160 Chapter VIII
bution of goods, and the most advanced parties objected to private wealth only
when it became too closely associated with government. They aimed at a separa-
tion of economic and political spheres, by which men of wealth, while free to get
rich, should not have a disproportionate influence on government, and, on the
other hand, government and public emoluments should not be used as a means of
livelihood for an otherwise impecunious and unproductive upper class.
The American Revolution was a political movement, concerned with liberty,
and with power. Most of the ideas involved were by no means distinctively Ameri-
can. There was nothing peculiarly American in the concepts, purely as concepts, of
natural liberty and equality. They were admitted by conservatives, and were taught
in the theological faculty at the Sorbonne.^1 Nor could Americans claim any ex-
clusive understanding of the ideas of government by contract or consent, or the
sovereignty of the people, or political representation, or the desirability of inde-
pendence from foreign rule, or natural rights, or the difference between natural law
and positive law, or between certain fundamental laws and ordinary legislation, or
the separation of powers, or the federal union of separate states. All these ideas
were perfectly familiar in Europe, and that is why the American Revolution was of
such interest to Europeans.
The Distinctiveness of American Political Ideas
The most distinctive work of the Revolution was in finding a method, and furnish-
ing a model, for putting these ideas into practical effect. It was in the implementa-
tion of similar ideas that Americans were more successful than Europeans. “In the
last fifty years,” wrote General Bonaparte to Citizen Talleyrand in 1797, “there is
only one thing that I can see that we have really defined, and that is the sover-
eignty of the people. But we have had no more success in determining what is
constitutional, than in allocating the different powers of government.” And he said
more peremptorily, on becoming Emperor in 1804, that the time had come “to
constitute the Nation.” He added: “I am the constituent power.”^2
The problem throughout much of America and Europe, for half a century, was
to “constitute” new government, and in a measure new societies. The problem was
to find a constituent power. Napoleon offered himself to Europe in this guise. The
Americans solved the problem by the device of the constitutional convention,
1 See on Réal de Curban Chapter III above, and my Catholics and Unbelievers in Eighteenth
Century France (Princeton, 1939), 126, quoting L. J. Hooke, Religionis naturalis et moralis philosophiae
principia, methodo scholastica digesta (Paris, 1752–1754), I, 623–24: “Status is a permanent condition of
man, involving various rights and a long series of obligations. It is either natural, constituted by nature
itself, or adventitious, arising from some human act or institution.... By the status of nature we under-
stand that in which men would be who were subject to no government but joined only by similarity of
nature or by private pacts.... In the status of nature all men are equal and enjoy the same rights. For
in that state they are distinguished only by the gifts of mind or body by which some excel others.”
Italics are the Abbé Hooke’s.
2 Correspondance de Napoleon I, III (Paris, 1859), 314; R. M. Johnston, The Corsican (N.Y., 1910),
182.