The French Made Headlines, but We Made History : THE RADICALISM OF THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION, <i> By Gordon S. Wood (Alfred A. Knopf: $27.50; 425 pp.)</i>

Lacking the drama of kings in guillotines or royal families on trial, the American experience of 1776 was rather humdrum as revolutions go, a necessary but tedious way to get the British government off our land and our backs.

But in this clear and absorbing book, Gordon S. Wood makes a convincing case that the changes America underwent during and after its revolution are every bit as profound as those embraced by the French a few years later. Culminating in “the emergence of the liberal, democratic, capitalistic world” of the early 19th Century, our revolution stripped 18th-Century provincial society of paternalism, patronage and dependent relationships. The significant difference is that social changes endured in the United States, whereas in France, a luridly bloody revolution was followed by anarchy, despotism, the Napoleonic Empire and--coming full circle--the return of the Bourbon monarchy.

Just how much our revolution diluted class distinctions, for example, becomes clear when you consider that today, the difference between a commoner and a gentleman is often difficult to discern, while in the 18th Century it was quite apparent. Then, commoners worked with their hands, while gentlemen lived off their property. This precise definition excluded many of those professions that now claim gentility. The lowly physicians who lanced boils and applied hot packs to hemorrhoids were excluded, as were the attorneys who drafted wills, filed lawsuits and collected debts.

“Even members of the liberal professions, if they were too dependent on their work as a source of income, were regarded as ill equipped for virtuous leadership,” Wood points out. “On the eve of the Revolution, Virginians debated in the newspapers as to whether or not lawyers practiced ‘a groveling, mercenary trade.’ ”

“Elitist politics” were the hallmark of 18th-Century social life, Wood writes, pointing to the elaborate role-playing, circumspection, caution and calculation--not to mention the flattery and fawning--that “made the 18th Century so distinctive.”

“Even much of the writing of pamphlets or newspaper essays was an extended form of personal correspondence among gentlemen who knew one another intimately. By filling their writings with personal references, Latin quotations, and esoteric allusions to the heritage of Western culture, gentlemen showed that they still thought of the audience for their political polemics as roughly commensurate with the social world comprised of other educated gentlemen,” Wood writes. Benjamin Franklin, for instance, refused to regard himself as a gentleman until, at age 43, he amassed enough wealth to cease all manual labor.

The distinctions began to blur, nevertheless, as more and more commoners began to enter politics and run for office.

While Wood sees ours as “a real and radical revolution,” he also points out that it occurred “not because the mass of people pressed upward from below with new demands but because competing gentry, for their own parochial and tactical purposes, courted the people and bid for their support.”

The intellectuals and critics who invoked republican principles and sentiments, in fact, hardly could be called Populists: While “opposed to the practices and values of the dominant monarchal world,” Wood writes, they “wanted to enlighten and improve monarchy, not cut off the heads of kings.” None of the republican-minded “wanted to try the disastrous 17th-Century English experiment in republican government again,” when Parliament, led by Oliver Cromwell, offed the head of Charles I and installed Cromwell as Lord Protector.

However, republicanism was no less revolutionary because of the prudence of its practitioners. “It was in every way a radical theology, as radical for the 18th Century as Marxism was to be for the 19th Century. . . . It offered new conceptions of the individuals, the family, the state, and other individuals. Indeed, republicanism offered nothing less than new ways of organizing societies.”

Just as there are those who dismiss the American Revolution because of its leaders’ elitism, there are those who believe its legacy was ephemeral. Thomas Jefferson, for instance, was deeply disillusioned by the failure of the American people to appreciate and follow the enlightened government and society he had given so much to bring to power. He could only shake his head when the violently passionate Andrew Jackson became President.

Like the English and French intellectuals who had held such glowing hopes for the French Revolution, only to watch it collapse into the despotism of Napoleon, Jefferson believed that his beloved republic was being taken over by louts, jackasses, lawyers and self-servers. He was horrified, for instance, that Jackson would throw open the doors of the White House and invite all and sundry to stop in for a drink with the new chief executive.

In many respects, these events suggest that history merely repeats itself time and again. However, Wood believes that Jefferson was unduly pessimistic about the fate of his new society. These changes did not mark the collapse of republicanism, he argues convincingly, for “these insignificant borderland provinces had become a giant, almost continent-wide republic of nearly ten million egalitarian-minded bustling citizens who not only had thrust themselves into the vanguard of history but had fundamentally altered their society and their social relationships.”

This carefully constructed book is a joy to read. Wood has taken rarefied social and political theories out of their dusty academic den, shaken them vigorously, and discovered some new truths for us to hold, even though they are not self-evident.