The American Revolution is to a large extent said to have been influenced by the enlightenment ideology. This not being a movement per se, but a period in which scholars all over the world used reason to justify or oppose authority, it prepared Americans to oppose the British rule in thirteen states in North America that later formed the United States. Far across Europe, the enlightenment period had not gone unnoticed. However, intellectual opposition to authority did not bear any fruits to the masses. In France, there was opposition to a government led by the rich who owned land and the church that grew wealthier at the expense of spiritual impoverishment. The American Revolution was in opposition to a tyrannical British rule which took place in 1775-1783 while the French revolution took place in 1789. This paper sets to show that the American Revolution inspired the French people to believe in their capability to rally against and oust their king, which culminated in the French Revolution of 1789.
The American leading revolutionaries were Thomas Paine and Edmund Burke who had used the enlightenment idea in opposing the existing rule by the British colonialists on the American People. During the same time, the were some French scholars such as Rousseau and Voltaire who were also interested in the teachings of the enlightenment school of thought but were not inspired enough to take up arms against tyrannical rule through reason as was the case with that school of thought. The Americans used the arguments in Enlightenment that sought to restore the delineable rights of man as spelled out in the Bible. As such, the practicability of the teachings enlightenment inspired the French people to take up arms against the Church-oriented government that had imposed harsh rules and hefty taxation and denied the people especially the poor and the middle class of basic human rights (McPhee, 2002).
The success of the American Revolution was a wake-up call for the French people. American independence from British Rule fired the imagination of aristocrats who despite promising a greater phase of equality and governance were not sure about the right way to go about it. This is shown by the haste in which the French people carried out the war against the government. In their minds, they viewed the Bible as the source of all evil as it had been used by the rich and the church to oppress the commoner. One philosopher and leader of the revolution, Voltaire called the Bible a book of fairy tales and claimed that within one hundred years it would be over and done with. They thus conceptualized that to oppose the oppressive rule they had to oppose the Bible first (McPhee, 2002).
After the success of the American Revolution, there was a lot of literature both in praise and criticism of the war which found its way to the French people. However, to the French, this was a reality check on the possibility of achieving the promises of enlightenment, and reading from the literature available envisioned the benefits of a revolution. They came to realize that a better world was possible if it was created by men using reason. Unfortunately, the inspiration was somehow fanatical and to some extent realistic. This is because as it was later realized, the French took little time in planning the war. The majority middle class and the poor just descended on the ruling class leading to a very expensive quest for independence. This was different from what happened in America. The Americans had first declared their independence from England but after their claims were denied, they took up arms (Kreis 2006).
From the paper, it is clear that the French were inspired by the success of the American Revolution. Unfortunately, the way the French people carried out their revolution was different. They viewed that God, through the church and the Bible had been responsible or rather had imposed the tyranny rule. As such, the revolution was a fight against the Church and those loyal to it (McPhee, 2002). In the American case, the revolutionaries sought God’s guidance in the war and prayed for success and guidance in reason. However, despite such an enormous difference amongst many, the American Revolution had a significant role to play in fueling the French revolution.
References
McPhee, Peter. The French Revolution 1789-1799, London: Oxford University Press, 2002.
Kreis, Steven The Origins of the French Revolution, 2006. Web.