People did not have phones, the Internet, or social media in the 1700s. News did not spread as quickly as it does today.
But ideas still moved back and forth between Europe and the Americas. Europe is where the Enlightenment ideas of individual freedom, progress, and human rights began. Then they crossed the Atlantic. These ideas inspired Britain’s American colonies to revolt. They also helped to shape a new kind of government. Soon, those ideas were traveling back to Europe, and especially to France. Many French people read and admired the Declaration of Independence. Both Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson spent years in Paris as ambassadors for the United States. By 1789, the ideas that had traveled from France to North America and back to France had started a revolution there.
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