Abstract
Approaching the Revolutionary era from a transnational perspective, this article explores the rich exchanges and collaborations between radical British and French popular societies. Both early French political and antislavery societies adapted their associational strategies from Anglo-American examples – indeed, borrowing the word ‘club’ itself to describe such organizations. Most significantly, in November 1789, correspondence from the London Revolution Society directly inspired the founding of the Paris Jacobin Club, and the integrated national network the Jacobins formed consciously built from British designs. By 1792, active experimentation proliferated in both nations as the Jacobins radicalized, and their example boomeranged to motivate the creation of a more integrated radical political network in Britain, the London Corresponding Society. Utilizing club correspondence, radical newspapers and pamphlets, and personal communications between key members, this article seeks to demonstrate the applied power of Revolutionary cosmopolitanism and transnational epistolary connections. Whereas prior scholarship of these connections has been largely limited to the French Revolution’s influence on Britain, the extent of the British influence on the early Jacobins has been virtually ignored. This account attempts to highlight the rich mutual exchanges that inspired the most radical and influential movements of the Revolutionary age.
The London Revolution Society’s entry into French Revolutionary politics helped inspire the creation of the Jacobin Club network. On 25 November 1789, the French National Assembly heard the session’s President read a letter from the British club, which ‘distaining National partialities’, declared its approbation of France’s revolution and ‘the prospect it gives to the two first Kingdoms in the World of a common participation in the blessings of Civil and Religious Liberty’. By asserting the ‘inalienable rights of mankind’, revolution could make ‘the World free and happy’. The address produced a ‘great sensation’ and loud applause in the Assembly, which wrote back to London declaring how it had seen ‘the aurora of the beautiful day’ when the two nations could put aside their differences and ‘contract an intimate liaison by the similarity of their opinions, and by their common enthusiasm for liberty’. 1 Within a week, growing Anglophilia helped provide the impetus for the founding of Paris’s own Société de la Révolution, which in January 1790 finally adopted the better known title of Société des amis de la Constitution, retaining the English-style nickname Club des Jacobins. 2
The late 1780s saw the rise of newly inclusive and increasingly cosmopolitan social movements. Liberty and rights, concepts previously restricted to certain nations and privileged groups, could increasingly be applied to anyone, anywhere. Only low barriers existed between different movements and countries: indeed the reduction of borders, boundaries and old hatreds appeared of great importance for righting past abuses. 3 Antislavery, reform and Jacobin associational efforts would readily share ideas, strategies and personnel, drawn from similar bases of support. While radical club networks would come to stretch across much of the world over the Revolutionary decade, the most innovative exchanges passed between old rivals France and Britain. The antislavery movement’s growth in Britain after 1787 began to inspire emulators in France. Dissenting Protestants, who dominated the London Revolution Society, saw the rise in concern for universal rights as an opportunity to push for full inclusion in British political life. Early French Jacobins created their network in consultation with British models, whose power the ‘British Jacobins’ from 1792 onwards would seek to reapply at home. The most prominent social movements of the age arose through transnational exchanges between radicals, adapting freshly developing ideas and practices to new ends.
As Revolutionary historians make the Global Turn, it becomes necessary to remove certain nationalist lenses to view aspects of the age anew. ‘Révolution française’ itself was a far less common term at the time than ‘La Révolution’, a process accelerating in one country, but possessing both older origins and universal targets. National sentiment, by contrast, during the early Revolution seemed to many a medieval relic of the despotic wars of kings and a concept whose time had passed. Revolutionaries, working to abolish ‘despotism’ in France, pressed forward. Why should a Revolution with universal principles not be applied universally? And where could a more visible break with the past be made than through developing alliances between former French and British rivals? Though reaction amongst conservatives and French fears of invasion eventually led to the Revolutionary wars and the rise of modern nationalism, 4 trends towards greater cosmopolitanism, internationalism and universalism in the early Revolution appear equally profound.
The extent to which the Revolutionaries of 1789 were inspired by international examples has produced much debate, particularly in France. Though the Revolution’s premier early academic historian, Alphonse Aulard, asserted that ‘England and America influenced the elaboration of republican ideas in eighteenth-century France’, such statements became rarer and increasingly discouraged over much of the twentieth century. 5 Marcel Reinhard, Chair of the French Revolution at the Sorbonne, answered the first volume of Robert Palmer’s now-classic The Age of Democratic Revolutions in 1960 with a scathing review in the flagship journal Annales historiques de la Révolution française, declaring the supposed ‘difficulty of finding direct influence’ between eighteenth-century revolutions, while asserting that the ‘revolutionary power of France far surpassed, from the first step, all the other movements to which it has been compared’. 6 Only over the past decade, largely thanks to the Caribbean-centred scholarship of David Geggus, Laurent Dubois, Yves Bénot, and Jeremy Popkin, has the international dimension moved towards the centre of Revolutionary studies. 7
The growing historiographical interest in transnational history offers a major opportunity to reassess the international trends and influences impacting the Revolutionary age. This burgeoning field has thus far been dominated by studies of economics and empires, but the global currents and repercussions of radical ideas and their supporting networks may have been just as profound. Though the study of eighteenth-century epistolary exchange has increasingly emerged as a subfield, the existing scholarship has not explored the active transnational political connections between early French Revolutionaries and other Atlantic radical centres in any detail. 8 Though a large literature exists on the French Revolution’s impact, the subject is generally contoured as a uni-directional story of the French example, while the influences of foreign radicals upon revolutionaries in France, and the resulting mutual dialogues, remain under-explored. 9 Studying club interactions provides a major means through which to bridge connections between centres of late eighteenth-century radicalism, illuminating the extent of cosmopolitanism and desired universalism which marked the age. 10 Largely unnoted in overarching treatments of the era is the extent to which each of the Age of Revolution’s most prominent social movements directly corresponded with and built from prior exemplars: colonial America’s Sons of Liberty explicitly drew inspiration from and corresponded with radical clubs of John Wilkes-era Britain in the 1760s, early British Parliamentary reformers borrowed methods from the Americans, and early antislavery campaigns in both countries drew both radical activists and club practices from preceding movements. 11 Direct correspondence between British and French radical organizations between 1787 and 1793 would develop reciprocal and mutually inspiring relationships driving both sides towards integration.
Despite the clear French appropriation of the word ‘club’, the direct British link with the founding of the Jacobin network, and the regular correspondence between radical societies passing across the Channel, the connections between British and French clubs around the time of the Revolution have been little pursued by historians. Antislavery studies have almost exclusively focused upon divergences between the two countries, and little noted the extent of their interactions and influence. 12 In histories of the early Jacobins, Aulard mentions the London Revolution Society’s role in the network’s founding, but does not pursue the subject further. Michael Kennedy’s three-volume history of the Jacobin network in France only includes the relationship in a foreign policy chapter, isolated from the club’s domestic development. 13 The most recent French studies – the Atlas de la Révolution française’s volume on Sociétés politiques, Christine Peyrard’s Les Jacobins de l’Ouest and Michel Vovelle’s Les Jacobins – do not mention British influences on early French clubs at all. 14 While Rachel Hammersley has described the British ideological origins of some aspects of French Republicanism, seeing the Paris Cordeliers Club as a key conduit, no historian has explored in depth the active exchanges between the two countries’ political societies. 15 Through the examination of a wide range of printed and manuscript materials relating to the development of the club networks located in over twenty French and British archives and libraries, particularly the voluminous club correspondence circulating both nationally and internationally, much of the relationship can be reconstituted. Societies in Britain and France developed interactive epistolary exchanges across countries and movements, fuelling major changes for all involved.
This article looks at how British and French radical movements were in many respects mutually constituting, providing inspiration and examples for each other at key junctures. British reform and antislavery club networks helped inspire the creation of early French Revolutionary political societies between 1788 and 1790 through letters of friendship, and encouragement, corresponding regularly first with the Société des amis des noirs, and then, more significantly, helping inspire the rise of Jacobin Clubs throughout France. A new associational culture arose which strengthened connections between both Revolutionaries across France and with sympathizers abroad, helping to radicalize the movements involved. Though significant differences between French and British club networks remained, in their mutual dialogues we can see the international origins, development and aspirations of the age’s most important social movements.
I
Well established since the Restoration of Charles II, British political societies had by the 1780s become a mainstay of the country’s political system. Held in ‘public houses’ or private residences, devoted to either general discussion or specific causes, over 25,000 varied ‘clubs’ formed across the English-speaking world during the eighteenth century. 16 Most of these organizations remained proudly local: though exchanges of correspondence occurred, and visitors (including many French travellers) could gain temporary admission, British societies generally remained small and restricted by divisions of class, status and gender. 17 One French observer, Anne-Marie du Boccage, wrote of London in 1750 that ‘men of all levels have coteries where they impose the laws according to their own tastes’. 18 Formal political alliances between groups remained rare, as clubs instead typically emphasized their independence. The Wilkesite Society of the Supporters of the Bill of Rights, founded in 1769, featured at its height a modest 12 affiliated societies. 19 Though widespread petitioning campaigns occurred first in support of Wilkes, and then in the Christopher Wyvill-led Yorkshire Association reform movement of 1779–84, these campaigns were largely directed through electoral assemblies and corporate structures. 20
The antislavery societies which formed and affiliated from 1787 onwards represented a new type of social movement in Britain, bringing freestanding organizations across every county into a concerted national political campaign. Building from earlier Quaker and American social movements opposing the brutalities of slavery, as well as growing interest in universal human rights, the Society for Effecting the Abolition of the Slave Trade sought to achieve its aim through publicity and organization. Society leaders spread knowledge of colonial practices through a combination of speeches, pamphlets and newspaper articles, and thereafter encouraged the formation of local societies to both further diffuse knowledge and petition Parliament for political redress. 21 The Manchester branch soon proved the most vocal, and in December 1787 sponsored a circular letter to ‘every principal town throughout Great Britain’, as well as ‘every other Friend to this Cause of Humanity’, to help procure the end of the slave trade. 22 Underscoring its commitment, the Manchester committee reported less than two months later a total of 11,000 signatures – two-thirds of all local men eligible. 23 Petitions from over one hundred areas arrived during the first half of 1788, prompting the first Parliamentary debates on ending the trade. 24
The British antislavery effort rapidly gained French adherents, even though French political societies had only a short history before 1787. Most Enlightenment-era salons remained closely connected with important state officials, and usually muted direct political critique. 25 Though Wilkes had gained admirers (and took periodic residence) in France in the 1760s, no groups there had organized on his behalf. 26 A new variety of explicitly political discussion-groups, the ‘musées’, described by a high police official as ‘imitated from the English’, arose in 1779, and by 1783 it became fashionable in Paris to refer to a variety of philanthropic, artistic and literary groups as ‘clubs’. 27 The abolition campaign quickly attracted French reformers. Within three months of the British society’s founding, the London leadership accepted Jacques-Pierre Brissot and Etienne Clavière’s offer to form a Paris-based Société des amis des noirs, working to abolish the French traffic. In late January 1788, the Société published an open address in the Comte de Mirabeau’s recently founded Analyse des papiers anglois proclaiming the imminent success of the British campaign, and inviting ‘all friends of humanity’ to ‘prepare this Revolution in France’. 28 The French should join the British, an early pamphlet declared, ‘to advance the system of peace and fraternity which must unite all peoples’. 29 Even as the Analyse published detailed descriptions of the British mobilization effort, however, the response in France would be slow. 30
Early French interest also developed in American examples, though their relationship did not become as close as with the British. In 1787, a year before Brissot and Clavière founded the Société des amis des noirs, the two began a Société Gallo-américaine in Paris, to help the two countries ‘better understand each other’ and build closer cultural and financial relationships. 31 Though the club did not succeed, in May 1788 Brissot departed on a seven-month voyage to America. With letters of introduction from both British abolitionists and the Marquis de Lafayette, from Boston to Philadelphia he found himself received with ‘l’accueil le plus flatteur’ by both antislavery activists and older revolutionary radicals like Samuel Adams. 32 After returning to France, Brissot completed and published a three-volume account of his trip, so the French could ‘observe men who conquered their liberty’, even while playing an important role in the early Revolution. 33
Many during the Revolution would share his interest: Thomas Jefferson, James Monroe and other Americans would be widely fêted during their stays in France, while an American flag flew in the Paris Jacobin Club alongside the French and British, and word of Benjamin Franklin’s death in 1790 led to widespread public mourning. 34 However, there were more limitations to the Franco-American relationship than the Franco-British one. Despite limited correspondence between the Société des amis and the Pennsylvania Abolition Society in 1790–91, the distance separating the countries did not allow for efficient epistolary exchange – whereas correspondence could pass from Paris to London as quickly as to Marseille – and many in France did not find America’s example as applicable to their society as that of the British. 35
In contrast to the consolidating American political system, the British in the late 1780s appeared poised for a new era of radical change. The liberating possibilities of the antislavery movement helped reinvigorate calls for parliamentary reform. Inspired by the campaigns of Wilkes and Wyvill against alleged infringements of English liberties, Protestant Dissenters renewed their attempts to overturn the Test and Corporation Acts, which restricted non-Anglicans from holding political office. Dissenters in December 1786 adopted a similar organizational structure as the later British antislavery movement, with a central committee in London directing instructions, diffusing publications and orchestrating petitions from the provinces. The movement gathered force between 1787 and 1789, motivating multiple Parliamentary attempts for repeal – the last of which failed by only 20 votes. Like the antislavery movement, Dissenters described their movement as a struggle of ‘liberty, good sense, and humanity’ fighting ‘oppressive, dishonourable, and pernicious statutes’. 36 If the Dissenters had succeeded, the elimination of other restrictions on British suffrage might well have followed. By late 1789, concurrently inspired by the French granting of civil rights to Protestants, the Dissenters’ repeal campaign would become the most aggressively cosmopolitan of British social movements.
Despite France’s rapid politicization during 1788 and 1789, and the advances made by their British counterparts, in the early Revolution extra-governmental political networks remained uncommon. Popular political societies had met state repression throughout the crises of 1787 and 1788, which only relaxed under the Necker ministry thereafter. 37 The Société des amis, despite their declared admiration for Anglo-American antislavery models, remained an elite, Parisian movement. In March 1788, Brissot called for a wider campaign, with a larger distribution of antislavery writings and a newspaper which could create ‘general enthusiasm’ and be ‘devoured with avidity by artisans, farmers and men of all classes’. 38 Though the organization declined the venture, and in June 1789 still rejected taking ‘la forme du club’, its members – including future Jacobins like Brissot, Mirabeau, Lafayette, the Marquis de Condorcet, Henri Grégoire and Maximillien Robespierre – became increasingly aware through such debates of the forms and effects of Anglo-American social movements. 39
Hoping to encourage Franco-British direct action on colonial slavery, British abolitionists sent Thomas Clarkson, their most successful political organizer, to France in the autumn of 1789. Clarkson, expressing himself in a letter to Mirabeau after his arrival, saw antislavery as inseparable from the French Revolutionaries’ cause of liberty, believing that without colonial reforms ‘very serious Revolutions (if they have not already happened) will take Place there’. Pushing for abolition of the slave trade and the ‘amelioration’ of colonial slavery, Clarkson first approached the existing Société des amis. 40 The group appeared in disarray, however, with a sparsely attended meeting limiting its objectives to lobbying minister Jacques Necker. Clarkson also found powerful amis in the legislature unwilling to push for immediate abolition. He did, however, remain in France for six months, lobbying legislators and distributing printed material both on the horrors of the slave trade, and the formation of the British antislavery societies themselves. 41
The direct prompting which led to the creation of the French Jacobin network, however, came from a relatively minor group in British reform politics, the London Revolution Society. The club, featuring prominent liberal intellectuals such as Richard Price and Charles Stanhope, looked to build consensus for Dissenter civil rights through mobilizing nationwide celebrations of the Glorious Revolution’s centennial in 1788. Disastrously, however, the illness of King George III led to the cancellation of most celebrations. 42 Inspired by the early French Revolution, the Revolution Society’s members sent their felicitations. Having already, on 20 July 1789, greeted news of the Bastille’s fall with a resolution to continue correspondence with revolutionaries to help ‘the Sons of Freedom to assert their Rights’, club members at a banquet held on 4 November 1789 adopted an address to the National Assembly. 43 Writing as ‘Men, Britons, and Citizens of the World’, the Revolution Society expressed its ‘ardent wishes that the influence of so glorious an example may be felt by all Mankind’, until ‘Universal Liberty and Happiness prevail’. 44 The address would make the Revolution Society famous throughout France, and inspire ongoing correspondence between the society and the soon multiplying number of French clubs. 45
The Jacobin network did not emerge from a vacuum, but rather from the intellectual ferment and social mobilization occurring during the late 1780s. The new campaigns’ cosmopolitan reach – speaking in the name of broad human and/or political rights – encouraged the development of widely applicable methods for building support. With the rise of effective club networks in Britain, and growing interest in the possibilities of associational life in France, early Jacobins would find models to adapt for their own fledgling societies.
II
Despite the early Revolution’s rapidly expanding democratic sociability, until November 1789 formal clubs did not play a major role in its political process. The electoral districts which served a similar debating function in late 1788 and early 1789 took governing power in July’s Municipal Revolutions, making them less suitable for wide-ranging discussions. Among early political societies, the Breton Club, often described as the Jacobins’ predecessor, began as a debating society for those serving in the Estates General. Though playing a central role in the crisis surrounding the Tennis Court Oath, it would revert to being a provincial Breton caucus by the October Days. 46 Coalitions between radical groups were slow to form, and the conservative Monarchiens, featuring elite adherents both in the National Assembly and Paris society, appeared more powerful in the summer and autumn of 1789. 47 Radical Parisian sociability then centred upon the fluid scene at the Palais-Royal, though growing repression – particularly after the events of August and October 1789 – decreased the area’s influence. 48 No extra-governmental structure existed for Revolutionaries across France. The Jacobin network’s rise appeared to represent a break not just from the Old Regime, but also from the early Revolution, which also lacked organizations for the cultivation and diffusion of radical opinion.
Though the early Jacobin network appears to have organized covertly in the months following the Revolution Society’s address, the surviving sources call our attention to the British origins of the ‘Club’. In a rare surviving founding document, the Jacobins of Strasbourg, in their January 1790 Act of Union, described their organization as founded on the model of the Paris Société de la Révolution, created in turn ‘on the inspiration of that established in London’. 49 The Chronique de Strasbourg elaborated how ‘America and England’s examples prove their utility’, in making both the ‘law respected’ and governmental ministers responsive to the populace. 50 The Jacobins of Montpellier in February 1790 declared how ‘This town’s citizens desire to form a club’, going on to specify in their bylaws that ‘the word ‘Club’ in English signifies an equal-paying group; the first founding principle of a club is thus equality’. The Montauban Jacobins, in their first writings, refer to themselves not as a Société, but as the Club des patriotes, while the Jacobins of Béziers chose club patriotique (the term ‘patriot’ itself being a foreign revolutionary import). 51 Early Jacobins saw not just a common name, but a direct connection between French and British clubs: those of Vire in their June 1790 founding bylaws accorded voting rights not just to local club members, but to all in attendance from other ‘Clubs patriotiques, whether French or foreign, who follow the same principles’. 52 The first Jacobin clubs looked outwards for both inspiration and affiliation, seeing themselves as part of wider international trends.
Typically taking the formal name of Société, however, the organizations paid homage to the French salons, scientific and literary societies which also served as important inspirations. Certain Jacobin clubs – such as those of Cherbourg and Albi – grew directly out of literary groups. 53 Even these types of organizations, however, had English origins: Diderot and d’Alembert’s Encyclopédie traced the existence of formal scientific societies to the Royal Society of London, chartered by Charles II, as the first occasion when philosophers could ‘assemble themselves to search for truths in peace’, an arrangement spreading to France only several decades later. 54 In many respects, the goals of such societies related directly to the new clubs, as they also looked to enlighten a greater number through diffusing specialized knowledge. ‘A Patriotic Society’, declared the prospectus of the Jacobins’ Journal des Clubs, ‘is a school in which one is instructed in the science of free government’. Sharing the results of governmental experimentation in ‘un commerce de pensées’ and spreading news of advancements appeared essential for the emerging New Regime’s success. 55
Balancing foreign and domestic examples, club partisans also quickly established justifications based upon the French Declaration of the Rights of Man and the agreed-upon portions of the forthcoming constitution. A 1790 justification by future Paris Mayor Jean-Nicolas Pache claimed clubs to be covered by Article XI of the Declaration, which guaranteed ‘the free communication of thoughts and opinions’ – itself an outgrowth of Anglo-American freedoms of speech and association. The constitution, meanwhile, would assure the ability to ‘assemble peacefully and without arms’ for political discussions. 56 Though such exchanges had already been occurring informally, clubs offered the possibility of institutionalization. From late 1789 – spurred by the National Assembly’s explicit permission in December for ‘citoyens actifs’ (those men with sufficient property for voting rights) to participate – clubs moved from the periphery to near the centre of Revolutionary politics. 57 By the end of 1790 over 300 such societies were established, the number climbing to over 1,200 by late 1791, and cresting at 3,500 in the Year II. 58
Expanded political sociability through local societies, proponents held, would both spread democratic civic virtues and strengthen the revolutionary order. Through developing the ‘grandeur and pride which belongs to a free nation’, the Journal des Clubs declared, associational life would help members ‘avoid extremes’ and develop more ‘unamistic’ [sic] spirit. 59 Building upon British and American examples, the elaboration of a denser civil society appeared necessary for educating active citizens. Yet the early Jacobins also went a step further: the same issue of the Journal also spoke not just of diffusing principles, but also of conducting ‘surveillance’, particularly against the municipal officials who had attempted to block Jacobin expansion into their locales. 60 The Revolution would need to be defended as well as propagated, with fraternity and vigilance both remaining enduring Jacobin principles.
Equally important as local cohesion would be the building of a national Jacobin correspondence network on a model largely borrowed from preceding Anglo-American radical club and antislavery organizations. Rapidly expanding across France from the end of 1789 through the first half of 1790, the movement in many ways served as a virtual twin to the large Federation gatherings drawing hundreds of thousands across the provinces. ‘[B]y such correspondence undertaken between Friends of the Constitution’, wrote the Jacobins of Carcassonne, ‘we can consolidate the bases of universal patriotism’. 61 Each club entered into communication with local societies in its region, as did larger centres with each other, and all with the Paris Comité de correspondance. Regional issues could thus be resolved internally, with each society also possessing a potential national (and even international) reach. ‘By rapid correspondence’, the Jacobins of Rouen wrote, ‘we can communicate inspirations and discoveries, mutually raising our patriotism, while also holding ourselves on guard’ more effectively against counterrevolutionaries. 62 The Jacobin network’s strength relied as much on virtual relations developed through letter-writing and distribution as through physical club meetings themselves.
The Jacobins soon moved beyond the relatively limited scope of handwritten correspondence typical of the British clubs to develop printed circulars and, soon, newspapers publishing items from across its network. Part of the wider revolution in print which arose in France with the coming of press freedom in 1789, clubs increasingly received printed circulars from other societies, often from hundreds of miles away. Even writers from small municipalities appeared well informed on issues of common concern. 63 The first (unsuccessful) attempt at establishing a common newspaper, the mid-1790 Journal des sociétés-patriotiques françaises, promoted the advantages of wide circulation: ‘Isolated, with very few rapports between them’, its prospectus declared, ‘patriotic societies cannot have the useful influence on opinion that their patriotism deserves’. 64 A newspaper would serve as facilitator. Later that year, the Jacobins’ own aforementioned Journal des Clubs began. With the clubs lacking a common programme, discussions appeared wide open. The paper embodied many idealistic hopes of the network: the Commercy chapter declared in a circular how the newspaper could ‘be the depository of our good intentions and the organ of our patriotism: it can be a mirror which brings together all rays and reflects their light and heat’. 65 Correspondence, moving between the largest number of clubs with the greatest possible speed, could develop opinion and bring multifaceted Revolutionary projects and spaces together. The Revolution could accelerate through circulating ideas faster. Never before in either France or Britain had a general-interest club network acquired such scope or power.
French clubs concurrently corresponded with the London Revolution Society in progressively greater numbers. The earliest communication, from Dijon’s already-established Club patriotique was sent on 30 November 1789 only five days after the reading of the Revolution Society’s address in the National Assembly. ‘Why do we worry about admitting’, the letter began, ‘that the Revolution which is operating today in our country is due above all to the example that England has offered us over the last century?’ The Dijon club declared that, through their development of constitutional government, ‘the happiness of the English has prepared that of the universe’. 66 The Revolution Society wrote back declaring their hope for a ‘fraternal union’ between peoples, while congratulating the French Revolutionaries on extending ‘principles of justice and reverence for human rights’ through ‘common participation’ in politics. 67 Early addresses did not focus on the particularities of each nation’s politics, but rather the similarities in what the clubs desired to accomplish.
Over the following year 23 addresses to the Revolution Society arrived from clubs across France, many thanking the Londoners for inspiring them to found their clubs. The Strasbourg Jacobins declared that the ‘example of your honourable Society has given birth to all the Amis de la Constitution’. 68 The Amiens club referred to the Revolution Society as a ‘monument of English liberty’, which led ‘Our Revolution to look to form on your model a thousand societies animated by the same ardour and spirit’. 69 Aix-en-Provence’s Jacobins credited the London society with ‘believing in the idea of establishing these societies which multiply in France today’. 70 The Jacobins of La Rochelle, a town with a long history of Catholic-Protestant infighting, now declared that the English and French would ‘follow the same principles… carrying the flame of philosophy into regions that superstition and despotism still cover in shadows’. 71 In attempting to break with the past and establish broad new fraternal alliances, numerous French clubs appeared both cognizant of the British origins of their associations, and attempted to develop contact further.
The ideal of an integrated patriotic national club network for both fraternal mobilization and spreading intelligence was of recognized British origin. The French system would seek to build upon this model. Beyond simple recognition, French clubs also sought both instruction from and collaboration with their British counterparts. The Montpellier Jacobins entered into active correspondence with London less than a month after their founding, generating excited correspondence from across their region. ‘We can only applaud’, wrote the Jacobins of Marseille to Montpellier on 1 October 1790, ‘your project of corresponding with the friends of the Revolution in England, and with foreigners in Paris. We owe our union to these close-knit brothers who before us conquered their liberty. We have asked for affiliation and correspondence ourselves’. 72 With the British having become exemplars for hundreds of French clubs, an active exchange of letters and ideas held great promise for the still-fledgling network. ‘We hope you can procure for us’, Nimes’ Jacobins wrote to Montpellier two weeks later, ‘a mémoire on the constitutional organization of patriotic societies’ from London, asking also for any correspondence received. 73 Though the relationship had limitations – very little overt ‘radical Whig’ or ‘Commonwealthman’ ideology appears to have passed the Channel, and the Jacobins’ knowledge of how British clubs actually functioned remained partial – the early French clubs appeared hungry for information on earlier associational models, and adapted many aspects of British societies for their own ends.
Despite the Revolution Society members’ exertions in the ongoing campaign for the Test and Corporation Acts repeal, the club welcomed the French correspondence, responding to each address. In July 1790, writing to the Lille Jacobins, the Londoners declared themselves ‘pleased to feel the respect shown in the Addresses received from the Societies… on a plan similar to theirs’, and solicited further exchange, ‘Convinced that the spirit of freedom is rapidly advancing across Europe’. 74 With French clubs, like that of Lorient, denouncing ‘religious differences’ as among the Old Regime ‘prejudices which often divide nations’, the Dissenters reportedly accepted French financial contributions for their repeal effort. 75 Given the extent to which the Revolution Society publicized the exchanges in Britain, especially around their annual Bastille Day banquets, they appeared sincere in believing the British–French clubs relationship to be mutually beneficial.
With the failure of the Dissenters’ repeal campaign, however, and intensifying attacks from both British Francophobe conservatives and the Anglican Church, the Revolution Society began to retreat politically. Responding to the Jacobins of Vire on 5 April 1791, the Society chastised their correspondents for having ‘contemplated with more attention the excellencies of our Constitution than its deficits’, going on to say that having ‘entirely emancipated yourselves… you will soon feel the superiority of your present government to ours’. 76 After a period of apprenticeship, the Jacobin clubs now appeared to hold greater promise. By 1791, fledgling French societies increasingly modelled themselves on clubs in their own network instead of foreign examples. The Jacobins also talked less of their British origins, some now omitting British precedents from club primers and bylaws altogether. 77
Even among Anglophiles, the British example remained partial, and certain illiberal aspects of the Jacobins continued to diverge from prior precedents. Though British clubs had traditionally guarded against both ‘counterrevolutionary’ Jacobite sympathizers and encroachments from powerful ministers of the king, the French clubs developed defensive apparatuses on a level which would have been unsuitable for the relatively stable British political scene. Already in early 1791, the Jacobins of Lyon warned in a circular of ‘shadowy plots against the friends of liberty’, while those of Paris declared the network should ‘inspire universal terror in the enemies of public good’. 78 Vigilance became one of the network’s central functions. A second divergence appeared in the Jacobins’ intolerance of rival clubs not adhering to their program, in contrast to the heterogeneous British club scene. Counterrevolutionary clubs did exist: the Paris-based Club des impartiaux attempted to institute a network bringing together ‘all those who are enemies of anarchy and demand the return of legitimate authority’, while the so-called Amis de la paix successfully established clubs in 23 different towns over 1790–91. 79 One provincial Jacobin club proposed raising a deputation of twelve thousand to present a petition to the National Assembly calling for the dissolution of the Club monarchique. 80 Though clubs commonly remained private in Britain, Jacobins refused to countenance such a practice. If ‘not open to all citizens’, the Jacobins of Confolens warned the National Assembly in April 1791, ‘shady conspiracies will form there’. 81 The Jacobins also railed against the existence of the centre-left Société de 1789, Cercle social and Club des Feuillants over the same period. 82 Free association, many Jacobins declared, could be too destructive if applied to the wrong purposes.
The Anglo-French fraternal movement would be tested – though in certain respects strengthened – by the Nootka Sound crisis, which recurrently threatened to bring France and Britain to war in 1790 and 1791. Though National Assembly deputies of many persuasions (including some members of the Jacobins) urged intervention to uphold French international ‘honour’, the prospect of France entering a conflict on the side of Spain to uphold the Bourbon ‘Family Compact’ led opposing radicals to denounce dynastic interests and agitate for peace. 83 The Bordeaux Jacobins led the effort, declaring to Paris’s Jacobins in July 1790 ‘our general view that all means to ensure peace be pursued’. Brissot’s Patriote français published their letter, declaring that ‘all constitutional clubs, throughout France, should make such resolutions’. 84 The radical Parisian press increasingly made distinctions between British popular sentiments and their government’s policies. 85 ‘The enlightened English’, wrote Révolutions de Paris, ‘do not want a war, on the contrary they desire an alliance with [France], for the peace of Europe and the universe’. 86 Bordeaux’s Jacobins successfully called upon the London Revolution Society to speak against renewed war rumours in 1791. 87 Radicals strongly declared they would not be swayed by the national rivalries of the past.
The Revolution Society pursued an enhanced relationship directly with the French National Assembly, albeit with mixed results. During the first Nootka crisis on 21 July 1790 the Assembly read a letter from the London club calling for the two nations to ‘learn to see each other as equals, and love each other as free men, equals and brothers’, inaugurating a new era of peace. The response was generally favourable. Charles de Lameth called for the Assembly to reply, believing ‘that this could help Europe remain at peace’. Conservative Louis de Foucauld, counter-asserted that ‘a société particulière cannot be in correspondence with a National Assembly’, and, furthermore, called attention to the ‘two nations [as] unfortunately rivals’. At this point, however, he was drowned out by cries of ‘No!’ The motion to correspond with the Revolution Society passed. 88 The legislature maintained their prudence nine days later, however, after a 14 July Revolution Society toast arrived, calling for ‘an alliance between the two first kingdoms of the world’, and the ‘union of philosophy and politics which honourably distinguishes our age’. With the society overstepping its bounds, Lameth’s calls to send a new complimentary response failed. 89 Earlier eighteenth-century legacies of mistrust and Anglophobia could be rekindled.
The new Revolution Society addresses created a sensation among many radicals, however, and Limoges’s Jacobins headed a campaign towards establishing an international alliance between the two networks. In an October 1790 circular distributed across France, the club asserted how ‘all nature will retake its rights’. To ‘prove to the whole world how the French desire to unite all peoples’, the Limoges society called for local clubs to petition Paris’s Jacobins to open discussions with the Revolution Society for ‘establishing the means to realize this sublime plan’. Simultaneously with the alliance, a proclamation would be published ‘declaring to all peoples our pacific intentions, and views for the happiness of the world’. 90 At least 27 local clubs fully adhered, several speaking of it as a strategy to ensure ‘universal peace’, and oppose ministerial intrigues in both countries. 91 The Paris Jacobins, however, likely fearing conservative reaction, did not pursue the plan.
Correspondence between local Jacobin Clubs and the Revolution Society continued at an increasing clip, with 47 addresses – more than twice as many as in 1790 – arriving from 35 different French clubs during 1791. This was not a one-time formality for many, as nine groups from the previous year wrote again and the same number sent multiple addresses. The letters, which in 1790 expressed fascination with the British model, had by the following year fallen into repetitive formulas of felicitation. 92 Yet hopes of a broad alliance continued. The Tours Jacobins, for example, wrote to London of how ‘humanity’ would ‘make us Compatriots with all the peoples of the earth’. 93 With inaction in Paris, however, little progress was made.
The British example continued to be discussed, and used as a positive precedent in debate. With the Jacobin clubs’ future threatened following their role in the events leading to the July 1791 Champ-de-Mars massacre, radicals called upon British analogies to justify their continuance. Brissot illustrated the utility of intra-systemic dissent through the example of British opposition to the slave trade: ‘does a single man in the English Parliament rise to contest the societies’ right to deliberate, which is to say, thereby offering their opinion on the laws? Certainly not.’ An important distinction existed, whereby ‘all citizens are forced to obey the law, [but] all have the liberty to deliberate and offer their opinions about the laws’. 94 The clubs survived the reaction.
Coordination also continued across movements in the antislavery effort. French newspapers – particularly Brissot’s Patriote français – printed notices of the abolition of slavery in northern American states and British Parliamentary debates on ending the slave trade, leading some to pronounce a negotiated end to the Atlantic trafficking immanent. 95 Though the Jacobins did not directly adopt the massive petitioning campaigns used in British movements, in March and April 1791, 15 of their affiliates brought the first wave of French abolitionist petitions before the National Assembly. On 24 March Riom’s Jacobins called for the granting of rights to slaves as part of a ‘universal regeneration’, which alone could bring ‘peace and tranquillity to our colonies’. 96 The Lyon Jacobins wrote on 20 April to the Société des amis des noirs declaring that they ‘burn to unite our efforts to yours to ensure victory’. 97 Only the 1791 Saint-Domingue uprising and the retreat of the antislavery cause from mainstream politics thereafter halted momentum towards an alliance between Jacobins and the international campaign against slavery.
Revolutionary though the early Jacobins were, they remained interested in precedents, examples and potential alliances. The integrated national networks of Anglo-American radical politics served as a central inspiration for French designs. While the growth of the French clubs in many respects responded to the unique conditions of the early–mid Revolution, British societies offered Jacobins important models for local, national and international cohesion, showing them methods for applying egalitarian principles and cosmopolitan hopes to concrete political situations. Although a full alliance between the two networks would prove elusive, and the initial British–French tutelary relationship declined as the Jacobins became better established, dialogue between club networks in both countries would accelerate again in 1792.
III
As the Revolution radicalized in France, thereby surpassing easy parallels with Britain’s constitutional order, the relationship between the clubs changed. Increasingly, France became the avant-garde, and Britain the country which began adopting the other’s examples. In 1792, a new British radical network – the London Corresponding Society – arose, agitating for widespread political reform through a French-style associational model. Though the history of the ‘English Jacobins’ has usually been characterized as the spread of French Revolutionary ideas in Britain, this account highlights the extent to which the movement developed in active dialogue with its French counterparts, who declared the new British organization a potential partner for international change. Only the coming of war in early 1793 halted the growing convergence between British and French radical networks.
Despite their astounding gains in the late 1780s, the British antislavery and Dissenting movements failed to deliver legislative results. Indeed, both causes – which initially responded enthusiastically to the Revolution – would soon be castigated for their French associations. The antislavery effort continued to see French Revolutionaries as a potential partner in abolishing the slave trade. Despite Clarkson’s unsuccessful 1789 trip, the following year the London committee still reported ‘a reasonable hope that the spirit of humanity will at length abolish the Slave Trade in that Empire’. 98 In 1792, as legislation for gradually abolishing the trade passed the House of Commons but stalled in the Lords, the London committee continued writing to the moribund Société des amis des noirs hoping to stimulate parallel action, even as they faced growing condemnation for doing so from Burkean conservatives. 99 Antislavery support retreated for over a decade thereafter.
Dissenters, particularly through the Revolution Society, loudly proclaimed their relationship with French Revolutionaries. Though declining an invitation to participate in Paris’s 1790 Fête de la Fédération, the society helped organize 14 July celebrations throughout Britain. 100 The Revolution Society banquet in London, advertised as an opportunity to ‘testify their common Joy at an Event so important in itself, and which is likely to promote the general Liberty and Happiness of the World’, drew 670 participants, including a deputation from the Nantes Jacobins. 101 Emphasizing French progress in liberty appeared a strategy to pressure Parliament to keep up in expanding British rights. ‘We can assure you’, reported the Nantes deputation, ‘that the people of London are at least as enthusiastic for the French Revolution as the people of France’. 102
The Dissenters’ campaign for political rights faltered against increasing opposition from Anglicans. Church of England clergy mounted a counter-campaign against the repeal of the Test & Corporation Act, declaring the Church ‘in danger’. Popular conservative mobilization helped spark the 14 July incidents of 1791. 103 The most serious occurred in Birmingham, where a crowd forcibly dispersed the local Bastille Day banquet, which had featured toasts asking for the Rights of Man to be extended to ‘all nations’, and for ‘the people of England to never cease to remonstrate till their parliament becomes a true national representation’. Rioters sacked the property of Revolutionary supporters, including the house, library and laboratory of famed scientist Joseph Priestley. 104 As the Dissenters’ movement withered, the Revolution Society – which had never substantially extended its membership into the wider community – ceased to be a major political force, opening a space for the growth of new organizations to advance radical reforms.
The lack of a radical British club network with the Jacobins’ power or scope recurrently led to calls for new associations in Britain. The radical Francophile newspaper The Argus in November 1790 declared ‘frequency of communication’ to be the key to the rival Whigs’ political networks, while the ‘want of system in operation, of unanimity in the plan of measures, has hitherto been one of the principal reasons why the endeavours of former Oppositions have been ineffectual’. Closer affiliation appeared necessary for radical interests to ‘bring their united efforts to bear in the same direction’ to stimulate political action. 105 The publication of Thomas Paine’s The Rights of Man in 1791 also stimulated the idea that a national corresponding network could come to replace government itself. ‘If we are asked what government is’, Paine orated at a radical London club that August, ‘we hold it to be nothing more than a National Association’, for promoting the greatest possible liberty. 106 Given the dissatisfaction among radicals with the British government, proposals for new associations moved forward.
The London Corresponding Society, founded in January 1792, attempted to adapt a Jacobin-style network to Britain. In the spirit of international cooperation, Covent Garden shoemaker Thomas Hardy and Maurice Margarot, a multinational radical just arrived from Paris, served as founders. Looking to reform the election laws which made Parliamentary representation highly unequal, and establish universal manhood suffrage through abolishing property restrictions, the movement involved wide sectors of the population in building a broad club network to elaborate radical politics. 107 Whereas earlier reform societies had been largely elite-based, the Corresponding Society featured primarily artisans, labourers and shopkeepers. 108
Following earlier networks’ example of diffusion through correspondence, the London Corresponding Society spread its Jacobin-influenced founding principles and affiliated clubs throughout the British Isles. According to Hardy, ‘Several thousands of the first printed Address and resolutions were distributed gratis throughout the Nation’, and also reprinted in the Argus. 109 The society’s first circular declared man ‘entitled to Liberty’, and resolved ‘to keep a watchful eye on the Government’, echoing Jacobin vigilance. 110 Soon multiplying in numbers, the London branch split into autonomous cells: ‘Members entered so quickly that it was found expedient to divide the society into separate bodies’, Hardy recounted, with each group sending a delegate for meetings of the society’s general committee. 111 By November the society would boast 26 divisions in London, still increasing ‘much every week’. Within months, the Corresponding Society had expanded into 14 cities, many of which also quickly boasted multiple cells. 112
The new British radical network’s first deputation to France came from Manchester, the growing industrial city already at the forefront of the parliamentary reform and antislavery movements. James Watt (son and namesake of the steam engine innovator) and author Thomas Cooper arrived at the Paris Jacobins on 13 April 1792, just a week before the declaration of war between France and Austria. Assuring the Paris club that ‘there are men all around who take a lively interest in your cause, the cause not only of the French, but of humankind’, the Englishmen orated that ‘the time has come to abolish all national prejudice, and embrace as brothers all free men, no matter what country they come from’. Whereas the London Revolution Society had only maintained occasional correspondence with the Paris leadership, this deputation now asked for ‘friendly correspondence’ to ‘establish the important principles of universal liberty, the only means to establish an empire of peace and happiness for men on a solid and unshakable basis’. In contrast to their coolness towards a Revolution Society alliance the previous year, the Paris Jacobins now responded by taking an ‘unbreakable oath’ to support the Manchester club, and sent the address to all their provincial affiliates. 113 A common movement working across national lines increasingly seemed attainable.
The Corresponding Society used exchanges with France to bring its developing network together, generating publicity and adhesion to a common programme. On 11 October 1792, the London central committee, declaring the international situation to be ‘calling upon us to countenance, at this juncture, the French Nation’s arduous struggle against despotism and Aristocracy’, asked all the society’s branches to declare full support for the French war cause. Enclosing to each affiliate a proposed address to the National Assembly, the leadership requested either adhesion, or their objections in writing. 114 The resulting address quickly arrived before the French National Convention on 7 November, declaring the society’s ‘duty to assist and help by all their means the defenders of the Rights of Man’. 115 Supporting the French Revolution became a prerequisite for inclusion in British radical politics.
The new British deputation arrived at the Convention on 28 November, proclaiming the British movement’s programme and connections with French Revolutionaries. Whereas ‘before the epoch of your Revolution’, British societies engaged to spread liberty, now ‘the success of your efforts ensures to virtuous men that their efforts will not be without recompense. Parallel societies now form in all parts of England’. The French legislators applauded. ‘Following France’s example’, the address concluded, ‘revolutions will become easy. It would not be extraordinary if in a short time you received felicitations from a National Convention of England’. 116 Describing France as a clear exemplar and applicable model for Britain, the deputation broadcast both the French origins of their radicalization and their plans for change at home. The French legislators responded enthusiastically, urging British radicals to ‘filter useful information through all branches of the social tree’, in hope of a future ‘eternal alliance’ between free peoples. 117 The Jacobins sent the address throughout their network, declaring the Revolution ‘va faire le tour du monde’. 118 Given the quick spread of the antislavery, Dissenter and Jacobin networks, another similar groundswell appeared possible.
Many French Jacobins, still enamoured with possibilities of British alliances and looking for all available help to combat the Austrian invasion, in turn pursued interactions with the radical British clubs. ‘Generous Republicans’, wrote the Jacobins from the threatened town of Laon in December after receiving British arms and supplies, ‘the philanthropic gift you present France’s warriors announces your enthusiasm in the sacred cause they defend’. Soon, they declared, ‘France and England shall form a Treaty of Union as lasting as the course of the Seine and the Thames’. 119 Less-threatened areas also concurred: ‘How glorious will it be for France & England to form a confederation for the destruction of Tyrants’, asked the Jacobins from the Provençal town of Apt. ‘[S]oon will they become our allies’, declared Mâcon’s Jacobins. 120 Though the Convention responded to a martial address received from a radical society at Newington (near Dover) on November 10 by urging English adherence to neutrality, the Society of Constitutional Information’s shipment of a thousand pairs of boots to Dunkerque led the French War Minister to thank them for helping to ‘propagate Universal Liberty’ abroad. 121 Throughout 1792, strict nationalism appeared less salient than the Revolution’s international potential.
War between Britain and France, however, though long considered a possibility, arrived quickly. Word of Louis XVI’s 21 January execution immediately led to the British government expelling the French ambassador, and on 1 February the French National Convention pre-emptively declared war. While acknowledging strong support among the British ‘people’, Brissot and other Convention members in favour of the conflict nevertheless declared their differences with George III and Parliamentary conservatives irreconcilable. 122 Despite growing Anglo-French fraternal sentiment, such feelings were trumped by widespread fear of international aristocratic conspiracy. Some also declared a successful French campaign could lead to radical regime change in Britain: one French pamphlet viewed the rise of British popular societies as presaging the British monarchy’s overthrow, which would enable future ‘social happiness’ and ‘eternal peace’ between the two nations. 123 Not surprisingly, however, such rhetoric placed British radicals in an untenable position at home.
The radical clubs in Britain encountered serious opposition from conservative organizations, whose support skyrocketed with the coming of the French war. The Association for Preserving Liberty and Property against Republicans and Levellers, founded in November 1792 by conservative judge John Reeves, rapidly created a nationwide association to rally patriotic opinion in favour of the conflict and against radical clubs. Taking over London’s Crown and Anchor Tavern for their headquarters, where the Revolution Society had earlier held Bastille Day banquets, the society used many of the same strategies as their radical brethren in creating a provincial club network. 124 By September, 386 loyalist affiliates were formed throughout the kingdom, with members instructed to disrupt radical networks’ meetings and correspondence. 125 Though claiming to be a temporary response to the international crisis, their continued meetings into 1794 and beyond led one radical writer to note how ‘The affiliated Jacobin Clubs of the French Provinces have been made the model of the Reevesian Associations… Every man is called upon, more palpably than in France, to declare the Constitution glorious and unreformable’. 126 Despite its initial development as a radical platform, the club network model offered a template independent of specific political cause, and surprising rhetorical and strategic similarities abounded between radical and Tory organizations.
The Corresponding Society’s network remained far looser than that of the French Jacobins. Adhesion by provincial societies to any measure proposed by London remained voluntary. Though claiming a similar radical orientation, no common programme amongst the clubs would develop. Of course, such a situation presented benefits for the societies’ resisting governmental repression through plausible deniability of involvement in any specific action, since the network generally did not enjoy the degree of elite support it did in France. Government spies deeply infiltrated the radical networks, and would bring their leaders to trial on treason charges in 1794. 127 British government and politics did not allow for the development of a fully unified popular movement.
Only the coming of war in early 1793 stopped the elaboration of vibrant British–French club exchanges. Associational network models unknown in Europe six years earlier came to play a central role in radical politics. Moving beyond single-issue antislavery and repeal campaigns, British radicals applied the new club model to a general French-style campaign for political change and shocked their political system. Behind a strong egalitarian ethos, and escaping the isolation which had limited earlier club models, radical corresponding societies networked towards an unprecedented collective power.
IV
Against a historiography which has largely approached each club network in isolation, the connections between British and French movements demonstrate the utility of a transnational approach for understanding some of the Revolutionary era’s most important social movements. British antislavery and radical reform societies elaborated a new model for political action. Quickly, interactions between radical British and French political clubs helped stimulate the rise of new associational cultures across the two nations. By associating and educating diverse populations on issues of common concern, clubs appeared as both an ideal enactment of new egalitarian values and an effective method of organization for advocating practical reforms.
The growing dialogues between radicals achieved their greatest influence with the rise of general interest political clubs after 1789. The London Revolution Society’s encouragement helped develop an ideal of political sociability and correspondence in France which motivated the founding and spread of the Jacobin Clubs. The Jacobins, in turn, surpassed the cohesion of earlier British examples and broadened radical networks’ advocacy from the pursuit of specific interests to overarching general concerns. Exchanges of information and inspiration across countries and causes drove each radical network forward. While club networks in both countries developed in ways befitting their specific political circumstances, and though rising nationalism would eventually derail many of their cosmopolitan goals, French and British radicals between 1787 and 1793 regularly sought international interactions, and learnt important strategies from each other. The associational ideal and inclusive reach of Revolutionary era clubs advanced in turn with societies’ willingness to look outwards.
Footnotes
Acknowledgements
My thanks to G. Matthew Adkins, Suzanne Desan, Talissa Ford, Jan Goldstein, Philippe Minard, Nathan Perl-Rosenthal, April Shelford, David Torrance and audiences at the Mount Allison University Faculty Research Workshop, University of Pennsylvania Humanities Forum and French Historical Studies for their comments on earlier drafts. This project benefitted from a Mellon Postdoctoral Fellowship at the University of Pennsylvania Humanities Forum.