revolution in the americas and europe
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Lecture 4: Revolutions in the Americas and Europe
Introduction: the meaning of revolution
• 18th century meaning of revolution = astronomical, orbit of planet
• Revolution = return to status quo, not radical break e.g. Britain’s Glorious Revolution, 1688-1689
Lecture structure:
• 1) American Revolution
• 2) French Revolution
• 3) Britain and counter-revolution in the 1790s
1) America: aristocratic revolt?
• Expansion of British Empire and army in Americas
• Stamp Act (1765)
• Townshend duties (1767)
• Tea Act and Boston tea party (1773)
• Thomas Jefferson, A Summary view of the rights of British America (1774)
• Continental Congress (1774)
• Shots fired at Lexington, MA (May 1775)
Thomas Jefferson (1743-1825)
Declaration of Independence (July 1776)
• Example of British revolution 1688-9, right of resistance against tyranny
• Declaration = defence of existing rights of 13 colonies
• Divisions between colonies – not a unified American ‘nation’
2) France: moderate and radical revolution
French Revolution: interpretations
• ‘bourgeois revolution’ (Georges Lefebvre, Alfred Souboul)
• revision of ‘class struggle’ interpretation (Alfred Cobban, Colan Lucas)
• Seizure of power by tyrannical minority (François Fouret, Simon Schama)
i) Moderate phase: 1789-91
• Meeting of Estates General at Versailles (May 1789)
• Declaration of rights of man (August 1789)
• Moderate leaders: Jacques Pierre Brissot, Abbé Sieyès, Comte de Mirabeau
• Establishment of limited monarchy on the British model
Tennis court oath, 20 June 1789
ii) Radical phase: 1791-94
• Louis XVI’s flight to Varennes (June 1791)
• France at war with external powers (from April 1792) and fighting a civil war (the Vendée)
• Attack on Tuileries Palace (August 1792)
• National convention declares a republic (September 1792)
• Execution of Louis XVI and Marie-Antoinette (Jan 1793)
• Autumn 1793: the Terror begins (revolutionary ‘tribunals’, Committee of Public Safety)
• Constitutional agenda: universal male suffrage, civil equality for women, abolition of slavery in French colonies, de-Christianization, levée en masse
French Revolutionary calendar
Robespierre and ‘the Terror’
Explaining ‘the Terror’
Supporters of Revolution: circumstantial factors (war with internal & external enemies)
Critics: Terror inherent in revolutionary ideology
Influence of Rousseau: general will, purification, national regeneration
Maximillien Robespierre (1758-94)
The fountain of regeneration at the Festival of Unity
National regeneration and unity through bloodshed
3) Britain and the ideology of ‘counter-revolution’
• Support for initial phase of French Revolution
• Richard Price: connection between revolutions of 1688-89 and 1789
• Edmund Burke, Reflections on the French Revolution (1790):
Britain = evolutionary not revolutionary
• Burke opposed by Thomas Paine, Rights of Man (2 parts, 1791-92)
• Crackdown on Paineite radicalism in 1790s
The Contrast 1792: Which is Best? Thomas Rowlandson (1792)