Chapter 19: Revolutions and Politics

Background to Revolution

Social Change

As in the Middle Ages, eighteenth-century European society was legally divided into groups with special privileges, such as the nobility and the clergy, and groups with special burdens, such as the peasantry.
Traditional prerogatives for elite groups persisted in societies undergoing dramatic and destabilizing change.
Economic growth created new inequalities between rich and poor.
While the poor struggled with rising prices, investors grew rich from the spread of manufacture in the countryside and overseas trade, including the trade in enslaved Africans and the products of slave labor.
Another social change involved the racial regimes established in European colonies to legitimize and protect slavery.
The contradiction between slavery and the Enlightenment ideals of liberty and equality was all too evident to the enslaved and the free people of color.

Growing Demands for Liberty and Equality

In addition to destabilizing social changes, the ideals of liberty and equality helped fuel revolutions in the Atlantic world.
The call for liberty was first of all a call for individual human rights.
Before the revolutionary period, even the most enlightened monarchs believed they needed to regulate what people wrote and believed.
The call for liberty was also a call for a new kind of government. Reformers believed that the people had sovereignty— that is, that the people alone had the authority to make laws limiting an individual’s freedom of action.
Equality was a more ambiguous idea.
Eighteenth-century liberals argued that, in theory, all citizens should have identical rights and liberties and that the nobility had no right to special privileges based on birth.
First, most eighteenth-century liberals were men of their times, and they generally believed that equality between men and women was neither practical nor desirable.
Second, few questioned the inequality between blacks and whites.
Finally, liberals never believed that everyone should be equal economically.
The two most important Enlightenment references for late-eighteenth-century liberals were John Locke and the baron de Montesquieu.
The belief that representative institutions could defend their liberty and interests appealed powerfully to the educated middle classes.
Revolutions thus began with aspirations for equality and liberty among the social elite.
Soon, however, dissenting voices emerged as some revolutionaries became frustrated with the limitations of liberal notions of equality and liberty and clamored for a fuller realization of these concepts.
The age of revolution was thus marked by sharp conflicts over how far reform should go once it was initiated.

The Seven Years’ War

The roots of revolutionary ideas could be found in the writings of Locke or Montesquieu, but it was by no means inevitable that their ideas would result in revolution.
One of the most important was the global conflict known as the Seven Years’ War (1756–1763).
The war’s battlefields stretched from central Europe to India to North America (where the conflict was known as the French and Indian War), pitting a new alliance of England and Prussia against the French and Austrians
Unresolved tensions also lingered in North America, particularly regarding the border between the French and British colonies
British victory on all colonial fronts was ratified in the 1763 Treaty of Paris.
Canada and all French territory east of the Mississippi River passed to Britain, and France ceded Louisiana to Spain as compensation for Spain’s loss of Florida to Britain.
By 1763 Britain had become the leading European power in both trade and empire, but at a tremendous cost in war debt.
Since the Caribbean colony of SaintDomingue remained French, political turmoil in the mother country would directly affect its population.
The seeds of revolutionary conflict in the Atlantic world were thus sown.

The American Revolutionary Era, 1775-1789

The Origins of the Revolution

The high cost of the Seven Years’ War doubled the British national debt.
Anticipating further expenses to defend newly conquered territories, the government in London imposed bold new administrative measures.
These measures seemed perfectly reasonable to the British, for a much heavier stamp tax already existed in Britain, and proceeds from the tax were to fund the defense of the colonies.
This dispute raised important political questions.
To what extent could the British government reassert its power while limiting the authority of elected colonial bodies? Who had the right to make laws for Americans? The British government replied that Americans were represented in Parliament, albeit indirectly (like most British people), and that Parliament ruled throughout the empire.
Americans’ resistance to these threats was fed by the great degree of independence they had long enjoyed.
Moreover, greater political equality was matched by greater social and economic equality, at least for the free white population.
In 1773 disputes over taxes and representation flared up again.
Under the Tea Act of that year, the British government permitted the financially hard-pressed East India Company to ship tea from China directly to its agents in the colonies rather than through London middlemen, who sold to independent merchants in the colonies
In protest, Boston men disguised as Native Americans staged a rowdy protest (later called the “Tea Party”) by boarding East India Company ships and throwing tea from them into the harbor.
The British Parliament also rejected compromise, and in April 1775 fighting between colonial and British troops began at Lexington and Concord.

Independence of Britain

As fighting spread, the colonists moved slowly toward open calls for independence.
On July 4, 1776, the Second Continental Congress adopted the Declaration of Independence.
Written by Thomas Jefferson and others, this document boldly listed the tyrannical acts committed by George III (r. 1760–1820) and confidently proclaimed the natural rights of mankind and the sovereignty of the American states.
After the Declaration of Independence, the conflict often took the form of a civil war pitting patriots against Loyalists, those who maintained an allegiance to the Crown.
Many wealthy patriots— such as John Hancock and George Washington— willingly allied themselves with farmers and artisans in a broad coalition.
On the international scene, the French wanted revenge against the British for the humiliating defeats of the Seven Years’ War.
Thus by 1780 Britain was engaged in a war against most of Europe as well as the thirteen colonies.
Under the Treaty of Paris of 1783, Britain recognized the independence of the thirteen colonies and ceded all its territory between the Allegheny Mountains and the Mississippi River to the Americans.
Out of the bitter rivalries of the Old World, the Americans snatched dominion over a vast territory.

Framing the Constitution

The liberal program of the American Revolution was consolidated by the federal Constitution, the Bill of Rights, and the creation of a national republic.
Strong rule would be placed squarely in the context of representative self-government.
Senators and congressmen would be the lawmaking delegates of the voters, and the president of the republic would be an elected official.
The power of the federal government would in turn be checked by that of the individual states.
When the results of the secret deliberations of the Constitutional Convention were presented to the states for ratification, a great public debate began.
The result was the first ten amendments to the Constitution, which the first Congress passed shortly after it met in New York in March 1789.
These amendments, ratified in 1791, formed an effective Bill of Rights to safeguard the individual.

Limitations of Liberty and Equality

The American Constitution and the Bill of Rights exemplified the strengths and the limits of what came to be called classical liberalism.
A vigorous abolitionist movement during the 1780s led to the passage of emancipation laws in all northern states, but slavery remained prevalent in the South, and discord between pro- and antislavery delegates roiled the Constitutional Convention of 1787.
The young republic also failed to protect the Native American tribes whose lands fell within or alongside the territory ceded by Britain to the United States at the Treaty of Paris.
Although lacking the voting rights enjoyed by so many of their husbands and fathers in the relatively democratic colonial assemblies, women played a vital role in the American Revolution.

Revolution in France, 1789-1791

Breakdown of the Old Order

As did the American Revolution, the French Revolution had its immediate origins in the government’s financial difficulties.
The efforts of the ministers of King Louis XV (r. 1715–1774) to raise taxes to meet the expenses of the War of the Austrian Succession and the Seven Years’ War were thwarted by the high courts, known as the parlement.
When renewed efforts to reform the tax system met a similar fate in 1776, the government was forced to finance its enormous expenditures during the American war with borrowed money.
Unlike England, which had a far larger national debt relative to its population, France had no central bank and no paper currency.
These crises struck a monarchy that had lost much of its mantle of royal authority.
Kings had always maintained mistresses, who were invariably chosen from the court nobility.
Despite the progressive desacralization of the monarchy, Louis XV would probably have prevailed had he lived longer, but he died in 1774.
The new king, Louis XVI (r. 1774–1792), was a shy twenty-year-old with good intentions.

The Formation of the National Assembly

Spurred by a depressed economy and falling tax receipts, Louis XVI’s minister of finance revived old proposals to impose a general tax on all landed property as well as to form provincial assemblies to help administer the tax, and he convinced the king to call an assembly of notables in 1787 to gain support for the idea.
The assembled notables, mainly aristocrats and high-ranking clergy, declared that such sweeping tax changes required the approval of the Estates General, the representative body of all three estates, which had not met since 1614.
Facing imminent bankruptcy, the king tried to reassert his authority.
As its name indicates, the Estates General was a legislative body with representatives from the three orders, or estates, of society: the clergy, nobility, and everyone else.
The petitions for change drafted by the assemblies showed a surprising degree of consensus about the key issues confronting the realm.
On May 5, 1789, the twelve hundred delegates of the three estates gathered in Versailles for the opening session of the Estates General.
In angry response, in June 1789 delegates of the third estate refused to meet until the king ordered the clergy and nobility to sit with them in a single body.
On June 17 the third estate, which had been joined by a few parish priests, voted to call itself the National Assembly.
The king’s response was disastrously ambivalent.
On June 23 he made a conciliatory speech urging reforms, and four days later he ordered the three estates to meet together.
It appeared that the monarchy was prepared to use violence to restore its control.

Popular Uprising and the Rights of Man

While delegates at Versailles were pressing for political rights, economic hardship gripped the common people.
Against this background of poverty and political crisis, the people of Paris entered decisively onto the revolutionary stage.
Just as the laboring poor of Paris had been roused to a revolutionary fervor, the struggling French peasantry had also reached a boiling point.
In the summer of 1789, throughout France peasants began to rise in insurrection against their lords, ransacking manor houses and burning feudal documents that recorded their obligations.
In some areas peasants reoccupied common lands enclosed by landowners and seized forests.
Fear of marauders and vagabonds hired by vengeful landlords— called the Great Fear by contemporaries— seized the rural poor and fanned the flames of rebellion.
Faced with chaos, the National Assembly responded to peasant demands with a surprise maneuver on the night of August 4, 1789.
Having granted new rights to the peasantry, the National Assembly moved forward with its reforms.
On August 27, 1789, it issued the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen.
The National Assembly’s declaration had little practical effect for the poor and hungry people of Paris.
The economic crisis worsened after the fall of the Bastille, as aristocrats fled the country and the luxury market collapsed.
On October 5 some seven thousand women marched the twelve miles from Paris to Versailles to demand action.
Liberal elites brought the Revolution into being and continued to lead politics.
Yet the people of France were now roused and would henceforth play a crucial role in the unfolding of events.

A Constitutional Monarchy and Its Challenges

The day after the women’s march on Versailles, the National Assembly followed the king to Paris, and the next two years, until September 1791, saw the consolidation of the liberal revolution.
The constitution passed in September 1791 was the first in French history.
It broadened women’s rights to seek divorce, to inherit property, and to obtain financial support for illegitimate children from fathers, but excluded women from political office and voting.
This decision was attacked by a small number of men and women who believed that the rights of man should be extended to all French citizens.
In addition to ruling on women’s rights, the National Assembly replaced the complicated patchwork of historic provinces with eighty-three departments of approximately equal size, a move toward more rational and systematic methods of administration.
The National Assembly also imposed a radical reorganization on religious life.
The Assembly granted religious freedom to the small minority of French Protestants and Jews.
Imbued with the rationalism and skepticism of the eighteenth-century philosophes, many delegates distrusted popular piety and “superstitious religion.”
The attempt to remake the Catholic Church, like the abolition of guilds and workers’ associations, sharpened the conflict between the educated classes and the common people that had been emerging in the eighteenth century.

World War and Republican France, 1791-1799

The International Response

The outbreak of revolution in France produced great excitement and a sharp division of opinion in Europe and the United States.
One passionate rebuttal came from a young writer in London, Mary Wollstonecraft (1759–1797).
Incensed by Burke’s book, Wollstonecraft wrote a blistering attack, A Vindication of the Rights of Man (1790).
Two years later, she published her masterpiece, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792).
The kings and nobles of continental Europe, who had at first welcomed the Revolution in France as weakening a competing power, now feared its impact.
But the crowned heads of Europe misjudged the situation. The new French representative body, called the Legislative Assembly, that convened in October 1791 had new delegates and a different character.
Although the delegates were still prosperous, well educated middle-class men, they were younger and less cautious than their predecessors.
Many of them belonged to the political Jacobin Club
Jacobins and other deputies reacted with patriotic fury to the Declaration of Pillnitz.
France’s crusade against tyranny went poorly at first.
Prussia joined Austria against the French, who broke and fled at their first military encounter with this First Coalition of foreign powers united against the Revolution.
Rather than offering refuge, the Assembly suspended the king from all his functions, imprisoned him, and called for a constitutional assembly to be elected by universal male suffrage.

The Second Revolution and the New Republic

The fall of the monarchy marked a radicalization of the Revolution, a phase that historians often call the second revolution.
As with the Legislative Assembly, many members of the new National Convention belonged to the Jacobin Club of Paris.
But the Jacobins themselves were increasingly divided into two bitterly opposed groups— the Girondists and the Mountain, led by Robespierre and another young lawyer, Georges Jacques Danton.
This division emerged clearly after the National Convention overwhelmingly convicted Louis XVI of treason.
Everywhere they went, French armies of occupation chased princes, abolished feudalism, and found support among some peasants and middle-class people.
Groups within France added to the turmoil. Peasants in western France revolted against being drafted into the army, with the Vendée region of Brittany emerging as the epicenter of revolt.
In March 1793 the National Convention was locked in a life-and-death political struggle between members of the Mountain and the more moderate Girondists.
The laboring poor and the petty traders were often known as the sans-culottes because their men wore trousers instead of the knee breeches of the aristocracy and the solid middle class.
The Convention also formed the Committee of Public Safety in April 1793 to deal with threats from within and outside France.
Counter-revolutionary forces in the Vendée won significant victories, and the republic’s armies were driven back on all fronts.
By July 1793 only the areas around Paris and on the eastern frontier were firmly held by the central government.
Defeat seemed imminent.

Total War and the Terror

A year later, in July 1794, the central government had reasserted control over the provinces, and the Austrian Netherlands and the Rhineland were once again in French hands.
Robespierre and the Committee of Public Safety advanced on several fronts in 1793 and 1794, seeking to impose republican unity across the nation.
First, they collaborated with the sans-culottes, who continued pressing the common people’s case for fair prices and a moral economic order
The people were also put to work, mainly producing arms and munitions for the war effort.
The government told craftsmen what to produce, nationalized many small workshops, and requisitioned raw materials and grain.
Second, while radical economic measures supplied the poor with bread and the armies with weapons, the Reign of Terror (1793–1794) enforced compliance with republican beliefs and practices.
In their efforts to impose unity, the Jacobins took actions to suppress women’s participation in political debate, which they perceived as disorderly and a distraction from women’s proper place in the home
The Terror also sought to bring the Revolution into all aspects of everyday life. The government sponsored revolutionary art and songs as well as a new series of secular festivals to celebrate republican virtue and patriotism.
The third and perhaps most decisive element in the French republic’s victory over the First Coalition was its ability to draw on the power of dedication to a national state and a national mission.
The all-out mobilization of French resources under the Terror combined with the fervor of nationalism to create an awesome fighting machine
By spring 1794 French armies were victorious on all fronts. The republic was saved.

The Thermidorian Reaction and the Directory

The success of the French armies led Robespierre and the Committee of Public Safety to relax the emergency economic controls, but they extended the political Reign of Terror.
As Robespierre’s closest supporters followed their leader to the guillotine, the respectable middle-class lawyers and professionals who had led the liberal revolution of 1789 reasserted their authority.
This period of Thermidorian reaction, as it was called, hearkened back to the beginnings of the Revolution; the middle class rejected the radicalism of the sans-culottes in favor of moderate policies that favored property owners.
In 1795 the middle-class members of the National Convention wrote yet another constitution to guarantee their economic position and political supremacy.
The Directory continued to support French military expansion abroad. War was no longer so much a crusade as a response to economic problems.
Two years later (1799) Napoleon Bonaparte ended the Directory in a coup d’état and substituted a strong dictatorship for a weak one.

The Napoleonic Era, 1799-1815

Napoleon's Rule of France

Born in Corsica into an impoverished noble family in 1769, Napoleon left home and became a lieutenant in the French artillery in 1785.
Napoleon soon learned that some prominent members of the legislature were plotting against the Directory.
The flamboyant thirty-year-old Napoleon, nationally revered for his heroism, was an ideal figure of authority.
On November 9, 1799, Napoleon and his conspirators ousted the Directors, and the following day soldiers disbanded the legislature at bayonet point.
Napoleon’s domestic policy centered on using his popularity and charisma to maintain order and end civil strife.
He did so by appeasing powerful groups in France by according them favors in return for loyal service.
Napoleon’s bargain with the solid middle class was codified in the famous Civil Code of March 1804, also known as the Napoleonic Code, which reasserted two of the fundamental principles of the Revolution of 1789: equality of all male citizens before the law, and security of wealth and private property.
At the same time, Napoleon consolidated his rule by recruiting disillusioned revolutionaries to form a network of ministers, prefects, and centrally appointed mayors.
Napoleon applied his diplomatic skills to healing the Catholic Church in France so that it could serve as a bulwark of social stability.
After arduous negotiations, Napoleon and Pope Pius VII (pontificate 1800–1823) signed the Concordat of 1801.
The domestic reforms of Napoleon’s early years were his greatest achievement. Much of his legal and administrative reorganization has survived in France to this day, but order and unity had a price: authoritarian rule.
After 1810 political suspects were held in state prisons, as they had been during the Terror.

Napoleon’s Expansion in Europe

Napoleon was above all a great military man.
After coming to power in 1799, he sent peace feelers to Austria and Great Britain, the two remaining members of the Second Coalition that had been formed against France in 1798.
In 1802 Napoleon was secure but driven to expand his power.
Aggressively redrawing the map of Germany so as to weaken Austria and encourage the secondary states of southwestern Germany to side with France, Napoleon tried to restrict British trade with all of Europe.
Austria, Russia, and Sweden joined with Britain to form the Third Coalition against France shortly before the Battle of Trafalgar.
Napoleon then proceeded to reorganize the German states.
In 1806 he abolished many of the tiny German states as well as the ancient Holy Roman Empire and established by decree the German Confederation of the Rhine, a union of fifteen German states minus Austria, Prussia, and Saxony.
Napoleon’s intervention in German affairs alarmed the Prussians, who mobilized their armies after more than a decade of peace with France.
In the subsequent treaties of Tilsit in 1807, Prussia lost half of its population, while Russia accepted Napoleon’s reorganization of western and central Europe and promised to enforce Napoleon’s economic blockade against British goods.

The Grand Empire and Its End

Increasingly, Napoleon saw himself as the emperor of Europe, not just of France.
The so-called Grand Empire he built had three parts.
The core, or first part, was an ever-expanding France, which by 1810 included today’s Belgium and the Netherlands, parts of northern Italy, and German territories on the east bank of the Rhine.
The second part consisted of a number of dependent satellite kingdoms, on the thrones of which Napoleon placed members of his large family.
The third part comprised the independent but allied states of Austria, Prussia, and Russia.
After 1806 Napoleon expected both satellites and allies to support his Continental System, a blockade in which no ship coming from Britain or her colonies could dock at a port controlled by the French.
The impact of the Grand Empire on the peoples of Europe was considerable. In the areas incorporated into France and in the satellites.
The first great revolt occurred in Spain.
In 1808 a coalition of Catholics, monarchists, and patriots rebelled against Napoleon’s attempts to make Spain a French satellite.
Yet Napoleon pushed on. In 1810, when the Grand Empire was at its height, Britain still remained at war with France, helping the guerrillas in Spain and Portugal.
Leaving his troops to their fate, Napoleon raced to Paris to raise yet another army.
Possibly he might still have saved his throne if he had been willing to accept a France reduced to its historical size— the proposal offered by Austria’s foreign minister, Prince Klemens von Metternich.
All across Europe patriots called for a “war of liberation” against Napoleon’s oppression.
Less than a month later, on April 4, 1814, a defeated Napoleon abdicated his throne.
The allies also agreed to the restoration of the Bourbon dynasty under Louis XVIII (r. 1814–1824) and promised to treat France with leniency in a peace settlement
Yet Louis XVIII lacked the magnetism of Napoleon.
Hearing of political unrest in France and diplomatic tensions in Vienna, Napoleon staged a daring escape from Elba in February 1815 and marched on Paris with a small band of followers.
As for Napoleon, he took revenge by writing his memoirs, nurturing the myth that he had been Europe’s revolutionary liberator, a romantic hero whose lofty work had been undone by oppressive reactionaries.

The Haitian Revolution, 1791-1804

Revolutionary Aspirations in Saint-Domingue

On the eve of the French Revolution, SaintDomingue— the most profitable of all Caribbean colonies— was even more rife with social tensions than France itself.
Legal and economic conditions on Saint-Domingue vastly favored the white population.
Most of the island’s enslaved population performed grueling toil in the island’s sugar plantations.
Despite their brutality, slaveholders on SaintDomingue freed a surprising number of their slaves, mostly their own mixed-race children, thereby producing one of the largest populations of free people of color in any slaveholding colony.
The political and intellectual turmoil of the 1780s, with its growing rhetoric of liberty, equality, and fraternity, raised new challenges and possibilities for each of Saint-Domingue’s social groups.
The National Assembly frustrated the hopes of all these groups.
Cowed by colonial representatives who claimed that support for free people of color would result in slave insurrection and independence, the Assembly refused to extend French constitutional safeguards to the colonies.
In July 1790 Vincent Ogé (aw-ZHAY) (ca. 1750– 1791), a free man of color, returned to Saint-Domingue from Paris determined to win rights for his people.
In May 1791, responding to what it perceived as partly justified grievances, the National Assembly granted political rights to free people of color born to two free parents who possessed sufficient property.
When news of this legislation arrived in Saint-Domingue, the white elite was furious, and the colonial governor refused to enact it.
Violence now erupted between groups of whites and free people of color in parts of the colony.

The Outbreak of Revolt

Just as the sans-culottes helped push forward more radical reforms in France, the second stage of revolution in Saint-Domingue also resulted from decisive action from below.
Revolts began on a few plantations on the night of August 22. Within a few days the uprising had swept much of the northern plain, creating a slave army estimated at around 2,000 individuals.
On April 4, 1792, as war loomed with the European states, the National Assembly issued a decree extending full citizenship rights to free people of color, including the right to vote for men.
Warfare in Europe soon spread to Saint-Domingue.
Toussaint L’Ouverture (1743–1803), a freed slave who had joined the revolt, was named a Spanish officer.
Since the beginning of the slave insurrection, the Spanish colony of Santo Domingo, just to the east of Saint-Domingue, had supported rebel slaves
Desperate for forces to oppose France’s enemies, commissioners sent by the newly elected National Convention promised to emancipate all those who fought for France.
The tide of battle began to turn when Toussaint L’Ouverture switched sides, bringing his military and political skills, along with four thousand well-trained soldiers, to support the French war effort.
The increasingly conservative nature of the French government during the Thermidorian reaction, however, threatened to undo the gains made by former slaves and free people of color.

The War of Haitian Independence

With Toussaint L’Ouverture acting increasingly as an independent ruler of the western province of SaintDomingue, another general, André Rigaud (1761– 1811), set up his own government in the southern peninsula.
Civil war broke out between the two sides in 1799, when L’Ouverture’s forces, led by his lieutenant, Jean Jacques Dessalines (1758–1806), invaded the south. Victory over Rigaud in 1800 gave L’Ouverture control of the entire colony.
This victory was soon challenged by Napoleon, who had his own plans for re-establishing slavery and using the profits as a basis for expanding French power.
It was left to L’Ouverture’s lieutenant, Jean Jacques Dessalines, to unite the resistance, and he led it to a crushing victory over French forces.
Haiti, the second independent state in the Americas and the first in Latin America, was born from the first successful large-scale slave revolt in history.
Yet Haitian independence had fundamental repercussions for world history, helping spread the idea that liberty, equality, and fraternity must apply to all people.
The next phase of Atlantic revolution soon opened in the Spanish American colonies.