ABSTRACT
When the first U.S. Senate convened in December 1790 in its new quarters in Philadelphia, the two full-length portraits of Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette—1784 gifts of the French government to the Confederation Congress—were moved from the Senate’s temporary chamber in New York. But because of divisive debates over the changing political conditions in revolutionary France, the portraits were hung with curtains that could be drawn for protection. Though symbols of l’ancien régime could be easily covered, the principles of the French Revolution began to permeate American politics and occasioned the rise of party politics in the United States. In the new Senate, two principal representatives of the emerging factions or parties, the pro-French revolutionary “Republicans” and the antirevolutionary “Federalists,” were James Monroe of Virginia and Rufus King of New York.
