Abstract
The French revolutionaries challenged the diplomatic culture of the old regime and created a new theater of power in etiquette, language, and dress. These men created a new symbolic system and used rituals to forge a revolutionary community. The elaborate and punctilious, not to say litigious, attention to form and style that had characterized the old regime was echoed in the new. This defiance of the commonly accepted mores of the old regime led Burke to label these revolutionaries “outlaws of humanity.” For many compromise became impossible and conflict inevitable and permanent. For the British Secretary of State, Grenville, the principles and actions of the French left no hope for peace.
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- 1.
Quoted in Frederick C. Beiser, Enlightenment, Revolution, and Romanticism: The Genesis of Modern German Political Thought, 1790–1800 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992), 178.
- 2.
Isaac Deutscher, The Prophet Armed: Trotsky : 1879–1921 (London: Oxford University Press, 1954), 371. See David Armstrong, Revolution and World Order: The Revolutionary State in International Society (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993), for a discussion of the diplomacy implications of revolutionary states.
- 3.
Linda and Marsha Frey, “‘The Reign of the Charlatans is Over’: The French Revolutionary Attack on Diplomatic Practice,” The Journal of Modern History 65, no. 4. (December 1993): 707.
- 4.
David Cannadine, “Introduction: Divine Rites of Kings,” in Rituals of Royalty: Power and Ceremonial in Traditional Societies, edited by David Cannadine and Simon Price, 1–19 (Cambridge: University Press, 1987), 1.
- 5.
Quoted in Frans De Bruyn, “Theater and Countertheater in Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France,” in Burke and the French Revolution: Bicentennial Essays, edited by Steven Blakemore (Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 1992), 28.
- 6.
David A. Bell , The First Total War (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2007), 87–89 and 109.
- 7.
Frédéric Masson, Le Département des affaires étrangères pendant la Révolution, 1787–1804 (Paris: E. Plon, 1877), 271.
- 8.
Virginie Martin , “Les Enjeux diplomatiques dans le Magasin encyclopédique (1795–1799): du rejet des systèmes politiques à la redéfition des rapports entres les nations,” La Révolution française: Cahiers de l’Istitute d’histoire de la Révolution française 1 (2012): 24, footnote 23.
- 9.
Ibid., 5.
- 10.
Quoted in Justin Hart, “Archibald MacLeish Rediscovered: The Poetry of U.S, Foreign Policy,” Historically Speaking: The Bulletin of the Historical Society 8, no. 3 (January/February 2007): 21.
- 11.
Quoted in Pierre Treilhard, La Sensibilité révolutionnaire (1789–1794) (Geneva: Slatkine reprints, 1967), 18.
- 12.
Jacques-Pierre de Brissot de Warville , Rapport fait à la Convention nationale au nom du comité diplomatique sur la négociation entre Genève et la République de France, et sur la transaction du 2 novembre 1792 (Paris: Imprimérie nationale, 1792), 5.
- 13.
A.N., D XXIII, carton 2, dossier 34, Society of the Friends of the Constitution to the Diplomatic Committee , Nantes, 28 February 1791.
- 14.
John Quincy Adams , Writings (New York: Macmillan, 1913–1917), 2: 211, to John Adams, 21 September 1797. See Marvin R. Zahniser, Uncertain Friendship: American-French Relations through the Cold War (New York: Wiley, 1975), 73.
- 15.
Maurice Agulhon , “Politics and Images in Post-Revolutionary France,” in Rites of Powers: Symbolism, Ritual, and Politics since the Middle Ages, ed. Sean Wilentz (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1985), 194–195.
- 16.
Clifford Geertz , “Centers, Kings and Charisma: Reflections on the Symbolics of Power,” in Rites of Power, ed. Wilentz, 30.
- 17.
Clifford Geertz , “Ideology as a Cultural System” in Ideology and Discontent, ed. David E. Apter (New York: Free Press of Glencoe, 1964), 63–64.
- 18.
Geertz , “Centers, Kings and Charisma: Reflections on the Symbolics of Power,” in Rites of Power, ed. Sean Wilentz, 30.
- 19.
Edward Muir , Ritual in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge: University Press, 1997), 4.
- 20.
Richard Stites , “Russian Revolutionary Culture: Its Place in the History of Cultural Revolutions,” in Culture and Revolution, edited by Paul Dukes and John Dunkley (London: Pintner, 1990), 138.
- 21.
Crane Brinton , A Decade of Revolution, 1789–1799 (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1934), 142–150.
- 22.
Edmund Burke , “Letters on a Regicide Peace” in The Works of The Right Honourable Edmund Burke (London: George Bell and Sons, 1893), 5: 215.
- 23.
Ibid., 5: 208. Lotman called this “the poetics of every day behavior.” Quoted in Peter Burke, Varieties of Cultural History (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1997), 194.
- 24.
Robert Darnton, “The French Revolution: Intellectuals and Literature,” Lecture, University of Montana, June 1, 1989.
- 25.
Ronen Steinberg, “Naming a Difficult Past after 9 Thermidor ,” paper presented at the Consortium on the Revolutionary era, 1750–1850, 24 February 2017.
- 26.
The revolutionaries replaced the Gregorian calendar with a revolutionary one which was both rational and commemorative. It began on 22 September 1792, the first day of the Republic, thus 1 vendémiaire, year I. The ten-day décade displaced the seven-day week. The months with three décades were renamed according to a nature. Thus, nivôse (snow). Adopted in October 1793, it lasted until Napoleon abolished it in 1806.
- 27.
Lynn Hunt , Politics, Culture and Class in the French Revolution (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1984); Maurice Agulhon , Marianne au combat: L’Imagerie et la symbolique républicaines de 1789 à 1880 (Paris: Flammarion, 1979); Mona Ozouf , Festivals and the French Revolution (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1988). For a more extended discussion of festivals, see James R Lehning, The Melodramatic Thread: Spectacles and Political Culture in Modern France (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2007), in particular the introduction.
- 28.
François Furet , Interpreting the French Revolution (Cambridge: University Press, 1981), 78 and 130.
- 29.
Hunt , Politics, Culture and Class in the French Revolution, 15; Furet, Interpreting the French Revolution, 77.
- 30.
See, for example, Stéphanie Roza and Pierre Serna, ed., “La Révolution ou l’invention de la femme et de l’homme nouveaux” La Révolution francaise: Cahiers de l’Institute de la Révolution française, 6 (2014).
- 31.
Maurice Agulhon , “Politics and Images in Post-Revolutionary France,” in Rites of Power, ed. Wilentz, 199.
- 32.
Quoted in Beiser, Enlightenment, Revolution and Romanticism, 178.
- 33.
Charles Popham Miles, ed., The Correspondence of William Augustus Miles on the French Revolution 1789–1817 (London: Longmans, Green and Co., 1890), 2: 9, December 1792.
- 34.
B. L., Add. Mss. 58980 fol. 21, Sir Sidney Smith to Grenville, 13 January 1795, quoting his brother Spencer.
- 35.
T. C. W. Blanning , The Origins of the French Revolutionary Wars (London: Longman, 1986), 208, 73.
- 36.
Quoted in ibid.
- 37.
Quoted in ibid., 116.
- 38.
Quoted in Bell , The First Total War, 1.
- 39.
Philippe-Joseph-Benjamin Buchez and Prosper-Charles Foux, eds., Histoire parlementaire de la Révolution française (Paris: Paulin, 1834), 6: 77, 20 May 1790.
- 40.
Ozouf, Festivals and the French Revolution, 10.
- 41.
Bell , The First Total War, 115.
- 42.
Calonne quoted in Marc Belissa , “Can a Powerful Republic Be Peaceful? The Debate in the Year IV on the Place of France in the European Order,” in Republics at War Republics at War, 1776–1840: Revolutions, Conflicts and Geopolitics in Europe and the Atlantic World, edited by Pierre Serna, Antonio De Francesco, and Judith A. Miller (New York: Palgrave, 2013), 69.
- 43.
Pierre Serna, “Introduction: War and Republic: ‘Dangerous Liaison’” in ibid., 1.
- 44.
Ibid., 65.
- 45.
Hagley, W2-529, Pierre Samuel Du Pont de Nemours to Regnault de St. Jean d’Angély, 24 April 1798.
- 46.
Hagley, W3-372, 7 vend n.y. [28 Sept 1798], Victor Du Pont to his wife.
- 47.
Jean-Yves Guiomar , l’Invention de la guerre totale, XVIIIe–XXe siècle (Paris: Félin, 2004). This view is not without its critics such as Peter Paret in The American Historical Review 112, no. 5 (December 2007): 1489–1491.
- 48.
Blanning , The Origins of the French Revolutionary War, 211.
- 49.
Furet , Interpreting the French Revolution, 127.
- 50.
Virginie Martin , “In Search of the ‘Glorious Peace’? Republican Diplomats at War, 1792–1799” in Republics at War, ed. Serna and De Francesco, 46.
- 51.
Ibid.
- 52.
See the example of Alquier in Munich in Léonce Pingaud, Jean de Bry (1760–1835) (Paris: Librairie Plon, 1909), 87.
- 53.
Stuart Woolf , Napoleon’s Integration of Europe (London: Routledge, 1991), 9.
- 54.
Ibid., 46.
- 55.
Karl von Clausewitz , On War, edited and translated by Michael Howard and Peter Paret (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1989), 332.
- 56.
Furet , Interpreting the French Revolution, 127.
- 57.
Karl Marx quoted in ibid., 129.
- 58.
Marc Belissa , “Introduction,” in Acteurs diplomatiques et ordre international XVIIIe–XIXe siècle, edited by Marc Belissa and Gilles Ferragu (Paris: Éditions Kimé, 2007), 8 and Marc Belissa , “Révolution française et ordre international” in Acteurs diplomatiques et ordre international XVIIIe–XIXe siècle, ed. Marc Belissa and Gilles Ferragu (Paris: Éditions Kimé, 2007), 41.
- 59.
Quoted in Bell , The First Total War, 98.
- 60.
Ibid., 1.
- 61.
Quoted in ibid., 79–80.
- 62.
Reynaud Morieux , “Patriotisme humanitaire et prisonniers de guerre en France et en Grande-Bretagne pendant la Révolution française et l’Empire,” in La Politique par les armes: Conflits internationaux et politisation (XVe–XIXe siècle), edited by Laurent Bourquin, Philippe Hamon, Alain Hugon and Yann Lagadec, 299–314. Rennes: Presses universitaires de Rennes, 2013.
- 63.
Dan Edelstein , The Terror of Natural Right: Republicanism, the Cult of Nature, and the French Revolution (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009), 3–4. Edelstein bases his explanation of the terror on an intellectual formulation that cannot explain what is essentially an emotional and visceral response conditioned at last partially by the viciousness of revolutionary struggles. See Marisa Linton, Choosing Terror: Virtue, Friendship and Authenticity in the French Revolution (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013).
- 64.
Marc Belissa , “Révolution française et ordre international” in Acteurs diplomatiques et ordre international XVIIIe–XIXe siècle, ed. Belissa and Ferragu, 41; Edelstein , The Terror of Natural Right, 30–32.
- 65.
Quoted in ibid., 261.
- 66.
B. L., Add Mss. 59020, fol. 112, Lord Robert Fitzgerald to Grenville , 13 January 1795.
- 67.
Quoted in Emma Vincent Macleod, A War of Ideas: British Attitudes to the Wars against Revolutionary France, 1792–1802 (Brookfield: Ashgate Publishing, 1998), 15.
- 68.
Quoted in ibid., 16.
- 69.
Quoted in ibid., 18.
- 70.
Ludwig Wittgenstein , On Certainty, edited by G. E. M. Anscombe and G. H. von Wright, translated by Denis Paul and G. E. M. Anscombe (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1969–1975), 23, 13, 17, and 35. Thanks to Nicholas Capaldi for bringing this selection to our attention.
- 71.
B. L., Add. Mss. 59094, fol. 5, Grenville to Sir M. Eden, 27 September 1793.
- 72.
B. L., Add. Mss 59067A, fols. 5–35, 20 December 1794 and [1800].
- 73.
Peter Burke, Popular Culture in Early Modern Europe (New York: Harper and Row, 1978), xi.
- 74.
Desch quoted in Arthur M. Eckstein, Mediterranean Anarchy, Interstate War, and the Rise of Rome (Los Angeles, CA: University of California Press, 2006), 185.
- 75.
Martin, “In Search of the ‘Glorious Peace’? Republican Diplomats at War, 1792–1799” in Republics at War, ed. Serna and De Francesco Martin, 47.
- 76.
Ibid., 59.
- 77.
Ibid., 53.
- 78.
Ibid., 51.
- 79.
Ibid., 48. Also see Patricer Gueniffey, Bonaparte, 1769–1802 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2015).
- 80.
Ibid., 52.
- 81.
Ibid., 58.
- 82.
Ibid., 60.
- 83.
Hagley, W3-261, Victor Du Pont to his family, 28 June 1795 and W3-262, Victor Du Pont his father Philadelphia 3 July 1795.
- 84.
Hagley, W3-1058, Letombe to Victor Du Pont , 26 Sept 1795.
- 85.
Hagley, W3-261, Victor Du Pont to his family, 28 June 1795, Philadelphia.
- 86.
Martin, “In Search of ‘Glorious Peace’? Republican Diplomats at War, 1792–1799” in Republics at War, ed. Serna and De Francesco, 47.
- 87.
Hagley, W3-1149, Boston , 7 mesidor IV [25 June 1796].
- 88.
Hagley, W3-1209, Mozard to Victor Du Pont , Boston , 26 frimaire, V [16 Dec 1796].
- 89.
Hagley, W3-261, Victor Du Pont to his family, 28 June 1795, Philadelphia.
- 90.
Edmund Burke , The Works of the Right Honorable Edmund Burke (Boston : Little, Brown and Company 1866), 4: 433, October 1793.
- 91.
Edmund Burke , The Speeches of the Right Honorable Edmund Burke in the House of Commons and in Westminster Hall (London: Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme and Brown, 1816), 3: 456.
- 92.
Friedrich Gentz , Fragments Upon the Balance of Power in Europe (London: Golden Square, 1806), 93.
- 93.
B. L., Add. Mss. 59041, fol. 106, Grenville to Stahremberg, Cleveland Row, 2 December 1797.
- 94.
Garrett Mattingly , Renaissance Diplomacy (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1955), 195–196.
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Frey, L., Frey, M. (2018). Introduction. In: The Culture of French Revolutionary Diplomacy. Studies in Diplomacy and International Relations. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-71709-8_1
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