In The Age of Revolutions: And the Generations Who Made It, Nathan Perl-Rosenthal offers a different narrative. Examining Atlantic revolutions that occurred between the 1760s and the 1820s, he groups their fomenters into two generations. The first came of age in a hierarchical world, and prevailing assumptions about class, caste, and mobility mostly prevented them from forming durable, democratic cross-class revolutionary movements. In this generation belong the American and French revolutions, Túpac Amaru II’s revolt in Peru, and other smaller rebellions in Europe. But these disrupted the status quo just enough that a second generation—the Napoleonic wars, the Haitian revolution, and the revolutions against Spanish rule in South America—could build the mass movements necessary to claim and maintain power. The second generation had a more authoritarian and conservative bent, but the world their revolutions made was one in which “republics and individual rights, though not necessarily equality, were in the ascendant.”
Perl-Rosenthal focuses on “what makes a revolution happen, in the most immediate sense, [which] is political organizing and political mobilization. Revolutionaries organize by making connections with one another and creating the means, informal or institutional, to work together toward common goals.” To show how these political alignments and movements begin and sustain revolutions, Perl-Rosenthal employs three kinds of historical study. The first is biographical: highlighting the lives of representative (though not necessarily well-known) figures in revolutionary movements. The second is examining “the practices of sociable and collective life”—the salons, coffeehouses, and parks where people gathered, debated, and acted. Third is studying visual and material culture, music history, and literature to assess the worldviews of the two revolutionary generations. The result is a fascinating, multifaceted history that manages to be both thorough and humane, one that can guide us through turbulent conversations about revolution, social change, and the meaning of our country’s origins.
The Age of Revolutions begins with a portrait of the hierarchical world of the eighteenth century, one in which social status was usually fixed at birth and class mobility was the exception. As colonial production created rapid economic growth and rising inequality throughout the Atlantic world, the wealthy and working classes had less and less to do with each other. When elites withdrew from public spaces into opulent homes, working-class people claimed those spaces and made them prime gathering spots of political organizing. “In places as different as the streets of Paris and Boston, the plantation fields of Saint-Domingue, and the market squares of Charleston, the lower sorts gained an unexpected measure of dominance,” writes Perl-Rosenthal.