thus the judges should only have ‘the right that Brutus had against Caesar.’91 The Romanization of French Men and Women Mona Ozouf stated that ‘the Revolution did not invent the Romans, and its taste for them cannot be explained by some educational peculiarity.’92 However, varieties of the republican religion were inadvertently spread through French schools and colleges throughout the eighteenth century. Camille Desmoulins estimated that there were only about ten republicans in France in 1789: ‘These republicans were for the most part young men, nourished on the reading of Cicero in colleges, acquired there a passion for liberty. They raised us on the schools of Rome and Athens, and in the pride of the republic, so that we live in the abasement [abjection] of monarchy, and under the reign of the Claudiuses and Vitelliuses.’93 Louis-Sebastien Mercier wrote, in Tableau de Paris (1781), that learning Roman history in college had made him into a republican: The names of Brutus, Cato, and Scipio pursued me into sleep; they stored [entassoit] in my memory the familiar le ers of Cicero; while on the one 90 Saint-Just, Oeuvres complètes, 364. ‘O Dieu! Faut-il que Brutus languisse oublié loin de Rome! Mon partis est pris cependant: si Brutus ne tue point les autres, il se tuera lui-même.’ 91 Ibid., 377, 380–1. 92 Ozouf, Festivals and the French Revolution, 272. 93 Camille Desmoulins, Histoire secrète de la Révolution, in Oeuvres, t. 1, 309–10. ‘Ces républicains étoient la plupart des jeunes gens, qui, nourris de la lecture de Ciceron dans les collèges, s’y étoient passionnés pour la liberté. On nous élevoit dans les écoles de Rome et d’Athènes, et dans la fierté de la république, pour vivre dans l’abjection de la monarchie, et sous le règne des Claude et des Vitellius.’

160 Imperial Republics hand, the catechist came on Sundays and spoke to me of Rome as the capital of the world the residence of the pontifical throne. . . . I was a republican with all the defenders of the republic; I made war with the senate against the redoubtable Hannibal; I razed Carthage the proud [superbe], I followed the march of the Roman generals, and the triumphant flight of their eagles, against the Gauls; I saw them without terror conquer the country where I was born, I wanted to make tragedies of all of Caesar’s stages [stations]; and it only has been several years since I had a glimmer of good sense that made me French and a resident [habitant] of Paris.94

Others never perceived the incompatibility between identifying oneself as a Roman and as a French Parisian. Camille Desmoulins wrote to his father in December 1789: ‘Were you divining that I am a Roman when you baptized me Lucius, Sulpicius, Camillus? And were you being a prophet?’95 Desmoulins and his wife named their son Horace. The thought of Rome gave meaning to Saint-Just’s life: ‘The world is empty since the Romans; and their memory refills it, and foretells the return of liberty.’96 The images of Rome that inspired the French to revolutionary heroism were not confined to college-educated males. The young Manon Phlipon, who later took part in the French Revolution as Mme Roland, from her reading of Plutarch, regre ed not having been born a man in antiquity and wished that she could have been born a Spartan or Roman

94 Louis-Sebastien Mercier, Tableau de Paris (Amsterdam: s.n., 1782), 255–6. ‘Les noms de Brutus, de Caton, de Scipion me pursuivoient dans mon sommeil; on entassoit dans ma mémoire les épîtres familières de Cicéron; tandis que d’une côté, le catéchiste venoit le dimanche, & me parloit encore de Rome, comme de la capitale du monde, où résidoit le trône pontifical.  . . . J’étois Républicain avec tous les défenseurs de la République; je faisois la querre avec le Sénat contre le redoubtable Annibal; je rasois Carthage la superbe, je suivois la marche des Généraux Romains, & le vol triomphant de leur aigles, dans les Gaules; je les voyais sans terreur conquérir le Pays où je suis né, je voulois faire des tragédies de toutes les stations de César; & ce n’est que depuis quelques années, que je ne sais quelle lueur de bon sens m’a rendu François & habitant de Paris.’ 95 Desmoulins, Oeuvres, t. 2, 350. ‘Deviniez-vous que je suis un Romain quand vous me baptisiez Lucius, Sulpicius, Camillus? Et prophétisiez-vous?’ Baptized Lucie Simplice Camille Benoist, Desmoulins alluded to the forename of Brutus; Sulpicius was the name of numerous consuls; and Camillus was the renowned general. 96 Oeuvres complètes de Louis-Antoine de Saint-Just, ed. Anne Kupiec and Miguel Abensour (Paris: Gallimard, 2004), 735. ‘Le monde est vide depuis les Romains; et leur mémoire le remplit, et prophétise encore la liberté.’

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woman.97 She regre ed not having been Brutus, Agis, Cleomenes, the brothers Gracchus, or even their mother Cornelia. Awaiting death, Mme de Roland wrote: ‘Oh, Brutus, whose strong hand freed the corrupt Romans, we have erred like thou [toi].’98 Germaine de Staël also described herself in a le er to Edward Gibbon as Cornelia, ‘the mother of the Gracchi’ destined ‘to restore liberty to France’99 This self-description was preposterous since Mme de Staël was opposed to social equality and specifically sided with the Roman senate against proponents of the agrarian law. In 1798, the greatest woman in the world (in J.S. Mill’s and in her own opinion), while wanting to mate with the greatest man in the world (the first consul on his way to becoming emperor whom Germaine called Scipio and the ‘best republican in France’),100 wrote Des Circonstances actuelles qui peuvent terminer la révolution et des principes qui doivent fonder la république en France, in which she fused Roman and French history by asserting that the ambition of the tribunes to implement the agrarian law, rather than the intransigence of the patricians in flouting the law, was responsible for the civil strife in Rome, while the Roman senate, like the French Directory, excelled at turning warfare successfully on foreigners and diverting civil strife.101 The writer and actor Olympe de Gouges led revolutionary festivals as Saint Minerva and made a very Roman gesture of inviting Robespierre to join her in drowning themselves in the Seine to cleanse Parisians of

 97 Le res de Madame Roland, t. 1, 374–5. In a le er to a friend, Sophie Cannet, in February 1776, Manon Philipon wrote: ‘En verité, je suis bien ennuyée d’être femme: il me fallait un autre âme ou un autre sexe, ou un autre siècle. Je devais naître spartiate ou romaine.’ In her diary, she wrote: ‘Plus d’une fois, je pleurai, dépitée de n’être pas née Spartiate ou Romaine.’ In a le er to her future husband, Jean-Marie Roland, vicomte de la Platière, who was older than she and whom she called Cato – he had the dubious quality of being considered by Edmund Burke to be the only reputable revolutionary and became Minister of the Interior in Brissot’s government, Manon wrote: ‘Combien des fois je pleurai, dépitée de n’être pas née Spartiate ou Romaine.’  98 Mémoire de Madame Roland, 235.  99 Anne-Louise-Germaine de Staël, Correspondance générale (Paris: J.J. Pauvert, 1960–82), t. 2, 369. 100 J. Christopher Herold, Mistress to an Age: A Life of Madame de Staël (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1958), 178. 101 Anne-Louise Germaine de Staël-Holstein, Des Circonstances actuelles qui peuvent terminer la révolution et des principes qui doivent fonder la république en France, ed. Lucia Omacini (Paris: Droz, 1979), 383.

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the blood shed on 20 August 1792 when Prussian troops were marching towards Paris.102 Germaine de Staël, a century a er Bernard Fontenelle’s Une Digression sur les anciens et les modernes proclaimed the superiority of the Romans to the Greeks in all fields of literature (poetry, philosophy, history, etc.) except tragedy, eliminated Fontenelle’s exception in De la Li érature (1799). Following Montesquieu’s and De Lolme’s view that Athenians were wrong in holding the theoric fund to be sacrosanct,103 De Staël held the Athenians to be too frivolous to have produced grand passion and concluded that Roman tragedies were superior to those of Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides. ‘The dominant passion of the Athenian people was amusement. One saw them decree the penalty of death on whoever proposed to take away, even for military service, money devoted to public festivals. They did not have, as the Romans did, the ardent desire for conquest.’ The Romans carried a civilized literature to the world; their aristocratic character made Rome ‘the queen of the universe, and they held themselves to be possessed of the status of patricians of the world.’ Foreshadowing France’s ‘mission civilisatrice,’ De Staël asserted that ‘the Romans civilized the world that they conquered.’104 Following Horace’s Odes (4.4.31f), De Staël thought the feroces of the Roman eagle signified the martial quality of patricians in contrast to the degeneres

102 Mona Ozouf, Festivals in the French Revolution, trans. Alan Sheridan (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989), 71; Scurr, Fatal Purity, 215. 103 The theoric fund was the money set aside for citizens to watch dramatic spectacles. For me, it was a fundamental ground of Athenian greatness, but, for eighteenthcentury thinkers, it was a sign of Athenian superficiality and frivolity. Charles de Secondat, baron de Montesquieu, De L’Esprit des lois, ed. Gonzague Truc (Paris: Garnier, 1962), III, iii, t. 1, 25, wrote that Athenians preferred pleasure to liberty: ‘Ils avaient fait une loi pour punir de mort celui qui proposerait de convertir aux usages de la guerre l’argent destiné pour les théâtres.’ Jean Louis De Lolme, The Constitution of England, ed. David Lieberman (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 2007), 156, repeated Montesquieu’s censure. 104 Anne-Louise-Germaine de Staël, De la Li érature (Genève: Droz, 1959), 61, 91, 93–4, 131. ‘La passion dominante du peuple d’Athènes, c’étoit l’amusement. On l’a vu décréter la peine de mort, contre quiconque proposeroit de distraire, pour le service militaire même, l’argent consacré aux fêtes publiques. Il n’avoit point, comme les Romains, l’ardeur de conquérir.’ ‘Les Romains ont civilisé le monde qu’ils avoient soumis.’ Aristocratic Romans made Rome ‘reine de l’univers, se considéroient comme possesseurs du patriciat du monde.’

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doves, base birds associated with the plebeian Venus.105 The Romans were, for De Staël, an aristocracy bent on conquest and civilization; the Athenians, democrats given to frivolous amusements, and thus their tragedy, as well as their comedy, poetry, history, and philosophy, were inferior to comparable Roman genres of literature. While eighteenthcentury thinkers were singular in thinking Seneca to be a philosopher of the highest rank, the equal or superior to Plato and Aristotle,106 De Staël provided what she took to be the political causes for the superiority of the Romans. Although she later turned against Napoleon’s imperial rule, De Staël’s writings on Rome and Athens manifest a higher estimation of aristocracy than democracy and of military power than culture, spirit, or self-consciousness. The sacrosanct character of the theoric fund, which Montesquieu, De Lolme, and De Staël deprecated, displayed the core of Sophocles’ wisdom that one must pursue knowledge about oneself, come what may; the tragedies which held a mirror before the Athenians merely displayed, for De Staël, a taste for frivolous amusements. Whereas the Romans had their triumphal abasement of their opponents, Aeschylus celebrated Athens’s victory over the eastern empire in his tragedy The Persians by ennobling the people Athens conquered. This enduring monument to the greatness of Athens was dismissed as trivial amusement by De Staël and those who shared her eighteenth-century taste. In admiring Roman, and deprecating Greek, philosophy, poetry, and drama, De Staël’s self-proclaimed tastefulness was corrupted by her aristocratic inclinations and her preference for power over intelligence. Even her beloved Romans were not foolish enough to think they had improved on Greek philosophy and drama. De Staël’s admiration for Rome and contempt for Athens were widespread throughout the eighteenth century. Chantal Grell demonstrated the eighteenth-century consensus that Athens was anarchistic: ‘The zealots of Sparta and republican Rome did not cease, in effect, denouncing the defects of the Athenian constitution.’107 De Staël’s contemporary 105 Giamba ista Vico, The New Science, trans. Thomas Goddard Bergin and Max Harold Fisch (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1968), 204. 106 No philosophers before or since held Seneca in the esteem that Hume, Rousseau, Diderot, D’Holbach, and Helvétius did. See G.M. Ross, ‘Seneca’s Philosophic Influence,’ in C.D.N. Costa, ed., Seneca (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1974), 116–65. 107 Grell, Le Dix-Huitième Siècle et l’antiquité en France, 495: ‘Les zélateurs de Sparte et de la Rome républicaine n’eurent de cesse, en effet, de dénoncer les travers de la constitution d’Athènes’; also 496–500.

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and fellow anti-Jacobin, Dominique-Joseph Garat, wrote: ‘Athens, until the hegemony of Philip, escaped the domination of tyrants, yet she almost always was tyrannized by the mad and atrocious passions of its citizens.’108 One almost never encounters in the writings of the eighteenth century any restatements of Aristotle’s view of the collective virtue of the many poor, their prudence or capacity to contribute to public deliberations. The only exception I have encountered was an English defender of the French Revolution, John Thelwall, who wrote: ‘Now, though every workshop cannot have a Socrates within the pale of its own society, nor even a manufacturing town a man of such wisdom, virtue, and opportunities to instruct them, yet a sort of Socratic spirit will necessarily grow up, wherever large bodies of men assemble. Each brings, as it were, into the common bank his mite of information, and pu ing it into a sort of circulating usuance, each contributor has the advantage of a large interest, without any diminution of capital.’109 Even Thelwall’s friend Thomas Hardy, the head of the London Corresponding Society, also arrested for supporting the French Revolution and acqui ed for seditious conspiracy, thought Athens ‘a nest of factions, conspiracies and violence’ where there was no rule of law or respect for individual rights.110 Thomas Paine thought Athens to be the most democratic state of antiquity but deprecated its lack of representative government. Alexander Hamilton and James Madison, as we have seen, held Rome to be a positive model of the virtues of representative government and an expansive republic and Athens to be a negative model of the vices of direct democracy. However, the main reason for the pre-eminence of Roman over Athenian imagery in the French Revolution was its expansionary dynamic. As Anthony Pagden, in his comparative study of Spanish, British, and French imperialism, wrote: ‘Unlike . . . the Greek polis, the Roman civitas was crucially a civilization for exportation . . . The frontiers between the world of civil men and of barbarians were forever

108 Garat, Mémoires sur la Révolution, 53: ‘Athènes, jusqu’à Philippe, échappa à tous les tyrans, mais elle fut presqe tojours tyrannisée par les passions folles et atroces de ces citoyens.’ 109 John Thelwall, The Rights of Nature, against the Usurpations of Establishments. A Series of Le ers to the People of Great Britain, Occasioned by the Recent Effusions of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke (London: H.D. Symonds, 1796), pt. 1, 22. 110 Thomas Hardy, The Patriot. Addressed to the People, on the Present State of Affairs in Britain and in France (Edinburgh: J. Dickson, 1793), 49–54.

The Role of Brutus in the French Revolution 165

dissolving. Potentially at least, the Imperium was a culture without limits, which is why Terminus, the god of boundaries, refused to a end the foundation of the city of Rome.’111 The neo-Roman penchant for expansion was the product of imperial rivalry between France and Britain in the eighteenth century; the supersession of Christian by patriotic virtue was exacerbated by the losses suffered in the Seven Years’ War when the English were cast as the Carthaginians by the French (much as the English had cast the Dutch in the previous century as the commercial Carthaginians who must be destroyed). The patriotism enhanced imperial rivalry with Britain brought the imperial Roman Republic to the fore as the dominant model to replace the ancien régime. The British victory in the Seven Years’ War (1756–63) led to the loss of her American colonies, since the colonists no longer needed British protection from New France and resented being taxed for it; they also disliked the Quebec Act of 1774, which granted Catholics civil rights and extended the boundaries of Quebec into the Ohio Valley. The French victory over the British in the American War of Independence came at an enormous cost, namely, the fiscal crisis of the French state that required Louis XVI to convoke the Estates-General. The French Revolution was not expansionary from the outset; the great fear of 1789 that aristocrats might call in Prussian troops, as Dutch oligarchs had done in 1787 to suppress patriots, was limited to a acks on suspected French, not foreign, enemies. Nor was revolutionary expansionism simply a product of the veneration for Rome held by many of the French revolutionaries. The Americans had the support of the French, the Spanish, and the Dutch; the French had no allies and, by 1792, faced the armed enmity of the Prussians, Austrians, and the British. The Jacobins, who initially opposed war and conquest, became associated with the emergency wartime measures and dictatorial methods of dealing with counterrevolution in the Vendée (west-central France) and abroad. The French Revolution, unlike the American Revolution, abolished slavery and thus could be said to depart from the Roman model, although the first consul Napoleon a empted to reimpose plantation slavery, which Thomas Jefferson supported. The French Revolution was more than a political revolution, which changed the form of government; it was a social revolution that overturned property relations. It

111 Anthony Pagden, Lords of All the World: Ideologies of Empire in Spain, Britain and France c.1500–c.1800 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1995), 22.

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has become almost axiomatic in the English-speaking world that political revolutions are successful and relatively bloodless, while social revolutions are bloody and unsuccessful in achieving social equality or some version of the Roman agrarian laws. Perhaps political revolutions succeeded because revolutionaries were not oppressed and exploited. American farmers and wage labourers were hardly as oppressed as French peasants and wage labourers. The Americans, to repeat, were the wealthiest and least taxed part of the British Empire. Thus, perhaps the reason why political revolutions are successful and social revolutions unsuccessful is that the former are not urgently needed to combat oppression and exploitation. Few American historians emphasize that the stature of the American Founding Fathers was a ributable to the favourable conditions for cultivating excellence in colonial America. The Roman model was a patrician form of patriotic virtue; Harrington, Trenchard and Gordon, and Montesquieu followed Machiavelli in thinking an expansionary republic required a patrician senate to lead poor plebeians into wars to pursue the prospects of new lands and booty. Voltaire and Smith thought the imperialist dynamic would have abated if intransigent patricians had not murdered all proponents of the agrarian laws. To the extent that Voltaire and Smith were right, the French Revolution acquired an imperial dynamic under the Directory which flowered under Napoleon. Roman republican imagery arose in the ancien régime from the imperial rivalry with the Carthaginian/English; developed into an ideal of patriotic virtue that superseded loyalty to the crown; served a variety of purposes during the French Revolution; descended into brutality with the beheading of Louis XVI, war, and terror; emerged under the Directory, as imperialist troops were led into conquest by a senatorial class; and culminated in the Napoleonic Empire. Like the American Revolution, the French Revolution was born from imperial rivalry and generated its own imperial dynamic. The Roman Republic served both republican and imperialist objectives in the republican revolutions of the eighteenth century.

8 Imperial Pride and Anxiety: Gibbon’s Roman Empire and Ferguson’s Roman Republic

J.G.A. Pocock and others have asserted that the British in the second half of the eighteenth century became preoccupied with the question of how Britons could remain free at home while domineering abroad.1 Some Britons opposed imperialism and many more combined pride in British imperial accomplishments with anxiety that British freedom might sink under the weight of its empire. As Pocock indicated, the Romans served as a model for the British; their virtue, born of republican liberty, achieved an empire but the empire tended and tends to corrupt the virtue on which political liberty depends. Not everyone gloried in the British Empire. An odd item appeared in London’s Morning Chronicle of 17 January 1780 which appeared to lament the death of the heroic Captain Cook and his shipmates at the hands of Polynesians: We call Cook, most justly, a civilizer, a circumnavigator, a great man. Had we been born in an island in the South Seas, we should perhaps have called him an invader, a pirate. Let us observe, how much more of humanity there is in rude nature, than in civilization. Were a body of strange beings, with strange arms, and a strange language, to land at Plymouth, we should make signs to them, that unless they returned forthwith to the

1 J.G.A. Pocock, Barbarism and Religion: The First Decline and Fall (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), vol. 3: 309–10, 419–47; P. J. Marshall, ‘A Free though Conquering People’: Eighteenth-Century Britain and Its Empire (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2003); Nigel Leask, British Romantic Writers and the East: Anxieties of Empire (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), 16–17, 79, 228; Jeremy Black, A Subject of Taste: Culture in Eighteenth-Century England (London: Hambleton, 2005), 229.

168 Imperial Republics place from whence they came, we should make use of the arms given us by God and nature, to put them all to death. Perhaps the Governor of Plymouth, finding himself be er provided than when the French paid him a visit, would not think it necessary to make any signs, but the signal of a ack. Had this been the case with Cook, and all his companions, long before now, who would have blamed the natives? Had we been antient, instead of modern Britons, how should we have behaved to any Roman Captain Cook, who came to explore our island?

This outright opposition to British (and Roman) imperialism was not a solitary voice. Adam Smith, as we have seen, advocated emancipation of the American colonies insofar as they would contribute to continental defence. Richard Price and Joseph Priestley were even stronger opponents of British imperialism. Both Price and Priestley lamented that the liberty of Rome was garnered at the expense of its slaves in the provinces subjected to republican governors.2 It was generous, if inaccurate, for Britons to think that the condition of the free and wealthy colonial Americans was similar to the provinces subjected to, and exploited by, the Roman Republic. Price also indicated that the Britons, like Romans, would become the servants of the wealth extracted by the nabobs of East India Company and West Indian plantations: ‘Rome sunk into slavery, in consequence of enlarging its territories, and becoming the centre of the wealth of conquered provinces, and the seat of universal empire.’3 Joseph Priestley claimed: ‘It is easy to show, in a sufficient number of instances, that wars, revolutions of empire, and the necessary consequences of them, have been, upon the whole, extremely favourable to the progress of knowledge, virtue, and happiness.’4 Thus not all Britons would have agreed with James Bea ie’s view that Albion

2 Richard Price, Observations on the Nature of Civil Liberty, the Principles of Government, and the Justice and Policy of the War with America (Edinburgh: J. Wood and J. Dickson, 1776), 21; Joseph Priestley, Lectures on History, and General Policy (London: J. Johnson, 1788), 29. 3 Richard Price, Additional Observations on the Nature and Value of Civil Liberty, and the War with America (Dublin: W. Whitestone et al., 1777), 64. 4 Joseph Priestley, A Description of a New Chart of History, Containing a View of the Principal Revolutions of Empire That Have Taken Place in the World (London: J. Johnson, 1770), 20. Priestley did not provide any evidence for his claim, other than a vague appeal to Providence, but the sentence remained unchanged in all subsequent editions (through the American and French Revolutions) until the ninth and final edition in 1797.

Gibbon’s Roman Empire and Ferguson’s Roman Republic  169

was carrying on the civilizing missions of Greece and Rome.5 However, a common reaction of Britons a er the Seven Years’ War was a combination of imperial pride and anxiety about the decadence and luxury brought in from the Indies, which might sap the moral and military strength of the British Empire, as it had in the last years of the Roman Republic. A prolific and popular writer of the second half of the eighteenth century, John Brown proclaimed that Roman and British virtue could acquire a great empire but could not maintain it; the mores of the Romans were corrupted by its large empire and would corrupt British manners and martial virtues. Unlimited colonial acquisitions can become a burden to the mother country.6 Jonas Hanway, the much-travelled merchant and philanthropist, asserted that ‘Rome, the greatest state in the world, began to crumble into ruin’ by the vices introduced by the wealth from the provinces; the noble Brutus would have required the moral strength provided by the Christian religion to resurrect the simple virtue of the ancient Romans.7 It is in the context of the combination of pride and anxiety about the British Empire that we are to read two works of the leading lights of the British Enlightenment, Edward Gibbon and Adam Ferguson. This combination of pride and anxiety was manifest in Horace Walpole’s confession to Lord Hertford in 1765 that ‘my heart . . . had felt all the Roman pride of being the first nation upon earth!’ but also in his assertion in 1770 that ‘our virtues are extremely like those of our predecessors the Romans, so I am sure our luxury and extravagance [are] too.’8 Edward Gibbon’s The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire and Adam Ferguson’s The History of the Progress and Termination of the Roman Republic were two monumental studies of Rome, wri en around the time of the American and French Revolutions. Gibbon’s work was started during

5 James Bea ie, The Minstrel; or, The Progress of Genius (London: E. and C. Dilly, 1779), 54. 6 John Brown, Thoughts on Civil Liberty, Licentiousness and Faction (Dublin: A. Leathley et al., 1765), 74–7, 172. 7 Jonas Hanway, The Commemorative Sacrifice of Our Lord’s Supper Considered as a Preservative against Superstitious Fears and Immoral Practices (London: J. Dodsley, 1777), xxix, 263–5; also Jonas Hanway, LeĴers on the Importance of the Rising Generation of the Labouring Part of our Fellow Subjects (London: A. Millar and T. Cadell, 1767), vol. 2: 114; Joseph Hanway, Virtue in Humble Life (London: J. Dodsley, 1774), vol. 2: 243. 8 Horace Walpole’s Correspondence, ed. W.S. Lewis (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1983), vol. 38: 513; LeĴers of Horace Walpole, ed. Peter Cunningham (Edinburgh: John Grant, 1906), vol. 5: 235.

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the Seven Years’ War9 and published between the American War of Independence and the French Revolution, and Ferguson’s work was first published a er the French and Americans had defeated the British at Yorktown in October of 1781. These works of scholarship were wri en from the pride of imperial rise and anxiety about imperial overreach. In the spring of 1776, Gibbon wrote to his friend Georges Deyverdun, comparing the Roman and British Empires and declaring the joint necessity ‘to finish my book and to subdue America.’10 In 1779, Gibbon wrote: ‘The decay of the two empires, the Roman and the British, proceeds in equal steps.’11 The fact that Ferguson wrote about the Roman Republic rather than the Roman Empire did not mean that his work was not concerned with the problem of achieving empire abroad and maintaining liberty at home; the last two volumes of Ferguson’s three-volume work have as many references to ‘empire’ as ‘republic.’12 J.G.A. Pocock has claimed that the most enduring form of ‘the Machiavellian moment’ is ‘that constituted by the problem of libertas and imperium, in which liberty is perceived as accumulating an empire by which it is threatened.’13 We might note that Pocock’s Machiavellian moment encompasses both monarchists and republicans, and that anxiety about empire abroad threatening liberty at home was a more common theme among British monarchists, such as Gibbon, Ferguson, Smith, Nathaniel Hooke and William Guthrie, than French and American republicans. The a raction of the Roman Empire to historians, as Pocock has argued and as this book has a empted to establish, was that ‘eighteenth-century commercial society was aristocratically governed and shared aristocratic values,’ including the desire ‘to extend civilization.’14 Gibbon was clear  9 David Hume wrote Gibbon on 24 October 1767 persuading Gibbon to rewrite his manuscript, which was wri en in French, into English; since the victory of the English at the Plains of Abraham, English will become the lingua franca, as Latin superseded the more beautiful and philosophic Greek language. English is to French as Latin is to Greek. 10 Cited in Harold James, The Roman Predicament: How the Rules of International Order Create the Politics of Empire (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006), 8. James indicates how contemporary Americans look to Rome, fascinated by its imperial republic and anxious about the political effects of imperial overreach. 11 Pocock, Barbarism and Religion, 3: 8. 12 Adam Ferguson, The History of the Progress and Termination of the Roman Republic (London: W. Strahan, 1783). Volume 1 has more references to republic than empire, while volume 3 has more to empire than republic. 13 Pocock, Barbarism and Religion, 3: 310. 14 Ibid., 414, 422.

Gibbon’s Roman Empire and Ferguson’s Roman Republic  171

that the Romans civilized the English,15 as the English civilized those they conquered. The savage Irish and the cannibalistic Scots were not improved by the Romans, a task le for the English to complete. Gibbon’s reflections on the cannibalistic Scots, whom he compared with the civilized Scot David Hume, led Gibbon ‘to encourage the pleasing hope that New Zealand may produce in some future age the Hume of the Southern Hemisphere.’16 It would have been unlikely, if the Scot Ferguson had continued his narrative until the Roman conquest of Britain, that he would have made as sharp a contrast as the Englishman Gibbon between the civilized English and the uncivilized Scots. His Lowland compatriots, David Hume, John Millar, William Robertson, and Adam Smith, provided a balanced account of the Roman conquest of Britain as both civilizing and oppressive.17 In An Essay on the History

15 Edward Gibbon, The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (New York: A.A. Knopf, 1993), vol. 1: 56–7, 397; vol. 2: 566–7; vol. 3: 322–4. 16 Ibid., 2: 577. Thus did Gibbon predict that some Hume of the southern hemisphere would become his intellectual biographer. 17 David Hume, The History of England (London: A. Millar, 1762), vol. 1: 3–8. In his essay ‘That Politics May Be Reduced to a Science,’ Hume thought the Romans wielded a tyrannical dominion over their provinces during the republic but the imperial yoke became more bearable under the emperors. John Millar, An Historical View of the English Government (Dublin: Zachariah Jackson, 1789), 2–3, 16, agreed with Hume that the Romans were oppressive during the republican period but, by the time of the conquest of Britain, the English derived advantages from the Romans while the Scots remained uncivilized. William Robertson, The Situation of the World at the Time of Christ’s Appearance [1755] (Edinburgh: E. Balfour, 1791), 14–19, 53, stated that the Romans, ‘by enslaving the world, however, they civilized it,’ united people by commerce and communications and prepared the way for Christianity to which the Highlanders still stand in need. Adam Smith, Lectures on Jurisprudence, ed. R.L. Meek, D.D. Raphael, and P.G. Stein (Oxford: Clarendon, 1978), 414–15, and An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations (London: T. Strahan and T. Cadell, 1776), vol. 2, bk. 4, ch. 7, tended to oppose Roman provinces as distinct from independent Greek colonies but thought Roman and British imperialism could have civilizing effects. One might note that the Englishman Jeremy Bentham, The Works of Jeremy Bentham, ed. J. Bowring (New York: Russell and Russell, 1969), vol. 5: 269, and the Irishman Edmund Burke, An Abridgement of English History in The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke (London: G. Bell, 1890), vol. 6: 290, agreed with Gibbon on the civilizing effect of the Romans on Britain. Jennifer Pi s, A Turn to Empire: The Rise of Imperial Liberalism in Britain and France (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005), interprets Bentham and Burke as anti-imperial. To be sure, Pi s recognized that Bentham’s view that the withdrawal of Britain from India would have the same effect as the Roman withdrawal from Britain is ambiguous; whereas I read Bentham to mean a reversion to barbarism, Pi s stated a possible

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of Civil Society, Ferguson declared that Rome and England ‘have proved the great legislators among mankind. The first has le the foundation, and the great part of the superstructure of the civil code to the continent of Europe: the other in its island has carried the authority and government of law to a point of perfection, which they never before a ained in the history of mankind.’18 In An Essay on the History of Civil Society, Ferguson espoused an aristocratic form of republicanism; he thought the Roman Republic was healthy when in the hands of patricians but thought it went into decline when plebeians were admi ed to the magistracies,19 and admired the younger Cato for ‘the justness of his understanding, and the extent of his penetration, as he was by the manly fortitude and disinterestedness with which he strove to baffle the designs of a vain and childish ambition.’20 However, despite his respect for the senate and the patricians, Ferguson seemed to favour an agrarian law. ‘The citizen at Rome, at Athens, and in many republics, contended for himself, and his order. The Agrarian Law was moved and debated for ages: it served to awaken the mind: it nourished the spirit of equality, and furnished a field on which to exercise its force; but it was never established with any other of its other and more formal effects.’21 The last clause of the sentence is so vague that it seemed to undermine the energy aroused by the egalitarian measure; perhaps Ferguson meant that the idea of agrarian redistribution moved the Roman Republic to greatness but it was impossible to implement effectively. Ferguson dramatized in a Rousseauian manner the effect of commerce with respect to the difference between the ancients and the moderns: ‘To the ancient Greek, or the Roman, the individual was nothing,

reading would be national liberation (114). Pi s correctly wrote (60) that ‘Burke never claimed that imperial rule was inherently or necessarily illegitimate’ but British rule over India was unduly oppressive. Pi s, in my view, did not sufficiently relate Burke’s changing views on the relationship of the East India Company and the British Parliament to Burke’s patrons in India or to the balance in Parliament when Henry Dundas, William Pi ’s Minister for Scotland, filled the East India Company with Scots and ensured servile placemen in Parliament. For greater details, see my Patrons of Enlightenment (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2006), chap. 9. 18 Adam Ferguson, An Essay on the History of Civil Society (Dublin: B. Grierson, 1767), 248. 19 Ibid., 199–200. 20 Ibid., 200. 21 Ibid., 235.

Gibbon’s Roman Empire and Ferguson’s Roman Republic  173

and the public everything. To the modern, in many nations of Europe, the individual is everything, and the public is nothing.’22 However, to moderate injustice and promote equality, Ferguson favoured the abolition of primogeniture and entails, and the enactment of sumptuary laws. ‘These different methods are more or less consistent with the interests of commerce’ and will promote greater national harmony.23 However, like Machiavellian republicans, Ferguson was torn between his support for social equality and his championship of senatorial authority. In his response to Richard Price’s support for the American cause at the outbreak of the War of Independence, Ferguson wrote: ‘When all the powers of the Roman senate were transferred to the popular assemblies, the liberty of Rome came to an end.’24 By the time he wrote The History of the Progress and Termination of the Roman Republic, Ferguson was clear that it was the controversy over the agrarian and Licinian laws that led the free republic into ‘despotism’ or ‘tyranny’ by undermining senatorial authority. Thus the Roman Republic is a model for all free nations to emulate and to avoid its fatal defects: ‘This mighty state, remarkable for the smallness of its origin, as well as the greatness to which it a ained, has, by the splendor of its national exertions, by the extent of its dominion, by the wisdom of its councils, or by its internal revolutions and reverses of fortune, ever been a principal object of history to all the more enlightened nations of the western world.’25 Ferguson insisted that ‘the Agrarian Law’ had ‘served to the last hour of the Republic as an object of popular zeal, or furnished a specious pretence, which ambitious and designing men continually employed, to captivate the ears of the populace.’26 The ‘sedition of Tiberius Gracchus’ hastened the ruin of the Roman Republic.27 As with Harrington, Trenchard and Gordon, Montesquieu, and others, Ferguson supported the murder by the senate of earlier proponents of agrarian reform, such as Spurius

22 Ibid., 82. 23 Ibid., 236. We can perhaps see here why Hume, the champion of luxury and freedom of commerce, thought Ferguson’s Essay to be a bad book that should never have been published. 24 Adam Ferguson, Remarks on a Pamphlet Lately Published by Dr. Price Intitled, Observations on the Nature of Civil Liberty (London: T. Cadell, 1776), 14; Ferguson’s emphasis. 25 Ferguson, The History of the Progress and Termination of the Roman Republic, 1: 3. 26 Ibid., 30. 27 Ibid., 3: 320.

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Cassius, Spurius Maelius, and Manlius Capitolinus.28 Ferguson’s late opposition to the agrarian laws brought him into contradiction with one of his lifelong central tenets, namely, the desirability of a citizens’ militia to a professional army. Ferguson began his account of the career of Tiberius Gracchus with his fundamental principle, ‘No free state or Republic is safe under any other government of defence than that of its own citizens.’29 He recognized that Tiberius’s reforms were concerned with the diminishing number of free citizens in Italy, displaced by large numbers of slaves working the latifundia of the patricians and knights.30 Nevertheless, Ferguson insisted that Tiberius’s purpose was ‘unseasonable,’ ‘impracticable, and even dangerous,’ while his supporters were motivated by ‘envy, interest or mistaken zeal for justice.’ They were mistaken because ‘the distinctions of rich and poor are as necessary in states of considerable extent as labour, and good government. The poor are destined to labour, and the rich, by the advantages of education, independence and leisure, are qualified for superior stations.’31 Although Ferguson did not address Tiberius Gracchus’s concern about slaves replacing farmer-soldiers, he asserted that, until ‘the sedition of Tiberius Gracchus,’ ‘the People had submi ed to the Senate, as possessed of an authority which was founded in the prevailing opinion of superior worth.’32 Edward Gibbon was as strong a champion of the Roman senate as Ferguson; in fact, he asserted, in the opening paragraph of Decline and Fall, that in the golden age of Rome ( .d. 98–180) the senate had sovereign authority, while the emperors merely executed their policy deliberations and legislation.33 Gibbon had no hesitation in considering this era as that ‘period in the history of the world, during which the condition of the human race was most happy and prosperous.’34 Like Ferguson, Gibbon thought democracy or the domination of the plebeians undermined the republic. ‘Under a democratical government, the citizens exercise the powers of sovereignty; and those powers will be first abused, and a erwards lost, if they are commi ed to an

28 Ibid., 1: 22, 30–2, 48, 70. 29 Ibid., 276. 30 Ibid., 283. 31 Ibid., 284–5. 32 Ibid., 277. 33 Gibbon, Decline and Fall, 1: 3. 34 Ibid., 90.

Gibbon’s Roman Empire and Ferguson’s Roman Republic  175

unwieldy multitude.’35 Yet it was the greed and intransigence of the senate in blocking the Gracchic reforms that led to the demise of the republic. ‘The lands of Italy, which had been originally divided among the families of free and indigent proprietors, were insensibly purchased or usurped by the avarice of the nobles; and in the age which preceded the fall of the republic, it was computed that only two thousand citizens were possessed of any independent substance.’36 Gibbon was clear that republicanism depends upon farmer-soldiers: In the purer ages of the commonwealth, the use of arms was reserved for those ranks of ‘citizens, who had a country to love, a property to defend, and some share in enacting those laws, which it was their interest, as well as duty, to maintain. But in proportion as the public freedom was lost in extent of conquest, war was gradually improved into an art, and degraded into a trade.’ Gibbon continued: ‘That public virtue which among the ancients was denominated patriotism, is derived from a strong sense of our own interest in the preservation and prosperity of the free government of which we are members. Such a sentiment, which had made the legions of the republic almost invincible, could make but a very feeble impression on the mercenary servants of a despotic prince.’37 Passages such as these warrant J.G.A. Pocock’s claim that ‘something in the nature of a “Machiavellian moment” is necessary to the understanding of the Decline and Fall.’38 Gibbon thought religion and military honour under the dominion of the Caesars replaced the patriotic virtue of the Roman Republic. In the early days of the republic, ‘the arms of the people were controlled by the authority of the Patricians; and the balance of freedom was easily preserved in a small and virtuous community.’ Gibbon appeared to admire the patricians as a caste of birth, rather than a class of wealth: ‘The proudest and most perfect separation which can be found in any age or country between the nobles and the people is perhaps the Patricians and Plebeians, as it was established in the first age of the Roman republic.’39 Perhaps, when Gibbon referred to noble avarice undermining the republic, he meant, following Montesquieu, the newly rich rather than the old patricians. Or perhaps, following both Montesquieu and Rousseau, it was more the size of the empire, 35 Ibid., 40; also 186. 36 Ibid., 3: 265–6. 37 Ibid., 1: 12–13. 38 Pocock, Barbarism and Religion, 3: 259. 39 Gibbon, Decline and Fall, 2: 108.

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rather than the intransigence of the senate in blocking agrarian reform, that necessitated monarchical government. However, there is nothing in Gibbon comparable to Mably’s assertion that we should prefer an inglorious virtue to the glorious dominion of a great empire. A er all, Gibbon dropped his History of the Liberty of the Swiss to write his monumental work on the Roman Empire.40 Whatever anxiety Gibbon felt about maintaining liberty in Britain and exercising dominion abroad, Gibbon did not follow Smith in advocating the emancipation of Britain’s colonies. Nor indeed did Ferguson. Anxiety about the weight of empire was, and is, secondary to pride in one’s country’s imperial accomplishments. Indeed, imperial pride may well have been a precondition for the anxieties Britons felt for the risk to their virtue and liberty in acquiring vast overseas possessions, with the exception of those few who advocated abandoning overseas or colonial interests. People are more likely to be anxious about that for which they feel pride or love than that for which they have no strong a achment – the house one has built or the garden one has cultivated (in relation to the houses and gardens of others) a er a storm has passed through one’s town, one’s own children doing daring feats in a playground more than the risky acts of children one does not know, and so forth. Most Britons were anxious about their empire because they were proud of their empire. Ferguson’s and Gibbon’s a raction to Rome exhibited a patrician bias or a view that the senatorial class was best suited to lead Roman legions to a splendid empire. Their view was common among seventeenth- and eighteenth-century republicans. As we have seen, a raction to aristocratic Rome was o en combined with repulsion to democratic Athens, with the exceptions of Marchamont Nedham, John Milton, and some of the Levellers in the English Civil War, John Thelwall and Thomas Paine. Perhaps we could include Adam Smith’s preference for Athens’s independent colonies to Rome’s dependent provinces as an additional counter-example to the prevailing Romanophilia. Burke’s ambiguous A Vindication of Natural Society furnished a possible counter-example: ‘Rome has a more venerable aspect than Athens; and she conducted her Affairs, so far as related to the Ruin and Oppression of the greatest part of the World, with more Wisdom and Uniformity.’41 But Harrington,

40 See Hugh Trevor-Roper’s introduction to Gibbon, Decline and Fall, lxix–lxx. 41 Edmund Burke, A Vindication of Natural Society (London: M. Cooper, 1756), 63.

Gibbon’s Roman Empire and Ferguson’s Roman Republic  177

Sidney, Montesquieu, Rousseau, Mably, Madison, Hamilton, Desmoulins, Saint-Just, Roland, and De Staël ranked Rome and Sparta above Athens. Madison and Hamilton called America a republic, not a democracy, since Athenian democracy lacked constitutional safeguards for private property and would become mob rule even if its citizens were all as wise as Socrates. John Brown expressed the common sentiments of his time when he claimed that Spartans were inferior to Romans but superior to Athenians. The Romans and Spartans were soldiers, whereas ‘the People of thens were ‘a Body of Labourers and Mechanics, who earned their Bread with the Sweat of Their Brows; too generally ignorant and ill-educated, too generally profligate in Manners and void of Principle.’42 That is, the consensus about the superiority of Rome to Athens reflected apprehension about the demands for plebeian participation in eighteenth-century politics. Romanophilia and Athenophobia also expressed a higher estimation of the practical to the theoretical life, of the life of power politics to the life of the mind. Above all, the veneration of Rome exhibited the pride, as well as the anxiety, concerning the rivalry of Britain and France for global domination. Horace Walpole wrote in January 1780: ‘My first object in politics is to demolish the French marine. My Whig blood cannot bear to part with a drop of the empire of the ocean. Like the Romans I would have Rome domineer over the world, and be free at home.’43

42 John Brown, Thoughts on Civil Liberty, Licentiousness and Faction (Dublin: A. Leathley et al., 1765), 87, 90. 43 Horace Walpole’s Correspondence, 33: 158.

Conclusion

If Hobbes was right to be worried about the use his contemporaries made of classical antiquity, he was also right to think that republicans have lamented the use of arbitrary power by monarchs, while being less concerned with the exercise of arbitrary power in republics, whether it is the practice of ostracism in Athens, the murder of proponents of agrarian reform in Rome, or secret denunciations in Venice. To be sure, Thomas Jefferson opposed John Adams’s Aliens and Seditions Acts, which curtailed civil rights more than any measures taken by colonial governments, and Adams was later to oppose Jefferson’s blockade of Haiti. Camille Desmoulins denounced restrictions on freedom of the press during Robespierre’s wartime rule. Contemporary republicans, such as Chalmers Johnson and Noam Chomsky, have been highly critical of American covert operations and arbitrary use of presidential powers, and thus there is no reason to generalize Hobbes’s observation that republicans are unconcerned with the deprivation of civil liberties in republican regimes. However, republican theorists such as Quentin Skinner, Philip Pe it, and Maurizio Viroli, who have insisted that freedom is the absence of domination or arbitrary power, have been reluctant to provide historical evidence as empirical support for their contention that arbitrary power is less common in republics than monarchies, or that subjects of constitutional monarchies are less free or more servile than citizens of republican governments. Many political theorists have praised America’s political revolution, deprecated France’s social revolution, and indicated the singularity of the successful use of violence in the American War of Independence. Hobbesian philosophy condemns the romanticism of republican revolutions, the sense of rebirth, the casting off of Old Adam in the

Conclusion  179

revolutionary creation of a new order of things. Yet the myth of revolution has inspired and given hope to millions in the past and present. We remain torn between Hobbes and Marx. Canada is the only country in the Americas not to have had a revolutionary break from European empires. Canadians lack the nationalist pride of their republican neighbours to the south. Nationalism, if not the offspring of the American and French Revolutions, was certainly strengthened by these revolutions. Canadian allegiances are usually multiple, to Canada and to new Canadians’ country of origin and to their mother tongue: Canada is proverbially a mosaic, not a melting pot. Allegiances to provinces and regions, to Quebec, to Newfoundland, to the north, to Alberta, to Nova Scotia, to British Columbia, compete with allegiance to Canada even more than the proud states of Texas, California, and New York contest American patriotism. That Canadians have multiple roots, rather than a single a achment to the nation-state, may be indicative of pre-modernity, such as the Frondeurs were a empting to revive, or of post-modernity, where economic and cultural life cannot be contained with a national form. If Canadians do not know what it is to be Canadian, they do not know what it is to be un-Canadian. We lack a House Un-Canadian Activities Commi ee. Canada is a constitutional monarchy. Republican theorists seem to be divided on the question of whether constitutional monarchies can command the allegiance of republicans.1 Like most Canadians, I am indifferent to royalty. However, eliminating the monarchy would rupture our constitution, our laws and our treaties with Aboriginal Canadians. Monarchy also clearly indicates that justice is not equivalent to majority rule, as the First Nations and Québécois have reason to

1 Philip Pe it criticized Quentin Skinner for making republicanism more complicated than an opposition to monarchy. Skinner’s position in Liberty before Liberalism is that the republican tradition was constituted by allegiance to a Roman conception of freedom as not being a slave, and could be espoused by constitutional monarchists as well as republicans. See Philip Pe it, ‘Keeping Republican Freedom Simple: On a Difference with Quentin Skinner,’ Political Theory 30 (2002): 340. Canadians tend to think of the Irish Republican Army as more of a terrorist organization than a liberation movement, while Americans tend to see the IRA as more anti-imperialist than terrorist. Pe it did not discuss the IRA in his difference with Skinner; both discuss republican freedom at such a level of abstraction that specification of Anglo-Irish relations is not a topic under discussion. However, it is quite possible that they would disagree on Irish republicanism.

180 Imperial Republics

know.2 Aboriginals have been be er able to negotiate with the crown than with white se lers. Canadian identity flowed from the Quebec Act of 1774, which established the Catholic religion and French civil law in Quebec and ultimately led to two nations contained within one state, a state that was forced to tolerate diversity, bi-nationalism, and later multiculturalism. What kept Canada in the British Empire was a major factor driving the Americans from it. Canadian thinkers have emphasized empire; Harold Innis’s Empire and Communications (1950), popularized in the works of Marshall McLuhan, Donald Creighton’s Empire of the Saint Lawrence (1956), and George Grant’s Technology and Empire: Perspectives on North America (1969) have illuminated the fact that empires can be simultaneously resisted and extended, while showing how Canadians extended the French, British, and American empires and constructed a provisional identity in opposition to them. Carl Berger’s The Sense of Power: Studies in the Ideas of Canadian Imperialism 1867–1914 (1970) indicated that the first Canadian nationalists were Imperial Federationists. This book has been indecisive on the big issue of when, if ever, revolutions are justifiable. Our comparison of the American and French Revolutions has indicated that the greater the oppression of the revolutionary peoples, the lesser the prospect that the revolutionary objectives will be achieved. Our limited aim has been to show that republicanism and imperialism are not antithetical, and that expansionary republics have sometimes integrated conquered peoples into the expanding republic and hence are no longer seen as imperialist by the formerly subject peoples. Perhaps commercial elites will eliminate the ‘undefended border’ between Canada and the United States if the imperial republic decides to enact Madison’s and Hamilton’s view that nations desire to extend their territory or determines that it needs to commandeer our water, energy, and mineral resources. The British North America Act’s aim of procuring ‘peace, order and good government’ is Hobbesian, and Canadian Hobbesians would be reluctant to go down

2 Right-wing Albertans have adopted an American sense of justice in emphasizing the principle of majority rule, and dismissing collective rights, or special rights for Aboriginal and francophone Canadians. See David J. Bercuson and Barry Cooper, Deconfederation: Canada without Quebec (Toronto: Key Porter, 1991); David J. Bercuson and Barry Cooper, Derailed: The Betrayal of the National Dream (Toronto: Key Porter, 1994); Tom Flanagan, First Nations? Second Thoughts (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2008).

Conclusion  181

with the flags waving and the guns blaring if the border were removed. However, those a ached to Canadian traditions would be seriously conflicted. Nor would Canadians commend constitutional monarchy to our American friends to improve its form of government, or limit the right to bear arms and the legitimation of violence arising from the republican revolution – the tree of liberty that must be watered in blood. Doubtless, there are advantages in distinguishing the head of state from the head of government,3 but the different traditions and ‘habits of the heart’ must be taken into account before regime change is deliberated. The primary intention of this book has been to criticize the thoughtless adulation of Rome and deprecation of Athens in the eighteenth century. Monuments of power are less enduring than monuments of intellect. Greek tragedies are now used as a Greek balm to a Roman sore, namely, to relieve post-traumatic stress disorder in the veterans of American wars. In addition, the Aristotelian ideal of the self-sufficient city-state may commend itself, relative to Machiavellian expansion, in proportion as energy costs make local production more efficient than shipping or flying commodities to the global marketplace. However, it is not for political theorists to foresee the future. Imperial Republics has indicated that a gulf exists between republican theory and republican practice. We have questioned whether the neo-Roman idea of freedom as not being a slave or subject to an imperial power does not presuppose both slavery and imperialism. We have asked for greater specification about what is included and what excluded from the idea of freedom as the absence of domination or arbitrary rule. Does arbitrary rule preclude the right of employers to render employees redundant at will? Are non-unionist workers, especially migrant labourers without citizenship in their place of employment, slaves, according to republican theory? Finally, our primary purpose has been to challenge republican theorists to specify the conceptual relationship between republics and empires – whether contradictory, complementary, or some combination of opposition and co-existence.

3 I do not mean only the pragmatic advantage of freeing the head of government from the ceremonial tasks of the head of state but, more importantly, the ability to criticize the head of government without assaulting ‘the divinity that doth hedge’ an American president. The greater prestige of presidents than prime ministers, of course, does not prevent violent hatred and assassination of presidents but it is more difficult to force the resignation of presidents for imprudent policies or illegal acts.

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Imperial Republics has shown that the historical record suggests that revolutionary republics of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries have been expansionary and have used republican Rome as a model of imperialist expansion. For the very reasons that Athens was deprecated in the eighteenth century, twenty-first-century anti-imperialists might celebrate the Athenian sense of nemesis, the tragedy of imperial hubris, the independence of her colonies, the belief in the collective prudence and integrity of the many poor, their participation in public deliberations, the higher taxes on the rich, the importance of publicly funded ‘entertainments’4 even relative to military budgets. Whether this city that produced more intelligence and beauty than any other civilization could have done so without excluding from citizenship women and slaves whose labour provided adult male citizens with the leisure for intelligent conversation and civic duties is a question worth asking. That is, the city that appeared too democratic for the eighteenth century may seem too aristocratic for the twenty-first century. Nevertheless, the pitfalls of neo-Romanism are all too apparent when the imperial republic to the south is palpably on the decline a er besting in Afghanistan its imperial rival in the Cold War, and presenting itself on the world’s stage as the only remaining superpower.

4 In employing the word ‘entertainment,’ I am following the usage of Montesquieu, De Lolme, and De Staël and not equating the brilliant products of the theoric fund with Fox News or the commercial entertainments that manufacture thoughtless consent to America’s imperial role.

Index

Adams, John, xiv, xvi, xix, 14, 18, 45, 65 n59, 95–6, 178; as Romanophile, 87, 89, 90, 90 n84, 92, 92 n93, 107 Adams, Samuel, 8, 87, 91–2 Addison, Joseph, 54, 56 n26; Cato, xvii, 13, 50–1, 57–9, 79; Freeholder, 56 Aes ylus, 162–3; The Persians, 19 agrarian and Licinian law: agrarian reform, 39, 42, 46, 92 n98, 120–1, 128, 156 n76, 178; disputes over, xv–xvi, 10 n30; during the Fren Revolution (confiscation of émigré estates), 140–6, 166; in Georgia, 71, 75, 79; Ma iavelli on, 19–20, 22–4, 42; perceptions of during American Revolution, 89, 91, 110; perceptions of in eighteenthcentury France, 122, 123 n27, 125, 128, 130, 161; perceptions of during the English Civil War, 37–9, 41–6; perceptions of in late eighteenth-century Britain, 172–4, 176; perceptions of in monar ical Britain of the Augustan Age, 57, 57 n30, 60–65; Roman versus Spartan, 144–5; senatorial

opposition to, 10, 10 n30, 19, 23–4, 37–9, 41, 44, 91, 176 Albany Plan of Union, 80, 98 American Revolution, xi, xiii, xiv–xv, xx, 16, 51, 79, 82 n41, 83 n48, 86 n62, 92 n93, 94, 140, 147, 154–6, 165–6; American revolutionaries, xi–xii, xiv, 7–8, 71, 81, 87 n65, 119. See also United States Amerindian nations: Cherokees, 76; Chi asaws, 76–7, 76 n16; Cho taws, 76–7; First Nations, 77, 179–80; Muscogee/Creek, 76–7; Pontiac’s rebellion, 82–3; Tomo i i, Yamacraw ief favoured by Oglethorpe, 76–7 ancien régime, xx, 97, 141–2, 145, 147 n29, 165–6; republican imagery in, 165–6 Anglo-Dut War, 16, 32, 32 n23, 47, 52, 74 Anne of Austria, 108–9 Arendt, Hannah, xiii, 7, 86, 90 n84, 147 Areopagus, 10, 38, 60, 90, 104, 126 Aristotle, xvi, 26, 31, 42, 46, 163; Aristotelian anti-imperialism, 17,

184 Index 19; on class harmony, 9, 24, 105, 164; and farmer-soldiers, xvi, 19, 21, 25; mixed constitution, 19, 21, 24, 105; on private property, xv, 20; on self-sufficient polis, 18, 20 Armitage, David, x, 3, 3 n3, 29–30, 36 Athenaphobia, 12, 77, 177 Athenian democracy, 8–9, 12 n40, 29, 37–39, 43, 46, 60, 90–1, 104, 106–7, 125, 163–4, 176–7; as anar ic, xix, 7, 8 n20, 9, 43–4, 91, 125–7, 129, 130 n58, 151, 154–5, 164; as rejected by Fren revolutionaries, 147, 151–5, 155 n67 Athenian egalitarianism, 48, 60, 90–1, 130 n58, 172 Athenian imperialism, as hampered by democracy, 22, 26, 90, 92–3, 124, 162–4, 162 n103 Athenian philosophy, 31, 126, 155, 162 Athens, 133, 159, 172; Aristotle’s, xvi; colonies, 10, 22, 176; as deprecated by eighteenth-century republicans, xii, xiv, xix, 7–8, 129, 181–2; as maritime empire, 10–12, 19–21, 25–26, 127; as model for antiimperialists, 27, 30–1, 35–9, 47–8, 60, 182 Augustine of Hippo, Saint, 58 n34, 77, 120 Bailyn, Bernard, xii, xix, 51 Bank of England, 70, 159 Barère de Vieuzac, Bertrand, 15, 15 n52, 91 n92, 142–3, 150, 156–7 Barron, William, 11, 65–7 Barthélemy, Jean-Jacques, 125–6, 126 n40 Bentham, Jeremy, 69, 171 n17, 119 n15

Billaud-Varenne, François Nicolas, 151, 155 Bodin, Jean, 5; as monar ist, 102–6; opposition to Roman Empire, 104; as sympathetic to Roman Republic, 103–4, 106; theory of unmixed sovereignty, 18, 102, 105 Bolingbroke, Henry St John, Viscount, 68 Bonaparte, Napoleon, 58 n34, 95–6, 95 n109, 153, 154 n65, 163, 165–6; Napoleonic Empire, xxi, 166; Napoleonic France, 95; Napoleonic Wars, 47, 49, 153–4 Bouineau, Jacques, 134, 152 Boulainvilliers, Henri, comte de, 53, 107 Brissot, Jacques Pierre, 143 n12, 149–50, 161 n97 Britain/British, xiii n22, xviii, xx, 3, 11, 13, 16, 24, 26, 33, 40, 49, 52, 54, 58, 71, 81, 83, 118, 122, 137; American independence from, 6, 13, 148; as Carthage, xvii, 12, 64–5; civilized by Rome, 13, 58, 119, 119 n15, 171, 171 n17; colonial loyalty to, 74, 97; as constitutional monar y, xviii; Empire, xx, 16, 49 n1, 58, 65, 68–72, 75, 79–84, 97–8, 137, 167–70, 176, 180; Enlightenment, 110, 169; as fiscalmilitary state, 54, 70; imperial rivalry with France, xx, 24–6, 72, 95 n109, 97, 138–40, 150, 165, 177; opposition to imperialism, 168–9; parliament, 36, 66, 80–1, 83–4 87, 122; relationship with American colonies, 11, 66–7, 67 n64, 74, 79, 83–4, 176; southern colonies (Maryland, Virginia, and

Index 185 the Carolinas), 50 n4, 66, 75, 78, 85 n54; war with colonies, 93. See also England (prior to the union of Scotland and England in 1707) British North America Act, 66, 90 n84, 180 Brown, John, 169, 177 Brutus, 56, 169; David’s Brutus, 142; image used by opponents of the Crown, 98, 100–1, 114, 142 n9; Nathaniel Lee’s Lucius Junius Brutus, 56; as popular name, xvii, 101, 142; Portia, the wife of Brutus, xiii; as symbol of the reign of terror, xxi, 142 n9, 143, 151–2, 156–9; as synonym for republican hero, 32, 68, 159, 161; Voltaire’s Brutus, 131 n64, 133 n75, 142 Brutus, Lucius Junius (founder of the Roman Republic), xvii, 3 n3, 10, 14, 38, 55 n19, 58 n34, 101, 114, 133–4, 134 n78, 156 Brutus, Marcus Junius (killer of Julius Caesar), xvii, 7 n15, 85 n57, 101–2, 113, 118, 158, 158 n87, 160 n34 Burke, Edmund, 15, 69, 84–5, 176; on the Fren Revolution, 141, 151, 154, 154 n67, 161 n97; Moving Resolutions for Conciliation with the Colonies, 6–7, 84; opposition to empire, 69, 171 n17; A Vindication of Natural Society, 176 Caesar, Augustus, xxi, 41, 98, 110, 112, 157, 175 Caesar, Julius, xvii, 7 n15, 41, 56, 58, 58 n34, 98, 100–1, 112, 115, 127, 142 n8, 152, 158–60, 175; Commentaries, 92; and regal imagery, 98, 110, 157–8; as symbol

of victory, 110; as tyrant, 13, 33, 39, 50, 60–1, 68, 97 n117, 101–3 Calvinism, 28, 31–2, 52, 101; Calvinist resistance movements, xviii, 100; Dut Calvinism, 32, 52, 101 Canada, 14, 72, 81, 83, 94, 179; advocated annexation of, 17, 94, 95 n108, 96; American retreat in 1776, 14, 89; as constitutional monar y, xviii, 179; as mosaic, 179 Carrier, Hubert, xx, 99, 109 nn52–3, 110 n54, 111 n60, 112 n63, 113 n72, 114 n74 Carthage, xvi–xvii, 38, 97, 101, 118, 124, 135, 152, 160; as America, 65 n59, 89; as Britain/England, xvii, 12, 50, 64–5, 136, 150; as commercial republic, 8 n20, 89, 152; as France, xvii, 47; as Holland, 50, 74; as Mazarin, 109 n52 Cassius (Gaius Cassius Longinus), xv n30, xvi, 23, 39, 43, 61 n50, 62, 64 n57, 68, 100, 102, 118, 121, 128, 174 Catholicism, 15, 53, 72, 106; antiCatholicism and republicanism, 32, 59, 72, 86–8, 102; Catholic Canadiens, 71, 86, 165, 180; Catholic League, 100, 102, 105; and the Jansenist movement, 108 Cato, Marcus Portius (the elder), xvii, 12, 27–8, 49 n1, 50 n4, 60, 62, 79, 109 n52, 133 Cato, Marcus Portius Uticensis (the younger), xvii, 13 n46, 45, 50, 50 n4, 58 n34, 100–1, 149, 158, 172; Cato, xvii, 13, 50–1, 57–9, 79; Marcia, wife of, xiii

186 Index Cato, as combined reference to Cato the elder and Cato the younger, xvii, xx, 50, 50 n4, 29, 60, 67–8, 79, 85, 101, 112, 115, 135, 157–8; Cato’s Le ers, xiv, xvii, 50, 52, 59, 65, 101; cult of, 48; as representative of republican virtue, xvii, xx, 58–9, 79, 98, 158 Catrou, François, 116, 122 Charles II, 37, 45, 47, 55; Restoration of, 16, 30, 37, 40, 53 Chesterfield, Philip Stanhope, 4th earl of, 56 Christianity, 13, 35, 56, 58, 67 n64, 99, 121 n23, 171 n17; Christian arity, 14; Christian Rome, 117, 120; Christian virtues, 108, 116, 165, 169 Cicero, Marcus Tullius, xv–xvi, 20, 46, 54, 56, 62–3, 64 n57, 100, 112, 159; De Officiis, 44, 148 n39; Philippics, 32; popular model for orators during Fren Revolution, 118 n8, 149, 152; on private property, xv, 20, 120, 149, 152; representative of imperial republic, 32 n23; wife of, 49 n1 Cincinnatus, Lucius Quinctius, 23, 88, 92, 92 n98 citizen(s)/citoyen: distinct from bourgeois, xvi, 7, 24, 26, 129; exclusion from citizenship, 96, 106, 151, 182; Fren , 147, 151; Greek, 9, 12, 22, 24–6, 126, 129, 147, 162 n103, 164, 172, 177, 182; republican, ix, ixn2, 3, 84 n53, 172, 174, 178, 181; Roman, 4 n5, 13, 27, 57, 58, 60–1, 63, 84 n53, 106, 115, 117–18, 118 n8, 124, 129,147, 175; virtues of citizenship, x, 19–23, 45, 175

city-states: Greek, xv, 181; Italian, 5, 7 Coen, Jan Pieterszoon, 52 Colbert, Jean-Baptiste, 52, 110, 114, 131, 133 colony/colonies, 5 n7, 6, 13, 57 n30, 72–3, 76, 77 n23, 78, 80, 85 n54, 95 n109, 105, 132, 135–6, 138, 176; American, 11, 64, 66, 67, 67 n64, 73–5, 77–84, 97, 109, 168; commercial, 11, 66, 67, 73, 132; Greek, 10, 11, 11 n3, 19, 22, 50 n4, 65, 67, 67 n64, 127, 171 n17, 176, 182; Roman provinces, 11 n3, 23, 57, 65–7, 104 comitia centuriata, 91, 105–6, 127 comitia tribunata, 36, 91, 105, 127 Condé, Henri de Bourbon, prince de, 106 Condé, Louis de Bourbon, prince de (le grand Condé), 106, 108, 110, 112–15 Condorcet, Marie Jean Antoine Nicolas de Caritat, marquis de, 82, 155 Constant, Benjamin, 140, 155 Cornelia Africanus, 144, 161 Coyer, Gabriel François, abbé, 55 n19, 132–6, 134 n81, 140, 142 Cromwell, Oliver, 26, 32–3, 37, 39–41, 45, 56, 61, 112, 114, 135 Cromwell’s Protectorate, 16, 53 D’Alembert, Jean, 4, 14, 132; Encyclopédie 4, 14, 55 n19 D’Argenson, René-Louis de Voyer, 122 David, Jacques-Louis, 14, 142, 152 Desmoulins, Camille, 122, 140, 147, 150, 155, 157–60, 160 n95, 177, 178

Index 187 dictator, 93, 125; Caesar as, 33, 103; Cincinnatus as, 92 Diderot, Denis, 12–13, 53 n12, 97, 122, 132, 136–8, 155; Encyclopédie, 4, 14, 55 n19; Histoire des deux Indes, 12, 136 Dut , 31, 32 n23, 33, 39, 42, 47, 49, 72, 101, 134, 165; Dut in America, 73–4; Dut East Indies Company, 52, 73–4 Earl of Sha esbury, Anthony Ashley Cooper, 1st earl of, 47–8, 74, 78, 78 n26; 3rd earl of, 53 East India Company, 168, 171 n17 Edict of Nantes, 106 empire(s): American, 92–3, 93 n99, 93 n100, 95 n108, 96, 180; AngloFren imperial rivalry, xxi, 3, 13, 24, 55 n19, 136, 150, 165–6, 177; Athenian, 20, 25–6, 90, 163; British, 26, 49, 49 n1, 56, 69–70, 74, 80–4, 88, 97, 137, 166–7, 169, 180; definition of, ix–x, xn6, xix, 4, 180–1; Dut , 33, 73–4; European, 33, 137, 179; Fren , xi, xxi, 15, 26, 49, 49 n1, 138, 180; land-based empires of conquest, 10, 12, 25–6 124, 132, 136; maritime empires of trade, 10, 12, 25–6, 65, 67, 124, 131–2, 137–8, 177; negative connotation of, xi, 22, 29, 35–6, 69, 69 n72, 71, 80, 93, 97, 167–70, 176; positive connotation of, 17, 24–5, 31, 34–5, 38, 40, 44–6, 68–9, 71, 79–83, 88, 92–3, 93 n100, 95, 102, 119 n11, 119, 120, 131–2, 138, 169, 170–1, 176–7; relation to republics, ix–xi, xix, 4, 8, 12, 15, 24, 88, 93 n100,

97 n117, 153, 170, 170 n12, 181; relationship to nation-building, x n6, 4 n5. See also Roman Empire England, 12, 13 n43, 16, 31–2, 39–41, 44–5, 47–9, 50, 50 n4, 55 n19, 58–9, 67–8, 81, 95, 114, 132, 135–7, 138 n103, 150, 172; English Civil War, xi, xiii, xix, xx, 10, 18, 56, 98, 110, 114, 141, 159, 176; English republicans, 102, 109; Parliament, xx, 16, 28–9, 31, 33, 37, 40, 45, 47, 53–4; republican thinkers, 18, 27, 29–39; tax system, 40, 68, 70, 73. See also Britain (a er unification of England and Scotland in 1707) Enlightenment, 10, 14, 143, 154, 169; American, xiv (see also Franklin, Jefferson, Madison); British (Sco ish), 38, 52 n12, 55 n18, 110; Fren (les lumières), 55 n18, 110, 122, 134; liberal, xiv equality, xi, xvi, 5, 7, 57, 60–1, 63, 75, 79, 84, 118, 128–9, 141, 172–3; as foundation of liberty, 61, 63, 127; vs liberty, 161, 166; and republicanism, 124–5; Spartan, 8 n20, 60, 128, 151. See also agrarian laws Estates-General, xx, 100, 122; convocation in 1614, 108; convocation in 1789, xx, 148, 165; demand to meet during the Fronde, 108 n47, 113 Estwi , Samuel, 65–6 farmer-soldiers, 174; Aristotle’s view on, xvi, 19, 21–2, 25; as basis of republics, 124, 175

188 Index Federalist Papers, 8 n20, 9, 11, 24, 71, 85 n54, 90–1, 93–4 Federalists, 90 n84, 91, 94, 104 Ferguson, Adam, xxi, 169–72, 176; as ampion of the Roman Senate, 172–4; An Essay on the History of Civil Society, 171–2; The History of the Progress and Termination of the Roman Republic, 170, 173; as opponent of agrarian law, 173–4 France: in America, 52, 54, 59, 77, 81–2, 95, 95 n109; as Carthage, xvii; cosmopolitanism of, 135, 135 n87; Fren Empire, xi, xxi, 15, 26, 49, 49 n1, 138, 180; as imperial republic, xx, 15–16, 150–4, 161–6; imperial rivalry with England, 3, 12, 24, 47, 49–50, 52, 54, 55 n19, 72, 81, 84, 95 n109, 136–7, 150, 165, 177; patriotism in, 55 n19, 108, 111, 131, 135, 139, 142, 165; philosophes, 55 n18, 70, 135; rebellions in seventeenth century, 18, 98, 108–15; religious conflict in, 106; as republic, xviii, 8, 12, 149, 156; sixteenth-century, 99–102, 106; taxation in, 70 Franklin, Benjamin, 72, 79–82, 79 n32, 82 n41, 87; Albany Plan, 80–1; as American revolutionary against the Loyalists, 81; British imperialist views on taxation, 81–4, 83 n48; Observations concerning the Increase of Making, Peopling of Countries, &c, 80; Plain Truth, 72, 79 Fren Revolution, xi, 50, 51 n6, 97, 107, 140–66, 169, 170, 179–80; causes of, xix–xx, 139, 143, 146, 147–8; classical republicanism in, xv, 18, 146–7; counterrevolution, 149–50, 151 n50; Fren

revolutionaries, 119, 134, 140–1, 143, 155–6, 160–1, 164; Girondins and Jacobins, 14 n50, 142, 144, 145–6, 146 n24, 149–52, 151 n50, 155, 165; and imperial expansion, xi, xix, xx, 70, 154, 164–6; and land redistribution, 145–6; liberal and illiberal republicanism, xii, xxi, 143, 147; monar ical until flight to Varennes, 7–8, 142–3, 143 n12; Roman imagery during, xi, xiv, 14, 144, 147, 155–6, 166; and slavery, 7, 150, 150 n44, 154; as social revolution vs American political revolution, 165–6; virtue and terror, 151, 151 n50, 158 Fronde, xx, xxn38, xxi, 98–9, 106–7, 110, 110 nn60–1, 114, 116, 179; of the jurists, 109, 114; L’Ormée (popular Fronde), 109–10, 110 n54, 113, 113 n70; of the princes and nobles, 109, 113–14, 113 n70; Roman imagery in, 109, 112 Frondeurs, as David versus Goliath, 109 Gauls, xvn30, 101, 107, 160; Caesar’s victory over, 110; as conquerors of Rome, 117; as opposed to tyranny, 101 Gibbon, Edward, xxi, 5 n7, 63, 63 n57, 119 n15, 161, 169–71, 171 n16, 176; admiration of Roman patrician class, 170, 174–5; anxiety about empire, xxi, 69, 160, 170; The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, 169–70, 170 n9, 174–5 Glorious Revolution, 47–9, 53–6, 70, 72 Gordon, Thomas, xiv, xviii, 10–11, 37, 50–1, 50 n4, 51 n6, 51 n7, 58–61,

Index 189 63 n57, 65, 67–8, 68 n67, 79, 113, 118, 122, 166, 173 Grac i, xv, 42, 57, 61, 104, 118 n8, 120–1, 128, 130, 133, 144–5, 148, 152, 161, 175; Cornelia Africanus, 144, 161 Grac us, Gaius, xvi, 43, 61 n50, 62, 63 n57, 118, 120–1, 129 Grac us, Tiberius, xvi, 43, 61 n50, 62–3, 63 n57, 91, 118, 120–1, 128, 145, 174 Guthrie, William, 10 n30, 30, 62, 62 n55, 63 n57, 170 Haiti. See Saint-Domingue Hamilton, Alexander, xix, 5, 5 n9, 6, 8, 14, 16, 24, 72, 87–8, 93–4, 96, 107, 164, 177, 180; preference for Rome as model for America, 8, 37, 90–1, 177; Remarks on the Quebec Bill, 72, 88. See also Federalist Papers Harrington, James, 30, 92, 114; advocate of agrarian law, 42–7, 60–1, 75, 79; The Commonwealth of Oceana, 16, 39–45, 57; on infinite Oceana expansion, 42; as neoMa iavellian, 18, 24, 27, 30–1, 36–9, 39 n46, 43–7, 60–2, 118, 125, 152, 166, 173, 177 Hobbes, Thomas, xii, xiii, xiii n19, 27, 39, 44–5, 53, 102, 114; as antiimperialist, 27–8, 32 n23; Behemoth, 27–9; De Cive, 27–8; Hobbesian liberty, 5, 32 n23, 178; Hobbesian philosophy, 28; Leviathan, 27, 114; as theorist of representative government, 28–9 Hooke, Nathaniel, 10 n30, 37 n38, 170; as British monar ist, 63 n57; sympathetic to agrarian law, 62–3

Horace, 162, 55 n20; cited by John Adams, 14; Desmoulins names his son a er, 160 Hotman, François, xviii, 100, 112; Franco-Gallia, 100; hostile to Rome as symbol of oppression, 101 House of Lords, 39, 83; comparisons to Roman Senate, 10, 36, 38 hubris, 97; as Athenian understanding of imperialism, 182. See also nemesis Huguenots, xxi, 99 n7, 106, 108, 113; in Fren religious wars, 99, 102, 105–6; Saint Bartholomew’s Day Massacre of, 100. See also monar oma s Hume, David, 6, 10, 68–9, 107, 119 n15, 163 n106, 170 n9, 171, 171 n16, 173 n23; analogy of England’s colonial interests as cancerous stoma , 5 n7, 68; The History of England, 171 n17; Political Essays, 5; as proponent of large aristocratic republics, 104 imperial republic, ix, xi, xvi, xix–xxi, 4, 16–18, 21–2, 24, 38–9, 45–6, 48, 125, 126 n40, 139, 150–4, 161–6, 170 n10, 180–2 imperial republicanism, 17, 56, 182 Ireland, 11, 66 n64, 67; conquest of, 16, 33, 50 n4, 65, 70; destruction of wool trade, 11, 132; Harrington on, 42; Milton on, 31–2 Jacobins, 144, 146 n24, 150, 155; counter-revolutionary ‘White Terror’ against, 151 n50; and egalitarianism, 142, 145; initial opposition to war, 149, 165; and terror, 151–2

190 Index James II: Catholicism, 47, 53, 74; as Tarquinius Superbus, 55, 56 Jaucourt, Louis, evalier de: on la patrie, 55 n19, 134, 142 Jay, John: advocacy of a united American people, 71–2 Jefferson, Thomas, xiv, 15 n52, 86–91, 91 n92, 94–6, 157, 157 n80; expansionism, 16–17; on Haitian revolutionaries, 95, 95 n109, 178; Louisiana Pur ase, 95–6, 95 n109; on slavery, 82, 82 n42, 165 Johnson, Samuel, 6, 26, 92 n93 jurists, 99, 108, 112; Fronde of the jurists, xx n38, 109, 113–14; as Roman senators, 100. See also parlements kingship, 27, 38, 62, 143; elective, 101–2. See also monar y La Boétie, Étienne, 100 liberalism: in the American Revolution, xiv, 85, 86 n62, 94; in the Fren Revolution, 140–3, 149, 156; relation to republicanism, xvi–xix, xxi, 85, 85 n57, 86 n62 libertas: neo-Roman conception of liberty, 84; presupposes slavery and imperialism, 84, 85 n57, 170; and taxation, 86 Licinian law. See agrarian law Livy (Titus Livius), xv n30, 18, 20, 46, 105, 120, 147 n30, 152, 155 Lo e, John, xiv–xv, 50 n4, 51, 51 n7, 53, 67, 140; liberalism, 78, 86 n62, 94; Lo e’s Carolina, 78; on slavery, 67; tax proviso, 83–4, 84 n49, 86 Louis XIII, xxi, 108–9, 111

Louis XIV, 47, 52, 111, 113, 116, 131; emergence as Augustus, xxi, 98, 110; Mazarin and Fronde, 18, 110–11, 113, 115; minority of, xx–xxi, 18, 108–9, 109 n52 Louis XV, 115 Louis XVI: convokes EstatesGeneral, 147, 165; execution, 97, 142 n9, 157–8, 166; flight to Varennes, 8, 142, 143 n12; as Tarquin or Caesar, 157–8; trial, 15, 91 n92, 142 n9, 157–9 Mably, Gabriel Bonnot, abbé de, 5 n7, 11, 25, 25 n12, 125–9, 126 n40, 127 n45, 155, 176–7 Ma iavelli, Niccolò, xvn30, 13, 15 n30, 18, 27, 123 n27, 152, 154; on class conflict, 19, 22–3, 70, 125; Discourses on Livy, 4, 21–2, 30 n13; and imperialism, xx, 4 n5, 24, 26–7, 39, 45–7, 70, 151–2, 181; and imperial republics, xvi, 17, 20, 45, 128, 154, 166, 170; Ma iavellian moment, 170, 175; Ma iavellian republicans, xiv, xvi, 18, 20, 24, 27, 30–1, 33, 36, 38–9, 42–3, 45–6, 109, 118, 122, 125, 128, 166, 173; The Prince, 4 n5; on Sparta and Venice as anti-imperial republics, 22, 45–6 Madison, James, 8, 85 n54, 90–1; advocates annexation of Canada, 16–17, 95 n108, 96, 107, 180; preference for republics over democracies, xix, 8, 24, 37, 90, 164, 177. See also Federalist Papers Manlius Capitolinus, 23, 39, 43, 61 n50, 62, 64 n57, 92 n98, 102, 114, 118, 118 n8, 120–1, 174 Marat, Paul, 140, 156, 156 n76, 157, 157 n80

Index 191 Marcus Curtius (legend of), 15 n52, 156 n76 Marius (Gaius Marius), Roman general, opponent of Sulla (Lucius Cornelius Sulla Felix), ampion of the senatorial classes, 60, 148–9 Marx, Karl, xii–xiii, 42, 179; on Roman roles in Fren Revolution, xii Mazarin, Jules, Cardinal, xx, 18, 108–9, 109 n52, 111–15; as Goliath, 109; as Ma iavelli, 109 Mazarinades, 109; Le Caton François, 109 n52, 115; Les Cauteles de la Paix, 114; Les Curieuses Re er es faites sur la vie de Iules Cesar pour monstrer les conformitez de Mazarin, 115, 115 n77; La Guide au Chemin de la Liberté faisant voir, 115; La Mercuriale, 108 Melon, Jean-François, 50 n4, 125 n37, 131–2 Milton, John, 10, 19, 32 n23, 37, 45, 47, 53, 114; as advocate of expansionary republicanism, 18, 30, 33, 35–6; as Athenaphile, 27, 30, 37–8, 60, 154, 176; Paradise Lost, 35; Paradise Regained, 30–1, 34–5; as Protestant, 30, 32–3, 35, 36, 80 monar oma s, xviii, xxi, 98–9, 99 n7 monar y, 16, 29, 33 n23, 36, 41, 43, 98, 101, 113 n70, 117, 127, 142, 148; constitutional, 99, 105, 108, 143 n12, 179, 181; proRoman opponents of, 99, 131 n64; republicanism as opposition to, xvii–xviii, 117, 179 n1; subjection to as slavery, 66, 115 Monroe, James, 94

Monroe Doctrine, 17, 96 Montagu, Edward Wortley, 10 n30, 64–5 Montesquieu, Charles de Secondat, baron de, xiv, xviii, 5, 5 n7, 16, 18, 39 n46, 40, 49 n1, 50 n4, 51, 63 n57, 64, 79, 107, 124 n23, 133–4, 134 n81, 136, 140–1, 141 n4, 151, 162 n103, 175; admiration for the patrician class, 24, 61, 125, 128, 166, 173, 175; as ampion of empires of trade, 12, 25, 52, 124, 125 n37, 132; Considérations sur les causes de la grandeur des Romains et de leur decadence, 124, 125 n37, 127; critic of Athens, 8 n20, 12, 25, 37, 124, 162–3, 177, 182 n4; De l’Esprit des lois, 5, 11, 125, 131, 162 n103; on the fall of Roman Republic, 10, 24; and the Fronde, xxn38, 111–12; Persian Le ers, 132 n71; on virtue as the principle of republics, xvi, 51 n7; wife of, 49 n1 Moyle, Walter, 57, 57 n30 Napoleon. See Bonaparte, Napoleon nationalism: and imperialism, 116–17; and patriotism, 15 n54, 55 n19, 131, 179 Navigation Acts, 65, 92; English Navigation Act of 1651, 53 Nedham, Mar amont, 10 n30, 27, 30–1, 37 n38, 46–7, 114; admiration for Athens, 10, 27, 30, 36–8, 48, 60, 154, 176; sympathetic to agrarian law, 38 nemesis, 97; Athenian sense of, 182. See also hubris neo-Romanism, xii, xxi, xviiin35, 15, 17, 20, 20 n51, 82, 85, 86 n62, 181–2; in America, 88, 7 n15, 8, 85 n57,

192 Index 87 n65, 88, 90 n85; in Britain, 36, 48, 51 n7; in France, xxi, 97–98, 154, 165 Neville, Henry, 38, 47 New England, 6, 74, 79, 84 New France, 74, 165 New Netherlands, 73–4 New Sweden, 73 New York, 73, 74, 83, 179; anglicization of, 74, 74 n8 Oglethorpe, James, 26, 71, 77 n23, 97; and agrarian equality, 75, 78, 78 n26; aversion to slavery, 75–6, 75 n12, 78, 78 n26; recall and introduction of plantation economy, 78; relations with Amerindian nations, 76–7, 76 n15; victory at ba le of Bloody Marsh, 77–8; victory over Spanish Florida, 97 ostracism: Athenian practice of, 12, 32 n23, 37, 178 Paine, Thomas, 80 n33, 89 n78, 176; republics and empires seen as antithetical, x–xi; as sympathetic to Athens, 9, 12 n40, 164 Parker, Henry, 36 parlements, 99, 111, 113; Bordeaux, 114; Paris, xx n38, 105–6, 108–9, 111–12 patricians, 49 n1, 62 n3, 88 n76, 91, 106, 125 n37, 131 n64, 147 n30, 174, 176 n76; bias of Livy and neoMa iavellians, 63, 163, 172, 175; intransigence to plebeians on land distribution, xv–xvi, xv n30, 38, 64, 119–20, 128, 161, 166; and senate, 106, 128; tribunes introduced to

e patrician power, 36, 91. See also Roman Senate patrie, la, 14 n49, 15, 115 n76, 115 n79, 130, 132, 135 n85, 239; citoyen vs sujet, 117 n4; definition of, 14, 55 n19, 117 n4, 132–3, 133 n75; difference from royaume, xxi, 117 n4, 131 n64, 133–4; modelled on Rome, 14, 114–15, 117, 117 n5, 119, 134, 134 n78, 134 n79, 135, 150, 155–6 patriotism, xvii, 89 n79, 130; as defensive vs offensive, 131; Fren patriotism, 111, 132–9; relation to commerce, 130 n63, 131; relation to nationalism, 15 n54, 55 n19, 131 Peloponnesian War, 20, 154 n67 Pericles, 19–20, 60, 60 n42, 126; as anti-aristocrat, 104; as aristocrat, 155 Pe it, Philip, ix–x, xvii–xviii, xxii, 5, 32 n33, 178, 179 n1 Philip II of Spain, 101 Pi , William (the younger), 69, 83, 172 n17 Plato, xvi, 31, 58, 126–7, 163; as proponent of aristocracy, 46, 125; view on private property, xv plebeians, xv–xvi, 5, 10, 10 n30, 12, 19, 22, 23, 36, 44, 61–2, 63 n57, 64, 68, 70, 88 n76, 91, 102, 120, 123, 123 n27, 127, 145, 147–8, 147 n30, 166, 172, 174–5, 177; and aristocratic notion of ‘people,’ 44, 104–5, 123, 163 Plutar (Lucius Mestrius Plutar us), 54, 125 n37, 144, 152, 160 Poco , J.G.A., 3, 7, 20, 39, 39 n46, 45, 90 n84, 138, 167; on Gibbon and

Index 193 imperial anxiety, 167, 170–1, 175; The Ma iavellian Moment, 3, 170, 175; on tension between dominion and liberty, 170 Polybius, 19; theory of mixed sovereignty, 19, 92, 105 Ponet, John, 18, 98 Pope, Alexander, 55 n20, 58–9 Price, Ri ard, 69, 168, 173 Priestley, Joseph, 168, 168 n4 private property, 144 n16, 145, 151, 156, 160; Aristotle on, xv, 20; democracy la ing constitutional safeguards to protect, 177; protection of, as primary function of state, xv, 149, 149 n38; Roman and neo-Roman views of sanctity of, 20 n5, 152 Publius. See Federalist Papers Quakers, 72; Amerindians and African-Americans treated as friends by, 79; as neutral in war between Britain and colonies, 79–80, 80 n33 Quebec, 74, 179–80; American invasion of, 16, 51, 78, 89; Quebec Act, 71–2, 83, 86–7, 165, 180 Québécois, 179 queen regents: rebellions against Marie de’ Medici during minority of Louis XIII, 108; against Anne of Austria during minority of Louis XIV, 108 Racine, Jean, 110, 110 n56 Rahe, Paul, xiv–xv, 86 n62 Raynal, Guillaume-Thomas, abbé, 12–13, 97, 136–40 reign of terror, xxi, 151, 158; and counter-revolution, 151 n50; relationship to patriotic virtue, 158

republic(s): ancient and modern, xiv–xv, xviii, 27, 43, 146; as anti-imperial, x–xi, xvi, 21–2; commercial, 24, 49, 92; conservative, 4, 22, 128; definition of, xvii–xviii, 105; as distinct from democracies, xix, 90, 177; as expanding, xi, xvi, xix, 4, 12, 15–17, 24, 36, 45–6, 48, 105, 125, 128, 151, 153, 164, 166; imperial, ix, xi, xvi, xix–xxi, 4, 16–18, 21–2, 24, 38–9, 45–6, 48, 56, 95 n117, 105, 125, 126 n40, 139, 151, 153, 165, 170 n10, 179–82; large aristocratic versus small democratic, 104. See also Roman republic republican(s): British, x, 168; conservative, xvi; freedom and a el slavery, 5–7, 84–6, 85 n57, 96; and liberty, xii, 5–6, 7 n15, 32 n23, 47 n75, 88, 133 n75; opponents of monar y, xvii, 104, 178; republican ideals and humanist neo-Stoicism, xii, 13–14, 50–2, 58–60, 84 n53, 99–101, 113, 159; republican Rome as model for, xi–xii, xviii, xxi, 3, 7–8, 17, 32, 49, 50–2, 56, 58–60, 69, 71, 88, 90 n84, 90, 98, 102, 106, 107, 109, 139, 155–63, 166, 182; republican theory, xvii–xviii, 4, 51, 114, 170, 179, 181; revolutions, xii, xiv, xxn38, 15, 88, 107, 114, 140, 142–3, 147, 163, 181–2; social equality in republican regimes, 9, 43, 62, 75, 89, 118, 124–5, 141, 149, 152, 163, 175; virtues, xvii, 104, 123 n27, 150 n43, 158 republicanism, ix; classical, xii, xiv–xv, 27; contrast with

194 Index liberalism, xvii–xix, 86 n62; definition of, xvi–xviii, 5; illiberal, 5–6, 32 n23, 30–6; liberal, 5, 28, 30–6, 32 n23, 33, 167; neoMa iavellian (see Ma iavelli); relationship to imperialism, ix–xi, xvi, xix–xxi, 4, 16–18, 21–2, 29–30, 30–6, 32 n23, 38, 45–6, 48, 56, 88, 90, 83 n50, 97 n117, 127, 139, 151, 152, 170 n10, 179–82; relationship to virtue, xiii, xvi–xviii; and selfrule or autonomy, ix Retz, Cardinal (Jean-François Paul de Gondi), xx n38, 112, 112 n66 Ri elieu, Cardinal, 108–9, 109 n53, 111–12, 142 rights, 9, 112, 121, 128, 141, 147–8, 156, 164–5; collective, 121, 144 n16, 180 n2; liberal language of rights and republican language of virtue, xvi–xviii, 53–4; property, xiii, 120, 147–8, 156 Robespierre, Maximilien, xvi, 140, 141 n4, 142, 143 n12, 145, 150 n44, 151–2, 155–6, 158–9, 161, 178 Roland, Jean-Marie, 161 n97, 145 Roland, Manon Philipon (Madame), 141, 144–5, 160–1, 161 n97, 177 Rollin, Charles, 118–22, 121 n23, 125 Rome/Roman: balance of power as inspiration for bicameral legislatures, xiv, 43, 91; civil religion, 24, 102, 155; concept of imperium, 99, 111, 165, 170; emperors, 99, 103, 110; law, 4 n5, 99, 102, 105, 139, 172; liberty, 7, 10, 59–60, 84–6, 85 n57, 117–18, 147, 168, 173, 179 n1, 181; literature, 27, 123–4, 162; matrons, xiii–xiv; as model for Fren and American

revolutions, xii, xix, 88, 107, 119, 139, 144–66, 169; as model of imperial republic, xii, xvi, 4, 21, 45, 96, 146 n40, 151, 165, 170 n10; as non-commercial, 49, 89, 120, 125; pseudonyms, 11, 87; Romanophilia, 12, 30, 38, 87, 176–7; Romans of the eighteenth century, xviii–xx, 3–4, 7, 12, 17–18, 26, 36–7, 49–50, 56, 69, 119, 122, 155, 158–64, 167; as a symbol of oppression, 38, 101, 171 n17; tragedies, 124, 162. See also Roman Empire; Roman Republic; Roman Senate Roman Empire, 35, 96, 99, 103–4, 115, 137–8, 170, 176; decay of, 10, 10 n30, 28, 37 n38, 46, 59–60, 125, 153; Roman imperialism as providential, 120 Roman Republic: as la ing commerce, 49 n1; language and symbols of, xi, 15, 59, 98–9, 114–15, 144, 158; late republic, 41; as model for American revolutionaries, xi, 8, 16, 90; as model of conquest, 8, 10, 19, 26, 46, 49, 66, 131, 135, 147, 149–53; as model of imperialism, ix, xii, xvi, xix, xxi, 12–13, 15, 18–19, 22–4, 26, 39–40, 44–8, 57–8, 60, 65, 69–70, 92, 96, 104, 120, 123 n27, 126 n40, 128, 131, 139, 153, 165, 179, 182; as model for neo-Ma iavellian imperialists, xii, xvi, 3, 16, 18, 26–7, 30, 36, 38, 104; as model of virtue, 12, 53, 58–9, 89 n78, 104, 116; as symbol of Calvinist resistance, xxi, 99–102; victory over Carthage, 97, 118

Index 195 Roman Senate, xiv, xvn30, xvi–xvii, xix, 10, 16, 20, 22–4, 29, 36–8, 43–4, 56, 61–3, 88, 88 n76, 90–1, 90 n84, 93, 97 n117, 99–102, 104–6, 110, 115, 120–30, 133 n75, 147, 159, 160–1, 172–6; Fren jurists as Roman senators, 100, 112, 114; senators, xii, xv, xvii, 10 n30, 12, 19, 20 n5, 24, 37–9, 44, 48, 60–2, 65, 68, 71, 89, 91, 102, 104, 112, 121–3, 125, 149, 158, 176 Rouillé, Pierre-Julien, 116–17, 122 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, xvi, xix, 10, 14 n49, 29, 45, 63 n57, 104, 122, 129–31, 135 n87, 140–1, 143, 150 n47, 155, 163 n106, 172, 175; as anti-imperialist, 24, 131; Considerations on the Government of Poland and on Its Planned Reformation, 130; Discourse on Political Economy, 130; Plan for a Constitution of Corsica, 130; ranking of Rome, Sparta, and Athens, 7, 129, 155, 177; Social Contract, 122, 129–30 royaume, as distinct from patrie, xxi, 117 n4, 131 n64, 133–4 Saint-Domingue, 153; slave revolution in, 95–6 Saint-Just, Louis-Antoine, 140–1, 149–50, 150 n44, 155–6, 157 n80, 159, 160, 177 Sallust (Gauius Sallustius Crispus), 61, 68, 79, 152 Scipio Africanus (Publius Cornelius Scipio Africanus), 133, 135, 145, 159, 160 n94, 161; use of name by republicans, 87, 112, 135 Scipio Nasica (Publius Cornelius Scipio Nasica), xvii

Scotland, 100, 171 n17; Cromwell’s defeat of, 16; invasion of England, xn4, 16, 31, 33, 42, 43, 45; union with England, 58, 81 Sellers, Mortimer, x–xi, 84 n53, 90, 90 n84 Servius Tullius, 56, 127 Seven Years’ War, 50; British reactions to, 69–70, 169–70; comparisons of England and Carthage during and a er, 50, 136, 165; Fren losses as a result of, 95 n109, 137; Fren patriotism during, 135; impact on American loyalty to Britain, 97, 165; issues of taxation following, 82–4 Sha esbury, Anthony Ashley Cooper, 1st earl of, 86; advocate of Second Anglo-Dut War, 32 n23, 47, 74; as advocate of slavery for the Carolinas, 78, 78 n26 Sha esbury, Anthony Ashley Cooper, 3rd earl of, 53 Shays, Daniel, 91–2, 91 n92; Shays’ Rebellion, 14, 15 n52, 91, 92 n93 Sidney, Algernon, xiv, xvi, 18, 27, 30–1, 38–9, 86, 114, 122; as England’s Cato, 45–7; as patrician imperialist, xvi, 48; preference for Rome over Athens, 46, 177 Sieyès, Emmanuel Joseph, abbé, xix, xix n36, 39 n46, 142–3, 152 Skinner, Quentin, x, xn6, xvii–xviii, xviii n35, xxi, 5, 7 n15, 28, 32 n23, 51, 51 n7, 178, 179 n1 slavery, 5, 7, 8 n20, 13, 23, 25–6, 32, 32 n23, 49, 52, 59, 67, 68 n67, 75, 75 n12, 76, 77 n22, 78 n26, 82 n42, 85, 88, 90, 92 n98, 94, 110 n56, 114, 119, 120, 150, 150 n44,

196 Index 154, 168, 182; of debtors, 86, 92 n93, 120, 181; Georgia ban on repealed, 78, 97; liberated slaves in Saint-Domingue, 95–6, 95 n109, 153; Montesquieu’s view of, 132, 132 n71,136; neo-Roman conception of, 115, 120–1, 133, 153, 165, 174, 181; opposition to as justification for imperialism, 6, 132; opposition to as republican conception of liberty, xvii–xviii, 5–7, 7 n15, 13, 28, 32 n23, 85 n57, 179 n1; post-revolutionary opposition to, 82, 82 n41, 146; Roman view of, 84, 84 n53; servitus, opposite of free citizen of Rome, 84, 86 Smith, Adam, xix, xixn36, 52; as advocate of emancipation of American colonies, 65, 168; as critic of Roman imperialism and slavery, xvii, 7, 64, 69, 85, 119 n15, 166, 170–1; An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, 11, 65; Lectures on Jurisprudence, 171 n17; preference for independent Greek colonies, 176; as sympathetic to agrarian law, 46, 64 Socrates, 9, 24, 129, 164, 177 Solon, 10, 37, 126, 151 n51 Soreau, Antoine, 113; Le res de Brutus et de Cicéron, 13 South Sea Company, 59, 67–8; South Sea Bubble, 60, 68 Sparta, xii, 19–22, 25 n12, 29, 87, 89 n78, 102–3, 126, 130, 131, 134, 153, 155, 160, 163; as conservative republic, xvi, 4, 8 n20, 21–2; as egalitarian republic, 8,

8 n20, 60, 126 n40, 127–8, 144–5, 149, 151, 155; preferred more than Athens less than Rome, xiv, 7–8, 27, 46, 129, 155, 177 Spurius Cassius, xvn30, xvi, 23, 39, 43, 62, 64 n57, 118, 121, 128, 174, Spurius Maelius, 39, 43, 62, 64 n57, 92 n98, 118, 118 n8, 121, 174 Staël, Germaine de, 37, 124 n29, 140, 161–3, 177, 182 Stokes, Anthony, 11, 65–6 Sulla, Lucius Cornelius Sulla Felix, 60 Tacitus, Publius (or Gaius) Cornelius, 20, 45–6, 68, 122, 152 Tarquins, 36, 46, 114, 149, 159; Etruscan kings, xvn30; James II as Tarquinius Superbus, 56; Charles I as Tarquinius Priscus, 37, 56, 159; Tarquinius Superbus, 56, 119 n11 taxation, 40, 54, 70; and American Revolution, xii–xiii, 81–6, 147, 165–6; and Fren Revolution, xii, 145, 147; during the Fronde, 100; as issue of liberty, x–xii; permissible and impermissible taxation, 83; progressive taxation in Athens, regressive taxation in imperial states, 12, 12 n38, 12 n40, 23, 54, 66, 68, 70, 124, 182; and representation in the colonies, 66–7, 82–4, 86 Tencin, Claudine-Alexandrine Guérin, Marquise de, 123, 123 n28, 124 Thelwall, John, 9, 57 n30, 164, 176 Toussaint, L’Ouverture, 95–6 trade, 5 n7, 11, 16, 47, 50 n4, 66, 68, 74, 93 n48, 95–6, 135, 152, 175; with

Index 197 Amerindians, 73, 75–6, 80–1, 83; empires of trade vs empires of conquest, 10, 12, 25, 49, 65, 67, 124, 131–2, 137; noble contempt for, 56; in spices, 52 tragedy, xx n38, 133 n75, 182; Greek, 37, 97, 124, 162–3, 181; Roman, 124, 162 Tren ard, John, xiv, xviii, 10–11, 37, 50–1, 59–61, 64–5, 67, 79, 86, 113, 118, 166, 173 tribunes, 8, 121, 145; and agrarian law, 23, 125; as e to patrician power, 36, 91, 102, 115, 127–8, 145; civil strife blamed on, 64, 91; comparison to Jacobins, 145 tyranny, 21, 36, 72, 101, 153, 158; aristocratic tyranny, 36–8, 64; kingship as, 10, 13, 27, 38; Mazarin’s tyranny, 112–15; of the people, 8, 84, 105; as political despotism, 141, 173; as result of agrarian law/equality, 61–2, 64 United States, 70–1, 88, 93–4, 117, 180; constitution of, xi, 72, 89, 90 n84, 92, 65 n108; as republic, xviii, 85, 86 n62, 87–92, 90 n84, 93 n100, 96–7; union of colonies as product not precondition of revolution, 83. See also American Revolution universities: Hobbes’s view of, as Trojan horse, 27, 29 Venice, xii, xvi, 4–5, 21–2, 39, 42, 45, 128, 178 Vertot, Réné-Aubert, abbé de, 63, 117–20, 122; Histoire des révolutions arrivées dans le gouvernement de la

République Romaine, 116, 118; and Ma iavellian tradition, 118, 125; opposition to agrarian law, 120 Vindiciae contra Tyrannos, xviii, 100–1 Viroli, Maurizio, xvii–xviii, xxi, 5, 7, 15, 32 n23, 85 n57, 178 virtue: language of, xvi–xviii, xx, 53; pagan antiquity as source of, xvii, 23, 53–9, 63, 89 n79, 101, 114, 116–18, 131, 158, 167, 169, 175 Voltaire (François-Marie Arouet), 37 n38, 53, 122, 123 n28, 135 n87, 136, 166; Brutus, 131 n64, 140, 142, 155; Dictionaire Philosophique, 132, 133 n75; view of Fronde as a comic tragedy, xxn38, 63 n57, 110, 111 n58; view of patrician arrogance towards plebeians, 10 n30, 123 n27 Walpole, Horace 169, 177 Walpole, Robert, 67, 68 n67, 89 n79; policy of low taxes, 12 n40, 68, 84 n49 War of Independence. See American Revolution War of Jenkins’ Ear, 68, 77, 77 n22 Washington, George, 82 n41, 87; and Addison’s Cato, xvii, 13, 51; as Cincinnatus, 88, 92, 92 n98 Weil, Simone, xxn38, 111 Whigs, xiii, xx, 55, 55 n20, 56, 56 n26, 63, 177; and Bank of England, 59; and Glorious Revolution, 48, 56 women, xiii, 33, 133 n75, 134, 159, 184; in American Revolution, xix, 86; in Fren Revolution, xiv, xix, 8 n20, 113, 141, 144–5, 160–3, 182 Yorktown, ba le of, 72, 97, 170