Transcript Atlantic Revolutions and Their Echoes

Atlantic Revolutions and Their Echoes
1775-1914
Importance of the French Revolution
• The French Revolution was the centerpiece of a
revolutionary process all around the Atlantic
world between 1775 and 1875
• Atlantic revolutions had an impact far beyond the
Atlantic world
• Inspired efforts to abolish slavery, give women
greater rights, and extend the franchise in many
countries
• Nationalism was shaped by revolutions
• Principles of equality eventually gave birth to
socialism and communism
Revolutions a Ripple Effect
• Revolutions of North
America, Europe, Haiti, and
Latin America influenced
each other - they shared a
set of common ideas
• Grew out of the European
Enlightenment – Idea that it
was possible to engineer,
and improve, political and
social life, traditional ways
of thinking were no longer
untouchable
Popular Sovereignty
• Core political idea was “popular
sovereignty”—that the authority
to govern comes from the
people, not from God or
tradition
• John Locke (1632–1704) argued
that the “social contract”
between ruler and ruled should
last only as long as it served the
people well
• Main beneficiaries of revolution
were middle-class white males
(except in Haiti)
• GOAL: extend political rights
further than ever before, can be
called “democratic revolutions
North American Revolution, 1775–1787
• Struggle fro independence
from oppressive British rule
• Launched with the
Declaration of
Independence 1776
• Military Victory against the
British in 1781
• Federal Constitution
drafted in 1787 – 13
colonies become one
nation
Conservative Political Movement of AR
• American Revolution was
a conservative political
movement
• Aimed to preserve
colonial liberties, rather
than gain new ones
• For most of seventeenth
and eighteenth centuries,
the British North
American colonies had
much local autonomy
Maintaining Status Quo
• Colonists regarded autonomy as their birthright
• Few thought of breaking away from Britain before
1750 – because of security, protection in war,
access to British Markets
• Colonial society - was far more egalitarian than in
Europe, (all free people enjoyed the same status
before the law)
• Less poverty, more economic opportunity , fewer
social differences
• They were republican well before the revolution
Causes for Revolution
• Britain made a new drive to control the colonies and get
more revenue from them in the 1760s
• Needed money for its global war with France, imposed a
number of new taxes and tariffs on the colonies
• Colonists were not represented in the British parliament
• Challenged colonial economic interests
• Attacked established traditions of local autonomy
• British North America was revolutionary for society that
had already emerged, not for the revolution itself - no
significant social transformation came with independence
from Britain
• Accelerated democratic tendencies - already established
• Political power remained in existing elites -property
requirements for voting were lowered but remained intact
Effects of Revolution
• Many Americans thought they were creating a new world
order - some acclaimed the United States as “the hope and
model of the human race”
• Declaration of the “right to revolution” found in the
Declaration of Independence inspired other colonies around
the world – Latin America, Vietnam
• U.S. Constitution- Bill of Rights, Checks and Balances,
separation of Church and State - was one of the first lasting
efforts to put Enlightenment political ideas into practice
The French Revolution, 1789–1815
• French soldiers had fought for the American revolutionaries
• Government was facing bankruptcy – from helping with
American Revolution
• Attempted to modernize tax system and make it fairer, but
was opposed by the privileged classes
• King Louis XVI called the Estates General into session in a
new effort to raise taxes
• First two estates (clergy and nobility) were around 2
percent of the population
• Third Estate was everyone else
National Assembly
• When the Estates General convened in 1789,
Third Estate representatives broke loose and
declared themselves the National Assembly drew up the Declaration of the Rights of Man
and Citizen, launched the French Revolution
French Revolution a Social Conflict
• Unlike the American Revolution,
the French rising was driven
by pronounced social conflicts
• Titled nobility resisted monarchic
efforts to tax them
• Middle class resented aristocratic
privileges
• Urban poor suffered from
inflation and unemployment
• The peasants were oppressed
• Enlightenment ideas gave people
a language to articulate
grievances
Violent, Radical, French Revolution
• Ended hereditary
privilege, Abolished
slavery (for a time), the
Church was subjected to
government authority,
king and queen were
executed (1793)
• Terror of (1793–1794) Maximilien Robespierre
and his Committee of
Public Safety killed tens of
thousands of people
regarded as enemies of
the revolution
A New France - French Revolution
• Effort to create a wholly new society - 1792 became
Year I of a new calendar
• Briefly passed a law for universal male suffrage
• France was divided into 83 territorial departments
• Created a massive army (some 800,000 men) to
fight threatening neighbors
• Nationalism, with revolutionary state at the center
Influence of French Revolution
• Napoleon Bonaparte (r. 1799–
1814) seized power in 1799
• Preserved many moderate
elements of the revolution - kept
social equality, but got rid of
liberty, subdued most of Europe
• Imposed revolutionary practices
on conquered regions
• Resentment of French
domination stimulated national
consciousness throughout
Europe
• National resistance brought
down Napoleon’s empire by
1815
The Haitian Revolution, 1791–1804
• Saint Domingue (later called
Haiti) was a French Caribbean
colony
• Majority of population were
slaves - around 500,000 slaves,
40,000 whites, 30,000 “free
people of color”
• French Revolution sparked a
spiral of violence - revolution
meant different things to
different people
• Massive slave revolt began in
1791 - became a war between a
number of factions
• Power gradually shifted to the
slaves, who were led by former
slave Toussaint Louverture
Haitian - Unique Revolution
• Only completely successful slave revolt in world history
• Renamed the country Haiti (“mountainous” in Taino)
• Identified themselves with the original native
inhabitants
• Declared equality for all races
• Divided up plantations among small farmers
• Haiti’s success generated great hope and great fear created new “insolence” among slaves elsewhere,
inspired other slave rebellions, caused horror among
whites, led to social conservatism , increased slavery
elsewhere, as plantations claimed Haiti’s market share
• Napoleon’s defeat in Haiti convinced him to sell
Louisiana Territory to the United States
Spanish American Revolutions, 1810–1825
• Native-born elites (creoles) in Spanish
colonies of Latin America were offended
at the Spanish monarchy’s efforts to
control them in the 18th century
• Latin American independence
movements were limited at first because
of: little tradition of local selfgovernment, society was more
authoritarian, with stricter class divisions
, whites were vastly outnumbered
• Creole elites had revolution thrust upon
them by events in Europe
• 1808: Napoleon invaded Spain and
Portugal, put royal authority in disarray,
Latin Americans were forced to take
action, most of Latin America was
independent by 1826
Spanish American Revolution
• It was a longer process than in
North America
• Latin American societies were torn
by class, race, and regional
divisions
• In Mexico, move toward
independence began with a
peasant revolt (1810) led by priests
Miguel Hidalgo and José Morelos creole elites and clergy raised an
army, crushed revolt
• Fear of social rebellion from below
shaped the whole independence
movement
Nativism and Reversal of Roles
• Leaders of independence movements appealed to the lower
classes in terms of nativism: all free people born in the
Americas were Americanos
• Lower classes, Native Americans, and slaves got little benefit
from independence
• Proved impossible to unite Spanish colonies, unlike the
United States - distances were greater, colonial experiences
were different, stronger regional identities
• After Latin America gained independence, its relationship
with North America gradually reversed
• The United States grew wealthier and more democratic,
became stable Latin American countries became
increasingly underdeveloped, impoverished, undemocratic,
and unstable
Echoes of Revolution
• Voting rights: by 1914, major
states of Western Europe, the
United States, and Argentina
had universal male suffrage
• Even in Russia, there was a
constitutional movement in
1825
• Abolitionist, nationalist, and
feminist movements arose to
question other patterns of
exclusion and oppression
The Abolition of Slavery
• Slavery largely ended around the world between 1780 and 1890
• Enlightenment thinkers were increasingly critical of slavery
• American and French revolutions focused attention on
slaves’ lack of liberty and equality
• Growing belief that slavery wasn’t necessary for economic
progress
• Three major slave rebellions in the British West Indies showed
that slaves were discontent; brutality of suppression appalled
people
• Abolitionist movements were most powerful in Britain - 1807:
Britain forbade the sale of slaves within its empire 1834:
Britain emancipated all slaves other nations followed suit, under
growing international pressure
• Most Latin American countries abolished slavery by 1850s 
Brazil was the last (1888)
• Resistance to abolition was vehement among interested parties
in the United States, civil war to ended slavery 1861–1865
Results of Abolition
• Abolition often didn’t lead to
the expected results little
improvement in the
economic lives of former
slaves
• Unwillingness of former
slaves to work on plantations
led to a new wave of global
migration, especially from
India and China
• Few of the newly freed
gained anything like political
equality
Nations and Nationalism (Change)
• Revolutionary movements gave new prominence to more
recent kind of human community—the nation
• Idea that humans are divided into separate nations, each
with a distinct culture and territory and deserving an
independent political life
• Before the nineteenth century, foreign rule in itself wasn’t
regarded as heinous most important loyalties were to clan,
village, or region
• Independence movements acted in the name of new nations
Power of Nationalism 19th Century
• Inspired political unification of
Germany and Italy – Otto Von
Bismark
• Inspired separatist movements by
Greeks, Serbs, Czechs, Hungarians,
Poles, Ukrainians, the Irish, and
Jews
• Fueled preexisting rivalry among
European states - drive for
colonies in Asia and Africa
• Nationalism took on a variety of
political ideologies
• “Civic nationalism” identified the
“nation” with a particular
territory, encouraged assimilation
Feminist Beginnings
• Feminist movement developed in
the nineteenth century, especially
in Europe and North America
• Transformed the interaction of
women and men in the twentieth
century
• European Enlightenment thinkers
sometimes challenged the idea
that women were innately inferior
• During the French Revolution,
some women argued that
liberty and equality must include
women
• First organized expression of
feminism: women’s rights
conference in Seneca Falls, New
York, in 1848
Transatlantic Feminist Movement
• Argued for a radical transformation of the position of women
• 1870s, movements focused above all on suffrage - became a
middle-class, not just elite movement, most worked through
peaceful protest and persuasion
• By 1900: some women had been admitted to universities,
women’s literacy rates were rising , some U.S. states passed laws
allowing women to control their property and wages, some areas
liberalized divorce laws, some women made their way into new
professions
• 1893: New Zealand was the first to grant universal female
suffrage, Finland followed in 1906
• Movement led to discussion of the role of women in modern
society
• Opposition some argued that strains of education and life
beyond the home would cause reproductive damage, some saw
suffragists, Jews, and socialists as “a foreign body” in national life