American Revolution's Ripple Effects on Europe and France

Introduction: Seeds of Revolution Across the Atlantic

The United States and the United Kingdom are today great partners on a divided world stage. Ironically, their relationship — at its worst — helped to plant the seeds for a reciprocating progressiveness that would leap back and forth across the Atlantic through the coming century. Bred in the thick of British colonialism, the United States surfaced into existence with an ingrained nod to monarchical elitism alongside a full-fledged thrust toward constitutional democracy. The transition would offer a new compact with the people, with expectations of political involvement and activism promoting suitable elected representation. In the United Kingdom, meanwhile, the rule of the British Crown and a feudalist system with deeply unequal socioeconomic tendencies helped maintain a culture of political ignorance among the public while assuring leadership, authority, and wealth to those who had inherited it.

The events unfolding in the United States — though the point may well be debated in historiographical discourse — may, from a certain perspective, be seen as the catalyst for the realization in Europe of political ideals that had previously existed only in philosophical rhetoric. The actualization of those ideals in the burgeoning United States sent a signal soon heeded by the French. As the French Revolution unfolded into the era of Napoleonic expansionism, much of Europe would come under the influence of constitutional democracy. The discussion here demonstrates that, given the immediacy with which the French Revolution succeeded the American Revolution, the commonality of their respective aspirations toward constitutionality, and their shared struggles to define a balance between democratic governance and centralized authority, France represented the first and most crucial lynchpin in redirecting the external resistance to feudalism born of America's revolution toward the internal needs of a drastically unequal Europe.

Certainly, the American Revolution was by explicit intent championed as a break from the philosophical repugnance of European feudalism, and most directly from British colonialism. Rejecting monarchy, the United States presumed to stand in principled opposition to the undemocratic impulses that had instigated its founding. But the divide between the ideals of its British background and its progressive principles was immediately apparent in the structure of its originating government. Indeed, "the evolution of America's political parties was to a great extent the outgrowth of the British political system, which in an oversimplified analysis, can be said to have been divided into conservatives, who tended to support the monarchy and the power of the King, and liberals, who sought to restrain royal prerogatives and enhance the legitimacy of Parliament as an alternate power source" (Sage, 1). In vying for independence, the United States still demonstrated in some ways its cultural relationship to Europe while explicitly seeking an evolution in the terms surrounding that culture.

Enlightenment Foundations and Locke's Theory of Natural Rights

America's fight for independence emerged quite naturally out of the needs of its people to establish a form of governance, economy, and society reflective of the demands created by the development of the colonies. Moreover, this need would be increasingly revealed in the sentiments of progressive thinkers and public authorities throughout the European and American intellectual communities, who were beginning to think according to an ethical standard concerning the treatment of all people. The late eighteenth and early to mid-nineteenth century would be distinguished in the history of humanity as a period given over to revelations regarding the rights of man, resolutions concerning the proper governing of societies, and rumblings of equality in parts of the world that had been perpetually understood in terms of sharp divisions across class, ethnicity, and religion.

Western Europe would largely be the seat of conception for the philosophical and discursive advancement of this period, with the intellectual centers of urban France and Germany serving as forums for the elevation of the individual and of a collective human brotherhood. During the historical period that would come to be known as the Enlightenment, various subjugated groups seized the emergent opportunity to demand the rights accorded them by their creator. Fundamental among the principles of Enlightenment thought were the considerations put forth by a man from, ironically, the very seat of America's subjugation.

In his consideration of the balance between central leadership and the will of the individual, British political philosopher John Locke offers an evaluation of power that draws its inspiration from the natural law of reason. In an analogy that may serve as the basis for a thorough discourse on this predilection, Locke describes a circumstance he contends is indicative of each man's inalienable capacity for choice, regardless of the presence or absence of an intervening authority. He remarks that "a thief, whom I cannot harm, but by appeal to the law, for having stolen all that I am worth, I may kill, when he sets on me to rob me but of my horse or coat; because the law, which was made for my preservation, where it cannot interpose to secure my life from present force, which, if lost, is capable of no reparation, permits me my own defence" (Locke, Section 19).

Here is the truest manifestation of Locke's promise that reason will ultimately dictate a power structure. Even as the law is a most imposing presence once one has entered into the confines of the social contract at the center of Locke's premise, it becomes a mere shadow of a consideration in the context described above. When threatened, each man retains the power to defend himself. Acting as executor of his own justice, a man in this scenario makes the active decision to exit the social contract. Where law and reason under traditional circumstances suggest that such rationality is shared among all parties within the confines of the social contract, when it can be evidently determined that this is not a mutual quality — as with Locke's thief hypothetical — one's obligation to that contract is considerably diminished.

Thus, to the Americans, who saw that the monarchy governing and exploiting them from afar was irrationally suited to their purposes, Locke's ideology is a visible presence in key revolutionary writings. America's most important contribution to the world community was both actual and philosophical. Its actionable revolution demonstrated that the forces of monarchy could be dismantled, that a balance of democracy could be achieved, and that the ideals of the rights of man were something more than mere rhetoric. Many of the most important pieces of literature contributing to the revolution would prove fundamental in shaping events the world over during the nineteenth century. Thomas Paine's 1776 pamphlet Common Sense remains the most famous and representative of such literature, and the sentiments it delivered help explain how the patriots prevailed against the mighty British military — offering a template to the numerous independence movements spurred in the wake of America's birth.

Thomas Paine, Common Sense, and the Revolutionary Template

In a text designed to produce a sense of revolutionary outrage, Paine crafts a philosophical treatise on appropriate governance designed to counter the increasingly archaic nature of monarchy such as that imposed upon the colonists by the British. In his pamphlet, Paine openly calls for and advocates armed resistance as a means of defending the economic and governmental systems developing apart from the British Crown. He characterizes the distinction between kingship and the evolving colonial democracy as irreconcilable, contending that "men of all ranks have embarked in the controversy, from different motives, and with various designs; but all have been ineffectual, and the period of debate is closed. Arms, as the last resource, decide the contest" (Paine, 82).

Couched in Paine's sense of righteous indignation, the text drives largely toward this point by arguing that the colonists can tolerate the imposition of kingship only insofar as they can tolerate the sacrifice of the freedoms inherently associated with life in nascent America. This would be the undercurrent that swept the colonists into vehement support for the cause of independence, drawing a core philosophical connection between the anticipated form of government and the emotional disposition of those with the means to achieve it. As this discussion shows, those means would prove to be within reach of dramatically outsized forces such as the American colonists, encouraging soon after the far more numerous French peasantry to cast aside the shackles of oppression.

In this encouragement, America helped to touch off something perhaps all the more miraculous given the proximity of European peasantry to its own oppression. First in the doctrines formulated in the wake of French independence, and secondly in the way that Napoleon Bonaparte would begin the spread of such doctrines to a continent driven by inequality, America's revolution could be said to have been the opening round in the deconstruction of colonialism and feudalism throughout Europe and, thus, the world. Drafted in the image of the American Declaration of Independence — though perhaps more ambitious and sweeping in its trajectories — the Declaration of the Rights of Men would dictate a universal principle arguing that all men are born equal and that any distinctions made between men according to social conditions must be terms agreed upon by all parties.