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Introduction Introduction This is a book about the fate of the ideal of citizenship in the Age of Revolu- tions. It examines how over the course of the 1790s Americans, Frenchmen, and Dutchmen articulated and debated their ideas and ideals of citizenship in light of the Haitian Revolution (1791–1804) and the French revolutionary Terror (1793–1794). It argues that the uprisings of free coloured people and black slaves in Saint-Domingue and the Terror in continental France became trans- nationally shared points of reference and sites of contemplation. They turned into phenomena that bred anxieties and raised difficult questions about the nature and limits of two core ideals of the revolutionary citizenship discourse of the Age of Atlantic Revolutions: civic equality and political participation. The momentous and, to many, shocking events that reverberated throughout the Atlantic world coloured events at home, informed a range of arguments in domestic political debates, and generated parallel patterns in the evaluation of the limits and dangers of revolutionary citizenship. By the end of the 1790s, the intellectual repercussions of these experiences shattered the ideological unity of an Atlantic revolutionary movement – and moment. It led Americans, Frenchmen, and Dutchmen to abandon the notion of a shared, Atlantic, revo- lutionary vision of citizenship and to forge more nationalized conceptions of what it means to be a citizen. In two important ways, this is a different story than is usually told about the age of revolutions as a turning point in the history of citizenship. First, the legacy of the age of revolutions for the meaning of citizenship is often told in terms of rights-based constitutionalism, the nation-state, representative de- mocracy, and political participation. The 1790s, however, were also a breeding ground for a set of arguments for limited citizen participation in politics, for a sustained critique of factional popular societies and the dangers they were seen to represent; for arguments in favour of an exclusive regime of (imperial) citizenship based on civilizational inequality, and for arguments in favour of the idea that nation-states should follow their own path in devising their citi- zenship arrangements and models. These sets of arguments have long shaped debates about the idea and ideal of citizenship. Importantly, they were not only put forth by reactionary and counter-revolutionary conservatives, but by a cohort of moderate revolutionary and post-revolutionary politicians, jour- nalists, thinkers, and publicists who gave shape to what I call the ‘Atlantic Thermidor’.1 1 I wish to thank James Alexander Dun for suggesting this term and discussing it with me. © RENÉ KOEKKOEK, 2020 | doi:10.1163/9789004416451_002 This is an open access chapter distributed under the terms of the CC BY-NC 4.0 license. René Koekkoek - 9789004416451 Downloaded from Brill.com09/30/2021 09:50:51AM via free access 2 Introduction Secondly, The Citizenship Experiment aims to overcome the static picture of either the era’s ideological and conceptual unity – or, alternatively, its essential plurality. Instead, I propose that the history of what many at the time recog- nized as a transatlantic political discourse can best be narrated in terms of moments of convergence and moments of divergence. The Atlantic revolution- ary moment of the 1790s was only a short-lived transnational episode of intellectual interaction between largely separate national communication communities. The evolving interaction between ‘national’ political contesta- tion, on the one hand, and a transnational, intellectual-political horizon, on the other hand, was unstable. The emergence and disintegration of a shared revolutionary citizenship discourse was not a clash of fixed principles, but an evolving process beset with contingencies and events that prompted contem- poraries to differentiate between models of citizenship and envision different outcomes. 1 Citizenship in the Age of Revolutions In pre-revolutionary times, citizenship was primarily understood as a legal and socioeconomic status within the walls of the city. In France and the British American colonies it was overshadowed by the notion of ‘subject’ who was only granted a limited set of rights.2 Over the course of the eighteenth century, however, political thinkers, philosophers, publicists, journalists, as well as lawyers, administrators, and even magistrates of the French parlements (royal sovereign courts), began to employ the notion of citizen more frequently, push- ing it in new directions and investing it with new meanings and ideals.3 Some of these conceptions of citizenship, as has been well documented, harked back to moral and republican ideals derived from classical times.4 Others were 2 J.H. Kettner, The Development of American Citizenship, 1608–1870 (Chapel Hill, N.C.: University of North Carolina Press, 1978); M. Prak, ‘Burghers into Citizens: Urban and National Citizen- ship in the Netherlands during the Revolutionary Era (c.1800)’, in: M. Hanagan and C. Tilly (eds.) Extending Citizenship, Reconfiguring States (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield 1999), pp. 17–35; P. Sahlins, Unnaturally French: Foreign Citizens in the Old Regime and After (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2004). 3 D.A. Bell, Lawyers and Citizens. The Making of a Political Elite in Old Regime France (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994); J. Merrick, ‘Subjects and Citizens in the Remonstrances of the Parlement of Paris in the Eighteenth Century’, Journal of the History of Ideas 51 (1990), pp. 453–460; P. Rétat, ‘Citoyen-sujet, civisme’, in: R. Reichardt and E. Schmitt (eds.) Handbuch politisch-soziale Grundbegriffe in Frankreich 1680–1820, 8 vols. (Munich: Oldenbourg Verlag, 1988), vol. 8, pp. 75–105; J.J. Kloek and W.W. Mijnhardt, 1800. Blueprints for a National Com- munity (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005). 4 For the American colonies, see J.G.A. Pocock, The Machiavellian Moment: Florentine Political Thought and the Atlantic Republican Tradition (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, René Koekkoek - 9789004416451 Downloaded from Brill.com09/30/2021 09:50:51AM via free access <UN> Introduction 3 intimately bound up with eighteenth-century social, cultural, and economic processes – and the intense (theoretical) reflection upon these processes: the rise of commercial society and its corresponding public ethics, the growing availability of consumer and luxury goods, the ongoing specialization and divi- sion of labour, and new regimes of taxation.5 In addition, citizenship was in- vested with new meanings related to the rise of the public sphere, enlightened sociability in various kinds of ‘societies’ (sociétés/genootschappen), and the self-reflexive ways in which Americans, Frenchmen, and Dutchmen came to understand ‘society’ (or ‘civil society’/‘burgermaatschappij’) in historical and comparative socio-anthropological perspective.6 2003 [1975]); C. Robbins, The Eighteenth-Century Commonwealthman: Studies in the Transmis- sion, Development, and Circumstance of English Liberal Thought from the Restoration of Charles ii until the War with the Thirteen Colonies (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1959); G. Wood, The Creation of the American Republic, 1776–1787 (Chapel Hill, N.C.: University of North Carolina Press, 1969). For the Dutch Republic, see W.R.E. Velema, Republicans: Es- says on Eighteenth-Century Dutch Political Thought (Leiden: Brill, 2007); S.R.E. Klein, Patriots republikanisme. Politieke cultuur in Nederland (1766–1787) (Amsterdam: Amsterdam Univer- sity Press, 1995). For France, see K.M. Baker, ‘Transformations of Classical Republicanism in Eighteenth-Century France’, Journal of Modern History 73 (2001), pp. 32–53, as well as several essays in Inventing the French Revolution. Essays on French Political Culture in the Eighteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990); H. van Effenterre, ‘La cité grecque, modèle de République des Républicains’, and C. Nicolet, ‘Citoyenneté française et citoyenneté romaine, essai de mise en perspective’, both in: S. Bernstein and O. Rudelle (eds.) Le modèle républicain (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 1992), pp. 13–56; R. Monnier, Républican- isme, patriotisme et Révolution française (Paris: L’Harmattan, 2005); J.K. Wright, A Classical Republican in Eighteenth-Century France. The Political Thought of Mably (Stanford, CA: Stan- ford University Press, 1997). 5 The literature on these topics is extensive, but see T.H. Breen, The Marketplace of Revolution: How Consumer Politics shaped American Independence (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004); I. Hont, ‘The Early Enlightenment Debate on Commerce and Luxury’, in: M. Goldie and R. Wokler (eds.), The Cambridge History of Eighteenth-Century Political Thought (Cam- bridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), pp. 379–418; J. Shovlin, The Political Economy of Virtue. Luxury, Patriotism, and the Origins of the French Revolution (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell Uni- versity Press, 2007); M. Sonenscher, Before the Deluge: Public Debt, Inequality and the Intel- lectual Origins of the French Revolution (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2007). On tax regimes, M. Kwass, Privilege and the Politics of Taxation in Eighteenth-Century France: lib- erté, égalité, fiscalité (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000). 6 On the public sphere, see J. van Horn Melton, The Rise of the Public in Enlightenment Europe (Cambridge University Press, 2001) and H. Barker and S. Burrows (eds.) Press, Politics and the
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