420 Chapter XVII
teers from the United States. He rejoiced in “upheavals of the globe, these great
revolutions that we are called upon to make.”^26
The American Joel Barlow was another. Lately in London he had written his
Advice to the Privileged Orders, which the British government found only slightly
less subversive than Paine’s Rights of Man. He had come to Paris as one of the
delegates bringing greetings from the London Society for Constitutional Infor-
mation. After the annexation of Savoy, when the Abbé Grégoire went on a tour to
the new eighty- fourth department he took the Connecticut Yankee with him.
Barlow was led to believe that Savoy might elect him as one of its deputies to the
Convention. He was not elected; he was not yet a French citizen. In the Alpine
majesty of Savoy his thoughts turned to plain little Connecticut. He wrote his
mock- epic on corn- meal mush, Hasty Pudding, at an inn in Chambéry. He also
wrote on a more pressing topic, A Letter addressed to the People of Piedmont, pub-
lished in French at Grenoble, in Italian at Nice. The latter edition was so thor-
oughly suppressed by the King of Sardinia that no known copy is in existence.
Barlow advised the Italians to join in the general revolution. “Italy must be free...
Italy is destined to form one great republic.”^27
Condorcet meanwhile penned his Avis aux Bataves, urging the Dutch to revolt.
The Dutch exile, Kock, translated it. He and others, after Jemappes, had set up a
kind of government in exile, the Batavian Revolutionary Committee. Word came
from Amsterdam that the patriots were ready to rise, but would do so only after
the arrival of the French army, not before. Even Brissot hesitated to invade the
Dutch provinces after the victory in Belgium, knowing that invasion would bring
both the Dutch and British governments into the war. A group of Dutch revolu-
tionaries appeared at the Jacobin Club in December. They met with considerable
skepticism from Robespierre and others.^28
“Why don’t the Batavian patriots make their own revolution,” someone asked at
the Jacobin Club, “since they have the money and means of their own? Or why
don’t they offer a hundred millions to the French nation to enable us to do it?”^29
This picture should be kept in mind, since it was to be reproduced many times
in the following years, in connection with Italy as well as Holland. It is a picture in
which revolutionaries from other countries importune the French, and the French
are themselves divided, some urging the “foreign” revolutionaries to revolt, some
favoring positive French assistance, others expressing contempt for these ineffec-
tual malcontents or unwillingness to spend French blood and treasure for their
liberation.
These various points of view came momentarily together when the Convention,
on December 15, issued its famous decree on policy to be pursued in occupied
countries during the war. This decree represented the definitive action foreseen in
the decree of November 19. The two together have been commonly called the
26 J. P. Brissot, Correspondance et papiers (Paris, 1912), 304, 313–16.
27 J. Woodress, A Yankee’s Odyssey: the Life of Joel Barlow (Philadelphia and New York, 1958),
134–35.
28 Colenbrander, Gedenkjstukken, I, 79–84, 92–96, 196.
29 Ibid., 81 n. Colenbrander gives no source, and the sentences are not in Aulard’s Jacobins, but are
characteristic of what was then being said in other speeches printed by Aulard.