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Teaching the French Revolution: Lessons and Imagery from Nineteenth and Twentieth Century Textbooks

Casey Harison
University of Southern Indiana


NEGATIVE POPULAR IMAGES of the French Revolution have long held sway in the United States. These images have often been cast in terms of a comparison between the American and French Revolutions. As one scholar has noted, a typical aim of histories comparing the two revolutions has been "to demonstrate the superiority of the American Revolution." 1 Admittedly, this view has not gone unchallenged. Well known works (now a bit dated) by Jacques Godechot and R.R. Palmer cast the events as parallel phenomena of the "Atlantic Revolution" having much in common. 2 Yet when published in the 1950s, these works went against the interpretive grain in the United States, where the differences between the revolutions rather than the similarities had long been emphasized. Indeed, the American inclination to distinguish the two had begun early in the nation's history, serving as a divide between Federalists and Republicans in the 1790s. For example, John Quincy Adams remarked in 1800 that an essay he was reading was worthy of publication because it (the essay) "rescu(ed)" the American Revolution from the disgraceful imputation of having proceeded from the same principles as the French." 3 1
     The discomfort with which many Americans viewed the French Revolution is not news to historians of the United States. Yet on several levels the sort of aversion evident in Adams' comment, and the later interpretive tide against which Godechot and Palmer were to swim, strikes the present-day observer as surprising. After all, from an historical perspective, the similarities between the two revolutions are numerous and important. Whether one chooses to interpret the American experience more as a war of independence than a revolution, nonetheless both it and the French Revolution occurred in the same era, both overturned rule by a monarch, both were more-or-less guided by the ideas of the Enlightenment, both resulted in a constitutional republic, and both recognized universal principles enunciated by theorists well-known on each side of the Atlantic. Certain individuals—Lafayette and Tom Paine most notably—had an impact in both settings. Many influential persons of the time in America and France saw the two events as individual representations of the same phenomenon. The sympathy exhibited at the time by many ordinary Americans and French toward the other nation's condition is incomprehensible without taking into account their shared revolutionary histories. 4 Indeed from a distance of two centuries, Adams' insistence upon separating the revolutions serves just as well to remind one of the opposite: that the American and French Revolutions, and the republics that emerged from them, were indeed "sister" events. 2
     Still it must be said that Adams was onto something, for in spite of the common heritage and goals of the two revolutions, American images and interpretations of the French Revolution of 1789-1794 have often been strikingly unfavorable. When Americans have juxtaposed the two revolutions, the French version has usually come out much the worse. This tendency likely reflects the emergence of a "myth" that began in the late eighteenth century which, Gordon Wood argues, "has continued into our own time—the myth that the American Revolution was sober and conservative while the French Revolution was chaotic and radical." 5 3
     This article considers a part of the process by which such myths and negative images of the French Revolution were fashioned in the United States by examining interpretations found in nineteenth and twentieth-century American school texts. A review of nineteenth-century texts constitutes the central part of the paper. The texts are part of the Floyd Family Collection at Indiana State University (see appendix for a full list), representing books used in Indiana schools, although most were used across the country. The books range from the primary through the college level. The paper situates these textbook views of the French Revolution in the historiography of the Atlantic Revolution and republicanism in the United States and France. It then concludes with a broad survey of interpretive trends in twentieth-century high school and college texts, describing how some themes have remained static, but also how changes have made their way into the literature. The review of nineteenth-century textbooks represents an original reading of the evidence, while the section on twentieth-century interpretations relies especially upon secondary sources. The paper does not consider views of the French Revolution in histories of the United States, nor monographs designed for specialized audiences, of which, in any event, there were few produced in the nineteenth century. 6 4


French Revolutions

     There is more than one French revolution, though the "Great" French Revolution of 1789 is probably the one that first comes to mind, and for good reasons. Judging from the way present-day historians position the event in first-year college texts, not to mention its vitality as a source of dissertations, monographs and scholarly articles, the Revolution of 1789 continues to be seen by many as "the decisive event of modern history" not only in "Western Civ" classes but even in world history. 7 The Revolution was indeed momentous, for it overthrew the Old Regime and set or reaffirmed France (and eventually other parts of Europe) on a secular, culturally democratic, politically republican and liberal economic course. Because the persons who were its prime movers defined their actions in universal themes, the French Revolution has remained ever since an inspiration and sometimes a model for revolutionary movements across the world. 8 5
     But because there was at the time no clear consensus in France or the rest of Europe for this foray into modernity, the Revolution was accompanied, as is well-known, by social and economic turmoil, civil and foreign war. The (First) French Republic created by the Revolution was established in 1792 and lasted until overthrown by Napoleon in 1799, though the Revolution really had climaxed with the end of the Terror in July 1794. Ever since, the events of the Terror and certainly the imagery associated with it—the Paris crowd, the guillotine, the figures of Robespierre and St. Just, the desecration of Nôtre-Dame cathedral—have loomed overlarge in the literature on the topic, obscuring the accomplishments of the period and dominating the historical imagination. 9 6
     Three other French revolutions, probably less well known in the United States, followed in 1830, 1848 and 1870-1871. All of these affairs were characterized by the same broad Enlightenment goals proclaimed in 1789, including the desire for citizenship and an improved quality of life, but with a growing emphasis upon social issues. Like the Revolution of 1789-1794, those of the nineteenth-century were marked by a lack of consensus, but even more so by modern themes such as class consciousness. It was only after the Paris Commune of 1871 had ended that a form of republic (the Third) was settled upon as the government that, as the saying went, was least likely to divide the French. Aside from the interlude of the Vichy regime (1940-1944), France has continued to have a republican form of government ever since. The grounding of republicanism in France in all sorts of institutional and cultural ways has continued apace since 1871, and the centennial and bicentennial celebrations of 1789 are only the most obvious signs that, to date, the Revolution has won out. 10 7


Textbooks As a Source

     Why should school texts be considered a source for understanding how Americans have experienced the French Revolution, and in this case, texts used in Indiana? I would argue first, that while the special or direct influences of the French Revolution upon Indiana were occasionally intriguing, they were not exceptional 11 and hence that the views of the French Revolution found in texts used in Indiana may be considered representative of a broader American pattern. Next I would argue that reading school textbooks has been an obvious and important way for ordinary persons to understand their own history and that of others. Describing the influence of this form of literature, James Axtell argues that it would be "difficult to overestimate the role played by textbooks in the teaching of American history." 12 Yet he, like others, has found that school texts have been routinely underutilized by scholars as a research source. This is worth noting because, as Axtell and others have discovered, survey texts are often marked by biases. In his own area of expertise—the Age of Discovery—Axtell found in a review of sixteen texts abundant "sins of commission and omission," "half-truths" and an "ethnocentric" perspective that was particularly apparent in the description of Native Americans. 13 Another scholar discovered biases about social class in a study of seventeen American history textbooks published between 1865 and 1914. 14 Others have found similar slants on a variety of topics, including race, gender, place of birth, and in coverage of events both domestic and foreign. 15 According to Axtell, distorted reporting about France or French influence in America begins with historical eras even before the Revolution. Describing his own field of study in 1987, Axtell writes that the "largest gap" in research on America in the Age of Discovery is the "full story of French experience" and that "the French affected the course of North American history much more than the Spanish and therefore deserve considerably more coverage than they are currently getting; which is an error-ridden pittance." 16 Axtell argues that writers of American history texts have, in the main, privileged the role of English Protestants at the expense of French, Spanish or Portuguese Catholics. Considering all of this, the justification for my study of textbooks is established. Some of the background to this ingrained and perhaps ongoing disposition may be found in the textbook interpretations described below. 8


Nineteenth-Century Textbook Views of the French Revolution

     The fifteen authors of nineteenth century textbooks I will discuss are nearly all Americans, their books published mainly in New York or Boston. Though I have provided biographical sketches for most of the authors, I have not attempted in any systematic way to identify their political sympathies. All of the books offer surveys of European history, with a focus on the medieval, early modern and modern periods. Coverage of the French Revolution in these elementary through college-level textbooks is sometimes evenhanded, but more often is marked by negative stereotypes. In only two texts written after 1900 do the assessments of the French Revolution have a more positive tone. 9
     Mixed views of the French Revolution may be found in Scottish historian Alexander Fraser Tytler's Elements of General History (1825), one of the first history texts to be used in Indiana schools. Tytler devotes considerable coverage to the Old Regime (France before 1789) and to the Revolution and Napoleon, analyzing events by juxtaposing concepts of republican versus aristocratic, Protestants versus Catholics, the Old World versus the New. The Old Regime is described as decadent, venal and "profligate." 17 The National Assembly, which wrote France's first constitution and sat from 1789 through 1791, is assessed sympathetically. The text depicts the year 1792 as the turning point when the Parisian "mob" begins to dominate and the situation devolves into civil and foreign war. The king and queen are portrayed as having numerous flaws, though not deserving of the guillotine (both were executed in 1793). The "execrable" Robespierre (first among equals on the Committee of Public Safety in 1793-94) is given most of the blame for "atrocities" committed during the Terror. 18 With the emergence of Robespierre as a leading figure, writes Tytler, "The French Revolution had...attained that pitch of extravagance and disorder, which left no hopes of any check or termination, but that which actually ensued, namely a military despotism." 19 This text, like most of the others reviewed here, has an Anglophilic tone. Thus in describing the wars of the Revolutionary and Napoleonic eras, French advances are said to be "encroachments" and aggressive, while this section of the narrative is full of accounts of English naval victories. In a workbook designed to accompany the main text, the story ends, not surprisingly, with students called upon to "recite the battle of Waterloo" (Napoleon Bonaparte's final military defeat, in which the Duke of Wellington and an English army played a crucial part). 20 10
     Stories About General Lafayette for the Amusement of Children (1829), an anonymous booklet produced not long after Lafayette made a triumphant tour of the United States, depicts the French Revolution in the personalized style so evident in textbook accounts of the period. Here, children read that the people of eighteenth-century France "wanted more liberty." They (the French) had heard "how much better pleased the people of the United States were since Americans had become free of the king of England" and that they wished "to live as did the people here." 21 But once the Revolution began: 11

The state of things soon became very bad in France. They began to fight among themselves, and a great deal of blood was shed. Scarcely any one was safe. Many were for murdering the king, and at length they did murder him and the queen. This was in the year 1793. This is what is called the French Revolution. 22

Lafayette—referred to minus the aristocratic definite article as "Fayette"—receives center stage in the booklet as protector of the royal family against the excitable mob. Lafayette's defection to the Austrians in 1792 is explained as a result of things growing worse and worse. "When he had done all he could...he was determined to sail to the United States, where he knew that he could live in peace." 23 There follows in this book designed to "amuse" children, a print showing Louis XVI standing before the guillotine with the caption "Here is a picture of the French murdering their king."

     New Hampshire lexicographer Joseph Worcester's (1784-1865) Elements of History (1835) sympathizes with some of the early events of the French Revolution. Louis XVI and Marie-Antoinette are described as having received the punishments they deserved, while the French Republic is said to have been forced into war in 1792 to defend itself against a conspiracy of European monarchs. The start of the Revolution is characterized as representing "progress." 24 Like the other texts, Worcester's history also tends to be personalized. Lafayette especially is given a prominent role, and his abandonment of the Revolution is construed as the moment when events shift from praiseworthy to troubling. Here, as in the Tytler text, the unpleasant side of revolution is connected to the actions of "the furious rabble." He offers the events of July 1789 as an example, when "mobs of frantic women of violent character" are said to have taken part in the attack on the Bastille. 25 Later, the book has Robespierre enter the picture as a symbol of the revolution's devolution into "the reign of terror" and the triumph of the "most violent revolutionists...men almost unparalleled in depravity and cruelty." 26 12
     Emma Willard's (1787-1870) Universal History in Perspective (1850) and Last Periods of Universal History (1855) offer a generally negative take on the Revolution, and like earlier texts they highlight the fate and sufferings of the king (an "innocent victim") and queen, as well as Charlotte Corday (the young woman who assassinated the journalist Marat and was then executed herself). Willard, best-known for the schools she founded and her support for higher education for women, also focuses on the civil war in the western region of Vendée and what she describes as an all-out attack upon Christianity. She retells a sensationalist story, designed to epitomize the hedonism of the era, of "a goddess of reason, personified by a naked prostitute...drawn in triumph through the streets of Paris." 27 13
     Marcius Willson's (1813-1905) Outlines of History (1871) follows the pattern of viewing the past through the lives of well-known individuals: Lafayette (who brought the "democratic spirit" of the American Revolution to France), Corday (presented as a heroine), and Louis XVI (who "met death with magnanimity and firmness, amid the insults of his cruel executioners"). 28 For Willson, a prolific writer whose main interests were American history and pedagogy, the French Revolution was a misguided event marked by violence and depravity. Though it was the "great event of the eighteenth century," it was also "the most awful convulsion the world has ever known." 29 Willson suggests that the Revolution followed a depraved path as opposed to the moral trajectory of the American Revolution because French society was immoral. 30 Like Thomas Malthus and Herman Melville, other Anglo-American writers impressed by the suddenness and violence of the events in France, Willson could only make sense of the French Revolution as an affliction handed down by God. He writes: 14

We are shocked and dismayed at the spectacle which it presents; and it is only by knowing both its causes and effects, that we can regard it in any other light than a great moral desolation, unconnected with human agencies, which the almighty sent upon the earth as he sends the deluge and the earthquake.... The French Revolution has developed the truth that all people are not prepared for the full enjoyment of regulated liberty; and it has illustrated the dangers to be apprehended from the turbulence of democratic ascendancy. 31

Willson concludes with a memorial to the executed Louis XVI: "His fate will be commiserated, and his murderers execrated, so long as justice or mercy shall prevail on earth." 32

     Texts on English history used in Indiana secondary schools also characterize the French Revolution as extravagant. Here, however, the comparison is less with the American than with the English "Glorious Revolution" of the late seventeenth century, the latter assessed as reasonable, orderly and progressive compared to the French Revolution. Coverage of the years 1789 through 1815 in these books highlights the place of the "mob" and the guillotine in French politics, with the era of war after 1792-93 typically represented as a personal encounter between Napoleon and Wellington. 33 M.E. Thalheimer's A History of England for the Use of Schools (1875) blames the wars of the Revolutionary and Napoleonic periods on France. Likewise, any similarity to the English revolutionary experience was only external. "The English Revolutions of 1648 and 1688 were conducted with strict respect to law and public order; the French Revolution was disgraced by horrid scenes of bloodshed and sacrilege." 34 The text devotes considerable space to a description of the two incursions by the French into Ireland in the 1790s, but does not mention England's prior support of the counterrevolutionary Vendéans in 1793-94. Arthur Mowry's First Steps in the History of England (1902) takes the same approach of comparing the English and French revolutionary experiences to the detriment of the latter for carrying "their freedom too far." 35 15
     Three books make a point of assessing the French Revolution from a long-term perspective, an approach that has the effect of blunting the narrative of anarchy and violence which so dominates the other texts. One of these, François Guizot's (1787-1874) General History of Civilization in Europe (1896), the single text by a French author among those reviewed here, is a broadly conceived work that places the revolution in a French centralizing tradition dating from the seventeenth century. In a brief account that downplays the role of the event in France's history, Guizot de-emphasizes the details and violence of the Revolution in favor of interpreting it as a natural expression of the emergence of the modern nation-state. 36 16
     But it is especially P.V.N. Myers'A General History for Colleges and High Schools (1898) that differs from the earlier texts by assessing the French Revolution less in terms of short-range excesses than long-range successes. The result is the strongest affirmation of the Revolution among the texts reviewed in this section. Myers describes the events of 1789 as: 17

the revolt of the French people against royal despotism and class privilege. "Liberty, Equality, Fraternity," was the motto of the Revolution. In the names of these principles the most atrocious crimes were indeed committed; but these excesses of the Revolution are not to be confounded with its true spirit and aims. The French people in 1789 contended for those same principles that the English Puritans defended in 1640, and that our fathers maintained in 1776. It is only as we view them in this light that we can feel a sympathetic interest in the men and events of this tumultuous period of French history. 37

Myers's analysis appears to rely upon the work of the French writer and politician Alphonse de Lamartine, a sympathizer of the Girondins (one of the political factions of the Revolution, which lost out to the Montagnards in 1793). 38 Myers's account emphasizes the abuses and misdeeds of the French ruling classes which brought about the upheaval. The king is described as having suffered an "unfortunate" fate, but also as having "conspired with the enemies of France," with the implication that his execution was justified. 39 The "Reign of Terror," though dominated by a "mob (that)...murdered hundreds simply because their wealth was wanted," is otherwise depicted as an anomalous response to terribly difficult circumstances. 40 According to the text, the fact that the Revolution produced a republic was a sign of its innate progress. The wars in which the republic was engaged after 1792 are explained as "defensive," though Myers does not deny the republican missionary zeal that transported the Revolution across borders. He continues:

Herself a republic, she (France) would make all nations republics. Had not the minds of the people in all neighboring countries been prepared to welcome the new order of things, the Revolution could never have spread itself as widely as it did. But everywhere irrepressible longings for social and political equality and freedom, born of oppression, were stirring the souls of men. The French armies were everywhere welcomed as deliverers. 41

 
Summing up the Revolution, Myers writes that "...a great gain for freedom was made...for revolutions never move backward." 42  
     Samuel Bannister Harding's New Medieval and Modern History (1913) is, with Guizot and Myers, one of the three texts that goes against the pattern of negative interpretations, with the account of events leading up to 1789 straightforward and approving. Harding (1866-1927), a native of Indianapolis who taught in the history department at Indiana University for more than two decades, describes Jean-Jacques Rousseau—the philosophe whose writings provided a logic for popular revolt and for the unicameral legislatures of 1791 and 1793—as an apostle of democracy. Harding gives considerable coverage to the Declaration of Rights of Man and Citizen because, as he writes, this document has "exercised great influence on the opinions of mankind." 43 Countering those interpretations that had harped long and hard on the violence of the period, Harding downplays the events of 1793-94, interpreting the Terror as a government policy that was temporarily "perverted to party and personal ends. Outside of the Vendée," he notes, "rural France suffered very little. Even in Paris the great majority of the people were unaffected, and went about their occupations and amusements as usual." 44 18


Interpretive Trends in Nineteenth-Century Texts

     Several interpretive trends may be identified in the textbook coverage described above. Personal political views may have colored the views of some authors, though, as noted earlier, this analysis does not investigate that possibility. One pattern is striking: most of the texts offer highly personalized accounts of well-known figures, some of them heroic (Louis XVI, Marie Antoinette, Lafayette, Corday), some malevolent (Robespierre, Marat), but all of whom "lost" in some sense or other during the Revolution. Popular figures well-known in France such as Lazare Carnot or Georges Danton (the latter probably the favorite revolutionary leader of ordinary French) are neglected, and Tom Paine, who played an important role in both Revolutions, goes all but unmentioned. 45 The tone that emerges from this form of history focused on the lives of famous individuals is almost uniformly tragic. 19
     Additionally, the "failures" of the Revolution are recounted endlessly, but the "successes" are hardly mentioned. In most of the texts, two failures are especially noted. The first, the fall of the constitutional monarchy and descent of the republic into foreign war and (Bonaparte's) dictatorship. The second, the perceived inability of the French to govern themselves, which in turn engenders civil war. When progress does happen (the abolition of feudal rights in August 1789, or the completion of the first constitution in 1791), it is eventually lost or misdirected. Plausible alternative interpretations emphasizing the extraordinarily difficult circumstances faced by the French are rarely offered. 46 Only two of the histories (Myers and Harding) acknowledge the important civil, legal and economic rights won by the French or their partially successful journey from subject to citizen. The texts do not fully recognize the impact of the Code Napoléon in France or in the many other parts of the world where this law code was to be used as a model. Nor do they identify what both liberal and socialist economists of the first half of the nineteenth century deemed the most significant result of the Revolution, the triumph of the bourgeoisie and of laissez-faire economic principles. 47 20
     The narrative recounting of the French Revolution adopted by some of the authors (especially Tytler, Willard, Wilson, Stories About General Lafayette) lends itself to the telling of a tragic story, while those texts that downplay tales of individuals and approach events broadly and analytically (Guizot, Harding, Worcester, Myers) are able to highlight the long-term gains and possibilities opened up after 1789. 48 The "script" of the French Revolution in most of these texts ends in failure, particularly when compared implicitly or explicitly with that of the American Revolution. Judging by most of these books, nineteenth-century Indiana students would have been more likely to "read" the French Revolution as an unhappy event doomed by the mercurial nature of the French than as an attempt made in very difficult circumstances to secure republican freedoms. 21
     Similar views of the French Revolution colored American opinions of the French revolutions of 1830, 1848 and 1870-1871. There were strong reactions in Indiana and elsewhere in the United States to the June Days rebellion of 1848 and the Paris Commune of 1871. These were influenced by fear of socialism and "Red Republicanism," a condition that lingered and was exacerbated in the era of the American labor disturbances of the 1880s and 1890s. It was not until the Russian Revolution of 1917 that the Paris Commune would be replaced as a model for all that could, from the American point of view, go wrong with a modern republic. 49 Only near the end of the nineteenth century and then again during the First World War (see below), were texts written that downplayed the violence of the French Revolution in favor of emphasizing its contribution to the development of modern citizenship. 22
     Why do the negative assessments of the French Revolution found in these nineteenth-century textbooks prevail over positive views, particularly in light of the parallel origins of it and the American Revolution? No doubt, some of the emphasis on the tragedy of individual lives in the textbooks had to do with educational methodology that, for much of the century, emphasized moral instruction. As a scholar of nineteenth-century school texts notes, "a cardinal educational canon of the nineteenth century" was to offer children "'striking instances of virtue, enterprise, courage, generosity, patriotism, and, by a natural principle of emulation, incite (them) to copy such examples' " 50 The study of individual "great men" was, in nineteenth-century America, deemed to demonstrate to children socially desirable qualities. Even in Indiana, where funding for public schools lagged behind that in neighboring states for much of the century, these pedagogical goals were embedded in the school curriculum. 51 How better to achieve such ends in the context of learning about important events like the French Revolution than to examine the fate of those well-known heroes and knaves who appear time-and-again in the textbook accounts. 23
     More broadly, the different trajectories of the American and French Revolutions—ours seemingly marked by relative consensus and theirs by divisiveness—along with the impact in the 1790s of the "Citizen Genêt" and "XYZ" affairs and the Quasi-War, could hardly help but influence American perceptions at this crucial early moment in the evolution of a national identity. 52 In this regard, as Joyce Appleby has written, the French Revolution was unsettling because in fact it "revealed to Americans in the 1790s the limits to their consensus." The events across the Atlantic suggested "that what was truly authentic about the (American) revolution were the social changes it wrought." This implied that "America's destiny was linked with a worldwide effort to destroy oppressive institutions of the past." 53 To realize this was to accept a universalist view with profound implications with which some Americans, like Jefferson, agreed and others, like John Adams, did not. 24
     A related reason for the preponderance of negative assessments may be the differences between French and American republicanism that had emerged by the early nineteenth century. In theory both emphasized limited government, but in practice French republicanism remained tied to the legacy of centralized state power, while the American style, forged through innumerable local political contests, was suspicious of centralized government. Both forms had an ambiguous relationship with what would later be called human rights, though the American version, burdened by slavery and, after the Civil War, poor race relations, often struck French observers as deeply flawed. Both adopted a market economy closely tied to conceptions of political freedom, though the French remained far more skeptical about the promises of laissez-faire than the Americans. Finally, because of the revolutionary legacy and because other viable political alternatives (including monarchism, Bonapartism and socialism) were present in their experience, French republicanism was marked, depending upon one's point of view, by divisiveness or diversity. Meanwhile, the mythic idea of a "consensual republic" took hold in the United States. 54 Indeed, much of the historiography on early nineteenth-century American republicanism has focused on its exceptional and parochial, as opposed to universal, qualities. Jacksonian republicanism, this view holds, was marked by a working-class political ethos emphasizing rights and equality, a demand for fairness and "moral economy," along with qualities of nativism and a prejudice about where, and among which peoples, republics could or could not flourish. 55 These were characteristics that worked against a universalist conception of republicanism. 25
     Still, while it is not difficult to see recognition of the Jacksonian form of republicanism in, for instance, American newspaper accounts of nineteenth-century French revolutions, it is not clear that these sentiments found their way into the history texts reviewed here. The most likely explanation for the predominance of negative views of the French Revolution in the survey texts is the influence of Thermidorean (that is, French counterrevolutionary) or hostile English interpretations. In this regard, it is probable that negative stereotypes were more a product of lingering American elite fears of revolution and "mobocracy" than a reflection of lower-class nativism. 56 A related factor contributing to stereotypes in the texts is that an evolving nationalist sentiment influenced (ironically?) by European scholars may have produced a kind of myopia about the United States and her place in the world. As one historian writes, "History conceived as the origins and growth of the nation-state on the German model took root in many countries, yet nowhere has a nation-centered historical tradition been more resilient than in the United States." 57 Moreover, negative stereotypes about the French were widespread in the United States not just in history, but also in geography, language and literature books. In much of the American children's literature of the nineteenth century when the French are to be found, they are likely to be portrayed as imbued with loose morals, as dissipated, corrupt, fickle, inconstant and mercurial. 58 The fact that the French are mainly Catholic is usually represented as a strike against them. In the inevitable comparison with the Protestant English in nineteenth-century texts, the French are almost always depicted as coming up short. 26
     For their part, French commentators are puzzled by the American view of their Revolution. While noting the American "exceptional" argument, they remain befuddled by the American inability or disinterest in acknowledging the connections between the two revolutions. 59 French comparisons, even by a scholar like Patrice Higonnet, who views the American Revolution as a success and the French Revolution as a failure, tend to cast the two experiences as the most significant episodes of a larger Atlantic Revolution. One cannot find a French voice disowning the connectedness of the two revolutions in the manner of John Quincy Adams (cited at the beginning of this paper). Some French detect in the American treatment a cultural bias deriving from the "black legend" of their revolution which began with Edmund Burke's Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790) and the "veritable" counterrevolutionary genre that followed. 60 In the nineteenth century came Thomas Carlyle's influential History of the French Revolution (1837) casting the Revolution as a misguided episode representative of the naturally turbulent French. Charles Dickens relied upon Carlyle's history to write A Tale of Two Cities, which became the most-widely known fictional account of the Revolution. 61 By the mid-nineteenth century, Anglo-American audiences were certainly more likely to know of the Revolution through the patronizing versions of Carlyle and Dickens than from empathetic French accounts like those of Lamartine, Tocqueville or Jules Michelet. 62 French observers are able to identify a set of Anglo-American stereotypes coming mainly from English sources. These include a chronology in which things go well until 1791 or 1792, and then inevitably descend into mayhem and terror, with Robespierre, the guillotine, the Paris "mob," and war becoming the "symbolic archetypes" of the Revolution. 63 An alternative understanding of the French Revolution emphasizing the political, cultural and economic opportunities opened up after 1789 rarely shows up in Anglo-American accounts. Notably, one of the few sympathetic treatments to be found in the survey texts above (by Myers) is also the only account apparently influenced by a sympathetic French interpretation (Lamartine). The divergent American and French views suggest that language and culture may be as important as political ideas in contributing to popular perceptions. 64 27
     A case has also been made that the diffusion of "negative and repulsive" stereotypes of French revolutions which continued into the late twentieth century "was not innocent," but rather reflected the United States's global struggle against revolution that began in the late nineteenth century and peaked during the Cold War. 65 Although Palmer and Godechot's thesis about an Atlantic Revolution may have had some success during the "consensus history" of the 1950s, this explanation goes, this was not so much because views of the two revolutions were finally being reconciled, but because the political mood in the United States was postulating the emergence of a "West" (Europe and America) as that notion was being integrated into Cold War rhetoric. Not persuaded that America's negative views of the French Revolution had changed, Albert Soboul, leading French historian, "dismissed" Palmer's thesis "as a product" of the Cold War. 66 The historian David Brion Davis as late as 1990 could still wonder how the United States, "a nation created by revolution, a nation whose first president ceremoniously received the key to the fallen Bastille" could become in time "the world's leading adversary of popular revolutions." 67 The views of scholars like Soboul and Davis no doubt reflected the disenchantment that many Europeans and Americans felt toward post-1945 United States foreign policy. Where the American Revolution had offered a hope for the future in the late eighteenth century, wrote Palmer during the Bicentennial celebration of 1776, "Today...the dream has faded" and for some "turned into a nightmare." 68 28


Amended Views of the French Revolution in the Twentieth Century

     In spite of these ingrained and pervasive tendencies, there is evidence that another, more affirmative thread linking the American and French Revolutions via their universalist implications was making its way into school texts around the turn of the century, spurred by changes in graduate history education and the circumstances of the First World War. Obscured for much of the twentieth century, this direction has become more prominent of late. It is not surprising, because American republicanism, and particularly the Painite/Jeffersonian element in it, always contained the seed of universalism. This aspect showed through when the United States was the first country to recognize the French republics in 1848 and 1870. In terms of domestic political events the inherent strain of universalism came to the surface with the enfranchisement of Black Americans after the Civil War, the passage of a constitutional amendment granting the right to vote to women, and much later, in the Civil Rights Movements and the periodic emphasis given to human rights in the formulation of United States foreign policy since 1945. The universalist implications of the Atlantic Revolution and republicanism, long affirmed if not always acted upon in the French case, 69 blossomed especially in the twentieth-century American version where (for good or ill) the impulse increasingly involved the United States in military and business interests across the world. 29
     The alliances of the First World War suggested to many Americans that there was a natural division between "free" and "unfree" political systems. For some educators, the events in Europe represented, in fact, a "'war of ideas.'" 70 Thus after 1917, as the American and French republics (along with the new Russian republic) were united in war against Germany, at least one Indiana schoolbook description of the French Revolution adopted a new tone. While Louis Bénézet's The World War and What Was Behind It (1918) clearly seeks to marshal enthusiasm for the current effort against Germany and her allies. Reciting the events of earlier times, the battles of the First Coalition (1792-1801) are described as a contest between armies made up of free French citizens on one side and of German armies on the other in which the soldiers are said to behave "like sheep." Here, the description of the Battle of Valmy, when French armies defeated "invaders" crossing the eastern frontier in 1792, comes across as an obvious analogy for the current war. 71 30
     Professional historians schooled in progressive ideas and graduating from new doctoral programs also contributed to changing views of the French Revolution around the time of the First World War. 72 Particularly important in this regard was James Harvey Robinson (1863-1936). Trained at the University of Freiburg, professor of European history at Columbia University, a founder of the New School of Social Research in 1919-1921 and of the "New History" approach, Robinson brought a strong critical sense to the reigning model of historical study in the United States. As a member of two American Historical Association curricular committees and in an article he contributed to the American Historical Review in 1906, Robinson called for an "impartial" approach to the study of the French Revolution, which he forecast would "some day be recognized as fundamentally the most decisive and general adjustment to meet new and altered conditions of which we have any record." 73 Robinson's Medieval and Modern Times (1919), an early standard for the "Western Civ" course, takes up his own call to challenge existing stereotypes: 31

When one meets the words 'French Revolution,' he is pretty sure to call up before his mind's eye the guillotine and its hundreds of victims, and the Paris mob shouting the hymn of the Marseillaise as they paraded the streets with the heads of unfortunate 'aristocrats' on their pikes. Every one has heard of this terrible episode in French history even if he knows practically nothing of the permanent good which was accomplished at the time. Indeed, it has made so deep an impression on posterity that the Reign of Terror is often mistaken for the real Revolution. It was, however, only a sequel to it, an unhappy accident which will seem less and less important as the years go on, while the achievements of the Revolution itself will loom larger and larger. 74

There was some truth to Robinson's forecast, even if change was slow in coming.  
     Helping out in the cause were other scholars from the "new history" approach who were to become prominent in the field of French Revolutionary studies in the years before the Second World War. These included Crane Brinton, Louis Gottschalk, Leo Gershoy and Donald Greer, all of whom made important contributions—among the first by American researchers—to the study of the Revolution and to turning the Revolution and Napoleon into a field of study in university doctoral programs. This occurred as the now familiar "Western Civ" course was being introduced, in which, notably, the French Revolution was given something like pride of place. 75 For much of the twentieth century, Western Civ courses and texts typically identified the Revolution as the break between the pre-modern and modern past, some going so far as to describe the August 1792 attack on the Tuileries as the precise point dividing all that was new in Western history from all that was old. In the last two decades, as World history courses have begun to replace Western Civ courses, the French Revolution, though its centrality has been challenged, continues to be thought of as an historical watershed. 76 Thus, a college text on world history issued by a major publisher in 2001 informs its readers that "The French Revolution immediately affected all of Europe, most of the western hemisphere, and indeed the whole world." 77 In this text, several articles of the Declaration of Rights of Man and Citizen are prominently reproduced. The section even includes an inset on "The Historiography of the French Revolution," in which the author notes that he has endeavored to combine three scholarly interpretations. Though the "Reign of Terror" is presented, the description devotes much more space to the causes and direction of the Revolution than to the turmoil of 1793-1794. The text does not reproduce an image of the guillotine, a rarity in coverage of the Revolution. 78 32
     Perhaps reflecting these developments, scholars have recently begun to devote more attention to Godechot and Palmer's old idea, the Atlantic Revolution, and even to the international setting of United States history. 79 Some universities now offer courses or graduate programs in "Atlantic History" and even hire teachers versed in this burgeoning field. 80 H-NET initiated an e-mail discussion list on the "Atlantic World" in June 2001. Many college-level teachers of world history courses are already inclined to give priority to the parallel origins of the American and French Revolutions, emphasizing how signal events constrained the ways in which republicanism developed in each society. The "Sister Republics" of France and the United States have in some interpretations become "a single polity, a single powerful model." 81 33
     These trends have begun to influence the teaching of students below college age. The National Standards for World History (1994), a guidebook for curriculum in elementary, middle and high schools, presents the American and French Revolutions as parts of the same story. "The history of the United States, in this era," it notes, "was not self-contained but was fully embedded in the context of global change. To understand the role of the United States on the global scene, students must be able to relate it to world history." 82 Here, the French Revolution is treated quite differently from the nineteenth-century texts described above, with the focus not on individuals but on intellectual developments. Students are asked to evaluate the "leading ideas of the revolution concerning social equality, democracy, human rights, constitutionalism, and nationalism." 83 The standards propose that students in grades 7-8 read sections of the Declaration of Rights of Man and Citizen, and then demonstrate how its writing was influenced by the Enlightenment and the American Declaration of Independence. Apparently recognizing the lingering influence of stereotypes, however, students in grades 9-12 are advised to read The Scarlet Pimpernel and A Tale of Two Cities in order "to assess the accuracy of such literary accounts in describing the French Revolution." 84 Significantly, the "Reign of Terror," the guillotine, the Paris "mobs," all preoccupation of so many of the textbooks, are not even mentioned in the National Standards for World History. 34
     These changes are evident in Indiana. Two world history texts designed for high school students and recently used by the Evansville, Indiana school corporation approach the French Revolution in a more balanced manner than the nineteenth-century texts described earlier. 85 In each, the Revolution is represented as a kind of solution or response to preexisting "problems" bequeathed by the Old Regime. Both books do describe a turn to violence in 1792, and employ some of the stereotypical imagery of the period, but in general the accounts are evenhanded. Notably in one text, a synopsis of the Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen is prominently offered, while the Terror is not even mentioned in an accompanying chronology of the Revolution. 86 35
     Still, the adoption of a broader view is by no means complete. The assignments in the National Standards for United States History (1994), the equivalent on the American side to the National Standards for World History, retain a narrow perspective that does not go far in requiring students to contextualize the American experience. 87 Here, the French Revolution is mentioned only in passing and the transatlantic element downplayed. The universalist implications of the American Revolution are not set in the context of the Enlightenment or Atlantic Revolution, but rather are noted only in pointing out the familiar irony that Americans viewed twentieth-century revolutions in Mexico, Russia, Vietnam and Cuba with distrust. 88 A glance at the catalogs of Indiana colleges show no course offerings on "Atlantic History" or the "Atlantic Revolution." Moreover, it is not clear that the kinds of changes evident in the world history standards are being matched by changes in popular perceptions. The success of the stage play "Les Miz" in the 1980s and 1990s has provided audiences with the unusual experience of sympathizing with, and even rooting for French revolutionaries; but a recent television revival of "The Scarlett Pimpernel" has no doubt reinforced the old stereotypes. 89 36
     To conclude, it may be argued that the Atlantic Revolution and the spread of republicanism were developments that created a momentum that has impacted all nations, as well as American states like Indiana. Connecting the shared history of modern revolutions and republics, one scholar has written that "The modern republic...would emerge in the end as the most successful and durable legacy of the (French) revolution." 90 In the American classroom it may now be only a matter of taste whether the differences or similarities of the American and French Revolutions are emphasized. For both scholars and teachers, however, emphasizing a universalist over a parochial understanding has the benefit of allowing one to make sense of important twentieth-century developments like the emergence of the republic as the most widely-emulated form of government in the world and the adoption of human rights as a global standard of behavior. The political success of the republic, highlighted by Godechot and Palmer in their coverage of the Atlantic Revolution in the mid-twentieth century, remains intact at the start of the twenty-first century. In this regard, and in a manner strikingly absent in nearly all of the nineteenth-century textbook accounts described here, the French Revolution was a success. 37


Appendix

Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Century Textbooks Used in this Paper
From the Loyd Family Collection at Indiana State University

Bénézet, Louis P., The World War and What Was Behind It, or The Story of the Map of Europe (Chicago, 1918).

Guizot, François, General History of Civilization in Europe, nt (New York, 1896).

Harding, Samuel Bannister, New Medieval and Modern History (New York, 1913).

Kemp, Elwood, History for Graded and District Schools (Boston, 1902).

Meyers, P.V.N., A General History for Colleges and High Schools (Boston, 1898).

Montgomery, D.H., The Leading Facts of English History, 2nd ed. (Boston, 1898).

Mowry, Arthur May, First Steps in the History of England (New York, 1902).

Questions Adapted to the Study of Tytler's Elements of History, 4th ed. (New York, 1825).

Robinson, James Harvey, Medieval and Modern Times (Boston, 1919).

Stories About General Lafayette for the Amusement of Children (Hartford, Conn., 1829).

Thalheimer, M.E., A History of England for the Use of Schools (New York and Cincinnati, 1875).

Tytler, Alexander Fraser, Elements of General History, Ancient and Modern (Concord, N.H., 1825).

Willard, Emma, Universal History in Perspective (New York, 1850).

—. Last Periods of Universal History (New York, 1855).

Willson, Marcius, Outlines of History (New York, 1871).

Worcester, Joseph Emerson, Elements of History, Ancient and Modern (Boston, 1835).


Notes

1 Lynn Hunt, review of Patrice Higonnet, Sister Republics: The Origins of French and American Republicanism (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1988), in Journal of Modern History 63 (1991), 147. An Everett Helm Visiting Fellowship from Lilly Library at Indiana University supported some of the research for this paper. Russell Johnson, Nancy Rhoden, and Patricia Sides offered helpful critiques of drafts of the paper.

2 Jacques Godechot, France and the Atlantic Revolution of the Eighteenth Century, 1770-1799, tr. Herbert H. Rowen (New York: Free Press, 1965); R.R. Palmer, The Age of the Democratic Revolution: A Political History of Europe and America, 1760-1800, 2 Vols. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1959). Two older comparative works are Bernard Fay, L'Esprit révolutionnaire en France et aux Etats Unis à la fin du XVIIIe siècle (Paris: Champion, 1925) and Crane Brinton, The Anatomy of Revolution (New York: Vintage, 1965; originally published 1938). The idea of "sister republics" is presented most explicitly in Joseph Aron, Les Deux Républiques soeurs, France et Etats-Unis (Paris and New York, 1885) and Higonnet, Sister Republics. A recent comparison is Susan Dunn, Sister Revolutions: French Lightening, American Light (New York: Faber and Faber, 1999). Dunn is a professor of romance languages at Williams College, where she offers a course on "Sister Revolutions in France and America."

3 Cited in Palmer, Age of the Democratic Revolution, I: 188. Adams' reference was to the essay of the German political theorist Friedrich Gentz, who viewed the American Revolution as a conservative defense of traditional prerogatives and the French Revolution as a radical assertion of unproven, universal principles. Adams' distaste with the French Revolution continued into the following decades. In 1825, during Lafayette's famous return visit to the United States, then President Adams greeted the visitor with a long speech in which he referred to certain "illustrious" French, including the kings Louis XII and Henri IV, and the nobles Bayard, Coligny, Turenne and Fénelon, but left conspicuously unmentioned leaders of the Enlightenment or Revolution; Mémoires, corréspondance et manuscrits du General Lafayette, 6 vols. (Paris: H. Fournier, 1837), VI: 214,218.

4 Alexis de Tocqueville wrote of the early response to the French Revolution that "...the sympathies of the (American) people declared themselves with so much violence in favor of France that nothing but the inflexible character of Washington and the immense popularity which he enjoyed could have prevented the Americans from declaring war against England"; Democracy in America (New York: Vintage Books, 1945), I: 244. Joyce Appleby writes of a "sentimental bond" between Americans and French in the late eighteenth century; Liberalism and Republicanism in the Historical Imagination (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1992), 232. On the influence of the American revolutionary experience in France, see also C. Bradley Thompson, "The American Founding and the French Revolution," in Ralph C. Hancock and L. Gary Lambert, eds., The Legacy of the French Revolution (Boston: Rowman and Littlefield, 1996), 109-50.

5 Wood, The Radicalism of the American Revolution (New York: Knopf, 1992), 231.

6 A recent analysis, similar to the present but which focuses on the work of professional historians is Keith M. Baker and Joseph Zizek, "The American Historiography of the French Revolution," in Anthony Mohlo and Gordon S. Wood, eds., Imagined Histories: American Historians Interpret the Past (Princeton, 1998).

7 Best, Introduction, The Permanent Revolution, 4.

8 Eugene Kamenka, "Revolutionary Ideology and 'The Great French Revolution of 1789-?,'" in ibid., 81. See also Ferenc Féher, ed., The French Revolution and the Birth of Modernity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990), and Isser Woloch, ed., Revolution and the Meanings of Freedom in the Nineteenth Century (Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 1996), 5.

9 Though, as Eric Hobsbawm notes, "...for the solid and middle class Frenchmen who stood behind the Terror, it was neither pathological nor apocalyptic, but first and foremost the only effective method of preserving their country"; Echoes of the Marseillaise: Two Centuries Look Back on the French Revolution (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1990), 68. On the historiography of the Terror, an influential revisionist view is François Furet, Interpreting the French Revolution, tr. Elborg Forster (Cambridge, 1981). See also Lynn Hunt, "Forgetting and Remembering: The French Revolution Then and Now," American Historical Review 100 (1995), 1119-35.

10 On the social and cultural grounding of republican values in France, see Philip Nord, The Republican Moment: Struggles for Democracy in Nineteenth-Century France (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1995).

11 On French influence and emigration to Indiana, see Frances S. Childs, French Refugee Life in the US, 1790-1800 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1940); Aurele J. Violette, "French," in Robert M. Taylor, Jr. and Connie A. McBirney, eds., Peopling Indiana: The Ethnic Experience (Indianapolis: Indiana Historical Society, 1996); and Les Français des Etats-Unis à aujourd'hui (Paris, 1994). There were 13,563 francophones and 268,244 persons of French descent in Indiana according to the 1980 census; Ronald Creaugh, Nos Cousins d'Amérique: histoire des Français aux Etats-Unis (Paris: Centre National des Lettres, 1988), 445,454.

12 Axtell, "Europeans, Indians, and the Age of Discovery in American History Textbooks," American Historical Review 923 (1987), 621. The texts surveyed by Axtell were published between 1983 and 1987.

13 Ibid., 623,624,627.

14 Jean Anyon, "Ideology and United States History Textbooks," Harvard Educational Review 49 (1979), 361,379,383.

15 Dennis L. Carlson, "Legitimation and Delegitimation: American History Textbooks and the Cold War," Language, Authority and Criticism: Readings on the School Textbook (London: Falmer Press, 1989). Many instances of bias are cited in Ruth Miller Elson, Guardians of Tradition: American Schoolbooks of the Nineteenth Century (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1964), which has an informative section on views of the French and France found in American textbooks at the elementary and secondary levels (pp. 28-43).

16 Axtell, "Europeans, Indians and the Age of Discovery," 630.

17 Tytler, Elements of General History: Ancient and Modern (Concord, NH: Isaac Hill, 1825), 299.

18 Ibid., 319-21.

19 Ibid., 335.

20 Questions Adapted to the Study of Tytler's Elements of History, 4th ed. (New York: Samuel Wood, 1825), 155. The Battle of Waterloo was Napoleon's only outright military defeat and the only occasion when he faced an army commanded by Wellington. Outside of Spain, English troops played comparatively little part in the dozens of battles in Continental Europe during the Revolutionary and Napoleonic eras, including the many important victories by Bonaparte himself. Yet almost invariably it is the encounter at Waterloo that these nineteenth-century texts required American students to know.

21 Stories About General Lafayette for the Amusement of Children (Hartford, Conn.: M. & F.J. Huntington, 1829), 34.

22 Ibid., 36.

23 Ibid.

24 Joseph Emerson Worcester, Elements of History, Ancient and Modern (Boston: Hilliard, Gray and Co., 1835), 154.

25 Ibid.

26 Ibid., 154,156.

27 Willard, Universal History in Perspective (New York: A.S. Barnes and Co., 1850), 441-42, and Last Periods of Universal History (New York: A.S. Barnes and Co., 1855).

28 Outlines of History (New York: Ivison, Blakeman, Taylor and Co., 1871), 455.

29 Ibid., 817.

30 Ibid., 845.

31 Ibid., 871,843. Malthus commenced his famous Essay on the Principle of Population with an apocalyptic allusion to the "comet" of the French Revolution. Melville used a similar metaphor, referring to France's "red meteor of unbridled and unbounded revolt"; "Billy Budd, Sailor," in Billy Budd and Other Stories (New York: Penguin, 1986), 303.

32 Willson, Outlines of History, 455.

33 D.H. Montgomery, The Leading Facts of English History, 2nd ed. (Boston: Ginn and Co., 1898), 332-33, 335-36. This text devotes about twice as much attention to the Battle of Waterloo as to all of the Revolution.

34 Thalheimer, A History of England for the Use of Schools (New York: Wilson, Hinkle, and Co., 1875), 236.

35 Mowry, First Steps in the History of England (New York: Silver, Burdett and Co., 1902), 242.

36 François Guizot, General History of Civilization in Europe, nt (New York: Appleton and Co., 1896).

37 Myers, A General History for Colleges and High Schools (Boston: Ginn and Co., 1898), 647.

38 On Lamartine's Histoire des Girondins, see William Fortescue, Alphonse de Lamartine: A Political Biography (London: Croom Helm, 1983), 126ff. Victor Hugo, another sympathizer of the Revolution (though something of a latecomer to this idea, who, in any event, believed it had gone astray), is also quoted by Myers.

39 Myers, A General History, 658.

40 Ibid., 659.

41 Ibid., 667.

42 Ibid., 668,688.

43 Harding, New Medieval and Modern History (New York: American Book Co., 1913), 491.

44 Ibid., 506.

45 On Paine's ambiguous legacy in the United States, see Eric Foner, Tom Paine and Revolutionary America (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1976), 263-70. On the special treatment accorded by school texts to Lafayette, see Elson, Guardians of Tradition, 129.

46 Tocqueville, who saw the two revolutions as alike in many important ways, could not help but note the strikingly different circumstances under which the two events took place: "Separated from their enemies by three thousand miles of ocean, and backed by a powerful ally, the United States owed their victory much more to their geographical position than to the valor of their armies or the patriotism of their citizens. It would be ridiculous to compare the American war to the wars of the French Revolution, or the efforts of the Americans to those of the French when France, attacked by the whole of Europe, without money, without credit, without allies, threw forward a twentieth part of her population to meet her enemies and with one hand carried the torch of revolution beyond the frontiers, while she stifled with the other a flame that was devouring the country within"; Democracy in America, I: 117.

47 Hobsbawm, Echoes of the Marseillaise, 12ff.

48 The narrative history of the French Revolution was reprised in recent years with Simon Schama's bestselling bicentennial account, Citizens: A Chronicle of the French Revolution (New York: Knopf, 1989). Susan Dunn's recent book also focuses on individual successes and tragedies, with the first chapter devoted entirely to Lafayette's role in the American and French Revolutions; Sister Revolutions. For perceptive comments on the narrative approach to the history of the French Revolution, see Hobsbawm, Echoes of the Marseillaise, 97, and Alan B. Spitzer, "Narrative's Problems: The Case of Simon Schama," Journal of Modern History 65 (1993), 176-92.

49 Richard C. Rohrs, "American Critics of the French Revolution of 1848," Journal of the Early Republic 14 (Fall 1994), 362-63; Philip M. Katz, from Appomattox to Montmartre: Americans and the Paris Commune (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1998), 191,193.

50 Charles Augustus Goodrich, A History of the United States of America (Hartford, Conn.: H.F. Summer and Co., 1833), quoted in Elson, Guardians of Tradition, 186. The scholarly literature on nineteenth-century history curriculum is not extensive. See Clifton Johnson, Old-Time Schools and School-Books (Gloucester, Mass.: Peter Smith, 1963), Daniel Tanner and Laurel Tanner, History of the School Curriculum (New York: Macmillan, 1990), as well as two works by John A. Nietz: The Evolution of American Secondary School Textbooks (Rutland, VT: Charles E. Tuttle, 1966) and Old Textbooks (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1961).

51 James H. Madison, The Indiana Way: A State History (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990), 108-15; Howard H. Peckham, Indiana: A Bicentennial History (New York: Norton, 1978), 97-99; and Tanner and Tanner, History of the School Curriculum, 37-8. A brief account of the history curriculum in Indiana schools is Benjamin F. Walker, Curriculum Evolution as Portrayed through Old Textbooks (Terre Haute, IN: School of Education, ISU, 1976), 2-3.

52 Kennedy, Orders from France, 103,117, 311,314. In the several diplomatic and military encounters between the United States and France described in survey texts, the former is invariably cast as innocent and heroic, the latter (France) as conniving; Elson, Guardians of Tradition, 130.

53 Appleby, Liberalism and Republicanism, 204.

54 Higonnet, Sister Republics, 274. See also Biancamaria Fontana, "Introduction," in Fontana, ed., The Invention of the Modern Republic (Cambridge, 1994), 3.

55 The literature on American republicanism is extensive. For introductions to the topic, see Robert E. Shalhope, "Toward a Republican Synthesis: The Emergence of an Understanding of Republicanism in American Historiography," William and Mary Quarterly, 29 (1972), 49-80; Appleby, Capitalism and a New Social Order: The Republican Vision of the 1790s (NY: NYU Press, 1984); Sean Wilentz, Chants Democratic: New York City and the Rise of the American Working Class, 1788-1850 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984), especially ch. I; and Daniel T. Rodgers, "Republicanism: The Career of a Concept," Journal of American History 79 (June 1992), 11-38. On the racial and ethnocentric underpinnings of the belief that republics could flourish only in certain geographic areas, see Hunt, Ideology and U.S. Foreign Policy, ch. 3.

56 Bernard Bailyn, The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1967), 282-84, and Paul A. Gilje, The Road to Mobocracy: Popular Disorder in New York City, 1763-1834 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1987).

57 Ian Tyrrell, "American Exceptionalism in an Age of International History," American Historical Review 96 (Oct. 1991), 1031.

58 Elson, Guardians of Tradition, 134-35,143.

59 Patrick Thierry, "De la Révolution americaine à la Révolution française,' Critique (juin-juillet 1987), 62-5.

60 Pascal Dupuy, "La Diffusion des stéréotypes révolutionnaires dans la littérature et le cinéma anglo-saxons (1789-1989)," Annales Historiques de la Révolution Française 3 (1996), 512. See also Thierry, "De la Révolution américaine," in Elise Marienstras, Les Mythes fondateurs de la nation americaine (Paris: Maspero, 1977) and Michel Vovelle, La Révolution française. Images et récit (Paris: Messidor, 1986). On the Counter-Revolution, see Jean-Clement Martin, Contre-Révolution, Révolution et nation en France, 1789-1799 (Paris: Seuil, 1998) and Jacques Godechot, The Counter-Revolution: Doctrine and Action, 1789-1804, tr. Salvador Attanasio (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1971), especially ch. 4 for the influence of Burke.

61 Dupuy, "La Diffusion des stéréotypes," 519. Carlyle's and Dickens' images of the Revolution were reproduced repeatedly in film and print; ibid., 522 ff. By the early twentieth-century, a fanciful view of the French Revolution was also familiar to Anglo-American audiences through stage plays and films based upon Baroness' Orczy's character "The Scarlett Pimpernel"; ibid., 526-27, and Hobsbawm, Echoes of the Marseillaise, 5.

62 The "near-unanimous judgement of (English-language) literature since the early nineteenth century has been to condemn the French Revolution as a disaster" write Susan Sontag and Vasily Aksyonov, "The Literary Impact of the American and French Revolutions," Partisan Review 4 (Fall 1992), 628.

63 Dupuy, "La Diffusion des stéréotypes," 520.

64 Revisionist interpretations beginning with the work of François Furet in the 1970s and 1980s, which cast the Terror as integral to any understanding of the French Revolution, have partly contributed to the practice of disengaging it from the American Revolution. Keith Michael Baker, for instance, emphasizes the differences between the two, noting that "Unlike the American Revolution, which effectively translated the assertion of revolutionary will into the establishment of a stable constitutional order, the French Revolution opened a progressively widening gap between revolution and constitution..."; Inventing the French Revolution (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 252.

65 Dupuy, "La Diffusion des stéréotypes," 527-28.

66 Norman Hampson, "The French Revolution and Its Historians," in Best, ed., The Permanent Revolution, 230.

67 Davis, Revolutions: Reflections on American Equality and Foreign Liberations (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1990), 3.

68 Palmer, "The Fading Dream: How Europeans Have Seen the American Revolution," in Stanley Palmer, et al., Essays on Modern European Revolutionary History (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1977), 91,99. Critic Susan Sontag states the point more bluntly. Describing the "literary impact" of the two revolutions, she writes that the perceived "polarity" between the two "became an important topos in the discourse of the repudiation of Communism in Europe (in the late 1980s). To repudiate the Bolshevik Revolution was also to repudiate the French Revolution, of which it was seen as a successor and fulfillment, and to acclaim the American Revolution as a positive model;" Sontag and Aksyonov, "The Literary Impact of the American and French Revolutions," 627.

69 Where from the start there existed a "consciously ecumenical dimension"; Hobsbawm, Echoes of the Marseillaise, 34.

70 Gilbert Allardyce, "The Rise and Fall of the Western Civilization Course," American Historical Review 87 (June 1982), 706.

71 Bénézet, The World War and What Was Behind It, or The Story of the Map of Europe (Chicago: Scott, Foresman and Co., 1918), 108,109. This book was especially intended for children in the upper grades, but could also be read by adults. Bénézet, an 1899 graduate of Dartmouth College, was superintendent of schools in Evansville, Indiana in 1916-1924; see James E. Morlock, The Evansville Story: A Cultural Interpretation (Nc, np, 1956), 186. On the Franco-American rapprochement during the era of the Great War, see Albert Guérard, Beyond Hatred: The Democratic Ideal in France and America (New York, 1925).

72 Peter Novick, That Noble Dream: The "Objectivity Question" and the American Historical Profession (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), chs. 1,2, and Baker and Zisek, "The American Historiography of the French Revolution."

73 Lynn Hunt writes that "The French Revolution looms large in the American Historical Review at its beginnings because Americans considered the French Revolution especially significant to their own history"; "Forgetting and Remembering," 1120,1124. See also Baker and Zisek, "The American Historiography of the French Revolution," 354. Robinson also served as president of the AHA in 1929; Daniel A. Segal, "'Western Civ' and the Staging of History in American Higher Education," American Historical Review (June 2000), 771-72,775.

74 Robinson, Medieval and Modern Times (Boston: Ginn and Co., 1919), 473. On Robinson, see Luther V. Hendricks, James Harvey Robinson: Teacher of History (1946).

75 Baker and Zizek, "American Historiography of the French Revolution," 355.

76 For representative observations near the midpoint and end of the twentieth century, see, respectively, L.S. Stavrianos, "The Teaching of World History," Journal of Modern History 31 (June 1959), 110-17, and Michael Geyer and Charles Bright, "World History in A Global Age," American Historical Review 100 (Oct. 1995), 1034-60.

77 Howard Spodek, The World's History, Volume II: Since 1100, 2nd ed. (Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall, 2001).

78 Ibid., 495.

79 Katz, From Appomattox to Montmartre, 1, and Tyrrell, "American Exception-alism, 1031-1055.

80 Harvard University hosts an annual "International Seminar on the History of the Atlantic World, 1500-1800" headed by Bernard Bailyn.

81 Higonnet, Sister Republics, 280. Likewise, the Haitian Revolution of 1790-1804, which lately has been more and more been integrated into the story of the Atlantic Revolution; see AHR Forum: "Revolutions in the Americas—The Haitian Revolution," American Historical Review 105) (2000), 103, and John D. Garrigus, "White Jacobins/Black Jacobins: Bringing the Haitian and French Revolutions Together in the Classroom," French Historical Studies 23 (Spring 2000), 259-76. At the same time, writes Eric Hobsbawm: "...the comparatively modest international influence of the American Revolution—except, of course, on the French Revolution itself—must strike the observer"; Echoes of the Marseillaise, 34, 113.

82 National Standards for World History: Exploring Paths to the Present (Los Angeles: National Center for History in the Schools, UCLA, 1994), 203.

83 Ibid., 206.

84 Ibid., 207.

85 The texts are Marvin Perry, et al., A History of the World (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1985), ch. 20, and Ross E. Dunn, et al., Links Across Time and Place: A World History (Evanston, IL: McDougal, Littell and Company, 1990), 510-15. The former text gives the Revolution a central setting in its discussion; the latter does not.

86 Perry, A History of the World, 445,447.

87 National Standards for United States History, 75.

88 As recently as 1991, a scholar has written that "In an era of unprecedented internationalization in historiography, the legacies of nationalism and exceptionalism still haunt the study of American historiography"; Tyrrell, "American Exceptionalism," 1031. Baker and Zisek write that American historians have by-and-large left the comparative study of the American and French Revolutions to political scientists and sociologists, a tendency which "has left a gap" in our understanding of the revolutionary era; "The American Historiography of the French Revolution," 360.

89 "The Scarlett Pimpernel" was produced as a mini-series for the "A&E" television network and broadcast in spring 2000. The point about "Les Miz" should not be overstated, since the rebellion depicted in the novel and the play occurred not during the French Revolution of 1789 but in 1832, and in fact was defeated by government forces. The fact that revolution was stifled in this case made it arguably more palatable to the audience at which Hugo's Les Misérables was directed.

90 Fontana, "The Thermidorean Republic and its Principles," in Fontana, The Invention of the Modern Republic, 119.

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