Rhetoric was embedded in French Catholic education, and in revolutionary Paris rhetorical skills proved essential for any politician who wanted to command the assembly. Fabre d’Eglantine was an actor and director All expert in manipulating the political action behind-the-scenes. His play Philinte propounded Rousseau’s ideal that theatricality should be avoided in human life. Hérault de Séchelles by contrast drew on training by the classical actress Clairon to become a successful political orator, not ashamed to theorise the art of persuasion. The Marquis de Condorcet was a constitutional theorist who believed in truth, but lacked the performance skills to persuade others. The Comte de Mirabeau demonstrated outstanding skill as an orator and politician in the first years of the revolution, making no show of high personal morality, in contrast to Maximilien Robespierre who, partly in reaction, set himself up as a man of total sincerity. He bypassed the Assembly to control events through the more intimate forum of the Jacobin club. His sense of personal conviction owed much to Rousseau.

Chapter 4 presents the paradox of republican emancipation, a paradox based on the ambivalence of republican freedom at the time of the revolution. On the one hand, republican freedom is the status of those who are already masters of themselves. Freedom is independence and it is this independence that makes them capable of governing with competence and virtue. On the other, freedom is the newly claimed right of everyone, or anyone, not to be dominated – regardless of their virtue, or their economic and social situation, that is, regardless of their capacity to self-govern. But how can one reconcile the universal claim of freedom as nondomination with the republican supposition that the free person ought to be already socially, economically, and intellectually independent to be able to self-govern? If the many are incapable of self-governing, how can they ever become independent from the government of the few – how can they ever emancipate themselves? This chapter presents four instances of this paradox: the debate on passive/active citizenship, Condorcet’s position on the emancipation of slaves, Guyomar’s argument for the emancipation of women, and Grouchy’s proposal for changing the way we think about human dependence.

Chapter 3 presents the development of new forms of republicanism in the revolutionary period. Republicanism was called upon to address a problem that was historically foreign to it: enabling the emancipation of a large and diverse people that had just lost the unifying power of their King. After examining the arguments of the first republican treatises (Condorcet, Robert, Billaud-Varenne), the chapter lays out the solutions republicans imagined to the problems that arose with the defection of the King. This included the attempt to create a united popular sovereign, and, in response to Montesquieu’s challenges, the creation of a virtuous and educated citizenry that was ready to defend the republic. Revolutionaries imagined a republic based on an abstract notion of citizenship and a representative system without representation of particular interests. This chapter concludes with a discussion of the debate between Sieyès, Condorcet, and Robespierre on the representation of the people in a republic.

European writers in the 1780s praised the American Revolution and the creation of America’s Constitutional Republic as modern historical examples of human progress and the advance of human rights. These themes shaped the pro-American writings of authors who remained in Europe as well as those who crossed the Atlantic to make direct observations. Optimistic Europeans thus emphasized the emerging nation’s political progress in constructing constitutions and representative governments, social progress in fostering personal freedoms and commercial expansion, cultural progress in establishing enlightened education and religious tolerance, and moral progress in creating virtuous citizens and national leaders. But these same writers also condemned the new American nation for defending the regressive, rights-denying system of enslaved labor and for promoting new economic inequalities or consumerism. A critical narrative about the regressive, unenlightened aspects of the new society in the United States showed that European theorists understood how structural dangers threatened the new republic, even as they celebrated its revolutionary achievements. They feared that social contradictions within the new nation would undermine its political ideals and its more democratic social aspirations.