ONE
A traveler returning home to Geneva a few years after the battles of Lexington and Concord was amazed by the veritable “brochure mania” that had seized his small city-state.1 Within days of an armed skirmish, printing presses had churned out hundreds of pamphlets assaulting the governing councils of Geneva, many of the handbills framed in terms of individual sovereignty secured in Philadelphia. A few years later, first in the United Provinces of the Netherlands in 1787 and then in the Belgian provinces, lawyers, clerics, and the occasional philosopher launched another barrage of brochures denouncing the rule of tyrants and asserting the sovereign rights of independent peoples. The American War for Independence of 1776 was but the first of the cascading Atlantic revolutions.
Pamphlets, not muskets, ignited the revolutions that swept through America and Europe at the end of the eighteenth century. Written in Philadelphia coffeehouses, hawked on the streets of Geneva, and reprinted by Amsterdam booksellers, these documents defined the transgressions of tyrants as they called the people to rebellion. The rhetoric of freedom traveled on folded sheaves, often small enough to hide in a pocket. Transported, read, and debated in North America, Geneva, the United Provinces of the Netherlands, and the Belgian provinces, few were as bold and none were as widely read as Thomas Paine’s, but like Common Sense, they roused their readers to revolution.
In 1776, Paine, like the pamphleteers he inspired on both sides of the Atlantic over the next two decades, deployed “language as plain as the alphabet … to make those that can scarcely read understand.”2 His was a readership largely unaccustomed to the world of politics. In uncompromising prose, Paine made his argument for American independence to farmers and merchants as well as members of Congress, caricaturing British King George as “a worm, who in the midst of his splendor is crumbling into dust.”3 The forty-six pages of Common Sense, written, rewritten, and written again in Paine’s rooms above Robert Aitken’s bookshop on Front Street in Philadelphia and in noisy coffeehouses nearby, found their way into the hands of readers, some in positions of power, but more not. This network extended not only up and down the East Coast, it crossed the Atlantic. William Carmichael, aspiring to diplomatic service, pocketed Common Sense to give to Charles Dumas, a French immigrant born in the German principality of Ansbach and living in The Hague. From there, Paine’s call to revolution resonated among small republics and monarchies from Edinburgh to Warsaw, challenging the reigns of foreign emperors and the privileges of aristocratic orders. “In this century when sovereigns force their subjects to submit to the yoke of despotism,” the call for liberty could be read everywhere,” a countess, Anne Thérèse Philippine d’Yve, proclaimed in her pamphlet published in Brussels, the capital of the Austrian Netherlands.4
For more than a hundred years, pamphlets had proved an ideal medium for disseminating messages of protest. These unbound booklets of printers’ sheets, folded and stitched together without a cover, were published cheaply wherever there was a printing press and a cause. In the last decades of the eighteenth century, pamphlets, running the gamut from short poems in rhyming verse to theoretical treatises, some eight pages, others fifty-two, carried ideas across the Atlantic. Their crossings, like the revolutionaries who transported them, extended in both directions. In the 1770s, American pamphleteers quoted liberally from the philosophers of the European Enlightenment—Locke, Rousseau, Voltaire, Montesquieu, and Hume, among others—who had viewed the American wilderness as a blank slate on which to sketch the natural rights of man. American revolutionaries eagerly embraced this European vision of the exceptional promise of their primeval wilderness. A decade later, Genevan, Dutch, and Belgian insurgents, in turn, modeled their calls to arms on those of the victorious American patriots. They cast their struggles for sovereignty in the 1780s in the language of American liberty.
Monarchs and their ministers were as frightened by the discovery of a stack of new pamphlets as by the unearthing of a cache of arms. These small documents with their inflammatory rhetoric could be concealed in a closed hand and readily passed along. In 1787, an informant alerted Austrian spies to the identity of Brussels pamphleteers whose words incited villagers to revolt against their Austrian rulers. Austrian soldiers raided the house of a wine merchant in the center of Brussels, seized stacks of pamphlets, and, on the emperor’s orders, set them ablaze in the Grand Place. Before they went up in smoke, these revolutionary pamphlets drew readers, some literate, others not, into debates and discussions that resonated in the streets and cafés far beyond the benches of parliament and the seats of government.
Annotations scribbled in the margins of the revolutionary pamphlets that survive today in libraries and archives reveal a chain of engaged readers on both sides of the Atlantic. This alternative political sphere entangled ideas of liberty ranging from grievances against hereditary despots living far away to visions of a new world of individual sovereignty. The French journalist Camille Desmoulins, later dispatched to the guillotine by his friend the Jacobin Maximilien Robespierre, marveled at the free exchange of revolutionary ideas in the small states at the center of Europe. Opposing ideas battled openly in the Belgian provinces, he wrote, truly “the land of the pamphlet.”5 That would not be as true in revolutionary France, where the concentrated political power and ever-present guillotine inhibited debate.
These pamphlets that readily crossed borders, oceans, and mountains linked the revolutions, small and large, short-lived and enduring. Wherever they alighted, the pamphlets forged constituencies of like-minded though often far-flung revolutionaries. The readers of Common Sense from Philadelphia to The Hague discovered an abstract liberty that called them to a shared revolutionary cause. At the beginning of the revolutionary era, John Adams, happy that he “had been sent into life at a time when the greatest lawgivers of antiquity would have wished to live,” worried about the effect “so popular a pamphlet [as Common Sense] might have among the people.”6 He understood that it was in this alternative sphere of politics, the international network of individuals traveling outside the national institutions where Adams governed, that pamphlets resonated.
Paine’s Common Sense: “We have it in our power to begin the world over again”
In 1775, the outspoken Philadelphia physician, philanthropist, and abolitionist Benjamin Rush envisioned a pamphlet that ventured far “beyond the ordinary short and cold addresses of newspaper publications” in its uncompromising proclamation of American rights and its resounding condemnation of British rule.7 Rush would have written the argument for American independence himself, but many patients had left his care after the publication of his abolitionist tract a few years earlier. Instead he gave the assignment to an audacious young itinerant and part-time journalist, Thomas Paine, whom he had met at Robert Aitken’s bookshop. Thirty-eight years old, Paine had weathered two short-lived marriages, two stints at sea, an apprenticeship in corset making, the bankruptcy of a tobacco goods store, and dismissal from positions as a government tax collector and a teacher.
Paine had come to America from England in search of employment, a letter of introduction from Benjamin Franklin in hand. He landed in Philadelphia, sick with what was probably typhus. Nevertheless, the English radical exulted: “Those who are conversant with Europe would be tempted to believe that even the air of the Atlantic disagrees with the constitution of foreign vices. There is a happy something in the climate of America which disarms them of all their power of infection and attraction.”8 In his optimism, he echoed any number of European exiles who had already arrived in American harbors and armchair philosophers like the widely read Abbé Guillaume-Thomas Raynal, who could only imagine this virgin land of forests and rocky coasts peopled by self-sufficient farmers and their families.
Writing did not come easily to Paine. Franklin furnished Paine copies of British treatises on liberty to consider. Paine cast aside these polite but often abstruse philosophical arguments. Instead, he chose to write in a clear, straightforward prose for all to read. No long sentences or classical references would get in the way of his argument for American independence. Rush struggled to find a publisher willing to take on the incendiary pamphlet. Philadelphia bookseller Robert Bell finally agreed to print the pamphlet intended for a wide audience in 1776, but only on the following terms: if Common Sense lost money, Paine would pay publication costs himself; if it made a profit, half would go to Bell and the other half to buy mittens for American troops stationed in Canada.
FIGURE 1.1
Portrait of Thomas Paine, author of Common Sense. Portrait by James Watson, copied from the original by Charles Wilson Peale. Henry Laurens commissioned the portrait in 1779 to take with him to the United Provinces to raise money for the Continental Congress. The portrait was seized by the British when they captured Laurens at sea and has disappeared. It was acquired by a Paine admirer who engraved it in 1783, and made it available to other admirers of Common Sense, though labeled with the name “Edward Payne” instead of Thomas Paine. By permission of the National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C.
Published anonymously, Common Sense fulfilled its author’s expectations. Paine, never one to underplay his own achievements, estimated that 120,000 pamphlets were sold between February and May 1776.9 Some readers speculated that the author, known only as “the Englishman,” was Benjamin Rush; others suspected Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, or perhaps John Adams, the author of Novanglus and no friend of the king. The first thousand copies sold out in a week. Without pausing to consult Paine, Bell printed a second edition. After arguing over profits and production costs, Paine engaged a new publisher for a third edition, which he signed and expanded. These six thousand copies sold for a shilling (a little over five dollars in current value), half the cost of the original edition. Before long, sixteen editions had been published in Philadelphia alone. Each copy sold typically had more than one reader, as it passed from hand to hand in households and on the streets. Whether one-fifth of all colonists read it, as many historians have claimed, no other pamphlet was as instrumental in fomenting revolution.
Benjamin Rush proudly observed that Common Sense had “an effect which has rarely been produced by type and paper in any age or country.”10 Delegates lodged in Philadelphia for the Continental Congress sent copies of the pamphlet home to be “lent round” to those still “afraid of the ideas conveyed by the frightful word Independence.”11 By February 1776, Samuel Ward wrote to his brother, “I am told by good judges that two-thirds of this City & Colony are now full in his Sentiments; in the Jerseys & Maryland &c they gain ground daily.”12 From North Carolina, John Penn told the other delegates to the Continental Congress that everyone was talking about “Common Sense and Independence.”13 Travelers carried it from one locale to another throughout the colonies, while other copies arrived by post. Where the pamphlet landed, booksellers set type to reprint it. Paine was particularly pleased that he had reached his intended audience, not just the literary elite with their substantial personal libraries and comfortable reading clubs but “those that can scarcely read.” That was what set his pamphlet apart from what had come before.
A resolute republican, Paine set out to persuade Americans to “reject the usurpation” of both king and parliament with his scathing attacks on the powerful and his uncompromising argument for independence. “There is something exceedingly ridiculous in the composition of monarchy,” Paine explained, casting the hero of the legendary Battle of Hastings as “a French bastard landing with an armed banditti, and establishing himself king of England against the consent of the natives.”14 The Americans needed no king, he argued; their liberty was their natural right. Press reports that King George had branded the Americans as rebels in his opening address to Parliament gave Paine’s characterization credibility.
“’TIS TIME TO PART.” It was just “common sense,” Paine told the colonists who drilled on their town commons, but still expected to resolve their grievances peacefully with the mother country. Independence, Paine insisted, a full six months before the Declaration of Independence, “is in reality a self-evident proposition.” It was not reasonable that the vast American continent should be ruled by a “small island” on the other side of the Atlantic. Paine was calling for more than a break with England. “We have it in our power to begin the world over again,” he assured his new compatriots in what he pictured as “Free and Independent States of America.”15 In this radically different republic, the world would find peace, civilization, and commerce.
Loyalists were quick in their retort. James Chalmers of Charlestown, Maryland, answered Paine’s devastating critique of the English monarchy with Plain Truth, a forthright defense of the balanced constitution dependent on the crown. Criticizing Paine’s “intemperate zeal … as injurious to liberty,” Chalmers called for “a manly discussion of facts.”16 For him as for Edmund Burke, there was no such thing as abstract liberty. Instead, their liberty was anchored in traditional English principles. The readers of Plain Truth looked not to win American independence but instead to secure a British promise to respect individual civil liberties in America as in England.
Readers in England not only followed the discussion of rights in the colonies but jumped into the fray, even when their best interests might have counseled against it. Major John Cartwright published his defense of American natural rights in 1775, American Independence. He resigned his naval commission in 1777, acknowledging that his public support of the American rebels might “possibly be displeasing to Government.”17 In his pamphlet, Cartwright did not envision the actual separation of the colonies from England, but sought reforms that would build the foundation for a “lasting union between our colonies and the mother country.” Striving to write in “a plainer and indeed a coarser language … for the unrefined, though sensible bulk of the people,” he proclaimed in terms less bold than Paine: “The Americans, in common with the whole race of man, have indisputably an inherent right to liberty.”18 Renowned Welsh philosopher and Unitarian minister Richard Price went farther, advancing an even more unapologetic justification of the American rebels in his pamphlet Observations on the Nature of Civil Liberty (1776). He blamed Parliament for letting loose “the spirit of despotism and avarice” in the colonies in the form of onerous duties. Their liberty threatened, Price explained, “the people fled immediately to arms and repelled the attack.”19 That was only natural.
Written for readers on both sides of the Atlantic, Price’s pamphlet sold sixty thousand copies in just days. In gratitude, the Continental Congress offered Price citizenship if he and his family would emigrate to America. Price replied that although his ideas readily crossed the Atlantic, he could not travel. He regretted that he was too ill to visit “the future asylum for the friends of liberty.”20 So Thomas Paine and a number of Americans, including Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, and John Adams, came to visit the English champion of American liberty at his home just north of London.
An aristocrat living in the northeastern reaches of the United Provinces of the Netherlands, Joan Derk van der Capellen translated Price’s pamphlet into Dutch.21 Van der Capellen had already published his own pamphlet asserting that if the American colonies rose up to claim their liberty, European revolution would follow. “The flame that burns in America will spread quickly,” he wrote, “engulfing all of Europe, littered as the continent is with flammable material.” The tyrannical blunders of despotic emperors, kings, and especially the Dutch stadtholders would provide ample fuel for the insurrections.22 The Europeans had long suffered under their rulers. The Enlightenment ideals that sparked the rebellion in America would inspire them, especially the seasoned revolutionaries in the United Provinces, to claim their natural rights and to set the old order of Europe aflame. Van der Capellen’s stirring defense of the American revolutionaries and blistering attack on both the British king and Dutch stadtholder found its way into bookshops throughout the United Provinces.
Americans applauded their Dutch defender. Gosuinus Erkelen, a Dutch merchant living in Philadelphia, wrote van der Capellen in July 1777 to announce that he had distributed the pamphlet throughout the war-torn colonies. Erkelen conveyed greetings from the governors of Connecticut and New Jersey, Jonathan Trumbull and William Livingston. Trumbull thanked van der Capellen for his defense of liberty, which the American defined as “ancient and indubitable Rights, immunities & privileges … founded upon natural Liberty” and affirmed by royal charter and parliament. “The Cause of Liberty is not peculiar to our free State: it is a common cause,” Trumbull asserted. He wrote van der Capellen from his conviction that the “the few other free States which God in his Providence hath preserved from being Swallowed up by Tyranny,” could not rest “indifferent” to the destruction of American liberty.23
Van der Capellen suggested to his American correspondents that a diplomatic appointment might be fitting compensation for his pamphleteering. “My forefathers have, since time immemorial had a seat in the Corps and Estates of the Nobles,” he boasted, “but the trust of the American people means more to me.”24 Van der Capellen hoped, he wrote Livingston, that their extensive transatlantic correspondence would “lead to friendship based on the mutual love of liberty for all the human race.”25 The appointment was not forthcoming. Instead, the colonial governors acknowledged van der Capellen’s role in drawing the attention of readers on both sides of the Atlantic to “their common cause … the cause of liberty” and asked him to translate their pamphlets advocating the American position into Dutch.26 Erkelen’s mother would pay for the printing of the pamphlets, they promised van der Capellen, but would he please personally distribute them throughout his country. In letters to Price, van der Capellen had confided his dreams of emigrating to Maryland, where friends were launching a commercial venture. When he could not convince his wife that their daughter, who would inherit substantial lands in the United Provinces, would find suitable marriage prospects in America, van der Capellen returned to pamphleteering and translating, lecturing his compatriots “on the parallels between the American Revolution and the seventeenth-century Batavian Revolution.”27 He was often joined by John Adams, who was residing in The Hague trying to get the Dutch to be the first to acknowledge him as an official ambassador from the new republic.
The conservative English political philosopher Edmund Burke hailed that recognition of American independence as the beginning of “a great revolution.” It had launched something new, unprecedented, and exceptional. His analysis, which would be echoed by generations of American historians, portrayed this new nation as “a new species, in a new part of the globe.” For Burke, the American Revolution had altered politics as much “as the appearance of a new planet would in the system of the solar world.”28 The founding fathers of America had stunned the world with their declaration that all men were “created equal” and “created by their Creator with certain unalienable rights,” including “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” What was more, they had proclaimed those truths to be “self-evident.”
Dutch, Genevan, and Belgian pamphleteers saw the American Revolution not as exceptional, but as a beacon foreshadowing what was to come in Europe. Was this first revolution fought on the farms and in the forests in the New World really so far removed from the despots of the old world and their mercenary armies, Dutch revolutionaries asked, echoing van der Capellen. They recognized the American ideas of insurrection that traveled freely in pamphlets eastward across the ocean and then from port cities around the European continent. In the smaller states of Europe where grievances had rumbled for decades, discussions of revolutionary commonality clearly overshadowed Burke’s allusions to American exceptionalism, beginning in Geneva while the Americans were still fighting for their independence.
Brissot, or “Le Philadelphien” in Geneva: How Liberty Lost Its Only Asylum in Europe
Inspired by all that he read of liberty in America, a restless French lawyer–turned–journalist and aspiring philosopher, Jacques-Pierre Brissot, longed to cross the Atlantic to visit the newly independent republic for himself. As a young man, the thirteenth child of a Chartres tavern keeper, Brissot had taken up residence in Paris, “the center of science and a stage worthy of his efforts.”29 Threatened there with a lettre de cachet for libel, he fled to England. In 1782, after he failed to raise the funds necessary for a transatlantic voyage, Brissot settled for a shorter journey, to Geneva.
Geneva lay just across the border from France. “I could not have chosen a more favorable time for understanding the energy of the republican spirit,” Brissot mused. The disenfranchised poor of the independent city-state with its long republican traditions were demanding the rights of citizenship. Brissot arrived one year into the Genevan Revolution. In this, the first European revolution since the American War for Independence, Brissot expected to observe “man in all his force and dignity as nature made him.”30Brissot narrated a pamphlet, Le Philadelphien à Genève ou Lettres d’un Américain sur la dernière révolution de Genève (The Philadelphian in Geneva, or Letters from an American on the recent revolution in Geneva), from the perspective of an American because, he wrote, America had many “lessons to share with an old continent.”31 If the Americans were “a people whom nature, education, and tradition had endowed with that equality of rights which is everywhere else considered a chimerical dream,” the Genevans, independent heirs of William Tell, were worthy revolutionary followers.32 The American Revolution was meant to be imitated, and where better than in the prosperous Genevan republic?
Brissot wrote to challenge stories told by the Paris-based Genevan journalist Jacques Mallet du Pan of crowds rampaging and blood flowing through the streets of a ravaged city-state. To discredit the first European challenge to the aristocracy, Mallet du Pan had substituted “romantic scenes for the truth,” Brissot charged.33 Determined to set the record straight, Brissot based his 231-page pamphlet not only on eyewitness observations but, he claimed, on research in Genevan libraries. He detailed the political disputes that had rumbled through Geneva over the course of the eighteenth century. The Genevan constitution as it had evolved limited the franchise to fifteen hundred wealthy Genevan burghers, excluding both the five thousand natives, artisans mostly employed in watchmaking, and the yet more numerous habitants, the newest immigrants. The Act of Mediation of 1738 had named France and the neighboring Swiss cantons of Bern and Zurich as responsible for maintaining peace in the prosperous city-state. In the 1760s, in a flurry of pamphlets, the party of Représentants called for enlarging the franchise to include the natives. They denounced their opponents, the Négatives, as luxury-loving aristocrats determined to preserve the power of the oligarchic elite at all costs, even if that meant inviting foreign rulers to intervene in the affairs of the proudly independent Genevan republic. In the winter of 1780–81 Représentants warned the French, “in a century as enlightened as ours,” not to interfere as they reached out to the natives.34
On 5 February 1781, a contingent of Geneva’s natives and habitants stormed the municipal arsenal. In one of the many pamphlets printed in response, a fictional “Genevan citizen” explained to “a French philosopher” that disenfranchised Genevans had “armed themselves to secure their rights.” Five days later, the largest of Geneva’s governing bodies, the General Council of Geneva, voted to grant citizenship rights to one hundred of the natives and twenty habitants, hoping “to attach them permanently to the public interest” and thereby to defuse the unrest.35
The more elite Small Council refused to ratify the decision of the General Council. It stalled for more than a year, until April 1782, when it finally voted to overturn the reform. Within hours, armed natives took the Négatives hostage, occupied City Hall, closed the gates to the city, and persuaded the Représentants to support their insurrection.
The triumphant Genevan revolutionaries, including twenty-five-year-old François Ivernois, the wealthy financier and senior statesman Étienne Clavière, and Jacques Antoine du Roveray, the attorney general, welcomed Brissot to their city in June 1782. Brissot sensed the excitement of a people building their society anew without the constraints of the Old Regime. “Wherever a government does not respect property and crushes individuals, the people have the right to object and then to break their social contract and reclaim their liberty,” he asserted. Genevans, like the Americans, had claimed the right to resistance as “a natural right.”36 Meeting in their cercles or neighborhood clubs, the revolutionary Genevans impressed Brissot with their talk of reconstituting their republic to redistribute rights and to break the aristocratic hold on the governing councils. Brissot was especially taken with the women of Geneva, who discussed politics with intelligence. Their political engagement would serve them well as republican wives and mothers, he predicted, not at all like the courtly French ladies with their affairs and idle gossip. Brissot would later compare the modest American women in their demure calicoes to his friends’ wives in the Genevan republic.
Moderation was the badge of honor claimed by both sides in the Genevan Revolution of 1782. Pamphleteers espousing the cause of the Représentants, like Brissot, took on the identity of Bostonians or Philadelphians to emphasize the connection between the first two revolutions. They quoted liberally from Jean-Jacques Rousseau, a native son whose relations with Geneva and the natives were complicated. The Négatives’ pamphlets alleged a determining foreign influence on the Genevan revolutionaries, charging that “most of the leaders of the faction are hardly Genevan,” one of them even born in America.37 They painted Genevan revolutionaries as wild democrats impetuously leading the once-prosperous city-state into anarchy.
“A pamphlet mania took possession of the excited townsmen,” Mallet du Pan, born a Genevan natif himself, observed of the steady stream of brochures that issued forth from Geneva printing presses between February 1781 and August 1782.38 Responding to events, usually within a day or two, pamphleteers often elicited an equally timely rejoinder. One anonymous pamphleteer claimed in verse, after the storming of the arsenal, that at least two thousand natives were ready to shed their last drop of blood to preserve the independence of the republic and the liberty enjoyed by citizens. Banned and censored by the Small Council before the revolt in April, these pamphlets were “for the government of our century, what light is for birds of the night,” in the words of one pamphleteer.39Peddlers hid pamphlets inside the official calendars they sold and distributed them door to door. Although often addressed to the councils of Geneva, these pamphlets, whether legalistic letters or broad satirical dialogues, were clearly intended for a wider audience inside Geneva and beyond.
Like the Americans before them, the Genevans were convinced that “the universe” was watching them. They, too, assumed peoples from abroad would come to their aid in their struggle against a “monstrous government” imposed by violence and maintained by the force of foreigners, as they had for the Americans.40 In a barrage of desperate pamphlets filled with dire descriptions of their besieged state, Genevan revolutionaries appealed to their potential foreign allies, including the British, for military support in the battle against their powerful neighbors. They tried to assure these neighbors that their intention was only to restore the rights formerly enjoyed by their ancestors, denying any claim to innovation. No foreign aid was forthcoming.
Instead, summoned by the Genevan Négatives, troops from France, Sardinia, and Bern approached the embattled city-state and encamped, ironically, at the chateau Ferney, which had formerly been occupied by the philosopher Voltaire. These foreign “war-making machines” were armed with an ultimatum for the revolutionary republic: restore the prerevolutionary aristocratic order or be slaughtered. Pamphlets circulated by the Négatives predicted the success of these well-drilled troops in “pacifying” Geneva.
Brissot described Genevan “women, children, men of every age” defiantly taking to the streets to fight for their city. “The enthusiasm for the defense of liberty was universal,” he reported before he fled to safety in the mountains.41 Others suggested that after years of governmental deliberation and reams of legislation, the Genevans themselves in one instant had become a people with one cause.42
Unlike the American revolutionaries, though, the Genevans found themselves surrounded by hostile forces intent on restoring the prerevolutionary governmental structure. After debating their options, Genevan revolutionaries fled across the lake. In a final pamphlet addressed to their fellow citizens left to the mercy of the French troops, the departing leaders pledged to seek recourse “under another sky, a land where it was possible to breathe the pure air of liberty.”43
French troops marched through the city gates, disarmed the city’s militia, overturned all the revolutionary decrees passed in the spring, and levied new taxes to support their occupation. Ivernois noted that many of these same French soldiers had fought sixteen years earlier in America to establish the new republic. His own king had dispatched them to lay siege to the Genevans, Brissot lamented. “Liberty has lost one of its rare places of asylum,” Brissot wrote as he joined Genevan revolutionaries Clavière and Du Roveray in exile in Neuchâtel. They discussed the “what ifs” of the first European revolution in the company of the comte de Mirabeau and the printers of most of the revolutionary pamphlets who had also been forced to seek exile. If only the Genevan revolutionaries, “like the Americans, had had enough force to convince others to respect their struggle and to support their principles with arms.”44 If only they had had an ocean to protect them.
Americans were surprised to read about the defeat of the Genevan Revolution at the hands of the French, whose foreign minister had lent them his troops and wealth. In her history of the American Revolution, published in 1805, Mercy Otis Warren denounced the coalition of European aristocrats who had crushed the first hints of democracy on the other side of the ocean. She pronounced the French occupation of the Genevan republic as “inconsistent with the liberties of the people or the independence of their republic.”45
An anonymous Genevan pamphleteer reflected on the irony that in this era “of justice and humanity,” Geneva, the very symbol of liberty in Europe, had lost “its quality as a free state, independent, and sovereign.”46 Would the Genevans be ignored by history, they asked, their short-lived revolutionary triumph forgotten just because the city-state was “extremely small?”47 Or was the problem their bad neighborhood?
Van der Capellen’s Call to Arms in “A Republic such as ours”: The Dutch Patriot Revolution of 1787
Upon hearing of the defeat of the Genevan revolutionaries at the hands of French troops, van der Capellen advised the Genevans not only to abandon their fallen city but also to poison its atmosphere, leaving it barren, “inhabitable only by screech-owls and bats.” That warning would rouse “the remaining free commonwealths” to the defense of liberty, especially the Dutch republic that was straining under the rule of its hereditary stadtholder, Willem V.48
The irrepressible van der Capellen was convinced that the United Provinces of the Netherlands, which had itself originated in a revolution, would be the next stage on which eighteenth-century revolution would play. One hundred years earlier, Dutch nobles, merchants, and sailors had revolted against their tyrannical ruler, Philip II of Spain. Ever since, Dutch pamphlets had celebrated the courage of the revolutionary forefathers who established one of the most prosperous commercial republics in Europe. Van der Capellen saw the current stadtholder, Willem V, as but a faint reflection of the revolutionary leader chosen as the first stadtholder, William the Silent.
FIGURE 1.2
Portrait of Joan Derk van der Capellen, Patriot pamphleteer who roused the Dutch to revolution. Portrait by Louis Jacques Cathelin, 1788. Courtesy of the Atlas van Stolk Foundation, Rotterdam
European and American pamphleteers alike, including Thomas Paine, paid tribute to the heroic Dutch revolutionaries of centuries past. Few of them, however, expected the Dutch to rise up against their stadtholder in the 1780s, even though they had many grievances to lodge against the inept Willem V. On a visit to the United Provinces, Benjamin Franklin had scoffed at the mercantile practicality of his Dutch hosts. Commercial interests so dominated conversation, he reported, that a visitor could mistake the United Provinces for an immense spice shop.49 These merchants were no more revolutionaries than their stadtholder was a leader. Another traveler, the future revolutionary leader Peter Ochs from Basel, visiting his Dutch relatives in the midst of the American Revolution, had dismissed the political debates he overheard as mere factional squabbles, not the enlightened political theory that emanated from the French philosophes and inspired the Americans. Ochs speculated derisively that the flatness of the Netherlands simply did not inspire grand thoughts.50 Van der Capellen, however, was convinced that the Dutch just needed a signal to rally them to revolt.
In 1779, John Paul Jones sailed into the Dutch harbor of Texel trailing two captured English ships, all three flying the American flag. Striding ashore, Jones, the American naval hero and sometime pirate, challenged the standing Dutch foreign policy of neutrality. While he repaired his weather-beaten and battle-tested ships, Jones cast himself in verse to Anna Jacoba, Dumas’s thirteen-year-old daughter, as the friend of liberty “who tyrant power pursues!”51 Willem V, a pronounced Anglophile, called in vain for his arrest. Jones slipped safely out of Texel harbor past the storm-tossed British ships waiting to intercept him.
Jones’s visit fanned popular enthusiasm for revolutionary America, especially in Amsterdam, where he had been publicly applauded, but it exacerbated diplomatic tensions. Even as the Dutch government officially pursued a policy of neutrality and the stadtholder openly favored the British, Amsterdam merchants brazenly explored the promise of trade with the Americans.52 In December 1780, the revelation of secret negotiations between the city of Amsterdam and the Americans provoked the British to declare war on their former commercial ally. Humiliating losses in the Fourth Anglo-Dutch War shattered Dutch pretensions to status as a world power and proved the stadtholder, who would rather have allied with the British, an incompetent naval commander.
Van der Capellen seized the crisis to rally the Dutch people to form militias, drill on village greens, and free their republic from the rule of Willem V. “Arm yourselves; chuse your leaders, follow the example of the people of America,” he urged readers of a new pamphlet, Aan het volk van Nederlanden (To the people of the Netherlands), which he published anonymously and distributed through the streets of cities and villages under cover of darkness in September 1781. He called on his countrymen—aristocratic regents, merchants, and farmers—to rise up against the stadtholder who treated them, “the descendants of free Batavians,” as “hereditary vassals.” Van der Capellen proclaimed in a forthright assertion of natural rights that echoed the Americans’, “All men are born free.” He promised that “Jehovah, the God of Liberty” would favor the Dutch with his protection as he had his first chosen people, the Israelites, and more recently, the Americans.53
Although not as widely read today in the Netherlands as Common Sense is in the United States, at the time Aan het volk caused a sensation, resonating among van der Capellen’s aristocratic peers as well as with the bourgeoisie and the popular classes. While its rhetoric seems refined next to Paine’s, a conservative professor from Leiden complained that its “gruesome language would raise the hair of the most savage barbarians.”54 The government banned it after one month, but Aan het Volk was reprinted in three Dutch editions in the first year and immediately translated into French, German, and English. John Adams wrote from The Hague to friends in America that the “large pamphlet” had everyone talking.
Van der Capellen’s pamphlet soon was circulating in America, too. Abigail Adams wrote John of her hope that the spirit of the Dutch that led them “to repel the Tyranny of Philip administered by the cruel Alva” a century earlier would “cement an indissoluble bond of union between the United States of America and the United Provinces who, from a similarity of circumstances have each arrived at Independence, disdaining the Bondage and oppression of a Philip and a Gorge [sic].”55 John judged “the originals of the two Republics … so much alike that the history of the one seems but a transcript of the other.”56 They balanced their definition of liberty differently, the Dutch emphasizing tradition over the natural rights that the Americans asserted, but the parallels between the Dutch and the Americans, both relying on citizen militias to defend their freedom, were obvious to revolutionaries on the two sides of the Atlantic.
A virtual pamphlet war ensued in the United Provinces between the Patriot Party (de Patriotten), the alliance of local and provincial regents, artisans, and merchants who opposed the stadtholder, and the Orangists (de Oranjepartij), the stadtholder’s supporters, drawn from the popular classes as well as the aristocrats. Political allegiance did not necessarily follow socioeconomic divisions. As in Geneva, where the Négatives attracted support from the natives, Orangist crowds came from what the Dutch called het grauw, the mob. Ideology did not divide along the lines of an expected dichotomy, either. Patriot pamphlets like van der Capellen’s drew lessons from both the seventeenth-century Netherlands and revolutionary America. They ran together appeals to universal natural rights and a liberty based solidly in Dutch history. This union of Enlightenment rhetoric and claims founded in tradition did not set the Dutch apart from other eighteenth-century revolutionaries. The Dutch Patriots, like the Genevan Représentants before them, saw no contradiction in their multifaceted argument for liberty.
Militias organized on village greens throughout the United Provinces while the Holland Free Corps endorsed the revolutionary Leidse Ontwerp (Leiden Draft), which proclaimed liberty “an inalienable right, adhering to all the burghers of the Netherlands commonwealth.” The authors challenged the authority of the stadtholder or any other “power on earth” who would presume “to obstruct the enjoyment of this liberty.”57 Worried by the turn toward democracy, Willem V retreated to his country estate in the eastern province of Gelderland, beyond the reach of the armed Patriots.
The Patriot Revolution of 1787 was a decidedly diffuse affair, as decentralized as the Dutch republic itself. While Patriots controlled the provincial estates in Overijssel, Friesland, Holland, and Groningen, the Orangists held Zeeland and Gelderland. In Utrecht, rival estates, one Orangist and one Patriot, contended with each other for power. To break the deadlock, Princess Wilhelmina set out for The Hague. Her entourage was stopped by Patriot militias as it crossed into the province of Holland. The stadtholder was not alarmed that his wife, sister of Frederick William of Prussia, had fallen into enemy hands. Her detention would serve to justify an invasion by the Prussians led by the Duke of Brunswick. The Prussian army decisively overwhelmed the Patriot militias and crushed the Dutch Patriot Revolution, allowing Willem V triumphantly to reenter Amsterdam in September 1787.
Based on the experience of the American war and secret promises from Paris, the Dutch Patriots expected assistance from the French. They appealed to Mirabeau, who had once lived in the United Provinces, to make their case to the French foreign minister. They reminded the French philosopher that ever since their revolution more than a century earlier, the Dutch had enjoyed more sovereign rights than any other republic in Europe.58 Mirabeau, author of the influential Essai sur le despotisme (Essay on despotism), hesitated, torn between his personal friendship with the Prussian emperor and his commitment to the cause of liberty. Finally, in 1788, in collaboration with Genevan revolutionaries and Brissot, Mirabeau published Aux Bataves (To the Batavians), an ode to “the oldest of free peoples” in Europe. The pamphlet proclaimed the Dutch Patriot Revolution, like the American War for Independence, “the cause of all men,” worthy of attention. However, it chided the Dutch Patriots that they should not expect foreigners to fight their battles for them. “It is up to free nations to save themselves.”59
That was harsh advice to dispense in northern Europe, where small republics were at the mercy of the politics of their powerful imperial neighbors. Van der Capellen reminded his compatriots of the dangers for “a Republic such as ours that finds itself in the midst of European affairs.”60 At least the Americans had an ocean to protect them from what John Adams called the “Confederation” of “Crowned skulls, and numbskulls of Europe” who had allied “against Human Nature.”61 The Dutch Orangists, who supported the stadtholder much as the American Loyalists had the king, could call up imperial armies stationed in the neighborhood to maintain the privileges of the Old Regime. The Prussians had no interest in tolerating revolution just across their border in what was becoming an age of revolution.
The Revolt of the Belgians, 1787–1789: “God’s faithful servants”
“Everywhere you look, you see a continual struggle between a throne propped up by force and liberty supported by the voice of nature and law,” Brussels lawyer Charles Lambert d’Outrepont observed in his 1787 pamphlet. The renowned legal theorist, whose earlier attack on the tithes had been translated into German and English, was convinced, as van der Capellen had been, that the ideal of liberty, shared from one continent to another, seemed destined in an enlightened age to triumph over the forces of despotism. “Never have enlightened peoples better understood the dignity of men and the worth of civil liberty,” d’Outrepont explained, casting the growing Belgian resistance against their Austrian ruler’s reforms as part of the chain of revolutions that began in America and spread to Geneva and the United Provinces.62 D’Outrepont was not discouraged by the defeat of the first two European revolutions.
Just a year earlier, d’Outrepont had been one of the Austrian emperor’s most vocal supporters in the Belgian provinces. He had praised the governance of the Austrian Netherlands that Joseph II had inherited from his mother, Empress Maria Theresa, as enlightened. That was before Joseph II forced reforms from above on the Belgians, who had historically vested sovereign authority in the three estates of each of the provinces. They had assumed the emperor governed, as his mother had done, to protect them from foreign invasion, not to interfere in domestic affairs. By 1787, d’Outrepont was ready to lead the next revolution.
In their precociously industrializing society, a Belgian pamphleteer explained, “everyone lives happily in the midst of prosperity. The farmer, the artisan, the clergy, the nobility are all just one family attached to the Estates.”63 The centuries-old constitutions of the nine Belgian provinces defined the mutual obligations of the sovereign, the Austrian emperor, and the people represented by the provincial estates. Joseph II ignored the constitution, presuming to “rule above the law,” and the estates responded by threatening to withhold their taxes.64 The Austrian ruler’s proposed reforms of the church and the administration of his Belgian provinces, celebrated in pamphlets and newspapers abroad as enlightened, were denounced in a round of Belgian pamphlets as violations of their sovereignty.
Genevan and Dutch revolutionaries who had been offered shelter and freedom to worship in Brussels and Antwerp by Joseph II were caught in the middle of the battle of words. Why, the newly arrived refugees from the United Provinces asked, would the Belgians resist such an enlightened emperor? One Dutch Patriot, banker Jan Bicker, who arrived in Brussels with his family, wondered why the Belgians who had taken up arms against the Austrians claimed inspiration from the Dutch revolutionaries. “I found it a different patriotism,” Bicker commented. After a stray bullet fired by a Belgian volunteer just missed him, the Dutch revolutionary swore “to God, it was not my affair,” packed up his nine children and household help, and headed for France.65 Other Dutch Patriots followed. The entanglements of European diplomacy made for strange revolutionary alliances. The French, who had helped the Americans, had disappointed the revolutionary aspirations of both the Genevans and the Dutch, while their Austrian hosts turned out to be their revolutionary allies’ enemies.
The Belgians saw no ambiguity in their situation. They claimed, as had the Americans and Dutch before them, to be God’s chosen people. “All of Europe will be our witness,” an anonymous pamphleteer reassured his compatriots.66 Bicker may have seen their handbills appealing openly to God to descend to earth to save the Belgians, his “faithful servants” from Joseph II and his Austrian infidels as he had rescued the Israelites.67 Other Dutch Patriots would have noted the depictions of the ferocious Belgian lion, roaring, with claws extended, giving chase to the evil Austrian eagle that had ransacked churches, killed nuns, and carted off treasures.68 Belgian pamphlets deliberately echoed Dutch ones comparing Joseph II to the Spanish monarch Philip II, felled in the sixteenth century for his refusal to honor the rights of the Low Countries.
François Xavier de Feller, an ex-Jesuit and newspaper editor, published many of the attacks on the Austrian imperial reforms from Liège, a city on the verge of its own revolution against its prince-bishop, beyond the reach of Austrian censors.69 There, Jean-Jacques Tutot operated thirty-three printing presses. Other pamphlets were printed at Sint-Truiden, under the jurisdiction of Liège and controlled by the abbot of Saint Trudo, who sympathized with the revolutionaries. Brussels printer Joseph Michel, who had published many of the revolutionary pamphlets before one of his workmen denounced him to the Austrians in April 1788, moved his operations to Sint-Truiden. Michel and Tutot used an extensive network of shopkeepers, mail coaches, and friends to distribute the seditious literature through the Belgian provinces.
Many of these pamphlets likened the Belgians to the Americans, who had resisted a foreign ruler out of touch with the interests of his distant subjects. A naturally endowed, industrious people who had long enjoyed their liberty far from the interference of rulers, the Belgians had struggled mightily, as the pamphlets told it, to maintain the protection of a just and proven constitution against a foreign ruler. Like the Genevans and the Dutch before them, the Belgians were defending their historical rights as a traditionally free people. That meant the Belgians were “one hundred times more likely to succeed” than the neighboring French, who were also complaining about Louis XVI.70 The Belgians, unlike the French, already had a written constitution that guaranteed their rights.
FIGURE 1.3
“Les Biens d’autruy ne disiras pour les avoir injustement,” a satirical print from the Brabant Revolution. The Austrian eagle is attempting to escape with the treasures of the General Seminary, Leuven University, and other Belgian institutions. The Belgian lion, claws extended, roars back. J. J. Van den Elsken, 1789. By permission of the Bibliothèque Royale de Belgique/Koninklijke Bibliotheek België, Cabinet des Estampes, E 12.890 c
In 1788, the lawyer of the Estates of the Brabant province at the center of the Austrian Netherlands, Henri van der Noot, called on “the people who had vigilantly conserved their privileges” to rise up to resist “the most absolute despotism.”71 The emperor responded by ordering the arrest of all suspected revolutionary leaders. After van der Noot fled to exile in England, his mistress, Madame de Bellem, took up her pen in his absence to urge the Belgians to imitate the Americans. Together with her daughter Marianne, she distributed her own three-line poetic pamphlet, as well as other pamphlets, through the streets of Brussels.72 They apparently escaped arrest because the Austrian spies did not suspect women of pamphleteering.
The Comtesse Anne Philippine d’Yve asked rhetorically in a pamphlet dedicated À la nation (To the nation), “If this nation that was once so important, the model of the universe whose ancient glory has been inherited by the present generation would be allowed to sink into oblivion?” She answered with assurance that even though their leaders had been forced to flee, the Third Estate, the “voice of the people,” would soon rise up to remind the enlightened emperor of his duties to the sovereign people of these prosperous provinces.73 She adroitly blended two strains of liberty, one based in local tradition and the other in transatlantic ideals. While she argued that the medieval constitutions of the Belgian provinces should be preserved as the foundation of the new state, she appealed to the Belgians to fight for their natural rights and to secure their sovereignty.
An anonymous pamphlet dedicated to the Comtesse d’Yve heralded the centuries-old tradition of feminine involvement in public life in the Belgian provinces. “If the Belgians, the oldest of free peoples, have never lost their liberty,” the pamphleteer asserted, “it is because women no less than men have always worked to conserve it.”74 They were doing that still in 1789, hosting salons, but also writing, editing, and distributing pamphlets to an extensive network of correspondents from Vienna to Paris. After the countess left for Paris in 1789, she continued to send pamphlets to revolutionaries in Brussels, adding comments in the margins before she dispatched them across existing political borders. Her notations make clear the network of revolutionary writings reaching across Europe in 1789.
Working a very different set of connections, the exiled van der Noot asked the Dutch, the English, and the Prussian governments to lend military assistance to the Belgians. As recompense for driving out the Austrians, van der Noot offered to install the second son of the prince of Orange as Belgian stadtholder. The three powers scoffed, refusing to commit troops to what they viewed as a hopeless cause. His shuttle diplomacy alarmed the Dutch Patriots. Why, they asked, would the Brabant revolutionaries seek aid from the leading counterrevolutionary empire, which had just defeated the Dutch Patriots? Van der Noot’s appeal to foreign troops also unsettled many of the Belgian revolutionaries.
A secret committee, Pro Aris et Focis (For hearth and home), led by lawyer Jan Vonck, rejecting van der Noot’s diplomacy, called on the Belgian people to arm themselves. They conceived of their revolt as part of a larger Atlantic revolution fought by locally recruited militia. “The end of the XVIIIth century seems predestined to witness revolutions blazing forth all over the surface of the globe,” Vonck and his allies wrote, recounting the succession of cascading revolutions they expected to join. “The vast continent of colonial America was the first to erect the standard of liberty. … Supported by France, they broke forever the yoke of the cabinet of Saint James.” The United Provinces of the Netherlands, which had also counted on the Court of Versailles, “the sometime haven of unhappy kings and occasional supporter of oppressed peoples, tried to recover its rights and thought the happy moment had arrived when it could break stadtholderian despotism.” But, they continued, the French had abandoned the Dutch to their own means and the Patriots had been unable “to resist the force of twenty thousand Prussian bayonets.”75 The Belgians had learned their lessons from previous revolutions. They would look to their own forces and not count on foreign alliances. People made revolutions; imperial armies crushed them. Pro Aris et Focis printed thousands of pamphlets “to enlighten, awaken, and spark the genius of the Belgian people,” urging them to gather just over the border to drill.76 That was the other lesson they had learned: the force of militias recruited and sustained by widely distributed, plainspoken pamphlets.
Austrian troops swooped down on the militia’s training grounds in Liège, but Pro Aris et Focis had been forewarned and fled. The Austrians dubbed the elusive force “the army of the moon.” In September 1789, the Austrians raided a house in Brussels where, spies informed Minister Trauttmansdorff, popular revolutionaries gathered. They seized a stock of cartridges, three members of Pro Aris et Focis, and stacks of pamphlets. One of the three pamphleteers was Philippe Secrétan, a Genevan who had come to Brussels five years earlier as a tutor. When he was taken into custody, Secrétan had in his pockets three manuscripts that laid out plans for an insurrection. Based on that evidence, Trauttmansdorff believed he had found the source of the Belgian revolutionary conspiracy: a Genevan refugee and Secrétan’s lover, his employer, the Duchesse d’Ursel. Secrétan was arrested. In the pamphlet that he published in January 1790 to clear his name, Secrétan claimed the Austrians threatened to break him unless he gave them the names of the other leaders of Pro Aris et Focis. He named the duchess.77
On 24 October 1789, the feast day of the Archangel Raphael, the leaders of Pro Aris et Focis joined the provincial Belgian estates in the Dutch city of Breda to declare war against the Austrians. Their joint Manifeste du peuple brabançon (Manifesto of the Brabant people) borrowed language from the American Declaration of Independence as it enumerated the Belgian rights violated by Austrian tyranny. Joseph II “had tyrannized the Belgian People & reduced them to a Slavery contradictory to the Inaugural Pact,” they declared as they pledged “to defend and maintain our Liberty, our Religion, our Rights, our Privileges, and our customs to transmit them intact to our descendants as they were transmitted by our forefathers.”78 Like the Dutch, the Belgian revolutionaries united their defense of traditional privilege with an appeal to liberty framed in the terms of the American Revolution.
In less than two months, Belgian volunteers drove the Austrian dragoons from their provinces. They took advantage of a ceasefire in November to regroup and attack the Austrians. European commentators called the victory of the shoeless, untrained Belgian militia over the army of one of the most powerful nations of Europe miraculous. Many of these international gazettes had previously dismissed the Brabant Revolution as a “civil war” rather than a struggle for independence. We are all “BELGIANS,” the author ofMercure Flandrico-Latino-Gallico-Belgique replied indignantly, echoing Brissot’s response to similar charges leveled against the Genevans by Mallet du Pan.79 “Here we are all agreed,” the Abbé de Feller added.80 Pamphlets depicted van der Noot as the Belgian George Washington. The editor of the Journal général de l’Europe, originally a committed supporter of Joseph II’s reforms, celebrated the Brabant Revolution as the first stage of the “total overthrow of the political system of Europe.”81
“All of Europe is watching with great curiosity to see how the Belgians will use their newly secured liberty,” a pamphleteer advised van der Noot, who triumphantly returned to Brussels with his mistress, Madame de Bellem, the “Belgian Martha Washington” in December 1789.82 Van der Noot ignored the warning. Rather than electing a new assembly, the United States of Belgium consolidated power in the existing provincial estates.83 The rift between the Estates, dedicated to preserving traditional privileges, and Pro Aris et Focis, in league with the Genevan Représentants, Dutch Patriots, and American rebels, was soon apparent.
An allegorical pamphlet told the story of a band of revolutionaries who drove a despotic ruler from his throne and pursued him as he fled the palace of his forefathers. In his retreat, the prince’s crown slipped off his head and fell at the feet of the band of revolutionaries. The narrator, “a deputy from the Committee of the Moon,” asked the victorious revolutionaries what they would do with the crown.84 Their answer: they would break it into tiny pieces and distribute individual liberties to every citizen in the land. First, exhausted, they fell asleep. A cabal of monks and nobles then crept in and seized the crown, squeezing all of their privileged heads into it before running off. The moral of the pamphlet: an independent people must remain ever vigilant to secure its liberty from the grasp of the powerful and privileged, even after revolutionary victory.
“Sleep in a state, as Montesquieu says, is always followed by slavery,” Richard Price had warned in his pamphlet, Observations on the Nature of Civil Liberty. “There is nothing that requires more to be watched than power.”85 Pro Aris et Focis concurred; concentrated in the hands of the few, aristocratic power tended to tyranny. D’Outrepont, celebrating the “virtue and courage that severed the chains … of despotism,” worried in his 1790 pamphlet about the fate of the United States of Belgium if the Estates “clung to their old constitution” and “failed to imitate the example of the Americans who united their provinces into a common association … a social contract.”86 His answer was not long in coming. The Austrians reconquered the feuding Belgian provinces in November 1790. The third of three revolutions to burst upon the European stage between 1776 and 1789 was extinguished within a year.
“A general fermentation”: Independence and Liberty
America belonged to an interlinked Atlantic world where political ideas encapsulated in pamphlets traversed national borders as readily as the traveling revolutionaries who carried them. “Philosophy encouraged by the spectacle of America cannot be stopped in its progress,” future French revolutionary Jean-Baptiste Mailhe exclaimed in his pamphlet Discours sur la Grandeur et l’importance de la révolution dans l’Amérique septentrional (Speech on the greatness and the importance of the American Revolution), published in Toulouse in 1784.87 The American revolutionaries shared their revolutionary dreams, importing and exporting ideas as eagerly as they exchanged agricultural and manufactured products and traded slaves across the Atlantic. Benjamin Franklin wrote a friend that Europeans were convinced “that our Cause is the cause of all Mankind, and that we are fighting for their Liberty in defending our Own.”88 The American Revolution was no longer an exceptional event in the eyes of the revolutionaries themselves, even if Americans were surrounded by nature and their vast continent was separated from European corruption and despotism by an ocean.
“A general fermentation seems to be taking place thro’ Europe,” Richard Price, one of the conduits of that fermentation, observed in a letter addressed to Benjamin Franklin in 1787. “In consequence of the attention created by the American War, and the dissemination of writings explaining the nature and end of civil government, the minds of men are becoming more enlighten’d and the silly despots of the world are likely to be forced to respect human rights and to take care not to govern too much, lest they should not govern at all.”89 Europeans seeking “a reasoned and reasonable liberty,” a “cosmopolite” wrote from Brussels, had adapted American rhetoric to their struggles for rights, both natural and historic.90 The Genevans, the Dutch, and the Belgians discovered that overcoming entrenched privilege in Europe where monarchs lurked posed challenges not faced by Americans, an ocean removed from British rule. Even though they were defeated, the first three European revolutions shook the Old Regime. In the words of Thomas Paine, these first revolutionaries had begun, however haltingly, “the business of a world.” In Europe, as in America, “the Rubicon” had been crossed.91
One of the few French philosophes who lived to witness these revolutions, Nicolas de Caritat, the marquis de Condorcet, applauded the American insurrection for “providing the first example” of revolution. For revolutions to radiate outward beyond the minds of the few, the ideals of the Enlightenment had to be enacted, he suggested. “It is not enough that the rights of man be written in the books of philosophers and inscribed in the hearts of virtuous men.”92 The Americans, “a great people,” had built the philosophes’ new world for all to see and to emulate. Pamphlets had inspired the Americans to begin; then they broadcast the momentous news of the American Revolution, causing revolutions to pile up, one upon another. “The more free peoples that exist in the world, the more the liberty of each individual is assured,” Condorcet explained.93 Condorcet, like Brissot, narrated from an American perspective, although he would never cross the ocean.
The French philosopher Abbé Guillaume-Thomas-François Raynal, another armchair traveler whose ideas journeyed farther than he did, wrote one of the most widely read European descriptions of America. He realized that he would die “without having seen the asylum of tolerance, of customs, of laws, of virtue and of liberty” as he imagined Americans living “among the rocks, the mountains, the vast plains and their open spaces on the edges of the forests where everything is still wild and nothing calls to mind the servitude and tyranny imposed by men.” Nature itself had taught them to crave independence. The enlightened Americans recognized that “nature did not create the world so that the inhabitants of an island could force the whole world into submission.”94
Hired by George Washington and encouraged by the French minister to the United States, the chevalier de la Luzerne, Thomas Paine replied to the Abbé Raynal with a new pamphlet. Paine was determined to convince European readers, as Common Sense had the Americans, that the American War for Independence was a struggle for liberty, rooted locally, but envisioned in global terms. Paine, who had read a pirated, abridged translation of Raynal’s pamphlet, argued against what he characterized as Raynal’s reduction of the American Revolution to a battle over “a slight tax.” He did not acknowledge that Raynal had practically echoed Common Sense, and would have agreed with Paine that “our style and manner of thinking have undergone a revolution, more extraordinary than thepolitical revolution.”95 The Americans had become a new people in revolution; for the first time in the history of the world, truly free to enjoy their natural rights. Theirs was a lesson for the world.
Dutch journalist Antoine Cérisier translated Paine’s pamphlet into French.96 Liberty was exportable. Like Paine, who signed his pamphlet as “a universal citizen,” revolutionary ideas traveled well. An American traveler wrote home from Europe in 1783 to report that everyone was reading Paine’s letter to the Abbé Raynal. “The point of his pen has been as formidable in politics as the point of the sword in the field.”97 Paine sent hundreds of copies of his pamphlet to George Washington and his friends who had financed it, but its influence may have been greater in Europe.
A decade after the American Revolution began, Paine the pamphleteer was more convinced than ever that revolutionary ideas traveling the seas would knit the Atlantic world together, bringing an end to conflict. No longer divided by the threat of war fomented by imperial ambitions, republics would come together in an international federation. Science and commerce would link the peoples of the world, extending civilization. Richard Price, whose pamphlets crossed the Atlantic in the other direction, predicted in a letter to Benjamin Franklin that all of the revolutions together would yield “a state of society more favourable to peace, virtue, science and liberty, (and consequently to human happiness and dignity) than has ever yet been known.”98 Camille Desmoulins concurred. Soon, he predicted, “the English, the French, the Americans, and the Brabançons would unite as brothers” to secure their liberty.99 This revolution of the mind was more than a change in politics for Paine. In a postrevolutionary world, he predicted, “We see with other eyes: we hear with other ears; and think with other thoughts, than those formerly used.”100 Everything would change.
The French foreign minister, the comte de Vergennes, gave Paine fifty guineas to cover the costs of printing his pamphlet. It seemed a small price to pay in France’s campaign against England at the time of peace negotiations. Little did Louis XVI’s minister realize the greater threat posed to his monarch by “the contagion of liberty.” He assumed France with its legendary history of centralized absolutism was safely protected from the contagion by troops strategically deployed to suppress insurrection.
He did not realize that Europe was on the cusp of another revolutionary explosion that would eclipse the first struggles for liberty. Within a year, Peter Ochs of Basel, who retired to his reading rooms after observing the crushing defeats of the first European revolutionaries, forecast that a “French Revolution would awaken slumbering people and send a chill up the backs of aristocrats and despots throughout Europe.”101 It in turn would lend new life to the short-lived revolutions whose leaders would congregate in the new revolutionary capital, Paris.