794 Chapter XXXII
accept the surrender of liberty; the solution provided by Bonaparte could not prove
to be durable. Nor was it an equality that repudiated the power of government; the
world of Thomas Jefferson would also pass.
In forty years, from 1760 to 1800, “equality” took on a wealth of meanings, to
which few new ones have been added since that time. It could mean an equality
between colonials and residents of a mother country, as in America; between no-
bles and commoners, as in France; patricians and burghers, as at Geneva; ruling
townsmen and subject country people, as at Zurich and elsewhere; between Cath-
olic and Protestant, Anglican and Dissenter, Christian and Jew, religionist and un-
believer, or between Greek and Turk in Rhigas Velestinlis’ memorable phrase. It
might refer to the equal right of gildsmen and outsiders to enter upon a particular
kind of trade or manufacture. For some few it included greater equality between
men and women. Equality for ex- slaves and between races was not overlooked. For
popular democrats, like the Paris sans- culottes, it meant the hope for a more ade-
quate livelihood, more schooling and education, the right to stroll on the boule-
vards with the upper classes, and for more recognition and more respect; and it
passed on to the extreme claim for an exact equality of material circumstances,
which was rarely in fact made during the Revolutionary era, but was feared as an
ultimate consequence of it by conservatives, and expressed in Babeuf ’s blunt for-
mula, “stomachs are equal.”
Monarchy, religion, the church, the law, and the economic system—along with
the British Parliament, the Dutch Union of Utrecht, the old folk- democracies of
the upland Swiss, the gentry republic in Poland, and the patrician communes of
Italy—were brought into question so far as they upheld inequalities that were
thought to be unjust. “Everywhere inequality is a cause of revolution,” said Aris-
totle long ago, and his observation may remain as the last word on the subject. The
problem of the historian in deciding upon the causes of revolution, as of rulers in
preventing or guiding it, is to identify the sore spots, the political, economic, socio-
logical, or psychological matters which arouse, in a significant number of relatively
normal human beings, the embittered sense of inequality which is the sense of
injustice.
The present book began with a quotation from Alexis de Tocqueville, and may
close with another. For Tocqueville the course of all history revealed a continuing
movement toward a greater “equality of conditions.” In the introduction to his
Democracy in America, thinking of both France and the United States, and indeed
of all Europe since the Middle Ages, he explained his view of world history, in
which he was less oracular than Hegel, and less dogmatic than Marx.
“The gradual trend toward equality of conditions,” he said, “is a fact of Provi-
dence, of which it bears the principal characteristics: it is universal, it is enduring,
it constantly eludes human powers of control; all events and all men contribute to
its development.
“Would it be wise to think that a social movement of such remote origin can be
suspended by the efforts of one generation? Can it be supposed that democracy,
after destroying feudalism and overwhelming kings, will yield before the powers of
money and business—devant les bourgeois et les riches?