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[W]here is that liberty so much pretended, so dearly purchased? There was never yet any prisons or sufferings that I was in, but … for the bringing multitudes more out of prison. INTRODUCTION: THE LEVELLERS It is only having examined the positive aspirations of civil war radicalism that we may understand what it was a struggle against. The insistence upon a living christianity of substance, rather than form, was an attempt to realise the government of God, and through it the reality of social community. This entailed the struggle against outward bondage. Effective submission to God required liberty from the carnal oppression of man. William Walwyn explained: ‘If ever men shall kindly be brought to be of one mind … it must be by liberty of discourse, and liberty of writing; we must not pretend to more infallible certenty than other men.’ This struggle demanded liberty from religious, clerical, political, economic, legal and social oppression. It was this which first drove radicalism into the political arena, and developed civil war radical political theory. Even here its focus was religious and pragmatic. Leveller pragmatism was expressed in its fundamental identity as a petitioning movement. The primacy of the religious dimension was identified by Thomas Edwards (‘In one word … liberty of conscience, and liberty of preaching’) and Richard Baxter (‘Liberty of Conscience … was the Common Interest in which they did unite’). It was this which became the revolution's most important domestic practical achievement. From it, however, developed a demand for liberty from oppression of every kind. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

[S]uch is the aptness of Christian Preachers to raise Seditions, that oft-times … terrible Changes … have been occasioned … in our times in Scotland and England … And therefore Protestant Kings … who own themselves Head of the Church … did for their greater safety … prohibit all publick Extemporary Sermons and Prayers … This Charles the First King of England had in part effected by taking away the Sabbath Days Afternoon's Sermons. Could thought be controlled as easily as speech, all governments would rule in safety, and none would be oppressive. CAROLINE STATEBUILDING One feature of pre-statebuilding England was the relationship between weak institutions and powerful ideas. Alongside weak monarchy, dysfunctional parliaments and a partially reformed church, we have observed the impact of religious and political beliefs animated by the Thirty Years War. This charging of politics with ideology was not simply a feature of the troubles. When statebuilding finally came to Britain it did so within this context. In its domestic context, the Caroline experiment from 1625 to 1640 was remarkable in two ways. The first was, after seventy years of neglect, its range and ambition. This may have reflected a sense of urgency rather than confidence. It certainly demonstrated the conviction that the time had come to abandon half measures for fundamental reform. A second feature was that it was directed towards the intellectual as much as practical obstacles to effective monarchical government in England. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

I doubt not, but many men, have been contented to see the late troubles in England, out of an imitation of the Low Countries; supposing there needed no more to grow rich than to change, as they had done, the forme of their Government … And as to Rebellion in particular against Monarchy; one of the most frequent causes of it, is the Reading of the books of Policy, and Histories of the antient Greeks, and Romans. INTRODUCTION: RESTORING THE SENSE OF POSSIBILITY In the previous chapter we examined two sets of political fears. One was for the continuity, indeed survival, of parliaments. The other was for the efficacy, indeed survival, of royal power. Both existed across the century, and were central to every episode of the troubles. The first step towards explaining the troubles is to recover the contexts within which these fears may be understood. It is critically important that they were accompanied by religious concerns. Fears for the survival of aspects of the civil polity in England were intertwined with fears for the survival of protestantism and the church. The relationship between these, complicated in itself, was also deeply influenced by events in and outside the kingdom. Two broad contexts for these perceptions have already been identified. One was religious: the victories of the counter-reformation in Europe. The other was political: the military weakness of the Stuart crown. In the 1620s, as in the 1670s and 1680s, this combination had a devastating effect upon domestic political peace. The immediate result was that polarisation and conflict on the European continent became polarisation and conflict in England. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Things that love night, Love not such nights as these: The wrathful skies Gallow the very wanderers of the darke And make them keep their Caves: since I was a man Such sheets of Fire, such bursts of horrid Thunder, Such groanes of roaring Winde, and Raine, I never Remember to have heard. Man's Nature cannot carry Th'affliction, nor the feare. INTRODUCTION: BEHIND THE VEIL OF RESTORATION To recover England's troubles it is necessary to re-enter an alien mental world. In this respect, as Robert Darnton reminds us: ‘the most promising moment in research can be the most puzzling. When we run into something that seems unthinkable to us, we may have hit upon a valid point of entry into an alien mentality.’ Our present distance from the perceptions and fears that underlay the troubles is more than simply the effect of the intervening three hundred years. It is politically created: the first and final imperative of restoration was forgetting. The signs of this are everywhere. They are visible, not least, in English incomprehension in the face of the attitudes sustaining the last theatre of the troubles. That Northern Ireland's conflict has its origins in the seventeenth century is well enough understood. What is less frequently pointed out is that in the seventeenth century those troubles were English. It is then that we find the perceptions and language of that anti-hero Ian Paisley (a protestant enclave under encirclement, ‘popery’ whooping around the outside) in the mouths of England's heroes: John Pym, Oliver Cromwell, John Milton, the Earl of Shaftesbury, the Prince of Orange. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Britain's myriad of small towns remained at the heart of economic and social life into the early Victorian era, bridging the urban and rural worlds. Diaries like that of the Sussex shopkeeper Thomas Turner of East Hoathly reveal an almost constant interaction between villagers and small towns. Turner records how he went to the nearby town of Lewes to buy cottons and cheese, to attend property sales, pay debts, get a doctor, scotch rumours about the disharmony between him and his wife, to participate in church events, to ‘see the finest horse-race that ever I see run’ and as often as not to get drunk and come rolling home. While the traditional open market, the nucleus of most small towns since their inception, was often in decline after 1700, these communities consolidated their position in Georgian provincial society, growing in population and prosperity, as they acquired retail shops and specialist crafts, as well as new leisure activities. The transformation did not occur overnight. In the 1720s the antiquarian and polymath William Stukeley, fresh from London, was dismayed at the small town of Stamford in Lincolnshire, where there was ‘not one person … that had any taste or love of learning’ but within a few years things began to improve, as music making and club life blossomed, and he concluded eventually that this ‘is true life, not the stink and noise and nonsense of London’. By the 1760s Fanny Burney could talk of the ‘perpetual round of constrained civilities … unavoidable in a country town’. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

It is now widely recognised that towns played a central role in the development of a new, more modern British economy and society in the years between 1700 and 1840. However, it is often assumed that the expansive element in urban society, the new social attitudes and cultural values that were helping to change patterns of consumer demand, to mobilise capital resources and to generate novel industrial processes and products, were confined to the great metropolis of London and the specialist ports, resorts and industrial towns whose growth attracted so much attention from contemporary observers. Nevertheless, it would be a mistake to ignore the role played in this process by the established regional centres and historic county towns, many of which retained their importance well into the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Their experiences during this period of substantial and sometimes dramatic change in the urban system encompass every possible permutation from explosive population growth to sullen stagnation and raise pertinent questions about the very nature of ‘success’ in the context of urban development. Rather than being passive spectators of a drama taking place elsewhere, regional and county centres were fully involved in the action. Status, fuctions and patterns of development A substantial number of the ‘Great and Good towns’ of early modern England fell into the category of county centres, towns whose social and economic influence over a broad hinterland beyond their immediate market area was recognised by their contemporary classification as ‘the capital of all the county’ or simply ‘county town’. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

‘This iron age departed, we behold, / An age of pleasure, luxury, and gold; / No more exist those opposites to Life, / A social husband, and domestic wife … / Triumphal entries and their dull parades, / Are chang'd for Op'ras, Balls and Masquerades; / No longer Sunday's dull employment cloys, / For Church we substitute politer joys …’ Thus in mildly satirical vein a poetaster of the 1770s described the smart new cultural world of Georgian Britain. The sense of cultural transformation, of the new sociable importance of women, of new entertainments, of the secularisation of social life, is striking, acute – and exaggerated. As we shall see in this chapter, such changes do figure prominently in the dynamic, and increasingly pluralistic, cultural landscape of British cities during the Georgian era, but they were only part of the painting. In contrast to the earlier period, there can be little question that cities and towns after 1700 became vital centres for cultural mixing and dissemination, affecting not only the elite classes but a good part of national society as well. The leading cities, particularly London and Edinburgh, became cultural bazaars, increasingly cosmopolitan, importing and translating cultural ideas, goods and practices from continental Europe and beyond. Urban communities became exposition centres, exhibiting the fashionable models of cultural activity, whether performances of Handel's oratorios, meetings of a newly established learned society or the latest taste in furnishings, dress or speech. Yet British cities in the Georgian era were more than sites or stages for cultural exchange: they were also seedbeds of innovation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The past: from bandits to kings The Kallars, like the Maravars, settled in mixed economy zones such as Pudukkottai on the borders of the central political and economic regions of the south. They quickly attained dominance in these areas by exercising rights of protection over local communities and institutions. The Kallars were chosen for this role because their strongly kin and territory based social structure and cultural valuation of heroism and honor were highly conducive to the corporate control of the means of violence and coercion. It was no accident that Kallars, like Maravars, were often, when not granted rights of protection, the very groups from which others sought protection. The martial and predatory traditions of Kallars and Maravars were commented on very early in Tamil history. The Caṅkam classic Akanānūru refers to the Kallars as a fearless and uncultured people who lived originally in the mountains about Tirupati, capturing elephants and exchanging their tusks indirectly through other mountain people for grain. Their leader is said to have been one Pulli, highly skilled in taming violent and uncontrollable elephants. The correspondence of these traditions with those recorded in the vamcavalis of Maravar and Kallar kingly families suggests the integrity and venerability of the tradition concerning the early martial and heroic character of these groups, as well as their position on the periphery of Tamil culture and kingly civilization. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The settlement of Pudukkottai Settlement in the Pudukkottai area was relatively sparse until the early Cola period, that is the ninth and tenth centuries. However, the construction of a number of early rock cut temples of the Pallava style, the occupation of the area's numerous natural caves by wandering hunters and herders, Jaina ascetics, and early settlers, occasional Caṅkam literary references to chieftains in the area, and a few lithic inscriptions detailing such events as the feeding of Brahmans, the construction of a sluice, and the provision of arrangements for sacrifice and puja worship suggest that the area had been by no means unoccupied (Ayyar 1940, 526–527, 542, 546; IPS nos. 1–19; CLIPS). With the coming of the Cola era there is strong evidence of increasing agrarian settlement, the growth of locality institutions such as community, village, and town assemblies, and the construction and expansion of temples. During the ninth to the fourteenth centuries, which included periods of both Cola and Pantiya hegemony over the region, many of the local level social and political institutions which remain important in Pudukkottai through to the nineteenth century are already identifiable. Oral traditions and palm leaf manuscripts provide accounts of settlement in Pudukkottai which express certain fundamental features of social and political relations in the early medieval period. Perhaps the most cited version is found in the Tekkattur palm leaf manuscript: [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Mise en scène The Tondaiman kings of Pudukkottai were ranked as the third highest of the Tamil kings among the “seventy-five” who participated in the protection of the Madurai fort under the rule of Tirumalai Nayakar in the mid seventeenth century (Taylor 1835). Together with the Rajas of Ramanatapuram and Civakankai, the Tondaimans of Pudukkottai were part of the kumaravarkkam, the group of sons, the elite corps of the Nayaka's supporters. According to all accounts, the Tondaimans were among the most important of the Tamil little kings from the late seventeenth through the eighteenth century. By the nineteenth century, Pudukkottai, which had played a crucial role in the political and military fortunes of the East India Company, had not merely survived the turmoil of the last years unscathed, but had achieved an even more distinguished status. It became the only Princely State in the Tamil region of Madras Presidency under British rule. Pudukkottai means “new fort” and seems to refer to a fort that was built in the early eighteenth century in what became the capital town of the little kingdom. It did not have fixed geographical boundaries, but was the area over which the Tondaiman kings had political control at any given time. Until the end of the eighteenth century the region was simply called the “Tondiman's country” (see Orme 1803). The general area over which this political control was exercised was the historically and geographically crucial interstitial area between the traditional domains of Pantiya and Cola authority. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The end of the old regime: the Poligar Wars Be it known to all the Tinnevelly Polegars, and all the inhabitants of the Pollams, that Major Bannerman is commissioned by the Honourable Company to make inquiry into misconduct of the Tinnevelly Polegars in communications with the Collector, and to punish such as may be found deserving thereof. And having, on full inquiry into the conduct of the several Polegars of Yalarampanna, Naglepore, Colarpettah, Cadulgoody, and Kolattoor, discovered that they were leagued with PanjalumCourchy in the late levying of war against the Polegar of Shevagherry, who is under the Company's protection; and that the conduct of all these Polegars has been alike disobedient and rebellious to the Government of the Company, in disregarding the authority of the Collector, refusing to pay Company's kists, committing depredations, disturbing the peace of the country, and oppressing and murdering its inhabitants; he has deemed it expedient, by virtue of his instructions, and the powers with which he is invested from the Company, to mark in the strongest manner their displeasure against such criminal proceedings; and therefore proclaims, that the Polegars of Panjalum-Courchy, Naglepore, Yalarampanna, Colarpettah, Cadulgoody, and Kolattoor, are dispossessed of their Pollams. Translation of a Proclamation from Major John Bannerman Commanding Detachment on Service, to the several Polegars of the Tinnevelly Province, on the 18th Day of September, 1799 This proclamation was issued at the commencement of a major military campaign, one of the last of the “Poligar Wars.” [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The legacy The Indian state is barely visible to comparative sociology. When the state is evident at all it appears as a weak form of Oriental despotism, destined to disappear as suddenly, and as casually, as it emerged. It seldom possesses mechanisms – hydraulic or otherwise – that could enable it to sustain itself for long. It depends mostly on ruthless shortsighted taxation of the countryside, which eventually leads to such chaos that it dissolves on its own or is conquered by some new entrant on the political scene. Weber, Marx, Maine, and more recently Dumont have all held that in India, in marked contrast to China, the state was epiphenomenal. Marx's view is typical: “Just as Italy has, from time to time, been compressed by the conqueror's sword into different national masses, so do we find Hindustan, when not under the pressure of the Mohammedan, or the Mogul, or the Briton, dissolved into as many independent and conflicting States as it numbered towns, or even villages” (1972,35). Marx saw these village communities as the necessary complement of Oriental despotism: “these idyllic village communities, inoffensive though they may appear, had always been the solid foundation of Oriental despotism, that they restrained the human mind within the smallest possible compass, making it the unresisting tool of superstition, enslaving it beneath traditional rules, depriving it of all grandeur and historical energies” (p. 40). While states came and went, village communities endured. For sociology, caste, not the state, held these village communities together. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Corporate groups are often portrayed as reducing conflict, both among their own members and in society more widely. Early modern European guilds and companies themselves claimed this: the Calw merchant company was founded in 1650 to combat ‘all sorts of disorders, abuses, unseemly self-seeking and other grievances’ which had led to stagnation in the worsted industry, while the Moderation worsted-weavers' guilds received new privileges in 1686 ‘to clear away the encroachment, disorder and confusion which has crept in … since in all trades, especially crafts, there is great need for good, useful ordinances and provisions, while in their absence all sorts of disruptions and ruination result’. Influential later theorists followed these views. Thus corporate groups were praised by Hegel for socializing their members to forsake self-seeking for the general good, and by Otto von Gierke for creating social harmony by resolving conflicts among their members and mediating peacefully between them and the wider society. Present-day historians, too, often argue that guilds played an important role in conflict resolution, with beneficent social effects. However, there are also theoretical arguments suggesting that guilds might have created conflict, and that the sort of conflict they created may have been more harmful than competition among individuals. If a guild was successful, it acted in such a way as to obtain monopoly and monopsony rents for its members. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Three broad questions have motivated this study. The first concerns the role of social institutions in the development of proto-industries, and of economies more generally, in early modern Europe. The second concerns whether early modern Europeans had mentalities leading them to manifest distinctively ‘pre-modern’ economic and demographic responses, which in turn affected the aggregate long-term development of their societies. The third question concerns the impact of the guilds and merchant companies which enjoyed state privileges over so much of European trade and industry until the end of the early modern period. In this concluding chapter, the various strands of argument advanced in earlier chapters are drawn together in order to address these three broad questions. First, what significance can be assigned to social institutions in explaining the development of proto-industries in particular and early modern European economies in general? Recent surveys of the proto-industrialization debate, including the survey in Chapter 2 above, conclude that the predictions of the original theories have largely been refuted by empirical findings. Research has revealed enormous variation in how proto-industries developed in different European regions. Whether a region experienced the demographic and familial transformation, the improved position of women, the agricultural development, the social stratification, the polarization of land ownership, the impoverishment, the breakdown in traditional institutions, the factory industrialization, or any of the other changes predicted by the original theories, did not depend on whether it was proto-industrial. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In numerous European societies during most of the early modern period many producers – even in proto-industry – were organized into guilds or guild-like organizations. What effect did this have on these economies? Some argue that guilds acted as cartels, which obtained monopoly ‘rents’ for their members and exerted malign effects on the wider economy; others claim that guilds were ineffectual, that their negative impact has been exaggerated, or even that they were positively beneficial. This debate can be broken down into three separate issues. The first is the question of the date to which guild regulation survived in Europe. Did guilds retain real powers into the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries? Or had they, by 1600 or 1700, degenerated into merely formal organizations with only remnants of their medieval powers? The second issue is whether guilds ever acted as effective monopolists. Did they actually succeed in restricting entry, limiting output or setting minimum prices? Did they try to do so but fail in practice? Or did they in fact have different aims altogether, such as quality maintenance and consumer protection? The third debate concerns whether guilds were harmful or beneficial. Did their monopolistic activities impose deadweight costs on the economy and reduce the flexibility needed for economic growth? Or were any costs they may have created outweighed by the benefits they generated by overcoming imperfections in markets for capital, quality or technological innovation? [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Lycurgus claimed that children belonged not individually to their fathers, but to the state. Lycurgus established meals at which all the citizens ate together a common fare ordained by law … The most exquisite of all their dishes was the one they called the black broth. Learning was a basic requirement common to all men. The ‘bread of reason’, as Danton called it, was a vital commodity to be distributed to every child in the family, and which the Montagnards in their Declaration of Rights vowed to ‘put within the reach of all citizens’. It was, in the words of Condorcet, a collective debt which ‘society owes equally to all its members’. Understood as a fundamental human and social right, it followed that its provision should be made by the state free of charge: ‘Equal rights would have been consecrated in vain’, wrote Roux-Fazillac, ‘if all the citizens without distinction were not able to acquire the same knowledge.’ But it was also understood to be an individual obligation and hence compulsory in nature: Lakanal ruled that those deprived families who did not bother to send their children to school would not be entitled to welfare payments. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The wretchedness attending our species subordinates a man to another man: it is not inequality which is a real misfortune, but dependence. FROM MENIAL SERVITUDE TO HONOURABLE POVERTY Attitudes to poverty during the French Revolution were largely fashioned by perceptions of inequality. In advocating progressive taxation or the extension of property rights, the Jacobins assumed that transfers from the rich to the poor would make a substantial dent in poverty and narrow the distance between the two. In pooling and rationing scarce commodities, they were hoping that a different distribution system might rectify unequal consumption even without an expansion of the country's productive capacity. The ‘myth’ of the ‘artificial dearth’ (la disette factice), which was denounced by Gironde, Montagne and sansculotte militants alike, was proof that this was a land of plenty, with shares for everyone, and reflected a strong sense of what is fair and who has the right to enjoy what in a free and equal market economy. The ancien régime differentiated between the acceptable and unacceptable faces of poverty. Pauvreté, on the one hand, encompassed a vast segment of the working population, those who lived on the brink of deprivation and whose main feature, as Olwen Hufton has shown, was vulnerability. Christian tradition had surrounded this category of long-suffering labouring poor with an aura of moral rectitude. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

It is up to specific laws to equalise, so to speak, the inequalities, by the charges they impose on the rich and the relief they grant the poor. THE FISCAL CONSENSUS BETWEEN GIRONDINS AND MONTAGNARDS One of the very first acts of the Constituent Assembly in 1789 was to enshrine in the Declaration of Rights the cardinal principle of fiscal justice, namely that, while all citizens were deemed equally liable to taxation, its burden should be spread between them ‘in proportion to their faculties’. In giving prominence to the canon of fair proportion rather than equal sacrifice, and thus opening wide the door to progressive taxation, the Constituents were simply echoing the conclusions of the leading tax reformers of their age. The economist Boisguilbert and the abbé de Saint-Pierre, intent on putting an end to ‘arbitrary taxation’ (la taille arbitraire), were among the first at the beginning of the century to have highlighted the merits of graduation; Montesquieu and Rousseau, having meditated on the sumptuary prescriptions of antiquity, considered it to be the only reliable foil against the impropriety of excessive wealth; and the chevalier de Jaucourt and Jean-Louis Graslin had persuasively argued in its favour in their bitter polemic with the physiocrats. ‘The burden of taxation’, Jaucourt had written, ‘must be assessed in accordance with the principles of distributive justice.’ [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

It is certain that the right of ownership is the most sacred of all the rights of the citizen and more important in certain respects than liberty itself. Beware of listening to that impostor: you are lost if you forget that the fruit belong to all and the land belongs to no one! The fair apportionment of essential commodities entailed no common ownership of the means of production, no wholesale redistribution of the land, no ‘agrarian law’ and few if any curtailments of individual property rights. Nevertheless, declarations of principle decreed at regular intervals by the Convention make it clear that while no erosion of the sacrosanct right of ownership would be tolerated, the ‘red scare’ was very real and the risk of such erosion taking place was clearly perceived. At its very first sitting, on 21 September 1792, Danton had moved to much acclaim that all ‘territorial, individual and industrial properties would be eternally maintained’; on 18 March 1793 the death sentence was imposed on whomsoever proposed a lex agraria or ‘any other law subversive of territorial, commercial and industrial properties’, while on 7 May the people's representatives-on-mission were charged with ‘affirming liberty and ensuring the guarantee of properties’ and on 21 September, as the Terror was inaugurated, the spectre of arbitrary land redistribution was once again squarely laid to rest. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

I see everywhere public stores containing the riches of the republic; and the magistrates, truly fathers of the country, have barely any other function than to maintain the mores and distribute to each family the things they require. THE RIGHT TO EXISTENCE The fair distribution of the ‘fruits of the earth’ represented the acid test of Jacobin egalitarianism, relegating all the other social and economic reforms to second place. The primary goal of society, according to Marat, was ‘bread for all’. The ‘right to subsistence’ which La Rochefoucauld-Liancourt had wanted to see included in the Declaration of 1789, the ‘right to existence’ demanded by Robespierre, the ‘right to live’ defended by Thuriot, the ‘preservation of life’ considered the first of all human rights by Romme, ‘equality of consumption’ proclaimed by Harmand – all amounted to a principle that pre-empted all others: that of each person's entitlement to food. The Jacobin rhetoric of subsistence was indistinguishable in this respect from that of the sans-culotte militants: ‘The life of men’, Jacques Roux proclaimed, ‘is the most sacred of properties.’ Was it permissible in these circumstances for a consumer's right of appropriation to extend with impunity to staple foodstuffs beyond individual entitlement, or should it be subordinated to the common welfare? [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Every evening, at supper, which was the only meal when all the family could be assembled, he would find himself, like a venerable patriarch, at the head of a numerous household; for we were normally twenty-two at table, including the ploughboys and the vine-tenders, who in winter were threshers, the cowherd, the shepherd and two dairymaids. THE RIGHTS OF MAN: FROM 1789 TO 1793 The reference to the rights of man is a constant feature of revolutionary egalitarianism and helps underscore its continuity. The abolition of privileges, which introduced civic and political equality into the revolutionary process on the night of 4 August 1789 and heralded the advent of greater material equality, clearly occupied the minds of those who set about drafting the Declaration of Rights that same month. The fact that the Declaration itself gives prominence to the individual liberties enshrined in previous English and American bills of rights should not detract from the recognition that it contains a number of significant egalitarian safeguards as well, and that a basic difference in conception lends it a strong political and economic bias. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Believe me, Sir, those who attempt to level, never equalise … The levellers therefore only change and pervert the natural order of things; they load the edifice of society, by setting up in the air what the solidity of the structure requires to be on the ground. WHO'S WHO AMONG THE JACOBINS AND THE GEOGRAPHY OF MODERATION Before attempting to elucidate further the ideological underpinnings of Jacobin egalitarianism, it may be helpful to introduce the principal protagonists of this study, many of whom belong to the amorphous body of rank-and-file Montagnards not often the subject of historiographical scrutiny. The reader is entitled to ask who they were and why the regional centres in which they operated, often far from the capital, are of specific interest to our topic. The short answer is that they represent the mainstream, though by no means the silent majority, that they put into practice what they preached and that their activities were largely concentrated in areas free from terrorist excess. While none were major revolutionaries of the stature of a Danton or a Robespierre, it would be equally misleading to suggest that they were merely practitioners imposing the will of the legislature in the depths of the French countryside. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

If we try to establish exactly what the greatest good for all consists in, which must be the true end of any system of legislation, we find it comes down to these two main objects: liberty and equality. The social and economic history of the French Revolution has been receiving a poor press in recent years and it may appear foolhardy to propose a new interpretation of Jacobin egalitarianism at a time when it has come under fire as extremist, dangerously utopian and inherently violent. Yet the central question at issue has been left unanswered by historians for whom intolerance and terror appear integral to the entire revolutionary project. How, in practice as well as in the legislative texts, were the egalitarian principles proclaimed by the Jacobins put into effect? What, in the context of a Revolution dedicated to liberalism and to individualism, could be achieved by democrats whose prime purpose was not to impose equality, but to reduce inequality? While the language of redistribution has several registers, some quite threatening, the prevailing one is altogether less strident and seems to indicate that the various tendencies at play in mainstream Jacobinism favoured the emergence of a broad-based consensus where matters of fundamental principle were involved. Commitment to social justice did not necessarily entail adherence to a single rigid ideology, or imply a willingness to resort to force. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]