“Statement of account of Gouverneur Morris”

From the American Philosophical Society, Melanie Miller shared an intriguing glimpse of her work editing the papers of Gouverneur Morris.

Morris succeeded Thomas Jefferson as the U.S. of A.’s minister to France in 1792, having been in that country since 1789. He therefore got to see the French Revolution.

What’s more, these documents show, Morris got involved.

Labeled simply as a “statement of account of Gouverneur Morris, July-September 1792,” the paper is a record of the money Morris agreed to receive from Louis XVI to raise a counter-revolutionary force when it became clear that the monarchy was in danger of violent overthrow. This was a remarkable episode—while he was U.S. minister, Morris conspired with some of Louis’s loyal counselors to try to save the monarchy and help the royal family escape. . . .

Another group of items that I was delighted to find relate to the much-admired Marquis de Lafayette, whom Morris knew during the American Revolution and saw again in France. The letters came from Morris’s close friend and business partner, James LeRay de Chaumont. They discuss LeRay’s efforts to obtain repayment of an enormous personal loan Morris made to Lafayette’s wife at her request, to cover their “debts of honor” after the Marquis—whose fall from leader of the Revolution to being considered a traitor had been swift, just as Morris had predicted— fled France and was imprisoned by the Austrians. Our research for Morris’s later diaries (1799-1816) originally led us to the tentative conclusion that Morris had never been repaid. These letters confirm it. His later financial difficulties were considerably exacerbated by this default.

It was acknowledged by her family and others that Morris saved Mme. de Lafayette from the guillotine during the Great Terror, and his diaries show that his efforts led to the Austrian emperor’s decision to release the Marquis in 1797. A letter from LeRay, who met with Mme. de Lafayette in Paris more than once after she and her husband returned to France and were restored to their estates, confirmed what I could only infer from Morris’s letters: that Madame de Lafayette (who had never forgiven Morris for speaking truth to her husband in the early days of the Revolution) seemed outraged that Morris had the nerve to request repayment…

Founders Online currently hosts the papers of seven prominent men involved in forming the American republic, with John Jay the most recent addition. Though as a Bostonian I should root for Samuel Adams to be added to that list, I can’t help but think that Gouverneur Morris’s papers would be so much more fun.

The Continental Congress’s Thanksgivings

On 1 Nov 1777, the Continental Congress issued a recommendation “to the legislative or executive Powers of these UNITED STATES” to observe a Thanksgiving holiday on Thursday, 18 December.

The proclamation didn’t allude to any particular event, but scholars treat this as an expression of gratitude for the Continental victory at Saratoga.

Certainly the Congress, then meeting in York, Pennsylvania, after being pushed out of Philadelphia, wasn’t feeling thankful about the Battles of Brandywine or Germantown.

The 1777 proclamation was explicitly Christian, referring to “the Merits of JESUS CHRIST,” and culminating in a prayer “to prosper the Means of Religion, for the promotion and enlargement of that Kingdom, which consisteth ‘in Righteousness, Peace and Joy in the Holy Ghost.’”

The Congress continued to issue Thanksgiving proclamations every fall until after the formal end of the war. The 1779 and 1780 resolutions were explicitly Christian, the other four merely theistic (though one mentioned “Louis the Most Christian King our ally”).

At first the Thanksgiving proclamations kept up the pattern of not mentioning specific events. But the long document of 26 Oct 1781, issued just days after the Congress learned of the victory at Yorktown, spelled out multiple blessings:

the goodness of God in the year now drawing to a conclusion:

in which a mutiny in the American Army [the Pennsylvania Line Mutiny, which drove the Congress out of Philadelphia again] was not only happily appeased but became in its issue a pleasing and undeniable proof of the unalterable attachment of the people in general to the cause of liberty since great and real grievances only made them tumultuously seek redress while the abhorred the thoughts of going over to the enemy,

in which the Confederation of the United States has been completed [i.e., Maryland finally ratified the Articles of Confederation] by the accession of all without exception in which there have been so many instances of prowess and success in our armies; particularly in the southern states, where, notwithstanding the difficulties with which they had to struggle, they have recovered the whole country which the enemy had overrun, leaving them only a post or two upon on or near the sea [Charleston, Savannah, and Wilmington, which was soon to be evacuated]:

in which we have been so powerfully and effectually assisted by our allies, while in all the conjunct operations the most perfect union and harmony has subsisted in the allied army:

in which there has been so plentiful a harvest, and so great abundance of the fruits of the earth of every kind, as not only enables us easily to supply the wants of the army, but gives comfort and happiness to the whole people:

and in which, after the success of our allies by sea, a General of the first Rank [Cornwallis], with his whole army, has been captured by the allied forces under the direction of our illustrious Commander in Chief.

For the next three years, the Congress’s Thanksgiving proclamations and recommendations to the states all referred to the slow steps toward a final peace:

• 1782: “the present happy and promising state of public affairs; and the events of the war in the course of the last year now drawing to a close”
• 1783: “hostilities have ceased, and we are left in the undisputed possession of our liberties and independence, and of the fruits of our own land, and in the free participation of the treasures of the sea”
• 1784: “a general pacification hath taken place, and particularly a Definitive Treaty of peace between the said United States of America and his Britannic Majesty, was signed at Paris, on the 3d day of September, in the year of our Lord 1783; the instruments of the final ratifications of which were exchanged at Passy, on the 12th day of May, in the year of our Lord 1784, whereby a finishing hand was put to the great work of peace, and the freedom, sovereignty and independence of these states, fully and completely established”

And then the Continental Congress stopped recommending Thanksgivings. From 1785 to the advent of the new federal government, there were no national Thanksgiving proclamations.

In those years the Congress had difficulty completing normal business, going for long periods without a quorum. The external crisis had passed, and people disagreed about solutions to the internal difficulties. And the Congress delegates might have felt that with independence won Americans had both less to wish for and less to be thankful for.

The image above is one page of the Congress’s Thanksgiving proclamation in 1781, signed for that legislature by Thomas McKean and Charles Thomson and now owned by the Rosenbach museum and library. The texts of all the Congress’s proclamations have been shared by the Pilgrim Hall Museum.holiday

Mysteries of Marie Antoinette and Her Family

Yesterday I listened to this episode of the History Extra podcast, an interview with Nancy Goldstone about her new book, In the Shadow of the Empress: The Defiant Lives of Maria Theresa, Mother of Marie Antoinette, and Her Daughters.

Although the episode title focuses on Holy Roman Empress Maria Theresa, a large part of the conversation was about the empress’s youngest daughter, Marie Antoinette of France. In that section, Goldstone posited that:

• Louis XVI was on the autism spectrum.
• Marie Antoinette might have been dyslexic.

The latter theory didn’t appear in her book, she said. The former is a major argument, and her publisher is marketing that as part of what’s new.

Another element of Goldstone’s portrait of Marie Antoinette, not so new, is that she had a long emotional and sexual relationship with the Swedish count Axel von Fersen. I discussed the recent reading of their letters earlier this month.

Goldstone has written or co-written quite a range of books, including previous biographies of royal women, memoirs of the book trade, and murder mysteries. She hasn’t written about the eighteenth century before, however. I’ve seen some reviews complain that she’s overlooked sources that have come to light in the last few decades, which specialists would certainly use.

That said, Goldstone’s status as a non-academic historian writing for a popular readership has probably freed her to acknowledge the usual caveats about the impossibility of making any sort of sophisticated diagnosis when a subject has been dead for centuries and share her ideas anyway.

Autism and dyslexia may be like schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, homosexuality, and other human conditions with genetic components that appear in individuals in all sorts of societies in all eras. Those societies understand and respond to the conditions differently—accepting, denying, punishing—leaving different evidence in the historical record. Our present understandings of those conditions may be more advanced than in previous centuries but are undoubtedly still limited. Nonetheless, I think these possible diagnoses are worth at least considering.

In the podcast Goldstone also raised the possibility of genetic testing to see if, as she suspects, Marie Antoinette’s two younger children were fathered by Count von Fersen rather than King Louis. I don’t know if there’s enough genetic material available to make that possible; both children died young, though one became the doomed Dauphin, whose heart is reportedly preserved.

Elements of Marie Antoinette’s Letters

The Swedish count Axel von Fersen (1755-1810) came to Rhode Island in 1780 to serve as an aide-de-camp to Gen. Rochambeau, commander of the French troops in North America. He met the American commanders and took part in the Yorktown campaign.

Unlike some European officers, Von Fersen wasn’t motivated by republican leanings. Instead, he had to leave France because his close friendship with the young queen, Marie Antoinette, was becoming close to a scandal. The two had meet in 1774 as teenagers, then renewed the acquaintance in 1778. Advisors felt it wiser for the count to go to another continent for a while.

Count Von Fersen returned to Europe in 1783 and was soon back in France as a diplomat for the king of Sweden. In 1787 that king appointed the count as his secret personal envoy to Louis XVI, which also gave him more time with Marie Antoinette. When the French Revolution broke out, Von Fersen became a close advisor to the royal couple.

By June 1791 the French government was holding the royal family in Paris, with Lafayette in charge of the guards. Count Von Fersen organized an escape plan, personally driving the family in a carriage out of the city.

Then the party split up. Louis and his family made it as far as Varennes before a crowd recaptured them and returned them to the Tuileries Palace in Paris. What little trust the government and people had in the royal family evaporated. Von Fersen fled across the border.

The count continued to correspond with Marie Antoinette in the months that followed. In 1982 his descendants sold a cache of those letters to the French national archives. Someone had scribbled over parts of fifteen letters, rendering phrases impossible to read.

In recent years scientists have developed new ways to analyze such cross-outs by mapping how they respond to types of radiation. These methods mean analysts no longer need to destroy samples of the paper or chemically alter the ink.

One example reported in 2013 involved the original score of Luigi Cherubini’s 1797 opera Médée. Large sections of the final pages were blotted out. According to tradition, Cherubini disliked critics telling him the opera was too long and bluntly cut it short.

Because Cherubini had written his score using standard iron gall ink and marked it over with charcoal, X-ray sensors could easily distinguish the elemental signatures of those two types of black.

The letters between Marie Antoinette and Axel von Fersen were a bigger challenge, though, because both the original writing and the scribbles were made with iron gall ink. That meant both layers were full of iron and sulfur.

However, as Anne Michelin, Fabien Pottierand, and Christine Andraud just reported in the journal Science Advances, the chemical composition of eighteenth-century inks could vary; “additional metal elements—that are present as impurities in the vitriol (iron sulfate) used to prepare the ink—are also found in diverse amounts.”

In particular, they found that on eight of the letters the upper layer of ink has a lot more copper than the lower layer. By mapping where the less cupric ink lay, they revealed enough of the underlying writing to decipher such phrases from Marie Antoinette as “ma tendre amie” (my tender friend) and “vous que j’aime” (you who I love).

The next question was who had made those changes. The authors write:

The most common hypothesis was that redaction was carried out in the second half of the 19th century by the great-nephew of the Count of Fersen, the Baron of Klinckowström, or perhaps by a different member of the Fersen family, before the publication of this correspondence to preserve their reputation.

However, the analysts were able to match the elemental signature of the scribbles to the ink that Von Fersen used to write his letters. In other words, he probably crossed out those sensitive phrases himself after reading them to protect the queen.

King Louis XVI was sent to the guillotine in January 1793, charged with conspiring with France’s foreign enemies. Marie Antoinette followed nine months later.

Count Von Fersen never married. He became active in Swedish politics, rising to be Marshal of the Realm, the highest non-royal official in the government. In 1810, during a heated public dispute over the royal succession, a mob stomped him to death.

“She thinks her forte is the understanding”

Marie Anne Pierrette Paulze was only thirteen years old in 1771 when she was married to Antoine Laurent de Lavoisier.

Marie Anne’s family was under pressure to marry her to a powerful nobleman in his fifties, so Lavoisier—a twenty-eight-year-old colleague of her father’s—seemed preferable.

Marie Anne’s father and husband both worked as tax collectors for the French monarchy, a lucrative and unpopular profession. In 1775 Antoine Lavoisier was also appointed to oversee the manufacture of gunpowder at the Paris Arsenal, which stimulated his interest in science.

Over the following years the Lavoisiers worked together closely. Marie Anne helped Antoine set up laboratory experiments, took notes on the results, translated English scientific treatises into French (adding her own commentary), and created illustrations for the papers Antoine wrote. The image above shows Marie Anne’s own drawing of them and their staff at work.

Those papers included demonstrations of the conservation of mass, arguments against phlogiston theory, a new system for naming chemicals, and the first attempt to list the modern elements. Lavoisier also advocated for some social reforms, but of course he continued to collect taxes.

Gouverneur Morris arrived in Paris in 1789 and wrote about the Lavoisiers in his diary:

[8 June 1789:] Dine with Mr. deLavoisier. . . . Madame appears to be an agreeable woman. She is tolerably handsome, but from her manner it would seem that she thinks her forte is the understanding rather than the person.

In other words, she valued her brains over beauty.

[25 Sept 1789:] Go to the Opera according to my promise and arrive towards the close of the piece at the loge of Madame Lavoisier. . . . Go to the Arsenal and take tea with Madame Lavoisier en attendant le retour de Monsieur [while awaiting the return of Monsieur] who is at the Hôtel de Ville. As Madame tells me that she has no children I insist that she is une paresseuse [an idle girl], but she declares it is only a misfortune. Monsieur comes in and tells us of the obstination of the bakers. . . .

[6 Oct 1789:] Go to the arsenal. Admitted with difficulty. They are at dinner. Madame Lavoisier is detained in town, as all carriages were stopped and the ladies obliged to join the female mob. While we sit at table, we learn that the militia and the Régiment National are marching towards Versailles.

The French Revolution was breaking out around this upper-class set.

At first the Lavoisiers kept up. Antoine sponsored a press to publish political and scientific material, proposed education reforms, and helped to promote the new metric system. In 1791 the republic abolished the tax-collecting organization. The next year, Antoine lost his job overseeing gunpowder and had to move out of the Arsenal.

But the Lavoisiers were still very rich. Marie Anne hosted dinner parties and after-dinner salons. In 1791 Morris visited her gatherings with William Temple Franklin. At one the company discussed a “riot at Birmingham,” blaming it on British government policy. After another Morris wrote, “there are a number of Gens d’Esprit [wits] who are in general but so so company.”

In January 1793, the French government executed Louis XVI. That spring the radical Jacobin party took over, and in October the government executed Marie Antoinette. The next month, the authorities arrested Antoine Lavoisier and his former tax-collecting colleagues, including Marie-Anne’s father. They were convicted of defrauding the state and guillotined in May 1794.

Two months later, the Thermidorian counterrevolution began. Near the end of 1795 Antoine’s clothing was delivered to his thirty-seven-year-old widow with a note declaring that he had been “falsely convicted.”

TOMORROW: The widow Lavoisier.

Some Podcast Episodes to Sample

I’m sure everyone reading this has sampled several early American history podcasts. There really is a plethora of them, from both individuals and institutions.

Here are a few recommendations of individual podcast episodes that I recently found interesting. They may have slipped by because they appeared in the series unaccountably not devoted to the history of the early America or Boston.

History Extra’s Matt Elton spoke with Jeremy Black about Sir Robert Walpole, who served as prime minister of Great Britain from 1721 to 1742. Prof. Black presented the case that Walpole, the first man to hold that power (even before the term “prime minister” became codified) is still the greatest. Other historians will speak up for other prime ministers, but since this series is linked to the 300th anniversary of Walpole coming to power, he does seem to have a head start.

On the BBC’s In Our Time, Melvyn Bragg conversed with Kathleen Burk of University College London, Frank Cogliano of the University of Edinburgh, and Michael Rapport at the University of Glasgow about the Franco-American Alliance of 1778, what led up to it and what results it produced for all the parties involved. The end of that treaty of amity in the 1790s raised the question of whether the young republic had made an agreement with the nation of France or simply its monarchy. For pragmatic and perhaps temperamental reasons, Washington chose to interpret the situation in the second way.

On Mainely History, host Ian Saxine and Prof. Andrew Wehrman discussed the controversies of smallpox inoculation, not just in Maine but also not neglecting that district. Wehrman notes that by the late 1700s colonial Americans understood the benefits of inoculation, but they also recognized that it carried risks both to individuals an to surrounding communities, so they were ready to protest inoculation efforts that seems risky or inequitable.

The Library Company of Philadelphia’s Talking in the Library series shared a 2020 talk by Prof. Sally Hadden about two rising young attorneys in federal Boston—Harrison Gray Otis and Christopher Gore. Both represented Loyalists trying to regain the rights to their property, and they used that business to build their own wealth before going into politics.

All of these podcasts are available through multiple platforms and apps, so you should be able to find them by search. But I’ve included direct links in each description for people who prefer that route.

News from France and “the language of patriotism”

Boston’s Civic Festival to honor the new republic of France on 24 Jan 1793 came at an unusual cultural and political moment.

The latest news from Europe relayed the events of late 1792. Bostonians knew about how the French assembly had deposed Louis XVI and proclaimed a republic. The French army was pushing back the combined forces of several European monarchies and keeping Britain at bay. It looked like the American model of political liberty and equality was spreading in the Old World.

To be sure, the news included a hint of French Revolutionaries turning on themselves. After trying and failing to preserve the king and constitutional monarchy, the Marquis de Lafayette (shown here) had fled to Austrian territory. He was under arrest, viewed by both French republicans and Austrian monarchists with suspicion.

The 26 January Columbian Centinel showed how Bostonians still admired Lafayette and were following his story. One of the toasts offered at the festival was “Justice to M. LAFAYETTE.” Did that mean justice from France or from Austria? Quite possibly both.

For the most part, however, the people of Boston saw plenty to celebrate. Though Louis XVI’s government did support the U.S. of A. in its fight for independence, Americans had grown up thinking of the French monarchy as an example of tyranny. Now the former king appeared to be in alliance with his fellow despots against his people, so it was easy to hail his downfall. Likewise, New Englanders with their Puritan heritage and established Calvinism felt little sympathy for the Catholic church in France. The decorations on Faneuil Hall included “a crown, sceptre, mitre, and chains” being broken under the feet of Liberty.

The festival toasts signaled high hopes for republicanism:

• “The Law—May it always breathe the spirit of liberty and speak the language of patriotism.”
• “Civic virtues to the military, and a military spirit to the citizens.”
• “May the light of philosophy irradiate the caverns of superstition and despotism, and reveal their horrors."
• “In all governments may Liberty be the check, and Equality the balance.”

There were similar but smaller celebrations in other Massachusetts towns.

New Englanders didn’t know that the French government had indicted Louis XVI for treason in December and beheaded him just three days before their festival. Once news of that execution arrived in late March, Americans’ support for the French republic began to fade. Splintering opinion about France was a big part of the development of two semi-organized political parties in the U.S. of A.

In the spring of 1793, some Americans founded what historians later called Democratic-Republican Societies, the basis of what became the Jeffersonian party. On 8 April, Edmond-Charles Genêt arrived in Charleston as the new French minister to America and set about commissioning privateers to attack British ships. President George Washington issued a controversial neutrality proclamation on 22 April.

Those developments changed how Bostonians responded to the French Revolution. In January, as I discussed, Benjamin Russell’s Columbian Centinel not only applauded the Civic Festival but referred to local dignitaries and the editor himself with the title “Citizen.” By June, however, that newspaper was firmly Federalist and using that honorific only for officials from France. In his book Parades and the Politics of the Street, Simon P. Newman wrote that by spring Federalist politicians were conspicuously absent from further celebrations of the French republic.

The Centinel continued to refer to “Liberty Square” instead of Dock Square for several months, but that term faded away. As for “Equality Lane,” the name appeared almost exclusively in advertising for John Bryant’s tavern (no longer called “Liberty Hall”). The last reference that I found came in the 23 Aug 1793 American Apollo, in an advertisement for young acrobats.

After that, “Equality Lane” reverted to being called “Exchange Lane” (no more “Royal”) or “Shrimpton’s Lane” after an early owner of the land. The new name had lasted such a short time that it was never official, never appeared in town directories or on maps. When historians have mentioned “Equality Lane,” it was always in the way William Cobbett used it, as evidence of Boston’s brief infatuation with the French Revolution.

But for a moment in early 1793, Bostonians were calling each other “Citizen” and honoring “Equality” over commercial “Exchange.”

The World War of 1778 to 1783

An exhibit on “The American Revolution: A World War” just opened at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History. There is also a website showing some of the artifacts.

This exhibit focuses on the siege of Yorktown which, when we count sailors as well as troops on land, involved more Frenchmen than Americans.

Among the items on display are paintings of The Siege of Yorktown and The Surrender of Yorktown, both from 1786, and a Charles Willson Peale portrait of George Washington from the early 1780s. All three originally hung in the Comte de Rochambeau’s chamber as a reminder of his partnership with the American general. This is the first time the canvases have been together in more than two centuries.

Shown here is another early artistic celebration of the Franco-American alliance: a French porcelain figurine from the 1780s of King Louis XVI and diplomat Benjamin Franklin.

This exhibit is scheduled to remain on view until next July.

When Jefferson Investigated the Storming of the Bastille

Since this is Bastille Day, I’m linking to Sara Georgini’s article on for the Smithsonian magazine, “How the Key to the Bastille Ended Up in George Washington’s Possession.”

Here’s a taste:

On July 14, 1789, a surge of protesters stormed the medieval fortress-turned-prison known as the Bastille. Low on food and water, with soldiers weary from repeated assault, Louis XVI’s Bastille was a prominent symbol of royal power—and one highly vulnerable to an angry mob armed with gunpowder. From his two-story townhouse in the Ninth Arrondissement, the Virginian Thomas Jefferson struggled to make sense of the bloody saga unspooling in the streets below.

He sent a sobering report home to John Jay, then serving as Secretary for Foreign Affairs, five days after the Bastille fell. Even letter-writing must have felt like a distant cry—since the summer of 1788, Jefferson had faithfully dispatched some 20 briefings to Congress, and received only a handful in reply. In Jefferson’s account, his beloved Paris now bled with liberty and rage. Eyeing the narrowly drawn neighborhoods, Jefferson described a nightmarish week. By day, rioters pelted royal guards with “a shower of stones” until they retreated to Versailles. At evening, trouble grew. Then, Jefferson wrote, protesters equipped “with such weapons as they could find in Armourer’s shops and private houses, and with bludgeons…were roaming all night through all parts of the city without any decided and practicable object.”

Yet, despite his local contacts, Jefferson remained hazy on how, exactly, the Bastille fell. The “first moment of fury,” he told Jay, blossomed into a siege that battered the fortress that “had never been taken. How they got in, has as yet been impossible to discover. Those, who pretend to have been of the party tell so many different stories as to destroy the credit of them all.” Again, as Jefferson and his world gazed, a new kind of revolution rewrote world history. Had six people led the last charge through the Bastille’s tall gates? Or had it been 600? (Historians today place the number closer to 900.)

In the days that followed, Jefferson looked for answers. By July 19, he had narrowed the number of casualties to three. (Modern scholars have raised that estimate to roughly 100.) Meanwhile, the prison officials’ severed heads were paraded on pikes through the city’s labyrinth of streets. With the Bastille in ruins, the establishment of its place in revolutionary history—via both word and image—spun into action. Like many assessing what the Bastille’s fall meant for France, Thomas Jefferson paid a small sum to stand amid the split, burnt stone and view the scene. One month later, Jefferson returned. He gave the same amount to “widows of those who were killed in taking the Bastille.”

At least one of Jefferson’s close friends ventured into the inky Paris night, bent on restoring order. Major General Marie-Joseph Paul Yves Roch Gilbert du Motier, Marquis de Lafayette, a mainstay at Jefferson’s dinner table, accepted a post as head of the Paris National Guard. As thanks, he was presented with the Bastille key.

I saw that key a couple of years ago; here’s that little story.

How Should We Refer to the Chevalier D’Eon?

Four years ago I reported on art dealer Philip Mould’s identification of a portrait as showing the Chevalier d’Eon.

A French diplomat and spy, D’Eon ran afoul of his own government and took refuge in London. Dressing as a woman while teaching men to fence, D’Eon became a celebrity, eventually claiming to have been a woman all along.

The National Portrait Gallery in London acquired that oil painting to go with its many engravings of D’Eon made for a wider audience. In connection with the display of that portrait, Assistant Curator Claire Barlow recently wrote:

D’Eon’s extraordinary story sparked a debate over the display of the portrait: which pronoun to use? The answer ought to be whichever pronoun D’Eon preferred but here we hit the great problem of working with historical objects – the limitations of surviving evidence. While living as a man, D’Eon had bought women’s clothes for himself but he only began living exclusively as a woman due to external pressure. The French court, convinced by persistent rumours about D’Eon’s gender, only agreed to give him a pension if he wore ‘clothing appropriate to her sex’. This ruling reflects the strict eighteenth-century gender division: ultimately, D’Eon had to choose. He took the pension and lived the rest of his life as a woman, forging a very successful career in Britain as a female fencer.

We simply don’t know whether D’Eon would have chosen to be transvestite, transsexual or something else entirely if those options had been available. We didn’t want to repeat the mistake of the French king, in not realising that a man could choose to wear a dress, so we decided to use the male pronoun.

The chevalier’s Wikipedia entry, in contrast, suggests the article’s editors have tried to avoid pronouns at all, producing sentences like “In an effort to save d'Éon's station in London, d'Éon published much of the secret diplomatic correspondence about d'Éon's recall…”

I’m not sure D’Eon was really forced into the choice of living as a woman. The 1777 agreement between D’Eon and Pierre-Augustin Caron du Beaumarchais, acting on behalf of the French government, did state that D’Eon had to dress as a woman as a condition of returning to France with a pension. However, it also served as a royal ruling that D’Eon was a woman and used female terms like “demoiselle” and “spinster.”

D’Eon’s additions to that agreement, crossed out by Beaumarchais, insisted that the chevalier had been female all along: “Seeing that son sexe has been proved by witnesses, physicians, surgeons, matrons and legal documents”; and “That I have already worn [female clothing] upon several occasions known to his Majesty.” Those don’t seem like the protests of someone being made to do something against his will. Saying the king made D’Eon dress in female clothing seems like saying Brer Fox made Brer Rabbit go into the briar patch.

Furthermore, in 1785 D’Eon returned to Britain, beyond Louis XVI’s reach. The French Revolution ended the pension from Paris in the early 1790s. Yet D’Eon continued to live as a woman until dying in 1810, so consistently that it was a surprise when physicians reported the chevalier had “male organs in every respect perfectly formed.”

I agree that it’s impossible to know whether the Chevalier d’Eon would have chosen any of the modern categories of transvestite, transsexual, or genderqueer. But it looks to me like D’Eon did choose to maneuver into the eighteenth-century category of woman.

The Revolutions of Sir Robert Smyth

In 1774, Thomas Paine emigrated to Pennsylvania with a letter of recommendation from Benjamin Franklin and a fervent wish to help the American colonists resist the royal government.

That same year, Sir Robert Smyth (1744-1802) was first elected to Parliament, representing the boroughs of Cardigan. Sir Robert had inherited a baronetcy (a hereditary knighthood), but we all remember that knights and baronets are technically commoners and therefore eligible for election to the House of Commons, right?

In Parliament, Smyth “generally voted with the court,” or the Tory government, according to Horace Walpole. He supported Lord North’s American policy, speaking in favor of the Quebec Act and delivering “a reply to [opposition member Edmund] Burke…laughing at his metaphors.” His opponent challenged the results of Smyth’s election, however, and he lost his seat at the end of 1775.

In 1780, Sir Robert returned to Parliament as the member from Colchester, a seat he held for ten years. He had shifted from voting with Lord North to being a strong opponent of him and the American war. Smyth instead appears to have aligned himself with the younger William Pitt.

As shown above, Sir Joshua Reynolds painted Smyth’s wife Charlotte and children in 1787, a portrait now at the Metropolitan Museum. The children were:

• Louisa, born 1782, according to Debrett’s Baronetage.
• Charlotte, born 1783.
• George-Henry, born 1784, and heir to the baronetcy, which is why he gets the top position among the children and all the attention.

In 1790 Smyth stepped away from Parliament. He moved even further to the left and moved his family to Paris, going into business there. Smyth was part of a small community of British gentlemen who were big fans of the French Revolution.

Another of those men was Thomas Paine. He’d left the U.S. of A. in 1787 with big plans for building an iron bridge in England, but then got inspired by the events in France. When Burke criticized the French Revolution, Paine replied with his Rights of Man, moving back and forth between London and Paris as British government agents threatened him. On one of those trips, Lafayette entrusted Paine with the key to the Bastille, which the marquis wanted to go to George Washington.

In 1792, Paine moved to France one step ahead of an indictment for seditious libel. Britain convicted him in absentia while France elected him to four seats in its new National Convention—even though at the time he didn’t speak French.

The Convention was the legislative successor to the Assembly, part of the French constitutional monarchy that fell apart in late 1792. The country was then at war with Austria and Prussia. Louis XVI was arrested. Lafayette fled the country. In September the Convention declared France to be a republic.

On 18 Nov 1792, according to a story that appeared in London newspapers, “the English arrived in Paris [i.e., the British expatriate community] assembled at White’s Hotel, to celebrate the triumph of victories gained over their late invaders by the armies of France.” Paine was staying in that mansion, also known as the Hotel d’Angleterre, and attended the dinner.

The other diners included Sir Robert Smyth and Lord Edward Fitzgerald, younger son of an Irish duke and a former British army officer who had been wounded at Eutaw Springs, South Carolina. The newspaper report credited them with a couple of actions:

Among several toasts proposed by the citizens, Sir R. Smith and Lord E. Fitzgerald, was the following: “May the patriotic airs of the German Legion (Ça ira, the Carmagnole, Marseillaise March, etc.) soon become the favourite music of every army, and may the soldier and the citizen join in the chorus.” . . .

Sir Robert Smith and Lord E. Fitzgerald renounced their titles; and a toast proposed by the former was drank:—“The speedy abolition of all hereditary titles and feudal distinctions.”

Thus, the baronet Sir Robert Smyth was now, he declared, simply Citizen Smyth.

TOMORROW: Imprisonment, flirtation, and young Charles Este.