Lessons from America: Aristocratic émigrés in America and the development of modern French political culture

FAIN: FT-52591-04

Doina Pasca Harsanyi
Central Michigan University (Mount Pleasant, MI 48859-0001)

My project is a book-length manuscript that focuses on the historical context which shaped French political liberalism in the post-revolutionary period. It will consider, as a case-study, the group of former members of the Constituent Assembly who immigrated to America between 1793 and 1798 and then returned to positions of significant influence under the Directory, the Consulate and the Empire. As such they participated in, and contributed their reflections on America to, the post-thermidorian effort to end the Revolution which in turn generated the ideology and politics of liberalism.