The French and American Revolutions Compared
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government was not the aim of the Jacobin revolutionaries, public opinion
began to turn against the French. As early as 1790, Edmund Burke warned
in his famous Reflections on the Revolution in France that the revolution was
doomed to failure because its leaders sought a radical break with the past
and were attempting to create a whole new society based on visionary
theories of government. The French, he asserted, were attempting not to
restore their ancient liberties, but to set up a new order for all mankind
based on what the French called the Rights of Man. Unfamiliar with constitutional government, lacking experience in parliamentary institutions
and practices, having no solid grasp of the meaning and substance of the
rights the English and Americans had come to know, the French naively
believed they could leap over centuries of historical development and instantaneously create an enlightened political system never before experienced by any civilization. The whole scheme of things, thought Burke,
was hopelessly idealistic and dangerous.
Not the least of his concerns was the Declaration of the Rights of Man,
which lacked any constitutional base of support and therefore amounted
to little more than words on paper. As interpreted by revolutionary
leaders, the rights themselves—‘‘liberte, egalite et fraternite’’—called for
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a complete leveling of society, the abolition of all social classes and distinctions, including the elimination of the clergy, and a redistribution of
the wealth. In pursuit of these goals, the Jacobins plunged the nation into
what came to be called the Reign of Terror. Death stalked the countryside. Mass executions, murder, cruelty, and human atrocities of every description became the order of the day. France, once the pride of Europe
and the hallmark of Western civilization, plummeted into a state of barbarism—on a scale never before thought possible. Thus was born the
first modern revolution, the dress rehearsal, it is sometimes said, for the
Russian Revolution of 1917.
During the Reign of Terror, Gouverneur Morris of Pennsylvania, who
had been a leading member of the Constitutional Convention of 1787,
was the American Minister to France. Shocked by what he saw, he began
sending home reports to American political leaders. Writing in 1792 to
Robert Morris, another Pennsylvania delegate to the Convention, he related on one occasion that the owner of a French quarry had demanded
damages because so many corpses had been dumped into his quarry that