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In April 1792, France had declared war on the “King of Hungary and Bohemia,” that is the House of Austria or Hapsburg, which, since it possessed most of Belgium, was the most important of the powers that adjoined the French frontiers. By the following summer the French were also at war with the kingdoms of Prussia and Sardinia, and by 1793 with Great Britain, the Dutch Republic, and the Bourbon Monarchy of Spain. Despite occasional appearances, or stated war aims, the war that began in April 1792 became an ideological conflict between new and old—between “democratic” and “aristocratic” forms of society in the sense explained in the preceding volume. This chapter focuses on this complex story and nations involved. It begins with a tale of two cities, involving ceremonial events in Frankfurt and Paris on July 14, 1792. It was, of course, Bastille Day, but it was also the date of the imperial coronation of Francis II, a young man of twenty-four who proved to be the last Holy Roman Emperor.

This chapter first discusses the impact of the French Revolution on the United States. The development was twofold. On the one hand, there was an acceleration of indigenous movements. On the other, there was an influence that was unquestionably foreign. The latter presented itself especially with the war that began in Europe in 1792, and with the clash of armed ideologies that the war brought with it. The warring powers in Europe, which for Americans meant the governments of France and Great Britain, attempted to make use of the United States for their own advantage. Different groups of Americans, for their own domestic purposes, were likewise eager to exploit the power and prestige of either England or France. The chapter then turns to the impact of the Revolution on the “other” Americas.

The year 1796 was marked by Napoleon Bonaparte's brilliant victories in North Italy. The French victories in Italy made possible the creation of the Cisalpine Republic in the Po valley. Milan immediately became, in 1796, a center to which patriots and revolutionaries congregated from all parts of Italy. Other Italian republics were soon set up on the model of the Cisalpine, and in fact, by the turn of 1797–1798, there was a general alarm at the prospect of a “Cisalpinization” of Europe. The Cisalpine Republic is best understood in a broad perspective. This chapter begins with a view of “world revolution” as seen in 1796 from Paris. It then turns to the French attitude to revolution in Italy, then shifts the point of observation to Italy itself, in an attempt to describe the sources of revolutionary agitation in that country from an Italian standpoint. The closing section presents an account of the Kingdom of Corsica.

This chapter examines the conflict which developed in France between a reforming monarchy and a resurgent aristocracy, and traces the beginnings of the French Revolution. The French Revolution had points of resemblance to movements of the time in other countries is the central theme of this book. Like them, it arose out of circumstances characteristic of Western Civilization, and it was to merge with them, especially with the war that began in 1792, into a great struggle that no political borders could contain. From the beginning, however, there was much that was unique about the revolution in France. The French Revolution remained primarily political, but in its effects on society and social and moral attitudes it went far beyond the merely political. It changed the very nature and definition of property, and to some extent its distribution; it transformed, or attempted to transform, the church, the army, the educational system, institutions of public relief, the legal system, the market economy, and the relationship of employers and employees.

This chapter considers the prevailing notion in the eighteenth century that nobility was a necessary bulwark of political freedom. Whether in the interest of a more open nobility or of a more closed and impenetrable nobility, the view was the same. Nobility as such, nobility as an institution, was necessary to the maintenance of a free constitution. There was also a general consensus that parliaments or ruling councils were autonomous, self-empowered, or empowered by history, heredity, social utility, or God; that they were in an important sense irresponsible, free to oppose the King (where there was one), and certainly owing no accounting to the “people.” The remainder of the chapter deals with the uses and abuses of social rank and the problems of administration, recruitment, taxation, and class consciousness.

This chapter traces the conflicts faced by the aristocratic constituted bodies at the close of the Seven Years' War. Fighting had gone on for a generation interrupted by a few years of truce; governments had accumulated great debts, which they had now to find means to carry or repay. The search by governments for new sources of income met with resistance from magistracies or assemblies in many countries. It therefore produced constitutional crises. “From the need for money, which put into motion the machinery of reforms, arose a great drama: the clash between autonomous entities and the central power, between local governing classes and foreign rule.” The discussions cover the quasi-revolution in France, 1763–1774; the monarchist coup d'etat of 1772 in Sweden; and the Hapsburg Empire.

This chapter begins the treatment of the English-speaking world, involving the structure of Parliament, the British constitution, and the American Revolution. Of all the constituted bodies of Europe, largely aristocratic in composition, which in some countries came into conflict with kings in the decade before 1775, the most famous and the most powerful was the Parliament of Great Britain, whose misfortune it was to be challenged from both sides at once. Or, at least, the most ardent devotees of the Houses of Parliament found Parliamentary independence being undermined by the King, in the person of George III, while at the same time a growing number of dissatisfied persons, in America, in Ireland, and in England itself, expressed increasing doubts on the independence of Parliament, invoking a higher authority which they called the People.

This chapter presents a compressed account of the Four Years' Diet of 1788–1792 and its background. Poland is first exhibited as a land of aristocracy triumphant. The question is then asked whether the Polish Revolution of 1791 was a revolution at all, and if so in what sense; and what observers in other countries—such as Burke in England, the revolutionaries in France, and the rulers of Prussia and Russia—thought that they learned from it. Jean-Jacques Rousseau drew lessons from Poland in 1771. With the country dissolving in civil war, subverted by Russia, and sinking into the First Partition, the author of the Social Contract, at the request of certain Polish patriots, offered his diagnosis of their situation. For Rousseau, the trouble with Poland was that it had no consistance, no staying power to resist pressure and infiltration from outside. What it needed was character, a character of its own, resting on the collective consciousness or will of its people.

This chapter discusses the impact of the American Revolution on the democratic and revolutionary spirit in Europe, to the desire, that is, for a reconstitution of government and society. The first and greatest effect of the American Revolution was to make Europeans believe, or rather feel, often in a highly emotional way, that they lived in a rare era of momentous change. They saw a kind of drama of the continents. The successful War of American Independence presented itself as a great act of retribution on a cosmic stage. There were many Europeans who said that America would someday, in its turn, predominate over Europe.

This chapter details events in 1973, when the issue for France and the world was whether revolution or counter-revolution should prevail. In every country where the government was at war with the French Republic in 1793—in Britain and Ireland, in the United Provinces and in Belgium restored to the Emperor, in the Austrian Monarchy, the small German states and the Prussian kingdom, in the Italian kingdom of Sardinia—there were groups of people whose sympathies lay in varying degree with the declared enemy. Wherever the French Revolution had been heard of there were men who wished it not to fail. Their concern was not only for France but for the future of some kind of democratization in their own countries. For those, on the other hand, who hoped to see the whole revolution undone, these first months of 1793 saw a revival of the exciting expectations of a year before. The Republic seemed a sinking ship, crazed, in addition, by mutiny in its own crew.

This chapter focuses the peace that prevailed on the Continent from the signing of the treaty of Campo Formio in October 1797 to the attack on Rome by the King of Naples in November 1798, which proved to be the opening episode in the War of the Second Coalition, and hence of the grand climax or confrontation in 1799 between the Old Regime and the New Republican Order. It argues that the peace was no more than a semi-peace. On the one hand, neither France nor Austria could accept the terms of Campo Formio with any finality. Each looked for bastions against the other in Switzerland and Italy. On the other hand, France with its Dutch ally remained at war with Great Britain. While British diplomacy worked to bring Continental armies back into the field against France, the French first threatened to invade England and support revolution in Ireland, then redirected their fleet and army into the expedition to Egypt, from which it was hoped that Bonaparte could counteract the growth of British power in the Indian Ocean, where both French and Dutch interests were at stake. The Egyptian campaign transferred the Anglo-French conflict to the Mediterranean and the Near East.

This chapter considers the extreme Left of the French Revolution led by an obscure journalist who called himself “Gracchus” Babeuf and his co-worker Philippe Buonarroti, a French citizen of Italian birth, and their Conspiracy of Equals of 1796. The Conspiracy of Equals has always been looked back on with respectful interest by partisans of the modern Left, as the first manifestation of the revolutionary movement of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. How far the Conspiracy was “communistic” remains uncertain. But even the inner leadership had diverse aims, and the whole movement was so secret and so short-lived that the secondary organizers, not to mention the ordinary followers, never knew who the leaders were or what their purposes might be.

The period of about a year beginning late in 1797 was the high point of the whole decade, and indeed of all European history until 1848, in the matter of international agitation stirred up by the revolutionary-democratic movement. This chapter attempts to recapture this moment of excitement, and to offer an impression of the movement as a whole before following it again in separate countries. Events happened so swiftly, with so little central direction, and yet with so many immediate repercussions over hundreds and thousands of miles, that no plan of exposition can do justice to the reality, which is best seen, though elusively, in any number of chain reactions. For example, in March 1798 the French occupied the Swiss city of Bern and seized its famous “treasure” of some 6,000,000 livres in coin. The money was used to help finance Bonaparte's expedition to Egypt, which in turn was directed in part against the British in India, where the Earl of Mornington was at war with Tipu Sultan who considered himself an ally of the French Republic.

This chapter presents a descriptive survey of the constituted bodies of the middle of the eighteenth century, with especial reference to their membership and recruitment. It covers the diets of Eastern Europe, councils and estates of the Middle Zone, provincial estates and parlements of France, and parliaments and assemblies in the British Isles and America. It argues that nothing was more characteristic of the eighteenth century than constituted bodies of parliamentary or conciliar type. They existed everywhere west of Russia and Turkey. They were more universal than the institution of monarchy, more widespread than the famous middle class. All defended their liberties as they understood them. In defending their rights and justifying their pretensions, the constituted bodies elaborated a good deal of political theory.

This chapter focuses on England during the revolutionary decade. It argues that in Britain and Ireland, as in Eastern Europe, it was counter-revolution that prevailed. The net effect of the revolutionary decade was to demonstrate, or to consolidate, the strength of the established order. The very lengths to which the established order went, however, in dealing with disaffection (or what was called “sedition”) offer a measure of the magnitude of the discontents. The men who ruled England were not the sort to be frightened by witches. The British governing class was neither timid, foolish, intolerant, nor especially ruthless when unprovoked. That Englishmen of this class became fearful of unrest at home, intolerant of ideas or organizations suggesting those of the French Revolution, repressive in Britain, and deliberately terroristic in Ireland can be taken as evidence of the reality of something of which, from their own point of view, they had reason to be afraid. In England as elsewhere there was a contest between democrats and aristocrats.

The forces of aristocracy, which in some countries in the 1780s prevailed over democratic movements, prevailed in others over monarchy itself. This chapter takes up a thread left hanging at the close of Chapter IV. It was shown there that, by the middle 1770s, or just before the American Revolution, the kings of France and of Sweden, and the Queen of Hungary and Bohemia, had asserted royal authority and put the constituted bodies of their several realms under restraint. The following fifteen years made clear the limits beyond which enlightened despotism could not go. However held down, the constituted bodies—estates, diets, parlements, and the like—had strong powers of survival and resurgence. This chapter deals mainly with the Hapsburg monarchy under Joseph II and Leopold II, with observations, since not everything can be told, on Prussia, Sweden, and Russia.

In 1792, the French Revolution became a thing in itself, an uncontrollable force that might eventually spend itself but which no one could direct or guide. The governments set up in Paris in the following years all faced the problem of holding together against forces more revolutionary than themselves. This chapter distinguishes two such forces for analytical purposes. There was a popular upheaval, an upsurge from below, sans-culottisme, which occurred only in France. Second, there was the “international” revolutionary agitation, which was not international in any strict sense, but only concurrent within the boundaries of various states as then organized. From the French point of view these were the “foreign” revolutionaries or sympathizers. The most radical of the “foreign” revolutionaries were seldom more than advanced political democrats. Repeatedly, however, from 1792 to 1799, these two forces tended to converge into one force in opposition to the French government of the moment.

This chapter discusses a movement of modern democratic type in Geneva in 1768, which made a positive impression on institutions of government. In the roles played by upper, middle, and lower classes, in the conflict between political and economic demands, and in the interplay between revolutionary and counterrevolutionary pressures, this “revolution” at Geneva prefigured or symbolized the greater revolution that was to come in France. It was, moreover, a revolution precipitated by the presence in the neighborhood of Jean-Jacques Rousseau. It was here that the Social Contract produced its first explosion. Near at hand, at the same time, lived another worthy of more than local repute, namely Voltaire. The embroilment of Rousseau and Voltaire in the politics of Geneva meant the blowing of two antithetical views of the world into a teapot tempest; or, rather, the agitations at Geneva, which in themselves were significant enough, were brought to the level of world history by the involvement of these two difficult geniuses.

This chapter details events in the Netherlands and Belgium. In both countries, constituted bodies—in this case town councils and estate-assemblies—determining their own membership within a closed system, claimed to represent the country and to rule in their own right. Both asserted their powers and liberties against a “prince”—the Prince of Orange in the case of the Dutch, the Austrian Emperor in that of the Belgians—and both, after 1780, found a new popular party fighting at their side. The new party, which was neither exactly popular nor yet a party in a more modern sense, at first felt no difference of purpose from its allies. As the controversies developed, however, the new party began to brand its allies, or erstwhile allies, as “aristocrats,” and to favor an actual reconstitution of the old constituted bodies, so that these bodies would become representative in a new kind of way, either by actual choice at the hands of voters outside their own ranks, or through a broadening of membership to reflect wider segments of the population.

This chapter details the Dutch Revolution of 1794–1795, which resulted in the Batavian Republic, the first and the most important of the “satellite” or “sister” republics created under French auspices. The Batavian Republic was important not only in itself but more broadly. It was hoped, by enemies of Great Britain, that the alliance of the French and Batavian Republics, controlling the whole coast without interruption from the Frisian Islands to the Pyrenees, and using the extensive shipping, banking, and other resources of the two together, would form an invincible combination against British trade and sea power. And when Italian, Swiss, German, or Irish revolutionaries wished to explain to the French what they wanted in the following years, they often named the Batavian Republic as their model.

The year that saw the survival of the revolution in France saw its extinction in Poland. The same months in which it became clear that structural changes would spread to Belgium and Holland saw the stamping out of “Jacobinism” in Austria and in Hungary. This chapter describes—not the failure of revolution in Eastern Europe, since, except in Poland, no revolution was attempted—but the triumph and strengthening of counter-revolutionary forces in Eastern Europe at this time. These were the forces, agrarian and conservatively aristocratic, which had already largely destroyed the work of Joseph II in the Hapsburg Empire and combined to annihilate the Polish constitution of 1791.

This chapter details events in 1799, when a gathering and confrontation of the forces described in the preceding chapters took place with the War of the Second Coalition—a confrontation in which the matter in question was the survival of the New Republican Order in Europe. Neither side can be said to have won. Or rather, the counter-revolution was certainly defeated, but the New Order prevailed only by being transmuted into something else, the authoritarian, innovating, dynamic, and yet compromising semi-monarchism or semi-republicanism represented by Bonaparte. The struggle went on because compromise was impossible; and compromise was impossible because so few people were ready to occupy a middle ground, and because so many, on both sides, feared that any advantage gained by their adversaries would be ruinous to themselves.

Instead of attempting the hopeless task of a full and rounded account of the French Revolution, this chapter selects a few points for more detailed treatment: how the year 1789 opened with a fully developed revolutionary psychology, what the Revolution essentially consisted of, and why the French Revolution, though inspired by much the same principles as the American Revolution, adopted different constitutional forms and took on a magnitude unknown to the upheavals of Western Civilization since the time of the Protestant Reformation. The chapter brings the story, for all countries, to about the year 1791, to the eve of the great war in which all these national and social developments were to be gathered together into one tremendous struggle.

This chapter discusses the players involved in the American Revolution, which is considered a great event for the whole Euro-American world. In the Age of the Democratic Revolution, the American Revolution was the earliest successful assertion of the principle that public power must arise from those over whom it is exercised. It was the most important revolution of the eighteenth century, except for the French. Its effect on the area of Western Civilization came in part from the inspiration of its message (which in time passed beyond the area of Western Civilization), and in part from the involvement of the American Revolution in the European War of American Independence, which aggravated the financial or political difficulties of England, Ireland, Holland, and France.

In 1792, the French army occupied Belgium, and the Russian army, closely followed by the Prussian, occupied Poland. In both cases the entering powers announced themselves as liberators, and were welcomed as such by certain elements in the population. The French in Belgium within a few weeks passed to a policy of annexation. The Russians and Prussians had annexationist designs on Poland from the beginning. The French were soon driven out, but returned in 1794, so that Belgium remained incorporated into France for twenty years. The Russian and Prussian monarchies never gave up what they took of Poland in 1793, except that for a few years the Prussian segment belonged to Napoleon's Grand Duchy of Warsaw. Only with the destruction of the Russian and Prussian monarchies themselves, in 1918, were the annexations of 1793 undone, and then only in part. This chapter, under the formal parallel of liberation and annexation, traces the realities which these terms represented in 1792–1793—that is, to show who was liberated from what, or how and why annexed—and to indicate also the impact of these events on the further radicalizing of the revolution in France itself.

By 1799 there were five revolutionary republics in Italy, all but one swept away in the Austro-Russian reaction. They were the Cisalpine, the Ligurian, the Luccan, the Roman, and the Neapolitan—or Parthenopean as the French called it. This chapter treats only the Cisalpin. Absorbing the earlier Cispadane Republic of 1796, and evolving, after the battle of Marengo of 1801, into the Italian Republic and the Napoleonic Kingdom of Italy, the Cisalpine stands as a prominent landmark both in the spread of revolution in the 1790s, and in the long process of the modernization of Italy which we know as the Risorgimento.

This chapter focuses on Switzerland and the Helvetic Republic. Until 1798, all of Switzerland was an incredibly complex mosaic of dissimilar pieces. Over a millennium, there had grown up an indefinite number of small communities—from cities like Zurich to remote clusters of pastoral families in Alpine valleys—which no longer belonged to the Holy Roman Empire, and did not yet belong politically to anything else. There was no Swiss state, Swiss citizenship, Swiss law, or even Swiss government. However, nowhere else was the impact of certain principles of the Revolution more apparent and more lasting—especially of the principles of legal equality and of the unity and indivisibility of the Republic. The idea of a Swiss people became a reality under the Helvetic Republic, whose main features were confirmed in the Napoleonic Act of Mediation of 1803, and reconfirmed at the Congress of Vienna.

This chapter argues that the American Revolution was a political movement, concerned with liberty, and power. Most of the ideas involved were by no means distinctively American. There was nothing peculiarly American in the concepts, purely as concepts, of natural liberty and equality. They were admitted by conservatives, and were taught in the theological faculty at the Sorbonne. Nor could Americans claim any exclusive understanding of the ideas of government by contract or consent, or the sovereignty of the people, or political representation, or the desirability of independence from foreign rule, or natural rights, or the difference between natural law and positive law, or between certain fundamental laws and ordinary legislation, or the separation of powers, or the federal union of separate states. All these ideas were perfectly familiar in Europe, and that is why the American Revolution was of such interest to Europeans.

For the Western world, the period from 1760 to 1800 was the great revolutionary era in which the outlines of the modern democratic state came into being. Here for the first time in one volume is the author's account of this incendiary age. The book argues that the American, French, and Polish revolutions—and the movements for political change in Britain, Ireland, Holland, and elsewhere—were manifestations of similar political ideas, needs, and conflicts. The book traces the clash between an older form of society, marked by legalized social rank and hereditary or self-perpetuating elites, and a new form of society that placed a greater value on social mobility and legal equality. Featuring a new foreword, the book introduces a new generation of readers to this enduring work of political history.

This chapter focuses on events in Europe in the years between 1774 and 1789, or between the beginnings of the American and of the French revolutions. During this period, the stresses and conflicts grew more acute. Events in America aroused the sense of a new era in Europe, encouraged a negative attitude in Europe toward European institutions, and induced a belief in the possibility of change in the directions desired by persons hitherto excluded from political life. The influence of America, and of much indigenous European development, operated in general in a democratic direction. But real events in Europe, as distinguished from the stirring up of ideas, seemed to be going the opposite way. There was a widespread aristocratic resurgence, or perhaps only a “surgence,” a rising bid for power and recognition, or successful offensive against antiaristocratic forces, whether monarchic or democratic, at the very time when other developments, such as the impact of the American Revolution, made a great many people less willing than ever to accept any such drift of affairs.

This chapter focuses on Germany during the revolutionary decade. The years of political change coincided with the supreme efflorescence of German thought and culture. It was the age of Goethe and Schiller, of Mozart and Beethoven, of Kant, Fichte, Hegel, Herder, Schleiermacher, and the Humboldts. Under the influence of such masters, a new German national consciousness was beginning to take form. An ambivalent attitude to revolution entered into the national outlook. The Germans neither rejected revolution in the abstract, nor accepted it in its actual manifestations. Nothing was more characteristic, in Germany before 1800, than to continue to hail the principles and goals of the French Revolution with enthusiasm, and to believe that in French hands, thanks to French faults, these principles had miscarried.

This chapter details events following the end of the Terror and the political and emotional crisis of the Year II. The question that a great many Frenchmen put to themselves both in France and in the emigration, and a question to which observers throughout Europe and America awaited the answer, was whether some kind of moderate or constitutional regime would be durably established. The next four years showed that constitutional quietude was still far away. The difficulty was that not everyone agreed on what either moderation or justice should consist in. Justice, for some, required the punishment of all revolutionaries and their sympathizers. For others, it meant a continuing battle against kings, priests, aristocrats, and the comfortable middle classes. Both groups saw in “moderation” a mere tactic of the opposition, and moderates as the dupes of the opposite extreme. Compromise for them meant the surrender of principle. It meant truckling with an enemy that could never be trusted, and had no real intention of compromise.