Aux armes, historiens!

Revolutions Without Borders: The Call to Liberty in the Atlantic World. By Janet Polasky. Yale University Press; 371 pages; $35 and £25.

REVOLUTIONARIES want to tear down walls. Between 1776, when America declared independence, and 1804, when Haiti at last threw off the yoke of French rule, the compartments and divisions of established power became everyone’s target. This book assiduously describes how, just as the doctrine of the universal rights of man seized the Western world, so too did an irrepressible iconoclasm.

But what sets “Revolutions Without Borders” apart as a work of history is that Janet Polasky tears down walls, too: scholarly ones. Instead of telling the usual heroic national story, she ranges wherever her wayfaring revolutionaries take her—to Paris and Washington, but also to Poland, Sierra Leone and the Caribbean. Instead of confining herself to the deeds of valiant men, she also gives the stage to women and slaves. The result is a spectacle that conveys the thrill of the Enlightenment as well as the delirium of revolution.

Ordinary people were hungry for new ideas and many of those ideas travelled on paper. Ms Polasky loosely marshals her material by type—one chapter is based on pamphlets, another draws on newspapers, a third is taken from diaries and so on. In the first year of the French revolution, 194 new papers appeared in Paris and 90 in the provinces. In 1788 politics filled only 5% of French journals; a year later the share was two-thirds. And yet, although news was sought after, it would take weeks or months to reach far-flung outposts, which fuelled rumour and insubordination by commanders and diplomats unsympathetic to the line at home.

Ms Polasky demonstrates how wandering radicals were also vital to the spread of ideas. She includes familiar names, like Thomas Paine, the Englishman who fomented revolt in the Americas before returning across the Atlantic to fight the good fight in continental Europe, but also lesser-known figures, such as Equiano Olaudah, who bought his freedom and wrote about the slave trade; Thaddeus Kosciuszko, who waged war in the Americas and returned to lead a doomed revolution in his native Poland; and Anna Maria Falconbridge, chronicler of the miseries of the black pioneers who, with the backing of British abolitionists, tried to settle in Sierra Leone.

This book is at its best in describing the effect of revolution on the slaves and free men and women in the Americas and the Caribbean. Slaves were not literate—the only one in Guyana who could read and write was executed in 1796—so the historical record comes down from whites.

Some whites tried to find reasons why universal theories did not apply or, failing that, lived in stunning contradiction. Yet notions of liberty and of the rights of man were intoxicating both to those suffering in bondage and also to non-whites, who, although free, enjoyed fewer rights than white landowners. Revolt was never far from the surface. Most of the slaves in Saint-Domingue, for instance, had been on the island for less than a decade and many had fought in African armies. When they rose up in 1791, they seemed to the whites to be alarmingly well organised.

Sometimes the book’s pace slackens. Chapters based on novels and intimate letters are designed to show how the revolutionary spirit also spread inward—to marriage and family life. But the claim remains vague and unsubstantiated.

“Revolutions Without Borders” ends on a wistful note. The French Directoire, which ruled from 1795 until it came increasingly under the sway of Napoleon Bonaparte, dispensed with the revolution’s universal character. Its armies in parts of Belgium, Germany, Italy and Switzerland became just another occupying force. In America the counter-revolutionaries ensured that the country was hostile to figures like Paine. As the walls went up again, Ms Polasky’s wandering revolutionaries were left with nowhere to call home.