WEBVTT NOTE 81. The Impact in Europe 1 00:00:00.000 --> 00:00:05.000 Volume 4, Chapter 81, The Impact in Europe 2 00:00:05.000 --> 00:00:15.000 Through a burgeoning press, book and periodical, reading clubs, and the reports of foreign soldiers who had served in the American War, 3 00:00:15.000 --> 00:00:19.000 Europe was swept with fervor for the revolutionary cause. 4 00:00:19.000 --> 00:00:25.760 Indeed, a widely read political press and the formation of a public opinion really began 5 00:00:25.760 --> 00:00:30.400 in this era under the impact of the American Revolution. 6 00:00:30.400 --> 00:00:37.600 France, Germany, Ireland and the Netherlands were particularly taken by the revolution 7 00:00:37.600 --> 00:00:42.120 and its inspiring example for the rest of the world. 8 00:00:42.120 --> 00:00:47.280 Under its impact, a political press developed in Germany and the Netherlands. 9 00:00:47.280 --> 00:00:52.680 In Ireland and the Netherlands, two countries with close personal and kinship ties to the 10 00:00:52.680 --> 00:00:59.480 American people, the revolutionary example of the Sons of Liberty and Committees of Correspondence 11 00:00:59.480 --> 00:01:02.760 inspired popular political clubs. 12 00:01:02.760 --> 00:01:08.480 In the lands of America's wartime allies, France and Holland, revolutionary sentiment 13 00:01:08.480 --> 00:01:12.640 could grow in a particularly favorable climate. 14 00:01:12.640 --> 00:01:18.920 Major French revolutionary leaders from Lafayette to Brousseau de Warville were deeply inspired 15 00:01:18.920 --> 00:01:20.560 by the American example. 16 00:01:20.560 --> 00:01:26.620 France, as well as Ireland and Holland, learned about constitutional conventions, committees 17 00:01:26.620 --> 00:01:33.480 of public safety, test oaths, confiscation of emigrate property, paper money and price 18 00:01:33.480 --> 00:01:36.400 controls from the Americans. 19 00:01:36.400 --> 00:01:42.300 Ambassador Franklin was lionized in Paris and an international intellectual debate was 20 00:01:42.300 --> 00:01:49.140 is waged over the virtues of the various American constitutions by such leading liberals as 21 00:01:49.140 --> 00:01:57.140 John Adams and Jefferson in the United States, Turgot, Condorcet, Dupont de Nemours, Mirabeau, 22 00:01:57.140 --> 00:02:03.900 Abbé Mably and Abbé Morallet in France and Richard Price in England. 23 00:02:03.900 --> 00:02:09.140 In Holland, John Adams intrigued with the radical Republicans to join the war against 24 00:02:09.140 --> 00:02:16.140 was the wishes of the pro-British Orange Regime. Adams had close contact with the Dutch revolutionaries 25 00:02:16.420 --> 00:02:23.420 headed by J.D. van der Kaepelen, Toad de Paul, the Reverend van der Kemp and the bankers 26 00:02:23.420 --> 00:02:30.420 of Amsterdam. The Belgian Revolution of 1789 was greatly influenced by the American constitutions 27 00:02:31.300 --> 00:02:38.300 and state papers and the Declaration of Independence by Flanders against Austrian rule in 1789. 28 00:02:39.140 --> 00:02:45.300 in 1799 reproduced the language of the American Declaration. Moreover, the Act of Union of 29 00:02:45.300 --> 00:02:53.020 the United Belgian States in 1790 almost exactly reproduced the language as well as the spirit 30 00:02:53.020 --> 00:02:58.820 of the Articles of Confederation. The central legislative body of the Union was even called 31 00:02:58.820 --> 00:03:05.300 Congress. The American Revolution and the question of participating in the fight against 32 00:03:05.300 --> 00:03:11.980 East England led to the formation of a Dutch Revolutionary Patriot Party around Kaepelin. 33 00:03:11.980 --> 00:03:18.780 Kaepelin, in a notable pamphlet of 1781, an address to the Netherlands people, denounced 34 00:03:18.780 --> 00:03:25.020 the pro-British orange oligarchy and bureaucracy, pointed to the example of an American government 35 00:03:25.020 --> 00:03:31.300 elected by the people, and, most importantly, called for the arming of the people, after 36 00:03:31.300 --> 00:03:34.580 the examples of America and Ireland. 37 00:03:34.580 --> 00:03:40.580 He also urged the formation of spontaneous grassroots citizens groups, like the American 38 00:03:40.580 --> 00:03:45.980 Committees and the English Associations, to put pressure upon the government. 39 00:03:45.980 --> 00:03:52.260 To follow the American example, he wrote, was to be ready, every man with his musket. 40 00:03:52.260 --> 00:03:59.620 Accordingly, the burghers of Utrecht and other towns began to arm, drill, organize free corps, 41 00:03:59.620 --> 00:04:02.860 and form national meetings and assemblies. 42 00:04:02.860 --> 00:04:08.660 The mass army and the pressure of the burghers polarized and split the patriot movement. 43 00:04:08.660 --> 00:04:15.340 For the aristocratic and traditionally anti-orange Dutch regents, in control of the councils 44 00:04:15.340 --> 00:04:21.260 and provincial estates, began to be frightened at the democratic demands of the middle class 45 00:04:21.260 --> 00:04:22.700 burghers. 46 00:04:22.700 --> 00:04:29.180 The burghers' free corps was led by the fiery Ondatje, a student at the University of Utrecht, 47 00:04:29.180 --> 00:04:33.380 and became a focal point for both sides in the Patriot split. 48 00:04:33.380 --> 00:04:38.540 The Dutch masses rallied to Undatcha and the Patriots while some of the regents left to 49 00:04:38.540 --> 00:04:40.500 join the Orange Party. 50 00:04:40.500 --> 00:04:47.740 Free Corps began forming in 1784 and the first National Assembly of Free Corps met at Utrecht 51 00:04:47.740 --> 00:04:49.860 at the end of that year. 52 00:04:49.860 --> 00:04:56.300 By 1786, the National Assembly of Free Corps and the liberal wing of the regents issued 53 00:04:56.300 --> 00:05:03.180 a joint declaration calling for a truly republican, democratic and liberal regime. 54 00:05:03.180 --> 00:05:09.300 What is more, the Utrecht burghers deposed the old aristocratic town council and chose 55 00:05:09.300 --> 00:05:11.620 a new council by general election. 56 00:05:11.620 --> 00:05:16.460 The following year civil war broke out with the troops of the Prince of Orange. 57 00:05:16.460 --> 00:05:21.820 The Dutch revolution seemed to be sweeping all before it, but, as was later to occur 58 00:05:21.820 --> 00:05:30.780 In France, the forces of foreign armed counter-revolution intervened to crush the popular movement. 59 00:05:30.780 --> 00:05:37.140 While financially aided by France, the patriots were overwhelmed by large-scale British bribery 60 00:05:37.140 --> 00:05:43.820 and intrigue, but especially by the intervention of 20,000 Prussian troops who invaded the 61 00:05:43.820 --> 00:05:51.300 Dutch provinces, occupied Utrecht in Amsterdam and crushed the Dutch Patriot Revolution. 62 00:05:51.300 --> 00:05:57.300 The intriguer, British Ambassador, Sir James Harris, was close to tears of joy as he in 63 00:05:57.300 --> 00:06:03.300 the Prussians restored the rule of the House of Orange. Edmund Burke, in a prefigurement 64 00:06:03.300 --> 00:06:10.480 of his reactionary role in the French Revolution, also hailed the crushing of the rebellion. 65 00:06:10.480 --> 00:06:17.200 Harris' financial argus controlled the restored regime and the House of Orange instituted 66 00:06:17.200 --> 00:06:23.480 of Veritable Reign of Terror, driving many thousands of patriots into exile. 67 00:06:23.480 --> 00:06:29.280 Most of the refugees fled to France and the Austrian Netherlands, though van der Kemp 68 00:06:29.280 --> 00:06:31.760 emigrated to the United States. 69 00:06:31.760 --> 00:06:38.280 Britain and Prussia made so bold as to guarantee formally the rule of the Orange Regime. 70 00:06:38.280 --> 00:06:44.560 Palmer rightly concludes that the Dutch Republic first lost its independence not to the Jacobins 71 00:06:44.560 --> 00:06:52.600 in 1795, but to the already well-developed forces of the European Counter-Revolution 72 00:06:52.600 --> 00:06:55.480 in 1787. 73 00:06:55.480 --> 00:07:01.400 The Belgian provinces, led by the province of Brabant and by the lawyer Jean-Francois 74 00:07:01.400 --> 00:07:09.900 Vanck, successfully revolted against Austrian rule and declared their independence in 1789. 75 00:07:09.900 --> 00:07:15.620 After independence, the Vonkists determined to complete their revolution and democratize 76 00:07:15.620 --> 00:07:21.280 and liberalize the restrictive feudal and guild systems of Belgium. 77 00:07:21.280 --> 00:07:26.980 In provincial revolutionary committees and in elections of local officials, insurrectionary 78 00:07:26.980 --> 00:07:31.780 committees of middle class citizens began to sweep Belgium. 79 00:07:31.780 --> 00:07:38.100 The Belgian aristocracy countered by forming an Estates General and adopting an act of 80 00:07:38.100 --> 00:07:44.780 of Union modeled in its decentralization on the Articles of Confederation, and insisting 81 00:07:44.780 --> 00:07:50.900 that the American model was only a national external revolution for independence. 82 00:07:50.900 --> 00:07:56.580 The liberals led by the moderate vonk, however, countered by citing the importance of the 83 00:07:56.580 --> 00:08:02.780 American state constitutions and the consequent liberalizing of each state. 84 00:08:02.780 --> 00:08:12.780 Thus both sides in the Belgian struggle relied on their varying interpretations of the true nature of the American Revolution. 85 00:08:12.780 --> 00:08:23.780 Finally, after various scuffles, the reactionary Estates Party won out in the spring of 1790 and hundreds of liberal leaders were forced to flee to France. 86 00:08:23.780 --> 00:08:31.260 A rightist reign of terror, launched by the Catholic clergy and its reactionary theoretician, 87 00:08:31.260 --> 00:08:37.340 Abbe Feller, broke out against the liberals, and one monk declared in a sermon that anyone 88 00:08:37.340 --> 00:08:41.260 meeting a vonkist should kill him on sight. 89 00:08:41.260 --> 00:08:46.860 Masses of peasants led by their priests poured out into the towns to kill liberals. 90 00:08:46.860 --> 00:08:53.220 Hence the return of Austrian rule in late 1790 was understandably greeted by the harassed 91 00:08:53.220 --> 00:09:00.060 Belgian liberals as almost a deliverance from the rule of the Belgian aristocracy. 92 00:09:00.060 --> 00:09:06.960 They then returned to Belgium bitterly anti-clerical and looking wistfully to revolutionary and 93 00:09:06.960 --> 00:09:11.340 anti-clerical France for their future model. 94 00:09:11.340 --> 00:09:17.360 The first of the 18th century European revolutions had occurred in the city of Geneva. 95 00:09:17.360 --> 00:09:22.900 The Burgers, with Rousseau as their philosopher, tried to break through the tightly knit rule 96 00:09:22.900 --> 00:09:32.580 The rule of the local aristocracy in 1767-68 gained a few concessions. In 1781, the burghers 97 00:09:32.580 --> 00:09:39.140 again tried to democratize rule in Geneva. The Geneva aristocrats appealed to the powers 98 00:09:39.140 --> 00:09:44.820 that had presumed to impose and guarantee a tight aristocratic rule in Geneva in the 99 00:09:44.820 --> 00:09:51.820 Act of 1738, the cantons of Bern and Zurich and the Kingdom of France. Genoese aristocrats 100 00:09:52.900 --> 00:10:05.900 M. Ducrest urged external intervention in the cause of all legitimate governments and of all sovereigns to crush the atrocious and unprovoked horrors of sedition. 101 00:10:05.900 --> 00:10:13.900 France, Bern and Zurich promptly sent in troops and laid siege to Geneva and finally stormed it. 102 00:10:13.900 --> 00:10:27.900 The foreign powers, consulting with the town aristocracy, not only reinforced the pre-1781 aristocratic rule, but they even revoked the minor concessions of 1768. 103 00:10:27.900 --> 00:10:42.900 The banker Etienne Clavier, a burger leader, fled from Geneva to Paris and there formed with Briseau d'Orville, a gallo-American society, to perpetuate the ideals of the American Revolution. 104 00:10:42.900 --> 00:10:50.900 Clavier was later Minister of Finance in the revolutionary Girondin government of France. 105 00:10:50.900 --> 00:10:59.900 Another particularly direct outgrowth of the American War was the upsurge of a revolutionary movement in Ireland. 106 00:10:59.900 --> 00:11:09.900 In response to John Paul Jones' raid on Belfast in the spring of 1778, upper and middle class Irishmen, almost all Protestants, 107 00:11:09.900 --> 00:11:33.900 For instance, the submerged bulk of Roman Catholic peasantry had no voice in Irish political life, formed armed companies throughout Ireland. Designed originally for defense against invasion, these armed companies, the Irish volunteers, remained in being to emulate the Americans and press for greater liberty in Ireland. 108 00:11:33.900 --> 00:12:03.900 In the legal, because of their ostensible purpose of common defense, the volunteers exchanged ideas and met in regional assemblies, newspapers, pamphlets, grand juries and county meetings agitated for liberal reforms against England, especially for the relaxing of British imperial trade restrictions in order to ease the severe economic crisis caused by the embargo of Irish exports, especially linens, to the United States. 109 00:12:03.900 --> 00:12:11.020 Politically, the volunteers wanted home rule for the Irish, Parliament and democratic reform 110 00:12:11.020 --> 00:12:14.620 of that aristocratic body itself. 111 00:12:14.620 --> 00:12:20.580 The pressure of the armed volunteers forced substantial concessions from the British, permitting 112 00:12:20.580 --> 00:12:24.260 some exports of Irish goods to the colonies. 113 00:12:24.260 --> 00:12:30.740 Further pressure by volunteer movement, grown to 80,000 armed men, forced the British in 114 00:12:30.740 --> 00:12:38.640 in 1782 to grant the Irish Parliament, led by the reformer Henry Grattan, home rule and 115 00:12:38.640 --> 00:12:45.280 equal status with the British Parliament under the Crown. Such infamous measures as Poining's 116 00:12:45.280 --> 00:12:51.320 Law were repealed. Exuberantly, the Irish admitted that it was 117 00:12:51.320 --> 00:12:56.880 America's victory, joined to their own armed pressure, that had forced England to grant 118 00:12:56.880 --> 00:12:58.360 and Home Rule. 119 00:12:58.360 --> 00:13:05.040 It was on the Plains of America, wrote one Irishman, that Ireland obtained her freedom. 120 00:13:05.040 --> 00:13:10.340 But Home Rule proved disappointing, and trade restrictions and royal control continued in 121 00:13:10.340 --> 00:13:11.600 force. 122 00:13:11.600 --> 00:13:18.840 The volunteers insisted on continuing in force to demand reform of the Irish parliament itself, 123 00:13:18.840 --> 00:13:23.380 but they were weakened by a grave inner contradiction. 124 00:13:23.380 --> 00:13:30.480 Their desire to democratize ran squarely against their commitment to keeping the body of Roman 125 00:13:30.480 --> 00:13:33.620 Catholics submerged. 126 00:13:33.620 --> 00:13:38.540 If the Roman Catholics were to be given the vote, the entire social system established 127 00:13:38.540 --> 00:13:45.460 by the English conquest, notably land monopoly, and the established Protestant Church would 128 00:13:45.460 --> 00:13:47.780 be cast into peril. 129 00:13:47.780 --> 00:13:53.280 This content with the results of Home Rule swelled the ranks of the volunteers, who even 130 00:13:53.280 --> 00:13:59.980 and began to admit Catholics into their ranks. In consequence, Grattan and the Irish Whigs, 131 00:13:59.980 --> 00:14:06.100 whose victory for Home Rule had rested on the Volunteers, now denounced these people's 132 00:14:06.100 --> 00:14:13.660 troops as an anarchic menace. The Volunteers pressed on to hold their first Grand National 133 00:14:13.660 --> 00:14:22.260 Convention, the world's first national convention, in late 1783. Their reform plan, having been 134 00:14:22.260 --> 00:14:28.140 When rejected by Parliament, the volunteer ranks grew further in the following year. 135 00:14:28.140 --> 00:14:33.360 Roman Catholics were increasingly welcomed and the Irish radicals began to talk openly 136 00:14:33.360 --> 00:14:34.960 of revolution. 137 00:14:34.960 --> 00:14:41.180 In particular, the American example was increasingly held up as a model and the reformers began 138 00:14:41.180 --> 00:14:47.660 to call for a national Congress in open imitation of revolutionary America. 139 00:14:47.660 --> 00:14:53.180 But the Attorney General suppressed the radical press and arrested the sympathetic sheriff 140 00:14:53.180 --> 00:14:54.540 of Dublin. 141 00:14:54.540 --> 00:15:01.340 The volunteer movement soon faded away, largely because it never resolved its contradiction 142 00:15:01.340 --> 00:15:07.400 on Roman Catholic emancipation, and hence because it never had the courage to openly 143 00:15:07.400 --> 00:15:11.980 enlist the Roman Catholic masses on its side. 144 00:15:11.980 --> 00:15:18.140 Edmund Burke, significantly enough, staunchly favored the conservative side, the side of 145 00:15:18.140 --> 00:15:21.220 prescriptive custom. 146 00:15:21.220 --> 00:15:26.300 At the same time, he bitterly opposed English parliamentary reform. 147 00:15:26.300 --> 00:15:32.620 There he went to the logical conclusion of conservatism that any sharp change in government 148 00:15:32.620 --> 00:15:36.040 was simply anarchy. 149 00:15:36.040 --> 00:15:41.220 For to discredit the only form of government which we either possess or can project, what 150 00:15:41.220 --> 00:15:47.220 Is this but to destroy all government? And this is anarchy. 151 00:15:47.220 --> 00:15:57.220 Thus, in four countries in Western Europe, armed liberal mass movements arose during the 1780s, inspired by the success of the American Revolution. 152 00:15:57.220 --> 00:16:06.220 In England, a feebler association movement collapsed with the division of the reform forces between Pitt and Fox. 153 00:16:06.220 --> 00:16:21.220 In three of these cases, Holland, Belgium and Geneva, the movement proceeded to the point of revolution, but in each of them the revolution failed and was crushed by armed counter-revolution. 154 00:16:21.220 --> 00:16:37.220 By the end of the 1780s, the first liberal impetus had been crushed by a regnant counter-revolution that, in most of these cases, relied on armed foreign aid to help crush the revolutionary forces. 155 00:16:37.220 --> 00:16:47.220 Generally, it was Great Britain to whom the reactionaries looked for succor. This was true of the Dutch, of the Irish magnates and of the Belgian right. 156 00:16:47.220 --> 00:16:52.220 and of course it had also been true of the American Tories before their expulsion. 157 00:16:52.220 --> 00:17:01.220 Everywhere England began to emerge as the home, the nucleus of international armed counterrevolution. 158 00:17:01.220 --> 00:17:08.220 In reaction to England's role, the liberal and democratic forces in Europe, and for that matter in America, 159 00:17:08.220 --> 00:17:12.220 had begun to turn to France for aid and sustenance. 160 00:17:12.220 --> 00:17:20.220 France, England's ancient foe, played this role, interestingly enough, long before the 161 00:17:20.220 --> 00:17:27.060 French Revolution, aiding the left in America, Holland and Ireland and providing a haven 162 00:17:27.060 --> 00:17:31.420 for refugees of all of the lost revolutions. 163 00:17:31.420 --> 00:17:37.280 This was done not because of idealism, as its own role in crushing Geneva and liberalism 164 00:17:37.280 --> 00:17:42.920 made evident, but to help even the score with Great Britain. 165 00:17:42.920 --> 00:17:50.000 And so, outside of America, the wave of liberal revolutions had failed abysmally. 166 00:17:50.000 --> 00:17:58.120 They failed basically because they were bourgeois rebellions that did not tap support among 167 00:17:58.120 --> 00:18:04.760 the peasant masses by mounting a total assault on the feudal land system. 168 00:18:04.760 --> 00:18:10.760 By failing to be truly revolutionary, the middle classes could not command mass support, 169 00:18:10.760 --> 00:18:14.960 and left themselves vulnerable to armed force. 170 00:18:14.960 --> 00:18:23.600 As Palmer explains, the democratic movement failed everywhere before 1789, except in America. 171 00:18:23.600 --> 00:18:29.760 Moderate though it was, or seems in retrospect, it failed to obtain any concessions at all. 172 00:18:29.760 --> 00:18:36.200 All the efforts of English and Irish parliamentary reformers and of Dutch, Belgian and Genovese 173 00:18:36.200 --> 00:18:42.760 Democrats had come to absolutely nothing. Indeed, matters were, if anything, worse, 174 00:18:42.760 --> 00:18:48.880 for the fear and vindictiveness of threatened oligarchies had been aroused. The democratic 175 00:18:48.880 --> 00:18:54.520 movement had failed for various reasons, in some places because the forces of the old 176 00:18:54.520 --> 00:19:00.860 Order had successfully called upon foreign aid, and in all cases, because the democratic 177 00:19:00.860 --> 00:19:07.200 interests, though important and enlightened, were a numerical minority in the country as 178 00:19:07.200 --> 00:19:14.780 a whole. They had no mass following. The mass, outside London, Paris or Amsterdam, really 179 00:19:14.780 --> 00:19:20.680 meant the rural population. Country people at lower income levels in the countries now 180 00:19:20.680 --> 00:19:27.920 Now Being Considered, were politically unaroused. So far as the ruling aristocracies drew their 181 00:19:27.920 --> 00:19:33.520 incomes from land or their influence from the goodwill of the tenetree, they had little 182 00:19:33.520 --> 00:19:40.600 to fear from disaffected lawyers or impudent pamphleteers. The one thing that would undermine 183 00:19:40.600 --> 00:19:46.920 them was wholesale defection on their own estates. This did not happen until it happened 184 00:19:46.920 --> 00:19:51.200 and in France in the summer of 1789. 185 00:19:51.200 --> 00:19:57.800 If these events prove anything, it is perhaps that no purely middle-class or bourgeois revolution 186 00:19:57.800 --> 00:19:59.040 could succeed. 187 00:19:59.040 --> 00:20:05.880 Lawyers, bankers, merchants, shopkeepers, students and professors could not alone unseat 188 00:20:05.880 --> 00:20:08.880 the holders of political power. 189 00:20:08.880 --> 00:20:13.880 Another reason for the democratic failure, applying at least to Holland, Belgium and 190 00:20:13.880 --> 00:20:20.880 in Geneva was that these countries had the misfortune to be small and hence easy objects 191 00:20:20.880 --> 00:20:22.680 of intervention. 192 00:20:22.680 --> 00:20:29.200 The attempt of conservative Europe to intervene in France in 1792 was to have a very different 193 00:20:29.200 --> 00:20:31.600 outcome. 194 00:20:31.600 --> 00:20:38.440 Above all it was necessary to engage the masses as the American revolutionaries had done but 195 00:20:38.440 --> 00:20:45.600 in Europe, written as America had not been by internal feudalism, still dominated by 196 00:20:45.600 --> 00:20:53.560 monarchy and by theocracy, mass upheaval would have had to rend and disrupt the entire social 197 00:20:53.560 --> 00:20:54.880 fabric. 198 00:20:54.880 --> 00:21:00.440 The stage was set for France to pick up the baton of the American Revolution. 199 00:21:00.440 --> 00:21:06.200 The seemingly far greater radicalism of the French Revolution was merely a function of 200 00:21:06.200 --> 00:21:11.200 The Far Greater Built-In Resistance to Libertarian Principles 201 00:21:11.200 --> 00:21:14.200 As Palmer justly concludes, 202 00:21:14.200 --> 00:21:20.200 The American and the French revolutions proceeded from the same principles. 203 00:21:20.200 --> 00:21:26.200 The difference is that these principles were much more deeply rooted in America, 204 00:21:26.200 --> 00:21:35.200 and that contrary or competing principles, monarchist or aristocratic or feudal or ecclesiastical, 205 00:21:35.200 --> 00:21:41.200 though not absent from America, were, in comparison to Europe, very weak. 206 00:21:41.200 --> 00:21:48.200 Assertion of the same principles, therefore, provoked less conflict in America than in France. 207 00:21:48.200 --> 00:21:55.200 It was the weakness of conservative forces in 18th century America, not their strength, 208 00:21:55.200 --> 00:21:59.200 that made the American Revolution as moderate as it was. 209 00:21:59.200 --> 00:22:19.200 The difference lay in the fact that certain ideas of the Age of Enlightenment, found on both sides of the Atlantic, ideas of constitutionalism, individual liberty or legal equality, were more fully incorporated and less disputed in America than in Europe. 210 00:22:19.200 --> 00:22:25.120 For a century after the American Revolution, as is well known, partisans of the revolutionary 211 00:22:25.120 --> 00:22:31.240 or liberal movements in Europe looked upon the United States generally with approval, 212 00:22:31.240 --> 00:22:38.520 and European conservatives viewed it with hostility or downright contempt. 213 00:22:38.520 --> 00:22:44.700 The French, indeed the European liberals in general, had to face far more entrenched opposition 214 00:22:44.700 --> 00:22:51.220 than had the Americans, and Palmer brilliantly concludes that in France, the Revolution was 215 00:22:51.220 --> 00:22:58.260 itself a reaction against an immovable conservatism already formed. 216 00:22:58.260 --> 00:23:04.820 Just as in America, British aggrandizement radicalized public opinion, so the tendency 217 00:23:04.820 --> 00:23:13.820 of European counterrevolution to harden after suppression of the revolts of the 1780s radicalized 218 00:23:13.820 --> 00:23:16.820 French Revolutionary Opinion. 219 00:23:16.820 --> 00:23:22.380 It should be noted that the European theorist of the old order did not take the current 220 00:23:22.380 --> 00:23:29.060 neoconservative tack of praising the American Revolution and reviling the French. 221 00:23:29.060 --> 00:23:35.540 These reactionary ideologues knew their enemy and that most emphatically included the American 222 00:23:35.540 --> 00:23:42.060 Revolution, which was attacked with the same phrases later used to denounce the French. 223 00:23:42.060 --> 00:23:48.060 Similarly denounced were the Dutch, Geneva and Belgian revolutions of the 1780s. 224 00:23:48.060 --> 00:23:55.060 The Abbé Feller, theorist of the Belgian right, Malet Dupin in France, and Scholzer, 225 00:23:55.060 --> 00:24:00.060 another historical jurist as opposed to natural rights jurist in Germany, 226 00:24:00.060 --> 00:24:08.060 all became noted opponents of the French Revolution and were equally hostile to the American. 227 00:24:08.060 --> 00:24:23.060 Edmund Burke formed his defense of reaction in the cauldron of the moderate and liberal Dutch, Irish and English reform agitations long before he attacked the alleged horrors of the French Revolution. 228 00:24:24.060 --> 00:24:36.060 The American Revolution, the European right realized, was a vital milestone in the advance and development of the Western Revolutionary tradition.