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Author : Murray Bookchin
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Although the city was the cultural center of the ancient world, its material base was extremely fragile. Hence the remarkable rise and fall of cities throughout antiquity. City life depended to a remarkable degree on the viability and the economy of agrarian communities and labor so that cities appear more as islands in a vast rural ocean than self-sustaining economic entities. Indeed, prudent estimates of the number of rural workers needed to sustain a single city dweller have been placed at a ratio of ten to one. Hence any serious agricultural catastrophe like a drought, floods, or pest infestation, not to speak of wars that devastated agriculture, could lead to the breakdown, indeed the complete disappearance, of a major city as so many civic ruins from antiquity attest to this very day.
The fragile dependence of the city on the countryside’s economy placed a high.premium on the stability of urban institutions. The Hellenic emphasis on the polis as a realm of reason that had to vigilantly guard itself against a surrounding world of chaotic uncertainty and mindless barbarism—a sensibility so important to understanding its attitude toward women, slaves, and aliens—is not without its roots in the compelling realities of ancient urban life. A nature tamed by man, specifically by well-established and reliable farmers, forms the matrix of Hellenic philosophy and the great cultural monuments of the Athenian polis. Civic democracy was largely an agrarian democracy, and its ideal of the farmer-citizen, however dubious it became in the later history of the polis, was the product of a very viable agrarian heritage. Rome, too, developed these ideals and did ndt require Greek culture to produce them.
Correspondingly, the ancient city was not only a center for country life whose standards were formed by farmers, later by nobles and “country gentlemen,” but it was “seafaring” in a very loose sense of the term. Owing to the insecurity that the city felt as an “atoll... on an ocean of rural primitivism,” it direly needed access to the sea to cope with any dislocations between town and country. The all-important factor that could correct any imbalances caused by drought, flood, plague, arid other such disasters was imports or, put more bluntly, the tribute that a city-state could exact from a league of captive “allies” or the victims of outright conquest. The Delian League,i which Athens established to assert its supremacy over the eastern Mediterranean, quickly turned into a relatively modest looting enterprise to feed and provide the “good fife” for its citizens. The Roman Empire is a lasting historical example of parasitism run riot to the point of moral, cultural, and societal suicide.
Hence, ancient cities were located within a hundred miles or so of the Mediterranean Sea or close to navigable rivers that led to major bodies-of water. Ancient Lugdunum (modern Lyons) provides us, with an example of a city that Rome founded in 43 B.C., deeply inland in Gaul, that was. felicitously located at the confluence of the Rhone and Saone rivers. Beyond the coasts and rivers, cities dwindled to towns and, not much farther, to villages and hamlets that then phased into a little known wilderness where military forts kept a guarded eye on restless barbarian tribes. Ancient cities were never autonomous urban centers. Fragile in the extreme, they depended upon local agricultural communities for the most important essentials of fife, a very simple technology, and a considerable amount of human muscle power to work it, If they expanded beyond the capacity of their agricultural base, they direly needed tribute from other city-states to sustain themselves unless they enjoyed natural blessings such as the Nile, whose annual overflow in September provided Egypt with endless quantities of fertile soil from the highlands of Ethiopia.
Modern urban dwellers tend to feel uneasy about so tentative and qualified an image of the city., We like to think of cities as “eternal” and urban cultural fife as free of rural social influences. We are willing to grant that cities do change with architectural innovations, technology, and societal advances but that basically they are immune to the ravages of time and the vicissitudes of history. The tombs of buried cities in Anatolia, Mesopotamia, North Africa, and the ruins of Central America and Mexico are grim reminders that cities can die forever without successors to overlay them, indeed that historically they have been terribly Vulnerable to social and ecological changes. Nor do we like to think that, cities have any significant roots in agrarian societies, Indeed that they did not always “dominate” the countryside in the (ill-encompassing sense that they do today. The enormous power modern cities exercise over rural fife—not only economically and technologically but culturally—seems to be a historic destiny in Our eyes that is structured into citification or “civilization” from its very origins, a telos that predestines urban fife to achieve lasting supremacy over all other fife ways. The great urban belts that sprawl across the land, ugly as they may be, appear to us as the culmination, perhaps the fulfillment, of a drama in which early temple cities or Greek poleis were merely archetypal characters ill a larger and more sweeping civic story that reaches its climax In what we call “modernity” and all its citified amenities. That contemporary urbanization does not represent the culmination or fulfillment of citification, that the history of the city cannot be properly understood with the hindsight and Eurocentricity of a New Yorker, Parisian, Berliner, or Londoner reveals a modern conceit that under critical examination tells us how skewed and misleading are popular ideas of how cities actually developed and the special identities they acquired.
This conceit, to be sure, is not entirely modern. Ancient empires such as the Babylonian and Persian built cities to last and earnestly believed in their immortality. The Greek image of the polis as immortal was woven into the heroic image of the democratic citizen and the ideal that noble actions would yield a lasting fame that would survive his own mortality. The words “eternal Rome” are proverbial. Even before the rise of Christianity, they entered deeply into the consciousness of the city’s citizens. As it turned out, the closing years of the empire, a span of two centuries before it finally fell apart, were riddled by deep civic pessimism. The Romans of that time were filled with a fatalistic despair about the future of their city and eventually transferred their allegiance from the “eternal city” to the “City of God.”
What distinguished their civic optimism from our civic arrogance, however, is our preening belief in the autonomy of the city, our conviction that city life and its traditions have always enjoyed a supremacy over rural lifeways and cultures, indeed that the former stands in innovative and exciting contrast to the latter. This conceit is very different from the ancient commitment to the city and has its origins in the highly introverted civic development of Europe during the late Middle Ages. Judging from the comedies of antiquity, Greeks and Romans had their “country bumpkins” who were the naive foils for “city slickers. But the ancients never doubted that these “bumpkins” were their “country cousins” in a very real cultural and material sense. The ancestral farm, if an urban citizen owned one, or the family village where the bones of his ancestors lay, was a place to which he repaired from the demands and stresses of city living. It was there that he found his “roots” and from there that he carried his household deities into the very confines of the city. It was from the country, too, that he acquired his bread, cheese, figs, and precious olives so characteristic of Mediterranean fare, for no doubt existed in his mind that, all its cultural amenities aside, the city was materially dependent upon the immediate countryside and the farmers who trundled its produce into his squares.
His political fife, such as it was after the decline of the polis, had a distinct rural imprint: it centered around assemblies even in Rome and other cities outside Latium, on such councils of “elders” as the Senate, and, in republican times, on a citizen-militia, all of which were institutions formed by early village and town democracies. It is in this sense, by no means a strictly exploitative one, that we can agree with Chester G. Starr’s observation that nearly all ancient cities “controlled a wide expanse of countryside, which extended in more recently urbanized areas as far as fifty miles or more from the city walls; they thus resembled an American or English county more than our purely urban units of government. Commerce and industry might have some significance within this complex but did not need to do so, for its unity rested primarily on administrative, agricultural, and psychological bonds.”{31} A brisk walk of an hour or so could bring a Roman within clear sight of farmland and within two or three additional hours to villages that seemed largely untouched by urban culture.
That the ancient city also carried enormous political weight in Mediterranean life and was a source of considerable ferment, indeed, potentially, of serious rebellions against its imperial sovereigns, is a fact that never left the minds of the Roman emperors. Not that the peasantry was totally passive and free of strong resentments—not only toward the imperial city but also its own urban centers. Attica’s “party of the Plain,” as historians call it, enviously regarded the Athenian town-dweller as a parasite and periodically aligned itself against him, hence Kleisthenes’ shrewd admixture of urban with rural trittyes to neutralize these conflicts. In Roman times a rural police was created by the city, particularly In the Near East, to maintain “order” among the agricultural poor.
But the emperors kept an especially tight rein on the cities under their control, for it was here that internecine conflicts against urban oligarchies and civic chauvinism could reach acute proportions. “The ancient city was an institution which swallowed up much of its citizens’ hearts,” Starr tells us, and Roman emperors “were undoubtedly right in feeling that the Roman world could not endure outright war among its constituent units but the necessary alternative was deplorable: the race for titles was miserable stuff to fire civic loyalty and to promote urban thinking.”{32} Ultimately, through imperial paternalism, legal constraints, and the use of oligarchies to control or deflect the anger of lower orders in their own cities, “the vigor of local politics waned; the cities were not granted, as a substitute, a really significant, inspiriting influence on the imperial government. In all this the Empire was wiping out not merely freedom of thought in the political Sphere but the very possibility of serious political action for the bulk of its subjects. So it was destroying a very important focus for the forces which had led to the expansion and remarkable vitality of Mediterranean civilization up to this point. The upper classes and the Caesars both delivered devastating blows at the sense of local attachment, the solidarity of the city, from which the thinkers of the past had drawn their strength.” Whatever Roman civilization seemed to produce in the way of order and uniformity of laws, it more than destroyed in the way of creativity and political commitment. By the latter part of the fifth century A.D., the Mediterranean basin had ceased to be either orderly or innovative. In balance, the cost of imperial and bureaucratic control from above with its loss of local control and participation outweighed, by far, the dubious benefits it professed to confer and the entire basin suffered a collapse that was to haunt civilization throughout future centuries.[6]
By contrast to the Mediterranean basin, Europe through the Middle Ages and well into modern times followed a very different development. Although European patterns of civic freedom never equaled the institutional and political creativity of the polis, many medieval communes were as vital and energetic as the Greek cities, and it is from this world that modern images of urban supremacy really derive. From the thirteenth century onward, particularly in Italy and the lowlands of modern Belgium and Holland, city-states began to emerge that were structured around uniquely urban tasks—artisan oriented, financial, commercial, and industrial—that slowly loosened urban fife from its traditional agrarian matrix and provided the town with an authentic civic fife and momentum of its own.
Which is not to say that medieval towns and cities ceased to be dependent upon their rural environs for food and raw materials. But as time passed, in different parts of western Europe, it was to be the city that gradually remade the countryside in its own image and entangled the landed nobility in its own economic and political concerns. And ultimately it was to be the city that imposed its technics, economic relationships, culture, and values on agrarian communities.
Traditional agrarian attitudes did not place a high premium on artisans, merchants, and financiers; these were not orders that were respected in ancient society. A Greek or Roman “bourgeois” who made a profitable income from trade and workshops tried to accumulate enough wealth in order to retire on landed property of his own and five in rural gentility with the airs of a noble. Capital migrated from town to country, not the reverse. The medieval world radically altered this movement. For the first time on a large scale, urban entrepreneurs began, to view their vocations as honorable and invest their earnings from generation to generation in their own enterprises.
As family fortunes increased, they remained in the city and were not invested into estates. Quite to the contrary, it was the Italian and Flemish noble who often moved to town and began to enchance his own fortunes by involving himself in industry, trade, and foreign promise. The “merchant prince” of the Middle Ages was not simply a euphemism for men of ignoble lineages who managed to, acquire “princely” fortunes from trade. The words often included noblemen of highly prestigious families who regarded the city as a center of a very lucrative commerce and began to participate in it with the avidity of the most pedestrian burgher.
How this reversal of traditional trends occurred can only be noted summarily here, The breakup of the top-heavy, highly parasitic, and costly Roman Empire led to a general retreat of the Latin cities and their European affines in Iberia, Gaul, and Britain to their authentic ecological chora: the land base that could properly support a modest urban population. As sources of tribute began to break away from the empire and its provinces were assailed by repeated invasions of semitribal German, Slav, and Magyar peoples, the fragile ancient city dwindled to little more than a village scale, at least in western Europe where urban fife had a, very limited land base and abutted the vast forest that still covered most of the continent. Rome’s population alone declined from its highpoint of a million to less than 50,000 in the “Dark Ages” that followed and never fully recovered demographically through the medieval period, despite its enormous importance as the center of western Christianity. Already, as early as the third century, the European provinces such as Iberia, Gaul, and Britain began to detach themselves from the empire in everything but name and move toward a localist economy that produced only for their own particular needs. As John Mundy and Peter Reisenberg point out, the foundations for a decentralized medieval society were not created by German invaders, the “barbarians at the gates” who sounded the death knell of a terminally ill empire; they were established by Rome itself when the late Caesars, faced with a completely unwieldly imperial structure, set each order in Roman society adrift with the necessary “duties, privileges and special jurisdictions [it needed] to implement its work.” Each group, in effect, was obliged to make “its own law” in order to survive. “Moreover, the old classical conception of liberty was replaced by something less grand but more socially exact. Gildsmen, or collegiati, were privileged, for example, even to the equestrian grade. But privilege depended upon obligatory service. This perception of an inmixture of liberty and servitude pervaded late Roman and much of medieval social thought.”{33}
The veering of the former Roman provinces toward a highly localist society, one in which each component was internally held together by an elaborate hierarchy of clearly defined rights and duties, laid the foundations for European feudalism. Autarchy, now based on hierarchy, surfaced with a vengeance in the form of minutely segmented and self-sufficient communities, all supported by agriculture and a rude form of manorial artisanship. Cities that were once the islands in a rural world largely disappeared while the rural society seemed to solidify into minute congeries of simple manors, each surrounded by small dependent villages. The serfs who peopled these villages were not attached permanently to the land. Both manor and village, in turn, seemed to be haunted by the nearby debris of ruined cities, some partly occupied, which were testimony to an exotic world clouded by legends of past greatness and the misty traditions of imperial power. Within this setting, we do not have to go too far to understand the origins of the Arthurian legends of Britain and the dreams of grandeur that clustered around the name of Charlemagne.
These ruins came to fife very slowly, often as the building materials of churches, modest villas, and town halls. The medieval towns and the few cities that we find in the eleventh century after the great tides of “barbarian” invaders and the fractured empires of Charlemagne receded into history were very unusual phenomena. Although they were never independent materially, there is a very real sense in which they were to become quite autonomous economically, to an extent, in fact, that was quite rare in the ancient city. To begin with, they were not simply religious or administrative centers as were so many of their classical predecessors, although such centers were fairly common in medieval Europe. What is significant about them is that they were largely structured around the tasks that most markedly distinguish the city from the agrarian village: crafts, trade, a nascent form of mechanized industry, and a culture—moral, artistic, architectural, and even religious—that is peculiar to such a citified constellation of activities. No longer was nonagricultural work demeaning, nor for that matter was work generally, as ultimately became the case during the imperial period of Rome and the old Mediterranean slavocracy. Quite to the contrary, nonagricultural work was to be celebrated over all other forms as authentic evidence of “civilization,” so that, etymologically speaking, the word now came into its own. The artisan and tradesman, normally metics whom the ancient city dweller viewed with condescension as the urban counterparts of the rural “primitives” (the view that the imperial age created toward its once idealized yeomanry), now found themselves the center of a new concept of urbanity, indeed, the city’s most prized and productive member. Trade itself, which aristocrats at all times slyly exploited to their own advantage, was openly acknowledged as an honorable enterprise, and wealthy merchants began to give lavishly of their fortunes to adorn this new civic temple to their interests. However much the Church viewed profit making as intrinsically evil, it soon learned to accommodate itself to this new civic reality despite its pious denunciations of gain from the pulpit.
This new kind of city appeared not only because of the extraordinary energy Europe brought to a world drained by imperial tribute; it also emerged because of the inherent weakness that marked a highly decentralized and parochial system of agriculture. Whatever may be the image Roman nobles developed of their servile farming orders, the aristocrats of the ancient world still prized their status and traditions as landed gentry. To own a large estate, worked by gangs of slaves and tenants, was as much a calling as it was a lucrative enterprise. The nobles, moreover, had used the Empire to wrest all political power from the artisan and merchant orders, and thus gave their imprimature to the ancient city: its odium of parasitism, display, indolence, luxury, and class arrogance. The cities they now controlled became monuments to their power as lords of a basically agrarian economy and culture. Under the Caesars, this economy and culture did not disappear; quite to the contrary, it was greatly strengthened by a huge bureaucracy and enriched by an immense flow of tribute. The ancient city never transcended these economic and cultural limits. The polis, to be sure, gave it a creativity that made civic life seem like a work of art. Rome, particularly under the Empire, gave it a highly elaborate state apparatus that made it a self-destructive engine for exploiting Mediterranean society.
The medieval city was more fortunate and found itself surprisingly free of these limits. Agrarian society in the Middle Ages was much too fragmented to establish lasting obstacles to urban development:, and its culture was much too introverted to challenge the new “civilization” nurtured by the towns. The famous medieval maxim, “Urban air makes for freedom/’ could be, said to include freedom of thought and an openness to innovation as well as personal and political liberty. Like a calculating observer who can patiently stand by while his opponents exhaust themselves in mutual combat, the medieval towns played for time and waited for the temporal lords to drain their strength in the ceaseless rivalries that marked the era. When the local nobles were weak enough or drained of their wealth, the cities stepped in to assert their own autonomy, either by buying their freedom or by force of arms, and ultimately were to assert their supremacy over the countryside.
This drama, to be sure, did not unfold with the elegant consistency we often expect from a good story. Many cities and towns failed to gain their freedom for generations, despite bitter struggles with their territorial lords. And when they did so, their liberties were often fragile and highly vulnerable to internal as well as external challenges. In retrospect, however, we can see a fairly distinct pattern of civic freedom emerge, not only from territorial lords but also structurally, within the medieval civitas itself. The Italian city-states, in particular, provide the dramatis personae and almost exemplary “plot lines” for an overall story of European civic development. Not that other cities—Flemish, German, French, and Swiss—are not good examples in their own right, or, in some cases, more lasting patterns of civic freedom. But what Lauro Martines calls the “power and, imagination” of the Italian city-states is so vibrant, so artistically creative and institutionally stimulating, that one senses a degree of organicity and roundedness rarely matched for that period by other European regions.{34} And if we rise above the national chauvinism that afflicted medievalists of the recent past, it would be hard to disagree with Mundy that the “distinction between the northern European and Italian town” drawn by Belgium’s great historian, Henri Pirenne, a distinction that so greatly biased a whole generation of medieval scholars toward the northern city-states, “seems to have no basis in fact, at least through the ages of urban renewal up to the twelfth century,” a time when urban freedom reached its peak internally.{35}
We also know that the movement for civic freedom really began in Italy and only later did it move up to Flanders, northern France, and southern, Germany. Thereafter it became a contagion in the cities of western and central Europe. To discuss so mixed and uneven a development in civic freedom’ we would be obliged to leap almost dervishly from one region to another to uncover the underlying sequence of events that makes medieval urban development reasonably intelligible. If most of this account focuses on the Italian experience, it is because the peninsula’s city-states encapsulate in a clearly definable area the basic cycle that marked the rise and decline of civic democracy in Europe as a whole. Indeed, it was in Italy that the city-state of the High Middle Ages was to come into its own, and it is from the rich accounts of that civic world—its extraordinary art and architecture, its changing political relationships, and its cycle of birth, maturation, and decay—that the European municipality was to play out its most authentic internal development and lead, almost unerringly, to the urban drama that is unfolding before our eyes today.
The origins of these city-states need not concern us. After at least a millennium of urban development, from the legendary founding of Rome in 753 B.C. to the last of the emperors in 476 A.D., probably no area in ancient Europe was more citified than Italy and few municipalities exhibited more staying power than those that the German invaders engulfed as they rolled over the peninsula. Thus, Italian cities never really disappeared. However much they declined demographically, they recovered fairly early and by the tenth century began to grow with exceptional verve and energy.
Nor need we trouble ourselves too much about the factors that led to this recovery. So far as the northern Mediterranean was concerned, the Saracen floodtide that swept over the basin began to recede by the eleventh century: even Sicily was reclaimed for Christianity by 1091, after two centuries of Muslim occupation. By this time, a lively trade existed between Italian and Arab merchants until the Mediterranean between the twelfth and fourteenth centuries was largely controlled by the Italian city-states lake from 1150 to 1350. These city-states were soon the major entrepot agents that brought Christian and Muslim into commercial contact with each other, and the economic foundations for a flourishing municipal fife were securely established.
The locale of the Italian city-state, or communa to use its medieval Latin name, covered most of the northern and central areas of the peninsula and embraced the great Renaissance cities of Florence, Venice, Verona, Pisa, Sienna, and Cremona, to cite only a few, and those great political nodal points of Italy’s history, Milan, Genoa, and Bologna. It is not the Renaissance that will concern us here, except insofar as the Dominican Fra Savonarola represented a popular reaction to the aristocratic and simoniacal world that fostered it, and it is not the communa as a “city republic,” words so easily interchangeable with “city-state” that will be our main focus of interest. What is insufficiently known about the Italian commune is the extent to which it became a stage for a working democracy and its actors a new expression for an active citizenry. Dazzling as its cultural treasures and adventurous as its stories may be, we must put aside the pure glamour of the commune and examine those brief periods when it seemed more like a polis than a republic.
Democracy clearly emerged in the early Italian cities, not only representative forms of governance and oligarchies of various kinds, only to submerge and then reappear again for a short time in richly articulated forms. Its principal institution took the.form of a popular assembly and we hear of it almost from the inception of the commune itself. The Italian commune, it should be clear, was not simply a community or even a town in the customary civic sense of the term, although it was this as well. It was above all an association of burghers who were solemnly united by an oath or conjuratio, The conjuratio, in contrast to the formation of a community by mere force of circumstances and events, turned what we might simply designate as a town into a vibrant fraternity. Although motivated by shared practical concerns, the burghers who took this oath were presumably forswearing their personal self-interest on behalf of a common one, a conscious act of mutual fealty not to a local noble, cleric, military chieftain, or distant monarch. Despite its strongly religious terms, it was an act of citizenship, unique in an age of religious congregations, that pledged members of the commune to respect each others’ civic rights and extend them untampered to newcomers and future generations.
The conjuratio, in fact, did considerably more: it committed the citizens of the commune to orderly and broadly consensual ways of governing themselves with a decent respect for individual liberty and a pledge to their mutual defense. The stormy conflicts between the monarchs of the Holy Roman Empire and their Italian vassals, and more disruptively between local bishops, nobles, and military captains over landed domains and control over the cities, were resolved by a delineable and, at times, a logical course of urban development to which the conjuratio forms a point of ethical entry. Once the cities replaced arbitrary rule with some kind of elective rule, coordinates emerged for gauging its political evolution. Men then swore to aid and defend each other, to pledge their prestige and bring their personal jurisdictions to the service of a shared community, and to respectfully invest the chosen heads of this civic association with executive and judicial powers. A consulate, composed of all the consuls in formal assembly, constituted the highest executive and judicial magistracy of this remarkable association. We know that its members were chosen at a general assembly of the commune itself, a popular assembly that “was quite likely convened with some regularity, and in times of trouble even more often,” Lauro Martines tells us. “Here the views of leading men were heard and important decisions taken, usually by acclamation.” We know, too, that this general assembly of “all the members of the commune” was the “oldest communal institution” of these Italian cities, and further, that the, consuls usually “sounded out the general assembly” before they made any major decisions about such issues as war and peace, taxes, and laws.{36} What is so vexing is that we know so little about this revival of a highly democratic, face-to-face form of political control and of the citizens who created it. Whether age endowed it with the legitimacy of an unbroken tradition back to ancient times, we do not know—only that it was the oldest of the commune’s structures. This much is clear: whatever authority the assembly enjoyed prior to the consulate—that is, if it existed at all before the conjuratio—is clouded by the furious infighting between clerics, nobles, opportunists of all kinds who managed to grasp and lose control of the cities for nearly two centuries before these civic entities freed themselves of arbitrary rule and disruptive rivalries.
Considering the volatility of the Italian city-states, the assembly soon lost ground to the consulate and the consuls, who began to elect their own successors. The Italian city was never to be restrained by such Hellenic mores as “nothing in excess” or the Pythagorean ideal of harmonia. One could almost say that seldom did anything but excess and explosive political theatrics, mark these fervent and creative urban entities. In any case, civic leadership fell into the hands of large, wealthy families who were to establish the parameters of civic ‘politics for centuries to come, even after they were temporarily removed from power or replaced by newcomers from within or outside the city. The assembly, in turn, never totally disappeared. It lingered on in a highly atrophied form and haunted the oligarchs and despots who usurped its powers. We know that in Bergamo, for example, as elsewhere, outgoing consuls were obliged to hold elections for new ones in popular assemblies, although the nomination of candidates was the privilege of only a few. Such practices persisted well into the twelfth century when cities such as Genoa and Pistoia tried to eliminate prearranged nominations of consuls between electors that favored one of the parties at the expense of another.
In time, this early popular democracy gave way to republican forms of governance, and the powers of the city were invested in a large legislature dominated by influential urban families. In some places, the assembly continued on as a vestige to be manipulated by oligarchs. Elsewhere, it was replaced by “assemblies” that were simply republican legislatures. “Emulating all princely courts and the general assemblies in Italian towns, some of these [representative] assemblies hoped to meet four times a year,” observes John H. Mundy. “This was impracticable for general assemblies, but smaller select councils often did meet three or four times yearly....”{37} Although Mundy is referring here specifically to England, the drift from popular assemblies to oligarchical councils was as true of Italy as it was for Europe generally. The “conciliarism,” as this parliamentary trend was called, essentially replaced civic democracies, such as they were, with authentic city republics, and the great towns of Italy looked more, institutionally speaking, like preimperial Rome than classical Athens.
We must not suppose, however, that Italy became a centralized State at this time, even on a municipal base. Whether as a democracy or a republic, the Italian city rested to an astonishing extent on little neighborhood “communes” that existed within the larger urban commune. We have no parallel for this development in ancient Athens or Rome. Irrespective of the kind of consulate it had, the city’s neighborhoods acquired an autonomy of their own that is truly spectacular by any standards of civic governance. Fortified towers rose everywhere—in Milan, Florence, Pisa, Verona, Pavia, Parma, and the like—held by noble families in consortia or sworn family groupings that were pledged to maintain their neighborhood turf against other corporate intruders and the commune as a whole. Oaths were sworn everywhere in the tradition of the conjuratio but so localist in their commitments that we can only describe a commune as a loose confederation of neighborhood communes, indeed, a confederation of neighborhoods within the commune. “When a union of this sort brought peace to a neighborhood,” observes Martines, “that part of the city became nearly impregnable, because the linking of towers and the easy blocking of the narrow streets made for an effective domination of the adjoining area.”{38}
Let there be no mistake about the fact that these consortia were anything but neighborhood democracies. The towers were built by leading wealthy families who were much too powerful in Home respects, and much too weak in others, to seize complete control of the commune. They were highly localist oligarchies that kept Italian cities in continual turmoil until they were supplanted by despotic signori, family dynasties ruled by one man who replaced a multitude of oligarchies, often to be unseated again and his sons restored in reckless shifts of aristocratic and military power. Italian civic history is not notable for any even or linear development from democracy through republican systems to oligarchy, monarchy, and despotism. All five of these institutional forms bubbled up in an unpredictable assortment of patterns, predominantly as one at certain times or in combination with each other on many other occasions. Ultimately, the Renaissance cities settled down as oligarchies and princely courts where an electrifying but aristocratic humanism gave us the priceless artistic treasures of that era.
But the consortia created “bad” and lasting habits that fostered a highly democratic atmosphere at the base of city fife. It produced neighborhood loyalty and citizen empowerment with a vengeance. “Propertied urban inhabitants were attached tenaciously not merely to a city but to a street, a parish, an ambiance—to a radius of perhaps 150 meters,” declares Martines. “And though a citizen might frequent an estate in the country, he lived in the city and there, if fortunate, he died. More likely than not, he married someone from that vicinage, and all his main blood ties, as well as his closest friendships, were there. The character of the neighborhood could be so distinctive, could’ leave so deep an imprint on its inhabitants, as to make for different linguistic expressions and even for different intonations or accents. Dante detected neighborhood differences in speech at Bologna.”[7]{39}
These loyalties gave the commune a political vitality it never fully lost until recent times. Conciliar governance did not abolish major democratic features of the city such as the selection of consuls by sortition at Lucca, for example, where the neighborhoods or contrada convened in their own assemblies and “lots were drawn,” notes Daniel Waley, whereupon “each of the 550 men who drew slips inscribed elector consiliari then had the duty of naming one man from his own contrada as a councilor.”{40} When the podesta system of government or podesteria was established in Italian communes that vested all executive power in a single man, he too was often chosen this way. In Vicenza during the mid-thirteenth century, twenty city electors “were chosen by lot, and of these twelve were eliminated by voting; the eight remaining electors then proposed three names, from which the final choice was made by a further vote of the council.”{41} The councils, in turn, often required a quorum of two-thirds to arrive at a decision, and in some cities councilors were fined for failing to attend. Nor is it unusual to learn that a majority of two-thirds was needed to make major decisions, at which time even larger quorums and majorities as high as 10/11 or 16/17 were required—proportions that could almost be regarded as consensual.
The podesteria, for all its majesty and seeming absolutism, was by no means the authoritarian ogre it initially appears to be. A podesta was not selected from any members of the community. He had to be an outsider who could distance himself from the internecine familial and factional conflicts that often brought the city to the brink of chaos, hence too the elaborate electoral system that was meant to buffer the influence of particularly powerful groups. Nor could he come from a neighboring commune, which obviously was privy to the city’s infighting. He was selected for his impartiality, for his legal training, and ordinarily held his office for no more than a year, often as little as six months. The consulate, like the assembly, did not disappear; indeed, in Treviso as late as 1283, general assemblies of virtually all resident citizens who enjoyed rights to public office were convened to deal with emergencies, even if only to bestow almost despotic powers of control on a military captain.
A detailed account of the podesteria, signori, the later courts of the Sforza and Medici, and the republican oligarchies that overturned these various forms of one-man control, would require a volume in itself. Here we must focus on the conflict between the “People” and the “nobility,” the popolo and nobilta as they were called respectively. Equivalently, we could have called the “people” the “foot soldiers” or pedites and the “nobility” the “knights” or milites, the military characterizations so redolent of the rise of Greece’s hoplites and the supremacy they achieved over the aristocratic cavalry. The parallel, limited as it may be, is quite instructive. What the Italian citizens of the twelfth and early thirteenth centuries called the popolo was in no sense the urban poor, the Thetes of ancient Athens. The poor in the commune were a socially inchoate stratum of journeymen, relatively unskilled craftsmen who verged on being proletarians, laborers, servants, itinerant tradesmen, runaway serfs, and that vast déclassé of beggars and thieves who plagued the medieval cities almost from their inception. Many of these elements could be expected to follow any standard that filled their empty pockets. In a feudal world where a feeling of social place was crucial to one’s sense of self-regard, they were outside the pale of the commune’s life and its broader political concerns.
^yhat the commune meant by the popolo were men with a certain amount of material substance, such as master craftsmen, professionals, notaries, well-off tradesmen, even financiers and an emerging commercial bourgeoisie that owned sizable fortunes from foreign trade. Although there was a close interlinking of the nobilta and the very well-to-do popolo that makes it difficult to draw precise class lines in the conflicts that brought the two into opposition with each other, many of the popolo were’ virtually excluded from the city’s political life and were treated like resident aliens, the metics of ancient Athens. They paid its taxes, served in its militia, and were subject to all its laws without any right to hold public office or enter into its civic councils. In cities of 40,000 or more, active citizenship was restricted by property qualifications, social status, and length of residence to a thousand or less. Although the Milanese popolo provided the city with the greatest part of its revenues, for example, they held only one-fifth of the consulate’s offices. Later, on the intervention of the Holy Roman Emperor, Otto IV, they were given half of the conciliar seats. This reform and others like it were enough to whet appetites without providing enough sustenance to keep them satisfied. In the first half of the thirteenth century, the popolo began to take over the reins of power in one commune after another—Bologna by 1231, Pistoiain 1237, Florence in 1250—and to acquire a growing voice in the governance of Piacenza, Lodi, Bergamo, Siena, Parma, and Qenoa. “The popolo’s breakthrough into politics was the result of revolutionary organization,” declares Martines with a decisiveness that is not easy to encounter among many historians of the era.{42} In a very real sense, perhaps more sweeping than we realize, he is correct.
In retrospect, what makes the popolo’s ways of organizing so revolutionary was its highly localist and organic fashion of acting politically, a form of organizing that is utterly antithetical to modern concepts of party politics. The popolo had turned themselves into a neighborhood movement, not unlike the contrada in structure and the consorterie in their ‘confederal way of interlinking with each other. The noble families of two centuries earlier had taught its more servile orders well in the arts of political organization and power, The tradition of organizing a movement on a block-to-block, square-to-square basis had not died out in Italian cities after the podestarie subdued the interfamilial squabbles within the nobility. It was still very much alive, and the popolo used it well. However varied the specific structures this organization produced, certain forms clearly emerged from this neighborhood base.
The rise of vocational gilds provided one very important pattern for linking men of the same occupation from different neighborhoods into a common organization. Gilds were established not only for merchants, physicians, apothecaries, jurists, and notaries, but also for smiths, cloth finishers, butchers, bakers, furriers, tanners, leather makers and the like, generally reflecting the popolo’s social composition as a whole. These vocational groups, composed almost exclusively of well-to-do tradesmen and master craftsmen in their fields, were the earliest popular organizations of which we have any record, and they tried not only to control the operations of their crafts and its produce but also constituted themselves into armed societies with the very distinct goal of controlling the commune. Before long, open clashes exploded between the popolo and the nobilta at Brescia in 1192, Piacenza in 1198, Milan in 1201, and in year-by-year sequence, Cremona, Assisi, Lucca, and onward to Pistoia in 1234.
Neighborhoods were now convulsed by strife between poorly trained and the more highly skilled fighters of the noble consorterie, Rarely had the armed citizen moved so much to the forefront of civic political life. By now, armed popular societies based on neighborhood ties began to supplant the gilds in order to deal with the endemic warfare that erupted in the city’s streets. These societies were better trained than the vocational organizations. More closely cemented by their ties as neighbors, they had a better knowledge of the quarters in which they functioned and they could muster their forces more rapidly and on shorter notice as emergencies arose. If Bologna can be taken as an example of the enhanced ways of dealing with the nobilta, it demonstrated the need for the armed neighborhood societies to extend beyond the gild framework into a more cohesive, area-oriented, well-synchronized, and highly cooperative form of military organization. By the middle of the twelfth century, the city could boast of twentyfour armed neighborhood companies in comparison to Florence’s twenty and still smaller numbers elsewhere. Moreover, the Bolognese societies were consolidated across adjacent urban parishes into what looked very much like a citywide militia. The popolo, to be sure, had not created the idea of a neighborhood militia out of thin air; such companies of men living in the same parts of the city had been the backbone of the communal military system for years. What the popolo did, however, was to change the militia’s function from a mere civic guard, designed exclusively to defend the commune from external enemies, into a politically insurrectionary force designed to change the commune’s internal structure and power relationships.
Florence’s armed societies can be taken as a general example of the structure that the popolo established in the popular communes of Italy after their victory over the nobilta, The twenty neighborhood companies it had created earlier now became the commune’s exclusive fighting force, absorbing the remains of the old one where it could. In districts where the popolo was weak, a larger number of militia units were assigned to guard its interests. The rest were equally distributed throughout the city. Each company adopted its own banner and insignia—a “dragon, a whip, a serpent, a bull, a bounding horse, a Hon,” even a ladder, “were emblazoned on individual shields and helmets,” Martines notes. “Rigorous requirements required guildsmen to keep their arms near at hand, above all in troubled times. The call to arms for the twenty companies was the ringing of a special bell, posted near the main public square. A standard-bearer, flanked by four lieutenants, was in command of each company. These men were elected by a council of twenty-four members of the company and served one year. The Captain of the People was the commander of the twenty companies. Being an outsider, he was expected to stand above the temptations of local partizanship. His oath of office obliged him to call the companies to action whenever there was a threat to the popolo.... The popolo had no trouble finding only the most committed and reliable men for its armed companies. The success of this was seen in moments of crisis, when the ardor of the companies won many victories for the popolo,” a fact that was not lost on Machiavelli some two centuries later when he voiced his compelling argument for a citizen-militia as opposed to the use of mercenaries in The Prince.{43}
Once it came to power, the popolo did not completely eliminate the podestal constitution. A large Council of the People was formed to counterbalance the power of the old communal legislature and a powerful council of “elders” functioned as the commune’s executive. The Captain of the People was elevated to a status that, for all practical purposes, matched that of the podesta, and he was fully regaled with a court system that paralleled that of the podestal one. The popolo, in effect, had structured a dual power into the older constitution, matching the communal council with a popular one, the podesta with the militia chieftain, and courts of both men as counterweights to each other. Overarching this entire structure was the popular militia itself, which could easily intervene in the popolo’s interests if its interests were in anyway threatened.
If this was a democracy, it was one of merchants, notaries, professionals, and master craftsmen, not of journeymen, weavers, dyers, and laborers who formed the only “proletariat” the thirteenth-century world knew. By the same token, however, it was not a democracy of blooded idlers and aristocratic bullies. The popular democracy was composed of men who worked with their hands at crafts or devoted long hours of the day to the chores of administration, business, and legal affairs. Whether they were wealthy entrepreneurs or men of modest means, they saw themselves as self-made individuals, not the heirs of family wealth and unearned status; they believed; with good reason, that, they lived highly productive, sober,‘and socially useful lives and were far more capable than the nobles of bearing serious responsibilities on, their shoulders. They were no one’s clients and no one’s masters, except where they trained their own successors in the skills of their crafts. Although the new manufacturers who operated with hired labor could hardly make this last claim for themselves, they were far from constituting a majority of the typical ltalian popolo. Italy in the thirteenth century was not an industrial society with modern capitalists and workers. It was a largely artisan and highly paternalistic world, and the men who fathered its workshops as well as its families were not, disposed to grant the least modicum of: power to anyone who was a subordinate. These men knew only too well that, without them, the commune would quickly atrophy and disappear, but without the nobles and, to a considerable extent, their own subordinates, it could survive and ultimately flourish.
For limits of space, it is impossible to explore the vast cultural impact the popular commune had on its age, be it the painting of Giotto, the sensual realism of Boccaccio, the shift of literature from Latin to the vernacular, the laicization. of education, the huge increase in popular literacy, or a political tradition that trounced any attempt at institutionalized despotism. For all his aristocratic inclinations, Dante was a popolani, no less than the chronicler Giovanni Villani whose history of Florence is one of the best to be written of his era. The popular commune created new men who breathed a fresher urban air than any of their medieval contemporaries: one relatively free of superstition, turgid scholasticism, and social status; Above all, it produced a new kind of citizen who, with his Weapons by his side and craft tools in his hands, felt boldly empowered arid politically confident. Alert to any threat to his liberties; he was prepared to fight for his rights with the same energy with which he fashioned his produce. This alertness extended beyond a defensive stance against an aggressive nobility into a mili tant interest in public affairs and a readiness to occupy public responsibility. Not since Hellenic times did men of relatively modest means feel so close an identification between their own interests and those of the city in which they lived. Deeply individuated, indeed animated by a vivacious love of public debate and political discussion, such as Italians are to this very day, this new citizen seemed all the more motivated to shape his city’s destiny as well as his own. The ancient civitas as an association of active citizens had been reborn, and its spirit was to live in its citizen body long after its institutions were to atrophy and pass into history.
That the popular commune did not last as long as the Athenian polis is no mere quirk of ill fortune. Like the Roman Republic, its problems could not be resolved by replacing a small oligarchy with a bigger one. The popular commune, was not a “leveler” of social orders and economic classes. Quite to the contrary, it gave a new impetus to trade, the accumulation of wealth, and increasing economic and political differentiation, setting the popolo grosso or “fat people” against the popolo magro or “thin people.” In time, the commune developed a siege mentality, fearful of the popolo magro within its walls and the nobiltas who were slowly gathering their forces outside them. To live with one’s weapons by one’s side with an ear open to the requests of a buyer and another to the peals of an alarm bell is not conducive to trade and is exhausting to the spirit of a nascent bourgeois. After a few generations—and the time span varied from city to city—signorial rule began to overtake republican virtue. The process was as insidious then as it is today: popular assemblies began to vote increased emergency powers to their podesta and captain; the same men were repeatedly confirmed in executive office, and their tenure was extended from one year to five, from five to ten, and ultimately to lifetime office. Soon the leader’s son supplanted his father after death and dynasties began to turn elective offices into mere charades. However much they lingered on ceremoniously in form, the republics began to die in fact, and the Italian cities, unevenly and with trepidation, entered the age of the signori. That the republican era never ceased to haunt the Italian mind is attested to by sporadic attempts to revive it. The most notable, to be sure, were Cola di Rienzi’s assumption of power as the tribune of a new Roman republic in the mid-fourteenth century and Fra Savonarola’s theocratic republic in Florence toward the end of the fifteenth. Rienzi, however, had his eyes focused more on a unified Italy than an emancipated Rome, a project that was woefully advanced for its time, and Savonarola turned Florence into a hysterical battleground for an apocalyptic battle between Christ and Satan. If Rienzi was too early for the fourteenth century, Savonarola was too late for the fifteenth. Both men challenged entrenched attitudes that stood as insuperable obstacles to their projects: Rienzi, a predominantly feudal sensibility; Savonarola, a vivacious Renaissance sensibility that increasingly made his monkish mentality an anachronism. And both men went down in tragic defeat: Rienzi as a hero of Italian nationalism, Savonarola as a fanatic of Italian medievalism.
There can be no doubt that all of Europe watched the career of the Italian city-state with keen interest and borrowed heavily from its pioneering civicism. If Europe had any capital during the High Middle Ages, it was papal Rome, also an Italian city-state. Pilgrims and invaders, kings and beggars, knights and merchant-adventurers, all crisscrossed the peninsula for reasons of their own, and Italian merchants were to be seen everywhere: at fairs in France, city gates in Germany, on London’s docks, and in Flemish city squares. Hence, if civic freedom needed a stimulus it could not generate on its own, the Italian city-state was a ubiquitous presence that could provide one. In any case, and in almost every way, the cities of western Europe went through all the phases that the Italian cities had pioneered and added certain adornments of their own.
Generally, European towns north of the Alps lagged behind the Italians by a half-century or so, and at some point in time they branched off from this shared development into institutional stagnation. Various kinds of republican structures can be found at one time or another in almost every town of Europe, often preceded by consulates and followed by oligarchies with a wide variety of names. Elective systems of governance, which Roman traditions inspired in Italy, were reinforced north of the Alps by German tribal traditions. Not until well into the High Middle Ages did hereditary kingships come into fashion; until then, monarchs were elected to the throne and by no means did they occupy it with complete regal confidence. Moreover, they were surrounded by councils that spawned the parliamentary structures of later times, essentially oligarchic in character but in some measure reflective of the aristocratic, clerical, and commoner estates that made up the sovereign’s realm. As in Italy, the word “people” was defined in a highly restricted manner. “Note that there is a difference between the people (populus) and plebs which is the same as that between an animal and a man or between a genus and a species,” declared a thirteenth-century canonist in the Aristotelian language of the day. “For nobles and non-nobles collected together constitute the populus, The plebs is where there are no senators or men of consular dignity.”{44} The inferences we can draw from these remarks are that the “people” include everyone of all orders and degree; the plebs consist of that segment of the “people” who are not equipped to govern. The governing councils of European towns generally reflected this distinction: an urban patriciate monopolized most of the civic offices. Rich merchants took over Bruges in the mid-thirteenth century; Rouen in the late twelfth; Freiburg, which established a lifetime consulate, in 1218; and many large cities of Germany such as Cologne. The conciliar system and the early assemblies were reworked into oligarchies. Needless to say, there were also exceptions. At Nimes, the constitution provided for the election of five consuls from the “whole people of the city or its larger part,” typically indirectly, such as existed in the Italian city-states. Arles locked its carefully controlled general assemblies into an oligarchy by placing virtually all changes of law and imposition of taxes in the hands of its consuls and their council.
“Democratization” of the European cities occurred slowly and generally followed on the heels of the popular communes in Italy, often in exacting detail. Basel established a captain of the people in 1280; Freiburg turned its oligarchy into an annually elected board of twenty-four consuls following a “popular” revolt very similar to Bologna’s; Liege created what can best be called a gild-type city republic, headed by sixty governors of its craft gilds and two burgomasters. The city went even further than most when, from 1313 onward, it made the issuance of new laws contingent upon the approval of a popular assembly composed of all the city’s citizens, irrespective of their status. Even broader extensions of civic liberties were to mark the stormy popular movement of Flanders when civic government was shaped by the despised weavers and fullers of cloth-manufacturing towns such as Ghent and Ypres where the “fat” and “thin” people were to clash in brutal conflicts. This chronic struggle is too complex to narrate here; it involved not only battles between well-to-do oligarchies and virtual proletarians who manufactured wool products as mere hired help but also the intervention of the Count of Flanders, Guy de Dampierre, and the French monarch, Philip the Fair. Patriotism intermingled with class conflicts to a point where democratic demands were repeatedly diluted by the hatred of the Flemish people toward France. As a result, lowly artisans and their lordly masters fought side-by-side when they were not fighting face-to-face. Ultimately, the “thin” people, organized into “lesser gilds” triumphed over their patriciates, and established a civic structure that gave adequate representation to the weavers, fullers, and gildsmen of “low degree” in a tripartate magistracy that excluded all or most of the patricians.
What the European communes could not resist was the steady rise of the nation-state, indeed one that the rich merchants favored to restrain their unruly local barons who interfered with the free movement of trade and their unruly laboring classes who posed a continual threat to civic oligarchies. Perhaps the earliest harbinger of this new drift toward territorial centralism occurred when the Flemish communes, led by Philip van Artavelde, the son of the great champion of Flemish liberty, Jacques van Artavelde, were thoroughly routed by Count Louis in the Battle of Roosebeeke in 1382. “Henceforth, Flanders was to give up the dream of government by a league of independent towns and submit to the ever more and more centralized rule of powerful territorial lords, whose model was naturally the aggressive monarchy of France,” concludes Ephraim Emerton in his wistful account of this tragic history. “At the death of Count Louis in 1383 the county passed by inheritance to his son-in-law, Philip the Bold of Burgundy, the first in the fine of princes through whom the Low Countries were drawn into the politics of France, the Empire, and Spain. The cities, still great and powerful, enjoying very wide privileges, were to be only incidents in the larger relations of the country.”{45}
Emerton’s closing remarks on the struggle of Flemish towns for civic freedom and autonomy might well seem like a touching epitaph for the commune as the nation-state began to emerge. Not only did it survive as little more than a haunting dream in Flanders, but also in Italy, where the triumph of the signori by the fifteenth century was virtually completed. Savonarola’s brief restoration of a Florentine republic in the closing years of that century reads more like a parody of the city’s glorious republican: past than an authentic revival. It would seem that Daniel Waley’s verdict on the nature of Italian civic republicanism could be applied to European communes as a whole. “The existence of republican forms of government in the Italian city-states was intensely precarious,” Waley writes in an assessment that can only be regarded as an understatement. “These institutions were so constantly under pressure or even in full crisis that there is little reason to be puzzled at their failure to survive in most of the cities.”{46} Internal factionalism, which often reached insurrectionary proportions, “suffices on its own to explain why, in most cities, the regime of a single individual was able to secure acceptance before the end of the fourteenth century. Clearly the occasional survival of republicanism as an exception needs more explaining than do the triumphs of the signori. Republicanism in decline is seen as a puzzling historical problem only if the republic is regarded as the body politic in health, the ‘tyranny’ (signoria) as a pathological form.”{47}
Perhaps, as Waley seems to suggest, we should reverse the judgment modern liberal historians have of what constitutes the health arid pathology of a body politic. But it is fair to ask, as I have throughout this book, whether any kind of politics, much less one that can be “embodied” in an active citizenry, is possible under a tyranny or, for that matter, a “representative democracy” (republic). Waley seems to surrender the need for an ethical judgment of the commune, of the conjuratio’s radical implications and its sense of promise, if he asks us to surrender to the “facts” of the historical record rather than cherish the possibilities civic freedom holds for a humanity that has yet to fulfill its unfinished potentialities for a rational way of life. We can never let this commitment to an ethical judgment give way to the evidence of a grossly irrational reality merely because the record of the human enterprise speaks faultingly against it. Truth rarely lies in the center of experienced facts. If it did so, we would still believe the earth is flat and justice is merely the authority of the strong. These are the irrefragable facts as they are experienced in everyday life. Historians, in turn, would merely be turgid chroniclers of anecdotes, storytellers of things past whose accounts can never be free of their own hidden biases and proclivities. Until very recent times, philosophy for more than two millennia has warned us that “brute facts” do not really exist and are never free of interpretation, even as we deny humanity any sense of possibility, the hope of going beyond the “facts” and achieving its most worthy ideals. “Brute facts” will become real only when we become brutish and deal with the existing reality on its own terms, no different in principle from the adaptive ways we impute to other living beings.
Actually, the history of civic freedom does not end with the fourteenth century or the rise of the nation-state. The ideal of popular assemblies as a form of self-governance, and the city as the nuclear arena for politics and an active citizenry, seems to have enjoyed a remarkable degree of persistence, especially if we bear in mind that there were so many factors—statist, economic, logistical, and demographic—to work against. That it exists even today in the form of the New England town meeting, however vestigial it appears by comparison with its past, is testimony to the need people have felt in fairly politicized regions to retain forms of face-to-face decision making and direct democracy. In fact, the town meeting is much too close to our discussion of the city’s future to be examined in any detail here. It may be regarded as a legacy, but it is still a living legacy that should not be consigned to the past. Suffice it to say, for the present, that from 1760 to the closing years of the American Revolution, it spread out of New England and reached as far south as Charleston. During this period, it fueled the revolution as surely as the more well-known Committees of Correspondence and such popular societies as the Sons of Liberty. Considerable effort was needed to eliminate the town-meeting form in many communities of the new United States and to nibble away at its powers in New England itself. We shall see that as recently as the 1960s, Vermont townships and their popular meetings essentially controlled the state government because the House of Representatives was elected by towns, not along geographic and demographic lines.
Nor can we deal with the challenging problems raised by the Swiss Confederation, a piece of contemporary history that seems to have been shunted away from “mainstream” accounts of civic freedom. To assign a few paragraphs to a living illustration of confederalism, participatory democracy, and active citizenship, despite the philistine smugness of Swiss life and the conservatism of Swiss politics, would be doing violence to the extraordinary example of freedom that is also with us. It will require a section of a later chapter on civic confederal forms to even remotely approximate the insights Benjamin Barber brings to this issue in his discussion of direct democracy in the Swiss cantons. What Barber asks us to recognize is that democratic forms in themselves, however radical they may seem to be, “are inherently neither conservative nor progressive; they can be employed to bring about rapid and even radical change under conditions of consensus and unity of governing and people. They can obstruct reform and paralyze effective government altogether where the people are no longer one with their governors or synonymous with their government.... Democracy in Switzerland appears reactionary because the conditions that justify it have eroded; democracy in the villages of Graubünden is failing because the village communities are themselves moribund. Neither the institutions themselves nor a putative peasant mentality is to blame.”{48} Democracy, in sum, has its own prerequisites, and it will be no small part of the coming chapters to examine them in the light of modern societal problems—American, European, Graubünden, no less than those that exist for a New England town-meeting democracy.
The most dazzling, almost meteoric example of civic liberty and direct democracy in modern times is the rise and brief ascendancy of the sectional assemblies in the Great French Revolution, a movement that addresses the typical question of whether or not a face-to-face democracy is possible in a large city, indeed by the standards of two centuries ago a world city. It should be kept in mind that eighteenth-century Paris, where the sectional assemblies flourished, was the capital of continental Europe’s most absolute monarchies, a city that, more so than any other aside from London, seemed to have been a creature of the nation-state.
Under the Bourbons, Paris had very little self-government of its own. Ruled more or less directly by the monarchy, it groaned under the imposition of an inept regal administration and a corrupt nobility that reduced its lower orders to sheer destitution. Yet within a span of only four years, Paris acquired not only complete control over its own civic afFairs but created a system of control that was built around face-to-face neighborhood assemblies, coordinated by a commune that, at its revolutionary highpoint, called for the complete restructuring of France into a confederation of free communes. This demand was to survive for nearly a century after the revolution, when it became the insurrectionary program of the more famous Paris Commune of 1791.
Ironically, the sectional assemblies have their origin in the sixty district assemblies Louis XVI convened in Paris to elect the city’s middle-class deputies to the Estates General. These assemblies were directed to select the 147 electors who, in turn, were to choose Paris’s twenty deputies to the Third Estate. The French Revolution, although spurred into action by the power plays between the Third Estate and the monarchy, really began from below and, most typically, as a result of Parisian militancy. Despite the highly discriminatory franchise that the Xing imposed on his own capital—nearly a quarter of the city’s population was disenfranchized in contrast to a sixth in the rest of France—the district assemblies were highly spirited and acted in flat defiance of the throne. They rejected the presiding officers with whom they were saddled by the municipality and chose presiding officers of their own; the 147 electors to whom they were entitled were unabashedly raised to four hundred; and what is perhaps most damning, they refused to go home as the monarchy directed them to do. They defiantly established themselves as permanent fixtures of Paris’s municipal government. The four hundred electors, in turn, began to meet almost daily at the museum and shortly afterwards at the Town Hall, where they simply edged out the royal appointees to the municipal government. The electors, in effect, became a provisional Paris, “Commune”’ until an authentic Commune was constitutionally elected. By September 1790, the Paris Commune numbered three hundred and coexisted uneasily with the sixty district assemblies from which it drew its representatives.
The tension between the Commune and its district assemblies and within the assemblies themselves mounted as the revolutionary fever of the’ city rose. The distinction between propertied “active citizens” who had franchise rights and propertyless “passive” ones who were expected tp be little more than political bystanders ultimately made any exclusion of the disenfranchized people, the sans culottes, increasingly awkward. By this time, the “districts” had been renamed “sections” and their number reduced from sixty to forty-eight by the National Assembly in order to diminish their power. Despite such attempts to suppress the “districts” and later the “sections” as deliberative bodies, the assemblies largely ignored the National Assembly’s decrees. In May 1790, the Assembly tried to limit the concerns of the sectional assemblies to purely municipal issues, a ploy typipal to this day of conservative elements in New England town meetings, but the restriction ultimately proved to be ineffectual. With the outbreak of war, the revolution moved markedly leftward. In July 1792, the Theater-Français sectipn decreed the elimination of all distinctions between “active” anil “passive” citizens, a decree that was quickly adopted by all the forty-eight sections of Paris. The sectional assemblies were now thrown open to all the underprivileged orders of Paris: the laboring classes, relatively unskilled artisans, carpenters, construction workers, nascent proletarians of the textile and luxury goods workshops, and the like. A year later, on Danton’s request, the newly elected revolutionary Convention that replaced the National Assembly dbcreed that poor citizens could receive a stipend of forty sous for, attending sectional assemblies, which were reduced to two a week, presumably so that the sans culottes could attend them with reasonable regularity. The attempt by the liberal Girondins to close all sectional assemblies by nine in the evening so that working sans culottes would be unable to attend the assemblies after they returned home contributed greatly to the popular insurrection that removed them from the Convention and brought the Jacobins to power.
Although the details of how these local assemblies functioned leaves much to be desired, partly because the minutes of the sections were lost in the flames of the Paris Commune of 1871, partly, too, because their history has yet to be written by historians sympathetic to their decentralistic outlook, we know enough to describe them in broad terms. Sectional assemblies met at least twice weekly in the summer and autumn of 1793, the high tide of the sans culotte movement and often went into “permanent session” during hectic periods of the revolution. Attendance fluctuated widely from a hundred or less when the agenda was routine to overflowing halls (usually in state-commandeered churches and chapels) when serious issues confronted the revolutionary people. Structurally, each section had a president with a committee to assist him, a recording secretary, tellers for counting votes, and ushers to maintain order. Although it is not very clear how fixed these positions were, the President’s committee was renewed monthly by an assembly vote, and very few presidents seem to have held office for more than a year. Each section, it must be stressed, made its own rules and probably varied in form and the frequency of its meetings.
A multitude of revolutionary commissars and committees surfaced from these assemblies and dealt with a large number of important economic, political, and military problems. We have only to enumerate the names of the sectional committees to gain some idea of the functions this neighborhood democracy undertook. Aside from its assemblee generale of the local citizen body, each section’s “most important function, that of police, was entrusted to a commissaire de police, aided by sixteen commissaires de section. To meet the needs of local administration the sections formed almost as many committees as a modern American town or city. There were comites civile and comites revolutionaires (Vigilance Committees); there were comites de bienfaisance (Relief Committees), comites militaires, comites d’agriculture, and commissions de salpetres (for providing gunpowder). Each section had its own revolutionary court system and justices of the peace as well as special committees to organize work for the unemployed (ateliers de charite), or tenth-day festivities (fetes decadaires), or open-air suppers for the poor (banquets populaires).[8]
The forty-eight sectional assemblies, in turn, were coordinated by the Paris Commune to which each section elected three deputies at an assemblee primaire. Also at this special assembly, usually quite heavily attended, the sections elected the Bureau of the Commune: the city’s mayor, its procureur, and his two deputies, who essentially constituted a communal executive committee to which sixteen administrateurs were chosen from the Commune’s normal complement of 144 sectional representatives. To buffer this rather manipulative executive from popular pressure, an additional thirty-two members were added to the Bureau to form a Corps Municipal. When this majestic group of forty-eight sectional notables convened with the remaining ninety-two deputies that formed the Commune, it bore the solemn title of the Conseil General de la Commune or, as it came to be known in the historical literature, the Commune’s General Council.
The more radical sections of Paris were not unmindful that these concentric rings of authority surrounding the commune’s Bureau were meant to camouflage an inner circle of executives who were as disquieted by the irascibility of the sections as the Convention was of the Commune, a body that it really saw as a dangerous challenge to the nation-state. Although the Commune eventually became more radical under sectional pressure as time went by, the sections were always more radical than the Commune and began to act very much on their own. When necessary, as was frequently the case, sans culotte sections did not hesitate to bypass the Commune completely and form their own interlocking committees and networks. Delegations from one section often visited the assemblies of another, where they were usually greeted with fervent embraces, hortatory speeches of welcome, and characteristic “kisses of fraternity,” which often culminated with banquets topped by endless toasts to liberty and the brotherhood of man. As F. Furet et al. tell us: “From the angle of political solidarity, the participants in activities of the sections saw themselves as forming a whole, a ‘family’ of ‘brothers and friends,’ where the use of the familiar form tu broke down all the barriers of social and cultural origin. Outside the section this fraternal solidarity was further expressed by ‘fraternization,’ a sort of pact for mutual aid between the popular sections to resist the pressure of the aristocrats and the moderates, and then to eliminate them from the committees which they controlled. Thus on May 14, 1793, the Social Contract section, under the direction of its president, went in a body to the Lombard section to chase out the ‘aristocracy.’ In this way the sections were regenerated in the bourgeois quarters dominated by the moderates before the fall of the Girondins, and by the ‘new moderates’ after the month of September 1793.”{49}
It is difficult to fully convey the enormous powers the sections accrued by 1793 before they were subverted by the Convention. The titles of their various comites and commissions do not’ tell us how intensely active the sections had become in the administration of their neighborhoods and finally in running the entire city of Paris. They were sources of information on local counterrevolutionaries and grain speculators, both of whom existed by the nestful in the city. They became the dispensers of a rough-and-ready popular justice, the guardians of the “maximum” that regulated the price of staples, the dispensers of food for the poor and sustenance for the widowed and orphaned, the caretakers of refugees from the provinces and the homeless who all but lived on the streets. They were the authentic organizers of the great journées, the insurrectionary “days” that pushed the revolution in an increasingly egalitarian direction much to the dismay of the Jacobins, whom they mistakenly worshiped with almost unthinking reverence before they were betrayed by the Robespierres, Dantons, and Saint-Justs. They forged the “holy pike” that armed the revolutionary populace and made it possible for it to intervene directly in the Convention’s proceedings and alter the course of its decrees and laws. Going even further, the sections began to intervene significantly in the economy of the city. Their comites d’agriculture scoured the countryside to feed the city, their committees to establish ateliers de charite freely appropriated workshops abandoned by wealthy emigres and used them to provide jobs for the unemployed who made uniforms, weapons, and gunpowder fpr the embattled revolutionary armies at the front. Not unlike the Athenian festivals of an earlier age that did so much to cement the polis together, the sections not only called periodic fetes decadaires and neighborhood banquets populaires but helped to stage the fervent citywide celebrations that occurred throughout the revolution, fostering a sense of civic fraternity that Paris was to rarely see again after 1793, when the “year of the sans culottes” passed into history. And it was these canaille, or “rabble” as they were also called, who were to be pushed from tho stage of history and shot down by the thousands in the reaction that followed the tenth of Thermidor (July 28,1794), when Robespierre and his followers were guillotined.
Finally, “From the principle of popular sovereignty,” observe Furet and his colleagues, “the sans culottes went as far as the notion of direct government. With the same verve which made them rise against the Girondins, in the summer of 1793 certain sections demanded to keep their own civil records, to levy their own taxes, and to render justice without appeal. No limitations should be imposed upon the assembly of citizens, which decided everything. A decision by the Convention (September 9, 1793) having limited section meetings to two days a week, the sans culottes got around the decree by holding a daily meeting of the ‘Society of the section.’ This assembly claimed to supervise the civil servants and magistrates, who in their eyes were merely their subordinates. Members of the comites civiles, revolutionary commissions, police commissioners, or commissioners for supplies were subjected to constant surveillance by the sections, at least as long as the latter maintained their independence from the revolutionary government. Censure, ‘purifying’ votes, and revocability of elected persons were the principal means by which this popular sovereignty was exercised, according to the Rousseauean principle of a sovereign and indivisible popular opinion.”{50}
The well-to-do classes of France had everything to fear from these sectional assemblies and a radical Commune of Paris. Although it was highly unlikely that the largely bourgeois districts of 1789 ever envisioned a France governed by a completely popular direct democracy, the rise and growing influence of the sectional assemblies clearly evoked images of a confederal France structured around sections similar to the Parisian in all the cities and towns of the country—a nationwide commune of communes. The extent to which this vision of an entire European country began to take hold of the popular imagination as early as November, 1792, is suggested by a statement that the Section de la Cité circulated for the approval of other sectional assemblies. “The citizens of Paris declare ... that they recognize no sovereignty except a majority of the communes of the republic ..the statement provocatively declares, “that they only recognize deputies In the Convention as composers of a draft constitution and provisional administration of the republic.” By the spring of 1793, such views ceased to be isolated. On April 29 of the following year, the Conseil General of the Commune, which is to say the broadest of the concentric groups within that body, took practical steps toward implementing the idea of a federation of communes by establishing a corresponding committee to communicate with the 44,000 municipalities of France. In a printed circular to the municipalities, the committee’s secretary boldly declared: “That is the only kind of federalism the people of Paris want.... All the communes in France should be sisters.”{51}
For all his biases and preconceptions, Daniel Guerin is on solid ground when he resolutely concludes, “The bourgeois philosophers who had pronounced direct democracy unworkable in large countries [no less Rousseau than other social theorists of his day], on the grounds that it would be materially impossible to bring all the citizens together in one meeting, were thus proved wrong. The Commune had spontaneously discovered a new form of representation more direct and more flexible than the parliamentary system and which while not perfect, for all forms of representation have their faults, reduced the disadvantages to a minimum.” Indeed, it is doubtful if the Commune and the sectional assemblies could be regarded as a system of “representation.” The sans culottes had gone much further than any assembly form of which we know in establishing a direct democracy, this in the very heart of a nation-state that the Jacobins had centralized to a degree that would have been the envy of France’s most absolutist monarchs.
From : TheAnarchistLibrary.org.
Chronology :
January 02, 2021 : Chapter 5 -- Added.
January 16, 2022 : Chapter 5 -- Updated.
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