The French and American Revolutions:
Jonathan Rowe on Sep 17th 2005
An oft-repeated claim comparing the American and French Revolutions goes something along the lines of “the French Revolution was based on the Enlightenment, while America’s was based on Christianity,” or another variation is, “the American Revolution holds that rights come from God, while the French believed rights come from the people or government only.” Admittedly, I know more about the American Revolution than the French (so perhaps Kuznicki will chime in), but my research tells me these claims are wrong, that both the American and French Revolutions were based on the same Enlightenment principles, which were relatively novel for the time (”the new science of man”).
As Francis Fukuyama put it in a Booknotes interview about his classic, The End of History and the Last Man:
Now, by the French Revolution, we don’t mean just the limited historical event; what we mean is the emergence of what we understand as modern liberal democracy because in the French Revolution, ultimately what it was about was a revolution in favor of the principles of liberty and equality. Now you could substitute the American Revolution for that because, I think in that kind of ideological sense, those two revolutions were equivalent. I mean, they were both revolutions to create what I earlier defined as a liberal democracy as a political system based on popular sovereignty with guarantees of individual rights.
This isn’t to say there weren’t profound differences between the two revolutions; clearly there were. But at base, they appealed to same Enlightenment principles. This shouldn’t be surprising; Jefferson, the author of our Declaration of Independence also, while in France, assisted in writing the French’s Declaration of the Rights of Man. The Declaration of Independence was also heralded in France and helped spark their revolution. It’s no wonder that the two documents are quite similar in what they say.
The way both nations approached these revolutionary ideas was quite different. To repeat, these Enlightenment principles were revolutionary, that is they were anti-traditional. In both societies many traditional practices, customs, laws and institutions were antithetical to these principles, slavery being the most obvious, but also monarchy, feudalism, established Churches, religious tests, and many others. The French attempted to “sweep away” all those practices and institutions, inconsistent with these Enlightenment principles, and remake society, going so far as to start the calendar over from “year one.” Their society went into convulsions.
America on the other hand, allowed as a compromise many of the institutions which were inconsistent with our ideals of liberty and equality. But in doing so there existed a great tension between the revolutionary anti-traditional principles upon which we were founded and the illiberal traditional practices like slavery, state-established Churches and religious tests, and other “compromises” with liberty and equality. But because there was such a tension, history in the US marched in the direction liberty and equality and most if not all of these illiberal institutions were eventually ended because of our foundational principles. Obviously the American approach to liberty and equality turned out to be superior to the French for no other reason than their society went into convulsions and ours didn’t (but then again, they had an established Church to disestablish, and a monarchy to unseat).
Also, contra the claim “we followed Christianity, the French, the Enlightenment, or America is based on God given natural rights, the French, government granted positive rights,” in reality, the theoretical approach to God and rights was nearly the same in both the American and French Revolutions.
Again, given that Jefferson was one of the main “idea-men” behind both Revolutions, this shouldn’t surprise. Both made supplications to an always undefined, generic God, never explicitly referencing Him as the God of Scripture (even though, in many minds He probably was). And both invoked God as the ultimate guarantor of rights.
For instance, in all three Declarations of the Rights of Man (one, two and three), God is invoked. First, “Therefore the National Assembly recognizes and proclaims, in the presence and under the auspices of the Supreme Being, the following rights of man and of the citizen.” Then in the following two Declarations, “proclaim(s) in the presence of the Supreme Being the following declaration of the rights of man and citizen.”
True, these supplication are nominal and vague, but American supplications to God in our Founding documents and pronouncements (given by our key framers) are similarly nominal and vague! Indeed, the American Constitution is entirely Godless save for the customary way of stating the date, “In the Year of our Lord” and in invoking the “blessings” of liberty (and the French, likewise refer to natural rights as “sacred”).
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A very interesting post; I will be replying in detail later today or possibly tomorrow. Briefly, there are two things most people don’t appreciate about the French Revolution, and that would do a lot to confound the simplistic ideas of it that we find in the U.S.
The first is that the Revolution had a very great deal more religious content to it than most will acknowledge. To say that the Revolution was based on the Enlightenment and was therefore irreligious is to say something perfectly absurd, contradicted at almost every single point by the actions of the revolutionaries themselves.
The second is that the Revolution was (for reasons too complicated to explain in a comment) completely unable to accept the idea of a loyal opposition. It failed to grasp that political dissent did not necessarily mean treason, leading to successive waves of leaders coming under suspicion for disloyalty (Necker, Bailly, Mirabeau, Danton, Hebert, Robespierre…), when really what they had were differences of political opinion. This dynamic is almost entirely absent in the American Revolution, and it is the most important difference that I see between the two events.
I will have much more to say about this subject, hopefully this evening, but for right now I need to run… Again, thanks for a fascinating post.
Thanks. Can’t wait to read your post.
I would argue that the French and American revolutions, while both based on Enlightenment thinking, emphasized very different thinkers: The French Revolution was more Rousseau, and the American more Montesquieu.
[...] This is the third in a series of posts that Rowe and I have been making on the eighteenth century’s two great revolutions–the French and the American. Be warned: It’s quite long, and I will probably be revising it throughout the day. [...]
Fascinating thread. I just wanted to briefly comment on something Jason says in a comment above:
The second is that the Revolution was (for reasons too complicated to explain in a comment) completely unable to accept the idea of a loyal opposition. It failed to grasp that political dissent did not necessarily mean treason, leading to successive waves of leaders coming under suspicion for disloyalty (Necker, Bailly, Mirabeau, Danton, Hebert, Robespierre…), when really what they had were differences of political opinion. This dynamic is almost entirely absent in the American Revolution, and it is the most important difference that I see between the two events.
It’s easy for us modern Americans to assume that our country was at its founding as tolerant of dissent as it is today, but it was not the case. In the early American republic, men could be and were jailed at times for being critical of the government. During the John Adams administration, there was the Sedition Act which made criticism of the government explicitly criminal. And often personal criticisms of prominent officials were found to be civil libel (truth was not then a complete defense against libel, as it is held today).
(I recently enjoyed the book The Tyranny of Printers, in which I learned much about early American politics that I never knew before.)
Anyway, good work, gentlemen, carry on…
[...] As far as the French Revolution is concerned, I obviously think that it — and by that I mean the theoretical case for it (not! how the Revolution, in practice, turned out) — was a good idea; indeed, support for the theoretical/ideological case made in the Declaration of Independence demands in principle support for the French Revolution given that the ideas in the French’s Declaration of the Rights of Man strikingly parallel those of America’s Declaration. Indeed, the Declaration of Independence was heralded in France and helped spark their revolution. Jefferson, the Declaration’s author, while in France, supported and helped to spur on the Revolution. He even assisted in writing the French’s Declaration of the Rights of Man. Thus, there is an irrefutable ideological connection between these events. [...]
[...] Next, he claims that “Christian principles delineated…the Declaration of Independence.” Funny, I don’t see one citation to Scripture or reference to God in Biblical terms at all in America’s Declaration. And Flannery draws a faux distinction between the ideology of the American and French Revolutions (indeed, I wrote this post exposing the way Christian Nationalists often make this error). It’s true that the French Revolution became hostile to religion in a way that the American never did (and keep in mind, they had a national Church to disestablish — one that was very illiberal one at the time, the RCC — and we didn’t). But both revolutions, in their founding documents, make parallel ideological assertions. This shouldn’t surprise given that Thomas Jefferson, the author of America’s Declaration, was in France helping to spur on their Revolution and assisted in writing their Founding document, the French’s Declaration of the Rights of Man. [...]
[...] And indeed, there is a philosophical connection between almost every evil she invokes and the ideals of the Founding: Those “compromises” are only able to be judged as “evil” by using the same moral standards which gave rise to the Declaration and the Constitution in the first place. These are the abstract ideals of the Western Enlightenment — the unalienable rights of “liberty” and “equality” — upon which both the United States and France declared independence and built (or in the case of the French — attempted to build) their new orders. [...]
[...] The video singles out Maximilien Robespierre as the poster boy for Enlightenment influenced atheistic slaughter. But Robespierre was not an atheist but a firm believer in God. And, as I pointed out in this much read post, the French Revolution was declared according to a strikingly parallel set of principles/ideals as the American. [...]
[...] Well sort of, not really. I don’t see the Bible as a “political revolutionary” book. As I’ve long noted, passages like Romans 13 seem to intimate the opposite. Yet, Founding era ministers preached revolution from the pulpit. And I’ve seen religious conservative historians try to “credit” orthodox sources, most notably Samuel Rutherford’s Lex Rex, for the proposition of political revolution and consequently America’s Declaration of Independence. The same religious conservatives also tend to attempt to distinguish between America’s Revolution and France’s, arguing the former was more of a “Christian” revolution, the latter an “Enlightenment” revolution. As I noted in this post (which by the way, one of my most widely read posts via search engines) the American and French Revolutions were declared according to a strikingly parallel set of ideological principles, and there is far more of a connection between those two historical events, than between America’s Revolution and the orthodox Protestant documents from an earlier generation like Lex Rex and the Vindiciae Con Tyrannus. Thus if one concludes “Christian principles” are responsible for the American Revolution, one must also give those very same principles the blame for the French Revolution. [...]
[...] differences between the two (obviously — the two events turned out quite differently) but both appealed, at base, to the same ideals, the same Enlightenment principles of a generically defined Supreme Being who grants men [...]