TWO

Journals Relating “A share in two revolutions”

Travel journals presented a more personal perspective than did the pamphlets. Like their travels between revolutions, the tales itinerants recounted in journals were often circuitous. So too were their loyalties. Many journal writers began their journeys to Philadelphia and Paris as revolutionaries. A few discovered revolution en route. Others, especially visitors to France frightened by the violence they witnessed after 1791, renounced revolution altogether. Their reflective journal entries betrayed their individual expectations, hopes, and disappointments as they compared the fate of their shared ideals from one revolution to another.

Everything remains to be done and everything is possible,” Étienne Dumont, a Genevan revolutionary refugee who arrived in Paris via Saint Petersburg and Wiltshire, wrote, urging his friends to join the cosmopolitan coterie of revolutionaries in Paris. “All that was rock solid is now as malleable as wax,” he added, calling them to come witness the Old Regime crumbling apart at its very core.¹ Americans, Genevans, Dutch Patriots, and Belgian refugees were all gathering in the salons and cafés of revolutionary France, the center of the Enlightenment. Their Atlantic world was not constrained by rigid national borders. Its permeable boundaries were readily crossed by travelers and their publications, as pamphleteers had discovered.

At the end of the eighteenth century, transatlantic travel was no longer the preserve of the privileged but was within the reach of individuals of at least middling means. Increasingly, European merchants came to America after the War for Independence looking for economic opportunities, while sons of American settlers sailed the Atlantic in the other direction seeking a European education. In the 1780s, Americans and Europeans crossing paths on the Atlantic compared the luxuries that ostentatiously accompanied privilege in Old Regime Europe with the practical frugality of their revolutionary American republic. A few years later, during the French Revolution, a number of itinerants from all over Europe joined American diplomats, poets, and merchants as witnesses to the unprecedented exuberance of the Parisian crowds in the new capital of Atlantic revolution.

To chronicle their journeys, these travelers kept journals, understood in the eighteenth century to mean daily, weekly, or monthly accounts of notable events.² The conventions of travel writing were well defined by the end of the eighteenth century. Manuals such as An Essay to Direct and Extend the Inquiries of Patriotic Travellers advised journal-keeping travelers to be meticulous observers, to take notes on the spot in shorthand, and to transfer their accounts to journals each evening.³ Immediacy would render their accounts more convincing, transporting their readers to new worlds, in this case into the midst of revolution. The author of A Tour in Holland in 1784 by an American, Elkanah Watson strove to write regularly, “to seize the chain” of events as it was occurring. He edited his entries later, making sure they ran “along from link to link, in some regular order to the end of the sheet.”⁴ Often, travelers published their journals as collections of letters written to friends, one entry following from another, describing their journey.

“Of all the various productions in the press,” an eighteenth-century editor commented, “none are so eagerly received by us Reviewers, and other people who stay at home and mind our business, as the writing of travelers.”⁵ Instead of focusing on tales of extraordinary individuals, as had earlier travelogues, these journals systematically recorded the details of foreign societies for their curious readers. The Philosophical and Political History of the Settlements and Trade of the Europeans in the East and West Indiespublished by the Abbé Raynal in 1770 helped to define the genre of travel journals as treatises on natural, civil, and political liberty, even though neither he nor the other philosophes who contributed to the six massive volumes had traveled to either the East or the West Indies.⁶

Georg Förster, whose descriptions of the flora and fauna on his first voyage with his father and Captain Cook around the world from 1772 to 1775 earned him a position as a professor at the University of Vilna in Poland, was one of the most accomplished of the so-called philosophical travelers who published their journals. In 1790, Förster, then the university librarian at Mainz, set off in the direction of England to buy books. He planned his journey as the frame for a new travelogue and stopped at the numerous revolutionary sites of northern Europe en route. In letters addressed to his wife and friends, he recounted his conversations along the way with “free people who loved to discuss politics more than their private interests.” That was just what he needed for his journal. Upon his return home, he collected his letters, supplemented these observations with historical research, and published the two-volume Ansichten vom Niederrheim (Views of the lower Rhine River) to substantiate his optimistic political conviction that “Europe has made an immense step forward.”⁷ The signs of revolution could seemingly be found wherever one looked.

If less overtly political than pamphleteers, many late-eighteenth-century travelers published their journals to argue a cause. They staked out strong positions on the French Revolution, which had felled the entrenched foundations of the Old Regime many of them despised. Unlike some pamphlets, the accounts of journal writers typically reflected their own immediate experiences in the towns of the newly independent American republic or surrounded by the crowds of the fast-moving French Revolution.

Personally, these travelers fostered transatlantic connections between the American and the French revolutions. In the friendships nurtured by their travels, they connected the two revolutions that continued to gather momentum after 1789. Published in Paris and Philadelphia, their journals often had just the opposite effect. Written for readers who had stayed behind, travel journals inadvertently reinforced the distinctions that would separate the Americans from the French in the 1790s. European travelers to the American Revolution perpetuated views of a primitive, unsullied American wilderness out of which the first revolutionaries had carved their republic, lending support to the notion of American exceptionalism. At the same time, French convictions that their liberty reached beyond both the political independence secured by the Americans and the failed revolutions of their neighbors were bolstered by the fearful reaction of the droves of visitors to their revolutionary capital. Travelers embracing bold new visions of liberty and equality as universal revolutionary principles could bring people together, while their own journals divided readers along national lines in a revolutionary era with so much at risk.

“Good living”: An American Apprenticeship in Europe

Traveling transformed the revolutionary perspective of a young American in the years after the American War for Independence. Propelled by “my anxiety for change and desire of seeing the new world,” Elkanah Watson developed the habit of daily journal writing. During the American War, he had smuggled more than fifty thousand dollars sewn into his clothes from Providence to the army in Charleston. He believed his uncommon adventures delivering letters to General George Washington, riding to Plymouth with a musket on his back to rouse the Committee of Safety, and sailing an old fishing schooner to set a British captive free warranted recording. That was even more true of his trip across the Atlantic, throughout which he “exulted in the comparative view of Europe and America.”⁸ He would correct, revise, and edit his journal entries multiple times.

Watson sailed in 1779 with funds and letters to be delivered to Benjamin Franklin, stationed in Paris on diplomatic mission. Without steady work in America, Watson had decided to hazard “the fate of the tortuous waves or some gloomy [British] prison” for the “alluring prospect of accumulating wealth.” He expected, “after acquainting myself with the customs, manners, Religions & superstitions of other countrys” and after accumulating some wealth, “to return to the land which gave me existence.”⁹

Watson’s ship dropped anchor at Île au Rhé on the French coast in September, after twenty-nine days at sea. Ashore, he initially noted, “we stood to be gaz’d at, like so many stout piggs.”¹⁰ He revised his journal entry for publication, expanding his description of his first encounter with the Old World. “In a few moments, I was surrounded by a crowd, gazing at me with great interest. So strong and universal was the feeling in France, excited by our Revolution.”¹¹ Although a vast sea separated the continents, he mused, “it is only a month since I was cantering thro’ the streets of Boston. A short period Indeed to gain upward of three thousand miles East.”¹² Other eighteenth-century travelers’ descriptions of the ocean crossing, “the rolling, the pitching, the broken tables” resulting in “the disorder of a dinner seasoned with salt water” or the seasickness endured day after day in an airless, cramped cabin, suggest that few of them found the transatlantic crossing short.¹³ Ocean crossings still separated the continents for all but the adventurous.

FIGURE 2.1
A page from Elkanah Watson’s journal describing his arrival in France in September 1779 after twenty-nine days at sea. He was met by spectators expecting to see “North American Savages.” From Travels in France 1779 & 1780, GB 12579, box 1, volume 3, New York State Archives. Courtesy New York State Library, Manuscripts and Special Collections, Albany, N.Y.

Watson may have survived the journey with little discomfort, but he was not prepared for the starkly different culture that confronted him in prerevolutionary France. After a visit to the court at Versailles to present his papers to the king, Watson was invited by Benjamin Franklin to dine with him at the home of his noble neighbor and landlord. “Having never as yet been introduc’d in France into the polite circles & intirely rusty in their polish’d manners,” Watson was “determined to make the best of it.” His first step, though, “betray’d” him as an American rustic. Following Franklin from the garden into his neighbor’s lavishly decorated salon, where “a number of gentlemen elegantly dress’d were huddl’d in a body,” Watson bowed deeply to them. Franklin did not. Only when the other guests laughed did he realize the two “gentlemen” were “domesticks” and meant to be ignored.¹⁴

Not long after, Watson hired a servant of his own. He also procured his own carriage to convey him around the city, now convinced that the French understood better than the Americans “the secret of making the most of life, and of good living.” Watson was, in his own words, “enraptured.” He quickly put aside the prejudice against the French he had harbored “since the cradle.”¹⁵ He began to learn French; his “whole thoughts and curiosity were absorbed by the novelties around me.”¹⁶ In his notebooks intended to be read, after revision, by Americans, Watson described in detail what native residents took for granted, down to “the clattering of wooden shoes upon the pavement,” the “young ladies cantering thro’ the streets astride mules,” and the beggars who “infested” the highways, making travel unsafe.¹⁷ For Watson, as for other revolutionary itinerants, everything seemed new and noteworthy.

Watson took advantage of his transatlantic connections and the “funds which had been intrusted to me” to launch a “mercantile house” in Nantes. He documented the progress of his business as a lesson to future generations on the uniquely American work ethic and ambition. In contrast to the lazy French aristocrats of the Old Regime, he noted, revolutionary Americans worked hard to make their own way in the world. Only in America had young men like himself learned “to seek resources in their own minds,—to rely on their own hands,—to earn their bread by the sweat of their brow, and to spurn the props of wealth earned by others.”¹⁸

Watson struck up correspondence with other Americans engaged in “the busy theatre of Commerce” in Europe. John Adams, many years his senior, counseled the newly arrived Watson “to cultivate the manners of your own country, not those of Europe.” That did not mean putting “on a long face” or avoiding dances, theater, and cards, he added. “But you may depend on this,” Adams advised, “that the more decisively you adhere to a manly simplicity in your dress, equipage & behavior, the more you devote yourself to business & study, & the less to dissipation & pleasure, the more you will recommend yourself to every man & woman in this country whose friendship & acquaintance is worth your having or wishing.” Watson replied, assuring Adams that “the pursuit of mony is my profession indeed sir.”¹⁹ In that, he would remain a good American.

Years later, as he edited his journal for publication, Watson reassured his readers that even if his young head had been temporarily turned by “the splendour, elegance, and taste” of French dinners where “at least forty different dishes were served in successive courses, and all on silver utensils,” and even if he partook eagerly of the privileges of prerevolutionary France, he remained at heart an American egalitarian. Watson was determined to hold close the “cordiality and simplicity” of his native land because its liberty promised entrepreneurial success.²⁰

When Thomas Paine arrived in Nantes in March 1781, Watson, now proficient in French, was pressed into service as his translator. By then, Watson had adapted to life in France and was appalled at the behavior of the American hero. He acknowledged that Paine’s Common Sense had passed through Europe as an “electric spark.” Everyone knew the name of Thomas Paine and associated it with American independence, he granted. However, Paine, who spoke no French and lodged in a common boarding house, appeared to Watson to be “coarse and uncouth in his manners, loathsome in his appearance, and a disgusting egoist.”²¹ His odor filled the room and sent the French fleeing for air. As Watson told the story in his journal, he persuaded Paine to bathe by promising him English newspapers and instructing servants in French to turn up the heat of the water until the American hero was “well boiled.” Paine appeared not to notice, asked Watson for a clean shirt, and commented with pride, “people know me almost as generally here as in America.”²²

Watson stayed in Europe until 1784, long enough to witness the early glimmers of revolutionary resistance against the Dutch stadtholder. Watson judged the Dutch Patriots, who pronounced God to be on their side, presumptuous. That claim belonged to the Americans alone, he told Adams, observing: “Seldome, in the history of man, has the interposition of Providence been more distinctly revealed than in the events of our Revolution, when the victory was withheld from the great and powerful, and given to the humble and feeble.”²³ Adams, deploring “the uninterrupted Opposition of Family Connections, Court influence, and Aristocratical despotism” that had allied to block Dutch recognition of the Americans, concurred.²⁴

Adams invited Watson to his new residence in The Hague. Watson must have wondered about Adams’s advice to hold tight to his frugal, practical American values; it required fourteen folio sheets to inventory the gold framed mirrors, damask curtains, furniture, china, silver, and portraits of Adams’s elegant residence. Yet even as he indulged in European luxuries, Adams would persist in contrasting the simple American farmers with the effete European aristocrats.

Watson spent his last night in Europe in London with the surgeon William Sharp, brother of the abolitionist Granville Sharp, whom Watson lauded as “a noble enthusiast in the cause of African emancipation and colonization.” In Sharp’s home, Watson read the published letters of Ignatius Sancho, a leader of the black community in London who had been born aboard a slave ship on the Middle Passage. Watson was “impelled by the interest it excited” in him to seek out Sancho’s widow before he sailed. In her small cottage, he met “a family of cultivated Africans, a spectacle I had never witnessed” in America.²⁵ The London experience, as he described it in his journal, shook his rigid American understanding of race. Sharp entrusted two bundles of books dealing with emancipation to Watson for delivery to George Washington at Mount Vernon in hopes of persuading the American leader to free the slaves. Perhaps Watson read them aboard ship.

Watson returned home, he wrote in his journal, to “contemplate a young empire, blessed with singular advantages, unconnected from its situation with the entangled politicks of Europe, enjoying the freest local governments on earth, and inhabited by a brave and enterprising people scattered over a great continent.”²⁶ He was ready to take advantage of boundless possibilities for getting ahead that he was convinced were to be found only in America; Europe had provided him with the capital to do so.

Watson invested his European wealth in land in the not yet developed regions of northern New York, western Virginia, and Michigan. Based on projects he had observed in his travels, he explored the possibility of connecting the Hudson River with Lake Erie, a proposal deemed so radical that it, along with his calls for free schools and turnpikes, led to his dismissal from the board of directors of the Bank of Albany. These novel ideas, though, struck him as consonant with equality as the Americans had defined it. Equality for Watson meant unbridled economic opportunity. He did not find that in Europe on the brink of revolution. The wide-open opportunity was exceptionally American.

Europeans Witness “The prodigious effects of liberty”

European entrepreneurs shared Watson’s eagerness to exploit America’s economic opportunities. Was there ever a better moment to expand commerce than with “a new people, a people who enjoy extensive lands nourishing an immense population and laws that are favorable to the rapid growth of that population?” French pamphleteer Jacques-Pierre Brissot and his friend Genevan financier Étienne de Clavière asked.²⁷ That was the optimistic view advanced by Saint John de Crèvecoeur in his influential journal published as Letters from an American Farmer. Crèvecoeur, the son of a French nobleman, had studied in England and served as a lieutenant in the English army defending Canada in 1759, before he married and settled down to farming in New York, cultivating his new identity as James, a simple American farmer, to narrate his journal. Crèvecoeur depicted the Americans as hardworking people who happily spurned the old world’s “involuntary idleness, servile dependence, penury, and useless labour” and dedicated themselves instead to “toils of a very different nature, rewarded by ample subsistence” in the wilderness.²⁸

Crèvecoeur was no revolutionary. In 1779, as the fighting drew closer to his home in upstate New York, he left his young family and returned to Europe. Crèvecoeur had sold his American journal to an English publisher for thirty guineas before crossing the channel to France. Although Letters from an American Farmer did not elicit much interest in America, it was widely read in Europe, with new editions published in London, Dublin, Belfast, Leipzig, Paris, and Maastricht. Translated into a romantic French prose, Crèvecoeur’s manuscript expanded to twice its original length. A countess, Sophie d’Houdetot (the inspiration for Rousseau’s Julie) introduced him to the American envoy, Benjamin Franklin, who in turn offered Crèvecoeur access to the elite circles of Paris. In 1787, Crèvecoeur, together with Brissot and Clavière, organized the Gallo-American Society “to enlighten Europeans curious about the progress of America.”²⁹

Brissot, who had always wanted to see America for himself, finally succeeded in 1788 in convincing three European bankers to send him across the Atlantic to explore investment opportunities in the American debt. He disembarked in Boston expecting to meet “a people whom nature, education, and tradition had endowed with that equality of rights which is everywhere else considered a chimerical dream.”³⁰ Letters of introduction from the marquis de Lafayette gave him an easy entrée into the inner circles of American political society. Brissot discussed alfalfa farming with John Adams, books with Benjamin Franklin, and barn designs with George Washington. Only Crèvecoeur was begrudging in his welcome, putting Brissot up for one night and then ushering him to a lodging house around the corner.

Brissot kept a journal during his six-month trip. In the preface, he instructed other aspiring travelers in the practice of journal keeping. “If he wishes nothing to escape him he must get used to noting things rapidly and in such a way as not to miss anything.” Travelers should never fall behind in their recording, “for the observations pile up in the mind,” but instead must be disciplined about writing every evening. He advised a potential travel writer to climb into garrets, visit stables, and go beyond “the confines of his dignity.”³¹

Writing with all the naïveté of a newly arrived traveler, Brissot was easily convinced that without aristocratic titles and “conscious of their liberty,” Americans treated each other “as merely brothers and equals.” He acknowledged that Europeans habituated to “the depradations of despotism” might struggle “to accustom themselves to the idea of a ‘sovereign’ people, of a president, or ‘elective king,’ who shakes hands with a workingman, has no guards at his door, travels about on foot etc.”³² Other European visitors to revolutionary America who extolled the virtues of liberty and equality in the abstract were unwilling to share a bench in an inn with a coachman.

Brissot especially appreciated the openness of unmarried girls in America, whose liberty seemed to him consistent with a virtuous republic. He was amazed to learn that they could ride in a chaise with a young man without fear of seduction. The married women Brissot met in America reminded him of the politically engaged republican women of Geneva. They cared about nothing so much as making their husbands happy and bringing up virtuous children for the new republic, he assumed, and did not indulge in the frequent affairs that characterized the life of French aristocracy. His own wife, Brissot added, was home in Paris reading Rousseau’s Émile. “Let those who doubt the prodigious effects of liberty on man and on his industry come to America!” Jacques-Pierre Brissot advised readers he hoped would follow him to this new republic. “What miracles they will witness!”³³

On a tour of the South, though, Brissot came face to face with American institutions that disturbed his idyllic picture. A committed campaigner against the slave trade, he was shocked by the plantations he visited and by his conversations with their masters. He asked his Quaker hosts in Philadelphia, all committed abolitionists, how “men who were taking up arms to defend their own liberty” could “rob other men of this same blessing?”³⁴ Indolent white plantation owners living off the labor of their slaves were no better than leisured aristocrats in Europe. Although Brissot had intended to hold up America as a land of promise to his European readers, he could not reconcile bondage with revolutionary principles. All he could do was point to the valiant efforts of American abolitionists before the Revolution, including the tailor John Woolman and the multilingual French émigré Anthony Benezet.

Brissot’s frustration with American slavery was echoed by European visitors arriving in the new American republic on diplomatic missions from Europe. François Barbé-Marbois, first secretary to the French minister, Anne César de la Luzerne, crossed the Atlantic with John Adams and his son. From their hammocks slung at the back of the Sensible, Barbé-Marbois and the twelve-year-old John Quincy witnessed the “keel hauling” of a black slave on a passing corsair. In the journal that he kept, Barbé-Marbois recounted his horror when he realized that the black object he saw falling from the top of the yards into the sea only to be yanked back up into the air and dropped down again was “a miserable negro, entirely naked.”³⁵ A twenty-four-year-old Dutch diplomat, Carel de Vos, on his first trip out of Philadelphia, witnessed a slave auction in Fredericksburg, “an event that was very shocking to us as Europeans and that seemed so contradictory to the principles of American freedom.”³⁶ Black men were rented for ten or eleven pounds per year, he observed, or even traded for tobacco, as if they were beasts. The encounter with slavery jolted de Vos, otherwise a dispassionate observer of architecture, politics, and flora and fauna in the new republic, out of his customary restraint.

Thomas Jefferson’s neighbor, the Tuscan merchant Filippo Mazzei, who enthusiastically adopted the American revolutionary cause as his own, confronted the role of slavery in a prosperous agricultural economy as a Virginian farmer. Together with Jefferson, he drew up plans to introduce grapevines and olive, citrus, and mulberry trees to the new world. In his journal, though, Mazzei asked how it was possible “that after the famous revolution succeeded in America, that after the principles were established for new governments that breathed liberty and equality, slavery could still exist in the United States.”³⁷ How could the self-sufficient farmers held up by European philosophers as the ideal citizens of a modern republic limit liberty to white settlers like themselves? Mazzei adapted to Jefferson’s Virginia, but not to its treatment of men and women taken from Africa to labor in the New World.

Mazzei’s journal, Historic and Political Research on the United States of America, was translated into French by one of the staunchest French abolitionists, the marquis de Condorcet, and his wife, Sophie de Grouchy. Mazzei criticized Crèvecoeur’s portrayal of American customs as overly idyllic. However, even the optimistic Crèvecoeur’s journal had turned dark at the end. Crèvecoeur questioned the humanity of American revolutionaries who could auction Africans like beasts, “the daughter torn from her weeping mother, the children from wretched parents, the wife from loving husband … arranged like horses at a fair, they are branded like cattle, and then driven to toil, to starve, and to languish, for a few years, on the different plantations of these citizens.”³⁸ Brissot leaped to Crèvecoeur’s defense, despite agreeing with Mazzei that resettlement of blacks in Africa offered the best solution to the deep racial divide in America.

Brissot planned to publish his journal to encourage other entrepreneurial Europeans to follow him to America, but instead got caught up in the French Revolution. He finally published it in 1791 as a lesson to the French on securing their revolutionary liberty and equality and resisting the lure of luxury and privilege. His journal was translated and republished the next year by the American poet and businessman Joel Barlow, who left out everything critical of the United States. It went through five German editions, one Irish, one Dutch, and one Swedish.

Barbé-Marbois, named French consul to America and then tapped as intendant of Saint-Domingue, had to wait for two decades to edit his journal. Exile in French Guiana gave him time to reflect on senators he observed on the Philadelphia waterfront returning from market, fish tucked under their arms. In his journal, like Brissot, he wondered whether Europeans accustomed to “porters, stewards, butlers, and covered carriages with springs” would ever offer “the same resistance to despotism” as Americans.³⁹ Barbé-Marbois supplemented his original journal entries with information drawn from letters he had written to his wife that she collected for him. It was handed down through generations until it was finally published in an English translation in 1920.

As travelers crossed the Atlantic between the two revolutions, they wondered whether absolute monarchies could navigate their way peacefully toward a republic, or whether that fate was reserved for the New World. Brissot compared the American revolutionaries with French patriots “who extol the Declaration of the Rights of Man while gravely considering the choice of a new cabriolet or a fashionable waistcoat.”⁴⁰ When the crisis that would topple one of the stablest of the Old World monarchies intensified, he asked whether the French had not become too refined over the centuries for liberty as the Americans had defined their natural rights. Were Europeans perhaps too attached to the luxuries and privileges of the Old Regime to see a revolution through to the end? Could it be that the American people inhabiting their rustic paradise were unique?

Witness to the Fire That Has “consumed all the dusty cobwebs of antiquity”: Dumont in Paris, 1789–91

Defying the expectations of almost all of the transatlantic travelers, France roused itself “from its circle of frivolities” to revolt in the spring of 1789. Genevan pastor Étienne Dumont predicted from Paris that liberty and equality, spawned by the Enlightenment and reared in the American “nursery of patriots,” would define the new world in France.⁴¹ Dumont had emigrated to Saint Petersburg when the French crushed the Genevan Revolution of 1782. He moved on to Lord Lansdowne’s Bowood House in Wiltshire, where he joined a political circle that included the Baron d’Holbach, Mirabeau, Benjamin Franklin, and Joseph Priestly. Word of revolutionary stirrings in Geneva drew Dumont back across the Channel to try to negotiate French support for Genevan reforms.

Dumont decamped at the home of Brissot’s friend the Genevan banker Étienne Clavière outside of Paris, collaborating with other Genevan exiles in writing speeches and articles for Mirabeau. Dumont left every few days for Versailles to observe the French Estates General, meeting for the first time in more than a century. “Everything remains to be done and everything is possible,” he wrote his friend British lawyer Samuel Romilly, urging him to come to France. “All that was rock solid is now as malleable as wax,” he promised.⁴² The world was changing, and the new revolutionary wave that would sweep Europe was beginning in Paris.

On his way to join Mirabeau for dinner shortly after his arrival in Paris, the diplomatic Dumont brushed off cautions offered by his hosts about not adhering to French protocol. “A foreigner can form friendships with whom he likes,” Dumont explained of his brash conduct.⁴³ Outsiders, unconstrained by the conventional boundaries of social standing or political allegiance, could meet with everyone. That freedom gave adventurous travelers a unique perspective on the revolutions through which they moved and to which some returned when they went home.

Dumont chronicled “the chaos of confused opinions” that was revolutionary France in the spring of 1789. He reported that the commoners elected as the Third Estate wanted delegates from all three estates to deliberate together in one room, voting individually, rather than adjourning to three separate rooms, with each estate getting one vote.⁴⁴ Dumont could not understand why the first two estates, the clergy and the nobility, refused to vote in a common assembly with the commoners. Even from the perspective of a Genevan pastor accustomed to a hierarchical social ordering, this entrenched defense of privilege appeared ridiculous. Why should “a hundred thousand noblemen and eighty thousand priests have the confidence to complain that they would be considered as equal to the other twenty-four million countrymen?” Dumont asked in May 1789.⁴⁵ He was frustrated that the privileged orders who made up such a small part of the French population presumed to block reform.

In his journal entry of 18 June 1789, Dumont marveled at the momentous transformation of the French government he had just witnessed. It had happened so suddenly. The Third Estate had arrived in the morning to find the meeting room barred shut. These delegates then proceeded, in Dumont’s view, with the impetuosity of the French character, to the tennis court, where they proclaimed themselves the National Assembly two days later. He described the Tennis Court Oath as “nothing less than a declaration of independence,” the beginning of the end of the Old Regime. Instead of estates defined by the privileges of birth, the deputies to the National Assembly now referred to classes, “a denomination well calculated to strip those orders of the respect which they derived from their ancient titles,” and to set the nobles and clergy “in their proper light as usurpers.”⁴⁶ Dumont recognized that French deputies to the Third Estate thought of themselves no longer as representatives of orders defined by inheritance but as national citizens with rights. Inspired to hasten a similar dismantling of privilege in Geneva, Dumont set to work to write a new constitution for his native land, which appeared to be launching another revolution of its own.

Dumont regretted that he had spent the fourteenth of July at Versailles and missed the storming of the fortress like Bastille in Paris. He had to rely on others’ accounts of the crowds that wrested control of the prison and seized its arms, decapitating the old governor of the prison and mounting his head on a pike. As soon as he could get to Paris, Dumont visited the Faubourg Saint-Antoine, the poor district of the French capital so long in the shadow of the Bastille, and described for his readers firsthand “the whole prison, its dark stair-cases, its mysterious passages, its triple doors plated with iron and fastened by enormous bolts, its cells, which resembled graves.”⁴⁷ The Genevan émigré rejoiced that the common people of France were claiming their sovereign rights and that their delegates were writing a constitution for the nation.

Identifying as enthusiastically with the French revolutionaries as the French revolutionary Brissot had seven years earlier with the Genevans, Dumont proclaimed: “We may be said in the space of a week to have lived a century.” History was moving at such a rapid pace that Dumont struggled to keep up in his journal with the events he witnessed. He apologized for neglecting his journal through much of July 1789: “I have been so much taken up with the astonishing events which have happened here, that I have not had a moment’s leisure to write to you.”⁴⁸ Journal writing required quiet moments for reflection, and these were in short supply in revolutionary Paris in the summer of 1789.

On the night of 4 August 1789, the French National Assembly convened and with little debate voted to abolish all of the feudal privileges that remained from the Old Regime. Rather than voicing his own opinion of the dramatic events about which he was beginning to harbor doubts, in his journal Dumont quoted Mirabeau, who lamented that “it was just like the French. They are a whole month disputing over syllables [in writing the Declaration of the Rights of Man], and then, in one night, they upset the whole of the ancient law and order of the kingdom.”⁴⁹ Dumont’s journal entry for 15 August excused the escalating violence of the French Revolution as the inevitable result of a servile people suddenly freed and declared equal. The French lacked the historical tradition of liberty written into constitutions on which the Genevans, the Dutch, and the Belgians had founded their revolutions. The French themselves admitted that they “had been sunk in slavery for centuries,” and so had to turn to philosophical principles instead of experience.⁵⁰

Although he had identified with the promise of the French in the spring of 1789, by August, Dumont had begun to distance himself from the violence of their revolution. Like many of his American friends in Paris, he worried about the democracy fueled by popular revolution. Perhaps the traveling skeptics were right to doubt the aptitude of the French for revolution. The moderation of the constitution writers who had prevailed in previous revolutions was being impetuously trampled underfoot by Parisian crowds.

Disillusioned by the instability of revolutionary France and full of hope for revolutionary Geneva, Dumont left for home in 1790, traveling with Achille du Chastellet, a French aristocrat who had served as an aide de camp in the American Revolution before joining the French army. In January 1789, triggered by a spike in the price of bread, Genevan revolutionaries had torn down the city gates, built barricades, and driven out foreign troops with fire pumps filled with boiling water and soap lye. In a February edict, the Genevans banished all foreign troops from their city and invited the exiles of 1782 to return, though not to take up politics in Geneva again. Dumont celebrated. “Great news! Happy news! Extraordinary news,” he wrote in his journal. He lobbied the French, still guarantors of the Genevan constitution, to permit the exiles to return to their offices in Geneva. He hoped after seven years’ exile “to finish what the Genevan revolution [of 1782] had only suggested,” an enduring revolution for equality and citizenship.⁵¹The French refused to allow the Genevan revolutionaries to resume their offices.

The problem was not just with the French. Dumont realized as soon as he reached Geneva that his time abroad in Saint Petersburg, London, and Paris discussing the rights of man with Mirabeau, Sieyès, and Romilly had enlarged his “ideas of Liberty” beyond those of the Genevan revolutionaries who had never left their city-state, a common fate of expatriates.⁵² He found himself caught between two revolutions: too radical in his republicanism for the Genevans and too moderate in his condemnation of popular democracy for the French. He felt like an outsider to both.

An admirer of the British separation of powers, Dumont traveled back to England from Geneva.⁵³ Changes should be accomplished through legal means, he was now even more convinced than ever. There, Samuel Romilly pressed him to publish his journal. His personal history of the first year of the French Revolution would serve as a tribute to their mutual friend Mirabeau. Dumont refused. “Of what use are books?” he asked. “Who can write or even think without disgust, when he sees the most enlightened country in Europe returning to a state of barbarism? The howlings of savages are less frightful than the harangues of the representatives of a nation esteemed the gentlest and the most polished of the continent.”⁵⁴ He was thoroughly disillusioned.

Revolution, so reasonable in America and Geneva, had become too “enthusiastic” in France for Dumont. Even Brissot, who “would have been excellent had he been born in the United States,” had been swept away in France “by the enthusiasm of Liberty.”⁵⁵There, crowds dictated their unstable democracy. Excessive liberty had degenerated into French license, he observed, and all in the name of his countryman Rousseau. Dumont feared the political leaders of France would never agree to a constitutional consensus, unlike the British in 1688. He added little to his journal on the French Revolution after he returned to Paris on his way to England. “The fire which has been thus kindled,” he remarked, had by then “consumed all the dusty cobwebs of antiquity, together with the tarnished liveries of magnificence.”⁵⁶

In 1792, Romilly translated Dumont’s journal into English. Published as The Groenvelt Letters, alleged to be a translation from a German traveler, Henry Frederic Groenvelt, the journal included twelve letters from Dumont and ten from Romilly.⁵⁷ Dumont attempted to explain the French violence after the Terror of 1793, while Romilly condemned it. Anonymous publication protected them both from the many British critics of the French Revolution. After Dumont’s death, his nephew Jacob-Louis Duval published a more complete edition of Dumont’s narrative as the Recollections of Mirabeau. Duval claimed in the preface that his uncle’s journal was more reliable than “most writings of its kind” because “M. Dumont, a foreigner in France, always refused by a rare feeling of delicacy to take any active part in the events that were taking place before his eyes. He therefore has nothing to conceal.”⁵⁸ Duval thought that distance lent Dumont’s journal more credibility, even if the claim was not exactly true.

Helen Maria Williams in Paris: “Notwithstanding a few shocking instances of public vengeance”

The English poet and novelist Helen Maria Williams picked up the story of the French Revolution where Dumont’s journal left off. Williams, however, was less quick to condemn the French than he. Before she left England for France, she sounded the themes of revolutionary universality in her poetry. One of her best known poems, “On the Bill Lately Passed for Regulating the Slave Trade,” condemned that commerce, and “An Ode to Peace” celebrated the end of the American Revolution. Her sentimental novelJuliainvited comparison with Rousseau’s Julie, ou la nouvelle Héloïse.

FIGURE 2.2
Portrait of the English author Helen Maria Williams, by an unknown artist and published by Dean and Munday. NPG8601, stipple engraving. The journals Williams published based on her observations provided details of the French Revolution for the British public. Courtesy of National Portrait Gallery, London

Williams arrived in Paris on 13 July 1790, the eve of the first celebration of the Festival of the Federation. She watched the processions of men and women from the provinces assembling on the Champs de Mars, where the hero of the American Revolution, the marquis de Lafayette, now major general of the French Federation, swore the civic oath to the revolution. “How am I to paint the impetuous feelings of that immense, that exulting multitude?” she asked in her journal, intended for publication in England.⁵⁹ “It was man reclaiming and establishing the most noble of his rights, and all it required was a simple sentiment of humanity to become in that moment a citizen of the world.”⁶⁰ John Paul Jones led an American delegation that included Thomas Paine and the poet Joel Barlow. Here, for Williams, was the true manifestation of a cosmopolitan revolution.

Williams followed in Dumont’s path, making her own pilgrimage to the Bastille. In her account, she singled out the women in the crowd who, driven by their families’ hunger, “far from indulging the fears incident to our feeble sex,” had defied “the cannon of the Bastille … with a spirit worthy of roman matrons.”⁶¹ Williams also reminded her readers of the October 1789 march to Versailles by Parisian women. They had covered the twenty kilometers in the cold rain to demand lower bread prices and an end to the king’s veto power. Lafayette followed the women to Versailles with the national guard and persuaded the crowd to spare the royal family. She imagined for her readers the scene of fishwives storming the royal apartments and then triumphantly leading the king, the queen, and the dauphin back to the French capital. She approved. After the historical prologue, Williams turned in her journal to the events of the French Revolution she witnessed herself.

Williams regularly attended the debates of the National Assembly, joining the other women in the galleries. Where Dumont heard chaos and confusion in revolutionary France, Williams saw “the mists of ignorance and error … rolling away, and the benign beams of philosophy … spreading their lustre over the nations.”⁶² The ideals of the Enlightenment were being realized in Europe as in America, she rejoiced. In France, at last, “the golden dream of the moralist” had become “historical fact.”⁶³ It took her longer than most English and American visitors to be disillusioned by the evidence. For a while, Williams reveled in the tumult of French debates driven by philosophical principles, such a contrast to the more restrained English Parliament, which had yet to outlaw the slave trade.

Like Dumont, Williams was especially stirred by Mirabeau, “the professed friend of the African race,” when he demanded an end to the slave trade. A convinced abolitionist, Williams pronounced the revolutionary French too enlightened to “persist in thinking what is morally wrong, can be politically right,” as the English continued to do.⁶⁴ She could not countenance the economic justifications of the slave trade.

Williams returned to England in September 1790 for a brief visit, as the first volume of her letters on the French Revolution was published. She deplored the timidity of the English, who criticized her as they fretted about the violence of the crowds in the streets of Paris. “Alas,” she responded to her more cautious readers, “where do the records of history point out a revolution unstained by some actions of barbarity?”⁶⁵ Dumont would have answered, in England in 1688.

Most travelers’ journals written in the midst of revolutions strove to engage the emotions of their readers, for, as the London salonnière Elizabeth Montagu wrote her sister, “without the accompaniment of Sympathy, a long narrative of frivolous matters is the most tiresome thing in the world.”⁶⁶ That often meant taking sides in narrating events. Like other members of the large community of American and English expatriates who gathered in Paris in the first years of the French Revolution, Williams felt most at home in Paris with the moderate revolutionaries, the Girondins, who believed in a free market, not the economic leveling advocated by the more radical Jacobins.

Williams discussed politics at the salon of Madame Roland, a prominent Girondin, and entertained a salon of her own on Sundays in her apartment. Traveling revolutionary exiles gathered there to drink tea, including Brissot, Joel and Ruth Barlow from Connecticut, Thomas Paine, the German chronicler Georg Förster, Wolfe Tone from Ireland, and Mary Wollstonecraft, the English feminist. Wollstonecraft, who found Williams’s manner somewhat affected (“authorship is a heavy weight for female shoulders”), was nevertheless drawn to Williams “by her simple heart” and her powerful connections.⁶⁷ Williams seemed to know everyone in revolutionary politics, including the Jacobin leader Maximilien Robespierre, who stopped by her apartment to share in the political conversation. The adventurous Venezuelan general Francisco Miranda, who would fight for the French revolutionaries before leading campaigns for independence in South America, often visited her, as did the Polish engineer who fought in the American Revolution, Thaddeus Kościuszko. She also attracted John Hurford Stone, a wealthy English coal merchant who managed his manufacturing interests as he promoted abolitionism on both sides of the Channel. They never married, but lived together until his death in 1818.

The expatriates from Britain and America gathered every Sunday and Thursday at White’s Hotel in the Passage des Petits Pères. Calling themselves the Society of the Rights of Man, they toasted the victories of the French Revolution with deputies from the National Convention and celebrated French General Dumouriez’s victory over the Austrians at Jemappes. They sang “Ça Ira” and the Marseillaise, translated into English by Helen Maria Williams, as well as a parody of “God Save the King” composed by Joel Barlow.

Williams had her critics. Some challenged her amorous liaison with a married man, Stone, others her politics. English novelist Laetitia Matilda Hawkins published a two-volume attack on the widely read Letters from France, charging that Williams inflamed “the minds of my countrywomen with notions they had better be without.” How, Hawkins wanted to know, could a woman condone the violence of the French Revolution? And why, she asked, would an English author celebrate the demise of hereditary privileges? Hawkins also condemned Williams for her unconditional support of the abolitionists. Above all, she criticized Williams for intruding into politics, properly the domain of the “male genius,” which alone could plumb “the depths of science and accumulated wisdom of ages.”⁶⁸ She insisted that Williams would be more usefully engaged as a wife and mother back in England.

Rather than viewing her politics as unfeminine, the Société des Amis de la Constitution (Society of the friends of the constitution) of Rouen in northern France held Williams up as a model of true domesticity. Earlier, in London, Williams had befriended a young French couple and helped them to marry over the objections of an aristocratic father, an example of revolution in the family. It did not seem to matter to the Rouen revolutionaries that the English author who had publicly come to the aid of the French couple was a single woman living with a married man. They assigned her the role of “Liberty.” She would bedeck the altar in Rouen in a dramatic representation of La famille patriotique (The patriotic family).

Williams in turn heralded “the considerable role” French women played in their revolution.⁶⁹ Rather than be intimidated by Hawkins and the other critics, Williams called on English women to emulate the example of the French and “to intervene in the important questions or interests of human concern.”⁷⁰ Women had a different role to play than men, Williams explained, because their natures were not the same. In a revolutionary age, she was convinced, the morality of women gave them a particular role to play in politics. “To understand the common good,” she argued, “it is not necessary to possess the wisdom of a philosopher, it is enough to have the sensibility of a woman.”⁷¹ This sensibility, she believed, distinguished her journal from the stack of eyewitness accounts written by men. She told stories that men overlooked, guaranteeing a substantial audience for her volumes of letters in England.

After a second trip to England, Williams brought her mother and two sisters back with her to Paris, arriving just in time to experience the beginning of the Terror on 10 August 1792. Looking down from their windows on the Rue de Lille, the Williamses saw the Parisians storm the Tuileries. Helen Maria Williams described for her English readers the crowd, after being pushed back several times, mounting a final assault on the royal palace. To escape their vengeance, Louis XVI and his family fled through the passages to the meeting room of the Legislative Assembly. The crowd brazenly pursued the royal family through the royal apartments until the Swiss Guards defending them fired on the insurgents. To end the melee, Louis XVI ordered his guards to put down their arms. He assumed his subjects would then calmly retire. Instead, the crowd massacred the guards, stripping them of their clothing and mutilating their bodies. Crossing the gardens the next day, Williams reported that she inadvertently stumbled over two dead guards, an incident that upset her readers more than it did Williams.

In September 1792, as Prussian troops approached Paris, mobs stormed prisons rumored to house counterrevolutionaries. They tried the prisoners on the spot and killed those they pronounced guilty, mounting their heads on pikes. Williams’s good friend Anna Seward, back in England, counseled her, in a letter published in Gentleman’s Magazine, “to fly that land of carnage.” How, she asked, could Williams call “the fire which led the French into chaos the rising sun of Liberty”?⁷² Williams dismissed Seward’s advice and stayed on, little wavering from the conviction expressed in her first volume of letters in 1790 that “notwithstanding a few shocking instances of public vengeance, the liberty of twenty-four millions of people will have been purchased at a far cheaper rate than could ever have been expected from the former experience of the world.”⁷³ The French had learned from the Americans, who had taken lessons from the seventeenth-century English revolutionaries, and in the end, Williams predicted, they would teach “mankind a lesson, which perhaps the whole human race will be proud to learn.”⁷⁴

At the height of the Terror in 1793, though, Williams must have had her doubts as the ruling Jacobins rounded up the Girondins, including many of her closest friends, and charged them as counterrevolutionaries. Also falling under suspicion were the numerous foreigners befriended by the Girondins. Outsiders were not as free, as Dumont had once thought, to flout national customs or bridge political factions. After the night when the Convention called for the arrest of all English expatriates, Williams, her mother, and her sister were relieved to see the dawn in their own apartment. They assumed that as women they had been spared. Later that day, however, they were arrested and escorted by commissioners from the revolutionary committee to the Luxembourg prison. From their cell, they heard that the Girondins were guillotined on 26 October 1793. The Williams sisters and their mother were freed at the end of December. Robespierre ordered all foreigners to leave the capital in April 1794 and, together with Stone, they fled to Switzerland.

After the Jacobin leader Robespierre fell victim to the guillotine, Williams returned to France to publish a third and fourth volume of her letters in 1795 and 1796. She acknowledged, unlike most other American and English visitors, that revolutions cost blood. When other exiles questioned the French Revolution for betraying the promise of the summer of 1789 with a bloodbath, Williams was steadfast in her acceptance of the revolution that swept away the Old Regime of privilege.

In 1795, after six years of upheaval in France, this revolutionary Atlantic world had begun to seem inordinately noisy even to Helen Maria Williams. Remembering her prison cell in Paris, the English writer sighed, “How I envied the peasant in his lonely hut! … My disturbed imagination divided the communities of men but into two classes, the oppressor and the oppressed; and peace seemed only to exist with solitude.”⁷⁵ She had tried to retire to the mountains of Switzerland but discovered there was no escape from politics. There was no way to avoid taking sides in a world divided into two, “the oppressor and the oppressed.”

Many of her fellow travelers, including veteran revolutionaries, had been frightened by the violence of the Terror. In comparing revolutions, Brissot observed, “Natives are often too prejudiced in favor of their native land, and foreigners are too prejudiced against them.”⁷⁶ It was the job of the travel journal writer, he explained, to ask questions abroad to reveal the truth in between. Only the rare travelers who shared in the sociability of revolutionary Paris before the Terror came away convinced cosmopolitans, finding that “truth in between.” Williams was one of them.

“Alarmingly republican”: Transformed Travelers between Revolutions

The revolutionary French offered shelter, if not security, to revolutionary refugees and aspirants from across the Atlantic world. Thomas Paine carried the American flag in the French Festival on the Champ de Mars in Paris in the summer of 1790, explaining, “A share in two revolutions is living to some purpose.”⁷⁷ Together with many other foreigners in Paris, Paine claimed a role in what he envisioned as a universal world revolution for liberty. The marquis de Lafayette entrusted Paine with the key to the Bastille. Paine was to convey “this early trophy of the Spoils of Despotism and the first ripe fruits of American principles transplanted into Europe to his great Master and Patron,” George Washington.⁷⁸

In the beginning, the French Revolution had appeared to be an extension of the American Revolution onto a continent still infested with monarchs and overrun by aristocrats. Jefferson was one among many Americans who credited the Americans with waking up the French “from the sleep of despotism in which they were sunk.”⁷⁹ There remained a great deal of work to be done. Paine and Jefferson expected the French to take the lead in that revolution. As late as 1792, a dinner companion commented that “like his friend T. Payne [Jefferson] cannot live but in a revolution, and all events in Europe are only considered by him in the relation they bear to the probability of a revolution to be produced by them.”⁸⁰

In the summer of 1789, American and French revolutionaries openly celebrated their shared experiment. Newly arrived in Paris, the American diplomat Gouverneur Morris wrote his friend the comte de Moustier, French minister in New York, that he found “on this Side of the Atlantic a strong resemblance to what I left on the other: a Nation which exists in Hopes, Prospects, and Expectations.”⁸¹ The Société de 1789 gathered French moderates, many of them, such as Lafayette, Condorcet, and La Rochefoucauld, closely tied to America, in 1790 to plot universal human progress guided by reason. After the summer of 1791, most visitors from the new United States found fewer reasons to join the new republics in common cause. In June 1791, Thomas Jefferson’s aide William Short warned him from Paris that France had become “alarmingly republican.”⁸² Short was referring not only to the presumed fate of the king after his capture at Varennes on the French border, but to the readiness of crowds to take to the streets of Paris. “Those who court the People have a very capricious Mistress,” Morris, newly appointed American minister plenipotentiary for France, wrote Short.⁸³ It was not just that the French Revolution had taken a radical turn between 1789 and 1792.

With few exceptions, during the French Revolution, American expatriates in Paris frequented the circles of the elite. Morris’s French mistress entertained him at the Louvre. A committed republican in America, Morris proved loyal to the royal family in France throughout the Revolution. It was to Morris that Louis XVI entrusted his treasures before the storming of the Tuileries. The American expatriates adapted to their surroundings. They were quite comfortable among the privileges against which Adams had warned Watson and amid which they all lived abroad. America may have been the land of equality, of opportunity, and of the rustic farmer celebrated in French journals, but these travelers feared the common people of France, most often depicted in their journals as unrulyand threatening crowds. They noted the differences separating the two continents.

Traveling in the other direction, European travelers who came to America imagining the land of equal opportunity, left disillusioned by the Americans’ unwillingness to abolish the institution of slavery.⁸⁴ After their visits to the plantations owned by the founding fathers of America, they, too, returned home committed exceptionalists.

The ideas that crossed national borders in pamphlets influenced the course of their neighbors’ politics; the revolutionaries who traveled often found that they themselves had been transformed by the experience. That was true of the visitors to America in the decade before the French Revolution, such as Brissot, who noticed coachmen sharing benches with worthier travelers, and of the American expatriates who planted corn in the formal gardens of the Champs Élysées during the opening years of the French Revolution. Watson and Brissot both had ongoing revolutions to which they could return from their travels, the first engaging in commerce, the second in politics. Dumont and Williams did not have that option. Geneva’s second revolution of 1789 was as short-lived as the first in 1782, and England seemed inhospitable to revolution in Williams’s eyes, if not Dumont’s. Writing of revolutionary opportunities yet to be realized, neither of them returned home to resettle comfortably among compatriots. Like the travelers of the next chapter, the experience of revolution set them upon a restless quest for liberty that continued across borders for the rest of their lives.