SUZANNE DESAN
24 August 1792. Two weeks earlier the monarchy had been overthrown. Within the last week, General Lafayette had defected, the Prussians had invaded, and the fortress town of Longwy had just fallen, though Paris did not yet know. Verdun would tumble a week later. In the midst of this ferment, the playwright Marie-Joseph Chénier led a delegation of Parisian citizens to the bar of the Assembly, petition in hand. He urged the deputies to offer full French citizenship to a list of “courageous philosophers who have sapped the foundations of tyranny.” The Legislative Assembly, facing not only the war but also a domestic political struggle with the Paris Commune and a full reform agenda, took time for a hot debate of Chénier’s proposal. Two days later, eighteen foreigners—ranging from British abolitionist Thomas Clarkson to writer of the United States Constitution James Madison—were pronounced French citizens, with full political rights.1
Certainly, this act was meant to play on the cosmopolitan stage of the Enlightened public sphere of Europe. But this granting of citizenship was not purely performative or honorary. Three of the adopted citizens—Tom Paine, the Prussian Anacharsis Cloots, and the Englishman Joseph Priestley—were soon elected as deputies to the new Convention, though only the first two would serve. The decree’s supporters made the politics clear: if the republic was to be universal, it must be a global creation from the outset; the National Convention would be, in Chénier’s words, “a congress of the whole world.” This idea immediately provoked the resistance and anxiety of some deputies. “You are delivering the Convention to foreigners!” exclaimed the deputy Claude Basire at one point mid-debate. And invasion by outsiders was not the only threat. Lasource warned that the Assembly should not give away this glorious title of French citizenship so lightly. To build a republic was a fragile and controversial act. “If you set about giving this title to those who have not asked for it, wouldn’t you risk suffering the humiliation of a refusal?”2
When exploring this striking move by la patrie en danger, historians have either seen it as a diplomatic “gesture of defiance,” or most often, inquired what this incident meant for the treatment of foreigners and the creation of citizenship. They have variously interpreted the 26 August decree as a high point of cosmopolitan openness before its demise or as a step toward politicizing citizenship and clarifying the exclusionary meanings of universalism.3 I reverse the citizenship question and ask instead: what could the act of adopting these foreigners possibly do for the nascent republic? Ask not what your country can do for foreigners; ask what foreigners can do for your country.
On one level, the events of 24–26 August 1792—tied to a particular political moment—show how issues of foreigners and foreign policy became entangled with domestic politics: in the tense weeks after the overthrow of the king, the Legislative Assembly sought to stake out its legitimacy and future Girondins worked indirectly to defend their foreign policy. On another, broader level, this event performs crucial ideological work for the new republic. I will argue that this debate illustrates how the emerging republic laid claim to universalism by incorporating foreigners. Historians have largely situated the origins of republican universalism in the Enlightenment discourse of natural rights. For the French revolutionaries, “universalism” meant that the legitimacy of the nation—the very sovereignty of the nation itself—rested on the defense of universal human rights and on guaranteeing equality before the law. While some scholars have stressed the exclusionary contradictions of this ideology, others have emphasized that it also enabled various groups of people to demand rights.4 Republican universalism had both exclusionary and liberationist potential, and the issue of inclusion/exclusion is clearly pivotal.
However, to focus primarily on the issue of how Enlightenment ideas about rights promoted inclusion or exclusion obscures another aspect of republican universalism: its hybrid construction5 through interaction with foreign peoples and powers. In this chapter, I will analyze the 24–26 August event to suggest how multiple international forces—people, ideas, geopolitics—fundamentally informed the French national act of claiming a universal basis for their republic. In order to ground the republic in a claim to worldwide validity, the revolutionaries had to figure out how to incorporate various aspects of foreignness: I argue that they drew legitimacy and vital energy from the presence of foreigners—from their ideas, their representation, and their participation in a shared crusade to alter history.
To build universalism, the revolutionaries appropriated and politicized Enlightenment cosmopolitanism. Cosmopolitanism provided a frame for imagining relationships among foreign individuals, and also foreign powers. I examine how this cosmopolitan frame influenced notions of global fraternity and regeneration. I also show how geopolitics was entangled in building republican universalism, and suggest the limits and contradictions of this ideology on both the domestic and the international stage. For the revolutionaries, to root the republic in universal rights was an international act: they claimed to defy the whole system of aggressive, monarchical geopolitics and take up the cosmopolitan pursuit of peace. Parallel to the rights of individuals were the rights of whole peoples to liberty and reciprocal respect. But at the same time, from 1789 on, the universalizing impulse carried a contradictory message—the sense that the French should spread their Revolution, whether by example, missionary zeal, or eventually, by force.6 As the revolutionaries embraced leading foreigners as citizens in August 1792, they simultaneously expressed their cosmopolitan renunciation of conquest and their commitment to an international crusade—a nutshell of the dilemmas emerging in republican universalism. In the months after this debate, once France repelled the Prussian invasion and began to advance into neighboring territories, the National Convention repeatedly disputed whether universalist ideology guaranteed each people the right to determine their own sovereign status or whether France should take the lead in regenerating, liberating, and colonizing areas such as the Savoy, Belgium, and the Rhineland.
This chapter, then, explores a brief but revealing incident—the debate over adopting foreigners—to ask how the revolutionaries laid claim to universalism in part by incorporating foreign peoples and projects and by politicizing cosmopolitanism. The event also sheds light on tensions within universalism. I will weave together analysis of the debate and press responses with examination of the foreigners chosen.
When Chénier led a delegation of Parisians to petition for adopting fourteen strangers, he intended to combine performance and politics. This well-known playwright was already tuned in to the symbolic power of foreigners. In April 1792 he had helped orchestrate the festival of Châteauvieux, which featured liberated Swiss soldiers, American and British radicals, and images of Algernon Sydney, Ben Franklin, and William Tell, with a javelin at his feet for slaying the Austrian governor and emancipating Switzerland.7
Four months later, when Chénier and his Parisians brought their list of proposed citizens to the Assembly, the political situation was heated. Enemy troops had crossed the French border. Meanwhile, the 10 August uprising that overthrew King Louis XVI had ushered in a moment of tense power-sharing between the Legislative Assembly and the Paris Commune, newly triumphant after spurring on the attack on the monarchy. The Assembly, and its leading political group, soon known as the Girondins, had been reluctant to suspend the king. Pressured by popular activism and the Commune, the Assembly had agreed to imprison the king and call elections for a new legislature to lead France, a National Convention to be elected by universal manhood suffrage.8 In short, at this moment when France worked toward defining its emerging republic, it faced both foreign invasion and divisive domestic politics.
In this loaded context, the debate over foreign citizens held significance and sparked controversy because it cut to the heart of key matters just when France set out to invent its republic. First, legitimacy. How could the embrace of universal values, drawn largely from the Enlightenment, legitimize and unify the fragile act of building the republic? Second, sovereignty. If the sovereignty of the republic rested conceptually on the defense of rights, did that mean that non-French defenders of rights could participate in building the sovereign nation? Did their commitment to universal goals trump their outsider status? Third, international relations and the Revolution beyond the hexagon. How could the revolutionaries’ new vision of sovereignty garner transnational legitimacy and also challenge traditional geopolitics of “tyrannical” states? And what did the claim to universalism mean for exporting revolution to other peoples or colonies?
Chénier’s delegation, with its list of Enlightened foreigners, offered one response to these large questions. After a lively discussion, the deputies agreed that the Committee of Public Instruction should draw up a list of meritorious “philosophes who had had the courage to defend liberty and equality in foreign countries.” On 26 August, the Legislative Assembly voted to grant citizenship to eighteen individuals. Presented as “citizens of the world,” these men did not represent the whole globe. Rather, they embodied the European and American Enlightenment, its assertion of cosmopolitanism, and the commitment to certain revolutionary political stances. Their names, exactly as listed in the 26 August decree, are as follows: “the doctor Joseph Priestley, Thomas Payne, Jérémie Bentham, William Wilberforce, Thomas Clarkson, Jacques Mackintosh, David Williams, N. Gorani, Anacharsis Cloots, Corneille Pauw, Joachim-Henry Campe, N. Pestalozzi, Georges Washington, Jean Hamilton, N. Madison, H. Klopstock, and Thadée Kosciusko.” The deputy Philippe-Jacques Ruhl successfully added the German playwright Friedrich Schiller.9 Seven of the new citizens hailed from Great Britain, four from German states, three from the new United States, and one each from Italy, the Netherlands, Switzerland, and Poland.
In imagining and claiming these European and American writers, generals, and politicians as representatives of humanity as a whole, the French revolutionaries espoused and built on a logic drawn from Enlightenment cosmopolitanism, a concept with multiple meanings. First, it refers to a set of ideals about human emotions and morals: as a philosophical stance, cosmopolitanism held that core human qualities and moral characteristics transcended national, religious, or linguistic differences. Hope for progress lay in the fact that all human beings shared moral commitments to the world at large and emotional bonds to one another. Second, in geopolitics, cosmopolitanism signified the ideal of perpetual world peace. Third, cosmopolitanism could also suggest a set of practices, of transnational interconnectedness, correspondence, dialogue, and rubbing shoulders with people of other nations, often imagined as an elite experience. Fourth, cosmopolitanism could be a rhetorical strategy, a positioning of oneself as impartial, and therefore uniquely capable of offering insight from above the fray. Finally, a fifth meaning: even as they discussed universal human qualities, proponents of cosmopolitanism were intrigued by the comparative study of different cultures. They explored and assessed—often in judgmental ways—the diverse customs, histories, religions, and values of peoples from various geographies, climates, or regions of the world. To put this last point succinctly, some peoples seemed to have progressed more than others, and it was important to figure out why.10
The revolutionaries did not enact cosmopolitanism as an ideal. Instead, they used one set of ideals and practices, cosmopolitanism, to inform another ideal: universalism—a legitimizing ideal under construction in practice. Rather than simplistically positioning cosmopolitanism as an ideal that was opposite to nationalism, I argue that cosmopolitan assumptions and practices informed the republican universalism that at times underpinned nationalism. As they recruited certain foreigners to help them define republican universalism, the revolutionaries drew on and politicized these cosmopolitan claims.
Cosmopolitan language and assumptions provided a frame for expressing the fraternity of the revolutionary crusade and giving it emotional power that could spring across borders. Chénier, Antoine-Adrien Lamourette, and Pierre Vergniaud linked France’s mission to the fate of “the human race,” “all the peoples of the world,” the “free world,” and the “liberty of the world.” Both the initial debate and the final decree invoked “universal fraternity”—the ultimate global, emotional bond. At one point in the deliberations, Claude Fauchet leapt up to embrace François Chabot as he stepped down from the tribune.11 Adopting foreigners could tie this ardor and fraternity of revolutionaries in the Assembly and in France to the cosmic wave of revolutionary zeal abroad. Even as these outsiders became French, they retained their foreignness and made manifest the universalism of transnational revolution.
In fact, some of the chosen foreigners clearly personified this transnational passion for revolution and had cultivated it in their writings. For example, in his 1789 work, Briefe aus Paris (Letters from Paris), the adoptee Joachim Heinrich Campe, swept away by the energy and harmony of the Revolution, longed to spread this joy back home: “My heart heats up and expands as I contemplate…all the consequences that it will bring for Europe, for the world!… I’d like to cry for joy as I anticipate springtime and the general happiness of peoples.” In choosing Campe, the revolutionaries blended revolutionary fervor with geopolitical motives. Beyond his heartfelt defense of spreading revolution, Campe’s hometown origins helped him make the list: now back in Germany, he had been publishing a reformist newspaper in the duchy of Braunschweig or Brunswick, the very principality whose duke was invading France.12
If the adopted foreigners embodied the emotional power of global fraternity, according to their supporters, they were also bringing about the moral transformation of the world at large. Marguerite-Élie Guadet listed the moral and political accomplishments of several of the nominees: “Wilberforce pleaded the slaves’ cause with an energy that shamed greed…. Priestley has taught men the secret of their power.” To adopt such figures would put humanitarian goals of political and social reform at the heart of republican universalism. In an analysis of late Old Regime cosmopolitan writers, the historian Sophia Rosenfeld has argued that by taking a stance as “citizens of the world” or “friends of humanity,” anonymous authors could make powerful international critiques of despotism or unjust warfare precisely because they situated themselves as impartial, as outside national politics, as vessels who allowed the forces of “reason, compassion, and imagination” to speak on behalf of humanity at large. While Rosenfeld is interested in individual authorial strategies, her point applies also to the self-conscious, cosmopolitan positioning of the revolutionaries who collectively claimed to conduct transparent politics for the liberty of the whole globe, politics without partiality, and as I will discuss below, the spread of revolution without conquest. As Marie-Jean Hérault de Séchelles promised, free France would not look, as the self-interested Louis XIV had, for adoring savants in foreign courts to be paid off with gold robbed from “sweat and blood of the people.” No, “free France [would be] satisfied to associate with her glory these great men from distant countries who had dared to speak the language of liberty and equality.”13
In building their claim to republican universalism, the French revolutionaries drew on the iconic, moral pull of leading humanitarians who above all had defended human rights in action. In its report on the debate, the Journal des débats et des décrets made clear that the selected foreigners had “proclaimed the rights of man,” and thereby “prepared the reign of universal liberty.” The Assembly chose men who embodied the quest for rights and the Enlightened reform of education and justice: abolitionists like Wilberforce and Clarkson, educators like Pestalozzi and Campe, theorists of natural rights and democratic politics like Paine and Mackintosh, a justice-system reformer like Bentham—whose prison design, the Panopticon, was under review by the legislative committee. Their “philosophical ties of blood”—to use Lamourette’s phrase—brought “glory” and grandeur to France and philosophers alike.14
In some cases, these rugged crafters of universal liberty, equality, and rights generated even more moral and affective pull because they had been victimized, like France herself, by kings, the evil defenders of the status quo. Because France was struggling to repel invasion by some of these kings and carve out new republican politics, this move held all the more power. Expelled from Habsburg lands, his property seized, the Milanese novelist and economist Giuseppe Gorani had been “honored and made famous by the hatred and persecution of the house of Austria, this great enemy of the happiness of mankind.” The “court of Saint James” had targeted Paine. And as for Priestley—whose home had been ransacked by Church and King rioters in the Birmingham riots of 14 July 1791—his “misfortunes had covered him with glory as much as did his virtues and his genius.”15
As the revolutionaries associated themselves with this coterie of great philosophers, for all their global claims, they laid out an imagined geographic hierarchy that placed France at the pinnacle, standing on the base of Europe, which in turn represented the world as a whole. When he depicted Priestley as “cosmopolitan, and consequently, French,” Chabot pithily encapsulated the bond between France and the global, Euro-elite. Two months later, in October, when the Convention invited intellectuals to offer their suggestions for France’s constitution, the future Montagnard Bertrand de Barère enunciated the architecture of this joint creation of republican universalism most clearly: “The Constitution of a great Republic cannot be the work of a few minds; it should be the work of the human mind…. Anyone…in France, in Europe, in the whole world, who is capable of drawing up and writing a plan for a republican Constitution, is necessarily a member of the Committee of the Constitution.” He envisioned a constitution generated by the cosmopolitan dialogue of the educated and Enlightened public sphere. The Constitutional Committee should draw on “all the luminaries, interrogate the genius of liberty everywhere,…reap the benefits of the freedom of the press.” It should “establish political and moral correspondence with philosophes and publishers, bring together all the minds to better band together all the wills, and give the solemn initiative to public opinion.”16
Public opinion, print culture, correspondence networks—a textbook model of the Enlightened, cosmopolitan public sphere, one to be guided by an elite corps of writers, by “great men” who combined the power of the pen with their innate genius. “Why wouldn’t [France] consult these foreigners who have taught her how to be free?” asked the Courrier des 83 départements. “Why wouldn’t all the geniuses of Europe sit in the National Convention?” As the Annales patriotiques et littéraires stated, the Assembly offered citizenship “to the men in Europe who had most gained fame through their love of liberty…. France declares that they are her children because they are the children of liberty.”17
Encompassed within this avowedly open model of creating republican universalism lay limits and tensions generated in part by its construction out of the old Republic of Letters. How could the cosmopolitan model of sovereignty set up by elite, “grands hommes” encompass a new, broader definition of popular sovereignty and grassroots public opinion? The popular insurrection of 10 August brought this question to the forefront. Mid-debate, Basire, advocate of universal manhood suffrage, attacked the elitist assumptions of the decree when he exclaimed against the adoptees: “It’s the aristocracy of half talents!”18 And what was the role of each nation’s sovereignty and self-governance in this republicanism led by France, to be seconded by Europe, and spread from there to a global universal republic, no doubt a colonial one? Revolt in Saint-Domingue and the imminent success of French armies in Europe would soon pose this question acutely and repeatedly.
For the supporters of the decree, cosmopolitanism, as appropriated by the revolutionaries, could provide a bridge across those tensions and contradictions with its ideals of human diversity, progress, and regeneration. Most of the adopted citizens of France were writers who used their words not only to reveal, unmask, and critique, but also to regenerate and civilize. Within their cosmopolitan appreciation of human variety, within “their writings that promise the triumph of liberty in all the climates of our globe,” some had assessed the readiness of different peoples for liberty. The adoptee Cornelius de Pauw, who had written on the Americas, China, and ancient Egypt, was celebrated for theorizing a climatological hierarchy: in contrast to Europe’s temperate readiness for civilization, the wet, cool climate of the Americas had a degenerative effect, both moral and physical.19
Although de Pauw was not fully optimistic about the possibilities for universal progress across climates and geographies, most French revolutionaries, and their newly adopted citizens, argued that such differences among people—both within France and far beyond—would be repaired by institutional political reforms coupled with revolutionary regeneration. Nominee James Mackintosh waxed poetic about the “energy of freedom” and praised the French for beginning “her regenerating labours with a solemn declaration of…sacred, inalienable, and imprescriptible rights.” Setting himself up as the “orator of the human race” and the “prophet of universal regeneration,” adoptee Cloots argued tirelessly that the Revolution would bring about the regeneration of humanity by destroying Catholicism’s hold on the popular imagination and creating a vast republic. In contrast to his uncle de Pauw, Cloots believed that the human thirst for liberty overcame cultural and climatological varieties among peoples. To see the universal “instinct for liberty,” one only had to look at the “experience of Boston and Charlestown, the patriotism of Indians in Pondicherry, the Africans of the Ile de Bourbon, the Americans of Saint-Domingue, the independence of blacks in the blue mountains of Jamaica and the thick forests of Guyana, the voice of nature that preached liberty to the Iroquois and the Samoyeds.”20
For all that he championed liberty as a shared human quest, Cloots also epitomized the view that regeneration and republican politics should be built outward from France and Europe to span the globe. By tapping into the fervent beliefs of new citizens like Cloots and Mackintosh, the revolutionaries staked out not only their cosmopolitan belief in global fraternity and their moral commitment to human rights and Enlightened reforms, but also their investment in the loaded and unequal politics of regeneration from above.
This vision of republican universalism faced some pointed opposition within the Assembly. Notably, opponents voiced anxiety that this ideal rested on a perilous confidence in human emotions of fraternity and moral commitment to the collective good. Taking a realpolitik position in this time of war, Jacques-Alexis Thuriot bluntly exposed the fault line underlying the universalist claim to fraternal transcendence and impartiality. Emotions on behalf of humanity did not necessarily trump national feeling. While it was true that great men belonged to all of humanity, if an Englishman, a Prussian, and a German were adopted as French citizens, and if France were at war with their countries, no one could expect them to reliably support measures to repel the enemy. He proposed that the nominees be granted citizenship but not the right to become representatives. Also mistrustful of the intentions and loyalty of strangers, Lasource objected to offering citizenship to those who had not asked for it, to those who had in effect not voiced their political will.21
Attacking the cosmopolitan assumptions from a different angle, Basire impugned the sincerity of elite authors called on to regenerate France and the globe. Written words alone did not prove the purity and truthfulness of emotions, he warned. External style did not necessarily reveal the true workings of the heart. According to Basire, authors of public writings could show talent and even offer “dazzling ideas,” but they could also mislead the people and, once in the Convention, “betray the public good…. Do not expose your fellow citizens to seductions like these.” This future Montagnard called into question the false expressions of fraternity by “famous foreigners”—an “aristocracy of half talents”—and implicitly aligned himself with the ordinary citizens who had overthrown the crown on 10 August.22
His objections spotlight the extent to which domestic political positioning mixed with the ideological attempt to hammer out revolutionary ideals. Chénier, and most likely his fellow Parisian delegates, had backed the Commune. In contrast, many, though not all, of the deputies who picked up his proposal and carried it forward belonged to the Girondin faction. For these deputies, to adopt foreigners marked the opportunity to move attention away from Parisian leadership and seize a transnational mantle for the Revolution, even as they outlined its universalist claims. With the exception of Lasource, the leading opponents of the 24 August petition were future Montagnards, aligned with Paris and suspicious of the Girondins.23 The alignments, however, were complex and fluid. Chabot, future Montagnard and backer of the Commune, favored the decree and connected the foreign defenders of liberty with the “brave French citizens [who] had poured forth in a majestic front on 10 August.” Why hesitate to make international heroes into citizens? “Did we wait for the sansculottes to ask for liberty to give it to them? No, principles pleaded in their favor for four years, they have conquered this right, and you have declared that it belonged to them.”24 By drawing a parallel between foreign philosophes and sansculottes in the quest for rights, Chabot reinforced the leadership role of Paris in creating the incipient republic, allied 10 August with the transnational pursuit of liberty, and reiterated the commitment to universal manhood suffrage that the Assembly had been pressured into allowing.
In the 24 August 1792 debate, the selective assimilation of foreigners became a site for articulating domestic political alignments and for working out the ideological underpinnings of the new republic. As they wrestled over incorporating foreign people and ideas as part of creating the republic, the revolutionaries tapped into the emotional and moral power of cosmopolitanism and also politicized its cultural assumptions to build a regenerative vision of universalism. At the same time, this domestic forging of republican universalism became bound up with geopolitics.
Strikingly, when the Assembly offered full citizenship to these eighteen outsiders, the supporters’ speeches, press accounts, and the decree itself also directly espoused the cosmopolitan renunciation of conquest by force. The 26 August 1792 decree announced that “friends of liberty and universal fraternity” should be “cherished by a nation which has proclaimed its renunciation of all conquest and its desire to fraternize with all peoples.” After all, noted the decree boldly, the National Convention would soon set “the destiny of France, and perhaps that of the human race.”25
The historian Marc Belissa has shown how French revolutionaries were influenced by Enlightenment attempts to envision a cosmopolitan system of international or inter-European peace: over the early 1790s, the revolutionaries escalated their militancy, and wrestled with their earlier goal of forming a “universal republic,” an Old Regime phrase often used—in opposition to “universal monarchy”—to refer to a loose confederation of states agreeing to follow international laws in order to avoid war. If individuals had rights, whole peoples also had sovereign rights that should be reciprocally respected. In the spring of 1790, the Assembly had decreed that France renounced wars of conquest and would never use its forces against the liberty of any people.26
Two years later, when the supporters of the 26 August decree invoked this cosmopolitan language of renouncing conquest, they made clear that inventing the republic was a geopolitical act. In effect, they defined the creation of a new nation as an international challenge, as a geopolitical move whose significance far transcended the borders of the hexagon. They boldly claimed that the French republic would inaugurate a new kind of state: it would not be led by tyrants and would not engage in the endless rounds of destructive warfare and territorial aggrandizement.
In reporting on the adoption of foreigners, the journalist Antoine-Joseph Gorsas provided the most in-depth commentary on this tie between cosmopolitan geopolitics, adopted foreigners, and the regenerative republic. He first excoriated the monarchical “scoundrels who had divided Europe between them,…cultivated national hatreds and put the globe into a state of perpetual warfare.” He then praised the nominees, these “ardent cosmopolitans” and “enlightened philosophers” who had dared to challenge the tyrants. France had been the first to answer their call and should now “hasten the resurrection of the world…and present all peoples with the olive branch of fraternity” (emphasis mine). With feigned disbelief, Gorsas brushed aside Thuriot’s objection that warfare could shatter the cosmopolitan emotion of loyalty to universal liberty (and France). The journalist dismissed this pragmatic argument with vaunted praise for the brave, disinterested, and enlightened citizens-to-be who had forsworn “all national prejudice.”27
As Gorsas made clear, the new republic would regenerate not just individual citizens but also the whole system of geopolitics. Along these same lines, in his introductory speech, Chénier depicted the French constructing their cosmopolitan republic, against “diplomatic ineptitude [and] the tortuous negotiations between courts who have agreed on mutually deceiving one another.” Those old squabbles would never produce “universal fraternity” or enable “all nations to rest in the shade of equality.” Bentham had written a plan for perpetual peace, and several of the other adopted foreigners, including Mackintosh, Paine, and Friedrich Klopstock, had celebrated the French renunciation of conquest in 1790. At a prorevolutionary festival in Hamburg on 14 July 1790, an ode by Klopstock had proclaimed: “War, the most horrible of monsters, has been enchained by her [the Assembly.]”28
In effect, as part and parcel of republican universalism, with the 26 August 1792 adoption of foreigners, the revolutionaries appropriated the cosmopolitan image of the universal republic—as a peaceful alliance of nations against the universal monarchy. To root the creation of the republic in the universalist claim of forging international peace had great moral potency. With the Prussian army bearing down on the emerging republic, this renunciation of conquest positioned France on the defensive in the war that it had declared four months earlier. In this mode, not only did the 26 August decree voice “the desire to fraternize with all peoples,” but it also claimed as allies men who had been victimized, like France, by powerful monarchs, malevolent defenders of tyranny at home and incessant warfare abroad. With this stance, France’s defensive war took on the resonance of a crusade in the name of all humanity. As the Chronique de Paris commented, the Assembly invited these eighteen outsiders to “defend the cause of the human race against tyrants and their slaves.”29
For the Girondins, who faced the political rivalry of Paris and who could be accused of leading France into the current disastrous war, the language of renouncing conquest had particular appeal. By claiming to act on a much larger global stage, they implicitly downplayed the activism of Paris, defined their war as a defensive war, and simultaneously raised the Revolution above territoriality into the realm of the universal. As Vergniaud stated in the Assembly, “It is not only for this little part of the globe that we call France that we have conquered liberty; it is not only on the Place Vendôme [i.e., in Paris against Louis] that we should concentrate the attack against despotism…. What means could be more sure, more effective, for assuring French liberty than associating with our dangers the philosophes from foreign nations, who have defended it?” In the Patriote français, Jacques-Pierre Brissot likewise called for a philosophic alliance shielding liberty against despotism: “May this wise and philanthropic decree win over for France this crowd of philosophers who have built respect for the Revolution in their countries; this is the only kind of conquest that we cannot renounce.”30
From cosmopolitanism, the revolutionaries built the powerful notions of regeneration from above and a global fraternity of nations; however, they further recast cosmopolitanism by hitching these aspirations to an inevitable tide of international revolution moving through time and space. For the revolutionaries, the chosen foreigners laid out a geography of transformation. “Payne, Priestley, and Mackintof [sic] in England; Pitalozzi [sic] in Switzerland; Gorani on the banks of the Tiber, and Malakowski on the banks of the Vistula have successfully pleaded the cause of humanity against tyranny, and laid the foundations of the universal Republic.”31 While the claim to universalism lifted the cause above territory, the very spatiality of this imagery—the banks of the Tiber, the banks of the Vistula—gave this movement a romantic allure and a sense of spatial destiny. It could not but unfold.
The crafters of the 26 August decree endorsed international revolution selectively, in dialogue with current geopolitics. No Dutch patriots or Belgians, whether Vonckist or Statist, found their way onto the rolls. Instead Chénier more cautiously invoked those whose “luminous writings had served either American liberty or French liberty,” and the list would include a marked number of British individuals battling for republican principles. While Tom Paine’s transatlantic activism made him an obvious choice, David Williams, minister and political theorist, had written a universalist, deist liturgy and had just published a work diagramming the progress of revolutionary, political reform in Britain, America, and the new France. Both Paine and Williams demonstrated revolution on the march. Spanning revolutions in action, the Polish general Thaddeus Kosciusko had fought in the American Revolution and had led the recent Polish attempt to defend their new constitution against Russian invaders.32
The American Revolution, safely across the sea, also offered James Madison, George Washington, and oddly enough, Alexander Hamilton. When he praised Madison for “in the Federalist developing in depth…the system of confederations,”33 Chénier effectively drew a parallel between the American federal system and the cosmopolitan quest for a universal republic. Madison and other drafters of the Constitution had feared that the individual American states would emulate the geopolitics of European nation-states, jealously guard their own interests, and splinter into warfare: Madison’s “compound republic,” a federative system, offered the promise, as yet untested, of peaceful union among the American states, a possible model for Europe. The Assembly’s choice of these Americans simultaneously linked France to the transatlantic wave of revolution and reiterated the cosmopolitan claim that the republic should promote respect between self-governing states.34
As the French enlisted foreigners, they voiced the conflicting international impulses of their universalist project, supporting both the transnational spread of regenerative revolution and the peaceful defense of each people’s autonomy. While there is no room here to explore the varied responses of the adopted foreigners, two replies suggest how much these tensions within universalism opened the door to malleable interpretations on the ground. Republican universalism could be evoked for and against conquest and colonization, for and against various peoples’ autonomy and liberty. Swept up in the zeal for revolution, the adoptee Cloots pushed for a “universal republic,” defined not as a confederation of republican peoples, but as a republican empire distributing rights from above. “Let us push war with vigor, it will be decisive…. The universal republic will replace the Catholic Church.” In contrast, Bentham treated the French Convention to his opinion on their overseas empire: “Your predecessors made me a French Citizen: hear me speak like one…emancipate your colonies…. Do you seriously mean to govern the world, and do you call that liberty? What is become of the rights of men? Are you the only men who have rights?”35
The adoption of foreigners by the French revolutionaries was in some ways a curious event: a divided nation under threat of invasion asserted that its politics of liberty and self-invention had global significance, voiced its intent to transform geopolitics in the name of peace, and enlisted leading European and American philosophes and activists in its cause. Curious as it may have been, this adoption of foreigners, just when France struggled over how to create a republic, reveals several key facets of France’s emerging claim to universalism. Far from being a unified discursive claim, republican universalism developed as a vital terrain of debate, as a field for struggling over the direction and validity of the republic. Different groups would work to stretch and shape its elastic meanings in various ways to fit their particular goals in domestic politics and geopolitics. The August debate offered future Girondins in particular the opportunity to affirm the power of the weakened Legislative Assembly and to defend their war in universalist, cosmopolitan terms.
This August 1792 event also suggests more broadly how the revolutionaries built republican universalism by assimilating and altering some aspects of Enlightenment cosmopolitanism. The deputies tapped into its unifying emotional power, its moral authority, its practices of sociability, its roots in print culture and elite correspondence, its internationalist vision of peace among nations, and its claim to transcend the particular even while believing in a hierarchy of civilization among the diverse peoples of the world. Nationalism did not just bump cosmopolitanism out of the way. Rather, to fuel a political crusade, the revolutionaries both drew on and transformed cosmopolitanism. Certain cosmopolitan assumptions helped to render revolutionary universalism less than fully universal, riddled with tensions and contradictions, open for debate. The cosmopolitan celebration of great men’s genius stood in uneasy relationship with the republic’s proclaimed roots in popular sovereignty. Likewise, the concept of regenerating the diverse peoples of the earth—from France to Europe and then beyond—made room for a colonizing republic and seemed to validate a cultural and political hierarchy with France at its pinnacle.
The act of granting citizenship to foreigners also helps us understand the French Revolution as an international creation. As they strove to shape and claim universalism, the revolutionaries also debated how to incorporate foreignness, foreign people, and transnational concepts into the very foundations of the republic. Republican universalism had many sources, including, of course, the powerful Enlightenment ideologies of natural rights and popular sovereignty. But because these ideologies held power only as global assertions, the revolutionaries had to root their legitimacy in claims that transcended France and articulated its relationship to foreign peoples and ideas. War accentuated this ideological need and made it concrete. Within weeks after the 26 August decree, French armies reversed the war’s direction and invaded Savoy, and then the Austrian Netherlands and the Rhineland. The issue of defining universal rights became all the more entangled with conflict over sovereignty and territory. The French themselves and their allies and opponents abroad engaged in repeated debate and conflict over whether universalism legitimized conquest in the name of liberty or guaranteed each people’s right to sovereignty.36 This international conflict over sovereignty, the foundational claim to defend universal human rights, and the transnational, Enlightenment origins of revolutionary ideas—these three forces accentuated the centrality of foreigners and foreign issues to the Revolution. Republicanism—born at war and based in universalism—could not be simply a national product.