CHAPTER XV - SOCIAL AND PSYCHOLOGICAL FOUNDATIONS OF THE REVOLUTIONARY ERA

Summary

There was a revolutionary era at the close of the eighteenth century somewhat as there had been an era of the Protestant Reformation in the sixteenth. In neither period did the same things happen in all countries. Everywhere, in the sixteenth century, there had been dissatisfaction at conditions in the church, but only certain places turned Protestant, each in its own way, Lutheran, Anglican or Calvinist, with no acceptance even of the common designation of Protestant until long after the event; some Protestant regions went back to Catholicism, and in the end most Europeans remained in the Roman church. Similarly, in the revolutionary era, by which the last third of the eighteenth century is to be understood, there was a widespread dissatisfaction at conditions in government and society. There were similar ideas in many countries on the direction of desirable change. The same vocabulary of political key words appeared in all European languages: ‘aristocracy’ and ‘feudalism’ acquired a bad sense for those who favoured a new order, for whom ‘sovereignty of the people’, ‘equality’ and ‘natural rights’ had a good sense, with a few terms, such as ‘constitution’, ‘law’ and ‘liberty’ favoured by all, though with different meanings. But only in two countries, the British American colonies and France, did revolution reach the point of permanently destroying the older authorities. Only in France did the revolution make social changes of the deepest kind. Only the French made a successful revolution entirely by their own efforts, since even the American Revolution owed its decisive outcome to French intervention.