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REFORM AND TRANSITION IN THE
MEDITERRANEAN
Series Editor: Ioannis N. Grigoriadis

LIMITED STATEHOOD
IN POST-
REVOLUTIONARY
TUNISIA
Citizenship, Economy and
Security

Ruth Hanau Santini

 Reform and Transition in the Mediterranean

Series Editor
Ioannis N. Grigoriadis
Bilkent University
Ankara, Turkey

“This path-breaking study, moving beyond simplistic, teleological treatments of

state formation and democratization, examines, in intimate detail, actually existing
politics in post-2010 Tunisia.
Ruth Hanau Santini deploys a sophisticated theoretical framework (limited sov-
ereignty, hybrid governance) and extensive empirical detail to chart the nuances
and contradictions of Tunisia’s trajectory. She juxtaposes its unique bottom-up
and theoretically empowering constitution-making process with the state’s limited
capacity to match its normative commitments with actual performance.
This study is exemplary of the new research through which younger scholars of
MENA are combining advanced theoretical tools with intimate familiarity with
actual societies to transcend the simplicities of the transition paradigm and map-
ping the divergent and contradictory pathways of actual post-Uprising politics and
statehood.”
—Professor Raymond Hinnebusch, University of St. Andrews, UK

“Compared to the huge amount of literature on post-revolutionary Tunisia, this

timely book brings a fresh perspective. While narratives describe why and how polit-
ical transition succeeds in this country whereas elsewhere it failed, Ruth Hanau
Santini circumvents the redundant dissertations on its “exceptionalism” by bringing
back the state in society. And even from this point of view, the author forsakes the
Leviathan state to focus on its Achilles’ heel: an inability to impose the monopoly of
force, a lack of capacity to implement significant decisions, a contradiction between
rhetoric and action, a hiatus between expectations and realisations and a multiplica-
tion of sources of power. The book then illuminates the complex and contentious
dynamics working state-society relations in the post-2011 Tunisia, by exploring
three empirical Areas of Limited Statehood: citizenship, economy, and security.
Now any theory on Tunisia must cope with this original and stimulating book.”
—Professor Hamadi Redissi, University of Tunis El Manar, Tunisia
The series of political and economic crises that befell many countries in
the Mediterranean region starting in 2009 has raised emphatically ques-
tions of reform and transition. While the sovereign debt crisis of Southern
European states and the “Arab Spring” appear prima facie unrelated, some
common roots can be identified: low levels of social capital and trust, high
incidence of corruption, and poor institutional performance. This series
provides a venue for the comparative study of reform and transition in the
Mediterranean within and across the political, cultural, and religious
boundaries that crisscross the region. Defining the Mediterranean as the
region that encompasses the countries of Southern Europe, the Levant,
and North Africa, the series contributes to a better understanding of the
agents and the structures that have brought reform and transition to the
forefront. It invites (but is not limited to) interdisciplinary approaches
that draw on political science, history, sociology, economics, anthropol-
ogy, area studies, and cultural studies. Bringing together case studies of
individual countries with broader comparative analyses, the series provides
a home for timely and cutting-edge scholarship that addresses the
structural requirements of reform and transition; the interrelations
between politics, history and culture; and the strategic importance of the
Mediterranean for the EU, the USA, Russia, and emerging powers.

More information about this series at

http://www.palgrave.com/gp/series/14513
 Ruth Hanau Santini

Limited Statehood in
Post-Revolutionary
Tunisia
Citizenship, Economy and Security
Ruth Hanau Santini
University of Naples - L’Orientale
Naples, Italy

Reform and Transition in the Mediterranean

ISBN 978-3-319-74405-6    ISBN 978-3-319-74406-3 (eBook)
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-74406-3

Library of Congress Control Number: 2018934894

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2018

This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the
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known or hereafter developed.
The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this
publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are
exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use.
The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information
in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the
publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, express or implied, with respect to
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The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland
To inspiring Fathers and Mothers
 Acknowledgement

This book could not have been written without the many people, friends
and colleagues that accompanied me throughout these past few years.
In Tunis, I was lucky enough to have several conversations with Hamadi
Redissi, Asma Nouira, Mohamed Kerrou and Fabio Merone, and spend
time with Nibras, Elyes, Imen, Oussama and many others, including
members of parliament, journalists, activists and academics, as well as sev-
eral European diplomats, who were generous enough to always find time
to see me and share with me their views and takes on current Tunisian
politics.
Intellectually, I also benefitted from the work and support of Francesco
Cavatorta, Raymond Hinnebusch, Bob Springborg and Gianni Sofri in
Bologna, whose unwavering trust and friendship has meant the world to
me, and of Mauro Calise in Naples, a light at the end of the tunnel, each
and every time.
Several colleagues have been kind enough to invite me to present my
ideas and take them a step further, including Morten Valbjorn, Justin
Frosini, Amr Adly, Georges Fahmi, Kevin Kohler, Daniela Pioppi, Ersilia
Francesca, Rosario Sommella, Roberto Belloni, Francesco Strazzari and
Salvatore Vassallo.
My enlarged family includes Mirella, Fabio, Enrica, Ilaria, Irina, Cecilia,
Martha, Alessia, Aniseh, Claudia, Olindo, Stefania, Teresa, Patrizia, Kaika,
Valeria, Paola, Arianna and Chicca. At different points, each and every one
of them has been an emotional lifesaver, be it under the guise of early
morning runs on the seaside, exhausting and last-minute hiking trips, new
adventures with coastal rowing or out-of-the-blue never-ending phone

vii
viii Acknowledgement

calls, and very often this has come with many laughs attached. I am grateful
to each and every one of them, as I am to my little sister, whose evolution
into an admirable human being never ceases to amaze me. My family pro-
vides a wide array of resilient and ironic human beings, and I am particu-
larly lucky to count Carlo and Daniela among them.
This book has benefitted from countless research trips in Tunisia: the
first, in 2011, was sponsored by The Brookings Institution, where I was
working. Later on, I was able to continue to travel to the region on a regu-
lar basis thanks to two research projects I coordinated: EUSPRING and
STREETPOL. The former was funded by the Italian Compagnia di San
Paolo in Turin, and it focused on post-2011 Arab citizenship, while the
latter was sponsored by the Italian Ministry for Higher Education, and it
analyses contentious politics in North Africa. Within these projects, I have
been blessed with outstanding collaborators and assistants, first and fore-
most Pietro Longo, Giulia Cimini and Luce Laquaniti, whose passion for
the region and knowledge of Tunisia have been truly stimulating.
Finally, this book is dedicated to my Father, who has instilled in me love
for humanity and politics, and to my Mother, whose human revolution
continues to inspire me.
Last but not least, at Palgrave I was very lucky to work with a formi-
dable team, including Ambra Finotello, Imogen Gordon Clark and
Arunprakash Ramasamy. This book could not have seen the light of day
without the support and advice offered at every stage of the process by this
series’ editor, Ioannis Grigoriadis, who made it a smooth and exciting
experience.
 Contents

1 Rethinking Statehood in Post-Revolutionary Tunisia   1

2 Between the State and Society: Elements

of Formal Citizenship  13

3 Limited Statehood and Contentious Politics  37

4 Limited Statehood and Informal Economy  61

5 Limited Statehood in the Security Sector  83

Conclusions  109

Index  117

ix
 CHAPTER 1

Rethinking Statehood
in Post-Revolutionary Tunisia

Abstract The chapter concentrates on the organized hypocrisy of domestic

sovereignty by analyzing different shapes and formats of areas of limited
statehood (ALS) in post-2011 Tunisia, both on a geographical and func-
tional or sectoral level. In ALS, the capacity to implement and enforce cen-
tral decisions is lacking and there is no monopoly on the use of force (Risse,
T. Governance Without a State? Policies and Politics in Areas of Limited
Statehood. New York: Columbia University Press, 2013). The restriction of
statehood can be sectoral (only in some policy areas), territorial (only on
some parts of the territory), temporal (only for a certain amount of time),
and social (only with regard to specific parts of the population).
By ‘organised hypocrisy’, Krasner (Sovereignty: Organized Hypocrisy.
Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999) and Lipson (European Journal
of International Relations, 13(1), 5–34, 2007) refer to the inconsistency
between rhetoric and action resulting from conflicting material and ide-
ational pressures, in particular those derived from the clash between the
logic of consequences and the logic of appropriateness. This chapter aims to
set the stage for a dynamic reading of post-revolutionary state-­society rela-
tions, in the tradition set by Migdal (Strong Societies and Weak States: State-
Society Relations and State Capabilities in the Third World. Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 1988) and others of overcoming the binary
opposition between the state and societal forces and look at the state in
society. By investigating how, within areas of limited statehood, dynamics of

© The Author(s) 2018 1

R. Hanau Santini, Limited Statehood in Post-Revolutionary Tunisia,
Reform and Transition in the Mediterranean,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-74406-3_1
2 R. HANAU SANTINI

hybrid governance emerge and manifest themselves, the c­ hapter will attempt
at start illustrating the contentious and complex, both domestic and exter-
nal, political dynamics observed in the post-2011 Tunisian trajectory.

Keywords Limited statehood • Sovereignty • Governance • Tunisia

Is the state in post-revolutionary Tunisia more solid than it was under the
‘corporatist authoritarian’ regime of Ben Ali (who ruled from 1987 until
early 2011) (Entelis 2004; Redissi 2007) because of its more democratic
credentials, its renewed relations with society, and its partially reacquired
legitimacy? Or is it functionally equivalent to what it was during the previ-
ous dictatorial decades, in light of still insufficient economic redistribution
leading to prolonged waves of protests, its vulnerability to terrorism, and
its incapacity to extract taxes from the whole territory?
Being less fierce, has it become stronger (Ayubi 1995)? In other words,
by relying less on pure coercion and more on administrative penetration
and a relaunched cultural statist project, has the Tunisian state solidified its
position, despite its persisting output deficits? The answer depends on
where we sit, and on whether the emphasis is placed on what the state
does in terms of functions, how it does it, in terms of instruments, or what
it achieves, in terms of outputs. In the Weberian sociology of the state,
administration and security are the benchmarks according to which each
state can be judged (Badie and Birnbaum 1983), with functionalist ver-
sions of the institutionalist approach notably leading to strength-weakness
assessments against an ideal-typical, Western-modelled performing state
(Chandler 2004; Rotberg 2003). In these accounts, the focus is on the
state’s capabilities to secure the grip on society, which is neatly, almost
hermetically, separated from the state (Stepan 1978). In the past few
decades, statist approaches have been challenged by more nuanced under-
standings that emphasize the social underpinnings of the state, and its
contingent and non-teleological nature.
In particular, the assumption concerning state autonomy has been dis-
puted by many, with commentators either stressing the blurred boundaries
between state and society, and identifying the state as only one among many
organizations in society (Migdal 2004), or positing a mutually c­ onstitutive
relationship between state and society, with the state being conceptually
interdependent with society (Wendt 1999). The state autonomy theory is
contested on another level, as it bypasses altogether the importance of the
 RETHINKING STATEHOOD IN POST-REVOLUTIONARY TUNISIA 3

image of the state as basis for its legitimation and ­durability. As argued by
Buzan, three faces of the state exist simultaneously: its physical base, and
international territorial recognition; its institutional expression, given by the
consensus on political rules and the scope of state institutions; and lastly, the
idea of the state, consisting of the implicit social contract and ideological
consensus (Buzan 1991: 63).
Studies on the Arab state have either treated it as an independent causal
factor, or as a far from neutral arena for power contestation among a plu-
rality of social forces (Anderson 1987). Readings belonging to the first
approach have focused on the role of colonialism and its legacies in the
processes of Arab state formation and the emergence of the Arab inter-­
state system with the fall of the Ottoman Empire, while approaches per-
taining to the other side of the debate have emphasized endogenous
factors and Arab agency, even vis-à-vis processes of negotiated statehood
with external powers.
Without delving into a review of the debate over the state and theories
of state (Ayoob 1995; Bourdieu 2014; Hibou 2004; Jessop 2015; Migdal
1988; Mitchell 1991; Skocpol 1985; Tilly 1985) or of the Arab state in
particular (Ayubi 1995; Dawisha and Zartman 1988; Henri and Springborg
2010; Hinnebusch 2010; Hinnebusch 2015; Hudson 1977; Kamrava
2016; Kienle and Sika 2015; Saouli 2011; Owen 2004), this book starts
from the assumption that the notion of statehood, despite its continuing
salience, remains elusive.
An attempt to go beyond rigid boundaries of statist versus states-in-­
society approaches or materialist versus more ideological conceptions of
statehood can be premised on a more agential account of areas of limited
statehood (ALS). Elaborating on the ideal type of consolidated statehood
as the institutional structure of authority possessing the monopoly of force
and the capacity to implement decisions, Risse establishes a continuum in
terms of degrees of statehood, where at the opposite of consolidated state-
hood lies ‘limited’ statehood, which can manifest itself within a wide range
of degrees of intensity and modalities (Risse 2013). Areas of Limited
Statehood are areas where the capacity to implement and enforce central
decisions is lacking and where there is no monopoly of the use of force
(Risse 2013). The restriction of statehood can occur on a sectoral level
(only in some policy areas); a territorial level (only on some parts of the
territory); a temporal level (only for a certain amount of time); and a
social level (only with regard to specific parts of the population). The con-
ception of the state is narrow, following the steps of Weber, with a critical
4 R. HANAU SANTINI

distinction between statehood, revolving around the ability to rule and

implement decisions, thanks also to the legitimate possession of coercive
instruments, and governance, which in an effective formulation refers to
‘intentional action towards providing public services for a given commu-
nity’ (Mayntz 2004: 67). Governance is impersonal and has a variable
geometry: it can rise from the bottom-up, complementing the action of
the state, try to compete with and replace it, or coexist side-by-side.
Governance, in this view, differently from statehood, is about service and
the provision of public goods. Despite recent attempts to provide more
politicized accounts of governance, taking into account how the provision
of goods can change according to the nature of actors involved, especially
in conflict and war-torn contexts (Mampilly 2011; Kalyvas 2006), notions
of governance in more peaceful political orders have struggled to effectively
capture the dimension of power politics implicit in many—supposedly
empirical—configurations of order. Purely functionalist approaches struggle
to come to terms with the political consequences of non-state and external
actors providing for goods on the local or national level, and the interac-
tion dynamics generated with states. In this book, by widening the remit
of the nature of the state, and taking into account the state as system as
well as the state as idea, which is often empirically charged with expecta-
tions in terms of the provision of public goods, governance will remain on
the backburner as compared to statehood.
Krasner and Risse conceptualize statehood as the effective domestic
dimension of sovereignty (Krasner and Risse 2014), which refers to the
organization of public authority within a state and its level of effective
control (Krasner 1999: 9). Behind this definition of domestic sovereignty
as the organization and effectiveness of political authority lie two key ana-
lytical dimensions, authority and control. The former involves a mutually
recognized right for an actor to engage in specific activities, while the lat-
ter can be achieved even by brute force. If we link these dimensions more
closely to the two analytically distinct logics of action, the logic of appro-
priateness and the logic of consequences (March and Olsen 1998), the
black box of statehood opens up, and gaps and inconsistencies generated
by mismatches between states’ functions, instruments and images can be
better accounted for. This is premised on Krasner’s elaboration of the
nature of sovereignty as ‘organised hypocrisy’ when looking at two ­external
dimensions of sovereignty, notably the international legal and the
Westphalian one (Krasner 1999: 6–10). By ‘organised hypocrisy’, Krasner
(1999) and Lipson (2007) refer to the inconsistency between rhetoric and
 RETHINKING STATEHOOD IN POST-REVOLUTIONARY TUNISIA 5

action resulting from conflicting material and ideational pressures, in

­particular those derived from the clash between the logic of consequences
and the logic of appropriateness. Since domestic sovereignty is the one
domain where no single logic of action dominates but rather the two
coexist, as do authority and control, conflicts between the two are to be
expected. The book will employ the notion of ‘limited statehood’ in this
more dynamic and agential way, by stressing the instances of mismatches
between logic of action by the state and logic of appropriateness, referring
to the ideational dimension, normative expectations of state action from
its citizens, and empirically analyzing some issue areas where the gaps
between the two point to manifestations of limited statehood and emer-
gence of instances of multilevel governance.
Without conflating analytically distinct logics of action of the state, by
bearing both in mind across different issue areas and/or geographic terri-
tories, the material and symbolic facets of statehood come together. As a
matter of fact, the notion of statehood encapsulates two separate and yet
inseparable faces: its material force on the one hand, and its ideological
construct on the other (Mitchell 2006). Put another way, the Janus-faced
state should at best be thought of as the ‘state as system’ on the one hand,
and the ‘state as idea’ on the other. The former refers to a system of insti-
tutionalized rules, while the latter to the reification of this system that takes
over a symbolic identity, progressively divorced from practice (Abrams
1988). The paradox lies in the inseparability of these two aspects, as ‘the
phenomenon we name “the state” arises from techniques that enable mun-
dane material practices to take on the appearance of an abstract non-mate-
rial form’ (Abrams 1988: 170).
Overall, this chapter lays the ground for a dynamic reading of post-­
revolutionary state-society relations, in the tradition set by Migdal (1988)
and others of overcoming the binary opposition between the state and soci-
etal forces, and looking at the state in society, and vice versa. Taking a step
further from the literature on the Arab state which is still a reference point
in studies of MENA political systems, including those of Hudson (2015)
and Ayubi (1995), and the paradigm of state dominance and the penetra-
tion of the state, mostly through coercive tools, this book adopts a nuanced
conceptual approach which will elaborate on various shapes the ‘organised
hypocrisy’ of domestic sovereignty can take in ALS (Risse 2013).
The book concentrates on the ‘organised hypocrisy’ of domestic sover-
eignty by analyzing different shapes and formats of ALS in post-2011
Tunisia, both on a geographical and functional or sectoral level. The aspect
6 R. HANAU SANTINI

which will be explored is how the sovereignty norm (a manifestation of

the logic of appropriateness), particularly relevant in a post-revolutionary
setting and in the Tunisian case, given the frequent reference to the neces-
sity to strengthen the state, conflicts with and is constrained by expressions
of more material and contingent interests and pressures belonging to the
logic of consequences. This will be explored by illustrating several empiri-
cal policy arenas, such as the informal economy and security, as well as
more vertically, by analyzing the state of the art of state-society relations
as they have developed since 2011, both in a formal sense, by analyzing
the phase of constitutional politics before the adoption of the new
Constitution in early 2014, and in terms of informal relations, by looking
at contentious collective action and state reactions to various forms of citi-
zens’ engagement.
By investigating how, within ALS, dynamics of hybrid governance
emerge and manifest themselves, this book will attempt to illuminate the
contentious and complex political dynamics observed in the post-2011
Tunisian trajectory.
The second chapter looks at how state-society relations have been
changing in the wake of the 2011 revolution in Tunisia, through the prism
of citizenship rights. The chapter will analyze the genealogy of post-2011
Tunisian inclusive and yet highly politicized constitutional politics and the
ways in which this phase has laid the foundations for a new social contract.
Focusing on the 2014 Constitution is particularly relevant given the
exceptional nature of that document in the Arab world: all constitutions
adopted in Tunisia before then had been presented to the citizenry as
‘advanced’ legal documents because they contained provisions recogniz-
ing the universality of some rights (in the Tunisian case, restrictions mostly
revolved around political rights). In practice, constitutions aimed to keep
all the prerogatives in the hand of the executive. This had important con-
sequences in the sphere of citizenship rights: despite their proclamation,
their enjoyment was restricted by the adoption of martial laws, justified by
the state of emergency. This chapter investigates how the new citizenship
rights’ provisions in the Constitution have expanded notions of what can
be contended, fought for, and demanded by societal forces, setting a key
precedent in changing post-2011 state-society relations.
The third chapter illustrates the continuation of socio-economically
driven contentious collective action in post-2011 Tunisia. Protests have
proceeded in waves and have reshaped notions of legitimacy, state-society
equilibria and relations between the center and the periphery. The chapter
 RETHINKING STATEHOOD IN POST-REVOLUTIONARY TUNISIA 7

investigates how these dynamics have arisen and evolved, focusing in

particular on the similarities and differences between the 2010–2011
­
­protests and the 2016–2017 ones. While the former constituted a leader-
less, cross-­class and cross-ideological wave, which succeeded to generate
powerful discursive narratives, which were generalized and acted as vessels
for mobilization across several sectors of society, the same attempt was
only partially successful in 2016–2017, with protests remaining more geo-
graphically clustered, despite their reverberations in the capital, and which
failed to evolve into national movements or widespread contentious col-
lective actions. The hinterland and southern region of the country, espe-
cially those in the south-east bordering with Libya, are classic examples of
ALS, given the limited state penetration not only in terms of capacity to
extract resources (taxes) and authoritatively implement decisions, but in
terms of the increasing gap between logic of appropriateness and logic of
consequences shown by state action, failing to fill in pre-existing gaps
despite pledges and post-revolutionary promises. This mismatch, or state’s
organized hypocrisy, generated by the continuing gap between social
expectations and reality, has fuelled frustration and paved the way for sev-
eral contentious outbursts across the country’s marginal areas.
The fourth chapter takes further the analysis of these marginal regions
by empirically assessing the shapes of the prevailing economic activities
and the deep-seated confrontational relationship with the central author-
ity, pertaining to incomplete processes of state-building. Two bordering
regions of the country could be conceptualized as areas of limited state-
hood, the Tataouine region at the border with Libya and the Kasserine
region, bordering with Algeria, in the western part of the country. Labeling
these areas as marginal and peripheral is not referred purely to their geo-
graphical location, but to the perception of these areas both in the capital
and from these areas themselves. The political and economic discrimina-
tion of these regions has been an established practice since the creation of
modern Tunisia in 1956 and increasingly so since the 1990s. In Tunisia,
limited statehood mostly refers to a partial state penetration in these
­politically, economically and socially peripheral regions, which, as will be
explored, has been a tacit but historically persistent selective approach.
The informal sector has traditionally accounted between a third and half
of the national GDP, and since the 2011 uprising, given the slow growth
experienced, this trend has further consolidated. In these areas, cross-
border smuggling has represented a social and economic safety valve.
Until 2010, this occurred under the benevolent eye of the regime, which
8 R. HANAU SANTINI

simultaneously controlled it through local notables and security forces and

profited from it, by letting smugglers bribe state officials, be they notables
or security forces. It also allowed the regime to concentrate resources and
investment in the ‘useful’ Tunisia, the coastal areas, further increasing
socio-economic regional disparities. The political and economic discrimi-
nation of these regions has been an established practice since the creation
of modern Tunisia in 1956 and increasingly so since the 1990s. Since the
2011 uprisings, the increasing number of non-state actors involved in this
sector, the incapacity and/or unwillingness of the central authority to
enforce and implement laws, both in terms of curbing this trade and also
of implementing the constitutional provisions related to positive discrimi-
nation and investment in marginalized regions, has further cemented lim-
ited statehood.
The fifth chapter looks at the post-2011 state of security in Tunisia,
which, differently from most other policy arenas, has remained on the side-
lines of significant evolutions, despite pressures and societal demands for
change. In post-revolutionary times, namely, when statehood traditionally
undergoes a process of consolidation, the security sector and its reform is
one of the essential steps undertaken by the new regime. Despite public
pressures to deeply change the politics of security in the aftermath of the
revolution, the onset of terrorist attacks and the availability of external
donors to strengthen the performance of security forces without structural
reforms in their norms and principles has favored centralization of security
policy-making and has improved security and the perception of security in
the country, without operating any significant change in terms of norma-
tive orientation of the security apparatus.
Since the 1990s, the security sector under Ben Ali had developed increas-
ingly authoritarian practices in its modus operandi. It had, namely, evolved
into a community policing without proper oversight, decentralization and
participation mechanisms, thereby amounting to little more than a hyper-
localized form of surveillance. Unsurprisingly, post-uprising societal forces
demanded new operating procedures for the security forces according to
rule of law standards and increased accountability. However, when the
country was shaken by terrorism, demands shifted on the need for greater
effectiveness in the performance of the security forces. In 2013, namely, the
country suffered from major setbacks in its perception of stability and
safety, when two prominent politicians, Mohamed Brahmi and Choukri
Belaid, were killed by terrorists. These tragic events threatened to derail the
 RETHINKING STATEHOOD IN POST-REVOLUTIONARY TUNISIA 9

country’s fragile trajectory towards democracy and stability. And yet, they
were not sufficient in triggering reforms in the security arena. The targeted
political violence morphed into wide-scale terrorist attacks in 2015, first at
the Bardo national museum in Tunis and few months later on the beach of
a hotel resort in Sousse. It was only then, and under European tutelage,
that the political system operated sweeping changes in the security sector.
Refraining from adopting a comprehensive security sector reform (SSR), as
had been envisaged in the early stages after the 2010–2011 revolts, changes
were technical in nature and scope. They lost any transformative goal as far
as revolutionizing the codes of conduct of the security forces and were lim-
ited to responding to external incentives by European countries. Moreover,
they occurred only when the Tunisian Presidency of the Republic was strong
enough, after the December 2014 presidential elections, to centralize the
process. The chapter illustrates the failure of the early attempt by the EU to
engineer a liberal-interventionist security sector reform, and explores the
complex interplay between domestic politics and changing equilibria, also
between the state and societal forces, and external pressures. The chapter
concludes by illustrating how this example ties with the emergence of traits
of limited statehood in other policy arenas.
The book concludes by assessing what the different instances of limited
statehood in post-revolutionary Tunisia show in terms of evolving practices
of statehood and of state-society relations. Across different policy areas,
statehood manifests itself as limited. Among them, the redefinition of the
social contract, the continuation of protests and of contentious collective
action, the persistence of the informal economy as part and parcel of long-
standing dynamics of fueling expectations and failing to deliver, and the
shape-up of a security sector increasingly efficient but failing to meet the
standards of civilian control and rule of law, as demanded in the wake of the
revolution by Tunisians. More broadly speaking, in Tunisia and in the rest
of the region, the clash between expectations of change and the same or
worsening reality for many citizens, the mismatch between state discourses
inspired by the logic of appropriateness and state behaviors driven by logic
of consequences hinder the chances for state ­consolidation and pave the
way for the emergence and continuation of contentious collective action.
In other words, especially in post-revolutionary settings, blatant manifesta-
tions of the state’s ‘organized hypocrisy’, which manifests itself in an
increasing discrepancy between normative narratives of change and self-
serving practices, risks reifying limited statehood.
10 R. HANAU SANTINI

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 CHAPTER 2

Between the State and Society: Elements

of Formal Citizenship

Abstract Through the prism of citizenship rights, this chapter looks at

how state-society relations have been changing in the wake of the 2011
revolution in Tunisia. It does so by analyzing the genealogy of post-­
revolutionary Tunisia’s inclusive and yet highly politicized constitutional
politics, and the ways in which this phase has laid the foundations for a
new social contract. Focusing on the 2014 Constitution is particularly
relevant given the exceptional nature of that document in the Arab world:
all constitutions adopted in Tunisia before then had been presented to the
citizenry as ‘advanced’ legal documents because they contained provisions
recognizing the universality of some rights (in the Tunisian case, the
restriction mostly revolved around political rights). In practice, constitu-
tions aimed to keep all the prerogatives in the hand of the executive. This
produced important consequences in the sphere of citizenship rights:
despite their proclamation, their enjoyment was restricted by the adoption
of martial laws, justified by the state of emergency. This chapter investi-
gates how the new provisions for citizenship rights in the Constitution
have expanded notions of what can be contended, fought for, and
demanded by societal forces, setting a key precedent in changing state-­
society relations, post-2011.

Keywords Citizenship • Rights • Tunisia • Constitution

© The Author(s) 2018 13

R. Hanau Santini, Limited Statehood in Post-Revolutionary Tunisia,
Reform and Transition in the Mediterranean,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-74406-3_2
14 R. HANAU SANTINI

1   Citizenship in Abstract and in Practice

This chapter investigates, through the prism of citizenship rights, how
state-society relations have shifted in the wake of the 2011 uprising in
Tunisia. The analytical core of this chapter lies in the analysis of the
Tunisian 2014 Constitution, which is examined by looking at citizens’
rights and obligations, the more formal side of citizenship. The following
chapter will take a closer look at the other side of citizenship, the ide-
ational aspect and its practices, by focusing on repertoires of contentious
acts, which attempt to rearticulate state-society relations.
The analytical focus on citizenship, both as an arena for struggles over
rights and as a field of study, enables one to bypass purely bottom-up ana-
lytical approaches to Arab societies (as in the 1950s and 1960s, and par-
tially from the 2000s) or purely institutionalist accounts. The latter have
been predominant since the 1980s and 1990s and have focused on the
Arab state and its dominance over society, made possible by an increas-
ingly coercive penetration of society (Hudson 2015). Dynamic and con-
textual analyses of the contentious relation between state and society have
been rare, as accounts tend to be either top-down, with a focus on elites
or state structures and institutions, or bottom-up, looking at the protests
and social movements that bring societal forces to the fore.
Since the 2010–2011 uprisings, however, the literature focusing on
political systems in the Middle East and North Africa has made more sys-
tematic reference to citizenship as a broad conceptual framework that
enables one to capture various kinds of phenomena pertaining to state-­
society relations (Challand 2013; Parolin 2009; Meijer 2014a, b; Meijer
and Butenschøn 2017). The authoritarian backlash within some of the
countries that experienced revolts in 2010–2011 does not limit the useful-
ness of employing citizenship lenses to observe the shifting balance of
power in state-society relations. As a matter of fact, the continuation of
protests, more or less organized, in some post-uprisings’ countries (for
instance in Tunisia, Egypt and Morocco) testifies to the resurgence and
vitality of agency along a wide spectrum of mobilization tools, which
combine online and offline activism with the spontaneity of collective
action, including non-movements and street politics (Bayat 2009).
Sometimes acting as veto players trying to obstruct or prevent undesired
change, post-2011 forms of contentious politics also draw their legitimacy
from the 2010–2011 uprisings’ articulation of citizenship rights. By
employing revolutionary referents to legitimize new waves of protests,
 BETWEEN THE STATE AND SOCIETY: ELEMENTS OF FORMAL CITIZENSHIP 15

mobilized actors shape not just new forms of resistance politics, but ‘acts
of citizenship’, which are becoming more commonplace.
Unlike modernization, transitology or democratization approaches, the
analytical lenses provided by citizenship studies have progressively rejected
any normative bias in terms of the ideal-typical forms and shapes citizen-
ship should possess, as well as the necessary trajectories of its evolution
that come in teleological accounts of change. This is not a standard prac-
tice, however, as some scholars maintain that citizenship is indissolubly
linked to the Western experience. In their view, full citizenship can only
exist in liberal democracies, where a number of conditions apply: the prin-
ciple of equality, rule of law, the progressive erosion of horizontal ties such
as kinship, tribes and clans, and the emergence of free and equal citizens
(Kivisto and Faist 2007). The rejection of a supposedly neutral notion of
citizenship is espoused also by some scholars from non-Western countries,
who consider citizenship a historically and culturally contingent Western
concept, non-transferrable elsewhere (Chatterjee 2006). However, as
argued by Meijer, citizenship can represent a useful vantage point from
which to look at state-society relations in all those contexts where a mod-
ern bureaucratic state has emerged and asserted control over a political
community within a defined territory (Meijer 2014a, b).
In addition to the lack of normative and teleological orientation,
another added value provided by the notion of citizenship is its encapsula-
tion of two dimensions, one vertical and the other horizontal: state-society
relations on the one hand, and relations among citizens on the other.
Focusing on citizenship, in other words, automatically privileges agency,
by highlighting power relations, not only between the ruler and the ruled,
but, horizontally, by shedding light on the various shifting relations among
individuals, communities and societal groups. The salience of citizenship
as a notion and as a field of study has been further testified to by the
numerous discursive references to citizenship (muwatana) by mobilized
publics, movements, and protesting individuals since the 2010–2011
uprisings. Citizenship seems to have been able to increasingly capture bot-
tom-­up demands of renewed social contracts and the political imaginary
of new state-society relations.
Originally, citizenship was closely associated with the study of the evo-
lution of rights, divided into three categories: civil rights, also understood
under the broad label of ‘negative liberties’, or those areas where the state
should not interfere (the right to property and safety, equality before the
law, freedom of speech, religious freedom); political rights (the right to
16 R. HANAU SANTINI

vote and freedom of organization of a political party); and social rights (the
right to social welfare, education, health, unemployment benefits) (Marshall
1950). T.H. Marshall analyzed how the above-mentioned categories devel-
oped throughout British history, with civil rights emerging in the eigh-
teenth century, political rights first fully introduced in the nineteenth
century and expanded in the twentieth century, and social rights intro-
duced with the establishment of the welfare state from the second half of
the 20th century. Since Marshall, the model has been refined, and other
categories of rights have been added (economic, cultural, and sexual)
(Meijer 2014a, b). Alongside this, the idea that a single trajectory of neces-
sary successive developments of rights is inescapable has been questioned,
and the idea that several pathways are possible is now widely accepted. In
addition to that, the expansion of certain categories of rights has been
problematized as a possible strategy of cooptation of certain social groups
by ruling elites, Arab experiences with state feminism a renown case in
point, while others have underscored the role played by contentious politics
and social struggles in driving citizenship ‘from below’ (Turner 2000). As
an organizing principle of state-society relations, citizenship is a contractual
relationship, which defines the legal status of individuals and sets the rules
for participation in political institutions (Butenschøn et al. 2000: 11). And
while citizenship is traditionally defined as ‘the juridical process by which
the legal subjects of a state are constituted’, it also entails a set of daily prac-
tices, as pointed out and explored by Turner, Isin and others (Suad 2000:
3). Citizenship should be understood as a field of political struggle. It is a
dynamic analytical category, possessing the power to reinvent and trans-
form itself depending on the historical era it finds itself in. Moreover, citi-
zenship can be expansive and evolutionary (Balibar 2015), which makes its
study in post-revolutionary contexts all the more appealing for heuristic
purposes. Citizenship encapsulates a tension between freedom and obedi-
ence on the one hand and between universalism and particularism on the
other (Isin 2017: 514). Isin namely elaborates on ‘acts of citizenship’ (Isin
and Nielsen 2008), those practices of self-assertion by virtue of which mar-
ginalized people become citizens in their own right. They encompass
minor, everyday acts, which produce civic relations between ordinary citi-
zens (Boutaleb 2017). Citizenship practices, stemming from this concep-
tion, oscillate between these two modalities and their analysis enables us to
ascertain the tension between citizens and the state in a contingent way.
The focus on practices of citizenship underscores the twofold logic of citi-
zenship first elaborated by Etienne Balibar: citizens are submissive and
 BETWEEN THE STATE AND SOCIETY: ELEMENTS OF FORMAL CITIZENSHIP 17

subversive, they are subject to power, as they have to abide by the rules and
are controlled and disciplined, and they are subjects of power, as they are
empowered to contest these same forces and change them (Isin 2017). It
is in this second understanding that citizenship shows its symbolic power,
by creating an ideational arena, a symbolic space, where citizens can
express, communicate, and share different claims and experiences (Mouffe
2000). Against this background, citizenship provides a communicative
arena where the ontological primacy of individuals can reinforce commu-
nal ties, with individual and community rights potentially strengthening
each other.

2   Citizenship in the MENA Region

In the MENA region, with the crumbling of the Ottoman empire and the
establishment of semi-autonomous states—which suffered to different
degrees under colonial domination—the shift from a multi-religious, mul-
tiethnic and multilingual empire to states could have led to the affirmation
of the principle of equal citizenship. As argued by Meijer, the project failed
for a number of reasons. When nationalism became the rallying cry for
mobilization against colonialism, citizenship (muwatana) reflected the
notion of citizen (muwatin) as member of the homeland (al watan) or the
community (jama’a) rather than as an individual with a set of pre-­
determined rights (Meijer 2014a, b). From the 1930s to the 1950s, with
the inclusion of the masses in nationalist politics, the emphasis on social
justice became part and parcel of nationalist movements. And, as a matter
of fact, once independence was acquired, most Arab states did expand
social and economic rights, although this came at the expense of civil (free-
dom of expression and association) and political rights (the right to estab-
lish new political parties). In essence, this was the trade-off at the basis of
the notorious ‘authoritarian bargain’, which was framed as a strategy by
authoritarian populist regimes to depoliticize and demobilize local popula-
tions in exchange for public goods and services. Citizenship was sacrificed
on the altar of welfare, with the hollowing out of even constitutionally
affirmed civil and political rights. These were repressive mechanisms with
which regimes hampered any politicization of acts of citizenship and their
transformation into forms of collective action. Post-colonial state build-
ing, however, failed not only to forge effective national identities once
ideological ones, such as Nasser’s pan-Arabism, evaporated, but, as far as
­citizenship was concerned, the promise inherent in the social contract
18 R. HANAU SANTINI

failed to be respected. This was the case when the pressures induced by
globalization, structural adjustment programs, and global financial crises
took their toll on far from competitive economic systems, leading to sig-
nificant cuts in public expenditures earmarked for welfare measures.
In the Tunisian instance, the kingmaker of the country’s independence
from France in 1956, Habib Bourguiba, abolished the centuries-old
Beylicate and created a republic, based on the idea that Tunisians consti-
tuted a community of equals, where demos substituted ethnos (Zemni
2017). His authoritarian modernization from above—since it was imposed
from the top and did not trust societal forces—lasted until 1970, and it
consisted in the abolition of traditional territorial institutions (the sheikhs as
religious local authorities on the one hand and the caïds as administrative
authorities on the other), and of religious courts and religious schools
(Redissi and Ayadi 2015). This marked the end of religious authority,
whose separation from political power laid the ground for the creation of
modern citizens, supposedly entitled to their own sets of rights and obliga-
tions. In 1959, rights were constitutionalized, but their application and
implementation were continuously curtailed, in a cyclical process where the
expansion of rights (such as the creation of the League of Human Rights in
1977) was undermined by the absence of the rule of law and lack of mecha-
nisms for the implementation of rights (Blibech et al. 2014). Suffice it here
to mention, in terms of curtailment of political rights, that, from 1963, the
political system became mono-party and the season of political liberaliza-
tion was formally brought to a close. Civil rights, meanwhile, along with
freedom of expression, were severely limited by the enactment of the Press
Code in 1975. Similar to what has been previously argued, Bourguiba and
the Neo-Dustour party prioritized economic development over civil and
political citizenship rights, under the aegis of a neo-corporatist compromise
which characterized the Bourguiba era until 1987 (Redissi 2007).
The pillars of the neo-corporatist state were the organizations represent-
ing workers Union générale tunisienne du travail (UGTT), industrialists
Union Tunisienne de l’industrie, du commerce et de l’artisanat (UTICA),
farmers Union générale des agriculteurs tunisiens (UGAT), women Union
nationale de la femme tunisienne (UNFT), and youth Union Tunisienne
des Organisations de Jeunesse (UTOJ). By cutting across ideological and
political cleavages, representation through categories was intended to depo-
liticize society, contain conflict and control the working class (Zemni 2017).
The erosion of state welfare policies started in the 1980s with the adoption
of the first structural adjustment programs prescribed by the IMF, and the
state’s renunciation of its role as developmental actor.
 BETWEEN THE STATE AND SOCIETY: ELEMENTS OF FORMAL CITIZENSHIP 19

In the wake of the ‘medical coup’ against Bourguiba by Zine El-Abidine

Ben Ali in 1987, Bourguiba’s charismatic leadership was replaced by Ben
Ali’s expanded personal power, at the expense of formal institutions and
citizens’ rights. What had been previously conceived as a strong state, able
to effectively penetrate and transform society, born in the struggle for
independence and guided through the initial post-colonial period by
Bourguiba, was progressively transformed into a ‘fierce’ state, over-relying
on its coercive apparatus to control, rather than penetrate and shape soci-
ety (Ayubi 1995). This was characterized by the role of the intelligence
services (mukhabarat) in controlling and surveilling the population, and
the formalization of a neo-corporatist state and a neo-patrimonial gover-
nance system (Schrader and Redissi 2011), where the privatization of the
economy ended up creating a ‘private state’, with the state having become
prey to an inner circle, or a clan, rotating around the presidency (Hibou
2000). Particularly after 1992, repression became routinized, and the
fierce nature of the state became ever more evident. While at least on the
surface, the state seemed to have a grip on society, less in infrastructural
terms than through coercion, it was mostly with the six-month-long Gafsa
protests in 2008 that the first cracks in the system started to become more
apparent. The crisis of the populist-authoritarian bargain was indicative of
a parallel crisis in the state’s output legitimacy, the only one it could still
appeal to. With the 2008 Gafsa revolt laying the ground for successive
rounds of mobilization, as in 2010–2011, the social contract was pro-
claimed defunct and in need of an overhaul. As well as a rethinking of the
social contract, the 2010–2011 uprising demanded a redefinition of the
political rules of the game, which, in the aftermath of Ben Ali’s fall, would
be negotiated from scratch. The election of a Constituent Assembly in
October 2011 and its over two years of constitutional endeavor would
produce, after four drafts, the most progressive and inclusive constitution
in the Arab world.

3   Arab Constitution-Making

The literature on Arab constitutions has tended to rely more on formal
and legalistic conceptions of citizenship (Parolin 2015), distinguishing
between constitutional politics and civil law as the two main areas of the
concrete application of citizens’ rights and duties vis-à-vis their state (Grote
and Röder 2016). Many accounts have focused on exogenous colonial
influences on these texts’ formulations and evolution, and have assessed
20 R. HANAU SANTINI

the often contingent and utilitarian nature of many constitutional changes

according to the interests of the ruler in place. What has remained partially
neglected is the study of the contested nature of state-society relations in
the Arab world seen through the lenses of constitutions and their imple-
mentation. Analyses tend to focus exclusively either on specific categories
of subjects (women, minorities, etc.) or on specific institutions impacting
upon the implementation of rights (the role of the military and of consti-
tutional courts).
The beginning of the twenty-first century saw the articulation across
North Africa of new political visions framed in the language of freedom,
human rights, and a different judiciary; in other words, a constitutionalist
discourse. This went hand in hand with the emergence of an Arab public
sphere (Lynch 2007), which made it easier, once the revolutionary fervor
began to spark, for the opposition to be able to hear its voice and spread
itself around in constitutional terms. Traditionally, constitutions in the
Arab-Islamic world have been considered devoid of constitutional spirit,
since they rationalize political power but then subjugate it to authoritarian
logic, something which was made possible by their genesis as octroyé docu-
ments by the ruler to the people, without the direct engagement of society
in their formulation (Brown 2002). This does not mean that all constitu-
tions abide by these precepts: the 1861 Tunisian Constitution, for instance,
while formally aiming to enhance the Ottoman Empire’s administrative
control of its peripheries, also acknowledged fundamental liberal rights.
The Constitution had been adopted as part of a project to reform the
country, formally still a province of the Ottoman Empire, and while its
main goal was to mend strained Jewish-Muslim relations by ruling over
intra-confessional relations, it included a set of rights and freedoms (the
rights of inviolability of the person, honor and property, if not freedom of
expression and association), that were officially blind to confessionalism
(Coulson 1964: 150).
Constitutions can be examined on a number of levels. One could focus
on legalistic aspects and implications of provisions, their novelty, and the
challenges for their implementation, or one could take a more political
perspective, and look at the documents as the supreme manifestation of
constitutional politics, determining the new rules of the power game in a
given polity at a time of profound change and transformation, and embed-
ding and encapsulating the state of the art of the contractual terms of the
relationship between state and society. The Tunisian Constitution of 2014
embodies both dimensions and stands as a full-fledged attempt to suspend
previous rules and order and create new state-society equilibria.
Another random document with
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apprentice warrior was so full of grace, his steed so full of fire, and
both so eminently beautiful, that James was lost in admiration. But
suddenly, as the youth bent forward to present his master’s device,
his spur pricked the flank of his charger, and the latter, with a bound
and a plunge, threw his rider out of the saddle, and flung young Carr
of Fernyhurst, at the feet of his ex-master, the King. The latter
recognised his old page, and made amends for the broken leg got in
the fall, by nursing the lad, and making him Viscount Rochester, as
soon as he was well. James created him knight of the Garter, and
taught him grammar. Rochester gave lessons to the King in foreign
history. The ill-favored King walked about the court with his arms
round the neck of the well-favored knight. He was for ever either
gazing at him or kissing him; trussing his points, settling his curls, or
smoothing his hose. When Rochester was out of the King’s sight
James was mindful of him, and confiscated the estates of honest
men in order to enrich his own new favorite. He took Sherborne from
the widow and children of Raleigh, with the cold-blooded remark to
the kneeling lady, “I maun have it for Carr!”
Rochester was a knight who ruled the King, but there was another
knight who ruled Rochester. This was the well-born, hot-headed,
able and vicious Sir Thomas Overbury. Overbury polished and
polluted the mind of Rochester; read all documents which passed
through the hands of the latter, preparatory to reaching those of the
King, and not only penned Rochester’s own despatches, but
composed his love-letters for him. How pointedly Sir Thomas could
write may be seen in his “Characters;” and as a poet, the knight was
of no indifferent reputation in his day.
Rochester, Sir Thomas, and the King, were at the very height of their
too-warm friendship, when James gave Frances Howard, the
daughter of the Earl of Suffolk, in marriage to young Devereux, Earl
of Essex. The bride was just in her teens. The bridegroom was a day
older. The Bishop of Bath and Wells blessed them in the presence of
the King, and Ben Jonson and Inigo Jones constructed a masque in
honor of the occasion. When the curtain fell, bride and bridegroom
went their separate ways; the first to her mother; the second to
school. Four years elapsed ere they again met; and then Frances,
who had been ill-trained by her mother, seduced by Prince Henry,
and wooed by Rochester, looked upon Essex with infinite scorn.
Essex turned from her with disgust.
Rochester then resolved to marry Frances, and Frances employed
the poisoner of Paternoster-row, Mrs. Turner, and a certain Dr.
Forman, to prepare philters that should make more ardent the flame
of the lover, and excite increased aversion in the breast of the
husband. Overbury, with intense energy, opposed the idea of the
guilty pair, that a divorce from Essex was likely to be procured. He
even spoke of the infamy of the lady, to her lover. Frances,
thereupon, offered a thousand pounds to a needy knight, Sir John
Ward, to slay Overbury in a duel. Sir John declined the offer. A more
successful method was adopted. Sir Thomas Overbury was
appointed embassador to Russia, and on his refusing to accept the
sentence of banishment, he was clapped into the tower as guilty of
contempt toward the king. In that prison, the literary knight was duly
despatched by slow poison. The guilt was brought home less to
Rochester than to Frances, but the King himself appears to have
been very well content at the issue.
James united with Rochester and the lady to procure a divorce
between the latter and Essex. The King was bribed by a sum of
£25,000. Essex himself did not appear. Every ecclesiastical judge
was recompensed who pronounced for the divorce—carried by
seven against five, and even the son of one of them was knighted.
This was the heir of Dr. Bilson, Bishop of Winchester, and he was
ever afterward known by the name of Sir Nullity Bilson.
Sir Nullity danced at the wedding of the famous or infamous pair;
and never was wedding more splendid. King, peers, and illustrious
commoners graced it with their presence. The diocesan of Bath and
Wells pronounced the benediction. The Dean of St. Paul’s wrote for
the occasion an epithalamic eclogue. The Dean of Westminster
supplied the sermon. The great Bacon composed, in honor of the
event, the “Masque of Flowers;” and the City made itself bankrupt by
the extravagant splendor of its fêtes. One gentleman horsed the
bride’s carriage, a bishop’s lady made the bride’s cake, and one
humorous sycophant offered the married pair the equivocal gift of a
gold warming-pan.
The King, not to be behindhand in distributing honors, conferred one
which cost him nothing. He created Rochester Earl of Somerset.
Two years after this joyous wedding, the gentleman who had made a
present to the bride, of four horses to draw her in a gilded chariot to
the nuptial altar, had become a knight and secretary of state. Sir
Richard (or, as some call him, Sir Robert) Winwood was a
worshipper of the now rising favorite, Villiers; and none knew better
than this newly-made knight that the King was utterly weary of his
old favorite, Somerset.
Winwood waited on the King and informed him that a garrulous
young apothecary at Flushing, who had studied the use of drugs
under Dr. Franklin of London, was making that melancholy town
quite lively, by his stories of the abuses of drugs, and the method in
which they had been employed by Lord and Lady Somerset, Mrs.
Turner (a pretty woman, who invented yellow starched ruffs) and
their accomplices, in bringing about the death of Overbury. The food
conveyed to the latter was poisoned by Frances and her lover,
outside the tower, and was administered to the imprisoned knight by
officials within the walls, who were bribed for the purpose.
There is inextricable confusion in the details of the extraordinary trial
which ensued. It is impossible to read them without the conviction
that some one higher in rank than the Somersets was interested, if
not actually concerned, in the death of Overbury. The smaller
personages were hanged, and Mrs. Turner put yellow ruffs out of
fashion by wearing them at the gallows.
Lady Somerset pleaded guilty, evidently under the influence of a
promise of pardon, if she did so, and of fear lest Bacon’s already
prepared speech, had she pleaded not guilty, might send her to an
ignominious death. She was confined in the Tower, and she implored
with frantic energy, that she might not be shut up in the room which
had been occupied by Overbury.
Somerset appeared before his judges in a solemn suit, and wearing
the insignia of the Garter. He pleaded not guilty, but despite
insufficiency of legal evidence he was convicted, and formally
condemned to be hanged, like any common malefactor. But the ex-
page won his life by his taciturnity. Had he, in his defence, or
afterward, revealed anything that could have displeased or disturbed
the King, his life would have paid the forfeit. As it was, the King at
once ordered that the Earl’s heraldic arms as knight of the Garter
should not be taken down. For the short period of the imprisonment
of the guilty pair, both guilty of many crimes, although in the matter of
Overbury there is some doubt as to the extent of the Earl’s
complicity, they separately enjoyed the “Liberty of the Tower.” The
fallen favorite was wont to pace the melancholy ramparts with the
George and collar round his neck and the Garter of knighthood
below his knee. He was often seen in grave converse with the Earl of
Northumberland. Sometimes, the guilty wife of Somerset, impelled
by curiosity or affection, would venture to gaze at him for a minute or
two from her lattice, and then, if the Earl saw her, he would turn,
gravely salute her, and straightway pass on in silence.
When liberated from the Tower, the knight of the Garter, convicted of
murder, and his wife, confessedly guilty, went forth together under
protection of a royal pardon. Down to the time of the death of Lady
Somerset, in 1632, the wretched pair are said never to have opened
their lips but to express, each hatred and execration of the other. The
earl lived on till 1645—long enough to see the first husband of his
wife carry his banner triumphantly against the son of James, at
Edgehill. The two husbands of one wife died within a few months of
each other.
Such was the career of one who began life as a page. Let us
contrast therewith the early career of one whose name is still more
familiar to the general reader.
Toward the middle of the sixteenth century there was established at
York a respectable and influential Protestant family of the name of
Fawkes. Some of the members were in the legal profession, others
were merchants. One was registrar and advocate of the Consistory
Court of the cathedral church of York. Another was notary and
proctor. A third is spoken of as a merchant-stapler. All were well to-
do; but not one of them dreamed that the name of Fawkes was to be
in the least degree famous.
The Christian name of the ecclesiastical lawyer was Edward. He was
the third son of William and Ellen Fawkes, and was the favorite child
of his mother. She bequeathed trinkets, small sums, and odd bits of
furniture to her other children, but to Edward she left her wedding
suit, and the residue of her estate. Edward Fawkes was married
when his mother made her will. While the document was preparing,
his wife Edith held in her arms an infant boy. To this boy she left her
“best whistle, and one old angel of gold.”
The will itself is a curious document. It is devotional, according to the
good custom of the days in which it was made. The worthy old
testator made some singular bequests; to her son Thomas, amid a
miscellaneous lot, she specifies, “my second petticoat, my worsted
gowne, gardit with velvet, and a damask kirtle.” The “best kirtle and
best petticoat” are bequeathed to her daughter-in-law Edith Fawkes.
Among the legatees is a certain John (who surely must have been a
Joan) Sheerecrofte, to whom, says Mistress Fawkes, “I leave my
petticoat fringed about, my woorse grogram kirtle, one of my lynn
smockes, and a damask upper bodie.” The sex, however, of the
legatee is not to be doubted, for another gentleman in Mrs. Fawkes’s
will comes in for one of her bonnets!
The amount of linen bequeathed, speaks well for the lady’s
housewifery; while the hats, kirtles, and rings, lead us to fear that the
wife of Master Edward Fawkes must have occasionally startled her
husband with the amount of little accounts presented to him by
importunate dressmakers, milliners, and jewellers. Such, however,
was the will of a lady of York three centuries ago, and the child in
arms who was to have the silver whistle and a gold angel was none
other than our old acquaintance, known to us as Guy Faux.
Guy was christened on the sixteenth of April, 1570, in the still
existing church of St. Michael le Belfry; and when the gossips and
sponsors met round the hospitable table of the paternal lawyer to
celebrate the christening of his son, the health of Master Guy
followed hard upon that of her gracious highness the queen.
Master Guy had the misfortune to lose his father in his ninth year.
“He left me but small living,” said Guy, many years afterward, “and I
spent it.” After his sire’s decease, Guy was for some years a pupil at
the free foundation grammar-school in “the Horse Fayre,” adjacent to
York. There he accomplished his humanities under the Reverend
Edward Pulleyne. Among his schoolfellows were Bishop Morton,
subsequently Bishop of Durham, and a quiet little boy, named
Cheke, who came to be a knight and baronet, and who, very
probably went, in after-days, to see his old comrade in the hands of
the hangman.
Some seventeen miles from York stands the pleasant town of
Knaresborough, and not far from Knaresborough is the village of
Scotten. When Guy was yet a boy, there lived in this village a very
gay, seductive wooer, named Dennis Baynbridge. This wooer was
wont to visit the widowed Edith, and the result of his visits was that
the widowed Edith rather hastily put away her weeds, assumed a
bridal attire, married the irresistible Dennis, and, with her two
daughters, Anne and Elizabeth, and her only son Guy, accompanied
her new husband to his residence at Scotten.
Baynbridge was a Roman Catholic, as also were the Pullens,
Percies, Winters, Wrights, and others who lived in Scotten or its
neighborhood, and whose names figure in the story of the
Gunpowder Plot.
At Scotten, then, and probably soon after his mother’s marriage, in
1582, Guy, it may be safely said, left the faith in which he had been
baptized, for that of the Romish Church. Had he declined to adopt
the creed of his step-sire, he perhaps would have been allowed but
few opportunities of angling in the Nidd, rabbiting by Bilton Banks,
nutting in Goldsborough Wood, or of passing idle holydays on
Grimbald Craig.
On the wedding-day of Edith Fawkes and Dennis Baynbridge, the
paternal uncle of Guy made his will. He exhibited his sense of the
step taken by the lady, by omitting her name from the will, and by
bequeathing the bulk of his property to the two sisters of Guy. To
Guy himself, Uncle Thomas left only “a gold ring,” and a “bed and
one pair of sheets, with the appurtenances.”
When Guy became of age, he found himself in possession of his
patrimony—some land and a farm-house. The latter, with two or
three acres of land, he let to a tailor, named Lumley, for the term of
twenty-one years, at the annual rent of forty-two shillings. The
remainder he sold at once for a trifle less than thirty pounds. Shortly
after, he made over to a purchaser all that was left of his property.
He bethought himself for a while as to what course he should take,
and finally he chose the profession of arms, and went out to Spain,
to break crowns and to win spurs.
In Spain, he fell into evil company and evil manners. He saw enough
of hard fighting, and indulged, more than enough, in hard drinking.
He was wild, almost savage of temper, and he never rose to a
command which gave him any chance of gaining admission on the
roll of chivalry. There was a knight, however, named Catesby, who
was a comrade of Guy, and the latter clung to him as a means
whereby to become as great as that to which he clung.
Guy bore himself gallantly in Spain; and, subsequently, in Flanders,
he fought with such distinguished valor, that when Catesby and his
associates in England were considering where they might find the
particular champion whom they needed for their particular purpose in
the Gunpowder Plot, the thought of the reckless soldier flashed
across the mind of Catesby, and Guy was at once looked after as the
“very properest man” for a very improper service.
The messenger who was despatched to Flanders to sound Guy,
found the latter eager to undertake the perilous mission of destroying
king and parliament, and thereby helping Rome to lord it again in
England. The English soldier in Flanders came over to London, put
up at an inn, which occupied a site not very distant from that of the
once well-known “Angel” in St. Clement’s Danes, and made a gay
figure in the open Strand, till he was prepared to consummate a work
which he thought would help himself to greatness.
Into the matter of the plot I will not enter. It must be observed,
however, that knight never went more coolly to look death in the face
than Guy went to blow up the Protestant king and the parliament. At
the same time it must be added, that Guy had not the slightest
intention of hoisting himself with his own petard. He ran a very great
risk, it is true, and he did it fearlessly; but the fact that both a carriage
and a boat were in waiting to facilitate his escape, shows that self-
sacrifice was not the object of the son of the York proctor. His great
ambition was to rank among knights and nobles. He took but an ill-
method to arrive at such an object; but his reverence for nobility was
seen even when he was very near to his violent end. If he was ever
a hero, it was when certain death by process of law was before him.
But even then it was his boast and solace, that throughout the affair
there was not a man employed, even to handle a spade, in
furtherance of the end in view, who was not a gentleman. Guy died
under the perfect conviction that he had done nothing derogatory to
his quality!
Considering how dramatic are the respective stories of the page and
squire, briefly noticed above, it is remarkable that so little use has
been made of them by dramatists. Savage is the only one who has
dramatized the story of the two knights, Somerset and Overbury. In
this tragedy bearing the latter knight’s name, and produced at the
Haymarket, in June, 1723, he himself played the hero, Sir Thomas.
His attempt to be an actor, and thus gain an honest livelihood by his
industry, was the only act of his life of which Savage was ever
ashamed. In this piece the only guilty persons are the countess and
her uncle, the Earl of Northampton. This is in accordance with the
once-prevailing idea that Northampton planned the murder of Sir
Thomas, in his residence, which occupied the site of the present
Northumberland house. The play was not successful, and the same
may be said of it when revived, with alterations, at Covent Garden, in
1777. Sheridan, the actor, furnished the prologue. In this production
he expressed his belief that the public generally felt little interest in
the fate of knights and kings. The reason he assigns is hardly logical.

“Too great for pity, they inspire respect,

Their deeds astonish rather than affect.
 Proving how rare the heart that we can move,
Which reason tells us we can never prove.”

Guy Faux, who, when in Spain, was the ’squire of the higher-born
Catesby, has inspired but few dramatic writers. I only know of two. In
Mrs. Crouch’s memoirs, notice is made of an afterpiece, brought out
on the 5th of November, 1793, at the Haymarket. A far more
creditable attempt to dramatize the story of Guy Fawkes was made
with great success at the Coburg (Victoria) theatre, in September,
1822. This piece still keeps possession of the minor stage, and
deservedly; but it has never been played with such effect as by its
first “cast.” O. Smith was the Guy, and since he had played the
famous Obi, so well as to cause Charles Kemble’s impersonation at
the Haymarket to be forgotten, he had never been fitted with a
character which suited him so admirably. It was one of the most
truthful personations which the stage had ever seen. Indeed the
piece was played by such a troop of actors as can not now be found
in theatres of more pretensions than the transpontine houses. The
chivalric Huntley, very like the chivalric Leigh Murray, in more
respects than one, enacted Tresham with a rare ability, and judicious
Chapman played Catesby with a good taste, which is not to be found
now in the same locality. Dashing Stanley was the Monteagle, and
graceful Howell the Percy, Beverly and Sloman gave rough portraits
of the king and the facetious knight, Sir Tristam Collywobble—coarse
but effective. Smith, however, was the soul of the piece, and Mr.
Fawkes, of Farnley, might have witnessed the representation, and
have been proud of his descent from the dignified hero that O. Smith
made of his ancestor.
I have given samples of knights of various qualities, but I have yet to
mention the scholar and poet knights. There are many personages
who would serve to illustrate the knight so qualified, but I know of
none so suitable as Ulrich Von Hutten.
 ULRICH VON HUTTEN.
“Jacta est alea.”—Ulrich’s Device.

Ulrich von Hutten was born on the 21st of April, 1488, in the
castle of Stackelberg, near Fulda, in Franconia. He was of a noble
family—all the men of which were brave, and all the women virtuous.
He had three brothers and two sisters. His tender mother loved him
the most, because he was the weakest of her offspring. His father
loved him the least for the same reason. For a like cause, however,
both parents agreed that a spiritual education best accorded with the
frame of Ulrich. The latter, at eleven years old, was accordingly sent
to learn his humanities in the abbey school at Fulda.
His progress in all knowledge, religious and secular, made him the
delight of the stern abbot and of his parents. Every effort possible
was resorted to, to induce him to devote himself for ever to the life of
the cloister. In his zealous opposition to this he was ably seconded
by a strong-handed and high-minded knight, a friend of his father’s
named Eitelwolf von Stein. This opposition so far succeeded, that in
1504, when Ulrich was sixteen years of age he fled from the cloister-
academy of Fulda, and betook himself to the noted high-school at
Erfurt.
Among his dearest fellow Alumni here were Rubianus and Hoff, both
of whom subsequently achieved great renown. In the Augustine
convent, near the school, there was residing a poor young monk,
who also subsequently became somewhat famous. Nobody,
however, took much account of him just then, and few even cared to
know his name—Martin Luther. The plague breaking out at Erfurt,
Rubianus was accompanied by Ulrich to Cologne, there to pursue
their studies. The heart and purse of Ulrich’s father were closed
against the son, because of his flight from Fulda; but his kinsman
Eitelwolf, provided for the necessities of the rather imprudent young
scholar.
The sages who trained the young idea at Cologne were of the old
high and dry quality—hating progress and laboriously learned in
trifles. At the head of them were Hogstraten and Ortuin. Ulrich
learned enough of their manner to be able to crush them afterward
with ridicule, by imitating their style, and reproducing their gigantic
nonsense, in the famous “Epistolæ Obscurorum Virorum.” In the
meantime he knit close friendship with Sebastian Brandt, and
Œcolampadius—both young men of progress. The latter was
expelled from Cologne for being so, but the University of Frankfort
on the Oder offered him an asylum. Thither Ulrich repaired also, to
be near his friend, and to sharpen his weapons for the coming
struggle between light and darkness—Germany against Rome, and
the German language against the Latin.
At Frankfort he won golden opinions from all sorts of people. The
Elector, Joachim of Brandenburg; his brother, the priestly Margrave
Albert; and Bishop Dietrich von Beilow were proud of the youth who
did honor to the university. He here first became a poet, and took the
brothers Von Osthen for his friends. He labored earnestly, and
acquired much glory; but he was a very free liver to boot, though he
was by no means particularly so, for the times in which he lived. His
excesses, however, brought on a dangerous disease, which, it is
sometimes supposed, had not hitherto been known in Europe. Be
this as it may, he was never wholly free from the malady as long as
he lived, nor ever thought that it much mattered whether he suffered
or not.
He was still ill when he took up for a season the life of a wandering
scholar. He endured all its miserable vicissitudes, suffered famine
and shipwreck, and was glad at last to find a haven, as a poor
student, in the Pomeranian University of Griefswalde. The Professor
Lötz and his father the Burgomaster, were glad to patronize so
renowned a youth, but they did it with such insulting condescension
that the spirit of Ulrich revolted; and in 1509, the wayward scholar
was again a wanderer, with the world before him where to choose.
The Lötzes, who had lent him clothes, despatched men after him to
strip him; and the poor, half-frozen wretch, reached Rostock half
starved, more than half naked, with wounds gaping for vengeance,
and with as little sense about him as could be possessed by a man
so ill-conditioned.
He lived by his wits at Rostock. He was unknown and perfectly
destitute; but he penned so spirited a metrical narrative of his life and
sufferings, addressed to the heads of the university there, that these
at once received him under their protection. In a short time he was
installed in comparative comfort, teaching the classics to young
pupils, and experiencing as much enjoyment as he could,
considering that the Lötzes of Griefswalde were continually assuring
his patrons that their protégé was a worthless impostor.
He took a poet’s revenge, and scourged them in rhymes, the very
ruggedness of which was tantamount to flaying.
Having gained his fill of honor at Rostock, his restless spirit urged
him once again into the world. After much wandering, he settled for a
season at Wittenburg, where he was the delight of the learned men.
By their eleemosynary aid, and that of various friends, save his
father, who rejoiced in his renown but would not help him to live, he
existed after the fashion of many pauper students of his day. At
Wittenburg he wrote his famous “Art of Poetry;” and he had no
sooner raised universal admiration by its production, than forth he
rushed once more into the world.
He wandered through Bohemia and Moravia, thankfully accepting
bread from peasants, and diamond rings from princes. He had not a
maravedi in his purse, nor clean linen on his back; but he made
himself welcome everywhere. One night he slept, thankfully, on the
straw of a barn; and the next sank, well-fed, into the eider-down of a
bishop’s bed. He entered Olmutz ragged, shoeless, and exhausted.
He left it, after enjoying the rich hospitality he had laughingly
extracted from Bishop Turso, on horseback, with a heavy purse in
his belt, a mantle on his shoulder, and a golden ring, with a jewel set
in it, upon his finger. Such were a student’s vicissitudes, in the days
of German wandering, a long time ago.
The boy, for he was not yet twenty years of age, betook himself to
Vienna, where he kept a wide circle in continual rapture by the
excellence of his poetical productions. These productions were not
“all for love,” nor were they all didactic. He poured out war-ballads to
encourage the popular feeling in favor of the Emperor Maximilian,
against his enemies in Germany and Italy. Ulrich was, for the
moment, the Tyrtæus of his native country. Then, suddenly
recollecting that his angry sire had said that if his son would not take
the monk’s cowl, his father would be content to see him assume the
lawyer’s coif, our volatile hero hastened to Pavia, opened the law
books on an ominous 1st of April, 1512, and read them steadily, yet
wearied of them heartily, during just three months.
At this time Francis the first of France, who had seized on Pavia,
was besieged therein by the German and Swiss cavalry. Ulrich was
dangerously ill during the siege, but he occupied the weary time by
writing sharp epitaphs upon himself. The allies entered the city; and
Ulrich straightway departed from it, a charge having been laid
against him of too much partiality for the French. The indignant
German hurried to Bologna, where he once more addressed himself
to the Pandects and the Juris Codices Gentium.
This light reading so worked on his constitution that fever laid him
low, and after illness came destitution. He wrote exquisite verses to
Cardinal Gurk, the imperial embassador in Bologna, where the pope
for the moment resided; but he failed in his object of being raised to
some office in the cardinal’s household. Poor Ulrich took the course
often followed by men of his impulses and condition; he entered the
army as a private soldier, and began the ladder which leads to
knighthood at the lowest round.
Unutterable miseries he endured in this character; but he went
through the siege of Pavia with honor, and he wrote such sparkling
rhymes in celebration of German triumphs and in ridicule of
Germany’s foes, that, when a weakness in the ankles compelled him
to retire from the army, he collected his songs and dedicated them to
the Emperor.
The dedication, however, was so very independent of tone, that
Maximilian took no notice of the limping knight who had exchanged
the sword for the lyre. Indeed, at this juncture, the man who could
wield a sledge-hammer, was in more esteem with the constituted
authorities than he who skilfully used his pen. The young poet could
scarcely win a smile, even from Albert of Brandenburg, to whom he
had dedicated a poem. Sick at heart, his health gave way, and a
heavy fever sent him to recover it at the healing springs in the valley
of Ems.
A short time previous to his entering the army, the young Duke Ulrich
of Wurtemburg had begun to achieve for himself a most unenviable
reputation. He had entered on his government; and he governed his
people ill, and himself worse. He allowed nothing to stand between
his own illustrious purpose and the object aimed at. He had for wife
the gentle Bavarian princess, Sabina, and for friend, young Johan
von Hutten, a cousin of our hero Ulrich.
Now, Johan von Hutten had recently married a fair-haired girl, with
the not very euphonious appellation of Von Thumb. She was,
however, of noble birth, and, we must add, of light principles. The
duke fell in love with her, and she with the duke, and when his friend
Johan remonstrated with him, the ducal sovereign gravely proposed
to the outraged husband an exchange of consorts!
Johan resolved to withdraw from the ducal court; and this resolution
alarmed both his wife and the duke, for Johan had no intention of
leaving his lightsome Von Thumb behind him. Therefore, the duke
invited Johan one fine May morning in the year 1515, to take a
friendly ride with him through a wood. The invitation was accepted,
and as Johan was riding along a narrow path, in front of the duke,
the latter passed his sword through the body of his friend, slaying
him on the spot.
Having thus murdered his friend, the duke hung him up by the neck
in his own girdle to a neighboring tree, and he defended the deed, by
giving out that ducal justice had only been inflicted on a traitor who
had endeavored to seduce the Duchess of Wurtemburg! The lady,
however, immediately fled to her father, denouncing the
faithlessness of her unworthy husband, on whose bosom the young
widow of the murdered Johan now reclined for consolation.
On this compound deed becoming known, all Germany uttered a
unanimous cry of horror. The noblest of the duke’s subjects flung off
their allegiance. His very servants quitted him in disgust. His fellow-
princes invoked justice against him and Ulrich von Hutten, from his
sick couch at Ems, penned eloquent appeals to the German nation,
to rise and crush the ruthless wretch who had quenched in blood, the
life, the light, the hope, the very flower of Teutonic chivalry.
The “Philippics” of Ulrich were mainly instrumental in raising a
terrible Nemesis to take vengeance upon his ducal namesake; and
he afterward wrote his “Phalarismus” to show that the tyrant excited
horror, even in the infernal regions. The opening sentence—“Jacta
est alea!” became his motto; and his family took for its apt device
—“Exoriare aliquis nostris ex ossibus ultor!” From this time forward,
Ulrich von Hutten was a public man, and became one of the
foremost heroes of his heroic age. He was now scholar, poet, and
knight.
His fame would have been a pleasant thing to him, but the pleasure
was temporarily diminished by the death of his old benefactor,
Eitelwolf von Stein. The latter was the first German statesman who
was also a great scholar; and his example first shook the prejudice,
that for a knight or nobleman to be book-learned was derogatory to
his chivalry and nobility. Into the area of public warfare Ulrich now
descended, and the enemies of light trembled before the doughty
champion. The collegiate teachers at Cologne, with Hogstraten, the
Inquisitor, Pfefierkorn, a converted Jew, and Ortuin—at their head,
had directed all the powers of the scholastic prejudices against
Reuchlin and his followers, who had declared, that not only Greek,
but Hebrew should form a portion of the course of study for those
destined to enter the Church. The ancient party pronounced this
Heathenism; Reuchlin and his party called it Reason, and Germany,
was split in two, upon the question.
At the very height of the contest, a lad with a sling and a stone
entered the lists, and so dexterously worked his missiles, that the
enemy of learning was soon overcome. The lad was Von Hutten,
who, as chief author of those amusing satires, “Epistolae
Obscurorum Virorum,” ruined Monkery and paralyzed Rome, by
making all the world laugh at the follies, vices, crimes, and selfish
ignorance of both.
Leo X. was so enraged, that he excommunicated the authors, and
devoted them to damnation. “I care no more,” said Von Hutten, “for
the bull of excommunication than I do for a soap-bubble.” The
reputation he had acquired, helped him to a reconciliation with his
family; but the members thereof had only small respect for a mere
learned knight. They urged him to qualify himself for a chancellor,
and to repair to Rome, and study the law accordingly.
Something loath, he turned his face toward the Tyber, in 1515. The
first news received of the law-student was to the effect, that having
been attacked, dagger in hand, at a pic-nic, near Viterbo, by five
French noblemen, whom he had reproved for speaking ill of
Germany and the Emperor Maximilian, he had slain one and put the
other four to flight. From this fray he himself escaped with a slash on
the cheek. He recounted his victory in a song of triumph, and when
the law-student sat down to his books, every one in Rome
acknowledged that his sword and his pen were equally pointed.
His French adversaries threatened vengeance for their humiliating
defeat; and he accordingly avoided it, by withdrawing to Bologne,
where he again, with hearty disgust, applied himself to the severe
study of a law which was never applied for justice sake. He found
compensation in penning such stirring poetry as his satirical “Nemo,”
and in noting the vices of the priesthood with the intention of turning
his observation to subsequent profit. A feud between the German
and Italian students at Bologna soon drove our scholar from the
latter place. He took himself to Ferrara and Venice; was welcomed
everywhere by the learned and liberal, and, as he wrote to Erasmus,
was loaded by them with solid pudding as well as empty praise.
From this journey he returned to his native country. He repaired to
Augsburg, where Maximilian was holding court, and so well was he
commended to the emperor, that on the 15th of June, 1517, that
monarch dubbed him Imperial Knight, placed a gold ring, symbolic of
chivalrous dignity, on his finger, and crowned him a poet, with a
laurel wreath, woven by the fairest flower of Augsburg, Constance
Peutinger.
After such honors, his father received him with joy at his hearth; and
while Von Hutten went from his native Stackelberg to the library at
Fulda, yet hesitating whether to take service under the Emperor or
under the Elector of Mayence, he bethought himself of the irrefutable
work of Laurentius Valla against the temporal authority and
possessions of the Popedom. He studied the work well, published an
improved edition, and dedicated it, in a letter of fire and ability, to Leo
X.;—a proof of his hope in, or of his defiance of, that accomplished
infidel.
Luther and Von Hutten were thus, each unconscious of the other,
attacking Popery on two points, about the same moment. Luther
employed fearful weapons in his cause, and wielded them manfully.
Von Hutten only employed, as yet, a wit which made all wither where
it fell; and an irony which consumed where it dropped. In the
handling of these appliances, there was no man in Germany who
was his equal. Leo could admire and enjoy both the wit and the
irony; and he was not disinclined to agree with the arguments of
which they were made the supports; but what he relished as a
philosopher, he condemned as a Pontiff. The Florentine, Lorenzo de’
Medici, could have kissed the German on either cheek, but the
Pope, Leo X., solemnly devoted him to Gehenna.
As a protection against papal wrath, Von Hutten entered the service
of Albert, Elector-Archbishop of Mayence. Albert was a liberal
Romanist, but nothing in the least of an Ultra-Montanist. He loved
learning and learned men, and he recollected that he was a German
before he was a Romanist. In the suite of the elector, Von Hutten
visited Paris, in 1518. He returned to Mayence only to carry on more
vigorously his onslaught against the begging monks. He accounted
them as greater enemies to Germany than the Turks. “We fight with
the latter, beyond our frontier for power; but the former are the
corrupters of science, of religion, of morals—and they are in the very
midst of us.” So does he write, in a letter to Graf Nuenar, at Cologne.
The building of St. Peter’s cost Rome what the building of Versailles
cost France—a revolution. In each case, an absolute monarchy was
overthrown never again to rise. To provide for the expenses of St.
Peter’s, the Dominican Tetzel traversed Germany, selling his
indulgences. Luther confronted him, and denounced his mission, as
well as those who sent him on it. Von Hutten, in his hatred of monks,
looked upon this as a mere monkish squabble; and he was glad to
see two of the vocation holding one another by the throat.
At this precise moment, Germany was excited at the idea of a
projected European expedition against the Turks. The Imperial
Knight saw clearly the perils that threatened Christendom from that
question, and was ready to rush, sword in hand, to meet them. He
declared, however, that Europe groaned under a more insupportable
yoke, laid on by Rome, and he deprecated the idea of helping Rome
with funds against the Moslem. What a change was here from the
Imperial crusading knights of a few centuries earlier. “If Rome,” he
said, “be serious on the subject of such a crusade, we are ready to
fight, but she must pay us for our services. She shall not have both
our money and our blood.” He spoke, wrote, and published boldly
against Rome being permitted to levy taxes in Germany, on pretence
of going to war with the unbelieving Ottomans. At the same moment,
Luther was denouncing the monks who thought to enrich the coffers
of Rome by the sale of indulgences. One was the political, the other
the religious enemy of the power which sought to rule men and their
consciences from under the shadow of the Colosseum.
There was little hope of aid from the emperor, but Von Hutten looked
for all the help the cause needed in a union of the citizen classes
(whom he had been wont to satirize) with the nobility. To further the
end in view, he wrote his masterly dialogue of “The Robbers.” In this
piece, the speakers are knights and citizens. Each side blames the
other, but each is made acquainted with the other’s virtues, by the
interposition of a Deus ex machinâ in the presence of the knight,
Franz von Sickingen. The whole partakes of the spirit and raciness
of Bunyan and Cobbett. Throughout the dialogue, the vices of no
party in the state find mercy, while the necessity of the mutual
exercise of virtue and aid is ably expounded.
The knight, Franz von Sickingen, was author of a part of this
dialogue. His adjurations to Von Hutten not to be over-hasty and his
reason why, are no doubt his own. By the production of such papers,
Germany was made eager for the fray. This particular and powerful
dialogue was dedicated to John, Pfalzgraf of the Rhine, Duke of
Bavaria, and Count of Spanheim. This illustrious personage had
requested Ulrich that whenever he published any particularly bold
book, in support of national liberty, he would dedicate it to him, the
duke. The author obeyed, in this instance, on good grounds and with
right good will. There is in the dialogue an audible call to war, and
this pleased Luther himself, who was now convinced that with the
pen alone, the Reformation could not be an established fact.
Ulrich longed for the contact, whereby to make his country and his
church free of Romanist tyranny. But he considers the possibility of a
failure. He adjured his family to keep aloof from the strife, that they
might not bring ruin on their heads, in the event of destruction falling
on his own. The parents of Ulrich were now no more; Ulrich as head
of his house was possessed of its modest estates. Of his own
possessions he got rid, as of an encumbrance to his daring and his
gigantic activity. He formally made over nearly all to his next brother,
in order that his enemies, should they ultimately triumph, might have
no ground for seizing them.
At the same time, he warned his brother to send him neither letters
nor money, as either would be considered in the light of aid offered
to an enemy, and might be visited with terrible penalties.
Having rid himself of what few would so easily have parted from, he
drew his sword joyously and independently for the sake of liberty
alone, and with a determination of never sheathing it until he had
accomplished that at which he aimed, or that the accomplishment of
such end had been placed beyond his power.
“Jacta est alea,” cried he, viewing his bright sword, “the die is
thrown, Ulrich has risked it.”
In the meantime Von Hutten remained in the service of the Elector-
Archbishop of Mayence. The courtiers laughed at him as a rude
knight. The knights ridiculed him as a poor philosopher. Both were
mistaken; he was neither poor nor rude, albeit a Ritter and a sage.
What he most cared for, was opportunity to be useful in his
generation, and leisure enough to cultivate learning during the hours
he might call his own. His satirical poems, coarsely enough worded
against a courtier’s life, are admirable for strength and coloring. Not
less admirable for taste and power are his letters of this period. In
them he denounces that nobility which is composed solely of family
pride; and he denounces, with equally good foundation, the life of
“Robber Knights,” as he calls them, who reside in their castles, amid
every sort of discomfort, and a world of dirt, of hideous noises, and
unsavory smells; and who only leave them to plunder or to be
plundered. He pronounces the true knights of the period to be those
alone who love religion and education. With the aid of these, applied
wisely and widely, and with the help of great men whom he names,
and who share his opinions, he hopes, as he fervently declares, to
see intellect gain more victories than force—to be able to bid the old
barbarous spirit which still influenced too many “to gird up its loins
and be off.” Health came to him with this determination to devote
himself to the service and improvement of his fellow-men. It came
partly by the use of simple remedies, the chief of which was
moderation in all things. Pen and sword were now alike actively
employed. He put aside the former, for a moment, only to assume
the latter, in order to strike in for vengeance against the aggressive
Duke of Wurtemburg.
The crimes of this potentate had at length aroused the emperor
against him. Maximilian had intrusted the leadership of his army to
the famous knight-errant of his day, Franz von Sickingen. This
cavalier had often been in open rebellion against the emperor
himself; and Hutten now enrolled himself among the followers of
Franz. His patron not only gave him the necessary permission but
continued to him his liberal stipend; when the two knights met, and
made their armor clash with their boisterous embrace, they swore
not to stop short of vengeance on the guilty duke, but to fight to the
death for liberty and Christendom. They slept together in the same
bed in token of brotherly knighthood, and they rose to carry their
banner triumphantly against the duke—ending the campaign by the
capture of the metropolis, Stutgardt.
Reuchlin resided in the capital, and the good man was full of fear; for
murder and rapine reigned around him. His fear was groundless, for
Von Hutten had urged Sickingen to give out that in the sack of