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Teaching the French Revolution:
Lessons and Imagery from Nineteenth and Twentieth Century Textbooks
Casey Harison
University of Southern Indiana
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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."
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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. |
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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."
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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.
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French Revolutions
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Textbooks As a Source
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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.
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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. |
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Nineteenth-Century Textbook Views of the French Revolution
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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. |
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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).
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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: |
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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.
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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."
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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."
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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."
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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: |
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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
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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
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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."
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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.
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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: |
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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.
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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
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Summing up the Revolution, Myers writes that "...a great gain for
freedom was made...for revolutions never move backward."
42
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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."
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Interpretive Trends in Nineteenth-Century Texts
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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. |
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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
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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. |
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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. |
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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. |
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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. |
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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. |
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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
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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
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27
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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
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Amended Views of the French Revolution in the Twentieth Century
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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
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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
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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
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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
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There was some truth to Robinson's forecast, even if change was
slow in coming.
|
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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
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32
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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
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33
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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
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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
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35
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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
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36
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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. |
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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.
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