Europe and the American Revolution 201
into the French language through translation of the American state constitutions.
For the subjects of government to repudiate and dismantle their government, re-
vert to a “state of nature,” and then by deliberate planning to constitute govern-
ment anew, to invent and delimit new offices and authorities and endow them
with written grants of power, was at least in a juridical sense the very essence of
revolution, the practical acting out of the social contract, and the assertion of the
sovereignty of the people. It is hard to believe that the French Revolution would
have been very different even if the American Revolution had never happened. It
is easy to show that the Americans attempted no such substantial break with their
past as did the French. Nevertheless, in constitutional theory, in the belief that a
people must will its own government by a kind of act of special creation, the two
revolutions were much alike.
Over the specific and detailed content of the American constitutions the French
discussion roamed very freely. One problem, however, preoccupied all of the French
and all of the Americans in this international argument. It was the problem of how
best to prevent the growth of hereditary aristocracy. French and Americans were
agreed that there was one thing they did not want, though some would tolerate it
as a necessary evil—”aristocracy” in the sense of legal privilege, or estates and ranks
of society, or nobilities, patriciates or hereditary magistracies, or a self- selecting,
exclusive, and perennial governing class, in short the “constituted bodies” as I have
described them in earlier chapters. There was no agreement on how this unwanted
phenomenon was to be prevented. But the disputes over the separation of powers
in the American constitutions, and the furor over the Society of the Cincinnati,
can best be understood against this background of aversion to the hierarchic class
structure of Europe.
The argument may be said to have begun when Benjamin Franklin gave Turgot
a copy of Price’s Observations on Civil Liberty. Turgot wrote a letter of appreciation
to Price, in the course of which he made some strictures on the American consti-
tutions, which in turn prompted John Adams to write his Defense of the Constitu-
tions of the United States. Adams meanwhile had been close to the Abbé Mably,
who also wrote a book on the American constitutions, which seems to have an-
noyed Jefferson and certainly annoyed Condorcet. Jefferson’s friend Mazzei, sup-
ported by Condorcet, refuted Mably. A New Jersey gentleman then demolished
Adams’ Defense, or purported to do so. His pamphlet, coming to Jefferson in Paris,
was translated there with long notes by Condorcet and Dupont de Nemours, the
intellectual successors to Turgot. This pamphlet was said by Morellet and Mounier,
whose judgment commands respect, to have had a great influence in France during
the critical months of August and September 1789. Meanwhile, and very signifi-
cantly, while the French disputed over bicameral and unicameral legislatures, and
over the amount of power to be granted to the executive, John Adams and Thomas
Jefferson, the future Federalist and the future Democratic Republican, do not seem
really to have disagreed.
To bring this somewhat doctrinaire argument into perspective, it is necessary to
point out that Turgot had been Louis XVI’s principal minister from 1774 to 1776,
that he had designed a great reform program to equalize the tax burden and reduce
the privileges of nobility, and that he had been forced out of office by the Par-