Revolutionary republic

[1] The term also refers to the form of government that the National Convention favored during the French Revolutionary Wars, as France established republics through its occupation of neighboring territories in Europe.

The institution of republican governments as a means of promoting democratic nationalism over monarchies (primarily the Bourbons and Habsburgs) set the stage for the appearance of nationalist sentiment across Europe, which significantly influenced the course of European history (see 1830 and Revolutions of 1848).

Leading up to and during the American Revolution in the 1760s and 1770s, intellectual and political leaders in the Thirteen Colonies closely read history to compare forms of governments and their effectiveness.

The Country Party relied heavily on the classical republicanism of Roman heritage; it celebrated the ideals of duty and virtuous citizenship.

[5] J. G. A. Pocock explained the intellectual sources in America:[6] The Whig canon and the neo-Harringtonians, John Milton, James Harrington and Sidney, Trenchard, Gordon and Bolingbroke, together with the Greek, Roman, and Renaissance masters of the tradition as far as Montesquieu, formed the authoritative literature of this culture; and its values and concepts were those with which we have grown familiar: a civic and patriot ideal in which the personality was founded in property, perfected in citizenship but perpetually threatened by corruption; government figuring paradoxically as the principal source of corruption and operating through such means as patronage, faction, standing armies (opposed to the ideal of the militia); established churches (opposed to the Puritan and deist modes of American religion); and the promotion of a monied interest—though the formulation of this last concept was somewhat hindered by the keen desire for readily available paper credit common in colonies of settlement.American revolutionaries took a lesson from Ancient Rome.