High Tide of Revolutionary Democracy 633
ized laws, customs, concessions, and privileges, and all generally reinforced by
an officially recognized parish clergy, whether Protestant or Catholic as the case
might be. These were the people who generally had the most influence with the
mass of the population, which looked to them, rather than to upholders of new
ideas, for cues as to their opinions or conduct and for initiative in public affairs.
In Europe, therefore, as already observed in preceding chapters, the democratic
movement had to be unitary and centralizing, because it had to destroy before it
could construct. It was in Switzerland that the greatest concession was made to the
federal principle, for reasons analogous to those in America, namely the popular
character of some pre- existing institutions. By the Helvetic constitution, each can-
ton sent four delegates to the senate, regardless of size, while the lower house was
ultimately to be elected in proportion to population. Elsewhere the revolutionary
movement swept pre- existing collectivities into the discard. It attempted to break
up and transform the local leadership structures, the local centers of influence and
loyalty, the local habits of deference and subordination. It proclaimed the existence
of a “people,” not necessarily any pre- existing unit of human beings, and not neces-
sarily a “nation” in the later meaning of the word—a “Cisalpine” people, a “Hel-
vetic” people, the “people between the Meuse, Rhine and Moselle”—of which the
first two declared themselves to be independent republics, the third used its newly
declared sovereignty to join itself to the French Republic, within which it was or-
ganized in departments.^44 In each such case, by the declaration of sovereignty, the
claims to sovereignty made by older corporate entities were denied. The change
was to be deep, chemical, and molecular. Or, as in a meat chopper, the tissues and
sinews of the old order were to be ground up until nothing remained but the indi-
vidual particles, or citizens, who, if the figure can be tolerated, might then be re-
arranged into patties (or “departments”) of similar content and equal size.
The same points are illustrated, at the level of pure ideas, by Rhigas Velestinlis’
proposed statute for a Greek Republic, which of course never went into effect and
has remained virtually unknown. The uncertainty of meaning of both “Greek” and
“people” in this document is very dear. On the one hand, Greeks are “the descen-
dants of the Hellenes, living in Rumelia, Asia Minor, the Mediterranean islands
and Moldo- Wallachia.” On the other hand, the Greek people is a kind of neces-
sary constitutional postulate, “the universality of inhabitants of the State, without
distinction of religion or language, Greeks, Albanians, Vlachs, Armenians, Turks
and all other races.” All are equal, but Greek is the official language, because it is
easiest to learn. The republic is one and indivisible, but is divided into eparchies
and toparchies. These replace the existing collectivities in the Ottoman Empire.
The “nation” itself is the basis of representation, “not simply the rich and the great”
(italics in the original); the people meet in primary assemblies of from 200 to 600
voters, and elect a member of the Legislative Body for every 40,000 of the popula-
tion. By such means, even more than by the Directory and other organs that the
constitution then described, it was hoped that the complex realities of the Greek
44 For the “people between the Meuse, Rhine and Moselle” see numerous documents in J. Han-
sen, Quellen zur Geschichte des Rheinlandes im Zeitalter der französichen Revolution, and especially IV,
315–26.