XXII-THE FRENCH REVOLUTION AS SEEN BY THE AMER ICANS OF THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY. By PROF. CHARLES D. HAZEN, THE FRENCH REVOLUTION AS SEEN BY THE AMERICANS OF THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY. By CHARLES D. HAZEN. That the French Revolution was not a purely local movement at any time, that it refused to be compressed within the boundaries of France, that it expanded as naturally and inevitably as does a heated gas, is one of the platitudes of history. Crossing the Channel, crossing the Rhine, scaling the Alps and Pyrenees, the forces to which we give this name came down into the different countries of Europe to become factors of the first magnitude in their political life, both internal and external, for a long time to come. Nor did these forces affect merely those countries that lay in the immediate neighborhood of the land of their genesis. Thrown forth by the impulsion, inherent in their very nature, they found the ocean no more difficult to cross than the river Rhine, and a far-away, pioneer, undeveloped country as ready for their play as the old complicated societies of Europe. It was just as this turbulent, tumultuous period was coming on that our new National Government was being instituted. The conflict generated in France was one between the old and the new, the established order and an improved order that men hoped to establish, respect for the conservative restraints of the past and the demand for much wider individual freedom. In the wars that soon broke out England and the allies stood for the former, France for the latter. These different conceptions quickly found points of attachment in America. "Freedom and order," says John Quincy Adams, in his Lives of Madison and Monroe, "were also the elementary principles of the parties in the American Union, and as they respectively predomi nated each party sympathized with one or the other of the combatants. And thus party movements in our own country became complicated with the sweeping hurricane of European politics and wars. The division was deeply seated in the Cabinet of Washington. It separated his two principal advisers and he endeavored without success to hold an even balance between them. It pervaded the councils of the Union, the two houses of Congress, the legislatures of the States, and the people throughout the land." But this division did not exist at first. The outbreak of the French Revolution was hailed in America with expressions of ardent enthusiasm and lively sympathy, almost unanimous, broken only here and there, in widely isolated cases, by some subdued utterance of distrust or doubt. France and America were united by a close friendship, born of a political alliance and maintained by feelings of gratitude and by the interest awakened in both nations by years of intimate association with each other. During the latter part of the eighteenth century the influence exerted by each of these widely separated and widely different nations upon the other had been most marked. France had given to America her philosophy and her military aid. America had rendered the thought of revolution familiar to France, and stood forth herself as the successful living embodiment of certain great conceptions of liberty, equality, and self-government, to the attainment of which for themselves Frenchmen were more and more aspiring. These two nations were deeply interested in one another, and thus a condition favorable to proselytism was at hand. That Frenchmen were influenced by American thought and American experience has been well and abundantly shown by Mr. Rosenthal in his "America and France." That Americans followed the tragedy that was unrolling itself in France with the most absorbing interest is shown in a multitude of ways; by the politics of this country, which were largely Gallican or Anglican for a number of years; by the writings of our ministers to France, Thomas Jefferson and Gouverneur Morris, which display with vividness and generally with accuracy the course of the Revolution from the meeting of the notables in 1787 down through the Reign of Terror; by the literary productions of the period, whose themes and thoughts betray on J. Q. Adams, The Lives of James Madison and James Monroe, 1850, pp. 213-215. every page the influence of the Revolution. The works of Joel Barlow, an American, living in Europe at this time, who wrote in the most radical republican vein upon the most burning topics of the day, those directly connected with the Revolution; the works of Noah Webster, classmate of Barlow at Yale, who, besides editing a leading New York daily, published in 1794 a critical review of the Revolution; of William Cobbett "Peter Porcupine" an Englishman, residing in Philadelphia, who wrote in 1796 a scathing History of American Jacobinism, and who daily castigated the Democrats of the country; the satirical poems of the Hartford Wits, published under the title The Echo; the poems of Robert Treat Paine, delivered at Harvard commencements, his speeches, his Jacobiniad, as well as the works of many other obscurer men who dipped their pens or tuned their lyres in commemoration of Revolutionary events, are sufficient evidence of the absorbing interest that centered in this subject. If we seek still further evidence of this interest we may examine the newspapers, we may run over the advertisements of the booksellers for a clue as to what men were reading, and the answer is decisive. The French news fills more columns in the papers of the day, I think it is safe to say, than does the American. Among the books that were widely advertised and evidently widely read were Mirabeau's Speeches, Memoirs of Dumouriez, Rabaut's History of the French Revolution, Robespierre's reports, translations of the different French constitutions, Paine's Rights of Man, Barlow's The Conspiracy of Kings, and Advice to the Privileged Orders. A study of the history of the American theater will but confirm the impression already made. The stage became political and democratic. "Tammany," one of the earliest American operas, and one which at this time enjoyed great popularity, was a "mélange of bombast," and was "seasoned high with spices hot from Paris," as Dunlap, the historian of the American theater, asserts. Helvetic Liberty, or the Lass of the Lakes; Liberty Restored; The Demolition of the Bastile; Tyranny Suppressed; Louis XVI (William Preston's tragedy), were plays that were on the rude and shaky American stage of this period, and that show the temper of the time. And if we seek still further to know this temper we find the present Quoted by Seilhamer, History of the American Theater, 1895, pp. 85, 86. |