The French Revolution followed American independence by six years, but it was the later event that went into the books as “the Great Revolution” and became the revolutionary archetype. It is not only the contrast of the conspicuously greater political violence of the French Revolution that has led historians to play down the comparative radicalism of its American counterpart but the fact that the French Revolution swiftly became the model for radical political transformation. For more than a century successful revolutionaries no sooner took power than they designed tricolors and located themselves to the “left” or “right,” terms that originally denoted where the delegates sat in the French Convention; the French taught succeeding generations the revolutionary drill. Until the Russian Revolution displaced it, the French Revolution formed the dominant modern political myth, the distorting mirror in which posterity located its dreams and dreads.

The American Revolution, on the other hand, was distinguished by its alleged conservatism; historians have generally held that we didn’t kill enough people, engender enough proto-Bolsheviks, or produce a sufficient social upheaval to achieve true revolutionary significance—a failure lamented in some quarters and celebrated in others.

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