Let there fall externally what will on the parts which can feel the effects of this fall. For those parts which have felt will complain, if they choose. But I, unless I think that what happened is an evil, am not injured. And it is in my power to think so.
In the brief ten years before the century ended, France formed a republic, executed a king, established an effective if faction-ridden revolutionary regime, and passed from that through a period of confusion that ended with a coup d’état and General Napoleon Bonaparte’s accession to power. Through it all, the French nation continually fought the rest of Europe.
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The American Revolution in the 1770s inspired these radicals in Europe. It offered a great lesson to ponder and perhaps to imitate. To European observers, the American founding fathers were true men of the Enlightenment—rational yet passionately concerned about equality, peaceful yet ready to go to war for their freedom. By wresting independence from a formidable imperial power, they had proved that the Enlightenment ideas worked.
For it is in thy power whenever thou shalt choose to retire into thyself.
Sweeping aside English institutions and ignoring the mood of the English people, James made it plain that he meant to be an absolute monarch. In 1611 he dissolved Parliament and for the next ten years ruled England without it. Thus the leaders of the Puritans and the advocates of parliamentary authority in England tended to merge in their resistance to royal power.
Calvinism’s emphasis on the sovereignty of God led in turn to a special view of the state. Luther tended to consider the state supreme. The German princes often determined where and how the gospel would be preached. But Calvin taught that no one—whether pope or king—has any claim to absolute power. Calvin never preached the “right of revolution,” but he did encourage the growth of representative assemblies and stressed their right to resist the tyranny of monarchs.
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