The Brits had been sending many of their criminals to the Colonies as indentured servants; that ended with the Revolution. Which led to the penal colonies in Australia, at that time largely unsettled by Britain (& other Europeans). New South Wales was established in 1788.
(Not good news for the original locals, but they didn’t have newspapers yet.)
That’s why the Revolution itself was of critical importance in Europe after the fighting stopped. Americans, and French officers serving there such as Lafayette, influenced enlightenment thought in France before, during and after the Revolutionary war. Certainly Franklin affected things. Had the American Revolution not occurred, or occurred differently, the French Revolution would have happened differently - and possibly not at all.
Jingoistic bullshit. There is no question that French (and Scottish and English) Enlightenment thinkers influenced the American founding fathers far more than any American ever influenced anyone in 18th century France (or Britain). The Enlightenment had been going great guns in France for almost a century before the American revolution occurred. Lafayette and other Frenchmen were in America, supporting the rebellion, because they already believed in Enlightenment ideals and the need for radical political reform (and as a way of undermining France’s traditional enemy, the British). They did not not learn that from their American experience.
America was no intellectual powerhouse in the 18th century (it it did not have the population to be, for one thing, or any real higher education system, just a handful of backwater seminaries), and the American founding fathers only received any significant attention at all in France because they won their war (with French help) against the hated British. Sure, Franklin (one American) had a certain established reputation amongst European intellectuals, but he was only one Enlightenment thinker amongst many Europeans, many of whom were far more influential in their own countries and even in other European countries.
It is absurd to say that the French revolution would not have happened if the American one had not: it was born out of conflicts within the French polity, and ideologically based in French (and, to a small extent, British) thought. It did not come about because French people wanted to follow America’s example, and it did not (and could not) follow that example. There was very little to suggest, as yet, that America was going to be a success, and, anyway, the situations of pre-revolutionary France and America, and their revolutions (if the American one is properly so called at all) were totally different sorts of events. America’s was about colonists gaining independence from the mother country, and establishing a new national identity from scratch, but involved little social change within the American states; France’s was about radically overhauling the political and social structure of a pre-existing sovereign state, whose national identity did not change at all. The American experience had very little to teach the French, even if they had been interested. The course of the French revolution was affected by American ideas and examples only in relatively trivial ways. Anything else is simply Americans projecting their current self-importance, rooted in the very real importance they have on the world stage now, back into a past when they (or, rather, the ancestors of some of them) were not very important at all.
back into a past where it
ital added
Great post, and I agree…except for these bookends. Just cause you have these buttons doesn’t mean that the poster you replied to tries to push them.
:: sigh I am of course not without sin in this regard, nor a couple other regular players I know here. Without offended righteous dudgeon half my brain cells would be permanent asleep. ::
Thomas Paine’s Common Sense was a huge seller in Europe (in both France and England).
Maybe they were just using it for attic insulation. Or maybe they really were being influenced by the events in the Colonies.
IIRC it was Barbara Tuchman’s “March of FOlly” that delved into the revolution and British thought. To Britain, the revolution was an annoyance, much like the Vietnam war to the Americans. It was unpopular and expensive and they just wanted it over. They hired Hessian mercenaries because they couldn’t get the average Brit excited about joining the army. The government was increasingly annoyed at incompetent military performance, and IIRC (been a while since I read it) the military screw-ups lead to the government changing hands. After 7 years of numbing futile guerilla war, they just wanted to be done with it. The fact that it gave their European rivals an opportunity to stick it to Britain also added to the need to get it over with as little effort as possible.
Well, just because they bought it in large numbers doesn’t mean they were profoundly influenced by it. Or, more realistically, that they were influenced by it beyond being more sympathetic to/supportive of the American colonists. I don’t know that there is much evidence that in influenced how English or French people thought about their own governments.
Besides, Paine was English, and only arrived in Massachussets about a year before writing Common Sense. However influential Common Sense was in Euorope, it was certainly much more influential in the American colonies/states, and if anything it’s more illustrative of the influence of European thought and European thinkers on the colonists than the other way around.
IIRC Common Sense did have great appeal in Britain among the more liberal gentry and it added fuel to the fire of those seeking parliamentary reform. Edmund Burke was a firm critic of the British war effort in the Colonies.
But the horrors of the French revolution soon after thoroughly dampened radical/reformist feelings in Britain for several generations.
Butterfly wings sir, butterfly wings…
One of the prime contributors ( though hardly the only one ) to the French budget crisis that helped propel the French Revolution was the quadrupling of the French naval budget under Antoine de Sartine starting in May 1776 to prepare for a potential ( and eventual as it turned out ) French intervention in the American Revolution. This unprecedented buildup allowed France in concert with its allies to for once and somewhat briefly achieve naval parity/theoretical superiority over Britain which would prove vital to the AR. But the cost was ruinous and really more than the state could sustain and helped set the stage for the royal collapse.
No American Revolution, no French Revolution? Hard to say, but it is possible history being as chaotic as it is.
The Blackwater of the 18th century, the Hessians from Germany probably cared.
Now take a look back at the OP. The question on the table isn’t whether “Americans” influenced “Europeans” or vice-versa. The question is whether the American Revolution was of any import in Europe. Judging by the sales of Paine’s tract. it was.
It doesn’t get covered much at all. Britain has a lot of history to cover. As I recall, we spent more time on the New Deal than we did on the Revolutionary War. Plus, as njtt notes it wasn’t until at least 100 years later that the US became a significant economic power in its own right. So at the time, it really wasn’t that important and there was always the idea in Britain that the American colonies cost more to administer than they were worth.
Well exactly. Those grapes were sour anyway.