The Surprising Pacification of Citizen Genêt
Citizen Genêt presenting himself to President Washington, in a scene painted by the nineteenth-century artist Howard Pyle
(Alamy Stock Photo)
By Allen C. Guelzo
This article appears in the Summer 2025 issue of the Coolidge Review. Request a free copy of a future print issue.
One hot day in August 1831, Alexis de Tocqueville and his friend Gustave de Beaumont toiled up a hill overlooking the Hudson River a few miles above Albany and began inquiring at the house there for a “M. Genêt.” Tocqueville was gathering materials for the book which would become Democracy in America, and he wanted to speak with a man who had, almost forty years before, been a French diplomat in America and who could converse with him in French.
In the event, we have no clear notion of what Tocqueville and M. Genêt discussed, since Tocqueville made no mention of M. Genêt in Democracy in America. And with good reason, too, since M. Genêt was, in fact, the notorious Edmond-Charles Genêt, who had lit the powder for an embarrassing diplomatic collision of two revolutionary republics, France and the United States. Tocqueville was uncertain whether he should publicize his visit.
As it turned out, he needn’t have worried.
The man who became known simply as Citizen Genêt started out on a very different foot. Born in 1763 to a modest bourgeois bureaucrat family, Genêt gravitated into the king of France’s foreign service and became France’s chargé d’affaires at the court of Catherine the Great when the Revolution broke out in 1789. He was intelligent, quick-witted, facile in his grasp of languages—and at definitely the wrong place in Saint Petersburg, as the Russian empress was planning to join a British-led coalition in making war on the new revolutionary regime in France. Genêt returned to Paris and attached himself to the Girondists, who then controlled France’s National Convention. In November 1792, he was named the republic’s diplomatic minister to the United States.
Genêt was not a radical like the Girondists’ rivals, the Jacobins. But when he arrived in Charleston on board the aptly named thirty-two-gun frigate Embuscade on April 8, 1793, he met what seemed to be all the radical adulation a revolutionary Frenchman could have wished for. He accommodated himself accordingly by handing out letters of marque. These were used in the eighteenth century to commission civilian vessels as privateers who would hunt down enemy merchant vessels on the high seas. Genêt gave letters of marque to four vessels with American crews. He did not bother to get permission from President George Washington’s administration in Philadelphia.
Ignoring such diplomatic niceties, Genêt set off for Philadelphia on April 18, expecting to be welcomed, as an American newspaper put it, with “the firing of cannon and other demonstrations of joy.” And why not? Had not France been America’s great ally in its Revolution? Did not France and America have a diplomatic treaty which bound them to at least some degree of reciprocity? Most important, were they not now the two leading examples of republican revolution in a world of aristocrats?
That certainly was the opinion of Secretary of State Thomas Jefferson, who expected that Genêt’s arrival in Philadelphia “would furnish occasion for the people to testify their affections” for republican France. It was not, however, the opinion of President Washington, who saw no advantage whatsoever to being dragged into the French Republic’s war with Britain and its aristocratic allies. Even before Genêt reached Philadelphia, Washington had assembled his cabinet to query them about issuing a proclamation of neutrality, a proclamation which in fact he released on April 22. Jefferson cooperated, grudgingly, fearing that for all practical purposes “our treaty with France is void.”
Washington’s Rage—and Compassion
Citizen Genêt arrived in the American capital on May 16, three days after the first of the privateers he had commissioned showed up there with a British prize in tow. He set an ambitious agenda. He would use Philadelphia as the platform from which to preach uprisings among Francophone populations in British Canada and in Spanish-ruled Florida and Louisiana; he would negotiate a new alliance between France and the United States that would “mingle their commercial and political interests”; he would license more privateers to use American ports and ships to raid British commerce; and he would demand, politely, that Americans liquidate the last of their Revolutionary War debts to France so that the Girondists could finance their war against Britain.
All of this put Thomas Jefferson in an exceedingly difficult position. On June 5, Jefferson had to advise Genêt that President Washington had concluded that “arming and equipping vessels in the Ports of the United States to cruise against nations with whom they are at peace, was incompatible with the territorial sovereignty of the United States,” and so no French privateers could be outfitted or received in American ports. A week later, he had to inform Genêt that there would be no advances on the American debt to France.
Genêt responded in fury: Washington was wrong to see the privateers as a violation of sovereignty, and even more wrong to slow-walk payments of the debt. Moreover, Genêt had the opinion of all true Americans—les vrais Americains—on his side, and they “would force its Government to make common cause with us.” Jefferson struggled to warn Genêt through June and July that he was tempting an explosion from Washington. But Genêt contemptuously replied that Washington “was not the sovereign of the country…nor could he declare war or make peace,” and in July the French minister moved ahead with plans to outfit yet another privateer, the Petite Democrate.
He did not move fast enough, or in the right direction. Washington erupted in one of his rare bursts of uncontrolled rage when he learned about the Petite Democrate on July 11. “Is the Minister of the French Republic to set the Acts of this Government at defiance—with impunity?” Washington burst out. “And then threaten the Executive with an appeal to the People”? The next day, Washington’s cabinet agreed to request Genêt’s recall.
If Genêt expected Americans to rally to his support, he was wrong on that score, too. Public opinion, Jefferson told James Madison on August 18, was “becoming universal…in support of the President against Genêt.” In October, the French Committee on Public Safety agreed to the recall.
For the unhappy Citizen Genêt, returning to France would have involved something more risky than merely a strikeout in a diplomatic mission. Control of the French Revolution had passed into the hands of the Jacobins, who would soon inaugurate the Reign of Terror, sending anything that looked like dissent to the guillotine. That included the Girondists, and it is likely that Genêt would have joined many of his soon-to-be-headless friends in the tumbrel. In fact, it was broadly rumored that his successor, Joseph Fauchet, had stowed a portable guillotine on the ship bearing him to America with which to execute Genêt as soon as possible.
But Washington intervened. “As long as we were in danger from his Intrigues,” the president told Rufus King, “we wished him ill,” but Washington would not allow that ill-wishing to become a pretext for the Jacobins to work their bloody will. “We felt compassion and were anxious he should not be sacrificed,” Washington said, and so all demands for Genêt’s extradition were refused.
The New American
However shortsighted Citizen Genêt had been as a diplomat, he knew enough not to bite the hand that protected him. If anything, he blended seamlessly into the fabric of life in the United States. He married Cornelia Clinton, the daughter of George Clinton, New York’s obstreperous governor. He set himself up as a gentleman farmer and dabbler in scientific projects in the Hudson Valley. In 1804, Genêt became an American citizen. By 1821, he would become so Americanized that hardly anyone noticed when he gave an address to the Rensselaer County Agricultural Society on “The Means for Opening New Sources of Wealth for the Northern States,” or when he was elected to the council of the Literary and Philosophical Society of New-York.
A decade later, Genêt was waiting peacefully on his hill for Alexis de Tocqueville, and he would die there, in peace, three years later, on the forty-fifth anniversary of Bastille Day. His great-grandson Edmond Charles Clinton Genêt would be the first American casualty of World War I.
In the same year that Genêt gave his Rensselaer County address, John Quincy Adams remarked that the American republic “goes not abroad, in search of monsters to destroy.” In the case of Edmond-Charles Genêt, Adams might have added that it does not even turn those who have tried to undermine it into monsters, either. There was a generosity in the American republican experiment absent from so many other modern revolutions, a generosity which reached its height in Lincoln’s call for malice toward none at the end of a great civil war. Edmond-Charles Genêt is an emblem of that generosity, a generosity that allowed someone who planned to shoehorn the United States into violent conflict to become a complacent and harmless farmer.
That’s not a bad aspiration for our times, either.
Allen C. Guelzo is a historian of nineteenth-century America and the Thomas W. Smith Distinguished Research Scholar at Princeton University. He is a Nonresident Fellow of the American Enterprise Institute and a three-time winner of the Gilder-Lehrman Institute’s Lincoln Prize.
This article appears in the Summer 2025 issue of the Coolidge Review. Request a free copy of a future print issue.