632 Chapter XXVI
sion of the territory.” Indivisibility and division, to paraphrase Talleyrand, were two
words for much the same thing. They reflected the basic structure of a unitary
democratic republic. As the French constitution of the Year III, in its first article,
divided the area of France into eighty- nine departments, which it listed by name,
so did the constitutions of the Sister Republics. The Batavian and Roman consti-
tutions each created and named eight departments, adopting the names of rivers or
other natural features; the Cisalpine, eleven, which expansion raised to twenty; the
Neapolitan, seventeen. The Ligurian constitution left the names and the exact
number for subsequent legislation. The Helvetic created twenty- two “cantons,”
soon reduced to eighteen; the historic names were used, but boundaries were re-
drawn to obtain more equality between cantons, and to admit the former subject
districts to cantonal status. In each republic the Legislative Body possessed the
power to alter the boundaries and number of the departments. Each department,
in each republic, had an elected council and a single executive officer appointed by
the central government, usually called a “commissioner,” as in France, but known
as a “prefect” in the Roman and Helvetic republics, in anticipation of the later
French usage. Within each department there were to be municipalities organized
on a uniform pattern according to new legislation.
It was these features of “departmentalization” and “municipalization,” as con-
temporaries saw, that marked the cutting edge of the revolutionary process, mow-
ing down the dense growth of feudal, manorial, aristocratic, patrician, and old-
fashioned burgher influences on the immediate local scene. It was these features
also, more than the higher levels of government structure, that anticipated the
political organization which in later times was to become characteristic of Conti-
nental Europe. And it was in these features that European constitutional princi-
ples in the 1790’s most widely departed from those in the United States.
Nowhere is the difference between American and European “democracy” more
evident. In the American union it was Alexander Hamilton who could conceive of
abolishing the pre- existing states, or of dividing a big state like Virginia into sev-
eral small ones so that all might be more equal. In America it was the democrats
who in such matters favored the inherited order. In America, to use European
terms (in which “federal” was opposite to the American “Federalist”), both the
unitary and the federal principle could be accepted. The unitary principle prevailed,
at the national level, in the direct election of members of the House of Representa-
tives by electoral districts equally populous, and in the direct authority of the na-
tional courts and executive over individual citizens in certain spheres. The “federal”
principle prevailed in the equal representation of states in the national Senate, re-
gardless of size, and in the theory that the states were themselves emanations from
the sovereign people, and so were not subject, like European departments, to re-
definition or reshaping by any higher organs of government. In America the pos-
sessors of local power were not thought of as obstacles to democratization. Indeed,
it was in the traditional township or county meeting, or in the farmhouse and the
village store, that liberty and equality were believed to be most firmly rooted.
In Europe the opposite situation prevailed, with local power and influence re-
posing in manorial landowners, seigneurial judges, ancestrally prominent families,
gild notables, and closely knit urban patriciates, all enmeshed in a variety of local-