The French Revolution on America’s Mind Part I

“…the Declaration of the Rights of Man of 1789 and the dictatorship of the Committee of Public Safety of the Year II (1793–94) represent principles and values debated passionately today. From China to Central Europe, they are the headline makers.”

 --Nancy Nichols Barker, professor of history, UT Austin 

 

In the fledgling United States of America and among many British intellectuals, the French Revolution (1789–1799) initially inspired enthusiasm, almost ecstasy. Americans hailed events in France as the natural continuation of their own Revolution for independence and vindication of their daring republican ideals. Over the course of the 1790s, the Revolution shifted dramatically—as did interpretation of its significance. By the time the Reign of Terror had come and gone and Napoleon Bonaparte had seized power, Americans were polarized—many disillusioned, others still hopeful. Mapping these changes offers a window into the interplay of ideology, domestic politics, and America’s struggle to define its place in the world in its earliest decades.

The Age of Enlightenment  (1685-1815) laid the intellectual foundations of both revolutions. Thinkers like John Locke and Adam Smith in Britain, Montesquieu and Voltaire in France, and Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin in America advanced the ideas and ideals of reason, empiricism in science, secularism, natural rights, universalism, limited government with separation of powers, and economic freedom including free trade. These ideas circulated widely through new libraries, pamphlets, salons, coffeehouses, and newspapers. As Jefferson wrote in 1786, “The flames kindled on the 4th of July 1776 have spread over too much of the globe to be extinguished by the feeble engines of despotism.”¹ Political events were understood to be the offspring of philosophy carried into action by those who believed that education and open debate could transform society.

France had been a vital ally in America's revolution, providing the military and financial   assistance that made independence possible. Franklin, later joined by John Adams, spent nearly a decade in Paris cultivating goodwill and raising loans. The Marquis de Lafayette, a French aristocrat, fought beside Washington and became a symbol of Franco-American fraternity. George Washington wrote that “the support of the King of France was the deciding stroke without which our Revolution could not have succeeded.”² On the French side, figures like Nicholas Condorcet (later a victim of the Terror) hailed the American victory as “the hope of all peoples”³ and a harbinger of Europe’s own liberation.

In America public celebrations greeted the news of the Bastille’s fall. “Liberty trees” were again planted and French revolutionary tricolors appeared alongside American flags. Toasts to “Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity” were raised in taverns. Newspapers hailed the Revolution as evidence that Enlightenment ideals were now sweeping the world—and unstoppable. The Massachusetts Centinel in 1789 declared, “France has caught the sacred flame of liberty which blazed at Bunker Hill.”⁴ The National Gazette frequently printed comparisons between 1776 and 1789, assuring readers that “the cause of France is the cause of America.”⁵

Thomas Jefferson, recently back from Paris where he had witnessed the early stages of the Revolution, described it as the dawning of universal liberty. To Prof. William Short, his most influential teacher at the University of Virginia, he wrote that it would “establish the rights of man on the broad basis of freedom and reason” and that its cause was “that of the whole human race”⁶. For Jeffersonians, the Revolution, symbolizing the triumph of reason and natural rights, represented virtually unadulterated hope—an extension of the American project.

The shocking transformation of the Revolution may be remembered better than its glorious advent. The abolition of monarchy in 1792 and the execution of Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette in January 1793 shook the European and American public. The United States, just a few years into its post-Revolutionary era and constitutional experiment, now faced unsettling and frightening questions about shared ideas and ideals, loyalty to an ally, and confidence in philosophical concepts such as “man’s rights” and even the method of reasoning from first premises to logically consistent principles and policies to guide individuals and governments.

Reports of the guillotine, mass imprisonments, and mass executions horrified readers. A notorious example is when an agent of the Terror, representative Jean-Baptiste Carrier, ordered the drowning of thousands of prisoners in the Loire River. Victims, including many priests, women, and children, were locked in the holds of ships that were then sunk.  The Revolution seemed to slide with accelerating momentum from the “rights of man” into genocide, from revolutionary government to rabid mob rule. Edmund Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790) gained traction among American Federalists. “The age of chivalry is gone,” he lamented, “that of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded.”⁷ Federalists seized upon Burke’s warning that unchecked democracy meant “the most horrid, ferocious, and barbarous anarchy.”⁸ Leaders like Alexander Hamilton and John Adams saw in France a warning against democracy unleashed. Hamilton argued in 1794 that “anarchy is always the forerunner of tyranny” and that the Jacobins represented “the worst tyranny of all—the tyranny of a multitude.” Adams, in his Discourses on Davila (1790–91), warned that “the desire of equality becomes insatiable, and equality itself soon destroys liberty.”¹⁰

Jefferson and his allies remained sympathetic, though increasingly defensive. Jefferson famously remarked to Short (1793) that he would rather see “half the earth desolated” than seeliberty perish.¹¹ For Jeffersonians, violence was tragic but perhaps necessary in the struggle against tyranny. Paine, author of Common Sense and a hero of the American Revolution, published his wildly popular The Rights of Man (1791–92) to defend the French cause, insisting that “the cause of France is that of all mankind.”¹² He was rewarded with imprisonment in France during the Terror, when only American diplomatic pressure saved him from execution.)

Divisions were inflamed further by the arrival in 1793 of Edmond-Charles Genêt, French ambassador to the United States. “Citizen Genêt,” bypassing official channels, sought to rally American public support for French military ventures against Britain. His brashness embarrassed even Jeffersonians and gave Federalists ammunition to portray any pro-French enthusiasm as reckless.

To a considerable extent, attitudes thus fractured along emerging partisan lines, with Federalists recoiling in horror, Republicans clinging to ideals of solidarity.

President Washington sought to steer the new nation clear of European “entanglement”—and thereby laid down a policy debated to this day.  His Proclamation of Neutrality (1793) did not initiate but instead crystallized the growing split. In a private letter to Henry Knox, Washington confessed that the Revolution had become “too violent for the sober judgment of men” and feared it might “spread its infection across the Atlantic.”¹³ His Farewell Address (1796) reaffirmed and generalized his warning against “permanent alliances with any portion of the foreign world.”¹⁴

Federalists endorsed neutrality as essential to national survival. The Revolution in Europe threatened to entangle the new American republic in costly wars, particularly with Britain, its largest trading partner. Jeffersonians tended to view neutrality as betrayal. Wasn’t Washington’s, with his seeming tilt toward Britain, abandoning an ally to whom America owed its own independence--abandoning it in its hour of need? James Madison said that neutrality “struck a blow against the cause of liberty abroad”¹⁵.

Newspapers that had once united in cheering for the “new France” now became battlegrounds, with editors like Benjamin Franklin Bache (Aurora) defending France, while John Fenno’s Gazette of the United States condemned French radicalism. By the mid-1790s, American enthusiasm versus disdain for the Revolution had become at least as much domestic politics as foreign policy. To support France equated with supporting Jeffersonian Republicanism; to criticize France aligned oneself with the Federalist order.

Against this backdrop, John Jay, in 1795, negotiated with Britain to resolve lingering problems from the Revolutionary War. The Jay treaty marks a turning point in American attitudes. Naturally France, under siege by European monarchies, viewed the treaty as a U.S. betrayal and diplomatic relations soured. Seconding French opinion were Republicans who denounced the treaty as selling out an ally. Crowds burned Jay in effigy, shouting “Damn John Jay! Damn everyone who won’t damn John Jay!”¹⁶

The Federalist attitude had become motivated less by ideology than economic reckoning. For a rapidly accelerating U.S. economy, as eager to sell as to buy, preserving peace and trade with Britain was essential. By contrast, France was an unstable, dangerous power. America could not afford an alliance.

By the final years of the century, American optimism about the French Revolution had collapsed. What began in shared ideals ended in suspicion, hostility, and even armed conflict at sea. The so-called Quasi-War (1798–1800), an undeclared naval struggle between the United States and France, became the crucible in which earlier debates hardened into a national disillusionment. The spark was the infamous XYZ Affair. When President Adams sent envoys to Paris to resolve tensions, French agents—later identified only as X, Y, and Z—demanded substantial bribes as the price of negotiation. The revelations shocked the American public. Toasts of “Millions for defense, but not one cent for tribute!” echoed from town meetings to taverns, and indignation spurred Congress to authorize the expansion of the navy. For many, the scandal symbolized degeneration of the French Revolution into corruption and arrogance.

The insult to American honor seemed to confirm the conviction that France was no longer the “republic of virtue” (still a shining ideal of intellectuals who idolized the statesmen of the ancient world like Cato); it was an aggressive power that scorned lawful diplomacy. Building frigates and making other preparations for war, Federalists declared that the United States must protect its sovereignty against revolutionary zeal twisted into Napoleon’s imperial ambition. The Republicans thus faced a dilemma. Their sympathies with France had not been extinguished; they focused on the ideals that had inspired the philosophes and inspired the Paris street. But…how defend the brutal, bloody behavior of the “Directory” at the height of the terror? Jefferson and his allies shifted their rhetoric, condemning Federalist overreaction while quietly conceding that France had eroded its moral claim on American loyalty. 

Domestic politics reflected and magnified the crisis. In 1798, fear of French subversion on American soil propelled passage of the Alien and Sedition Acts, which Federalists portrayed as essential national security measures to curb foreign agents and dangerous radicals. Republicans denounced them as a partisan weapon to silence dissenters and muzzle the press. The laws widened the partisan divide, making the struggle over France inseparable from the struggle over America’s own liberties.

When Jefferson won the presidency in 1800, he inherited the legacy of ambivalence toward the Revolution. He never renounced his belief that it was a noble in its ideals. In 1801, he told Elbridge Gerry that France had “been carried away by the torrent of furious passions, but her cause was just and holy.”¹⁸ His administration cultivated cordial relations with Napoleon, culminating in the historic Louisiana Purchase (1803), an acquisition of roughly 828,000 square miles of land from France that doubled the size of the United States.

Able by now to bring some perspective to viewing their own revolution and France’s, Americans early in the 19th century became increasingly invidious in contrasting their own success with the chaos of France. Jefferson seemed to concede failure, reflecting in 1815 that “we can never forget that liberty once lost is lost forever.”¹⁹ Adams was unrestrained: America’s Revolution had been “founded on morals and religion,” while France’s had been “a volcano of atheism and blood.”²⁰

Tyranny, slaughter, the very dismantling of civil society in France—followed by the Napoleonic military dictatorship and engulfing European war—rang down the curtain on the Age of Enlightenment. The end date commonly assigned to the era is 1815, the year of Napoleon’s final (brief) return to power. Not that the ideas and ideals of the era disappeared: They continued to shape what we call “modernism” or the “modern world,” including, above all, America. What occurred instead was an epic loss of morale. Lost and never entirely regained was the root philosophical optimism ignited by reason and science in the Age of Science (1700s), accelerating throughout the Enlightenment (1800s) with triumph after triumph, culminating in widespread confidence in mankind’s inevitable progress. The march of science and medicine, the emergence of secular society, the burgeoning industrial economy, assertion of the rule of law, vibrant freedom of trade, and expectations for the new “human sciences” of education, psychology, and economics: All continued apace. 

What was lost, not momentarily but fundamentally, was confidence in reason, in understanding man’s nature, in the logic of political liberty resting on human rights and individual responsibility and, above all, in the limitless potential of liberation. It was an optimism most explicitly and memorably expressed by Marquis de Condorcet, one of the last great philosophes, in Sketch for a Historical Picture of the Progress of the Human Mind, published after his death in 1794, articulating his belief in the progress and "indefinite perfectibility of humankind." He wrote  “The time will . . . come when the sun will shine only on free men who know no other master but their reason.” He wrote these words when already hiding from the latest Jacobin purge. Captured by agents of the Terror, he died in prison awaiting the guillotine. There scarcely could be a more dramatic clash of Enlightenment confidence with French Revolutionary reality.

The Enlightenment had seen reason triumph over the dogmatic grip of Catholic scholasticism on European universities, begin to lift the burden of disease from mankind, persist in speaking and publishing the truth in the face of a fiercely repressive church and state, and reach liberating insights into society, government, and law. The same confident march of reason, man’s rights, universalism, and constitutionalism had appeared to lay the philosophical and educational foundations of liberating political revolution. And then…