The age of political revolutions
Find out how, in a single generation, power stopped belonging to rulers by birth and started needing the consent of the ruled, and learn why a principle written down in public is so hard to keep under control.
BEFORE
Subjects, not citizens
From lesson 2 onwards, rule was justified by birth, by God, or simply by custom. A king ruled because his father had. Nobles and clergy held legal privileges that a farmer could never acquire, and as with Hammurabi's stone, the same act carried a different penalty depending on who you were.
Revolts were common, and often ferocious. But they were nearly always against a particular ruler who had gone too far, not against the idea that some people are born to rule. Limits on kings existed too: English barons forced one on their king in 1215. That was a bargain among lords, not a claim that power comes from the people.
Sovereignty
The final right to make the rules. The old answer was that it sits with a person or a family, given by God or inheritance. The revolutionary answer was that it sits with the people, or the nation, who lend it to a government and can take it back.
Everything else follows from that swap. If power is lent, it can be written down in a contract, limited, divided, and reclaimed at an election. If it is owned, none of those questions even make sense.
Check yourself
Sahar reads about two events. In one, villagers rise up, kill a hated governor and ask the king to send a better one. In the other, an assembly declares that the king holds his power only by the will of the nation. Which is a revolution in the sense of this lesson?
- The first, because real violence changed who was actually in charge of the province
- The second, because it changes the rule about where power comes from
- Neither of them, since in both cases a king is still sitting on the throne afterwards
- Both equally, because each of them was a direct challenge to a government
Show the answer
The second, because it changes the rule about where power comes from
Yes. Revolts against cruel rulers are as old as rulers. What was new after the 1770s was attacking the rule behind the ruler: the claim that authority is lent by the people and can be taken back.
Three revolutions, one generation
| Where and when | The claim | What actually followed |
|---|---|---|
| America, 1776–89 | No rule without consent; a written constitution above the government | A republic that kept slavery and took Indigenous land |
| France, from 1789 | Sovereignty belongs to the nation; a declaration of rights | A rights code and mass conscription, then Terror, then Napoleon |
| Haiti, 1791–1804 | Those declared rights apply to us as well | The only large slave revolt to end in an independent state |
THE IDEA ESCAPES
Haiti, and the words that got away
Saint-Domingue was France's richest colony, worked by around half a million enslaved people producing sugar and coffee. In 1791 they rose. Printed declarations of rights had crossed the Atlantic, thanks to the cheap press of lesson 5, and the rebels used them: if all men are born free and equal, say so here. After thirteen years of war against French, Spanish and British forces, they declared independence on the first day of 1804.
The price was long. In 1825 France sent warships and demanded an enormous payment in return for recognising the new state, and Haiti paid it off over generations while most governments refused to trade with it. A revolution can win and still be punished for winning.
Check yourself
Match each moment to what was new about it
Show the answer
- America, 1787 → A written constitution standing above the government
- France, 1789 → A public declaration of the rights of every citizen
- Haiti, 1804 → A state founded by people who had been enslaved
- Iran, 1906 → A constitution and an elected assembly won from a shah
What these revolutions actually invented
- The written constitution. A document that stands above the government and that a court can hold it to. Most countries on Earth now have one.
- The declaration of rights. A public list of things no government may do to a person, which anyone can quote.
- The citizen. One legal status for everybody, at least on paper, replacing a ladder of ranks with different laws for each rung.
- The election as the source of authority. Rulers now have to claim they represent someone. Even governments that hold unfree elections still hold them, which tells you how completely this idea won.
Check yourself
Old logic of power, or new?
- He rules because his father ruled
- A written document limits what the government may do
- Nobles pay less tax by right of birth
- Everyone is equal before the law, at least on paper
- You are the subject of a person
- You are a citizen of a nation
Show the answer
The old logic: He rules because his father ruled, Nobles pay less tax by right of birth, You are the subject of a person
The new logic: A written document limits what the government may do, Everyone is equal before the law, at least on paper, You are a citizen of a nation
Check yourself
- 1776: a public declaration states that all men are created equal. Several of the men who sign it own enslaved people, and nothing about slavery changes.
- 1791: enslaved people in a French colony quote those same words back, fight for thirteen years, and found a state in which slavery is abolished.
What does the pair tell you about writing a principle down in public?
- Declarations are just words, so they change nothing on their own
- Once a principle is public, people it was never meant for can hold you to it
- Writing rights down is dangerous and is usually a mistake
Show the answer
Once a principle is public, people it was never meant for can hold you to it
Yes, and this is the lesson-2 idea grown up. A written law is fixed and quotable, so it can be turned against the people who wrote it. Abolitionists, suffragists, trade unionists and independence movements all argued from words their opponents had published.
THE OTHER HALF
If the nation rules, who is the nation?
Saying power belongs to 'the nation' answers one question and opens a harder one. A king did not need his subjects to be alike; a nation seems to. So governments began to make one: a national language taught in state schools, a national history, national military service. In 1793 France called up citizens by the hundred thousand, something no king could ever have asked of subjects.
This built enormous strength, and it also built a new way of deciding who does not belong. Within a century that question would be asked about minorities inside settled borders, and lesson 11 shows what the answers cost.
The balance of the age
What it gave
The idea that a government must justify itself. Constitutions and courts that can strike down a law. Equality before the law as a public standard, whether or not it was kept. And a language of rights that later movements used to argue for the abolition of slavery, for the vote, and for independence from empires.
What it cost
Decades of war across Europe and the Americas, the Terror, Napoleon's campaigns, Haiti crushed by debt and isolation, and the rise of an idea of the nation that would be turned, before long, against the people inside it who did not fit.
Check yourself
After these revolutions, the countries that made them quickly gave every adult the vote and equal rights in practice.
Show the answer
False
False. Voting was at first restricted by property and to men in both France and the United States; slavery continued in the United States for another seventy years; and women waited more than a century for the vote almost everywhere. What the revolutions did was put a standard in writing that could be quoted against the people who wrote it. Most of the later gains were argued for, and won, in exactly those words.
Lesson recap
- Before, power belonged to rulers by birth, custom or God, and revolts changed the ruler rather than the rule.
- Between the 1770s and 1804 the American, French and Haitian revolutions put sovereignty in the people and wrote it down.
- Their inventions are everywhere now: constitutions, declarations of rights, citizenship, and rulers who must claim to represent someone.
- The written principle ran ahead of the practice, and that gap became the strongest tool later movements had.
- The same age invented the nation, which answered who should rule and opened the question of who belongs.