The Revolution Comes to Italy 571
the government who hoped to recover Louisiana for France. This might mean
Louisiana west of the Mississippi which had belonged to Spain since 1763 and
which the French proposed to regain in return for setting up a Spanish Bourbon
prince with a new kingdom in North Italy—so far were these elements in the
French government from sponsoring a revolutionary Italian republic. Or, “Louisi-
ana” might mean the whole of French Louisiana before 1763, from the Alleghenies
to the Rockies. Since the signing of the Jay treaty between the United States and
Great Britain the French believed that the Americans were moving toward war
with France. They lost whatever interest they had had in maintaining the existing
boundaries of the United States, which were, or course, hardly more than a dozen
years old. There was talk with the Spanish of a kind of Latin alliance to check the
spread of English- speaking influence in America. There was talk of a separate po-
litical entity, in which the Western democrats in the United States, sponsored by
France, should have a republic of their own. There was even talk, after the Anglo-
French peace negotiations began at Lille, of offering the American West to the
British, since it would be easier for the French to give away Kentucky and Ohio
than the Dutch possessions in South Africa and Ceylon. Never had the American
West been so involved in remote foreign developments.^7
Believing that the Americans were now working for England, Delacroix em-
barked, in January 1796, on promoting une heureuse révolution in the United States,
though all he meant by it was to sponsor the election of Jefferson as president and
so bring the American “republicans” into power.^8 The American minister, Monroe,
kept assuring the French that the people of the United States (as was probably
true, on balance) did not support their own government in its policies of appease-
ment to England. In April Jefferson wrote a letter to his old friend Philip Mazzei,
then in Italy, describing the political situation in the United States, where, he said,
good republicans opposed a selfish combination of monocrats, aristocrats, and An-
glophiles; this letter, when first published in the Paris Moniteur a few months later,
created a furor in America, and confirmed the French in their belief that the
United States was in need of a “revolution.”^9 Meanwhile the French General Col-
lot, on an ostensibly scientific expedition, sounded out the separatist sentiments
west of the Alleghenies, and George Rogers Clark was for the second time com-
missioned as a brigadier general in the French army. The well- known firebrand,
Mangourit, who had been an aide to Genet in America in 1793, and who had
worked at that time with the South Carolina democrats, including Colonel Tate,
was transferred in June 1796 from Madrid to Philadelphia. At Madrid he had
proved too outspokenly vehement, loudly declaring that the present King of Spain
would be the last. He was told, in his instructions as chargé d ’affaires in America, to
favor the election of Jefferson, seek contacts with Madison and Robert Livingston,
7 F. J. Turner, “The Policy of France toward the Mississippi Valley in the Period of Washington
and Adams,” in American Historical Review, X (1905), 249–79; A. P. Whitaker, The Mississippi Ques-
tion , 1795–1803 (New York, 1934); R. Guyot, Le Directoire et la paix de l ’Europe (Paris, 1912), the
index under “Louisiane.”
8 A. DeConde, Entangling Alliance: Politics and Diplomacy under George Washington (Durham,
N.C., 1958), 456.
9 Moniteur, 6 pluviose An V ( January 25, 1797).