The Early ‘Republic of France’ as a Cosmopolitan Moment

Abstract

Recent historiography has shown that the French Revolution owed much of its initial impetus to transnational, transatlantic and trans-Channel developments. 6 Likewise, since J. G. A. Pocock's seminal study of the Atlantic republican tradition, historians have complexified the genealogies of republicanism, demonstrating that France was not outside the circulation of republican ideas, which was accelerated in the second half of the eighteenth century, and that it was necessary to take into account other political traditions-from the Athenian model to the Salamanca school of natural rights and resistance against tyranny-that have informed the different strands of republicanism. 7 Indeed, as Clément Thibaud recently pleaded, a 'polycentric' history of 'Atlantic republicanisms' is needed to avoid the pitfalls of exceptionalism, diffusionist models and linear genealogies. 8 However, it is the argument of this article that a coherent republican tradition existed, circulating across the Atlantic world, from which actors drew references and ideas that informed their worldviews and activities. To put it more clearly, we do not reify the idea of a single Atlantic republican tradition. Rather, we posit that republicanism was a reservoir of different ideas and languages, among which was an 'advanced' or 'radical' tradition, kept alive especially within the anglophone world since the English civil war of the seventeenth century. As Burke correctly identified, this tradition informed the French Revolution from its very inception but its apex came perhaps with the advent of the Republic in 1792.We focus here on the English republican tradition, justified in this approach by the fact that among the eighteen recipients of French citizenship on 26 August 1792, ten were from the English-speaking world, and that, on 25 September 1792, another act, this time voted by the newly founded Republican Convention, extended the list of recipients to five other British (