The Issues and the Adversaries 393
they were called “Jansenists,” and when revolution came to Italy in 1796 the Italian
Jansenists were among its sponsors. Jansenism, Gallicanism, anti- papalism, and
church- reformism had also been important in France in bringing on the first ec-
clesiastical legislation of the Revolution. French Protestants divided after 1789
into many camps, and did not noticeably differ from Catholics of similar social
condition in their political behavior; but the Protestants owed full equality of
rights to the Revolution, and there were few absolute or total counterrevolution-
aries among French Protestants. In the Dutch Republic the large Roman Catholic
minority, and the Protestant sectaries, who though tolerated remained in an infe-
rior social status with a second- class citizenship, furnished many recruits to the
Batavian revolution. In England there was a high correlation between Dissent and
a proclivity to “French ideas.” In Ireland both the Presbyterians and the Catholics
remained outside the Anglican establishment; the Catholic authorities tended to
be cautious, knowing the vulnerability of their flocks; the Presbyterians were active
in protest movements, and notably pro- French. Jews also found the promise of the
equality of rights in the program of the Revolution. Jewish communities as such,
where they existed in strength, as at Amsterdam, Frankfurt, Venice, and Rome,
played a passive role; but individual Jews who had grown away from institutional
Jewry, and become active in trade or letters or social life, were highly receptive to
the new forms of state and society. In Poland an organized Jewish battalion de-
fended the revolution at Warsaw in 1794.
In an occupational analysis, the rank and file of support for the new order, or for
“French” ideas, came from the levels above the lowest class, and below the well-
to- do and the prominent, from the pre- industrial world of the self- respecting and
more or less literate workingmen, those in the skilled trades, the retail shops, or the
kind of manufacturing establishments in which an employer worked alongside a
dozen men whom he knew personally and in whose work he shared. These were
the people who, in an actual revolution, furnished the bulk of the insurrectionary
crowds in the cities of France or Holland. People of similar social station made up
most of the membership of the London Corresponding Society and the political
clubs of the English Midlands and of Scotland. Often they received direction from
“intellectuals,” or lawyers not too fully employed, or persons who for one reason or
another did not have to work for a living, fils de famille, strays from the aristocracy,
or sometimes men of actual means. Thus in Paris the wealthy brewer Santerre, the
lawyer Danton, the doctor Marat, became in various ways spokesmen, or at-
tempted to be such, for a revolutionary following made up of the working class.
The working class world, at its upper levels, through the owners of middle- sized
manufacturing enterprises, touched on the world of merchants and large- scale
commercial entrepreneurs, the “middle class” properly so called. The business or
commercial class enjoyed an intermediate status; its members might be wealthy,
economically powerful, and respected as useful and important members of the
community, while remaining on the fringes of political life, and either not received
at all in the choicest society, or received with a certain condescension. Many of the
business groups were also outside the officially preferred churches, Dissenters in
England, or Protestant but not Dutch Reformed in the Netherlands, or Protestant
in some of the French provincial towns, or occasionally Jews. The business classes