They were different. That is true. However, ironically, these two revolutions were inspired by the same ideas: liberty, equality, and the rights of the people.
Thomas Jefferson no less than Maximilien Robespierre was a fierce lover of liberty. Patrick Henry no less than Abbé Sieyès believed the people were sovereign and had a right to govern themselves. George Washington believed as Saint-Just did that virtue was a republican value upon which the safety of liberty depended. However, they meant very different things by these ideas.
I believe the best way to understand the difference between these two revolutions is to understand the difference between these ideas. They are like windows into the souls of the revolutions—spotlights on their hopes …show more content…
For Americans, the state of nature was very real. It was where individuals were endowed by the Creator with natural rights like life and liberty. Looking largely to John Locke, they believed governments should be instituted to protect those rights.
Freedom already existed naturally, but it had to be protected from potential sources of coercion, mainly from governments or from majorities who would deny people their individual rights. For some, the state of nature was a benign place. For others, like English philosopher Thomas Hobbes, it was where life was “nasty, brutish and short.”
It was an uneasy balance of Enlightenment optimism, with its faith in Reason, mixed in with an old-fashioned Protestant distrust of human nature. Freedom was largely a negative thing, and rights existed in nature to be discovered by Reason, not to be created by philosophers or government committees.
For the French, it was completely different. They imagined a new order in which everyone naturally loved and cared for one another, but only if all the bad laws and customs of the past were completely