The American and French Revolutions Compared: The View from the U.S.S.R.

Abstract

In recent years a number of works have appeared in the United States in which the American Revolution is compared with other revolutions, especially the French Revolution, the one closest to it in time. This is indeed a topic of great interest. It is currently receiving special attention in connection with the major propaganda campaign now under way in the United States in preparation for the two-hundredth anniversary of the American Revolution. One of the goals of this campaign is to prove the superiority of the American type of revolution. The author of the present note does not attempt a comprehensive analysis of the problem but seeks to focus on some of the current questions in the comparative history of the two revolutions. This topic has always had a political coloration, from the first tracts written in the immediate aftermath of the events of those far-off years to the most recent historical and sociological scholarship. The first writer to examine the topic at some length was F. Gentz, who published an essay entitled Comparison of the French and American Revolutions in the spring of i8oo in the Historisches Journal of Berlin, of which he was the editor. The essay was translated into English and published in book form in Philadelphia by John Quincy Adams, who was then American ambassador to Prussia. The translator, like the author, addressed himself directly to American public opinion. In comparing the two revolutions he showed a predilection for the American, which he reviewed as more moderate and less destructive whereas the French Revolution came in for sharp criticism for its radicalism. Gentz, the publisher of a reactionary journal and later secretary to Austrian Chancellor Metternich, devoted his entire life to the struggle against the French Revolution. He was a conservative in his political views and a supporter of legitimacy. A republic, like the one that had been established in the United States, was by no means his ideal. In a recently published work the French historian A. Gerard remarks that Gentz's reactionary philosophy was like a vaccine, which, it was hoped, could protect his