Chapter 19

The late eighteenth century witnessed revolutions that combined the ideals of the philosophes with the frustrations of social and economic groups long denied equal rights and status. Europe and the world were never the same again.

The revolution began, of all places, in the British colonies in America. Pushed to rebellion by a growing dissatisfaction with the way Britain administered their affairs for them, the colonists declared their independence and to the world’s surprise, but not without the world’s help, made good on their boast that they were free. They tried to establish a republic based on the theories of Enlightenment philosophes. Europeans took notice.

In the same decade that the Americans gained their independence, Louis XVI of France called his Estates-General to help him raise revenues. During the early summer of 1789, the Third Estate declared itself to be a national Assembly and proceeded to initiate the French Revolution. Within four years France executed Louis XVI and established a Republic, frightening and enraging all the kings of Europe. When the radical phase of the revolution went too far and France found herself beset with enemies on every side, a conservative reaction set in and led to the rise of the liberal dictator who made himself emperor of the French, Napoleon Bonaparte.

For a decade Napoleon remade the map of Europe, using his military genius to defeat and to topple monarchs and replace them with his relatives and generals. In each place he introduced reforms inspired by the Enlightenment and the French Revolution. Even after he was defeated and exiled, after royal figures were restored to their thrones, the spirit of the French Revolution lived on to inspire succeeding generations. The world in which we live was born in the revolutions of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.