Robert Roswell Palmer

Robert Roswell Palmer (January 11, 1909 – June 11, 2002), commonly known as R. R. Palmer, was a distinguished American historian at Princeton and Yale universities, who specialized in eighteenth-century France. His most influential work of scholarship, The Age of the Democratic Revolution: A Political History of Europe and America, 1760–1800 (1959 and 1964), examined an age of democratic revolution that swept the Atlantic civilization between 1760 and 1800. He was awarded the Bancroft Prize in History for the first volume. Palmer also achieved distinction as a history text writer.

Life

Born in Chicago, Illinois, Palmer accelerated through the public schools. By winning a citywide contest for a play written in Latin, he earned a full scholarship to the University of Chicago where he studied with the historian Louis Gottschalk and earned his bachelor's degree (Ph.B.) in 1931. He received his Ph.D. in History from Cornell University three years later, studying with Carl L. Becker. His dissertation was The French Idea of American Independence on the Eve of the French Revolution – "published/created" 1934.

Palmer began teaching at Princeton University as an instructor in 1936, and worked there for nearly three decades, becoming a full professor. He was dean of arts and sciences (1963–1966) at Washington University in St. Louis, then returned to teaching and writing at Yale, where he retired as professor emeritus. Palmer had visiting professorships at numerous universities, including Berkeley, Chicago, Colorado and Michigan. After retiring in 1977, he returned to Princeton as a guest scholar at its Institute for Advanced Study.

Palmer married Esther Howard in 1942, and they had three children and four grandchildren. His son, the historian Stanley Palmer, is a professor of history at the University of Texas at Arlington. After R.R. Palmer's death in 2002 at Newtown, Bucks County, Pennsylvania, a memorial service was held at Princeton Chapel.

Work

In 1950 Palmer published A History of the Modern World, which is in its eleventh edition as of 2013. (Joel Colton is a co-author from 1961, the 2nd edition, and Lloyd Kramer is coauthor from 2002, the 9th ed.) The text has been translated into six languages and is used in more than 1000 colleges and many AP European History high school courses. It is notable for its clear, essay-like writing style. Palmer's introduction covers the period from the earliest signs of human civilization to 1300 CE. The main body of the text covers events from the Black Death to the Fall of the Soviet Union in European history. The book is organized partly by ideas: for example, the relation of the French Revolution to modern and ancient thought may be mentioned before the French Revolution.

Palmer's most important work of historical scholarship is The Age of the Democratic Revolution: A Political History of Europe and America, 1760–1800. It was published by Princeton in two volumes: The Challenge (1959), which won the Bancroft Prize in American History, and The Struggle (1964). Palmer's masterwork traced the growth of two competing forces – ideas of democracy and equality, on the one hand, and the growing power of aristocracies in society, on the other – and the results of the collision between these forces, including both the American Revolution and the French Revolution. Thus it foreshadowed the development of "comparative Atlantic history" as a field. It remains a valuable resource for scholars. In 1971 Palmer published a slightly revised and condensed version of the second volume as The World of the French Revolution.

The following is a chapter by chapter summary — with copious quotations — of "The Age of Democratic Revolution: the Challenge":

• Palmer's two volumes aim to treat the movement toward democracy as a pan-European (including the American "colonies" and to a far less extent South America) phenomenon. His account is valuable for its treatment of the various democratic movements that failed—in Geneva, Poland, Ireland, Sweden, Belgium, the Netherlands, England, Italy, and Hungary—movements for the most part entirely forgotten, that is to say, forced into historical oblivion by the historical status (rightly) accorded the outstandingly successful American (1775-1787) and French (1789-1800) Revolutions.
• Note's the work of Professor J. L. Talmon (The Rise of Totalitarian Democracy [Boston, 1952]) who traces Soviet communism back to the doctrines of Robespierre and Rousseau. Talmon was an enemy of communism; Palmer, however, notes that Marx, Lenin, and Trotsky (as well as Soviet scholars) would not repudiate this lineage.
• Discussion of the history of the words 'Democrat' and 'Aristocrat' in European languages. This is a very fine discussion the details of which defy notation. [13-20]
• Corporate Rights (i.e. the rights of groups of people) vs. Individual Rights [28ff]
• The trappings and duties of "aristocracy" [30]
• Montesquieu's notion of aristocracy as the bulwark against a despotic executive; compared with Adam's view of aristocracy as the vehicle of despotism and a strong executive as the protector of the people [57-59].
• "Whenever old disorders have been eradicated speedily and with success, it will be seen that it was the work of a single enlightened person against many private interests."—Pietro Verri on the enlightened despotism Maria Theresa (1765). [105]
• Intermediate bodies (i.e. the nobility) as checking the king. [106]
• Discussion of Jean Jacques Rousseau's The Social Contract (1762) [119ff]

"The act by which a people acknowledges and confirms itself is a united people" = The General Will [121]

Reading this account the realization forces itself upon one that in present-day America the 'General Will' had collapsed—undermined to dilapidation by Blue-state/Red-state extremism et alia.

"That the depositories of executive power are not the masters of the people, but its officers; that the people may establish or remove them as they please. {R.]" [123]

"It is precisely because the force of things always tends to destroy equality that the force of legislature should always tend to maintain it."—Thus Empress Maria Theresa favors the common man against the Bohemian landlords. [124]

The primacy of public over private duty: "In a good state men will have little private interest or private business; they will constantly be busy as citizens, attending assemblies, watching over officials, ratifying laws. [P.]" {But recall that Rousseau's model was the tiny republic of Geneva where direct democracy was at least potentially possible}

Disease, madness, unhinging of the mind, forgetfulness of the past, rebirth from the ashes = the revolutionary process! [126]

The problem of imposing of a common will: the 'dictatorship' of the Terror and the proto-totalitarian character of any radical revolution when enacted in the face of a capable and resisting status quo. [126]

• Resistance to taxation qua taxation—the great American tradition: "In their habit of depending on the British they were truly provincial. They had little notion of providing for their own defense; they recognized no problems of international relations with which it was incumbent upon them to deal. In the matter of taxes they were, indeed, in the state of nature; as late as 1778 the Continental Congress wrote to Franklin, then in Paris, that since the Americans had never been much taxed before the Revolution it would be madness to tax them now, so that the war with Britain made it urgent to obtain a loan from France. One suspects that 'no taxation without representation' meant no taxation with representation, either; even Thomas Paine, in 1780, thought Americans should pay more taxes." [157]
• The American Revolution construed in terms of The Social Contract: "The British government, in its own way, tried to do something for the West India sugar planters, the American Indians, the French Canadians, and the British taxpayers. Its policies in America were in part shaped by these needs. The Americans recognized no such needs as the proper determinants of policy in America. There had ceased to be, in Rousseau's phrase, any general will for the empire as a whole, by which Americans would accept sacrifices in the interests of others with whom they felt common ties." [173]
• The Question "Was there really an American Revolution?" [185ff]

One school holds "that there was no 'democratic revolution' in America because America was already democratic in the colonial period. [186]

Palmer argues, "There was a real revolution in America, and it was a painful conflict in which many were injured." He validates this claim by means of "two quantitative and objective measures: how many refugees were there from the American Revolution, and how much property did they lose in comparison to the French Revolution?"

Palmer's brilliant paradox: "The American Revolution was, indeed, a movement to conserve what already existed. It was hardly, however, a 'conservative' movement, and it can give limited comfort to the theorists of conservatism, for it was the weakness of the conservative forces in eighteenth-century America, not their strength, that made the American Revolution as moderate as it was." [189] What he means, as he goes on to show clearly, is that because there was no violent conservative counter-revolution in America, there was no need for the American revolutionaries to violently assert themselves. Compare here the situation in France: the regicide of King Louis XVI and the period of the Terror in France that followed were motivated by the power and threat of counter-revolution: the French aristocratic émigrés who, with the aid of Austrian and Prussian bayonets, were ready and eager (in the summer of 1792) to reinstall the monarchy and void the gains of the Revolution [Vol. II].

• The Pennsylvania constitution of 1776: "All male taxpayer twenty-one years of age had the vote, and were eligible for any office. To sit in the assembly, however, it was necessary publicly to acknowledge the divine inspiration of the Old and New Testaments." {A fine stick in the eye for those who wish to deny the Christian roots of early American political consciousness.} [220]
• Adam's library was ultimately found to contain four (!) copies of The Social Contract. [223]
• The origin of the concept of Constitutional Government': "The idea of limited government, the habit of thinking in terms of two levels of law, of an ordinary law checked by a higher constitutional law, thus came out of the realities of colonial experience." [234] . . . "A modern authority on Swiss constitutional history emphasizes 'the continuing importance' of the fact that with the American Revolution, 'the formal establishment of a written constitution as the basis of public law and political organization made its appearance for the first time.'" [265]
• "Rights demanded for human beings as such (cf. Cicero). It was not necessary to be English, or even American, to have an ethical claim to them."
• "Henceforth the United States, in Louis Hartz's phrase (cf. The Liberal Tradition in America), would be the land of the frustrated aristocrat, not of the frustrated democrat; for to be an aristocrat it is not enough to think of oneself as such, it is necessary to be thought so by others; and never again would deference for social rank be a characteristic American attitude. Elites, for better or for worse, would henceforth be on the defensive against popular values." [235]
• Chapter IX "Europe and the American Revolution" records the effect of the American Revolution in Europe—particularly its intellectual reverberations.

"The first and greatest effect of the American Revolution in Europe was to make Europeans believe, or rather feel, often in a highly emotional way, that they lived in a rare moment of momentous change. They saw a kind of drama of the continents." [239]

Brissot (the virtual head of the French government in 1792): "He has been called an early pre-socialist, and credited with the idea that property is theft, but he was also involved in speculation in Ohio River land, and with this in mind made a trip to the United States . . . etc." [261]

"The great problem (and it was a real problem) was to prevent the powers thus constituted from usurping more authority than they had been granted. According to one school, this should be done by a balance of constituted institutions or 'powers'; according to the other "the people itself must maintain constant vigilance and restraint upon the powers of government . . . Brissot belonged emphatically to the second school. The Constituent Power, or People, he said, must keep perpetual watch over government." [262-3]

Palmer's comment: "B. saw one side of the American constitutional doctrine, that the people should ordain government. He did not see the other side, that the people having ordained government should allow themselves to be governed by it, or that having set limits they ought to abide by the limits, and short of extreme provocation, be content with the occasional and strictly legalized power to vote unwanted officials out of office. Even democrats in America came to accept this somewhat routinized constitutionalism." [265]

How in late 18th century Prussia "The idea that the 'people,' that is the governed, should take part in the formation or conduct of government was unfamiliar."

"One problem, however, preoccupied all of the French and all of the Americans in this international argument. It was the problem of how best to prevent the growth of a hereditary aristocracy."

The dispute between Turgot (Louis XVI's principal minister between 1774 and 1776) and John Adams. Turgot objected to the doctrine of separation of powers' since he thought that the Nation must be represented as an undifferentiated whole. [267-9]

Abbé Mably joined Adams in opposition to Turgot. "Regarded as an early prophet of socialism, he had remarked to Adams (and Adams agreed) that people who are hungry cannot be punctilious about virtue." . . . He was painfully aware of inequalities of wealth. He thought that the rich and poor had different interests. Hence, unlike Turgot, he believed that American government should have powers of regulation to prevent the accumulation of excessive fortunes." . . . "Mably did not believe in Adam's popularly elected executive (neither did any Frenchman, or Jefferson either), but he did firmly believe in a two-chamber system with a strong senate, by which 'aristocracy and democracy are held in equilibrium. [270]

Adam's "reading of European history taught him, what it never taught most democrats, Jeffersonians or Whigs, that monarchy over the centuries had often protected the people against the nobles."---Adams wrote--"[the executive] is the natural friend of the people, and the only defense which they or their representatives can have against the avarice and ambition of the rich and distinguished citizens." And it is the usual practice "of a few illustrious and wealthy citizens to excite clamors and uneasiness" against the executive, which is the essence of government.

According to Adams [Palmer writes] "The rich should be made to sit apart in a house of their own, not to protect their own interests, and not because in a popular one-chamber system the people would despoil them, but for the opposite reason, because if the rich sat in a one-chamber house they would corrupt the popular representation, and despoil the people." [274]

Adams: "There is no special Providence for Americans, and their nature is the same as others." . . . In America, too, he thought people easily fell into the habit of accepting the leadership of a few families; in the simplest New England town meetings, he observed, men of the same families were elected to office for four and five generations." [274]

How Adams perplexed his readers by his careless use of the word "orders". He was referring to different orders of political office (senate, popular assembly, executive); whereas his critics mistook him to be referring to social orders such as Kings, Lords, and Commons.

Jefferson Notes on Virginia: he faulted Virginia's constitution for the particular defect of its "dominion over the executive and judiciary by the legislative assembly", which he called "elective despotism"; but which Adams referred to as "aristocracy." [276]

The views of Condorcet (friend and biographer of Turgot, and future intellectual luminary of the revolution soon to come to France).

Condorcet, like Turgot, advocate for a single assembly to represent simply the nation as such. [278]

Though the Revolution brought him to accept manhood suffrage, in 1788 he favored voting rights only for those who owned enough landed property to live without working; to smaller landowners he proposed giving fractional votes. [278]

• Dupont de Nemours writing to Jefferson: "there is a perfect government, the beau idéal of government," better than even the Americans yet have, but which the nations will enjoy some day because of the perfectibilité de l'esprit humain (= "the prefectablility of the human spirit"). "Nothing could be further from Mably, or from Adams, or even from Jefferson, all of whom preferred to trust in institutional arrangements rather than in human nature or mere declared rights, to prevent the usurpation of power." [279]
• We Americans enjoy "perfect equality" as a nation of small farmers; there never has been and is not now a trace of aristocracy among us; we have no orders, ranks, or nobility. --John Stevens, an "affluent landed gentleman" and author of a critique of Adams' views called Observations on Government (1787). However, his disagreements with Adams were non-essential.
• The French reception of Adams and Stevens was significant: "They [the French] disagreed on the matter of constitutional powers; they declared, unlike Stevens, that an upper chamber, and an executive veto, were useless imitations of the British constitution. There need be only a single omnicompetent assembly, checked by frequent elections, by direct intervention of the people, and by declaration of rights." [281]
• Palmer now explains—in what I consider his most illuminating remarks—how matters on the ground made it impossible for the French to simply assume the American constitution lock, stock, and barrel.

"In France an upper chamber would mean a chamber composed largely of the high nobility, and the executive was bound to mean King Louis XVI, who by June 1879 had got himself into the position of supporting the nobility against the Third Estate." [281]

"There were really two meanings to the separation of powers, which the Americans could keep separate and which the French could not. There was [on the one hand] the idea of separation of social classes, the old idea of Montesquieu, expressible in the formula of King, Lords, and Commons. There was [on the other hand] the idea of separation between functions of government, expressible in the formula of executive, senate, and assembly. The French were not free to have the latter without the former."

"In America the senators were not lords, nor were the governors kings; they were temporary occupants of office, with no personal right to the exercise of public authority." Here Adams, Stevens, Jefferson, and Franklin all agreed—as did all Americans "after the defeat of the Loyalists." [282]

"In France [however] the essence of the revolution was the revolt of the Third Estate against the nobility. With the hostile nobility to overcome, and a king sympathetic with the nobility to contend with, the creation of an upper house and a strong independent executive was simply not among the possible choices for men interested in furthering the French Revolution."

Ergo: Politics is once again shown to be the art of the possible!

• In the next section, Two Parliaments Escape Reform, Palmer explains how the parliaments of Ireland and England escaped the early attempts at rendering them more democratic [285-308]; then he discusses the "The Conservatism of Edmund Burke" [308-316].

His discussion of Burke is not very enlightening. It does, however, portray Burke as somewhat self-serving and not entirely consistent, and as not having the respect of his colleagues in the British Commons, many of whom would walk out when he began his fumigations! Special reference is made to Burke's undelivered speech probably meant for June 16, 1784--"a beautifully compact statement of what was to become philosophical conservatism." [313-17]

"The point to be emphasized in the present connection is that Burke's conservatism was well formed long before the French Revolution."

• The next notable section is entitled The Limitations of Enlightened Despotism. There Palmer relates the failed attempts of the Kings of France and of Sweden, and of the Queen of Hungary and Bohemia to restrain the constituted bodies (dominated exclusively by the landed nobility) by means of the assertion of royal authority.
• The Lessons of Poland follows, where Palmer explains the political circumstances—which were at the same time the causes—of the first two partitions of Poland: the partition of 1772 occurred because the Poles lacked a powerful central government to resist the aggression of Prussia, Austria, and Russia; that of 1793 occurred because Russia and Prussia (with the support of the disempowered Polish nobility) refused to let stand the liberal/democratic constitution revisions of 1991.

How Adams was horrified by conditions in Poland where 'a gentleman' was fined only fifty livres for killing a peasant. A government without three independent branches, he concluded, would degenerate either into absolute monarchy or into aristocracy, as in Poland, where "nobility will annihilate the people, and attended with their horses, hounds and vassals, will run down the king as they would a deer." [412]

Poland suffered from a strange institution of noble prerogative called the Liberum Veto (in habitual use from 1652) whereby "any deputy in the central diet [assembly of the nobility], acting as the representative of his home assembly (and in practice carrying out the will of some magnate--or foreign prince even!) could arise in the diet and by pronouncing the formula, sic nolo, sic veto, not merely block the legislation in question, but force the dissolution of the diet itself. Forty-eight of fifty-five diets held between 1652 and 1764 were thus arbitrarily dissolved by minority or indeed individual interests. [Thus, in view of the powerlessness of the executive, i.e. the Polish King] There was a general atrophy of the institutions of government." {Can anyone say 'Filibuster'?}

The free veto [Liberum Veto] meant that a principle of unanimity prevailed; thus, it entailed a denial of the principle of majority rule in deliberate bodies. "Acceptance of majority rule, Konopczynski reminds us (and it is easy to forget) is in fact a difficult, artificial, and acquired habit of mind. It depends on several prerequisites: first, that votes be counted, not evaluated in importance according to the identity of the voter; that is, that all votes be considered equal. In the order of business discussion must be distinctly followed by voting, lest nothing emerge but a vague sense of the meeting, or apparent unanimity in which responsibilities are indefinite and differences of opinion are temporarily covered up, only to break out later. There must be a party of some kind, personal, political, religious, or economic, willing to work for years to carry out a decision, and to resist its reversal. It is well to have a settled and fixed population, for if dissidents can simply go away, or retire so far into the depths of the country as to be forgotten, they never learn to submit to majority wishes, nor does the majority learn to govern. A strong executive is useful, for there can be no majority rule unless minorities are obliged to accept decisions once made. Lastly, persons who in their own right are the masters of men, sovereigns on estates with subjects of their own, submit with reluctance to a majority even of their own equals; majority rule has always seemed more reasonable to middle classes than to seigneurs. [417]

"European monarchs, as Rousseau told the Poles, were fond of liberty for their neighbors, because they believed that liberty made men weak. Nor can this cynical opinion be called mistaken . . . " (Palmer means, in light of the way the monarchs actually did run roughshod over the early democratic movements in Europe . . . at least until Napoleon—and even he ended up a 'monarch'!) [422]

Palmer relates how the "liberal/democratic" Polish constitution of 1991 became an ideological football: the French radicals condemning it as too weak; Burke commending it as a refutation of the violence of the French Revolution; the authoritarian monarchs of Prussia, Austria, and Russia condemning it as 'rank Jacobinism'. [429-424]

• Palmer ends his first volume with The French Revolution: the Aristocratic Resurgence [439-67] and The French Revolution: the Explosion of 1789 [469-502]. Together they constitute a marvelously lucid account of the run up to and launching of the French Revolution. Palmer's overall account is the clearest that I have encountered so far. To anyone interested I would suggest reading these chapters after breezing through George Lefebvre's short classic The Coming of the French Revolution.

[End of summary]

The 1941 monograph Twelve Who Ruled is also noteworthy. It has been in print since its first edition, was reissued with a new preface in 1989 for the French Revolution bicentennial, and was reissued as a Princeton Classic in 2005 as part of the University Press centennial celebration. The book is a fusion of history and collective biography, focusing on the members of the Committee of Public Safety and their efforts to guide France during the Terror following their Revolution. Columbia University history professor Isser Woloch, a specialist in the Revolutionary and Napoleonic eras, has stated that Twelve Who Ruled "may be the best book on the French Revolution written by an American."

Selected works

• The French Idea of American Independence on the Eve of the French Revolution (Cornell Univ. PhD dissertation) – "published/created" 1934
• Catholics and Unbelievers in Eighteenth Century France (Princeton University Press, 1939)
• Twelve Who Ruled: the Committee of Public Safety, during the Terror (Princeton, 1941; Bicentennial ed. with a new preface, 1989)
• The Procurement and Training of Ground Combat Troops, by Palmer, Bell I. Wiley and William R. Keast (Department of the Army, 1948) – about the U.S. Army, 1939–1945
• A History of the Modern World (Alfred A. Knopf, 1950); 11th ed. by Palmer, Joel Colton, and Lloyd Kramer (McGraw-Hill, 2013)
• The Age of the Democratic Revolution: a political history of Europe and America, 1760–1800 (Princeton, vol. 1, 1959; vol. 2, 1964) online edition vols. 1–2; online free
• The World of the French Revolution (Allen & Unwin, 1971) – shorter and less scholarly treatment of The Age, vol. 2
• The Improvement of Humanity: education and the French Revolution (Princeton, 1985)

• Georges Lefebvre, The Coming of the French Revolution, 1789 (Princeton, 1947) [orig. 1939]
• The School of the French Revolution: a documentary history of the College of Louis-le-Grand and its director, Jean-François Champagne, 1762–1814 (Princeton, 1975), edited and transl. by Palmer
• Louis Bergeron, France Under Napoleon (Princeton, 1981) [orig. 1972]
• The Two Tocquevilles, Father and Son: Hervé and Alexis de Tocqueville on the coming of the French Revolution (Princeton, 1987), ed. and transl. by Palmer
• Jean-Paul Bertaud, The Army of the French Revolution: from citizen-soldiers to instrument of power (Princeton, 1988) [orig. 1979]
• From Jacobin to Liberal: Marc-Antoine Jullien, 1775–1848 (Princeton, 1993), selected and transl. with commentary by Palmer
• Jean Baptiste Say, An Economist in Troubled Times: writings (Princeton, 1997), selected and transl. by Palmer

• Atlas of World History (Rand McNally, 1957; Revised ed., 1965)

From 1983 the [Rand McNally] Atlas of World History, general editor R. I. Moore, is based on The Hamlyn Historical Atlas (Hamlyn, 1981).

Honors and awards

• 1960, Bancroft Award in History, American Council of Learned Societies Special Prize
• 1961, served as president of the Society for French Historical Studies
• 1970, president of the American Historical Association
• 1990, Antonio Feltrinelli International Prize for History in Rome
• Honorary degrees awarded by the universities of Uppsala and Toulouse