Reviews & Comments

Any historian with a fine mind and a compelling writing style could probably build a strong book about any decade of American destiny, beginning with the Revolutionary War.

Jay Winik, who teaches history at the University of Maryland, without question possesses a fine mind and writes compellingly. The decade he has chosen is the 1790s - as opposed to the 1860s, which provided the foundation for his previous book, “April 1865.”

The 1790s is a wise choice, and Winik makes his book especially memorable by focusing not just on the trendy Founding Fathers (George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, John Adams, James Madison, among others) but also on the leaders of the French Revolution and the leaders of the Russian ruling class as they deal with threats from the masses stirring outside the Kremlin gates.

It is Winik’s thesis that what happened in each nation - with Great Britain as an important but secondary player - during the 1790s influenced what happened in the other nations. Winik makes a convincing argument that the American Revolution, French Revolution and Russian Repression should not be studied in isolation.

Winik opens the book with a historical backdrop, showing how the British colonies began morphing into the United States of America decades before the 1790s, how the seeds of revolution began growing in France, how monarchical absolutism seemed unshakeable in Russia.

By the time the American Founding Fathers signed the Declaration of Independence from Great Britain in 1776, the fates of all the established European and Asian nations had become intertwined with the astounding happenings across the Atlantic Ocean.

France, ruled by King Louis XVI just before the gathering storm in Paris, intervened on behalf of the American revolutionaries partly as a way to pay back the British for the Seven Years’ War battering. The Spanish and the Dutch followed suit, for their own selfish nationalistic reasons.

As for Russia, ruled by Empress Catherine the Great, her motives seemed so murky and her moods so changeable that nobody could figure out how her actions might affect the American revolutionaries. Eventually, also in spite of herself, Catherine encouraged revolution, something she feared deeply in her own empire.

To demonstrate Winik’s overall way with words and his skillful character sketches, here is his introduction of a protagonist, after stating that tsar after tsar before the protagonist had led to seemingly perpetual madness in the vast Russian empire:

“… It was in 1762 that the real changes came, with another majestic occupant of the Romanov throne, who would cast a broad shadow across the remainder of the century and the four corners of the globe. Yet this tsar wasn’t a man, or a Romanov, or even a Russian. She was a minor German princess, Sophie of Anhalt-Zerbst, born to a small house of royalty in the hodgepodge territory of the Holy Roman Empire. We know her today by a different name, Ekaterina, or later, as Catherine the Great.”

Winik introduces not only political rulers but also intellectual powerhouses, thus giving the book a welcome dimension beyond the usual fare of such histories.

The biggest strength of the book is Winik’s effort to prove that the occurrences in each nation affected the other nations. As he says, “Though the chapters of this book are organized by accounts of America, France and Russia, which serve as frames through which to see the larger age, the story is actually one continuous, interlocking narrative, unfolding much as the protagonists of the day themselves saw it.”

When Winik actually accomplishes what he promises - explaining the drama through the minds of those involved in it - the book is history at its finest.

Unfortunately, from time to time Winik tells rather than shows, giving the text a preachy tone. He also spends his valuable capital with readers unwisely at times, attributing so much meaningfulness to this action or an inaction that it becomes difficult to tell what is truly significant. Not all books of about 700 pages are too long, but this one is.

That criticism of the book is more than carping. But the criticism does not erase the premise of this review: Anybody who cares about why the United States, Russia and France are as they are today will find plenty to appreciate in this book. After all, the past is prologue.

Steve Weinberg is a director of the National Book Critics Circle.

Revolutionary Road

In his previous and well-received book on the last month of the Civil War, “April 1865,” Jay Winik demonstrated a flair for storytelling that suggested an almost cinematic, you-are-there immediacy. He also embraced the old-fashioned idea that prominent personalities, most dramatically Robert E. Lee, actually shaped the course of history, reinforcing Emerson’s maxim that history is biography writ large.

Both tendencies are on display in “The Great Upheaval,” but here the canvas is much larger. The time is the last decade of the 18th century. The place, or rather places, are the United States, France and Russia. The cast of characters is a veritable gallery of greats: all the founding fathers, with George Washington as the foundingest father of them all; Louis XVI, Marie Antoinette, Robespierre and Napoleon; Catherine the Great, Prince Potemkin and Thaddeus Kosciuszko. Cecil B. De Mille could not have asked for more.

There are two overlapping story lines at work here. The first might be called the big-bang theory of the modern political universe. Namely, in the late 18th century an enormous explosion of enlightened ideas about human equality, personal freedom and individual rights rocked the Western world, then radiated its energies out to undermine the hierarchical assumptions of the medieval order. This is hardly a novel argument; indeed it is a bedrock assumption of the liberal or Whig interpretation of the last two centuries of Western history.

Winik’s second story line, which advances a more unconventional claim, is that the revolutions in America and France, and the nonrevolution or reaction in Russia, were all of a piece, that they represented different enactments of the same overarching plot. It seems to me that Winik is on solid ground in the linkage between the American and French Revolutions. But the Russian connection seems somewhat strained. Catherine the Great’s decision to take Russia in an autocratic direction, to reject the enlightened impulse, was rooted in a realistic assessment of the extremely bloody consequences of the French Revolution. She recognized that the comparatively calm consequences of the American Revolution did not translate into a European context. She was right about that, and thereby bought another century for the Russian monarchy, but also assured that when the revolutionary moment arrived, it would be more violent and, ultimately, uncontrollable.

The logic of Winik’s argument about the interconnected character of revolutionary events raises a host of tantalizing questions: How did Americans manage to control the revolutionary energies and create the world’s first nation-size republic? Why did France implode in a spasm of gore and terror? How fateful was Russia’s rejection of the liberal agenda? But Winik’s deepest instinct is not to soar to panoramic altitudes but rather to dive into the details and recover a palpable sense of what it was like, for example, to watch Marie Antoinette go to the guillotine, or George Washington dominate a room by his silence.

Winik frequently pauses in his narrative to provide lengthy background pictures of the star players. Here, for example, is a typical passage from his profile of Louis XVI:

“His early childhood was nothing short of desolate. He was sickly, meek and pathologically shy. Ignored by his parents, who preferred his handsome older brother, and taunted by his own family as ‘Louis the Fat,’ he was orphaned at the age of 10 and was then haughtily ridiculed by his formidable grandfather. ... Physically, he walked with a waddle and was plump even as king, but he grew to be quite tall for his times — 5 feet 10; and he had soft blue eyes. ... His eyesight was bad, but his memory was superb. For that matter, so was his moral compass: modest and loyal, almost to a fault, he always esteemed the church, and, uncommon not just in a French king but in most kings, was ill at ease with his father’s many infidelities.”

Winik is a master of the character study, and although his book is based almost entirely on secondary sources, he has an uncanny knack for synthesizing the work of others, then imposing his own distinctive mark. I spent five years reading all of Washington’s papers, but could detect no gaffes or missteps in Winik’s rendering of the man.

But because personalities loom so large in his story, they sometimes seem to determine all the outcomes. Thus the American Revolution succeeded because of the preternatural wisdom of Washington. The French Revolution happened because of the chronic indecisiveness of Louis XVI. And Russia opted to oppose the liberal surge because of the enlightened realism of Catherine the Great.

What is missing from this narrative is the impersonal dimension, the geographic, demographic, socioeconomic differences between France and Russia on the one hand, and the United States on the other. Leadership did make a difference in securing the revolution in America. But the Americans could afford to be more patient because they did not face pent-up hatred like that of the French peasantry and Parisian poor. America also enjoyed splendid isolation from the cauldron of European politics. If it had been located in the middle of Europe, it would almost surely have suffered the tragic fate of Poland, regardless of the impressive leadership skills of Washington and the founding fathers. Indeed, one of Washington’s elemental insights was to recognize that history had dealt him cards that no European monarch could match.

My sense is that Winik is not oblivious to these deep-rooted differences between the American and European contexts. But as a born storyteller, he privileges the personal. If you want a comparative analysis of the revolutionary movements in America and Europe, you should look elsewhere. If you want to understand, intellectually and emotionally, what it was like to experience this historic upheaval, this is the book for you.

Joseph J. Ellis is the Ford Foundation professor at Mount Holyoke College and the author of the forthcoming “American Creation: Triumph and Tragedy at the American Founding.”

How Russia, France, and the US rocked the 18th century

from the September 18, 2007 edition

Historian Jay Winik takes a new look at the revolutionary fervor that changed the world.

By Randy Dotinga

In the revolutionary years of the late 18th century, one nation stood above almost all others as a beacon of progressive thought. New freedoms abounded there and its leading intellectual lights put desiccated old monarchies to shame.

When the country’s popular leader went on a lavish tour, luminaries from across the West showed up to pay their respects. Wine flowed, ladies danced, and philosophers compared notes under the gaze of the most enlightened monarch of the time.

Her name? Catherine the Great. Her country? Russia.

Today, the empress is nearly forgotten in the West except as a woman with a fondness for the boudoir (and, according to some, the stable). But she played a crucial role in creating a new world order, argues historian Jay Winik in his epic and vivid new book The Great Upheaval: America and the Birth of the Modern World, 1788-1800.

Few leaders “would come to embody the tensions and ferment of the age as Catherine, who would become inextricably intertwined within the tapestry of the two great revolutions germinating in America and France, all with seismic consequences for years to come,” writes Winik.

The stories of the French and American Revolutions are familiar ones to modern readers thanks to a plethora of popular histories published in recent years. And bookshelves are littered with tomes by authors who insist they’ve stumbled upon a Very Important and Revealing Moment in History.

Fortunately for Winik, he actually has a real turning point to write about, a moment in time when the old was upended with lasting consequences. His ambitious triple play – weaving together the stories of Russia, America, and France – offers a fresh take on the era, and his enthusiasm gives readers a treat.

While we think of the US as being largely isolated from the rest of the world at that time, the new American nation was hardly immune to foreign influences. Months-old news was devoured as eagerly as breaking bulletins are today, and the events abroad were hugely influential here.

Catherine could have tried to snuff out the American Revolution but, as Winik writes, she inadvertently served as unwitting midwife.

Meanwhile, Poland – inspired by the US and France – tried to have a revolution of its own, but Catherine succeeded in burying it.

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.

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.

It is appropriate that Jay Winik’s riveting The Great Upheaval is published this Sept. 11. The author of April 1865 examines another profoundly turbulent period in history, 1788-1800. It is reassuring to read about how human beings survived an era as unsettled as our own.

At the end of the 18th century, blood and new ideas were everywhere: There was the utopia-turned-nightmare of the French Revolution and its guillotine. There was the unimaginably savage conflict between Orthodox Russia and the Muslim Ottoman Empire. Accepted beliefs about man, God, kings and the world were upended.

And there was the just-hatched United States, trying to establish itself as a viable, independent government against all odds.

Founding Father fever has long gripped the reading public. Ron Chernow, David McCullough and Joseph Ellis have produced terrific books about Alexander Hamilton, John Adams and Thomas Jefferson, to mention just a few.

Winik joins the group with The Great Upheaval. With a twist. He looks beyond the Continental USA and adds a European perspective. In alternating chapters, Winik presents what was happening in France and Russia as well as in the USA. (England is touched on.) He stresses that Europe and America were far more connected than we realize.

“There was an uncommon fluidity of the age … almost unheard of even today,” writes Winik. “Intellectuals, advisors, military men, and ideas freely crossed borders, changed allegiances, settled in, and then moved on.”

Thus, when the French executed their king and queen, the reverberations were felt in the streets outside George Washington’s Philadelphia residence and in the Russian palaces of the horrified Empress Catherine the Great.

Broadening his approach lets Winik expand his cast of historical characters and showcase his dazzling ability to capture the drama of history. Upheaval includes a comprehensive synthesis of historical trends that crossed country boundaries: the rise of nationalism, the Enlightenment, the erosion of religion and monarchies.

And like Antonia Fraser, Winik includes the vivid, telling human details that stick with the reader. He does a spectacular job in detailing the collapse of the French monarchy, the last days of Louis XVI and Marie-Antoinette, and figures like Robespierre, Danton and Marat. The chapters about Russia and the Ottoman Empire are particularly strong because for American readers with an appetite for accessible history, here is new material. Winik is one of those delightfully opinionated historians who doesn’t hide his feelings about the men and women of the past.

His admiration for the dynamic, German-born princess who transformed herself into the Tsarina Catherine the Great through hard work, raw ambition and brains vibrates off the page. She embraced the Enlightenment but became a tyrant to keep power.

Winik’s point is that this era produced many titanic figures. What set America apart was George Washington’s unique willingness to let go of power by not running for a third term and the creation of a government based on balance and compromise. With the exception of slavery, issues could be settled without bloodshed.

This is one of those books you want to buy for friends and family. And our country’s current leaders.

☆ THE GREAT UPHEAVAL: America and the Birth of the Modern World, 1788-1800

Wide-angle presentation of the philosophical, political and martial storms buffeting the infant American republic at the close of the 18th century. In the years following the Constitution’s adoption, the United States weathered three domestic rebellions, a quasi-war with France and continued humiliations at the hands of Britain. It withstood the unexpected emergence of political parties and the most contentious election in its history (sharply chronicled in Edward J. Larson’s A Magnificent Catastrophe, 2007). It managed an unprecedented, peaceful transfer of power between antagonists and witnessed the death of Washington, the figure most indispensable to the precarious American experiment. To explain fully the nature and extent of the young nation’s peril and the reasons for its birth and unlikely survival, Winik (History and Public Policy/Univ. of Maryland; April 1865: The Month That Saved America, 2001, etc.) examines the international zeitgeist, especially forces at work in France and Russia. He explains the era’s unusual fluidity, the surprising intertwining of people and events illustrated by spot-on portraits of the Enlightenment’s greatest men and women, especially those - e.g., Franklin, Jefferson, Talleyrand, Lafayette, Gouverneur Morris, John Paul Jones, Citizen Genet, Thaddeus Kosciuszko — who played important roles on more than one continent. His painterly prose catches Napoleon, Potemkin and Russian General Suvorov at war and the likes of Mirabeau, Hamilton and Adams thinking their way into the next century. Marvelously varied scenes in this sweeping narrative range from Catherine the Great’s tour of the Crimea to the backwoods Whiskey Rebellion, from the dinner table at Mt. Vernon to the Ottoman Sultan’s seraglio, from the glittering court of Louis XVI to Marat’s bathtub and Robespierre’s appointment with the guillotine. Winik effortlessly condenses impossibly large events — particularly the French Revolution, whose lofty ideology and bloody effusions shaped so much — all in service of his grand thesis: that this crucial decade of despotism, rebellion, war and democracy accounts for the nation — indeed, the world — we’ve inherited. Thrilling in scope and elegant in style and argument — a certain bet to win numerous awards.

In his book April 1865, Jay Winik demonstrated a capacity to write compellingly about familiar events in America’s most costly war. His new book is a cinematic reconstruction of the birth of the modern world between 1788 and 1800. He brilliantly moves across a world stage, capturing men, women, and tumultuous events – revolution, war, political strife – that he persuasively calls The Great Upheaval. No interested in history will want to miss it.”