178 Chapter IX
The Sense of a New Era
The first and greatest effect of the American Revolution in Europe was to make
Europeans believe, or rather feel, often in a highly emotional way, that they lived in
a rare era of momentous change. They saw a kind of drama of the continents. This
was the generation that read Raynal’s Philosophical History of European Establish-
ments in the Two Indies, a huge work published in Paris in 1770, which went
through fifty- five editions in five or six languages within thirty years. It was a long
humanitarian recital of the evils brought upon the world by European greed and
colonialism. Seen against this background, the successful War of American Inde-
pendence presented itself as a great act of retribution on a cosmic stage. There were
many Europeans who said that America would someday, in its turn, predominate
over Europe. Nor was this the view of enthusiasts only. No reports were more
coldly analytical than those sent home by the Venetian ambassadors. The Venetian
Ambassador in Paris observed in 1783, in a report written in secrecy and with no
intention to be pompous: “If only the union of the Provinces is preserved, it is
reasonable to expect that, with the favorable effects of time, and of European arts
and sciences, it will become the most formidable power in the world.”^1
More than power was involved, and more than the grandiose conceptions of an
embryonic geopolitics. The American Revolution coincided with the climax of the
Age of Enlightenment. It was itself, in some degree, the product of this age. There
were many in Europe, as there were in America, who saw in the American Revolu-
tion a lesson and an encouragement for mankind. It proved that the liberal ideas of
the Enlightenment might be put into practice. It showed, or was assumed to show,
that ideas of the rights of man and the social contract, of liberty and equality, of
responsible citizenship and popular sovereignty, of religious freedom, freedom of
thought and speech, separation of powers and deliberately contrived written con-
stitutions, need not remain in the realm of speculation, among the writers of
books, but could be made the actual fabric of public life among real people, in this
world, now.
Thus was created an American myth, or mirage, or dream, “the first of those
great movements of secular mysticism,” to quote a recent author, “which modern
man has been experimenting with for the last two hundred years.” It was “essen-
tially the belief that certain key doctrines were achieving their first realization in
the United States.”^2 The first realization was not to be the last. Hence came an
expectancy of change, a sense of great events already begun, a consciousness of a
new era, a receptivity to that attempt at world renewal soon to be made in France.
And if anyone thinks that Americans had nothing to do with launching this mys-
tique of world revolution, let him examine the Great Seal of the United States,
conveniently printed on the back of the dollar bill, with its penetrating eye, its ev-
erlasting pyramid dated 1776, and its Latin motto: Novus Ordo Saeclorum.
1 A. Bernardy, “La missione di Benjamino Franklin a Parigi nei dispacci degli ambasciatori Vene-
ziani in Francia, 1776–1786,” in Archivio storico italiano (1920), 252.
2 D. Echeverria, Mirage in the West: A History of the French Image of American Society to 1815
(Princeton, 1956), 116, 140. This is the latest and best study of the subject for France.