ABSTRACT
In the 1950s, Atlantic history demonstrated the interconnectedness of the American and the French revolutions. Robert Palmer and Jacques Godechot were the first to expose this theory of mutual, transnational influence through the hybridisation of revolutionary concepts, in the late eighteenth century, which had led these two nations to overhaul their political systems.
In the wake of the American Revolutionary War, Gouverneur Morris, whose brilliance and acumen were displayed during the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia, had acquired and developed an acute sense of politics. Penman of the preamble of the Constitution, Morris brought his republican experience to the French salons and beau monde in 1789. A few years later, however, Morris was trying to make the king escape in order to save him and the French monarchy. This paper thus offers to discuss Gouverneur Morris’s vision of the French Revolution through a transatlantic perspective in order to shed light on his singular revolutionary experience and pragmatic republicanism.
