626 Chapter XXVI
either invested or borrowed in England, were likely to be on the conservative side
ideo logically; yet even in these cases a resentment against the “modern Carthage,”
which had been growing throughout the century, might induce a willingness, at
least temporarily, to experiment with new arrangements. In the United States,
where commercial contacts with England were reinforced by strong cultural ties,
the mercantile community was predominantly Federalist and pro- British, and it
was among small farmers and landed gentry, remote from the cities, that one found
sympathy for republicanism and for France. In this respect the United States stood
in contrast to the European Continent. One result was that Americans never un-
derstood how “bourgeois” the European revolution was.^35 A list of North of Ire-
land radicals in 1798 included Presbyterian ministers, schoolteachers, merchants,
shopkeepers, innkeepers, a miller, a land steward, and a watchmaker. A list of Ital-
ian revolutionaries in Piedmont, at the same time, for about two thousand whose
occupations are known, included many lawyers, Catholic clergy, merchants, doc-
tors and government employees, but hardly any peasants or city laborers.^36
The friends of the Great Nation, and the warmest citizens of the Sister Repub-
lics, were therefore middle- class people of certain kinds. As Mallet du Pan scorn-
fully said in 1796, they were “those foresighted people with their little investments,
those sagacious men of business, those second- hand shopkeepers of every descrip-
tion who in most of the commercial cities of Europe continue to show themselves
as auxiliaries of the French Revolution.”^37 They were lawyers, doctors, journalists,
writers, professors and students, middling property- owners and rentiers; persons
prospering in towns but not belonging to the established inner circles; those hop-
ing to gain from the purchase of church land, as happened in Belgium and Italy,
but not in Holland, and not much in Switzerland; those profiting from business
with the republican armies; members of religious minorities; Jews who desired a
fuller acceptance in the general community, and who obtained it in all the repub-
lics except the Helvetic; and enterprising men of affairs, who chafed under the
older restraints of gild and town, and could see a place for themselves in a new
European economy, dominated by France, in which they would have more free-
dom in the recruitment of labor and the development of new enterprises or new
inventions.
Throughout Western Europe, and by no means confined to the new revolution-
ary republics, there was a universal phenomenon of politicization. In Poland some-
what the same development had been suppressed. It became manifest in two ways,
in political clubs and in the rapid growth of a political press. It would seem that
every city of Central and Western Europe must have had its “club,” in some cases
simply continuing the reading societies and discussion groups that had flourished
for years before 1789, in other cases introduced by French soldiers or even by
French generals during military occupation after 1792.^38 The word “club,” of En-
35 See Chapter X X XI below.
36 R. B. McDowell, Irish Public Opinion 1750–1800 (London, 1944), 196; G. Vaccarino, Storia del
Piemonte (Turin, 1960), 245–71, as cited by J. Godechot in Revue historique, Vol. 228, p. 185.
37 J. Mallet du Pan, Correspondance politique pour servir à l ’ histoire du republicanisme français
(Hamburg, 1796), p. 5.
38 See the chapter, “Les clubs,” in J. Godechot, La Grande Nation (Paris, 1956), I, 317–55.