Kings Were Inevitable and Untouchable Until They Suddenly Weren’t After a Few 1700s Revolutions

History Unplugged Podcast

History Unplugged

Society & Culture, History

4.2 • 3.7K Ratings

🗓️ 28 March 2024

⏱️ 45 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

At the turn of the nineteenth century, two waves of revolutions swept the Atlantic world, disrupting the social order and ushering in a new democratic-republican experiment whose effects rippled across continents and centuries. The first wave of revolutions in the late 1700s (which included the much-celebrated American and French Revolutions and the revolt against slavery in Saint Domingue/Haiti) succeeded in disrupting existing political structures. But it wasn’t until the second wave of revolutionaries came to maturity in the early 1800s—imbued with a passion for social mobility and a knack for political organizing—that these new forms of political life took durable shape, from the states of independent Haiti and Spanish America to the post-revolutionary governments that arose during and after Napoleon’s long reign over early nineteenth-century Europe.

Today’s guest is Nathan Perl-Rosenthal, author of “The Age of Revolutions and the Generations Who Made It.” We look at familiar figures like John Adams and little-known yet pivotal actors such as Marie Bunel, a confidant of Toussaint Louverture in the Haitian Revolution. Monarchies topple and are resurrected, republics emerge and find their footings, and a new social order of mobility upends the previous hierarchical system of rigid social classes. We see that one generation’s fledgling successes allowed their successors to fulfill the promise of a new world order.

Transcript

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0:00.0	It's going to hear with another episode of the History Unplugged Podcast.
0:07.0	For thousands of years, the only form of government that you could live in was an empire, a monarchy, a
0:12.2	the bureaucracy, some form of feudalism, or if you were lucky, a city-state ruled by a philosopher King.
0:17.0	There are other examples, but all the modern forms of what we consider government mostly came into being after a big bang of political
0:23.7	revolutions that all happened in a few short decades in the late 1700s.
0:28.2	This gave us the American, French, and Haitian revolutions, nearly all the modern nations in South America,
0:33.4	and ushered in republics constitutional monarchies, and nationalist movements
0:37.2	around the world. What was so special about the late 1700s as this world
0:41.6	historical tipping point of government.
0:43.0	To explore this question as today's guest, Nathan Pearl Rosethall, author of the
0:47.5	Age of Revolution and the Generations who Made It.
0:50.0	We look at the first wave of revolutions in the late 1700s, which include well-known figures like John Adams. You can't really change the world in one generation and
0:54.3	Pearl Rosenthal argues this was really a two-generation process. The
1:00.4	second wave of revolutionaries came to maturity in the early 1800s,
1:04.0	but did such things as create the post-revolutionary governments that arose during an after Napoleon's reign
1:09.0	and gave us the 19th century in the modern world as we know it today.
1:12.0	We see how one generation's
1:13.7	fledgling successes allow their successors to meet the promise for a new world order.
1:17.8	This episode helps make a lot of sense of modern political history and why the
1:21.3	world seemed to change after the American, French, and Napoleonic
1:24.2	revolutions. I hope you enjoy this discussion with Nathan Pearl Rosenthal.
1:27.7	And one more thing before we get started with this episode, a quick break for word from our sponsors.
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