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CITIZENSHIP

CITIZENSHIP. In the modern world, citizenship is a legal status that bestows uniform rights and duties upon all members of a state. Modern citizenship is associated with equality before the law, freedom from arbitrary rule, and a basic sense of human dignity bound up with the idea of human rights. It is a powerful term that evokes not only the rights that citizens may claim, but also the duties to which they are called, including dying for one's country. In early modern Europe, the status of citizen was far feebler and more varied in nature. At the dawn of this period, there were no centralized national states, and the vast majority of the population were servile peasants who lived under the rule of a local lord. The idea of citizenship, that is, a body of free people bound by a common law, was restricted to those who enjoyed full rights of membership in privileged towns, the burghers or bourgeois. There was no concept of universal rights of citizens. Rights took the form of privileges that were legitimated by tradition and distributed inequitably according to place, rank, and membership in other corporate bodies—guilds, parliaments, universities, and the like. Urban citizenship was thus just one form of juridical status that coexisted alongside a wide array of corporate groups entitling members to rights and privileges.

RIGHTS AND RESPONSIBILITIES

In general, the citizenship of towns offered several kinds of benefits. Only citizens could hold municipal office and perhaps engage in lucrative urban trades. They enjoyed the privilege of being tried in a local court by their peers and were usually entitled to reduced taxes. Citizenship was commonly restricted to the propertied elite. Jean-Jacques Rousseau's Geneva, for example, was divided into an inner core of "citizens" and "bourgeois" who exercised full urban rights, and a wider tier of "inhabitants" and "natives," who had the right to live in the city but not to participate in the most profitable professions or hold municipal office.

The actual type and worth of rights conferred by urban citizenship varied by town. In Zurich and London citizenship was not prerequisite for access to the guilds. In fact, guild membership could be a way to acquire citizenship. In sixteenth-century Antwerp, it was not uncommon for members of the city council to register for citizenship just before taking office. In some cases, acquisition of citizenship was turned into a routine commercial transaction. In theory, the laws of sixteenth-century Bologna made it difficult for naturalized citizens to hold municipal office. In reality, citizens selected for office frequently designated a substitute to fill the post, a practice that amounted to a form of office selling. Nonetheless, urban citizenship might offer important advantages to its members. Citizens of Antwerp (poorters), for example, could not be arrested without cause and were exempt from torture. This was of little concern until the 1540s when the number of registrations for citizenship in Antwerp suddenly jumped. At that time, the town council began to use Antwerp's citizenship rights to protect persecuted Protestants.

Citizenship entailed responsibilities as well as rights. Citizens might be required to serve in the urban militia and to pay local taxes supporting the cost of communal self-government and fortifications. The status of citizen was usually inherited, but it could also be acquired by foreigners. Usually, naturalization required establishing a residence within the city for an extended period of time, paying specified taxes, and taking on other obligations of urban membership. Frequently, citizenship was associated with social and moral qualities. Many central European cities refused citizenship to adulterers and bastards.

Citizenship first became the object of more systematic theoretical reflection in self-governing Italian city-states during the early Renaissance. The recovery of Aristotle and other classical authors, combined with the struggle of Italian city-states to assert their independence from emperors and foreign invaders, stimulated thinkers to clarify the basis of political community. One important strand drew on the work of Bartolus of Sassoferato and his pupil, Baldus de Ubaldis, the most influential jurists working in the Roman law tradition. They provided the first philosophical foundation for viewing the city-state as a fully independent, self-governing corporation of citizens.

A second important tradition drew on Florentine civic humanism. Humanists argued that the best form of government was elective, not monarchical, since elected rulers would best work to achieve the goals of the republic: to attain glory, sustain liberty, and preserve the common good. The civic humanist tradition culminated in the Discourses of Niccolò Machiavelli, who wrote in a period of tumult following the French invasion of Italy in 1494. Looking back to the tradition of the Roman Republic, Machiavelli urged his fellow citizens to prevent decline by practicing virtù. For Machiavelli, virtù meant the patriotic love of the republic that led citizens to place the welfare of the political community above individual interests. Good laws and institutions were also necessary to sustain virtù. Among the latter, the most important were civil religion to foster a spirit of unity and a citizen militia to encourage a spirit of self-sacrifice and bravery.

NATIVES AND FOREIGNERS

Given its classical, urban, and corporate roots, citizenship was not easily transferred to monarchical realms, where the king reputedly embodied the state and where vast aristocratic patron-client systems created webs of political obligation. A rudimentary idea of citizenship did distinguish native-born subjects of kingdoms (known as denizens in England, regnicoles in France, and naturales in Spain) from foreigners, who suffered various kinds of disabilities. In Spain, only naturales of the five kingdoms of Aragón could hold offices in their respective kingdoms, engage in transatlantic commerce, or emigrate to the New World. In England, aliens could not vote in parliamentary elections, hold real property, own a British ship, or engage in the profitable colonial trade. In France, foreigners or aubains (a term originally applied to outsiders moving into the jurisdiction of a feudal lord) paid special taxes, and the king could seize their property upon death. Naturalization removed these disabilities. Naturalization might require proof of assimilation into the national culture, as was the case in Spain, or merely be a routine bureaucratic procedure. In France, one had to do little more than offer evidence of Catholicity and French residence and pay the necessary fees. In England, aliens could apply to Parliament for a private naturalization act, a route that was generally closed to Jews, Catholics, and Dissenters. A lesser status of "free denizen," which bestowed the right to participate in the colonial trade, could be purchased by those groups, but it did not grant exemption from steep alien custom duties.

In most cases, the status of a woman, whether at the municipal or national level, followed that of her husband. At times, however, foreign women married to foreign men seeking naturalization were required to be naturalized independently of their husbands. Because women generally could not hold office or practice lucrative trades, naturalization was of less worth to them than to men. Citizenship for women tended to remain a passive status that granted basic judicial protections, but did not authorize vital rights of political participation. Later, during the French Revolution, the secondary status of women was reconfirmed by the overt creation of "active" and "passive" categories of citizenship.

Throughout the early modern period, the quest for religious freedom and the evolution of citizenship remained closely tied. In the medieval world, the political community was also a closed community of Christian believers. Jews were outsiders, frequently banished, and allowed residence in certain countries only if they lived in specified locales, wore distinctive dress, paid special taxes, and the like. With the Reformation, Christian unity was shattered and states were "confessionalized," so that the enjoyment of civil and political rights became tied to membership in the established church of the realm. Religious dissenters might be prohibited from holding office, bequeathing property, joining guilds, obtaining an education, marrying, bringing up their own children, and receiving a Christian burial. In certain cases, toleration was granted as a concession from the ruler or in limited form, such as the right to private worship. Freedom of religion as a universal right of citizenship, however, was only conceptualized after natural law theory offered a nondoctrinal way of legitimating membership in the state.

FROM ABSOLUTE MONARCHY TO ENLIGHTENMENT

The period of religious revolt in the later sixteenth and seventeenth centuries was critical to the rise of absolutist citizenship. Rebellious subjects invoked rights of the "ancient constitution" against absolute monarchs, or cited resistance theories that vested sovereignty in the ambiguous notion of "the people." The bloodshed of the period led royal theorists to define the citizen as a subject who owed unquestioned obedience to the sovereign in return for protection. In his Six Books of the Commonwealth, Jean Bodin stated that the citizen was "a free subject who is dependent on the sovereignty of another" (p. 19). Approximately a century later, in De Cive, or, The Citizen (1642), Thomas Hobbes presented a contractual theory of political society in which men voluntarily gave up the natural rights that they enjoyed in the bellicose state of nature to a ruler or ruling body in order to gain security: ". . . each citizen is called the subject of him who hath the chief command" (p. 68).

Despite Hobbes's theorizing, subjects showed themselves determined to hold onto historic rights. After James II was ousted from the English throne during the Glorious Revolution of 1688, a Bill of Rights declared that hierarchically ordered "estates" would be maintained in their "ancient rights and liberties." At the same time, John Locke's Second Treatise on Government pointed the way toward a far more radical interpretation of rights as abstract, natural, and universal in scope. For Locke, rights were "inalienable," derived from a free and egalitarian state of nature. Governments were not products of dynastic inheritance or divine will: they were artificial creations grounded in popular consent whose central purpose was to secure citizens' rights. Popularized through tracts such as Cato's Letters, a Lockean conception of rights ultimately became one of the major foundations of the American Declaration of Independence.

By the eighteenth century, then, the usage of the word "citizen" had begun to shed its absolutist association with "subject" and break free from the idea of graded ranks and historically conditioned privileges. This transformation was part of a wider linguistic shift. Words connoting a vertical ordering of society organized by notions of deference and command were abandoned or took on new meaning. The word "king" became uncoupled from "nation," which he had previously embodied. The word "society" no longer meant a business partnership, but a universal field of human relations. Social gradations still existed, but they were often described as classes, which implied productivity and individual effort, rather than as estates, orders, or corps, which suggested a preexisting, divinely sanctioned hierarchy. In the article "Citizen" in his Encyclopedia, Denis Diderot defined the citizen not in terms of participation in the privileges of a city, but as "a member of a free society . . . who partakes of the rights of that society and enjoys its privileges."

Two moral qualities were particularly associated with the citizen: utility and virtue. Political economists spread the idea that the most powerful state was the one that counted the greatest number of "industrious" men. The pursuit of plenty, according to these thinkers, was not something to be scorned for its corruption of civic spirit, but to be praised for its ability to unleash national productive power. Utility did not necessarily negate hierarchy, but it did shift the justification for social ranks from innate qualities, like noble birth, to functional attributes available to any hardworking person.

Virtue continued to be defined by reference to classical republican qualities. In his Spirit of the Laws, Montesquieu spoke of virtue in terms of "the love of our country, of the thirst of true glory, of self-denial, of the sacrifice of our dearest interests, and of all those heroic virtues which we admire in the ancients" (Vol. I, Bk. III.5, p. 23). Yet virtue also acquired enlightened overtones of sociability and humanitarianism. Rousseau spoke of virtue not only in terms of patriotic self-sacrifice, but also of sensibility and pity revealed through the inner voice of the conscience. For Rousseau and others, virtue was a humanitarian sentiment most easily found among the common people. By imparting moral worth to ordinary people, virtue legitimated their quest to gain a political voice.

Many rejected the ideals of classical republicanism as a model for citizenship altogether. The direct democracy suitable to small, face-to-face societies like the ancient republics would not work in large, culturally diffuse states. Furthermore, too much popular participation had opened up ancient republics to constant factionalism. Rather than relying on direct democracy, men like Jean Louis de Lolme argued, it would be better to set up a passive system of representation and create institutional checks and balances to channel the interests of the people toward the common good. Ancient republics, furthermore, had practiced slavery, denigrated women and domestic life, spurned commercial development, and even permitted infanticide. Republican citizenship would have to be made compatible with the technological progress, commercial prosperity, and humane virtues that most enlightened elites endorsed.

THE SOCIAL CONTRACT

By the end of the eighteenth century, then, two visions of republican citizenship had emerged. One, often labeled "liberal," was derived from a natural law tradition and emphasized the rights of individuals, representation, and material progress. It was concerned with checking arbitrary power and securing the conditions that would allow men and women to enjoy the fruits of their labor in peace. A second, more activist and communal strand inspired by classical republicanism appealed to civic virtues of self-sacrifice, public-spiritedness, and the constant vigilance of citizens against enemies of freedom.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau brought elements of both traditions together in The Social Contract, a treatise meant to serve as an ideal, not an actual blueprint, for society. According to Rousseau, men in their natural state were free and equal, but they were also amoral and governed by instinct. Men reached their full human potential only through the exercise of citizenship. In the social contract, each individual gave up his powers from the state of nature to everyone else in order to form a state. The essence of citizenship, then, was participation in the social contract, which created a state of morality, civil freedom, equality, and democratic participation. Citizens were bound by law, but remained free, because they imposed laws on themselves. Citizens were equal before the law, because everyone came into the social contract under the same terms. The public interest or "general will" served as the ultimate source of law, because all individuals had sacrificed their private interests to become part of the state. For Rousseau, citizenship was a legal status, but not a passive one, as it implied moral duties and active participation.

The actual transition to a new form of citizenship stemmed from the practical need to make states more competitive in war. In France the monarchy contributed to a more egalitarian definition of society by attempting to tax privileged members of society. Royal reforming ministers and their allies argued that payment of taxes defined citizenship, because all members of society, even the privileged, owed the state taxes in return for protection. As the Physiocrat writer LeTrosne declared in his work on tax reform, ecclesiastical tax exemptions put the clergy "outside the class of citizens" and stripped them "of all right to civil protection" (p. 501). In reply, the most powerful corporate bodies in France, the sovereign courts known as parlements, stretched corporate politics to the breaking point and went beyond their traditional defense of "fundamental laws." Claiming to speak for "the Nation," the parlements stated that the nation had a right to consent to taxes and thereby made themselves virtual co-sovereigns with the king.

The bankruptcy of the French government in 1788 proved that a new organization of the state was necessary. Drawing on political economy and social contract theory, the Abbé Sieyès in What Is the Third Estate? laid out the terms of modern citizenship as a national, egalitarian, and utilitarian status. Citizens were members of the nation, that is, "a body of associates living under common laws" (p. 55). Since privileges were exemptions from the common law, all those who enjoyed privileges, notably the nobility, were noncitizens. Eventually, this logic was used to justify the execution of the king, since an absolute monarch stood outside the common law formed by the social contract and thus could be judged, as Saint Just argued in 1792, "not as a citizen, but as a rebel" (p. 123). Enshrined in "The Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen" of 1789, citizenship became synonymous with both the enjoyment of fundamental rights and a new vision of national sovereignty. Rather than being one legal status among many in a corporate society, citizenship had become the primary status mediating all other juridical relationships in the state and the primary marker of human worth.

See also Bodin, Jean; Cities and Urban Life; Class, Status, and Order; Democracy; Diderot, Denis; Enlightened Despotism; Hobbes, Thomas; Locke, John; Machiavelli, Niccolò; Monarchy; Montesquieu, Charles-Louis de Secondat de; Parlements; Political Philosophy; Political Secularization; Revolutions, Age of; Rousseau, Jean-Jacques.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Primary Sources

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Diderot, Denis. Political Writings. Edited and translated by John Hope Mason and Robert Wokler. Cambridge, U.K., 1992. Includes translation of Diderot's article on "Citizen" from his Encyclopedia.

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Locke, John. Two Treatises of Government. Edited by Peter Laslett. Cambridge, U.K., 1988.

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GAIL BOSSENGA