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| The Great Upheaval: American and the Birth of the Modern World, 1788-1800 By Jay Winik Harper 688 pp., $29.95 |
How Russia, France, and the US rocked the 18th century
Historian Jay Winik takes a new look at the revolutionary fervor that changed the world.
from the September 18, 2007 edition
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In Poland and beyond, Europe followed the twin revolutions and their aftermaths with great interest. Benjamin Franklin was so popular in France that his face appeared on snuffboxes; French revolutionaries found fame – and inspired fear – almost everywhere.
And then there was empire builder extraordinaire Catherine, a darling of the smart set from Philadelphia to St. Petersburg who dragged her country out of "semi-barbarism" but found some freedoms too much to bear.
Winik is a bit too fond of questions and overheated language but does a fine job of painting a picture of the grim 18th-century world (when a full half of all infants died) and describing the leaders of the time.
In Winik's last work, "April 1865: The Month That Saved America," he uncovered signs of the tremendous physical and emotional stresses facing the Civil War commanders. He made them seem less than superhuman but still extraordinary. Here, Winik strips away the patina of mythology to reveal the contradictions and internal battles that make historical figures so intriguing. Full of life but tremendously cruel (Catherine the Great), brilliant yet unable to play well with others (Thomas Jefferson), or both royally clueless and regally over the top (France's Louis XVI), the major players both influenced one another and changed the world.
Lively portraits of extraordinary people are scarcer in Edward J. Larson's Magnificent Catastrophe: The Tumultuous Election of 1800, America's First Presidential Campaign, which picks up in the US where Winik leaves off.
The title of the Pulitzer Prize-winning Larson's book and its first line ("They could write like angels and scheme like demons") promise a lush look at the pitched battle between presidential candidates John Adams and Mr. Jefferson, but "Magnificent Catastrophe" ends up being a bit on the dry side.
Still, Mr. Larson reminds us that nasty presidential campaigns aren't a creation of the modern age. Even in 1800, "partisanship prevailed to the bitter end and showed no signs of abating," Larson writes," the result of "conflicting hopes for liberty and fears of disorder."
"George Washington's vision of elite, consensus leadership had died," Larson writes, "and a popular, two-party republic … was born."
Even at her most open-minded, Catherine the Great over in Russia would have been appalled by the prospect of giving so much power to the people. Thanks to the revolutionaries of the 18th century, such a view was on its way out even by the time of the 1800 campaign.
As Winik puts it in "The Great Upheaval, "the great contest over liberty had begun in the age of 1790s." And it's pretty clear who won.
• Randy Dotinga is a freelance writer in San Diego.
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