The aim of this essay is to return to the genesis of the American agrarian myth in the eighteenth century, as a path to investigate the origins of the American national identity. This will be done by means of a comprehensive reassessment of St. John de Cre`vecoeur, the Norman noble whose name is bound to the success of Letters from an American Farmer. His work contains the origins of the agrarian ideal as a peculiarly American phenomenon, prior to independence and before Republican ideology placed agrarian democracy at its foundations, making the project of agrarian development and democratic participation inseparable one from another. A Frenchman who became American and then, after 25 years, French again, Cre`vecoeur represents an ideal lens through which to analyse the hitherto insufficiently explored contribution of French economic culture to the creation of American national identity. As a multi-faceted figure whose richness has been dominated by his image as the author of a best-selling autobiographical novel, Cre`vecoeur is here also seen (partly through unpublished sources) as an agronomist who was no stranger to physiocracy and as a diplomat and French intellectual who always felt profoundly American. It was precisely this attachment to the land, seen as fundamental to the vision of a new and distinct form of peaceful cohabitation and democratic partnership, that became a political theme and an economic ARTICLE IN PRESS www.elsevier.com/locate/histeuroideas 0191-6599/$ -see front matter r
Résumé Par sa réflexion sur l’instruction publique Du Pont de Nemours acquit une compétence et une originalité par rapport au mouvement physiocratique qui se consolidèrent au contact de la réalité révolutionnaire. Du Pont donna un témoignage précieux du legs de la physiocratie, en plaçant l’instruction publique au coeur du libéralisme, où l’individu pouvait assurer son autonomie matérielle et intellectuelle seulement par une participation responsable et éclairée à la vie de la collectivité.
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