Compared to other significant problems
of historical interpretation, relatively little
has been written that bears directly upon
the problem of the Western Revolution
of the eighteenth century. There are at
least two major reasons for this dearth.
The emphasis on the international char-
acter of the eighteenth-century upheaval,
while a commonplace during the seven-
teen-nineties, has only been revived quite
recently and did not receive an elaborate,
full-dress presentation until major works
by J. Godechot and R. R. Palmer appeared
in the nineteen-fifties. Secondly, oppo-
nents of the Western interpretation have
stressed national peculiarities over inter-
national common denominators. Not un-
naturally, they have concentrated on revo-
lutionary histories and monographs writ-
ten within a national framework rather
than book-length rebuttals of the Palmer
thesis. By the very nature of their case,
therefore, historians stressing the national
characteristics of revolution may appear
parochial compared to the grandiose gener-
alizers. To avoid onesidedness broad gen-
eralizations should be substantiated by na-
tional or even local studies of revolution
against which overall syntheses should be
tested.

The proponents of the international in-
terpretation of eighteenth-century revolu-
tions stress their debt to the analysts who
lived through the events. A number of
such contemporary accounts are worth
reading or dipping into if only to recapture
the original flavor of the argument. Among
counterrevolutionaries who viewed the
revolutions as a world movement, two ac-
counts stand out. J. Mallet du Pan Con-
siderations on the Nature of the French
Revolution ( London, 1793) is a brilliant
analysis by a Genevan ex-liberal turned
counterrevolutionary propagandist. Un-
like Mallet du Pan, the Abbé A. de
Barruel represents uncompromising reac-
tion, not only against revolution, but
against the whole Enlightenment. His
Memoirs, Illustrating the History of Jaco-
binism, 4 vols. ( London, 1797- 1799) de-
velop at tedious, yet fascinating, length
the thesis of a worldwide conspiracy by
Illuminati and Free Masons who are be-
hind all political unrest. On the revolu-
tionary side, J. de Barnave Introduction
à la Révolution française ( latest edition,
Paris, 1960) is almost unique for its time
(though it was not published until the
middle of the nineteenth century) in pre-
senting a materialist interpretation of his-
tory. Barnave attributed the revolutions to
the material and social development of so-
ciety, a development which had progressed
further in France than in other western
countries, accounting for the greater in-
tensity of the French Revolution. The
Marquis de Condorcet, on the other hand,
in his Outline of an Historical View of
the Progress of the Human Mind ( Lon-
don, 1795), written while in hiding during
the Terror, rested his case on the intellec-
tual progress of the western world, which
had reached its highest point in France.
Two interesting dissenting opinions from
this "Western" approach are found in
President John Q. Adams' Discourses on
Davila, written in the seventeen-nineties,
but not published (and then anonymously)
until 1805, and F. Gentz The French
and American Revolutions Compared*
( Gateway, 1959). Both writers made a
sharp distinction between the American
Revolution, which was legitimate because
it took tradition and experience into ac-
count, and the French Revolution, which
was unjustifiable because of its essentially
anti-traditional Utopian aims.

The only comprehensive interpretation
of the eighteenth century which has in-
corporated the western interpretation of
revolution without making this the central

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