Abstract
Who was the first American to link the American and French Revolutions with a historical analysis of their common origins? Tom Paine clearly has a claim to the mantle of the first political Atlantic historian of the ‘two revolutions question’, explicitly linking the origins of the French Revolution to the events in the United States. Paine dedicated a good part of his life and writings in the 1790s to amplify the impact of the American Revolution upon the events in France. He also unwittingly launched what is now a 220-year-old interpretive, historiographical and methodological controversy.1
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Notes
Morris’ collusion is disputed by Melanie Randolph Miller (2005) Envoy to the Terror: Gouverneur Morris and the French Revolution (Dulles, Va.: Potomac Books), pp. 117–19.
Gordon Wood (1999) The Radicalism of the American Revolution (New York: Viking), p. 2.
Keith Michael Baker (1990) ‘Inventing the French Revolution’, in Inventing the French Revolution (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), pp. 203–23.
Annie Jourdain (2004) La Révolution: Une exception française? (Paris: Flammar-ion)
John Dunn (1972) Modern Revolutions: An Introduction to the Analysis of a Political Phenomenon (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), p. 2.
David Hume (1963) ‘Of National Characters’, in Essays: Moral, Political and Literary (Oxford: Oxford University Press), p. 210.
Alexis de Tocqueville (1953) Oeuvres complètes (Paris: Gallimard), vol. 2, pp. 334–7.
Françoise Mélonio (1993) Tocqueville et les français (Paris: Aubier), p. 255.
Bernard Fay (1927) Revolutionary Spirit in France and America (1927) (New York: Cooper Square).
Donald Greer (1935) The Terror, a Statistical Interpretation (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press).
Crane Brinton (1939) The Anatomy of Revolution (New York: W.W. Norton), p. 39.
Quoted by Linda K. Kerber (1997) ‘The Revolutionary Generation: Ideology, Politics and Culture in the Early Republic’ in Eric Foner (ed.) The New American History (Philadelphia: Temple University Press), p. 32.
Clinton Rossiter (ed.) (1961) The Federalist Papers (New York: The New American Library), p. vii.
See the account of Bernard Bailyn (2005) Atlantic History: Concept and Contours (Cambridge, Mass. and London: Harvard University Press), pp. 24–8.
R.R. Palmer (1959 and 1964) The Age of the Democratic Revolution: A Political History of Europe and America, 1760–1800 (Princeton: Princeton University Press)
Jacques Godechot (1974) Un jury pour la Révolution (Paris: Robert Laffont), p. 362.
Durand Echeverria and Everett C. Wilkie (1994) The French Image of America: A Chronological and Subject Bibliography of French Books Printed Before 1816 Relating to the British North American Colonies and the United States (London: Scarecrow Press)
Durand Echeverria (1957) A History of the French Image of American Society to 1815 (Princeton: Princeton University Press)
Hannah Arendt (1961) On Revolution (New York: Viking), pp. 110
Theda Skocpol (1979) States and Social Revolutions: A Comparative Analysis of France, Russia, and China (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), p. 7.
Stanley Eltkins and Erick McKitrick (1993) The Age of Federalism: The Early American Republic, 1788–1800 (Oxford: Oxford University Press), p. 303.
François Furet and Mona Ozouf (eds) (1989) A Critical Dictionary of the French Revolution (Cambridge Mass.: Harvard University Press)
Jean Tarrade (1972) Le commerce colonial de la France à la fin de l’Ancien Régime: L’évolution du régime de “l’Exclusif” de 1763 à 1789 (Paris: Presses universitaires de France).
Jacob Munro Price (1973) France and the Chesapeake: A History of the French Tobacco Monopoly, 1674–1791, and of its Relationship to the British and American Tobacco Trades (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press)
Albert Hall Bowman (1978) The Struggle for Neutrality: Franco-American Diplomacy during the Federalist Era (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press).
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© 2009 Allan Potofsky
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Potofsky, A. (2009). The One and the Many: The Two Revolutions Question and the ‘Consumer-Commercial’ Atlantic, 1789 to the Present. In: Albertone, M., Francesco, A.D. (eds) Rethinking the Atlantic World. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230233805_2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230233805_2
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