However, the wealthy classes within the cities generally made political amends with the royalty of the solidifying territorial states, often against the interests of peasants or of rural barons. The territorial states swallowed the cities, their wealthy merchants, independent artisans and working poor alike. Urban governments then tended towards tyranny, maintained by gun and guile, but were plagued by insurrection. Unfortunately for absolutist states, they were in the end unable to digest all the forces represented by cities, and it wasn’t until the failure of absolutism that new models of the territorial state could emerge. And these models had far more potential for centralization than any previously. Modem Times In France, where royal absolutism was most developed, the Bourbon Kings regularly taxed commerce beyond the economy’s limits, making merchants pine for a constitutionally limited monarchy, like Britain’s. Revolution against the Stuart Kings in the 17th century had weakened the British monarchy, and this unfettered the merchant economy. Government support for import and export set the stage for the massive textile production of the industrial revolution. The French monarchy went bankrupt in their support for the American Revolution against rival Britain. The ensuing dissatisfaction with the Bourbon administration was one of the causes of the French revolution. Contempt for a monarch’s centralizing tendencies was nothing new; the Albrecht DUrer's satirical “column of victoryfor the subjugation of the peasants", a comment on the vicious suppression of central Europe's peasant's revolution of 1525. Even a city dweller like DUrer, artist to Emperors, could see the absurdity oftreating society's ruralfoundations so poorly. He notes bitterly that the baskets ofspoils could be filled at will with cheeses, eggs, butter, onions and herbs. Q) medieval rich were a united class only in the face of peasant rebellions. Positions like the prime minister, originally the King’s valet, smacked too much of the kingdom as an extension of the King’s household, and angered nobles who felt the power in their own households were then undermined. Aristocratic discontent created opportunities for the bourgeoisie, the extremely wealthy, free-thinking group that had evolved around commerce. With the support of the masses the modem alliance of urban insurrection with social revolution was forged. This opened the door, which the bourgeois then tried to shut, on a wildly democratic, revolutionary experiment in the heart of the former absolutism: the Paris commune of the sans-culottes. By 1792, sectional assemblies all over the city were opened to every class, and the poor were paid to attend. The sections ran their own police, relief and defense against the reacting aristocracy. The assemblies succeeded in maintaining the economy and judiciary for their sections, but within two years were betrayed by the hardening revolutionary government under Robespierre. With the revolution came a major component of modem centralization: patriotism. In France, the revolution gave a bigger portion of the population than ever before a feeling of having a stake in their country, more than would have ever been possible under Kings. This patriotism allowed Napol6on to tear through Europe’s aristocratic control, and develop what was at the time unprecedented central authority. The downfall of royal power, and the emergence of an urban-based professional class of bourgeois politician, made room for a new economic trend. By the middle of the 19th century, after Britain’s successes in the cotton trade, industrialism began to take hold, supported by capital and nations in a force that is one of the most destmctive of modem times: self-sustaining growth. Page 38 Rain Winter/Spring 1992 Volume XIV, Number 2
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