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PART SIX

Revolutions Reshape theWorld, 1750–1870

CHAPTER 21Revolutionary Changes in theAtlantic World, 1750–1850

CHAPTER 22The Early IndustrialRevolution, 1760–1851

CHAPTER 23Nation Building and EconomicTransformation in theAmericas, 1800–1890

CHAPTER 24Africa, India, and the NewBritish Empire, 1750–1870

CHAPTER 25Land Empires in the Age ofImperialism, 1800–1870

Between 1750 and 1870, nearly every part of the world experienced dra-matic political, economic, and social change. The beginnings of indus-

trialization, the American and French Revolutions, and the revolutions forindependence in Latin America transformed political and economic life in Eu-rope and the Americas. The most powerful nations challenged existing bordersand ethnic boundaries. European nations expanded into Africa, Asia, and theMiddle East while Russia and the United States acquired vast new territories.

The American, French, and Latin American revolutions created new po-litical institutions and unleashed the forces of nationalism and social reform.The Industrial Revolution introduced new technologies and patterns of workthat made industrial societies wealthier, more fluid socially, and militarilymore powerful. Western intellectual life became more secular as the practicalbenefits of science and technology became evident. Reformers led success-ful efforts to abolish the Atlantic slave trade and, later, slavery itself in theWestern Hemisphere. Efforts to expand voting rights and improve the statusof women also gained support in Europe and the Americas.

European empires in the Western Hemisphere were largely dismantledby 1825. But the Industrial Revolution led to a new wave of economic and im-perial expansion. France conquered the North African state of Algeria, whileGreat Britain expanded its colonial rule in India and established new colonies

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in Australia and New Zealand. Of these, Indiaalone had a larger population than that of allthe colonies Europe had lost in the Americas.

Throughout Africa, European economic influ-ence greatly expanded, deepening the region’sconnection to the Atlantic economy and generating newpolitical forces. Some African states were invigorated by thisera of intensified cultural exchange, creating new institu-tions and developing new products for export. The OttomanEmpire and the Qing Empire were also deeply influenced byWestern expansionism. Both empires met this challenge byimplementing reform programs that preserved traditional struc-tures while adopting elements of Western technology and organi-zation. The Ottoman court introduced reforms in education, themilitary, and law and created the first constitution in an Islamicstate. The Qing Empire survived the period of European expansion,but a series of military defeats and a prolonged civil war severelyweakened the authority of the central government. Russia lagged behindWestern Europe in transforming its economy and political institutions, butmilitary weakness and internal reform pressures led to modernization efforts,including the abolition of serfdom.

The economic, political, and social revolutions that began in the mid-eighteenth century shook the foundations of European culture and led to the ex-pansion of Western power around the globe. Some of the nations of Asia, Africa,and Latin America resisted foreign intrusions by reforming and strengtheningtheir own institutions, forms of production, and military technologies. Others pushedfor more radical change, adopting Western commercial policies, industrial technologies,and government institutions. But after 1870, all these states would face even more aggressiveWestern imperialism, which few of them were able to resist.

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21 RevolutionaryChanges in theAtlantic World,1750–1850

CHAPTER OUTLINEPrelude to Revolution: The Eighteenth-Century Crisis

The American Revolution, 1775–1800

The French Revolution, 1789–1815

Revolution Spreads, Conservatives Respond, 1789–1850

ENVIRONMENT AND TECHNOLOGY: The Pencil

DIVERSITY AND DOMINANCE: Robespierre and Wollstonecraft Defend and Explain the Terror

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On the evening of August 14, 1791, more than twohundred slaves and black freedmen met in se-

cret in the plantation district of northern SaintDomingue˚ (present-day Haiti) to set the date for anarmed uprising against local slave owners. Althoughthe delegates agreed to delay the attack for a week, vi-olence began almost immediately. During the follow-ing decade, slavery was abolished; military forces fromBritain and France were defeated; and Haiti achievedindependence.

The meeting was provoked by news and rumorsabout revolutionary events in France that had spreadthrough the island’s slave community. Events in Francehad also divided the island’s white population intocompeting camps of royalists (supporters of France’sKing Louis XVI) and republicans (who sought an endto monarchy). The free mixed-race population ini-tially gained some political rights from the French As-sembly but was then forced to rebel when the localslave-owning elite reacted violently.

A black freedman named François DominiqueToussaint eventually became leader of the insurrec-tion. He proved to be one of the most remarkable rep-resentatives of the revolutionary era, later taking thename Toussaint L’Ouverture˚. He organized the rebelsinto a potent military force, negotiated with the is-land’s royalist and republican factions and with repre-sentatives of Great Britain and France, and wrote hisnation’s first constitution. Commonly portrayed as afiend by slave owners throughout the Western Hemi-sphere, to the slaves Toussaint became a toweringsymbol of resistance to oppression.

The Haitian slave rebellion was an importantepisode in the long and painful political and culturaltransformation of the modern Western world. Eco-nomic expansion and the growth of trade were cre-ating unprecedented wealth. The first stage of theIndustrial Revolution (see Chapter 22) increased man-ufacturing productivity and led to greater global in-terdependence, new patterns of consumerism, and

altered social structures. At the same time, intellectu-als were questioning the traditional place of monar-chy and religion in society. An increasingly powerfulclass of merchants, professionals, and manufacturerscreated by the emerging economy provided an audi-ence for these new intellectual currents and began topress for a larger political role.

This revolutionary era turned the Western world“upside down.” The ancien régime˚, the French termfor Europe’s old order, rested on medieval principles:politics dominated by powerful monarchs, intellec-tual and cultural life dominated by religion, and eco-nomics dominated by a hereditary agricultural elite.In the West’s new order, politics was opened to vastlygreater participation; science and secular inquirytook the place of religion in intellectual life; andeconomies were increasingly opened to competition.

This radical transformation did not take placewithout false starts and temporary setbacks. Imperialpowers resisted the loss of colonies; monarchs andnobles struggled to retain their ancient privileges; andthe church fought against the claims of science. Revo-lutionary steps forward were often matched by reac-tionary steps backward. The liberal and nationalistideals of the eighteenth-century revolutionary move-ments were only imperfectly realized in Europe and theAmericas in the nineteenth century. Despite setbacks,belief in national self-determination and universalsuffrage and a passion for social justice continued toanimate reformers into the twentieth century.

As you read this chapter, ask yourself the follow-ing questions:

● How did imperial wars among European powersprovoke revolution?

● In what ways were the revolutions, expanded liter-acy, and new political ideas linked?

● How did revolution in one country help incite revo-lution elsewhere?

● Why were the revolutions in France and Haiti moreviolent than the American Revolution?

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Saint Domingue (san doe-MANG) Toussaint L’Ouverture (too-SAN loo-ver-CHORE) ancien régime (ahn-see-EN ray-ZHEEM)

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PRELUDE TO REVOLUTION: THE EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY CRISIS

In large measure, the cost of wars fought among Eu-rope’s major powers over colonies and trade precipi-

tated the revolutionary era that began in 1775 with theAmerican Revolution. Britain, France, and Spain werethe central actors in these global struggles, but other im-perial powers were affected as well. Unpopular andcostly wars had been fought earlier and paid for withnew taxes. But changes in the Western intellectual andpolitical environments led to a much more critical re-sponse. Any effort to extend the power of a monarch orimpose new taxes now raised questions about the rightsof individuals and the authority of political institutions.

The rivalry among Europeanpowers intensified in the early1600s when the newly inde-pendent Netherlands began an

assault on the American and Asian colonies of Spain andPortugal. The Dutch attacked Spanish treasure fleets inthe Caribbean and Pacific and seized parts of Portugal’scolonial empire in Brazil and Angola. Europe’s otheremerging sea power, Great Britain, also attacked Spanishfleets and seaports in the Americas. By the end of theseventeenth century expanding British sea power hadchecked Dutch commercial and colonial ambitions andended the Dutch monopoly of the African slave trade.

As Dutch power ebbed, Britain and France began along struggle for political preeminence in western Eu-rope and for territory and trade outlets in the Americasand Asia. Both the geographic scale and the expense ofthis conflict expanded during the eighteenth century.Nearly all of Europe’s great powers were engaged in theWar of the Spanish Succession (1701–1714). In 1739 awar between Britain and Spain over smuggling in theAmericas quickly broadened into a generalized Euro-pean conflict, the War of the Austrian Succession (1740–1748). Conflict between French and English settlers inNorth America then helped ignite a long war that alteredthe colonial balance of power. War began along theAmerican frontier between French and British forcesand their Amerindian allies. Known as the French andIndian War, this conflict helped lead to a wider struggle,the Seven Years War (1756–1763). British victory led toundisputed control of North America east of the Missis-sippi River while also forcing France to surrender mostof its holdings in India.

Colonial Warsand Fiscal Crises

The enormous costs of these conflicts distinguishedthem from earlier wars. Traditional taxes collected in tra-ditional ways no longer covered the obligations of gov-ernments. For example, at the end of the Seven Years Warin 1763, Britain’s war debt reached £137 million. Britain’stotal budget before the war had averaged only £8 million.With the legacy of war debt, Britain’s interest paymentsalone came to exceed £5 million. Even as Europeaneconomies expanded because of increased trade and theearly stages of the Industrial Revolution, fiscal crisesovertook one European government after another. In anintellectual environment transformed by the Enlighten-ment, the need for new revenues provoked debate andconfrontation within a vastly expanded and more criti-cal public.

The complex and diverse in-tellectual movement calledthe Enlightenment applied themethods and questions ofthe Scientific Revolution of the

seventeenth century to the study of human society. Daz-zled by Copernicus’s ability to explain the structure ofthe solar system and Newton’s representation of the lawof gravity, European intellectuals began to apply the log-ical tools of scientific inquiry to other questions. Somelabored to systematize knowledge or organize referencematerials. For example, Carolus Linnaeus˚ (a Swedishbotanist known by the Latin form of his name) sought tocategorize all living organisms, and Samuel Johnsonpublished a comprehensive English dictionary with overforty thousand definitions. In France Denis Diderot˚worked with other Enlightenment thinkers to create acompendium of human knowledge, the thirty-five-volume Encyclopédie.

Other thinkers pursued lines of inquiry that chal-lenged long-established religious and political institu-tions. Some argued that if scientists could understandthe laws of nature, then surely similar forms of disci-plined investigation might reveal laws of human nature.Others wondered whether society and government mightbe better regulated and more productive if guided byscience rather than by hereditary rulers and the church.These new perspectives and the intellectual optimismthat fed them were to help guide the revolutionarymovements of the late eighteenth century.

The English political philosopher John Locke (1632–1704) argued in 1690 that governments were created to

TheEnlightenmentand the Old Order

542 Chapter 21 Revolutionary Changes in the Atlantic World, 1750–1850

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Carolus Linnaeus (kar-ROLL-uhs lin-NEE-uhs) Denis Diderot(duh-nee DEE-duh-roe)

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protect life, liberty, and property and that the people hada right to rebel when a monarch violated these naturalrights. Locke’s closely reasoned theory began with theassumption that individual rights were the foundation ofcivil government. In The Social Contract, published in1762, the French-Swiss intellectual Jean-Jacques Rous-seau˚ (1712–1778) asserted that the will of the peoplewas sacred and that the legitimacy of the monarch de-pended on the consent of the people. Although bothmen believed that government rested on the will of thepeople rather than on divine will, Locke emphasizedthe importance of individual rights, and Rousseau envi-sioned the people acting collectively because of theirshared historical experience.

All Enlightenment thinkers were not radicals likeRousseau. There was never a uniform program for polit-ical and social reform, and the era’s intellectuals oftendisagreed about principles and objectives. The Enlight-enment is commonly associated with hostility toward re-ligion and monarchy, but few European intellectualsopenly expressed republican or atheist sentiments. Thechurch was most commonly attacked when it attemptedto censor ideas or ban books. Critics of monarchial au-

thority were as likely to point out violations of ancientcustom as to suggest democratic alternatives. EvenVoltaire, one of the Enlightenment’s most critical intel-lects and great celebrities, believed that Europe’s mon-archs were likely agents of political and economic reformand even wrote favorably of China’s Qing˚ emperors.

Indeed, sympathetic members of the nobility andreforming European monarchs such as Charles III ofSpain (r. 1759–1788), Catherine the Great of Russia(r. 1762–1796), Joseph II of Austria (r. 1780–1790), andFrederick the Great of Prussia (r. 1740–1786) activelysponsored and promoted the dissemination of newideas, providing patronage for many intellectuals. Theyrecognized that elements of the Enlightenment critiqueof the ancien régime buttressed their own efforts to ex-pand royal authority at the expense of religious institu-tions, the nobility, and regional autonomy. Goals such asthe development of national bureaucracies staffed bycivil servants selected on merit, the creation of nationallegal systems, and the modernization of tax systemsunited many of Europe’s monarchs and intellectuals.Monarchs also understood that the era’s passion for sci-ence and technology held the potential of fattening

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C H R O N O L O G YThe Americas Europe

1754–1763 French and Indian War

1770 Boston Massacre1776 American Declaration of Independence1778 United States alliance with France1781 British surrender at Yorktown1783 Treaty of Paris ends American Revolution

1791 Slaves revolt in Saint Domingue (Haiti)

1798 Toussaint L’Ouverture defeats British in Haiti

1804 Haitians defeat French invasion and declareindependence

1756–1763 Seven Years War

1778 Death of Voltaire and Rousseau

1789 Storming of Bastille begins French Revolution;Declaration of Rights of Man and Citizen in France

1793–1794 Reign of Terror in France1795–1799 The Directory rules France1799 Napoleon overthrows the Directory1804 Napoleon crowns himself emperor1814 Napoleon abdicates; Congress of Vienna opens1815 Napoleon defeated at Waterloo1830 Greece gains independence; revolution in

France overthrows Charles X1848 Revolutions in France, Austria, Germany,

Hungary, and Italy

1750

1775

1800

Jean-Jacques Rousseau (zhah-zhock roo-SOE) Qing (ching)

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From early times Europeans had used sharp points, lead,and other implements to sketch, make marks, and write

brief notes. At the end of the seventeenth century a sourceof high-quality graphite was discovered at Borrowdale innorthwestern England. Borrowdale graphite gained accep-tance among artists, artisans, and merchants. At first, puregraphite was simply wrapped in string. By the eighteenthcentury, pieces of graphite were being encased in woodensheaths and resembled modern pencils. Widespread use ofthis useful tool was retarded by the limited supply of high-quality graphite from the English mines.

The English crown periodically closed the Borrowdalemines or restricted production to keep prices high and main-tain adequate supplies for future needs. As a result, artisansin other European nations developed alternatives that usedlower-quality graphite or, most commonly, graphite mixedwith sulfur and glues.

The major breakthrough occurred in 1793 in France whenwar with England ruptured trade links. The government ofrevolutionary France responded to the shortage of graphiteby assigning a thirty-nine-year-old scientist, Nicolas-JacquesConté, to find an alternative. Conté had earlier promoted themilitary use of balloons and conducted experiments with hy-drogen. He had also used graphite alloys in the developmentof crucibles for melting metal.

Within a short period, Conté produced a graphite that isthe basis for most lead pencils today. He mixed finely groundgraphite with potter’s clay and water. The resulting paste wasdried in a long mold, sealed in a ceramic box, and fired in anoven. The graphite strips were then placed in wooden cases.Although some believed the Conté pencils were inferior tothe pencils made from Borrowdale graphite, Conté produced

a very serviceable pencil that could be produced in uniformquality and unlimited amounts.

Summarizing the achievement of Conté in The Pencil,Henry Petroski wrote: “The laboratory is really the modernworkshop. And modern engineering results when the scien-tific method is united with experience with the tools andproducts of craftsmen. . . . Modern engineering, in spirit ifnot in name, would come to play a more and more active rolein turning the craft tradition into modern technology, withits base of research and development.”

Source: This discussion depends on Henry Petroski, The Pencil: A History ofDesign and Circumstance (New York: Knopf, 1990); the quotation is frompp. 50–78. Drawing by Fred Avent for Henry Petroski. Reproduced bypermission.

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national treasuries and improving economic perfor-mance (see Environment and Technology: The Pencil).Periodicals disseminating new technologies often gainedthe patronage of these reforming monarchs.

Though willing to embrace reform proposals whenthey served royal interests, Europe’s monarchs movedquickly to suppress or ban radical ideas that promotedrepublicanism or directly attacked religion. However,too many channels of communication were open to per-

mit a thoroughgoing suppression of ideas. In fact, cen-sorship tended to enhance intellectual reputations, andpersecuted intellectuals generally found patronage inthe courts of foreign rivals.

Many of the major intellectuals of the Enlightenmentmaintained extensive correspondence with each otheras well as with political leaders. This communication ledto numerous firsthand contacts among the intellectualsof different nations and helped create a coherent assault

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on what was typically called ignorance—beliefs and val-ues associated with the ancien régime. Rousseau, forexample, briefly sought refuge in Britain, where the Scot-tish philosopher David Hume befriended him. Similarly,Voltaire sought patronage and protection in Englandand later in Prussia.

Women were instrumental in the dissemination ofthe new ideas. In England educated middle-class womenpurchased and discussed the books and pamphlets ofthe era. Some were important contributors to intellec-tual life as writers and commentators, raising by exam-ple and in argument the issue of the rights of women. InParis wealthy women made their homes centers of de-bate, intellectual speculation, and free inquiry. Their sa-lons brought together philosophers, social critics, artists,and members of the aristocracy and commercial elite.Unlike their contemporaries in England, the women ofthe Parisian salons used their social standing more to di-rect the conversations of men than to give vent to theirown opinions.

The intellectual ferment of the era deeply influencedthe expanding middle class in Europe and the West-ern Hemisphere. Members of this class were eager con-sumers of books and the inexpensive newspapers andjournals that were widely available. This broadening ofthe intellectual audience overwhelmed traditional insti-tutions of censorship. Scientific discoveries, new tech-nologies, and controversial work on human nature andpolitics also were discussed in the thousands of coffee-houses and teashops opening in major cities and markettowns.

Many European intellectuals were interested in theAmericas. Some Europeans continued to dismiss theNew World as barbaric and inferior, but others used ide-alized accounts of the New World to support their cri-tiques of European society. These thinkers looked toBritain’s North American colonies for confirmation oftheir belief that human nature unconstrained by thecorrupted practices of Europe’s old order would quicklyproduce material abundance and social justice. Morethan any other American, the writer and inventor Ben-jamin Franklin came to symbolize both the natural ge-nius and the vast potential of America.

Born in 1706 in Boston, the young Franklin was ap-prenticed to his older brother, a printer. At seventeenhe ran away to Philadelphia, where he succeeded as aprinter and publisher and was best known for his PoorRichard’s Almanac. By age forty-two he was a wealthyman. He retired from active business to pursue writing,science, and public affairs. In Philadelphia Franklin wasinstrumental in the creation of the organizations thatlater became the Philadelphia Free Library, the Amer-

ican Philosophical Society, and the University of Penn-sylvania.

Franklin’s contributions were both practical andtheoretical. He was the inventor of bifocal glasses, thelightning rod, and an efficient wood-burning stove. In1751 he published a scientific work, Experiments andObservations on Electricity, that established his intellec-tual reputation in Europe. Intellectuals heralded thebook as proof that the simple and unsophisticated worldof America was a particularly hospitable environmentfor genius.

Franklin was also an important political figure. Heserved Pennsylvania as a delegate to the Albany (NewYork) Congress in 1754, which sought to coordinate colo-nial defense against attacks by the French and theirAmerindian allies. Later he was a Pennsylvania delegateto the Continental Congress that issued the Declarationof Independence in 1776. His service in England as colo-nial lobbyist and later as the Continental Congress’s am-bassador to Paris allowed him to cultivate his Europeanreputation. Franklin’s wide achievement, witty conversa-tion, and careful self-promotion make him a symbol ofthe era. In him the Enlightenment’s most radical project,the freeing of human potential from the inhibitions of in-herited privilege, found its most agreeable confirmation.

As Franklin’s career demonstrates, the WesternHemisphere shared in the debates of Europe. New ideaspenetrated the curricula of many colonial universitiesand appeared in periodicals and books published in theNew World. As scientific method was applied to eco-nomic and political questions, colonial writers, scholars,and artists on both sides of the Atlantic were drawn intoa debate that eventually was to lead to the rejection ofcolonialism itself. This radicalization of the colonial in-tellectual community was provoked by the Europeanmonarchies’ efforts to reform colonial policies. As Euro-pean authorities swept away colonial institutions andlong-established political practices without consulta-tion, colonial residents had to acknowledge that theirstatus as colonies meant perpetual subordination to Eu-ropean rulers. Among people compelled to recognizethis structural dependence and inferiority, the idea thatgovernment authority ultimately rested on the consentof the governed was potentially explosive.

In Europe and the colonies, many intellectuals resis-ted the Enlightenment, seeing it as a dangerous assaulton the authority of the church and monarchy. ThisCounter Enlightenment was most influential in Franceand other Catholic nations. Its adherents argued the im-portance of faith to human happiness and social well-being. They also emphasized duty and obligation to thecommunity of believers in opposition to the concern for

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individual rights and individual fulfillment common inthe works of the Enlightenment. Most importantly forthe politics of the era, they rejected their enemies’ en-thusiasm for change and utopianism, reminding theirreaders of human fallibility and the importance of his-tory. While the central ideas of the Enlightenment gainedstrength across the nineteenth century, the Counter En-lightenment provided the ideological roots of both con-servatism and popular antidemocratic movements.

While intellectuals and the re-forming royal courts of Europedebated the rational and secu-lar enthusiasms of the Enlight-

enment, most people in Western society remained loyalto competing cultural values grounded in the preindus-trial past. These regionally distinct folk cultures wereframed by the memory of shared local historical experi-

Folk Cultures andPopular Protest

ence and nourished by religious practices encouragingemotional release. They emphasized the obligations thatpeople had to each other and local, rather than national,loyalties. Though never formally articulated, these cul-tural traditions composed a coherent expression of themutual rights and obligations connecting the people andtheir rulers. Rulers who violated the constraints of theseunderstandings were likely to face violent opposition.

In the eighteenth century, European monarchssought to increase their authority and to centralizepower by reforming tax collection, judicial practice, andpublic administration. Although monarchs viewed thesechanges as reforms, the common people often saw themas violations of sacred customs and sometimes ex-pressed their outrage in bread riots, tax protests, and at-tacks on royal officials. These violent actions were notefforts to overturn traditional authority but were insteadefforts to preserve custom and precedent. In Spain andthe Spanish colonies, for example, protesting mobs


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commonly asserted the apparently contradictory slogan“Long live the King. Death to bad government.” They ex-pressed loyalty to and love for their monarch while at thesame time assaulting his officials and preventing the im-plementation of changes to long-established customs.

Folk cultures were threatened by other kinds of re-form as well. Rationalist reformers of the Enlightenmentsought to bring order and discipline to the citizenry bybanning or by altering the numerous popular culturaltraditions—such as harvest festivals, religious holidays,and country fairs—that enlivened the drudgery of every-day life. These events were popular celebrations of sexu-ality and individuality as well as opportunities formasked and costumed celebrants to mock the greed,pretension, and foolishness of government officials, thewealthy, and the clergy. Hard drinking, gambling, andblood sports like cockfighting and bearbaiting were pop-ular in this preindustrial mass culture. Because thesecustoms were viewed as corrupt and decadent by re-formers influenced by the Enlightenment, governmentsundertook efforts to substitute civic rituals, patriotic an-niversaries, and institutions of self-improvement. Thesechallenges to custom—like the efforts at political re-form—often provoked protests, rebellions, and riots.

The efforts of ordinary men and women to resist thegrowth of government power and the imposition of newcultural forms provide an important political undercur-rent to much of the revolutionary agitation and conflictbetween 1750 and 1850. Spontaneous popular uprisingsand protests punctuated nearly every effort at reform inthe eighteenth century. But these popular actions gainedrevolutionary potential only when they coincided withideological divisions and conflicts within the governingclass itself. In America and France the old order wasswept away when the protests and rebellions of the ruraland urban poor coincided with the appearance of revo-lutionary leaders who followed Enlightenment ideals inefforts to create secular republican states. Likewise, theslave rebellion in Saint Domingue (Haiti) achieved revo-lutionary potential when it attracted the support of blackfreedmen and disaffected poor whites radicalized bynews of the French Revolution.

THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION,1775–1800

In British North America, clumsy efforts to reform colo-nial tax policy to cover rising defense expenditures and

to diminish the power of elected colonial legislaturesoutraged a populace accustomed to greater local auton-

omy. Once begun, the American Revolution ushered in acentury-long process of political and cultural transfor-mation in Europe and the Americas. By the end of thisrevolutionary century the authority of monarchs hadbeen swept away or limited by constitutions, and reli-gion had lost its dominating place in Western intellectuallife. Moreover, the medieval idea of a social order deter-mined by birth had been replaced by a capitalist visionthat emphasized competition and social mobility.

After defeating the French in1763, the British governmentfaced two related problems inits North American colonies. As

settlers pushed west into Amerindian lands, the govern-ment saw the likelihood of renewed conflict and risingmilitary expenses. Already burdened with heavy debtsfrom the French and Indian War, Britain tried to limit set-tler pressure on Amerindian lands and get colonists toshoulder more of the costs of imperial defense and colo-nial administration.

In the Great Lakes region the British tried to containcosts by reducing the prices paid for furs and refusing tohonor the French practice of giving gifts and payingrent for frontier forts to Amerindian communities thathad become dependent on European trade goods,especially firearms, gunpowder, textiles, and alcohol.When the British forced down the trade value of furs,Amerindians had to hunt more aggressively to get thevolume of commodities they required, putting newpressures on the environment and endangering somespecies. The situation got worse as settlers and whitetrappers pushed across the Appalachians to competewith indigenous hunters.

At the end of the Seven Years War (see Chapter 17),Pontiac, an Ottawa chief, led a broad alliance of nativepeoples that drove the British military from western out-posts and raided settled areas of Virginia and Pennsylva-nia. Although this Amerindian alliance was defeatedwithin a year, the potential for new violence existed allalong the frontier.

The British government’s panicked reaction was theProclamation of 1763, which sought to establish an ef-fective western limit for settlement, throwing into ques-tion the claims of thousands of established farmerswithout effectively protecting Amerindian land. No onewas satisfied. In 1774 the British government annexeddisputed western territory to the province of Quebec,thus denying eastern colonies the authority to distributeadditional lands.

Frontier issues increased hostility and suspicionbetween the British government and many of the

Frontiers and Taxes

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colonists but did not directly lead to a breach. However,when the British government sought relief from the costof imperial wars with a campaign of fiscal reforms andnew taxes, it sparked a political confrontation thatwould lead to rebellion. New commercial regulationsincreased the cost of foreign molasses and endangeredNew England’s profitable trade with Spanish and FrenchCaribbean sugar colonies. The colonial practice of issu-ing paper money, a custom made necessary by thecolonies’ chronic balance-of-payments deficits, wasoutlawed. Colonial legislatures formally protested thesemeasures, and angry colonists organized boycotts ofBritish goods.

The Stamp Act of 1765, which imposed a tax, to bepaid in scarce coin, on all legal documents, newspa-pers, pamphlets, and nearly all other printed material,proved incendiary. Propertied colonists, includingholders of high office and members of the colonial elite,now assumed leading roles in protests, using fiery po-litical language that identified Britain’s rulers as “parri-cides” and “tyrants.” Women from many of the mostprominent colonial families organized boycotts ofBritish goods. The production of homespun textiles bycolonial women now became a patriotic enterprise. Ayoung girl in Boston proclaimed that she was a “daugh-ter of liberty” because she had learned to spin.1 Organi-zations such as the Sons of Liberty held publicmeetings, intimidated royal officials, and developedcommittees to enforce the boycotts. The combinationof violent protest and trade boycott forced the repeal ofthe Stamp Act, but new taxes and duties were soon im-posed, and Parliament sent British troops to quell ur-ban riots. One indignant woman later sent herpoignant perception of this injustice to a British officer:

[T]he most ignorant peasant knows, and [it] is clear tothe weakest capacity, that no man has the right to taketheir money without their consent. The supposition isridiculous and absurd, as none but highwaymen androbbers attempt it. Can you, my friend, reconcile itwith your own good sense, that a body of men in GreatBritain, who have little intercourse with America . . .shall invest themselves with a power to command ourlives and properties [?]2

New colonial boycotts cut the importation of Britishgoods by two-thirds. Angry colonists also destroyedproperty and bullied or attacked royal officials. Britishauthorities reacted by threatening traditional liberties,even dissolving the colonial legislature of Massachu-setts, and by dispatching two regiments of soldiers toreestablish control of Boston’s streets. Support for a

complete break with Britain grew after March 5, 1770,when a British force fired on an angry Boston crowd, kill-ing five civilians. This “Boston Massacre,” which seemedto expose the naked force on which colonial rule rested,radicalized public opinion throughout the colonies.

Parliament attempted to calm public opinion by re-pealing some taxes and duties, but then stumbled intoanother crisis by granting a monopoly for importing teato the colonies to the British East India Company, raisinganew the constitutional issue of Parliament’s right to taxthe colonies. The crisis came to a head when protestersdumped tea worth £10,000 into Boston harbor. Britainresponded by appointing a military man, Thomas Gage,as governor of Massachusetts and by closing the port ofBoston. Public order in Boston now depended on Britishtroops, and public administration was in the hands of a


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general. This militarization of colonial government inBoston undermined Britain’s constitutional authorityand made a military test of strength inevitable.

As the crisis mounted, patriotleaders created new governingbodies that made laws, ap-pointed justices, and even tookcontrol of colonial militias,

thus effectively deposing many British governors, judges,and customs officers. Simultaneously, radical leaders or-ganized crowds to intimidate loyalists—people who werepro-British—and organized women to enforce boycottsof British goods.

When representatives elected to the ContinentalCongress met in Philadelphia in 1775, patriot militia hadmet British troops at Lexington and Concord, Massachu-setts (see Map 21.1), and blood had already been shed.Events were propelling the colonies toward revolution.Congress assumed the powers of government, creating acurrency and organizing an army led by George Wash-ington (1732–1799), a Virginia planter who had served inthe French and Indian War.

Popular support for independence was given a hardedge by the angry rhetoric of thousands of street-cornerspeakers and the inflammatory pamphlet CommonSense, written by Thomas Paine, a recent immigrantfrom England. Paine’s pamphlet sold 120,000 copies. OnJuly 4, 1776, Congress approved the Declaration of Inde-pendence, the document that proved to be the most en-during statement of the revolutionary era’s ideology:

We hold these truths to be self evident: That all menare created equal; that they are endowed by their cre-ator with certain unalienable rights; that among theseare life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness; that, tosecure these rights, governments are instituted amongmen, deriving their just powers from the consent ofthe governed.

The Declaration’s affirmation of popular sovereigntyand individual rights would influence the language ofrevolution and popular protest around the world.

Hoping to shore up British authority, Great Britainsent additional military forces to pacify the colonies. By1778 British land forces numbered 50,000 and weresupported by 30,000 German mercenaries. This mili-tary commitment proved futile. Despite the existenceof a large loyalist community, the British army found itdifficult to control the countryside. Although Britishforces won most of the battles, Washington slowly built

The Course of Revolution,1775–1783

a competent Continental army as well as the civiliansupport networks that provided supplies and financialresources.

The real problem for the British government was itsinability to discover a compromise solution that wouldsatisfy colonial grievances. Half-hearted efforts to re-solve the bitter conflict over taxes failed, and a later offerto roll back the clock and reestablish the administrativearrangements of 1763 made little headway. Overconfi-dence and poor leadership prevented the British fromfinding a political solution before revolutionary institu-tions were in place and the armies engaged. By allowingconfrontation to occur, the British government lost theopportunity to mobilize and give direction to the largenumbers of loyalists and pacifists in the colonies.

Along the Canadian border, both sides solicitedAmerindians as potential allies and feared them as po-tential enemies. For over a hundred years, members ofthe powerful Iroquois Confederacy—Mohawk, Oneida,Onondaga, Cayuga, Seneca, and (after 1722) Tuscarora—had protected their traditional lands with a combinationof diplomacy and warfare, playing a role in all the colo-nial wars of the eighteenth century. Just as the AmericanRevolution forced neighbors and families to join therebels or remain loyal, it divided the Iroquois, whofought on both sides.

The Mohawk proved to be the most valuable Britishallies among the Iroquois. Their loyalist leader JosephBrant (Thayendanegea˚) organized Britain’s most po-tent fighting force along the Canadian border. His raidsalong the northern frontier earned him the title “Mon-ster” Brant, but he was actually a man who moved easilybetween European and Amerindian cultures. Educatedby missionaries, he was fluent in English and helpedtranslate Protestant religious tracts into Mohawk. Hewas tied to many of the wealthiest loyalist familiesthrough his sister, formerly the mistress of Sir WilliamJohnson, Britain’s superintendent of Indian affairs forNorth America. Brant had traveled to London, had anaudience with George III, (r. 1760–1820) and had beenembraced by London’s aristocratic society.

The defeat in late 1777 of Britain’s general John Bur-goyne by General Horatio Gates at Saratoga, New York,put the future of the Mohawk at risk. This victory, whichgave heart to patriot forces that had recently suffered astring of defeats, led to destructive attacks on Iroquoisvillages. Brant’s supporters fought on to the end of thewar, but patriot victories along the frontier curtailedtheir political and military power. Brant eventuallyjoined the loyalist exodus to Canada. For these Ameri-

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cans the revolution did not mean the protection of lifeand property.

The British defeat at Saratoga also convincedFrance to enter the war as an ally of the United States in1778. French military help proved crucial, supplyingAmerican forces and forcing the British to defend theircolonies in the Caribbean. The French contribution wasmost clear in the final decisive battle, fought at York-town, Virginia (see Map 21.1). With the American armysupported by French soldiers and a French fleet, Gen-eral Charles Cornwallis surrendered to Washington as

the British military band played “The World Turned Up-side-Down.”

This victory effectively ended the war. The Con-tinental Congress sent representatives to the peaceconference that followed with instructions to work intandem with the French. Believing that France was moreconcerned with containing British power than withguaranteeing a strong United States, America’s peacedelegation chose to negotiate directly with Britain andgained a generous settlement. The Treaty of Paris (1783)granted unconditional independence and established


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generous boundaries for the former colonies. In returnthe United States promised to repay prewar debts due toBritish merchants and to allow loyalists to recover prop-erty confiscated by patriot forces. In the end, loyalistswere poorly treated, and thousands of them decided toleave for Canada.

Even before the Declaration ofIndependence, many colonieshad created new governmentsindependent of British colo-nial authorities. After inde-pendence leaders in each of

the new states (as the former colonies were called) sum-moned constitutional conventions to draft formal char-ters and submitted the results to voters for ratification.Europeans were fascinated by the drafting of writtenconstitutions and by the formal ratification of theseconstitutions by a vote of the people. Many of thesedocuments were quickly translated and published inEurope. Remembering conflicts between royal gover-nors and colonial legislatures, the authors of state con-stitutions placed severe limits on executive authoritybut granted legislatures greater powers than in colonialtimes. Many state constitutions also included bills ofrights to provide further protection against governmenttyranny.

An effective constitution for the new national gov-ernment was developed with difficulty. The Second Con-tinental Congress sent the Articles of Confederation—thefirst constitution of the United States—to the states forapproval in 1777, but it was not accepted by all the statesuntil 1781. It created a one-house legislature in whicheach state was granted a single vote. A simple majority ofthe thirteen states was sufficient to pass minor legisla-tion, but nine votes were necessary for declaring war,imposing taxes, and coining or borrowing money. Exec-utive power was exercised by committees, not by a pres-ident. Given the intended weakness of this government,it is remarkable that it successfully organized the humanand material resources to defeat Great Britain.

With the coming of peace, many of the most power-ful political figures in the United States recognized thatthe Confederation was unable to enforce unpopular re-quirements of the peace treaty such as the recognitionof loyalist property claims, the payment of prewardebts, and even the payment of military salaries andpensions to veterans. In September 1786 Virginia in-vited the other states to discuss the government’s failureto deal with trade issues. This led to a call for a new con-vention to meet in Philadelphia nine months later. A re-

The Constructionof RepublicanInstitutions, to 1800

bellion led by Revolutionary War veterans in westernMassachusetts gave the assembling delegates a sense ofurgency.

The Constitutional Convention, which began meet-ing in May 1787, achieved a nonviolent second AmericanRevolution. The delegates pushed aside the announcedpurpose of the convention—“to render the constitutionof the federal government adequate to the exigencies ofthe union”—and secretly undertook the creation of anew constitution. George Washington was elected pre-siding officer. His reputation and popularity provided asolid foundation on which the delegates could contem-plate an alternative political model.

Debate focused on representation, electoral proce-dures, executive powers, and the relationship betweenthe federal government and the states. Compromise so-lutions included distribution of political power amongthe executive, legislative, and judicial branches and thedivision of authority between the federal governmentand the states. The final compromise provided for atwo-house legislature: the lower house (the House ofRepresentatives) to be elected directly by voters and theupper house (the Senate) to be elected by state legisla-tures. The chief executive—the president—was to beelected indirectly by “electors” selected by ballot in thestates.

Although the U.S. Constitution created the mostdemocratic government of the era, only a minority of theadult population was given full rights. In some northernstates where large numbers of free blacks had foughtwith patriot forces, there was some hostility to the con-tinuation of slavery, but southern leaders were able toprotect the institution. Although slaves were denied par-ticipation in the political process, slave states were per-mitted to count three-fifths of the slave population inthe calculations that determined the number of congres-sional representatives, thus multiplying the politicalpower of the slave-owning class. Southern delegates alsogained a twenty-year continuation of the slave trade to1808 and a fugitive slave clause that required all states toreturn runaway slaves to their masters.

Women were powerfully affected by their participa-tion in revolutionary politics and by the changes in theeconomy brought on by the break with Britain. They hadled prewar boycotts and had organized relief and chari-table organizations during the war. Some had served inthe military as nurses, and a smaller number had joinedthe ranks disguised as men. Nevertheless, they were de-nied political rights in the new republic. Only New Jerseydid not specifically bar women from voting, grantingthe right to vote to all free residents who met modestproperty-holding requirements. As a result, women and

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African-Americans who met property requirementswere able to vote in New Jersey until 1807, when law-makers eliminated this right.

THE FRENCH REVOLUTION,1789–1815

The French Revolution undermined traditionalmonarchy as well as the power of the Catholic

Church and the hereditary aristocracy but, unlike theAmerican Revolution, did not create an enduring form ofrepresentative democracy. The colonial revolution inNorth America, however, did not confront so directly theentrenched privileges of an established church, monar-chy, and aristocracy, and the American Revolution pro-duced no symbolic drama comparable to the publicbeheading of the French king Louis XVI in early 1793.Among its achievements, the French Revolution ex-panded mass participation in political life and radical-ized the democratic tradition inherited from the Englishand American experiences. But in the end, the passionsunleashed by revolutionary events in France could notbe sustained, and popular demagogues and the dictator-ship of Napoleon stalled democratic reform.

French society was divided intothree groups. The clergy, calledthe First Estate, numberedabout 130,000 in a nation of 28

million. The Catholic Church owned about 10 percent ofthe nation’s land and extracted substantial amounts ofwealth from the economy in the form of tithes and eccle-siastical fees. Despite its substantial wealth, the churchwas exempted from nearly all taxes. The clergy was or-ganized hierarchically, and members of the hereditarynobility held almost all the upper positions in the church.

The 300,000 members of the nobility, the Second Es-tate, controlled about 30 percent of the land and retainedancient rights on much of the rest. Nobles held the vastmajority of high administrative, judicial, military, andchurch positions. Though traditionally barred from sometypes of commercial activity, nobles were important par-ticipants in wholesale trade, banking, manufacturing,and mining. Like the clergy, this estate was hierarchical:important differences in wealth, power, and outlookseparated the higher from the lower nobility. The nobil-ity was also a highly permeable class: the Second Estatein the eighteenth century saw an enormous infusion of

French Societyand Fiscal Crisis

wealthy commoners who purchased administrative andjudicial offices that conferred noble status.

The Third Estate included everyone else, fromwealthy financier to homeless beggar. The bourgeoisie˚,or middle class, grew rapidly in the eighteenth century.There were three times as many members of this class in1774, when Louis XVI took the throne, as there had beenin 1715, at the end of Louis XIV’s reign. Commerce, fi-nance, and manufacturing accounted for much of thewealth of the Third Estate. Wealthy commoners alsoowned nearly a third of the nation’s land. This literateand socially ambitious class supported an expandingpublishing industry, subsidized the fine arts, and pur-chased many of the extravagant new homes being builtin Paris and other cities.


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Peasants accounted for 80 percent of the Frenchpopulation. Artisans and other skilled workers, smallshopkeepers and peddlers, and small landowners held amore privileged position in society. They owned someproperty and lived decently when crops were good andprices stable. By 1780 poor harvests had increased theircost of living and led to a decline in consumer demandfor their products. They were rich enough to fear the lossof their property and status, well educated enough to beaware of the growing criticism of the king, but too poorand marginalized to influence policy.

The nation’s poor were a large, growing, and trouble-some sector. The poverty and vulnerability of peasantfamilies forced younger children to seek seasonal workaway from home and led many to crime and beggary.That raids by roving vagabonds threatened isolatedfarms was one measure of this social dislocation. In Parisand other French cities the vile living conditions and un-healthy diet of the working poor were startling to visitorsfrom other European nations. Urban streets swarmedwith beggars and prostitutes. Paris alone had 25,000prostitutes in 1760. The wretchedness of the French pooris perhaps best indicated by the growing problem ofchild abandonment. On the eve of the French Revolutionat least 40,000 children a year were given up by their par-ents. The convenient fiction was that these childrenwould be adopted; in reality the majority died of neglect.

Unable to afford decent housing, obtain steady em-ployment, or protect their children, the poor periodicallyerupted in violent protest and rage. In the countrysideviolence was often the reaction when the nobility orclergy increased dues and fees. In towns and cities an in-crease in the price of bread often provided the spark, forbread prices largely determined the quality of life of thepoor. These explosive episodes, however, were not revo-lutionary in character. The remedies sought were con-ventional and immediate rather than structural andlong-term. That was to change when the Crown tried tosolve its fiscal crisis.

The expenses of the War of the Austrian Successionbegan the crisis. Louis XV (r. 1715–1774) first tried to im-pose new taxes on the nobility and on other groups thatin the past had enjoyed exemptions. This effort failed inthe face of widespread protest and the refusal of the Par-lement of Paris, a court that heard appeals from localcourts throughout France, to register the new tax. Thecrisis deepened when debts from the Seven Years Warcompelled the king to impose emergency fiscal meas-ures. Again, the king met resistance from the Parlementof Paris. In 1768 frustrated authorities exiled the mem-bers of that Parlement and pushed through a series ofunpopular fiscal measures. When the twenty-two-year-

old Louis XVI assumed the throne in 1774, he attemptedto gain popular support by recalling the exiled membersof the Parlement of Paris, but he soon learned thatprovincial parlements had also come to see themselvesas having a constitutional power to check any growth inmonarchial authority.

In 1774 Louis’s chief financial adviser warned thatthe government could barely afford to operate; as he putit, “the first gunshot [act of war] will drive the state tobankruptcy.” Despite this warning, the French took onthe heavy burden of supporting the American Revolu-tion, delaying collapse by borrowing enormous sumsand disguising the growing debt in misleading fiscal ac-counts. By the end of the war with Britain, more than halfof France’s national budget was required to service theresulting debt. It soon became clear that fiscal reformsand new taxes, not new loans, were necessary.

In 1787 the desperate king called an Assembly of No-tables to approve a radical and comprehensive reform ofthe economy and fiscal policy. Despite the fact that themembers of this assembly were selected by the king’s ad-visers from the high nobility, the judiciary, and the clergy,it proved unwilling to act as a rubber stamp for the pro-posed reforms or new taxes. Instead, these representa-tives of France’s most privileged classes sought to protecttheir interests by questioning the competence of theking and his ministers to supervise the nation’s affairs.

In frustration, the king dis-missed the Notables and at-tempted to implement somereforms on his own, but his ef-fort was met by an increasingly

hostile judiciary and by popular demonstrations. Be-cause the king was unable to extract needed tax conces-sions from the French elite, he was forced to call theEstates General, the French national legislature, whichhad not met since 1614. The narrow self-interest andgreed of the rich—who would not tolerate an increase intheir taxes—rather than the grinding poverty of the com-mon people had created the conditions for politicalrevolution.

In late 1788 and early 1789 members of the three es-tates came together throughout the nation to discussgrievances and elect representatives who would meetat Versailles˚. The Third Estate’s representatives weremostly men of property, but there was anger directedagainst the king’s ministers and an inclination to moveFrance toward constitutional monarchy with an elected

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legislature. Many nobles and members of the clergy sym-pathized with the reform agenda of the Third Estate, butdeep internal divisions over procedural and policy issueslimited the power of the First and the Second Estates.

Traditionally, the three estates met separately, and apositive vote by two of the three was required for action.Tradition, however, was quickly overturned when theThird Estate refused to conduct business until the kingordered the other two estates to sit with it in a singlebody. During a six-week period of stalemate, manyparish priests from the First Estate began to meet withthe commoners. When this expanded Third Estate de-clared itself the National Assembly, the king and his ad-visers recognized that the reformers intended to forcethem to accept a constitutional monarchy.

After being locked out of their meeting place, theThird Estate appropriated an indoor tennis court andpledged to write a constitution. The Oath of the TennisCourt ended Louis’s vain hope that he could limit the

agenda to fiscal reform. The king’s effort to solve the na-tion’s fiscal crisis was being connected in unpredictableways to the central ideas of the era: the people were sov-ereign, and the legitimacy of political institutions and in-dividual rulers ultimately depended on their carryingout the people’s will. Louis prepared for a confrontationwith the National Assembly by moving military forcesto Versailles. Before he could act, the people of Parisintervened.

A succession of bad harvests beginning in 1785 hadpropelled bread prices upward throughout France andprovoked an economic depression as demand for non-essential goods collapsed. By the time the Estates Gen-eral met, nearly a third of the Parisian work force wasunemployed. Hunger and anger marched hand in handthrough working-class neighborhoods.

When the people of Paris heard that the king wasmassing troops in Versailles to arrest the representatives,crowds of common people began to seize arms and mo-


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bilize. On July 14, 1789, a crowd searching for militarysupplies attacked the Bastille, a medieval fortress used asa prison. The futile defense of the Bastille˚ cost ninety-eight lives before its garrison surrendered. Enraged, theattackers hacked the commander to death and then pa-raded through the city with his head and that of Paris’schief magistrate stuck on pikes.

These events coincided with uprisings by peasantsin the country. Peasants sacked manor houses anddestroyed documents that recorded their traditionalobligations. They refused to pay taxes and dues tolandowners and seized common lands. Forced to recog-nize the fury raging through rural areas, the National As-sembly voted to end traditional obligations and toreform the tax system. Having forced acceptance of theirnarrow agenda, the peasants ceased their revolt.

These popular uprisings strengthened the hand ofthe National Assembly in its dealings with the king. Onemanifestation of this altered relationship was passage ofthe Declaration of the Rights of Man. There were clearsimilarities between the language of this declaration andthe U.S. Declaration of Independence. Indeed, ThomasJefferson, who had written the American document, wasU.S. ambassador to Paris and offered his opinion tothose drafting the French statement. The French decla-ration, however, was more sweeping in its language thanthe American. Among the enumerated natural rightswere “liberty, property, security, and resistance to op-pression.” The Declaration of the Rights of Man alsoguaranteed free expression of ideas, equality before thelaw, and representative government.

While delegates debated political issues in Ver-sailles, the economic crisis worsened in Paris. Womenemployed in the garment industry and in small-scale re-tail businesses were particularly hard hit. Because theworking women of Paris faced high food prices everydayas they struggled to feed their families, their anger had ahard edge. Public markets became political arenas wherethe urban poor met daily in angry assembly. Here therevolutionary link between the material deprivation ofthe French poor and the political aspirations of theFrench bourgeoisie was forged.

On October 5, market women organized a crowd ofthousands to march the 12 miles (19 kilometers) to Ver-sailles. Once there, they forced their way into the Na-tional Assembly to demand action from the frightenedrepresentatives: “the point is that we want bread.” Thecrowd then entered the royal apartments, killed some ofthe king’s guards, and searched for Queen Marie An-toinette˚, whom they loathed as a symbol of extrava-

gance. Eventually, the crowd demanded that the royalfamily return to Paris. Preceded by the heads of two aris-tocrats carried on pikes and hauling away the palace’ssupply of flour, the triumphant crowd escorted the royalfamily to Paris.

With the king’s ability to resist democratic changeovercome by the Paris crowd, the National Assemblyachieved a radically restructured French society in thenext two years. It passed a new constitution that dramat-ically limited monarchial power and abolished the no-bility as a hereditary class. Economic reforms sweptaway monopolies and trade barriers within France. TheLegislative Assembly (the new constitution’s name forthe National Assembly) seized church lands to use ascollateral for a new paper currency, and priests—whowere to be elected—were put on the state payroll. Whenthe government tried to force priests to take a loyaltyoath, however, many Catholics joined a growing coun-terrevolutionary movement.

At first, many European monarchs had welcomedthe weakening of the French king, but by 1791 Austriaand Prussia threatened to intervene in support of themonarchy. The Legislative Assembly responded by de-claring war. Although the war went badly at first forFrench forces, people across France responded patrioti-cally to foreign invasions, forming huge new volunteerarmies and mobilizing national resources to meet thechallenge. By the end of 1792 French armies had gaineda stalemate with the foreign forces.

In this period of national crisisand foreign threat, the FrenchRevolution entered its mostradical phase. A failed effort by

the king and queen to escape from Paris and find foreignallies cost the king any remaining popular support. Asforeign armies crossed into France, his behavior was in-creasingly viewed as treasonous. On August 10, 1792, acrowd similar to the one that had marched on Versaillesinvaded his palace in Paris and forced the king to seekprotection in the Legislative Assembly. The Assemblysuspended the king, ordered his imprisonment, andcalled for the formation of a new National Convention tobe elected by the vote of all men.

Rumors of counterrevolutionary plots kept working-class neighborhoods in an uproar. In September mobssurged through the city’s prisons, killing nearly half theprisoners. Swept along by popular passion, the newlyelected National Convention convicted Louis XVI oftreason, sentencing him to death and proclaiming Francea republic. The guillotine ended the king’s life in January

The Terror,1793–1794

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1793. Invented in the spirit of the era as a more humaneway to execute the condemned, this machine was to be-come the bloody symbol of the revolution. These eventshelped by February 1793 to precipitate a wider war withFrance now confronting nearly all of Europe’s majorpowers.

The National Convention—the new legislature of thenew First Republic of France—convened in September.Almost all of its members were from the middle class,and nearly all were Jacobins˚—the most uncompromis-ing democrats. Deep political differences, however, sep-arated moderate Jacobins—called “Girondists˚,” after aregion in southern France—and radicals known as “theMountain.” Members of the Mountain—so named be-cause their seats were on the highest level in the assem-bly hall—were more sympathetic than the Girondists tothe demands of the Parisian working class and more im-patient with parliamentary procedure and constitu-tional constraints on government action. The Mountaincame to be dominated by Maximilien Robespierre˚, ayoung, little-known lawyer from the provinces who hadbeen influenced by Rousseau’s ideas.

With the French economy still in crisis and Paris suf-fering from inflation, high unemployment, and scarcity,Robespierre used the popular press and political clubs toforge an alliance with the volatile Parisian working class.His growing strength in the streets allowed him to purgethe National Convention of his enemies and to restruc-ture the government. Executive power was placed in thehands of the newly formed Committee of Public Safety,which created special courts to seek out and punish do-mestic enemies.

Among the groups that lost ground were the activefeminists of the Parisian middle class and the working-class women who had sought the right to bear arms indefense of the Revolution. These women had provideddecisive leadership at crucial times, helping propel theRevolution toward widened suffrage and a more demo-cratic structure. Armed women had actively participatedin every confrontation with conservative forces. It isironic that the National Convention—the revolutionaryera’s most radical legislative body, elected by universalmale suffrage—chose to repress the militant feministforces that had prepared the ground for its creation.

Faced with rebellion in the provinces and foreign in-vasion, Robespierre and his allies unleashed a period ofrepression called the Reign of Terror (1793–1794) (see Di-versity and Dominance: Robespierre and WollstonecraftDefend and Explain the Terror). During the Terror, ap-proximately 40,000 people were executed or died inprison, and another 300,000 were imprisoned. New ac-tions against the clergy were also approved, includingthe provocative measure of forcing priests to marry. Eventime was subject to revolutionary change. A new repub-lican calendar created twelve thirty-day months dividedinto ten-day weeks. Sunday, with its Christian meanings,disappeared from the calendar.

By spring 1794 the Revolution was secure from for-eign and domestic enemies, but repression, now institu-tionalized, continued. Among the victims were somewho had been Robespierre’s closest political collabora-tors during the early stage of the Terror. The execution ofthese former allies prepared the way for Robespierre’sown fall by undermining the sense of invulnerability thathad secured the loyalty of his remaining partisans in theNational Convention. After French victories eliminatedthe immediate foreign threat, conservatives in the


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Convention felt secure enough to vote for the arrest ofRobespierre on July 27, 1794. Over the next two days,Robespierre and nearly a hundred of his remaining allieswere executed by guillotine.

Purged of Robespierre’s collab-orators, the Convention beganto undo the radical reforms. Itremoved many of the emer-gency economic controls that

had been holding down prices and protecting theworking class. Gone also was toleration for violentpopular demonstrations. When the Paris working classrose in protest in 1795, the Convention approved theuse of overwhelming military force. Another retreatfrom radical objectives was signaled when the CatholicChurch was permitted to regain much of its former in-fluence. The church’s confiscated wealth, however, wasnot returned. A more conservative constitution wasalso ratified. It protected property, established a votingprocess that reduced the power of the masses, and cre-ated a new executive authority, the Directory. Once in-stalled in power, however, the Directory proved unableto end the foreign wars or solve domestic economicproblems.

After losing the election of 1797 the Directory sus-pended the results. The republican phase of the Revolu-tion was clearly dead. Legitimacy was now based oncoercive power rather than on elections. Two years later,Napoleon Bonaparte (1769–1821), a brilliant young gen-eral in the French army, seized power. Just as the Ameri-can and French Revolutions had been the start of themodern democratic tradition, the military interventionthat brought Napoleon to power in 1799 marked the ad-vent of another modern form of government: popularauthoritarianism.

The American and French Revolutions had resultedin part from conflicts over representation. If the peoplewere sovereign, what institutions best expressed popularwill? In the United States the answer was to expand theelectorate and institute representative government. TheFrench Revolution had taken a different direction withthe Reign of Terror. Interventions on the floor of the Na-tional Convention by market women and soldiers, thepresence of common people at revolutionary tribunalsand at public executions, and expanded military servicewere all forms of political communication that tem-porarily satisfied the French people’s desire to influencetheir government. Napoleon tamed these forms of polit-ical expression to organize Europe’s first popular dicta-torship. He succeeded because his military reputation

Reaction andDictatorship,1795–1815

promised order to a society exhausted by a decade of cri-sis, turmoil, and bloodshed.

In contrast to the National Convention, Napoleonproved capable of realizing France’s dream of dominat-ing Europe and providing effective protection for per-sons and property at home. Negotiations with theCatholic Church led to the Concordat of 1801. Thisagreement gave French Catholics the right to freely prac-tice their religion, and it recognized the French govern-ment’s authority to nominate bishops and retain priestson the state payroll. In his comprehensive rewriting ofFrench law, the Civil Code of 1804, Napoleon won thesupport of the peasantry and of the middle class by as-serting two basic principles inherited from the moderatefirst stage of the French Revolution: equality in law andprotection of property. Even some members of the no-bility became supporters after Napoleon declared him-self emperor and France an empire in 1804. However, thediscrimination against women that had begun duringthe Terror was extended by the Napoleonic Civil Code.Women were denied basic political rights and were ableto participate in the economy only with the guidanceand supervision of their fathers and husbands.

While providing personal security, the Napoleonicsystem denied or restricted many individual rights. Freespeech and free expression were limited. Criticism of thegovernment, viewed as subversive, was proscribed, andmost opposition newspapers disappeared. Spies and in-formers directed by the minister of police enforced theselimits to political freedom. Thousands of the regime’s en-emies and critics were questioned or detained in thename of domestic tranquility.

Ultimately, the Napoleonic system depended on thesuccess of French arms and French diplomacy (see Map21.2). From Napoleon’s assumption of power until his fall,no single European state could defeat the French mili-tary. Even powerful alliances like that of Austria and Prus-sia were brushed aside with humiliating defeats andforced to become allies of France. Only Britain, protectedby its powerful navy, remained able to thwart Napoleon’splans to dominate Europe. His effort to mobilize forcesfor an invasion of Britain failed in late 1805 when theBritish navy defeated the French and allied Spanishfleets off the coast of Spain at the Battle of Trafalgar.

Desiring to again extend French power to the Amer-icas, Napoleon invaded Portugal in 1807 and Spain in1808. French armies soon became tied down in a costlyconflict with Spanish and Portuguese patriots who hadforged an alliance with the only available Europeanpower, Great Britain. Frustrated by events on the IberianPeninsula and faced with a faltering economy, Napoleonmade the fateful decision to invade Russia. In June 1812

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Many Europeans who had initially been sympathetic tothe French Revolution were repelled by the Terror. In

1793 and 1794 while France was at war with Austria, Prus-sia, Great Britain, Holland, and Spain about 2,600 peoplewere executed in Paris, including the king and queen, mem-bers of the nobility, and Catholic clergy. The public nature ofthe judicial procedures and executions outraged many. Crit-ics of the Revolution asked if these excesses were not worsethan those committed by the French monarchy. Others de-fended the violence as necessary, arguing that the Terrorhad been provoked by enemies of the Revolution or was theconsequence of earlier injustices.

The following two opinions date from 1794. MaximilienRobespierre was the head of the Committee of Public Safety,the effective head of the revolutionary government. Robes-pierre was a provincial lawyer who rose to power in Paris asthe Revolution was radicalized. In the statement that fol-lows he is unrepentant, arguing that violence was necessaryin the defense of liberty. He made this statement on the eveof his political demise; in 1794 he was driven from powerand executed by the revolutionary movement he had helpedcreate.

Mary Wollstonecraft, an English intellectual and advo-cate for women’s rights who was living in Paris at the timeof the execution of Louis XVI, was troubled by the violence,and her discussion of these events is more an apology thana defense. She had published her famous A Vindication ofthe Rights of Woman in 1792, after which she left for Paris.Wollstonecraft left Paris after war broke out between Franceand Britain. She remained an important force in Europeanintellectual life until her death from complications of child-birth in 1797.

MAXIMILIEN ROBESPIERRE, “ON THE MORAL AND POLITICAL PRINCIPLES OF DOMESTIC POLICY”

[L]et us deduce a great truth: the characteristic of populargovernment is confidence in the people and severity towardsitself.

The whole development of our theory would end here ifyou had only to pilot the vessel of the Republic through calmwaters; but the tempest roars, and the revolution imposes onyou another task.

This great purity of the French revolution’s basis, the verysublimity of its objective, is precisely what causes both ourstrength and our weakness. Our strength, because it gives tous truth’s ascendancy over imposture, and the rights of thepublic interest over private interests; our weakness, because itrallies all vicious men against us, all those who in their heartscontemplated despoiling the people and all those who intendto let it be despoiled with impunity, both those who have re-jected freedom as a personal calamity and those who haveembraced the revolution as a career and the Republic as prey.Hence the defection of so many ambitious or greedy menwho since the point of departure have abandoned us alongthe way because they did not begin the journey with thesame destination in view. The two opposing spirits that havebeen represented in a struggle to rule nature might be said tobe fighting in this great period of human history to fix irrev-ocably the world’s destinies, and France is the scene of thisfearful combat. Without, all the tyrants encircle you; within,all tyranny’s friends conspire; they will conspire until hope iswrested from crime. We must smother the internal and ex-ternal enemies of the Republic or perish with it; now in thissituation, the first maxim of your policy ought to be to leadthe people by reason and the people’s enemies by terror.

If the spring of popular government in time of peace isvirtue, the springs of popular government in revolution areat once virtue and terror: virtue, without which terror is fa-tal; terror, without which virtue is powerless. Terror is noth-ing other than justice, prompt, severe, inflexible; it istherefore an emanation of virtue; it is not so much a specialprinciple as it is a consequence of the general principle ofdemocracy applied to our country’s most urgent needs.

It has been said that terror is the principle of despoticgovernment. Does your government therefore resemble des-potism? Yes, as the sword that gleams in the hands of the he-roes of liberty resembles that with which the henchmen of

D I V E R S I T Y A N D D O M I N A N C E

ROBESPIERRE AND WOLLSTONECRAFT DEFEND

AND EXPLAIN THE TERROR

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tyranny are armed. Let the despot govern by terror his bru-talized subjects; he is right, as a despot. Subdue by terror theenemies of liberty, and you will be right, as founders of theRepublic. The government of the revolution is liberty’s des-potism against tyranny. Is force made only to protect crime?And is the thunderbolt not destined to strike the heads ofthe proud?

. . . Society owes protection only to peaceable citizens;the only citizens in the Republic are the republicans. For it,the royalists, the conspirators are only strangers or, rather,enemies. This terrible war waged by liberty against tyranny-is it not indivisible? Are the enemies within not the allies ofthe enemies without? The assassins who tear our countryapart, the intriguers who buy the consciences that hold thepeople’s mandate; the traitors who sell them; the mercenarypamphleteers hired to dishonor the people’s cause, to killpublic virtue, to stir up the fire of civil discord, and to pre-pare political counterrevolution by moral counterrevolu-tion—are all those men less guilty or less dangerous than thetyrants whom they serve?

MARY WOLLSTONECRAFT, “AN HISTORICAL ANDMORAL VIEW OF THE ORIGIN AND PROGRESS OF THE FRENCH REVOLUTION”Weeping scarcely conscious that I weep, 0 France! Over thevestiges of thy former oppression, which, separating manfrom man with a fence of iron, sophisticated [complicated]all, and made many completely wretched; I tremble, lest Ishould meet some unfortunate being, fleeing from the des-potism of licentious freedom, hearing the snap of the guillo-tine at his heels, merely because he was once noble, or hasafforded an asylum to those whose only crime is theirname—and, if my pen almost bound with eagerness to recordthe day that leveled the Bastille [an abbey used as a prisonbefore the Revolution] with the dust, making the towers ofdespair tremble to their base, the recollection that still theabbey is appropriated to hold the victims of revenge and sus-picion [she means that the Bastille remained a prison forthose awaiting revolutionary justice]. . . .

Excuse for the Ferocity of the Parisians The deprivationof natural, equal, civil, and political rights reduced the mostcunning the lower orders to practice fraud, and the rest tohabits of stealing, audacious robberies, and murders. Andwhy? Because the rich and poor were separated into bands oftyrants and slaves, and the retaliation of slaves is always ter-rible. In short, every sacred feeling, moral and divine, hasbeen obliterated, and the dignity of man sullied, by a systemof policy and jurisprudence as repugnant to reason as atvariance with humanity.

The only excuse that can be made for the ferocity of theParisians is then simply to observe that they had not any

confidence in the laws, which they had always found to bemerely cobwebs to catch small flies [the poor]. Accustomedto be punished themselves for every trifle, and often for onlybeing in the way of the rich, or their parasites, when, in fact,had the Parisians seen the execution of a noble, or priest,though convicted of crimes beyond the daring of vulgarminds? When justice, or the law, is so partial, the day of ret-ribution will come with the red sky of vengeance, to con-found the innocent with the guilty. The mob were barbarousbeyond the tiger’s cruelty. . . .Let us cast our eyes over the history of man, and we shallscarcely find a page that is not tarnished by some foul deedor bloody transaction. Let us examine the catalogue of thevices of men in a savage state, and contrast them with thoseof men civilized; we shall find that a barbarian, considered asa moral being, is an angel, compared with the refined villainof artificial life. Let us investigate the causes which have pro-duced this degeneracy, and we shall discover that they arethose unjust plans of government which have been formedby peculiar circumstances in every part of the globe.

Then let us coolly and impartially contemplate the im-provements which are gaining ground in the formation ofprinciples of policy; and I flatter myself it will be allowed byevery humane and considerate being that a political systemmore simple than has hitherto existed would effectuallycheck those aspiring follies, which, by imitation, leading tovice, have banished from governments the very shadow ofjustice and magnanimity.

Thus had France grown up and sickened on the corruptionof a state diseased. . . . it is only the philosophical eye, whichlooks into the nature and weighs the consequences of hu-man actions, that will be able to discern the cause, which hasproduced so many dreadful effects.

QUESTIONS FOR ANALYSIS1. Why does Robespierre believe that revolution cannot

tolerate diversity of opinion? Are his reasons convincing?2. How does Robespierre distinguish the terror of despots

from the terror of liberty?3. How does Wollstonecraft explain the “ferocity” of the

Parisians? 4. What does Wollstonecraft believe will come from this

period of violence?

Sources: Maximilien Robespierre, “On the Moral and Political Principles of DomesticPolicy,” February 5, 1794, Modern History Sourcebook: Robespierre: Terror and Virtue,1794, http://www.fordham.edu/halsall/mod/robespierre-terror.html; Mary Wollstone-craft, “An Historical and Moral View of the Origin and Progress of the French Revolu-tion,” A Mary Wollstonecraft Reader, ed. Barbara H. Solomon and Paula S. Berggren(New York: New American Library, 1983), 374–375, 382–383.

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he began his campaign with the largest army ever as-sembled in Europe, approximately 600,000 men. Afterfighting an inconclusive battle at Borodino, Napoleonpressed on to Moscow. Five weeks after occupyingMoscow, he was forced to retreat by Russian patriots whoset the city on fire and by approaching armies. Duringthe retreat, the brutal Russian winter and attacks by Rus-sian forces destroyed his army. A broken and batteredfragment of 30,000 men returned home to France.

After the debacle in Russia, Austria and Prussia de-serted Napoleon and entered an alliance with Englandand Russia. Unable to defend Paris, Napoleon was forcedto abdicate the French throne in April 1814. The allies ex-iled Napoleon to the island of Elba off the coast of Italyand restored the French monarchy. The next yearNapoleon escaped from Elba and returned to France. Buthis moment had passed. He was defeated by an alliedarmy at Waterloo, in Belgium, after only one hundreddays in power. His final exile was on the distant island ofSt. Helena in the South Atlantic, where he died in 1821.

REVOLUTION SPREADS,CONSERVATIVES RESPOND,

1789–1850

Even as the dictatorship of Napoleon eliminated thedemocratic legacy of the French Revolution, revolu-

tionary ideology was spreading and taking hold in Eu-rope and the Americas. In Europe the French Revolutionpromoted nationalism and republicanism. In the Amer-icas the legacies of the American and French Revolutionsled to a new round of struggles for independence. Newsof revolutionary events in France destabilized the colo-nial regime in Saint Domingue (present-day Haiti), asmall French colony on the western half of the island ofHispaniola, and resulted in the first successful slave re-bellion. In Europe, however, the spread of revolutionaryfervor was checked by reaction as monarchs formed analliance to protect themselves from further revolution-ary outbreaks.

In 1789 the French colony ofSaint Domingue was amongthe richest European coloniesin the Americas. Its plantationsproduced sugar, cotton, indigo,

and coffee. The colony produced two-thirds of France’stropical imports and generated nearly one-third of allFrench foreign trade. This impressive wealth depended

The HaitianRevolution,1789–1804

on a brutal slave regime. Saint Domingue’s harsh pun-ishments and poor living conditions were notoriousthroughout the Caribbean. The colony’s high mortalityand low fertility rates created an insatiable demand forAfrican slaves. As a result, in 1790 the majority of thecolony’s 500,000 slaves were African-born.

In 1789, when news of the calling of France’s EstatesGeneral arrived on the island, wealthy white planterssent a delegation to Paris charged with seeking morehome rule and greater economic freedom for SaintDomingue. The free mixed-race population, the gens decouleur˚, also sent representatives. These nonwhite del-egates were mostly drawn from the large class of slave-owning small planters and urban merchants. Theyfocused on ending race discrimination and achievingpolitical equality with whites. They did not seek freedomfor slaves; the most prosperous gens de couleur wereslave owners themselves. As the French Revolution be-came more radical, the gens de couleur forged an al-liance with sympathetic French radicals, who came toidentify the colony’s wealthy planters as royalists andaristocrats.

The political turmoil in France weakened the abilityof colonial administrators to maintain order. The author-ity of colonial officials was no longer clear, and the verylegitimacy of slavery was being challenged in France. Inthe vacuum that resulted, rich planters, poor whites, andthe gens de couleur pursued their narrow interests, en-gendering an increasingly bitter and confrontationalstruggle. Given the slaves’ hatred of the brutal regime thatoppressed them and the accumulated grievances of thefree people of color, there was no way to limit the vio-lence once the control of the slave owners slipped. WhenVincent Ogé˚, leader of the gens de couleur mission toFrance, returned to Saint Domingue in 1790 to organizea military force, the planters captured, tortured, and ex-ecuted him. This cruelty was soon repaid in kind.

By 1791 whites, led by the planter elite, and the gensde couleur were engaged in open warfare. This breachbetween the two groups of slave owners gave the slavesan opening. A slave rebellion began on the plantations ofthe north and spread throughout the colony (see Map21.3). Plantations were destroyed, masters and overseerskilled, and crops burned. An emerging rebel leadershipthat combined elements of African political culture withrevolutionary ideology from France mobilized and di-rected the rebelling slaves.

The rebellious slaves eventually gained the up-per hand under the leadership of François DominiqueToussaint L’Ouverture, a former domestic slave, who cre-ated a disciplined military force. Toussaint was politically

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strengthened in 1794 when the radical National Conven-tion in Paris abolished slavery in all French possessions.He overcame his rivals in Saint Domingue, defeated aBritish expeditionary force in 1798, and then led an inva-sion of the neighboring Spanish colony of Santo Domingo,freeing the slaves there. Toussaint continued to assert hisloyalty to France but gave the French government no ef-fective role in local affairs.

As reaction overtook revolution in France, both theabolition of slavery and Toussaint’s political positionwere threatened. When the Directory contemplated thereestablishment of slavery, Toussaint protested:

Do they think that men who have been able to enjoythe blessing of liberty will calmly see it snatched away?They supported their chains only so long as they didnot know any condition of life more happy than slav-ery. But today when they have left it, if they had athousand lives they would sacrifice them all ratherthan be forced into slavery again.3

In 1802 Napoleon sent a large military force to SaintDomingue to reestablish both French colonial authorityand slavery (see Map 21.3). At first the French forces weresuccessful. Toussaint was captured and sent to France,where he died in prison. Eventually, however, the loss ofthousands of lives to yellow fever and the resistance ofthe revolutionaries turned the tide. Visible in the resis-tance to the French were small numbers of armed women.During the early stages of the Haitian Revolution, veryfew slave women had taken up arms, although many hadaided Toussaint’s forces in support roles. But after adecade of struggle and violence, more Haitian womenwere politically aware and willing to join the armed re-sistance. In 1804 Toussaint’s successors declared inde-pendence, and the free republic of Haiti joined theUnited States as the second independent nation in theWestern Hemisphere. But independence and emancipa-tion were achieved at a terrible price. Tens of thousandshad died; the economy was destroyed; and public admin-istration was corrupted by more than a decade of vio-


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lence. Political violence and economic stagnation were totrouble Haiti throughout the nineteenth century.

From 1814 to 1815 representa-tives of Britain, Russia, Austria,and Prussia met as the Con-gress of Vienna to reestablishpolitical order in Europe. Whilethey were meeting, Napoleonescaped from Elba, then was

defeated at Waterloo. The French Revolution and Na-poleon’s imperial ambitions had threatened the verysurvival of Europe’s old order. Ancient monarchies hadbeen overturned and dynasties replaced with interlop-ers. Long-established political institutions had beentossed aside, and long-recognized international bordershad been ignored. The very existence of the nobility andchurch had been put at risk. Under the leadership of theAustrian foreign minister, Prince Klemens von Metter-nich˚ (1773–1859), the allies worked together in Vienna

The Congressof Vienna andConservativeRetrenchment,1815–1820

to create a comprehensive peace settlement that theyhoped would safeguard the conservative order.

The central objective of the Congress of Vienna wasto roll back the clock in France. Because the participantsbelieved that a strong and stable France was the bestguarantee of future peace, the French monarchy wasreestablished, and France’s 1792 borders were recog-nized. Most of the continental European powers re-ceived some territorial gains, for Metternich sought tooffset French strength with a balance of power. In ad-dition, Austria, Russia, and Prussia formed a separatealliance to more actively confront the revolutionaryand nationalist energies that the French Revolution hadunleashed. In 1820 this “Holy Alliance” acted decisivelyto defeat liberal revolutions in Spain and Italy. By re-pressing republican and nationalist ideas in universitiesand the press, the Holy Alliance also attempted to meetthe potential challenge posed by subversive ideas. Met-ternich’s program of conservative retrenchment suc-ceeded in the short term, but powerful ideas associatedwith liberalism and nationalism remained a vital partof European political life throughout the nineteenthcentury.

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Despite the power of theconservative monarchs, pop-ular support for national self-determination and democraticreform grew throughout Eu-rope. Greece had been under

Ottoman control since the fifteenth century. In 1821Greek patriots launched an independence movement.Metternich and other conservatives opposed Greek in-dependence, but European artists and writers enamoredwith the cultural legacy of ancient Greece rallied politicalsupport for intervention. After years of struggle, Russia,France, and Great Britain forced the Ottoman Empire torecognize Greek independence in 1830.

Louis XVIII, brother of the executed Louis XVI, hadbeen placed on the throne of France by the victorious al-lies in 1814. He ruled as a constitutional monarch untilhis death in 1824 and was followed to the throne by hisbrother Charles X. Charles attempted to rule in the pre-revolutionary style of his ancestors, repudiating the con-stitution in 1830. Unwilling to accept this reactionarychallenge, the people of Paris rose up and forced Charlesto abdicate. His successor was his cousin Louis Philippe˚(r. 1830–1848), who accepted the reestablished constitu-tion and extended voting privileges.

At the same time democratic reform movementsappeared in both the United States and Great Britain. Inthe United States after 1790 the original thirteen stateswere joined by new states with constitutions grantingvoting rights to most free males. After the War of 1812 theright to vote was expanded in the older states as well.This broadening of the franchise led to the election ofthe populist president Andrew Jackson in 1828 (seeChapter 23).

However, revolutionary violence in France made theBritish aristocracy and the conservative Tory Party fear-ful of expanded democracy and mass movements of anykind. In 1815 the British government passed the CornLaws, which limited the importation of foreign grains.The laws favored the profits of wealthy landowners whoproduced grain at the expense of the poor who wereforced to pay more for their bread. When poor con-sumers organized to overturn these laws, the govern-ment outlawed most public meetings, using troops tocrush protest in Manchester. Reacting against these poli-cies, reformers gained the passage of laws that increasedthe power of the House of Commons, redistributed votesfrom agricultural to industrial districts, and increasedthe number of voters by nearly 50 percent. Althoughthe most radical demands of these reformers, called

Nationalism,Reform, andRevolution,1821–1850

Chartists, were defeated, new labor and economic re-forms addressing the grievances of workers were passed(see Chapter 22).

Despite the achievement of Greek independenceand limited political reform in France and Great Britain,conservatives continued to hold the upper hand in Eu-rope. Finally, in 1848 the desire for democratic reformand national self-determination and the frustrations ofurban workers led to upheavals across Europe. The Rev-olutions of 1848 began in Paris, where members of themiddle class and workers united to overthrow the regimeof Louis Philippe and create the Second French Repub-lic. Adult men were given voting rights; slavery was abol-ished in French colonies; the death penalty was ended;and a ten-hour workday was legislated for Paris. ButParisian workers’ demands for programs to reduce un-employment and prices provoked conflicts with themiddle class, which wanted to protect property rights.When workers rose up against the government, Frenchtroops were called out to crush them. Desiring thereestablishment of order, the French elected LouisNapoleon, nephew of the former emperor, president inDecember 1848. Three years later, he overturned theconstitution as a result of popular plebiscite and, afterruling briefly as dictator, became Emperor Napoleon III.He remained in power until 1871.

Reformers in Hungary, Italy, Bohemia, and else-where pressed for greater national self-determination in1848. When the Austrian monarchy did not meet theirdemands, students and workers in Vienna took to thestreets to force political reforms similar to those soughtin Paris. With revolution spreading throughout the Aus-trian Empire, Metternich, the symbol of reaction, fledVienna in disguise. Little lasting change occurred, how-ever, because the new Austrian emperor, Franz Joseph(r. 1848–1916) was able to use Russian military assis-tance and loyal Austrian troops to reestablish central authority.

Middle-class reformers and workers in Berlin joinedforces in an attempt to compel the Prussian king to ac-cept a liberal constitution and seek unification of theGerman states. But the Constituent Assembly called towrite a constitution and arrange for national integrationbecame entangled in diplomatic conflicts with Austriaand Denmark. As a result, Frederick William IV (r. 1840–1861) was able to reassert his authority, thwarting bothconstitutional reform and unification.

Despite their heroism on the barricades of Paris, Vi-enna, Rome, and Berlin, the revolutionaries of 1848failed to gain either their nationalist or their republicanobjectives. Monarchs retained the support not only ofaristocrats but also of professional militaries, largely re-


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cruited from among peasants who had little sympathyfor urban workers. Revolutionary coalitions, in contrast,were fragile and lacked clear objectives. Workers’ de-mands for higher wages, lower prices, and labor reformoften drove their middle-class allies into the arms of thereactionaries.

CONCLUSION

This era of revolution was, in large measure, the prod-uct of a long period of costly warfare among the im-

perial nations of Europe. Using taxes and institutionsinherited from the past, England and France found it in-creasingly difficult to fund distant wars in the Americas

or in Asia. Royal governments attempting to impose newtaxes met with angry resistance. The spread of literacyand the greater availability of books helped create a Euro-pean culture more open to reform or the revolutionarychange of existing institutions. The ideas of Locke andRousseau guided critics of monarchy toward a new polit-ical culture of elections and representative institutions.Each new development served as example and provoca-tion for new revolutionary acts. French officers who tookpart in the American Revolution helped ignite the FrenchRevolution. Black freemen from Haiti traveled to Franceto seek their rights and returned to spread revolutionarypassions. Each revolution had its own character. The rev-olutions in France and Haiti proved to be more violentand destructive than the American Revolution. Revolu-tionaries in France and Haiti, facing a more strongly

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entrenched and more powerful opposition and greatersocial inequalities, responded with greater violence.

The conservative retrenchment that followed thedefeat of Napoleon succeeded in the short term. Monar-chy, multinational empires, and the established churchretained their hold on the loyalty of millions of Euro-peans and could count on the support of many of Eu-rope’s wealthiest and most powerful individuals. Butliberalism and nationalism continued to stir revolution-ary sentiment. The contest between adherents of the oldorder and partisans of change was to continue well intothe nineteenth century. In the end, the nation-state, theEnlightenment legacy of rational inquiry, broadened po-litical participation, and secular intellectual culture pre-vailed. This outcome was determined in large measureby the old order’s inability to satisfy the new socialclasses that appeared with the emerging industrial econ-omy. The material transformation produced by indus-trial capitalism could not be contained in the narrowconfines of a hereditary social system, nor could therapid expansion of scientific learning be containedwithin the doctrines of traditional religion.

The revolutions of the late eighteenth century beganthe transformation of Western society, but they did notcomplete it. Only a minority gained full political rights.Women did not achieve full political rights until thetwentieth century. Democratic institutions, as in revo-lutionary France, often failed. Moreover, as Chapter 23discusses, slavery endured in the Americas past the mid-1800s, despite the revolutionary era’s enthusiasm for in-dividual liberty.

■ Key TermsEnlightenment

Benjamin Franklin

George Washington

Joseph Brant

Constitutional Convention

Estates General

National Assembly

Declaration of the Rights of Man

Jacobins

Maximilien Robespierre

Napoleon Bonaparte

gens de couleur

François Dominique Toussaint L’Ouverture

Congress of Vienna

Revolutions of 1848

■ Suggested ReadingThe American Revolution has received a great amount of atten-tion from scholars. Colin Bonwick, The American Revolution(1991), and Edward Countryman, The American Revolution(1985), provide excellent introductions. Edmund S. Morgan,The Challenge of the American Revolution (1976), remains amajor work of interpretation. Gordon S. Wood, The Radicalismof the American Revolution (1992), is a brilliant examination ofthe ideological and cultural meanings of the Revolution. A con-trarian view is offered by Francis Jennings, The Creation ofAmerica Through Revolution to Empire (2003). See also WilliamHoward Adams, The Paris Years of Thomas Jefferson (1997).Lance Banning, The Sacred Fire of Liberty: James Madison andthe Founding of the Federal Republic (1995), is a convincing revi-sion of the story of Madison and his era. For the role of womenin the American Revolution see Linda K. Kerber, Women of theRepublic: Intellect and Ideology in Revolutionary America(1980), and Mary Beth Norton, Liberty’s Daughters: The Revolu-tionary Experience of American Women, 1750–1800 (1980). Alsorecommended is Norton’s Founding Mothers and Fathers: Gen-dered Power and the Forming of American Society (1996).Among the many works that deal with African-Americans andAmerindians during the era, see Sylvia Frey, Water from Rock:Black Resistance in a Revolutionary Age (1991); Barbara Gray-mont, The Iroquois in the American Revolution (1972); andWilliam N. Fenton, The Great Law and the Longhouse: A Politi-cal History of the Iroquois Confederacy (1998).

For intellectual life in the era of the French Revolution see AnneGoldgar, Impolite Learning: Conduct and Community in theRepublic of Letters, 1680–1750 (1995); Dena Goodman, The Re-public of Letters: A Cultural History of the Enlightenment(1994); and James Swenson, On Jean-Jacques Rousseau Consid-ered as One of the First Authors of the Revolution (2002). Forthe Counter Enlightenment see Darrin M. McMahon, Enemiesof the Enlightenment, The French Counter-Enlightenment andthe Making of Modernity (2001). For the “underside” of thisera see the discussion of “folk culture” in Shaping History: Ordi-nary People in European Politics, 1500–1700 (1998), by WayneTe Brake. François Furet, Interpreting the French Revolution(1981), breaks with interpretations that emphasize class andideology. Georges Lefebve, The Coming of the French Revolu-tion, trans. R. R. Palmer (1947), presents the classic class-basedanalysis. George Rudé, The Crowd in History: Popular Distur-bances in France and England (1981), remains the best intro-duction to the role of mass protest in the period. Lynn Hunt,The Family Romance of the French Revolution (1992), examinesthe gender content of revolutionary politics. For the role ofwomen see Joan Landes, Women and the Public Sphere in theAge of the French Revolution (1988), and the recently publishedThe Women of Paris and Their French Revolution (1998) byDominique Godineau. Felix Markham, Napoleon (1963), andRobert B. Holtman, The Napoleonic Revolution (1967), providereliable summaries of the period.

The Haitian Revolution has received less extensive coveragethan the revolutions in the United States and France. C. L. R.


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James, The Black Jacobins, 2d ed. (1963), is the classic study.Anna J. Cooper, Slavery and the French Revolutionists, 1788–1805 (1988), also provides an overview of this important topic.Carolyn E. Fick, The Making of Haiti: The Saint DomingueRevolution from Below (1990), is the best recent synthesis.David P. Geggus, Slavery, War, and Revolution (1982), examinesthe British role in the revolutionary period. See also DavidBarry Gaspar and David Patrick Geggus, eds., A Turbulent Time:The French Revolution and the Greater Caribbean (1997).

For the revolutions of 1830 and 1848 see Arthur J. May’s briefsurvey in The Age of Metternich, 1814–48, rev. ed. (1963). HenryKissinger’s A World Restored (1957) remains among the most in-teresting discussions of the Congress of Vienna. Eric Hobs-bawm’s The Age of Revolution (1962) provides a clear analysis ofthe class issues that appeared during this era. Paul Robertson’sRevolutions of 1848: A Social History (1960) remains a valuableintroduction. See also Peter Stearns and Herrick Chapman, Eu-ropean Society in Upheaval (1991). For the development of Eu-ropean social reform movements see Albert Lindemann,History of European Socialism (1983).

For national events in Hungary see István Deák’s examinationof Hungary, The Lawful Revolution: Louis Kossuth and theHungarians, 1848–49 (1979). On Germany see Theodore S.Hamerow, Restoration, Revolution, and Reaction, 1815–1871(1966). For French events see Roger Price, A Social History ofNineteenth-Century France (1987). Barbara Taylor, Eve and theNew Jerusalem: Socialism and Feminism in the NineteenthCentury (1983), analyzes connections between workers’ andwomen’s rights issues in England.

■ Notes1. Quoted in Ray Raphael, A People’s History of the American

Revolution (New York: Perenial, 2001), 142. 2. Ibid., 141.3. Quoted in C. L. R. James, The Black Jacobins, 2d ed., (New

York: Vintage Books, 1963), 196.

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DOCUMENT 6Robespierre and Wollstonecraft Defend and Explain theTerror (Diversity and Dominance, pp. 558–559)

DOCUMENT 7Quote from Toussaint L’Ouverture (p. 562)

DOCUMENT 8Haiti’s Former Slaves Defend Their Freedom (photo, p. 563)

In Document 6, what factors shaped the twodifferent reactions to the same events? Whatadditional types of documents would help youunderstand the ideas of the American, French, andHaitian revolutions and the ways people respondedto those ideas?

Document-Based QuestionRevolutionary Ideas in theAmericas and FranceUsing the following documents, analyze the ideas ofthe American, French, and Haitian revolutions andthe ways people responded to those ideas.

DOCUMENT 1Excerpt from American colonist (p. 548)

DOCUMENT 2The Tarring and Feathering of a British Official, 1774(photo, p. 548)

DOCUMENT 3Excerpt from the Declaration of Independence (p. 549)

DOCUMENT 4Parisians Storm the Bastille (photo, p. 554)

DOCUMENT 5Playing Cards from the French Revolution (photo, p. 556)

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part six revolutions reshape the world, 1750–1870€¦ · part six revolutions reshape the world,...

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