ABSTRACT
This chapter considers the causes of the various Revolutions in the period after 1815 without realizing that the major cause of them all was the French Revolution of 1789. Indeed, the search for origins should go back to the Boston Tea Party and the Declaration of Independence. Without them, there might never have been a Tennis Court Oath or a Storming of the Bastille, or a Declaration of the Rights of Man; and all history from that time till would have been other than it is. The American and French Revolutions proclaimed two astonishing facts, new in the experience of European man. The first was that men could wage war successfully against their rulers. The colonists had by violence freed themselves from the King of Great Britain. The second fact, reinforcing the first, was that there had been formulated a political philosophy that justified this war of subjects against rulers.
