ABSTRACT
Honore Gabriel Riqueti, comte de Mirabeau first learned about the United States from the first US ministers to France, Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson, in Paris. Mirabeau returned to France and in 1789 led an effort by the common people at the Estates-General to form a national assembly, which he would briefly serve as president before his death in 1791, and helped compose the 'Tennis Court Oath', demanding a national constitution. Mirabeau favoured a constitutional monarchy for France built on the model of Britain, and sought to bring the Catholic Church in France under supervision of the government. On the other hand Mirabeau, like British Whigs and other French philosophes, argued that government in the United States should not too closely adhere to British precepts: 'what is well adapted to England is ill calculated for America'. Liberal Europeans of the age saw the United States as a republican experiment.
