Revolutionaries Between Nations, 1776-1789

Revolutions rolled through Europe in the long decade between the American and French Revolutions, transferring the ideals of liberty and popular sovereignty from one people to another. Anne Thérèse Philippine d’Yve, a Brussels salonnière , rejoiced in 1787 at the insurrections erupting all around her, wherever ‘sovereigns have forced their subjects to submit to the yoke of despotism’. 1 One of her compatriots elaborated: ‘Over half of the globe, all men utter but one cry, they share but one desire. Humanity, united in action after being oppressed for so long under tyranny, rises up with pride to reclaim a majestic and powerful liberty’. 2 These pamphleteers anticipated revolution to ‘reclaim’ liberty, not in France, but throughout the small sovereignties, each with their heritage of rights, some independent, others not, and all overlooked by historians, even those writing about Atlantic Revolution. Genevan, Dutch and Belgian revolutionaries in the 1780s cast themselves as part of a universal movement that would remake the world. For these small republics at the crossroads of Europe, wedged between colliding empires, citizenship held a promise not bounded by borders. They embraced the commonalities of a cosmopolitan campaign, adopting the American Revolution as, in Benjamin Franklin’s words, ‘the cause of all mankind’. 3 Historians whose hindsight is informed by the legacy of the nation states that have endured into the twenty-first century, however, miss the connections in this first revolutionary decade, highlighting instead national differences that separated the revolutions. 4

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