CHAPTER II
ARISTOCRACY ABOUT 1760:
THE CONSTITUTED BODIESIn aristocracy, the sovereign power is in the hands of a certain number of persons.
It is they who make the laws and see to their execution; and the rest of the people
stand in relation to them as, in a monarchy, the subjects do to the monarch....
Monarchical government, by nature, is constituted by dependent and subordinate
intermediate powers. The most natural such dependent intermediate power is that
of the nobility. Nobility enters in a sense into the essence of monarchy, of which the
fundamental maxim is: No monarch, no nobility; no nobility, no monarch....
Abolish in a monarchy the prerogatives of lords and clergy, nobility and towns, and
soon you will have either a popular or a despotic state.
—MONTESQUIEU, 1748
Edmund Burke, after the American troubles began, thought that the Virginians
were very much like the Poles. He would solve the American question by putting
America on the same legal footing as Ireland. For Ireland he recommended the
example of France, which he saw as a federal “empire,” where great provinces like
Brittany raised their own taxes and otherwise enjoyed extensive autonomy. Gibbon
cited England, France, Venice, and Genoa to show that liberty was preserved by a
gradation of social ranks. Rousseau considered the citizens of Geneva and the no-
bles of Venice to be much alike. The abbé Morellet, mixing in an Anglo- French
reforming circle which included Turgot, Condorcet, Lord Shelburne, Bentham,
Priestley, and Price, made much the same criticisms of the parlements of France
and the parliament of Great Britain. Kaunitz, commenting on difficulties between
the Hapsburg government and the diet of Bohemia, was reminded of similar dif-
ficulties in Hungary and Belgium.
All saw a uniformity of institutions. All had in mind those “constituted bodies”
which existed everywhere in the European world, west of Russia. The term is