By Katlyn Marie Carter

Comparisons of the American and French Revolutions are one of the oldest in the book. They started right off the bat, as Americans looked across the Atlantic to unfolding events in France, seeking evidence either to continue their own revolutionary struggles begun in the 1770s or to definitively end them. [1] 

The fact that this comparison started right away and often served political ends should give us pause. 

In the 1790s and for many decades thereafter, comparative analysis was often short-sighted and politically motivated. As Philipp Ziesche has shown, Federalists in the United States quickly began to cite the French Revolution as evidence of American exceptionalism. [2] In the nineteenth century, Alexis de Tocqueville famously examined “Democracy in America,” looking to the United States as a case study to understand democratic society. [3] While broad and forward-looking in his conclusions, Tocqueville turned to the American experience at least in part to draw lessons for application at home in France. 

In short, nearly everyone initially interested in comparing the French and American experiences with revolution, republicanism, and democracy had some interest in advancing their own domestic political visions, which were frequently conservative. The result was often a narrative of American success and stability in contrast to French failure and chaos.

Renewed focus on comparison of the revolutions in the mid-twentieth century, born of the Cold War alliance of western democracies against the communist Soviet bloc, raised the possibility of commonality. Though not exclusively focused on France and the United States, R. R. Palmer grounded his concept of an age of democratic revolution in their two revolutionary moments. [4] In contrast to earlier comparative analysis, this wave crested in a moment of trans-Atlantic solidarity and camaraderie in a world divided by the Iron Curtain.

Still, in American scholarship especially, the rather facile contrast of American success and French failure long persisted as the most common mode of comparative analysis. The title of Susan Dunn’s 1996 history neatly encapsulates it: Sister Revolutions: French Lightning, American Light. [5] 

More recently, some books have pointed to the potentially faulty foundations of the comparison. Jordan Taylor examined trans-Atlantic information flows and their impact in the early American republic to suggest Americans constructed a highly fragmented and deeply distorted view of the French Revolution in the 1790s. [6] When they couldn’t even agree on the facts of what was happening an ocean away, can we put much stock in early comparisons Americans might have made between their revolution and that of the French? Bringing the Haitian Revolution into the story further complicates the bi-lateral comparison. Ashli White reminds us that American thinking about what was happening in France was frequently filtered through Saint-Domingue and its refugees as a third revolutionary locale. [7] 

The possible pitfalls of comparative analysis of the American and French Revolutions are indeed manifold. Certainly, we need a broader framework, especially one that integrates the Haitian Revolution as another node of revolution that necessarily complicates a simple trans-Atlantic analysis. Aside from this, even comparing just the two revolutions necessitates contending with some very serious qualifiers. 

The circumstances, preconditions, social dynamics, and chronologies of each revolution are distinct in important ways. For example, the continued presence of a monarch as the French revolutionaries set to drafting a constitution in 1789 created a very different dynamic than that faced by the framers who met in Philadelphia to revise the government framework in 1787. Another major difference: the timing of military conflict within each of these revolutionary moments does not align; the Americans wrote their constitution after battle had concluded, while the French were struggling to do so as a war waged. And, as integrating the Haitian Revolution highlights, the French abolished slavery while the Americans did not. These divergences are crucial to consider.

Despite these meaningful differences, however, there are parallels that should continue to elicit careful comparison. My book, Democracy in Darkness: Secrecy and Transparency in the Age of Revolutions, makes a case for it. Though the situations in which they convened were distinct, the American Constitutional Convention and the French Estates General, turned National Assembly, both surpassed their mandates and set to writing a constitution in the name of the people. In constructing new representative institutions, revolutionaries in both places faced some common challenges and shared some similar goals. 

More fundamentally, perhaps, revolutionaries in the United States and France worked with similar ideas and even common terminology. [8] As I argue in Democracy in Darkness, phrases and concepts like representative democracy were coming into being in both countries nearly simultaneously—in a process that thinkers on both sides of the Atlantic recognized at the time as intertwined. Examining how these visions and their constitutive discourses evolved on each side of the Atlantic can help us recover the contingency and nuance in their initial articulations and the lasting impact of these. 

So yes, we should continue to compare the French and American Revolutions. Careful comparison can be useful to answer specific questions. But those questions must not be value-based or normative: why was one good and the other bad? One successful and other a failure? We must be attentive to the purpose of the comparison, careful to account for the meaningful differences, and open to the integration of other revolutionary contexts. In sum, we are better off learning from their histories in comparison, rather than seeking to extract lessons in morality or strategy. 

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Katlyn Marie Carter is an Assistant Professor of History at the University of Notre Dame and author of “Democracy in Darkness: Secrecy and Transparency in the Age of Revolutions” (Yale University Press, 2023).

Title Image: Benjamin Franklin is received at the court of King Louis XVI. Source: Wikimedia Commons.

Endnotes:

[1] Seth Cotlar, Tom Paine’s America: The Rise and Fall of Transatlantic Radicalism in the Early Republic(Charlottesville: The University of Virginia Press, 2011).

[2] Philipp Ziesche, Cosmopolitan Patriots: Americans in Paris in the Age of Revolution (Charlottesville: The University of Virginia Press, 2010).

[3] Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, trans./eds. Harvey C. Mansfield and Delba Winthrop (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2000).

[4] R.R. Palmer, The Age of Democratic Revolution: A Political History of Europe and America, 1760-1800, 2 vols. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1969-1970).

[5] Susan Dunn, Sister Revolutions: French Lightning, American Light (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1996). See also: Patrice Higonnet, Sister Republics: The Origins of French and American Republicanism (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1988).

[6] Jordan Taylor, Misinformation Nation: Foreign News and the Politics of Truth in Revolutionary America (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2022).

[7] Ashli White, Encountering Revolution: Haiti and the Making of the Early Republic (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2012).

[8] Sophia Rosenfeld, Common Sense: A Political History (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2014).