A Turning Point in European Constitutional History
If there is an event that traditionally marks the transition to modern times in the history of the West, is without a doubt the French Revolution, to such an extent that it is a common convention in European culture to consider 1789 the foremost turning point in the continent’s history.[656]
The French Revolution was not, of course, the first bourgeois revolution, as 13 years before it the American Revolution had begun.
It had, however, a much greater impact on western public opinion[657] because of the simple fact that it did not occur far off in the New World, but in Old Europe, and, what is more, in one of its premier states: France, a kingdom that had been the Continent’s leading power in the seventeenth century during the reign of Louis XIV, and which in the eighteenth, was still Europe’s greatest cultural juggernaut. All the great enlightened sovereigns spoke French, as it was considered the language of culture, while the philosophers wrote in French and Paris was the capital of Enlightenment (Roche 1998,659-661). France was, in short, the model to be followed.The truly impressive thing is that the French colossus, with one of Europe’s most powerful and well-established monarchies, crumbled to the ground like a house of cards in a question of just weeks,[658] along the way shaking the foundations of the European monarchies, who continued to uphold the traditional order of estate-based society. The French Revolution quickly transcended its status as an internal affair to become a process of change aimed at taking on and overturning the social, political and legal order of all of Europe. When in the spring of 1792, France’s revolutionaries declared war on Austria and Prussia, the conflict acquired a European dimension. When Louis XVI was executed (January 21, 1793), the other European monarchies, including Spain, declared war upon the French Convention. From this point forward, all Europe would ally to save the Old Order.
While the American Revolution was contained in North America, the French Revolution and its momentous Napoleonic spillover, in contrast, definitively transformed the very nature of European politics. In the brief space of 25 years, between 1789 and 1815, the bases of western public law were irreversibly altered.
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