Parades and the Politics of the Street by Newman Simon P.;

Author:Newman, Simon P.;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
Published: 2018-08-15T00:00:00+00:00

Throughout 1793, 1794, and 1795 the French Revolution provided partisans of the Democratic Republican party with some of their most effective weapons in the battle against the Federalists, and many ordinary folk gave both life and political power to these events, expressing their displeasure at Federalist policies and ideals that seemed rooted in counterrevolutionary ideology, and which were destined to hurt their material interests. While white Americans continued to invoke their own revolutionary heritage and the exceptionalism inherent to that invocation, this partisan adoption and employment of the French Revolution—an event with far greater significance for the shaping of modern nations and democracies than the American war for independence—suggests that on this one point Americans who celebrated the French Revolution shared a more worldly viewpoint than was shared by those who condemned it.150

But from 1796 on, the increasing belligerence of the French Revolution and the rising tide of condemnation by American clergymen, together with the ensuing decline of Franco-American relations that continued until the turn of the century, combined to encourage Democratic Republican leaders to distance themselves from the French Revolution.151 As French armies conquered more and more of Europe, Jefferson and his allies began to recognize the threat that French power posed to American interests, and they distanced themselves from the French. Yet many ordinary Americans took far longer to move away from France, and celebrations of French victories continued until the end of the century. In Boston, for example, the sailors on board the ship Eagle celebrated Bastille Day in 1796 with “distinguished conviviality.”152 The following spring “between two and three hundred citizens assembled at Kensington” outside Philadelphia, in order to celebrate French victories in Italy. In a toast to “The ship-carpenters of Kensington—May the next treaty made by our government give them bread instead of a stone,” these mechanics and artisans articulated their informed opposition to Federalist policies. Another toast to “The patriots of 1776” and “the spirit which animated them in that crisis” says something of their radical ideology, as did one to the American Republic, which hoped that “the glory of her revolution [may] never be tarnished by base ingratitude, or by a coalition with tyrants.”153 Cobbett dismissed these “ship-carpenters” as “seditious persons,” who thus had no legitimate place or role in national politics.154

Although these events were far more rare than the celebrations of the early to mid-1790s, they were kept alive by such ordinary folk as these and the pioneering yeoman farmers of Fayette County in Kentucky who celebrated French victories in Italy in 1800. This suggests that popular creation of and participation in French Revolutionary festive culture was by no means contingent on the enthusiasm of the Democratic Republican leadership. Ordinary citizens exercised more control than ever over the shape and content of these celebrations, expressing ideals that in some sense held Democratic Republican leaders to account: in one toast Kentucky citizens saluted Thomas McKean, the newly elected Democratic Republican governor of Pennsylvania, as an “old fashioned republican of 1776, who acknowledges no sovereign but the people.

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