Question

What are some similarities and differences among the American and French Revolutions? :?

Answer 1

Both were made by a clique of wealthy bourgeois anxious to rule more and to pay less tax. Both used propaganda to enlist the common people as footsoldiers of the revolt: in one case the 'Rights of Man,' in the other, the parallel pious platitudes in the Declaration of Independence. Both were equally hypocritical. In France the lower class ended up with a heavier burden (one day off in ten, not in seven, and abolition of the customary holidays on religious feast days, all without any increase in pay - so much for their rights) while in the USA the paint-card test applied: liberty and the pursuit of happiness were your right, but only if fair-skinned. Both declarations, of course, have their roots in enlightenment thinking.

There are some important differences. In the USA the class of wealthy traders, planters and manufacturers who made the 'revolution' established a Whig hegemony and a Whig ideology which persist to this day. There was no indigenous aristocracy to argue the point. This means that there was, really, no political revolution - there was a successful revolt against a colonial power which left the management of the States in much the same hands as before, and in fact entrenched their power.

In France there was an aristocracy, and they lost no time in cutting off their heads, drowning them, hanging them and (in the Septembriste atrocities) slicing them up with sabres and butchers' knives. That sort of intraverted violence was absent in America. The result of this infighting, of course, was that the power of any one class or group could never become entrenched as it was in America, and poor old France, cutting off the heads of successive batches of revolutionary leaders, staggered from régime to régime, ending up with rule by junta (the directoire), dictatorship and, once again, the Bourbon monarchy. And that was only the beginning of their troubles.