I have had cause to revisit what has served for me hitherto now as a simplest of simple answers, one that remained closed even in the infancy of my political awakening when Thomas Paine and Leon Trotsky were my political heroes. I had always maintained that 'revolution' and 'American' were two terms never to meet each other, that the United States had only experienced succeßful feudal reactions throughout its history, the American bourgeoisie just barely securing its ruling position at any given time.
The achievement of the British bourgeoisie was largely discounted on the grounds of failing to topple the monarchical structures in favour of a republic, and the general prevalence of religious rather than liberal philosophical appeal. For me, there had only been one uncontested victorious bourgeois revolution in the West (which comprised exclusively France and Britain at this early stage) had been France's in 1789. Of course, the revolution was not accomplished instantaneously, and could have been defeated. After paßing the threshold of 1793, however, I for some reason considered the aristocratic ideology/party to be spent, with no power whatsoever.
As my political education progreßed, these erroneous views underwent modification. Though, one view that did not see reform was the invalidity of suggesting any revolutionary potential residing within the inter-imperialist war of 1776. It was a war involving a bourgeois power, and the bourgeois power Britain. At this time, I completely ignored the material, political, and socio-cultural conditions of New England and New York, branding the entirety of the thirteen colonies a former-day feudal redneck Confederacy, seeking to impose its own imperialist policy locally.
I see to-day my egregious fault. The American bourgeois revolution is in fact the purest of its kind, and presents an almost as pure picture of (failed) large-scale aristocratic counter-revolution in the Civil War. The French Revolution is by far the more interesting of the two, as it was perhaps the purest liberal revolution, encompaßing all spheres of what would come to be the liberal world-view, the bourgeoisie's ideology in the sense of the 'ideal' way all things ought to be. Added to this was my personally altered perspective of the revolutions: I was not dealing with the repercußions of the French bourgeoisie's victory, and thereafter rule, as I have been the American, and the Jacobins almost perfectly aligned with my ideology and had been in power! See comrades, my form of communism (cough social-democracy cough) does work. Their closest American counter-parts, the Paineans, were scarcely remembered in our revolution. Many Progreßives in America view Jefferson, inexplicably (and some special few, the redneck scum Andrew Jackaß), as their ideological leader, but even at that politically-young stage, I opposed this as counter-productive and a fanciful romanticisation of feudalism. So my opinions was formed. Let us explore the purity of the one, and the various forces of impurity in the other.
The revolution of the colonies is one linked inherently with the revolution(s) and the civil wars betwixt the home kingdoms of Britain. New England sided with the bourgeois Parliamentarians, and every other colonial nation with the Cavaliers, the feudal power. This is the basic division betwixt the colonial nations down to the present day.
The bourgeois revolution was not, then, an original novelty when New England seceded, it was merely the continuation of the old to its completion. The Southern colonies realised this well, and drew the like conclusion from the opposite ideology; the counter-revolution in Britain seemed to be losing, and the stakes of feudal institutions to be in the most precarious of positions. Thus, if New England were to win its revolution against the feudal elements in Britain, and do away with the compromise of the claßes, then the South could do the same and erase the gains of the English bourgeois Parliamentarians and the Williamists. Unlike the great bourgeois French Revolution, the New English bourgeoisie was locked into an unholy alliance with the Southern aristocracy, and so did not at that time develop the full liberal world-view, which would invariably be an offencive provocation to the South, hence a liability for the war-time alliance. Though the union of states was indeed a compromise, it was one that did not join the two nations together, allowing both ruling-claßes total sovereignty within the boundaries of their nations.
The Civil War was at once an act of increasing capitalist imperialism and a feudal counter-revolution in reaction. The Federal Union was not an ideologically liberal entity (it would never become claßical-liberal, but would eventually adopt social-liberalism, and then post-modern-/neo-liberalism), but it was certainly a capitalist economy increasingly under the control of the bourgeoisie. To funnel more resources into the factories, it became ever more expedient to end the compromise of 'separate but united'. The South banded up and declared a counter-revolutionary 'civil war' to preserve their independent, feudal existence, based upon the peculiar institution. They were defeated, and the newly centralised US State signalled the dawn of pure bourgeois capitalism, and perhaps in part, without the triumph of the liberal republican world-view, the persecution of interal nationhoods and the ideal of nationalism itself, signalled also the dawn of soulleß globalism. Truly a tragedy: New England helped capitalism murder Dixie only to in turn be murdered by the capitalism machine it created. Romantic liberalism was smothered until the advent of its soulleß succeßor, post-modern-/neo-liberalism.
France travelled a profoundly different path. The bourgeois parties of the Revolution had developed an albeit unrefined and uncanonised liberalism as a proper ideological world-view Jacobinism is, I think it might be argued, one of the first ideologies to emerge from the pre-Enlightenment mode (religion) to the Enlightenment and so forth aeras mode of science, or theory. The French Revolution did not just spout argumentative fluff like 'liberty', 'happineß', or for that matter, the oft abused 'taxes', it provided propaganda for a concrete demonstration of how the theory(ies) in liberal ideology are the surest prescriptions for society to enthusiastically, heroically embrace. Citizenship, nationalism, humanism, rationalism, and sincere, theoretically and paßionately rigourous republicanism, all mixed with a bit of sans-culotte populism, actually had meaning, belief, and reasoning behind. Then there is the sheer scale and excitement of the history of the Revolution, whose events over-shadow the smaller field and theatre of the American Revolution. Comparing a Triple-A title to an Indie one will never make the latter look good, but it is especially damning when, in a reversal of the roles, it is the Triple-A that has heroic spirit, the Indie title being an uninspired cash-grab.
The French Revolution is far more interesting and inspiring, to be sure. Still, with my superior re-evaluation, I insist that 1776 is the clearer bourgeois seizure of power to study, over 1789. That said, 1789 is the best example of a liberal revolution, rather than a bourgeois one, and this is of equal importance to study. Despite my pronouncement, I will undoubtedly remain largely more committed to my study of the latter.
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