The Revolutionary Temper, page 24
Although rejoicing did not break out at the proclamation of the peace, official “réjouissances,” as after the previous two wars, were organized by the Hôtel de Ville for the Parisian population. They took place on December 14, 1783, after a long delay, owing to lack of funds. The celebrations began at 7:00 in the morning with an artillery salvo and the ringing of the tocsin in the Hôtel de Ville. At 4:00 p.m., the archbishop of Paris officiated over a Te Deum in Notre Dame, which was followed by another salvo. At 6:00 a large crowd gathered in the Place de Grève to watch a fireworks display, which went off without much mishap. Then two gigantic buffets, one at 7:00 and another at 10:00, provided the crowd with a free meal of sausages, side dishes, and bread accompanied by wine dispensed from fountains. Food and wine were also distributed from seventeen other locations, as if the municipal officials had offered dinner to everyone in Paris. Ordinary Parisians were also invited to a dance in the Halle au bled, the grain market, which had been converted into a ballroom 120 feet in diameter. A huge dome had recently been built over the Halle, and from it hung a chandelier weighing 1,000 pounds and covered with mirrors reflecting the light of five hundred candles. A band played in the middle of the dance floor, and a gallery under the dome made it possible for people of distinction to watch the common folk below, who danced the night away.6
The nouvellistes found nothing unusual to report about the celebration. Some spectators got knocked over during the fireworks; a gentleman was slapped in the gallery of the Halle au bled; a police agent had his wig snatched. After getting permission, with much difficulty, from the archbishop, a masonic lodge called Le Contrat Social celebrated the peace on the following day with a Te Deum and music in the Congrégation de l’Oratoire of the rue Saint Honoré.7 Meanwhile, having eaten their fill, gotten drunk, and danced, Parisians returned to their work. Apparently no one at the party had stopped to toast the new United States, but everyone was aware that the French monarchy had come to the rescue of a revolutionary republic, and Parisians in general were fascinated by this new species of humanity, the American.
21
What Is an American?
THE COMMON PEOPLE who danced away the night on September 14, 1783, had only a vague notion of the republic on the other side of the ocean, and the gentlefolk who watched them from the gallery probably could not picture it clearly on a mental map (reports often contained references such as “New-Haven dans la Nouvelle Yorck”).1 Yet a Frenchman, Michel-Guillaume-Saint-Jean de Crèvecoeur, was the first to ask, “What is an American?” That question opened up a set of subjects related to the new world, which provided opportunities to challenge old-world orthodoxies.
Born into a minor noble family in Caen, Crèvecoeur left France in 1755 at age nineteen to serve as a cartographer in the French army during the Seven Years’ War. He eventually settled on a farm in Orange County, New York, adopted the name of J. Hector St. John, married an American woman, fathered three children, and prospered, while recording his experiences in a journal. In 1779, he returned to France in order, he said, to see his ailing father. While passing through London, he found a publisher interested in producing a book of essays adapted from the journal. It appeared in 1782 as Letters from an American Farmer and offered a new vision of the new world. Written in homespun English, it contained vignettes of life on the frontier, contact with Indians, and customs in exotic communities such as Nantucket whalers and Pennsylvania Quakers. Across the ocean, it revealed, there was a land of opportunity, free from the constraints of the old world, where immigrants from all countries and all levels of society could seek their fortune and find it, provided they were willing to work. They were the answer to the question, “What is an American?” True, slavery had spread misery in the South, creating a dissolute oligarchy in cities like Charleston; but a promising future awaited the main population of ordinary, hard-working folk such as Farmer James, Crèvecoeur’s narrator and the quintessential American. Letters from an American Farmer was an early version of the American success story, and it was a success itself, a best seller, catering to the public’s fascination with the way of life in the new republic.2
In Paris Crèvecoeur was taken up by Elisabeth Sophie Lalive de Bellegarde, Comtesse d’Houdetot, and the members of her circle—worldly aristocrats and men of letters. Mme d’Houdetot had helped set the fashion for sensiblerie and seized on Crèvecoeur as an unsophisticated soul who had arrived in her salon directly from the unspoiled wilderness.3 Although intimidated by such attention from a countess, who, moreover, was believed to be the model for Julie in Rousseau’s La Nouvelle Héloïse, Crèvecoeur submitted to her campaign to reintroduce him to French society—and also to get him named French consul in New York, a post he held from late 1783 to 1790 (he returned on leave to Paris in 1785–1787). With help from the writers in her salon, he produced a “translation” of his book, now dedicated to Lafayette and issued in two volumes, more than twice the size of the original, in 1784. Having spoken nothing but English for most of the last two decades, Crèvecoeur could not manage correct, literary French. But his helpers—fashionable luminaries such as Jean-François de Saint-Lambert, Pierre-Louis de Lacretelle, and Guy-Jean-Baptiste Target—provided the necessary polish, along with additional text. By subtracting, so to speak, the English edition of 1782 from the French edition of 1784, one can isolate the themes interjected for the benefit of a French audience and gain a view of this ideal type, the American, as it was construed in France.4
The French edition followed the English in celebrating the egalitarian character of life in America thanks to its freedom from feudal dues and ecclesiastical domination, but it outdid the original in emphasizing sentiment and morality. Key terms, such as “moeurs” (morals, customs), were inserted to bring out the peculiar virtues of Americans,5 and long passages were added to show how those virtues shaped the social order. Like Farmer James, most Americans derived their sustenance from the soil. They lived simply, eschewed luxury, honored their conjugal vows, dedicated themselves to their children, sustained their neighbors in times of need, and worshipped the Supreme Being in sober country churches.6 Because they lived close to nature, Americans developed a sensitivity to the spirit that infused creation. The English edition indicated that “natural religion” would become a peculiarly American doctrine, and the French edition bathed this deism in sentiment. It expanded a two-page English passage, mostly of observations about the habits of birds, into a six-page hymn to Nature. Crèvecoeur, in the person of Farmer James, sang along with the birds, prayed in his fields, and retired to a “temple of greenery,” where he communed with the divine: “You come, carried on the wings of zephirs, thou sweet breath of Nature; already you are reasoning across the leaves that surround me everywhere.”7
A Rousseauistic political message infused the descriptions of this idyllic society, and in a later edition, published in 1787 and expanded to three volumes, Crèvecoeur made its implications explicit. He pictured a group of Europeans discussing the nature of society in an American tavern. One had emigrated to escape monarchical wars, one “the oppressive tyranny of our seigneurial landlords,” one religious persecution, and one the inhumane character of urban life. They decided to avoid those evils by carving their own society, “Socialburg,” out of the wilderness. They agreed on plans for homesteads, roads, a school, and a church. And above all, they committed themselves to basic principles: agrarian virtues (“Honor the plow”), equality (“Consider all men as equal by birth”), a deistic civil religion (“The base of society must be founded on the cult we owe to the Supreme Being”), and the social spirit of “fraternal union.” Socialburg would be run like the direct democracy idealized by Rousseau, and it would be created by an explicit social contract. Each immigrant signaled his commitment by drinking a toast, and on the following day they signed the contract composed of seventeen articles.8
Crèvecoeur’s vision of America had enormous appeal to a reading public imbued with Rousseauistic sensiblerie. In fact, Lettres d’un cultivateur américain probably was the most influential book about America published in France before 1789.9 Few books of any kind had such an enthusiastic reception. The Journal de Paris spread a rapturous review of the 1784 edition over three issues in 1785, a highly unusual treatment. The Mercure produced forty pages of extracts and the Année littéraire sixty pages. Three pirated editions were published by the end of 1785, and reprints continued to appear in subsequent years. Crèvecoeur succeeded better than anyone else who wrote about America, according to the Journal de Paris, because he knew how to “transmit his affections into the souls of his readers.”10 He also got across a political message, as Lacretelle explained in the Mercure, addressing his remarks rhetorically to the Americans: “In adopting democracy, you commit yourselves to strong and pure morals, and yet you do not separate yourselves from the rest of the universe, where political slavery and moral corruption triumph.”11 As United States ambassador to France, Thomas Jefferson received letters from enraptured readers of Crèvecoeur who intended to emigrate to America: “You are made to give us laws, because you illustrate for us the men of the Golden Age.… Ah, Monsieur, your land is the promised land.… How happy I would be to exist in such a good country. There I would be a man, whereas here I am nothing but a slave.”12
The wave of enthusiasm for the French version of the Lettres buried a problem that could have blunted its radical message: Crèvecoeur had not supported the American Revolution. In fact, he had refused to take an oath of allegiance to the Patriots and left his farm to escape revolutionary violence in 1782. The last letter in the English edition suggested that he favored neutrality rather than commitment to one side or the other. After he departed for Europe, his wife’s family fled to the Loyalist colony in Nova Scotia, and he expressed Loyalist sympathies in several letters. None of his aversion to the revolutionary cause came through in the French editions, however. On the contrary, they modified the text to justify the Americans’ right to revolt, and they condemned British tyranny in suitably revolutionary rhetoric.13 To the French, therefore, Crèvecoeur appeared as an American patriot, and after his makeover he occupied a prominent position in the ideological landscape that was radicalizing around him.
In January 1787 Crèvecoeur joined three other Frenchmen in founding the Société Gallo-Américaine, a philosophical club devoted to furthering close ties between France and America.14 Although it was intended to develop branches throughout both countries, it ceased to meet after three months because its members were swept up in other activities, some of them seditious. Crèvecoeur himself did not contemplate any radical activism. He wanted the Society to promote commerce between the two countries in a way that would benefit his function as the French consul in New York. But the other three founders, Jacques-Pierre Brissot, Etienne Clavière, and Nicolas Bergasse, combined a passion for all things American with radical activism. Brissot, who would go on to become a leader of the Girondists during the French Revolution, had pursued a checkered career as a philosophe and pamphleteer, which led to four months in the Bastille in 1784. In one of his tracts, Le Philadelphien à Genève, he defended the Genevan revolution of 1782 (an unsuccessful uprising against a patrician oligarchy), writing from the perspective of a Rousseauistic American revolutionary. At several of the Society’s meetings, he read selections from a book on French-American relations, De la France et des Etats-Unis, that he was drafting in collaboration with Clavière. They proposed ways to promote French-American trade with the proviso that France’s exports reinforce American morals—that is, no luxuries of the kind favored by the decadent French elite: no jewelry, copper instead of silver cutlery, and wollens rather than silk. And they celebrated the American Revolution for teaching the rest of the world about the social contract and the right of citizens to overthrow despotic governments.15
Clavière had been a leader of the Genevan revolution, and after fleeing to France, speculated on the Paris Bourse in ways that, as we shall see, developed into a campaign against the French finance minister. While meeting with the Gallo-Americans, Bergasse was preparing to argue a case in an adultery trial that also would turn into an attack on the government. The minutes of the Gallo-American Society show that this odd variety of subjects—the evil of adultery, the dangers of the stock market, the threat of luxury goods—belonged to the admixture of elements that went into the French enthusiasm for America. Although the Society soon dissolved, it was a progenitor of the Société des amis des Noirs, an anti-slavery society founded by Brissot and Clavière in 1788, which included Crèvecoeur (then in New York), Lafayette, Condorcet, Mirabeau, Robespierre, Grégoire, and others who would play an important part in the French Revolution.
The mythical America conjured up in France should not be reduced to radical Rousseauism, however, because it contained contradictory elements and led to violent polemics. Jefferson frequented the circle of Marie-Louise-Nicole-Elisabeth de La Rochefoucauld, Duchesse d’Enville, where he enjoyed the company of well-bred champions of the United States who favored rational argument rather than sentiment. The duchesse’s son, Louis-Alexandre de La Rochefoucauld had, at Franklin’s suggestion, translated the American state constitutions into French, and her favorite, Condorcet, published radical but carefully reasoned pamphlets under the name of a Bourgeois de New Haven (or “BDNH”), New Haven having granted him honorary citizenship.
But Jefferson kept running into romantics inspired not only by Crèvecoeur but also by the reflections on America in Raynal’s best-selling Histoire philosophique et politique des établissements et du commerce des Européens dans les deux Indes. Raynal actually took a somewhat critical view of the American Revolution that circulated as a pamphlet, Révolution de l’Amérique, extracted from the 1781 edition of the Histoire philosophique. Writing from Philadelphia, Thomas Paine attacked the pamphlet as a philosophical speculation uninformed by accurate information.16 Jefferson shared Paine’s distress about the errors in the depictions of America by the French. He spent many hours trying to correct the article on America that J.-N. Démeunier submitted to him before sending it to be published in the Encyclopédie méthodique, and in the end gave up: “He has left in a great deal of the abbé Raynal, that is to say a great deal of falsehood.”17
Although Jefferson had some contact with the Gallo-Americans, two of his closest friends, François Jean de Beauvoir, Marquis de Chastellux, and Filippo Mazzei, were their enemies. In 1786 Chastellux, a major general under Rochambeau, friend of Washington, and member of the Académie française, published a two-volume account of the three years he had spent in America from 1780 through 1782. Brissot attacked it in a violent pamphlet, which condemned some ironic remarks about Quakers and the unsophisticated character of American manners, as “poison,” the product of a desiccated soul. Mazzei, a Tuscan noble who had emigrated to Virginia and later joined Jefferson’s circle in Paris, retorted in a letter to the Journal de Paris that Brissot’s pamphlet demonstrated ignorance about the real life of Americans, notably Quakers, who were “Protestant Jesuits.” Mazzei also announced the imminent publication of a book that would provide an accurate picture of America—his own four-volume Recherches historiques et politiques sur les Etats-Unis de l’Amérique septentrionale par un citoyen de Virginie.
This work debunked the fantasies about America conjured up by “novelists,” beginning with Raynal and Mably, the philosophes who had helped launch the vogue, and culminating in Crèvecoeur. He warned readers that Crèvecoeur’s Lettres had spread such an inaccurate and idealized notion of American life that they could provoke a wave of misinformed and unprepared immigrants. Though badly wounded, Crèvecoeur did not reply publicly, but Brissot vehemently denounced Mazzei in L’Analyse des papiers anglais, a journal edited by Mirabeau, who also had been savaged in the Recherches historiques. Condorcet, writing as “BDNH” in the Journal de Paris, then defended Mazzei’s realistic account of America and castigated Brissot as a romantic enthusiast.18
For his part, Mirabeau promoted the radical view. In his Considérations sur l’ordre de Cincinnatus (1784), he assailed the Society of the Cincinnati, an association of officers from the Revolutionary War, as an attempt to create an aristocracy in the new republic because its membership was hereditary. Others, including Franklin, who had provided Mirabeau with material for his pamphlet, also deplored the aristocratic threat represented by the Society, but Mirabeau excoriated it in such violent language that his tract could be read as an attack on the sociopolitical order in France.19 The polemics continued into the French Revolution, when Brissot published his Nouveau voyage dans les Etats-Unis de l’Amérique septentrionale (1791), an account of his tour of America in 1788, which contained more abuse of Chastellux and praise of Crèvecoeur.
Despite the success of Crèvecoeur’s Lettres and the cross fire of books and pamphlets, nothing suggests that the general public took a great deal of interest in the polemics of the intellectuals. Information about Americans and their revolution spread among ordinary Parisians through reports on the war and talk about popular public figures, especially Washington, Franklin, and Lafayette. Franklin, who represented the American republic in France from 1776 to 1785, had a genius for appealing to the French. He impressed them as a canny diplomat, yet he adopted a man-of-the-people demeanor, appearing on occasion with his famous coonskin cap as if he had come from the frontier. His renown as a scientist led to his election to the Académie des sciences, and his experiments with electricity made him celebrated as the hero who had tamed lightning. He kept company with the philosophes, who applauded him when he embraced Voltaire at the masonic Loge des Neuf Soeurs in 1778. He was known for his wit, not the sardonic French variety but a generous, grandfatherly kind of humor that made him a favorite in salons, where he was known to some of the ladies as “cher papa.” Common folk saw him as one of them, the Poor Richard or Bonhomme Richard of their almanacs, more folksy and down-to-earth than Crèvecoeur’s Farmer James. Franklin’s image appeared in prints, statuettes, and busts and on objects Parisians encountered every day—dinner plates, vases, mugs, snuffboxes, fans, and waistcoat buttons. The Franklin bric-à-brac was enormous and can be appreciated today from the hundreds of objects preserved in the Musée de l’amitié franco-américaine at Blérancourt near Soissons. It testifies to his presence everywhere in Paris.20
