Ideas of Revolution in the Age of Atlantic Revolutions

Abstract

This article examines the concepts of revolution that political actors employed during the age of Atlantic revolutions (c.1760–1830) and how they used these concepts to analyze, compare, and connect the era's political events. The article begins by briefly recapitulating the evolving meanings of revolution in the seventeenth century and the early eighteenth. The capacious concept of a “revolution of government” that developed in the eighteenth century remained in regular use into the 1820s as a key conceptual tool to imaginatively connect otherwise disparate political movements/phenomena. Revolutionaries also created two new concepts, “total” and “limited” revolution, that were crucial to drawing political distinctions, especially between the American and French revolutions. These three concepts of revolution, I argue, all gave late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century actors an unusual degree of flexibility—which did not exist before or after the period—in describing the temporal and causal dynamics of revolutionary change.

C'est une grande émeute! – Non, sire, lui répondit Larochefoucault-Liancourt, c'est une grande révolution.

Lafayette, 1833¹

Introduction

In the first minutes of Jean Renoir's film La marseillaise (1938), King Louis XVI of France learns of the fall of the Bastille. “So it is a … revolt?” he says quizzically. “No, Sire,” replies the courtier Larochefoucault-Liancourt, “it is a great revolution.” The brief exchange, quoting a supposedly firsthand account, seems to reveal that even a high-ranking nobleman understood immediately during the first days of the French Revolution that he was witnessing the birth of an entirely new political phenomenon, the “great revolution.”² To viewers of La marseillaise in the 1930s, it would have been equally obvious that the revolution in question was just the first in a line of other “great revolutions” that had reshaped the political world during the intervening 150 years.

The French Revolution undoubtedly provided a crucial pattern or model for subsequent revolutions. Scholars have described the nineteenth- and twentieth-century “modern” revolution as a totalizing political phenomenon: it entails a thoroughgoing transformation of economic and social structures, often involving a large mass movement and the use of violence, figured as a sharp rupture in the fabric of politics, society, even time itself.³ Historians of ideas interested in the intellectual roots of this nineteenth- and twentieth-century revolutionary paradigm have traced back to the French Revolution some of its key elements, including the idea of a progressive and irreversible transformation of the socioeconomic order, and modern revolution's presumed ability to create a rupture in time. These studies have convincingly answered the question of how actors during the age of the first “great revolution” created the conceptual apparatus that later generations of revolutionaries would adopt and adapt to their own circumstances.

This article aims to answer a different question about concepts of revolution during the age of Atlantic revolutions (c.1770 to 1825). How did revolutionary-era elite actors use the idea of revolution to think about connections and comparisons among the political events of the late eighteenth century and the early nineteenth? It analyzes how actors in the period understood the language of “revolution” and shows how they employed three distinct concepts of revolution to think about relationships among the era's diverse political phenomena. The argument has both historical and historiographic implications: it reinterprets contemporary actors’ accounts of their political moment and suggests revisions to how historians frame the field of study.⁴

Three main concepts, one older and two newer, structured the comparative reflections of political actors in the revolutionary era. The older one, the notion of a “revolution of government,” had come into wide use early in the eighteenth century. A broad and inclusive concept by the 1750s, it encompassed all manner of rapid changes in governments from the fall of ministers to the creation of new polities and constitutions. Authors used the term to describe one-time events, frequently in the past, which might or might not have broader socioeconomic causes or repercussions. Writers on medicine and religion adopted this usage by analogy to describe similar rapid transformations in the bodily and moral realms.

Two newer ideas of revolution took shape during the late eighteenth century. One was a concept of “total” revolution, first used to characterize the French Revolution. This kind of revolution was imagined as an ongoing or unlimited process that either had changed or would change politics profoundly, which would likely have wide-reaching social, economic, and cultural consequences. This new vision of revolution spurred the creation of a countervailing notion of “limited” revolution: a transformation of political structures that had clear limits and an endpoint. This concept resembled the older idea of a “revolution of government,” which was also frequently limited in scope, but went beyond it in insisting (in contradistinction to the “total” revolution) that this type of revolution did not call the social order, the economy, or existing culture into question. In so doing, proponents of “limited” revolution drew on a still-emerging distinction between political, economic, and social spheres.

Contemporary observers and actors during the Atlantic revolutionary era deployed these three concepts of revolution for a number of political ends. The capacious eighteenth-century notion of revolution of government, which remained in regular use throughout the period, helped political actors connect seemingly disparate political phenomena. It provided a foundation for proclaiming solidarity and identifying similarity across the revolutionary Atlantic world. The “limited” and “total” concepts of revolution became important as a way to draw consequential political contrasts, especially among the American, French, and Spanish American revolutions. This constellation of concepts, taken together, offered the era's actors a flexibility, distinctive to the period, in describing the temporal and causal dynamics of revolutionary change. The concepts of both revolution of government and limited revolution could accommodate various ways of imagining the relationship between change in politics and other forms of transformational change. This flexibility contrasted with the less malleable causality of both pre-eighteenth-century and more modern concepts of revolution.

The argument I make here draws on a corpus of evidence composed mostly of printed primary sources covering the century and half between the end of the seventeenth century and the third decade of the nineteenth century. I drew together these sources in the first instance by culling the extensive bibliographies and secondary literature on revolution, discussed in more detail below, and through systematic reading of key published primary-source collections (among them J. P. Brissot's Le patriote français and Maximilien Robespierre's writings). The argument thus draws on the substantial bulk of sources discovered by prior scholarship, in a variety of genres and European languages. To supplement this bibliographic strategy, I conducted systematic searches for “revolution” and related keywords in digitized databases of book-length seventeenth- and eighteenth-century texts in English, French, and Dutch (ARTFL FRANTEXT, EEBO, ECCO, Evans, DBNL); Early American Newspapers (North American newspapers); and Rotunda (published writings of the American “founding fathers”). These keyword searches cast a wider net, identifying books relevant to the topic that had been overlooked by or omitted from earlier scholarship. Though I have made use of digital tools in assembling the corpus of sources, however, my approach to interpreting them remains firmly analog, grounded in extensive reading and contextualization.

Genealogies of modern revolution: historiography

Historians of ideas have shown convincingly that various forms of the “modern” concept of revolution originated during the decades of the Atlantic revolutions. A seminal 1931 essay by Eugen Rosenstock, “Revolution as a Political Concept in the Modern Era,” set the agenda for the field. Rosenstock identified the genesis of the nineteenth- and twentieth-century conception of revolution in an eighteenth-century semantic shift: revolution, he argued, went from meaning a circular turning back to a starting point, recalling its usage in astronomy, to being a word that referred to an open-ended and linear process of change.⁵ This claim, taken up most famously by Hannah Arendt, remains an article of faith for many historians even though decades of subsequent scholarship have shown that no such stark shift took place in the eighteenth century.⁶

In the 1970s, as part of a larger project on sociopolitical “keywords,” Reinhardt Koselleck undertook an exhaustive analysis of the term “revolution” in German-speaking Europe.⁷ Drawing on a much larger corpus than Rosenstock's, he showed that during the French revolutionary decade a “collective singular” notion of revolution had developed, which he argued had a “world” character and implied total social reconstruction. In line with his long-standing interests in the construction of historical time, Koselleck stressed the temporal disruption that this newly evolved concept of revolution implied.⁸

In the decades since Koselleck's initial sally into keywords, scholars have pursued a similar approach in a number of other linguistic corpuses. In French, this includes several monographs and the work of the “18e et Révolution” collective led in part by Jacques Guilhaumou. (Ironically, that project on the “political lexicon” of the French Revolution never produced a study of the term “revolution” itself.)⁹ Parallel projects in Spanish in more recent years have covered the Iberian and Iberian Atlantic contexts: these include a substantial entry in the Diccionario politico y social del siglo XIX espanol and an entire volume of the Iberconceptos collaborative project.¹⁰ These studies have recovered the diversity of meanings that “revolution” had in distinct Atlantic regions even as they persist in showing how these meanings eventuated in modern concepts of revolution.¹¹

In the past decade, Keith Michael Baker and Dan Edelstein have proposed a novel account of how a modern concept of permanent revolution emerged during the early French Revolution. Their work is methodologically rich and in many respects persuasive. Baker and Edelstein are careful to interpret the revolutionary era's language in context and root their arguments in a revolutionary longue durée extending back to the seventeenth century.¹² Baker's unusual method—he relies on evidence of collocations (appearances of words together) taken from a large corpus of digitized sources—gives his argument a claim to exhaustivity that few other studies have had.

Baker and Edelstein focus on how revolution came to be understood during the French Revolution as an ongoing, open-ended process. Baker's essay in a volume they coedited on Scripting Revolution argues that in the 1789–94 period, “revolution” assumed a new meaning as “act” rather than “fact.” Having hitherto been a way to describe an event in the past, “revolution” now became an active process that was inhabited and willed forward by “revolutionaries.”¹³ In an interlocking argument, Edelstein has shown how a “novel concept of revolution” appeared during the first years of the French Revolution, which could “operate as a self-reflexive authority” and authorize ongoing or “continuous” revolutionary action.¹⁴

Baker and Edelstein's accounts are quite convincing as genealogies of the notion of permanent revolution that were so important to communist revolutionaries in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. (Edelstein draws a direct line between the notion of “continuous” revolutionary action in the French Revolution and the modern idea of permanent revolution.) Yet in this respect, both Baker and Edelstein remain firmly in alignment with Rosenstock and Koselleck: their central goal, as it was for the early concept historians, is to trace the origins of modern concepts of revolution.¹⁵

The field's focus on the genealogy of modern concepts of revolution, in short, has left a blind spot when it comes to the meaning of revolution during the Atlantic age of revolution itself. The emphasis on examining concepts of revolution that were important to nineteenth- and twentieth-century revolutionaries has led scholars to give short shrift to concepts of revolution that, though prominent in the revolutionary period, did not remain in regular use thereafter.

The “revolution of government” emerges, c.1640s–1770s

The “revolution of government” that became one of the main conceptual resources for revolutionary-era political actors had a pedigree that stretched back to antiquity. Its eighteenth-century form, however, was a distinctive conceptual formation: revolution in this period became both broad and thin, able to signify almost any kind of rapid or sudden change, whether in the political system or outside it.

The notion that governments went through cyclical changes was present already in the works of Aristotle. He used the term metabole in the Politics to denote the transitions from one political regime to another.¹⁶ These shifts, in Aristotle's writings, were closely linked to changes in the social and economic structures of society: changes of regime had socioeconomic causes, and political change reliably brought about redistributions of wealth and other social changes.¹⁷ The Greek historian Polybius took up this model and gave it a distinctive, systematic form. He claimed that states moved in a predictable fashion from one form of government to another, as each type first degraded into its corresponding corrupt version (monarchy into tyranny, aristocracy into oligarchy, and so on) and then gave way to the next in the sequence. He termed this process anacyclosis. While the timing of these changes was uncertain, their order was predictable and inevitable; the process could be slowed but not stopped.¹⁸

As Dan Edelstein has recently shown, translators of Polybius brought “revolution” into the vocabulary of early modern European political thought as a translation of anacyclosis. The first published translations of the Histories appeared in the 1540s; by the 1550s, writers were using “revolution” to denote the cycling of governments.¹⁹ This usage persisted into the early seventeenth century: European thinkers used the language of “revolutions,” with a distinctly Polybian cast, to refer to an iterative, cyclical process of major constitutional change. For instance, contemporary histories of the 1647 “Revolutions of Naples,” a revolt led by the fisherman Masaniello against Naples's Spanish sovereign, depicted the Neapolitan “revolutions” as the outcome of profound social strife between the poor and the nobility.²⁰ Authors described the events of the English Civil War as a series of “revolutions” in the same fashion: Antony Ascham's important 1649 treatise paired “revolutions” with “confusions” to describe a profound disruption of the sovereign power.²¹

Between the 1670s and the 1740s, “revolution” expanded to encompass forms of rapid change that were nonconstitutional or even nonpolitical in character, detaching the term from its Polybian and Aristotelian roots. Hans-Jürgen Lüsebrink and Rolf Reichardt have shown that “revolution” was used in the French linguistic corpus during the first two thirds of the eighteenth century “to describe even the smallest changes” in politics. This included “disorders” and “conspiracies” as well as changes of sovereign.²² The Abbé Vertot's popular 1719 Histoire des Révolutions arrivées dans le Gouvernement de la République Romaine was exemplary in this regard: Vertot used “revolution” liberally to refer to all manner of change, including regular elections and palace intrigues.²³

Spanish publications on both sides of the Atlantic in the eighteenth century used “revolution” broadly as a synonym for “change” as well. The first dictionary of the Royal Spanish Academy, published in 1737, defined “revolution” as “unrest, riot, sedition, change [alteración],” as well as a “new plan in the state or government.” (There, again, is the use of “revolution” as a synonym for “change” in general.)²⁴ Chilean authors in the eighteenth century, as Alejandro San Francisco has shown, described the conflicts among conquistadores during the early colonial period as “frequent revolutions” and use the term “revolution” to characterize conflicts among the governing elite in subsequent decades.²⁵

English-language authors in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries also used “revolution” capaciously to refer to many different types of political change. The Richard Steele-founded Tatler, precursor to the celebrated Spectator, used “revolution” in a typically acerbic discussion of changes in the ministry. Writing about men who were quick to switch their loyalty to new leaders, the author of the number sardonically suggested that the greatest “Hardship” these men faced was that they got no notice of “any approaching Change or Revolution,” forcing them to perform rapid changes in their loyalty and political position. The use of “Change,” seemingly as a synonym for “Revolution,” emphasizes the fact that “Revolution” could now be used to encompass far more than changes in constitutions.²⁶

Debates over the English “Glorious Revolution” of 1688–9 may have played a role in this shifting usage, especially in the English-speaking world. Some contemporary authors chose or accepted the “revolution” label for the 1688–9 events precisely because they did not regard it as a fundamental change in the constitution. England entered the crisis a monarchy and exited it still a monarchy.²⁷ Others, however, seem to have called 1688–9 a “revolution” because they believed that it embodied a fundamental shift in the relation between king and Parliament, which equated to the kind of thoroughgoing, constitutional change that had usually been labelled “revolution” earlier in the century. Given the transitional nature of the concept in this moment, such ambiguity in usage should not be surprising.²⁸

As “revolution” acquired non-constitutional meanings, its usage changed in two significant ways. One was that the events called “revolutions” could, increasingly, be any kind of change in a government. Steele's description of the change of ministry left little room to imagine that this “revolution” was anything other than a changing of the guard in the halls of power. Vertot used “revolutions” to describe ordinary political changes in the Roman Republic. In so doing, he broke with the usage of “revolution” by translators of Polybius, who had largely reserved the term for the most dramatic forms of regime change in the Roman world.²⁹

By the middle of the eighteenth century, authors regularly used “revolution” to describe changes in government that were ipso facto singular and firmly in the past, marking further departures from the Polybian and Aristotelian paradigms. The author of a pamphlet about Madras entitled The very extraordinary revolution which happened in the government of Fort. St. George in August last, by seizing the person of the governor (1777) found “revolution” the appropriate word to describe the one-off, unexpected change of political fortune described in its title.³⁰ A 1749 multivolume examination of the War of Spanish Succession concluded with a reference to the “sudden Revolution that put the House of Bourbon on the Throne of Spain,” characterizing dynastic succession as a form of “revolution.”³¹ Similarly, the author of A History of the Late Revolution in Sweden (1776) made “revolution” synonymous with a rapid reordering of political power. This royalist coup—the “revolution itself, or the introduction of despotism”—was understood as a sudden, one-time change in the government.³² In all of these cases, the shift towards the singular meant that revolution could be firmly situated in the past tense: these revolutions were “late” or had “happened,” unlike the ceaseless, ongoing cycle of changes that Polybius and Aristotle had imagined.³³

Mid-eighteenth-century authors began, tentatively, to attribute a causal role to human action in the making of specific revolutions. Seventeenth-century authors, working within Polybian and Aristotelian frames, had imagined “revolutions” (in the plural) as an almost natural fact, an inevitable occurrence. Once revolution became singular, however, it could also have discernible causes and causal agents. The 1772 “revolution” of Sweden, in which the Swedish king seized absolute political power, offers the clearest instance of this emerging belief. Observers across Europe agreed that this “revolution” had been effected by King Gustavus III himself.³⁴ The author of the History of the Late Revolution accused the king of organizing a well-laid “scheme” to seize power and described in detail how the “revolution” was “executed” by him. These included elaborate military and political plans that culminated in a dramatic personal seizure of power in Sweden's parliament.³⁵

The first half of the eighteenth century also saw the usage of “revolution” to denote rapid change spread to areas of life other than politics or government strictly speaking. As early as 1703, Daniel Defoe had referred to a “Revolution” of “religion” at the time of the formation of Christianity.³⁶ Over his long career, Jean-Jacques Rousseau used “revolution” to signify change in a wide variety of different domains of life. In his Lettre sur les Spectacles, discussing the idea of establishing a theatre in Geneva, he wrote that it would cause “a revolution in our habits, which will produce … one [i.e. a revolution] in our manners [moeurs].”³⁷ In the Confessions, he reflected on finding himself suddenly out of favor: “It is easy to judge,” he wrote, “what an abrupt revolution must have occurred in my ideas.”³⁸ The philosophe Abbé Raynal, in similar fashion, referred to a “revolution in the manners” of the English after the Seven Years War.³⁹ The Dictionary of the Spanish Academy noted that “disorder and change of the humors” could also be described as a “revolution.”⁴⁰

Revolution also became part of the technical vocabulary of medicine during these years, as a synonym for a sudden, often unpredictable, sometimes irreversible, physical change. These meanings migrated not from the technical vocabulary of mechanics or physics (in the sense of the rotation of wheels or heavenly bodies) but from the realm of politics. They were extensions or expansions of the broad political concept of revolution-as-change into other fields of life. Physicians wrote of a “revolution in constitution” that took place when an individual arrived in the tropics. (These “revolutions” could be the cause of significant disease.) The Encyclopédie used the term to describe an abrupt change in physical condition: “Accident, in Medicine, means a revolution that brings on an illness.”⁴¹ And Rousseau, again in the Confessions, used it as part of the description of the sudden onset of an illness: “I felt a sudden and almost unimaginable revolution in my whole body.”⁴²

The nonpolitical uses of “revolution” in the mid-eighteenth century had the same kind of narrow ambit as was common in political uses of the term. Just as it was possible by the mid-eighteenth century to write about “revolution” in politics without adducing socioeconomic causes or consequences, so it was possible to speak of “revolution” occurring in religious practice or belief without accompanying change in the structures of the state or the economic sphere. A “revolution in habits” or “manners” could take place without concomitant changes in politics. The physiological sense of “revolution,” by the same token, emphasized physical transformation, leaving open the possibility that other aspects of an individual's life (thoughts, feelings) could be left untouched.

Persistence and transformation in concepts of revolution, 1776–1830

Political actors in multiple Atlantic regions and languages continued to employ the idea of a “revolution of government” as a matter of course from the 1770s through the 1820s. This usage, which has been occluded by recent scholarship, stretched across the political spectrum. Actors’ use of this capacious concept of revolution was not merely vestigial. It did important ideological work for both pro- and antirevolutionary actors, providing a conceptual scaffolding for political alliances and critiques across revolutionary borders.

Starting in the early 1790s, two new concepts of revolution came into circulation alongside this older one. As scholars have long recognized, actors began to use “revolution” in a new way during this period to talk about the French Revolution. Actors described the French Revolution as a “total” form of revolution, which aimed at far-reaching and possibly unlimited changes. In response to this new concept, commentators fashioned a countervailing idea of “limited” revolution: revolution that was limited in scope and aims. This was clearly related to the “revolution of government” but not identical with it. These two concepts became central to important comparative debates about the era's revolutionary movements, first involving the American and French revolutions and then the revolutions of Spanish America.

Persistence

Dictionary definitions offer a handy, albeit methodologically limited, heuristic for assaying the persistence of the eighteenth-century concept of revolution throughout the Atlantic revolutionary era.⁴³ The 1798 dictionary of the Académie française defined revolution as “change which occurs in public affairs … in opinions, etc.,” and more specifically as the “memorable and sudden changes which have shaken” certain countries. The dictionary offered the celebrated 1772 “Revolution of Sweden” as an example of the genre.⁴⁴ The 1828 first edition of Noah Webster's American Dictionary of the English Language offered a definition that also fell squarely into the pattern of the revolution of government. “In politics,” Webster wrote, a revolution is “a material … change in the constitution of government.” He offered as examples of the phenomenon “the revolution in England, in 1688,” which “was produced by the abdication of king James II,” and the cases of the “revolutions in Poland, in the United States of America, and in France.”⁴⁵

Actual usage confirms the persistence into the revolutionary era of older, eighteenth-century ideas of revolution. They appeared in politically consequential writings on the American Revolution. Thomas Paine, in one of the 1777 “American Crisis” essays, brassily declared that it would be easier to “effect a revolution” in England by replacing George III on the throne than for the British Army to reconquer America. “Revolution” here equated to a change of sovereign.⁴⁶ Multiple authors described the scission of the British Empire as a “revolution.” Paine marked the end of the American war with another “American Crisis” paper that extolled US independence, calling it the “greatest and compleatest revolution the world ever knew.”⁴⁷ The 1780 edition of the celebrated Histoire des Deux Indes, published under the name of the Abbé Raynal but coauthored by a number of leading French men of letters, also used “revolution” to describe the breakdown of the British Empire in 1776.⁴⁸ He repeated this usage in 1781, in his pamphlet on the Révolution de l'Amérique, calling the division of the British empire a “revolution.”⁴⁹

Both English- and French-speaking authors continued to employ the older usage to describe political changes on both sides of the Atlantic during the French Revolution. Writing to George Washington in July of 1789 about the month's events in France, US ambassador Gouverneur Morris wrote, “You may consider the Revolution as compleat; that is to say the Authority of the King and of the Nobility is completely subdued.”⁵⁰ Implicitly, for him, the “Revolution” was complete when only changes in government (the end of the “Authority” of the king and privileged orders) had thus far taken place. Thomas Paine, on the opposite side of the American political spectrum from Morris, deployed the same concept in The Rights of Man, referring to “revolutions, or changes in governments,” synonymously.⁵¹ Pennsylvanian Tench Coxe, in a 1790 letter to Alexander Hamilton, described the US Constitution as “the revolution of 1789, for as such I view it.” His explanation made clear that he meant the creation of a new frame of government. This “revolution,” he went on to explain, would open the way to settling “a great number of public difficulties,” among them questions about the public debts of the states.⁵²

Actors in the francophone world, even as they began to use the language of revolution in new ways, continued to employ the term in the older manner to refer to a completed political change. References to the “revolution of 14 July” were common. Jacques Necker's 1795 history of the French Revolution explained that what had been revolutionary about that day was the transfer of political power occasioned by the destruction of the “vital principle of Royal Authority.”⁵³ Maximilien de Robespierre, French legislator and leader of the Jacobin Club, excoriated a group of his onetime republican allies in 1793, the so-called Girondins, for having opposed the “Revolution of 10 August.” This “Revolution,” which Robespierre spoke of often, had marked the de facto end of the king's authority and set in motion the abolition of the monarchy.⁵⁴ Giuseppe Gorani, an Italian enthusiast for the early French Revolution who had become close with the Girondin group, in turn described their purging from the National Convention as its own “revolution” (the “Revolution of 31 May 1793”).⁵⁵

Commentators extended the term “revolution,” albeit less systematically, to the revolt by enslaved people in St Domingue now known as the Haitian Revolution. An eyewitness account by a M. Gros, first published in 1792, contains multiple references to the “revolution” of St Domingue. Particularly striking was a passage in which he quoted a free man of color using the word “revolution” in reference to the Haitian uprising. (He attributed the “first causes of this revolution” to “France.”)⁵⁶ An 1804 manuscript by a French observer described it as “this revolution.” The author argued, moreover, that the Haitians and their white French allies intended to “revolutionize the Globe” by abolishing slavery, figuring them as active agents of revolutionary change.⁵⁷ Such references are admittedly less common for Haiti than for some other revolutions of the era. This may have been a deliberate linguistic choice by early leaders of the Revolution, as some scholars have argued, to set their movement apart.⁵⁸ Or it may be that hostile observers intended to downgrade the Haitian movement's importance by calling it a “revolt” or “insurgency.” More evidence will need to be amassed to adjudicate these arguments, but in either case “revolution” was undoubtedly part of the contemporary vocabulary for talking about Haiti.

Spanish-speaking political actors during the late eighteenth century and early the nineteenth continued to draw on the language of revolutions of government to describe political events on both sides of the Atlantic. Francisco de Miranda referred in 1799 to one of the periodic coups that took place in France's Directorial government as “a kind of Revolution.”⁵⁹ In similar fashion, Manuel de Vidaurre, who became a leading theorist of Latin American independence, described a revolt in Upper Peru as the “revolution that happened in Cuzco on 3 August 1814.”⁶⁰ In Santa Fe in the province of New Granada in 1810, the seizure of power by a local junta was celebrated by a local observer as a “wondrous revolution” that had taken place without shedding a “single drop of blood.”⁶¹ The concept of revolution as a bloodless change of regime was widely deployed in Spain itself between 1820 and 1823, a period during which the political structure of the monarchy was changed by the king's reluctant acceptance of a liberal constitution.⁶²

The consistency with which we find capacious uses of “revolution” in the era, to describe many different forms of political change, strongly suggests that revolutionary actors were trying to make a point. It is possible that some authors were simply being sloppy or hyperbolic when they labelled every little political event a “revolution.” But it is far more plausible that the inclusive usage that we see from many contemporary actors reflected an equally capacious vision of the revolutionary Atlantic world, as one in which many distinct revolutionary movements were linked together by shared principles and causal chains. This worldview would be entirely consonant with the extensive transatlantic and hemispheric connections among revolutionaries that a great deal of recent scholarship has uncovered.⁶³

A number of actors were explicit about their view of the era's revolutions as being interconnected and similar in nature. The American and French revolutions were frequently discussed in this fashion. J. J. Brissot, a leading publicist of the early French Revolution who knew the United States well, declared in 1791, “The American Revolution brought forth the French Revolution.”⁶⁴ The English radical Dr Joseph Priestley, in his reply to Edmund Burke's Reflections on the Revolution in France, opined in similar fashion that “the French … arose from the same general principles” as the “American Revolution.”⁶⁵ An anonymous pro-French author writing in a Philadelphia newspaper in 1793 insisted, like Priestley, that “French and American principles … coincide.” He or she believed that the revolutions had the same aims as well: both were intended only to secure “equality of political rights.” “Nothing is more false,” the author asserted, than to claim that “equality of property is the object of the French revolution.”⁶⁶

Many other revolutions in and after 1789 became the object of similar connective work under the aegis of the notion of a revolution of government. In September 1789, less than two months after the seizure of the Bastille, the British radical Richard Price wrote to a political ally that “a similar Revolution [to France's] has already taken place in the Principality of Liege.”⁶⁷ A number of observers made similar connections between the Haitian and French Revolutions. We have already seen that M. Gros regarded the Haitian Revolution as sparked by the French. Baron Pompée Valentin Vastey, a leading Haitian man of letters in the early nineteenth century, concluded in similar fashion that “the French Revolution of 1789, was the original cause of the Revolutions of Haiti.” Once the “rights of man” had been proclaimed, he argued, they were lodged “in the hearts of both Blacks and Whites.”⁶⁸

Spanish American authors grouped the revolutions in the Northern and Southern Americas together by a similar logic.⁶⁹ Vicente Rocafuerte, future president of Ecuador, was one of the most enthusiastic comparers of the United States and Spanish America. In his introduction to an 1821 reprinting of a partial translation of Common Sense and other American political works, Rocafuerte described the revolutions as both connected and similar. “Seventy years ago … our brothers the valiant sons of Boston cried out against British tyranny, just as we have now against the despotism of the Peninsula [i.e. Spain].” He urged his readers to follow the North American example in forming republican governments.⁷⁰ Similar views are to be found sprinkled throughout Spanish American publications of the independence era. An unsigned article in the Argos de Chile in 1818, about a translation of Raynal's Revolution of America, for instance, opined that there was an “analogy” between “the glorious insurrection of the North Americans and ours”: “the same system of oppression … [and] identical causes of complaint on the part of the Americans” had led to similar revolutionary uprisings in both regions.⁷¹

Contemporary commentators’ inclusive view of revolution nonetheless provided a great deal of leeway to draw fine distinctions, judgments, and connections. That is, being inclusive did not mean being indiscriminate. Already in the early eighteenth century, it had been common practice to qualify “revolution” with adjectives. Revolutions could have scale or scope: they could be “great” or not. Revolutions had positive or negative valence: they could be “terrible” or “wonderful” or “glorious.” They could be the cause of great changes or the result of them: a revolution could “cause” another or be “sparked” by another. One revolution could contain several other, smaller ones. It was even possible to use this inclusive view of revolution to critique revolution altogether, as René de Chateaubriand did in his 1797 Essai sur les révolutions. He argued that the American Revolution, which he called an illegitimate attack on the Americans’ “legitimate sovereign,” was the “immediate cause” of what he regarded as an equally illegitimate and catastrophic French Revolution.⁷²

Transformation

The Atlantic revolutionary era brought change as well as continuity in the conceptual landscape of revolution. Starting in 1789, writers developed two new ways of thinking about revolution. These new concepts, which were frequently defined in opposition to each other, can be characterized, drawing on the language of the Marquis de Condorcet, as “total” revolutions versus “limited” revolutions. Though distinct, both were unambiguously regarded as species of “revolution.” These concepts, which were used by revolutionaries and counterrevolutionaries alike, emerged most clearly in comparative discussions of contemporaneous revolutions.

Transatlantic interrevolutionary comparisons began percolating almost as soon as the French Revolution began.⁷³ In 1790, British republican and physician Benjamin Vaughan wrote a letter to future US Supreme Court chief justice John Jay that hinted at an emerging contrast between the American and French revolutions. The “American revolution,” he wrote, had been “little more than the separation of partnership accounts.” The “French revolution,” on the other hand, was far-reaching: “they had more to do than America, which has led them to aim at every thing.”⁷⁴ An anonymous author writing in a Philadelphia newspaper in 1793 offered a similar argument in an article explaining the “difference between the French and American Revolutions.” Although the author regarded the two revolutions as having sprung from the same principles, he or she stressed that the opposition of “cunning priests” and “cruel aristocrats” had led the French “republicans” to adopt transformative social and economic policies, which its opponents derided as “excesses.”⁷⁵

The Marquis de Condorcet, a leading intellectual of the early French Revolution, produced some of the era's most fully realized analyses of the two revolutions. A 1790 eulogy for Benjamin Franklin echoed Vaughan's view of the two revolutions. The North Americans, Condorcet argued, had “always been free.” Their Revolution, unlike the one then unfolding in France, had thus been a conservative act: “for them [Americans] it was a matter not of conquering their liberty, but of defending it.”⁷⁶

Four years later, awaiting his execution at the hands of fellow revolutionaries, the ex-marquis elaborated on the comparison. The Americans, in their revolution, he wrote, had “limited themselves to establishing new authorities, substituting them for those which the British nation had exercised over them until that point.” The American Revolution had been “limited” in its aims. The French Revolution, on the other hand, had been “more total” (plus entière). “In France,” he wrote, on account of the scale of the Old Regime obstacles to overcome, “the revolution had to encompass the entire economy of the society, change all social relations, and penetrate to the utmost link of the political chain.”⁷⁷ This new kind of “total” revolution would be, as scholars have shown, an ongoing, open-ended transformation of society, potentially marking a rupture in the fabric of time, in which “the revolution” embodied a quasi-mythic source of legal or moral authority to radically transform the world.⁷⁸

Condorcet's characterization of the “total” revolution as encompassing “society,” “social relations,” and “economy” drew on what were then cutting-edge intellectual developments. It was during the decades preceding the French Revolution that both “society” and “economy” in something like their modern form had taken conceptual form. As Daniel Gordon showed some time ago, the use of “society” to describe the “durable and large-scale community” of human beings took off after 1750. Its conceptual existence as a distinct domain was just emerging.⁷⁹ Similarly, it was during the mid-eighteenth century that the idea of an “economy,” which had its own autonomous dynamics, was coming into wide usage.⁸⁰ These developments were what made thinkable the notion of a “total” revolution, transforming separate social and economic spheres, that Condorcet and others imagined.

Enthusiasts for the French Revolution on both sides of the Atlantic articulated similar contrasts between two types of revolution. The British radical David Williams offered an early and influential statement of this position in his 1790 Lessons to a Young Prince, which discussed both revolutions in detail. Williams portrayed the American Revolution as having been effected primarily through “passive prudence.” Like Condorcet a few years later, he thought the Americans were primarily defending a liberty that they already had. They had “not the resolution, since exhibited by the French, to level all provincial distinctions, and to organize the whole nation into one body.”⁸¹ The “purpose of the National Assembly of France,” on the other hand, was to “to organize the community itself; to form it into an actual body.” To do this required them to “abolish every contrivance and pretence by which one or a few may be privileged.” Though Williams admired both revolutions, he made no secret that the more complete French Revolution, which aimed at eliminating “every” obstacle, was to be preferred.⁸²

A similar conceptual strategy emerged from the other side of the political spectrum in the writings of Frederick Gentz, an acerbic critic of the French Revolution who produced the earliest full-scale comparisons of the two revolutions, published in English under the title The American and French Revolution Compared (1800). Gentz regarded the two revolutions as radically different in their principles and outcomes. His view of the French Revolution had much in common with that of Condorcet, albeit with the value judgment reversed. The French revolutionaries, in Gentz's view, had been chasing an ever-expanding goal of total transformation. The “perpetual mutability” of their principles and “absolute indefinitude of [the] object” they sought had led the French into conflict, warfare, and bloodshed. It had profoundly altered their society, and indeed all of Europe, leading to “breaches of the rights of property” that (in his words) “held the sword hovering over the head of every one, who had any thing to lose.”⁸³

Gentz regarded the American Revolution as quite different in character. The Americans, unlike the French, had had “only one object” in view from the start: independence from Britain. Because of this, they had “known exactly how far they were to go, and where they must stop.” Though he admitted that the revolutionary war had caused disruptions in the society and economy, he insisted that its effects had been essentially limited and political in nature: “the revolution altered little in the internal organization of the colonies, as it only dissolved an external connection.” Property rights and the social order, he stressed—not at all correctly, as we now know—had been unaffected.⁸⁴ This account of the American Revolution, as a “limited” revolution that entailed nothing but a shift in political regime, echoed with the notion of a revolution of government that had been widespread during the previous century.⁸⁵

Few of the many contemporary critics of the French Revolution were as explicit as Gentz in mapping the two revolutions onto a total/limited conceptual binary. But like Gentz, virtually all Francophobic commentators who made comparisons between the two revolutions nonetheless used the word “revolution” for both. William Cobbett, one of the most vehement Anglo-American opponents of the French Revolution, disclaimed almost any similarity between “the French revolution [and] that of America.” But he called both revolutions.⁸⁶ It seems likely that implicit in his understanding of the two revolutions was some version of the contrast, made explicit by Gentz, between a “total” French Revolution and a “limited” American one.

Comparative discussions of revolution extended to Spanish America beginning in 1808. Napoleon's invasion of the Iberian peninsula, the abdication of the Spanish king, and the establishment of first a governing junta in 1808 and then an imperial Cortes (parliament) in 1810, generated a profound political crisis in the transatlantic Spanish Empire. This “Atlantic crisis” helped to spark uprisings throughout Spanish America, which eventually led to independence during the 1820s.⁸⁷ The debates about Spanish America were more three-cornered than the earlier ones, since they could refer to both the French and American examples. But they also plotted revolutions along the axis from “limited” to “total.”

Some of the earliest comparative discussions in Spanish America took place in the periodicals that proliferated after 1810. One pitted the editors of the Mercurio Peruano, a moderate newspaper published in Lima, against the editor of El Robespierre español (The Spanish Robespierre), a radical journal briefly published in Cádiz. El Robespierre español, as befit its French namesake, advocated for a Jacobin-style revolution in Spain: the sixth issue, for instance, demanded that the nobility be abolished.⁸⁸ Yet more than advocating for French-style reforms, the editor of El Robespierre español cast the Spanish “revolution” in the image of the French. In an imagined dialogue published in the twelfth issue, he outlined a strikingly “total” vision of the Cortes's power. “What restrictions are there … on the Cortes?” the editor had one character ask. “None,” came the reply. The second character echoed language used to describe the French National Convention: “The Spanish people … have given their deputies plenary power … to break up, reform, abolish, create anew, revise or excise whatever is needed for the salvation of the patria, and its future happiness.”⁸⁹ Like the French Revolution, in his view, the revolution in Spain was unbounded and in principle limitless.

The editors of the Mercurio Peruano, who evidently followed El Robespierre español closely, used an article on liberty of the press to offer an alternative vision in a March 1812 issue of their newspaper. The original article, in language reminiscent of French radicals of the early 1790s, had excoriated the ministry for threatening liberty of the press. The editors of the Mercurio reprinted the article and rebutted it with considerable sarcasm. They ended with a commentary on the relationship between revolutions. “It is not correct that our revolution has the violent and bloody character the French one had,” they wrote. “Do you not know what revolution is? Revolution is the time of reform [el tiempo de las reformas].” In their view, they went on, “the Spanish” had been thrust into a revolutionary situation without “seeking it out.” The Spanish people's responsibility now was to “draw [from it] that which is consonant with the general welfare” and nothing more: only “to banish all tyranny … and set the state in order.”⁹⁰ These limited goals, focused on removing “tyranny” and restoring “order,” were a far cry from the unbounded transformations envisaged by the editor of El Robespierre.

A related comparative analysis of the Spanish Empire's revolutions appeared in the Chilean republican newspaper El Semanario Republicano in late 1813. The author proposed to discuss the “revolutions” or “enthusiasms” in Spain, Buenos Aires, “Mexico, Cundinamarca, Caracas and Quito.”⁹¹ He dismissed the “revolution” in Spain for its failure to adopt republican government or promote “new men” to positions of power. It had been, in his view, too limited. He had a more favorable view of the revolutions in Mexico, Quito, Caracas, and Cundinamarca. All were in some measure republican and they pursued, he wrote, “the same cause.” Yet they, too, had failed to take what he believed to be the “natural” next step, namely creating a “concentrated … and central” government for the Americas.⁹² This brought him to the “revolution of Buenos Aires,” which he regarded as the most “glorious” and “worthy of attention.” Its “strength” came from being backed by the “general enthusiasm of the people.” Its leaders had pushed for the formation of a supreme government over the newly independent republics, which he argued would ensure the safety and success of the revolution throughout the Americas.⁹³

Like the idea of a “revolution of government,” the “limited” and “total” concepts of revolution provided common frameworks through which eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century political actors could make sense of their rapidly changing political world. The revolution of government, a broad and inclusive concept, lent itself to lumping revolutionary movements together, whether positively or negatively. The “limited” and “total” concepts of revolution were better suited to creating contrasts. Both revolutionaries and counterrevolutionaries found these concepts useful as a way to generalize and connect revolutionary movements across the era's diverse political landscape.

Time and causality during the age of revolutions

The three distinctive ideas of revolution that circulated during the age of Atlantic revolutions gave rise to a period-specific flexibility in how actors imagined the temporality of revolutionary change. Because they understood “revolution” as capable of describing change largely or entirely in the realm of government and politics, eighteenth-century actors could posit a number of different causal and temporal relationships between “revolution” in politics and other kinds of change. Revolution in government or politics could follow from, occur alongside, or precede change in the social, economic, or cultural spheres. These multiple possibilities contrast sharply with the single path, consisting of major political transformation closely tied to a transformation of society, that was characteristic of ideas of revolution before the 1700s and after the 1820s.

To modern eyes, the account of revolutionary causality from the age of Atlantic revolutions that seems most familiar is the idea that changes in government or politics were caused by deeper or longer-running forms of change in other areas of life. Modern scholars typically view revolutionary change as the product of long-term causes, often at least partly socioeconomic in nature.⁹⁴ Some revolutionary-era actors believed so, though they typically cited a change in “sentiments” as the key causal factor. An anonymous pamphleteer writing in 1790 about the French Revolution, for instance, argued, “However unexpected or sudden the late revolution of our government may appear,” it was the result of “a gradual change in the sentiments of the nation” that was “strongly symptomatic of an approaching alteration in the constitution.”⁹⁵

Significant authors and actors on both sides of the Atlantic developed accounts of the causes of a change in “constitution” that saw it as following in the wake of other forms of change. The French counterrevolutionary Marquis de Bouillé, writing in the late 1790s, described the political events of 1787 as a product of long-germinating changes: “This year the revolution which had already taken place in the mind and in the manners and customs of the nation began to shew itself in the government.” (This was also how the Abbé Barruel described the origins of the French Revolution in his influential conspiracy theory.)⁹⁶ John Adams is usually believed to have offered a version of this argument about the American Revolution toward the end of his life: “The Revolution was effected before the War commenced. The Revolution was in the Minds and Hearts of the People.”⁹⁷

Those who thought about changes in constitutions in this sense, as the consequence of changes in other domains of life that had already occurred, had in common a belief in revolution's inevitability and durability. The political revolution, when it came, was merely the late-ripening fruit of a long growing cycle. The political valence or value judgment attached to that interpretation was by no means identical, as the cases of Adams, Bouillé, and Barruel show. Adams regarded the American Revolution, in which he had played a major role, as an unmitigated success. Barruel and Bouillé were virulent opponents of the French Revolution. Yet, not surprisingly, both of these counterrevolutionary figures were notably fatalistic about the Revolution; neither seems to have seriously considered that it could be fully reversed, however much they might have wished it.⁹⁸

Another possibility was that change occurred simultaneously in the political sphere and in another one; that is, multiple kinds of revolution occurred simultaneously. This does not seem to have been especially common among revolutionary-era authors, but it did have one important exponent: the Anglo-Irish MP and polemicist Edmund Burke. In writing about the October Days of 1789 in Reflections on the Revolution in France, Burke asserted that the “most important of all revolutions, which may be dated from that day,” was “a revolution in sentiments, manners, and moral opinions.” (In making this argument, Burke was playing off conventional wisdom that held that the October Days, during which the royal family were forced to return from Versailles to Paris, were “revolutionary” because they had shown that the king could be forced to submit to popular pressure.)⁹⁹ Although I did not find this approach to be very common in revolutionary-era writings, it has become a hallmark of some recent work in cultural history, which argues that the transformation of culture was as much the core of eighteenth-century “revolution” as any change in the distribution of political power.¹⁰⁰

Eighteenth-century concepts of revolution also opened up a third way of understanding the relationship between forms of change in a period of revolution: that rapid change in the political sphere would outstrip the pace of change in other areas of life. On this view, significant political change could occur without those changes in the political sphere immediately or automatically carrying along with them the rest of social life. This vision of revolutions in government as precocious or the leading edge of change was implicit in the political strategy of key actors in the French Revolution. The clergyman and publicist Emmanuel-Joseph Sieyès, for instance, argued powerfully in What Is the Third Estate? (1789) that the first step towards a regeneration of France was to create a new constitution.¹⁰¹ This preoccupation with constitution-making-first continued throughout the revolutionary decade, with Robespierre himself repeatedly calling for a “National Convention, as the sole remedy to the ills of the patrie”—the Convention's nominal purpose being to write a new constitution.¹⁰²

If revolution of government came first, then other things would have to come later. We have already seen a few instances in which actors imagined revolution and its aftermath unfolding in this fashion. This could be a matter of economic change catching up to political transformation, as Tench Coxe suggested in looking to the creation of a new political economy after the “revolution” that had been the implementation of the US Constitution. Spanish Americans expected that significant social and economic changes would follow on the “wondrous” revolutions that took place in 1810 and after. Leaders of the early French Revolution, too, understood that completing “revolution” in the purely constitutional sense was necessary in order for other forms of change to occur: Sieyès, for one, was clear-eyed about the fact that the abolition of the privileged orders’ economic and legal advantages, the main desideratum of the Third Estate, would only happen if political power were restructured first.

A number of actors focused their attention on persistent cultural habits or attitudes that remained to be modified in the wake of radical political change. The American Francophile poet Joel Barlow, for instance, wrote that the “political part of [the American] revolution … was not of that violent and convulsive nature that shakes the whole fabric of human opinions, and enables men to decide which are to be retained as congenial to their situation, and which should be rejected.” As a result, he wrote, it remained for the Americans to form “a national character.” Cultural change, in other words, would have to follow in the wake of pure political change.¹⁰³ James Mackintosh, the Scots Whig jurist and publicist, saw a similar process at work in the French Revolution. In Vindiciæ Gallicæ, his 1791 response to Burke, he defended the National Assembly's decision to abolish titles of nobility “on the principle that the security of a revolution of government can only arise from a revolution of character.” It was necessary, he wrote, to inculcate the principle of “equality” that the government had declared “into the spirits and hearts” of the French public. A change in culture was needed in the wake of a change in constitution.¹⁰⁴

As Mackintosh's reference to “security” suggests, this form of revolutionary change—with constitutional change moving ahead of other spheres of social life—was in many respects an anxious vision. When constitutional change took place in advance of other kinds of change, especially the cultural changes that would be needed to underpin a democratic or republican polity, the political revolution itself could suddenly seem rather fragile.¹⁰⁵ The constitution of a state that had undergone radical change was now almost of necessity out of sync with the social, economic, and cultural content of the society. This mismatch or cultural lag put the stability of the “revolution” (i.e. political change) at risk.¹⁰⁶

Recognizing that eighteenth-century actors could imagine political change as running ahead of the transformation of other parts of society casts a new light on the proposals that any number of actors made in this period to “end” or halt revolutions. If “revolution” meant only an ongoing process, then efforts to end or stop it were ipso facto counterrevolutionary. But if the “revolution” to which actors were referring was a revolution of government, then efforts to stop it could be protective, a first step towards bringing the surrounding cultural and social contexts into alignment. It seems far from coincidental, in this regard, that the most famous effort to “end” the French Revolution—the proclamation issued in mid-December 1799 that read “The revolution is fixed upon the principles with which it began. It is finished”—had accompanied the Constitution of Year 8. The Constitution itself, on this interpretation, could be understood as a reaffirmation of the “revolution,” imagined in orthodox eighteenth-century fashion as a revolution of government, not its opposite.¹⁰⁷

Conclusion

By the 1840s, as far as the most advanced theorists of revolution were concerned, eighteenth-century concepts of revolution had become terribly outdated. To see this one need look no farther than the young Karl Marx. In an 1844 newspaper essay, he retrospectively berated the French Jacobins for their seeming inability to understand that the social question was the foundation of all political ills. A revolution that was essentially political, Marx declared as if the point were now self-evident, was both “limited and contradictory.” The social revolution, which aimed at a thoroughgoing transformation of society, was the only true revolution.¹⁰⁸

Marx's declaration, however partisan in tone, suggests a clear line of division between two revolutionary epochs. During the Atlantic revolutionary era, eighteenth-century notions of revolution remained important to how actors understood their political world and its possibilities. In the modern era beginning around 1840, on the other hand, for a growing number of political actors, social revolutions were becoming the only ones that really counted.

Conditioned as we are by the brassy revolutionary rhetoric of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and the long ideological ascendance of the idea of social revolution, we tend to forget that this earlier era even existed. Or, as Lafayette did in his 1833 speech to the Chamber of Deputies, we remake eighteenth-century revolution in the modern era's image. This blurring of the earlier period and its distinctive concepts of revolution has been unfortunate—and not just for historians of the era. The history of revolutionary concepts during the long eighteenth century has implications for historians of modern revolutions as well.

Revolutionary change, as late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century actors imagined it, was limited, fragile, and often insecure. Nothing could be farther from the metaphor of the unstoppable wave so frequently invoked by the self-confident revolutionaries of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, constantly moving forward and submerging everything in its path. “Revolution” in the eighteenth-century sense, meaning changes in the structures and agents of political power, was finite in time and limited in scope. Whether such a “revolution” even survived was always an uncertain prospect, dependent on changes in the social, economic, and cultural spheres. For all of their protestations to the contrary, revolutionaries in the modern era had to cope with similar problems. Keeping the eighteenth-century vision in clear focus can illuminate similar kinds of contingency and frailty that ran through even the most successful revolutions of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

Even as they stressed its fragility, however, political actors during the Atlantic age of revolutions saw revolutions everywhere they looked. Though they disagreed vehemently about the substance, goals, and even value of the era's political upheavals, contemporaries used the language of revolution inclusively to refer to a wide variety of political phenomena.¹⁰⁹ This capacious usage should make it impossible for scholars of the Atlantic revolutions to summarily exclude any of the era's political events from the category. It should raise questions for scholars working on later periods as well. Modern revolutionaries and the scholars who study them have long been in the habit of focusing on events that they deem “great revolutions,” often to the exclusion of all else. The eighteenth-century history of revolution suggests how narrow and limited a view this represents. Instead of pressing the age of revolutions into service as the origin point for the idea of a “great revolution,” historians of modern revolution might consider how and where eighteenth-century concepts of revolution persisted into later periods—and the more capacious and diverse revolutionary world that they allow us to see.