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ABSTRACT of CRIMES and CALAMITIES: MARIE ANTOINETTE in AMERICAN POLITICAL DISCOURSE by Heather J. Sommer Early American Attitude

ABSTRACT of CRIMES and CALAMITIES: MARIE ANTOINETTE in AMERICAN POLITICAL DISCOURSE by Heather J. Sommer Early American Attitude

ABSTRACT

OF CRIMES AND CALAMITIES: IN AMERICAN POLITICAL DISCOURSE

by Heather J. Sommer

Early American attitudes toward Marie Antoinette as found in print culture and correspondence illustrates how factions came to understand her as exemplifying the threat politicized women appeared to pose to their republican experiment. Despite differing opinions about the course of the and the queen’s role within it, and Republicans believed she exacerbated ’s difficulties and disapproved of her conduct. In a time when American women were increasingly engaged in the public sphere, both parties used Marie Antoinette as a counterexample to define American women’s proper role within the new republic. Partisans suggested the queen’s absolutist agenda undercut French reform and/or hindered the people’s liberty and that American women should avoid political activity in order to be spared a similar disastrous fate. This instruction helped both parties devise an ideal republican society that promoted exclusive male political participation and female domesticity while protecting against feminine and monarchical depravities.

OF CRIMES AND CALAMITIES: MARIE ANTOINETTE IN AMERICAN POLITICAL DISCOURSE

A Thesis

Submitted to the Faculty of Miami University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts

Department of History

by Heather J. Sommer

Miami University Oxford, 2018

Advisor______Dr. Lindsay Schakenbach Regele

Reader______Dr. P. Renée Baernstein

Reader______Dr. William Brown

© Heather J. Sommer 2018

Table of Contents

Dedication ………………………………………………………………………………………. iv

Acknowledgements …………………………………………………………………………….... v

Introduction ……………………………………………………………………………………… 1

Chapter One ……………………………………………………………………………………. 17

Chapter Two ……………………………………………………………………………………. 35

Chapter Three …………………………………………………………………………………... 56

Epilogue ………………………………………………………………………………………... 70

Appendix ……………………………………………………………………………………….. 73

Bibliography …………………………………………………………………………………… 78

iii

To Mom and Dad

iv Acknowledgements

This work would not exist without the help of numerous individuals who have contributed either knowingly or unwittingly. I would first like to thank my wonderful advisor, Lindsay Schakenbach Regele, for her direction, feedback and encouragement, as well as the other members of my committee, P. Renée Baernstein and William Brown. Additional faculty members at Miami University, particularly Erik Jensen and Amanda McVety, have provided invaluable assistance in the development of this project. I am also grateful to my fellow graduate students for allowing me to bounce ideas off of them and for keeping me sane, with a special thanks to my dear friend and office mate, Erin Johnson, for her insight and company. In regards to accessing source material, I am indebted to the anonymous people who spent hours upon hours scanning or transcribing eighteenth-century newspaper articles, letters, books, etc. and making them available through digital archives such as Early American Imprints, Early American Newspapers, Founders Online, the Online, and Archives.org. I also owe thanks to Miami University’s library staff for securing access to many of these primary materials and other works, some of which were not easy to retrieve. As for the composition of this work, I am thankful for Kate Francis at the Howe Writing Center, who helped me keep my thoughts and words straight throughout the writing process. The foundation for this thesis was built during my time as an undergraduate at Ohio Northern University. The amazing faculty in the department formerly known as History, , and Justice cemented my passion for history, and I am eternally grateful for their continual support. A huge thanks to Robert Waters, my undergraduate advisor, for suggesting this research topic as well for his continued guidance and tolerance even though I am no longer his responsibility. I also wish to thank fellow ONU alum Jared Hardesty at Western University for helping me frame this project early on. Finally, I cannot even begin to express my love and appreciation for my family and friends who have endured many unsolicited ramblings about the American and French Revolutions. I am especially beholden to my aunt, Jeanne Sommer, for helping me prepare for my defense. Likewise, my parents, Rich and Annette Sommer, have been actively involved throughout this whole endeavor, providing unending support despite me showering them with my blood, sweat, and tears. Mostly tears.

v Introduction

July 14, 2018 will mark the twenty-fourth annual celebration in , Pennsylvania. Plans include a cabaret tribute to the French Revolution, complete with the guillotining of watermelons and intermittent commentary on current political issues, such as minority rights, that connects past and present through the themes of oppression and revolution. Each year the act culminates with a less-than historically accurate reenactment of the , in which French scale the grim walls of “the Bastille” (Eastern State Penitentiary) and capture “Marie Antoinette.” As the show climaxes, the queen, representing the ills of tyrannical regimes from the eighteenth century to today, mockingly cries out to the crowd, “Let them eat Tastykake!” as thousands of Butterscotch Krimpets are flung from the prison’s towers onto attendees below.1 This modern lampoon of Marie Antoinette is a dramatic example of how the queen’s persona continues to be interpreted by Americans in a political context. Long before an impersonator chucked sponge cakes from a prison tower in a satirical display of despotic power, Philadelphians included a wax figure of the queen in a 1794 execution exhibition, one such instance in which Americans propagated negative (and occasionally positive) depictions of the unfortunate monarch to convey ideas about the political climate of the Early Republic.2 Although American political factions debated the true maliciousness of her actions and the justness of her fate, discussions of Marie Antoinette’s political activity reveal an uneasiness both Federalists and Republicans felt toward the French queen. In a time when women in the United States were becoming increasingly active in public life, Marie Antoinette disturbed politically engaged American men across party lines because she seemed to single-handedly alter the destiny of an entire nation. While these men used the queen to express opposing opinions of the French Revolution, they agreed that she exemplified the threat politicized women posed to their republican experiment. Therefore, partisan reactions to Marie Antoinette’s role in French

1 Eastern State Penitentiary, “Bastille Day,” Events, (Web: Eastern State Penitentiary Historic Site, Inc., 2018). 2 William Cobbett, The political censor; or Review of the most interesting political occurrences, relative to the United States of America, (Philadelphia: William Cobbett, 1796), 9-10. 1 affairs reveal distinct and competing political visions that nonetheless converged on the subject of her political tampering to promote the exclusion of women in the American public sphere.3 Curiously, in a republic that had thrown off the shackles of monarchical power, Queen Marie Antoinette and Louis XVI were American heroes when the French Revolution began in 1789. The became the first U.S. ally in 1778, and Americans knew that without the financial and military support of the absolutist French monarchy, they likely would have lost their War for Independence. Treaties and gratitude connected the American political elite to the French royal government. Although Americans inherited an aversion to Catholic absolutism from the British, the French monarchy under Louis XVI came to represent the prospect of reform due to his defense of freedom of religion, assembly, commerce, and, in helping the colonists defeat Great Britain, . Americans initially did not concern themselves with the contradiction that a people who had just left one monarchy turned to revere another, for independence had been secured. When France wished to gain liberty from their king, however, this American paradox became more palpable and more contentious.4 This affection for the French monarchs stemmed from an even deeper contradiction within the early American political psyche. Americans’ feelings toward monarchy on the whole were complex, and they found themselves in a political identity crisis following the as they redefined themselves after over 150 years of being royal British subjects. Despite the popular myth that Americans completely disavowed monarchy during and after their revolution, many still retained respect for the persons and institution of monarchy, be it conscious or not. They did not reject all aspects of the institution, such as the stable executive

3 For the purpose of this work, the early American public sphere is broadly defined as the intellectual and social space within civil society (meaning the nongovernmental entities and associations existing beyond both the family unit and the state) in which political opinions are developed, discussed, debated, and transmitted to representative government for informed lawmaking. For more on these terminologies and other usages, see Jürgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society, tr. Thomas Burger and Frederick Lawrence, (Cambridge: the MIT Press, 1989); John L. Brooke, “Consent, Civil Society, and the Public Sphere in the and the Early American Republic,” in Beyond the Founders: New Approaches to the Political History of the Early American Republic, ed. Jeffrey L. Pasley, Andrew W. Robertson, and David Waldstreicher (Chapel Hill: University of Press, 2004), 207-250; Brooke, Columbia Rising: Civil Life on the Upper Hudson from the Revolution to the Age of Jackson, (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2010), 115. 4 William C. Stinchcombe, “Americans Celebrate the Birth of the Dauphin: American Views of France in 1782,” in Diplomacy and Revolution: The Franco-American Alliance of 1788, ed. Robert Hoffman and Peter J. Albert, (Charlottesville: University Press of , 1981), 69-70. For more on the development of colonial American anti-French, anti-Catholic, and anti-absolutist views, see Brendan McConville, The King’s Three Faces: The Rise & Fall of Royal America, 1688 – 1776, Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006), 20, 136. 2 power it provided, and some even championed the creation of an elective in the United States.5 With the adoption of the Constitution, however, republicanism became the official governing principle, and monarchical respect dwindled in favor of egalitarianism. Political commentators in the Early Republic thus used French events to facilitate this royal “desacralization” process and champion the voice of the people in both the United States and beyond.6 With the outbreak of the French Revolution, Americans hoped that the French would follow and even improve on their example, peacefully implementing much needed reforms on the absolutist French state. Unlike their own revolution, in which George III failed to defend the American colonists from Great Britain’s parliamentary abuses, they believed that French revolutionaries would collaborate with their king in order to peacefully transition from an to a more representative constitutional monarchy. Excluding the most radical Republicans who championed the immediate creation of a French republic, Americans from both parties wished for the monarchy to serve as the executive power in France to stabilize the government as it evolved. Even though this vision for the French Revolution would prove unattainable in the long term, it reveals the prominence that the foreign monarchy, and therefore monarchs, had in Americans’ idealized visions for the future of not only France, but “enlightened” Europe as a whole.7 The ways in which Americans sought to attain an “enlightened” state, however, differed from the French. The early American republic was radical in a political sense, having created a more decentralized and egalitarian government than the monarchies of Europe, but it proved to be far less radical than the first French Republic, which led to Americans having far different expectations for the French Revolution than their French contemporaries. The limited American

5 Ray Raphael, Mr. President: How and Why the Founders Created a Chief Executive, (New York: Vintage, 2012), 70-76. 6 For more regarding colonial monarchical veneration, see McConville’s The King’s Three Faces; Richard L. Bushman, King and People in Provincial Massachusetts, (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1985); Raphael, Mr. President: How and Why the Founders Created a Chief Executive, 9-15. For several discussions of the “desacralization” of monarchy in France, see Roger Chartier, The Cultural Origins of the French Revolution, (Durham: Duke University Press, 1991); Robert Darnton, Forbidden Best-Sellers of Pre-Revolutionary France, (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1996), 242; Dale K. Van Kley, “The Religious Origins of the French Revolution, 1560-1791,” in From Deficit to Deluge: The Origins of the French Revolution, ed. Thomas E. Kaiser and Dale K. Van Kley, (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2011), 127. 7 Stanley Elkins and Eric McKitrick, The Age of Federalism: The Early American Republic, 1788 – 1800, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), 354. 3 radicalization was due in part to the influence of British Enlightenment principles in its colonies, which stressed that improvement and innovation should be applied to existing political systems. In contrast, the French Enlightenment viewed tyrannical government as unalterable and called for its destruction so that a better system could take root. As British subjects geographically removed from the metropole, American colonists also had more rights than the French, including greater freedom of the press.8 American revolutionaries did not execute a king as the French did in 1793, but rather journalists enacted George III’s death metaphorically, opting for the printing press over the .9 For the French, however, total obliteration of the dysfunctional monarchial system, including sacrificing the lives of the monarchs, was eventually deemed necessary to create a successful republic. The American public thus became increasingly disenchanted by the more radical and bloody course of the French Revolution.10 The French Revolution also spoke to Americans’ visions for their own national government, which was put into effect only months before the Storming of the Bastille. The newly formed republic faced a host of challenges in the last decade of the eighteenth century, from domestic insurgences such as the Whiskey Rebellion to Great Britain’s looming presence in the frontier, which, in addition to growing partisanship, caused the United States to teeter between success and failure. French examples and ideas heavily influenced American politicians as they navigated these difficulties. As they sought to solidify their new nation, they studied the Gallic situation, which at first seemed a reflection their own, to determine what to emulate and what to avoid.11 Although both Federalists and Republicans initially supported the French struggle against despotism, its amplified extremism and the constitutional monarchy’s collapse reinforced partisan principles in the United States. The Federalists, supporting a strong national government

8 Bernard Bailyn, Ideological Origins of the American Revolution, (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1967), 27. For more on the general differences between American and French radicalism, see Seth A. Cotlar, Tom Paine’s America: The Rise and Fall of Transatlantic Radicalism in the Early Republic, (Charlottesville: Press, 2011), 4-6. 9 Marcus Daniel, Scandal and Civility: Journalism and the Birth of American Democracy, (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009), 110. 10 Elkins and McKitrick, The Age of Federalism, 327. This is not to say, however, that the American Revolution itself was entirely enlightened in its principles or relatively peaceful in its practices. For the Revolution’s sequestered violent aspects, see Holger Hoock, Scars of Independence: America's Violent Birth, (New York: Publishing, 2017). 11 Gordon S. Wood, : A History of the Early Republic, 1789-1815, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 196-197; Andrew Cayton, Love in the Time of Revolution: Transatlantic Literary Radicalism & Historical Change, 1793 – 1818, (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2013), 116. 4 in America, originally had approved the rise of republican ideals in France, but they came to see the French Revolution as disorganized and destructive. They lamented the losses of the more orderly French monarchical institution and the king and queen themselves. The Republicans favored limited federal power in the United States and oftentimes aligned themselves with the liberal politics of French reformers, eventually embracing republicanism in France and the destruction of the monarchy.12 This disagreement over the proper course of both the French Revolution and the U.S. government produced intense partisan conflicts that threatened to undermine their already fragile political system. Federalists and Republicans, then, sought to eliminate all other factors that endangered the success of their young nation as they battled for political supremacy. These men, including journalists, authors, poets, political commentators, and politicians who all came to define early American civil society, found common ground in targeting the political agency of women.13 Even though the American Revolution had opened up opportunities for women’s public participation, female political activity was foreclosed as part of a stricter adherence to Enlightenment ideals about the nature of civil life, which attempted to defend the United States against both unwieldly popular resistance and lingering monarchical pressures. Americans’ perceptions of gender roles made the subject of Marie Antoinette unique in discussions about the French Revolution, its struggling monarchy, and the United States’ push to establish a successful republic. While even the Republican political elite recognized that the French monarchy needed to stay intact for stability purposes, many did not want any remnants of the inherently corrupt institution to survive in their new nation. Post-Revolution American elites from both factions worked to create a republican government based on virtue and consensus that directly contrasted with the despotic monarchies of Europe. In their construction of an ideal society, they drew on the gendered language of Enlightenment philosophers, in which republicanism represented masculine independence and economy while royalism epitomized feminine dependence and opulence. Men of influence, especially Republicans, began to reject any public behavior they viewed as inherently monarchical, such as favoritism, material displays of authority, and private political power. Women, they believed, were most susceptible to this

12 Wood, Empire of Liberty, 174-177; Heather Sommer, “‘To weep over his faults and his fate’: America's Political Factions on the Trial and Execution of Louis XVI,” History Matters 13, (2016): 120. 13 Rosemarie Zagarri, Revolutionary Backlash: Women and Politics in the Early American Republic, (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007), 146. 5 sort of aristocratic politicking, for they were allured by the luxurious consumerism that accompanied it. In this way, women became directly associated with political practices that jeopardized republicanism. Without the guidance of republican vigor, women’s attraction to monarchical profligacy and their ability to subtly manipulate men to support their decadent whims would lead the new American republic to dissipation, corruption, and eventually a state of dependency that would lead the masses to clamor for the rule of a tyrannical king.14 Even as women were susceptible to monarchical dependency, they had the power to keep it in check by practicing what historians have described as “republican motherhood.” Educated in the virtues of republicanism, American women could both combat their aristocratic predispositions and do the vital work of transmitting republican morals to their children. Though initially observed as an opportunity for the expansion of women’s political clout given their role in shaping the next generation of American citizenry, subsequent scholarship has come to view this civil contribution as more of a means to restrict women to the domestic domain. However, historians have increasingly recognized women’s political awareness and agency beyond the household. Emboldened by previous opportunities to assert autonomy during the American Revolution and encouraged by revolutionary rhetoric, middle and upper-class women more frequently vocalized political opinions outside their homes, participated in patriotic activities, and in New Jersey, even partook in elections.15 For partisan men, however, this integration of women into civil society had its limits. Although some European theorists began to challenge beliefs relating to notions of inherent female intellectual inferiority, Federalists and Republicans, having inherited the philosophies of Enlightenment thinkers who characterized political engagement as unsuitable for the feeble, frivolous temperaments of women, shared the cultural assumption that the heart of the political arena was not a female province. Women’s perceived civic ineptitude and unsound judgement

14 Catherine Allgor, Parlor Politics: In Which the Ladies of Washington Help Build a City and a Government, (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 2000), 22, 55. 15 For the first use of the term “republican motherhood,” see Linda K. Kerber, Women of the Republic, (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1980). For the expansion on and critiques of this concept, see Susan Branson, “Daughters of Liberty to Women of the Republic,” in The Practice of U.S. Women’s History: Narratives, Intersections, and Dialogues, ed. S. Jay Kleinberg, et al., (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2007), 55; Kerber, “The Paradox of Women's Citizenship in the Early Republic: The Case of Martin vs. Massachusetts, 1805,” The American Historical Review 97, no. 2 (1992): 354; Gregory H. Nobles, “Writing Women into the Revolution,” in Whose Revolution Was it?, ed. Alfred Young and Gregory H. Nobles, (New York: NYU Press, 2011), 227-228, 246-247; Caroline Winterer, “Women and Civil Society: Introduction,” Journal of the Early Republic 28, no. 1 (2008): 27; Allgor, Parlor Politics, 55. 6 could throw a wrench into the workings of any political institution in which they had a voice. In so thinking, men took the burden of politics upon themselves, rationalizing that their republican reason, steadfastness, and stamina gave them the good character needed to navigate strife-ridden and temptation-laden public life. As a result, women were excluded from the principles of equality and natural rights they championed alongside men during the American Revolution.16 Each party also had additional reasons for regulating women’s participation based on their own partisan principles. Even though Republicans favored more liberal ideas such as expanding male suffrage and office-holding, they could not bring themselves to embrace political women due to their connection to monarchy and , wishing instead to restrict women to their roles as virtuous wives or unnamed participants in patriotic ceremonies.17 Federalists, who utilized extralegal forms of political participation associated with more aristocratic societies, such as informal female solicitation, were more accepting of women in the public sphere and less apprehensive of monarchical diffusion, yet they too placed restrictions on women’s political activity for the sake of maintaining hierarchical order.18 Both factions similarly wished to retain their political authority and dominant position in the existing gender stratification, which they believed would prevent the destabilization of their government.19 Marie Antoinette provided both Federalists and Republicans with a moral exemplar of why women should not participate in political life. In the mid-, these factions appropriated the queen to illustrate the unfortunate consequences of politicized women, driven by luxury, lust, and ambition, who transgress the appropriate bounds of femininity. While their reasons varied for denouncing the queen and, by extension, female political involvement, Federalists and Republicans were more aligned than differing in their beliefs. As more and more American women appeared to be entering the political sphere, both parties used Marie Antoinette’s life story to confirm preexisting conceptions about the dangers of feminine intrigue, leading them to insist that women should not stray from their proper domestic duties lest they risk their own safety and the welfare of the new American republic.

16 Allgor, Parlor Politics, 28, 55; Zagarri, Revolutionary Backlash, 3-5. 17 Branson, These Fiery Frenchified Dames: Women and Political Culture in Early National Philadelphia, (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2001), 96-97; Zagarri, Revolutionary Backlash, 79, 84-85. 18 Branson, These Fiery Frenchified Dames, 97; Zagarri, Revolutionary Backlash, 65. 19 Branson, These Fiery Frenchified Dames, 97; Zagarri, Revolutionary Backlash, 102. 7 In their respective surveys of women in early American political culture, Susan Branson and Rosemarie Zagarri briefly describe American reactions to Marie Antoinette’s execution, arguing that Federalists used the queen’s case to emphasize the radicalness of the French Revolution while Republicans continued to sympathize with the republican principles that brought her to the scaffold. While Branson places more emphasis on how women responded to the regicide, Zagarri describes how members of both political factions used the queen as a partisan weapon to decry or uphold the revolution in France, in turn reinforcing their own domestic political agendas.20 The instances cited by Zagarri depict the queen as a predominantly passive player in revolutionary events, concentrating on how factions either condemned or excused the acts the French revolutionaries perpetrated against her. While American partisans certainly did speak to the treatment of the queen in their political jousting, they were also intently invested in the queen’s royal and revolutionary activities precisely because of the nation-building plans and ideologies she, and potentially other women, seemed to undermine. Although Zagarri does not discuss bi-partisan consensus over Marie Antoinette, she does mention how factions revealed their anxieties regarding female menaces to the existing political and social order in their discussions of . Republicans despised the British feminist writer for her personal vice and immorality, while Federalists viewed her as a radical revolutionary whose challenges to the gender status quo threatened to undermine society as they knew it.21 For both sides, politically active women such as Wollstonecraft “violated the bounds of feminine modesty, challenged male authority, and eroded the essential distinctions between the sexes.”22 Yet Zagarri does not describe in detail how men sought to protect the nation from female foes; she focuses more on how partisan consensus on gender issues revealed itself in the language they used to defame one another. Partisans used gendered imagery in their political propaganda to advance their interests, and while this frequently reinforced negative female stereotypes, Zagarri suggests that women were not the primary target.23 However, as seen in discussions of Marie Antoinette, it was not only gendered language that undercut women, but the

20 Branson, These Fiery Frenchified Dames, 63-65; Zagarri, Revolutionary Backlash, 103-106. According to Branson, the trial and execution of Marie Antoinette outraged many American women, who believed she was falsely accused of gross sexual misconduct. For more on such allegations, see Chapter 3. 21 Zagarri, Revolutionary Backlash, 106-107. 22 Ibid, 5-6, 77-78. 23 Ibid, 102, 113. 8 explicit use of a female antagonist as a means to discredit and attack women’s political involvement. American opinions of Marie Antoinette reveal that the queen was just as, if not more, threatening to the developing American order as Wollstonecraft. The queen was a woman in a formal political station in one of the leading nations of the Atlantic world, and thus posed an immense risk to the American cultural norm. With vast power and the means to abuse it, reports of her alleged failings and disastrous conduct allowed American men to use her as an example of what could happen if women were given access to power in their newly established government. For Republicans, the queen embodied the evils of monarchy that they believed endangered French and American republicanism. For Federalists, the queen served as a threat not because she was a revolutionary opponent, but because she was part of the well-established government they consistently wished to uphold. Federalists understood that a political limit existed for even those women who helped their agenda: the queen illustrated how a woman could weaken a respectable political system from within, creating circumstances that would allow uncouth forces to take control of the state.24 In order to prevent what they perceived to be potential catastrophe, factions sought to reaffirm principles behind the notion of republican motherhood, using Marie Antoinette as the antithesis of what an American wife and mother should be. While historians frequently discuss republican motherhood as stemming from a uniform tradition of female domesticity, discourses about the French queen enhance understandings of the differing partisan views that also came into play. Both parties agreed that the lack of restraints placed by domestic obligations allowed a single woman to convulse the French nation. However, Republicans asserted that the queen’s monarchical machinations produced this turmoil, whereas Federalists believed her political ineptitude caused the chaotic situation. For the sake of each party’s ideals, then, the restrictions set by republican motherhood were intended to forestall women’s political participation to prevent either “creeping monarchy” or anarchy. Although in practice republican motherhood indirectly increased women’s political voices by requesting they know and instill civic values in their family members, factions allocated this private influence to thwart more worrisome activity.

24 Unlike Americans, who were removed from Gallic crisis, the French targeted Marie Antoinette as a scapegoat during their revolution in order to demonstrate the need for toppling the Ancien Regime; she was viewed as a collective threat to the revolutionary cause and was sacrificed for the greater good. See Lynn Hunt, The Family Romance of the French Revolution, (Berkley: University of California Press, 1992), 114. 9 The discussions about Marie Antoinette, then, explained and justified the need to eliminate overt female political involvement, part of a larger conversation that resulted in the cult of domesticity of the nineteenth-century.25 In addition to revealing (dis)similar aims to restrict female political actors, an in-depth analysis of partisan opinion of Marie Antoinette further complicates the distinctions between parties in regards to their views of women in politics. On the one hand, there existed men on both sides of the political spectrum who consistently supported the queen due to her backing of the American Revolution. On the other hand, the numerous criticisms from both factions suggest that they similarly understood her actions to be a danger to herself and France and sought to maintain stability in the new United States by discouraging other women’s public activities. Partisan attitudes toward Marie Antoinette thus expose conflicting notions of early republican political ideologies, and at the same time illustrate how factions used the queen to help create their new nation’s civic identity sans femmes. This work speaks to the reasoning behind men’s inclination to further enforce female domesticity from a political angle, investigating how factions perceived the repercussions of politicized women and sought to restrain its effects. The examination of newspaper articles, literature, and correspondence discussing Marie Antoinette in the last quarter of the eighteenth- century provides a case study for understanding partisan conceptions of women’s place in the new republic. Newspaper articles make up the bulk of sources examined. Newspapers fundamentally shaped Americans’ perceptions of both the French Revolution and Marie Antoinette, for the growing numbers and influence of newspapers widely dispersed political ideologies and led to the creation of the political culture and public sphere of the early American republic. The newspaper press was the political system’s central institution in the new United States, linking parties, voters, and the government together in the pursuit of specific political goals. The constitutionally guaranteed freedom of the press and the public’s toleration of partisan editors allowed newspapers to become the nexus of public debate, attacking political enemies and opposing ideologies while applauding their favored faction’s views. The extensive circulation of newspapers, be it through physical issues or information passed on in letters, newspaper clippings, or by word of mouth, exposed the general public to editors’ opinions of

25 For more on the development of the cult of domesticity and separate spheres ideology, see Zigarri, Revolutionary Backlash, 134-136. 10 various issues both foreign and domestic, which in turn shaped their own views. Consequently, these newspapers are useful for gauging public opinion, providing a sense of how Americans as a whole received and reacted to news about the French Revolution.26 The majority of American newspapers typically received international news from merchants traveling to and from Great Britain, yet several newspapers, such as the Gazette of the United States and the Republican National Gazette, received some of their foreign intelligence directly from government sources. Additionally, newspapers with larger pools of material tended to draw their information from sources that aligned with their partisan interests. Federalist newspapers predominantly reprinted British articles from London papers, which reflected their desire to reinforce political and economic ties with their former colonizer. Republicans, however, wished to distance themselves from Great Britain and strengthen relations with France, and therefore published more French sources. Despite Republican efforts to present abundant articles directly from France to their readers, British sources were more accessible due to linguistic commonality and greater numbers. The pervasiveness of British sources in turn greatly influenced American convictions about the French Revolution.27 Although a large number of articles regarding the French Revolution are foreign reprints, they are taken into account here since they molded the American readership’s mindsets to particular ideas about Marie Antoinette, which reflects how later American interpretations and commentary developed. Given Marie Antoinette’s international prominence as both a political figure and royal icon, she did not escape the scrutiny of American newspaper editors; between 1788 and 1794 they published at least 593 articles mentioning the queen in Philadelphia alone.28 This work, therefore, places particular emphasis on the ways in which partisan Philadelphian newspapers reported the experiences of the queen and, more broadly, the French Revolution. The nation’s capital served as the central conduit of news and opinion in eighteenth-century America, having both the largest newspaper circulation and national rather than regional influence. As a result, many articles originally printed elsewhere in the United States or in Europe made their way to

26 Elizabeth M. Packer, “This Time a Spectator: Philadelphia’s Printers Come to Terms with the French Revolution (1789-1793),” (Master’s thesis, Tufts University, 2013), 9, 16; Jeffrey L. Pasley, The Tyranny of Printers: Newspaper Politics in the Early American Republic, (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2002), 3, 7, 22- 23; Donald Henderson Stewart, The Opposition Press of the Federalist Period, (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1969), 16; Daniel, Scandal and Civility, 6. 27 Packer, “This Time a Spectator,” 52-53; Pasley, The Tyranny of Printers, 60-62. 28 Figures based on author’s examination of thirteen Philadelphian newspapers, see bibliography for full list and publication dates. 11 Philadelphia, and vice versa.29 The extent to which newspaper editors across the nation modified domestic and foreign news and commentary varied, but most editorializing happened in the capital itself. Editors elsewhere in the United States tended to selectively “copy and paste” articles based on political affiliation, so differences between other foreign reports from those in Philadelphia were slight.30 While this thesis relies mostly on newspapers from Philadelphia, it incorporates articles from other American newspapers if particularly relevant. Like newspapers, books, pamphlets, plays, and other forms of literature provide a window into transatlantic discussions of the French Revolution. The “reading revolution” of the late eighteenth-century led to higher levels of literacy amongst white Americans, which resulted in the increased diffusion of books and ideas across the Atlantic world. The thoughts these written works transmitted reflected both the personal experiences and biases of the authors as well as the wider political, cultural, and economic circumstances that molded the authors’ views. Books of the early American republic, then, can be considered products of the revolutionary age in which they were written, revealing both ideological harmony and discord within the new society as it attempted to define itself.31 The wide distribution of numerous opinions regarding the French Revolution, women’s roles in politics, monarchy and republicanism within the works examined here in turn exposed many Americans to varying concepts about the French queen, whose person intersected these issues. The majority of these works are of British or French origin, although there is a fair spattering of American literature throughout. American commentary prefacing, concluding, or interspersed within republished European works, however, reveals how partisans interpreted these thoughts. Furthermore, the political affiliation of the American authors, editors, translators, and/or publishers have been indicated in order to take partisan differences into account. The final source type utilized for this research is personal diaries and correspondence. Letters, one of the main channels of communication, reflect private opinions tailored to a certain audience in addition to the larger cultural and political milieu. Much of the personal and political

29 For example, see example: “From the Boston Argus. Observations on the Situation of France,” National Gazette, April 17, 1793, 196. 30 James Alexander Dun (author of Dangerous Neighbors: Making the in Early America, (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016)), in phone conversation with the author, February 3, 2017. 31 Cathy N. Davidson, Revolution and the Word: The Rise of the Novel in America, (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986), vii-ix; Richard D. Brown, Knowledge is Power: The Diffusion of Information in Early America, 1700- 1865, (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989), 4-5. 12 correspondence considered here was written by American political elites with close ties to French affairs, particularly those who served as diplomats in France under either the absolute monarchy or subsequent revolutionary governments. Several of these men were personally acquainted with Marie Antoinette and shared their direct observations and opinions of the queen with their fellow politicians or families stateside. It is critical not to make broad assertions about the entire American population’s attitudes toward the queen based on the individuals whose correspondence is examined. However, unlike newspapers, in which editors oftentimes selectively printed news that promoted their political perspective, the examination of diaries and letters provides an unabridged array of opinions about French events, although they still often reflected partisan biases. Additionally, it is because these very partisan sentiments were frequently representative of factional beliefs that these individual accounts can be combined with print sources in order to paint a fuller picture of American opinion.32 As discussions of the queen reveal, all of these forms of evidence are interconnected. Newspapers praised or critiqued books (most commonly ’s Reflections on the Revolution in France and ’s Rights of Man) and reprinted letters from around the transatlantic world. Letters referenced articles from newspapers and ideas from other published works, such as those alluded to by members of the Adams family, while political treatises incorporated letters and newspaper articles into their political commentary, with William Cobbett’s work being but one example. It becomes clear, then, that these functioned together to form American attitudes toward Marie Antoinette. Also, since the goal of this work is to analyze partisan men’s appropriation of the queen, most of the sources referenced here were written by men. However, a few pieces written by women are included either because they were reprinted by the partisan press and/or the sentiments conveyed are in the same vein as those held by men, thus illustrating larger partisan ideas. While much can be gathered from men’s political response to one female figure, Marie Antoinette was a unique individual who experienced extraordinary circumstances far different from any American woman. However, each party’s explicit use of the queen as a political entity and counterexample of the proper American woman reveals that her situation spoke to larger

32 Konstantin Dierks, In My Power: Letter Writing and Communications in Early America, (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2009), 282-284. For more on written correspondence, see Sarah M. Pearsall, Atlantic Families: Lives and Letters in the Later Eighteenth Century (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008). 13 concerns. The timing of the queen’s downfall corresponded with the increased presence of women in politics and prompted factions, fearing for their nation’s future, to firmly address the issue. Americans weighed their judgements surrounding her actions and treatment against their political ideals to define what they believed to be the best course of action for the United States, both domestically and abroad, in response to the French Revolution. Although these sentiments came from political elites, opinions of the queen and female political activity were almost certainly disseminated to the larger public given the influence of print culture of the time and fit seamlessly into the worldview of American patriarchal culture. This thesis is organized chronologically in order to trace how American opinions of the queen transformed as the French Revolution progressed and pinpoint shifting attitudes in sequence with particular events. Popular opinion about the French queen was largely influenced by whichever party dominated discussions about the French Revolution. In 1789, Americans were in general agreement about the conflict in Europe, but as partisanship in the United States emerged, Republicans became the predominant voice of revolutionary rhetoric and anti- monarchical sentiments. Following the fall of the French monarchy in 1792 and the inundation of information and refugees bearing news of the escalating violence, Federalists began to express their discontent. Federalists and Republicans battled for public opinion over the next few years, but with foreign policy issues threatening to entangle the United States in a European war and the outbreak of the , the public’s feelings toward the French Revolution became more tempered. By the end of the decade, Federalists were primarily in control of popular political expression in relation to French events.33 Partisan opinions about Marie Antoinette, however, were not quite as straightforward as their overall impressions of the French Revolution. The gradual change of American attitudes toward the queen can be thought of as a pendulum that swayed between degrees of sentiment that ranged from critical to sympathetic. Variances were slight at first; the weight did not move too far from its center, but these relatively moderate views eventually became the foundation for more extreme opinions. Over time, revolutionary events gave the pendulum increasing momentum, causing it to swing higher on either side of the spectrum: partisan attitudes became more radical and more public. This move to the extremity, however, was not balanced at first, for it was the Republicans who initially branched away from the center in the summer of 1791,

33 Branson, These Fiery Frenchified Dames, 55, 80-81. 14 while the Federalists did not actively voice their dissent until a year later. The divide between Federalist and Republican thought was not perfect throughout all periods of the French conflict, but general trends are certainly visible, and it is the disruption of such partisan polarizations that is of particular interest. Chapter 1 begins in 1778, when American opinion of Marie Antoinette was at its height, and traces its anfractuous decline in response to the first events of the revolution. Prior to the French Revolution, Marie Antoinette was venerated as a good mother to her children, reflecting what partisans considered to be women’s proper gender roles, yet neither faction was comfortable with her role as a political actor. The decline of her popularity was indicative of the waning of American royalism on the whole, with Republican anti-monarchical declarations becoming increasingly discernable in the press. The chapter ends with reactions to the failed , news of which reached the United States in late summer of 1791 and served as a turning point for many Americans. The flight disrupted American hopes for the French Revolution, for it revealed that the Gallic quest for liberty would not go as smoothly as they desired due to the lack of cooperation between the monarchs and revolutionaries. Chapter 2 explores the remainder of 1791 through April 1793, covering American reaction to the abolition of the French monarchy, imprisonment of the , and Louis XVI’s trial and execution. It is during this period when support for the French Revolution began to crumble and Americans, fearing the ramifications of their own revolution, appropriated the queen to voice such concerns. Federalists were at the forefront of this conservative backlash, using a victimized image of the disgraced queen ousted from her proper place in the hierarchical order, to lambast the French Revolution and its Republican supporters, yet they themselves were not without their disapprovals of her political maneuverings. Republicans retorted by claiming the queen’s championing of absolutism demonstrated the necessity of revolution and blamed the queen for the fate and failings of America’s great and beloved ally: her husband the king. Chapter 3, then, examines the remainder of 1793 through 1797, with emphasis on how Americans responded to the trial and execution of Marie Antoinette in October 1793 and the discussions surrounding the queen’s fate throughout the subsequent years. Discussions immediately after her execution present evenly mixed partisanship, but as the decade wore on, Federalist anti-revolutionary sentiments overpowered the Republicans, becoming in the process more critical of the queen. As Americans switched their focus from revolution to national

15 security, Marie Antoinette came to represent a variety of motifs in American political culture, including a personification of monarchy, the foil of masculine republicanism, and the antithesis of republican motherhood. Ultimately both Federalists and Republicans suggested to different extents that Marie Antoinette was responsible for her own fate. As they came to a consensus about her improper political undertakings, they sought to prevent other American women from following suit.

16 Chapter 1

Ten months after the commencement of the 1778 Treaty of Alliance, U.S. commissioner to France remarked in awe at what he considered to be the much-deserved reverence of for their monarchs: “The K[ing] and Q[ueen] are greatly beloved here—every day shews fresh Proofs of it.”34 Present in France at the onset of Franco-American relations, Adams witnessed Marie Antoinette at the height of her splendor, and declared that the queen was “an Object too sublime and beautiful for my dull pen to describe[,]” her “fine Complexion indicating perfect health, and was an handsome Woman in her face and figure.”35 She was adored by French and Americans alike, and at the time, Adams could not have predicted her fall from grace. Throughout the following decade, however, the queen increasingly became not an object of admiration, but repulsion. The gradual decline of Marie Antoinette’s popularity is indicative of the concurrent waning of regal reputation throughout the last quarter of the eighteenth century in the United States. Monarchical fascination and reverence was still very much ingrained in American culture in the years following the American Revolution, yet as the United States developed into a nation without a sovereign, they became ever more wary of monarchy, and absolutism in particular, which the French queen personified. As a result, print comments about the queen progressively became more negative as Americans became more aware of her political activities and absolutist agenda. The Republican Party in particular took advantage of this opportunity to further distance the United States from monarchy as an institution, using the public’s overall fondness for the French Revolutionary cause and the case of Marie Antoinette to urge their fellow Americans to break away from remaining veneration of royalty. Additionally, tarnishing the queen’s reputation made it easier for Americans to support the popular movements of the French Revolution, although some retained a favorable impression of the queen as an affectionate mother who had championed their fight for independence. Foreign and domestic commentary increasingly suggested that the queen was hindering French reform and stability, which set the stage for future debates.

34 John Adams to Abigail Adams, December 27, 1778, The Adams Papers, ed. L.H. Butterfield and Marc Friedlaender, Adams Family Correspondence (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1973), 3:141-142. 35 John Adams, “, 1778,”The Adams Papers, ed. Butterfield, Diary and Autobiography of John Adams, (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1961), 4:130-133. 17 This chapter will examine the varied and conflicted portrayals of Marie Antoinette to which Americans were exposed, either directly as ambassadors working closely with the French government, or indirectly as the general public who read newspapers and other publications. These layered perceptions reveal how Americans came to understand the queen as a political figure from early in her reign through the first several years of the French Revolution. Little direct public American commentary existed during this period, but outside information and interpretations presented to Americans influenced how their views of the queen changed as the Revolution progressed. Although foreign reprints did not expressly reflect American attitudes, the articles U.S. newspapers chose to republish generally aligned with their beliefs. Americans on both sides of the Atlantic took interest in this female political figure who was involved in both French and international affairs, and they eventually came to use these depictions of the queen to fit their own political agendas in the United States.36 Americans began to notice Marie Antoinette’s political influence when the United States negotiated with the French monarchy during the American Revolution. Reports from American diplomats in France suggested that principle delegate targeted the young queen specifically to obtain her endorsement of the American cause, and he successfully secured her approval. Although the queen did not have as much sway over her husband as she did during the French Revolution, American envoys tried to gain her favor via connected courtiers and ministers in an attempt to persuade her to support American interests, particularly paying off the United States’ debts to France.37 The signing of the Franco-American Treaty of Alliance and subsequent American military victories led to an outpouring of gratitude for the French sovereigns, and while the king generally received the most appreciation, the U.S. government extoled the queen by christening a naval ship in her honor, the USS Queen of France, and

36 Since newspapers became more partisan as the 1790s wore on, many periodicals referenced in this first chapter are unaligned or only loosely aligned with a particular party. If they do strongly support a particular faction, however, it is noted. Republican anti-monarchical voices in particular became increasingly discernable in the press as time passed. 37 Extract from Two Purported Letters by Benjamin Franklin, July 27 [i.e., after August 11] 1777,” The Papers of Benjamin Franklin, ed. William B. Willcox, (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1984), 24:412–413; Adams, “November 17. Sunday,” The Adams Papers, ed. Butterfield, Diary and Autobiography of John Adams, (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1961) 3:40–85; Adams to Robert R. Livingston, 13 August 1783, The Adams Papers, ed. Gregg L. Lint, C. James Taylor, Robert F. Karachuk, Hobson Woodward, Margaret A. Hogan, Sara B. Sikes, Mary T. Claffey, and Karen N. Barzilay, Papers of John Adams (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010), 15:226–227. 18 presenting her with a gold medallion that commemorated France’s aid.38 too declared that he felt “such perfect respect & attachment [to the] Queen, on account of her virtues – her sentiments in favour of America and the general rights & liberties of Mankind.”39 Washington’s flattery contradicted French court gossip, as recorded by Adams, which involved the queen’s “intrigues… constant dissipation, her habits of expense and profusion, [and] her giddy thoughtless conduct.” Despite these rumors, the American ambassadors generally spoke of her favorably, and the state portrait of the queen gifted to Congress by the French government in 1784 hung alongside that of her husband in the Chambers until the .40 What was just as, if not more, crucial to these diplomats as Marie Antoinette’s direct involvement in governmental affairs was her personal yet extremely public and political role as a mother. In addition to aligning with ideas of proper womanhood, Americans honored her in such a capacity due to lingering monarchical reverence and their genuine interest in the success of the French monarchy.41 When the queen gave birth to a son in 1781, Americans rejoiced since it signified the continuation of the benevolent empire that defended their republican enterprise, and they hoped that the dauphin would become like his father, “a friend and guardian of the rights of mankind.”42 Like contemporary Europeans, Americans believed that the provision of an heir was

38 Purchased from the French in 1777, the USS Queen of France was operated by the Continental Navy and scuttled after the British siege of Charleston of 1780. See Naval History and Heritage Command, “Queen of France,” Dictionary of American Naval Fighting Ships, (Web: U.S. Navy, 2015). For the presentation of the Libertas Americana medal, see Benjamin Franklin to Robert R. Livingston, April 15, 1783, The Papers of Benjamin Franklin, ed. Ellen R. Cohn, (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2008), 39:467-472. 39 George Washington to the Marquis de Lafayette, August 10, 1778, The Papers of George Washington, ed. David R. Hoth, Revolutionary War Series (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2006), 16:284–285. 40 Adams, “April 21, 1778,” The Adams Papers, ed. Butterfield, Diary and Autobiography of John Adams (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1961), 4:67–77; John Quincy Adams, “March 27, 1785,” The Adams Papers, ed. Robert J. Taylor and Marc Friedlaender, Diary of John Quincy Adams (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1981), 1:228–242; , The Diary and Letters of Gouverneur Morris, ed. Anne Cary Morris (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1888), 1:55. Regarding the portraits, see Joseph Martin Hernon, Profiles in Character: Hubris and Heroism in the U.S. Senate, (New York: M.E. Sharpe, Inc., 1997), 17; T. Lawrence Larkin, “A ‘Gift’ Strategically Solicited and Magnanimously Conferred: The American Congress, the French Monarchy, and the State Portraits of Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette,” Winterthur Portfolio, vol. 44, no. 1, (2010), 32. The British likely destroyed the portraits when they set fire to the Capitol building during the on August 24, 1814. 41 Washington to Lafayette, March 8–10, 1779,” The Papers of George Washington, ed. Philander D. Chase and William M. Ferraro, Revolutionary War Series (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2009), 19:401–405; Washington to Jean Holker, March 14, 1779, The Papers of George Washington, 19:477–478; Franklin to Queen Marie-Antoinette, [after October 22, 1781], The Papers of Benjamin Franklin, ed. Barbara B. Oberg, (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1999), 35:638–639; Virginia Gazette (Richmond), July 6, 1782. 42 Freeman’s Journal (Philadelphia), July 31, 1782, 3. See also William C. Stinchcombe, “Americans Celebrate the Birth of the Dauphin: American Views of France in 1782,” in Diplomacy and Revolution: The Franco-American Alliance of 1788, ed. Robert Hoffman and Peter J. Albert, (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1981), 64. 19 the queen’s most important duty since the Bourbon provided stability in the kingdom. With the long awaited birth of the dauphin also came additional political clout since she successfully performed her designated function as wife and queen despite the fact that French queens had no formal political roles.43 Marie Antoinette’s new power not only affected French politics but foreign policy in the United States, as well. Edmond Randolph observed that Congress became more mindful of policy toward the queen’s party, raising questions about her influence beyond that of her maternal role.44 The queen’s subsequent pregnancies also raised questions about paternity due to her liaison with the Count Axel de Fersen, which foreshadowed later American accusations of licentiousness and infidelity.45 For those Americans who were not in direct contact with the queen, she was still a recognizable figure who made numerous appearances in American culture. In addition to her fame for supporting the American cause for independence, Marie Antoinette was well known because of her notoriety as royalty, which Americans followed either out of a continued cultural attachment to monarchy or a general interest in foreign news and affairs.46 The first settlement in the Northwest Territory bore her name, Marietta, as did some American girls born following the creation of the Franco-American Alliance.47 The queen also appeared in American poetry, almanacs, and grammar books, appealing to the masses when described as a friend to the United States who possessed “a most chearful [sic] temper, extremely affable and obliging, easy of access to all ranks of people, and most graciously condescends to converse with the meanest of her subjects.”48 Some newspapers included reprinted British reports that told of the queen’s

43 Lynn Hunt, The Family Romance of the French Revolution, (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992), 89. 44 Edmund Randolph to , –24, 1782, The Papers of James Madison, ed. William T. Hutchinson and William M. E. Rachal, (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1965), 4:263–269. 45 John Quincy Adams, “March 27, 1785,” The Adams Papers, ed. Taylor and Friedlaender, Diary of John Quincy Adams (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1981), 1:228–242. For more American discussion about the queen’s amours, see Morris, The Diary and Letters of Gouverneur Morris, 1:55, 176. 46 For public fascination with the persons of royalty and the rise of international fame culture in the late eighteenth century, see Tom Mole and Heather McPherson, and Celebrity Culture, 1750-1850, ed. Tom Mole, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 7, 121. 47 For a report regarding the settlement of Marietta, see the Federal Gazette, October 11, 1788, 3. A discussion about naming a child after the queen comes from Sarah Bache, who in 1779 wrote to her father Benjamin Franklin “[A] little stranger… is hourly expected, and is to be named after one of their most Christian Majesty’s. … The Queen has so many names, one of them will be honour enough[.]” Her son, Louis Franklin Bache, was born on October 7, 1779. See Sarah Bache to Benjamin Franklin, September 25, 1779, The Papers of Benjamin Franklin, ed. Oberg, (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1993), 30:397-398. 48 Quote from Philomathes, Thomas's Massachusetts, New-Hampshire, and Connecticut almanack for the year of our Lord Christ 1780, (Worchester: Isiah Thomas, 1779), 24-25. For additional examples, see Samuel Campbell and Thomas Allen, eds., The American songster: being a select collection of the most celebrated American, English, 20 public and private activities, which were ultimately interconnected, such as nursing her sickly eldest son, portraying her as a mother figure tending to the future of the French state.49 In contrast to this responsible, nurturing image, the public was introduced to stories discussing her penchant to mischief from the onset of French-American relations, such as an anecdote describing Franklin’s observations of the queen’s questionable behavior.50 Americans did not republish such articles simply out of curiosity and fascination, but because they saw them as having political consequence. Americans recognized the role Marie Antoinette played as part of an increasingly interconnected global, political and ideological system of which France and the United States were a part. This overall positive view of Marie Antoinette was not dampened by the 1785 Diamond Necklace Affair, even as it tarnished the queen’s reputation in France.51 The incident involved swindlers who ordered an exorbitantly priced necklace for their own use in the queen’s name and never paid the crown jewelers for it as promised. Although many French subjects saw the instance as indicative of royal corruption and the inefficiencies of the Ancien Régime, reports republished in Philadelphian newspapers did not accuse the queen herself of any wrongdoing. While her penchant for luxury was known, publications portrayed her as cautious and responsible, not a spendthrift. The Pennsylvania Packet reported that the queen initially rejected

Scotch, and Irish songs, (New York: Campbell and Allen, 1788), 137; Copernicus Partridge, The North-American calendar: or, The Rhode-Island almanack, for the year of our Lord Christ 1786, (Providence: Bennett Wheeler, 1785); Abraham Weatherwise, An almanack, for the year of Christian aera 1788, (Boston: John W. Folsom, 1787); Thomas Greenleaf, Greenleaf's New-York, Connecticut & New-Jersey almanac, (New York: Thomas Greenleaf, 1790); Caleb Alexander, A grammatical system of the English language, (Boston: Samuel Hall, 1792), 12. 49 Pennsylvania Packet (Philadelphia), April 18, 1788, 2; Pennsylvania Journal (Philadelphia), , 1788, 3; Freeman’s Journal, April 30, 1788, 3; Pennsylvania Mercury (Philadelphia), May 8, 1788, 3; Independent Gazetteer (Philadelphia), August 25, 1788, 1-2. For the pervasiveness of British articles in American newspapers, see Elizabeth M. Packer, “This Time a Spectator: Philadelphia’s Printers Come to Terms with the French Revolution (1789-1793),” (Master’s thesis, Tufts University, 2013), 52-53; Jeffrey L. Pasley, The Tyranny of Printers: Newspaper Politics in the Early American Republic, (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2002), 60-62. 50 A British piece republished in the Connecticut Courant (Hartford) on November 10, 1778 speaks of Franklin demonstrating electrical experiments for Marie Antoinette in the : “[The queen] asked him in a fit of raillery, if he did not dread the fate of Prometheus, who was so severely served for staling fire from Heaven? ‘Yes, please your Majesty, (replied old Franklin, with infinite gallantry) if I did not behold a pair of eyes this moment, which have stolen infinitely more fire from Jove than ever I did, pass unpunished, though they do more mischief in a week, than I have done in all my experiments.’” 51 This affair augmented nefarious claims about the queen present in French pornographic pamphlets throughout her reign. Although such satirical pamphlets successfully squelched the queen’s popularity in France by portraying her as a greedy, reckless harlot, they do not appear to have directly swayed American opinion. They were not reprinted on U.S. soil, but Americans gradually became aware of some of the unseemly content passed through British or French information channels. For more on Marie Antoinette in such pamphlets, see William Howard Adams, The Years of , (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1997), 253; Hunt, The Family Romance, 101-107. 21 the offer from the jewelers before the scandal began, supposedly replying that “the state of her finances did not admit of her expending such a sum on so useless a purchase.”52 It was not until after the queen’s death that Americans reinterpreted the affair to paint the queen as a conspirator. This reinterpretation and concurrent shift in opinion occurred in the following decade as Americans reconsidered her past in light of revolutionary events in order to more forcefully argue that women in positions of power tainted society and the public sphere.53 As an economic crisis loomed large in France during the later , Americans came to view Marie Antoinette as less responsible while becoming more critical of how she conducted finances. News about the queen’s contribution to the country’s struggles began to circulate in the American press. Reprinted British reports suggested that the queen’s spending on her lavish wardrobe and sending large sums of money to her brother, the Joseph II, formed a large part of the French debt, and that she opposed the French finance minister for attempting to limit her expenditures.54 Some of these reports included a gendered component, suggesting that Marie Antoinette evaded the proper authority of both government officials and her husband by draining the treasury “without the privity [sic] of the king.” These instances increasingly associated the queen with absolutism, for she was depicted as acting haphazardly without restraints. Marie Antoinette’s evasion of her husband’s demands also started to damage Louis XVI’s reputation in the United States. For instance, after discussing the queen’s misuse of French funds, the Pennsylvania Evening Herald republished an account of a British traveler who “saw delineated on the walls of the Louvre, at Paris, the figure of the King of France, with a noble pair of antlers on his head. Under the figure was written – LE ROI!” American readers thus became exposed to depictions of Louis XVI as a cuckold, in literal or metaphorical terms, who could not control his wife.55 Such imagery was a stark contrast to American portrayals of

52 Pennsylvania Packet, , 1785, 2. For other reports that suggest the queen’s innocence, see Pennsylvania Packet, July 14, 1786, 2; Independent Gazetteer, December 8, 1786, 3; Pennsylvania Evening Herald (Philadelphia), June 6, 1787, 3; Pennsylvania Packet, June 7, 1787, 2-3; Independent Gazetteer, June 8, 1787, 2-3. 53 In response to Marie Antoinette’s execution, a Connecticut newspaper described the Diamond Necklace Affair as “One particular instance of her extravagance [that] ought to be noted, as well for its cruelty in its end, as for its folly in its origin.” In this American rendition, the queen went behind Louis XVI’s back to purchase the necklace, and later withdrew her support of the cardinal when it could not be paid, denying that she ever requested the necklace. The American writer ends the narration by referencing the queen’s death, saying: “Now weep ye Britons with the tears of a Crocodile; but Americans do not weep.” See Norwich Packet (Norwich, CT), January 23, 1794, 3. For more detailed discussion about this change of opinion, see Chapter 3. 54 Pennsylvania Evening Herald, January 9, 1788, 2; Pennsylvania Packet, November 21, 1788, 2; Independent Gazetteer, December 2, 1788; Pennsylvania Mercury, January 27, 1789, 3. 55 Pennsylvania Packet, November 27, 1788, 3. 22 Louis XVI as the virile hero of American republicanism from the same decade.56 Although these reprinted British articles did not include additional American commentary, they foreshadowed how the queen would eventually be used to change some Americans’ opinions of their royal ally and of the monarchical institution itself. Like British commentators, Americans within diplomatic circles began to speak more critically about Marie Antoinette. Unlike previous ambassadors who did not seriously contemplate stories concerning the queen’s extravagance and profligacy, Thomas Jefferson, who served as the United States Minister to France from 1785 to 1789, considered these proof that she posed a legitimate threat to the French state. Jefferson, an ardent Republican who believed that the ineffective French absolutist system desperately needed reform, saw her role as a prominent leader of the aristocratic party as hindering any political progression.57 He believed that the queen’s political principles opposed those of her husband, whom the minister respected and considered “honest and [wishing] the good of his people,” and that the queen often influenced the king to support her absolutist whims, pursuing Austrian and her own personal interests rather than the welfare of France and its people. 58 In letters to James Madison and John Adams written in the summer of 1787, Jefferson claimed that Marie Antoinette’s devotion to pleasure and expense caused her to be “detested” in France and that “an explosion of some sort is not impossible.” Jefferson thus came to see the French Revolution as a retaliation against the queen, and would throughout and beyond the conflict remain one of her most outspoken critics.59 With Marie Antoinette’s opposition to proposed political reorganizations following the meetings of the and the recall of the , the , conflicting American perceptions about the queen emerged. While Jefferson lambasted the queen for placing herself at odds with French reformers, Gouverneur Morris, an American

56 For example, see William Moore Smith, “An Ode on the Birth of the ,” Poems, on Several Occasions, Written in Philadelphia, (Philadelphia: Enoch Story, 1786), 75. Here Louis XVI, “the great Protector of our right,” is described using classical imagery as the potent “God-like” defender of American liberty. 57 Thomas Jefferson to John Jay, February 5, 1788, The Papers of Thomas Jefferson, ed. Julian P. Boyd, (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1955), 12:563–565. 58 Jefferson to Jay, October 8, 1787, The Papers of Thomas Jefferson, 12:217–218; Jefferson to Jay, June 17, 1789, The Papers of Thomas Jefferson, ed. Boyd, (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1958), 15:187–191; Jefferson to Jay, June 24, 1789, The Papers of Thomas Jefferson, 15:205–210. 59 Jefferson to Madison, June 20, 1787, The Papers of James Madison, ed. Robert A. Rutland, Charles F. Hobson, William M. E. Rachal, and Frederika J. Teute, (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1977), 10:63–67; Jefferson to Madison, August 2, 1787, The Papers of James Madison, 10:124-131; Jefferson to Adams, August 30, 1787, The Papers of Thomas Jefferson, 12:66–69. 23 statesman who at the time was in France for business, saw the queen’s femininity as taking precedent over her political involvement. Morris pitied her for the lack of acclimation she received from the French public, saying, “I cannot help feeling the mortification the poor Queen meets with, for I see only the woman, and it seems unmanly to treat a woman with unkindness.”60 Morris, a Federalist who from the start had misgivings about the radical reforms proposed by the Third Estate, regretted that many Frenchmen “hated, humbled, [and] mortified” their queen, yet he did agree with Jefferson in that her “intrigues to save some shattered remnants of the royal authority” would only undermine compromise between the Estates and inflame tensions.61 From across the Atlantic, President Washington too recognized her political maneuverings, and while he did not state whether or not he approved, he acknowledged that her actions, amongst myriad other French particulars, would draw out and intensify the budding revolution.62 In their discussions of French women in general, both Jefferson and Morris expressed their misgivings regarding the influence these women had on French politics, believing that their intrinsic civic ineptitude led to more harm than good for both the country and their own sensibilities. Both men believed that political engagement blemished women’s intrinsically docile nature, tainting women’s lives with the pressures of public life.63 Additionally, female public conduct contradicted beliefs that women should dedicate themselves to their family’s wellbeing, thus threatening established gendered norms.64 These sentiments, used either to sympathize with or criticize Marie Antoinette, would appear time and again regarding the queen and her collusions throughout the French Revolution. American newspapers took more notice of the queen’s political intrigues following the fall of the Bastille on July 14, 1789. After dismissing false accounts that Marie Antoinette had fled France and that the newly formed National Assembly had placed a price on her head given her opposition to the reformist Third Estate, newspapers reprinted reports that reflected Morris

60 Morris, The Diary and Letters of Gouverneur Morris, 1:74. 61 Ibid, 110. 62 Washington to Morris, October 13, 1789, The Papers of George Washington, ed. Dorothy Twohig, Presidential Series, (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1993), 4:176–179. 63 Andrew S. Trees, The Founding Fathers and the Politics of Character, (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004), 36, 88; Philipp Ziesche, Cosmopolitan Patriots: Americans in Paris in the Age of Revolution, (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2010), 20; David S. Shields, Civil Tongues & Polite Letters in British America, (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997), 315; Linda K. Kerber, Women of the Republic: Intellect and Ideology in Revolutionary America, (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1980), 279. 64 W. H. Adams, The Paris Years of Thomas Jefferson, 255. 24 and Jefferson’s observations.65 Some British articles went so far as to describe the queen’s aristocratic faction as an “infernal cabal” that clashed with the interests of the French people, and that she headed an “infamous plot” against the National Assembly that could lead to civil war.66 Others described her “ruinous” influence over the king, who increasingly relied on her opinions following the loss of his most trusted advisers. They believed that without her poor counsel, the king would completely cooperate with the new government.67 These articles directly or indirectly suggested that she transgressed proper gender roles through her “improper interference with political concerns.”68 Americans began to see the extent of the threat she potentially posed when the National Assembly pardoned her for her previous opposition in order to keep her in France and under their watch, for they did not want her to escape and continue conspiring against the reformist state with her fugitive brother-in-law.69 Despite this pardon, she and her party remained a thorn in the National Assembly’s side, their contesting interests making it difficult for the government to progress while irritating those involved in negotiations.70 At this time, newspapers affiliated with both American factions published similar reports, and neither provided their own opinions regarding Marie Antoinette’s machinations. Given the widespread coverage of the increasingly riotous events of October 1789, American attention remained on France. Newspapers reprinted reports of a mob that marched to the and successfully pressed their demands onto the royal family. The mob compelled the king and queen to move to Paris to reside among the people, for the royal family’s residence within reformist Paris would provide the best possible environment for the Revolution’s successes. While the mob did not ultimately harm Marie Antoinette, multiple articles chronicled her precarious interactions with the angry people throughout the unfolding events and the threats made on her life. Some newspapers portrayed the queen as completely defeated during her family’s forced relocation, feeling merely “a void sensation, like a criminal going to execution.”71 Others said she properly behaved according to her rank, such as the

65 Federal Gazette, September 19, 1789, 3. 66 Pennsylvania Packet, October 5, 1789, 3; Pennsylvania Mercury, December 12, 1789, 3. 67 Pennsylvania Packet, September 21, 1789, 2; Ibid, November 2, 1789, 2. 68 Ibid, November 12, 1789, 2. 69 Independent Gazetteer, November 9, 1789, 3; Pennsylvania Packet, November 10, 1789 2. 70 Federal Gazette, November 18, 1789, 2. A British poem published by the same paper on November 30, 1789 (3) articulated the queen’s frustration with the National Assembly and the French populace’s overall displeasure with her: “Where is the Queen? / In the spleen / Who made us poor? A W---e [whore].” 71 Federal Gazette, November 30, 1789, 2; Ibid, December 23, 1789, 2; Independent Gazetteer, December 1, 1789, 2-3. 25 British report that stated, “The Queen never appeared more like a Queen, neither dejected, or affecting indifference. She displayed an equanimity which even her enemies were forced to admire.”72 The British responses to these events also explicitly perceived the queen through a gendered lens, in or against her favor. The mildly Federalist Pennsylvania Packet reported that the queen displayed admirable poise and fortitude in the face of the menacing mob, resolving “with manly resolution, to brave a storm from which so many princes of the blood, and able generals, had tho't it prudent to fly[,]” following her husband to Paris instead of attempting to flee the country.73 While this language suggests that it was acceptable for the queen to embrace a sort of masculine determination within the given contentious circumstances, the same paper subsequently printed another British article suggesting she would never have been in this trying situation had she acted according to gender norms in the first place, stating: “It cannot but fill the mind with regret to see such an amiable character misguided by the impulse of ambition so in compatible with the proper pursuits and duties of her sex.”74 On the whole, the upset of royal power complicated perceptions of the queen, and Americans progressively reprinted articles with negative connotations, mirroring their disapproval of the absolutism Marie Antoinette represented and their endorsement of French popular action. An article reprinted from a London paper in Freeman’s Journal on December 2, 1789 discussed the immediate aftermath of the royal family’s relocation and articulated some prominent themes about Marie Antoinette that Americans frequently referenced as the Revolution progressed. First, as already mentioned, it discussed the queen’s party and how she and her favorites, both male and female, were political actors in the French drama. The pro- Revolutionary text reiterated that the move to Paris mitigated the threat posed by the queen, for “the plans of tyrants and traitors are defeated… the queen has lost herself for ever [sic] … and freedom is triumphant!” The queen’s loss of herself, or rather her political ambitions, led to the second point made about her wifely duties. Now that the royal family had moved to Paris, the British writer believed that “His majesty will now, for the first time, have an opportunity of admiring the admirable ingenuity and refined improvements of his cara sposa,” insinuating that

72 Pennsylvania Packet, December 11, 1789, 2. 73 Ibid, November 23, 1789, 2. 74 Ibid, December 16, 1789, 2. 26 the queen, knocked from her pedestal of power, was now in a position to be a proper spouse. Third, the article spoke of the queen’s frivolity and frequenting the theaters of Paris. This association with the theater solicited attacks, for men often considered women who regularly patronized the theater as involved in the public in ways more similar to those of prostitutes as opposed to the good housewife.75 And finally, although pro-revolutionary, the writer did not condone the treatment of the queen during the royal relocation, stating “During this singular and horrible procession… the women in particular loudly abus[ed] the queen in the most opprobrious terms; and called out for her to be given up to them, that they put out her eyes, and cut off her ears.”76 Unnerved by this threat of violence, American papers began to reprint slews of unverified reports regarding the murder or attempted murder of Marie Antoinette, a trend that continued until her actual death. These rumors reflected the anxieties many British commentators felt about the popular violence and the queen’s wellbeing, apprehensions that became engrained in many Americans as well.77 However, the Republican Independent Gazetteer republished a piece condemning the absurdities of all reports suggesting that the revolutionaries presented a danger to the queen, claiming that “not so much as an insult was offered to her Majesty’s person,” yet the piece did little to diminish the number of articles expressing concern, reflecting their continued attachment to her person.78 Additionally, the threats to the queen sparked one of the first bits of American newspaper commentary, for they credited the Marquis de Lafayette, hero of the American Revolution and up-and-coming leader of his own nation’s struggle for liberty, for saving the queen from the bloodthirsty mob.79 This article reflects Americans’ interest in their adopted patriot, but could also suggest that Lafayette embodied American values and sought to bring about French constitutional reform in a civilized, enlightened manner by saving the queen and championing order. Louis XVI too was viewed as a sort of American-inspired role model in France during the 1780s and the beginning of the revolution.80 However, as a woman

75 W. H. Adams, The Paris Years of Thomas Jefferson, 254. 76 Freeman’s Journal, December 2, 1789, 1. 77 For example, see Pennsylvania Packet, December 1, 1789, 1. 78 Independent Gazetteer, December 12, 1789, 2. 79 Federal Gazette, December 12, 1789, 2; Pennsylvania Packet, January 4, 1790, 3. 80 Stinchcombe, “Americans Celebrate the Birth of the Dauphin,” 69. At the onset of the French Revolution, Americans saw the king as reform-minded, understanding the need for political change and supporting those who sought to moderately modify the state structure. The queen and her party, however, were believed to be less enthused about such political alterations. 27 and leader of the absolutist aristocrats who increasingly clashed with American republican values, Marie Antoinette was not associated with such virtues, but continued to receive civil treatment by those who sought a peaceful transition to a new government. Other British articles claimed that her position as a mother rather than the bestowing of civil virtues on her behalf saved her from public fury. The Pennsylvania Mercury and Federal Gazette reported that the mob refrained from tearing Marie Antoinette to shreds when they heard of the tenderness she showed toward her now deceased son: “She has humanity, for which she deserves to live. Such is the charm of maternal affection!”81 The queen also reportedly used her surviving children to gain French sympathy. A republished piece in the Pennsylvania Packet stated that when the royals were present at meetings of the National Assembly, “The queen cries and points to her child – then they all cry – and having all wiped their faces, tell the king he is the best the nation has[.]”82 Her role as a mother eventually became key in American deliberations, but for both French subjects and American citizens, maternity did not secure their favor for long. The waning of French monarchical power and the royal family’s move to Paris did not subdue Marie Antoinette’s political activity, as Americans in France quickly discovered. Morris, who recognized the queen’s continuing sway over her husband, believed that she herself could be easily manipulated. While Morris distrusted women’s political intrigues in general, he was not afraid to use them. Once he concluded that the queen was out of imminent danger, Morris used his courtly connections to gain the queen’s, and by proxy the king’s, favor, intending to use his new prestige for the United States’ political and economic advantage.83 William Short, a Republican diplomat stationed in France as America’s chargé d'affaires following Jefferson’s recall to serve as the first Secretary of State, was less convinced that the queen was safe. Short knew that as long as Marie Antoinette continued to politick against the revolution, she remained vulnerable to both verbal and physical attack.84 In a letter to Jefferson, Short remarked that the queen was “in very real danger, as she is still very obnoxious to the people and their leaders, and

81 Pennsylvania Mercury, October 8, 1789, 3; Federal Gazette, October 12, 1789, 2. 82 Pennsylvania Packet, January 5, 1790, 2-3. 83 Morris, The Diary and Letters of Gouverneur Morris, 1:166, 287, 355, 399-400. 84 William Short to Jefferson, September 5, 1790, The Papers of Thomas Jefferson, ed. Boyd, (Princeton University Press, 1965), 17:488-493; Short to Jefferson, October 21, 1790, 17:608-619; Short to Jefferson, March 12, 1791, The Papers of Thomas Jefferson, ed. Boyd, (Princeton University Press, 1974), 19:537-541. 28 considered by them though unjustly, as the soul of all the efforts made against the revolution.”85 Jefferson, it seems, did not acknowledge Short’s concerns. Like Short, many political treatises published in the United States commented on the violence Marie Antoinette faced, particularly in response to Edmund Burke’s controversial Reflections on the Revolution in France. Published in 1790, the Irish statesman’s widely read work suggested that the apparent stability in France was deceptive, and the constitutional monarchy a fraud given that the king and queen were essentially prisoners of a National Assembly that deliberated under the menacing watch of the Parisian mob.86 Within his broader discussion of the ills of the French Revolution, Burke portrayed the queen as an innocent victim of revolutionary fervor, lamenting her precarious situation and arguing that the people of France wrongfully disgraced her.87 In addition to issuing multiple editions of this work, American printers published numerous retorts by British authors claiming that Burke’s embellished, heart-wrenching accounts did nothing but discount the revolutionaries who rightfully took up arms against the corrupt absolutist regime for which the queen stood. While these works agreed with Burke in that the queen’s inherent docile femininity was unsuited for exposure to revolutionary upheaves, they suggested that the queen was a hindrance to the revolutionary cause and that the fight for freedom should not be sacrificed for the veneration of a single woman. They argued that “the liberty and happiness of a whole nation” could not be surrendered to “female beauty, dignity, and compliance,” which threatened to “enslave our affections, [rather] than to lead our judgement.”88 Some critics, taking cues from debauched depictions of Marie Antoinette published in French libelles throughout her reign, went so far as to depict the queen as Medusa, whose mythic, aggressive female agency was understood in terms of savage excess.89 Editions of these

85 Short to Jefferson, December 23, 1790, The Papers of Thomas Jefferson, ed. Boyd, (Princeton University Press, 1971), 18:350–355. 86 Conor Cruise O’Brien, The Long Affair: Thomas Jefferson and the French Revolution, 1785-1800, (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 82. 87 Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France, (New York: Hugh Gaine, 1791), 56-68.

88 Joseph Priestley, Letters to the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, (New York: Hugh Gaine, 1791), 9-10; Catharine Macaulay, Observations on the Reflections of the Right Hon. Edmund Burke, (Boston: I. Thomas and E.T. Andrews, 1791), 22; David Williams, Lessons to a young prince, by an old statesman, on the present disposition in Europe to a general revolution, (New York: Childs and Swaine, 1791), 54-55. 89 Kate Davies, Catharine Macaulay and Mercy Otis Warren: The Revolutionary Atlantic and the Politics of Gender, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 149; Hunt, The Family Romance, 111-112. 29 responses published in the United States frequently included introductions written by American printers that advertised the works as gratifying to “every American” who has not lost sight of the “great principles of republican equality” that “actuate and preserve the independence of the United States.”90 By endorsing the works as a whole, these American printers implied that the queen opposed the republican sentiments championed by both the original authors and the American people, and that the energies used to pity her needed to be redirected to embrace the greater revolutionary cause. One reply to Burke’s work differed from the others in regards to the queen: Thomas Paine’s Rights of Man. The American patriot, a fervent supporter of French republicanism who simultaneously possessed deep appreciation for the French monarchs, agreed with the British authors that Burke exaggerated the sufferings of the royal family, but he was more critical of monarchy as an institution than he was of the sovereigns themselves. Prior to writing the work, Paine suggested that Washington congratulate “the King and Queen of France (for they have been our friends) and the National assembly on the happy example they are giving to Europe” in order to make the sovereigns aware of the United States’ attachment to both their persons and the ideals behind revolutionary reforms, which he hoped would encourage them to embrace the constitutional monarchy.91 Within the Rights of Man, Paine attacked Burke for snubbing the hardships of the average Frenchman in exchange for profusely lamenting the situation of the queen and other aristocrats, but not once did he rebuke Burke’s comments about the queen’s persona. Actually, in discussing French involvement in the American Revolution, Paine stated that it was out of “both justice and gratitude” to recall that Marie Antoinette supported the American cause and gave it “a at the French court.”92 In this sense, Paine praised the queen for her political influence and social politicking, a notion usually spat upon by his fellow Republicans while more frequently tolerated by Federalists. While Paine may have attacked Burke, he did not ridicule the queen in the process, the only opinion he gave relating to her being complimentary.

90 Macaulay, Observations on the Reflections of the Right Hon. Edmund Burke, 2; Williams, Lessons to a young prince, by an old statesman, 6. 91 Thomas Paine to Washington, May 1, 1790, The Papers of George Washington, ed. Dorothy Twohig, Mark A. Mastromarino, and Jack D. Warren, Presidential Series (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1996), 5:369– 370. 92 Thomas Paine, Rights of Man: being an answer to Mr. Burke's attack on the French Revolution, (Carlisle: George Kline, 1791), 52. 30 Marie Antoinette’s threat to the Revolution and vice versa seemed to be diminished as tensions in France deescalated and the queen appeared to make concessions, to the relief of many Americans. Reports appearing in American newspapers during 1790 and the first half of 1791 suggested that both the king and queen were cooperating with the revolutionaries in order to form a French constitution.93 Marie Antoinette vowed to raise her son to embrace the will of the French people, a pledge that seemed to embrace the revolutionaries’ model maternal role of patriot educator, not unlike the American republican mother, and took an oath of allegiance at the Fête de la Fédération ceremony celebrating the anniversary of the storming of the Bastille.94 The Pennsylvania Mercury reported that in a legal sense, the queen was no longer an inviolable figure but a “simple citizen” of France, and thus should abide by the same rule of law as her subjects.95 Additionally, a piece of American commentary published in the Federalist Gazette of the United States on July 23, 1791 suggested that the queen’s party was nearly extinguished and that she would be completely subdued once she recognized that “any machinations against the revolution must issue in total defeat and disappointment.”96 Americans thus believed that the revolution had finally put Marie Antoinette in her proper place as a mother inactive in public life and had triumphed over the absolutist tyranny she previously displayed. The Revolution seemed to be coming to a close when the royal family fled Paris in late June of 1791, taking both Americans and Frenchmen aback while giving Republicans an opportunity to further dampen royal affection in the United States. Many American newspapers reported incoming details about the family’s departure, capture, and return to the capital, with most articles suggesting that Marie Antoinette and Louis XVI were equally involved in planning their escape. Only one piece, a poem printed in the Republican Freeman’s Journal, painted Marie Antoinette as the author of the flight, while portraying the king as an easily manipulated drunkard who blindly followed her lead.97 A few British articles praised the flight, arguing that the move was justified since the people of Paris posed a threat to the royal family. The majority of opinionated pieces, however, were critical or pessimistic about the royals’ future prospects,

93 Federal Gazette, March 11, 1791, 2; General Advertiser (Philadelphia), March 22, 1791, 2; Gazette of the United States (Philadelphia), March 16, 1791, 783. 94 Pennsylvania Packet, April 10, 1790, 2; Pennsylvania Mercury, September 28, 1790, 2; Pennsylvania Journal, September 29, 1790, 1; Independent Gazetteer, October 2, 1790, 3. For French Revolutionary roles of women, see Hunt, The Family Romance, 122. 95 Pennsylvania Mercury, May 14, 1791, 3. 96 Gazette of the United States, July 23, 1791, 99. 97 Freeman’s Journal, August 31, 1791, 4. 31 suggesting that the failed escape caused a “political earthquake” that would “bring the fate of that country to a nearer crisis” and extinguish the king and queen’s last remaining powers.98 As one British commentator explained, the botched flight caused “the minds of the French people [to] have shaken off that reverence which is natural towards crowned heads.”99 The same was true of Americans. In fact, the harshest criticisms came from American commentary published in Republican newspapers, arguing that the flight served as additional evidence for the duplicity of monarchy, for the royal pair had abandoned their people and their sworn oaths to the new government. These pieces maintained that Americans should not pity the king and queen, but should rather feel for the French people given their subjection to the oppression of the absolute monarchy. They also maintained that the French people should embrace the opportunity the flight provided to move France toward republicanism.100 While increased restrictions placed on the royal family after the flight prompted British royal sympathizers to speak out against their treatment, these reprinted remarks provided Republican newspapers such as the General Advertiser an opportunity to belittle royalism and downplay the French king and queen’s plight: The disappointment and mortification of one man and his wife so sensibly affect these tender-hearted gentlemen, as to make them shed tears by the gallon; whereas they cannot spare a single sigh or tear for the unspeakable miseries, under which 25,000,000 of Frenchmen groaned, during the existence of despotism! - May we not compare the preposterous sensibility of such courtly sycophants, to the sensibility of the man [who] wept for the death of his monkey, but felt no remorse at plunging a dagger into the bosome [sic] of his own mother?101 William Short’s reaction to the flight was an outlier from these Republican opinions, for he revealed concern for both the queen’s person and the future of the French state. Writing immediately after the royal family’s apprehension, Short believed that the National Assembly would “conduct themselves with moderation” when dealing with their runaway monarchs, given the fragility of the new French constitution and their unwillingness to terminate it, “but it is impossible to answer for the excesses of the people and particularly with respect to the

98 Mail (Philadelphia), August 24, 1791, 2; Dunlap’s American Daily Advertiser (Philadelphia), August 25, 1791, 3; Federal Gazette, August 8, 1791, 2. See also Federal Gazette, August 29, 1791, 2. 99 Pennsylvania Journal, September 7, 1791, 1. 100 Independent Gazetteer, August 27, 1791, 3; General Advertiser, September 3, 1791, 3. 101 General Advertiser, September 5, 1791, 3. 32 Queen.”102 Short acknowledged the queen’s maneuvers that led to her unpopularity, but suggested that her interference in political affairs during the Revolution arose from the maternal desire to protect her family rather than the pursuit of selfish wants or purposeful malice toward the French people.103 Yet the queen’s position caused different concerns amongst other individuals. Back in the United States, Jefferson recalled that he “never saw [the president] so much dejected by any event in my life” after he relayed the news of the flight and capture to Washington during a cabinet meeting. The turn of French events proved to Washington that the French constitutional monarchy was an unsustainable fiction, and he feared what direction the French government would take. Jefferson too was anxious, though less about the fate of the monarchy and more about the fate of the Revolution.104 After the National Assembly acquitted the king and queen and returned them to their posts on the condition that Louis XVI formally accept the new constitution, many Americans thought that the queen had abandoned her political ambitions against the Revolution once and for all.105 While Morris himself was not keen on the constitution, he wished to diffuse tensions between the royal pair and the National Assembly, and therefore advised the king and queen to go along with the assembly’s demands.106 Meanwhile, Short believed that the king eagerly accepted the constitution so that order and tranquility could be restored to the nation as well as ensure the safety of his family, and while the constitution itself highly displeased the queen, she too begrudgingly decided to unite with the assembly.107 In the United States, newspapers reported that while the queen possessed a “dejected and decayed countenance” the day her husband accepted the constitution, she promised to “contribute to the utmost of her power to the welfare of the nation.”108 To Americans, the conflict between the queen and the nation seemed to

102 Short to Jefferson, June 22, 1791, The Papers of Thomas Jefferson, ed. Boyd, (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1982), 20:561-563. 103 Short to Jefferson, August 9, 1791,” The Papers of Thomas Jefferson, ed. Charles T. Cullen, (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1986), 22:19–23. 104 O’Brien, The Long Affair, 125. 105 Gazette of the United States, July 23, 1791, 99. 106 Morris, The Diary and Letters of Gouverneur Morris, 1:531. 107 Short to Jefferson “To Thomas Jefferson from William Short, September 14, 1791, The Papers of Thomas Jefferson, 22:144–146; Short to Jefferson, September 22, 1791, The Papers of Thomas Jefferson, 22:160–163. 108 General Advertiser, November 4, 1791, 2; Federal Gazette, November 30, 1791, 2. See also Gazette of the United States, November 19, 1791. 33 finally be settled, particularly after she convinced her Austrian brother Leopold II not to invade France.109 Absolutism, it seemed, was defeated, and the queen largely lost the prestige she once held in the American press. Americans rejoiced in the dawning of a new era, but the Revolution was far from over. Americans would increasingly appropriate Marie Antoinette into their expectations for and interpretations of the Revolution. While the Republicans had begun to incorporate the queen into their public discourse by 1791, the Federalists remained largely unresponsive. It would take the fall of the monarchy to break their silence.

109 National Gazette (Philadelphia), December 1, 1791, 39; Mail, December 16, 1791, 3; Dunlap’s American Daily Advertiser, January 5, 1792, 3. 34 Chapter 2

After President Washington appointed new representatives to several European courts, Gouverneur Morris was formally presented to Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette as the United States’ Minister Plenipotentiary to France on June 3, 1792. Following a brief discussion with the king, Morris turned to the queen, whose seven year old son stood by her side. Although having indirectly communicated with each other about business and political matters for over a year, they settled for small talk when speaking face-to-face. Gesturing toward the dauphin, the queen told Morris “He is not fully grown yet.” Looking down at the boy, who he wished would one day become the future constitutional king of France, Morris replied “I hope, Madame, that he will one day be very tall, and truly great.”110 Morris’ hopes for both the child and kingdom, however, never came to pass. Despite his efforts to save the constitutional monarchy, the increasing radicalness of the Revolution thwarted his and his fellow Federalists’ visions for a moderate French government in which the lives of the royal family would have been preserved. In the months leading up to and following the fall of the French monarchy, the once fairly-uniform American public opinion surrounding the French Revolution split along partisan lines. Among Federalists, who wanted the constitutional monarchy to stay in place as a buffer against the bloodstained chaos of the Gallic conflict, revolutionary opposition grew while Republicans more fervently championed the immediate creation of a French Republic no matter the collateral cost. These stances reflected what each side thought of their domestic situation: Federalists believed the French Revolution illustrated the destructive power of unfettered popular sovereignty, a force that presented a serious potential threat to the fledgling American republic, while Republicans disavowed Federalist criticism of French democracy as betraying the very principles of the American Revolution. This polarization is also visible in each party’s treatment of Marie Antoinette. While Federalists used the queen to argue against the increasing radicalism and violence of the revolution and pitied her situation, Republicans insisted that the queen was

110 Melanie Randolph Miller, Envoy to the Terror: Gouverneur Morris & the French Revolution, (Dulles, VA: Potomac Books, Inc., 2005), 92; Gouverneur Morris, The Diary and Letters of Gouverneur Morris, ed. Anne Cary Morris (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1888), 1:535-536. Quotes translated from the French by author. Morris’ original text: “[The queen] says ‘Il n’est pas encore grand.’ I reply, ‘J’espère, madame, qu’il sera bien grand, et véritablement grand.’” Louis-Charles would die an orphan in the hands of revolutionary custodians on June 8, 1795. 35 part of the very problem the revolutionaries sought to amend and used her actions to justify the revolution. Additionally, opinions of Marie Antoinette became part of larger American discussions of women’s proper place in governmental affairs. The American Revolution had created new opportunities for women’s informal participation in the civil arena, and their public political activity continued to grow even if they still lacked formal political rights. When the French Revolution escalated, Americans began to question their own revolution and feared its repercussions as they observed what could go wrong when a revolution goes too far. As partisans assessed the French situation, they attached blame to Marie Antoinette for either instigating the revolution or for allowing it to consume the monarchical state, forming an emerging consensus about the queen’s perceived folly that would only grow in time and at different rates for each party. With the queen’s political misconducts in mind and unnerved by the idea that women’s political activity in the United States could potentially expand beyond the control of men, partisans eventually sought to limit women’s public roles as part of a broader conservative backlash.111 As many American men sought to justify the civil limitations of women, they drew on different aspects of Marie Antoinette’s role in the downfall of France. While both sides began to speak more about her political intrigues, Republicans emphasized the dangerous implications of the queen’s political involvement whereas Federalists more often cast her as a victim of revolutionary radicalism. Federalists became more vocal about the queen, but unlike the Republicans, they embraced a positive, sympathetic view of Marie Antoinette to defend their ideology. For Federalists at the time, revolutionary anarchy – not politically active women – posed the greatest immediate threat. They would gradually make a connection between the two factors, believing that political women created environments that allowed the rise of unrestrained radicalism as illustrated by Marie Antoinette. However, it was not until after her execution that both sides came to view her in a much more negative light. For Morris, like other Federalists, the potential for French upheaval was at the forefront of his concerns. He used the aftermath of the failed flight to Varennes and his new ministerial position to try to both save the last remnants of the monarchy and to bolster the United States’

111 Rosemarie Zagarri, Revolutionary Backlash: Women and Politics in the Early American Republic, (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007), 1-2. 36 developing economy, seeking to reap the benefits of America’s “most favored nation” status as stipulated within the commercial treaty with France. The dilapidated state of the court provided Morris even more of an opportunity to give advice to the queen, using what courtiers remained in Paris to persuade her to have France buy flour from the United States. In addition, he offered to secretly assist the royal cause. Morris had a genuine interest in the survival of the monarchy, for he believed that the French people, having no prior experience in self-governance, were unable to handle the responsibility of republicanism. He thought that the French monarchy was better equipped to impose much needed state reforms than the revolutionaries, but also felt that the debilitated institution needed time to regain its strength before it could squelch the unruly democratic uprising. Although he was no friend of the absolutist Ancien Regime, he believed it was better than the alternative and sought to steer France safely between despotism and anarchy. While Morris intended to use the queen as a means for avoiding catastrophe, she also complicated his visions for a revitalized monarchy, for he feared her underhanded political schemes would undermine all potential progress. Despite this aggravation, Morris admitted that he loved Marie Antoinette, probably more out of admiration and respect than romantic interest, though the American ladies’ man did go so far as to request a lock of the queen’s hair.112 Morris’ admiration for Marie Antoinette reflects the esteem some other Federalists held for the queen as well. In addition to their lingering monarchical reverence, Federalists saw the queen at the top of a hierarchical society, one which they strove to emulate to some degree in the United States. According to Patricia Leigh Riley Dunlap, Federalists judged women based on class-designated virtue, and Marie Antoinette’s royal birth guaranteed her a genteel and ethical character.113 Federalists nodded to this notion of inherent integrity by publishing pieces that praised or sympathized with the queen, yet this certainly did not make the queen infallible in their eyes. Morris himself alluded to the queen’s immodesty in saying she was no stranger to sedition and that she had multiple lovers.114 However, as will be discussed in Chapter 3, most of his Federalist peers solely critiqued Marie Antoinette’s profligacy and ambition, overlooking the most dissolute accounts to protect some aspect of classist feminine virtue.

112 Miller, Envoy to the Terror, 132-133; Morris, The Diary and Letters of Gouverneur Morris, 1:15, 462, 467, 474, 479, 482, 491. 113 Patricia Leigh Riley Dunlap, “Constructing the Republican Woman: American Periodical Response to the Women of the French Revolution, 1789-1844,” (Dissertation, George Mason University, 1999), 87, 124. 114 Morris, The Diary and Letters of Gouverneur Morris, 1:55, 166, 176, 205. 37 Meanwhile, the American public learned that the subdual of the queen and her party following the king’s formal acceptance of the French constitution was only temporary. Reprinted British reports claimed that the Royal Party was regaining its strength while simultaneously creating deeper divides between those loyal to the crown and those partial to the revolution.115 The queen was at the center of this growing disparity, as demonstrated in a British tabloid published on January 19, 1792, which stated: “The Queen of France is in a fair way of encreasing [sic] the royal family, and of course, encreasing the grief of the democrates, who have the Bastleuphobia.”116 Although it proved to be a false report, it illustrated that the position of the queen as not only a political figure but as a mother conflicted with republican ideals, reflecting inherent tensions that existed within the constitutional monarchy. This depiction could also refer to how others perceived Marie Antoinette as trying to undermine constitutionalists using her one of her female “powers,” producing more royals to stand in the way of revolutionary reform. Americans also paid attention to how other European nations responded to the French Revolution. Newspapers recorded every move of the queen’s brother, Holy Roman Emperor Leopold II, reprinting British reports that noted the possibility that he might try to head a counterrevolution, which “may injure the personal safety of the King and Queen, by exposing them to the effects of suspicion and revenge.” Americans knew that Leopold’s maneuvers would likely determine if the queen lived or perished.117 He himself died before he could take action, and newspapers reported Marie Antoinette’s intense grief.118 Republicans reacted to the profusion of reprinted British empathy published in the United States by deeming such pity as un-American, claiming that true lovers of liberty should not sympathize with any monarch and that royal misfortunes merely stemmed from the fact that “they can no longer tyrannize over nations, & consider mankind as inherited property.”119 But commentary such as this did not stop Americans from publishing articles that discussed the hardships the royal family faced given the growing animosity toward them amongst radical French factions. For instance, the Mail reprinted a piece that claimed “murderous schemes are machinating” in France and that “Those who peep

115 Federal Gazette, May 12, 1792, 3; Ibid. May 14, 1792, 3; Mail, May 14, 1792, 2. 116 Mail, January 19, 1792, 3. 117 Mail, March 7, 1792, 2-3; Independent Gazetteer, March 2, 1792, 3; Mail, March 30, 1792, 2. 118 Federal Gazette, , 1792, 3; General Advertiser, May 18, 1792, 3; Pennsylvania Journal, May 23, 1792, 2. 119 National Gazette, May 21, 1792, 235. 38 into the palace see the Royal mourners surrounded with terror; a life of continual trepidation is scarcely worth the name.”120 Marie Antoinette’s anxiety and sorrow, however, did not stall her political colluding, as Americans soon discovered. The queen’s supposed involvement in an Austrian counterrevolutionary operative, her continued determination to reestablish the old order, and the persistent pressure she placed on the king destroyed the peace forged between her and the French people, causing her once again to become “odious to the nation.”121 One piece reported that the king, “being arrived at the last period of Royal degradation,” had even decided to abdicate, but “his magnauimous [sic] Queen opposed the project with indignation, and it was given up.”122 American newspapers reprinted British accounts that discussed the perilous position this put the queen in, including demands for her head and false reports of her imprisonment or assassination.123 Despite these accusations, some newspapers contained articles that continued to pity the queen, claiming “the unhappy princess has friends every where, but among the mob,” who “drag the reins of government” and unjustly ascribed her as the “origin of every obnoxious act.”124 The demonstration of June 20, 1792, when the people of Paris infiltrated the in an attempt to persuade Louis XVI to abandon his current policy and embrace the spirit of the French Constitution, further confirmed Marie Antoinette’s precarious situation and provided Americans another opportunity to judge her traits. The Federalist leaning Mail republished British sentiments stating that those who feel any “sentiment and humanity” should want to rescue the king and queen “from the perils which now surround them.”125 Even the typically critical National Gazette published material depicting the queen as a tragic heroine.126 While the demonstration had no immediate political effects, some articles suggested that it served to vitiate the queen while invigorating the king. The usually passive king, under the

120 Mail, , 1792, 2; Mail, June 4, 1792, 2. 121 Mail, August 8, 1792, 2; National Gazette, July 28, 1792, 258. 122 Mail, June 4, 1792, 2. 123 Mail, May 16, 1792, 2; Dunlap’s American Daily Advertiser, June 8, 1792, 3; National Gazette, July 28, 1792, 311. 124 Federal Gazette, September 4, 1792, 2; Pennsylvania Journal, September 5, 1792, 1. 125 Mail, September 26, 1792, 2. 126 National Gazette, September 15, 1792, 365; Ibid, September 22, 1792, 374. The rare instances in which the National Gazette published sympathetic portrayals of the queen do not seem to have much bearing on Republican rhetoric, but are interesting to include since the editor chose not to modify or edit them out of the initial reports before publication. 39 command of his domineering wife, displayed uncharacteristic firmness in the face of the mob, acting “noble and manly” whilst the frightened and intimidated queen stood helplessly by.127 One British piece in Dunlap’s American Daily Advertiser claimed that the weakness of the queen was the king’s strength: “The spirit of the queen of France seems subdued by successive misfortunes, or rather it has transmigrated to the breast of her royal consort, who now begins to prove himself ‘every inch a king!’”128 For the moment, it seemed as though proper gender roles had been reinstated and that the queen was put in her appropriate place as a submissive spouse, yet it would not be long before the queen would strike back and once again be associated with traits deemed unsuitable for her sex. For Morris, the events of June 20 exposed the irreparable inefficiencies of the constitutional monarchy: “The Constitution has this day, I think, given its last groan.”129 He decided that with the revolutionary government’s inability to restrain popular action and the growing tensions between France and foreign powers, the time was ripe to remove the queen and king from Paris before the mayhem escalated.130 Morris recognized that their lives were in danger and created escape plans, but Marie Antoinette made such a task difficult by entangling herself and the king with other European monarchies in order to sabotage the revolution. Morris saw the royal pair playing a double game: although they appeared to be more supportive of the National Assembly than ever before and seemingly flirted with the idea of a republican of government, the queen secretly pushed for a foreign invasion in an attempt to reinstate the Ancien Regime.131 While the queen seemed pleased with her efforts, an exasperated Morris was less than thrilled: “Her Majesty is in good spirits, and very affable. I am not pleased, however,

127 Mail, September 8, 1792, 2; Mail, October 2, 1792, 2. 128 Dunlap’s American Daily Advertiser, September 12, 1792, 3. 129 Morris, The Diary and Letters of Gouverneur Morris, 1:546. 130 The , written by Charles William Ferdinand, Duke of Brunswick and commander of the allied Austrian and Prussian forces, warned the French revolutionaries not to harm the royal family lest the combined armies of Europe strike Paris. This proclamation was widely published across Philadelphia. See Dunlap’s American Daily Advertiser, September 17, 1792, 3; Federal Gazette, September 17, 1792, 2; General Advertiser, September 17, 1792, 3; Mail, September 17, 1792, 3; Gazette of the United States, September 19, 1792, 126; National Gazette, September 19, 1792, 370; Pennsylvania Journal, September 19, 1792, 1-2. In response to the treat, the revolutionaries became even more suspicious of the French monarchs and question their true allegiances. A member of the National Assembly proposed to hold the royal family hostage “against the enterprises of foreign powers, who had taken arms in their name, against the liberties of France.” See Mail, September 13, 1792, 2; Pennsylvania Journal, September 19, 1792, 1-2. 131 Miller, Envoy to the Terror, 149. Although the National Assembly was formally dissolved in October 1791 and replaced by the new Legislative Assembly, which operated over the French Constitution, Americans continued to refer to the revolutionary law-making body as the National Assembly. 40 with her conduct.”132 Matters only proved more problematic when Morris presented the queen his proposals, as she rejected the plans because she preferred to rely on the foreign powers rather than chance independent action.133 Simply fleeing the capital would not allow them to reclaim what power was lost, preserving their current positions as constitutional monarchs, whereas foreign intervention could allow them to reestablish absolutism. Marie Antoinette wanted the latter for Louis XVI even though he was willing to accept the parameters of the constitutional monarchy.134 Morris was flustered with the queen’s uncooperativeness, for in her determination, she risked sacrificing national stability, the monarchy in its entirety, and ultimately her family’s lives. Morris’s dealings with Marie Antoinette foreshadowed other Federalists’ frustration, believing that the queen “killed” the monarchy from the inside through her misguided ambitions, something that they would emphasize more in subsequent years as they reflected on her life. The very political collapse Morris tried to evade came on August 10, 1792. French republican forces stormed the Tuileries Palace, defeating the royal Swiss Guard and forcing the royal family to take shelter with the National Assembly. Newspaper partisanship regarding the French Revolution increased in American newspaper reports detailing the fall of the monarchy, and conflicting accounts correlated with partisan opinions about the fate of the institution and the monarchs themselves. Reprinted foreign intelligence included a mixture of critical and sympathetic portrayals about the queen, and Federalists affiliated newspapers tended to gravitate toward the kinder reports. Federalists believed the French people overstepped their political bounds and that the end of the constitutional monarchy would lead to an increasingly unstable government. They also believed the French National Assembly treated Marie Antoinette unfairly and failed to provide adequate protection for her against the continuously threatening Parisian mob. For example, the Federalist Gazette of the United States described the queen and her family as “hostages” who “must fall an easy sacrifice to the cursed fury of the ,” and that the “horrible excesses of Paris are hardly conceivable.”135 Likewise, a piece of American commentary published in the Federalist leaning Mail discussed the “deplorable” state of France

132 Ibid, 143; Morris, The Diary and Letters of Gouverneur Morris, 1:550, 552, 568. 133 Miller, Envoy to the Terror, 150. 134 Ibid, 147-148. For another instance of an American noting the queen’s influence over her husband and directing his political decisions, see James Cole Mountflorence’s account of the French Revolution from November 11, 1792 in The Papers of Thomas Jefferson, ed. John Catanzariti, (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992), 25:120-133. Mountflorence was a friend of Morris and also a Federalist diplomat in Paris. 135 Gazette of the United States, October 3, 1792, 143. See also Dunlap’s American Daily Advertiser, October 3, 1792, 2; Mail, October 3, 1792, 3; Pennsylvania Journal, October 3, 1792, 3. 41 and claimed that the position of the royal family “must excite the compassion of every feeling man.” Yet the author was not completely sympathetic to the monarchy, arguing that the tyranny of absolutism caused the radicalization of a desperate populace, creating “a scene so gloomy and terrible.”136 Such commentary reveals the evolution of Federalist thought regarding the French Revolution: they were distraught by the violent acts that caused the monarchy to crumble, but had not yet completely abandoned the revolutionary cause. However, Federalists frequently reprinted British commentary that entirely opposed the revolution, and in all cases, the articles pitied the queen and lamented her situation. Republican affiliated newspapers published some of the same British reports as did the Federalists, but their American commentary was much sharper, for they celebrated the demise of the despotic monarchical institution and the rise of French republicanism.137 The National Gazette argued that the revolutionaries had the right to depose their monarchs, claiming that the king had “acted completely the political hypocrite,” and that “There is no doubt but himself, the queen, and some others of the royal family had contrived to hold a steady correspondence with the combined enemies of France.”138 Republican newspapers also included American opinions about the royals’ fate that were oftentimes used as political weapons against the Federalists who bemoaned their situation, such as the following excerpt: The great scene that has passed in the capital of France is a lesson worthy of the serious attention of every monarch in Europe. It is sickening to hear our prostituted prints [referring to Federalist newspapers] call the French barbarous and inhuman; because when justly incensed they have made examples of two or three thousand scoundrels, to rescue the liberties of millions of honest men, while the same ideots [sic] pretend to respect a family, the vain wars of whom have covered the earth with the blood of innocent individuals from one end of Europe to the other.139 While this quote discusses the broader ills of the Bourbon dynasty, other Republicans had no qualms with accosting the queen herself. One of the largest propagators of antimonarchical, and anti-Marie Antoinette sentiments, was , editor of the National Gazette and prolific poet whose works frequently commented on political issues and controversies.140 Freneau’s satirical responses to the fall of the monarchy referred to the king and queen as

136 Mail, October 13, 1792, 3. 137 Independent Gazetteer, October 6, 1792, 4; National Gazette, October 6, 1792, 389. 138 National Gazette, October 10, 1792, 394-395. 139 National Gazette, November 7, 1792. 140 For more on Freneau and poetic partisanship during the 1790s, see Colin Wells, Poetry Wars: Verse and Politics in the American Revolution and Early Republic, (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2018), 14. 42 “Folly’s sad victims,” and his poignant sarcasm relayed to his fellow Americans that it was ridiculous to continue honoring the royal pair by allowing their portraits to remain in the U.S. Senate Chambers.141 Two years prior, American senators hung curtains that could be drawn to protect or hide the portraits in the midst of heated debates over the changing political conditions in revolutionary France, but for Freneau, these curtains only masked American royalism.142 Freneau also expressed mock pity for the queen’s distress, depicting her as yearning for foreign monarchies to save her from plebeian life by restoring her to power so that she may live in luxury once more.143 Here Freneau utilized monarchical feminine association in which the disgrace of Marie Antoinette and her corrupt, opulent lifestyle represented the ruin of royalty and the triumph of democracy, all while praising the purity of masculine republican simplicity. Americans increasingly began to view Marie Antoinette in a gendered context after the fall of the monarchy, which coincided with American reception of Scottish Enlightenment theories that restricted women to the domestic realm even though it promised women extensive influence in the social sphere.144 At this time in the United States, civically engaged women became overtly active in and vocal about party politics, prompting discussions amongst partisan men about what was and was not proper female behavior.145 They applied the ideas about gender of the Scottish Enlightenment to their observations in order to make sense of the French, and by proxy their own, situation. Below is an excerpt from Scottish philosopher James Beattie’s Elements of Moral Science, which was published in the United States in 1792 and discusses the proper character of women, and queens more specifically, commonly accepted in eighteenth- century America: Fortitude is very becoming in both sexes, but courage is not so suitable to the female character: for in women, on ordinary occasion of danger, a certain degree of timidity is not unseemly; because it betokens gentleness of disposition. Yet from those of very high rank, from a queen or an empress, courage, in emergences of great public danger, would be expected, and the want of it blamed; we should overlook the sex, and consider the duties of the station. In general, however, masculine boldness in a woman is disagreeable;

141 Philip Freneau, “On the Portraits of the king and queen of France, in the Federal Senate Chamber, at Philadelphia,” in Poems written between the years 1768 & 1794, by Philip Freneau, of New Jersey, (Mount Pleasant, New Jersey: Philip Freneau, 1795), 433. 142 Joseph Martin Hernon, Profiles in Character: Hubris and Heroism in the U.S. Senate, (New York: M.E. Sharpe, Inc., 1997), 17. 143 Philip Freneau, “On the Demolition of the French Monarchy,” in Poems written between the years 1768 & 1794, by Philip Freneau, of New Jersey, (Mount Pleasant, New Jersey: Philip Freneau, 1795), 453. 144 Catherine Allgor, Parlor Politics: In Which the Ladies of Washington Help Build a City and a Government, (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 2000), 56. 145 Zagarri, Revolutionary Backlash, 5-6. 43 this term virago conveys an offensive idea. The female warriors of antiquity, whether real or fabulous, Camilla, Thalestris, and the whole community of Amazons, were unamiable personages. But female courage, exerted in defense of a child, a husband, or a near relation, would be true fortitude, and deserve the highest encomiums.146 Beattie’s description of what does or does not constitute acceptable demonstrations of courage by women (for courage was commonly deemed a masculine characteristic) can be used to unpack American gendered perceptions of the queen when the monarchy collapsed. Since Marie Antoinette was the most prominent example of a politically active woman and, given French circumstances, was frequently featured in political discourse, her involvement in the events of August 10 served to facilitate discussion about proper female behaviors. The depictions of Marie Antoinette present in American writings or publications ranged from matronly fortitude to Amazonian madness. In any case, it was clear to all Americans that the queen possessed some sort of fortitude, admirable or not. To begin with laudable valor: a reprinted British report that circulated around Federalist leaning newspapers stated that on August 10, Marie Antoinette behaved “with great fortitude,” looking “with an air of magnanimity and disdain on her enemies” and bearing her “condition with great equanimity.”147 This portrayal of the queen reflects Beattie’s acceptable queenly courage, in which she remained dignified and composed in a time of crisis. Likewise, the travel journal of Scotsman John Moore published in the United States stated that the queen’s “behaviour in this trying situation seemed full of propriety” and exuded “great firmness on this very trying occasion,” using such fortitude to preform her queenly duties, such as speaking “in an encouraging manner to the guards, praising their loyalty and attachment to the royal family.” Moore also illustrated Beattie’s discussion of the queen’s fortitude in terms of defending her family, asking his readers “Who could behold, without the most sympathetic emotion, a Queen of France, the sister of Emperors, in the presence of her husband and children, imploring the protection of a small band of gentlemen, and a few grenadiers?” Additionally, Moore pitied the queen and her family for being subjected to political turmoil and needing to display such courage, arguing that people should enter “warmly into the distress of the Queen” since she did

146 James Beattie, Elements of Moral Science, (Philadelphia: Matthew Carey, 1792), 157. 147 Dunlap’s American Daily Advertiser, October 6, 1792, 2; Mail, October 6, 1792, 2-3; Gazette of the United States, October 10, 1792, 150; Pennsylvania Journal, October 10, 1792, 2. 44 not enjoy the happiness of a more humble sphere as a woman in an inferior walk of life.148 American newspapers, however, did not print articles discussing matronly courage, an interesting omission if editors thought that she placed her family at risk in the first place. Other reports published by American newspapers that previously praised her courage claimed the events of that fateful day caused the queen’s fortitude to collapse as she reverted to her “natural” womanly state, drawing sympathy from the reader: “[The queen] weeps without ceasing - her great soul seems to have abandoned her.”149 Numerous negative depictions of the queen’s fortitude countered these positive portrayals. Americans came to interpret the queen’s unappealing audacity as masculine, malicious, or self-serving acts committed at the expense of the general welfare. Although French queens did not possess formal political powers, they were expected to encourage their husbands and male relatives to protect and provide for the people while also raising their male children to embrace such paternalistic virtues.150 Federalists and Republicans both came to recognize that the queen put the French public at risk by instigating a foreign invasion; therefore her confrontation and determination to thwart the revolution through violent means was not considered agreeable. As Federalist Abigail Adams Smith expressed in a letter to her mother regarding the foreign invasion that Marie Antoinette helped create: “I think the King and Queen will fall a sacrifice to the fury of the mobites, and is it not better they should, than that the people should be annihilated by a general massacre?”151 While Federalist publications were not as vocal about her violation of proper queenly obligations at first, it became an ever growing trend. Republican or impartial papers were more apt to depict the queen as embodying a disagreeable “masculine boldness.” One reprinted British piece referred to her as Catharine de Medici, a notoriously powerful and ruthless historical queen of France.152 Another British article printed in both the Federal Gazette and General Advertiser went so far as to say that Marie Antoinette directly instigated violence against the Parisians leading up to that fateful day, her name dashed

148 John Moore, A journal during a residence in France, from the beginning of August, to the middle of December, 1792, (Philadelphia: Henry and Patrick Rice, 1793), 32, 77-78 149 Dunlap’s American Daily Advertiser, October 12, 1792, 3; Federal Gazette, October 13, 1792, 2; Mail, October 13, 1792, 2; Pennsylvania Journal October 17, 1792, 2. 150 Lynn Hunt, The Family Romance of the French Revolution, (Berkley: University of California Press, 1992), 89. 151 Abigail Adams Smith to Abigail Adams, September 13-29, 1792, The Adams Papers, ed. C. James Taylor, Margaret A. Hogan, Karen N. Barzilay, Gregg L. Lint, Hobson Woodward, Mary T. Claffey, Robert F. Karachuk, and Sara B. Sikes, Adams Family Correspondence, (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2009), 9:304-308. 152 Federal Gazette, November 1, 1792, 2. 45 out as if it were a foul word: “On the 9th of August the Q---n sent for the Colonel of the , and after communicating to him the projected plot, threatened to shoot him, if he did not consent to fire upon the people the day following.”153 These sorts of depictions would become increasingly common within the Republican press. As for American politicians’ reactions to August 10, Morris was pained by the “extremely ignominious” treatment of the royal family, and described the bloody horrors that erupted on the Parisian streets after the constitutional monarchy collapsed.154 Even though his previous attempts to remove the king and queen from Paris failed, Morris informed Washington that he and Thomas Paine, who at the time was in France to support the revolution and was in close contact with its leaders, would request that the revolutionary government give the royal family asylum in the United States.155 In gratitude for the monarchy’s support for American independence, the American government offered to prepare a country manor for the royal family in Virginia where they could live out their lives in peace and settle into political obscurity. The French Revolutionary leaders either ignored or mocked Morris and Paine’s proposal.156 Meanwhile, William Short feared greatly for both the king and queen’s safety, predicting in his letters to Jefferson that both would be tried and executed, and that for the time being “They are still alive, but suffer a thousand deaths daily.”157 Jefferson, however, seemed unfazed, if not content with the events in France, chastising Short after reading his letters for not embracing France’s turn towards republicanism and for lamenting the royal family’s fate: “You have been wounded by the sufferings of your friends, and have by this circumstance been hurried into a state of mind which would be extremely disrelished if known to your countrymen.”158

153 Federal Gazette, January 28, 1793, 2; General Advertiser, January 31, 1793, 2. 154 Morris, The Diary and Letters of Gouverneur Morris, 1:572; Morris to Thomas Jefferson, September 10, 1792, The Papers of Thomas Jefferson, ed. John Catanzariti, (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990), 24:364–365. 155 Morris to George Washington, December 28, 1792, The Papers of George Washington, ed. Christine Sternberg Patrick, Presidential Series, (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2002), 11:559–563. 156 , Marie Antoinette: The Journey, (New York: Anchor Books, 2002), 397. This vain attempt resulted in Paine’s imprisonment and nearly cost him his life. Nonetheless, additional attempts were made to save members of the royal family by providing sanctuary elsewhere in the United States. For instance, after the execution of Louis XVI, French emigres residing in Pennsylvania hoped to bring the queen and her children to their settlement of Asylum. See François Furstenberg, When the United States Spoke French: Five Refugees who Shaped a Nation, (New York: Penguin Press, 2014), 243. 157 William Short to Thomas Jefferson, August 31, 1792, The Papers of Thomas Jefferson, 24:335–339; Short to Jefferson, August 15, 1792, The Papers of Thomas Jefferson, 24:298-299. 158 Jefferson to Short, January 3, 1793, The Papers of Thomas Jefferson, ed. John Catanzariti, (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992), 25:14-17. See also Conor Cruise O’Brien, The Long Affair: Thomas Jefferson and the French Revolution, 1785-1800, (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 124. 46 Unlike Jefferson, Short was appalled by his first-hand experiences with the revolution and considered revolutionary leaders “monsters” who directed the “blind multitude” to commit massacres. He believed that the royals were even more vulnerable to the “howling mob” once foreign monarchies declared war on revolutionary France and he predicted that Marie Antoinette would be assassinated with or without a trial.159 In the United States, many false reports circulated during this time about the queen’s murder, and numerous papers called it “melancholy” news that they hoped would prove to be inaccurate, though the Republican National Gazette intentionally published such reports without stating their lament.160 Once Americans established that she was still living, they began to publish speculations about her fate.161 Some reprinted articles suggested that there was still hope for Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette’s release, while others solemnly stated that their deaths were imminent given the barbarous conduct of the revolutionaries. Such predictions became increasingly pessimistic as time went on, and many expressed their displeasure at the prospect of her being killed.162 Even the National Gazette published a British piece that exclaimed “And for a nation that pretends to gallantry no less than honour to think of punishing a queen, a beauty, however in the zenith of her power and influence she may have abused it, is inconsistent, absurd, and sanguinary.”163 Yet American Republican commentary suggested that while revolutionaries would likely spare the king, “The queen will probably, ere long, die the victim of her disappointed ambition.”164 This juxtaposition between the well-intended but weak king and the ruthless liberty-hating queen became even more common following their executions. When the newly formed formally dissolved the monarchy in September 1792, they imprisoned the royal family in the Temple fortress in Paris. While Short

159 Short to Jefferson, September 18, 1792, The Papers of Thomas Jefferson, 24:390-402; Short to Jefferson September 28, 1792, The Papers of Thomas Jefferson, 24:425-427. 160 Federal Gazette, October 15, 1792, 3; Pennsylvania Journal, October 17, 1792, 3; Mail, October 16, 1792, 3; National Gazette, October 17, 1792, 402-403. For an example of Americans questioning the authenticity such reports and struggling to separate fact from fiction, see Thomas Boylston Adams to Abigail Adams, October 17, 1792, The Adams Papers, Adams Family Correspondence, 9:315-317. 161 Dunlap’s American Daily Advertiser, October 17, 1792, 3; Gazette of the United States, October 20, 1792, 163. 162 For reports suggesting clemency, see National Gazette, December 5, 1792, 42; Federal Gazette, December 26, 1792, 2; Dunlap’s American Daily Advertiser, December 28, 1792, 3; Mail, December 27, 1792, 3; Gazette of the United States, December 29, 1792, 243; National Gazette, December 29, 1792, 72; Gazette of the United States, January 5, 1793, 25. For less optimistic reports, see Dunlap’s American Daily Advertiser, January 9, 1793, 3; Gazette of the United States, January 19, 1793, 267; Pennsylvania Journal, January 23, 1793, 3; Federal Gazette, January 30, 1793, 2. 163 National Gazette, January 16, 1793, 89. 164 General Advertiser, January 15, 1793, 3. 47 and some British reprints suggested that the queen was unjustly confined and at risk, other Republicans thought this apprehension was ridiculous.165 They suggested that the new French government rightly imprisoned her for the sake of republicanism, for she still proved to be a threat to the Revolution and needed to be closely monitored to prevent her from communicating with enemy powers through encrypted letters.166 Some Federalist affiliated newspapers did reprint British articles that agreed that it was good to lock up the royal family because they clearly appeared to be traitors conspiring against their government, but these paled in comparison to the vehement French articles Republicans published about the queen’s machinations.167 These articles described Marie Antoinette’s use of wily female tactics to corrupt or deceive the Temple guards, playing on their sympathy “by the appearance of a woman resigned to misfortune,” acting in such a way “as might have won any person who did not know, that a very few days before, this woman of delicacy advised gun-powder to be put into the brandy given to the Swiss, that they might exert themselves the better against the people of the .”168 Such French reports portrayed the queen as mischievous, manipulative, deceptive, and unpredictable, revealing doubts that she would be subdued even in prison. Inhuman, animalistic comparisons of the queen were also present in French articles republished in Republican newspapers, referring to Marie Antoinette as a “panthress” and “she-wolf,” dehumanizing her and the rest of the royal family.169 The regurgitation of such French disparagements of the queen greatly bothered Federalists, who believed such treatment of the queen was inexcusable. Federalists disavowed such rhetoric Republicans and the French Revolutionaries that they admired used to describe the royal family, quoting Burke’s censures of the revolutionaries’ lack of respect for their former monarchs as well as their ill treatment of women: “a king is but a man; a queen is but a woman; a woman is but an animal; and an animal not of the highest order. All homage paid to the sex in general as such, and without distinct views, is to be regarded as romance and folly.”170 Yet the queen did not entirely escape the scrutiny of Federalists either. The Federalist leaning Dunlap’s

165 Short to Jefferson, October 12, 1792, The Papers of Thomas Jefferson, 24:474-476; Mail, October 23, 1792, 2; Mail, December 6, 1792, 2; Gazette of the United States, December 8, 1792, 218. 166 General Advertiser, October 24, 1792, 2; National Gazette, October 24, 1792, 410; Ibid, October 31, 1792, 2. 167 Dunlap’s American Daily Advertiser, February 2, 1793, 2. 168 National Gazette, November 10, 1792, 14. 169 National Gazette, April 24, 1793, 201. 170 Federal Gazette, March 20, 1793, 2. 48 American Daily Advertiser published an American piece that appropriated Burke’s eulogy on Marie Antoinette from his Reflections, replacing her name with “American independence” and the “Rights of Man,” arguing that these democratic notions should be valued more than monarchy.171 The most strident Federalist critique came from American commentary in the Gazette of the United States and suggested a tragic irony: the French Revolution as a whole was caused by the queen’s patronage of the American Revolutionary cause, which “arose from her avowed enmity to the English nation.” In spite of America gaining its independence, “The motives for the Queen’s conduct were fatally vindictive; to the policy of Louis, wretchedly temporizing in that first destructive step, his present lamentable situation is ascribable alone.”172 Once again, Americans interpreted vengeful masculine behavior as responsible for her misfortunes. American commentary published by Republicans also reflected on the American Revolution to better understand the situation in France and the fate of the royal family, but came to different conclusions. An American article published in the Republican General Advertiser on November 29, 1792 mocked the Federalist’s warmth for the king and queen, quoting Thomas Paine’s Rights of Man in that “they feel for the plumage… but have no pity on the dying bird.” The American writer claimed those who felt sorry for the royal pair misplaced their sympathies, for the monarchy had caused far more damage to France than the revolutionaries, who were the ones truly deserving of compassion. The United States set an example to all the world to abandon monarchy and its inherent evils, thus monarchical sympathy only harbored royalist attachments while abandoning the goals of the American Revolutionary cause. The article accused Federalists as being “monocrats” who wished to establish a limited monarchy in the United States, but argued that American citizens were capable of running a virtuous republic without the corrupting forces of royal power.173 A particularly interesting American article regarding the queen and women’s political involvement was published in both the Republican General Advertiser and National Gazette. In a letter to the editor, a female contributor spoke to women’s abilities as moral guides, arguing that American women should take it upon themselves to positively influence men’s political values to

171 Dunlap’s American Daily Advertiser, October 26, 1792, 3. 172 Gazette of the United States, March 27, 1793, 343. 173 General Advertiser, November 29, 1792, 3. 49 be republican rather than royalist, thus helping to prevent the resurgence of despotism in the United States. To illustrate her point, she alluded to Marie Antoinette’s contributions to the political situation in France: “It is scarcely necessary to resort to times past to prove my position; the will furnish ample testimony in my favour, not only that women have fashioned, but that they have actually governed men; perhaps the cause of the present revolution of France may be traced to that government.” On the contrary, the writer argued that women could also mold a republican society for the better and that education in republican virtue was a critical asset to the formation of the United States and necessary to “destroy the thriving plants of anti-republicanism in America!” She did not, however, suggest that women should have any formal power beyond their sphere of influence, which in itself “enables us [women] to fashion you [men] lords of the creation as we please,” a “power” that could be used for either republican good or despotic evil.174 Perhaps it was because of this assumption that women had the potential for harboring monarchical evils that she did not suggest that females should have any additional political clouts beyond those dictated by conventional Republican sentiments: that women could learn and could perpetrate republican virtue.175 Marie Antoinette’s infamous contributions to the revolution proved that it was too great a risk for either party to extend women’s political presence beyond the domestic sphere. Additionally, as the writer herself admitted, the queen was particularly dangerous because her political influence was not simply restricted to the agency of men, she herself governed through corrupt royalist means, and reports repeatedly demonstrated that she was not afraid nor incapable of taking matters into her own hands. The queen’s ability to be an independent actor led to disastrous consequences. As described above, the imprisonment of the French royal family generated more American discussions about both the nature of monarchy and women’s involvement in politics. Newspaper reports and personal accounts more frequently suggested that Marie Antoinette was just as much if not a greater threat to France than Louis XVI, be it to the people or the constitutional monarchy. Before the king’s execution, both Federalist and Republican American commentary became increasingly negative, with the Republicans especially critical. Republican criticism was largely rooted in pro-revolutionary and anti-monarchical rhetoric, whereas Federalists were unnerved by French radicalism and disorder. Both Federalists and Republicans

174 General Advertiser, December 26, 1792, 2; National Gazette, December 26, 1792, 65. 175 Dunlap, “Constructing the Republican Woman,” 124. 50 either indirectly suggested or blatantly stated that Marie Antoinette transgressed the appropriate bounds of femininity and that her conduct was fatally vindictive. Although Federalists were more inclined to support the monarchy while Republicans denounced the institution, both propagated depictions of Marie Antoinette that demonstrated the dangers of politicized women. While they had become increasingly leery of the queen, Federalists reverted to undiluted sympathy for her in response to her husband’s execution whereas Republicans became intensely opposed to the queen. Word of Louis XVI’s death reached the United States in the spring of 1793, distressing many Americans who lamented the unfortunate fate of their friend and defender, and both parties incorporated the queen in their discussions of the regicide.176 For Federalists, the execution cemented their belief that the French Revolution was out of control, and, fearing that similar chaos could ensue on American soil, energetically sought to maintain order in the political realm to prevent potential radicalization or destabilization. Immediately following the king’s death, they fixated on the evils of the revolutionaries, blaming them for their champion’s death all while taking a step back from their criticisms of Marie Antoinette, instead using her persona to lament his death. As for Republicans, they did not let the king’s execution dampen their support of the French Revolution, but rather than blaming France’s woes on their former ally, who they continued to view favorably to a certain degree, they made Marie Antoinette out to be the king’s Achilles heel. The death of Louis XVI escalated Republican distrust for political women since they held the queen largely responsible for his demise. Since both parties were in relative agreement about the king’s disposition and morality, they used Marie Antoinette to emphasize their differing arguments about the French Revolution because her persona could be, and was, interpreted in different ways. Federalist newspapers empathized with Marie Antoinette, reprinting articles that described her agony and anticipated that she too would face the guillotine. The most distraught British reprint in the Gazette of the United States claimed “No one fact has yet been proven that can criminate the unfortunate Queen of France! It is difficult for us to conceive upon what

176 William C. Stinchcombe, “Americans Celebrate the Birth of the Dauphin: American Views of France in 1782,” in Diplomacy and Revolution: The Franco-American Alliance of 1788, ed. Robert Hoffman and Peter J. Albert, (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1981), 69. For more on American reaction to the death of Louis XVI, see Heather Sommer, “‘To weep over his faults and his fate’: America's Political Factions on the Trial and Execution of Louis XVI,” History Matters 13, (2016). 51 pretense they can summon the suffering Antoinette to trial.”177 Given Federalists past questionings about the queen’s antics, this reprinted commentary does not accurately reflect what Federalists truly thought about her guilt, but goes to show that she was now far more the victim of the Gallic crisis than were the revolutionaries. Federalists’ reprinted stories about the royal family that humanized the monarchs and their children, evoking readers’ sympathy for a family mercilessly torn apart by the revolutionaries and suggesting that the revolution attacked the family unit, which was crucial for a well-functioning society.178 But Federalists were also expressing their own opinions. For example, a Federalist poem sought to remind Americans that it was both the French king and the queen, not the revolutionaries, who supported their cause during the War of Independence and should receive American support in return: “Which should in grateful bosoms well reflect on, / That Gallia’s court (not mobs) were our protection.” Americans, it argued, should reject the revolution that has killed one of the “royal benefactors” and likely intended to kill the other.179 This discussion was particularly critical due to the Franco-American Treaty of Alliance. Great Britain had declared war on France, and the United States needed to decide if they would intervene on France’s behalf as stipulated in the treaty. Federalists came to believe that the alliance with France signed during the American Revolution was with the French monarchy, not the French Republic. The deposition and executions of the royal pair abrogated the treaty, and the United States should not continue to be aligned with the government that sought to eradicate those with whom they made the treaty.180 Some Federalists appropriated the persona of Marie Antoinette to express the United States’ own sentiments toward the king. The most vivid examples of this can be found in poetry such as William Hill Brown’s poem “Death of Louis XVI,” and the anonymously printed “The Queen’s Lamentation for the Death of her Beloved Louis.” In the former, the United States, personified as Columbia, weeps alongside the widowed queen, mourning the loss of their champion and protector. While Marie Antoinette grieves for her actual husband, Columbia laments the loss of the virtuous man who saved her from Great Britain’s abuses and remained her

177 Gazette of the United States, April 17, 1793, 366. 178 For example, see Gazette of the United States, April 6, 1793, 354. 179 Connecticut Courant, April 1, 1793, 2. 180 Sommer, “‘To weep over his faults and his fate,’” 131. 52 closest friend and ally following her independence.181 In the latter, the queen herself is a channel for expressing American sentiments as she recollects the amicable relationship between her husband and the United States while also denouncing revolutionary cruelties and fretting over her own fortune and the fate of her children.182 These poems do not reference the queen’s political activities, instead portraying her in the proper role of a grieving wife and mother suffering at the hands of the revolutionaries. Additionally, these Federalist poems blame her station alone for her fate, as a member of the the revolution wished to eradicate, thus turning a blind eye to her actions which they had previously criticized. In both of these poems, however, the main subject of interest was Louis XVI, with Marie Antoinette serving primarily to relay the poets’ thoughts concerning his death. While the king was depicted as America’s “great and beloved friend and ally,” Marie Antoinette was not respected nearly to the same extent.183 From a gendered perspective, Louis XVI represented masculine power and sovereignty as the defender of republicanism in the United States, so Americans, even though they recognized his shortcomings, were not as critical of him as they were his feisty absolutist spouse.184 Likewise, Republicans were less critical of the king than the queen, but did not tolerate the use of Marie Antoinette to extract American sympathy. In response to a British poem bemoaning the death of the king, an American commentator argued that this sort of lamentation would “only be subservient to the advancement of morality and republican virtue” and feared that mourning the unfortunate fate of the monarch and the prospect of his widow served as an incubator for royalism in the United States.185 The most radical Republican retorts claimed that Americans need not forget the atrocities committed by “murderous and of their impious queens.”186 An American poem also appeared in the National Gazette that explicitly applauded

181 William Hill Brown, “Death of Louis XVI,” Gazette of the United States, April 13, 1793, 363. For more on the female personification of the United States, see Michelle Cleary, ““America Represented by a Woman” – Negotiating Feminine and National Identity in Post-Revolutionary America,” School for New Learning Faculty Publications (1998), 3-5. While Federalists equated Marie Antoinette to their female icon of American liberty, Columbia, at least in terms of their relationship to Louis XVI, the French viewed the queen as the opposite of their personification of freedom and reason, . See Hunt, Family Romance, 96, 122. 182 “The Queen’s Lamentation for the Death of her Beloved Louis,” The Tragedy of Louis Capet, (Springfield, Massachusetts: Edward Gray, 1793). 183 George Washington to Louis XVI, October 9, 1789, The Papers of George Washington, ed. Dorothy Twohig, Presidential Series, (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1993), 4:152–153. 184 The French too were more critical of Marie Antoinette than Louis XVI, through for somewhat different reasons. See Hunt, Family Romance, 122. 185 National Gazette, May 15, 1793, 227. For a copy of the poem mocked, see Gazette of the United States, May 18, 1793, 404. 186 General Advertiser, April 2, 1793, 2. 53 the execution of Louis XVI and eagerly awaited the death of the queen and other “tyrants.”187 Most Republicans, however, generally regretted Louis XVI’s fate given his prior support in the American Revolution, considering it unfortunate collateral damage in France’s progression toward liberty, and printed material that blamed the queen for his untimely death.188 An American article published in the National Gazette suggested that the king may have supported the constitutional monarchy had he not been “the mere Engine of A WOMAN! full of VICE, INTRIGUE, DECEPTION, and DUPLICITY!” 189 It became clear to Republicans that the corrupt monarchy was driven by a woman and that women in general embodied these negative characteristics. Republicans came to believe that the revolutionaries made the right choice to uproot the monarchy while they had the chance because the intrigues of the queen, and her influence over and demands of the king were a threat to liberty.190 Their commentary insinuated that Marie Antoinette ruined Louis XVI and the French government, and that she was emblematic of everything wrong with the monarchy. In regards to the Treaty of Alliance, Republicans argued that the treaty was with the French nation rather than the sovereign and wanted to continue supporting the French fight for liberty, but most knew that the United States could not afford to entangle itself in a European war.191 These discussions of Marie Antoinette reflect Americans’ continued interest in the queen and how they perceived her role in the development of the French Revolution. Republicans argued that the queen was at the heart of the monarchy’s difficulties, disintegrating the linchpin in America’s idealized visions for the future of France. By the summer of 1792, Republicans believed the sullied monarchy could no longer support their original conceptions and figured it was best for France to dispense with the queen and the rest of the institution in favor of republicanism. While Republicans saw the queen as hindering progress, Federalists had not yet given up on the French monarchy and believed that through the preservation of the sovereigns, the institution, and therefore their moderate revolutionary ideal, could still survive. While their

187 National Gazette, July 17, 1793, 299; Eric Burns, Infamous Scribblers: The Founding Fathers and the Rowdy Beginnings of American Journalism, (New York: Public Affairs, 2006), 280. 188 Republican notions regarding the incidental nature of the regicide reflect Thomas Jefferson’s sentiments in response to Shay’s Rebellion in 1787: “The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants.” See Jefferson to William Stephens Smith, November 13, 1787, The Papers of Thomas Jefferson, ed. Julian P. Boyd, (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1955), 12:355-357. 189 National Gazette, April 17, 1793, 196. 190 National Gazette, April 20, 1793, 197-198. 191 Sommer, “‘To weep over his faults and his fate,’” 132; Gordon S. Wood, Empire of Liberty: A History of the Early Republic, 1789-1815, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 182. 54 hopes for monarchical restoration came crashing down with the imprisonment of the royal family and Louis XVI’s execution in January 1793, the treatment of the queen further proved to them that the revolution had gone too far. However, Federalists too began to acknowledge that Marie Antoinette undermined their hopes for the constitutional monarchy. Both Federalists and Republicans, at one time or another, acknowledged her coerciveness and determination to thwart the revolution, herself embodying absolutist traits she sought to reinstate. They also recognized and disapproved of her ascendency over Louis XVI, which consequently led to the monarchy’s and his personal demise. Finally, they used the queen, be it in the context of her distasteful political activities or her victimized personage, to attack each other’s views of the French Revolution and, ultimately, each other’s values and visions for American society. On April 22, 1793, President Washington issued the Neutrality Proclamation, effectively nullifying the Franco-American treaties of 1778.192 This Federalist “victory” of sorts was part of the changing tide of American opinions regarding the French Revolution as the public became more inclined to disapprove of radical French actions. Republicans began to lose support in terms of foreign relations due to their undying attachment to the French despite the atrocities that took place. The public’s denouncement of the French Revolution, ironically, would lead to similar understandings about Marie Antoinette. Despite growing partisan differences, both Federalists and Republicans would agree about the detrimental effects of the queen’s political conduct and use it to limit women’s public roles. Yet it would take several years after Marie Antoinette’s own execution for Americans as a whole to absorb French events and come to a general consensus about the revolution and the queen’s role within it.

192 George Washington, “Neutrality Proclamation,” April 22, 1793, The Papers of George Washington, ed. Christine Sternberg Patrick and John C. Pinheiro, Presidential Series, (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2005), 12:472–474. 55 Chapter 3

In 1794, the owner of the Queen of France tavern hung a sign outside his establishment near Philadelphia depicting the decapitated corpse of its namesake, her severed head “lying by the side of [her] bleeding trunk” and “blood streaming down her garments.”193 The disturbing image of Marie Antoinette, whom the French Revolutionaries charged with high against the French Republic and sentenced to death by the guillotine’s blade, produced an outcry amongst passersby and patrons who were increasingly disenchanted with the French Revolution. The tavern keeper eventually caved to the public’s demands to alter the gruesome picture, but while he removed the gore, he kept the image of the headless female and renamed his establishment the “Silent Woman.”194 This visual representation of the queen strikingly illustrates how Americans appropriated the fate of Marie Antoinette to promote their ideas about both the French Revolution and politically active women. Even after alterations, the sign continued to serve as a salient reminder of both the dangers of female political intrigue and the desirable state of American women in the public sphere: silent. The previous chapter recounted the growing party differences in relation to their views of the situation in France and their appropriation of Marie Antoinette into their discussions of the French Revolution. This final chapter demonstrates the inverse, for reactions to the widowed queen’s confinement, trial, and execution, along with chronicles of her life experiences, reveal a growing partisan consensus. Immediately after her death, Federalists used a victimized portrayal of the queen to reprove the atavistic pandemonium of the French Revolution and its American Republican supporters, yet became increasingly critical of her in the years following her death. As the decade progressed and both parties had time to digest French events, Federalists rejoined Republicans in the belief that Marie Antoinette was responsible for her own fate, which they largely attributed to her political intrigues. Ultimately, both parties suggested to varying degrees that the queen was emblematic of the threat politicized women presented to American stability.

193 François-Alexandre-Frédéric, duc de La Rochefoucauld-Liancourt, Travels through the United States of North America, the country of the Iroquois, and Upper : in the years 1795, 1796, and 1797, trans. Henry Neuman (London: T. Gillet, 1800), 3:488-489; William Cobbett, A Bone to Gnaw, for the Democrats, (Philadelphia: Thomas Bradford, 1795), 19; Cobbett, The political censor; or Review of the most interesting political occurrences, relative to the United States of America, (Philadelphia: William Cobbett, 1796), 9. 194 Rochefoucauld-Liancourt, Travels through the United States, 3:489. 56 Following the beheading of Louis XVI, American newspaper articles speculated what would become of his widow, suggesting that she might face a jury, be banished to her native Austria, or torn apart by the Parisian mob before the revolutionary French government could take any formal legal action.195 It was not until the fall of 1793 that word arrived that a would determine Marie Antoinette’s destiny.196 Partisan reactions to the queen’s imprisonment and trial were mixed. The Federalist Gazette of the United States reprinted a British piece that argued that the revolutionary leaders intended to use a fraudulent trial to validate killing the queen even though no evidence existed to incriminate her, and another British article in Dunlap’s American Daily Advertiser suggested that her execution would be less cruel than the treatment she was receiving in prison.197 The Republican Independent Gazetteer also described the cruelties she faced, reprinting British descriptions of the queen’s agonizing 198 separation from her children. The impartial Federal Gazette published articles on both sides of the spectrum: one French testimony arguing that the “serpent” queen was guilty of all charges because “she exercised influence over her husband; she said she would bathe herself in the blood of the French,” and a British account lamenting that the people of France had judged her more for her faults than her virtues, making the queen a victim of “the intemperance of [her] feminine passion.”199 The only direct American commentary, however, came from the Republicans. The National Gazette, which continued to staunchly support the French Revolution’s current course, dismissed the British reports depicting the queen’s tortured state, claiming that she was “treated with as much tenderness as possible” by her revolutionary custodians.200 Federalists, who increasingly gravitated toward British anti-revolutionary accounts, used reports of the revolutionaries’ inhumane conduct toward Marie Antoinette to articulate the barbaric state the French Revolution had reached. Their articles emphasized the violation of her feminine sensibility, demonstrating the Revolution’s atrocities by juxtaposing the monstrous violence of the mob and the refinement of the queen.201 Many Americans believed that the virtue

195 Federal Gazette, May 4, 1793, 3; General Advertiser, July 9, 1793, 3; Dunlap’s American Daily Advertiser, May 6, 1793, 2. 196 Federal Gazette, September 28, 1793, 3. 197 Gazette of the United States, April 17, 1793, 366; Dunlap’s American Daily Advertiser, August 3, 1793, 2. 198 Independent Gazetteer, September 7, 1793, 2. 199 Federal Gazette, October 28, 1793, 3; Ibid, November 7, 1793, 3. 200 National Gazette, May 11, 1793, 211; Ibid, May 15, 1793, 226. 201 Other forms of print media outside newspapers also expressed similar sentiments. For example, see Stephen Storace, Captivity a ballad supposed to be sung by Marie Antoinette during her confinement, (Philadelphia: Carr & Co, 1793), Notated Music. 57 of a society could be gauged by its treatment of women, and therefore the abuse the French queen sustained at the hands of her own people was a clear sign that the Revolution threatened to undermine the most basic moral and civil values. However, Philip Freneau, editor of the National Gazette and mouthpiece for Secretary of State Thomas Jefferson’s pro-French agenda, published pieces that sought to reclaim the revolutionaries’ civility and legitimacy, arguing that the revolutionaries treated the queen reasonably, if not too courteously given the severity of her crimes against French welfare.202 Two conflicting versions of Marie Antoinette’s trial and execution appeared in American newspapers in January 1794: one British account that portrayed the queen as a victim of outlandish French accusations, specifically of with her eight year old son, and a French account that justified all the indictments against her.203 Rather than printing the version that most favored their party’s platforms, Federalist and Republican newspapers tended to publish both accounts, giving their readers the opportunity to formulate their own opinions based on each sides’ biases, or in some cases, to point out the opposition’s absurdity. Federalists reprinted British commentary describing the queen as “helpless victim” who’s “murder” was “an instance of unrelenting cruelty, of systematic injustice, and diabolical atrocity.”204 Federalists themselves also voiced their displeasure, but rather than giving a broad swath of sympathy that portrayed the queen as completely innocent as many of the British articles did, they latched on to the incest charge: the one allegation they firmly believed was entirely false and concocted by her enemies, thus the one which could be used to incriminate the revolutionaries. After printing the French description of the trial, the Gazette of the United States made its own opinion heard when it editorially asked its readers why “a defenseless female, on whom nature has conferred the rights of protection and tenderness from mankind – be stabbed at the bar of justice, with an accusation of no weight in her condemnation.”205

202 Ibid. For a similar argument regarding a Federalist reaction to the murder of the Princesse de Lamballe, see Philipp Ziesche, Cosmopolitan Patriots: Americans in Paris in the Age of Revolution, (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2010), 53. 203 For example, see Philadelphia Gazette, January 10, 1794, 2; Ibid., January 11, 1794, 2. 204 Dunlap’s American Daily Advertiser, January 11, 1794, 2; Philadelphia Gazette, February 6, 1794, 3. 205 Gazette of the United States, January 17, 1794, 2-3. Similar sentiments can be found in a letter from John Adams to his son Charles: “The Death of the Queen of France, affecting as it is, is not half so shocking as the last Article alledged [sic] against her. What will not those People do to render an unfortunate Woman odious.? [sic] There is nobody [who] will believe it, but their own Dupes.” See John Adams to Charles Adams, January 9, 1794, The Adams Papers, ed. Margaret A. Hogan, et al, Adams Family Correspondence, (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2011), 10:19-21. 58 While most Republicans neither defended nor denied the incest charge, their commentary blamed Marie Antoinette herself, not the revolutionaries, for her demise. The Independent Gazetteer, for instance, claimed that her death was the inevitable consequence of first Austrian and later British pressure against revolutionary France, antagonist monarchical forces that the queen herself helped organize.206 In executing the queen, who even in previous hardships had not been deterred from fighting against the revolution, the French people defended themselves and the spirit of liberty. The General Advertiser went a step further, denouncing Federalists’ sympathetic responses and using them to reprimand those who “revel in delight when an opportunity can be seized of dealing out abuse against the Republicans of France: the melting strains of language are employed to excite sympathy for a Queen, who was a disgrace to her sex, and to nature.”207 Federalists did not shy away from directly criticizing the Republicans either. In response to a report allegedly circulated by Republicans that described the queen’s execution as having been “conducted with the utmost order” and producing a swell of patriotic pride for the good of the French Republic, the Gazette of the United States righteously declared, “Nothing can be more displeasing to a lover of truth, than the pains which are taken to impress the American public with false ideas of the present situation of France.” Marie Antoinette had gone to her death, the paper wrote in what it claimed to be an authentic record of events, reviled and abused “in the most obscene and shocking manner” by the bloodthirsty revolutionaries, hence denouncing the American Republicans who continued to support them.208 None of the current or former American diplomats in France condoned the queen’s execution.209 Gouverneur Morris was distraught by her conviction and horrified by her demise, but not in the least surprised. He believed that the “weak, proud, [and] lustful” queen’s determination to reestablish the Ancien Regime not only “proved her ruin,” but brought about the

206 Independent Gazetteer, April 16, 1794, 3. 207 General Advertiser, February 7, 1794, 3. 208 Philadelphia Gazette, January 18, 1794, 3; Gazette of the United States, January 25, 1794, 2. 209 Absent from those mentioned are Benjamin Franklin, who lived only through the first tumultuous months of the French Revolution (d. April 17, 1790), and William Short. In 1793, Short was appointed minister resident to and was not in France at the time of Marie Antoinette’s trial or execution, nor did he communicate his feelings about the events. Perhaps this silence is due to Jefferson’s chastisement of Short’s warmth toward her and other victims of French radicalism. See George Green Shackelford, Jefferson's Adoptive Son: The Life of William Short, 1759–1848, (Lexington, KY: The University Press of , 1993), 95. 59 destruction of her kingdom.210 John Adams, despite being well aware of her past and present political scheming, argued that the queen’s death revealed the excess of the radical revolutionaries, asking “When will Savages be Satiated with Blood?”211 Thomas Jefferson believed that the revolutionaries could not have avoided taking some form of action against the woman whose profligate lifestyle “had been a sensible item in the exhaustion of the treasury, which called into action the reforming hand of the nation.” While he firmly believed that her “opposition to [the French Revolution], her inflexible perverseness, and dauntless spirit, led herself to the Guillotine, drew the king on with her, and plunged the world into crimes & calamities which will for ever stain the pages of modern history [,]” he would have preferred the revolutionaries “shut up the Queen in a Convent, putting harm out of her power.”212 Numerous pieces of European and American literature circulated around the United States that weighed in on the queen’s character and the fairness of her fate. While they ranged in their level of ferocity, very few discussed the queen without mentioning some personal fault. The only works that did not accuse the queen of any iniquities were the writings of English poet John Wolcot, American poet Sarah Wentworth Apthorp Morton, and Philadelphian printer William Cobbett, who all portrayed the queen as a grieving widow, an affectionate mother terrified for the fate of her children, and an unjustly scandalized victim of French revolutionary fervor. All but one of these works make no mention of the queen’s political activities and are defamatory toward the barbarous revolutionaries, suggesting that death itself was more merciful than her imprisonment.213 The sole work that makes some reference to the queen’s political interests is Cobbett’s Political Censor. The Federalist Cobbett expressed the most affectionate American

210 Gouverneur Morris to George Washington, October 18, 1793, The Papers of George Washington, ed. David R. Hoth, Presidential Series (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2008), 14:229–231; Morris, The Diary and Letters of Gouverneur Morris, ed. Anne Cary Morris (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1888), 1:166; Morris, The Diary and Letters of Gouverneur Morris, ed. Anne Cary Morris (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1888), 2:367. 211 John Adams to Abigail Adams, January 9, 1794, The Adams Papers, ed. Margaret A. Hogan, et al., Adams Family Correspondence (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011) 10:35–36. 212 Thomas Jefferson, The Autobiography of Thomas Jefferson, 1743-1790, ed. Paul Leicester Ford, (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011), 149. 213 John Wolcot, The Works of Peter Pindar, Esq., (New York: Allen, 1794), 143; Wolcot, Pindariana; or Peter's Portfolio, (Philadelphia: Benjamin Franklin Bache, 1794), 171-172; Sarah Wentworth Apthorp Morton, “Moral Reflections on the Death of Maria Antoinetta,” in Gazette of the United States, January 29, 1794, 3; Cobbett, A Bone to Gnaw, 19. For more on Morton’s poetry, see Colin Wells, Poetry Wars: Verse and Politics in the American Revolution and Early Republic, (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2018), 134; Susan Branson, These Fiery Frenchified Dames: Women and Political Culture in Early National Philadelphia, (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2001), 64. It is interesting to note that Benjamin Franklin Bache, editor of the General Advertiser who printed some of the sharpest critiques of the queen, also published Wolcot’s Pindariana. 60 sentiments about the queen, arguing that Americans should be repulsed by her execution since “the queen of France, the calumniated Antoinette, was the first foreigner … that advanced a shilling in the American cause.”214 These pure depictions of Marie Antoinette, however, were overshadowed by those who used the queen as an example of a dangerous politicized woman and emphasized her character as the antithesis to their ideal compliant, humble, and pious republican wife and mother. Although Republicans spoke less of the regicide than did the Federalists, they supported vicious attacks on the queen’s persona to validate the French revolutionaries’ deeds. These critical works argued that Marie Antoinette squandered the French state’s resources, influenced numerous men to help her achieve her political aims in exchange for sexual favors, brought ruin to those who dared step in the way of her ambition, and stood between the people of France and republican liberty.215 As Philadelphian printer Samuel F. Bradford succinctly put it, the queen was “Dissolute in her manners, unprincipled in her morals, [and] faithless in her promises.”216 The American preface to Pierre Étienne Auguste Goupil’s Memoirs of Marie Antoinette also described the queen’s life as “an enumeration of licentious excesses and unprecedented crimes” formed by “a groupe [sic] of monstrous intrigues and gigantic vices, which must excite astonishment and horror.” The anonymous translator vindicated the queen’s execution as the consequence of “an injured nation’s just resentment” while chastising Federalists, whose desperate attempt to portray the villainous monarch as “innocence suffering martyrdom by the sword of audacious injustice and unrelenting cruelty” only served to “throw an odium on the French nation and the cause of liberty.” By making this work available to the American public, the translator said that he sought to unmask the unglamorous reality of monarchy, providing the “true republican” a slew of debaucheries to reproach in order to live virtuous lives, with the queen’s story serving as “a buoy which warns the mariner to avoid the rock of danger.”217 This and other Republican publications suggested that Marie Antoinette’s fate was a lesson for

214 Cobbett, The political censor, 8-9. 215 Pierre Étienne Auguste Goupil, Memoirs of Marie Antoinette, (United States: translated, re-printed and published according to Act of Congress, 1794); Le Livre Rouge, (New York: G. Forman, 1794), 20-21; Mary Wollstonecraft, Historical and moral view of the origin and progress of the French Revolution, (Philadelphia: Thomas Dobson, 1795), 25-26, 31, 97-99, 297-298. 216 Samuel F. Bradford, The impostor detected, or A review of some of the writings of “Peter Porcupine,” (Philadelphia: Thomas Bradford, 1796), 26. 217 Goupil, Memoirs of Marie Antoinette, v-vi. 61 Americans who must ground their republican morals and reject royal degeneracy. Republicans continued to propagate these views throughout the remainder of the century.218 While Federalists had indeed strongly defended the queen in order to denounce the French Revolution and its Republican supporters, as time wore on, they spoke less about Marie Antoinette as a victim and more as a culprit. When Federalists gained the higher ground in partisan politics in the mid-1790s, they did not need to use the queen to decry the French Revolution because both the federal government and public opinion had turned away from the increasingly radical event.219 Since the queen was no longer necessary to lambaste Republican sympathy of the French, Federalists became more critical of her, using her to portray the formidable forces of femininity in the realm of politics. The beginnings of Federalists’ revert back to cynicism can be seen only a year after Americans learned of Marie Antoinette’s execution. In 1795, new editions of Guthrie’s Modern Geography were published in London and in Philadelphia, and their passages about the French Revolution reflect growing Federalist distance from the British whose works they had so often appropriated to discuss the queen. While the British edition pulls at the reader’s heartstrings, describing in detail the emotional separation of Marie Antoinette from her family members and the injustices she faced without even mentioning the charges against her, the edition published by Federalist printer Matthew Carey included a shorter and far more temperate account, with a hint of sympathy for the unfortunate princess but not sidestepping the accusations. And, like Federalist newspapers before, they discredited the charge of incest but did not question the other political indictments.220 Unlike literature reflecting Republican anti-monarchical sentiments, works written or printed by Federalists accused the queen only of extravagance or ambition, never of sexual indecency, and often contrasted the queen’s persona with the character of Louis XVI. For instance, a self-proclaimed impartial history of the French Revolution articulated the discrepancy

218 For later instances of Republican queen-bashing, see Philip Freneau’s The Time-Piece (New York), May 15, 1797, 109; Ibid, , 1797, 125. After the National Gazette crumbled in the fall of 1793, Freneau took a hiatus from newspapering until the spring of 1797 with the release of the first issue of The Time-Piece and Literary Companion. As the result of unfortunate timing, there is a dearth of Freneau’s opinions in the period when Americans first learned of the queen’s trial and execution. See Frank Smith, “Philip Freneau and The Time-Piece and Literary Companion,” American Literature 4, no. 3 (1932):270-273. 219 Wood, Empire of Liberty, 199-201. 220 William Guthrie, Guthrie's universal geography improved: being a new system of modern geography… (London: Printed for the Proprietors, 1795), 907-909; Guthrie, A new system of modern geography… (Philadelphia: Matthew Carey, 1795), 2:682. 62 between Marie Antoinette’s love of luxury and her husband’s frugality, for “However little disposed to the habits of profusion the king might [have been] in his own person, the expensive pleasures of the queen… served rather to promote than to diminish the general distress.”221 A tragedy dramatizing the last weeks of Louis XVI’s life contrasts the queen’s vengeful desires with the king’s level-headed demeanor, in which he gently rebukes his wife’s vindictiveness against the revolutionaries while encouraging her to embrace a proper, pious feminine persona.222 In these works, the king, “perhaps one of the most virtuous men of the age,” outshines the queen and her depravities.223 Given Americans’ intense sense of gratitude for his assistance in the Revolutionary War, it is possible that Louis XVI served as a foil to the corrupt femininity represented by the queen. To Americans, he demonstrated masculine prudence, sincerity, and – possibly – even republicanism given his reputation as an enlightened, patriot king who had defended American liberty. An anecdote published in the Gazette of the United States vividly relates this juxtaposition: during the American Revolution, the queen entreated her husband not to send several of his military officers to join the Continental Army because she enjoyed their company when dancing and gambling. Instead of reading the list of names, the sensible king “tore it before her majesty’s face declaring that he should be very sorry to know the names of his officers, who preferred so frivolous an amusement to their duties and their glory.”224 Although the Gazette of the United States portrayed the queen as having opposed French involvement in the American Revolution because it would diminish her merry making, European authors whose works were republished by Federalists recognized Marie Antoinette as taking a direct part in endorsing the American cause. Yet unlike Americans such as Cobbett and Thomas Paine, they did not praise her intervention.225 Echoing past Federalist criticisms, they declared that the queen supported the American campaign not out of a love for liberty but because she

221 Jean-Paul Rabaut, An Impartial history of the late revolution in France, from its commencement to the death of the Queen, and the execution of the deputies of the Gironde party, (Philadelphia: M. Carey, 1794), 18. 222 William Preston, The Death of Louis, the Sixteenth, a tragedy, (Philadelphia: E. Story, 1794), 22-23, 59. For the partisan tensions that emerged when the play was performed in Charleston, South Carolina in 1795, see Elizabeth Maddock Dillon, New World Drama: The Performative Commons in the Atlantic World, 1649–1849, (Durham: Duke University Press, 2014), 43-45. 223 William Playfair, The History of Jacobinism, its Crimes, Cruelties and Perfidies, (Philadelphia: William Cobbett, 1796), 73. 224 Gazette of the United States, October 27, 1795, 2. 225 Cobbett, The political censor, 8-9; Thomas Paine, Rights of Man: being an answer to Mr. Burke's attack on the French Revolution, (Carlisle: George Kline, 1791), 52. 63 wished to humiliate Great Britain and bring glory to France. Through her ambition and lust for revenge against the English, she openly expressed conventional masculine characteristics in the political arena, which posed an even greater threat than subtle, indirect female political persuasion many Americans already feared.226 While they may not have celebrated her actions because she expressed such virile traits through her political interests and intervention, these writers stated that the sway she held over her husband convinced the hesitant king to support the United States, perhaps in spite of his better judgement.227 Prior to her execution, Republicans more frequently discussed Marie Antoinette’s leverage over Louis XVI than did Federalists. This is likely a result of Republicans’ growing lack of confidence in and Federalists’ ever fervent defense of the French monarchy. Republicans’ increased support of the French Revolution prompted them to progressively distance themselves from their gracious ally, and the king’s apparent susceptibility to his femme fatale facilitated this separation. Federalists, however, sought to use the king’s honorable private character to bolster the legitimacy of the French monarchy while censuring the immoral revolutionaries, and thus did not want to draw attention to the king’s weakness. Federalists believed that no genuine government, American or French, could exist without the people’s confidence in political leaders, and feared that the king’s subservience to his wife would undermine the authentic (and ultimately physical) existence of the monarchical state.228 Yet once Federalists won over public opinion regarding the Gallic crisis and established political dominance in the United States following the king and queen’s executions, they more frequently addressed the situation that ultimately seemed to undercut the royal pair, suggesting that they feared a similar scenario may occur amongst political leaders in the United States. While the supposed means by which they believed the queen achieved influence over her husband varied, either by honestly earning his trust or through feminine chicanery, both Federalists and Republicans understood the repercussions of her fulfilled personal and political desires as a reason for the king’s downfall. These factions viewed the monarchy as a critical determinant in the French Revolution, with Louis XVI serving as the pillar supporting French

226 Linda K. Kerber, Women of the Republic, (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1980), 11. 227 John Gifford, The History of France, from the earliest times, till the death of Louis Sixteenth, (Philadelphia: Stewart & Rowson, 1797), 473; Playfair, The History of Jacobinism, 73; Rabaut, An Impartial history of the late revolution in France, 20. 228 For Federalist ideas regarding the respectability of governing officials, see Wood, Empire of Liberty, 203. 64 constitutionalism. When he failed to uphold the constitutional monarchy, members of both parties blamed Marie Antoinette for leading the well-intentioned but weak king astray. The tenacious queen, as a prominent leader of the aristocratic faction, pitted her husband against the revolutionaries in an attempt to preserve the absolute monarchy. Not only did the queen prevent the negotiation between the royalists and the revolutionaries, but in her refusal to cooperate, she hastened the collapse of both the French monarchy and American goals for France’s future. 229 These discussions of Marie Antoinette reflect Americans’ partiality or antipathy toward the French monarchy and how they perceived the development of the French Revolution. For Republicans, the queen’s antagonism toward the French revolutionaries and her dissolute character reinforced their beliefs in inherent monarchical evils. As the revolution progressed, Republicans believed that it was in France’s best interests to do away with the queen and the rest of the degraded monarchical institution in order to let republicanism blossom. For many, Marie Antoinette symbolized the aristocratic conspiracies that only popular resistance and force could destroy. They sought to prevent such corruption from infesting the United States by restraining its natural carriers: women. While Federalists also held some mistrust for absolute monarchy, they greatly appreciated that the institution provided consistency and order in France prior to the anarchy unleashed by the radical revolutionaries. As Federalists considered the unstable political situation in France, they fretted over their own new, vulnerable government in the United States, for the principles of the French Revolution threatened to turn America into a licentious and disorderly democracy which undermined their visions for a strong, stable federal government.230 Securing the current system against any potential risks, then, was of the upmost importance. Federalists believed that Marie Antoinette’s political ambition undermined the well-established monarchy, bringing ruin to herself and her kingdom. The unstable political situation in France resulted in part from her refusal to negotiate with moderate reformers, which fueled widespread discontent and led to the rise of radical revolutionaries who took over the French state.231 They mourned the queen’s execution, for she was a member of the monarchical institution they championed over

229 For Federalist examples, see Porcupine’s Gazette (Philadelphia), April 19, 1797, 158; John Gifford, The History of France, 473; Morris, The Diary and Letters of Gouverneur Morris, 1:399-400. For Republican, see Goupil, Memoirs of Marie Antoinette, 99; Wollstonecraft, Historical and moral view of the origin and progress of the French Revolution, 98-99; Jefferson, The Autobiography of Thomas Jefferson, 149. 230 Wood, Empire of Liberty, 178. 231 For example, see the Gazette of the United States, March 27, 1793, 343. 65 the revolutionary mobocracy, yet they were disappointed that she placed herself and her government in such as perilous situation. Unlike Republicans, Federalists’ criticisms of the queen were not an attack on her station, but served to deter other women from following suit. If a single woman could destroy the government of one of the most powerful nations in the world from within, they thought, how might the increasing number of women in the American political sphere destabilize their fragile new republic? The case of the queen bolstered each party’s beliefs that women’s political engagement led to more harm than good for their system of government. American men on both sides of the political spectrum understood that women should promote harmony in the domestic sphere lest they ferment disagreement and disorder in the realm of politics. Having adopted Aristotelian gender conceptions, both parties saw women as more mischievous, manipulative, and deceptive than their male counterparts and that proper governance required reason and steadfastness that feminine irrationality and unpredictability could not provide.232 They assumed women with power within the realm of government could thus create a great deal of damage if left unchecked, and Marie Antoinette exemplified this threat to government stability. Federalists and Republicans found a solution to the hazard of politicized women in the preexisting notions of female domesticity and used the queen to reinforce those principles. Both factions explicitly stated that the queen’s political desires prevented the proper fulfillment of her domestic duties. Although some Americans previously portrayed Marie Antoinette as an affectionate wife and mother, after her death she was frequently accused of ignoring (or corrupting) her husband and her children in her pursuit of power and pleasure. The Federalist Gazette of the United States directly criticized the queen’s supposed negligence of her domestic duties, reflecting previously published Federalist sentiments regarding female domesticity, and suggested that her greatest fault was failing to fulfill her role as a wife and mother. The Gazette claimed she sought satisfaction “not solely in that tranquil and retired path of domestik virtue, where all that is to be met with on earth, can alone be found.” Furthermore, the queen betrayed women’s proper role as a moral guide by not focusing her efforts on “training up” her children

232 Branson and Simon P. Newman, “American Women and the French Revolution: Gender and Partisan Festive Culture in the Early Republic,” in Riot and Revelry in Early America, ed. William Pencak, et al., (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2002), 234; Catharine Allgor, Parlor Politics: In Which the Ladies of Washington Help Build a City and a Government, (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 2000), 22. For American trepidation regarding French salonnières, see Andrew S. Trees, The Founding Fathers and the Politics of Character, (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004), 36; Ziesche, Cosmopolitan Patriots, 20. 66 “to piety and virtue.”233 Should a woman violate these prescribed gender roles and choose to become politically active, she, like Marie Antoinette, put herself and her family at risk. An American commentator for the Republican Independent Gazetteer claimed that it was unfortunate that the queen did not stay within the confines of the woman’s domestic sphere, and that her disastrous fate should serve to dissuade American women from participating in politics. He argued that women’s “exclusion from political concerns exempts them from a possibility of experiencing that rigor, which, for the general good, the sternness of justice must inflict, whatever the offender may be.” The “republican government” of the United States could not, and would not excuse any political activity that may hinder the state, no matter the culprit’s sex.234 An allegory of female crime and punishment, Marie Antoinette thus served as the ideal cautionary tale: she neglected her family, became politically active, made a series of ill- considered decisions, and paid the ultimate price.235 The threat of death was not the only means used to deter women’s political activity. Multiple texts also discussed the ways in which Marie Antoinette’s intrigues had adverse effects on her appearance and health. Numerous accounts argued that the queen’s exposure to politics, both intentional and inadvertent, accounted for her fading beauty, depicting the once lovely queen as unattractive by the time she faced the guillotine.236 In the introduction to his book concerning the French Revolution and other topics relevant to contemporary American politics, William Cobbett, who made only fond remarks about Marie Antoinette and her contribution to the American Revolution, beseeched his potential female readers not to peruse his work: “Politics is a mixture of anger and deceit, and these are the mortal enemies of Beauty. The instant a lady turns political, farewell the smiles, the dimples, the roses; the graces abandon her, and age sets his seal on her front.”237 Additionally, by breaching the natural order and immersing

233 Gazette of the United States, March 11, 1797, 2. As for previous sentiments, a Federalist periodical stated in 1794 that “from the Queen to the peasant, every wife has duties to fulfil. Frivolous amusements are, or should be, renounced, for the more pleasing and respectable avocations of an affectionate wife, a tender mother, and a beloved and honoured matron of a family.” See The Massachusetts Magazine (Boston), November 1794, 686. 234 Independent Gazetteer, November 5, 1794, 1. 235 Cathy N. Davidson, Revolution and the Word: The Rise of the Novel in America, (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986), 140. 236 John Moore, A journal during a residence in France, from the beginning of August, to the middle of December, 1792, (Philadelphia: Henry & Patrick Rice, 1793), 31; Philip Freneau, Poems written between the years 1768 & 1794, by Philip Freneau, of New Jersey, (Mount Pleasant, New Jersey: Freneau, 1795), 453; Rabaut, An Impartial history of the late revolution in France, 176. 237 Cobbett, A Bone to Gnaw, for the Democrats, iii. 67 themselves in political matters, women were told that their mental health would deteriorate along with their countenances. Members of both parties believed that political engagement blemished women’s inherently docile sensibilities and tainted their lives with stresses and burdens they were not fit to sustain.238 Republican John Dickerson articulated this sentiment when he recalled the pressure and humiliation the queen endured during her trial: “It is unmanly to condemn a woman, to whose delicacy even defense itself is in some cases worse than death[.]”239 The assumption that women were unsuited for politics explains the sympathy Federalists and even some Republicans like Dickerson felt for Marie Antoinette during the French Revolution. Since they thought women should not be subjected to political turmoil, they pitied the queen for being in a situation particularly uncomfortable for her sex. Given that these men did not believe women possessed the prowess to independently free themselves from political webs, not to mention far more dangerous revolutionary snares, they assumed that Marie Antoinette was a victim of forces she could not control and that it was cruel that she endured such strain.240 Most agreed, however, that she put herself in such a lamentable position, and by articulating the queen’s shortcomings to dissuade women’s political activity, partisans fervently “wished that few such events may hereafter occur.”241 Federalists and Republicans appropriated Marie Antoinette for different reasons when it came to denouncing or supporting the French Revolution, but for similar ends regarding women in politics. While Federalists were more willing to excuse her actions given her opposition to the lawless revolutionaries, Republicans highlighted her faults because they would not let the queen get in their way of defending France’s march toward liberty. Marie Antoinette made for a perfect partisan weapon since factions held starkly different views over the revolutionaries’ treatment of her, yet there existed consensus regarding her political schemes. Partisanship in regards to the queen and the course of the French Revolution, then, was greater, but less so when discussing her as a politically active woman. Both parties believed that the queen’s political intrigues led her and Louis XVI to the scaffold. Her notoriety and staunch opposition to the French Revolution invited both parties to

238 David S. Shields, Civil Tongues & Polite Letters in British America, (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997), 315; Trees, The Founding Fathers and the Politics of Character, 36, 88; Ziesche, Cosmopolitan Patriots, 20; Kerber, Women of the Republic, 279. 239 Aurora General Advertiser, May 19, 1797, 2. 240 For notions of women’s powerlessness, see Ziesche, Cosmopolitan Patriots, 53. 241 Independent Gazetteer, November 5, 1794, 1. 68 attack her character. The queen made an ideal target for Republicans seeking to berate the dilapidations of the monarchy, while Federalists criticized her collusions which ultimately ushered in revolutionary anarchy. Most Republicans came to the conclusion that she was a threat to French liberty the moment she protested the revolution, yet Federalists moved from first questioning her destructive potential to denouncing her accusers to finally declaring that she was indeed guilty of political colluding. Members of both parties understood the queen to have undermined both her husband and her kingdom, and feared that American women who overstepped appropriate bounds of femininity and entered the public sphere could likewise disrupt their party’s visions for the political and societal structure of the United States. Marie Antoinette, then, became emblematic of the threat American men thought women presented to national stability, for her actions appeared to disintegrate both gender boundaries and governments. Although they approached the issue from different angles, be it to prevent “creeping monarchy” or government instability, both factions wished to limit women’s civic roles to republican wives and mothers. The case of Marie Antoinette magnified their mistrust of women in politics, solidifying beliefs that limited republican political participation to men and reinforced beliefs of female domesticity. Her fate served to illustrate why women were unsuited for public life and what could potentially happen not only to them, but to the nation as a whole should they become politically active. Partisans used the queen as a counterexample of what virtuous republican women should be, suggesting that the queen’s political desires prevented the proper fulfillment of her domestic duties and that American women should avoid political involvement in order to be spared a similar disastrous lot. In general, Federalists were more likely to criticize her than Republicans were to support her, revealing a larger sense of how these parties viewed women’s place in politics. Both used Marie Antoinette as an attempt to impede female intrusion into public life, suggesting that unrestricted feminine political activity led to deadly consequences without clemency for the women involved. Despite that the queen amplified their alarm about politicized women, partisans who feared her example ultimately failed to halt women’s civil endeavors.

69 Epilogue

On the morning of Sunday, December 1, 1912, Pastor Russell H. Conwell delivered a sermon to his Grace Baptist Church congregation in Philadelphia. Speaking on power and influence, he gave several instances in which victories, personal, political, or otherwise, were unexpectedly achieved by those assumed to be meek or uninfluential, particularly women or children. “Many men are counted great, many men are given credit for that which they do not do,” Conwell said, with one such instance involving the War for Independence. “Our nation has given credit to Washington, to Jefferson, to Lafayette,” for American liberty, yet when looking beyond these men, he argued the war could not have been won without French intervention, and more specifically, female French intervention. “Louis XVI was really nothing, and Marie Antoinette was the power indeed behind the throne,” and it was she, driven by the urgings of his sister-in-law, Princess Elizabeth, who spearheaded France’s involvement in the American Revolution. Yet Conwell suggested that the queen may also be credited for unintentionally instigating France’s fight for freedom due to her abuse of public funds. The belief that the queen was directly involved in assisting the United States in addition to notions of her financial improvidence and civic ineptitude were still strong nearly 120 years after her death, and the latter belief at least still remains today.242 Just as an examination of Marie Antoinette reveals political tensions and consensus within the civil society of the 1790s, representations and treatments of the queen could be used as a barometer of sorts to measure attitudes toward royalism and public feminine activity within the political climate of the United States in later periods. Marie Antoinette’s presence within the American popular consciousness proves that there is an enduring repulsion or allure to her person, as many a political cartoon can attest, and charting the frequency of the usage of her persona against a timeline of American political events may reveal interesting trends.243 Some research has examined political uses of the queen in singular instances in the twentieth century, such as when Hollywood appropriated Marie Antoinette during the Great Depression in order to express concern about women’s perceived potential for destabilizing governments in times of

242 Russell H. Conwell, “The History of Fifty-seven Cents,” The Temple Review, 21, no.7, December 19, 1912. 243 For two examples of political cartoons portraying first ladies as Marie Antoinette, see Shelley Matheis, “Barbara Bush has a ‘Marie Antoinette’ moment,” illustration, 2005; Glenn Foden, “Barry the XVI and Michelle Antoinette,” illustration, 2012. 70 crisis, yet more could be done with the historical memory of her in the nineteenth, twentieth, and even twenty-first centuries.244 It would also be worth the researcher’s efforts to contextualize treatments of Marie Antoinette in times when women tried to make political gains and what those varying appropriations of her suggest. Similarly to the 1790s, the 1938 film Marie-Antoinette was in part a counter to the burgeoning women’s movement of the previous decades, championing a domestic ideal the queen herself was unable to obtain.245 Looking backward and forward in time, could a similar use of the queen have happened in, say, the 1840s in relation to the Seneca Falls Convention or the 1960s with the rise of second-wave feminism? While Pierre Saint-Amand has analyzed the similar treatment Hilary Clinton and Marie Antoinette received in their respective eras in a comparative study examining public misgivings regarding women’s advancement in the public sphere, an investigation of Marie Antoinette’s persona used by the American public to discuss first ladies or other prominent political women has yet to be seen.246 It is tempting to consider, should there be a continuing bias against female politicians, if it could be related to the historical association of monarchical dissipation and femininity. Such tendencies may be traced back to the eighteenth century and beyond, and could be uncovered not only through Marie Antoinette, but through representations (both positive and negative) of other historical, biblical, or mythical queens as well. More scholarship can also be devoted to when and why fascination with royalty waxes and wanes in American history after independence. Given America’s royalist past, how intertwined were monarchical and republican ideologies, and how did this divide occur? Additionally, in relation to historical memory, how did the United States’ become erased and replaced with notions of omnipresent republicanism, and has royalism ever been completely abandoned? How do evolving ideas of royalty explain popular American conceptions today? How do we make sense of existing tensions between royal fascination and abhorrence? Additionally, as alluded to above, future research could be done to discuss the gender connotations of monarchy in U.S. political culture. One such project could examine the allure or trepidation of American-born princesses such as Elizabeth Patterson Bonaparte (married to

244 Laura Mason, “‘We’re Just Little People, Louis’: Marie-Antoinette on Film,” in Marie-Antoinette: Writings on the Body of a Queen, ed. Dena Goodman, (New York: Routledge, 2003), 239- 251. 245 Ibid, 246. 246 Pierre Saint-Amand, “Terrorizing Marie-Antoinette,” in Marie-Antoinette, 253-272. 71 Jérôme Bonaparte, King of Westphalia and 's youngest brother), Wallis Simpson (Edward VIII of the United Kingdom), Grace Kelly (Rainier III of Monaco), and most recently Meghan Markle (Prince Harry of the United Kingdom), just to name a few. While this thesis begins to uncover Americans’ overall opinions about monarchy in American political ideology, women in politics is the primary focus. However, it might have easily gone further in looking at the United States’ rejection of monarchy in favor of republicanism and how notions of monarchy in an international context framed American civil identity. More can be contributed to the scholarship surrounding American political culture and civil society by investigating how Americans came to define and situate themselves as a republican people in a royalist world through their interactions with foreign monarchies. How did American notions of monarchy and republicanism mold foreign relations with these realms, and vice versa? Varying religious, political, economic, and social beliefs within the United States at different times certainly led to assorted and conflicting views about individual monarchies or the institution on the whole, and the analysis of discussions surrounding them could expose ensuing strains within the American political sphere. For instance, a comparison of American monarchical attitudes to loyalists who fled to Canada or elsewhere in the British Empire following the American Revolution could be a rich source for helping us understand how each group came to view monarchy differently. In a more recent context, tensions between government ideologies could be revealed by examining U.S. relations with contemporary monarchies, particularly absolutist regimes like Saudi Arabia. Studying these relations will better explain how Americans navigated a new political path following independence and created their national identity. Although Marie Antoinette, and monarchy in general, are regarded as the antitheses of republican liberty and justice, a precise understanding of American attitudes and appropriations of both royal individuals and institutions will allow us more fully to come to terms with the development of republicanism in the United States. As Americans continue to relate to non- republican entities or ideas, they define and redefine their own social and political characters. This work is but one small part of a story that has only begun to be explored.

72 Appendix Source Materials and Partisanship I. Newspapers and Periodicals: Information compiled from the Library of Congress Online Catalogue, Early American Newspapers: Series 1-7 Online Database, and the appendix of Donald H. Stewart’s Opposition Press of the Federalist Period.

Title Editor Years Published Political Affiliation

Aurora General Benjamin Franklin 1794-1807 Republican Advertiser Bache

Dunlap’s American John Dunlap 1791-1795 Leans Federalist Daily Advertiser

Connecticut Courant Watson & Goodwin 1764-1876 Federalist

Federal Gazette Andrew Brown 1788-1793 Impartial

Freeman's Journal Francis Bailey 1781-1792 Leans Republican

Gazette of the United 1790-1804 Federalist States

General Advertiser Benjamin Franklin 1790-1794 Republican Bache

Independent E. Oswald 1782-1796 Republican Gazetteer

Mail D.C. Claypoole 1791-1792 Leans Federalist

The Massachusetts Isaiah Thomas 1789-1796 Federalist Magazine

National Gazette Philip Freneau 1791-1793 Republican

Norwich Packet J. Trumbull 1773-1802 Impartial

Pennsylvania Matthew Carey 1785-1788 Impartial Evening Herald

73 Pennsylvania Thomas Bradford 1742-1793 Impartial Journal

Pennsylvania Daniel Humphreys 1784-1792 Leans Federalist Mercury

Pennsylvania Packet John Dunlap and 1771-1790 Leans Federalist D.C. Claypoole

Philadelphia Gazette Andrew Brown 1794-1802 Federalist

Porcupine’s Gazette William Cobbett 1797-1799 Federalist

The Time-Piece Philip Freneau 1797-1798 Republican

Virginia Gazette A. Davis 1782-1796 Impartial

II. Books, Broadsides, etc.: Included below are works from the 1790s that reflect partisan opinions. If an editor’s party is not explicitly stated by a consulted secondary source, the faction in which their publication’s views seem to align is in parentheses. Information compiled from Eric Burns’ Infamous Scribblers: The Founding Fathers and the Rowdy Beginnings of American Journalism, Marcus Daniel’s Scandal and Civility: Journalism and the Birth of American Democracy, and Donald H. Stewart’s Opposition Press of the Federalist Period.

Title American Author Year Published Political Affiliation and/or Publisher

Beattie’s Elements Matthew Carey 1792 Federalist of Moral Science

Bradford’s The Samuel F. Bradford, 1796 Republican, Impartial impostor detected, or Thomas Bradford A review of some of the writings of “Peter Porcupine”

Burke’s Reflections Hugh Gaine 1791 (Federalist) on the Revolution in France

74 Cobbett’s A Bone to William Cobbett, 1795 Federalist, Impartial Gnaw Thomas Bradford

Cobbett’s The William Cobbett 1796 Federalist political censor

Freneau’s Poems Philip Freneau 1795 Republican written between the years 1768 & 1794 Gifford’s The Stewart & Rowson 1797 (Federalist) History of France

Goupil’s Memoirs of Anonymous 1794 Republican Marie Antoinette

Greenleaf's New- Thomas Greenleaf 1790 Republican York, Connecticut & New-Jersey almanac

Guthrie’s A new Matthew Carey 1795 Federalist system of modern geography

Le Livre Rouge G. Forman 1794 (Republican)

Macaulay’s Isiah Thomas and 1791 Federalist Observations on the E.T. Andrews Reflections of the Right Hon. Edmund Burke

Moore’s A journal Henry & Patrick Rice 1793 (Federalist) during a residence in France

Paine’s Rights of Thomas Paine, 1791 Republican Man George Kline

Playfair’s The William Cobbett 1796 Federalist History of Jacobinism

Preston’s The Death Enoch Story 1794 Federalist of Louis, the Sixteenth

75 Priestley’s Letters to Hugh Gaine 1791 (Republican) the Right Honourable Edmund Burke

“The Queen’s Edward Gray 1793 (Federalist) Lamentation” in The Tragedy of Louis Capet Rabaut’s An Matthew Carey 1794 Federalist Impartial history of the late revolution in France

Williams’ Lessons to Childs and Swaine 1791 Republican a young prince

Wolcot’s Pindariana Benjamin Franklin 1794 Republican Bache Wolcot’s The Works Thomas Allen 1794 (Federalist) of Peter Pindar, Esq.

Wollstonecraft’s Thomas Dobson 1795 (Republican) Historical and moral view of the origin and progress of the French Revolution

III. U.S. Ambassadors to France:

Name Position Years in office Political Affiliation

John Adams Commissioner to 1777-1779 Federalist France

Benjamin Franklin Commissioner and 1776-1785 Impartial Minister Plenipotentiary to France

76 Thomas Jefferson Minister 1785-1789 Republican Plenipotentiary to France Gouverneur Morris Minister 1792-1794 Federalist Plenipotentiary to France

William Short U.S. chargé d'affaires 1789-1792 Republican in France

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