Gouverneur Morris, France, and Republicanism in the Atlantic Space

Abstract: Exemplifying par excellence the American and exotic figure Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson had epitomized before him, Gouverneur Morris worked in France as the herald of enlightened republican principles. In 1789, when he arrived in Paris, Morris was thrilled to see that the French had begun their own revolution in the name of liberty. Moreover, as he lived among the nobility, the New Yorker criticized what represented to him the decaying monarchy's corrupt values and frivolity, which he contrasted with the morals and the aesthetics of simplicity of the United States. He thus appeared as the standard-bearer of an idyllic and idealized American identity and tried to translate these virtuous republican principles to the French. However, Morris is now remembered as an enemy of the French Revolution, a traitor to the republican cause, and an ally of the French monarchy. Unraveling why this former Patriot became the foe of the Revolution that claimed to be the heir of the American War for Independence could help us to see the variety of republican sentiments making the revolutionary Atlantic world.