The Explosion of 1789 371
choices. Moderation in Belgium, Holland, Geneva, Milan, England, Ireland, and
Poland had accomplished nothing.
After the October Days of 1789, which led to the transfer of its sittings to Paris,
the Assembly remained at work for two years, applying in all directions, and not
merely to government, the revolutionary principle of the people as constituent
power. The old France which had fallen to pieces was put back together according
to a new pattern. National sovereignty, equality of rights, and universality of free
citizenship were the most prominent features of the new design. The formerly
sovereign King became an officer under the constitution. Nobility and all its titles
were abolished. The old constituted bodies, as they have been called in preceding
pages, the thirteen parlements and the various Provincial Estates, disappeared. All
other “bodies,” corporate groups, and special interests faced a similar liquidation.
Trade and professional gilds, employers’ associations and workingmen’s unions
were proscribed as contrary to individual liberty and equality. The right of free ac-
cess to any private occupation or any public office for all qualified persons was
proclaimed, with the understanding that qualifications should depend only on the
nature of the task to be performed. The church was reorganized, and its bishops
and parish clergy were made elective. Protestants and Jews received the same rights
as Catholics; or rather, religious affiliation was made irrelevant to citizenship, or to
membership in the civil community called the nation. Property, like government,
was freed from the lingering idea of lordship; this was the essential meaning of the
abolition of feudalism. In the redefinition of property, there could be no property
in public office or manorial forms of income; these were abolished with compensa-
tion. The Assembly assumed the old royal debt as a public or national obligation,
which no government of the Revolution ever expressly repudiated. To pay it off,
the property of the church was confiscated, on the ground that it had always been
held in trust for the public anyway. The state took on the responsibility for the
costs of religious worship, as for social services and education. Taxes, law courts,
army, schools, scientific and literary academies were all revolutionized.
The abolition of the provinces and of regional liberties made the same rights
and obligations prevail uniformly throughout the country. The basis of representa-
tion and the liability to taxes became geographically homogeneous. Various local
administrations and officials were made locally elective. The constitution gave the
vote to over half the adult male population; or to more than two- thirds of those
over the required age of twenty- five. Voters, as such, voted only for electors, who in
turn chose the national deputies and the lesser elected officials; but those who
might qualify as electors were very numerous, certainly more numerous than those
who could read a newspaper or compose a written message, probably being half
the men of twenty- five or older. When “equality” was talked of in the eighteenth
century, universal suffrage was one of the last things it called to mind; but even if
democracy be anachronistically identified with the number of persons entitled to
vote, the government set up in France by the constitution of 1791 was incompara-
bly more democratic than any other in the Western World at the time, with the
sole exception of certain states in the American Union.^25 Under revolutionary con-
25 See Appendix V.