Word: french
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Among McCain's first unguarded words that morning were, "Where's the goddam doughnuts?" Before long, he had insulted the French, teased his wife Cindy about a former boyfriend and flogged Democrats and Republicans alike for being bought and paid for by one shameless lobby or another. And it was only...
...book's subtitle comes from a 1790 letter written by Gouverneur Morris, a delegate to the 1787 Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia who in 1792 would become the U.S. minister to France. The French, he noted, "have taken Genius instead of Reason for their Guide, adopted Experiment instead of Experience, and wander in the dark because they prefer Lightning to Light." Morris' remark underscores a growing rift between the two nations on the matter of the proper way to run a revolution...
...French had handsomely supported the Americans in their struggle against the English. Dunn writes, "The American model was France's for the taking--after all, she had paid for it, and her officers and soldiers had fought and died for it." Said a French veteran of the American Revolutionary War: "They have given a great example to the new hemisphere. Let us give it to the universe!" But as their own revolutionary fervor increased during the 1780s, the French began to believe that the Americans had not gone far enough in shucking off the bad old ways...
...French, Dunn acknowledges, faced a broader revolutionary challenge than the Americans had a few years earlier. Wresting political autonomy from a power across an ocean was not the same as toppling a thousand-year-old home-grown feudal system. But, the author argues, the French could have learned one lesson from America and thereby avoided a bloody philosophical blunder. Instead of following the Founding Fathers' careful protections of individual liberties, the French made the unity of their people the highest goal. "Curiously," Dunn writes, "all the qualities that had traditionally been attributed to the quasi-divine king--oneness, indivisibility, infallibility...
...should surprise no one that, as Dunn notes, Lenin had a statue of Robespierre erected in Moscow in 1918. (Made of cheap stone, it soon crumbled, as the Soviet Union would some 70 years later.) Sister Revolutions shows not only how the French and American experiments developed, but also why their differing examples have continued to beguile ambitious leaders...