French Revolution

Augustin Thierry laments that the steady growth of liberty in France had been disrupted by the cataclysm of the French Revolution (1859)

Catharine Macaulay supported the French Revolution because there were sound “public choice” reasons for not vesting supreme power in the hands of one’s social or economic “betters” (1790)

Condorcet on why the French revolution was more violent than the American (1794)

Condorcet writes about the inevitability of the spread of liberty and prosperity while he was in prison awaiting execution by the Jacobins (1796)

Edmund Burke on liberty as “social” not “individual” liberty (1789)

Edmund Burke, Legislatures, and the Balance between Good and Evil

Edmund Burke, Man’s Necessities, and Governmental Responsibilities

Georg Jellinek argues that Lafayette was one of the driving forces behind the French Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen (1789)

Germaine de Staël on the indestructible love of liberty (1818)

James Mackintosh on how constitutions grow and are not made (1799)

James Mackintosh on the relationship between justice and utility (1791)

Knox on how the people during wartime are cowered into submission and pay their taxes “without a murmur” (1795)

Liberty in the French Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen (1789)

Lord Acton on the destruction of the liberal Girondin group and the suicide of Condorcet during the French Revolution (1910)

Lord Acton on the storming of “the instrument and the emblem of tyranny” in Paris, the Bastille, on July 14, 1789 (1910)

Madame de Staël argues that Napoleon was able to create a tyrannical government by pandering to men’s interests, corrupting public opinion, and waging constant war (1817)

Madame de Staël on how liberty is ancient and despotism is modern (1818)

Madame de Staël on the tyrant Napoleon (1818)

Noah Webster on the resilience of common religious practices in the face of attempts by the state to radically change them (1794)

Richard Price on giving thanks for the principles of the Revolution of 1688 (1789)

Richard Price on how the “domestic enemies” of liberty have been more powerful and more successful than foreign enemies (1789)

Thomas Paine responded to one of Burke’s critiques of the French Revolution by cynically arguing that wars are sometimes started in order to increase taxation (“the harvest of war”) (1791)

Tocqueville on Centralised Government in Canada and Decentralised Government in America (1856)

Tocqueville on the 1848 Revolution in Paris (1851)

Tocqueville on the true love of liberty (1856)

Tom Paine on the "Decline and Fall of the English System of Finance" (1796)

William Godwin on the need to simplify and reduce the power of the state (1793)