630 Chapter XXVI
the same school of constitutional thinking. The German journalist Lange ex-
pressed a fundamental idea very well, if in somewhat Kantian fashion. In Ger-
many, he said regretfully, there were rulers and subjects, but no citizens. “A man
without citizenship is out of his element, like a fish out of water. He is unawak-
ened to the feeling of his own independence, because he is kept in the perpetual
status of a minor and is treated as a Thing, not as an End.”^41
Of the ten constitutions there were some in which native inspiration and au-
thorship were very strong (the Bolognese, Cispadane, Ligurian, Neapolitan, and
Batavian), others in which Frenchmen predominated in the drafting (the two Cis-
alpine constitutions, the Helvetic, and a document prepared for Lucca in 1799),
and one, the constitution of the Roman Republic, which was simply written in
Rome by four French commissioners. The constitutions were nevertheless all much
alike, and all strongly resembled the French constitution of the Year III, both be-
cause the French would not have tolerated any wide departures, and because the
revolutionaries from Holland to Naples drew on the same fund of ideas, and faced
the same problems of “feudalism,” oligarchy, church questions, and privileged
classes. Even in France, where a revolutionary vanguard continued to favor the
constitution of the Year I, most ordinary democrats accepted the structure of the
Directory and criticized only its politics and its personnel. In the Sister Republics
the constitution of the Year III was accepted without argument as “democratic.”
All the constitutions began with declarations of rights, with which all but the
Batavian and Helvetic incorporated declarations of civic duties, following the
French model.^42 All stated the basic rights to be liberty, equality, security, and
property. Equality meant equality in the eyes of the law. As the Greek draft curi-
ously put it: “All men, Christians and Turks, are equal by the natural order.” All
declared sovereignty to reside in the “citizenry as a whole,” which meant, as the
Swiss said, that “no part or right of sovereignty could be detached and become a
private property.” Native- born men became citizens at a certain age, generally
twenty- one. Little encouragement was given to foreigners in these revolutionary
republics. Where by the French constitution it was possible to be naturalized after
seven years’ residence, in the Cisalpine the requirement was raised from seven
years in the first constitution to fourteen in the second. The Ligurian constitution
required ten years, the Roman fourteen. The Batavians would grant citizenship to
persons of foreign birth only if they had resided in the republic for ten years and
could read and write Dutch. The impenetrable Swiss, in their revolutionary con-
stitution of 1798, demanded twenty years for naturalization. It may be noted in
41 See the chapter, “Les constitutions,” in Godechot, op.cit., II, 418–50; K. J. Lange, Deutsche
Reichs- und Staatszeitung, April 23, 1799.
42 For the texts of the Italian constitutions see A. Aquarone, Le costituzioni italiane (Milan, 1958);
for the Batavian constitution in French translation, D. Verhagen, L’ influence de la Révolution française
sur la première constitution hollandaise du 23 avril 1798 (Paris, 1949), 59–99; for the Helvetic constitu-
tion in German and French, J. Strickler, Actensammlung aus der Zeit der helvetischen Republik, Bern,
1886–1940, I, 567–87; for Velestinlis’ proposed draft, in Greek and French, A. Dascalakis, Oeuvres de
Rhighas Velestinlis (Paris, 1937), 76–125. See also the discussion of the Batavian constitution in Chap-
ter X XI of the present book, and of the Bolognese, Cispadane, and Cisalpine in Chapter XV. C.
Ghisalberti, Le costituzioni “giacobine” 1796–99 (Varese, 1957), gives an incomparably more substantial
discussion of the Italian constitutions than does Verhagen of the Dutch.