THE WESTERN CHARACTER OF THE NATIONAL REVOLUTIONS
Like the Protestant Reformation in Germany, the English Revolution, the American Revolution, the French Revolution, and the Russian Revolution were, of course, national revolutions.
The Papal Revolu--23-
tion, by contrast, was a transnational revolution, a revolution throughout Europe in behalf of the clergy, under the pope, against imperial, royal, and feudal domination. Clearly, the Papal Revolution may be called Western or European, but is it proper to characterize the national revolutions in the same way? Two points should be made with respect to this question that bear directly on an understanding of the Papal Revolution.
First, all the national revolutions from the sixteenth century on -- except the American -- were directed in part against the Roman Catholic (or in Russia, the Orthodox) Church, and all of them transferred large portions of the canon-law from the church to the national state, thus secularizing them. Therefore in studying the legal systems, both ecclesiastical and secular, that were created in the late eleventh and the twelfth and thirteenth centuries under the impact of the Papal Revolution, it must be borne in mind that a great many elements of those systems eventually passed into the secular law of all the European nations, under the impact of the national revolutions. In this respect, the national revolutions had an international character.
Second, all the great national revolutions of the West were also, in their very nature, Western revolutions. Each of them was prepared in several countries. The Protestant Reformation was prepared by Wyclif in England and Hus in Bohemia, as well as by active reform movements in every country of Europe, before it broke out in Germany. The Puritan movement in England not only was based on the earlier teachings of the French-Swiss reformer John Calvin, but it also had close ties with other Calvinist movements in Holland and elsewhere on the Continent.
The Enlightenment of the eighteenth century was an allWestern phenomenon, which formed the ideological basis not only of both the American and French revolutions but also of agitation for radical change in England and elsewhere. The Russian Revolution was born in the international communist movement founded by two Germans; its roots lay in the Paris Commune of 1870.Similarly, the national revolutions had enormous all-Western repercussions after they broke out. The immediate effect of their outbreak was invariably a reaction of fear and hostility in other countries -Âfear of the spread of the revolutionary virus, hostility toward the nation that was its bearer. Eventually, after twenty or thirty years, when the revolution had settled down in its home country, the other countries accepted a mild version of it. Thus, after the Lutheran Revolution had subsided in Germany, absolute monarchies with a strong civil service appeared in England, France, and other countries; after the Puritan Revolution had subsided in England, constitutional monarchies and quasi-parliamentary institutions emerged on the European continent in the late 1600s and early 1700s; after the French and American revolutions had subsided, the English enlarged the electorate to include the middle classes in
-24- 1832; and after the Russian Revolution had subsided, "socialist" or "new deal" governments appeared in the 1930s in western Europe and the United States.
More important, the legal institutions of the various nations of Europe, although they became more distinctively national and less European from the sixteenth century on, nevertheless retained their Western character. This was true despite the fact that the secular courts and secular law squeezed the ecclesiastical courts and the canon law into an increasingly narrower jurisdiction, and in addition, even the Roman Catholic Church became increasingly nationalized.
Nevertheless, there were many common bonds among the various national legal systems.
All these systems share some basic modes of categorization. For example, they all strike a balance between legislation and adjudication and, in adjudication, between code law and case law. They make a sharp division between criminal law and civil law. In all, crimes are analyzed (as they were first analyzed by Abelard in the early twelfth century) in terms of act, intent or negligence, causation, duty, and similar concepts. In all, civil obligations are divided, either expressly or implicitly, into contract, delict (tort), and unjust enrichment (quasicontract). Behind these and many other common analytical categories lie common policies and common values. In the 1930s, for instance, when a statute of National Socialist Germany made punishable as a crime any act that "deserves punishment according to sound popular feeling (gesundes Volksgefuhl," this was viewed as a violation of the traditional Western concept of legality; and the Permanent Court of International Justice struck down a similar law of the Free City of Danzig, which was based on the German statute, as contrary to the rule of law (Rechustaat).