The French may not have the first democracy, may not have the best democracy, but they have had to fight harder than most for their democracy.
- paraphrasing from an audio tour by Rick Steves, I think.
Edit: oops, i flipped words in the title
The French were fighting and an inspiration for US independence.
Rousseau, for one, spoke of sovereignty residing not in a monarch, but in the people as a group, and of the need to craft laws for the general good. Thomas Jefferson’s rhetoric (including “All men are created equal”) owed much to Rousseau. However, the drafters of the U.S. Constitution may have been most inspired by the Baron de Montesquieu, who argued in his treatise The Spirit of the Laws that avoiding despotism required a government of checks and balances.
Without the ideas of these French philosophers to inspire them in tough times, it’s hard to imagine the revolution succeeding.