The American Revolution
Lastly, there is little doubt that the American Revolution of the
1770s and the formation of a republic in the 1780s served as a profound example
to all European observers. Hundreds of books, pamphlets and public lectures
analyzed, romanticized and criticized the American rebellion against Great
Britain. For instance, in 1783 the Venetian ambassador to Paris wrote that
"it is reasonable to expect that, with the favorable effects of time, and
of European arts and sciences, [America] will become the most formidable power
in the world." American independence fired the imagination of aristocrats
who were unsure of their status while at the same time giving the promise of
ever greater equality to the common man. The Enlightenment preached the steady
and inevitable progress of man's moral and intellectual nature. The American
example served as a great lesson - tyranny could be challenged. Man did have
inalienable rights. New governments could be constructed. The American example
then, shed a brilliant light. As one French observer remarked in 1789,
"This vast continent which the seas surround will soon change Europe and
the universe."Those Europeans who dreamed about the dawn of a New Jerusalem were fascinated by the American political experiment. The thirteen colonies began with a defensive revolution against tyrannical oppression and they were victorious. The Americans showed how rational men could assemble together to exercise control over their own lives by choosing their own form of government, a government sanctified by the force of a written constitution. With this in mind, liberty, equality, private property and representative government began to make more sense to European observers. If anything, the American Revolution gave proof to that great Enlightenment idea - the idea that a better world was possible if it was created by men using Reason. As R. R. Palmer put it in 1959 (The Age of Democratic Revolution: The Challenge):
The effects of the American Revolution, as a revolution, were imponderable but very great. It inspired the sense of a new era. It added a new content to the conception of progress.
It gave a whole new dimension to ideas of liberty and
equality made familiar by the Enlightenment. It got people into the habit of
thinking more concretely about political questions, and made them more readily
critical of their own governments and society. It dethroned England, and set up
America, as a model for those seeking a better world. It brought written
constitutions, declarations of rights, and constituent conventions into the
realm of the possible. The apparition on the other side of the Atlantic of
certain ideas already familiar in Europe made such ideas seem more truly
universal, and confirmed the habit of thinking in terms of humanity at large.
Whether fantastically idealized or seen in a factual way, whether as mirage or
as reality, America made Europe seem unsatisfactory to many people of the
middle and lower classes, and to those of the upper classes who wished them
well. It made a good many Europeans feel sorry for themselves, and induced a
kind of spiritual flight from the Old Regime
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