In April 1793, “Citizen Edmond Charles Genet,” then just 29 years old, arrived to great fanfare in Charleston harbor. He bore diplomatic papers announcing him the new minister (ambassador) to the United States from France and instructions from his Girondist patrons to excite American fervor in France’s war against England and Spain.
With tacit encouragement from Secretary of State Thomas Jefferson, the new French minister incited American privateers to invade Spanish territories in the old southwest, ran a full circuit of burgeoning Democrat-Republican Societies that formed in opposition to George Washington’s administration, recruited American sailors in the French cause and outfitted and armed American ships for war against English colonial positions. All of these activities constituted a massive breach with diplomatic norms and violated the American government’s firm commitment to remain neutral in European wars.
Federalists agonized over Genet’s contemptuous interference in American policy. The stalwart Federalist John Adams, who was vice president at the time, was horrified by Genet’s attempts to rally the American people against their own president.Writing many years after the fact, he shuddered at the memory of “Ten thousand People in the Streets of Philadelphia, day after day, threaten[ing] to drag Washington out of his House and effect a Revolution in the Government, or compel it to declare War in favour of the French Revolution, and against England.”
As was his wont, Adams exaggerated. But Genet certainly knew how to push the envelope. The final straw came when the minister rechristened an impounded British ship the Petite Démocrate and launched it on its way to France in open defiance of George Washington. Adding insult to injury, Genet — who thought he understood American politics, but didn’t — threatened to circumvent the president altogether and appeal directly to the people. Surely they would endorse his project to expand the “Empire de la Liberté” throughout the North American continent by seizing British and Spanish possessions.
“Is the Minister of the French Republic to set the Acts of this Government at defiance, with impunity?” asked an enraged Washington. “And then threaten the Executive with an appeal to the People? [What] must the world think of such conduct, and of the Government of the U. States in submitting to it.”
Ultimately, Washington proved the better student of American politics than Genet, whose Republican allies even acknowledged the damage he did for his cause. (The verdict is still out on Ron Dermer.)
The “Citizen Genet Affair” ultimately ended as bizarrely as it originally unfolded. In 1794, after the administration demanded that the French minister be recalled, the Jacobin faction— by then fully in control and unleashing its “reign of terror” —issued a call for Genet’s return. Realizing that his probable fate was the guillotine, Genet pled for asylum, and George Washington, the same president whom he so openly defied, allowed the former diplomat to remain in the United States. He lived out his days as a prosperous gentleman farmer in the Hudson Valley, where he died in 1834.
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Of course, in 1793 as today, the tumult over Citizen Genet was less about France than it was about domestic politics.
Americans in the 1790s were sharply divided over concrete questions concerning political economy. Federalists tended to support a mixed society of small farmers and manufacturers. They were tolerant of paper money, a permanent federal debt and tariffs that would — all at once — fund that debt, support homegrown industry and forge allegiance to a central state. Many Republicans, on the other hand, preferred an agrarian society of small, independent farmers; they distrusted banks, permanent debt, standing armies and centralized authority.
On a more fundamental level, Federalists adhered to increasingly archaic ideas about the social composition of the nation. They saw the body politic as organic and unbroken: There was one common good, and men of education and achievement could be counted on to act with disinterest and virtue in furthering the needs of the whole. Republicans were, in some ways, more realistic about what America had become. They believed the country was too diverse, too populous and too advanced to entertain a single, common interest. More to the point, they saw nothing wrong with various interests competing with each other on an even and level playing field.
Josh Zeitz has taught American history and politics at Cambridge University and Princeton University and is the author of Lincoln’s Boys: John Hay, John Nicolay, and the War for Lincoln’s Image. He is currently writing a book on the making of Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society. Follow him @joshuamzeitz.