Revolutions Take Generations

The Bastille looms large in the revolutionary imagination. When Paris crowds seized the French king’s fortress in July 1789, they unwittingly created a model for every subsequent upheaval. From the Russian Revolution through the “color revolutions” of the early 2000s to today’s calls for an “intifada revolution,” would-be revolutionaries imagine their movements as versions of the one in 1789: brusque, often violent ruptures in a nation’s political life that incise a line of demarcation in time, dividing the old-regime past from a radically new and different future.

This vision took shape during the half century from 1775 to 1825, the era of the American, French, Haitian, and Spanish American revolutions. Patriots proudly proclaimed the rights of man while shattering European empires and launching dozens of democratic republics. A central article of faith for these revolutionaries and their heirs was that they were beginning “the world anew,” in the Anglo-American radical Thomas Paine’s memorable phrase.

Critics of revolutionary movements are similarly focused on this era. They point to the dark underbelly of the Atlantic revolutions: how they ended up hardening racial divisions, spawning authoritarian regimes, and catalyzing the creation of new empires. Many right-wing critics have attributed these ills to the force of revolutionary ruptures, arguing that when revolutions demolish a nation’s ideological and social foundations, violence and extremism, not liberation, are the result.

[Rebecca L. Spang: How revolutions happen]

But both cheerleaders and critics have misunderstood the age of revolutions—and a central dynamic of modern politics. Far from being composed of sharp ruptures, revolutionary change in the 18th and 19th centuries was a generational affair. The revolutionary transformations demanded a long and difficult apprenticeship in the practice of mass politics. It was a younger cohort of revolutionaries, acculturated to social mobility by its early experiences, that finally managed to create mass movements after 1800. Recognizing the incremental pace of political change in the age of revolutions should spur us to rethink our expectations of what revolution can do, both in the present and for the future.

The main grievance of 18th-century revolutionaries was that their societies were structured by hierarchies fixed at birth. The era’s bewigged aristocrats, baroque rituals, and sailing ships may now seem alien. The hardening lines of social and economic inequality that underpinned them are uncannily familiar. In the Americas, millions of people lived in subordination, enslaved, based on the color of their skin. In Europe, wealth was becoming concentrated in the hands of a small minority. Social mobility was exceedingly difficult to achieve anywhere.

Starting in the early 1770s, revolutionaries set their sights on overturning these rigid hierarchies. The French National Assembly declared the abolition of all legal privilege starting weeks after the fall of the Bastille. This included practices such as feudal justice and later the “tyranny” of primogeniture, which transferred a father’s wealth to his eldest son, denounced by both Thomas Jefferson and François Lanthenas, a French friend of Paine. In the highlands of Peru, during the early 1780s, Native rebels took up arms against the tiny minority of Spaniards who ruled over them. When a massive revolt of enslaved people broke out in 1791 in Saint-Domingue, France’s wealthiest Caribbean colony, equality was one of its watchwords.

Inequality proved much easier to denounce than to eliminate. One reason for its durability was that the old regime was well entrenched and able to defend itself. Impressive wealth, legal bulwarks, and armed force all conspired to resist revolutionary change. The Peruvian revolt of 1780–81, for example, was met with ferocious repression by the Spanish crown. Dozens of its leaders were executed in gruesome fashion in Cuzco’s central square.

Patriots realized that small groups of committed revolutionaries were doomed to fail. To overcome the old regime’s resistance, they needed to create mass movements. And here revolutionaries encountered a deep and insidious obstacle: themselves. No matter how radical their ideas were, the first generation of patriots was a product of the 18th-century world. They had grown up with and internalized its hierarchical codes. These habits of mind made collaborating across social groups very difficult. White, Black, and Native patriots organized largely separately. Wealthier and well-born revolutionaries systematically sought to command the revolutions in the making, refusing to share power with the less fortunate.

Internal divisions damaged or shattered revolutionary coalitions over and over again. French revolutionaries faced a persistent gulf between the aims and tactics of elite revolutionaries, who dominated their country’s governing bodies, and ordinary people organizing in villages and cities. Patriots in Saint-Domingue—the future state of Haiti—were deeply divided not only between white and Black but also between wealthier people of color, who had been free before the revolt, and self-emancipated former slaves. The hostility between ex-slaves and free people of color, many of whom had been enslavers themselves, was often visceral.

In North America, wealthy white men retained a hammerlock on the patriot movement in its first decades. During the imperial crisis, from 1765 to 1775, it was men such as John Hancock and the Lee family, among the richest people in America, who directed the political movement. Independence in 1776 did little to change this state of affairs. Gentlemen, like the Virginia planter George Washington, dominated the new governments. It is no accident that the U.S. Constitution, one of the era’s most durable republican achievements, was drafted in a secret conclave and ratified by purpose-chosen assemblies stocked with the well-off.

By 1799, the Atlantic revolutionaries’ record of political accomplishments was decidedly mixed. They could count some successes. But the major achievements, including emancipation in Saint-Domingue, republicanism in France, and the very existence of the United States, all seemed to stand on a knife’s edge.

Enter the second generation of revolutionaries. Around 1800, patriot movements throughout the Atlantic world experienced a changing of the guard. The elders were leaving the political stage—some, such as Washington and Benjamin Franklin, were already dead by 1800—and a younger generation, born after 1760 and reared in the crucible of the revolutionary upheavals, was taking their place.

This younger generation’s early experiences primed it to see the world very differently than its forebears had. Crucially, this generation viewed social status as malleable and changeable. This new, more flexible vision of the social order was shared by both high- and low-born. When Gabriel Aguilar, a poor miner in Upper Peru, started in the 1790s to have visions of numinous beings who assured him that he would marry an elegant lady and become a king, he found a receptive audience among the Cuzco gentry for his dreams of grandeur. Enslaved people, such as the Virginian Gabriel Prosser, felt that freedom could be in their grasp. In 1799, Gabriel organized a massive revolt that, had it not been betrayed, would have violently shaken the edifice of slavery in the American South.

The new generation’s egalitarianism was tangible in the everyday life of the Atlantic world’s cities. Washington, D.C., which became the U.S. capital in the late 1790s, was famous for its social mixing: The great lived and drank shoulder to shoulder with ordinary folks in its taverns and boardinghouses. Theaters, dance halls, and public expositions multiplied rapidly after 1800 in Europe, creating an extended world of public spaces shared by gentlemen and the working classes. U.S. Senator Jonathan Roberts, who became one of the tribunes of democratic republicanism in the early 19th century, recalled how as a young man in the 1790s he had developed a horror of “cast[e]s, and classes”—any and all forms of inherited social status or assumed superiority.

The social attitudes of the younger generation gave it an aptitude for mass political organizing that crossed lines of class and racial caste. The Democratic-Republicans in the United States were among the first to build a durable alliance of white smallholders and grandees. They triumphed in the national elections of 1800, with the help of an elaborate party apparatus that connected citizens across lines of class, and remained in power for more than two decades. Elections that took place across Spanish America in 1812 and 1813, under a new constitution, were the most inclusive to date, granting nearly universal manhood suffrage that embraced Black and Native people as well as the poor. In Haiti, a citizen army became the foundation of the new nation, serving both as a center of political engagement and as an aegis against foreign enemies.

The movements that took shape after 1800 propelled and sustained revolutionary political change. The United States became secure in its independence and the safety of emancipation in Haiti grew more assured. South America finally broke with Spain, and far-reaching political and social reforms began in many of its regions, particularly along the Caribbean coast and the Rio de la Plata. In Europe, the decline of the old regime accelerated as legal reforms and major shifts in property ownership empowered a new middle class.

[Rebecca L. Spang: The revolution is under way already]

Yet the price to be paid for the growth of mass movements was high: Revolutionary politics went in illiberal directions across much of the Atlantic world. In the United States, the Democratic-Republican party worked systematically to exclude Black Americans from politics. The Haitian government, even as it defended the freedom of formerly enslaved people, curtailed those people’s freedom of expression and created a command economy. In South America and Europe, young charismatic leaders succeeded in bridling the mass movements and turning them into vehicles for one-man rule and new imperial states. Though they implemented revolutionary programs in law, social policy, and culture, they did so while creating new forms of hierarchy.

Some 250 years after the age of revolutions began, we still live with its troubled legacies. This era remains both the origin point and the template for our contemporary political world. Rediscovering its generational rhythm can provide useful insights and correctives for the present.

It is high time to abandon the deceptive, quasi-messianic vision of revolution that the early modern patriots proclaimed. Their dream of abrupt and complete revolutionary transformations, which could improve the world seemingly overnight, can easily become a dangerous mirage. Not so much, as right-wing critics might argue, because it leads to revolutionary overreach. Rather, because the fantasy of transformative change in an instant—a Bastille around every corner, if you will—spawns disillusionment and despair when it fails to materialize. The story of the Atlantic revolutions counsels a longer view, recognizing that some kinds of change will take a generation or more to come to fruition. Impatience can be a would-be revolutionary’s worst enemy.

This history of the Atlantic revolutions also suggests a bittersweet future for today’s radical politics. Those in the generation that is coming of age now have a more visceral awareness of political ills, like the propensity for strongman politics and the pervasiveness of racial exclusion, than many in their parents’ generation. My older daughter, born when Barack Obama was in the White House and marked by the racial-justice protests that have taken place since 2020, has a view of the world that is already tangibly different from the one that I had at her age. There is reason to be optimistic that the worldviews of this rising generation will allow it to complete some of the slow revolutions that its parents’ generation began. Like their 18th-century forebears, though, today’s young people are likely to find that these revolutions will be neither pure nor complete. They will have to find a way to live with the uncomfortable knowledge that organizing against great injustices can end up reinforcing or even creating insidious new forms of exclusion.