CHAPTER XVI
THE ISSUES AND THE ADVERSARIES
Every European is today part of this last struggle of civilization.... The Revolution
being cosmopolitan, so to speak, ceases to belong exclusively to the French.
—J. MALLET DU PAN, BRUSSELS, AUGUST 1793
“What had liberty and the rights of man to do with this second revolution?” Noah
Webster posed the question in a tract on the French Revolution published in New
York at the height of the Reign of Terror. By the second revolution he meant the
events in France in the summer of 1792. Later historians have also used the term
“second revolution” for these events—the popular upheaval in Paris which led to
the attack on the Tuileries on August 10, the dethronement, humiliation, and sub-
sequent death of Louis XVI, the collapse of the first constitution of the Revolu-
tion, the deportation of priests, the September Massacres, the mounting violence,
the streaming of French armies across the frontiers into neighboring countries,
and the famous decree of November by which the French Republic offered “aid
and fraternity to all peoples wishing to recover their liberty.”
A methodical man, author of children’s spelling books, eventually to be famous
as a maker of dictionaries, Webster admitted that he had welcomed the French
Revolution of 1789. He had seen in it the same objectives as the Americans had
sought in 1776. But the developments since 1792 went beyond anything he could
approve. They showed a “wild enthusiasm,” a “political insanity.” In American poli-
tics he had become rather conservative; at least he was now a staunch Federalist.
He could hardly share the enthusiasm for France which American democrats con-
tinued to feel. But he was far from taking part in the unqualified denunciation that
was the stock in trade of Federalist polemics. He was willing to admit, as news of
the guillotinings was brought by successive vessels into American seaports, that
not all the relevant facts might be known. The French, he thought, were excited
because foreign powers had tried to intervene in their affairs. “Perhaps other cir-