Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

Contemporary American Opinion of the French Revolution

1898; Oxford University Press; Volume: 3; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês

10.2307/1833709

1937-5239

James Farmer, Charles Downer Hazen,

Political Theory and Influence

any of Franklin's letters or papers up to the time when he left France which shows that he expected any considerable change in the government of that country," says a recent writer/ Franklin has left behind no description of the economic, moral and political conditions of France in the years immediately preceding the great convulsion.That there lay hid in those conditions the germs of a sweeping and violent change seems never to have occurred to him.To be sure, he never had occasion or inclination to probe very deeply beneath the surface of French life.An old man at the time he entered upon his mission, far from en- joying good health, he made no journeys of importance through the country.Yet seeing a great deal of the politi- cal, literary, and scientific society of the capital, he would have caught whatever revolutionary premonitions were in the air and would almost certainly have recorded them.He was in France from 1776 to 1785.He enjoyed French society.Life as men lived it in France seemed to him full of fine pleasure and incitement, of which his pages are evi- dence, abounding, as they do, with praises of that people.He did not find them abnormally and disastrously organized, and when he sailed for home he carried with him, appa- rently, no presentiment of that eventful future that lay so near across their pathway.Nor do we find any symptoms of an impending change in the writings of Jay or Adams.Adams, indeed, travelled across the country twice, in 1778 and 1780, but the obser- vations he made upon his journeys, being very frag- mentary and superficial, are of no value to the student of the Old Regime.In after years, in the light thrown upon French conditions by the Revolution, he recorded the im- pressions made upon him by the retreat of Madame du Barry and the palace of Madame de Pompadour.These remarks on morals, the position and manners of women, the importance of virtue as a foundation for society, are edify- ing, no doubt, but seem rather like afterthoughts.^Hale.Franklin in France, II, 391.Thomas Jefferson in France.3 But in the writings of Jefferson and Morris we see ourselves swept along in the broad, deep current of an actual revolution.These were men of judgment, insight, and wide acquaintance with affairs.Trained in the suggestive school of American politics, absorbed in the practical opera- tion of government, with a keen sense for the fitness or weakness of institutions, and very observant, they were well qualified to be critics of Frenchmen, French institutions and conditions, French aspirations and struggles, as that country was about to enter upon an experience that, at the outset at least, seemed ver\' familiar to Americans.wit, rather Gallic than English, somewhat of a cynic, too.These men differed temperamentally.Their political ideas were also sharply at variance, and when their tempera-4The French Revolution.ments and their intellectual likings and dislikes interject themselves into their descriptions, we perceive in each a distinctly personal note.But this is not always the case, for while these men had strongly individual traits, they had traits in common as well.Both were intelligent, facile, acute, and penetrating.Both were strongly prejudiced men, though in inverse senses, but both were thoughtful and possessed discernment.Both were flexible, pliant, easily appreciative of different conditions than those to which they were accustomed at home.The description which they have left us of France in the most interesting period of her history is continuous from 1784 to 1794, changing in 1789 by the passing of one of them from the scene and the entrance of the other upon it, with the consequent alteration of the note where the strictly impersonal one is dropped.'In May, 1784, Congress appointed Thomas Jefferson to a foreign mission, to join Franklin and John Adams in Europe in negotiating treaties of commerce.Sailing from Boston in July he had a quick voyage and reached Paris, his destination, August 6.Soon after Dr. Franklin's re- peated request to be relieved of