American Jacobinism: The French Revolution, American Anti-Jacobinism, and Antidemocratic Anxieties

Abstract

Scholars examining popular political discourse at the turn of the nineteenth century have often noted American anti-Jacobins’ and Federalists’ histrionic denunciations of the French Revolution. Looking to popular anti-Jacobin political writings of the period, I argue that the meaning of “Jacobin” and “Jacobinism” shifted from referring to the feared extremes of French revolutionary politics to the feared extremes of American popular democracy. The latter meaning, which I denote as “American Jacobinism,” formed as a response to a perceived threat to American sovereignty: the practices and claims of persons demanding to be included within the popular sovereign. By redeploying Jacobinism as a means of associating democratic actors and claims with extremist excesses, anti-Jacobin discourse demonstrates how political fear and ideological-linguistic manipulation are used to constitutively exclude persons from a sovereign “people,” obstructing democratic deliberation and delegitimating democratic claims.