Traveling Through Revolutions: Chastellux, Barlow, and Transatlantic Political Cultures, 1776–1812

Abstract

The American and French Revolutions at the end of the eighteenth century stimulated the development of an optimistic, liberal, transatlantic political culture that united the advocates of both revolutions. Of course nobody knew in the early 1780s that the American Revolution would be followed before the end of that decade by a revolution in Europe, but the revolutionary events in America attracted the attention of European intellectuals and took on new philosophical significance after the outbreak of the French Revolution. Writers on both sides of the Atlantic began to argue about the similarities and differences in these two modern revolutionary movements, thus launching a historical debate that continues down to our own day. Did the French Revolution express and extend the principles of America’s Revolution or did it break decisively from American ideas about government and civil society?¹ This complex, long-debated question remains a useful starting point for research on late eighteenth-century transatlantic dialogues, in part because it leads to important historical comparisons of texts and events that both promoted and denied human rights in Europe and America. My objective here, however, is to raise a somewhat different issue for cross-cultural comparisions by contrasting the political optimism of that revolutionary age with the widespread cynicism in the transatlantic political culture of our own era.