Review of The Great Upheaval

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Was there ever a generation quite like that of America’s founders? We ask that question rather often, write and read books about it, sermonize about it on the Fourth of July and sometimes answer it smugly—and narrowly. For as remarkable as Washington, Adams, Jefferson, Franklin and Madison were, they were not alone. Theirs was also the age of Voltaire, Rousseau and Montesquieu, of Lafayette, Catherine the Great and Napoleon.

It was an age of grand sailing ships and glorious wartime expeditions, of primitive communications and great distances, a world apart from our seemingly shrunken globe of cellphones and Internet links. In our self-satisfaction we think of ourselves as the first residents of some global village or nodes in some new network of international affiliations.

Not so. As Jay Winik reminds us in “The Great Upheaval,” the notable figures of the late 18th century—“perhaps the greatest galaxy of thinkers and doers in history”—had their own interlocking directories. “All the great figures of the day, from one end of the globe to the other, watched one another and reacted to one another—the Americans, the French, the Russians, the Ottomans were all part of one grand, interwoven tapestry.” For that reason, as Mr. Winik shows, the fate of France was tied to that of America, and the fate of Poland to that of Russia, and America to England, and England to France, and so forth. In some odd way the world was smaller then than now.

This is part of Mr. Winik’s thesis in “The Great Upheaval,” a remarkable work of history, a sweeping panorama of great leaders, great thinkers, great battles and great stakes, with nations and civilizations hanging in the balance. By some accident of historical physics, the signature struggles of the millennium were all crammed into one generation—or so it seems—pitting the individual against society, freedom against tyranny, secularism against theocracy, change against stability. Powerful forces of the time, Mr. Winik says, “raised doubts, discredited ancient customs, bred skepticism, unraveled old standards and gave birth to new ones, undermined the comfort and support of tradition, and, as monarchy weakened and republicanism strengthened, led to the emergence of the modern age.”

Paroxysms, Patriotism

“The Great Upheaval” itself is a kind of musical composition with three principal melodies or strains: The first captures the experience of the U.S. in its precarious early days; the second that of France in revolutionary tumult; and the third that of Russia, striking south against the Ottomans and west against the Poles and then inward. Weaving the three strains into one—showing how these nations affected one another and the course of history—is Mr. Winik’s task. He describes the American rebellion and the struggles of the early American republic, the paroxysms and new patriotism of France, and the glory and agony of late 19th-century Russia. His overarching theme can be simply distilled: how the travails and tragedies (and the glories) of our world were created in their world.

As Mr. Winik notes, the greatness of the historical moment called forth courage, imagination and idealism—but it also entailed great flaws. For America, the flaw was the stain of slavery; for France, it was terror and war; for Russia, it was over-reaching imperial ambition and then an over-reaction to dissent. The results were liberalism, revolution, nationalism, democracy, republicanism—and authoritarianism. “Contrary to the way conventional histories like to tell it,” Mr. Winik urges, “none of these remarkable events occurred in isolation.”

Not the American Revolution, which was bred by the philosophes, the thinkers who shook Europe from its intellectual moorings and America from its British colonial bonds. Not the French Revolution, which drew its oxygen from the American rebellion and drew its Declaration of the Rights of Man from America’s Declaration of Independence. Not the turmoil of Catherine’s Russia, with a mix of reform and repression that was set in train by the tumult of the revolutions elsewhere. “After having earlier helped the cause of American independence,” Mr. Winik writes, Catherine “dedicated herself to destroying the very idea of republicanism.”

Mr. Winik sustains this theme of reverberating effects by giving us several embedded narratives, none more gripping than his chronicle of the French Revolution, especially the trials and then the actual trial of Louis XVI, his death by guillotine and then the ordeal of his widow, Marie Antoinette, who met the same fate. This dramatic sequence of events is the spine of the book, but in some ways the entire volume reaches its highest point of historical irony with the death of Robespierre, the revolutionary who led the Terror and was ultimately murdered by it: “In the end,” Mr. Winik writes, “the man so reviled was his own victim: He had glorified the republic but could find no compassion for the men and women whose patriotic fervor did not match his own; he had preached universal brotherhood and equality, but then coldly executed the innocent as well as the guilty; he had sanctified the vast, ennobling goals of the Revolution, but had destroyed the very men who tirelessly labored to make them a reality.” And though the American Revolution and the great American generation of the early republic constitute a large portion of Mr. Winik’s tale, in some ways the most memorable portrait he sketches is that of Russia’s Catherine, who has always occupied a peripheral if not entirely invisible place in the American story.

Many Dimensions

For Catherine was a figure of many dimensions, many contradictions, many passions. “She tamed the Muslim world and charmed—or awed—the Christian one,” Mr. Winik writes. She did more than that. She expanded Russia by 200,000 square miles, opened up education to women, introduced smallpox inoculation to the population, became a collector of paintings by Raphael, Van Dyck, Rembrandt, Watteau and Chardin, championed neoclassicism in architecture (leaving St. Petersburg transformed), and served as the patron and protector of Voltaire, the sponsor of Diderot and the author of poems, librettos, fairy tales and a dictionary. For all that, she also crushed Poland, snuffed out its idealistic heart and massacred its people.

To such momentous history Mr. Winik brings a writing style that is brisk and approachable. His account is lovingly presented, without excess or rhetorical flourish and yet with a subtle, beguiling forward momentum. The story unfolds slowly but irresistibly, drawing the reader into a world so unlike our own and yet so central to our self-understanding.

Now a word about the American difference in a volume whose thesis is the inter-relationship between events on the American continent and around the world. This American difference was not truly apparent until 1801. The occasion is the House struggle over the deadlocked election of 1800, which we commonly find notable for the emergence of Jefferson as John Adams’s successor but which is remarkable for a far more subtle and important reason—the passage of the presidency from a man of one political doctrine to a man with a far different outlook.

“America had accomplished one more resounding first: peacefully transferring political power from one party to another,” Mr. Winik writes. “While the hands of European and Russian monarchs and reformers alike were drenched in blood, despite all the dissention and rancor, in America they were virtually spotless.” Not a bad accomplishment. Not bad at all, when you realize that the election of 1800 ends a stunning period in world history with what we now think of as but the beginning of our own.