Abstract
The image and perceptions of the American Revolution in France powerfully influenced French military thought and reform in the late eighteenth century. When the war broke out in 1775, France was already knee-deep in its intense efforts to reform the army, and civilian French writers had been puzzling for decades over how to create a more virtuous society and a more efficient army. While military reformers attempted to improve the army by elevating the soldier’s status and increasing his sense of patriotism, they witnessed a tangible and contemporary example of victorious citizen soldiers across the Atlantic. A broader readership likewise embraced the American image of a citizen army fighting out of patriotism, and saw in the American Revolution proof that the virtue and patriotism of the ancient world had been reborn in the modern one.
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Notes
For a nineteenth- and twentieth-century historiography of the French and American Revolutions, see Martin Lathe Nicolai, ‘Subjects and Citizens: French Officers and the North American Experience, 1755–1783,’ (Ph.D. diss., Queen’s University, 1992), 19–25.
Lloyd Kramer, Lafayette in Two Worlds: Public cultures and personal identities in an age of Revolutions (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996).
Gilbert Bodinier, Les Officiers de L’Armée Royale: Combattants de la guerre d’Indépendance des Etats-Unis de Yorktown à l’an II (Chateau Vincennes: Service Historique de L’armée de Terre, 1983);
Samuel Scott, From Yorktown to Valmy (Colorado: University Press of Colorado, 1998).
Number of subscriptions of Gazette de France in 1781: 12,000; number of subscriptions of Gazette de Leyde in 1778: 2,560. See Jeremy Popkin, News and Politics in the Age of the Revolution (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1989), 48, 121.
Popkin, News and Politics, 87, 76. For more on the inaccuracy of international reporting on the American Revolution, see William Slauter, ‘News and Diplomacy in the Age of the American Revolution,’ (Ph.D. diss., Princeton University, 2007).
An analysis of some of the major themes of the Affaires can be found in August W. Eberle, ‘The American Revolution in the Affaires de l’Angleterre et de l’Amérique, 1776–1779,’ (Ph.D. diss., Kansas State, 1939);
and George B. Watts, Les Affaires de l’Angleterre et de l’Amérique and John Adams (Charlotte: Heritage Printers Inc., 1965), 1–10.
Briefer mentions of the periodical can be found in Elise Marienstras and Naomi Wulf, ‘French Translations and Reception of the Declaration of Independence,’ Journal of American History 85 (March, 1999): 1299–324;
Bernard Faÿ, L’esprit révolutionnaire en France et aux Etats-Unis à la fin du XVIIIe siècle (Paris: E. Champion, 1925).
More recent treatment is by William Slauter in ‘News and Diplomacy’ and ‘Forward-Looking Statements: News and Speculation in the Age of the American Revolution,’ Journal of Modern History 81 (December 2009): 759–92.
Durand Echeverria, Mirage of the West: A History of the French Image of American Society to 1815 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1957), 56; Watts, Les Affaires de l’Angleterre et de l’Amérique and John Adams, 1.
Caroline Cox, A Proper Sense of Honor: Service and Sacrifice in George Washington’s Army (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004), ix, 238.
Armstrong Starkey, European and Native American Warfare 1675–1815 (University of Oklahoma Press, 1998), 111–12.
Jacques-Antoine Hippolyte, comte de Guibert, ‘Essai Général de Tactique,’ in Ecrits militaires, ed. Henri Ménard (Paris: Copernic, 1976), 67.
See the Journals of Louis-Alexandre Bertheir, Jean-Baptiste Antoine de Verger, Jean-François-Louis de Clermont-Crèvecoeur in The American Campaigns of Rochambeau’s Army, ed. trans. Howard C. Rice, Jr and Anne S.K. Brown (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1972);
see also Louis de Récicourt de Ganot, ‘Voyage au continent américain par un Français en 1777 et Réflexions philosophiqes sur ces nouveaux Républicains,’ ed. trans. Durand Echeverria and Orville T. Murphy in Military Analysis of the Revolutionary War, ed. Don Higginbotham (Millwood: KTO Press, 1977);
Chevalier de Pontgibaud, ‘Journal,’ ed. and trans. Hugh F. Rankin in Narratives of the American Revolution (Chicago: R.R. Donnelley & Sons Company, 1969).
Birn, Royal Censorship of Books; Joyce Appleby, ‘America as a Model for the Radical French Reformers of 1789,’ William and Mary Quarterly, 28 (1971): 267–86.
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© 2015 Julia Osman
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Osman, J. (2015). A Citizen Army in America. In: Citizen Soldiers and the Key to the Bastille. War, Culture and Society, 1750–1850. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137486240_5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137486240_5
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