By Why did the American Revolution succeed while the French Revolution failed? It’s an excellent question that comes up almost every time anyone lectures on either — or both — of these fateful events. The answer requires a tour through philosophy, character, religion, and politics.
First, let’s establish the premise behind the question itself.
The American Revolution achieved the goals its instigators intended: independence from Great Britain, a constitutional republic, and a limited government focused on defending individual liberty, enterprise, and property. We are still living under that system — and celebrating it — 250 years later.
The French Revolution appeared promising at the outset. Bridging the two upheavals, the Marquis de Lafayette even wrote (with Thomas Jefferson’s assistance) the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen just days before the storming of the Bastille in July 1789. But three years later, Lafayette was on the run as the Revolution descended into cataclysmic violence and oppression. Instead of peace and freedom, France welcomed war and dictatorship under Napoleon Bonaparte. When he was finally defeated, the country reverted once again to monarchy. Ending up with little to show for their bloody adventure, the French suffered a death toll estimated at thirty to forty times that of the American Revolution.
Didn’t France abolish slavery in its colonies in 1794? Yes — but only to reinstate it under Napoleon eight years later. A revolution is hardly a success if, on the heels of a paroxysm of savagery, its major achievements evaporate. The sad fact is that France moved from one monarchy to another, taking a deadly detour through one of history’s bloodiest episodes of depravity.
The Battle of Ideas
America certainly benefited from more than a century of British “salutary neglect” before King George III and Parliament began their mischievous intrusions in the 1760s. Beginning with the Mayflower Compact in 1620, the American colonies developed a substantial tradition of local self-government, electing officials, serving on juries, and participating in town meetings. The French, by contrast, had lived under absolute monarchy for as long as anyone could remember. Some measure of the chaos that followed their Revolution can surely be attributed to a lack of political experience. I suspect, however, that even more consequential forces were at work.
Among the most important differences between the two revolutions was philosophy. What were the revolutionaries and their sympathizers thinking in America in 1776 and in France in 1789? What ideas — and whose ideas — motivated them to take up arms?
In many respects, the answer comes down to a contest between two giants of the Enlightenment: John Locke of Britain (1632–1704) and Jean-Jacques Rousseau of France (1712–1778).
An Ideology of Terror
In his 2007 book Liberal Fascism, commentator Jonah Goldberg offers this observation:
…[W]hat truly makes the French Revolution the first fascist revolution was its effort to turn politics into a religion. In this, the revolutionaries were inspired by Rousseau, whose concept of the general will divinized the people while rendering the person an afterthought.
Philosophically speaking, the French Revolution undermined itself almost from the start. To the extent it drew from Rousseau, it was at war with human nature as much as it was in conflict with the aristocracy.
Consider the stark contrasts between the leaders of the American Revolution and those of the French Revolution, and it is easy to see which country was blessed with greater personal character. If France had a George Washington, it would be the Marquis de Lafayette — but he defected early, just in time to avoid the guillotine. The other major figures of the French Revolution were monsters soaked in blood. Though war occasionally brought out the worst in a few, America had no counterparts to the French revolutionaries of the 1790s: Robespierre, Babeuf, Saint-Just, and Marat. Nor did it have a cynical Committee of Public Safety dispatching thousands to the national razor.
Can you imagine any of the 56 signers of the Declaration of Independence uttering the spine-chilling rhetoric of Louis Antoine de Saint-Just, Robespierre’s right-hand man, known as the “Archangel of Terror”? He declared:
You have to punish not only the traitors, but even those who are indifferent; you have to punish whoever is passive in the republic and who does nothing for it… The vessel of the Revolution can arrive in port only on a sea reddened with torrents of blood… A nation generates itself only upon heaps of corpses.
When resistance to the Revolution arose in the western French region known as the Vendée, Paris dispatched troops to crush it. The result was a massacre; at least 170,000 people were killed.
Why America Took a Different Path
Would Washington, Adams, or Franklin have countenanced such a holocaust? It is difficult to imagine.
It is unlikely the French were simply bad people as a rule while Americans were uniformly virtuous. But in the decades leading up to 1776, the American colonies were steeped in the moral and religious currents of the Great Awakening, a Christian revival that emphasized self-examination, personal responsibility, and restraint.
Protestant values of self-improvement through hard work, private enterprise, and thrift helped shape early American development. In France, by contrast, the Revolution elevated men who sought power for the purpose of remaking society itself. That self-indulgent impulse to reshape others at any cost did not take root in early America as it did in France. The United States did not empower men with the apparatus of concentrated, legalized force and then expect them to behave modestly with it. Early America did not entertain the notion that society could be perfected through coercion.
From its inception, the American Revolution was narrower in scope than the French Revolution. Americans focused on a lofty but comparatively limited objective: independence from British rule and the restoration of local self-government. Indeed, the Founders generally viewed the new nation’s mission as counter-revolutionary in spirit. They sought the traditional rights of Englishmen — rights they believed they already possessed but which had been eroded by Crown and Parliament.
The French Revolution, by contrast, pursued far more ambitious aims. Its leaders sought to “reform” everything and everyone. The revolutionaries of Paris even abolished the calendar. Their ideological descendants in the twentieth century, the Khmer Rouge of Cambodia, would do the same, replacing “1975” with “Year Zero.”
The revolutionaries in France also assaulted Christianity, killing priests and sacking churches across the country. They viewed the Catholic Church as an instrument of royal tyranny. In that judgment, they were at least partially correct. In America, where a wide range of denominations flourished, the ties between church and state were far weaker. The Founders never saw the need to compel belief or subdue religious institutions by force.
From his vantage point as a British parliamentarian, Edmund Burke applauded the spirit of liberty that animated the French upheaval but quickly recognized where it was headed. The revolutionaries, he wrote, were:
…the ablest architects of ruin that had hitherto existed in the world. In that very short space of time they had completely pulled down to the ground their monarchy, their church, their nobility, their law, their revenue, their army, their navy, their commerce, their arts, and their manufactures… [there was a danger of] an imitation of the excesses of an irrational, unprincipled, proscribing, confiscating, plundering, ferocious, bloody and tyrannical democracy.
Lest the reader be tempted to dismiss Burke as a foreign critic predisposed against France, consider the French observer Joseph de Maistre. In Considerations on France (1796), widely regarded as one of the most penetrating contemporary analyses of the Revolution, he wrote — despite his hostility to Enlightenment ideas — that:
What distinguishes the French Revolution and makes it an event unique in history is that it is radically bad. No element of good disturbs the eye of the observer; it is the highest degree of corruption ever known; it is pure impurity… In order to bring about the French Revolution, it was necessary to overthrow religion, outrage morality, violate every propriety, and commit every crime. This diabolical work required the employment of such a number of vicious men that perhaps never before had so many vices acted together to accomplish any evil whatsoever.
Both the American Revolution and the French Revolution promised “power to the people.”
In the end, it was the former that delivered it. The latter produced far more blood and chaos than liberty, equality, or fraternity.