15 - Rebellion, revolution, reform: the transit of the intellectuals

Summary

In late 1788 Louis XVI called the Estates General to meet in response to increasing agitation for reform. On 8 January 1789 Thomas Jefferson, observing the heightened political tensions, described the events and gave his benign opinion of their expected outcome: ‘from the natural progress of things [the French] must press forward to the establishment of a constitution which shall assure to them a good degree of liberty’. The author of the American Declaration of Independence suggests as well in the same letter from Paris that the American events of 1775–83 had provided the energy for this ‘illumination of the public mind as to the rights of the nation’: ‘Tho’ celebrated writers of this and other countries had already sketched good principles on the subject of government, yet the American war seems first to have awakened the thinking part of this nation in general from the sleep of despotism.’ The American War had also, though Jefferson didn’t state it, been a major source of the ongoing financial crisis of the French state. Jefferson’s letter was addressed to the distinguished London Dissenting Minister, Richard Price, an intellectual colleague in the culture of Enlightenment liberality. On 4 November 1789, Price delivered a sermon to the London Revolution Society to mark the centenary of the 1688 ‘Glorious Revolution’, in which he claimed the kinship of parliamentary sovereignty between the 1688 Settlement and the recent occurrences in both America and France: ‘After sharing in the benefits of One Revolution, I have been spared to be a witness to two other Revolutions, both glorious.’