A Tale of Two Countries: The French and American Revolutions Followed the Same Philosophy—Except When It Came to Religion

MARK NOLLMark Noll is professor of history at Wheaton College in Wheaton, Illinois, and the author of many books, including, most recently, One Nation Under God? (Harper & Row).

What a season for centenaries! In 1988 Britain celebrated the tercentenary of its “Glorious Revolution,” which established parlimentary power and a Bill of Rights. Now in 1989 there are two bicentennials, one celebrating the inauguration of the American government under the Constitution, and another, the outbreak of the French Revolution.

Beyond doubt, the world was transformed by the revolutions that these centennials observe. Each contributed powerfully to notions of natural human rights. Each moved government from aristocracy toward democracy. Each had at least something to do with new economic and intellectual orders. Each also deeply affected the Christian faith.

The Age Of Revolution

In 1688 the English Parliament ousted King James II, called William and Mary to the throne, and issued a Bill of Rights. While this revolution preserved the state church, it did for the first time in England give Protestant dissenters a measure of legal toleration.

A century later, 13 of England’s erstwhile colonies struggled to secure the revolution by which they had gained political independence. The Constitution that achieved this goal increased the sovereign power of the new United States and curbed the authority of the individual states. In religion, the new national government proposed a bold innovation. It would not require any religious test for its officers, nor would it allow (on a national level) any intermingling of the institutions of state and church.

The inauguration of government under the United States’ new Constitution coincided with the opening salvos of the third great political revolution. In France, a series of long-festering conditions had prepared the way for an explosion. Political strain existed between the form of goverment—absolute monarchy—and its actual expression—royal power checked on every side by privileged nobles, corporations, and the Roman Catholic Church. Intellectual strain grew from tension between traditional Catholic authoritarianism and rising confidence in human reason (known popularly as the Enlightenment). Social strain divided aristocrats from a rising “middle class” of commercial interests and both of those groups from a large peasant sector, which, although very poor, was required to bear the burden of taxation.

In 1789 these tensions snapped. “The Third Estate,” the bourgeois branch of France’s estates-general (a three-tiered congress with the first two estates being made up of nobility and clergy), created a new National Assembly in June; on July 14 a popular uprising in Paris liberated the Bastille (the hated Paris prison); these actions then set off riots by peasants throughout France, which destroyed records of their servitude and created what was called the “Great Fear” among the aristocrats; on August 26 the National Assembly issued a “Declaration of Rights,” establishing, for example, the rights to “liberty, property, security, and resistance to oppression.”

Traumas and triumphs followed with breathtaking speed. The guillotine, especially in 1793 and 1794 under the leadership of charismatic leader Maximilien Robespierre, seemed always at work. It ended the lives of Louis XVI and his queen, Marie Antoinette. The revolution pursued radical dechristianization, as its leaders tried to obliterate the presence of the church. In Paris, the revolutionaries renamed 1,400 streets to eliminate references to monarchs or saints; the Cathedral of Notre Dame became the Temple of Reason.

Eventually, reaction set in, culminating in the rise of a dashing young general, Napoleon Bonaparte, first as consul, and then as emperor. From 1792 to 1815, moreover, France pulled all Europe into war, war, and still more war.

Friend Or Foe

A major puzzle must confront all Christians who compare the developments of the French Revolution with those that had taken place only brief years before in America. Why was it that Christianity survived as a full partner in the “American Revolutionary Settlement” when traditional faith suffered so grievously in the French Revolution?

In 1789, and for a few years thereafter, the whole world was convinced that events in France were but the second act in the drama begun in America (or from a traditionalist viewpoint, only the next step in the accelerating destruction of Western civilization). Numerous American evangelicals even saw in the first years of France’s revolution the spreading influence of a Christian liberty that had come to fresh prominence in the New World.

But despite common beliefs in natural rights, common loathing of arbitrary government, and common commitment to the will of the people, the American Revolution preserved a larger space for Christianity than did the French.

Alexis de Tocqueville, the most insightful foreigner ever to visit these shores, spent much of his life pondering why the revolutions in France and America diverged on religion. In his book on the French Revolution, Tocqueville phrased the issue like this: “There is no country in the world where the boldest doctrines of the [French] philosophies of the eighteenth century, in matters of politics, were more fully applied than in America; it was only the anti-religious doctrines that never were able to make headway.”

Why the difference? The answer is easily stated, but the implications of that answer are difficult to grasp. Again it is Tocqueville who puts it best, this time from his great treatise Democracy in America: “In France I had almost always seen the spirit of religion and the spirit of freedom marching in opposite directions. But in America I found they were intimately united and that they reigned in common over the same country.”

In America, the aspirations of democratic liberty and the principles of Christian faith made peace with each other. In France, aspirations that were only slightly more radical and principles that were only slightly more traditional made war.

It took a decree from the Emperor Napoleon to restore the Catholic church in France. In America, by contrast, it was the energetic labor of ordinary people, mostly Methodist and Baptist lay preachers, who secured the place of Christianity in a nation created by revolution.

In France, republicanism has been the partner of atheism. In America, republicanism has been the handmaiden of faith.

In France, the monied and titled elites have remained Catholic to a much greater degree than the masses. In America, the intellectual and economic elites have moved much further from Christianity than the people at large. And in England, whose revolution was earlier and less comprehensive, still other patterns have prevailed.

In the late twentieth century, political centenaries have become glitzy media events. Given the enduring significance of what occurred in 1688 and 1789, however, careful attention should be the order of the day instead of mindless hype. The world in which Americans, the French, and the British now live—as citizens and as saints—was created in those two years. Now, centuries later, it would be a fitting memorial to ponder, and at length, the genesis and development of that world.

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