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Lecture 4: Revolutions in the Americas and Europe
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Page 1: Revolution In The Americas And Europe

Lecture 4: Revolutions in the Americas and Europe

Page 2: Revolution In The Americas And Europe

Introduction: the meaning of revolution

• 18th century meaning of revolution = astronomical, orbit of planet

• Revolution = return to status quo, not radical break e.g. Britain’s Glorious Revolution, 1688-1689

Lecture structure:

• 1) American Revolution

• 2) French Revolution

• 3) Britain and counter-revolution in the 1790s

Page 3: Revolution In The Americas And Europe

1) America: aristocratic revolt?

• Expansion of British Empire and army in Americas

• Stamp Act (1765)

• Townshend duties (1767)

• Tea Act and Boston tea party (1773)

• Thomas Jefferson, A Summary view of the rights of British America (1774)

• Continental Congress (1774)

• Shots fired at Lexington, MA (May 1775)

Thomas Jefferson (1743-1825)

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Declaration of Independence (July 1776)

• Example of British revolution 1688-9, right of resistance against tyranny

• Declaration = defence of existing rights of 13 colonies

• Divisions between colonies – not a unified American ‘nation’

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2) France: moderate and radical revolution

French Revolution: interpretations

• ‘bourgeois revolution’ (Georges Lefebvre, Alfred Souboul)

• revision of ‘class struggle’ interpretation (Alfred Cobban, Colan Lucas)

• Seizure of power by tyrannical minority (François Fouret, Simon Schama)

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i) Moderate phase: 1789-91

• Meeting of Estates General at Versailles (May 1789)

• Declaration of rights of man (August 1789)

• Moderate leaders: Jacques Pierre Brissot, Abbé Sieyès, Comte de Mirabeau

• Establishment of limited monarchy on the British model

Tennis court oath, 20 June 1789

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ii) Radical phase: 1791-94

• Louis XVI’s flight to Varennes (June 1791)

• France at war with external powers (from April 1792) and fighting a civil war (the Vendée)

• Attack on Tuileries Palace (August 1792)

• National convention declares a republic (September 1792)

• Execution of Louis XVI and Marie-Antoinette (Jan 1793)

• Autumn 1793: the Terror begins (revolutionary ‘tribunals’, Committee of Public Safety)

• Constitutional agenda: universal male suffrage, civil equality for women, abolition of slavery in French colonies, de-Christianization, levée en masse

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French Revolutionary calendar

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Robespierre and ‘the Terror’

Explaining ‘the Terror’

Supporters of Revolution: circumstantial factors (war with internal & external enemies)

Critics: Terror inherent in revolutionary ideology

Influence of Rousseau: general will, purification, national regeneration

Maximillien Robespierre (1758-94)

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The fountain of regeneration at the Festival of Unity

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National regeneration and unity through bloodshed

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3) Britain and the ideology of ‘counter-revolution’

• Support for initial phase of French Revolution

• Richard Price: connection between revolutions of 1688-89 and 1789

• Edmund Burke, Reflections on the French Revolution (1790):

Britain = evolutionary not revolutionary

• Burke opposed by Thomas Paine, Rights of Man (2 parts, 1791-92)

• Crackdown on Paineite radicalism in 1790s

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The Contrast 1792: Which is Best? Thomas Rowlandson (1792)