The Great Divide

by Thomas Fleming

  President Washington did not even open the Commune’s package. He sent it to Jefferson, who recommended it should be submitted to Congress for a reply. The President ignored this advice, which signaled his awareness that the House of Representatives under James Madison’s leadership was exhibiting tendencies that troubled him. He sent the Commune’s package to the Senate. This was in keeping with the Constitution, which gave the Senate a role in foreign policy. The senators ignored it.

  Then came an event that revealed to everyone in and out of France what was really happening in Paris: on June 21, 1791, Louis XVI and his Queen and family attempted to escape their semi-imprisonment in the Tuileries Palace and flee to the protection of friendly foreign monarchs. Behind him, the King left a message, declaring he had been a prisoner, acting under duress since he was dragged from Versailles to Paris.

  Alas, for the monarch and his moderate supporters in the National Assembly, he was recaptured at Varennes and returned to Paris through streets lined with tens of thousands of silent, glaring spectators. Signs declared that anyone who applauded the King would be beaten. William Short told Jefferson the story in late June, adding: “The Crisis is really tremendous and may have a disastrous issue.”

  A few days later, another report from Charge’ Short made this prophecy more specific: “You will easily conceive that the post of M de la Fayette is the most disagreeable and dangerous that can be imagined…. The people of Paris [the Commune] headed by some popular ambitious men declare loudly in favor [of] a republican government.” The Jacobins, members of a radical political club who had little or no use for a king, declared that Lafayette was behind the flight and he would pay for it “with his head.”4

  Three months later, Secretary of State Jefferson received these reports and promptly informed the President of the King’s failed flight. Later, he wrote that he had never seen George Washington “so dejected by any event in my life.” All the President’s hopes for the French Revolution—and all his doubts—collapsed into deep gloom—and fear for the safety of Lafayette.5

  Secretary of State Jefferson refused to accept the meaning of the King’s capture, even when Short spelled it out for him. The Secretary continued to talk and write about the Revolution as if the calendar had stopped turning in 1789. Three months later, on August 30, 1791, the day that Jefferson received Short’s dispatches about the King’s ruinous move, the Secretary of State wrote to a French friend in Paris, congratulating him on the news that the constitution was nearing completion. Two weeks later, when the King’s acceptance of the document was announced to the public, Short warned Jefferson that public confidence in the moderate charter—and the King—was close to zero.

  Jefferson also ignored this all too accurate prophecy. Soon, James Madison, whose thinking on the French Revolution was now virtually dictated by Jefferson, was hailing the King’s acceptance as if he had never heard of the monarch’s flight and return to a Paris smoldering with hatred. “The French Revolution seems to have succeeded beyond the most sanguine hopes,” he told one correspondent.

  It was growing apparent that for both Madison and Jefferson, the French Revolution was only real as an issue in American politics. They saw it could become crucial to the success of their new “Republican” Party. The reader will note that the name is in quotations. Many historians no longer use it. They prefer the name Jeffersonian Republican or Democratic-Republican. Henceforth, we will use the latter term.6

  Not surprisingly, President Washington had less and less confidence in Jefferson’s judgment of the upheaval in Paris. He virtually said as much when he named Gouverneur Morris, a man Jefferson disliked, as America’s first minister to the new French government. The wealthy New Yorker had been in Paris when the Revolution began in 1789, and his skepticism about its outcome was soon well-known.

  When Jefferson notified Morris of his appointment, the Secretary of State urged him to make frequent attempts to assure everyone of “the spirit of sincere friendship and attachment we bear to the French nation.” He should avoid opinions “that might please or offend any party.” Jefferson told Morris that the Revolution was immensely popular among “the great mass of our countrymen,” not too subtly warning him it would be a mistake to differ with this majority opinion.

  Writing from London, Morris accepted the appointment as minister and told the Secretary of State he agreed completely with the wisdom of observing silence about the current government of France. “Changes are now so frequent, and events seem fast ripening to such an awful catastrophe, that no expressions on the subject, however moderate, would be received with indifference.” The letter demonstrated that Morris was no slouch at the diplomatic game. He promised obedience to the Secretary of State, and simultaneously told him he did not know what he was talking about.7

  Meanwhile, the Senate was debating Morris’s appointment. Virginia Senator James Monroe, by now competing with James Madison for the role of Jefferson’s favorite political combatant, denounced the New Yorker. Monroe relied almost entirely on Jefferson’s adverserial vocabulary. Morris was a “monarchy man” whose chief interest in Europe was lining his own pockets. Other senators agreed with Monroe.

  Gouverneur Morris had never learned to be a popular politician; he frequently told people they were wrong and proved it in cutting terms. Even the two senators from Massachusetts, both conservatives, disliked him, probably because Morris’s penchant for pretty women offended their puritan instincts. But the President’s prestige was at stake and enough supporters of Washington rallied to confirm Morris’s appointment as minister to France.

  Another reason for Morris’s two-sided reply to the Secretary of State was a deeply personal letter that the President had written to him. Washington began by saying he had nominated Morris “with all my heart.” He then gave the new minister a pungent summary of the Senate debate on his appointment, and told him that he had better face the fact that he was often charged with “imprudence of conversation and conduct.” Especially troubling was a supposed “hauteur disgusting to those who happen to differ with you.” Washington hoped these warnings would inspire the circumspection Morris would need to represent America in Paris.

  To the President, one fact outweighed all Gouverneur Morris’s flaws: Morris would tell him the truth, no matter how much he might be forced to dissemble with others. Washington too saw that the French Revolution was becoming an issue in American politics. The President wanted advice from someone he trusted. He liked the way Morris had dealt with the British in London, making it clear that the “honor and interest of his country” was the only thing that mattered to him.8

  In early March of 1792, Jefferson informed his Anas that Washington had told him he had “begun to doubt very much of affairs in France.” The remark was made while they were discussing the letter they had received from King Louis XVI, announcing his approval of his nation’s new constitution. At the President’s request, the Secretary of State had written a carefully neutral response to it. Jefferson had reluctantly obeyed, blaming Washington’s tone on Gouverneur Morris “[who] has kept the president’s mind constantly poisoned with his forebodings.”9

  Washington had sent copies of the King’s letter to the House of Representatives and the Senate. The President became more than a little annoyed when Congressman James Madison persuaded the House to send an independent reply to the French government, warmly congratulating them on completing a wonderful constitution. It was an almost embarrassing contrast to Washington’s cool, neutral response. Washington wondered aloud if he should tell Madison and his House allies that foreign policy was none of their business.

  The Secretary of State took not a little pleasure in informing the President that the resolution to send their letter had passed the House with only two dissenting votes. It was evidence of how eagerly most Americans supported France’s revolution—something the President could only ignore at his political peril.

  The Secretary of State had not a little to do with creating this a
ttitude. Philip Freneau’s National Gazette printed nothing but gushing praise of France’s revolutionaries. Jefferson was so emotionally committed to their success, he did not seem to realize he was creating a dangerous division between a realistic view of the Revolution as a series of potentially tragic events in Paris and the idea of it as a political issue in America.

  The Secretary of State was extremely pleased when the President took his advice and decided not to tangle with the House of Representatives for interfering in American foreign policy. Instead, he told Jefferson to revise his noncommittal letter—adding a mention that both the House and Senate had expressed their approval of the new French Constitution.10

  As Jefferson’s failure to change Washington’s mind about Hamilton’s financial system become apparent to him, the Secretary of State grew more and more pessimistic about American politics and invested even more emotion in the French Revolution. In a letter to Lafayette, he praised his military as well as his political talents, and his use of the latter to exterminate “the monster aristocracy” and pull out “the teeth and fangs of its associate, monarchy.”

  In America, Jefferson continued, an opposite tendency was becoming visible. “A sect” of wayward greedy political operators saw the Constitution as only a step to the nation’s true political destiny—“an English constitution” with a king at the nation’s helm. The American legislature had become a hive of “stock jobbers and king jobbers.” But the voice of the people was beginning to make itself heard. The next election was likely to rid Congress of most of the jobbers.11

  Lafayette never received the Secretary of State’s letter. Jefferson had written it to ally him with the Democratic-Republican Party, on the assumption that he would wield a great deal of power under France’s new Constitution. By the time the letter reached Paris, the Marquis had heard the voice of the people howling for his blood, and had fled his homeland.

  As William Short had predicted, the Marquis’s political fortunes had been in decline since Louis XVI’s failed flight. When a riotous mob on the Champ de Mars demanded the banishment of the King and the establishment of a republic, the National Assembly asked Lafayette and his guardsman to restore order. The mob opened fire, one bullet whizzing close to the Marquis. He ordered the Guard to fire over the rioters’ heads. When the citoyens still refused to disperse, Lafayette ordered the Guard to fire on them. At least twelve people were killed, the mob fled, and Lafayette’s popularity plummeted to zero.

  In the National Assembly, attention turned to the frontiers, where anti-revolutionary émigrés had established a military presence. These naysayers were backed by King Frederick William of Prussia and Leopold II, the Emperor of Austria, Queen Marie Antoinette’s brother. In 1791, the two kings had issued a statement expressing concern for the safety of King Louis and the Queen. On April 20, 1792, the National Assembly declared war on both countries. Hotheads in the Assembly decided that these two “rotting despotisms” would be easy to defeat by appealing to the hunger for liberté in the souls of their oppressed subjects.12

  The shift to overt hostilities added new intensity to the distrust and anger that was sweeping through Paris. Worse, the French army performed poorly in its attempt to seize the frontier cities. The untrained troops fled when the professional soldiers of the Austrian army advanced on them. The Jacobins condemned the French commanders, claiming that they were all attached to the “old order.” One failed brigadier general was massacred by an enraged mob in the city of Lille.13

  In a last desperate attempt to maintain order, Lafayette asked the National Assembly to declare martial law. He was condemned in a raging speech by a leader of the Jacobin Political Club, Maximilian Robespierre, who accused him of plotting a coup d’etat. On August 10, the Jacobins and their supporters in the Paris Commune stormed the Tuileries Palace, massacred the six hundred Swiss Guards, the King’s only reliable protectors, and arrested Louis XVI. Lafayette was summoned to Paris for what would obviously be a show trial followed by the guillotine. On Aug 22, 1792, the Marquis and four aides fled France. Lafayette hoped to reach neutral Holland or England and there be joined by his wife and children. Eventually, they planned to seek refuge in America. On the French border, the Marquis was seized by Austrian soldiers and flung into the first of many vile prisons. The royalist émigrés had convinced the Austrians that Lafayette was as hateful as the Jacobins.14

  In America, Secretary of State Jefferson was soon hearing the grim news from Paris via William Short. Jefferson had persuaded Washington to appoint Short minister to the Netherlands, but information continued to flow to the young Virginian from the seething French capital. Virtually every intelligent person in Europe waited anxiously to learn what was happening in Paris.

  Equally dire reports came from Gouverneur Morris. Describing the attack on the Tuileries Palace, Short had denounced “those mad and corrupted people in France who under the name of liberty have destroyed their own government.” Morris was less emotional than Short, and closer to the meaning of the massacre: “Another revolution has been affected (sic) in this city. It was bloody.”15

  Morris went on to describe how the Jacobins were now in control and were outlawing other political clubs and associations, notably the Feuillants, who had favored the constitutional monarchy. Morris advised Jefferson to read with caution any French newspapers that came his way. They were being written not only “in the spirit of a party but under the eye of a party.” With the coolness of a man who knew he had Washington’s backing, Morris closed his letter by asking for “orders from the President respecting my line of conduct.”

  Jefferson must have twitched with irritation at these words. Morris was all but saying that he did not trust any orders from the Secretary of State. Nonetheless, Jefferson conferred with Washington, and they agreed that Morris should remain at his post. Most of the other diplomats in Paris were leaving—a statement that the emerging republic was illegitimate. But Jefferson told Morris that the United States believed it should recognize any government that had been created by the will of the people. He must have been surprised—and pleased—when he received a letter from Morris, expressing the same opinion.16

  The Jacobins now issued an Edict of Fraternity, which declared France’s support for other revolutionary movements throughout the world. To prove their friendly feelings for America, they conferred honorary citizenship on “Georges Washington, N. Madison, T. Paine, and Jean Hamilton.” (sic) Some people have puzzled over the omission of Thomas Jefferson. Perhaps it was a commentary on his association with the moderate Feuillants such as Lafayette during his time in Paris. They—and all their friends—were now scorned, derided, and soon would be on their way to the guillotine.

  Washington and Hamilton did not reply to this grant of citizenship, but “N. Madison” wrote an oozingly flattering reply, hailing the “sublime truths and precious sentiments in the revolution of France.” T. Paine, who had been banished from England, was in France and accepted the honor by joining the National Assembly in time to participate in the unanimous vote to exterminate royalty in France. “Kings,” the deputies proclaimed, “are in the moral order what monsters are in the physical.”17

  The stage was now set for what has become known as the September Massacres. The Secretary of State heard about them first in a letter from William Short. He reported “the arrestation, massacre or flight of all those who should be considered friends of the late constitution…The mob and demagogues of Paris have carried their fury in this line as far as it could go.” In a postscript, he told how the rioters were “menacing the assembly to immolate these victims without delay.” He predicted there would soon be “proceedings, under the cloak of liberty, égalité, and patriotism, as would disgrace any chambre ardente that has ever existed.” A chambre ardente was a sixteenth century court in which heretics had been tried and burned at the stake.

  A few days later, Jefferson was reading Gouverneur Morris’s report on September’s tidal wave of blood. The Jacobins and their s
upporters murdered well over a thousand priests, royalists, judges, editors—anyone decreed an enemy of the state. Morris described the death of the Princess de Lamballe, a member of the Queen’s household, in graphic detail. “She was beheaded and disemboweled, the head and entrails paraded on pikes and the body dragged after them through the streets.” At the building known as the Temple, where the King and Queen were being held prisoner, Marie Antoinette was forced to look out the window at the gruesome spectacle.18

  Another victim was Jefferson’s friend, the Duke de la Rochefoucauld, and his son. They were in their carriage when a mob attacked them, dragged them into the street, and stabbed and clubbed them to death before the horrified eyes of the Duke’s wife, William Short’s by now beloved friend, Rosalie. It was not the sort of news that would reconcile Jefferson’s protégé to the revolution. In the National Assembly, an ecstatic Maximilian Robespierre called the mass murders proof that they were conducting “the most beautiful revolution that has ever honored humanity.” His journalist friend, Jean Paul Marat, agreed wholeheartedly. “Let the blood of traitors flow,” he said. “That is the only way to save the country.”19

  The Secretary of State received Morris’s letter on January 10, 1793. He already knew about the September Massacres from American newspapers, many of which expressed disgust and outrage. Jefferson’s political spokesman, Philip Freneau, displayed a very different point of view. He was irked to see some newspapers censuring the French as “barbarous and inhuman.” What had they done? Killed “two or three thousand scoundrels to rescue the liberties of millions of honest men.” Freneau compared this to the villainy of the French royal family, “the vain wars of whom covered the earth with the blood of innocent individuals from one end of Europe to another.”20