306 Chapter XII
The Prussian code thus fell well short of any general conception of citizenship.
The Prussian monarchy remained very much a monarchy of the old regime, that is,
a conglomeration of separate kinds of people held together by nothing more than
higher authority. The ideal was rigidly hierarchic. Everyone had some rights, but
some people had much better rights than others. The code systematized the segre-
gation of classes that had become a main policy of the kingdom. Land and prop-
erty were classified as people were; nobles, burghers, and peasants could not ac-
quire land out of their class, lest the operations of a common market bring a
burgher admixture into the martial and agrarian virtues of Junker squires. The
landed nobility and the government service were the two favored classes. They
tended to merge, or to feel akin in their values and attitudes, in what Professor
Rosenberg calls an “aristobureaucracy,” which maintained itself into the twentieth
century.
Always with a view toward showing what the international revolutionary distur-
bance at the end of the eighteenth century was about, I have argued, in preceding
chapters, that before the revolution of 1789 in France, or before the war of 1792 by
which the revolution was intensified and extended, the position of governing or
politically privileged classes was if anything growing stronger. The distinctive thing
about these classes—since all societies have upper classes and governing groups—
was the high degree to which they were hereditary, self- perpetuating, or self-
recruiting, their claim to hold their positions in their own right, and their insistence
on maintaining an independence, as Charles Fox said in the Commons in England,
against the pressure of either King or people. These “aristocrats,” to use the term cre-
ated by the revolutionary movement itself, were by no means in retreat, and the
turmoil of democratic revolution did not merely carry forward a long evolutionary
process which might more peacefully have accomplished the same end. The great
generalization of Alexis de Tocqueville, that history exhibits a centuries- long move-
ment toward a greater equality of conditions, seems true to me only if it includes the
thought, as a subordinate generalization, that men have at times fought for this in-
crease of equality against contrary tendencies and against very positive opposition.
At the risk of excessive schematism, but in the attempt to draw a picture of Western
Civilization as a whole, evidence has been assembled to persuade the reader that
everywhere, except in the United States, the problem of taking wider classes of peo-
ple into the community was either not recognized as a problem, or was plainly de-
nied to be a problem, or was unsolved. Aristocracies had defeated democratic move-
ments in England, Ireland, Holland, Belgium, and Geneva. They had won
concessions from monarchs in the Hapsburg countries, Prussia and Russia; and on
failing to win similar concessions in Sweden, they endangered the viability of the
monarchy itself. We turn now to the two countries which along with America were
then the most famous for revolution—Poland and France. These two were obviously
very unlike, yet they have a resemblance under the schematism that has been set up.
Both the Polish and the French revolutions began with a kind of aristocratic resur-
gence, the former against anarchy, the latter against royal absolutism. And in both
the revolution reached a life- and- death crisis in the war of 1792.