206 Reason and Its Rivals (ca. 1550– 1815)their many slogans.) Th eir many plans for reform seemed worryingly un-
settling, for good reason, to those who were committed to traditional ways—
most notably to feudal magnates whose tradition- encrusted rights placed
severe limits on the free marketability of land.
Th e French Revolution, commencing in 1789, reinforced and greatly mag-
nifi ed this association between natural law and radical reformism. Moreover,
its pop u lar agitators were far more alarming than their genteel (and strongly
royalist) physiocratic pre de ces sors. Th e revolutionaries, and especially the
Jacobins, were renowned for their bombastic appeals to natural rights— and
also for their policies of extreme centralization and ruthless extirpation of
obsolete customs, feudal and ecclesiastical privileges, and other vestiges of
the past. (Th ey also had a regrettable fondness for the guillotine.)
In the fi eld of international law, too, there were some indications that
the French Revolution would mark a radical break with the past. But this
promise— or threat— was not, in the event, borne out. In many respects, the
French Revolution would appear to have made comparatively little impact on
international law, however cataclysmic an event it was in many other ways.
Th e wars that raged in its wake, from 1792 to 1815 almost without interrup-
tion, were begun and ended in much the usual way— with indignant (and
oft en mutual) accusations of wrongdoing at the start, and peace agreements of
a more or less coerced character at the end. Innovations certainly did occur,
but those that proved the most lasting were of an incremental character— and,
ironically, came not from the agitators and fi rebrands of Paris, but rather from
the bewigged judges of the admiralty courts of En gland.
Radicalism in the Air
Th ere were various early indications that the French Revolution might lead
to fundamental changes in international relations. One of these signs was
the Declaration of Peace, issued by the National Constituent Assembly in
May 1790. In it, the French government announced its renunciation of
“the undertaking of any wars aimed at conquest” and vowed to “never em-
ploy its forces against the liberty of any people.” Th e republican constitu-
tion of 1793, in a similar spirit, grandly proclaimed the French people to be
“the friends and natural allies of free peoples.” It renounced any ambition of
interfering in the aff airs of other countries, while asserting freedom for it-