616 Chapter XXVI
by the disclosure in 1798 of the XYZ affair, as they called it, which led to further
maritime hostilities with France, to the Alien and Sedition Acts (supposedly
aimed against Irish democrats) and to the Virginia and Kentucky Resolutions by
which democracy was to be protected against the encroachments of government.
In these circumstances, some believed that the best way to allay democratic agita-
tion in the United States was to launch a war of conquest against the American
possessions of Spain, then France’s ally. This was the view of Alexander Hamilton.
The same idea was expressed by General Dumouriez, who was then living in Ger-
many. Appalled by the proliferation of revolutionary republics very different from
the one he had envisaged for Belgium in 1792, Dumouriez wrote a book urging all
governments to come to the aid of England, and advised the United States to sup-
press its Jacobins by a war to annex New Orleans, Texas, and trans- Mississippi
Louisiana.^5
The revolutionizing of Switzerland, itself set in motion by the creation of the
Cisalpine Republic, aroused the hopes of certain Germans who wished to revolu-
tionize Germany. A group of Germans in Basel, a Swiss town across the Rhine
from Baden, revived the agitation for a Swabian Republic that had been briefly
favored by the French, working through the adventurer Poteratz, in 1796. From
Mainz, occupied by the French, Professor A. J. Hoffman of the University in that
city sent agitators into Baden and Württemberg. The professors at the University
of Kiel were denounced by Dumouriez for their Jacobinism. At the University of
Jena, Professor J. G. Fichte was the favorite of the radically minded students. At
the University of Königsberg, Professor I. Kant wrote a “justification” (which he
did not publish) of the policy of the French Directory toward England.^6 To the
English, in whose own universities such sentiments were unheard of, the behavior
of German students and professors seemed most reprehensible. As Hugh Elliot
(brother of the Viceroy of Corsica already mentioned in these pages) wrote from
Dresden in August 1798 to Lord Grenville, the Foreign Secretary: “The partisans
of revolution and innovation have not been more active in any country than in
Germany; and, unfortunately, the German universities have been the center of a
spirit of democracy, which has from thence been diffused into all the various
classes of what are styled the learned professions.”^7
States (New York, 1907–1943), IV, 185–88; R. R. Palmer, “Herman Melville et la Révolution fran-
çaise” in Annales historiques de la Revolution française, No. 136 ( July–Sept., 1954), 254–56. It appears
that the intermediary between the French and Pitt was the uncle of Herman Melville.
5 Le Général Dumouriez, Tableau speculatif de l ’Europe, n.p., février 1798, reissued and amplified
as the Nouveau tableau... septembre 1798; see pp. 257–61 of the latter.
6 K. Obser, “Die revolutionäre Propaganda am Oberrhein in Jahre 1798” in Zeitschrift für Ge-
schichte des Oberrheins, new series, X XIV (1909), 199–245 (Obser furnishes no evidence for his remark
that the propagandists were “mostly Jews,” p. 201); X. Léon, Fichte et son temps, 2 vols. (Paris, 1927),
I, 518–85; I. Kant, “Rechtfertigung des Direktoriums der französiche Republik wegen seines ange-
blich ungereimten Planes, den Krieg mit England zu ihrem Vorteil zu beendigen. 1798,” in Sämtliche
Werke (1867–1868), VIIIi, 644–45; a memorandum of the Prussian resident at Frankfurt, about Feb-
ruary 1798, of which a copy was sent to England, Dropmore Papers, IV, 107–8, reporting on “l’influence
morale du système révolutionnaire français dans cette partie de l’Allemagne et sur la manière dont les
agents démocrates cherchent à agiter les pays de la rive droite du Rhin.... Ce ne sont plus actuelle-
ment les agents français, mais les clubbistes de l’Allemagne... .”
7 Dropmore Papers, IV, 281.