Europe and the American Revolution 179
The influence of the American Revolution in Europe has been thoroughly stud-
ied only for France. It is possible, however, by putting together sporadic pieces of
evidence, some of them of uncertain significance, to present an impression of what
Europe as a whole thought and felt about the events in America; and such is the
purpose of this chapter. Only the immediate reaction of the years before 1789 is
considered, since the French Revolution and events flowing from it had the effect
of eclipsing the American Revolution in the European consciousness, and even of
distorting or transfiguring it, causing some to believe in a great international or
world revolution common to Europe and America both, and others to distinguish,
like Gentz and J. Q. Adams, between an undesirable revolution in Europe and a
revolution in America that had been no revolution at all.
There were great differences, country by country, in the way in which Europeans
reacted. At one extreme, there were three countries in which admirers of the Ameri-
can Revolution enjoyed, or seized, the opportunity for political action in their own
affairs. These three were England, Ireland, and the United Provinces. In England
those who most warmly sympathized with America were kept busy attending meet-
ings, forming associations, drafting plans, and conducting propaganda for parlia-
mentary reform. In Ireland and in the Dutch provinces they formed militia compa-
nies, wore uniforms, attended drills, and built up an actual revolutionary pressure
which produced real results. As one of the Dutch leaders said, to follow the example
of America meant that all should be ready, “every man with his musket.”^3 Where
action of such positive kind was possible there was less need to vent one’s feelings in
poems, orations, pamphlets and treatises on distant lands.
At the other extreme, south of the Alps and Pyrenees, the American Revolution
seems in these years to have produced little commotion. Carli’s Lettere americane of
1780 proves to be about the Lost Atlantis. It was with Latin America that these
countries had their contacts, and the important works of two American- born Jesu-
its, in refuge in Italy after the dissolution of the Jesuit order—Molina on Chile and
Clavigero on Mexico—were written in Italy during the American Revolution, on
which, however, they gave no information. Knowledge of British America had long
been scarce in southern Europe, and the governments there had no desire for their
subjects to learn about it now. Probably beneath the political censorship there were
stirrings of interest that cannot now be traced. A few pamphlets of Benjamin Frank-
lin’s appeared in Italian, but excitement in Italy over Franklin, and over the United
States, was apparently greater after 1796, that is, after the Italian revolutions which
accompanied the French irruption, and which freed the press and opened the way to
political experimentation. I know of only one work of Italian authorship, and one of
Spanish, specifically on the subject of English- speaking America, between the
American and the Franco- European revolutions: Castiglioni’s travels published at
Milan in 1790, which showed a realistic approach to American politics, and a work
published at Madrid in 1778 by Don Francisco Alvarez.
Don Francisco’s is a curious production, which may give evidence of an actual
curiosity about the American Revolution held down by the censorship of an ap-
3 Quoted from J. D. van der Capellen van de Poll by H. L. Fairchild, Francis Adrian van der Kemp
(N.Y., 1903), 56.