John Adams once wrote that "It is much easier to pull down a government...than to build [one] up."1 Trite though it may be, this little aphorism reflects a great deal upon the differences in kind between the American and French Revolutions. Each occurred within years of each other, but ultimately culminated with entirely different results; the American resulting in the establishment of a free society and the French ending with the dictatorship of Napoleon Bonaparte.
Inherent to the ultimate success of the American Revolution was its markedly un-Revolutionary character. Prior to the outbreak of war with Great Britain in the Spring of 1775, the thirteen American colonies had decades of experience in self-government, having operated within a largely defacto state of sovereign self-government for decades. Each had a colonial legislature, popularly elected to varying degrees, which collected the revenues and controlled the purse. This was undergirded by a generally vibrant civil society, with colonists often literate in the British Constitution, the English Common Law, and their rights as Britons under both.
After the conclusion of the French and Indian War, the British Parliament had begun to levy increasingly burdensome taxes and duties on the colonies, which they understandably resented. The slogan "No taxation without representation" reflected the popular belief that only the colonial legislatures popularly elected by the colonists, and not the British Parliament, had the authority to levy taxes and duties on them. When the colonies finally declared independence in 1776 they did so not to tear apart one regime and replace it with another ex nihilio, but rather to preserve the system of self-government they had held and cherished for years. They were severing their bonds with Great Britain to preserve the free, self-governing society that had existed a priori, in other words.
In fact, the formal governments that were formally established during and after the war—the state constitutions, the Articles of Confederation, and ultimately the U.S. Constitution—were similar in nature to the antebellum colonial governments. As Charles Austin Beard wrote in his book American Government and Politics, the state and national governments of the nascent republic were "based as far as possible on the experience of the colonies and the states. The very names applied to the Senate, House of Representatives, and President were taken from the institutions of some of the states, while many clauses of the Constitution...were taken almost verbatim from state constitutions."2
The American Revolution resulted in a free society then not because it created one out of scratch, but because it preserved one through the war and independence and simultaneously built systems of government at the state and national level based upon the experiences and models of their previous colonial governments.
The same does not hold for the French Revolution. What began as a popular demand for representative government and the end of absolute monarchy rapidly degenerated into a tumultuous force which uprooted and destroyed the central institutions that had governed France for centuries—most notably the monarchy and the church establishment. The ancien regime was swept away in its entirety. Whereas the revolutionary Americans had preserved the general structure of their traditional English and colonial governments, reforming and adapting the new constitutional governments where appropriate, the French began de novo, divorcing themselves entirely from the traditions and experiences of their history.
In doing this they condemned themselves to failure. Reflecting upon the Revolution from across the English Channel, Edmund Burke wrote that a people "will not look forward to posterity, who never look backward to their ancestors...the idea of inheritance furnishes a sure principle of conservation and a sure principle of transmission, without at all excluding a principle of improvement. It leaves acquisition free, but it secures what it acquires."3
Untethered from the pillars of their history and tradition, the Revolution that was premised on notions of Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity (Liberté, Egalité, and Fraternité) morphed into a Reign of Terror which resulted in the deaths of thousands of French men and women.
Further, by eradicating so many of the foundational vestiges of the French social structure as they had existed at that time, an open void and state of anarchy and chaos was created which left France vulnerable to a strong man placed to swoop in and assert himself. This is indeed what happened with the absolute dictatorship of Napoleon Bonaparte, which culminated a revolution that had begun as a movement to replace absolute monarchy. The Revolution failed.
1. Letter from John Adams to James Warren (Jan. 9, 1787), in Adams Papers, Massachusetts Historical Society, as quoted in McCullough, David (2001). John Adams. New York, NY: Simon & Schuster, at 473-4.
2. Charles Austin Beard, American Politics and Government 2 (J.S. Cushing Co.-Berwick Smith Co. 1910).
3. Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790), reprinted in Modern Political Thought: Readings from Machiavelli to Nietzsche, at 552 (David Wootton ed, Hacket Publishing Company, Inc. 1996).
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