The Origin and Principles of the American Revolution, Compared with the Origin and Principles of the French Revolution

This book is published by Liberty Fund, Inc., a foundation established to encourage study of the ideal of a society of free and responsible individuals.

Contents

Introduction, by Peter Koslowski

Preface, by John Quincy Adams

The Origin and Principles of the American Revolution, Compared with the Origin and Principles of the French Revolution

Index

Editor’s Notes

Introduction ^*

by Peter Koslowski

There may be no other two historical events that are of greater impact than the American and the French revolutions. The first gave birth to a new nation that was to develop into the leading power in the world a century and a half later. The second gave birth within a generation to the greatest power in Europe for about twenty years, changing all its neighbor states forever. Napoleon, the heir of the French Revolution, set out to rule all Europe until he was defeated by an alliance of all the major powers of Europe.

It is, however, not only power but ideas that changed as the result of the two revolutions and their revolutionary ideas. “The Ideas of 1776,” of the American Revolution and of American independence, shaped Western constitutionalism and representative democracy; “the Ideas of 1789,” the ideas of the French Revolution, led to a new civil law of the continental European states, to a new understanding of government and the relationships of state and church, and to realization of democratic government based on the concept of popular sovereignty. The French Revolution also gave birth to the spirit of revolution, to the idea that a nation can change itself by a total overthrow of its past and inherited character into an entirely new social body. This spirit of revolution has influenced all radical revolutions since then, especially the Russian Revolution of 1917. A comparison of the French and American revolutions is not only a study of world history, a study of the hour of the births of the American and the French Republic; it is also a study of the birth of the ideas that shaped all Western nations and all countries of the world searching for a constitution of liberty and democracy.

Friedrich Gentz is one of the first observers of both revolutions. Most of his continental contemporaries concentrated their attention on the French Revolution, which lay closer and had revolutionized the leading European countries. The United States of America was literally on the other side of the world from Europe. Those who had immigrated to America from Europe usually did not have the means to return. Gentz was prescient about the importance of the United States in its infancy, whereas his compatriots still looked at the United States as a half-civilized, distant land of little importance, considering Europe and the world to be shaped, as Leopold Ranke later put it, by the five Great Powers: Austria, Britain, France, Germany, and Russia. It is a paradox that the nation that sent the greatest number of people to the United States of America knew the least of all Western European nations about the United States. The German inability to grasp the potential of the United States, to which Gentz is the notable exception, had consequences well into the centuries. In both world wars, the German governments had no adequate perception of the economic and military power of the United States, yet Gentz was predicting this over a century earlier.

Although becoming more powerful in the eighteenth century, Britain was a maritime power, being at the same time inside and outside of Europe. France, not Britain, was the first continental power in the perception of Europeans. France had ended the Holy Roman Empire and had defeated Austria again and again. Gentz wrote about the subsidies paid to the Holy Roman Emperor by Britain. Finally, Napoleon divided Germany, just as Prussia, Russia, and Austria had divided Poland, remarking that he did to the Germans only what they had done to the Poles, although Russia got the largest share of Poland. Gentz brought all his powers of argument and persuasion to bear against Napoleon’s attempt to legitimize the expansion of the French Revolution. Gentz conceded that the partition of Poland of 1792 was unjust, as was every partition of any European nation. Although he had been born in Prussia, he also believed that even the Germans’ self-partition into Prussia and Austria was wrong, that it had been furthered by the French Revolution’s attempt to break away Prussia and other German states from the old Holy Roman Empire. With Edmund Burke, Gentz agreed that European nations had no right to divide a European nation.

At the end of the eighteenth century, Britain was looked upon with suspicion on the Continent. Britain’s colonial expansion seemed to contradict the doctrine of the balance of power. In Europe, the British continued to insist on this balance of power, even though in the greater world there was no balance of power any more. Britannia ruled the waves, and she did nothing to restore the balance of power except by driving the North American colonies into rebellion.

Gentz was one of the few intellectuals who defended Great Britain, arguing that it had become great by superiority in trade and industry and not by doing evil. It was not Britain’s and America’s machinations, but their commercial courage and genius that had given them their economic superiority over the Continent, Gentz wrote. The European nations are free to imitate Britain in that, and all European nations could and should do so. However, Gentz found hard to reconcile with free trade the British Navigation Act, which permitted only British ships to transport goods to Britain. America, he was aware, was following Britain in trade and industry. Gentz received a lot of criticism for his defense of Britain and America; he was even called an Anglo-maniac. The British Foreign Office paid him a generous monthly allowance for his reports to London.

Gentz was, however, never a British agent. When he was working for Prince Metternich later, the Austrian foreign minister and driving force at the Vienna Congress in 1815, Gentz insisted to the British that Metternich needed to be able to read all of Gentz’s reports to and correspondence with the British government.

Gentz recognized that the founding of the French Republic in 1792 had led to escalating warfare, culminating in 1795 when the French army conquered the Netherlands and founded the Batavian Republic, trying to turn the proud trade power into a department of France. After the radical Directory had seized the supreme power in September 1795, external warfare increased even further when the revolutionary army attacked Germany, Austria, and Italy and marched on Vienna and Milan in 1796. The French Revolution continued the expansion that King Louis XIV had started. France had made large conquests in the Spanish Netherlands (Belgium) and in German lands on the left bank of the Rhine, particularly in Habsburg Alsace. But Louis XIV had not succeeded in realizing his ambition to extend France’s eastern border all along the left bank of the Rhine, as the French Revolutionary War succeeded in doing in 1796. The French Revolution brought back to France the power and expansionism that the ancien régime of the monarchy had lost, particularly during the Seven Years’ War of 1756 to 1763, known as the French and Indian War in North America.

Winston Churchill called this the first world war, a war fought not in one part of the world but in both hemispheres. It was fought between the European powers over territorial gains in the colonies and over predominance in Europe.

France’s support for the American Revolution in the aftermath of this war between 1763 and 1788 produced mixed results for France herself, even though it helped to bring about the separation of the colonies from the British motherland. In spite of securing American independence, France was unable to extract considerable material gains from the American War of Independence. Rather the costs of fighting damaged the French national finances and contributed to the coming of the French Revolution.

Gentz writes at the end of his essay that he had set himself the goal of investigating the two world revolutions according to four principal points of view, “with regard to the lawfulness of the origin, character of conduct, quality of the object, and compass of resistance.” (p. 93)

Can we judge unique historical events, such as these great revolutions, on the basis of general principles? Revolution is a generic term. Revolutions follow a scheme of actions of the same type. To revolutionize is to follow a pattern of action and to respond at the same time to the particular historical situation. Like any actions, revolutions must be judged by the circumstances preceding their beginning, by their origin. They must be judged by the character and quality in which they are conducted and carried through, by the conduct of the revolutionaries. They must further be judged by the quality of their goals, that is, by the revolutionary intention, and they must finally be judged by the extent of resistance or support they receive from the nation. In every action, the goal or intention is the beginning, and the realization of the goal is the consummation of the action. An action must be judged by the circumstances that set it in motion, by its origin. It must further be judged by how the action is conducted, and finally by its success or failure. Revolutions are, of course, not only intentional actions but also events in which the acting persons are often driven by dynamics outside of their control. But revolutions are also political actions that can be judged as such. Gentz intended to judge the two revolutions as political actions and as historical events.

The North American colonies found themselves in an odd position when the conflict with Britain started, both inside and outside their motherland. They were required to pay taxes, but they had no voice in how those taxes were used. They were subjects of the British crown, yet had no seats in the British Parliament. They had to accept a British monopoly in trade with the colonies but could not export their own products to Britain.

Gentz points out the paradox of an American tax revenue to be paid for use only in Britain. This resembles the inconsistency of restricting the North American colonies to buying only British wares. Gentz compares Britain’s trade monopoly in the colonies to a tax levied on North America, and he quotes the Second Continental Congress of the United States, which called the monopoly “the heaviest of all contributions.” Gentz emphasizes the link between the impulse toward political control over a colony and the impulse to market control, limiting access to the market only to the motherland. It is inherent to being a colony that the motherland has a monopoly of trade and that the colony wishes to change this situation. Gentz clearly perceives the limits to the legitimacy of the colonial relationship: “The relation between a colony and the mother country is one of those, which will not bear a strong elucidation.” (p. 19) The American Revolution brought to an end a strained and, from a natural-right point of view, an awkward relationship. Since there was little explicit legal definition of the relationship between the colonies and the motherland, the American Revolution did not have to break many laws. The colonies just applied to themselves such constitutional principles as parliamentary representation, which the motherland had applied to itself only.

The French Revolution acted within an elaborate, valid system of law under a king who was willing to enact constitutional reform. The revolution broke the law and killed the king. The French breach of law was far more extensive and serious than the colonial breach of law. In the end, the two revolutions are judged according to which broke more “real right.” It is a breach of real right if one counters resistance to political action by violence that is out of proportion to that resistance. Violence must be minimized in political action. The French Revolution (and to an even greater extent the Russian Revolution) required an enormous degree of violence, with many victims. (It is an interesting question whether the National Socialist movement in Nazi Germany was a revolutionary movement, in this sense.) If a revolution needs to kill so many people to overcome the population’s resistance, then by these lights, it cannot be legitimate, since its means are out of proportion with its goals. Gentz’s criteria for judging eighteenth-century revolutions are even more applicable to the revolutions of the twentieth century.

The latest revolutions of our time, in the Czech Republic and East Germany in 1989, two hundred years after the French Revolution, have been called the Velvet Revolution and the Peaceful Revolution, respectively. Were they revolutions? Some have claimed that they were not true revolutions but rather implosions of two states of the former Warsaw Pact. Rosenstock-Huessy called revolutions like that semirevolutions (Halbrevolutionen).¹

Gentz is a conservative and classical liberal. Like other conservatives, he does not like revolutions and does not believe in them, since he is convinced that the social world requires continuity and tradition. Conservatives also abhor the use of political violence for radical social change. In the end, Gentz comes to the conclusion that the American Revolution was a legitimate revolution, since it was not really a revolution. Its goal was to establish a constitutional regime that was in accordance with the British tradition of constitutional principles. The American Revolution did not unleash large-scale violence. It had clearly defined and limited goals. It finished revolutionalizing when these goals were reached. In general it succeeded in maintaining civilized conduct during its political fighting and military warfare. It did not aim at enforcing its principles on other nations.

All this cannot be said, according to Gentz, about the French Revolution: It used enormous violence. It faced very great internal resistance, which was overcome only by ruthless repression. (The people of Paris used to say that Robespierre was trying to reduce the population of the French Republic to one-half its pre-revolutionary numbers.) The goals or objectives of the French Revolution became more and more extensive and changed unpredictably under the varying influence of the different revolutionary factions. The French Revolution did not maintain good conduct. It did not come to an end by itself but was ended only by the ascent of Napoleon. Finally, it did try to enforce its principles on other nations.

Gentz is not only critical of the origins and historical conduct but also of the pivotal political ideas of the French Revolution. He considers the declaration of natural and unalienable rights of man as well as the idea of popular sovereignty to be superfluous rhetoric in the American Revolution and a dangerous illusion in the French Revolution. Although the French Revolution took over these two ideas from the American Revolution, through Jefferson’s advice to Lafayette, these concepts were effective only in the French Revolution, according to Gentz, producing tremendous philosophical error, political disaster, and human misery.

The so-called rights of man are erroneous, Gentz believes, if they are used as an abstract claim against the concrete and real right. There is no right of man outside of the real right of the state. The French Revolution was an assault on the “real right” of states in the name of abstract and fictive revolutionary principles. If the French Republic absolved the subjects of the European states of their duty of obedience to their lawful governments, it created, according to Gentz, a situation like that during the religious wars, when various sides claimed to have the divine right to absolve their believers of their duty of obedience as citizens or subjects.

There is also no abstract sovereignty of the people, because the law is above any sovereign except God, and even God must be thought of as following the right He has set in place. The people or the nation cannot therefore simply call into being a law based on what it wills at any given time, as the French revolutionaries tried to do. The American Revolution and, following from it, the Constitution of the United States also follow the idea of popular sovereignty, but the right is constituted by the people, who are also bound by it. Both the people and the people’s government are under the law. Gentz points out that this apparently small difference in the understanding of popular sovereignty is in fact no small difference at all. This is Gentz’s central insight and also is arguably the greatest legacy of the American Revolution and the most important lesson to learn from the suffering of the French people in theirs.

The Origin and Principles of the American Revolution, Compared with the Origin and Principles of the French Revolution

Preface

The Essay, of which a translation is here given, was published in the Historic Journal, a monthly print which appears at Berlin; and was written by Mr. Gentz, one of the most distinguished political writers in Germany. It is for two reasons highly interesting to Americans: First, because it contains the clearest account of the rise and progress of the revolution which established their independence, that has ever appeared within so small a compass; and secondly, because it rescues that revolution from the disgraceful imputation of having proceeded from the same principles as that of France. This error has no where been more frequently repeated, no where of more pernicious tendency than in America itself. It has been, here not simply a commonplace argument, as Mr. Gentz represents it to have been in Europe, but has been sanctioned by the authority of men, revered for their talents, and who at least ought to have known better.¹

The essential difference between these two great events, in their rise, their progress, and their termination, is here shewn in various lights, one of which alone is sufficient for an honest man. A modern philosopher may contend that the sheriff, who executes a criminal, and the highwayman, who murders a traveller, act upon the same principles; the plain sense of mankind will still see the same difference between them, that is here proved between the American and French Revolutions.—The difference between right and wrong.

We presume it will afford a pure and honest gratification to the mind of every truly patriotic American reader,² to see the honourable testimony borne by an ingenious, well-informed, and impartial foreigner to the principles and conduct of our country’s revolution. The judgment of a native American will naturally be biassed by those partialities in favour of his country, from which it is so difficult for the citizen to divest himself as an historian. The causes of hatred and affection must be more remote from the mind of a foreigner, and his decisions must therefore have a greater intrinsic value. The historian of his own country must always in some sort be considered as its advocate; but an impartial foreigner is its judge.

The approbation of such a writer as Mr. Gentz is the more precious too, for not being unqualified. The mild censure, which he passes upon certain parts of our proceedings is the strongest proof of his real impartiality; and though our sentiments as Americans may differ from his, upon various points of political speculation, we shall find very few, if any instances, that have incurred his censure, which our own candour will not equally disapprove.

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