The America of the French imagination

The component parts of a French vision of America were numerous and were a long time in the making. The rebellion of the 13 colonies against the British – vividly described to a receptive audience in the memoirs of the Marquis de Chastellux – did much to amplify and popularise pro-American sentiments in France. The understandable desire to reverse the humiliation suffered during the Seven Years’ War was combined with long-standing Anglophobia and national self-interest to produce not only French military intervention on the side of the rebels but also a portrayal of the American Revolution as a moment both of universal significance and of inspiration for reformers in France.

Here, the scientific reputation of Benjamin Franklin (resident in Paris between 1776 and 1785) played a key role in convincing French opinion that America was a country of educational progress and technological invention. The subsequent sojourns in France of Thomas Jefferson, Tom Paine and others served to confirm that America was at the forefront of political and philosophical developments. From this rose-tinted perspective, George Washington appeared as nothing short of a philosopher-king, a man of pre-eminent ability and virtue, who, like many of his contemporaries, bore comparison with the heroes of antiquity.

By the late-18th century, therefore, the idea of the former British colonies as a land of liberty, virtue and enlightenment had become a frequent topic of conversation in the salons of Paris. A new society and nation, it seemed, had been created where men lived in harmony, free from the oppression and injustices of the past, and where they enjoyed both religious and political freedom. An era, pregnant with unique and radical possibilities for the future, had begun in 1776. In America, the philosopher Condorcet wrote: ‘we see… for the first time a great people delivered from all its chains, giving itself in peace the laws and constitution that it believed most likely to bring it happiness’. Above all, America gave living expression to the idea that society could be transformed, and for the better.

It followed that the political system of the United States was equated with the government of reason. The goal pursued was that of the happiness of the people rather than the glory of a monarch or prince. In no other country were the rights of the individual so widely recognised or protected. America’s leaders were men of honour and intellectual distinction, devoid of personal ambition and greed while its citizens, freed from the twin evils of poverty and the taste for luxury, combined private decency and public duty. Of his visit to America in 1788, Jacques-Pierre Brissot wrote: ‘I flew from despotism, and came at last to enjoy the spectacle of liberty among a people where nature, education and habit had engraved the equality of rights.’

Allied (somewhat uneasily) to this vision of the United States as giving physical form to the maxims of the 18th-century philosophes was the image of America as a country of moral innocence and rural simplicity. No one did more to establish this image than Hector St-John de Crèvecoeur. His Letters from an American Farmer, first published in English in 1782 and then in a much-revised form in French two years later, painted a picture of an agrarian economy peopled by frugal and hard-working freeholders untouched by the ignorance and corruption of the Old World. Absent were the social distinctions of European aristocratic society.

Yet this enthusiasm for things American must not be exaggerated. While the American Revolution proved a crucial encouragement for French (as well as broader European) radical opinion, its perceived shortcomings were widely broadcast and shared by such future leaders of the French Revolution as Mirabeau and Brissot. First among these blemishes, as the philosopher Condorcet observed in his Réflexions sur l’Esclavage des nègres, was the failure to abolish the ‘crime’ against ‘natural morality’ that was slavery. To many, the glaring contradiction between principle and practice seemed self-evident. The Americans, ‘more than any other people’, Brissot wrote, ‘are convinced that all men are born free and equal’. Unfortunately, he added, a ‘numerous party… still argue the impossibility of cultivating their soil without the hands of slaves, and the impossibility of augmenting their number without recruiting them from Africa’. This was an issue to be much discussed in future decades, but it is interesting to note that 18th-century writers such as Condorcet and Brissot, like many of their American contemporaries, were convinced that slavery would soon disappear. ‘The sentiments of humanity and the calculations of reason’, Brissot predicted, would prevail.

A second major issue of concern was the role of religion in American society and the extent or otherwise of religious toleration. The fight against superstition and the oppression associated with organised religion was a central preoccupation of the French philosophes. At first glance they were prepared to celebrate America as a land of religious liberty. This theme was developed in the Abbé Raynal’s hugely influential and widely read Histoire philosophique et politique des établissements et du commerce des Européens dans les deux Indes. Of William Penn, Raynal wrote: ‘The virtuous legislator made toleration the basis of his society. He admitted every man who acknowledged God to the rights of a citizen and made every citizen eligible to state employments. But he left everyone at liberty to invoke the Supreme Being as he thought proper.’

This happy and prosperous condition enjoyed by the inhabitants of the city of brotherly love was contrasted sharply with the fanaticism of the New England Puritans. There, Raynal reported, witchcraft, blasphemy and adultery were punishable by death. Liars and drunkards were publicly whipped. Violations of the Sabbath were the subject of fines. An ‘intemperate religious zeal’, Raynal concluded, had produced ‘a system of intoleration… which attempted to put a stop to every difference of opinion’. Of course, there were many Catholic observers in France who saw things differently. In their view, there was too much religious liberty in America. The proliferation of sects of one esoteric kind or another was a threat to the very existence of the true Church.

Similarly, there was evidence – as revealed most clearly by the contributions of Alexander Hamilton, James Madison and John Jay in The Federalist Papers – that the new republic was intent upon putting a brake on the democratic impulses of the populace through the introduction of a sophisticated system of checks and balances. To refer again to Condorcet: if he acknowledged that the republican constitutions of the 13 states were based upon ‘a solemn recognition of the natural rights of man’, he also believed that ‘their simplicity was impaired by a determination to preserve a balance of power within the state’. They had ‘as their principle’, he continued, ‘the identity of interests rather than the equality of rights’. There were misperceptions here, but critics were not slow to conclude (and not entirely without reason) that America’s federal system amounted to a revised form of the British monarchical and aristocratic constitution minus the latter’s endemic corruption. Nor did French commentators fail to notice that 11 of the 13 states had opted for a bicameral legislature, the clear preference of most of these commentators being for the unicameral constitution of Benjamin Franklin’s Pennsylvania.

Thus, if in 1789 the outbreak of the French Revolution was met with near unanimous approval in the United States, there was no great eagerness in France to imitate the American example. To be sure, revolutionary France was quick to bestow honorary citizenship upon such distinguished Americans as George Washington and James Madison and among the Revolution’s leaders there were those who cited the American constitution favourably, but a view emerged – especially among the radical wing of revolutionary opinion – that the circumstances of the two countries were so different that the attempt to copy an imperfect model made little sense.

Moreover, if the fates of the American and French Revolutions were often seen as being intertwined, there were also many in Paris who believed that a France shorn of privilege and social distinctions should aspire to create an entirely different kind of republic, one which embodied the sovereignty of an homogeneous and virtuous people. Again, Condorcet illustrated this point. At the height of the Jacobin Reign of Terror, he wrote that ‘the principles from which the constitution and laws of France were derived were purer, more precise and more profound than those that guided the Americans’.

The disastrous and bloody consequences of France’s revolutionary ambitions (including Condorcet’s own death in prison) are too well known to need recounting. Certainly, they caused consternation in America where, in the eyes of many Federalists, events in France provided a vivid illustration of where democratic principles might lead. Here it is sufficient to note that, with the fall of Maximilien Robespierre in 1794, a renewed attempt was made in France to fashion a stable political regime and that, in these difficult circumstances, France’s constitution makers felt that they could learn from America. This was not always explicitly acknowledged, but there can be no doubt that what became the French constitution of 1795 bore a strong American imprint.

Nevertheless, as the continental war between France and England intensified, the French began seizing American ships and confiscating their cargoes. When American envoys arrived in Paris in October 1797, they were met by humiliating demands and veiled threats from a French government determined to push American neutrality in the conflict to the limit. The result was what President John Adams called ‘the half-war with France’ and what many in the United States saw as the threat of a French invasion. It was not until 1800 that France and the United States brought their disagreements to a close through the Treaty of Mortefontaine.

By this date Napoleon Bonaparte was First Consul and the days of the French republic were numbered. In these changed political circumstances, the example of America held little appeal for either Bonaparte himself or for the supporters of his soon-to-be-established First Empire. Nor, indeed, did it attract support from a wider public opinion now marked by a post-revolutionary scepticism towards ideas of progress, rights and fraternity. Many came to believe that helping the Americans against the English in the first place had been a mistake. Not only had this act of selfless generosity led to France’s own financial travails and subsequent humiliation during the Revolution but the Americans, it was widely believed, had since displayed only ingratitude towards their French benefactors.

Napoleon’s fate aside, there were growing commercial and international rivalries between the two nations. This was especially so after the sale by France of Louisiana to the United States in 1803. Gone now was any possibility of a French Empire in North America. Gradually, the French became aware of America’s potential to become a major maritime and commercial power and already there was a sense of the threat posed by American expansionism west towards the Pacific and south into Mexican territory (where the French had long dreamed of establishing a monarchy under a Bourbon Prince) and the Caribbean. If the Anglo-American war of 1812-15 led to a revival of Franco-American enthusiasm and amity, tensions between the two countries focused upon the fate of the Spanish colonies in Latin America: a matter brought to a head by the proclamation of President Monroe in December 1823 that intervention by any European power on either American continent would be regarded as a threat to the ‘peace and safety’ of the United States and by the unresolved claim for damages incurred by American shipping during the Napoleonic Wars.

The latter issue was of inordinate complexity and reached a climax in the early 1830s – the time of Alexis de Tocqueville’s visit to America – when the French Chamber of Deputies refused to ratify a treaty signed between the two nations in 1831. What was seen by the French as the intemperate language and arrogant behaviour of President Andrew Jackson brought the two countries again to the brink of war. It also did much to persuade French opinion that something profound had changed in the character of American politics, and for the worse.

With the presidential office occupied by someone frequently characterised in the French press as an ill-mannered and uneducated backwoodsman, the golden age of Virginian presidents such as Jefferson and Madison appeared to be over. Nor was this the only apparent sign of decline. Partisan political conflict, as evidenced by the Nullification Crisis of 1832 and the so-called Bank War, seemed on the increase and likely to intensify. Popular (and frequently violent) protest was on the rise. So too, according to the French press, was lawlessness and anti-Catholic sentiment. Some French commentators – no doubt with their own unhappy experiences of a successful general in mind – predicted the emergence of a dictatorship in the United States.

Moreover, the Arcadian myth of a pastoral America was often counterbalanced by the recognition that between a civilised and sophisticated France and the rural backwardness of American life there was an unbridgeable chasm marked not by physical distance alone. For some, including many of those who were forced to seek refuge there after 1789 and who endured the bitterness of exile, America was nothing more than an intellectual and cultural desert.

America, on this view, had no art, no literature, no theatre, and no refinement of any kind, only a love of money. Conversation was said to be dull and domestic life to be lacking in intimacy and warmth. ‘It is’, the writer Stendhal observed, ‘as though the springs of sensitiveness had dried up in these people.’ Americans, he added, ‘are just, they are rational, but they are not at all happy’.

Victor Jacquemont, who returned to France disillusioned after his visit to America in 1826-7, gave clear expression to these pessimistic sentiments. When the celebrated writer Chateaubriand visited the United States in the 1790s, Jacquemont wrote, ‘he found that all the men of the American revolution were still alive; they were republican by principle but aristocrats in their mores, or at least in their manners’. With their death went the political wisdom they had displayed. America was now ‘entirely democratic in its mores’ and government was ‘necessarily the expression of the opinions and mores of society’. It was impossible for any political leader to rise above the level of the masses. Only through flattery of ‘the vulgar suffrage’ could they secure office. No country was so lacking in originality. No population was less colourful. Everyone came from the same mould, in a similar way that ‘houses are all built exactly to the same plan’. Americans were humourless. Relations between the sexes were characterised by ‘coldness’ and a lack of intimacy. Parents treated their children without tenderness. Manners were ‘stiff, flat and vulgar’. Americans had no taste for art or poetry, and no appreciation of what was beautiful, only a sense of material pleasures and the pursuit of wealth. Acquiring knowledge without a practical end in view was unknown. The excessive passion for equality meant that an educated person was paid no better than an office clerk, with the result that ‘judges are corrupt and professors ignorant’.

Nor did Jacquemont set much store by America’s much-vaunted religious liberty. Rather he painted a picture of ‘religious intolerance’ where ‘the religion of the greatest number makes the law for the smaller number and oppresses it’. Anyone with political ambition, Jacquemont observed, was obliged to ‘appear religious’. Most obviously, Jacquemont saw that any claims by America to moral superiority were diminished, if not nullified, by the existence of slavery. ‘In a democratic country in which the principle of government is equality’, he wrote, ‘this terrible inequality established by society almost in defiance of the law revolts me.’ The hatred and contempt that the white and black populations felt for each other, Jacquemont believed, would survive beyond slavery’s ultimate abolition. As for the Native American population, their proximity to ‘European civilisation’ meant that they would be deprived of their lands by the ‘new settlements’. When they resisted, they were subject to ‘a war of extermination’. Drunkenness, disease and poverty would do the rest.

In brief, French attitudes towards the American republic were marked by a noticeable disaffection from the 1820s onwards. Prior to this date, opinion had remained broadly supportive (and, in some quarters, convinced of the undiminished success of the American experiment) but with the dawning of the era of Jacksonian democracy there was increasing doubt and uncertainty expressed about America’s future and whether it could fulfil the hopes that had been placed upon it.

In the years immediately preceding Alexis de Tocqueville’s arrival in 1831, there emerged therefore a relatively standardised set of questions that drew the French investigator to America. How could the success of the young American nation and republic be explained? What type of society was America and what drove it forward? Would economic prosperity and urbanisation destroy the simple virtues of the American citizen? Was the mercantile spirit, especially when combined with the absence of a fixed and established aristocracy, compatible with the flourishing of the arts and sciences? Was there an identifiable American national character? Would America’s federal system stand the test of time? As its territory and population expanded, how could the Union be held together? What was to become of the institution of slavery?

Above all, 19th-century French travellers like Tocqueville were drawn to America by their sense that it was there, in a democratic society unlike any other, that important aspects and developments of a possible shared future were being realised for the first time. Through a lens of amazement, what Tocqueville saw as he took his first tentative steps on American soil was a society that was new, vigorous, restless, lacking a past, composed of people from many nations, a world totally unlike anything that had existed before. At first sight, the only thing that held it together was a shared sense of individual self-interest. Yet what came most to strike Tocqueville – as he confessed in the very first sentence of Democracy in America – was the existence of an equality of social conditions. This social state of equality extended its influence beyond political institutions, laws and mores to civil society as a whole, shaping opinions, feelings and ways of acting. It infused all aspects of American life. ‘The people’, Tocqueville wrote, ‘rule the American political world as God rules the universe.’ Moreover, Tocqueville came to see that this was not only providential and universal, but also irreversible. In America, therefore, Tocqueville had seen ‘more than America itself’. ‘My wish’, he concluded, ‘has been to know it if only to realize at least what we have to fear or hope from it.’