Was there any anti American sentiment during the French Revolution?

by elicubs44

Allow me to clarify. The French support of the American Revolution was a major contributor to their massive debt, and therefore large taxes. Did the French people harbor any anti American feelings because of this?

StoryWonker

Quite the opposite, in fact! While the American war was in part responsible for the Crown's debts, those were also due to poor fiscal policy and the underdeveloped financial institutions of the French state that made it unable to seriously tackle its debt problem, compounded by a series of poor harvests that led to urban hunger.

It wasn't the Americans who were viewed as the cause of this, but the King and court, especially the Queen, whose lavish parties and entertainments contrasted poorly with urban bread riots and the like.

What we might call the 'intelligentsia' of France - the philosophes, porgressive-minded aristocrats, devotees of Rousseau, etc. - were very much in favour of America. Ben Franklin was famously well-received by Parisian salons, and Thomas Jefferson and other Americans were staples of well-to-do parties leading up to the Revolution.

The ideas of natural liberty, the Rights of Man, etc. that America was seen to represent were highly influential in this culture, and these were the people who would go on to be influential in the National Assembly. America also represented a more rustic, 'natural' country, one where humanity was more in touch with nature and therefore closer to virtue than the sophisticated and urbanised France - a classic Rousseauean perspective, but one that had influence. In practice, American interpretations of these ideas didn't have much sway - the Revolution owed much more to Rousseau than it did to Locke or Paine - but America was seen to stand for the ideals of the French salons.

Sources:

The Oxford History of the French Revolution, William Doyle

Citizens: A Narrative of the French Revolution, Simon Schama