I

A strong causal connection between the American and French Revolutions is integral to the notion of an Age of Revolutions and of an Enlightenment;Footnote ¹ although these related concepts have been appropriately refined and diversified by some historians, these two revolutions are still often linked by two historiographical steps in particular. First, they are related by explaining both as successive and cumulative instantiations of secular natural-rights theory.Footnote ² But the significance of natural-rights discourse in late eighteenth-century Europe may have been misdiagnosed if it coexisted in symbiosis with, and not as a successor to, still vital older usages of “rights,” and if that mental world was far from secular.Footnote ³ Second, the American and French Revolutions are linked by the construction of a teleology of revolution. Since teleologies were not common in human affairs, a valid construction has often to be replaced by the use of metaphors, explored here. Both steps contributed to the related scenarios of the “Age of Revolutions” and of “the Enlightenment,” each imagined as a relay race in which largely similar values were carried forward.

In both respects Price's presumed role was important. His sermon at a Nonconformist meeting house on 4 November 1789, published in extended form as A Discourse on the Love of Our Country, was occasioned by an invitation to celebrate Britain's Revolution of 1688 (by implication, another foundational event). But Price seemed to turn aside from its still-disputed domestic complexities to link by memorable rhetoric the American Revolution with what was then occurring in France:

The metaphor of spreading light proved unforgettable, perhaps the most telling image coined in English to encapsulate the later understanding of the American Revolution as the first of the Age of Revolutions. In Reflections on the Revolution in France, Edmund Burke gave Price's sermon an additional currency. Later, Price's use of this metaphor of a kindling blaze having a profoundly beneficial effect was even more telling once the category “the Enlightenment” was coined. From the mid-twentieth century his image as a vindicated prophet steadily strengthened.Footnote ⁵

Price's euphoric but brief linkage between American and French events was then given defining status not in any extended analysis by Price himself (he died on 19 April 1791) but in the most influential English-language text to explain the French Revolution, Thomas Paine's Rights of Man (published March 1791). Its classic account of the historical origins of the French Revolution traced it to the writings of the philosophes and to the impact in France of the American example, brought home by French troops who had served in the American theater of war. Rights of Man included a six-thousand-word narrative, embodying this interpretation, that ran from “The despotism of Louis XIV” to the moment when the National Assembly beat off the threat of counterrevolution and sat down peacefully, without retribution, to frame a written constitution “founded on the Rights of Man and the Authority of the People.”Footnote ⁶ At this point in his text Paine reprinted the “Declaration of the Rights of Man and of Citizens,” its text probably copied from the translation in Price's A Discourse on the Love of Our Country (1789).Footnote ⁷

This narrative passage is familiar to generations of readers. But there is a problem if Paine was not its primary author. It was probably written by the Marquis de Lafayette, whose “foible,” according to Thomas Jefferson, was “a canine appetite for popularity and fame ”;Footnote ⁸ if so, this passage was not evidentially grounded historiography but Lafayette's self-serving propaganda, designed to promote his own career in the turbulent waters of revolutionary France.Footnote ⁹ Price knew Lafayette, and later commended him proleptically: “What an excellent and distinguished citizen he is! I remember the enthusiasm and warmth with which he defended American liberty when he was in London during the war with America. He did not doubt then that he would one day effectively contribute to giving liberty, not only to America, but to his own country.”Footnote ¹⁰ Although that career led to exile and imprisonment, Lafayette's vision was widely influential. But if this passage was not Paine's, attention turns back to Price. Was Price correct in visualizing the two revolutions in this way? Did such a linkage effect a singular “blaze?”

II

First, concepts. In the anglophone eighteenth century, “enlightenment” was everywhere, “the Enlightenment” was nowhere. Even Burke satirized “this enlightened age,” not “the Enlightenment.”Footnote ¹¹ If the idea had not been conceptualized, part of the conventional teleology linking the two revolutions must be reconsidered, and one historiographical question reemerges. If the Enlightenment is to be construed as a progressive international movement of intellectual, social and political reform, then the largest problem is to explain the connection between the American and French Revolutions: despite inescapable complexities, the first has to be depicted as in some sense the normative and ideological parent of the second. But French participants, preoccupied with France, often did not draw this connection: the Marquis de Condorcet, in a historical overview, compared aspects of England's Revolution of 1688 with the French Revolution (to the consistent advantage of the second), ignored the American Revolution, and mentioned the American case only in passing.Footnote ¹² What, then, of Price?

Price's published works, equally with his contemporaries’, never used the concept “the Enlightenment,” for it was coined only later. Nor were the ubiquitous metaphors “light” and “enlighten” novel synonyms for the later reification: in the twentieth century “the Enlightenment” carried a different set of meanings, and in the eighteenth “enlightening” was a spreading practicality.Footnote ¹³ The old metaphors were to be found in the Bible and were long familiar to theologians. “The Enlightenment” was not implied when Price used the verb “enlighten” and the adjective “enlightened” of secular matters, as did his contemporaries. Even so, meanings differed. Condorcet looked to other nations catching up in “civilization” with “those people who are most enlightened.”Footnote ¹⁴ But by contrast Price saw himself as living in “The present age of increased light, considered as succeeding the ages of Greece and Rome” following “an intermediate period of thick darkness”: it was an application of a long-standing English condemnation of the Catholic Church in what Price called “the dark ages,” not a novel analysis of novel practical circumstances in the late eighteenth century.Footnote ¹⁵

In France, wrote Price in the old unreified sense, the National Assembly “are building up a constitution for 27 millions of people, and I expect that it will be an excellent one because formed by enlighten'd men in an enlighten'd country with the lights and examples of the American and English constitutions to assist them.”Footnote ¹⁶ This argument had both a metaphorical and an empirical component, the latter appraised later in this article. The metaphor, signifying the spread of truth, was unproblematic, and Price was as familiar with it as were his contemporaries. But instead of inferring from events the autonomous logic of any secular social or intellectual movement, Price wrote of his actors: “May wisdom and virtue descend from heaven to guide them.”Footnote ¹⁷ His vocation was that of a Dissenting minister. For him, “enlightenment” was a shorthand term for the agenda of Arian Protestant Nonconformity: this limited the reception of his narrative of emancipation, but for Price it was only the achievement of those aims that would fully deliver “liberty.” Finally, an obstacle to attributing to Price an idea of spreading enlightenment as a process is that in his published works he hardly ever employed the term “process,” and then with other meanings.Footnote ¹⁸ It is inappropriate to assign Price a leading part in a movement of which he was necessarily not aware; instead, his idea of “providence” was the driving force of his Arian Nonconformity.

Nor could Price's political predictions be given a teleology by a reified notion of “progress,” since Price, like his English contemporaries (including even Thomas Paine), was without the meaning later given to that term, a normative improvement implicit in a “process” understood as a secular dynamic.Footnote ¹⁹ The guiding hand of “Providence” was not a synonym for this later idea of progress, but its opposite. For Price's contemporaries a progress was a journey. As early as 1758 Price wrote of the “progress” of truth and science, meaning their development, and even “an everlasting progress” in those things.Footnote ²⁰ Price's mind was formed before 1776, and it is not clear that his ideas developed in any major respect in response to the American and French Revolutions: these events merely gave those ideas a more urgent application. Already, by 1767, mankind was capable of “an endless future progress in knowledge and happiness,” but only because it was part of “our progress in virtue.”Footnote ²¹ There was nothing specially exalted about the term, which applied to prosaic things like “the progress of our foreign trade” and “the progress of the National Debt,” as well as to negative moral developments like “the progress of corruption.”Footnote ²² So “the progress of truth” was offset by “our slow progress in redeeming our debts”Footnote ²³ and by what Price wrongly thought was “the progress of depopulation in the kingdom.”Footnote ²⁴

After the independence of the Thirteen Colonies, Price still wrote similarly of the “commencement and progress” of the American war, “the progress of truth” and “the progress of improvement” without reifying them into progress as such; indeed these older usages still also included “the progress of evil in human affairs.”Footnote ²⁵ He merely affirmed “the progressive course of human improvement,” centrally with the “progress of Christianity”; that is, of its true form, Arian Protestant Nonconformity, fed as it was by “the blood of the martyrs,” namely the adherents of true theology, their blood shed by “persecutors.” For Price, “it is obvious that this end is to be brought about by the operations of Providence concurring with those tendencies to improvement, which I have observed to be inseparable from the nature of man.”Footnote ²⁶ If it was obvious, no narrative needed proof. Even in 1789, Price expressed his admiration of the French Revolution and his hope that “no adverse event may interrupt its progress,” without developing any deeper analysis of any developmental logic of “a Revolution unparalleled in history” or what the Patriotic Society of Dijon called “the progress of the human mind” than a metaphor: “We are now seeing the dawn of better times, and the example of France is likely to increase it into a glorious effulgence.”Footnote ²⁷

Effulgence was possible because an Arian like Price necessarily distanced himself from original sin;Footnote ²⁸ a Socinian like his fellow Nonconformist minister Joseph Priestley rejected it entirely.Footnote ²⁹ Price held the doctrine of the millennium, the thousand-year reign of Christ on Earth foretold in Revelations; thanks to his Arianism, Price tended towards a “postmillennialist” position in which human reforms were important and Christ's subsequent Second Coming seemed increasingly figurative, but he did not repudiate its literal meaning.Footnote ³⁰

Price's image of “a general amendment beginning in human affairs” in his sermon of 1789 can be made to seem a synonym for a present-day idea of progress as a secular response to a secular French Revolution only if its prior nature as theology is neglected. Yet in 1767 Price had already predicted “an approaching general amendment in human affairs” as something “very plainly foretold in the scriptures,” in which “every false religion [would] be destroyed, and the kingdoms of this world become the kingdoms of the Lord and of his Christ.” Earlier still, in 1759, he had announced “a time” when “the whole world shall enjoy the like happiness” already secured by Britain thanks to its being “the bulwark of the Protestant interest in the world … a time when Popish darkness and oppression shall be succeeded by universal Peace and Liberty.” Thanks to the advance of “virtue and piety founded upon rational principles,” there were “many indications of an approaching general amendment in human affairs. The season fixed by prophecy for the destruction of the man of sin [the Papacy] cannot be far distant, and the glorious light of the latter days seems to be now dawning upon mankind from this happy Island.”Footnote ³¹ Anti-popery, not “the Enlightenment,” was Price's organizing category. For Price, “The only science worth pursuing with anxiety is that which leads to the amendment of the heart, and helps us to establish our souls in purity and tranquillity”;Footnote ³² “to resolve upon amendment” was “to begin a life of virtue”;Footnote ³³ in 1787, “A command to pray for a blessing, implies that we shall obtain it, if we use the means. In the present instance particularly, it assures us, that an extension of Christ's kingdom and an amendment of the state of the world, are blessings which lie in some degree within our reach.”Footnote ³⁴ Price's politics were inseparable from his theology, and this was millennialist.

Whether Price's knowledge was sufficient to establish the validity of his euphoric comments on the American and French Revolutions is questioned below. Yet he was not compelled to inform himself more fully of secular matters since his vision was essentially a theological one. Consequently, throughout his life progress was progress of or progress in, summed up as “the progress of improvement.”Footnote ³⁵ This signified the improvement of something known, not progress as an autonomous actor in its own right, an instantiation of something new; that is, a reified Enlightenment. By contrast Condorcet (d. 1794), in his posthumously published Outlines of an Historical View of the Progress of the Human Mind (1795), repeatedly used a reified and atheist notion of “progress.” The work is often regarded as its first great expression, but the theist Price (d. 1791) cannot have been influenced by it. The evidence suggests that fundamental changes in Price's views were promoted by the growth of Arianism and Socinianism in England in the 1760s,Footnote ³⁶ not by accurate knowledge of the American or French Revolutions.

A general lack of analysis of connections between the two great revolutions was, at the time, not unusual. Even some major authors could see no need to explore potential links between the American Revolution and the French.Footnote ³⁷ Christopher Wyvill, defending Price, argued for the importance of the American case for reform in Britain, but did not ascribe the French Revolution to the American.Footnote ³⁸ Lafayette's account of his own heroic role, repeated in the briefest form, could take the place of deeper analysis.Footnote ³⁹ Even Condorcet's critic, Jacques Mallet du Pan, who contended, “The troubles in Holland gave vegetation to the various seeds profusely sown during the American War,” did not explain how this happened or extend the metaphor to France.Footnote ⁴⁰ The most forthright assertion of a simple link between the two revolutions came from Priestley, but he was Price's fellow politicized Nonconformist minister; he did not expand on his assertion, and how much he too knew of the American Revolution is now a question.Footnote ⁴¹

Second, an ideology: natural rights. In France Condorcet recalled “a fatal blow” dealt to “the fabric of prejudice” by “a doctrine, of which Turgot, Price, and Priestley were the first and most illustrious advocates.” Yet he identified it not as human rights but as “the doctrine of the infinite perfectibility of the human mind … the perfectibility of man.” Given the attention today accorded to natural rights, it is important that Condorcet did not, in his published work, prioritize rights doctrine or cite putative American pioneers. Nor did he anticipate the mid-twentieth-century reification of a transatlantic Enlightenment, or argue that Price had been part of one; indeed Price was named only once in Condorcet's key text, and then in a rhetorical flourish. The Frenchman promised that the doctrine of perfectibility “will be developed with sufficient minuteness” in the “Tenth Epoch” of his book, which he entitled “Future Progress of Mankind,” but there, in a single paragraph, he merely restated his earlier assertion. As a natural philosopher and atheist, he attributed “the future destiny of mankind” to the working out of “general laws, known or unknown, which regulate the phenomena of the universe”; to a “revolution,” not to a social movement or (like Price) to providence.Footnote ⁴²

Condorcet was not a historian; he offered two problematically different historical explanations of the outbreak of the American Revolution. His first ascribed it to colonists’ understanding “more perfectly perhaps than Europeans, what were the rights common to all the individuals of the human race,” an argument that would, much later, feed into the Enlightenment scenario. But he did not ground this rhetorical explanation in his second, his wholly conventional narrative of the outbreak and course of that revolution in terms of British taxes and colonial protests. When Condorcet wrote of “the transatlantic revolution,” he meant the revolution that broke out across the Atlantic in 1776, not a movement found on both its shores. His narrative lacked anything specific that would effectively link the American to the very different French case, and he acknowledged no debt to Price in his, Condorcet's, thoughts on the impact of the American example. Instead, he asserted a clear affinity between the two revolutions, as “the writings and principles of the Americans” were seized on in “a country at once the most enlightened, and the least free”—France. But to Condorcet, as to many of his countrymen, French experience mattered most. In the light of that priority, according to Condorcet the American Revolution had not really been a revolution at all: “In these innovations there was nothing that extended to the mass of the people, nothing that altered the subsisting relations formed between individuals.”Footnote ⁴³ Rights, then, did not perform either role.

The atheist Condorcet showed no appreciation that the theist Price's goals (explored below) had been significantly different: there is no evidence that the atheist and the theist regarded the fundamentally contrasting premises of their confidence in improvement as unimportant, since they seem to have been unaware that they disagreed or that they cooperated despite such disagreement. Euphoria took the place of proof. The two men were scarcely embarked together in a common cause, much later termed “the Enlightenment,” since they could give no explanation of such a commonality. Elsewhere, in a previous book, his publication hitherto best known in English translation, Condorcet dealt with Price only for having disagreed with the economist Anne Robert Jacques Turgot and mentioned Priestley not at all.Footnote ⁴⁴

III

It is argued here that Price's rhetoric of 1789 on the relation between the two revolutions was an overstatement, and that he was not in a position to develop his argument on the basis of evidence. This limitation is not a criticism of Price: thanks to the labours of generations of historians, far greater detailed knowledge of the internal events of the Thirteen Colonies and of France is now accessible than was available to outside observers (or even to participants) at the time. The limitation is nevertheless important. Price never visited either North America or France (Congress invited him to go to America in 1778 as an adviser, but he refused). He began life as a provincial figure of modest social standing and necessarily limited horizons. His more general vision was formed in relation to the legal position of English and Welsh Nonconformists, catalyzed by his emerging Arianism.Footnote ⁴⁵ Until the 1750s he had been an enthusiastic supporter of the Hanoverian regime.Footnote ⁴⁶ Price was not in any simple sense an architect of republicanism: the thousand-year reign of Christ on Earth which he literally anticipated could hardly be classified as a republic.

What, then, did Price know of the American situation? He knew Benjamin Franklin in London, probably from 1757 to 1762,Footnote ⁴⁷ but their earliest surviving correspondence concerns scientific matters. Price met several Americans who visited London in the years before 1776 and moved in the circles of English Dissenting ministers, but no evidence remains of the content of their exchanges. Price's surviving correspondence with Americans in the colonies begins only in March 1770. It shows that he exchanged letters chiefly with controversialists like Charles Chauncy, Congregationalist minister of the First Church in Boston, Massachusetts; Ezra Stiles, minister of the Second Congregational Church in Newport, Rhode Island; and William Gordon, minister of the Third Congregational Church in Roxbury, Massachusetts (who had emigrated to the colonies as recently as 1770).Footnote ⁴⁸

These letters concerned issues of Nonconformist interest beginning with the rumour of a metropolitan conspiracy to introduce Anglican bishops to the colonies, a long-standing colonial preoccupation.Footnote ⁴⁹ Those who promoted such causes “are almost universally the objects of hatred and contempt,” Price was told; they “have transmitted home cargoes of the most flagrant lies” and spread “abominable falsehoods.”Footnote ⁵⁰ Price's American contacts were primarily his coreligionists in New England who wished to relay to Price a picture of British politicians as “those who are endeavouring to fasten on us chains of Slavery … The alternative now seems to be, a submission to Slavery, or an exertion of our selves to be delivered from it.”Footnote ⁵¹ The Quebec Act of 1774 accentuated New Englanders’ and English Nonconformists’ anti-Catholicism, Ezra Stiles vilifying the bishops: “They have greatly dishonored themselves in two capital Instances lately; in their combination against your Petition for a Relief from Subscription to the XXXIX Articles; and in voting for the Quebec Bill for establishing the Romish Idolatry over two Thirds of the Territories of the British [Empire], and thereby exciting a Jubilee in Hell and throughout [the] Pontificate.”Footnote ⁵²

No alternative interpretation was presented to Price by his colonial contacts.Footnote ⁵³ He accepted their vision, extrapolating to America his belief that, in England, the bishops “have hitherto shewn themselves enemies to truth and liberty … friends to intolerance and persecution,”Footnote ⁵⁴ and that, in England, “the influence of the crown has already in effect subverted liberty here,” joined with “the present despotic ministry.”Footnote ⁵⁵

The evidence of his correspondence suggests that Price learned from his colonial correspondents little more than this about the causes of the American Revolution. His stance on that episode was not informed by significant knowledge of the situation in America, but by a shared and mutually reinforcing transatlantic Nonconformist narrative. As he wrote to an English friend who had just emigrated to Rhode Island,

This was in 1772, at a moment of profound peace. Price, already known as an expert on actuarial calculations, had generalized his religious critique of English society into a claim that England's population was declining (it was, in reality, approaching its decades of fastest growth).Footnote ⁵⁷ There was a damaging contradiction at the heart of Price's teaching: if his millennialism pointed to utopia, his declinism pointed to disaster. His declinist theory had therefore to be counterbalanced by an opposite: it required the existence of societies that were flourishing because of (what might otherwise have seemed a minor matter) the absence of an established church. In revolutionary America and revolutionary France, Price found two such candidates.

According to Price's chief American source, Charles Chauncy, “All the Colonies desire is the full enjoyment of their rights and privileges.”Footnote ⁵⁸ The Harvard natural philosopher John Winthrop added: “it seems as if it were designed to irritate the people into something which might be called rebellion.”Footnote ⁵⁹ Accounts sent from America differing from his own, claimed Chauncy, were merely “abominable falsehoods, which are continually transmitting home by those detestable inhabitants here, to whose lies it is owing that we have been bro[ugh]t into our present distressing circumstances.”Footnote ⁶⁰ Price heard only one side of a complex story, and heard it only from fellow Protestant Nonconformists. His famous pamphlet Observations on the Nature of Civil Liberty, the Principles of Government, and the Justice and Policy of the War with America (1776) was, as its title recorded, focused on abstract questions and on English policy and finance; it omitted the local situations within the thirteen significantly different colonies that had produced not just a war, but a revolution. Believing what he did about the declining state of England and the erosion of its liberties, it was natural for Price in 1784 to argue that “The establishment of the independence of the united states gives a new direction to the affairs of the world; and will, I hope, prove the greatest blessing to it. This country [England, not France], in particular, might be the greatest gainer by it.”Footnote ⁶¹ This was deduction from an a priori account of English affairs, not induction from the practical detail of American ones.

After 1783 evidence is lacking that Price acquired significant additional knowledge of the inner state of the new American republic.Footnote ⁶² This lack of knowledge was revealed in Price's pamphlet Observations on the Importance of the American Revolution. Following a dedication dated 6 July 1784, it rehearsed the themes more widely remembered from its author's subsequent Dissertation on the Love of Our Country of 1789. In 1784, he hailed

This eulogy seems, at first reading, evidence of Price's early perception of the ongoing significance of 1776.

But his pamphlet deserves more careful scrutiny. It began with Price's thankfulness that “I have been spared to be a witness to that very issue of the war which has all along been the object of my wishes”; that is, that the American Revolution confirmed his long-held preconceptions. Its “greatest gainers” would be Britons, not the French. The “one European country” could only be Ireland, not France, and the recasting of Ireland's constitutional relations with England as a result of the American war was not widely perceived as a harbinger of revolutions in continental Europe. Price outlined a more plausible view of the result of the American Revolution: not that it would trigger others, but that it created “a place of refuge for opprest men in every region of the world.”

Why, then, did he also argue the opposite? For Price, America's “liberty, science and virtue” were in a literal sense “sacred blessings” derived from “the hand of Providence”; its independence was “ordained by Providence”; it was divine intervention in an English Dissenting cause that would ensure that those virtues would “spread, till they become universal and the time arrives when kings and priests shall have no more power to oppress, and that ignominious slavery [to kings and priests] which has hitherto debased the world is exterminated.”Footnote ⁶⁴

It was primarily “revelation” that led him “to expect that a more improved and happy state of human affairs will take place before the consummation of all things”; that is, the Last Day. For Price, “the progress of improvement” was not a secular idea, and it was threatened by “the progress of evil in human affairs.” Only in this theological scenario could Price's verdict seem plausible: “Perhaps, I do not go too far when I say that, next to the introduction of Christianity among mankind, the American revolution may prove the most important step in the progressive course of human improvement.” Only in this scenario might the American Revolution credibly “become the means of setting free mankind from the shackles of superstition and tyranny.” But if it was a scenario shared with American Protestant Nonconformists, Price's was not a position identical with theirs, since the Arian Price argued against what he termed “Religious bigotry” (that is, the Trinitarian theology to which most Americans subscribed) and taught that “state policy ought not to be applied to the support of speculative opinions and formularies of faith” (American Dissenters had done just that for decades, and continued to seek to do so even after the ratification of the Constitution of 1787).Footnote ⁶⁵

In his pamphlet of 1784, Price warned of threats to the new American republic. But these proved to be, as Price's text continued, seldom American problems at all but familiar British ones, to illustrate which he drew contrasts with an idealized account of the American republic: the national debt and high taxes, easily curable in America, he claimed (they were not); the inequality of property, not a problem in America, he rejoiced (it was often highly unequal); “Granting hereditary honours and titles of nobility,” forbidden, he noted, by the Articles of Confederation (true, but there was little demand in the new republic for such grants); the inequity of the parliamentary franchise, citing his parishioner and fellow Arian Dissenter James Burgh's Political Disquisitions and claiming that no such franchise problem obtained in America (the franchise was still not uniform there); a standing army, where the Americans had militias (yet Washington had commanded regular troops); “The love of our country,” Price recommending instead “universal benevolence” (but not measuring its incidence in America); foreign trade, producing “Effeminacy, servility and venality,” where America, as a continent, argued Price, hardly needed overseas commerce (the new republic sought to rebuild its trade). And, at great length, threats posed by religious practices and structures: “slavish hierarchies and religious establishments”; laws against free discussion such as those laws in England imposing penalties on those who “write or speak against the Supreme Divinity of Christ, the Book of Common Prayer, and the Church Articles of Faith,” Trinitarian theological doctrines being merely “speculative opinions”; and “Civil establishments of formularies of faith and worship,” which, Price wrote, the American states had not set up. All this mattered so much because “what I wish most to urge is the tendency of religious establishments to impede the improvement of the world.”Footnote ⁶⁶

Such space did Price devote to his denunciation of religious establishments that his argument became far more a negation of England than an affirmation of America; it was hardly an analysis of the specificity of the American case, the domestic challenges it faced, or exactly how its example might communicate itself to Europe. Indeed his specific points praising the new republic were often incorrect. In one instance he knew that what he affirmed was untrue: “I cannot but dislike the religious tests which make a part of several of the American [state] constitutions.” But this, and slavery, were the only specifically American practices that Price discussed. It was his English preoccupations that led Price to picture America's future by negation, as merely not Anglican: “In a word, let the united States continue for ever what it is now their glory to be—a confederation of States prosperous and happy, without Lords—without Bishops—and without Kings.” Since lords, bishops and kings had been absent in the Thirteen Colonies, Price's older English Nonconformist litany did not capture what was special about the American republic and its founding revolution. This limitation slipped out in his Conclusion: “I have, indeed, since finishing this Address, been mortified more than I can express by accounts which have led me to fear that I have carried my ideas of them too high, and deceived myself with visionary expectations.”Footnote ⁶⁷ What these errors were he did not admit, but until his death Price did not revise his published opinions of 1784 in the light of evidence.

Price's pamphlet opened with short passages of uplifting rhetoric which Americans might easily find flattering, but even so the work did not command universal agreement in the new republic. Price recognized this, as he privately wrote, since he had argued for the “separation of civil policy from religion”; civil magistrates “should not aim at supporting truth by any kind of civil sanctions till they are sure they are in possession of it, and we can all agree where it lies,”Footnote ⁶⁸ a doctrine that he found went down badly in New England. The pamphlet was not well received in the South either, since it had recommended “measures for abolishing slavery and preventing the growth of an Arist[ocratic] power.”Footnote ⁶⁹ Price sent many copies to his American correspondents, but there is no evidence that any of them replied interpreting it as a call to export the flame of liberty to Europe.

The more general reaction of reformers was the opposite—“The United States will become the general Asylum of all the liberal minded in every part of Europe”Footnote ⁷⁰—not that the American Revolution would inspire and trigger others in Europe. Price continued to urge that the “united states have an open field before them, and advantages for establishing a plan favourable to the improvement of the world which no people ever had in an equal degree.”Footnote ⁷¹ But he was unspecific about how this might happen. In May 1786 Benjamin Rush urged that Price write a pamphlet to confute

This was to be done, urged Rush, by establishing a national system of education in which all schoolchildren would be indoctrinated in these principles. “It will only be necessary in this pamphlet,” he requested Price, “to be wholly silent upon those subjects in Christianity which now so much divide, and agitate the Christian world,” especially anti-Trinitarianism.Footnote ⁷² The Arian Price wrote no such pamphlet, not least because, as he replied, he would have found avoiding the doctrine of the Trinity “a hard restraint”—that is, impossible. He added, on American Episcopalians, “How strange it is, that the same people who have discarded the nonsense of hereditary right of Kings should retain the greater Nonsense of the Hereditary right (or uninterrupted succession) of Bishops; and for this reason scruple to make their own Bishops?”Footnote ⁷³ It was this sort of English issue that still preoccupied Price.

IV

Before September 1787 Price drew no special link between the American Revolution and the political tensions and debates in France that for some years preceded the fall of the Bastille.Footnote ⁷⁴ Nor did his American correspondents, now including George Washington, Benjamin Franklin and John Adams, who were preoccupied with launching the new American republic and framing for it an improved constitution. In 1785 Adams admitted to Price how remote a general revolution was. Looking forward to a future in which freedom of conscience, liberty and property were enjoyed and government not thought “misterious,” Adams added: “But at what an immense distance is that Period. Notwithstanding all that has been written from Sidney and Locke down to Dr P[rice] and Abbe de Mably, all Europe still believes Sovereignty to be a divine Right, except a few Men of letters.”Footnote ⁷⁵

Not until September 1787 did Price write:

Yet it was not primarily any future revolution in France that preoccupied observers, but the great and already evident changes in the Austrian Netherlands (where the reforms of the emperor, Joseph II, were threatened by the States General, which later, in 1789, declared him deposed) and in the United Provinces (where the position of the Stadtholder was undermined by the Patriot party).

Price had as yet no correspondents in either of these two places. His correspondence in 1787 displays no evidence that he had any particular knowledge of events in the Austrian Netherlands, the United Provinces or France. The only sources he specifically mentioned were a newspaper, the Gazette, and a book by a former Dissenting minister, the son and grandson of Dissenting ministers, William Godwin.Footnote ⁷⁷ These sources only referred to the possibility of French military intervention in the Low Countries, not to any idea of a future revolution taking place in France itself.

In 1784, 1785, 1786, 1787 and 1788, Thomas Jefferson, in Paris, made no prediction to Price of a future French Revolution.Footnote ⁷⁸ Price did not correct his correspondent, and indeed confessed his limited knowledge of France to Jefferson in October 1788:

This “citizen of the world” had never been abroad. The “cause of public liberty” was a phrase disclosing an external view of what was happening, generalized and unperceptive.

Only in January 1789 did Jefferson set out to Price his own view of what was then unfolding in France:

Evidently Jefferson had now accepted Lafayette's account, as would Paine, but even so did not end his letter by claiming that America was the overriding example in French minds. It was instead the English model that had for several decades been prominent in French debate, and only later, when the French Revolution took a more extreme course, that American examples featured prominently in French discussions.Footnote ⁸¹

For Price, the American case had, before 1789, already become central to validate his scenario of England's national corruption, decline and ministerial infamy. It was easy therefore now to talk up the American example. As he wrote to John Adams in March 1789, the American war “gave rise to that spirit of liberty which is now working thro’ Europe, and that will probably gain for France a free constitution. And it was this war that has gained for your country that independence which, I hope, will terminate in the establishment of a form of government that will be an example to the world.”Footnote ⁸² But the future tense revealed that for Price no such form of government had yet been established in the new American republic which could serve that function.

Price was, however, effusively grateful to Jefferson for his briefing from Paris, writing,

Debates in France still centred on rejuvenating the French Constitution as a limited monarchy retaining an aristocracy and a powerful church; these debates drew French attention to the English example more than to the very different circumstances of the American republic. Price concluded: “Being now advanced into the evening of life, it is with particular gratitude I look back and reflect that I have been spared to see the human species improved, religious intolerance almost extinguished, the eyes of the lower ranks of men opened to see their rights; and nations panting for liberty that seemed to have lost the idea of it.”Footnote ⁸³

Already, by 4 May 1789, and before the events of that summer in Paris, Price had formed the rhetoric that he was to deploy in his sermon on 4 November that year. Before leaving France on 26 September, Jefferson wrote Price three more letters, but in them did not give space to any effect on French opinion of the American example. In May, French preoccupations with the complex issues of the composition and voting of the Estates General had no American parallel. Jefferson acknowledged the priority of politics over abstract ideals, writing of his forecasts: “you are to keep in mind that these are conjectures, and you know how small a circumstance may give a totally different turn from what has been plausibly conjectured.”Footnote ⁸⁴

On 12 July, Jefferson updated Price on events in the Estates General and its transformation into the National Assembly, again not mentioning America but declaring, “Should this revolution succeed, it is the beginning of the reformation of the governments of Europe.”Footnote ⁸⁵ On 17 July, again, purely French events made up Jefferson's narrative of the fall of the Bastille.Footnote ⁸⁶ Finally, on 13 September 1789 Jefferson wrote to report misleadingly that “Tranquillity is perfectly established at Paris, and pretty generally so thro’ the whole kingdom.”Footnote ⁸⁷ In a series of letters Price was also briefed by his nephew and fellow Dissenting minister George Cadogan Morgan, then traveling through France. But Morgan admitted that spoken French was “as yet unintelligible” to him; his letters merely relayed the superficial first impressions of a tourist of street scenes, anti-Catholicism, bedbugs and landscapes, and apart from one letter on “the destroying madness,” the “violence and … popular rage” in Paris (a theme to which Price did not respond), there was almost nothing in these letters on the nature or causes of the French Revolution save that the French pursued the “Spirit of Liberty.”Footnote ⁸⁸

On the basis of inadequate information, Price convinced himself that all was well in the new American republic. As he wrote to an American diplomat: “I am frequently hearing of the distresses of your country, of the confusion into which it is falling, of its fraudulent conduct with respect to its debts, of the Dictatorship of the illustrious Washington, and a vast deal of nonsense of the same kind which some people here are eager to believe and propagate”: by definition, such problems could not exist. It had also to be the case that the “Revolution now establish'd in France must be an event unspeakably pleasing to the united American states. It is there this glorious Revolution has originated.” He echoed the title, “the Glorious Revolution,” that English Whigs had popularized in c.1710–14 to baptize for their party purposes the ambiguous events of 1688–9. And he was modestly delighted to find that the French were taking his advice: Honoré Gabriel Riqueti, Comte de Mirabeau, “translated into French my pamphlet on the American Revolution; and he sees now the principles in that pamphlet carried into execution in his country.”Footnote ⁸⁹

To Jefferson, Price enthused over a “Revolution that must astonish Europe” and expressed a hope of its outcome:

By definition, for Price any priority of the English model was unacceptable, for the Test and Corporation Acts disqualified England in advance; exemplary influence had by definition to be reserved for the United States, whatever the realities of its situation. What the tactical political reasons were that had made the separation of church and state gradually inevitable in the new American states, Price evidently never knew.

Only from July 1789 did Price's correspondents begin to include a few Frenchmen, but Price wrote to them in English, and there is no evidence that he had any command of spoken French (as, indeed, Jefferson and Paine did not) or any knowledge of French-language sources for what was unfolding in France.Footnote ⁹¹ Price had, in 1787, cited Condorcet, but had done so from an English translation just issued by that leading publisher of Unitarian and reformist tracts, Joseph Johnson.Footnote ⁹² At the moment when the Estates General had just transformed themselves into the National Assembly, Price addressed Mirabeau and repeated his boast about the influence of the pamphlet (presumably Observations on the Importance of the American Revolution) that Mirabeau had translated: “it is with the highest satisfaction he [Price] thinks that the principles in that pamphlet are now practised upon in France, and likely to be carried into execution there.” This could only have seemed plausible to Price on the basis of small knowledge of the complexity of French politics. But he continued: “The last step in the progress of reformation in France will probably be that which is already gained in America, that is, a separation of religion and speculation from the interference of civil power. But even this, France, if it perseveres, is likely to obtain before Britain.”Footnote ⁹³ Even at this peak of revolutionary euphoria, in July 1789, Price's narrowly English Dissenting preoccupations were clear: the repeal of the Test and Corporation Acts.

From 3 August to 18 October 1789 Price retreated to the country in South Wales.Footnote ⁹⁴ On 9 September, he wrote to Lansdowne: “I know little of what passes in the Political world except what I learn from the Gazeeter^[Footnote ^95] which I receive every morning from London, and supplies me with an intelligence from France which is often very delightful to me.” On the basis of scant knowledge, from one newspaper, Price continued:

Price's precommitments outweighed his information.

This was the extent of Price's knowledge of the French Revolution before he preached his famous sermon on 4 November 1789. Price's Discourse was, as he explained to Adams, “an effusion of zeal in the cause of human liberty and virtue,” but it did not contain evidence to establish that “the united states of America have the glory of having led the way” to the French.Footnote ⁹⁷ Indeed, “there is very little that is new in the Discourse.”Footnote ⁹⁸ Adams replied, giving priority to domestic French causes: “I know that Encyclopedists and OEconomists, Diderot, and d'Alembert, Voltaire and Rosseau [Rousseau] have contributed to this great event more than Sydney Locke or Hoadley: perhaps more than the American Revolution.”Footnote ⁹⁹ It is open to argument that the leading characteristic of the French Revolution was that it was profoundly French.

Examined closely, Price's Discourse did not mention the American Revolution until its very end. The aims of the Discourse (like Price's pamphlet of 1784) were to transmute patriotism, an attachment to a particular place and particular people, into “universal benevolence”; to argue that “most” actually existing governments were “usurpations on the rights of men”; and to advance purely domestic issues, like the “revisal” of the “Liturgy and Articles” of the established Church, the repeal of the Test and Corporation Acts, and the reform of “a representation in the legislature.” Price's cast list was English and French, not American. Happy the man, Price wrote, who had disseminated “among his fellow-creatures just notions of themselves, of their rights, of religion, and the nature and end of civil government. Such were Milton, Locke, Sidney, Hoadly, &c. in this country; such were Montesquieu, Marmontel, Turgot, &c. in France.”Footnote ¹⁰⁰ His pamphlet mentioned no American source and no American individual.

V

Price's knowledge of the situation on the ground in the American colonies was small, and he therefore accepted uncritically the rhetoric of his coreligionist colonial correspondents. His knowledge of the situation on the ground in France was similarly small; he therefore accepted the accounts of his few contacts there and projected onto France his own English priorities. On the basis of what Price acknowledged was “little” knowledge, he devised an image that was adopted by Paine, given unforgettable expression in Rights of Man, and later generalized as the domino theory of revolutions. It was an overstatement: the American Revolution did have a bearing on the French, chiefly by promoting the French state's bankruptcy, but not primarily by the euphoric communication of emancipatory ideas of natural rights.Footnote ¹⁰¹ Examined more closely, Price's famous peroration in his sermon of 4 November 1789 did not argue that the American Revolution had inspired the French; instead, he claimed that the “labours” of the “friends of freedom, and writers in its defence” (presumably including people like himself) had produced both. But that was not how he was generally understood.

Price was not the only commentator to argue about the relationship between the American Revolution and the French. John Quincy Adams, introducing a work by the German diplomat Friedrich von Gentz that argued for an “essential difference” between the two episodes, nevertheless conceded that others saw the two revolutions as profoundly related: “It has been, here [the United States] not merely a commonplace argument, as Mr. Gentz represents it to have been in Europe, but has been sanctioned by the authority of men, revered for their talents, and who at least ought to have known better.” Gentz himself conceded that “the great majority of the public” were drawn into “this fundamentally false point of view” of the similarity of the two revolutions; he argued against it, but was not easily able to frame a contrary case. He was only twelve years of age when the American Revolution began, and never visited America. His book instead rehearsed again the familiar narrative of unconstitutional British taxation and justified, defensive American resistance, a story he unwisely took in part from the English Nonconformist minister and superficial historian William Belsham, but it revealed no knowledge of the colonial situation on the ground. Gentz's legalistic arguments about difference were not widely persuasive: instead, “The similarity of the two revolutions was taken upon trust.”

Problematically, his constitutional argument required Gentz to deny the significance of the ideas of popular sovereignty and the rights of man in the American Revolution, “the natural and unalienable rights of mankind.” This was an “empty pomp of words”; the colonial revolutionaries “allowed to these speculative ideas, no visible influence upon their practisal [practical] measures and resolves.” Gentz had therefore to belittle the revolutionary significance of Paine's “contemptible” Common Sense and to ignore Paine's Rights of Man.Footnote ¹⁰² Gentz's strategy was to defend the legality of the American Revolution in order, by contrast, to deny that of the French, but the first argument did not preclude Price's assumption of a grand, principled affinity between the two. In due course the Second World War opened the way to a rehabilitation and internationalization of colonial American revolutionary rhetoric, finally under the title of “the Enlightenment.”Footnote ¹⁰³ In the long run Gentz's carefully constitutional denial seemed less plausible; Price's assertion became famous.

Yet Price's claimed causal relation between the American Revolution and the French depended on metaphor. It was not an evidence-based analysis, and so could not be turned into a usable theory. Because of the evidential shortcomings of his posited link, Price could not be fully effective as a prophet of republican liberty; his writings did not prove an illuminating guide to the future courses of the American or French republics, let alone of the world beyond. Far from the American Revolution being the intellectual parent of the French, this alleged affinity could not be made real, and the new United States was highly resistant to engaging with France as a natural ally. An overarching scenario linking the two revolutions was possible, but no such scenario was framed for a century and a half after Price's death. If it is now breaking up, a reconsideration rather than a celebration is appropriate.