198 Chapter IX
to be very defective, since it left the people with no initiative to meet, to punish
officials, or to effect constitutional changes. Brissot thus favored a kind of direct
democracy, a continuing and detailed popular pressure upon the officers of govern-
ment. This pressure, in the next few years in France, was to come from political
clubs, from the press, from municipal governments or communes, and from mass
demonstrations. Brissot favored it, as did Robespierre, until he was in office him-
self and threatened by it; both then turned against it. It was a mechanism for revo-
lution, of no use in stabilization. Brissot saw one side of the American constitu-
tional doctrine, that the people should ordain government. He did not see the
other side, that the people having ordained government should allow themselves
to be governed by it, or that having set limits they should abide by the limits, and,
short of the most extreme provocation, be content with the occasional and strictly
legalized power to vote unwanted officials out of office. Even the democrats in
America came to accept this somewhat routinized constitutionalism. In France
they did not, partly for doctrinaire and ideological reasons, partly because more
than purely political forms was at stake in the French Revolution, and partly be-
cause the provocation against democratic ideas did remain very extreme. The
method of the Free Americans was not, after all, altogether suited to circumstances
in France.
The American Constitutions: An International Argument
It is only in France that a detailed discussion of American government seems to
have taken place. Specifically political ideas about America may be traced in
France, as in the case of Brissot, until they lose themselves in the conflicts of the
French Revolution itself. The American state constitutions were published in
France on at least five different occasions between 1776 and 1786. They were also
published in Dutch, during the crisis of the Patriot movement in 1787. One can-
not generalize negatively about the vast periodical literature in German, but no
book containing the American constitutions seems to have appeared in Germany.
It is significant that large parts of Mazzei’s Recherches historiques et politiques ap-
peared at Leipzig under the more feeble title of Amerikanische Anecdoten, and that
in this work, while the new American federal constitution was included, it was
translated from the French, not from the English original. Outside of France po-
litical discussion of America seldom went beyond political generalities.
The British, Irish, and Dutch were occupied by their own political activities. In
Britain the parliamentary reformers were sympathetic to the Americans, and
Richard Price published a short book in 1785 on how the American Revolution
could become a benefit to the world. Expressing strongly the sense of a new era, he
observed that the American example had already emancipated one country (by
which in 1785 he must have meant Holland, or possibly Ireland) and would soon
emancipate others. He gave detailed advice to the Americans on the avoidance of
debt, inequalities of wealth, political corruption, and foreign trade. But he offered
no critique of the American constitutions. The British reform movement ante-