Publicity, Debt, and Politics: The Old Regime and the French Revolution
The French Revolution of 1789 both declared existing taxes illegitimate and vowed to honor the state’s existing debts. This tension between maintaining commitments and breaking with the past had the unintended effect of stimulating further innovation: the
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Publicity, Debt, and Politics: The Old Regime and the French Revolution Rebecca L. Spang
It has often been said that the French revolutionaries of 1789 wanted to break completely with history. Bemoaned by Edmund Burke as showing woeful disregard for chivalrous tradition, the same gesture was later joyfully anthropomorphized by Jules Michelet when he depicted French liberty in 1789 as a smiling newborn in her cradle. In what follows, I reconsider the notorious French attempt “to break with the past…to create an unbridgeable gulf between all they had hitherto been and all they now aspired to be” (the words are Tocqueville’s) from a new angle: the relation between public debt and modern politics.1 Revolutionaries began by wanting to leave France’s fiscal regime behind, but to do so they eventually created new monetary and political regimes as well. Central to any political or social history of modern Europe, the French Revolution should also be foundational to our understanding of public debt. This chapter argues that revolutionaries’ dedication to honoring past commitments—in other words, their reluctance to break with the
R. L. Spang (*) Department of History, Indiana University, Bloomington, IN, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2020 N. Barreyre, N. Delalande (eds.), A World of Public Debts, Palgrave Studies in the History of Finance, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-48794-2_2
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past—had the unintended effect of stimulating monetary innovation and that those changes then provoked further social and cultural unrest. Attempting to create a stable debt regime, in other words, led to political instability. The Revolution’s growing radicalization was less the product of extreme ideology than it was of the contradictions between existing property relations and new models of citizenship and participation. This analysis hence poses a sharp contrast with accounts of Britain’s eighteenth-century “Financial Revolution,” which generally see property rights, political participation, and modern public debt as supporting and re-enforcing each other.2 According to historians of Britain, the Glorious Revolution and the creation of the Bank of England lay the foundations for a new kind of debt: national borrowing, approved by Parliament (and funded by the tax legislation it passed), replaced the monarch’s personal debt. As the holders of public debt and the authors of fiscal policy became largely one and the same, the state was able to borrow greater sums for longer periods of time and at lower rates of interest. An increasingly effective excise bureaucracy combined with the rule of law and sanctity of property rights fueled the growth of modern politics and the expansion of Britain’s imperial power.3 In the British case, that is, the growth of public debt and of the bourgeois public sphere apparently coincided.4 By examining the very different case of France, this chapter shows that the elaboration of modern regimes of public debt depended on local political circumstances and forces us to reco
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