Carine Lounissi
The American Revolution coincided with the crisis of French monarchical institutions. In May 1774, Louis XVI acceded to the throne at the time when tensions between the British government and the American colonies were coming to a head. His rise to power prompted financial reforms overseen by a series of ministers. The economist Anne-Robert-Jacques Turgot, appointed finance minister in August, implemented reforms based on physiocratic theories, such as the liberalization of the commerce of grain, soon after his appointment and the abolition of the corporations and of the corvée in 1776. These reforms, however, triggered a strong resistance from aristocrats, Parliaments, urban merchants, and the clergy. The resistance eventually arrested Turgot’s liberal project, and he was dismissed two years later. Jacques Necker, a Swiss interventionist who held views antithetical to Turgot’s, then succeeded him to the post in June 1777. Nonetheless, like Turgot, he favored a form of limited local power through provincial assemblies. In addition, under his watch, serfdom was abolished in royal domains in 1779. Yet Necker, too, was dismissed in 1781 for his inability to stabilize French finances, which were further strained by the official military support of the American Patriots after 1778. He was replaced by Charles-Alexandre de Calonne in 1783 as the victory of the United States over Great Britain was settled through the Treaty of Paris. Calonne attempted to pass most of the physiocrats’ reforms, but he met the same opposition of the notables and was dismissed in his turn.
The American War of Independence was for Louis XVI and his ministers an issue of foreign policy linked to their desire to reassert the power of France vis-à-vis England after the Seven Years’ War. The American Revolution soon became a major topic of both oral and written debate in literary and political circles in France, especially after the 1778 Treaty of Alliance. Many of the writings published during the 1780s were dedicated or sent to American revolutionaries before or after being published. Benjamin Franklin, John Adams, and Thomas Jefferson, among others, promoted and shaped their diplomatic counterparts’ and the French intelligentsia’s impressions about the United States when they were in Europe. The French literature of the 1780s on the American Revolution undoubtedly contains propaganda in favor of the American republic, whether originating from the Americans behind the scenes or the authors. As a result, this American moment in France has led scholars to center on diplomatic Americanophilia and Anglophobia.1 Yet this approach needs to be revised for two reasons. First, French intellectual circles were deeply interested in America’s prospects during the war and later in the formation of the U.S. government, and not merely because of the ways in which it affected French geopolitics. Second, the discussion of the American Revolution was an opportunity to reflect on political, economic, and financial matters in the context of Turgot’s attempts to modernize the feudal system and then Calonne’s and Necker’s endeavors to prevent bankruptcy. In particular, the responses to the economic reforms provide further nuance to questions of agrarianism, natural rights, and trade that dominated both sides of the Atlantic at the turn of the nineteenth century. Thus, although there was no widespread call for the overthrow of the French monarchy in the wake of the American Revolution, it is possible to view the 1780s as formative years for those who would then take part in the reform movements of the French institutions in and after 1789. Moreover, this perspective reverses the usual direction of influence by looking at how the formation of the United States also influenced French thinkers rather than interpreting a unidirectional line of influence of French writers on the American revolutionaries.
Yet studying the 1780s through the lens of these liberal economic theories might give disproportionate attention to certain writers in the French, European, or Atlantic public spheres who then published books, pamphlets, or newspapers on the Insurgents and the new American republic. Some of these authors are indeed well-known because they later played a major role in the French Revolution like Jacques Pierre Brissot, Jean-Baptiste Mailhe, and Nicolas de Condorcet, though Condorcet had a quite different status from the other two as a recognized promising scientist who was politically active with links to Turgot. Other important figures of French philosophy who contributed to this public sphere included Gabriel Bonnot de Mably and Guillaume Thomas Raynal. However, many less famous, or rather less studied, authors also wrote influential works on the United States during the 1780s. This essay seeks to amplify those voices as they highlight how perspectives on republicanism unfolded in the 1780s for these writers read and responded to one another. They were merchants, lawyers, journalists, printers, and polygraphes, that is, authors who wrote on a variety of topics, who published various kinds of texts (essays, plays, novels, treatises, etc.) and who were often translators as well. They traveled at least in a European and more specifically English-French-Dutch triangle, between Paris, Amsterdam, Brussels, The Hague, and London, and a few of them across the Atlantic to Santo Domingo and North America. The American Revolution as a topic of discussion contributed to the creation of networks of correspondence and communication among writers and thinkers both in France2 and across the Atlantic among French writers and prominent American Patriots. Whereas the rise of the American Revolution as a subject of study in French circles did not provoke a thorough revolution in the republic of letters, it contributed to the increase of its transatlantic dimension both as a topic (French writers addressing America) and as a geographic reality (exchanges through networks of communication across the Atlantic).
A rising generation of writers, namely Joseph Mandrillon, Antoine-Marie Cerisier, and Michel-René Hilliard d’Auberteuil, entered the French and French-speaking public spheres in the 1780s. Born in the 1740s or at the beginning of the 1750s,3 they all belonged to the same generation, in contrast to established figures of the French Enlightenment, such as Raynal or Mably. Yet even if they have been either retrospectively labeled as secondary or second-rate authors or, more often, completely overlooked in critical studies,4 they figured largely in the existing intellectual networks of Brissot or Mailhe and were not less “well-known” than them at the time. They shared, moreover, the same socioeconomic background or profile. Mandrillon, a well-established French merchant and printer in Amsterdam,5 was elected to the American Philosophical Society on 22 January 1785, on the same day as Thomas Paine, James Madison, Dr. Richard Price, and Joseph Priestley.6 The previous year he published Le Spectateur américain ou remarques générales sur l’Amérique septentrionale et sur la république des Treize-Etats-Unis, a second edition of which was printed in 1785 in Amsterdam. He sent a copy of it to George Washington, who responded politely if not very enthusiastically.7
Cerisier was a French journalist who also lived in Amsterdam during the 1780s who not only communicated with Mandrillon but also lived at his place for a time.8 He published Le Destin de l’Amérique, a fake translation of various dialogues among major actors of the conflict between the colonies and Great Britain in 1780 in London. He also corresponded with John Adams and eventually served as an officious diplomatic agent for him during his stay in Holland.9 Rewarded with a pension for his writings in favor of the French alliance with the American republic, he would later collaborate with Brissot in 1788 to create the Société des Amis des Noirs.10
Hilliard d’Auberteuil was a lawyer and a polygraphe who wrote essays and at least one novel, Miss Mac Rea, roman historique, published in 1784 and set in the colonies during the American Revolution.11 He had previously written on colonial matters and on Santo Domingo. By the time he began to address the American Revolution, he had fallen into disgrace with the authorities both in Saint-Domingue and in the metropolis because he advocated some autonomy for the colony.12 He corresponded with Benjamin Franklin, whom he had met in Paris, and sent him his Essais historiques et politiques sur les Anglo-Américains,13 the two volumes of which were published in 1781 and in 1782 in Paris and in Amsterdam, respectively. Given the correspondence and contacts the three of them had with Americans, they can even be considered as members of more solid connections or networks than Brissot or Mailhe in the early 1780s; historiography has focused on the latter figures because they played a great part in the major French events of the subsequent years. However, Mandrillon, Cerisier, and Hilliard d’Auberteuil deserve more attention because they capture pressing debates in the 1780s on the intersection of republicanism and participation in a growing world marketplace.
Several contexts need to be considered when studying Mandrillon’s Spectateur, Cerisier’s Destin, and d’Auberteuil’s Essais: the American Revolution itself, French domestic and foreign policy, current views and debates on America in French public spheres, and transatlantic networking among writers and thinkers. The three texts were published after the 1778 Treaty of Alliance with France and at three different phases of the American Revolution: Cerisier’s appeared during the last year of the war (which virtually ended at Yorktown); Hilliard d’Auberteuil’s came out when the negotiations between the Americans and the other European belligerents were unfolding; and Mandrillon’s circulated when the Independence of the colonies was established and debates on the question of federalism emerged in the first years of the republic. D’Auberteuil and Mandrillon were more concerned with institutional questions because of the American context,14 but all three contributed to the ongoing discussions on America that had started in French intellectual circles. They all presented the United States as a promising country peopled by vigorous republicans, which countered the views of Georges-Louis Leclerc, comte de Buffon, Cornelius de Pauw, and others who depicted America as a place where all species (including the human one) degenerated.
The writers under discussion here hailed the United States as a large and grand republic that challenged the standard criteria used to define a republican regime. Whereas the three of them were clearly followers of Turgot and devoted to French affairs, they mostly appear in scholarship (when studied at all) in the context of the Dutch republican revolution of the 1780s.15 Yet all three more or less openly criticized what would be called the ancien régime after the French Revolution. They defended free trade and were opposed to the ways in which colonies were administered by European powers. Supporters of what we now term economic liberalism, they underlined the importance of work against speculation and annuities (rente in French) and the idleness of the aristocracy. In this regard, the new American republic was a kind of model for them and, in some respects, anticipated what they wished for France.16 At the same time, they expressed an ambivalent view of commerce; on the one hand, it brought prosperity and was a right for all nations, and, on the other, it bred corruption and luxury whereas agriculture guaranteed the existence and survival of simplicity and virtue among citizens. Therefore, even if they did not elaborate on the implications of freedom and civic participation, their writings were nourished both by a “republican” trend and a “liberal” one and thus provide further evidence that republicanism can thrive alongside the development of commerce.17 In the first section, I look closely at the kind of texts that circulated among French writers in the 1780s. In the next section, I trace how anticolonialism emerged out of the writers’ engagement with the implications of the American crisis. In the last two sections, I characterize the type of “republicanism” they defended in the wake of the American Founders’ assertion of popular sovereignty and their rejection of hereditary power through the French writers’ interest in physiocratic thought.
First, the 1780s as an American decade in French intellectual circles needs to be explored at greater length. When the American Revolution, the United States, and more generally North America emerged as a central topic in educated circles in France in the 1770s and 1780s, intellectuals raised not only diplomatic political issues but also scientific and geographical ones. It was precisely the moment when European and French writers, thinkers, and intellectuals constructed their own image of North America and of the United States, which was fueled by books like Crèvecoeur’s Letters from an American Farmer (first published in 1782 in English and then in French in 1784 and 1787) and travel literature by French explorers like Chastellux’s Voyages dans l’Amérique septentrionale, published in 1786. Political and economic issues intersected with scientific pursuits (geography, climate, zoology). America in general and North America in particular were subjects of exotic curiosity for French philosophy, in the sense given to the word at the time. The Buffon–de Pauw thesis on degeneracy, which was refuted by Jefferson in his Notes on the State of Virgnia (published in 1785 and translated in 1787) and by Filippo Mazzei in his Recherches historiques sur les Etats-Unis (commissioned by Jefferson and published in French in 1788),18 illustrates how America remained a topic within natural science. In France, this dimension of America, as a center of scientific and political experimentation, was typified by Benjamin Franklin, who resided in Passy, a suburb of Paris, from 1776 to 1785. He was considered by the literary and political elite as the archetype of American and Quaker simplicity, in the wake of Voltaire’s idealization of Pennsylvania. Franklin, though not a Quaker, exploited this impression and fashioned his own character in the mold of the simple, if exotic, American while living among Parisians. His image was reproduced on miniatures, plates, cups, saucers, and medals, objects which testify to the Franklinmania in Parisian circles; possessing these objects signaled one’s participation or endorsement of intellectual (philosophical, scientific, and political) pursuits.
The several types of writings on the American Revolution that circulated in France during the 1780s were first, speeches delivered or texts written for the various competitions of the literary academies; second, poems and prose writings celebrating America and the American Revolution; third, history books or rather books that intended to present “historical” accounts of the Revolution; and finally, essays that discussed the potential political consequences of the Revolution: the new American institutions it might require and the realignment of international or geostrategic power. My interest lies in this last category, but to better understand its circulation in the public sphere, it helps to delve into the kinds of writing that emerged in the other categories as well.
Among the writers who took part in the competition organized by the Académie des Jeux Floraux in Toulouse, in the South of France, which was the oldest academy of the kind and which had a strong influence in the eighteenth century,19 was Jean-Baptiste Mailhe. He won the first prize, and his speech was printed in 1784. Mailhe then became a quite prominent member of the National Assembly in 1791 and of the Convention after 1792. He played a significant part during Louis XVI’s trial as he headed the committee that prepared the bill of indictment of the former king. The text he wrote on the American Revolution has been said to be an important step in his political maturation.20 The last part of Mandrillon’s Spectateur was his own speech for the competition of the Academy of Lyons in 1783 on the discovery of America whose question was prepared by Raynal.
Among published poems and prose works, one example of texts written to praise the American Revolution is that of Chavannes de la Giraudière, a long epic poem published in 1783 in Amsterdam, where he lived at the time. He dedicated this poem to John Adams and corresponded with him in the mid-1780s. He was also in touch with Cerisier, who wrote to John Adams in February 1783 to inform him that de la Giraudière’s poem was almost completed.21 De la Giraudière, who nicknamed himself the “Chantre de l’Amérique” (the bard and eulogist of America), collaborated with Cerisier to edit the latter’s new journal, Le mercure hollandais, and he sent the first issue of the paper to John Adams one year later in 1784, informing him that he would act as a correspondent for the newspaper regarding news from and about the United States.22 It seems that Jean-Baptiste Mailhe also wrote a poem to celebrate the Independence of the United States that he sent in August 1778 to Benjamin Franklin at Passy. In the letter sent along with this lost poem, Mailhe expressed his wish for the success of “the revolution that was about to take place.”23
Books that fall in the broadly historical category were more numerous and of various lengths. They presented the major events of the American Revolution and of the War of Independence to the French audience of educated readers. They did not meet what are today considered the standards of historiography. Among those “history” books, one of the most widely circulated accounts appears to have been Paul-Ulrich Du Buisson’s Abrégé de la Révolution de l’Amérique angloise, published in Paris 1778 in the wake of the Treaty of Alliance with the United States, which might account for its success.24 Many of these “histories” were inaccurate, faulty, and often biased against the British.25 Yet at least one of these writers (who were then rather obscure and have remained so) asked for the input of firsthand witnesses and agents of the Revolution. François Soulès corresponded with Thomas Jefferson and asked him for information. He even sent him the manuscript of his Histoire des troubles de l’Amérique angloise, which Jefferson annotated at some length to correct what he viewed as inaccuracies. Jefferson bought the published version of the book, which was printed in Paris, and sent it to James Madison. Soulès would then become one of the French translators of Paine’s Rights of Man.
One of the accounts of the American Revolution that attracted special attention was Raynal’s short book on the subject, Révolution de l’Amérique, which was published in 1781 in London and The Hague and became a chapter of his influential Histoire philosophique: Révolution de l’Amérique. Its publication led Paine to answer what he perceived as Raynal’s flawed vision of the American Revolution in his Letter to the Abbé Raynal, published in 1782 and quickly translated in French. One of the several translations of Paine’s essay was made by Cerisier, who added footnotes defending and confirming several of Paine’s assertions, especially on the events of the War of Independence.26 This translation was published in Amsterdam in 1783. Cerisier informed John Adams of its forthcoming publication, and he even suggested that his translation of Adams’s Dissertation on the Canon and Feudal Law should appear in the same volume, a proposal that must have annoyed the recipient of the letter, who apparently never answered Cerisier on this point.
The last category of texts I consider—essays or pamphlets on the American Revolution that pertain to French domestic or international relations—were written either by authors who were part of the Parisian intellectual circles (such as Démeunier, Condorcet, and Mably) or authors outside of these circles (like Cerisier, Hilliard d’Auberteuil, and Mandrillon). Franklin’s publication of each of the thirteen colonies’ state constitutions in 1783 (translated into French by LaRochefoucault d’Enville) attuned political writers to the forms of American government and new questions about implementing republicanism. Many of these texts were published in the second half of the 1780s, when the crisis of French institutions deepened and when the question of federalism was debated with greater intensity in the United States. Some of these texts led to transatlantic debates, such as the Turgot-Mably-Adams debate on the tension between agrarian and merchant interests in the uses of government and later the four-volume book written by Jefferson’s friend, the Italian physician and translator Mazzei.27
Turgot, in his 1778 letter to Price, praised the American Revolution, even if he had opposed French involvement in the War of Independence.28 He considered that the origins of U.S. independence were found in Great Britain’s economic policy toward the colonies, which he deemed a “monopoly,” and he accordingly criticized what he perceived as an illegitimate right given to state governments to control trade. The American people were likely to produce the “example of a constitution through which man enjoys all his rights.” He saw in the United States at the same time a “hope” and a “model,” even if he feared that it had yet to become independent from what he called European prejudices and errors regarding economic and political matters.29 This viewpoint is reflected in the three writings by Cerisier, d’Auberteuil, and Mandrillon studied here.
Looking closely at this set of texts provides other takes on debates within liberalism as not only Turgot’s but also Mably’s influence appears in their writing. In addition to promoting free trade, Hilliard d’Auberteuil and Mandrillon evince anxiety about the spirit of commerce. Indeed, their work, especially Mandrillon’s, might have been influenced by Mably’s Observations sur le gouvernement et les lois des Etats-Unis (published in 1784 in Amsterdam by Rosard and translated in English in 1785). Mably’s view of republican government aligns with J. G. A. Pocock’s theses on civic virtue or humanism as promoting the common good. Cerisier did contribute to the publication of Mably’s 1784 edition at the request of John Adams. In the letter Adams sent to Cerisier asking him to take care of the publication of Mably’s book, Adams tried to convince his French correspondent by reminding him that he shared common views with Mably; however, Le Destin de l’Amérique instead reveals Cerisier’s affinity with Turgot, who has been categorized more on the liberal fringe with his physiocratic approach.30 Thus, Turgot’s and Mably’s ideas can be seen as polarizing in this context.
These three writers were influenced not only by French and colonial writers but by British ones as well. Many of these essays paid tribute to the freedom of speech in the English-speaking public sphere or rather to what French thinkers and authors imagined this freedom was like. What may be termed a transatlantic Whig point of view pervaded the circles of French writers, journalists, and thinkers who addressed the American Revolution. It is evidenced by the very titles and subtitles of their books. Mandrillon’s title is inspired by Addison and Steele’s Spectator, the widely read Whig periodical. Cerisier’s Destin is a fake translation. Mirabeau subtitled his essay on the Cincinnatus society “Imitation d’un pamphlet anglo-américain.” Du Buisson took on the identity of a “member of the American Congress” to publish Letters in 1779. Condorcet wrote as a “Bourgeois de New Haven” in 1787, also hiding behind an American persona.31 The masquerading and mimesis of American writers confirm the vogue of America or the American fashion in French intellectual circles. An extra-European republican model perhaps stimulated the reflection of writers who appeared unsatisfied with the French, but also English, monarchies.
These writings may, in fact, be considered as the visible part of a transatlantic web of connections and circulations that included networks of correspondence among prominent American Founders who stayed in Paris or in Europe, and French intellectuals. During the 1780s, the nexuses of these networks were Benjamin Franklin (who settled in Passy for a decade), John Adams (who stayed in France and in Holland from 1779 to 1788), and, during the second half of the 1780s, Thomas Jefferson (who stayed in Paris from 1784 to 1789). It is not easy to know whether these letter exchanges were prompted by French intellectuals because they were genuine Americanophiles or because they were reformers who wished to benefit from the advice of the American Founders. At bottom, though, these writers understood the diplomatic and geostrategic issues at stake during the War of Independence and then during the peace negotiations. In the case of Cerisier, John Adams consulted him according to Adams’s version of the story.32 Mandrillon and Hilliard d’Auberteuil appear, rather, to have initiated letter exchanges on their writings. Amid more pragmatic questions in these exchanges, these transatlantic correspondents shared a mutual interest in Enlightenment principles, science, and a curiosity about America.
In addition to networks among French peripheral or established intellectuals and the American Founders, others seem to have developed among French writers. One of them was centered in Amsterdam and might be described as the “Mandrillon connection.” This network connected at least Cerisier, Mandrillon, and Chavannes de la Giraudière. It also involved Dutch printers. The role of Holland in the Enlightenment and its diffusion, or “the role of the Dutch as middlemen in the international republic of letters,” in the eighteenth century has been studied at length.33 For my purposes, though, I want to illuminate the multiple actors, genres, and material cultures that circulated between this French-Dutch axis. De la Giraudière’s poem, for example, was published in Amsterdam by Jacobus Adrianus Crajenschot, the Catholic printer and Patriot in the Dutch context of the 1780s. He was also the printer of Cerisier’s translation of Paine’s answer to Raynal, but the Destin de l’Amérique was published in London by John Bew, a printer and bookseller of the famous Paternoster row who printed magazines and eclectic books. Mandrillon’s American Spectator was published in Brussels and Amsterdam by E. Flon, a bookseller and a printer who sold books such as those by Rousseau and Voltaire and who therefore primarily disseminated Enlightenment ideas rather than strictly printed material on the American Revolution.
Another network that connected writers on the issue of empire, colonialism, and America in the French Atlantic involved those who traveled between France and Saint-Domingue (later Haiti). Hilliard d’Auberteuil’s interest in the situation of the American colonies and in the American Revolution was informed by his own experience in the French colony of Saint-Domingue and his conception of the relations between the colony and the French metropolis. Du Buisson, who had previously posed as an American congressman in one text, published the Abrégé in answer to Hilliard d’Auberteuil’s writing on Santo Domingo, the colony’s capital city. Du Buisson, the general postmaster of Santo Domingo at the end of the 1770s, published his Abrégé in Paris through Cellot and Jombert, an official printer, or one officially recognized by the French king’s offices, whereas d’Auberteuil published his book himself in Paris and in Brussels. The accepted version of the story is that Du Buisson and Hilliard d’Auberteuil were rivals, but this possible connection has remained largely unexamined.
While scholars repeatedly recognize the existence of these networks among writers and printers, finding material to document them precisely proves difficult. One of Mandrillon’s letters to Cerisier was published in Cerisier’s Histoire des Provinces Unies, but their correspondence has not been archived except when it appears within the writings of the American Founders. In addition, the evidence to better understand the relationships among printers and writers and that could provide the detailed publishing history of the books is even less accessible and requires further investigation. Because the networks among French writers and their printers can mainly be reconstructed through the letters they sent to American Founders, the scope of a study of these networks remains limited even if the correspondence of the Founders details the connections and contacts of these French writers among themselves. As such, the narrative that develops when one exclusively studies French writers within collections on the American Founders reiterates American exceptionalism and obscures the transatlantic relations and intellectual circulations between France and the United States in the revolutionary era, which need to be reappraised.34
Both these published and unpublished materials clearly prove that there was an American moment in France in the 1780s. The American Revolution and the Alliance of 1778 turned the United States into a subject of political and scientific interest in intellectual circles in Paris and in French provincial cities, as well as in European cities where French journalists or polygraphes were established, such as Amsterdam. They also edited independent or sponsored newspapers (like Affaires de l’Angleterre et de l’Amérique, with which Franklin actively collaborated) and produced writings which were circulated in France and in Europe. The sample of writings that I will look into in this essay testify to the range of approaches to the United States and former British North America that appeared at the crossroads among geostrategy, economic theories, politics, and science.
Cerisier, Hilliard d’Auberteuil, and Mandrillon all expressed clear anticolonial and anti-imperial positions in their writings, which were inspired by both Raynal and physiocracy. First, the American Revolution appeared to them and to many other French authors as exceptional and as totally different from the other political changes and episodes that had taken place in the past. Mandrillon enthusiastically remarked that the “the American Revolution is a phenomenon in politics, a unique moment in history.”35 He distinguished this “revolution” from all those that had happened before and said it had “nothing in common with them.”36 The word “revolution” before the American Revolution and the end of the eighteenth century meant any kind of alteration in the governing spheres of a country. Thomas Paine in Common Sense and in his open letter to Raynal contributed to shifting meanings of the word. Paine, widely read and discussed in French literary and political circles and salons, notably explained the fundamental difference between the American Revolution and other “revolutions.”37 Even if Mandrillon did not refer to the Letter to the Abbé Raynal here, he mentioned Paine’s Common Sense, which had been the first text in which Paine argued in favor of a republican, democratic, and antimonarchical revolution in the British colonies.
Mandrillon then predicted that the American Revolution would be a model for the “administrators of empires,” who would “learn lessons [from it] to rule over peoples,” in particular regarding “the sacred rights of man” at the time and for “posterity.”38 His warning did not directly mention European monarchies or France, but he did present an anticolonial attitude; in the very first pages, he mentions the “rights of indigenous people,” especially those under the subjugation of Spain.39 Hilliard d’Auberteuil also voiced his optimism about the revolution “which completely changed the political system of Europe and the existence of all America.”40 He envisioned the other armed conflicts it could trigger and the fact that “several nations” could be the victims of these future wars, which certainly included Spain. Cerisier concluded his dialogue in 1780 on the vision of “an entirely free America” and even on the idea it could make the old dream of “perpetual peace” come true.41
The American Revolution, therefore, was seen as shaping a new world order that exposed the drawbacks of imperial designs. It put pressure on the rivalries among European powers for their share of territory and wealth in America. Cerisier linked the fight of the Insurgents of North America against the mother country to that of the Irish and, more broadly, to the colonials of the whole British Empire.42 He considered imperial rule as undermining the whole British political system and more specifically undermining the British Parliament,43 and he openly supported the positions held by Price and Priestley to reform British institutions, in particular representation in Parliament. Cerisier’s attack against the economic policy of the British government was quite harsh and sarcastic as he remarked that they had “taxed chimneys, windows, posts, horses, dogs and even servants” to pay for their imperial ventures.44 The British political system was neither what it used to be nor what authorities pretended it was. Cerisier opposed the alleged “despotism” that “was said to exist in France” to “the empire based on equitable laws” in Britain.45 It is clearly propaganda in favor of France. Such propaganda also explicitly surfaced at other moments, especially when one of the characters of Cerisier’s dialogue underlined that “Louis XVI’s behavior had been far more noble and open” than that of other monarchs.46
The three writers shared the criticisms of the Whig opposition not only for obvious strategic reasons linked to foreign policy but also because they had political affinities with them. Hilliard d’Auberteuil denounced the decay of British morals and of the British system, although he suggested that this Pandora’s box had been brought there from the outside since “the English who had almost all become wealthy travelers had carried with them in their country the corruption of other nations.”47 Britain was compared to the Roman Empire and to Carthage, but at the same time Hilliard d’Auberteuil thought that it could yet resist these foreign pressures thanks to “its excellent constitution.”48 The myth of the British constitution still survived, and this myth was the foundation for the Whigs in Britain, as well as for many of the American Whigs or the American Patriots (versus Loyalists) who opposed the prime minister’s policies.
These French writers took up Edmund Burke’s contention on 22 March 1775 in Parliament; spreading the fundamental rights of British subjects, he maintained, was “the cement” of the empire. Mandrillon stated that “the English should therefore have thought that they encroached on their own rights when they encroached on those of the English of America.”49 Cerisier repeated William Pitt’s warning when the former addressed the British authorities: “You will lose America if you want to bring it back by dint of cannon shots.”50 Hilliard d’Auberteuil described the policy led by the British in the colonies as “the tyranny of republicans” and again compared it to the Roman Empire.51 England was perceived as a place where “republican” virtues prevailed against the hordes of the North. For example, Hilliard d’Auberteuil pitted “the Goths and other Barbarians” against “London where republican equality was the source of a common pride.”52 What “republican” means here is not fully clear because he does not define it. In contrast, the behavior of the current British army and of the governors in the colonies of North America was equated to a form of savagery; this savagery then spread to the colonies a form of tyranny unknown to their inhabitants, which was also denounced by American Patriots. One of the methods used to gain control of the colonies was to divide in order to cement its reign; Hilliard d’Auberteuil, in fact, accused the British government of having “multipl[ied] distinctions among subjects who have the same rights in order to make them take up arms against one another.”53 This Aristotelian method of establishing tyranny consisted in corrupting people with “titles” and “honors” contrary to the habits and morals that prevailed in the colonies.54
According to Mandrillon, the “republican spirit,” which had “made swift progress among the colonists,”55 countered this declension. Again he does not expound on republicanism but alludes to it in the context of the suspension of the charters of the 1680s; it may have pertained to the rule of law, that is, fundamental rights guaranteed through established legal rules by which the governed as well as the governors abide. In Cerisier’s dialogue, his character of the annoyed British king remarked that “the colonists are quite miserable republicans.”56 Later, Cerisier’s character, Lord North, again compared the colonies to “ancient republics” and suggested that “the people” of the colonies had been seduced by “ambitious demagogues” who wanted to “make a revolution,”57 which might have been a reference to Paine and to the success of Common Sense.
Cerisier, Hilliard d’Auberteuil, and Mandrillon all sided with the American Patriots and blamed the imperial policies of the mother country. To them, the American colonists were “republicans” even before the Independence of 1776 and had been so at least since the end of the seventeenth century. At the time of the Glorious Revolution and the subsequent entrenchment of charters after William of Orange took over, Hilliard d’Auberteuil said that in the colony of New York “men [were] nurtured on the salutary principles of the republic.”58 More generally in all the colonies, “freedom” was taught to children almost from their birth.59 Therefore a republican culture or a republican habitus that differed from the culture that existed in European monarchies had grown there and had been encouraged. Yet he did not specify how this “republican” tradition diverged from that of the mother country. Such a tradition nonetheless explained, according to Hilliard d’Auberteuil, why Paine’s pamphlet, Common Sense, had so great an influence on its readers: “Such words addressed to republicans who were naturally alert and impatient of any yoke could but make a great impression.”60 So it was neither Paine’s writing nor the hostilities with Britain in the 1770s that first prompted calls for a republic, even if, as Hilliard d’Auberteuil underlined, Anglo-American colonists expressed little desire for independence before the Revolution.61
The republican education and customs of Americans were closely connected with their living conditions, which were perceived as totally different from those that existed in Europe at the time. Mandrillon and Hilliard d’Auberteuil had traveled to North America and so had firsthand knowledge of it, which was not the case for Cerisier. American society was said to align with natural laws and its government with natural rights and natural principles, whereas European society was depicted as ossified and perverted.62 The aristocracy and the clergy were attacked as useless. Hilliard d’Auberteuil devoted a section to the “errors and prejudices of the French” about commerce and the organization of the navy. He considered “the old noblesse” as illegitimate,63 and he accordingly celebrated the provisions in American constitutions against “the ambitions” of the clergy and “the positive suppression of all nobility and hereditary prerogatives.”64 European regimes and monarchies appeared as rife with “arbitrary rights and laws where abuses had been as multiplied as the offices of public administration.”65 These were stumbling blocks on the way to reforms in Europe and in France, whereas America was, in Hilliard d’Auberteuil’s view, “free from these shackles,” although he did not exclude that “new prejudices” could be created on the American side of the Atlantic.66
The three writings censure the whole of the French monarchical and aristocratic system in moral terms. Mandrillon remarks that monarchies in general, including France, are the seats of “splendor,” “sluggishness,” and “indolence.”67 Attacking both “the nobility and priests” for their “servile arrogance,”68 Hilliard d’Auberteuil further describes French morals as degenerate; pleasure had become the keyword of the French aristocratic society.69 This moral criticism of the European aristocratic way of life was then turned into an economic one. What explained the moral decadence of the European monarchies and even of the Dutch Republic for Cerisier was the domination of “rentiers,” “agiotage,” and useless “luxury.”70
This explains Cerisier’s explicit rejection of Necker, whom he called “a man of expedients.”71 Cerisier sarcastically created his character, the anti-French Lord Weymouth, as categorically ruling out the reformation of France’s sociopolitical system and economic order. At the same time, this character functions to praise Turgot as “an enthusiastic patriot who was about to establish general freedom of religion and industry.”72 Although Hilliard d’Auberteuil did not openly advocate revolution, he nonetheless made allusions that could be understood as moderate appeals to reform; he mentions, for example, “a just” king who was “eager to seize all means to heal the old wounds of government” and even states that victory against the English was not sufficient if many “unfortunate people lived under his reign.”73 The ideal government of these liberal republicans not only responded to nature but also included limiting territories and colonies to the natural boundaries of countries.74 While writings on the American Revolution published by major figures within French philosophy (like Turgot or Condorcet) speculate on the American Revolution,75 other writers demonstrate how it intersects concretely with French institutions more than their better-known contemporaries.
The colonists differed from people in Europe as the result of several factors: the environment, climate, and “necessity.” Europeans were well aware of Buffon’s and de Pauw’s visions of America, but Mandrillon, as well as Cerisier in his newspaper, Le Politique hollandais,76 challenged these views. Inhabitants of North American were morally regenerated by their contact with nature, and it was this wilderness that made them free and independent.77 These views echo Crèvecoeur in his Letters, which was published around the same time as Cerisier’s newspaper. The positive influence of nature was visible in the physical strength of American men. They were depicted as sturdy soldiers who were adapted to their wild environment. Hilliard d’Auberteuil pictured them quite dramatically as “walking across . . . marshes . . . like hunters accustomed to mimicking the agility of the game they pursue.”78 Rough living conditions produced healthy individuals.79 General Arnold appeared as “persevering and indefatigable” and as having a “robust temper.”80 American soldiers, leaders, and people in general embodied a model close to that of antiquity as the comparison with Rome exemplifies, even if there is an implicit reference to Sparta in his description of the education of children.81 Both Mandrillon’s and Hilliard d’Auberteuil’s conceptions of America seem to be underpinned by Montesquieu’s view of the influence of climate on morals in The Spirit of the Laws. The same characteristics that Montesquieu ascribed to the English are attributed to the North American colonists, that is, “impatience” and “courage,” which were, according to Montesquieu, necessary to prevent tyranny.82 North Americans embodied, for Mandrillon and Hilliard d’Auberteuil, the ideal free people. These writers characterized Americans as possessing “energy” and “courage” in contrast to European people, who tended toward degeneration and who seemed to have lost their virility and their virtù,83 reiterating their reversal of the thesis of American degeneracy.
Both nature and the adaptation of men to this given space-time created conditions favorable to “republican” morals and to the formation of a republican government. The North American territory was seen as an exceptional place predestined to be free. It was to Mandrillon an “empire for liberty” where natural rights were guaranteed by a fair political model and good legislation.84 It was another version of the British Empire and a more positive iteration of “empire” that did not imply the domination of one people over another but rather the contrary. The word here connoted greatness and immensity without the flaws of the imperial model of European nations. Whereas Hilliard d’Auberteuil praised the effects of primitive activities such as hunting on children, it was rather the agrarian or agricultural paradigm that prevailed in the development of the American republic. America was to him “this huge continent where despotism had not spread its empire” and that “was only awaiting peaceful and educated cultivators.”85 Transversing the Atlantic Ocean had made it possible “to begin the world over again,” as Paine said in Common Sense, which probably influenced Hilliard d’Auberteuil. “America” was also a creation of the European, especially French, imagination, a notion confirmed by Crèvecoeur’s fake autobiography of an “American farmer,” which generated a mythology of America in France. North America was seen as a land of plenty, as a “fertile” soil producing “fruits” and “wheat” in great quantity and enabling people to enjoy “innocence and the sweetness of a pastoral way of life.”86
Cerisier, Hilliard d’Auberteuil, and Mandrillon advocated physiocratic principles, which proposed that the source of economic viability and political and personal contentment was the fertile soil and agriculture. Mandrillon explains that “agriculture” was “the basis of the greatness of a nation” and that “commerce” was only “its consequence.”87 Hilliard d’Auberteuil also explicitly presents this essential notion of physiocratic economy: “the real wealth of nations consisted in the products of lands and in the works of industry which transform and exchange these products.”88 Beyond the economic health of a country, agriculture was the foundation of good morals and of a perennial republican regime. In Hilliard d’Auberteuil’s words, all those who tilled the land “did not move away from the rights of nature,” and if all “laborious men” could find work, the good moral order of society would be ensured;89 these were sentiments he shared with those Jefferson expressed in his Notes.90
Agriculture was the keystone of the American republic, and work in general was considered a fundamental value. The centrality of labor for the good order of society was emphasized by Mandrillon through a Mandevillian description of the state of Europe, where too many workers cannot find work and are useless in the “beehive.” Emigration to the colonies might have been a solution to the problem of poverty and unemployment in Europe, which was a criticism leveled at the mercantilist vision of the colonies and at how colonies were viewed in Europe and in France.91 According to physiocratic thought, the importance of labor as a value is even more clearly developed within a larger discussion of an ethic of work. Work contributes to human happiness and is viewed as an intrinsic part of man’s nature. It has a moral function because it increases self-worth. Such reflections go beyond the mere economic character of labor and come close to proto-utilitarianism: “The freedom to work for oneself naturally increases in each individual the courage and the activity that is inspired by the pleasure to be rewarded for it.”92 This liberation of the potential of America was made possible thanks to the American Revolution, which was seen not only as a political but also as an economic and moral change. The question of slavery was not taken into account in this picture and was not an issue here, although Hilliard d’Auberteuil had tackled this topic when writing on Santo Domingo.
In addition to agriculture, “commerce” and all “useful works” were instrumental in “conserving the morals” of the people, as Mandrillon stated.93 The American society whose commercial future had been opened by its Independence represented a model of a balanced social order in which there was neither “poverty” nor “luxury” nor an “excess of needs.”94 Yet Mandrillon stuck to a Rousseau-like vision of Native Americans, whom he pictured as the embodiment of the innocence of the first ages of humanity. Sciences and arts imported by Europeans to the American continent would hasten their technological progress and improve their sociability even if it also meant the importation of luxury and thus a tendency toward corruption. Mandrillon hoped these unavoidable evils would be balanced in America by more positive laws and provisions than in Europe. He hoped former British colonists and new American citizens would learn lessons from the European model about what not to reproduce.95 In the preface, he warned them against a possible negative influence of English culture, especially “English ideas on commerce and wealth.”96 His analysis might have been an answer to d’Auberteuil, since it clearly differed from the latter’s view, who thought that Britain had preserved American settlers from habits of “luxury” and “had taught them industry and commerce by dint of prohibitions.”97
Yet both Mandrillon and Hilliard d’Auberteuil agreed that commerce was good for America and that the American republic, “where commerce mostly benefited from all that could make the country and the citizen richer,” would help promote commercial freedom in general.98 Commerce as it existed in North America was a kind of rational and almost moral activity. Hilliard d’Auberteuil thought that “competition and candor,” “modesty,” “rightfulness and utility” were the cardinal virtues of commercial exchanges across the Atlantic.99 He defended the positive role of commerce and of “merchants and owners” in the former colonies and during the American Revolution.100 American “merchants” were “honest,” and North America was presented as “the country in which commerce is vital.”101 He praised General Arnold, whom he said was a former tradesman, and he turned Thomas Walker, the Canadian merchant who supported the American Revolution, into a martyr of the war and a victim of British “barbarity.”102 Both Mandrillon and Hilliard d’Auberteuil mentioned the role of trade during the conflict with Great Britain. The fact that “men and women [in the colonies] renounced the consumption of goods that were provided by the metropolis” after the Stamp Act was an important moment of the Revolution in Mandrillon’s view. It confirmed what Hilliard d’Auberteuil had said a few years earlier about how the British government used commerce as a weapon and its miscalculation that “destroying the trade” of the American settlers would be enough to regain the control of the colonies.103
North America was thus destined to be a commercial nation. Mandrillon ascribed this characteristic to geography and to “the central position of the territory of the United States.”104 The American Revolution would help establish what was a fundamental idea for these three “republican” or “liberal” writers and what Cerisier called “the natural right that all people have to trade with an unlimited freedom on all seas and in all countries.”105 Suppressing monopolies of trade was a major concern, and imperial British policy embodied mercantilism, which they interpreted as incompatible with the freedom of enterprise and of access to natural resources.106 The future or “destiny of America,” as Cerisier called it, presented a real concern as it included but also exceeded geostrategic questions. Hilliard d’Auberteuil predicted that “septentrional America was too great not to become itself an empire” in the future.107 Both Nationalists, who would then become Federalists, and Jeffersonians, discussed this idea on the other side of the Atlantic in the 1780s. Mandrillon summed up their interrogations when he considered that the crux of the matter was “to conciliate the wealth of their empire with peace, happiness and the freedom of each individual.”108 Yet how these national debates precisely crossed the Atlantic and whether Mandrillon knew of them still need to be investigated.
What is more certain is that he published his Spectateur américain after Mably’s 1784 book on American governments in whose publication Cerisier played a role at the request of John Adams, as discussed above. Mandrillon may have been aware of this book as he was part of Cerisier’s network. In his preface, Mandrillon seemed to level an implicit criticism at Mably when he said that it was not sufficient to write on the flaws of constitutions,109 while sharing his distrust of English commercial customs. The Constitutional Conventions that were taking place in the United States in the 1770s and 1780s raised issues that tended to challenge what may be considered as the orthodox vision of republican regimes in eighteenth-century political philosophy both in Europe and in North America. As Hilliard d’Auberteuil remarked, “the theory of republican government” was “almost yet unknown.”110 Yet he and Mandrillon continued to rely on the former criteria used to define the republican paradigm, notably the republican socioeconomic model, which implied an equality of wealth. Hilliard d’Auberteuil warned the Americans against military conquest and colonization and advised them to develop their commerce instead.111 He considered that they were first and foremost farmers, though, and contended that trade would not grow much before fifty years, since extending commerce meant the development of manufacture and of a navy.112 Similarly, Mandrillon insisted on the necessity of being “courageous enough to resist luxury,” to favor “agriculture” rather than “commerce.” These measures would prevent the American political system from falling into European degenerate and iniquitous forms of government such as “despotism,” “aristocracy,” and “anarchy.”113
The American republics could keep their exceptional character if their inhabitants remained wary of what Mandrillon called “English ideas on commerce and wealth.” He predicted that “commerce was the greatest enemy of the United States” because of the corruption it could generate in the country.114 Therefore Mandrillon thought that Americans should restrain their manufactures to “absolutely essential products,” which were already manufactured in Europe.115 In other words, they should keep the restrictions on production that had been imposed by the mother country in colonial times. Yet even in Hilliard d’Auberteuil’s writing, in which a more positive vision of commerce appeared, a negative one also surfaced. Whereas he had extolled Arnold’s and Walker’s patriotism, he quoted the case of the “avidity of a merchant of Boston” that nearly “caused a general massacre” during the War of Independence.116 He also alluded to Dunmore’s Proclamation in Virginia and suggested that the governor hoped that some of the colonists would be “corrupted by the commerce with the neighboring colonies,”117 although whether he referred either to Spanish colonies or to the British or French West Indies is not clear.
How to maintain and reconcile a republican regime within the individual American states and throughout the federal government was a major issue to them and to the Founders. One of the keys to enduring republican institutions, if not the main one, was moral virtue. Hilliard d’Auberteuil seemed to share some of Crèvecoeur’s fears about the potential harmful consequences of the War of Independence on the morals of Americans.118 Both he and Mandrillon, however, were ready to move away from the standard models of republican regimes that were used and theorized in political thought at the time. They did not consider that the extent of the territory was a problem for the conservation of the republic. Mandrillon, who wrote in the mid-1780s, when the federal question was debated with more urgency in the United States, predicted that a closer federal union would form and that even a centralization of power would take place.119 The size of the American republic was not an impediment to political happiness provided good morals were maintained. Hilliard d’Auberteuil went even further in challenging the usual conception of republics as possible only in small states as he believed that the United States could be made up of “thirteen confederate republics” as well as “twenty.”120 He argued that the republican model did not depend on the size of its territory as “activity, work and patriotism” could ultimately produce “power” or “influence” as well as in a monarchy.121 The new republican paradigm as it was unfolding in the United States appeared to him as something radically different from past models, which led him to reappraise the orthodox conception of republics to some extent.
As a result, Hilliard d’Auberteuil was quite optimistic about the future of the republican constitutions of the American states. What guaranteed morals and good order were more general factors or conditions, that is, “freedom of government,” which meant neither “motives of ambition nor power to be feared nor injustice to be afraid of nor too heavy taxes to be paid.” It also depended on economic prosperity and on a good distribution of work among the population in “which all laborious men find an occupation” and provided “the fertile soil produced abundantly in exchange of labor.”122 These physiocratic conditions would serve as the best barriers against moral and political degeneracy. They required the guarantee of “the right of ownership,” which he considered “the sacred basis of all other rights of civil society” and which he believed had not been secured enough in the American state constitutions, although it was the only way “republics” could prove viable and strong.123 When all these requirements were met, organs of control, such as the Council of Censors set up by the 1776 Constitution of Pennsylvania, which he criticized, would become superfluous.
Cerisier, Hilliard d’Auberteuil, and Mandrillon had clear affinities with the physiocrats since they emphasized the importance of agriculture as the primary economic activity for a country and of the right of ownership, the need for governments to interfere with the economy only in a minimal way, and the role of nature as the measure of all things. They offered an agrarian (and Jeffersonian) vision of America and insisted on virtue as the keystone of a well-governed and well-organized society, but they also advocated the importance of commerce and free trade as essential. The eighteenth-century ambivalent view of commerce surfaced because the danger of luxury and corruption was still real to Hilliard d’Auberteuil and Mandrillon. Hilliard d’Auberteuil and Mandrillon therefore had a rather ambiguous, if not at times contradictory, vision of the American Revolution. They supported and celebrated it as the feat of a free and republican people, but they pointed out its harmful consequences for American society.
These writings contributed to the debates about the future of the French social and political systems. They reflected the political, economic, and social crisis the French monarchy was going through in the 1780s. Those who supported or observed Turgot’s attempts to end the feudal system in France found echoes of his policy in the American republic, as Turgot himself suggested in his letter to Price.124 Nevertheless, many French public intellectuals who wrote on the American Revolution, including Cerisier, Hilliard d’Auberteuil and Mandrillon, were aware of the radical otherness of America’s spatial, social, economic, and political conditions. Consequently, whereas they hailed the American Revolution as a watershed, they did not support an end to monarchy. Their writings may be viewed as representative of some of the questions that would arise during the Revolution of 1789. Hilliard d’Auberteuil died in 1789, but Cerisier supported the convening of the States General and the reforms of the French monarchy. He apparently remained a royalist before he endorsed the republican government in 1792.125 Mandrillon also supported the Revolution, was a moderate reformer who approved of the first phase of the French Revolution and especially of Lafayette,126 but was later a victim of the Terror.
However, even if writing on the American Revolution turned out to be an opportunity for discussing “liberal” and “republican” issues, it does not seem sufficient as such to underpin the thesis of a potential “influence” of the American Revolution on the course of politics in France or in precipitating the French Revolution. The French revolutionary decade has tended to obscure how the new generation of French writers and publicists, like Cerisier, Mandrillon, Hilliard d’Auberteuil, and others, grappled with the legacy of the previous generation of French Enlightenment thinkers (such as Raynal, Rousseau, and Montesquieu) and constructed their legacy. The historiographical treatment of the opposition, which has been said to polarize the political debates in 1789 between Américanistes (the promoters of American forms of government or rather of the few unicameral legislatures in state constitutions) and Anglomanes (the supporters of checks and balances), also overshadows transatlantic debates prior to the French Revolution.127 Looking at the numerous French writings on the United States that were published in the 1780s, without overdetermining the significance of 1789 in a teleological way (unless one considers that the French Revolution had already begun with Turgot’s reforms), may reveal how the American Revolution as a topic contributed to an already ongoing mutation in the French public sphere, since it enabled all sorts of writers to take part in the public debate on political, as well as economic, social, and scientific issues.
1. As Allan Potosfky has already emphasized (Potofsky, “Le corps consulaire français et le débat autour de la ‘perte’ des Amériques: Les intérêts mercantiles franco-américains et le commerce atlantique, 1763–1795,” Annales historiques de la Révolution française 363 [January–March 2011], http://ahrf.revues.org/11930). My own interpretation of these writings has changed since I published “Penser la Révolution américaine en France (1778–1788): Enjeux philosophiques et historiographiques,” Cercles 16, no. 2 (2006): 97–113, www.cercles.com/n16/2/lounissi.pdf. See also Gilbert Chinard, L’Amérique et le rêve exotique dans la littérature française au XVIIe et au XVIIIe siècle (Paris: Hachette, 1913); Bernard Faÿ, Bibliographie critique des ouvrages français relatifs aux États-Unis, 1770–1800 (1925; New York: Burt Franklin, 1968) (Faÿ’s work has been discredited because of his collaboration with the Vichy regime); Durand Echeverria, “Mirage in the West: L’Amérique devant l’opinion française, 1734–1870: Questions de méthode et d’interprétation,” Revue d’histoire moderne et contemporaine 9, no. 1 (1962): 51–62; Durand Echeverria, Mirage in the West: A History of the French Image of American Society to 1815 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1957); Paul M. Spurlin, “The World of the Founding Fathers and France,” French Review, Bicentennial Issue: Historical and Literary Relations between France and the United States 49, no. 6 (1976): 909–25; Michele R. Morris, ed., Images of America in Revolutionary France (Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press, 1990); Claude Fohlen, “The Impact of the American Revolution on France,” in The Impact of the American Revolution Abroad, ed. Library of Congress (1976; Honolulu: University Press of the Pacific, 2002), 21–40; and Marie-Jeanne Rossignol, “The American Revolution in France: Under the Shadow of the French Revolution,” Europe’s American Revolution, ed. Simon Newman (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), 51–71.
2. In particular through the question of the “advantages and disadvantages of the discovery of America” that Raynal chose to ask in 1780 to organize a competition for the Academy of Lyons (Gilles Bancarel, “Du bon usage de la correspondence: Les lettres de l’Abbé Raynal,” in Réseaux de correspondances à l’âge classique [XVIe–XVIIIe siècles], ed. Pierre-Yves Beaurepaire, Jens Haseler, and Anthony McKenna [Saint Etienne: Presses Universitaires de Saint Etienne, 2006], 222).
3. Mandrillon was born in 1743, Cerisier in 1749, and Hilliard d’Auberteuil in 1751.
4. Nordholt describes them in a rather derogatory way as “hacks” (J. W. Schulte Nordholt, The Dutch Republic and American Independence [Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1982], 126, 128).
5. He is also sometimes described as a “banker” (see the letter “To George Washington from Joseph Mandrillon, 11 June 1784,” Founders Online, National Archives, http://founders.archives.gov/documents/Washington/04-01-02-0303). Source: The Papers of George Washington, Confederation Series, vol. 1, 1 January 1784–17 July 1784, ed. W. W. Abbot (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1992), 441–42.
6. Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society 19, no. 109 (June–December 1881): 13. His application, though, to the Society of Cincinnati was rejected on 18 May 1787 (Records of the Society of Cincinnati 6, https://www.societyofthecincinnati.org/pdf/Calendar%20of%20the%20Society%20of%20the%20Cincinnati%20Archives%20-%20May%203%202013.pdf).
7. Letter “To George Washington from Joseph Mandrillon, 11 June 1784,” Founders Online, National Archives, http://founders.archives.gov/documents/Washington/04-01-02-0303.
8. See his letters sent in October and November 1780 to John Adams, whom he asked to write to him at Mandrillon’s address in Amsterdam (“To John Adams from Antoine Marie Cerisier, 17 October 1780,” Founders Online, National Archives, http://founders.archives.gov/documents/Adams/06-10-02-0137). Source: The Adams Papers, The Adams Papers, vol. 10, July 1780–December 1780, ed. Gregg L. Lint and Richard Alan Ryerson (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1996), 274–76. “To John Adams from Antoine Marie Cerisier, 15 November 1780,” Founders Online, National Archives, http://founders.archives.gov/documents/Adams/06-10-02-0186-0001. Source: The Adams Papers, ibid., 343–44.
9. For a bibliography on this much-studied question, see Peter Nicolaisen, “John Adams, Thomas Jefferson and the Dutch Patriots,” in Old World, New World: America and Europe in the Age of Jefferson, ed. Leonard J. Sadosky, Peter Nicolaisen, Peter Onuf, and Andrew J. O’Shaughnessy (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2010), 124.
11. Joan Dayan, “Hilliard D’Auberteuil, The Breton Lawyer and Radical Critic of the Colonial Regime,” New Literary History 26, no. 2 (1995): 283–308.
12. Malick W. Ghachem, “Montesquieu in the Caribbean: The Colonial Enlightenment between ‘Code Noir’ and ‘Code Civil,’” Historical Reflections 25, no. 2 (1999): 183–210. It is Hilliard d’Auberteuil’s writings on the colony of Santo Domingo that have mostly been studied.
13. They were part of the same Masonic lodge (R. William Weisberger, “Benjamin Franklin: A Masonic Enlightener in Paris,” Pennsylvania History 53, no. 3 [1986]: 173–74).
14. Mandrillon, in particular, focuses on the formation of institutions because he partly reacted to Mably’s essay on the U.S. Constitution published in 1784 in London.
15. See Nordholt, The Dutch Republic. However, none of the three writers discussed in this essay is mentioned by Wyger Velema in his study on Dutch republicanism in the eighteenth century (Wyger Velema, Republicans: Essays on Eighteenth-Century Dutch Political Thought [Leiden: Brill, 2007]). The view that Mandrillon and Hilliard d’Auberteuil were part of those who advocated “modern constitutionalism” in France has been defended by Horst Dippel (see Anne-Marie Chouillet and Pierre Crepel, eds., Condorcet, homme des Lumières et de la Révolutions [Fontenay aux Roses: ENS Editions, 1997], 204).
16. Potofsky, “Le corps consulaire français,” http://ahrf.revues.org/11930.
17. My use of these terms is informed by the Pocock/Bailyn versus Appleby debate in the 1980s. See especially Lance Banning, “Jeffersonian Ideology Revisited: Liberal and Classical Ideas in the New American Republic,” as he unpacks some of the misinterpretations of the “scholarly battle.” Ultimately, Banning argues, “I would resist the rather contradictory suggestion that party battles of the new republic can be described as contests pitting Federalist attachment to tradition against a liberal, Republican commitment to change” (William and Mary Quarterly 43, no. 1 [1986]: 45).
18. Thomas Jefferson, Notes on the State of Virginia (1785 and 1787; London: Penguin, 1999), 43–71; Filippo Mazzei, Recherches historiques et politiques sur les États-Unis de l’Amérique septentrionale (Colle and Paris: Froullé, 1788), 3:84–103. On the publication and debates about America in the 1780s, see Robert Darnton, “Condorcet et l’américanomanie en France au 18e siècle,” in Pour les Lumières: Défense, illustration, méthode, trans. Jean-François Baillon (Pessac: Presses universitaires de Bordeaux, 2002), 35, which is a French translation of Darnton’s essay “Condorcet and the Craze for America in France,” in Franklin and Condorcet: Two Portraits from the American Philosophical Society (Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society, 1997), 27–39.
19. Jeremy L. Caradonna, “Prendre part au siècle des Lumières: Le concours académique et la culture intellectuelle au XVIIIe siècle,” Annales: Histoire, Sciences Sociales 3 (2009): 633–62.
20. Jean-Baptiste Mailhe, Discours qui a remporté le prix à l’Académie des Jeux Floraux en 1784 sur la grandeur et l’importance de la révolution qui vient de s’opérer dans l’Amérique septentrionale (Toulouse: Imprimerie de Desclassan, 1784); Jacques Godechot, “Le bicentenaire de la Révolution américaine,” Annales historiques de la Révolution française 226 (October–December 1976): 481–83; Geneviève Thoumas, “La jeunesse de Mailhe,” Annales historiques de la Révolution française 204 (April–June 1971): 233–41. Several writings of the same kind were published in the mid-1780s. For example, the Chevalier Deslandes, about whom not much is known, had his own speech on the same subject printed in Paris in 1785 (Chevalier Deslandes, Discours sur la grandeur et l’importance de la révolution qui vient de s’opérer dans l’Amérique septentrionale [Paris: Durand, 1785]).
21. “To John Adams from Antoine Marie Cerisier, 26 February 1783,” Founders Online, National Archives, http://founders.archives.gov/documents/Adams/06-14-02-0195 [last update: 2016–03-28]. Source: The Adams Papers, The Adams Papers, vol. 14, October 1782–May 1783, ed. Gregg L. Lint, C. James Taylor, Hobson Woodward, Margaret A. Hogan, Mary T. Claffey, Sara B. Sikes, and Judith S. Graham (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2008), 296–301.
22. “L. de Chavannes de la Giraudière to John Adams, 23 February 1784,” Founders Online, National Archives (http://founders.archives.gov/documents/Adams/06-16-02-0035 [last update: 2016-03-28]). Source: The Adams Papers, The Adams Papers, vol. 16, February 1784–March 1785, ed. Gregg L. Lint, C. James Taylor, Robert Karachuk, Hobson Woodward, Margaret A. Hogan, Sara B. Sikes, Sara Martin, Sara Georgini, Amanda A. Mathews, and James T. Connolly (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2012), 54–56.
23. “To Benjamin Franklin from Jean-Baptiste Mailhe, 21 August 1778,” Founders Online, National Archives (http://founders.archives.gov/documents/Franklin/01-27-02-0258 [last update: 2016-03-28]). Source: The Papers of Benjamin Franklin, vol. 27, July 1 through October 31, 1778, ed. Claude A. Lopez (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1988), 285.
24. Paul-Ulrich Du Buisson, Abrégé de la Révolution de l’Amérique angloise depuis le commencement de l’année 1774 jusqu’au premier janvier 1778 (Paris: Cellot and Jombert, 1778).
25. Echeverria, Mirage, 43.
26. Thomas Paine, Remarques sur les erreurs de l’histoire philosophique et politique de Mr. Guillaume Thomas Raynal, par rapport aux affaires de l’Amérique septentrionale, trans. A-M. Cerisier (Brussels: B. Lefrancq, 1783).
27. Among the most recent articles on this debate, see Will Slauter, “Constructive Misreadings: Adams, Turgot, and the American State Constitutions,” Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America 105, no. 1 (March 2011): 33–67.
28. Turgot’s letter was published only posthumously in 1784 and then by Mirabeau the following year in Considérations sur l’ordre de Cincinnatus.
29. Honoré-Gabriel Riqueti, comte de Mirabeau, Considérations sur l’ordre de Cincinnatus, ou Imitation d’un pamphlet anglo-américain, suivies d’une Lettre du général Washington et d’une Lettre de feu M. Turgot, au Dr Price sur les législations américaines. (London: J. Johnson, 1784), 189; Stéphane Bégaud, Marc Belissa, and Joseph Visser, Aux origines d’une alliance improbable: Le réseau consulaire français aux États-Unis, 1776–1815 (Brussels: PIE–Peter Lang; Paris: Direction des Archives, Ministère des affaires étrangères, DL, 2005), 14.
30. On Mably, see Johnson Kent Wright, A Classical Republican in Eighteenth-Century France: The Political Thought of Mably (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997). On Turgot, see Maria Luisa Pesante, “Between Republicanism and Enlightenment: Turgot and Adams,” in Rethinking the Atlantic World: Europe and America in the Age of Democratic Revolutions, ed. Manuela Albertone and Antonino De Francesco (Basingstoke, England: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), 61–79.
31. Lettres d’un membre du Congrès amériquain, a divers membres du Parlement d’Angleterre (Philadelphia and Paris: chez l’auteur, 1779); Quatre Lettres d’un Bourgeois de New Haven sur l’unité de la législation, in Mazzei, Recherches historiques et politiques.
32. Nordholt, The Dutch Republic, 125.
33. Martin Fitzpatrick, Peter Jones, Christa Knellwolf, and Iain McCalman, eds., The Enlightenment World (London: Routledge, 2004), 94.
34. Since Palmer’s and Godechot’s books, not many studies have been published on this question. Most of them tend to ignore the 1780s and to focus on the period starting after 1789 (see Patrice Higonnet, Sister Republics: The Origins of French and American Republicanism [Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1988]; and Denis Lacorne, “Essai sur le commerce atlantique des idées républicaines,” in Les politiques du mimétisme institutionnel: La greffe et le rejet, ed. Yves Mény [Paris: l’Harmattan, 1993], 39–60). On Americans in Paris, since Yvon Bizardel’s study (Bizardel, Les Américains à Paris pendant la Révolution [Paris: Calmann-Lévy, 1972]); the topic has been taken up by American scholars like Philipp Ziesche (Ziesche, Cosmopolitan Patriots: Americans in Paris in the Age of Revolution [Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2010]).
35. “La révolution américaine est un phénomène en politique, une époque unique dans l’histoire” (Joseph Mandrillon, Le Spectateur américain, ou Remarques générales sur l’Amérique septentrionale et sur la république des Treize-Etats-Unis, suivi de Recherches philosophiques sur la découverte du Nouveau-Monde, 2nd ed. [Amsterdam: Flon, 1785], xv).
36. Ibid., 139.
37. Thomas Paine, The Complete Writings of Thomas Paine, ed. Philip S. Foner (New York: Citadel, 1945), 2:220.
38. Mandrillon, Le Spectateur américain, 15.
39. Ibid., v.
40. “Qui change absolument le système politique de l’Europe, l’existence de l’Amérique entière” (Michel-René Hilliard d’Auberteuil, Essais historiques et politiques sur les Anglo-Américains [Brussels: l’auteur, 1782], 1:6).
41. Antoine-Marie Cerisier, Le Destin de l’Amérique ou Dialogues pittoresques, dans lesquels on développe la cause des événemens actuels, la politique & les intérêts des puissances de l’Europe, relativement à cette guerre, & les suites qu’elle devroit avoir pour le bonheur de l’humanité (London, 1780), 121–22.
42. Ibid., 107.
43. Ibid., 110.
44. “Taxé les cheminées, les fenêtres, les postes, les chevaux, les chiens et même jusqu’aux domestiques” (ibid., 104).
45. Ibid., 89.
46. Ibid., 79.
47. “Les Anglais devenus presque tous de riches voyageurs avaient rapporté dans leur partie la corruption des autres nations” (Hilliard d’Auberteuil, Essais historiques, 2:77).
48. Ibid., 2:277.
49. “Les Anglais devaient donc penser que c’était attaquer leurs propres droits . . . que d’attaquer ceux des Anglais d’Amérique” (Mandrillon, Le Spectateur américain, 130).
50. “Vous perdrez l’Amérique à vouloir la ramener à coups de canon” (Cerisier, Le Destin de l’Amérique, 56–57).
51. Hilliard d’Auberteuil, Essais historiques, 1:6.
52. “Londres où l’égalité républicaine faisait la fierté commune” (ibid., 1:270).
53. “On s’est intéressé à multiplier les distinctions entre les sujets sont les droits sont égaux pour les armer aisément les uns contre les autres” (ibid.).
54. Ibid., 1:271.
55. “L’Angleterre aurait déjà dû s’apercevoir que l’esprit républicain faisait des progrès rapides chez les colons” (Mandrillon, Le Spectateur américain, 144).
56. “Ce sont de bien méchants républicains que ces colons” (Cerisier, Le Destin de l’Amérique, 25).
57. Ibid., 44.
58. “Hommes nourris des principes salutaires de la république” (Hilliard d’Auberteuil, Essais historiques, 1:15).
59. “Aà peine les enfants commençaient à se faire entendre qu’ils répétaient à haute voix les catéchismes de la liberté” (ibid., 1:49).
60. “De tels discours adressés à des républicains naturellement vifs et impatients du joug devaient faire une grande impression” (ibid., 1:72–73).
61. Ibid., 1:72. He attributed this notion to his contact and correspondence with Benjamin Franklin, whose authority he cited.
62. Ibid., 2:142.
63. Ibid., 1:274–75.
64. Ibid., 2:97, 138.
65. Ibid., 2:151.
66. Ibid., 2:152.
67. Mandrillon, Le Spectateur américain, 129.
68. Hilliard d’Auberteuil, Essais historiques, 1:216, 275.
69. Ibid., 2:278.
70. Cerisier, Le Destin de l’Amérique, 68.
71. Ibid., 13.
72. “Il n’y a pas d’apparence que la nation française recouvre ses droits. Il y a quelques années un de nos contrôleurs généraux me jeta dans une peur terrible. Il coupait dans le vif. Nous étions perdus s’il fut resté dans le ministère. Ce patriote enthousiaste n’allait rien moins qu’à établir une liberté générale de religion et d’industrie” (ibid., 15–16).
73. Hilliard d’Auberteuil, Essais historiques, 1:275, 289–90.
74. Cerisier, Le Destin de l’Amérique, 123; Hilliard d’Auberteuil, Essais historiques, 1:141.
75. On Turgot, see Lacorne, “Essai sur le commerce atlantique,” 41; and on Condorcet, see Darnton, “Condorcet et l’américanomanie en France au 18e siècle,” 35.
76. Nordholt, The Dutch Republic, 220.
77. Mandrillon, Le Spectateur américain, 131.
78. “Les Américains traversent aisément ces marécages. . . . Ils marchent en chasseurs habitués à imiter l’adresse du gibier qu’ils poursuivent” (Hilliard d’Auberteuil, Essais historiques, 2:169).
79. “Ils les exerçaient à la chasse, leur apprenaient à vivre sobrement, à supporter la faim, la fatigue des longues marches dans les bois et dans les deserts” (ibid., 1:49).
80. Ibid., 2:49 and 1:174.
81. Ibid., 1:150 and 2:252.
82. Montesquieu, De l’Esprit des lois, bk. 16, ed. Victor Goldschmidt (Paris: Garnier-Flammarion, 1979), 385.
83. Hilliard d’Auberteuil, Essais historiques, 1:116–17; Mandrillon, Le Spectateur américain, xv.
84. “Cet espace immense où la liberté paraît avoir établi son empire, où les lois n’ont pour objet que de conserver à l’homme les droits qu’il tient de la nature” (Mandrillon, Le Spectateur américain, xi).
85. “Ce vaste continent où le despotisme n’avait point étendu son empire n’attendait que des cultivateurs paisibles et instruits” (Hilliard d’Auberteuil, Essais historiques, 1:9).
86. Ibid., 1:15–16, 20, 23, 24, 35.
87. Mandrillon, Le Spectateur américain, 184.
88. “La richesse réelle des nations consiste dans les productions des terres et dans les travaux de l’industrie qui prépare et échange ces productions” (Hilliard d’Auberteuil, Essais historiques, 1:41).
89. Ibid., 1:99 and 2:139.
90. Thomas Jefferson, Notes on the State of Virginia written in the year 1781, somewhat corrected and enlarged in the Winter of 1782, for the use of a foreigner of distinction, in answer to certain queries proposed by him. [1782]. The first edition of this work was not published in Paris before 1785, even if the title page of the first private edition mentions 1782. For the publishing history of the Notes, I relied on Kevin J. Hayes, ed., A History of Virginia Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 133. Yet whether Jefferson or his book had a direct influence on the three French authors’ agrarianism is not easy to determine as I did not find letters proving such a connection. We know that Mandrillon was in Paris in 1783, whereas Jefferson arrived in Europe only in 1784. Mandrillon’s letters to George Washington for 1784 were written in Amsterdam. Hilliard D’Auberteuil’s extant letters to Franklin were written from Paris, but only in 1782 and 1783, it seems. Whether they discussed the issue with Franklin or in salons is not yet established.
91. Mandrillon, Le Spectateur américain, 127–28.
92. “La liberté de travailler pour soi augmente naturellement dans chaque individu ce courage et cette activité qu’inspire le plaisir d’en être recompense” (ibid., 181).
93. Ibid., 131.
94. Ibid., 132.
95. Ibid., 134–35.
96. Ibid., xiv.
97. Hilliard d’Auberteuil, Essais historiques, 1:41.
98. “Où le commerce surtout jouit de tout ce qui peut enrichir la patrie et le citoyen” (Mandrillon, Le Spectateur américain, xi). Mandrillon had already praised free trade and the need for Europeans to establish commercial links with the United States in the second part of a translation published in 1782 (Par M. J.h M., Le Voyageur américain ou Observations sur l’état actuel, la culture, le commerce des colonies britanniques en Amérique, Adressées par un négociant expérimenté, en forme de lettres, au très-honorable comte de. . . . Traduit de l’anglois. Augmenté d’un Précis sur l’Amérique septentrionale & la République des Treize-Etats-Unis [Amsterdam: chez J. Schuring, 1782]).
99. Hilliard d’Auberteuil, Essais historiques, 1:47–48.
100. Ibid., 1:101.
101. Ibid., 2:255–56.
102. Ibid., 1:175, 212–15.
103. Mandrillon, Le Spectateur américain, 146; Hilliard d’Auberteuil, Essais historiques, 1:183.
104. Mandrillon, Le Spectateur américain, 181.
105. “Le droit naturel qu’ont tous les peuples de commercer avec une liberté illimitée sur toutes les mers et dans tous les pays” (Cerisier, Le Destin de l’Amérique, 90).
106. “La nature a donné le droit de pêcher à quiconque demeure sur le bord de mer” (Hilliard d’Auberteuil, Essais historiques, 1:131).
107. “L’Amérique septentrionale trop grande pour ne pas constituer elle-même un empire” (ibid., 2:261).
108. “Concilier la richesse de leur empire avec la paix, le bonheur et la liberté de chaque individu” (Mandrillon, Le Spectateur américain, 138).
109. Ibid., xiii.
110. Hilliard d’Auberteuil, Essais historiques, 2:151.
111. Ibid., 1:216.
112. Ibid., 1:271.
113. Mandrillon, Le Spectateur américain, xiii–xiv.
114. Ibid., xiv.
115. Ibid., 182.
116. “Il s’en fallut de peu que l’avidité d’un marchand de Boston ne causât un massacre general” (Hilliard d’Auberteuil, Essais historiques, 1:125).
117. “Anglo-Américains corrompus par le commerce des colonies voisines” (ibid., 1:271).
118. Ibid., 1:36.
119. Mandrillon, Le Spectateur américain, xiii–xiv.
120. Hilliard d’Auberteuil, Essais historiques, 2:108–9.
121. Ibid., 2:108–9.
122. Ibid., 2:139.
123. “Le droit de propriété est la base sacrée de tous les autres droits de la société civile” (ibid., 2:143) and “ce n’est que la réunion des propriétés, des sûretés et des félicités particulières que peuvent résulter dans la république la force et la prospérité de l’Etat” (ibid., 2:150).
124. Potofsky, “Le corps consulaire français,” http://ahrf.revues.org/11930.
125. Jeremy D. Popkin, “From Dutch Republican to French Monarchist: Antoine-Marie Cerisier and the Age of Revolution,” Tidschrift voor Geschiedenis 102 (1989): 534–44.
126. Letter “To George Washington from Joseph Mandrillon, 1 June 1790,” Founders Online, National Archives (http://founders.archives.gov/documents/Washington/05-05-02-0281 [last update: 2015-06-29]). Source: The Papers of George Washington, 452–54.
127. Joyce Appleby, Liberalism and Republicanism in the Historical Imagination (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1992), 238–50; Ziesche, Cosmopolitan Patriots, 26.