Re: English and French revolutions

["Alan Bradley" <alanb@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

> From: Julio Pino
> The key word here, of course, is REVOLUTIONARY.Had republicanism
prevailed
> in the UK, and the Church been disestablished, and England suffered as
> great a loss to its empire as Haiti did to France, then we could compare
> the two bourgeois revolutions.

This is whacky stuff here, Julio.

Republicanism didn't prevail in France either:  First you had Bonapartism
(Cromwellianism, kind of), and then the restored monarchy.  The French only
achieved a stable republic (the 3rd!) after 1871 - not an early date for
doing so.

English secular landowners had been "acquiring" Church lands since the days
of Henry VIII.  Most of the Church's legal prerogatives were swept away
during the Revolution - the Church of the Restoration period was not the
same as that of the period before the Revolution by any stretch of the
imagination.  In addition, the State Church's monopoly had been broken -
incompletely, perhaps, but permanently.

The clearest examples of the intellectual liberation involved in the
Revolution, though are names like the Royal Society, Boyle (Boyle's Law),
and, of course:  Newton.  These people, the first to make the transition
from alchemist to scientist, are products of the bourgeois revolution - not
of the days of the Inquisition.

And the point of the English Revolution was to enable England to _create_
its empire, not to lose it.

I suggest you should check out a few books on the topic.  Nearly anything
by Christopher Hill would be a good starting point.

Oh, and the radicals it produced are actually quite interesting, even
though they were unsuccessful:  there were supporters of Irish
self-determination in the 17th Century!

Alan Bradley
alanb@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx