By Paul Weiser
One of the great questions in history is why the two great revolutions of the eighteenth century went so differently. The American Revolution succeeded; the French Revolution engendered romantic nonsense, bloody terror, world war and national defeat - plus a pernicious model for all later revolutions. Many are the proposed explanations, but one has, perhaps, received insufficient notice.
Simply put, the American revolutionaries had allies. The French revolutionaries had only sympathizers abroad - their “allies” were satellites, taken and ruled by force. America could not compel France or Holland as France compelled Holland and the German or Italian states. The Americans had no recourse to force, thus had to use persuasion alone.
Both French and American revolutionaries regarded their ideologies as self-evident, making foreign sympathy automatic (as did the later Bolsheviks). But the Americans had to live that belief, both making their case and regulating their own actions so as to maintain the sympathy of others; the French, having access to coercion, sought instead to shock and terrify. So, too, did the Bolsheviks, for their “ally” Imperial Germany was cynical where Bourbon France was substantially idealistic.
In other words, Benjamin Franklin’s America - as its Declaration of Independence clearly states - was impelled to justify its actions, to prove it was part of the ongoing order of the world, a co-equal member of the community of nations. Robespierre’s France and Lenin’s Russia instead set themselves apart from the world, superior to it: they needed and wanted no friends, as their actions demonstrated.
If the community of nations can be thought of as a population of persons - always a dangerous analogy, but sometimes illuminating - America may be seen as an adolescent seeking independence by earning others’ respect through mature actions. By that standard revolutionary France and Russia were psychopaths.
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