While unquestionably important, the French Revolution was not the seminal event of the eighteenth century in the minds of many American historians. Indeed, in their view, the American Revolution enjoys that honor. In 1775 the American colonies began their fight for independence from Great Britain. By the summer of 1789, when France’s middle and lower classes first threatened the monarchy, the newly formed United States had already written a constitution and elected its first president. A dozen years later the United States had peacefully elected its third president, while France—whose initial attempt at a republic did not survive its seventh year—had fallen under the dictatorship of Napoleon Bonaparte. Although many modern historians have looked at the two revolutions as complementary facets of an “Atlantic Revolution,” American writers and observers in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries tended...