Atlantic Revolutions

Although sometimes extended to earlier upheavals, the term “Atlantic Revolutions” refers most commonly to the uprisings in Europe and the Americas between 1750 and 1850. The major revolutions during this period occurred in the United States (1775–1783), France (1789–1815), Haiti (1791–1804), and Spanish America (1810–1825), with smaller uprisings breaking out in other parts of Europe, such as Switzerland and Russia, as well as Brazil. Seeing these events as linked under the rubric of Atlantic Revolutions is a relatively new concept.

Concept.
For much of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries revolutions were studied within national histories and discussed as glorious and unique founding moments. This model began to change after World War II, both as a result of the oceanic history model popularized by the French Annales School of history (which looked at phenomena happening in many countries bordering a common body of water) and as a result of postwar politics. The creation of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) accelerated interest in seeing the Atlantic as an integrated region, as scholars looked for connections between the histories of the United States and its European allies. The first historians to speak of Atlantic Revolutions were Jacques Godechot and R. R. Palmer in the 1950s and 1960s. Their writings, which focused on uprisings in Europe and the United States, helped define the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries as the “Age of Revolutions” or “Age of Democratic Revolutions.” Nevertheless, their arguments were criticized by historians who posited that, in trying to see disparate movements as part of a single Atlantic Revolution, Godechot and Palmer had ignored the complexities of each.

The 1980s saw a new wave of interest in Atlantic history and in the question of linkages between revolutions around the Atlantic. Whereas Palmer and Godechot had been chiefly interested in the North Atlantic and rarely addressed Haiti and Latin America in their work, these regions have figured more prominently in the “Atlantic history” of recent scholarship. The best work of the early twenty-first century stresses also that comparative study is not a substitute for understanding each revolution in detail. Nevertheless, pan-Atlantic analysis can deepen our understanding of each of them.

Causes.
A cursory overview of the four major Atlantic Revolutions reveals important differences. The American Revolution was started by European settlers in a New World colony who felt they were not being treated fairly by their brothers in the metropole and who were anxious to control their own economy and borders. The French Revolution, which erupted on the European mainland in a society that was still largely feudal, was fed by resentment over disparities in privilege and became much more violent than its American counterpart. The Haitian Revolution, which turned the French colony of Saint-Domingue upside down, was led by slaves who sought their freedom during the chaos of the French Revolution. The Latin American Revolutions, less far-reaching than the French or Haitian Revolutions, broke out only after invaders had toppled the Iberian dynasties; they were led by Creole elites (Europeans born in the New World) who sought to protect the status quo.

Despite these and other differences, there are multiple points of convergence between the Atlantic Revolutions—in their origins, development, and legacy. The popular understanding of a revolution is that it is a situation in which “the people” rise inevitably against a horribly oppressive government, at the moment when conditions have reached their worst. Many aspects of the Atlantic Revolutions do not, however, fit this image. First, the populations in each area were diverse, and lacked a common identity and common grievances. In British North America, northerners and southerners had different interests, as did patrician landowners and urban workers. Old Regime France was a society rich in diversity—of religion, language, wealth, privilege, locality, and race. In colonial Saint-Domingue (now Haiti), French law differentiated between whites, blacks, and people of mixed race; further tensions existed within each group, such as between poorer Creole whites, richer Creole landowners, and European-born French officials. In Latin America, society was stratified racially, economically, and in terms of birthplace.

Second, revolutions were not always launched by the humblest members of society. The needy and hungry played a key role in the French Revolution especially, and popular violence was an important component of nearly all the Atlantic Revolutions, such as the one that arose in Mexico. Nevertheless, the poor were often unwilling to challenge the existing order, and revolutions were led, in general, by members of relatively privileged elites angered by a loss of autonomy or status. These included wealthy landowners in the Americas, lawyers in France, and priests and military officers in Mexico and Gran Colombia (Colombia, Ecuador, and Venezuela of the early twenty-first century). Even in Haiti, where slaves directed rebel armies, revolts were often led by house slaves, or freedmen, like Toussaint-Louverture rather than by the field slaves who suffered the greatest mistreatment. In situations where peasants did have rebellious inclinations, revolutionary elites sought control of the uprisings.

Third, even when groups had grievances, their dissatisfaction was not necessarily destined to turn into full-scale revolution. The decision to risk one's life challenging the existing monarchy and army was not an easy one. Within every socioeconomic group, individuals disagreed about the wisdom of trying to overthrow the government; bitter conflict erupted between those who desired revolution and those who preferred the status quo or more moderate change. In many places where the populace suffered great misery, revolutions did not break out.

Dissatisfaction morphed into revolution only because of certain triggers and unforeseen events. In British North America, responsiveness by the monarchy to the colonists' complaints about taxation could have kept the colonies within the empire. In France, King Louis XVI was widely acclaimed as a reformer until a series of mistakes by his government convinced many people in Paris that the nobles, clergy, and royal ministers were conspiring against them. In Haiti, slaves had long engaged in clandestine acts of resistance, but did not launch an effort for full emancipation until the chaos of the French Revolution was under way. Even in Spanish America, where the crown's new centralizing efforts had left many Creoles unhappy for decades, frustration led to revolution only after the French invaded the Iberian Peninsula under Napoleon. It is also true that these revolutions could not have succeeded unless a constellation of factors prevented the state from being able to suppress them. Uprisings hardly succeeded everywhere; in many places with difficult conditions (such as Russia and the French islands of Martinique and Guadeloupe), governments quashed local revolts before they spread.

Another important similarity is that each of the Atlantic Revolutions was driven by not only internal causes but also international conflicts. One of the most important causes of all the Atlantic Revolutions was the Seven Years' War (1756–1763; also called the French and Indian War), which reconfigured the British, French, and Spanish empires. Britain and France faced tremendous debt after the war, and their need to raise taxes to repay it reverberated throughout the Atlantic. In British North America, alarm over “taxation without representation” led to a growing desire for independence. In France, the looming bankruptcy of the monarchy, ruined by both the French and Indian War and support for the American Revolution, prompted the king to call an Estates-General and ultimately become powerless to stop increasingly radical demands for change. Spain was less afflicted financially, yet its reorganization of imperial administration after the war disturbed both Creoles and native groups. The 1780 Túpac Amaru revolt in Peru was an early sign of this discontent.

Yet another commonality in the Atlantic Revolutions was the role of Enlightenment ideas and increased literacy. Scholars disagree about the extent to which books can cause revolutions and note that works often called Enlightenment classics were read by a very small number of eighteenth-century readers. Moreover, subjugated populations in the New World and Europe hardly needed Enlightenment writings to convince them of the inequity of their condition. At the same time, Enlightenment ideas did play an important role in shaping how these revolutions developed. Elites from Paris and Philadelphia to Port-au-Prince and Río de la Plata had read Enlightenment books, and been exposed to ideas of popular sovereignty and national sovereignty. When their governments later acted in ways they found reckless, they drew on these ideas to argue that citizens had a right to dissolve the existing government and rule themselves. Even for those without access to books, cheap new forms of print such as newspapers and pamphlets spread revolutionary ideas, as did public spaces such as coffeehouses, taverns, and political clubs. Word of mouth also spread revolutionary ideals among those who could not read.

Despite the role of new ideas, few revolutionaries in the Atlantic saw themselves as trying to create wholly new systems. In the eighteenth century the word “revolution” was still tied to the verb “revolve,” implying a return to the way things used to be, before modern corruptions. In British North America, colonists did not see themselves as asking the monarchy for something new, so much as insisting that traditional English liberties be applied to them as in the past. In the cahiers de doléances (grievance lists) they prepared for the Estates-General, many rural French villagers called not for the destruction of the monarchy, but rather for it to be more active in enforcing customary restrictions against greedy nobles. In Haiti, slaves sought a rupture with the past in ending slavery; however, they often stated a preference for monarchy over republicanism and sought independence only when Napoleon seemed ready to re-impose slavery, a full decade after the Revolution began. In Spanish America, revolutionaries depicted themselves as trying to reestablish the level of autonomy they had before the crown's centralizing reforms; they also saw themselves as protecting the Catholic Church against those citizens who hoped to weaken it.

A final linkage between the causes of these revolutions is that each made the next more thinkable. The North American colonists who broke with King George III had some models, such as England's Glorious Revolution of 1688. Nevertheless, in abolishing monarchy and creating a republican government based on a written constitution, the founders of the United States embarked on a new course. Their success inspired would-be revolutionaries throughout the Atlantic. The French Revolution provided 0195176322.atlantic.01.tifThe Declaration of Independence. Thomas Jefferson and the committee that drafted the Declaration of Independence—John Adams, Roger Sherman, and Robert R. Livingstone—submitting their text to the Continental Congress. John Hancock presides; Benjamin Franklin sits in front of Jefferson. Engraving by Edward Savage based on Congress Voting the Declaration of Independence, painting by Robert Edge Pine, 1776. Prints and Photographs Division, Library of Congressa model of more radical egalitarianism and sparked multiple emulators. For its part, the Haitian Revolution sent shockwaves throughout the Atlantic, inspiring slave revolts elsewhere but also prompting slave owners to brutally crush any sign of dissension. Although the Latin American Revolutions appeared to come at the end of a chain of revolutions, by the time they happened in the 1810s and 1820s, European countries were in the throes of a conservative phase, and rule in France had passed back to the monarchy; the successful revolutions in Spanish America gave renewed optimism to the young French republicans who would launch the Revolution of 1830. Links between these revolutions also existed on a personal level; figures such as Thomas Paine, Henri Grégoire, Joel Barlow, Francisco de Miranda, and Simón Bolívar built an Atlantic republican network, offering each other advice about how best to ensure success.

Development and Challenges.
Revolutions around the Atlantic world shared not only common triggers but also important parallels in their development. Even in cases where multiple groups agreed to launch a revolution, consensus did not necessarily exist on what it should look like; abolishing an Old Regime was easier than deciding on the contours of a new one. In both France and Haiti, internal dissension turned bloody. One challenge was determining the relative strength of national and local governments; even as new national governments and new capitals were founded, many citizens felt greater allegiance toward local leaders. Coming up with a workable—and widely acceptable—constitution was another challenge. The United States had less difficulty in this regard than other new republics, yet even its original constitution (the Articles of Confederation) had to be scrapped when it proved ineffectual. Even when governments developed promising constitutions that pointed toward democracy, the charismatic military heroes who had led revolutions were often unwilling to step aside. Napoleon cast aside the constitution that had existed before his ascent and declared himself emperor. Toussaint's constitution made him leader of Haiti for life. José Antonio Páez seized power in Venezuela, resisting the constitution drafted by the national government of Gran Colombia.

Another challenge concerned the diversity of local populations. Revolutionary declarations about the rights