The Origin and Principles of the American Revolution, Compared with the Origin and Principles of the French Revolution
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Introduction, editorial additions, and index © 2010 by Liberty Fund, Inc.
This eBook edition published in 2012.
eBook ISBN: E-PUB 978-1-61487-127-9
Contents
Introduction, by Peter Koslowski
Index
Editor’s Notes
There may be no other two historical events that are of greater impact than the American and the French revolutions. The first gave birth to a new nation that was to develop into the leading power in the world a century and a half later. The second gave birth within a generation to the greatest power in Europe for about twenty years, changing all its neighbor states forever. Napoleon, the heir of the French Revolution, set out to rule all Europe until he was defeated by an alliance of all the major powers of Europe.
It is, however, not only power but ideas that changed as the result of the two revolutions and their revolutionary ideas. “The Ideas of 1776,” of the American Revolution and of American independence, shaped Western constitutionalism and representative democracy; “the Ideas of 1789,” the ideas of the French Revolution, led to a new civil law of the continental European states, to a new understanding of government and the relationships of state and church, and to realization of democratic government based on the concept of popular sovereignty. The French Revolution also gave birth to the spirit of revolution, to the idea that a nation can change itself by a total overthrow of its past and inherited character into an entirely new social body. This spirit of revolution has influenced all radical revolutions since then, especially the Russian Revolution of 1917. A comparison of the French and American revolutions is not only a study of world history, a study of the hour of the births of the American and the French Republic; it is also a study of the birth of the ideas that shaped all Western nations and all countries of the world searching for a constitution of liberty and democracy.
Friedrich Gentz is one of the first observers of both revolutions. Most of his continental contemporaries concentrated their attention on the French Revolution, which lay closer and had revolutionized the leading European countries. The United States of America was literally on the other side of the world from Europe. Those who had immigrated to America from Europe usually did not have the means to return. Gentz was prescient about the importance of the United States in its infancy, whereas his compatriots still looked at the United States as a half-civilized, distant land of little importance, considering Europe and the world to be shaped, as Leopold Ranke later put it, by the five Great Powers: Austria, Britain, France, Germany, and Russia. It is a paradox that the nation that sent the greatest number of people to the United States of America knew the least of all Western European nations about the United States. The German inability to grasp the potential of the United States, to which Gentz is the notable exception, had consequences well into the centuries. In both world wars, the German governments had no adequate perception of the economic and military power of the United States, yet Gentz was predicting this over a century earlier.
Although becoming more powerful in the eighteenth century, Britain was a maritime power, being at the same time inside and outside of Europe. France, not Britain, was the first continental power in the perception of Europeans. France had ended the Holy Roman Empire and had defeated Austria again and again. Gentz wrote about the subsidies paid to the Holy Roman Emperor by Britain. Finally, Napoleon divided Germany, just as Prussia, Russia, and Austria had divided Poland, remarking that he did to the Germans only what they had done to the Poles, although Russia got the largest share of Poland. Gentz brought all his powers of argument and persuasion to bear against Napoleon’s attempt to legitimize the expansion of the French Revolution. Gentz conceded that the partition of Poland of 1792 was unjust, as was every partition of any European nation. Although he had been born in Prussia, he also believed that even the Germans’ self-partition into Prussia and Austria was wrong, that it had been furthered by the French Revolution’s attempt to break away Prussia and other German states from the old Holy Roman Empire. With Edmund Burke, Gentz agreed that European nations had no right to divide a European nation.
At the end of the eighteenth century, Britain was looked upon with suspicion on the Continent. Britain’s colonial expansion seemed to contradict the doctrine of the balance of power. In Europe, the British continued to insist on this balance of power, even though in the greater world there was no balance of power any more. Britannia ruled the waves, and she did nothing to restore the balance of power except by driving the North American colonies into rebellion.
Gentz was one of the few intellectuals who defended Great Britain, arguing that it had become great by superiority in trade and industry and not by doing evil. It was not Britain’s and America’s machinations, but their commercial courage and genius that had given them their economic superiority over the Continent, Gentz wrote. The European nations are free to imitate Britain in that, and all European nations could and should do so. However, Gentz found hard to reconcile with free trade the British Navigation Act, which permitted only British ships to transport goods to Britain. America, he was aware, was following Britain in trade and industry. Gentz received a lot of criticism for his defense of Britain and America; he was even called an Anglo-maniac. The British Foreign Office paid him a generous monthly allowance for his reports to London.
Gentz was, however, never a British agent. When he was working for Prince Metternich later, the Austrian foreign minister and driving force at the Vienna Congress in 1815, Gentz insisted to the British that Metternich needed to be able to read all of Gentz’s reports to and correspondence with the British government.
Gentz recognized that the founding of the French Republic in 1792 had led to escalating warfare, culminating in 1795 when the French army conquered the Netherlands and founded the Batavian Republic, trying to turn the proud trade power into a department of France. After the radical Directory had seized the supreme power in September 1795, external warfare increased even further when the revolutionary army attacked Germany, Austria, and Italy and marched on Vienna and Milan in 1796. The French Revolution continued the expansion that King Louis XIV had started. France had made large conquests in the Spanish Netherlands (Belgium) and in German lands on the left bank of the Rhine, particularly in Habsburg Alsace. But Louis XIV had not succeeded in realizing his ambition to extend France’s eastern border all along the left bank of the Rhine, as the French Revolutionary War succeeded in doing in 1796. The French Revolution brought back to France the power and expansionism that the ancien régime of the monarchy had lost, particularly during