The French Who Broke Washington: How Citizen Genêt Incited the US Foreign Lobby Panic. Part I

It is a small irony of American history that the tool Genêt left behind, organized domestic pressure campaigns built to serve a foreign patron’s interests, would prove far more durable and far more useful than the man who improvised it.

This is a two-part story. Consider Part I the origin myth: the birth of American post-independence paranoia about foreign meddling, as told through the diplomatic equivalent of a toddler tantrum. Part II drags that same anxiety, kicking and screaming, into the twenty-first century, where it has learned better manners, better lawyers, and a considerably higher operating budget.

A Revolution America Loved, Until It Started Eating People

In 1789, the fall of the Bastille was, for most Americans, a satisfying sequel; the French, inspired by their own revolution, were apparently going to do to Versailles what the colonists had done to King George. Thomas Jefferson, who had spent formative years in Paris breathing the fumes of Enlightenment optimism, was thrilled. Then the sequel took a hard turn into slasher-film territory. By 1793, Maximilien Robespierre and the Jacobins had seized the machinery of state and set about using the guillotine as a policy instrument, dispatching roughly forty thousand people deemed insufficiently revolutionary. This bloodshed triggered America’s first major foreign policy crisis and birthed its two-party political system. A remarkable achievement, honestly; most countries need a war to build their first partisan divide. America managed it off the back of someone else’s civil massacre.

The split was tidy enough to sketch on a napkin. Jefferson, Secretary of State and unrepentant Francophile, decided the Terror was regrettable but survivable collateral damage in the march toward liberty. In January 1793 he wrote to William Short that the cause was worth almost any price, reasoning that he would rather see “an Adam and an Eve left in every country, and left free” than watch the revolution collapse. It is, even by the standards of eighteenth-century rhetorical excess, an unhinged sentence to put in an official diplomatic letter, the sort of thing that today gets you quietly removed from a State Department distribution list.

Alexander Hamilton took the opposite view, and he took it........

© New Eastern Outlook