REVOLUTION

In the summer and spring of 1789, American newspapers carried the first news of the revolutionary turmoil in Paris. First came the meeting of the Estates-General in May, then the National Assembly in June, and then the fall of the Bastille in July. In August, the Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizens was ratified, and Americans could not fail to note its resemblance to the Declaration of Independence and the Bill of Rights, upon which it was largely based.

In its early, temperate stages, from the spring of 1789 through the fall of 1791, the French Revolution was greeted with near-universal rejoicing in America. The beloved Lafayette was conspicuously at the center of the events unfolding in Paris, where he served as vice president of the National Assembly and commander of the revolutionary militia. He sent George Washington the key to the Bastille, engraved with the words: “It is a tribute which I owe to you, as a son to my adoptive father, as an aide-de-camp to my General, as a Missionary of Liberty to its Patriarch.” On the streets of American cities and towns, a rush of nostalgia brought back all of the old symbolism and music and pageantry of the American Revolution. Liberty poles were erected in town squares, just as they had been in 1776; men wore liberty hats, just as they had in 1776. At festivals and civic feasts, the Stars and Stripes appeared alongside the new Tricolor of Revolutionary France: a red, white, and blue flag designed by Lafayette himself to replace the royal white banner of the Bourbons.

Beginning in mid-1792, however, there were disturbing reports of mob savagery on the streets of Paris. In August, a crowd gathered outside the Palace of the Tuileries, where the royal family was being held in closely guarded splendor, and howled for the king’s head. They slaughtered some five hundred of the king’s Swiss Guards and paraded their severed heads on pikes. Lafayette was denounced and forced to flee across the border, where he was captured by the Austrians and thrown into jail. In September, as foreign armies massed on the border, rumors of a domestic counterrevolutionary plot circulated among the sans-culottes of the Parisian mobs.

More than a thousand prisoners, among them women, children, and priests, were dragged virtually at random from their cells and hacked to pieces. The princesse de Lamballe, a friend and confidante of the queen, was raped, murdered, and mutilated; her head was exhibited on a pike beneath Marie-Antoinette’s window. The duc de La Rochefoucauld, the man who had first translated the Declaration of Independence, was snatched from his carriage and stoned to death as his wife and aging mother watched helplessly.  

The details of the massacres were so outlandish that many Americans refused to believe them. Jefferson maintained that they should be dismissed as English propaganda. But in late March 1793, shortly after Washington was sworn in for his second term as president, news arrived in Philadelphia that could not be so easily ignored. Louis XVI had been sent to the guillotine in the public square named for his father. As his severed head was lifted from the basket into which it had fallen, cries of “Vive la Republique!” had resounded through the streets of Paris and “every hat was in the air.”

Ian W. Toll, Six Frigates: The Epic History of the Founding of the U.S. Navy (66-67). W. W. Norton & Company. Kindle Edition.