392 Chapter XVI
countries, like England, where legal doctrines put heavy emphasis on the inheri-
tance of a complex legal tradition. Lawyers who served small clients or new forms
of business enterprise, or those who thought that rationality and justice in the law
should prevail over its customary or mysterious aspects, were more receptive to the
Revolutionary message. Persons with some legal education, but with no practice or
settled careers, were of course among the first to plunge into revolutionary and
reformist movements.
In the other professions there was much sympathy with the Revolution. Atti-
tudes of reform- minded career servants of enlightened monarchy have been al-
ready noted. Doctors were also susceptible. Probably because medicine was as
closely related as any profession to science, and touched also on the humanitarian-
ism of the Enlightenment, its practitioners were impatient of much in the old
order of society and ideas. It was not surprising that Dr. Nathaniel Ames should be
the “Jacobin” of his family, while Fisher Ames became the High Federalist. The
guillotine itself had been promoted by a leading French medical man, Dr. Guillo-
tin, who favored it as a scientific and humanitarian innovation, preferable on these
grounds to the older techniques of execution. Men with an interest in science, en-
gineering, mining, road building, and other such modern undertakings were also
amenable to new ideas. Teaching was undeveloped as a profession. Individual cases
could be cited; Fouché, for example, was a physics teacher in a secondary school
before the Revolution. In the English universities, which were Church of England
institutions, and in the French universities which the Revolution abolished, there
were not many incumbents against whom revolutionary sympathies could be
charged. But in the universities of Holland, Switzerland, Germany, Poland, and
Italy professors of “Jacobin” inclinations could readily be found.
Student radicalism was no more than embryonic. There was unrest among stu-
dents at the University of Jena when Fichte was professor there; and at Princeton,
New Jersey, when the college burned in 1802, the president attributed the disaster
to years of “Jacobinical” agitation among the students. The young William Words-
worth, planning to edit a political journal in 1794, observed to his collaborator
that he wanted no misunderstanding of his ideas: he was “of that odious class of
men called democrats”; he disapproved of “hereditary distinctions and privileged
orders of every species”; he was therefore “not amongst the admirers of the British
Constitution.” They would naturally, in their proposed review, he said, deplore the
current atrocities in France, but would often speak favorably of the Revolution.
They could expect to find no friendly readers among partisans of the war, but
might attract a few Dissenters and students at Oxford and Cambridge.^11 The ex-
periment was never tried.
In all European countries, before the 1790’s, there was an established or offi-
cially recognized church, in which membership was necessary for the enjoyment of
full political rights. Persons outside such a church, or those of its own members
who strongly desired to reform it, were more than ordinarily liable to the appeal of
the Revolution. In Italy there were many Catholics who thought the Church un-
necessarily wealthy, too little truly Christian, and too much influenced by Rome;
11 W. Knight, Letters of the Wordsworth Family, 3 vols. (London, 1907), I, 66, 70, 75.