Worldwide Reactions to Revolutionary Change

As the example of the colonies shows, the French Revolution inflamed politics and social relations far beyond Europe. It soon became one of the most divisive political issues in the United States. Thomas Jefferson wrote in January 1793 that “the liberty of the whole earth” depended on the Revolution’s success; John Adams, in contrast, believed that the French Revolution had set back human progress hundreds of years. In India, the ruler of the southern kingdom of Mysore, Tipu Sultan, planted a liberty tree and set up a Jacobin Club in the futile hope of gaining French allies against the British. (See “Contrasting Views: Perspectives on the French Revolution.”)

Many had greeted the events of 1789 with unabashed enthusiasm. The English Unitarian minister Richard Price had exulted, “Behold, the light . . . after setting AMERICA free, reflected to FRANCE, and there kindled into a blaze that lays despotism in ashes, and warms and illuminates EUROPE.” Democrats and reformers from many countries flooded to Paris to witness events firsthand. Supporters of the French Revolution in Great Britain joined constitutional and reform societies that sprang up in many cities. Pro-French feeling ran even stronger in Ireland. Catholics and Presbyterians, both excluded from the vote, came together in 1791 in the Society of United Irishmen, which eventually pressed for secession from England.

European elites became alarmed when the French abolished monarchy and nobility and encouraged popular participation in politics. The British government, for example, quickly suppressed the corresponding societies, charging that their contacts with the French were seditious. When the Society of United Irishmen timed a rebellion to coincide with an attempted French invasion in 1798, the British mercilessly repressed them, killing thirty thousand rebels.

Many leading intellectuals in the German states, including the philosopher Immanuel Kant, initially supported the revolutionary cause, but after 1793 most of them turned against the popular violence and military aggressiveness of the Revolution. The German states, still run by many separate rulers, experienced a profound artistic and intellectual revival, which eventually stimulated anti-French nationalism. This renaissance included a resurgence of intellectual life in the universities, a thriving press (1,225 journals were launched in the 1780s alone), and the multiplication of Masonic lodges and literary clubs.

Despite the turn in opinion, European rulers still dreaded the mere mention of revolution. Spain’s royal government simply suppressed all news from France, fearing that it might ignite the spirit of revolt. Despite similar government controls on news in Russia, 278 outbreaks of peasant unrest occurred there between 1796 and 1798. When Naples revolted under French influence in 1799, 100 republicans, including leading intellectuals, were executed when the royalists returned to power.