Revolutionizing of the Revolution 415
their very taste for elaborate mystification made them innocuous if not ridiculous
in real political life. Probably the reading clubs which sprang up in many European
cities after about 1770, for the joint purchase and discussion of newspapers and
books, were more important than Freemasonry as nurseries of pro- Revolutionary
feeling. Nothing more conspiratorial than the Freemasons has ever been discov-
ered. Belief in a concerted, secret, underground international revolutionary move-
ment, as developed by the French Barruel and the Scotch Robison, and advanced
in America by Jedidiah Morse, is an item not in the history of fact but in the his-
tory of counter- revolutionary polemics.^20
The French Jacobins of 1792, among whom a few individuals like Robespierre
were the exception, developed a psychology of world- revolution because they felt
so insecure at home. They demanded war at a time when they considered their own
king a traitor, when the Assembly was mortally divided, the generals unpredict-
able, and the country struggling to live under new laws on which the ink was
scarcely dry. Brissot argued, before war was declared, that it would be short and
easy because peoples everywhere would rise in a massive sympathy with France.
Many believed, or said they believed, that that other land of liberty, the United
States of America, in memory of French aid fifteen years before, and in common
opposition to tyrants, would rush immediately into the struggle. On April 20, the
very day on which the Assembly passed the declaration of war, an enthusiast at the
Jacobin Club jumped up to cry to a screaming audience, “Washington is at Sea!”^21
On August 26, 1792, the Assembly took one of the more extraordinary steps of
the Revolution, decreeing honorary French citizenship for seventeen foreigners of
varying eminence, as “men who in various countries have brought reason to its
present maturity.”^22 Coming at this moment it can be understood as a gesture of
defiance. With the Prussians approaching, bringing the émigrés in their train, with
Louis XVI unseated, and Paris quaking beneath them, with the Assembly itself
now marked for an early disappearance, the harassed legislators made common
cause with a wide assortment of benefactors of the human race. If on nothing else,
they could agree on a list of notable foreigners. The list itself is a subject of curios-
ity. The poet, M. J. Chénier, first proposed fourteen names, of which the Assembly
adopted eight: Thomas Paine, James Madison, Joseph Priestley, James Mackintosh
(known for his reply to Burke), William Wilberforce (the anti- slavery leader), the
Italian economist Gorani, and the German and Swiss educators, Campe and Pest-
a lozzi. To these, after discussion, the Assembly added Jeremy Bentham, Thomas
Clarkson (another anti- slavery Englishman), David Williams (a minor British
“radical”), Thaddeus Kosciuszko, Klopstock the German poet, George Washing-
20 The literature on Freemasonry is large and disputatious. See Gaston Martin, La franc-
maçonnerie française et la préparation de la Révolution (Paris, 1926); B. Fay, Revolution and Freemasonry
1680–1800 (Boston, 1935), translated from the French; with a new edition (Paris, 1961). For the “plot”
theory of international revolution as advanced by Barruel, see Chapter X XIII below; by Robison,
Chapters II and X X X; by Morse, Chapter X X XI. The plot theory was refuted by J. J. Mounier, De
l ’ influence attribuée aux philosophes et aux illuminés sur la Révolution de France (Tübingen, 1801).
21 A. Aulard, Société des Jacobins, 6 vols. (Paris, 1889–1897), III, for April 20, 1792. See also Lucy
M. Gidney, L’ influence des Etats- Unis d ’Amérique sur Brissot, Condorcet et Mme. Roland (Paris, 1930).
22 See the debates in the Moniteur; I am also indebted to a seminar paper by my student, Mr.
J. E. Seigel, “The Honorary Citizens of France: August 26, 1792.”