History o/European Ideas, Vol I I. pp 189-196, 1989 0191-6599/89 .%3.00+0.

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Printed in Great Britam Q 1990 Pergamon Press plc

1688 AND 1789 FROM THE VIEWPOINT OF 1830

JULIANROBINSON*

The study of the comparative history of revolutions takes its shape from the
debate of the years after Napoleons fall. It reaches its climax in the years
1830-32. It was a debate about the meaning of the revolutions in seventeenth-
century England and eighteenth-century France and the connexion between
them. It attempted to give these events their proper place in universal history, to
compare their roles in the formation of the modern nations, and to establish the
proper relationship between historical understanding and political action, At a
time when men of letters were also in positions of power, interpretations of the
past helped to shape modem institutions.
The serious historical debate opened in 1818 with the publication of Mme de
Staels Considkrations SW ies principaux Wnemens de la Rholution francaise. It is
true that a comparison between the legitimacy of 1688 and the illegitimacy of
1789 had been used by Burke in his Rejections in 1790 and debated therefter; and
Mme de Stael wrote partly in this tradition. She began by attempting to justify the
attempt by her father (Necker) to give to France in 1789 the essence of the English
Constitution of 1688-9, and broadened her work to make it a historical argument
for the charter of 18 14. The revolutionary period of England may be said to have
lasted nearly fifty years, if we reckon from the beginning of the civil wars under
Charles I to the accession of William III in 1688; and the efforts of those fifty
years had no real and permanent object other than the establishment of the
existing constitution: that is, of the finest monument of justice and moral
greatness existing in Europe. In England and in France the object was the same;
the establishment of representative government-a point towards which the
human mind is directing itself from all parts. And, at the end of the work, Mme
de Sta&l adds Our revolution, as we have already stated, followed the different
phases of England, almost with the regularity presented by the crisis of two
similar maladies.2
Mme de Statls work, published posthumously by her son and her son-in-law
(the Due de Broglie), excited criticism from both sides in 1818 because she wished
to distinguish the constructive achievements of 1789 from the destructive
violence that followed. Bonald attacked her for attempting to justify the early
constitutional ambitions of the revolution, the ex-conventionnel Bailleul for
trying to villify the later period. For both of them, the Revolution needed to be
considered as a whole.3

*Department of History, University of Nottingham, Nottingham NG7 2RD, U.K.

189
190 Julian Robinson

Mme de Staels work and the rejoinders to it emphasise the extent to which
interest in the comparative history of the two revolutions was associated with the
debate on the terms of the restoration of the Bourbons in 18 14. The comparison
was used by Augustin Thierry in his articles in the Censeur Europken in the years
1817-1819, doubtless drawing on his experience as Saint-Simons secretary in
1814, the year in which they had explored the similarities of the English and
French revolutions. Saint Simon repeated his views in his pamphlet DesBourbons
et des Smarts and its sequel in 1822. He argued that each revolution had gone
through five stages before-in the English case-terminating in a sixth, the
expulsion of the Stuarts.4
By 1820-23. however, Europe was undergoing a new series of revolutions,
matched by the repressive actions of the chief European governments, which
gave rise to a new series of historical reflections. In 1822 Mignet and Thiers, the
two friends who had reached Paris from Aix-en-Provence in the preceding year,
were at work on studies of the French Revolution, while providing the Courier
Francais and the Constitutionnel with comment on the political issues of the
present. Mignet wrote in the Courier Franfais on 1 March 1822 that la question
qui divise la continent [se reduit] a une lutte pour ou contre la reformation
politique, and his work on the French Revolution was involved with this
struggle. On 18 May he wrote to his friend Rouchon La Revolution inspire un
grand inter& On veut lopposer aux enemis et la faire connaitre aux amis. Et
comme lexpliquer cest la justifier, comme toutes les chases ntcessaires, je me
suis charge de cette besogne.5 For Mignet and Thiers, therefore, the debate
initiated in 1818 on the extent to which the constructive work of 1789 could be
disassociated from the violence of 1793 was given a new relevance by revolution
and counter-revolution in Europe in 1820-23.
When Mignets two volumes on the Revolution were published in May and
October 1824, the work argued for the need to accept the Revolution, which
Mignet extended to 1814, as a whole. The political reformation undertaken in
1789-9 1 had to be defended in 1792-5 against enemies at home and abroad, and
the work consolidated without internal divisions after 1795. It marked the
triumph of the third estate, but it showed that a potential division between
middle and lower classes existed within that estate. At the same time Mignet was
aware of the parallel with the English revolution; he had reviewed the works of
Lord John Russell and Boulay de la Meurthe and in 1822 and 1823 lectured at the
AthtnG on the Reformation and the English revolution. He began his history by
stating, I am about to take a rapid review of the history of the French
Revolution, which began the era of new societies in Europe, as the English
revolution had begun the era of new governments, and at the end he compares
Napoleon to Cromwell. Napoleon has presented in France what Cromwell
presented for a moment in England: the government of the army, which always
establishes itself when a revolution is contended against. . . all dictatorships are
transient, and Cromwell, had he lived, would have succumbed to European
opposition. Such is the fate of all powers which, arising from liberty, do not
continue to abide with her.6
Since Mignet had undertaken the outline account of the Revolution, Thiers
was able to change his approach to it, abandoning the prtcis of which the first
1688 and 1789 from the Viewpoint of 1830 191

two published volumes of his History were the beginning for a full-scale narrative
treatment. Thus, while the first two volumes published in September 1823
reached September 1792, he reached the coup d&tat of Brumaire only at the end
of 1827 with volume X. He aimed to show that the violence of the Revolution
could hardly be repudiated by those who applauded its constructive work, and at
the end of his seventh volume, after describing the invasion of the chamber on 1
Prairial and the defeat of the Sections on 13 Vendemiaire, he wrote Aux hommes
qui sappellent avec orgueil patriotes de 89, la Convention pourra toujours dire:
Vous aviez provoqd la lutte, cest moi qui lai soutenue et terminte. At the
same time Thiers drew the parallel between James II, in the English case, and
Polignac and Charles X, in the French, in his articles for the Augsburg
Allgemeine Zeitung, writing on 20 April 1826 On voit que notre roi est aussi
obstine a se perdre que le fut son analogue Jacques II, while in May 1830 he was
able to predict that the decisive political conflict would come in the summer.7
He and Mignet, with Carrel, founded Le National (whose first number appeared
on 3 January 1830) as a weapon of conflict: as Remusat wrote, Thiers et Mignet
se reprtsentaient le tours de la Revolution francaise comme une courbe dont tous
les points avaient ttt determines davance par la marche de la Revolution
dAngleterre, and in the pages ofLeNationaI they made the point that while 1640
was a revolution, 1688 was simply the replacement of one family by another.*
It was perhaps for this reason that the French historical writers who chose the
English revolution as their subject tended to focus on the earlier parts of the story,
rather than on the fall of James II. In 1819 Villemain published his history of
Cromwell: in 1822 another Napoleonic functionary, Boulay de la Meurthe,
published his Tableau politique de regnes de Charles ZZet Jacques ZZ,derniers rois
de la Maison des Stuarts. LHistoire de la revolution de 1688, en Angleterre (3 ~01s)
by Mazure, in 1825 was followed in 1827 by the Histoire de la Contre-r&o&ion
ddngleterre, by Armand Carrel, recently acquitted after being captured while
helping the constitutional regime in Spain to oppose the invading French
counter-revolutionary force in 1823. Bonald issued a warning of a different sort
in 1828, by comparing 1828 with 1640 to dissuade the Crown from attempting
conciliation. But of these reflections on the English Revolutions, the most
important was Guizots two volumes of 1826-7, on the Histoire de la Revolution
ddngleterre, depuis Iavtnement de CharlesZet jusquh la restoration de Charles ZZ.
Already, in the years 1823-5, Guizot had brought about the publication of 25
volumes of the Memoires relattfs aux revolutions ddngleterre, and although he
took the story only to 1649, his title showed his intention-realised only in
1856-to reach 1660, and his later preface of 1841 shows that he saw the History
of the English Revolution as reaching its conclusion only in 1688. And he wrote I
have no fear of its importance being underrated: our revolution, in surpassing,
did not make that of England less great in itself: they were both victories in the
same war, and to the profit of the same cause: glory is their common attribute:
they do not eclipse, but set off each other. Guizot hoped to add something to the
history of the English Revolution by his experiences of the French, as Villemain
had done in his CromweILv
192 Julian Robinson

II

The production of English historians in the 1820s is perhaps less impressive

than the French. Humes scepticism about the legality of the opposition to the
Stuarts still excited rejoinders, but the attention, as in France, tended to be on the
reign of Charles I or on the Commonwealth. George Brodie, a Scotch whig,
produced in 1823 his History of the British Empire from the Accession of Charles I
to the Restoration of Charles II(a work politely received by the young J.S. Mill in
1824), while William Godwin, the celebrated participant in the French
Revolutionary debate as author of the Enquiry Concerning PoliticalJustice, wrote
a History of the Commonwealth of England (4 volumes), published in 1824-8.
Similarly, Sir James Mackintosh (erstwhile author of Vindiciae Gallicae, 1791),
worked on a History of the Revolution in England in 1688, but it was not published
until 1834, two years after his death. The Stuarts received more sympathy in Isaac
dIsraelis history of Charles I (1829: 5 volumes).
One of those who wrote on the English and French Revolutions was Lord John
Russell. In 1819 there appeared his study of his ancestor William, Lord Russell,
who was the Whig martyr of 1683, and in 1821 he followed this with his Essay on
the History of the English Government and Constitution, (from Henry VII),
envisaged in 1820 as one part of a work destined to contrast the need of
continental governments for complete regeneration with the facility by which
mild reform might remedy the abuses of Englands government. None the less,
the Essay was really a plea for constitutional reform, and the European part was
remoulded as the Memoirs of the Affairs of Europe since the Peace of Utrecht,
whose two volumes appeared in 1824 and 1829, with a continuation on The
Causes of the French Revolution which was published only in 1832.
Though Lord John Russell is of interest because of his major role in the
Reform Bill, he was not a historian of the solidity of Henry Hallam. But Hallams
aims were not totally different from Russells: he aimed to put the constitutional
history of England in its European setting, and the famous work of 1827 was a
continuation of the View of the State of Europe during the Middle Ages (18 18). Its
tone was measured, sometimes arid. Macaulay reviewed it for the Edinburgh in
1828 and used the review to point to the excellence of 1688 while also underlining
the need for further constitutional reform. He had already argued, in his essay on
Milton (1825) (rather in the style of Mignet and Thiers) that those who accepted
1688 must also accept 1649.
Though the seeds of serious British historical interest in the French Revolution
were sown in these years, the fruit lay in the future. Mme de Statls work
encouraged the cautious William Smyth, who owed his appointment as Regius
Professor of Modern History at Cambridge to his whig sympathies, to lecture on
the French Revolution, and Croker, an arch-Tory, built up his first collection of
materials with a view to writing the history of the Revolution. The lives of
Napoleon by Scott (1827) and Hazlitt (1828) dealt superficially with the
Revolution, and Archibald Alison began to study it in 1829. J.S. Mill, who had
reviewed Brodie (1824), Mignet (1826), and Scott (1828) himself toyed with the
ambition of writing the history of the French Revolution.i3
1688 and 1789 from the Viewpoint of 1830 193

III

The extent to which this historical debate had become locked with the political
thought of the age may be illustrated by the events of 1830 to 1832 which
crystallised the significance of the comparative history of the revolution for many
participants.
In the French Revolution of July 1830, Thiers played a leading role in securing
the accession of his William of Orange in the person of Due dOrlCans. Guizot
saw 1830 as a revolution that was not revolutionary in which popular
intervention served to combine liberty with order and to protect the legal
constitution against a king who threatened it. Thus the work of 1789 was
confirmed, with the English example always in mind: nous avions lesprit plein
de la revolution de 1688.14Delacroixs famous painting of the 28 July 1830:
Liberty leading the people interprets the revolution in the same sense, and the link
between present and past was exemplified in the iconography of the July regime.
Guizot, as Minister of the Interior, instituted a public competition for the
paintings to decorate the Salle des Stances of the Chamber of Deputies (Palais
Bourbon). In the centre was to be Louis Philippe taking the oath to the charter,
flanked by two great episodes of French revolutionary history-Mirabeau
defying the Marquis de Dreux-Brezt on 23 June 1789 and Boissy dAnglas
confronting the severed head of his colleague Ftraud in the Convention on 1
Prairial (or 20 May) 1795. These paintings would remind the Deputies of the need
to resist both royal and popular Despotism. Equally, Odilon Barrots
appointment as Prefect of the Seine led to a scheme for the Hotel de Ville which
linked episodes of 1789 to those of 1830. The subjects of 1789 were the Takers of
the Bastille at the H&e1 de Ville (awarded to Paul Delaroche) and Bailly
proclaimed Mayor of Paris (awarded to Leon Cogniet)-subjects which
portrayed the popular participation of 1789 as being in the interests of order
against royal counter-revolutionary plots. l5 From the experience of July 1830
arose at least two new historical interpretations-on the one hand, Tocquevilles
acceptance of democracy as the hallmark of the age, and his examination of the
American, British and French past to see whether liberty was compatible with it;
and on the other, Michelets vision of French history as the triumph of the
people, reaching its climax with the revolutionary era, confirmed by the sun of
July 1830.
In Britain, the French Revolution of 1830 became bound up with the debate on
the Reform Bill and its eventual success in 1832. The commentary on these
events was conducted in high historical terms, both in Parliament and in the great
Reviews.
Reactions to the French Revolution of 1830 were various. Mill rushed to Paris,
but his ambition to write the history of the revolution gave way to the demands of
British politics in the 1830s, while Carlyles interest in the Revolution of 1789
was stimulated by the 1830 revolution, by the Saint Simonians, and by his
meeting Mill in 1831. From 1833 Carlyle was at work on the History which was
published in 1837. Brougham insisted on writing on the Revolution of 1830 for
the Edinburgh Review, where he argued we take it to be abundantly manifest,
that the battle of English liberties has really been fought and won at Paris.16 By
194 Julian Robinson

writing for the Edinburgh, Brougham forestalled Macaulay, who had hoped to
write the article, who went to Paris, and who accepted an invitation to write
instead a History ofFrancefrom the Restoration of the Bourbons to the Accession of
Louis Philippe. His commitments in British politics ensured that no more than a
fragment was written, but the fragment begins:

There are two portions of modern history pre-eminently important and

interesting-the history of England from the meeting of the long parliament to the
second expulsion of the Quarts; and the history of France from the opening of the
States-General at Versailles to the accession of the house of Orleans. It is not too
much to say, that neither of these periods of history will ever be thoroughly
comprehended by any man who has not often looked at them in connexion and
carefully examined the numerous points of analogy and of contrast which they
present.

In the great debates on the Reform Bill in the House of Commons, Macaulay
made frequent use of the examples of seventeenth-century England and
eighteenth-century France. All history is full of revolutions, produced by causes
similar to those which are now operating in England. A portion of the
community which had been of no account expands, and becomes strong. If this is
granted, all is well. If this is refused, then comes the struggle between the young
energy of one class, and the ancient privileges of another-as in Rome, North
America, France, Ireland and Jamaica. Macaulay ridiculed the Tory argument
that Englishmen were better off now than before by observing that a Jacobite
orator could have used the same argument to avoid a change of dynasty in 1688.
But he saw that historical analogies were largely meaningless without an
understanding of the whole pattern of historical development. The great cause
of revolutions is this, that while nations move onward, constitutions stand still
and though the great French Revolution can be construed to mean anything
history is full of large and precious instruction when we contemplate it in large
portions, when we take in, at one view, the whole lifetime of great societies.*
Croker, on the other hand, argued that the Whigs were deliberately trying to
bring on the full range of events that characterised the French Revolution. But
since he believed that human nature was always the same, he could not appeal
from the unhistorical game of analogies to a broad interpretation of history.
Croker had already drawn up a table of comparisons between the English and
French Revolutions, and he pursued the argument with the Whigs in his article
Revolutions of 1640 and 1830 in the Quarterly Review for March 1832, which
included a review of DumontsMirabeau in which Croker gloated over Dumonts
disillusionment with the Revolution by 1799. Macaulay, in the EdinburghReview
in July, said Dumonts view was like the criticism of a play by a man who had
only seen the first act.r9
Meanwhile Archibald Alison contributed a series of thirteen articles On
Parliamentary Reform and the French Revolution, meaning the Revolution of
1830, in Blackwoods Edinburgh Review, 1831-2. He too pointed out that the
French Revolution (of 1789) showed that democrats always advocated more
revolution, not less, as the solution to every problem: he claimed that all parties
in France agreed by 1832 that the state of the people was miserable in the
1688 and 1189 from the Viewpoint of 1830 19.5

extreme; and he predicted that passing the Reform Bill would mean the repeal of
the Corn Laws, collapse of agriculture, sequestration of Church property,
national bankruptcy, the acceptance of an agrarian law and the collapse of
Britains colonial empire. Finally a Caesar, a Cromwell, a Napoleon, will seize
the sceptre, and military despotism close the drama of British Reform.20
In 1833 Alison published the first two volumes of his History of the French
Revolution, a work which continued the diatribe against the follies of reform, and
charted (by 1842) its progress through military despotism to the just denouement
at Waterloo. Alison then embarked on the sequel, taking the story through the
further European revolutions until the advent of a new Bonaparte in 1851-2.
The Conservative historians could with reluctance accept an aristocratic limit
to royal power as in 1688: but they could not accept an attack on that aristocratic
power as in 1789. Their opponents, on the other hand, saw both 1688 and 1789 as
marking points where society and government, having diverged, had to be
brought together again by revolution. This historical progress marked the rise to
power of the third estate, and, in the same process, the making of a nation.
This process is perfectly illustrated, after 1830, in the works of Michelet and
Macaulay. The whole history of France, for Michelet, showed the creation of a
single people and its rise to power in the Revolution. For Macaulay, the
Revolution of 1688 represented, not the triumph of the Whigs, but the realisation
of the wishes of a nation united against the bigotry, illegality and obstinacy of
James II. By the summer of 1838 he had resolved to write the history of the period
from the Revolution which brought the Crown into harmony with the
Parliament to the Revolution which brought the Parliament into harmony with
the nation, thereby bringing the events of 1830-32 into the story of the
comparative history of European revolutions.

Julian Robinson
University of Nottingham

NOTES

1. G. de StaZI, Considerations on the Principal Events of the French Revolution (3 vol, 2nd
edn, London, 1821) I, 13-14.
2. Ibid, III, 368.
3. On the reaction of Bailleul to Mme de StaEl, see A. Omodeo, La cultura francese
nelleta dell0 restaurazione (Verona, 1946), pp. 219-238.
4. Y. Knibiehler, Naissance des Sciences Humaines. Mignet et Ihistoirephilosophique au
XZXe siecle (Paris, 1973), p. 60.
5. Ibid., pp. 86, 118.
6. F.A. Mignet, History of theFrench Revolution (London, 1873), pp. 1,408-9. A. Thiers,
Histoire de la revolution franfaise, 5th edn (1835), 10 vols, VII 388.
7. R. Marquant, Thiers et ZeBaron Cotta, Etude sur la collaboration de Thiers a la Gazette
CfAugsbourg (Paris, 1959), pp. 317, 498.
8. C. de Rkmusat, Memoires (5 ~01s) II, 286-7, q. Knibiehler. P. Thureau-Dangin, Le
Parti Liberal sous la restauration, (2nd ed.) (Paris, 1888), p. 471.
9. F. Guizot, History of the English Revolution, trans. A.W. Hazlitt (London, 1870),
pp. ix, xxi.
 Julian Robinson

10. See J.W. Burrow, A Liberal Descent: Victorian Historians and the English Past
(Cambridge, 1981), pp. 11-35.
11. For brief accounts see S. Walpole. Life ofLordJohn Russell, 2 vols (London, 1889), I,
pp. 100-105. J. Prest, Lord John Russell (London, 1972), pp. 20-24.
12. On Macaulay, see J. Clive, ThornasBabingtonMacaulay, The Shaping of theHistorian,
pp. 61-141.
13. See H. Ben-Israel, English Historians on the French Revoiution (Cambridge, 1968).
14. F. Guizot, Mtmoires, Vol. II (Paris, 1859), 19. On the relationship between 1688,1789
and 1830 for Guizot see P. Rosanvallon Le Moment Guizot (Paris, 1985) pp. 271-84.
15. See M. Marrinan, Painting Politics for Louis-Philippe; Art and Ideology in Orleanist
France, 1830-1848 (New Haven, 1987), pp. 77-108.
16. H. Ben-Israel, op.cit., p. 107, and pp. 127-136 for Carlyle.
17. T.B. Macaulay, Napoleon and the Restoration of the Bourbons (London, 1977), p. 43.
18. T.B. Macaulay, Works (8 volumes, ed Lady Trevelyan) VIII, 17, 30, 72.
19. On Croker, see Ben-Israel, op.cit., pp. 175-202.
20. A. Alison, Essays, Political, Historical and Miscellaneous (3 ~01s) (London, 1850), I
l-208, esp. 66, 69, 94. For Alisons History, see Ben-Israel, op.cit., pp. 150-153.