Volume 4, Chapter 81, The Impact in Europe
Through a burgeoning press, book and periodical, reading clubs, and the reports of foreign soldiers who had served in the American War,
Europe was swept with fervor for the revolutionary cause.
Indeed, a widely read political press and the formation of a public opinion really began
in this era under the impact of the American Revolution.
France, Germany, Ireland and the Netherlands were particularly taken by the revolution
and its inspiring example for the rest of the world.
Under its impact, a political press developed in Germany and the Netherlands.
In Ireland and the Netherlands, two countries with close personal and kinship ties to the
American people, the revolutionary example of the Sons of Liberty and Committees of Correspondence
inspired popular political clubs.
In the lands of America's wartime allies, France and Holland, revolutionary sentiment
could grow in a particularly favorable climate.
Major French revolutionary leaders from Lafayette to Brousseau de Warville were deeply inspired
by the American example.
France, as well as Ireland and Holland, learned about constitutional conventions, committees
of public safety, test oaths, confiscation of emigrate property, paper money and price
controls from the Americans.
Ambassador Franklin was lionized in Paris and an international intellectual debate was
is waged over the virtues of the various American constitutions by such leading liberals as
John Adams and Jefferson in the United States, Turgot, Condorcet, Dupont de Nemours, Mirabeau,
Abbé Mably and Abbé Morallet in France and Richard Price in England.
In Holland, John Adams intrigued with the radical Republicans to join the war against
was the wishes of the pro-British Orange Regime. Adams had close contact with the Dutch revolutionaries
headed by J.D. van der Kaepelen, Toad de Paul, the Reverend van der Kemp and the bankers
of Amsterdam. The Belgian Revolution of 1789 was greatly influenced by the American constitutions
and state papers and the Declaration of Independence by Flanders against Austrian rule in 1789.
in 1799 reproduced the language of the American Declaration. Moreover, the Act of Union of
the United Belgian States in 1790 almost exactly reproduced the language as well as the spirit
of the Articles of Confederation. The central legislative body of the Union was even called
Congress. The American Revolution and the question of participating in the fight against
East England led to the formation of a Dutch Revolutionary Patriot Party around Kaepelin.
Kaepelin, in a notable pamphlet of 1781, an address to the Netherlands people, denounced
the pro-British orange oligarchy and bureaucracy, pointed to the example of an American government
elected by the people, and, most importantly, called for the arming of the people, after
the examples of America and Ireland.
He also urged the formation of spontaneous grassroots citizens groups, like the American
Committees and the English Associations, to put pressure upon the government.
To follow the American example, he wrote, was to be ready, every man with his musket.
Accordingly, the burghers of Utrecht and other towns began to arm, drill, organize free corps,
and form national meetings and assemblies.
The mass army and the pressure of the burghers polarized and split the patriot movement.
For the aristocratic and traditionally anti-orange Dutch regents, in control of the councils
and provincial estates, began to be frightened at the democratic demands of the middle class
burghers.
The burghers' free corps was led by the fiery Ondatje, a student at the University of Utrecht,
and became a focal point for both sides in the Patriot split.
The Dutch masses rallied to Undatcha and the Patriots while some of the regents left to
join the Orange Party.
Free Corps began forming in 1784 and the first National Assembly of Free Corps met at Utrecht
at the end of that year.
By 1786, the National Assembly of Free Corps and the liberal wing of the regents issued
a joint declaration calling for a truly republican, democratic and liberal regime.
What is more, the Utrecht burghers deposed the old aristocratic town council and chose
a new council by general election.
The following year civil war broke out with the troops of the Prince of Orange.
The Dutch revolution seemed to be sweeping all before it, but, as was later to occur
In France, the forces of foreign armed counter-revolution intervened to crush the popular movement.
While financially aided by France, the patriots were overwhelmed by large-scale British bribery
and intrigue, but especially by the intervention of 20,000 Prussian troops who invaded the
Dutch provinces, occupied Utrecht in Amsterdam and crushed the Dutch Patriot Revolution.
The intriguer, British Ambassador, Sir James Harris, was close to tears of joy as he in
the Prussians restored the rule of the House of Orange. Edmund Burke, in a prefigurement
of his reactionary role in the French Revolution, also hailed the crushing of the rebellion.
Harris' financial argus controlled the restored regime and the House of Orange instituted
of Veritable Reign of Terror, driving many thousands of patriots into exile.
Most of the refugees fled to France and the Austrian Netherlands, though van der Kemp
emigrated to the United States.
Britain and Prussia made so bold as to guarantee formally the rule of the Orange Regime.
Palmer rightly concludes that the Dutch Republic first lost its independence not to the Jacobins
in 1795, but to the already well-developed forces of the European Counter-Revolution
in 1787.
The Belgian provinces, led by the province of Brabant and by the lawyer Jean-Francois
Vanck, successfully revolted against Austrian rule and declared their independence in 1789.
After independence, the Vonkists determined to complete their revolution and democratize
and liberalize the restrictive feudal and guild systems of Belgium.
In provincial revolutionary committees and in elections of local officials, insurrectionary
committees of middle class citizens began to sweep Belgium.
The Belgian aristocracy countered by forming an Estates General and adopting an act of
of Union modeled in its decentralization on the Articles of Confederation, and insisting
that the American model was only a national external revolution for independence.
The liberals led by the moderate vonk, however, countered by citing the importance of the
American state constitutions and the consequent liberalizing of each state.
Thus both sides in the Belgian struggle relied on their varying interpretations of the true nature of the American Revolution.
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.
A rightist reign of terror, launched by the Catholic clergy and its reactionary theoretician,
Abbe Feller, broke out against the liberals, and one monk declared in a sermon that anyone
meeting a vonkist should kill him on sight.
Masses of peasants led by their priests poured out into the towns to kill liberals.
Hence the return of Austrian rule in late 1790 was understandably greeted by the harassed
Belgian liberals as almost a deliverance from the rule of the Belgian aristocracy.
They then returned to Belgium bitterly anti-clerical and looking wistfully to revolutionary and
anti-clerical France for their future model.
The first of the 18th century European revolutions had occurred in the city of Geneva.
The Burgers, with Rousseau as their philosopher, tried to break through the tightly knit rule
The rule of the local aristocracy in 1767-68 gained a few concessions. In 1781, the burghers
again tried to democratize rule in Geneva. The Geneva aristocrats appealed to the powers
that had presumed to impose and guarantee a tight aristocratic rule in Geneva in the
Act of 1738, the cantons of Bern and Zurich and the Kingdom of France. Genoese aristocrats
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.
France, Bern and Zurich promptly sent in troops and laid siege to Geneva and finally stormed it.
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.
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.
Clavier was later Minister of Finance in the revolutionary Girondin government of France.
Another particularly direct outgrowth of the American War was the upsurge of a revolutionary movement in Ireland.
In response to John Paul Jones' raid on Belfast in the spring of 1778, upper and middle class Irishmen, almost all Protestants,
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.
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.
Politically, the volunteers wanted home rule for the Irish, Parliament and democratic reform
of that aristocratic body itself.
The pressure of the armed volunteers forced substantial concessions from the British, permitting
some exports of Irish goods to the colonies.
Further pressure by volunteer movement, grown to 80,000 armed men, forced the British in
in 1782 to grant the Irish Parliament, led by the reformer Henry Grattan, home rule and
equal status with the British Parliament under the Crown. Such infamous measures as Poining's
Law were repealed. Exuberantly, the Irish admitted that it was
America's victory, joined to their own armed pressure, that had forced England to grant
and Home Rule.
It was on the Plains of America, wrote one Irishman, that Ireland obtained her freedom.
But Home Rule proved disappointing, and trade restrictions and royal control continued in
force.
The volunteers insisted on continuing in force to demand reform of the Irish parliament itself,
but they were weakened by a grave inner contradiction.
Their desire to democratize ran squarely against their commitment to keeping the body of Roman
Catholics submerged.
If the Roman Catholics were to be given the vote, the entire social system established
by the English conquest, notably land monopoly, and the established Protestant Church would
be cast into peril.
This content with the results of Home Rule swelled the ranks of the volunteers, who even
and began to admit Catholics into their ranks. In consequence, Grattan and the Irish Whigs,
whose victory for Home Rule had rested on the Volunteers, now denounced these people's
troops as an anarchic menace. The Volunteers pressed on to hold their first Grand National
Convention, the world's first national convention, in late 1783. Their reform plan, having been
When rejected by Parliament, the volunteer ranks grew further in the following year.
Roman Catholics were increasingly welcomed and the Irish radicals began to talk openly
of revolution.
In particular, the American example was increasingly held up as a model and the reformers began
to call for a national Congress in open imitation of revolutionary America.
But the Attorney General suppressed the radical press and arrested the sympathetic sheriff
of Dublin.
The volunteer movement soon faded away, largely because it never resolved its contradiction
on Roman Catholic emancipation, and hence because it never had the courage to openly
enlist the Roman Catholic masses on its side.
Edmund Burke, significantly enough, staunchly favored the conservative side, the side of
prescriptive custom.
At the same time, he bitterly opposed English parliamentary reform.
There he went to the logical conclusion of conservatism that any sharp change in government
was simply anarchy.
For to discredit the only form of government which we either possess or can project, what
Is this but to destroy all government? And this is anarchy.
Thus, in four countries in Western Europe, armed liberal mass movements arose during the 1780s, inspired by the success of the American Revolution.
In England, a feebler association movement collapsed with the division of the reform forces between Pitt and Fox.
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.
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.
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.
and of course it had also been true of the American Tories before their expulsion.
Everywhere England began to emerge as the home, the nucleus of international armed counterrevolution.
In reaction to England's role, the liberal and democratic forces in Europe, and for that matter in America,
had begun to turn to France for aid and sustenance.
France, England's ancient foe, played this role, interestingly enough, long before the
French Revolution, aiding the left in America, Holland and Ireland and providing a haven
for refugees of all of the lost revolutions.
This was done not because of idealism, as its own role in crushing Geneva and liberalism
made evident, but to help even the score with Great Britain.
And so, outside of America, the wave of liberal revolutions had failed abysmally.
They failed basically because they were bourgeois rebellions that did not tap support among
the peasant masses by mounting a total assault on the feudal land system.
By failing to be truly revolutionary, the middle classes could not command mass support,
and left themselves vulnerable to armed force.
As Palmer explains, the democratic movement failed everywhere before 1789, except in America.
Moderate though it was, or seems in retrospect, it failed to obtain any concessions at all.
All the efforts of English and Irish parliamentary reformers and of Dutch, Belgian and Genovese
Democrats had come to absolutely nothing. Indeed, matters were, if anything, worse,
for the fear and vindictiveness of threatened oligarchies had been aroused. The democratic
movement had failed for various reasons, in some places because the forces of the old
Order had successfully called upon foreign aid, and in all cases, because the democratic
interests, though important and enlightened, were a numerical minority in the country as
a whole. They had no mass following. The mass, outside London, Paris or Amsterdam, really
meant the rural population. Country people at lower income levels in the countries now
Now Being Considered, were politically unaroused. So far as the ruling aristocracies drew their
incomes from land or their influence from the goodwill of the tenetree, they had little
to fear from disaffected lawyers or impudent pamphleteers. The one thing that would undermine
them was wholesale defection on their own estates. This did not happen until it happened
and in France in the summer of 1789.
If these events prove anything, it is perhaps that no purely middle-class or bourgeois revolution
could succeed.
Lawyers, bankers, merchants, shopkeepers, students and professors could not alone unseat
the holders of political power.
Another reason for the democratic failure, applying at least to Holland, Belgium and
in Geneva was that these countries had the misfortune to be small and hence easy objects
of intervention.
The attempt of conservative Europe to intervene in France in 1792 was to have a very different
outcome.
Above all it was necessary to engage the masses as the American revolutionaries had done but
in Europe, written as America had not been by internal feudalism, still dominated by
monarchy and by theocracy, mass upheaval would have had to rend and disrupt the entire social
fabric.
The stage was set for France to pick up the baton of the American Revolution.
The seemingly far greater radicalism of the French Revolution was merely a function of
The Far Greater Built-In Resistance to Libertarian Principles
As Palmer justly concludes,
The American and the French revolutions proceeded from the same principles.
The difference is that these principles were much more deeply rooted in America,
and that contrary or competing principles, monarchist or aristocratic or feudal or ecclesiastical,
though not absent from America, were, in comparison to Europe, very weak.
Assertion of the same principles, therefore, provoked less conflict in America than in France.
It was the weakness of conservative forces in 18th century America, not their strength,
that made the American Revolution as moderate as it was.
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.
For a century after the American Revolution, as is well known, partisans of the revolutionary
or liberal movements in Europe looked upon the United States generally with approval,
and European conservatives viewed it with hostility or downright contempt.
The French, indeed the European liberals in general, had to face far more entrenched opposition
than had the Americans, and Palmer brilliantly concludes that in France, the Revolution was
itself a reaction against an immovable conservatism already formed.
Just as in America, British aggrandizement radicalized public opinion, so the tendency
of European counterrevolution to harden after suppression of the revolts of the 1780s radicalized
French Revolutionary Opinion.
It should be noted that the European theorist of the old order did not take the current
neoconservative tack of praising the American Revolution and reviling the French.
These reactionary ideologues knew their enemy and that most emphatically included the American
Revolution, which was attacked with the same phrases later used to denounce the French.
Similarly denounced were the Dutch, Geneva and Belgian revolutions of the 1780s.
The Abbé Feller, theorist of the Belgian right, Malet Dupin in France, and Scholzer,
another historical jurist as opposed to natural rights jurist in Germany,
all became noted opponents of the French Revolution and were equally hostile to the American.
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.
The American Revolution, the European right realized, was a vital milestone in the advance and development of the Western Revolutionary tradition.