204 Chapter IX
dérations sur l ’ordre de Cincinnatus. With it he included a translation of Price’s re-
flections on the American Revolution, and of Turgot’s letter to Price, now pub-
lished in French for the first time.
Mirabeau’s pamphlet against the Cincinnati was a diatribe against aristocracy.
Monarchies, said Mirabeau, needed special “bodies” of men; in republics all men
belonged to one “body” and enjoyed the same rank. The Cincinnati, he declared,
echoing Franklin and Adams, violated the American constitutions and bills of
rights which asserted the equality of all citizens. They would introduce into Amer-
ica “an eternal race of Aristocrats, who may soon usurp those insulting titles by
which the European nobility crush the simple citizens, their equals and brothers.”^48
For the next two or three years, though the Society had meanwhile modified its
statutes, the Cincinnati commanded a degree of attention in France that now
seems out of all proportion to their true importance. Jefferson, who also disap-
proved of the society, tried to calm his French friends by explaining that the offi-
cers had meant no harm, and that they had had no intention of setting up an
aristocratic order. But for a time no French book about America was complete
without an extended and often heated treatment of this question. Perhaps the
French were right; a kind of publicly honored, solemnly paraded, and rigidly he-
reditary Sons of the American Revolution is not nowadays to be contemplated
with equanimity. In any case the French excitement reflected a profound dissatis-
faction with the social order in Europe.
Meanwhile Adams, now Minister to England, was methodically compiling his
Defense of the Constitutions of the United States against the “attack” of Turgot. It was
a long survey of all republics on which Adams could find any information, ancient,
medieval, and modern; democratic, aristocratic, and “regal” (England and Poland
were his modern “regal republics”)—an interminable setting forth of scores of ex-
amples hurriedly thrown together in a huge patchwork of long- unacknowledged
quotations, connected by paragraphs of his own composition in which he gave his
own thoughts on the matter. With all its defects as a piece of literary art, and with
the exception of the constitutions themselves and other official American docu-
ments, the Defense was the most important work of American political theory be-
fore the Federalist papers. It falls neatly into place in the present book also, since it
gives a comparative survey of the constituted bodies of Europe as they had come to
be in the eighteenth century, finds in them a universal trend toward hereditary
self- entrenchment in office, idealizes the British constitution in the manner of
Delolme, expresses some basic ideas of the American Revolution, was written in
Europe in an international controversy, and was designed as a polemic against aris-
tocratical government. Adams succeeded in making himself thoroughly misunder-
stood. He was even called an aristocrat; but it seems hardly possible that anyone
could actually read the Defense of the Constitutions of the United States without see-
ing that aristocracy was Adams’ principal bugaboo.
Adams started out with the eternal American protest against the attentions of
European intellectuals: “The writer has long seen with anxiety the facility with
which philosophers of greatest name have undertaken to write of American affairs,
48 H. G. R. de Mirabeau, Considérations sur l ’ordre de Cincinnatus, ou imitation d ’un pamphlet
Anglo- Americain (London, 1784). Quotation from p. 50 of 1785 edition.