War was a regular feature and, at times, a dominant characteristic of international relations between the Peace of Westphalia in 1648 and the beginning of monarchical Europe’s struggle with Revolutionary France in 1792. At least until the Enlightenment, contemporaries viewed it not merely as an acceptable way of pursuing international rivalries, but as a more normal and natural state of affairs than peace. Periods of open conflict, during which diplomatic representatives would usually be withdrawn, were assumed to be inevitable and, indeed, were frequently the anticipated outcome of the policies adopted by rulers and their advisers. The eighteenth century was significantly more pacific than its seventeenth-century predecessor had been, though in turn much more bellicose than its nineteenth-century successor. According to one calculation, the European ‘great powers’ were engaged in warfare for eighty-eight years of the century 1600–1700, sixty-four years from 1700–1800, and twenty-four years from 1800–1900. During the shorter period between 1700 and 1790, Russia was at war at some point during all nine decades; Austria, France, and Britain during eight; Spain and Sweden during seven; Prussia during six; and the Ottoman Empire during five: figures which underline the ubiquity of armed struggle even during the less bellicose eighteenth century.

This chapter describes the American Revolution in its general development and underlying logics, with particular attention given to the traditions of political participation and their and transformations, and the ways in which they were fused – or not – with individual equality.

Chapter 2 discusses the adaptations that Grouchy made to her initial draft of the Letters on Symapthy between 1786 and 1789. It explores her interest, during this period, in the affair of the trois roués, a court case that had captured the attention of her uncle Dupaty and Condorcet. This constituted her first sustained exposure to the political injustices of ancien régime. By engaging with the work of these two men, and the ideas of other eighteenth-century natural rights thinkers, Grouchy developed her own ideas as to how injustice could be combatted. This resulted in various additions to the Letters. Building on her original ideas about sympathy-based morality, she elaborated her own definition of natural rights. She went on to argue that these rights, and justice as a whole, could only exist in society when a minimal degree of social and economic equality was guaranteed by the state. This Chapter argues that this was the period when the Letters changed from a moral treatise to a text concerned with political theory.

Like all revolutionary processes, those that led to Latin American independence were highly volatile and experimental in nature. Often accompanied by extreme violence, even open warfare, the formation of the new Latin American states in the early nineteenth century required imagining new states, institutions, and laws. The need, often urgency, to transform colonial domains into various independent units frequently coincided with the desire to end (or at least modernize) the Ancien régime. Yet the wish to supersede the past did not guarantee rupture. Instead, it initiated a period of questioning more often than answering, of experimenting more often than finding solutions. After describing the context in which the independence took place, this chapter surveys some of the questions that had to be answered, mostly by identifying debates that required settling and the difficulties entailed in achieving this goal. It examines who had the power to declare independence, how to identify the territories that would become new polities, how the national territory and citizenship were defined, how new republican structures should be formed, and elections conducted, and the legal changes all these developments entailed.

With the collapse of the ancien régime following a fiscal crisis, the Revolutionaries of the 1790s sought to design a more equitable tax system, based on direct taxes; most indirect taxes were abolished. These new taxes, though, proved insufficient to meet France’s needs, particularly given the collapse of public credit due to political instability. Committed to honouring the debt incurred by the ancien régime, and facing the mounting expenses of a major European war after 1792, the Revolutionary governments failed to stabilise the fiscal situation. Instead, they were pushed to compensate for insufficient tax receipts by levying forced loans, imposing price controls and printing money, which produced hyperinflation by the mid-1790s. These drastic measures, and their failure to resolve the fiscal problems of the 1790s, did much to discredit the Revolutionary regimes, and consequently facilitated the emergence of post-revolutionary politics under Napoleon.

In this chapter, Richard Avramenko suggests that Tocqueville’s voyage to America should be understood in light of a lifelong aristocratic concern for unearthing lost remnants of the Ancien Régime. By way of illustrating Tocqueville’s ambivalent relationship to aristocracy, Avramenko draws an etymological distinction between the concepts of “debris” and “remnants,” two words Tocqueville uses in systematic ways throughout his corpus to differentiate certain institutions of the Ancien Régime that are doomed from others that might be rehabilitated for a democratic age. Avramenko traces the etymology of these two words in the French tradition and then locates these usages in Tocqueville’s discussion of various aristocratic or quasi-aristocratic institutions in the United States such as the Native Americans, the American South, the military, the new industrial aristocracy, and the profession of the law. Avramenko finds one inspiration for Tocqueville and Gustave de Beaumont’s travels in their childhood fascination with a 1798 novella Voyage d’un Allemand au Lac Onéida by Sophie von La Roche. The book tells the story of an aristocratic couple’s exile to Lake Oneida, New York, one of the destinations Tocqueville and Beaumont visited during their travels as chronicled in Tocqueville’s “Journey to Lake Oneida.”