The reason why the conflict between king and parliament in France resulted in such an altogether different outcome from the conflict between the American constituted bodies and the government in England lies exclusively in the totally different nature of these constituted bodies. The rupture between kind and parliament indeed threw the whole French nation into a "state of nature"; it dissolved automatically the political structure of the country as well as teh bonds among its inhabitants, which had rested not on mutual promises but on the various privileges accorded to each order and estate of society. Strictly speaking, there were no constituted bodies in the Old World. The constituted body itself was already an innovation born out of the necessities and indigenousness of those Europeans who had decided to leave the Old World not only in order to colonize a new continent but also for the purpose of establishing a new world order. The conflict of the colonies with king and Parliament in England dissolved nothing more than the charters granted the colonists and those privileges they enjoyed by virtue of being Englishmen; it deprived the country of its governors, but not of its legislative assemblies, and the people, while renouncing their allegiance to a king, felt by no means released from their own numerous compacts, agreements, mutual promises, and cosociations.
Hence, when the men of the French Revolution said that all power resides in the people, they understood by power a "natural" force whose source and origin lay outside the political realm, a force which in its very violence had been released by the revolution and liked a hurricane had swept away all institutions of the 'ancien regime'. This force was experienced as super human in its strength, and it was seen as the results of the accumulated violence of a multitude outside all bonds and all political organization. The experiences of the French Revolution with a people thrown into a "state of nature" left no doubt that the multiplied strength of a multitude could burst forth, under the pressure of misfortune with a violence which no institutionalized and controlled power could withstand. But these experiences also taught that, contrary to all theories, no such multiplication would ever give birth to power, that strength and violence in their pre-political states were abortive. The men of the French Revolution, not knowing how to distinguish between violence and power, and convinced that all power must come from the people, opened the political realm to this pre-political, natural force of the multitude and they were swept away by it as the kind and the older powers had been swept away before.
The men of the American Revolution, on the contrary, understood by power the very opposite of a pre-political natural violence. To them, power came into being when and where people would get together and bind themselves through promises, covenants and mutual pledges; only such power, which rested on reciprocity and mutuality, was real power and legitimate, whereas the so-called power of kings or princes or aristocrats, because it did not spring from mutuality but, at best, rested only on consent, was spurious and usurped. They themselves still knew very well what made them succeed where all other nations were to fail; it was, in the words of John Adams, the power of "confidence in one another, and in the common people, which enabled the United States to go through a revolution." This confidence moreover, arose not from a common ideology but from mutual promises and as such became the basis for "associations"-- the gathering-together of people for a specified political purpose. It is a melancholy thing to say (but I am afraid it contains a good measure of truth that this notion of "confidence in one another" as a principle of organized action has been present in other parts of the world only in conspiracy and in societies of conspirators.
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