1789: The Threshold of the Modern Age by David Andress

The Barnes & Noble Review

If you were to make a shortlist of history's most memorable dates -- (1066, 1492, 1776, 1941), then 1789, the year of the French Revolution, would have to be near the top. Historian David Andress isn't so much interested in 1789's specific events -- such as the storming of the Bastille on July 14th, or the issuance of France's Declaration of the Rights of Man, or even its philosophical echo in the drafting of the Bill of Rights in the new United States -- as much as he wants to explore the interconnections between all these epochal events. Andress's in-depth yet highly readable account succeeds in illuminating how 1789 was experienced as an international phenomenon in three nations undergoing major transitions: France, the United States, and Great Britain.

It was a year in which contradictions abounded. While France and the United States moved aggressively to establish written constitutions and legal protections based on universal principles of natural rights, Britain kept its governmental traditions of limited monarchy. Yet in the decade after 1789, France and the United States would pull back because of a desire to establish order amid rapid change, while tradition-loving Britain would begin gradually reforming its system and expanding its global empire. "Not least of the lessons of 1789," writes Andress, "was how fast the nations that most eagerly erected ideals into principles retreated from them in practice; and how, the nation that shunned such effusions, Britain, began reforming and empire-building.

Perhaps unlike any other single year (though the cultural tumult of 1968 comes to mind), 1789 triggered a global debate centering on change versus tradition. Inside each of the three nations Andress examines, these ideological conflagrations raged everywhere, from the halls of government to street demonstrations to the pages of political theorists. Understandably, much of Andress's account explores the ideals and often-violent events of the French Revolution. He does an outstanding job explaining the pre-1789 financial crisis of Louis XVI and how it was made worse by a feudal taxation system that exempted the nobility and clergy.

It was the French monarchy's desperate need for more revenue -- ironically created in part by France's support for the American Revolution -- that compelled Louis XVI to summon the Estates-General. The nearly bankrupt king hoped to use this ancient body to rubber-stamp his proposals for the elimination of tax exemptions for the nobility and clergy. Yet when the Estates-General actually began its deliberations, it became the focus for centuries of pent-up grievances, especially from the Third Estate (which represented the majority of French citizens). As Andress makes clear, the nobility and the clergy both opposed the king's demands for tax reform as well as the Third Estate's agenda for political inclusion. A showdown was inevitable, but it was hastened by mob violence in the streets.

In the nascent United States, the need for tax revenue also propelled political change. Under the old Articles of Confederation, the federal government lacked the power to demand taxes. It could ask the states for revenue, but the states could (and often did) ignore such requests. Those Founders who spearheaded the calling of a Constitutional Convention, like Alexander Hamilton, George Washington, and James Madison, did so to strengthen the federal government and give it stronger powers to compel taxation. Yet opponents of the new Constitution feared excessive federal power, citing the examples of monarchial France and Britain. Many state ratifying conventions, as part of their approval for the new Constitution, conditionally demanded written protections of natural liberties against governmental intrusion. These demands would be incorporated into the Bill of Rights, largely crafted by James Madison.

In Britain, King George III would become mentally incapacitated, thus triggering a constitutional crisis about the relationship between king and Parliament. If not quite so much as France, the nobility in Britain disproportionately controlled its political system. Andress writes in detail about the corrupt system of Parliamentary representation, where small boroughs of fewer than a dozen voters would send the same number of representatives as the burgeoning industrial cities like Manchester. "The distribution of seats bore no relation to population," Andress notes, rendering Britain's politics an "undemocratic system, riddled with corruption and elite patronage." Britain would change eventually, but incrementally and with relatively little bloodshed.

Andress's unique, tripartite perspective on the eventful year shows how reformers in Britain used events in France and America to buttress their demands for political reform. The threat of violence in all three nations put pressure on the political class to enact change, but also created a climate of fear that brought a predictable conservative crackdown. In France, the radicals would ultimately take control after much bloodshed, only to be ousted later by the (ultimately) conservative military coup of Napoleon Bonaparte. In the U.S., Federalists like President John Adams took draconian action against anti-government dissenters. The 1798 Alien and Sedition Acts, a true low point in the history of American law, made it a crime to speak out against the government, and was used to effectively gag Francophile democrats like Thomas Jefferson. In Britain, radicals like Thomas Paine, whose 1789 book The Rights of Man created a global sensation, were hounded by British authorities and forced to flee the country.

British Prime Minister William Pitt took advantage of France's internal troubles by expanding the British empire while trying to stifle radical voices in his own country. "Pitt's ministry founds itself in an enviable position," Andress observes, "able to sit back and watch [France's] domestic politics ruin her on the world stage." Britain moved ahead aggressively, especially in India, toward an imperial system that would make it the wealthiest nation on the planet. Meanwhile, British traditionalists such as Edmund Burke defended the historical development of the British political system as superior to the revolutionary upheavals and violence happening in France. In direct response to Burke's classic Reflections on the Revolution in France, Paine wrote his equally monumental defense of universal liberty, The Rights of Man. The passionate political debates of 1789 haven't died down since.

Regardless of the calendar, societies will always experience revolution and reaction, ever-competing claims for change and tradition. Yet the French and American model of written constitutions based on natural rights and universal principles of liberty would come to define much of the next two centuries after 1789. Looking back at the speed and magnitude of the change they wrought still yields a dramatic thrill: "Written constitutions, with liberal guarantees of rights...spread like measles across Europe and post-colonial states of Latin America from the 1820s onward." It's been less than a century since those same principles were embodied in a truly international body, the United Nations. After reading Andress's long examination of those 12 fateful months, 1789 doesn't seem so distant after all. --Chuck Leddy

Chuck Leddy is a member of the National Book Critics Circle who writes frequently about American history. He reviews books regularly for The Boston Globe, as well as Civil War Times and American History magazines. He is a contributing editor for The Writer magazine.

From the Publisher

The world in 1789 stood on the edge of a unique transformation. At the end of an unprecedented century of progress, the fates of three nations—France; the nascent United States; and their common enemy, Britain—lay interlocked. France, a nation bankrupted by its support for the American Revolution, wrestled to seize the prize of citizenship from the ruins of the old order. Disaster loomed for the United States, too, as it struggled, in the face of crippling debt and inter-state rivalries, to forge the constitutional amendments that would become known as the Bill of Rights. Britain, a country humiliated by its defeat in America, recoiled from tales of imperial greed and the plunder of India as a king’s madness threw the British constitution into turmoil. Radical changes were in the air.

A year of revolution was crowned in two documents drafted at almost the same time: the French Declaration of the Rights of Man and the American Bill of Rights. These texts gave the world a new political language and promised to foreshadow new revolutions, even in Britain. But as the French Revolution spiraled into chaos and slavery experienced a rebirth in America, it seemed that the budding code of individual rights would forever be matched by equally powerful systems of repression and control.

David Andress reveals how these events unfolded and how the men who led them, such as Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Paine, Emmanuel-Joseph Sieyès, and George Washington, stood at the threshold of the modern world. Andress shows how the struggles of this explosive year—from the inauguration of George Washington to the birth of the cotton trade in the American South;from the British Empire’s war in India to the street battles of the French Revolution—would dominate the Old and New Worlds for the next two centuries.

Publishers Weekly

Guiding readers on a journey across the "three interlocked powers of the late 18th century"-France, Britain and the new United States-historian Andress (The Terror) regales with stories of such leaders as Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Paine and Emmanuel-Joseph Sieyès, who stoked the flames of revolution, and Edmund Burke, who tried to extinguish the blaze. Looking at the social, economic, political and imperial factors coming together in 1789, Andress weighs the ironies of that revolutionary moment: the Bill of Rights and the French Declaration of the Rights of Man both appeared in that year, but Andress points out the familiar truth that the freedoms proclaimed by these documents were often compromised by the very governments that trumpeted them. A new language had emerged to confront those holding power, but that language too often licensed aggression against slaves, women and others seen as not subject to guarantees of liberty. Although Andress pedantically covers much familiar ground, he reminds us that the struggle between individual rights and oppressive social systems might have begun in 1789, but it is still with us today. Illus., maps. (Mar. 10)

Michael O. Eshleman - Library Journal

History has some years in which little happens and some in which everything seems to happen. Andress (modern history, Univ. of Portsmouth, England; The Terror) addresses one of the latter kind. Relying chiefly on secondary sources, he examines the state of affairs in the United States, Britain, and France during 1789. Here, of course, is the French Revolution, but here also is the mutiny on the Bounty, the establishment of the American federal government, the insanity of George III, William Wilberforce's battles against slavery, American-Indian aggressions, and the British Empire's challenges in India. Some of this-e.g., the French Revolution and the Bounty mutiny-has been extensively documented already, but 1789 is fresh, revealing, and insightful, particularly in its parallels among the different nations, e.g., the oppression by tax collectors everywhere. Although Andress covers a great deal of material, the narrative never feels rushed or shallow. It leaves you wanting more. A first-rate book; highly recommended for all libraries.

Kirkus Reviews

Andress (Modern History/Univ. of Portsmouth; The Terror: The Merciless War for Freedom in Revolutionary France, 2006) skillfully brings together the revolutionary currents from France, Britain and America in this exuberant study of the "hour of universal ferment."The explosive year of 1789 saw the convergence of a host of often contradictory forces-equality and human rights; the diminution of monarchial power; the spur to abolition, as well as new ways of enslavement; renewed global expansion; and the launch of the industrial revolution in the harnessing of cotton manufacturing and steam-that would usher in the modern age. Andress proceeds both chronologically and contextually, demonstrating a terrific grasp of the vast material. During the time, both France and the fledging American republic were reeling from the ramifications of the War of Independence, as both were close to bankruptcy (France having largely financed it) and grappling with constitutional crises. The new American Congress convened in New York City and argued over issues of federalism and debated a bill of rights. Meanwhile, Britain, under Prime Minister William Pitt, was recovering from the "trial of the century" of East India Company governor general Warren Hastings, as well as the destabilizing madness of George III. The same year that William Wilberforce made the ringing parliamentary denunciation of the slave trade, the new governor general of India, Lord Cornwallis, consolidated British supremacy in India; Captain Bligh wrestled mutiny aboard the Bounty; and President George Washington attempted to broker land treaties with the Indians. Rights, as Andress notes, provided the tinder of 1789, the apotheosis ofEnlightenment ideals, disseminated by legendary figures such as Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Paine. This important message endured through the turmoil and bloodshed that followed the French Revolution. A thorough, bracing primer for students of global history. Agent: Ivan Mulcahy/Mulcahy & Viney

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