212 Chapter IX
Sieyès added a note on it in the third edition of his famous tract on the Third Es-
tate. He hailed it as a useful work showing the need of a single representative body.
It was referred to repeatedly in the constitutional debates in the Assembly later in
the year. Mounier, the leader in these debates of the group desiring a strong execu-
tive and a bicameral legislature, thought that this refutation of Adams had done
much to undermine his own views. The Abbé Morellet, more conservative in 1789
than in 1787, was of the same opinion. Both of them wrote pamphlets in reply to
“Governor Livingston” and his French annotators.
The French Constituent Assembly, in the decisions made in September 1789,
provided no upper chamber of legislation, and the burden of thought was against a
strong and independent executive. For six years France was in effect to be ruled by
a single assembly, subject to the pressures of a direct democracy and sporadic pop-
ular intervention.
Obviously no pamphlet or war of pamphlets determined the constitutional de-
cisions made in France in 1789. The situation in France was very different from
that in America. In France an upper chamber would mean a chamber composed
largely of the higher nobility, and the executive was bound to mean King Louis
XVI, who by June 1789 had got himself into the position of supporting the nobil-
ity against the Third Estate. There were really two meanings in the doctrine of the
separation of powers, which the Americans could keep separate and which the
French could not. There was the idea of separation of social classes, the old idea of
Montesquieu, expressible in the formula of King, Lords, and Commons. There was
the idea of separation between functions of government, expressible in the formula
of executive, senate, and assembly. The French were not free to have the latter
without the former. For them a “senate” must mean a body of nobles; the executive
must mean the King, hereditary and unelected, or ministers who, as they in fact
still were in England, would be primarily agents of the King. In America the sena-
tors were not lords, nor were the governors kings; they were temporary occupants
of office, with no personal right to the exercise of public authority. In all the mud-
dle of arguments all Americans since the defeat of the loyalists agreed upon this—
John Adams, John Stevens, Jefferson, and Franklin alike. In France the essence of
the revolution of 1789 was the revolt of the Third Estate against the nobility. With
a hostile nobility to overcome, and a king sympathetic with the nobility to contend
with, the creation of an upper house and a strong independent executive was sim-
ply not among the possible choices for men interested in furthering the French
Revolution.
The effects in Europe of the War of American Independence will become ap-
parent in the next chapters. The effects of the American Revolution, as a revolu-
tion, were imponderable but very great. It inspired the sense of a new era. It added
a new content to the conception of progress. It gave a whole new dimension to
ideas of liberty and equality made familiar by the Enlightenment. It got people
into the habit of thinking more concretely about political questions, and made
them more readily critical of their own governments and society. It dethroned En-
gland, and set up America, as a model for those seeking a better world. It brought
written constitutions, declarations of rights, and constituent conventions into the
realm of the possible. The apparition on the other side of the Atlantic of certain