Vectors of Revolution : the British Radical Community in Early Republican Paris, 1792-1794 Rachel Rogers
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Vectors of Revolution : The British Radical Community in Early Republican Paris, 1792-1794 Rachel Rogers To cite this version: Rachel Rogers. Vectors of Revolution : The British Radical Community in Early Republican Paris, 1792-1794. History. Université Toulouse le Mirail - Toulouse II, 2012. English. NNT : 2012TOU20134. tel-00797967 HAL Id: tel-00797967 https://tel.archives-ouvertes.fr/tel-00797967 Submitted on 7 Mar 2013 HAL is a multi-disciplinary open access L’archive ouverte pluridisciplinaire HAL, est archive for the deposit and dissemination of sci- destinée au dépôt et à la diffusion de documents entific research documents, whether they are pub- scientifiques de niveau recherche, publiés ou non, lished or not. The documents may come from émanant des établissements d’enseignement et de teaching and research institutions in France or recherche français ou étrangers, des laboratoires abroad, or from public or private research centers. publics ou privés. THÈSE En vue de l’obtention du DOCTORAT DE L’UNIVERSITÉ DE TOULOUSE Délivré par Université Toulouse 2 Le Mirail (UT2) Présentée et soutenue par : Rachel Rogers Le 30 novembre 2012 Titre : Vectors of Revolution: The British Radical Community in Early Republican Paris, 1792-1794 École doctorale et discipline ou spécialité : ED ALLPH@ : Anglais Unité de recherche : Cultures Anglo-Saxonnes (CAS) Directeur(s) de Thèse : Professeur Xavier Cervantes, université de Toulouse 2 Le Mirail Professeur Jon Mee, University of Warwick Rapporteurs : Professeur Norbert Col, université de Bretagne-Sud, Lorient Professeur Mary-Ann Constantine, University of Wales - Centre for Advanced Welsh and Celtic Studies Autre(s) membre(s) du jury : Professeur Fabrice Bensimon, université Paris IV - Sorbonne VECTORS OF REVOLUTION: THE BRITISH RADICAL COMMUNITY IN EARLY REPUBLICAN PARIS 1792-1794 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS While in many ways a solitary exercise, this dissertation has been constantly nourished and transformed by the contributions, suggestions and criticism of a vast number of people, to whom I am sincerely grateful. Jon Mee deserves my infinite thanks for agreeing to supervise my work from afar, and for providing the idea for the project in the first place. My long- standing interest in the 1790s and popular radicalism from my years as an A-level and undergraduate History student in the late 1990s came into focus when he mentioned the British Club in an early email and pointed me in the direction of David Erdman’s book on John Oswald and a lone file in the vaults of the Archives Nationales. I would like to thank Jon for his generosity, time and encouragement over the last four years, for coming to Toulouse for supervision meetings, and for giving me the opportunity to take part in some exciting conferences and projects. He also introduced me to people who had valuable insights into the work I was doing. My thanks also go to my supervisor in Toulouse, Xavier Cervantes, without whose support and thoroughness, this project would not have been finalised. His faith in my ability, patient advice and encouragement to attend to detail drove me to refine my research techniques. I would also like to give special thanks to Mary-Ann Constantine, Norbert Col and Fabrice Bensimon for agreeing to sit on the examination panel for this dissertation. My colleagues and friends both from Toulouse Le Mirail and outside have made precious contributions to this thesis. I am grateful to Philippe Birgy, Wendy Harding, Catherine Lanone and Nathalie Dessens for their support in many of the initiatives I have been involved in – including a doctoral seminar I helped to organise in 2009-10 – and for their backing of archival visits through the research centre Cultures Anglo-Saxonnes. Nathalie Duclos included me in many collective projects from our research centre and Françoise Coste demystified aspects of American political culture at the turn of the eighteenth century for me in her course on the Federalist Papers. Other colleagues and teachers helped me enormously during my Masters and while I was working towards the CAPES and Agrégation exams. I would like to mention in particular John Moore, Vincent Latour, Jean-Louis Breteau, Nathalie Cochoy, Laurence Estanove, Anne Stefani, Meg Ducassé, Anne Beauvallet and Aurélie Guillain. My thanks also go to Nathalie Massip and Adèle Cassigneul with whom I worked on interdisciplinary research seminars and who were vital sources of support over the last four years. Thanks also to Emeline Jouve for timely chats in the staff room and for some helpful advice on finalising the dissertation. Gaëlle Serena and Baibre Ní Chiosáin were generous with their knowledge of manuscript sources and databases and helped me to locate key articles and access newspaper archives. Jean-Pierre Daraux lent me a rare copy of Grace Dalrymple Elliott’s journal which provided me with another expatriate perspective on the Revolution at a crucial stage. Nadine Aurières was a source of insight at the interlibrary loan department and Hanane Serjouan at the CAS office was on hand to help with the finer detail of research visits. Outside Toulouse, Jean-François Dunyach enriched my work in a discussion in Paris in 2009. He also put me in contact with Richard Buel who sent me an early version of his biography of Joel Barlow and whose help later led me to unearth an unpublished manuscript at Harvard’s Houghton Library. Jon Mee put me in touch with an array of scholars whose work I had read and who I was able to meet or write to during the course of this project. Thanks therefore to Mark Philp, Colin Jones, Mary-Ann Constantine, John Barrell and Nigel Leask for their thoughts, comments and clarifications, but also for sharing valuable documents and forthcoming work with me, and to Mary-Ann for encouraging me to take part 2 in the Locating Revolution: Place, Voice and Community 1780-1820 conference in Aberystwyth, Wales in July 2012. I much appreciated giving papers in Toulouse, Rennes, Bordeaux, Glasgow and Aberystwyth where listening to the work of others gave me new insights into my own. I would also like to thank the staff at the Bibliothèque Nationale, Bodleian Library, Kew Public Records Office, the British Library, Cardiff Public Library and the Archives Nationales in Paris for their guidance, in particular Pierre-Dominique Cheynet who unravelled some of the mysteries of the Archives Nationales cataloguing system for me in an early visit to Paris and pointed me in the direction of some useful collections. I would not have reached this stage without the support of friends and family, all of whom deserve enormous credit for reasons that I struggle to put into words. I would like to thank all my friends in Toulouse and elsewhere, particularly Barbara Moore, Susanna Clasby and Katie Pickthall, for their humour, care and curiosity, my belle famille in and around Paris, my brother Michael, my grandparents, and my parents Anne and Malcolm, always generous and open-minded, without whose help taking up studies again would have been beyond me. Finally, to Julien, for his constant support and timely advice, and to Corto, who arrived half- way through and brought lots of life (and mucky fingerprints) to eighteenth-century manuscripts. Toulouse, 2012. 3 A NOTE ON TRANSLATION I have chosen to cite French sources using English translations for reasons of discursive coherence and accessibility to the English-speaking reader. For the majority of primary printed documents and manuscript sources written in French and used in this study, I have translated the works myself and indicated this in the notes, providing the original French text where I judged it may be of comparative interest to both French- and English-speaking readers. For the names of committees and institutions which are not easily recognisable in English, except to the specialist of the period, I have chosen to keep the French titles. It is for this reason that I have employed the terms Comité de Salut Public, Comité de Sûreté Générale, and comités de surveillance révolutionnaire, rather than giving their sometimes rather awkward English equivalents. However, for groups or structures that are frequently referred to in the English language, such as the Jacobin Club, the Cordeliers Club, the Constituent Assembly or the National Convention, I have chosen to use the translation. Although the term “Mountain” is sometimes used in English academic work on the French Revolution, I have decided to retain the easily-recognisable French versions of “Montagne” and “Montagnards”. To make the text accessible to a non-specialist reader, I have used the Gregorian rather than French revolutionary calendar for all dates from October 1793 onwards, when the revolutionary calendar came into use. When I mention events which have become significant because of their associations with dates from the revolutionary calendar, such as 9 Thermidor, An II, I have used these appellations. In these cases, I have considered that the use of the calendar conveys more than a coordinate in time but conjures up a host of symbolic associations which are important to retain. Where old French spelling has been used I have kept the original, and any anomalies or linguistic mistakes made by British residents of Paris in their French writings have not been corrected. Where I felt it necessary, to avoid the impression of faulty transcription, I have highlighted the error in the text. 4 ABBREVIATIONS The following abbreviations have been used in the notes: AN Archives Nationales, Paris BM British Museum, London CPL Cardiff Public Library, Cardiff, Wales HL Houghton Library, Harvard University PRO Public Record Office, The National Archive, London TS Treasury Solicitors Papers FO Foreign Office Papers For all files in the Archives Nationales, see the bibliography for precise details of the collection. 5 TABLE OF CONTENTS Vectors of Revolution: The British Radical Community in Early Republican Paris 1792-1794 Acknowledgements ...................................................................................................................