SUSAN DUNN
Enlightenment Legacies
The United States and France celebrate their nationhood on July 4 and July
14, dates that conunemorate a revolutionary declaration of independence
and the people's storming of a hated symbol of the
ancien regime,
the
Bastille. On those summer days, red, white, and blue revolutionary flags fly
gaily over American and French cities and villages. Colorful parades and
fireworks, complemented by backyard barbecues and picnics, echo people's
patriotic joy.
As American and French citizens jubilantly fete their love of country,
are the courageous, violent revolutionary movements that accompanied
their nations' births still remembered? July 4 and July 14 survive as summer
festivals more than as historical commemorations, and people tend to for–
get the political audacity and courage of the men and women who fought
to break with the past and transform their societies-so much so that dur–
ing the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the United States and France
only rarely supported or encouraged other nations struggling for indepen–
dence, liberty, and equality.
France fought, at a tremendous cost in lives and money, to retain her
colonial outposts in Vietnam and Algeria and to deny their indigenous
peoples rights to independence and self-determination. The United States
has supported a plethora of dictators: Diem in South Vietnam, Batista in
Cuba, Marcos in the Philippines, the Shah of Iran, Duvalier in Haiti,
Pinochet in Chile. The list is disheartening. Only in March 1998 did the
American Congress pass, by the smallest of margins, a bill allowing Puerto
Ricans to vote on their own political status. France and the United States
have become, as the historian David Brion Davis suggests, the world's
leading adversaries of popular revolutions.
Thomas Jefferson would have been profoundly saddened, for his vision
of the United States was inseparable from the idea of revolution. Though
he advised people to be prudent and not to engage in traumatic revolution
for merely "transient causes," Jefferson nevertheless felt that when people
are subject to a despotic regime, revolution is not only their right, "it is
Copyright notice:
"Enlightenment Legacies" is excerpted from Chapter 6 of
Sister
Revolutions
by Susan Dunn. To be published by Farrar, Straus
&
Giroux. Copyright
© 1999 by Susan Dunn. All rights reserved.
