<


3. INDEPENDENCE – AND THE NEW REPUBLIC

THE AMERICAN AND FRENCH "REVOLUTIONS" COMPARED

CONTENTS

The American effort

The French effort

The  impact on the politics of the Western world

The textual material on this webpage is drawn directly from my work
        America's Story – A Spiritual Journey © 2021, pages 98-100.
THE AMERICAN EFFORT

In 1789 – the same year that the American Constitution was ratified and thus in full effect – the French Revolution broke out in Paris, as the French, taking their cues in part from America, attempted their own rebuilding of French government around the popular will.  Certainly the experience of the French fighting alongside the Americans in their rebellion against their own king served to inspire the French to look to the possibility of doing the same to their own bankrupt monarchy.  And the Americans coming up with a written program (the American Constitution) certainly also gave rise to the French hope that something similar by way of a perfect social design could also become the foundation for a new French government, a Republic, like the American Republic.

But in fact the results at this French effort to undertake something similar to the American program ultimately proved to be quite different for the French than for the Americans – tragically different.

The American effort.   The simple fact was that despite the tendency to want to call what the American colonies went through in the 1775-1783 period a "Revolutionary War" – there was nothing very revolutionary as to what actually took place in America at the time.  No new social order was put in place.  Only political practices of self-government, ones that had long been operative in America (over 150 years by that time), were simply being protected and preserved – against the designs of an English King intending to end such political independence and put "his" colonies completely under his despotic or dictatorial control (the political lust that comes to all people able to assume unlimited power).

The American colonies had been self-governing according to carefully written social contracts that birthed these colonies in the 1600s.  And now years later in the mid-1770s when they decided to not yield to the King's pressures but to go fully independent instead, they easily and quickly drew up new state constitutions (for Massachusetts, Virginia, Maryland, etc.) outlining the political institutions and procedures that would govern their newly independent states.  And then when they gathered some ten years later in 1787 to put together a Union of these newly independent states, they handled quite maturely the political differences that naturally were there, given the various differences in the makeup and cultural traditions of these different American states.  They well knew what they were doing – being long experienced in productive governmental reform. They were simply building on that same long experience.

THE FRENCH EFFORT

That was not the case for the French.  Prior to their rebellion against their king in 1789, the French people had absolutely no experience whatsoever in self-rule.  They certainly talked about the possibility a lot, especially at the polite gatherings in fashionable French homes of French intellectuals and socialites – where the dreams of political reform were often the central topic under discussion.  These enlightened dreamers could come up with the most beautiful of ideas about constructing a more perfect political world.  But these were ideas not based on any real experience, but only on the fanciful dreams that these Idealists held about human nature – and the possibilities of marshaling such human nature in order to build a utopian society.  In short, they had no idea of what it was they were talking about – as events would soon prove.

Once they succeeded in collapsing the monarchy, they then took on the privileged feudal aristocracy – and then also the French church and its prestigious hierarchy of bishops and priests.  But slaughtering off the keepers of the Old Order (the Ancien Régime) did not automatically open the way to the establishment of a stable, working Republic – for French society had no particular moral foundations at this point on which to erect their radically new society.  Chaos thus reigned in France – and only got worse when then the intolerant intellectuals (Girondins and Jacobins) then turned on each other as betrayers of the Revolution – because they differed with each other on points of Reason – or just because of intense political jealousy.   By 1793-1794 a "Reign of Terror" consumed France, the guillotine busy night and day cutting off the heads of enemy intellectuals, including most ironically, the most idealistic of the French revolutionaries, Maximilien Robespierre! At this point, no one was in command of the hungry mobs that prowled the streets of Paris – and in a good part of the French countryside.

It finally took the dictatorship of Napoleon Bonaparte (approximately 1799 to 1815) to bring France back to order – mostly by calling on the Paris mob and fired-up French nationalists of the countryside to join his new French army in its thrust outside of France to "liberate" the rest of Europe from the monarchs whose families had long ruled the continent.  This solved the problem of violent discord among the French – but now pitted the highly nationalistic Frenchmen against the kings, barons and commoners of the rest of the European continent (all the way to Russia) – and also the British just offshore to the northwest of France.

THE IMPACT ON THE POLITICS OF THE WESTERN WORLD

Eventually (1814-1815) Napoleon was defeated by a grand coalition of European monarchs – and the Bourbon monarchy was (briefly) restored in France.  But Europe would never be quite the same again with all this nationalism stirred to life – as the English, Spanish, Germans, Italians organized themselves as nations in order to counter aggressive French nationalism.  But in finally ending French nationalist domination, this new spirit of nationalism awakened in Europe would not then go away – but merely grow more aggressive – nation by nation – until it resulted in the mindless war of mutual national slaughter which was termed at the time "The Great War", and which we know today as World War One (1914-1918).

Meanwhile a young Republic – fully engaged with challenges of its own over in America – did its best to stay out of all this dynamic that was rattling Europe.  In this it would be only partially successful.

But at least the American Republic itself would hopefully remain strong – a system of fixed laws rather than changing personal political wills, which popular governments had the tendency to turn into, such as France had just become, and later, such as the "People's Republics," would become under their "enlightened" Communist dictators.

Indeed, as Franklin put matters: "A Republic, if you can keep it."



Go on to the next section:  The American Republic Gets Up and Running

  Miles H. Hodges