the Federalists.^9 In the following years, Jefferson’s Republicans would
virtually eliminate the Federalists, but the opposition was reborn with
the split of the remaining party into a Democratic and a Republican
faction. American politics had become competitive and divided for
good over the nature and meaning of democracy. The country’s public
opinion, wrote Alexis de Tocqueville in 1831, “is divided into a
thousand minute shades of difference upon questions of detail,” but
the more we look at the contending parties, “the more do we per-
ceive that the object of the one is to limit, and that of the other to
extend, the authority of the people.”^10
At about the same time, in 1789, the French Revolution produced
a more dramatic, sharper division over equality and democracy. The
starting point, a hierarchical society composed of three distinct estates –
the Church, the nobility, and the common people – was quite different
from that of the United States. To create a democracy in such a context,
the French had to make an even more radical break with the past.
Politically, this break was realized through the creation of the National
Assembly and the Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen in
- Ideologically, it was accomplished most remarkably by the
publication in the same year ofWhat is the Third Estate?by Emmanuel
Joseph Sieyes. The Third Estate, wrote Sieyes, is “everything;” even
though so far it has been “nothing.” Without the common people, the
two other estates, and indeed the country, simply could not exist.
Nothing would be produced or accomplished. Without the Church and
the nobility, on the other hand, everything would work. Indeed the
country would do better.^11 Equality was posed as the core issue from
the outset. What was at stake was the very constitution of society, in
social classes whose interests were seen as antagonistic. In a deeply
hierarchical society, such an egalitarian vision could not prevail without
a clash. Indeed, more than a hundred years of violent civil and inter-
national conflicts would be necessary to sort out the consequences of
the French Revolution.
Political philosopher John Dunn summarizes these conflicts with
the words of Filippo Michele Buonarroti, a Tuscan aristocrat who
(^9) James MacGregor Burns,The Deadlock of Democracy: Four-Party Politics in
10 America, Englewood Cliffs, NJ, Prentice-Hall, 1967, pp. 33 and 41.
Alexis de Tocqueville, quoted inibid., pp. 57–58.
(^11) Sieye`s, quoted in Dunn,Setting the People Free, p. 108.
The rise of the modern state system (1776–1945) 87