THE ENLIGHTENMENT REVOLUTIONS, PART 1 (UPDATE)
Jack Posobiec on Human Events had a very interesting series of postings over the last few days dedicated to some of the post Enlightenment revolutions. Generally there are two, very distinct types. The first is the struggle of newly discovered feelings of "national awakening" of an ethnic or cultural group within the context of the old multicultural concept of empire. Examples of rebellions of this type are the Dutch, the Greek and the American Revolutions. The other model is much more violent and is a civil war within the national context on the basis of religion, ethnicity or most common, social class. Examples of the latter are the French, Russian, German and Spanish revolutions. We will post them all, in parts. Some we have already covered over the years.
2018 A Bit of History: The Dutch Revolt: The Eighty Years' War and the Creation of the Netherlands.
As we shall see there is a marked moral difference between the revolutions for independence and the Rousseau/Marxist civil wars stoked by internal passions and resentment.
The Eight Years' War
An early example of the uprisings of the first kind was the Dutch Eighty Years’ War, which lasted from 1568 to 1648. The war was rooted in religion and empire. The Protestant northern half of the Low Countries found themselves part of the Habsburg heritage under the Catholic King of Spain, who decided to suppress the religiously motivated uprisings.
The war lasted for eighty years and ultimately led to the separation of the Protestant northern half (the Netherlands) and Catholic southern half (Belgium) and to the formation of a kind of United States before the USA even existed, the Constitutional Republic of the United Provinces of the Netherlands, or the Dutch Republic, under a constitutional document which has been the model for the American Constitution (more in the section on the American Revolution).
That this long struggle of independence was not entirely a religious war is evidenced by its leader, William of Orange (and incidentally my own family) who fought for independence from Spain, while retaining the Roman Catholic religion.
The successor state was the Batavian Republic, that ended in 1806 with the accession of Louis Bonaparte to the Dutch throne, turning the republic of independent provinces into centrally ruled state modelled on post revolutionary France. The Netherlands has never recovered its status as a Constitutional Republic. It is currently a Constitutional Monarchy in the EU. (More)
The English Civil Wars
The one exemption to the rule are the English Civil Wars (1642–51) that took place in the British Isles between supporters of the monarchy of Charles I (and his son and successor, Charles II) and opposing groups in each of Charles’s kingdoms, including Parliamentarians in England, Covenanters in Scotland, and Confederates in Ireland.
2023 Kings and Generals: Why did the English Civil War Happen? - Early Modern History DOCUMENTARY.
The English Civil Wars are traditionally considered to have begun in England in August 1642, when Charles I raised an army against the wishes of Parliament, ostensibly to deal with a rebellion in Ireland. But the period of conflict actually began earlier in Scotland, with the Bishops’ Wars of 1639–40, and in Ireland, with the Ulster rebellion of 1641.
Throughout the 1640s, war between king and Parliament ravaged England, but it also struck all of the kingdoms held by the house of Stuart—and, in addition to war between the various British and Irish dominions, there was civil war within each of the Stuart states. For this reason the English Civil Wars might more properly be called the British Civil Wars or the Wars of the Three Kingdoms.
A name that can't be omitted from this story is that of Oliver Cromwell. He was an intensely religious Independent Puritan who entered the English Civil War on the side of the "Roundheads" or Parliamentarians.
Cromwell led the English military campaigns to establish control of Ireland in 1649 and later Scotland in 1650, which resulted in the end of the Civil War with a Parliamentary victory at the Battle of Worcester on 3 September 1651 and the introduction of the Commonwealth of England, Scotland, and Ireland.
Commander-in-Chief Cromwell's body, along with that of John Bradshaw, President of the High Court of Justice for the trial of King Charles I and Henry Ireton, Cromwell's son-in-law and general in the Parliamentary army during the English Civil War, were removed from Westminster Abbey to be posthumously tried for high treason and 'executed' on 30 January 1661.
The wars finally ended in 1651 with the flight of Charles II to France and, with him, the hopes of the British monarchy. (More)
The American Revolution
American Revolutionary War was a struggle of independence of British American colonies from the British Crown between 1775 to 1783 that historically had its roots in the Enlightenment. That those ideas were actually a lot older than that, is evidenced by the earlier Constitution of the Dutch Republic, mentioned before.
Dec. 10, 2023 Kings and Generals: American Revolution - Causes, Problems, Beginning - Early Modern History.
It established the United States as a sovereign federal nation state founded on Enlightenment principles of the consent of the governed and constitutionalism. The President, Congress, and judiciary share Government powers and the federal government shares sovereignty with the state governments.
A constitutional republic is a state where the people hold power but elect representatives to exercise that power, and the rules are set down in a written constitution. It the rule not of men, but of laws, modelled after the Roman Republic.
The federal government was given only limited powers for limited purposes, while state governments retained most powers of government. See also the Dutch Republic of United Provinces. (More)
- More in part 2 -
Comments
Post a Comment