Europe and the American Revolution 199
dated the American Revolution, to which it was collaterally rather than lineally
related. British reformers did not have to learn from America; the Westminster
group, as already noted, with a program anticipating the Chartism of the 1830’s,
went beyond the Americans in their theory of democratic representation. The
King’s party was unaware that the rebellion had any constitutional significance at
all. Even Whigs, who had defended the American cause so long as it was an issue
of British politics, lost interest after the Americans left the empire. In all the copi-
ous disquisitions of Edmund Burke on political questions, published and unpub-
lished, until his death in 1796 (and I have searched them with this in mind), there
is apparently not the slightest reference to the American constitutions.^38
There was certainly an American influence in Belgium.^39 The people of these
Austrian Netherlands produced few books, but they had an active periodical litera-
ture, in which lively interest and contrary opinions on America were expressed.
The Abbé Feller, a founder of Belgian political journalism, and soon to be the best-
known enemy of the French Revolution among Belgian writers, took an equally
disapproving view of the American, and even refused to publish the Massachusetts
constitution of 1780. The American constitutions and state papers nevertheless
became widely known, and echoes of them can be found in the Belgian revolution
of 1789. The declaration of independence of Flanders (each province announced
its independence from the Hapsburg emperor separately) reproduced certain
phrases of the American Declaration of Independence. The democratic party
which briefly existed in Belgium in 1790 pointed to some of the American state
constitutions for examples of what it wanted. The act of union of the United Bel-
gian States resembled the American Articles of Confederation in its provisions
and even occasionally in language. These new United States of Belgium even called
their central body a Congress.
In Switzerland it is not clear whether many people had more than the general
though vivid impressions of Peter Ochs and Isaac Iselin. None of the hundreds of
writings published at Geneva in these years seems to have dealt with America, and
the emigration of Albert Gallatin in 1780 was an act of youthful adventure with-
out much political significance. The Genevese, like the Dutch, were preoccupied by
their own continuing political crises. On the other hand, the Swiss doubtless read
French and German works on America, and a modern authority on Swiss consti-
tutional history emphasizes “the continuing importance” of the fact that, with the
American Revolution, “the formal establishment of a written constitution as the
basis of public law and political organization made its appearance for the first
time.”^40
38 Burke did specifically refer to the American constitutions in the debates in the Commons on
the Canada Act in April 1791. He observed that the Americans, while lacking the materials for mon-
archy or aristocracy, never “set up the absurdity that the nation should govern the nation; that prince
prettyman should govern prince prettyman, but formed their government, as nearly as they could,
according to the model of the British constitution.” It was, however, a “bare imitation”; and the
English- speaking Canadians, having just fled from the American Revolution, wanted no bare imita-
tion but the real thing. Parliamentary History, X XIX, 365.
39 T. K. Gorman, America and Belgium: a Study of the Influence of the United States upon the Belgian
R evolution of 1789–1790 (London, 1925), 125–27, 157, 207–44.
40 E. His, Geschichte des neuern schweizerischen Staatsrechts (Basel, 1920), I, 14.