Chapter 13: Three Revolutions

On the morning of December 11, 1688, King James II of England dropped the Great Seal of the Realm into the River Thames and fled to France. He had been king for three years. He would never return.

What followed was not, strictly speaking, a revolution. Nobody stormed a palace. No barricades went up. The bloodshed in England itself was negligible — though Ireland and Scotland would pay a much heavier price. What happened was more like a corporate takeover: Parliament invited William of Orange, James's son-in-law, to sail from the Netherlands with an army. James's own officers defected. The political establishment concluded, with remarkably little anguish, that the throne was "vacant." William and Mary were crowned jointly, on Parliament's terms.

The terms mattered more than the monarchs. The Bill of Rights 1689 formally restricted royal power: no suspending laws, no levying taxes, no maintaining standing armies in peacetime — all without Parliament's consent. The coronation oath itself was rewritten. Previous monarchs had sworn to uphold "the laws and customs granted by the Kings of England." William and Mary swore to govern according to "the statutes in Parliament agreed on." The shift was seismic, for all its surface calm. Sovereignty had migrated from the Crown to an institution. The Earl of Shaftesbury declared: "The Parliament of England is that supreme and absolute power, which gives life and motion to the English government."

This was not popular sovereignty — Parliament in 1689 represented landed gentry and urban merchants, not "the people" in any sense a Chartist would recognize. But it was institutional sovereignty: power residing in a body that outlives any individual who holds office within it. And it came with a built-in feedback mechanism. The Crown needed Parliament for revenue. Parliament used this leverage to extract concessions. Every budget negotiation ratcheted the institution's power slightly higher. The feedback loop was economic, and it was relentless.

England's revolution succeeded, in large measure, because of its modesty. It changed who exercised power without attempting to redesign how governance worked or what it was for. It was a renovation, not a demolition. And for that reason, it was the most durable of the three revolutions this chapter examines.

Eighty-eight years later and three thousand miles west, the ambition was considerably greater.

The American Revolution began as a tax dispute and ended as a constitutional experiment that would become the longest-running written constitution in world history. The distance between those two points — from "no taxation without representation" to the elaborate machinery of checks, balances, and federalism — is the distance between grievance and governance theory.

The Founders' deepest fear was tyranny, and they had excellent reason for it. They had experienced governance by a remote metropolitan power that levied taxes, quartered soldiers, and suspended local courts without colonial consent. Their response was to build a system designed not to be efficient but to be safe — to make tyranny structurally impossible by dividing power so thoroughly that no single faction could dominate.

The Constitution of 1787 split power three ways (executive, legislative, judicial), then split the legislature in two (Senate and House), then split sovereignty itself between federal and state governments. Madison's Federalist No. 51 made the philosophy explicit: "Ambition must be made to counteract ambition." The system was deliberately slow. Deliberately frustrating. It was designed to prevent anyone from doing anything too quickly — including good things.

Where did this design come from? The question has generated scholarly debate for two centuries. The most direct influences are clear: Montesquieu's separation of powers, Locke's natural rights, English parliamentary tradition, Roman republican precedent. But one source — the Haudenosaunee Confederacy — remains contentious.

Benjamin Franklin, writing in 1751, wrote, in language that damns his compatriots more than its nominal targets, that "Six Nations of ignorant savages should be capable of forming a scheme for such an union... and yet that a like union should be impracticable for ten or a dozen English colonies." Congress would later pass a resolution in 1988 recognizing Iroquois influence on the Constitution. But historians like Elisabeth Tooker and Jack Rakove argue the direct evidence is thin — the Haudenosaunee system included matrilineal societies, clan mothers choosing leaders, and structures profoundly alien to the document the Founders produced.

The most honest assessment is that the Confederacy was a proof of concept rather than a blueprint. It demonstrated that a multi-nation federation could work — that separate peoples could coordinate governance without surrendering their sovereignty. The specific mechanisms the Founders adopted were drawn primarily from European sources. But the imagination that federation was possible owed something to the fact that a functioning example existed next door.

What the Constitution actually created, behind its language of "We the People," was a slaveholder's republic. The Senate was elected by state legislatures, not citizens. The Electoral College insulated the presidency from direct popular vote. And the Three-Fifths Compromise — counting enslaved people as three-fifths of a person for purposes of representation, while granting them no representation whatsoever — was not an embarrassing afterthought. It was the structural compromise that made the union possible. Without it, the Southern states would not have ratified. The feedback loop ran from propertied white men to governance and back. For everyone else, the loop was severed at the source.

And then came France. Where England had renovated and America had built from English parts, France attempted total reconstruction — and the ambition was intoxicating.

The French Revolution did not merely change the government. It tried to change everything. New calendar (Year One began in 1792). New system of weights and measures (the metric system — which, to be fair, was a genuine improvement). New religion (the Cult of the Supreme Being). New forms of address (citoyen and citoyenne replaced every aristocratic title). Even the months were renamed. Thermidor, Brumaire, Fructidor — poetry replacing tradition, reason replacing custom.

The Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen, adopted in August 1789, proclaimed what the English had implied and the Americans had asserted: sovereignty resides in the nation. Liberty, property, security, and the right to resist oppression are natural and imprescriptible. The declaration's language is Rousseau distilled into constitutional law.

The institutional trajectory that followed is the most dramatic cautionary tale in modern governance history. Estates-General (May 1789) became National Assembly, which produced a Constitutional Monarchy (1791), which collapsed into a Republic (1792), which descended into the Terror (1793-94), which exhausted itself into the Directory (1795), which fell to a coup that produced the Consulate (1799) and then Napoleon's Empire (1804). A decade from assembly to emperor. Fifteen years from the Declaration of the Rights of Man to a crowned dictator processing across Europe at the head of an army.

What happened? The question has occupied historians for two centuries, and the answer is never single. But the structural factors are visible. France's existing institutions were too delegitimized to reform incrementally — unlike England's Parliament, the Estates-General had not met since 1614 and carried no institutional authority. The social divisions were too deep — aristocracy, clergy, bourgeoisie, and urban poor were in genuine existential conflict. External war created pressure for centralization. And Rousseau's general will, when invoked under conditions of scarcity and military threat, became a license for whoever held power to claim they embodied the people's will.

The sans-culottes — working-class Parisians — practiced direct democratic politics through the Paris Sections, administrative districts where artisans and laborers met in the evenings to debate and decide. This was the closest historical approximation of Rousseau's direct democracy. But the Law of Suspects (September 1793) empowered local revolutionary committees to arrest anyone whose "conduct, relations or language" revealed them as "enemies of liberty." Revolutionary Watch Committees operated in every neighborhood. The Revolutionary Tribunal's traveling courts carried mobile guillotines.

Direct democracy under conditions of war and terror is not democracy. It is participatory authoritarianism — everyone is involved, and everyone is afraid. The feedback loop operated, but the signal it carried was fear.

There was a fourth revolution in this era. It is less often told, and its absence from the standard narrative is itself a governance story.

In August 1791, on the Caribbean island of Saint-Domingue — the richest colony in the world, its wealth built entirely on the labor of enslaved Africans — a slave revolt began. It would become the only successful slave revolution in history — and the founding of the world's first Black republic.

The Haitian Revolution applied Enlightenment principles more consistently than any of the other three. Liberty, equality, the rights of man — the enslaved population of Saint-Domingue took these declarations at face value and demanded they be honored universally. Toussaint Louverture, a formerly enslaved man who became the revolution's greatest leader, wrote a constitution in 1801 that declared: "There cannot exist slaves in this territory, servitude is therein forever abolished. All men are born, live and die free."

The 1805 Constitution under Jean-Jacques Dessalines went further still. To destroy the racial hierarchy inherited from the colonial era, it declared that "all Haitians shall be known by the generic denomination of Black" — regardless of actual skin color. Citizenship conferred blackness. Blackness conferred equality. It was a radical inversion of what Charles Mills would later call the racial contract: race as an instrument of liberation rather than subjection.

The world's response was punishment. The United States — a republic built on enslaved labor — refused to recognize Haiti until 1862, in the middle of its own Civil War over slavery. France demanded 150 million francs in "reparations" — not to the formerly enslaved, but to the former slaveholders. This indemnity, eventually reduced to 90 million, was not fully paid off until 1947. The revolution that most faithfully realized the promise of universal rights was the revolution most thoroughly punished for doing so.

Haiti's governance challenge after independence was the post-revolutionary dilemma in its starkest form. The institutions needed for stable governance were the institutions the revolution had destroyed or never inherited. Louverture and Dessalines governed as autocrats — not because they lacked democratic ideals, but because a newly free population facing immediate military threat, economic collapse, and total diplomatic isolation required centralized authority to survive. Liberation and authoritarianism were not contradictions. They were consequences of the same existential pressure.

In the middle of all this — before the Terror, with remarkable prescience — an Irish-born member of the British Parliament published a book that predicted everything that was about to go wrong.

Edmund Burke's Reflections on the Revolution in France appeared in 1790, when the revolution still looked triumphant. Burke predicted it would descend into violence and despotism. Events vindicated him with uncanny precision.

Burke's argument was not about France alone. It was a governance philosophy. The revolutionaries, he argued, were building on abstractions — liberty, equality, fraternity — while destroying the actual institutions that made social life possible. Abstract principles, applied to governance, produce destruction because they ignore the complexity of real social arrangements. Existing institutions, however imperfect, contain accumulated practical wisdom that explicit reason cannot fully articulate. Destroying them and starting from philosophical first principles severs the connection between governance and experience.

Burke's alternative was reform rather than revolution. Change from within. The small adjustment that preserves while improving. Society, he wrote, is a contract — but "not only between those who are living, but between those who are living, those who are dead, and those who are to be born." Governance is an inheritance. Each generation receives it, maintains it, and passes it on. The revolutionary who tears it down destroys knowledge that took centuries to accumulate and cannot be rebuilt in a decade.

Burke was right about the Terror. He was right about Napoleon. He was right that institutions encode knowledge their inhabitants cannot articulate. But his framework had a fatal blind spot: it could not distinguish between the wisdom of tradition and the inertia of privilege. "Accumulated knowledge" might also be accumulated injustice. The feudal bargain, after all, accumulated for five centuries — and the serfs did not find it wise.

And what of the women?

Each revolution proclaimed universal rights. Each drew a line that excluded half the human race. But the contradiction between universal language and particular exclusion was not lost on everyone.

In France, Olympe de Gouges — a self-educated butcher's daughter who had already written against slavery — published the Declaration of the Rights of Woman and of the Female Citizen in September 1791. It mirrored the Declaration of the Rights of Man, article for article, demanding that men and women share equal rights under law: shared wealth in marriages, fair inheritance, government participation. Two years later, she went to the guillotine. The formal charge was political — support for the Girondins and federalism — but her prosecutors weaponized her gender against her, denouncing her as an "unnatural" woman who had "forgotten the virtues that belong to her sex." The revolution executed her for political opposition, then used her womanhood to justify the killing. The message to other women was unmistakable.

In England, Mary Wollstonecraft published A Vindication of the Rights of Woman in 1792, arguing that women appeared inferior only because they received inferior education. Give women the same rational education as men, and they would be equally capable citizens. It was the revolutionaries' own logic turned against their practice.

The pattern across all four revolutions was the same: universal rhetoric created a space for excluded groups to claim inclusion — and then the revolution drew a line. In England, the line was drawn at the aristocracy. In America, at propertied white men. In France, at men. In Haiti, at the formerly enslaved. Each revolution simultaneously expanded the idea of who could govern and enforced a boundary around who actually would. The contradictions they created — between proclaimed universality and practiced exclusion — would generate a century of suffrage movements, abolition campaigns, and anticolonial revolts.

What do the four revolutions teach, taken together?

England's revolution preserved existing feedback mechanisms and strengthened them gradually. It produced the most stable outcome because it attempted the least. America's revolution built redundant feedback loops — separated powers, federalism, regular elections — but embedded structural exclusions that would require a civil war to begin addressing. France's revolution destroyed existing feedback mechanisms without creating stable replacements, and the rapid institutional turnover meant that no feedback mechanism survived long enough to function. Haiti's revolution faced the cruelest version of the post-revolutionary problem: the feedback loops it needed had never existed, and the world ensured they never would.

The recurring pattern is uncomfortable but clear: revolution promises liberation, delivers new forms of control, and eventually — if the society survives the turbulence — negotiates a compromise. The compromise is never what the revolutionaries envisioned. It is always less than justice and more than tyranny. And it is always, always incomplete — because the question of whose consent matters cannot be answered once and for all.

That question — whose consent? who counts as a citizen? who is included in "We the People"? — is the question the nineteenth century would spend a hundred years fighting over.

The revolutions had changed the vocabulary of governance forever. Rights. Representation. Constitution. Popular sovereignty. These words were now in the air, available to anyone who could breathe. And the people who had been excluded from the contract were already reaching for them.