Contrasting Ideals and Ends in the American and French Revolutions

This book describes momentous events in the American and French Revolutions. The American revolutionaries were nationalist patriots, who wanted independence from Great Britain and to create a new nation based on the principles of classical liberalism and Natural Rights theory. Their goal was the attainment of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, inherent in the God-given or Nature-derived rights of free men. They did not seek to overturn the basic institutions of society as eventually the French revolutionists did—when they destroyed churches, desecrated tombs, and even renamed the months of the year, creating a new revolutionary calendar. The French revolutionists adopted the revolutionary slogan Liberté, Égalité, Fraternité, but they did not grasp the fact that the leveling of society was incompatible with liberty. And regarding fraternity, they did not mean the brotherhood of all men because the nobility and common citizens who did not hold the purest aims of Jacobin ideology were exterminated.