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The Constitution’s Deep Roots
they ‘‘choked it up so he could not get men to work in it.’’ These victims,
he continued, were ‘‘the best people,’’ killed ‘‘without form of trial, and
their bodies thrown like dead dogs into the first hole that offered.’’ Other
accounts of the Revolution by Gouverneur Morris were equally alarming:
‘‘(September 2, 1792) the murder of the priests . . . murder of prisoners.
. . . (September 3) The murdering continues all day. . . . (September 4) And
still the murders continue.’’
Eyewitness accounts such as these, and tales of unspeakable horror and
brutality told by other foreign visitors to France, confirmed the darkest
suspicions of Edmund Burke, and as news about the fate of the French
Revolution spread across Europe and North America, so also did Burke’s
fame and influence. That Burke, who had defended the claims of the
American colonists and steadfastly opposed all policies calculated to reduce private liberties or centralize the authority of the crown, should
turn against the French Revolution puzzled many of his contemporaries
when his Reflections first appeared. Had he not sided with American
revolutionaries and argued that Americans were entitled to the rights
of Englishmen? How, then, could he oppose the French claim for liberty? There seemed to be an inconsistency. Those who thought so misunderstood Burke, however, and, unlike Burke, also misunderstood the
French and American revolutions.
Much of this confusion over the similarities and differences between the
two revolutions was laid to rest by Friedrich Gentz, a German diplomat
who served as an advisor to Clemens von Metternich, the great chancellor
of the Hapsburg Empire. It was Metternich who presided over the Congress of Vienna, the famous international peace conference of 1815 that
succeeded in restoring lasting peace in Europe after the Napoleonic wars.
Gentz was one of Burke’s most ardent admirers on the continent, and in
1794 translated Burke’s Reflections into German. In 1800, Gentz published
an important essay of his own, The French and American Revolutions. That
same year, John Quincy Adams translated this work into English and arranged for its publication in Philadelphia.
Picking up where Burke had finished, Gentz defended the American
Revolution as a constitutional struggle for political independence, the
restoration of the rights of Englishmen, and the establishment of selfgovernment. The American Revolution, he observed, was not an internal