American vs. French Revolution: A Comparison

American and French Revolutions: Key Differences

The settlers quickly realized that the 1765 proposal was destined to fail. With the Declaration of Independence of 1776, they found it impossible to continue living as subjects of the British monarch and under the protection of the laws of the motherland.

Seeking a strong separation from England, the first part of the Declaration explicitly invokes the doctrine of individual natural rights and the social contract. These concepts, previously alien to the debate on rights within the British constitutional tradition's historicist model, were now crucial. It became necessary to proclaim the monarch a tyrant—the last, strong thread connecting the settlers to the mother country—and this spurred numerous meetings of representatives.

The Concept of Tyranny

For the French constituents, tyranny represented an entire system: the ancien régime (old regime). The "tyrant" of the French Revolution was a complex network of privileges—judicial, fiscal, trade-related, and pertaining to public offices. These were all synthesized in the increasingly despised concept of the "old regime."

In contrast, the American Revolution did not need to destroy an "old regime." Unlike the French, the American Revolution stemmed from the need to oppose a legislator acting outside their legitimate jurisdiction. Tyrannus was a specific public authority acting illegally, not an entire system. A major theme in American political and constitutional culture is a persistent distrust of legislators, particularly regarding their claim to embody the general will, as in the French Revolution.

Statehood and Individual Rights

The French Revolution, committed to systematically destroying the old regime, required a strong element of statehood. The authority of the sovereign legislature, using general and abstract law, was needed to affirm and actualize individual rights. Simultaneously, through the artifice of representation, it enabled the unity of the people or nation against ancient privileges.

The American Revolution, however, stood precisely *against* any state-centric version of rights and freedoms. While the French Revolution entrusted rights and freedoms to a virtuous legislator (highly representative of the people or nation), the American Revolution distrusted the virtues of *any* legislator. It entrusted rights and freedoms to the Constitution, limiting the legislature with a higher-order rule.