John Adams and the Coming of the French Revolution

The eighteenth-century fin-de-siecle was a turning point modern history. The New World had shaken the Old with a revolutionary model for the destruction of the ancien regime. This was the age of revolutions and constitutions, and John Adams had stood front stage and center the drama, dabbling as he said, in so many Revolutions America, Holland and France.l Toward the end of his life, however, Adams was not at all optimistic about the future. In 1821 he predicted that the fabrication of constitutions, a process that he as much as anyone had initiated, would be the occupation or the sport, the tragedy, comedy, or farce, for the entertainment of the world for a century to come. Adams and his compatriots unwittingly had unleashed a chain reaction of revolutions that has not come to rest even now at the end of the twentieth century. Have I not been employed mischief all my days? Adams asked of Benjamin Rush. Did not the American Revolution produce the French Revolution? And did not the French Revolution produce all the calamities and desolations to the human race and the whole globe ever since? I meant well, however.2

Economic history · Political science · American Constitutional Law and Politics · History

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