The French Revolution began on July 14, 1789, when the exasperated citizens of Paris, spurred on by relatively small cadre of middle-class intellectuals, stormed the Bastille Fortress and freed the political prisoners held there. Many Americans believed that the French embraced their own understanding of ordered liberty and would create a constitutional republic similar to the U.S. Americans benevolently smiled on the political upheavals that defined itself by three benign words: liberté, égalité, fraternité.
Liberty, equality, and fraternity quickly transformed into oppression, inequality, and anarchy.
From the moment the mob stormed the Bastille, lies, violence and willful cognitive dissonance typified the revolutionaries and their partisans in the U.S. The horde forced down the gates of the castle and beheaded the governor and his assistant. Whereas rumor told of hundred of men imprisoned in the Bastille, the fortress housed only seven men: four men lawfully convicted of forgery, and a nobleman imprisoned at his family’s request for his predilection for the sexual escapades inspired by the Marquis de Sade. The remainder were insane — one man thought he was Julius Caesar.
Parading bloody heads of men murdered without trial though the streets of Paris signaled that from the outset the French Revolution would be about power and violence. Thomas Jefferson seemed unperturbed. He breezily noted that the executions at the Bastille served the useful purpose of quickening intransigent French nobles into embracing the coming radicalism of the French Revolution.
American sympathy for the worst aspects of the French Revolution, exemplified by Thomas Jefferson, is unsurprising. His years in France showed the palpable moral decay of the Roman Catholic Church hierarchy, the autocratic and dysfunctional structure of the Bourbon monarchy, and the diffident disinterest in duty of the aristocracy. This understandably convinced Jefferson that the French people endured a government entirely unresponsive to the basic functions and needs of society. Jefferson’s answer was to publicly and privately praise the democracy and revolution without any limiting principle. Although the murderous rampages and extralegal reign of Madame Guillotine known as the Terror lay several years in the future in 1789, terrorism inaugurated and sustained the French Revolution (until the rise of Napoleon Bonaparte) with the apparent sympathy of Jefferson, who happened to be serving as Secretary of State during the French Revolution’s early years.
In October 1789, another violent mob overran the palace of Louis XVI at Versailles. The king’s guards, recruited from Switzerland, fought bravely but were overrun, butchered, and gruesomely mutilated. Jefferson told fellow radical Thomas Paine the slaughter of the Swiss Guards was a natural part of the revolutionary process. “I have no news but what is given in the English papers. You know how much of these I believe. So far I collect from them that the king, queen, and national assembly are removed to Paris.” Jefferson suggested that the English papers made too much of the violence. “The mobs and murders under which [the English papers] dress this fact are like the rags in which religion robes the true god.”
Far too many Americans were under Jefferson’s spell. Too late they realized their support had been not for true liberty, but for a violent god of demagoguery robed in the blood-stained rhetorical garment of unfettered and ungoverned social democracy.
Jefferson questioned the conservatism of the American Revolution’s intellectual debates and the eventual republic created from revolutionary and constitutional debates in the 1780s. Jefferson lamented that the question “of whether one generation of men has a right to bind another never seems to have been stated on this or our side of the water.” To Jefferson the idea of timeless and transcendent law seemed a weakness in the American regime. One generation of humanity’s ability to overthrow any and/or all preceding societal foundations seemed so important to Jefferson he believed it merited a place “among the fundamental principles of every government.”
A friend of the French Revolution Jefferson might have been; a believer in Originalism he was not.
Fortunately, Jefferson was not president. George Washington was. Jefferson and his partisans tried to bring the U.S. into France’s revolutionary wars against the Britain. At considerable political cost to himself, Washington refused. The killing of the French royal family only strengthened Washington’s resolve. His principled neutrality earned him the ire of a hitherto universally adoring American populace. When France demanded the extradition of their ambassador, the obnoxious Citizen Genet, Washington refused. He understood that while France might seem an icon of liberty to Americans, the U.S.’ interest and heritage of constitutional liberty lay with Great Britain.
Over the fury of Francophile Jeffersonians, Washington signed Jay’s Treaty that allowed the U.S. commercial growth even if it allowed Britain considerable privileges in the U.S. economy. His successor John Adams, bombastic and clumsy, nonetheless refused to be bullied by the false rhetoric of liberty emanating from successive French governments. France responded to Adams’ neutrality by attacking U.S. shipping in the Quasi-War. By the time Jefferson assumed the presidency in 1801, he confronted the military dictatorship his beloved French Revolution had become. Napoleon Bonaparte assumed leadership of the French republic in 1799 and crowned himself emperor in 1804. He sold Louisiana to the U.S. and left the American republic alone, treatment far better than that given to the U.S. by the revolutionary French republic.
Despite Jefferson’s support for the French Revolution, many Americans also saw its oppressive emptiness. Politicians and thinkers in the Early Republic understood the necessity of making clear the differences the ideals of Philadelphia and Paris. John Quincy Adams, at the time a young diplomat translated a pamphlet comparing the American and French Revolutions because it rescued the American Revolution “from the disgraceful imputation of having proceeded from the same principles as that of France.”
Miles Smith, Ph.D., is an assistant professor at Regent University in the Department of Government, History, and Criminal Justice.
