We came to a church, where a podium had been set up.… [After] a prayer calling upon Heaven to bestow its blessing on the United States…a young man then went to the podium and began the customary reading of the déclaration des droits. This was truly a beautiful sight.... In this reading of the promises of independence, which have been so well kept; in this remembrance by an entire people of their nation’s inception; in this union of the present generation with a generation that has passed away…there was something deeply felt and truly grand.
So observed Alexis de Tocqueville on July 4, 1831, in a letter from Albany, New York, on his tour of the young nation that would result in the classic two-volume study, Democracy in America. Though referring to the American Declaration of Independence, Tocqueville used the name of another document with which he was more familiar—the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen, passed by the French National Assembly in 1789 when it established the short-lived constitutional monarchy. The revolutionaries soon dissolved that arrangement and sent the ill-starred Louis XVI to the scaffold, but the document endured, in the words of the great French historian Jules Michelet, as “the credo of the new age.”
Of course, it is possible that Tocqueville was referring to yet a third document, the Virginia Declaration of Rights, penned by George Mason in June of 1776. Proclaiming that all men are by nature equally free, possess inherent rights, and are entitled to the enjoyment of life and liberty, it also stipulated that all power derives from the people—formulations that directly influenced Thomas Jefferson’s wording of the Declaration of Independence. But the likelihood that the twenty-five-year-old Tocqueville was alluding to Mason’s document is slim. He knew virtually nothing about American history, his English was limited, and he was learning on the go. Only after leaving Albany, did he meet the New York state legislator John Spencer, who, having helped revise his own state’s constitution, gave the inquiring Frenchman his first lesson on US constitutional matters.
The two declarations that Tocqueville likely, if inadvertently, conflated—those of 1776 and 1789—were the products of historical moments of clarity and consensus in both America and France. In light of certain affinities between those documents, certain borrowings and certain differences, I would like to briefly expand upon the constitutional dialogue between the two countries from one moment to the other.
Even before the brash colonials won their independence from the British Crown, the French developed a genuine curiosity in the American experiment. Benjamin Franklin played a key role in satisfying that interest by effectively disseminating American ideas. Elected by Congress in 1776 to serve as commissioner to negotiate a treaty of alliance with France, he became Minister Plenipotentiary in 1778 when the French joined ranks with the Americans in their struggle against the English. Franklin was still in Paris in October 1781, when General Cornwallis surrendered to Washington at Yorktown, and remained in that post until May 1785.
During his seven years in Paris, Franklin orchestrated an ongoing dialogue between the two countries, significantly by promoting knowledge of American constitutional innovations. He commissioned French translations of the Declaration of Independence and of all state constitutions, including their bills of rights. In 1783, Franklin secured from the French foreign minister, Charles Gravier, Comte de Vergennes, the man most responsible for France’s support of the new nation, royal authorization to assemble the American constitutional texts in one volume. It became known in France as the “code of freedom” and was widely distributed in Franklin’s circle of progressive French elites. Perhaps most remarkable among the latter was the Marquis de Condorcet, a brilliant mathematician known for his work on probability and a philosopher of the enlightenment whose writings envisioned the continuous progress of humankind leading to ultimate perfection.
Succeeding Franklin as minister to France, Thomas Jefferson continued the work of spreading American ideas and countering misperceptions. He anonymously published his Notes on the State of Virginia in a French translation in 1785, one year before the publication of the English edition. Jefferson countered famous naturalist Georges-Louis LeClerc (better known by the name Count Buffon) who blamed what he characterized as the “degeneracy” of animal life in North America on the climate. He also disputed the claims of Abbé Raynal, a popular writer and propagandist, who belittled Americans for making no significant advances in the arts and sciences. In his intellectual combat with European critics, Jefferson enlisted the aid of his friend Philip Mazzei, a Virginia neighbor and wine grower near Monticello, who for a while lived in Paris. In 1788, Mazzei completed his Recherches sur les Etats-Unis, a four-volume work retracing American history with the aim of correcting various misconceptions about the New World. Mazzei also invited French contributors to the volume, one of whom, the philosopher Condorcet, writing under the pen name of a “Bourgeois of New-Haven,” argued the merits of a unicameral system against John Adams’s views. Recherches sur les Etats-Unis was a hasty production but a genuine contribution to French-American dialogue.
The question of whether there should one or two representative chambers sparked a critical debate in France. Some such as Jean Joseph Mounier, author of the Tennis Court Oath and parts of the 1789 French Declaration of the Rights of Man, eventually supported a unicameral system, even while sharing John Adams’s fear that a single assembly would end up “devouring us all.” As it turned out, the French revolutionaries rejected the bicameral system because they feared the higher chamber would naturally go to the aristocracy. In America, they reasoned, where no nobility existed, there was less danger and hence less fear of a class war between the two chambers.
Influential French figures also traveled to the United States, publishing detailed accounts of their journeys and otherwise contributing to the unfolding constitutional debate. Perhaps the most influential of them was Jacques-Pierre Brissot, a lawyer and journalist who published a newspaper called The French Patriot and was the founder of the Society of the Friends of the Blacks, a French abolitionist society. Brissot visited North America in 1788, meeting John Adams and John Hancock in Boston. Adams, a strong advocate for a bicameral legislature, expressed his misgivings about the direction the French debates over a future constitution was taking. When Brissot was elected representative for Paris in the National Assembly in 1791, he exercised a strong influence as head of the moderate Girondists (also called Brissotins), holding out for two chambers and championing American republican principles. But such moderation made him suspect, and he was guillotined in 1793 during the Jacobin-led Terror.
The French American dialogue about constitutional governance was built on a relationship of mutual aid. About 9,000 French soldiers had fought in the Battle of Yorktown in 1781 (a contingent that was almost as large as the American force of 10,000 to 11,000). Among the French veterans of the American war, the fourteen who became members of the French National Assembly in 1789 represented a significant constituency. The most influential among these was, of course, the Marquis de Lafayette, whose friendship with Jefferson critically influenced the writing of the French Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen.
Jefferson and Lafayette had first met in the dangerous days of 1781, when Jefferson was governor of Virginia and Lafayette marched a small army into the state to drive off the British invaders. Three years later, in France, they forged a deeper bond that, in the words of historian Merrill Peterson, “personified the historical nexus between the American and the French Revolution.” Because of his friendship with Lafayette, Jefferson became more than just a supportive observer of the early phase of the French Revolution. As historian Jonathan Israel has written, he figured “almost as a direct participant.”
Jefferson contributed personally to the writing of the French document. “Everybody here is trying their hands at forming declarations of rights,” Jefferson wrote to Madison on January 12, 1789. “As something of that kind is going on with you also, I send you two specimens from hence. The one is by our friend [Lafayette] of whom I have just spoken. You will see that it contains the essential principles of ours accommodated as much as could be to the actual state of things here.” In July, Lafayette sent another draft and Jefferson annotated it. Among imprescriptible rights of man, Lafayette had included property and the care of one’s honor. Jefferson wanted to delete these and leave only the care of one’s life, the power to dispose of one’s person and the fruits of one’s industry and of all faculties, the pursuit of happiness, and resistance to oppression. He had no objection to Lafayette’s reference to the sacredness of the king’s person.
The Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen was debated in the French National Assembly between August 17 and August 26 of 1789. Jean-Joseph Mounier and Abbé Sieyes were the main drafters. The first article of the French declaration was emphatic: “Men are born and remain free and equal in rights. Social distinctions may be based only on common utility” (which today would read as “on the common good”).
After consideration of the document, Jefferson wrote to Madison on August 28, 1789, “Our proceedings have been viewed as a model for them on every occasion; and though in the heat of debate men are generally disposed to contradict every [authority] urged by their opponents, ours has been treated like that of the Bible, open to explanation but not to question.” Was Jefferson justified in this characterization?
It was certainly an overstatement. Many in the assembly had expressed doubts. Among others, the Marquis de Lally Tollendal, influential representative from the nobility, argued that American ideas were not relevant to France. There was a dramatic difference between a small colonial people breaking away from a faraway government and a long established powerful governmental authority attempting to reform itself. Others pointed out that the relative social equality among Americans (white Americans, of course) made the declaration of a “theoretical equality” among all men inoffensive in that country but deeply problematic in France, with its long-established and deeply entrenched social hierarchies.
A large part of the French opinion held that the challenge to these aristocratic social hierarchies and the government they created had specifically domestic origins. The French Revolution was sui generis. American influence could only be negligible, because the French Revolution was unique in promoting universal principles—not principles of national independence from an oppressive colonizer. In this view, widely held, the French Revolution was the realization of French eighteenth-century philosophy. Victor Hugo famously expressed this view in Les Misérables, when Gavroche, a boy who lived on the streets of Paris, sings on the Barricades of 1830, long after 1789, “C’est la faute à Voltaire, C’est la faute à Rousseau.” (“It is Voltaire’s fault; it is Rousseau’s fault.”)
Tocqueville, in his book The Old Regime and the Revolution, his second masterpiece after Democracy in America, reflected on the abstract theories of government that a handful of men of letters had presumably promoted. He tried to understand how it had been possible that such a theoretical notion as that of a “general will,” which should have been confined within “a few philosophical heads,” took on the substance of political passion, spread, and became the basis of new institutions.
There was at least one eighteenth-century French philosopher, however, who had offered an answer to this difficult question. Condorcet, a friend of both Franklin and Jefferson, who contributed to the French Revolution until he was imprisoned during the Terror and found dead in his cell, held the American example to be crucial for France. Condorcet explained that philosophes, like himself, had indeed “rediscovered the long-lost notion of universal and equal rights well before the American Revolution.” But “they faced the great difficulty of how to diffuse this republican concept more widely in society” and to persuade the “‘ignorant’” who need “concrete, working examples.” Here, Condorcet went on, the American Revolution proved decisive for France by providing with its “Declaration of Independence, a simple and sublime exposition of those rights, so sacred and so long forgotten.”