Postcolonial Theory and the Specter of Capitalism. Vivek Chibber

the course of events belies any notion that there was an elite, antifeudal and liberal project, or that the delegates reached out to the masses by crafting a program that represented their interests.

      In fact, it was the reverse: the popular movement imposed the revolutionary agenda on the delegates. As we have seen, there is no evidence that the Third Estate had any inclination to dissolve feudalism or to extend political rights to laboring classes. They moved in this direction only under pressure from the movement. Possibly the mere fact that the decrees followed a mass rebellion is not conclusive evidence that the latter caused the former. Reform might have been coming anyway, and perhaps only the timing was affected by mass pressure. But even this argument cannot be sustained: consider the actual content of the legislation that followed the issuance of the general decrees, and the continuing association between reform legislation and the popular movement.

      Had the delegates been genuinely committed to a revolutionary program, they would certainly have tried to squeeze maximal leverage from the mass pressure. Instead, their strategy was to craft legislation that minimized the blows to the existing power structure. By the fall of 1789, the peasant revolt had subsided somewhat, giving legislators the sense that the immediate threat of violence, too, had subsided. Their reaction was to skew the laws toward the status quo, not against it. When antifeudal legislation finally emerged in March 1790, it was clearly intended to minimize the blow to seignorial power. Both the legal and the financial burden of freedom was placed on the peasants, making it highly difficult for them to wrest free of feudal obligations.⁴³ And, on the political front, when the Rights of Man were translated into actual law, it turned out that the non-propertied would have distinctly fewer rights than their betters. The Assembly refused to allow universal suffrage. A minimal property requirement was mandated for voting rights, and even more demanding preconditions for the right to hold office. In the end, only around 45,000 French men were given the right to hold high office.⁴⁴ Democratic rights were thus made conditional on being propertied.

      The legislation around the abolition of feudalism and the Rights of Man revealed the assembly’s priorities. Its members were committed, much as the English revolutionaries in 1640 had been, primarily to rolling back royal power; their attitude toward popular power was decidedly less enthusiastic, even hostile. It was a force they leaned on only because it was the sole available counter to royal malfeasance. Had they been committed to popular power, they would have used the mobilization of summer 1789 as a means to dismantle the ancien régime. Instead, they tried their best to preserve it, but with greater latitude for the propertied Third Estate. As Albert Soboul incisively summarizes:

      The new political institutions had one aim and one aim only, that of ensuring the peaceful, uninterrupted rule of the middle classes in their hour of victory, free from the threat of a counter-revolution and monarchy on the one hand, and of the any attempt of the people on the other.⁴⁵

      The National Assembly’s goal was to strike a fine balance between rolling back the threat of royal counterrevolution while also keeping the subaltern classes out of the political nation. But just as in the English case, no such equilibrium was possible. Above all, there was no direct control over the popular movement. And as mass uprisings erupted across the country, more and more segments of the elite reformist coalition defected to the side of reaction. As their base within the ruling classes contracted, the remaining reform-minded delegates had no choice but to increase their reliance on the mass movement—which only prompted further defections from the reform coalition, forcing it to embrace the revolution.