‘1789: The Threshold of the Modern Age’

In 1789, a Paris mob stormed the Bastille and George Washington, acclaimed by triumphal arches and crowds singing a rewritten rendition of "God Save the King," assumed office as the first president of the United States. The U.S. Congress was preparing to add the Bill of Rights to the Constitution as the French National Assembly proclaimed the more radical Declaration of the Rights of Man.

Liberty was the language of the age, and the precise meaning of the word would be debated and defined with speeches and pamphlets, ballots and bullets. Historians have marked 1789 as nothing less than the beginning of a new chapter in world history. In 1789: The Threshold oftheModern Age (Farrar, Straus & Giroux), David Andress examines civilization-shaping events in America and France together with less dramatic shifts in Great Britain. His purpose is to understand how the modern political order began.

During the past two centuries the story has been told many times, from many perspectives. Andress, a British academic historian, has done remarkable work in composing a provocative narrative linking the concerns of the late 18th century with the ongoing debates of our own time. Writing with keen insight into the human actors who embodied and directed the social forces of their age, Andress has an unerring eye for the right, telling details. Frustrated at not receiving a commission in the royal army, Washington gladly donned a general's sword and epaulets when the American Revolution called. The father of his country was an English gentleman through and through, whose continual show of reluctance to assume power was a matter of proper form. Men of good breeding must never appear eager.

A craftsman of jeweled language, Andress paints sentences with a light artist's touch in shades of irony and even sarcasm. The author feigns no surprise that Tom Paine, the most radical of American revolutionaries and later a freedom-fighting gadfly in England and France, schemed to build great bridges with proceeds derived from slave labor.

Britain fought against revolutions in America and France, and yet Britain's famously unwritten constitution, with its Parliament and Bill of Rights, provided inspiration for developments in Europe and the New World. In 1775 Great Britain was the most liberal nation on Earth, and although it would stave off the revolutions it unwittingly inspired, events in the United States and Francecoupled with the disabling mental illness of King George IIItriggered an evolutionary series of reforms that would gradually democratize the United Kingdom.

As Andress emphasizes, during the 19th and 20th centuries no nation escaped the influence of the United States, Britain and France, whose colonial empires and cultural assets shaped political and social life on every continent. But in many lands, the struggle to define liberty led to calamity and uncertain outcomes. In The Mexican Warsfor Independence (Hill & Wang), American historian Timothy J. Henderson lucidly summarizes the protracted struggle for an independence many Mexicans neither wanted nor understood.

For reasons that sound racist to contemporary ears, Thomas Jefferson declined to aid the first in a series of rebellions and the revolutionary French were routinely employed as the boogeyman by Mexican conservatives. The ideas of 1789 found their way nevertheless into the Mexican upheaval in the form of constitutions whose provisions were often ignored. Despite regional divisions and different views on the role of government, most of America's founders understood each other well enough and held enough in common to guide the emerging nation from revolution into a stable republic. Mexico was not so fortunate.