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AFRICA SINCE 1800

This history of modern Africa takes as its starting point the year 1800,
because, although by that time the greater part of the interior of Africa
had become known to the outside world, most of the initiatives for po-
litical and economic change still remained in the hands of African rulers
and their peoples.
The book falls into three parts. The first describes the precolonial his-
tory of Africa, while the middle section deals thematically with partition
and colonial rule. The third part details the emergence of the modern
nation states of Africa and their history. Throughout the 200 years cov-
ered by the book, Africa, and not its invaders, is at the centre of the story.
The authors are as concerned with the continuity of African history as
with the changes that have taken place during this period.
The new edition covers events up to the middle of 2003, and takes
account of the fresh perspectives brought about by the end of the Cold
War and the new global situation following the events of 11 September
2001. It is also concerned with the demographic trends that are at the
heart of so many African problems today, with the ravages of diseases
such as HIV/AIDS and malaria and with the conflicts waged by warlords
fighting for control of scarce resources.

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Africa Since 1800

ROLAND OLIVER
ANTHONY ATMORE

Fifth Edition

iii
  
Cambridge, New York, Melbourne, Madrid, Cape Town, Singapore, São Paulo

Cambridge University Press

The Edinburgh Building, Cambridge  , UK
Published in the United States of America by Cambridge University Press, New York
www.cambridge.org
Information on this title: www.cambridge.org/9780521836159

© Cambridge University Press 1967, 1972, 1981, 1994

This book is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to the provision of

relevant collective licensing agreements, no reproduction of any part may take place
without the written permission of Cambridge University Press.

First published in print format 2005

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Contents

List of Maps page vii

ONE. AFRICA NORTH OF THE EQUATOR 1

TWO. AFRICA SOUTH OF THE EQUATOR 18

THREE. THE OPENING UP OF AFRICA: (1) FROM THE

NORTH-EAST 35

FOUR. THE OPENING UP OF AFRICA: (2) FROM THE MAGHRIB 52

FIVE. WEST AFRICA BEFORE THE COLONIAL PERIOD, 1800–1875 63

SIX. WESTERN CENTRAL AFRICA, 1800–1880 78

SEVEN. EASTERN CENTRAL AFRICA, 1800–1884 90

EIGHT. SOUTHERN AFRICA, 1800–1885 103

NINE. THE PARTITION OF AFRICA ON PAPER, 1879–1891 118

TEN. THE PARTITION OF AFRICA ON THE GROUND, 1891–1901 130

ELEVEN. COLONIAL RULE IN TROPICAL AFRICA: (1) POLITICAL

AND ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENTS, 1885–1914 146

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vi Contents

TWELVE. COLONIAL RULE IN TROPICAL AFRICA: (2) SOCIAL AND

RELIGIOUS DEVELOPMENTS 160

THIRTEEN. THE INTER-WAR PERIOD, 1918–1938 170

FOURTEEN. NORTH AND NORTH-EAST AFRICA, 1900–1939 183

FIFTEEN. SOUTH AFRICA, 1902–1939 200

SIXTEEN. THE LAST YEARS OF COLONIAL RULE 211

SEVENTEEN. THE ROAD TO INDEPENDENCE: (1) NORTH AND

NORTH-EAST AFRICA 226

EIGHTEEN. THE ROAD TO INDEPENDENCE: (2) AFRICA FROM

THE SAHARA TO THE ZAMBEZI 244

NINETEEN. THE ROAD TO INDEPENDENCE: (3) CENTRAL AFRICA 267

TWENTY. THE LONG ROAD TO DEMOCRACY IN SOUTHERN

AFRICA 283

TWENTY ONE. THE POLITICS OF INDEPENDENT AFRICA 303

TWENTY TWO. ECONOMICS AND SOCIETY IN INDEPENDENT

AFRICA 323

TWENTY THREE. INTO THE THIRD MILLENNIUM 339

EPILOGUE 369

Suggestions for Further Reading 383

Index 389
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Maps

1 Northern Africa: geographical features and

vegetation. page 2
2 Northern Africa in 1800. 9
3 Africa south of the equator: geographical features
and vegetation. 19
4 Africa south of the equator in 1800. 22
5 North-East Africa: Egyptian expansion. 38
6 North-East Africa: Ethiopian expansion and
the Mahdiyya. 48
7 North-West Africa, 1800–1881. 54
8 West Africa, 1800–1875. 70
9 Western Central Africa, 1800–1880: trade routes. 79
10 Western Central Africa, 1800–1880: tribal areas
and migrations. 84
11 Eastern Central Africa, 1800–1884. 93
12 Early nineteenth-century migrations in South
and East Africa. 108
13 Southern Africa, 1800–1885: African migrations. 109
14 Southern Africa, 1800–1885: Boer migrations. 113
15 Europe at the time of the partition of Africa. 121
16 Africa on the eve of partition: African states and
European settlements. 124
17 European partition: Western Africa. 132
18 European partition: East Africa. 139

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viii Maps

19 Southern Africa: the European partition – Britain,

France, and Germany. 141
20 Southern Africa: the European partition – Leopold and
Portugal. 142
21 Africa: the final stage of partition, 1914. 144
22 Africa: colonial economies and administrations. 152
23 Africa and the First World War. 172
24 The Maghrib: economic development during the
colonial period. 185
25 North-East Africa under colonial rule: economic and
political development. 186
26 The independence of Africa. 227
27 South Africa and the Bantustans. 292
28 Nigeria: four decades of independence. 309
29 Africa and the Cold War. 316
30 The new South Africa. 321
31 Conflicts in the Horn of Africa. 341
32 Crises in Rwanda and Congo (Zaire). 344
33 Warlords in West Africa. 350
34 Sudan: North vs. South. 357
35 Oil in Africa. 379
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ONE. Africa North of the Equator

The Sahara and Islam: The Bonds Unifying Northern Africa

The geography of the northern half of Africa is dominated by the Sa-

hara desert. Throughout its vast area, 2,800 km (1,700 miles) from
north to south and nearly 8,000 km (5,000 miles) from east to west,
rainfall is less than 13 cm (5 inches) a year. Except around a few
oases where underground supplies of water reach the surface, agri-
culture is impossible, and the desert’s only inhabitants have been
nomadic herdsmen, breeding camels and moving their animals sea-
sonally from one light grazing ground to another. To the north of
the desert lies the temperate Mediterranean coastland – its rainfall
concentrated between January and March, with wheat and barley
as its main cereal crops and sheep, the main stock of its highland
pastures. Southward are the tropics, the land of the summer rains,
favouring a different set of food crops from those grown around the
Mediterranean. In the desert and northward live Berbers and Arabs,
fair-skinned peoples speaking languages of the Afroasiatic family.
South of the desert begins the ‘land of the blacks’ – to the Greeks;
‘Ethiopia’, to the Berbers, ‘Akal n’Iguinawen’ (Guinea); and to the
Arabs, ‘Bilad as-Sudan’.
The desert has always been a formidable obstacle to human com-
munication, but for two thousand years at least – since the introduc-
tion of the horse and the camel made travel easier – people have per-
severed in overcoming its difficulties. Before the days of the motorcar
and the aeroplane, it took two months or more to cross. Nevertheless,

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1. Northern Africa: geographical features and vegetation.

2
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Africa North of the Equator 3

people did cross it, not merely in isolated journeys of exploration,

but, regularly, year after year, in the course of trade, education, and
pilgrimage. The essential intermediaries in this traffic were the pas-
toral nomads of the desert itself. They bred the camels, trained them
for carrying, and accompanied and protected the caravans on their
journeys. They also controlled what was, until the twentieth-century
discoveries of oil and natural gas, the one great natural resource of
the Sahara, which was the salt deposited in almost inexhaustible
quantities by the evaporation of ancient lake basins situated in the
very middle of the desert, dating from prehistoric periods of much
greater rainfall. The salt was in high demand to the north, and more
especially to the south of the desert. The nomads brought in slaves to
mine it and supplied the all-important camels to transport it in bulk.
Given the salt caravans, which by the nineteenth century were em-
ploying hundreds of thousands of camels to carry tens of thousands
of tons of salt, the exchange of many other commodities from north
and south of the desert becomes much easier to understand. The gold
from the tributary valleys of the upper Niger, the upper Volta, and the
Akan forest was an early and important element in the trans-Saharan
trade. Slaves, captured all along the southern edges of the Sudanic
belt, accompanied nearly every northward-moving caravan. And, as
time went on, leather goods and cotton textiles manufactured in the
Sudan were carried northwards in considerable quantity. The staples
of the southward traffic were the woollen textiles of North Africa; the
cottons and muslins of the Middle East; and the weapons, armour,
and other hardware of southern Europe.
Therefore, long before any sailing ship from Europe reached the
Atlantic coast of West Africa, the Sudanic lands to the south of the
Sahara were in touch with those of the Mediterranean not only
by exchanging produce but also by the sharing of skills and ideas.
Whereas the Latin Christianity of the Roman provinces never crossed
the Sahara, Greek-speaking missionaries, both Orthodox and Mono-
physite, converted the Nubian kingdoms on the upper Nile and the
kingdom of Aksum in northern Ethiopia. In the west, Islam first
spread through the conquest of Egypt and North Africa in the sev-
enth century, and then moved on across the desert with little delay.
By the ninth century, the nomads of the central and western Sahara
were converting to Islam. By the eleventh century, at least, the new
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4 Africa since 1800

faith was beginning to penetrate the Negro kingdoms to the south of

the desert, where it appealed first and foremost to those who travelled
beyond their own communities and language areas as participants in
an already active system of regional and interregional trade. To them,
Islam offered wider intellectual and spiritual horizons and member-
ship in a universal brotherhood which looked after its members in
very practical ways. Between the eleventh and eighteenth centuries,
at least, the townsfolk of the Sudanic countries learned to be Mus-
lims like the Arabs and the Berbers to the north. Their learned and
pious men studied Arabic, the language of the Holy Koran, and a
few made the pilgrimage to the holy cities of Mecca and Medina,
passing through the great cities of Egypt and North Africa on the
way. The rulers and the rich men on both sides of the desert wor-
shipped the One God, read the same books, and discussed the same
things.
It would, of course, be a great mistake to imagine that all the civil-
isations of the Sudanic belt of Africa were due to contact with the
world of Islam. We now know that a pattern of urban life in walled
towns existed in widely scattered parts of West Africa long before
the spread of Islam, and that the characteristic political formation of
small ‘city states’ grouped in clusters – each cluster speaking a com-
mon language and observing common customs – must have been a
development indigenous to the region. The periodic and sporadic in-
corporation of city–states into larger political hierarchies, described
by outsiders as kingdoms or empires, is likewise to be seen as a re-
sponse to various local factors, including differences of economic op-
portunity and military power and the ambitions of individual rulers,
and not as the transfer of political ideas from the north of the desert
to the south. Nevertheless, the growing presence of Islam and the
proximity of the Islamic heartlands as the most obvious point of ref-
erence in the outside world did help to provide a certain element
of unity to the northern half of Africa, extending from the Mediter-
ranean almost to the Atlantic coast of West Africa. Within all this vast
area, despite multitudinous differences of language and culture, in-
terregional trade and travel were practised by a small number of
people and, by the beginning of the nineteenth century, nearly all
of these were Muslims, so that there was a certain pool of common
ideas in circulation from one end of it to the other.
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Africa North of the Equator 5

It is debatable just where the southern frontier of northern Africa

lay at different times in history. Until the twelfth and thirteenth cen-
turies, it probably included little more than the open grasslands,
forming a belt 500 or 600 km (300 or 400 miles) wide to the south
of the desert margin, from the Senegal to Lake Chad and eastwards
through Darfur and Kordofan to the Ethiopian highlands. Through-
out this region, beasts of burden, especially donkeys, could circu-
late, and troops of armed horsemen could control and levy tribute
upon the populations of quite large states. To the south again lay the
woodland belt, thickening progressively into dense equatorial rain
forest. Here, because of tsetse fly in the woodlands and lack of for-
age in the forest, all goods had to be carried by canoes or porters,
and soldiers fought on foot. Markets and states were smaller, and
there were few towns large enough for Islamic religion and learn-
ing to gain a foothold. Nevertheless, by the fourteenth and fifteenth
centuries, some interregional trade was beginning to penetrate even
these southern lands. Gold was found in the Akan forest, and kola,
the one luxury stimulant permitted by Islam, was grown exclusively
within the forest belt. When the Portuguese discovered the West
African coast, they found that the trading frontier of the Mande
traders from the Niger bend had already reached the coastline of
modern Ghana. During the three centuries that followed, the Euro-
pean traders operating from the Atlantic beaches pushed the fron-
tiers of interregional trade northwards again, but only by a matter
of 300 to 500 km (200 to 300 miles). By 1800, there was still far more
of West Africa which looked northwards for its contacts with the
outside world than southwards to the seaborne trade with Europe.
And, of course, throughout the whole vast region to the east of Lake
Chad, there remained no other source of outside contacts but the
northern one.

Countries of the Mediterranean Coast

By the end of the eighteenth century, people in the Muslim world as

a whole had lost much of the energy and sense of purpose that had
driven them to produce such a brilliant culture in the early centuries
of Islam. They failed to keep abreast of the new inventions and tech-
niques being discovered in western Europe, particularly in military
Exploring the Variety of Random
Documents with Different Content
possessions fall to his next of kin, to whom the law accords the
inheritance.'—(For. Jud. 1. vi. tit. v. 1. 12.)
In the institutions of the church there was an article which has
been hitherto very little noticed—namely, its penitential system. The
study of this system is rendered much more interesting at the
present day, since it is almost completely in accordance with the
ideas of modern philosophy as to the principles and objects of the
penal law. If we investigate the nature of the punishments used by
the church, of the public penances which were its principal mode of
inflicting chastisement, we shall find that their main design was to
excite repentance in the mind of the criminal, and moral terror by
the example in the beholders. There was also another idea mixed
up with it—that of expiation. In a general point of view, I do not
know if it be possible to separate the idea of expiation from that of
punishment, and if there be not in every punishment a hidden and
imperative demand for the expiation of the wrong committed,
independently of the design of leading the guilty to repentance,
and of scaring those who might be tempted to fall into crime. But
putting aside this question, it is quite clear that repentance and
example were the objects proposed by the church in its penitential
system. Are these not also the objects of truly philosophic
legislation? Have not the most enlightened jurists of the last age,
and of our own days, advocated reform in the European penal
legislation, upon the allegation of these very principles? Look at
their works—look at those of Bentham, for example—and you will
be surprised at the numerous resemblances you will find between
the penal modes proposed by them and those employed by the
church. They most certainly did not borrow them from her, nor
could she have foreseen that her example might be one day
adduced in aid of plans propounded by the least devout of
philosophers.

By all sorts of methods the church likewise strove to repress the

tendency of society to violence and continual wars. Every one is
aware that it was by 'the truce of God,' and numerous measures of
the same nature, that the church struggled against the employment
of force, and devoted itself to introduce into society a greater
degree of order and mildness. These facts are so well known, that I
am spared the trouble of entering into any detail. [Footnote 9]

[Footnote 9: As many readers of this edition may not be

such perfect masters of these facts as M. Guizot's
auditory, it may be permitted the translator to mention,
that the first volume of Robertson's History of Charles V.
will be found the best expositor of these and other
references which may not be familiar to the reader.]

Such are the principal points which I have to bring forward

regarding the relations of the church with the people. We have now
considered it under the three aspects which I first announced, and
gained a knowledge of it both within and without, both in its
internal constitution, and in its twofold outward position. It now
remains to apply our knowledge to decide, by means of induction
and conjecture, its general influence upon European civilisation.
This is a labour almost accomplished, or at least much advanced,
as the simple announcement of the predominant facts and
principles in the church reveals and explains its influence; the
results have in some sort already passed before us with the causes.
However, in summing them up, we are led, I think, to two general
conclusions.

The first is, that the church must necessarily have exercised a very
considerable influence upon moral and intellectual order in modern
Europe, and upon public ideas, sentiments, and manners. That the
fact is unquestionable, is proved by the moral and intellectual
development of Europe being essentially theological. A survey of
history from the fifth to the sixteenth century exhibits theology
possessing and directing the human understanding, and giving its
impress to all opinions: philosophical, political, and historical
questions, were all considered under a theological point of view.
The church was so supreme in the intellectual order, that even
mathematical and physical sciences were held to be subject to its
doctrines. The theological spirit was, as it were, the blood which
flowed in the veins of the European world, until Bacon and
Descartes—Bacon in England, and Descartes in France—were the
first to carry intellect out of the beaten tracks of theology.

The same fact is found in all branches of literature; theological

modes of thought, feeling, and expression, are displayed at every
step.

Upon the whole, this influence was salutary. Not only did it keep
up, and render productive, the intellectual movement in Europe, but
the system of doctrines and precepts, under sanction of which it
imparted the movement, was very superior to anything that the
ancient world had known. Movement and advancement existed at
one and the same time.

The situation of the church, furthermore, has given an extension

and variety to the development of the human mind which it never
had previously. In the East, intellectual progress was altogether
religious; in the Greek society it was almost exclusively human; in
the one, humanity, properly so called, its actual nature and destiny,
completely disappeared; in the other, it was man himself, his
immediate passions, sentiments, and interests, which occupied the
whole stage. In the modern world, the religious spirit has mingled
with all things, without excluding any. Modern intelligence is
impressed at once with humanity and divinity. Human sentiments
and interests hold a material place in our literatures, and yet the
religious character of man—that portion of his existence which is
directed to another world—appears at every step therein; insomuch
that the two great sources of the development of man, humanity
and religion, have flowed abundantly, and at the same time; so
that, in spite of all the evil and all the abuses mixed up with it, in
spite of all its acts of tyranny, in an intellectual point of view the
church has exercised an influence more calculated for development
than repression, for expansion than contraction.
In a political point of view, the matter is very different. There can
be no doubt that by softening feelings and manners, by decrying
and suppressing a great number of barbarous practices, the church
powerfully contributed to the amelioration of the social state; but in
the political order, as properly defined, in that which affects the
relations of government with subjects, of power with liberty, I do
not believe that, upon the whole, its influence has been beneficial.
Under this head the church has always come forward as the
interpreter and defender of two systems—the theocratical and the
imperial—that is to say, of despotism, sometimes under a religious
form, sometimes under a civil form. Taking all its institutions, its
entire legislation—taking its canons, and its modes of procedure—
the principle of theocracy, or of the old empire, is throughout found
predominant. When weak, the church sheltered itself under the
absolute power of the emperors; when strong, it claimed that
absolutism on its own account, on the plea of its spiritual power.
We need not linger in adducing facts or particular cases. There is
no question that the church often invoked the rights of the people
against the bad government of the sovereigns; it often even
approved of, and stimulated, insurrections; and it likewise
frequently advocated, in its intercourse with the sovereigns, the
rights and interests of the people. But whenever the question of
political guarantees has arisen between power and liberty,
whenever attempts have been made to establish a system of
permanent institutions, which might truly and effectually shelter
liberty from the encroachments of power, the church has generally
ranged itself on the side of despotism.

There is no occasion for much astonishment at this, or to charge

upon the clergy an undue proportion of human weakness, or to
imagine it a vice peculiar to the Christian church. It has a much
deeper and more powerful origin.

What does every religion lay claim to? The governance of human
passions and of human will. Every religion is a curb, a power, a
government. It comes in the name of divine law to subdue human
nature. Therefore human liberty is its especial antagonist, which it
is its object to vanquish. To this purpose is its mission and hope
directed.

But although religions have to struggle with human liberty, and

although they aspire to cast the will of man in a new mould, at the
same time they have no other moral means of acting upon man
than what he himself supplies, than his own will and liberty. When
they act by outward means, as by force or seduction—in other
words, by means other than the free concurrence of man— they
treat him as we would one of the elements, water or wind, as a
purely physical or material power; and they fail in their object, for
they do not thereby reach or influence the inclination. For religions
really to accomplish their task, it is necessary that man yields
himself up to them, but voluntarily and of his own free will, and
that he preserves his liberty even amidst his submission. Religions
are thus called to solve a double problem.

This they have too often overlooked. They have considered liberty
as an obstacle, and not as a means; they have forgotten the nature
of the force to which they were to address themselves, and have
acted with the human soul as with a material object. It is in
consequence of this error that they have been led to range
themselves on the side of power or despotism against human
liberty, regarding it only as an adversary, and straining much more
to subdue it than to procure it guarantees. If religions had well
considered their means of action, if they had not given way to a
natural but deceitful tendency, they would have discovered that
their province was to strengthen liberty, in order morally to control
it, that religion can, and ought to act only by moral influences; and
they would have respected the free will of mankind, whilst applying
themselves to direct it. This they have not done, and in the end the
religious influence has itself suffered as much as liberty.

I will not go further with the examination into the general

consequences of the influence of the church upon European
civilisation. I sum them up in this twofold result—a great and
salutary influence upon the intellectual and moral development; an
influence more disastrous than beneficial upon the political order of
things, properly so called. We have now to test our assertions by
facts, and to verify by history what we have deduced from the
mere nature of the ecclesiastical society, and the situation occupied
by it. Let us see what was the condition of the Christian church
from the fifth to the twelfth century, and whether, in fact, the
principles which I have laid down, and the results I have
endeavoured to draw from them, were such in their development
as I have ventured to surmise.

We are not to believe that these principles and consequences have

all appeared at once, and as connectedly as I have presented
them. It is a signal, and yet a very common error, when
contemplating the past at the distance of many centuries, to forget
with a singular obliviousness that history is essentially successive.
Take the life of a man, of Cromwell, Gustavus Adolphus, or Cardinal
Richelieu. He enters upon his career, and marches forward; great
events influence him, he influences great events; finally he reaches
the goal. Then we know him, but in his entirety, such as long
experience and varied events have made him. [Footnote 10]

[Footnote 10: The original is not strictly followed in this

phrase. M. Guizot gives vent to the following conceit:
—'Tel qu'il est sorti en quelque sorte, après un long
travail, de l'atelier de la Providence.']

Now, at starting he was not what he thus became, nor at any

single period of his life was he complete and fully fashioned: his
development was by a successive process. Men have a moral
growth as well as a physical: every day brings its change: their
being is perpetually undergoing modifications. The Cromwell of
1650 was not the Cromwell of 1640. There is, of course, always a
certain individuality at bottom—it is the same man who works his
way; but how changed are his ideas, his feelings, his designs! How
many things were lost and acquired! In a word, whatever moment
we may select in the life of a man, there is none in which he was
such as we behold him when its term is reached.

Nevertheless, the majority of historians have fallen into error upon

this point. Because they have acquired a complete idea of a man,
they see him such during the whole course of his career: to them it
is the same Cromwell who entered parliament in and who died
thirty years afterwards in Whitehall palace. And with regard to
institutions and general influences, the same mistake is incessantly
committed. Let us take care to avoid it. I have sketched in their
whole bearing the principles of the church and their consequences,
but historically the picture is not correct. The whole has been
partial, successive, distributed here and there over space and time.
Our entirety, our prompt and systematic concatenation, will not be
found in the recital of actual facts. Here one principle shoots forth,
there another; all is incomplete, dissimilar, and scattered; and it is
only by coming to modern times, to the end of the career, that the
whole result is perceived.

I shall proceed to represent the different states through which the

church passed from the fifth to the twelfth century. I thereby go to
the fountain head; and if I fail in the complete demonstration of
the assertions that I have thrown out, yet perhaps enough will be
shown to evince them warrantable.

The first state in which the church is found in the fifth century is
that of the imperial church, the church of the Roman Empire. At
the period the Roman Empire fell, the church was indulging in the
idea that her mission was accomplished, her triumph assured. She
had then completely vanquished paganism. The last emperor who
had assumed the office of pontifex maximus, a pagan dignity,
was the Emperor Gratian, who had died at the end of the fourth
century. She likewise believed herself at the end of her contest with
heretics, especially with the Arians, the principal heretics of the day.
The Emperor Theodosius had drawn up against them a peculiar and
stringent body of laws at the end of the fourth century. The church,
therefore, was in possession of the government, and had triumphed
over her two greatest enemies. She was in this prosperous state
when the Roman Empire suddenly failed her, and she found herself
opposed to other pagans and heretics in the shape of the
barbarians, as the Goths, Vandals, Burgundians, and Franks. It was
a prodigious fall. It may be easily imagined that a warm attachment
for the Empire must have been preserved in the bosom of the
church. Thus we see her steadily adhere to what remained of it,
the municipal system and absolute power; and when the barbarians
were converted, the church attempted to resuscitate the Empire.
She addressed herself to the barbarian kings, and besought them
to declare themselves Roman emperors, to assume all the rights
formerly held by them, and to enter into the same relations with
the church as she had had with the Roman Empire. It was
especially to this point that the bishops of the fifth and sixth
centuries laboured, and they imparted the general feature to the
whole church.

It was impossible for this attempt to succeed. There were no

means amongst the barbarians to reconstitute the Roman society.
Like the civil world around it, therefore, the church itself fell into
barbarism. That was its second state. When a comparison is made
between the writings of the ecclesiastical chroniclers of the eighth
century, and of those in the preceding ages, an immense difference
is found. Every vestige of Roman civilisation disappeared, even to
the language, and barbarism was at its very acme. For, on the one
hand, barbarians entered into the clerical order, and became priests
and bishops; and on the other, bishops adopted the barbarian life,
and without quitting their bishoprics, constituted themselves chiefs
of banditti, roaming over the country, pillaging and fighting, like the
companions of Clovis. Gregory of Tours mentions several bishops
who passed their lives after this fashion.

Two important facts, nevertheless, received their development in

the bosom of this barbarian church. The first was the separation
between the spiritual and temporal powers, which principle took its
stand at that epoch, as a natural consequence of the state of
things. The church not having succeeded in resuscitating the
absolute power of the Roman Empire, so as to gain a share of it for
herself, was driven to seek safety in independence. She was called
upon to defend herself on every side, for she was incessantly
threatened. The bishops and priests saw their barbarian neighbours
interfere every instant in the affairs of the church, in order to seize
upon her riches, her lands, and her power, and they had no other
means of defending themselves than alleging—'The spiritual order
is completely separated from the temporal, and you have no right
to intervene in its affairs.' This principle became the defensive
weapon of the church against barbarism in all quarters.

The second important fact which belongs to the same epoch, is the
development of the monastic order in the West. It was at the
commencement of the sixth century that Saint Benedict instituted
his order amongst the monks of the West, who were then very few
in number, but who subsequently multiplied prodigiously. The
monks were not, up to that period, members of the clerical body,
but were still regarded as laymen. No doubt priests and even
bishops had been sought out amongst them; but it was not until
the end of the fifth, and the beginning of the sixth century, that the
monks in general were considered as forming part of the clergy,
properly so called. After that, matters were reversed; priests and
bishops became monks, conceiving that they thereby made a new
progress in the religious life. Thus the monastic order took all at
once an excessive development in Europe. The monks struck the
imagination of the barbarians more forcibly than the secular clergy;
their numbers, as well as the singularity of their lives, had an
imposing effect upon them. The secular clergy, indeed—the bishop
and the simple priest—were less reverently looked upon by the
barbarians, accustomed as they were to see, maltreat, and despoil
them. An attack on a monastery, on so many holy men
congregated in one holy place, was a much more serious affair.
Thus the monasteries were, during the barbarian epoch, places of
asylum for the church, as she herself was a resort for refuge to the
laity. Pious men flocked to them for shelter, as in the East they fled
to the Thebaide to escape a worldly life and the contamination of
Constantinople.

Such are the two great facts which appertain to the barbarian
epoch in the history of the church: on the one hand, the
development of the principle of the separation between the spiritual
and temporal powers; and on the other, the development of the
monastic system in the West.

Towards the end of the barbarian epoch, there was a new attempt
to resuscitate the Roman Empire made by Charlemagne. The
church and the civil sovereign contracted once more a strict
alliance. It was a period of great docility, and therefore of great
advancement to the Papacy. The attempt at resuscitation again
failed; the Empire of Charlemagne fell, but the advantages that the
church had drawn from its alliance remained with her. The Papacy
was definitively planted at the head of Christianity.

After the death of Charlemagne, chaos came again; the church

relapsed into it as well as civil society, and emerged in like manner
to enter into the frame of feudalism. This was its third state. The
dissolution of the Empire of Charlemagne produced in the
ecclesiastical order almost the same effect as in the civil—the
complete disappearance of unity, a break-up into local, partial, and
individual distributions. This situation of the clergy, then, originated
a struggle not previously known up to that period—namely, the
struggle between the sentiments and interests of a fief-holder and
those of a priest. The chiefs of the church were between these two
temptations, each striving for the mastery; the ecclesiastical spirit
was no longer so powerful or universal, private interest had more
charms, whilst the taste for independence, and the habits of a
feudal life, relaxed the bonds of the ecclesiastical hierarchy. An
attempt was made in the bosom of the church to avert the effects
of this relaxation, and by a system of federation, by means of
general assemblies and deliberations, to organise in various
quarters national churches. It is at this epoch, under the feudal
system, that we perceive the greatest number of councils and
convocations, of provincial and national ecclesiastical assemblies,
held. This essay at unity appears to have been especially followed
out in France. Hincmar, archbishop of Rheims, may be considered
as the chief organ of this idea; he was constantly engaged in the
labour of organising the French church; he sought out and
employed all the means of intercourse and correspondence which
might restore some portion of unity to the feudal church. Hincmar
maintained, on the one hand, the independence of the church with
regard to the temporal power, and on the other, its irresponsibility
to the Papacy. It was he who, knowing that the Pope wished to
come into France, and threatened to excommunicate some bishops,
said, 'Si excommunicaturus venerit, excommunicatus abibit'
('If he come here to excommunicate, he shall go back with an
anathema at his own head.')

But the endeavour thus to organise the feudal church, had no

better success than the previous one to restore the organisation of
the imperial church. There were no means available to reestablish
unity in that church. Its disorganisation was continually increasing.
Each bishop, prelate, and abbot, isolated himself more and more in
his diocese or in his monastery. Disorders multiplied from the same
cause. This period was distinguished for the greatest abuses of
simony, for the completely arbitrary disposition of ecclesiastical
benefices, and for the most deplorable corruption of manners
amongst the priests.

These disorders were extremely revolting both to the people and

the better-minded portion of the clergy. Hence we see that at an
early date a spirit of reform arose in the church, and a desire to
find some authority competent to rally the stray elements and give
them law. Claude, bishop of Turin, and Agobard, archbishop of
Lyons, made some attempts of this sort in their respective dioceses;
but they were in no condition to accomplish so great a work. There
was only one force within the church itself which could succeed in
such an object, and that was the court of Rome, the Papacy. In
consequence, it was not long in becoming predominant. In the
course of the eleventh century the church passed to her fourth
state, that of a theocratical and monastical church. The creator of
this new form assumed by the church, so far as it belongs to a
man to create, was Gregory VII.

We are accustomed to regard Gregory VII. as a man who strove to

render all things stagnant, as an adversary of intellectual
development and of social progress, as a man, in fact, who
laboured to retain the world in a stationary or retrograding system.
No idea can be less correct; Gregory VII. was a reformer by means
of despotism, like Charlemagne and Peter the Great. He was in the
ecclesiastical order pretty nearly what Charlemagne in France and
Peter the Great in Russia were in the civil order. His object was to
reform the church, and, through her, civil society—to introduce into
them a greater degree of morality, justice, and regularity; and this
he wished to effect through the Holy See, and to its advantage.

At the same time that he endeavoured to subject the civil world to

the church, and the church to the Papacy, in the spirit of reform
and advancement, and not of stagnation or retrogression, an
attempt of the same nature was made, a similar movement was
produced, in the cloisters of the monasteries. A desire for order,
discipline, and rigid morality was zealously manifested. It was the
period in which Robert de Molême introduced a severe order at
Citeaux, it was the era of St. Norbert, and the reform of the
prebendaries, of the reform of Cluny, and finally of the great reform
of St. Bernard. A general ferment reigned in the monasteries; the
old monks stood up in their own defence, asserted innovation to be
a thing of evil, proclaimed their liberty infringed upon, maintained
that the people ought to rest satisfied with the manners of the age,
that it was out of the question to return to the primitive strictness
of the church, and treated all these reformers as madmen,
dreamers, and tyrants. Look at the history of Normandy by Orderic
Vital, and these complaints will be found unceasingly urged.

All, therefore, seemed turning to the advantage of the church, to

its unity and power. But whilst the Papacy was striving to clutch the
government of the world, and the monasteries were reforming
themselves in a moral point of view, a few vigorous-minded,
although isolated, men asserted the right of human reason to be
considered of some value, and to take part in the constitution of
opinions. The majority of them did not attack the received
doctrines, the articles of religious belief; they merely said that
reason had a right to investigate them, and that it was not
sufficient that they were affirmed by authority. John Erigena
(Scotus), Roscelin, and Abelard—these were the advocates by
whom individual reason recommenced to claim its inheritance;
these were the first authors of the movement made for liberty,
which was contemporaneous with the movement for reform made
by Hildebrand and St. Bernard. When we inquire into the
predominant character of this movement, we perceive it was not a
change of opinion, or a revolt against the public articles of faith,
but merely an assertion of the right of reason to exercise its
functions. The scholars of Abelard asked him, as he tells us himself
in his 'Introduction to Theology,' 'for philosophical arguments proper
to satisfy reason, begging him to instruct them, not merely so as to
repeat by rote what he communicated to them, but to understand
him; for no one can believe without first comprehending, and it is
absurd to preach to others of things which neither he who
professes, nor those whom he teaches, can understand. What
object can the study of philosophy have, if not to lead to that of
God, to whom all ought to be referred? With what view are the
faithful permitted to read the writings treating of the events of the
age and the books of the Gentiles, unless it be to form them for
the understanding of the truths of the Holy Scriptures, and to give
them the necessary ability to defend them? It is especially
necessary to be fortified by all the powers of reason, in order to
prevent, upon questions so difficult and complicated as those which
are the objects of the Christian faith, the subtleties of its enemies
succeeding too easily in adulterating the purity of our faith.'

The importance of this first attempt at liberty, of this reproduction

of the spirit of examination, was soon felt. Although occupied in
reforming itself, the church did not the less take alarm: it
immediately declared war against these new reformers, whose
appearance threatened it much more than their doctrines. Behold
the great fact which illustrates the end of the eleventh and the
commencement of the twelfth century, whilst the church presented
itself in the theocratic and monastic state! For the first time, a
serious contest arose between the clergy and the free-thinkers. The
quarrels of Abelard and St. Bernard, the councils of Soissons and
Sens, in which Abelard was condemned, are but the evidences of
that fact which has held so important a place in the history of
modern civilisation. It was the principal circumstance in the state of
the church in the twelfth century, the point of time at which we
shall now leave it.

A movement of a different nature took place at the very same

period, the movement towards the enfranchisement of the
boroughs. It was attended by a singular proof of the inconsistency
of barbarian and rude minds. If those burgesses who maintained
their own freedom with such zeal, had been told that there were
men who asserted the rights of human reason, of free examination,
and were denounced by the church as heretics, they would have
stoned or burnt them on the instant. Abelard and his friends were
exposed to this danger more than once. On the other hand, those
very writers who were the champions of the rights of human
reason, spoke of the efforts for enfranchisement of the boroughs as
productive of abominable disorder, and of the overthrow of society.
Thus war seemed declared between the philosophical and the
municipal movement, between intellectual and political
enfranchisement. To reconcile these two great actions, and to bring
them to a comprehension of the community of their interests, ages
have been required. In the twelfth century they were utterly
severed, as we shall see in our succeeding inquiry into the
enfranchisement of the boroughs.

Lecture VII.
Boroughs And Their Influence.
The feudal system and the church, the two first great fundamental
elements of modern civilisation, have now been brought down to
the twelfth century, and our present object will be to trace the third
of those elements, the boroughs, to the same era, confining
ourselves within the limits we have observed with regard to the
other two.

Our inquiry into boroughs commences with a different situation

from that held by the church or the feudal system. From the fifth to
the twelfth century, these latter, although they afterwards
underwent new developments, exhibited themselves as nearly
complete, and in a definitive state; their birth, growth, and
maturity, all occurred within that interval. It was very different with
boroughs. It was not until the end of the epoch upon which our
attention is engaged, in the eleventh and twelfth centuries, that
they took any place in history; not meaning thereby that their
previous history calls for no examination, or that the traces of their
existence long before that period are not discoverable, but that it
was only in the eleventh century that they made a distinct
appearance on the great stage of the world, and came out as an
important element of modern civilisation. Thus, in surveying the
feudal system and the church from the fifth to the twelfth century,
we have found effects developed and produced from causes, or, in
other words, whenever, by induction or conjecture, we have
deduced results from certain principles, we have been able to verify
them by reference to facts. This is a facility which we do not
possess with the boroughs. At the present moment, I shall only
speak of causes and origins; and what I may say upon the effects
of their existence, and upon their influence on the progress of
European civilisation, will be in some sort by way of prediction, as
the adducement of contemporary and known facts will be
impossible. It is not until a later date, in the period stretching from
the twelfth to the fifteenth century, that we shall perceive
corporations take their development, as an institution bear fruit,
and history prove our predictions. I mark this difference of situation
the more emphatically, in order to obviate objections against the
incompleteness and prematureness of the picture I am about to
give.

I will suppose that a burgher of the twelfth century had suddenly

appeared amongst us in 1789, at the moment that the terrible
regeneration of France commenced, and that there had been given
him to read (for we must endow him with the power to read) one
of those pamphlets which then so violently agitated the minds of
men; for example, the pamphlet of M. Sieyes—'What is the third
estate?' Let us imagine his eyes falling on this phrase—the main
point of the publication—'The third estate is the French nation, less
the nobility and the clergy.' I ask, what impression would such a
phrase produce on the mind of this man? Would he understand it?
The words, 'the French nation,' would be beyond his
comprehension, for they would convey no idea of anything known
to him, or existing in his own day; but if he should understand the
phrase—if he had a clear conception of that sovereignty attributed
to the third estate over all society, it would assuredly appear to him
a nearly insane and impious proposition, so much would it be in
contradiction to what he had seen, and to the entire bent of his
ideas and sentiments.

Now, ask this bewildered burgher to follow you, and conduct him to
some of the then boroughs of France, to Rheims, Beauvais, Laon,
or Noyon. A surprise of a different nature would here await him. On
entering the town he would perceive no towers, no ramparts, no
burgher guard, no means of defence, but all open and exposed to
the first hostile occupant. The safety of such a municipality would
appear to him very uncertain and weakly guaranteed. Penetrating
into the interior, and inquiring into what was there passing, into the
manner in which it was governed, and into the condition of the
inhabitants, he would be told that there was a power outside which
taxed them as it pleased, summoned their militia, and sent it to
distant wars, regardless of their consent; that there were
magistrates, mayors, and sheriffs, whom the burgesses had no
share in nominating, and that the affairs of the borough were not
decided in the borough itself, but that a man named by the king,
an intendant, alone and from a distance, administered them.
Furthermore, he would be told that the inhabitants had no right to
assemble and deliberate in common upon what concerned them—
that the bell of their church did not summon them to the public
square. The burgess of the twelfth century would be perfectly at a
loss to comprehend these matters. First he was bewildered and
dismayed at the grandeur and importance that the burgher
community, the third estate, attributed to itself, and now he finds it,
upon its own hearthstone, in a state of servitude, weakness, and
nullity, worse than anything he had known as most disastrous.
Passing from one contemplation to the other—from the idea of a
sovereign commonalty to the survey of its powerlessness—how
could he comprehend and reconcile the difference, or disentangle
his mind from confusion?

On the other hand, let us carry a burgess of the nineteenth century

back to the twelfth, and he will find things under the same double
aspect, but the situations changed. Contemplating the general
affairs of the age, the state, the government of the country, and
society at large, we see or hear nothing of the burgesses; they are
altogether without importance in the state. And not only so, but in
speaking or thinking of themselves and their situation in relation to
the general government of France, their language is timid and
humble in the extreme. Their old masters, the lords of fiefs, from
whom they wrung their franchises, are found treating them, in
words at least, with a pride which surprises us, but was far from
astonishing or irritating them.

But entering into the borough itself, and surveying what is there
passing, we find the scene changed. We are in a sort of fortified
place, defended by the armed burgesses, who tax themselves, elect
their own magistrates, sit in judgment, inflict punishments, and
assemble to deliberate upon their own affairs; making war even
against their lord, and having their own militia. In a word, they
govern themselves, and are superior to control.

Here is a contrast of the same order as that which so much

surprised the burgess of the twelfth century in the France of the
eighteenth, only the parts are reversed. In the latter, the burgher
order or nation is everything, the borough nothing; in the former,
the degrees of importance are diametrically opposite.

Assuredly many things and many extraordinary events must have

passed, and many revolutions have been accomplished between the
twelfth and eighteenth centuries, to produce so prodigious a
change in the state of one social class. Yet, in spite of this change,
there is no doubt that the third estate of 1789 was, politically
speaking, the descendant and heir of the burghers of the twelfth
century. That haughty and ambitious 'French nation,' which raised
its pretensions so high, proclaimed its sovereignty with such
pomposity, and pretended not only to regenerate and govern itself,
but also to govern and regenerate the world, incontestibly
descended from those borough communities, who made their
obscure though courageous stands in the twelfth century, with the
sole object of throwing off the tyrannical yoke of nameless lords in
their respective isolated corners.

Now, although there is no question that the explication of so great

a metamorphosis will not be found in the state of the boroughs in
the twelfth century, but that it has been effected and has its causes
in the events which have occurred between the twelfth and
eighteenth centuries, yet the origin of the third estate has been of
great consequence in its history; and whilst we shall not therein
discover the full secret of its destiny, we may at least discern the
germ thereof; for what it was at first, is found again in what it has
become, to a much greater extent than appearances would lead us
to presume. A survey, although an incomplete one, of the state of
the boroughs in the twelfth century, will, I think, be decisive of the
fact.

In entering upon an investigation into this state, in order fully to

comprehend it, we must consider the boroughs in two main points
of view. There are two important questions to resolve: the first,
that of the enfranchisement of the boroughs themselves, the
inquiry how the revolution operated, and from what causes, what
change it produced in the situation of the burghers, and what was
its effect upon society at large, upon the other classes, and upon
the state. The second question is relative to the government of the
boroughs, the internal condition of the enfranchised towns, the
relations of the burgesses amongst themselves, and the principles,
the forms, and the manners in vogue within the communities.

From these two sources—on the one hand, from the change
introduced into the social position of the burghers, and on the
other, from their internal or borough government—all their influence
on modern civilisation has been derived. That influence has been
productive of no one fact which may not be referred to one or
other of these two causes. Therefore, when we shall have
thoroughly sifted them, and obtained an insight into the
circumstances of their enfranchisement on the one hand, and their
government on the other, we shall possess, as it were, the two
keys to their history.

I will first say a few words on the diversity in the state of boroughs
throughout Europe. The facts which I shall bring forward will not
apply indifferently to all the Italian, Spanish, English, and French
boroughs; some of them are referable to them all; but there are
great and important differences. These I will indicate as I go on:
we shall subsequently find them in the progress of civilisation, and
will then investigate them more narrowly.

To have a proper idea of the enfranchisement of the boroughs, it is

necessary to go back to the state of towns from the fifth to the
tenth century, from the fall of the Roman Empire to the time at
which the borough revolution commenced. The differences were, I
repeat, very great; the condition of towns varied extensively in the
different countries of Europe, yet there are some general facts
which may be affirmed of almost all towns, to which I shall
endeavour to restrict myself. When I have done with them, the
more special matter will apply to the boroughs of France, and
particularly to those in the north of France, above the Rhone and
the Loire. These will be prominent points in the picture it is my
object to draw.

After the fall of the Roman Empire, from the fifth to the tenth
century, the towns were in a state neither of liberty nor of
servitude. In the use of words, we run the same chance of error as
I previously remarked took place in the description of men and of
events. When a society has endured for a long period, and also its
language, words take a complete, determinate, and precise
meaning, a legal and official sense, as it were. Time has introduced
into the meaning of each term a multitude of ideas which are
awakened as soon as it is pronounced, but which, not being all
included at the same date, are not all applicable to one period. For
example, the words slavery and liberty arouse ideas in our minds
at the present day infinitely more precise and perfect than
correspond to the facts existing in the eighth, ninth, or tenth
centuries. If we say that the towns were in a state of liberty in the
eighth, we say far too much, for we attach at present a meaning to
the word 'liberty' which does not portray the state of things in that
century. We fall into the same error if we say that the towns were
in servitude, for this word implies something very different from the
municipal conditions of the period. Thus, I repeat, the towns were
not then in a state either of servitude or of liberty; they suffered all
the evils which befall weakness, and were a prey to the continual
violence and depredations of the strong; but in spite of so many
and such frightful disorders, in spite of their impoverishment and
depopulation, they never lost a certain degree of importance. In
the major part there was a clergy or a bishop who exercised
considerable power, having influence over the inhabitants, and
serving as a link between them and their conquerors, thus
maintaining the town in a species of independence, and covering it
with the shield of religion.

Considerable remnants of the Roman institutions likewise lingered

in the towns. Frequent instances of the convocations of the senate
and the curia are met with at this epoch, and many facts of that
nature have been collected by Messrs de Savigny and Hulmann,
Mademoiselle de Lezardière, &c. There is some doubt concerning
public assemblies and municipal magistrates. But the affairs of civil
life, testaments, donations, and a multitude of other acts, are
legalised in the curia by its officers, as took place in Roman
municipalities. Yet barbarism, and an always increasing disorder,
hastened the depopulation of towns, and gradually undermined all
that remained of urban activity and freedom. The establishment of
the masters of the land in the country districts, and the growing
preponderance of the rural life, were additional causes of decay to
the towns. The bishops themselves, when they had entered into
the feudal frame, attached much less importance to their municipal
ties. Finally, when feudalism had completely triumphed, the towns,
without falling into the slavery of the serfs, found themselves under
the sway of liege lords, and comprised within fiefs, in consequence
of which they lost that share of independence which had been left
to them in times even more barbarous, in the first ages of the
invasion. So that from the fifth century to the period of the
complete organisation of feudalism, the state of towns was
continually getting worse.
When feudalism was once fairly established, when each man had
taken up his station, and planted himself on an estate, and the
wandering life had finally ceased, the towns, after a certain
interval, began again to acquire some importance, and to deploy a
renewed activity. Human activity is like the fecundity of the earth;
as soon as the storm ceases, it reappears, germinates, and bears
fruit. Whenever there is the least glimpse of order and peace,
mankind resumes hope, and with hope labour. Thus it happened in
the towns: so soon as the feudal system was well fixed, there
sprang up amongst the fief-holders new wants and a certain taste
for advancement and amelioration, to satisfy which a little
commerce and industry took root in the towns of their domains,
and wealth and population returned to them; slowly, I admit, but
still they returned. Amongst the circumstances which hastened that
result, may be reckoned one not hitherto much regarded—namely,
the right of sanctuary in churches. Even before the boroughs were
constituted, and before their force and ramparts enabled them to
hold out an asylum to the wretched population of the fields, the
protection which could be found in the church alone was sufficient
to attract a great many fugitives into the towns. They came to
shelter themselves either in the church itself, or around the church;
and they were not confined to men of the inferior class, serfs and
boors, but were frequently men of consideration and wealth who
had been proscribed. The chronicles of the epoch are full of such
examples. We see men, formerly powerful, pursued by a neighbour
yet more powerful, or by the king himself, abandoning their
domains, carrying off all their movables, and flying to a town to put
themselves under the protection of a church. These men became
burgesses; and such refugees were, in my opinion, of some
influence on the progress of towns, as they brought into them both
wealth and the elements of a population superior to the bulk of the
former inhabitants. Besides, is it not probable that when anything
like a considerable association had been formed in any quarter,
men would flock to it not only on account of the greater security
afforded by it, but also from the mere spirit of sociability which is
so natural to them?
By dint of all these causes, the towns acquired a certain degree of
strength after the feudal system had become somewhat regulated.
But security was not gained in the same proportion. It is true the
wandering life had ceased, yet this wandering life had been to the
conquerors and new proprietors of the soil a great means of
gratifying their passions. When urged by a craving for plunder, they
had made a foray, or gone to a distance in search of fresh fortune
or a fresh domain. But when each had fixed himself, and it was
necessary to renounce the conquering vagabond life, the taste for it
was far from ceasing, or brutish appetites, or fierce desires, from
abating. Their weight fell upon that part of the population lying
most at the mercy of those possessed of power, upon the towns.
Instead of going to a distance to pillage, they pillaged near their
own homes. The extortions of the lords upon the burgesses
redoubled from the beginning of the tenth century. Every time that
the proprietor of a domain in which a town was included had any
lust of pelf to satisfy, the burgesses were sure to feel its worst
effects. It was at this epoch, more than at any other, that the
complaints of the boroughs were loud and repeated, in
consequence of the absolute want of security to commerce. The
merchants, after making their rounds, were unable to return in
peace into their towns; the roads and avenues were incessantly
blocked up by the lord and his followers. The period in which
industry recommenced its exercise was thus precisely that in which
security was most deficient. Nothing frets men more than to be
thus troubled in their labours, and despoiled of the fruits which
they had thence anticipated. They are thereby much more annoyed
and enraged than when they are subjected to suffering in a course
of life for a long time fixed and monotonous, or when that of which
they are deprived is not the result of their own activity, exerted in
the reasonable hope of drawing sure returns. In the progressive
movement which lifts up a man or a population to a new fortune,
there is a principle of abhorrence for iniquity and violence much
more energetic than in any other situation.
This, then, was the condition of the towns in the course of the
tenth century. Their strength, importance, and riches had
increased; and these acquisitions rendering them every day objects
of greater envy to the lords, it became more than ever necessary
to be able to defend them. The danger and the evil grew in
magnitude with the means of resisting them. Indeed the feudal
system offered to all its participators the continual example of
resistance; it presented to the mind, under no modification, the
idea of an organised government, capable of regulating and
controlling all by its intervention alone. On the contrary, the
spectacle of individual will, refusing to submit to any restraint, was
unceasingly displayed. The greater number of the fief-holders was
in this position with regard to their lords-paramount, and the small
lords with regard to the great; so that, at the very time when the
towns were oppressed and tormented, and they began to have new
and important interests to maintain, they had under their eyes a
continual lesson of insurrection. Feudalism has certainly done this
service to humanity, that it has given a perpetual exhibition of
individual will acting in all its energy. The lesson was not thrown
away, for notwithstanding their weakness, and the prodigious
inequality of condition between them and their lords, the towns
became insurgent on all sides.

It is difficult to assign a precise date to the event. It is generally

said that the enfranchisement of the boroughs commenced in the
eleventh century; but in all great events, how many unknown and
unsuccessful efforts are made before that which finally prevails! In
all things, Providence, to accomplish its designs, lavishes courage,
virtues, sacrifices man himself; and it is only after a countless
multitude of unknown labours, in appearance utterly lost, after
numberless noble hearts have sunk under discouragement, and the
painful conviction of the hopelessness of their cause, that the
triumph is achieved. This was doubtless the case with the
boroughs. There can be little question but that very many attempts
at resistance and struggles for enfranchisement were made in the
eighth, ninth, and tenth centuries, which not only did not succeed,
but the memory of which remained without renown, because
unfortunate. But these endeavours most assuredly exercised an
influence upon posterior events; they gave animation and
prevalence to the spirit of liberty, and laid the train for the great
insurrection of the eleventh century.

I call it insurrection designedly. The enfranchisement of the

boroughs, in the eleventh century, was the result of a veritable
insurrection, of a real war declared by the inhabitants of towns
against their lords. The first fact which is always met with in such
histories, is a levy of the burghers, who arm themselves with any
weapon they can catch, the expulsion of the officers of the
superior, who had come to make exactions, or an enterprise against
his castle; the characteristics of war are always there. If the
insurrection is suppressed, what is the first act of the conqueror?
He orders the destruction of the fortifications raised by the
burghers, not only around their town, but around each house. We
find that at the formation of the confederacy, after undertaking to
act in common, and swearing the borough as a whole, the first
proceeding of each burgher was to place his house in a state of
defence. Some boroughs, whose names are at the present day
buried in obscurity—for example, the petty borough of Vézelai in
Nivernais—maintained a prolonged and energetic contest with their
lords. In the case of Vézelai, victory fell to its abbot, and he
instantly enjoined the demolition of the fortified houses of the
burgesses. The names of several of those whose houses were thus
destroyed have been preserved.

If we enter the interior of these houses of our ancestors, and study

the mode of construction, and the kind of life which it reveals, we
shall find everything adapted for war, and possessing a warlike
character.

The following is the construction of a burgher's house of the twelfth

century, as far as we can judge at the present day. There were
generally three floors, with a single room on each floor. The
ground-floor was a low room, in which the family fed; the first floor
was very elevated, as a means of safety, affording the most
remarkable peculiarity in the construction. On this was a room in
which the owner of the house dwelt with his wife. The building was
almost always flanked by towers at the angles, usually of a square
form, another adaptation for war, and a means of resistance. On
the second and last floor was a room, the use of which is
uncertain, but which probably served for the children and the rest
of the family. Above, there was very often a small platform,
evidently destined to serve as an observatory. Thus the whole
construction of the house gives an idea of war. In reality, such was
the actual character and true designation of the movement which
produced borough enfranchisement.

Now, when war has continued a certain time, whoever may be the
belligerents, it necessarily ends in peace. The treaties of peace
between the boroughs and their adversaries were the charters. The
borough charters were mere treaties of peace between the
burghers and their superiors.

The insurrection was general. When I use the term general, I do

not mean that there was any concert or coalition amongst all the
burghers of a country; far from it. The situation of the boroughs
was almost everywhere the same, exposed to the same danger,
and overborne by the same misfortunes. Having acquired pretty
nearly the same means of resistance and offence, they employed
them at almost the same moment. It is possible, also, that example
may have had some effect, and that the success of one or two
boroughs may have been contagious. The charters sometimes seem
drawn upon the same pattern; that of Noyon, for example, served
as a model for those of Beauvais, Saint Quentin, &c. Yet I am very
doubtful that example operated to such an extent as is commonly
supposed. The communications were difficult and rare, reports
vague and unaccredited. There are more grounds for believing that
the insurrection was the consequence of an identical situation, and
of a spontaneous general movement. Again, I mean the word
general merely to express that it took place in almost every district,
for it was not the result of a unanimous and concerted movement.
On the contrary, all was individual and local; each borough rose
against its superior on its own peculiar account, and all was
effected in separate localities.

Great were the vicissitudes of the strife. Not only did success
alternate, but even after peace appeared made, and charters had
been sworn to on both sides, they were broken or eluded in every
possible way. The royal power bore an important part in the
alternations of this strife, of which I will speak more in detail when
I come to treat of royalty itself. Its influence in the movement of
borough enfranchisement has been perhaps too much exaggerated;
sometimes it has been denied altogether, or too much underrated.
At present, I confine myself to the declaration that it frequently
interfered, invoked sometimes by the boroughs, sometimes by the
lords; that it often played contrary parts, acting now on one
principle, then upon another, and unceasingly changing its designs
and conduct; but that, upon the whole, its action was attended
with more good than bad consequences.

Notwithstanding all these vicissitudes, and the continual violations

of charters, the enfranchisement of the boroughs was
consummated in the twelfth century. Europe, and especially France,
which had been overrun with insurrections, was now filled with
charters of a more or less favourable tendency. The degree of
security with which the boroughs enjoyed them was variable, but
still they enjoyed them. The fact was established, and the right was
recognised.

We will now inquire into the immediate results of this great fact,
and the changes it produced in the position of the burghers in
society.

In the first place, it altered nothing, at least at the commencement,

in the relation of the burghers with the general government of the
country, with what we now call the state; they interfered with it to
no greater extent than before. Everything remained local, and
confined to the limits of the fief.

One circumstance, however, must be taken to modify this assertion.

Between the burghers and the king a tie began at that time to be
formed. In many cases the boroughs had invoked the support of
the king against their superior, or his guarantee, when a charter
was promised or sworn to. In other cases the lords had called for
the judgment of the king between themselves and the burghers. At
the demand of one or other of the parties, from a concourse of
different causes, the royal power had interfered in the quarrels,
whence sprang up pretty constant relations between the burghers
and the king, which sometimes became very intimate. By these
means the commonalty grew connected with the centre of the
state, and began to have ties with the general government.

Although everything remained local, still the effect of the

enfranchisement was to call a new and general class into being. No
coalition had existed amongst the burghers, nor had they, as a
class, any public and common existence. But the land was covered
with men occupying an identical situation, with common interests
and manners, amongst whom there could not fail to be formed by
degrees a certain bond and unity, which was sure to originate a
burgher class. Thus a necessary result of the local enfranchisement
of boroughs, was the formation of a great social order, the citizen
or burgher class.

We must not imagine that this class was then what it has since
become. Not only has its situation greatly changed, but its
elements or component parts were quite different. In the twelfth
century, it was only composed of dealers and traders driving a
trifling commerce, and of small proprietors, either of houses or of
land, who had taken up their abodes in towns. Three centuries
afterwards, the burgher class comprised, in addition, lawyers,
physicians, local magistrates, and persons engaged in various
literary avocations. It was thus formed successively, and of very
distinct elements; but neither to the succession nor to the diversity
has proper attention been paid in its history. Whenever the burgher
class is spoken of, it has been considered, apparently, as at all
epochs composed of the same elements. Such a conclusion is
absurd. It is, perhaps, more than all in the diversity of its
composition, at the various eras of history, that the secret of its
destiny ought to be sought. So long as it included neither
magistrates nor lettered men—so long, in fact, as it was not what it
became in the sixteenth century—it possessed neither so high a
standing nor so great an influence in the state. The successive rise
within itself of new professions and relative moral positions, of a
new intellectual development, must be traced, in order to
comprehend the vicissitudes of its fortunes and its power. In the
twelfth century it was composed, I repeat, of petty traders, who
retired into the towns after making their purchases and sales, and
of owners of houses or small estates who had fixed their residence
in them. Such was the European burgher class in its first elements.

The next great result of the enfranchisement of boroughs was the

contest of classes, which thereupon arose inevitably from the fact
itself, a contest which occupies all modern history. Europe, as at
present constituted, has sprung from the struggles amongst the
different orders of society. In other regions, as I have formerly
stated, the contest produced very opposite effects. In Asia, for
example, one class completely triumphed; the system of castes
succeeded that of classes, and society fell into stagnation. Thanks
be to God, no such consequence has happened in Europe. No one
order has been able to vanquish or enslave the others; the contest,
instead of becoming a principle of immobility, has been the cause
of advancement. The relations of the different classes amongst
themselves, and the necessity in which they have found themselves
to struggle and to yield by turns, the variety of their interests and
passions, the desire for conquest, without being able to accomplish
it—from all this has resulted, perhaps, the most energetic and
fruitful principle of development in European civilisation. The orders
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