Theodore Roosevelt et Governeur Morris: Regard d’un futur président sur le témoin de deux révolutions

Theodore Roosevelt on Gouverneur Morris: A Future President’s Appraisal of the Witness of Two Revolutions

In 1888, Theodore Roosevelt, a young historian, and president-to-be, published a biography of Gouverneur Morris, one of the lesser-known Founding Fathers. Characteristically, Roosevelt seemed more concerned with expounding his own political thinking than with writing history. Yet, for this reason, a study of the future president’s discourse, examined in the light of the response of an eminent revolutionary, minister to France during the Terror, affords an assessment of the influence in the United States, one century later, of the legacy of two revolutions, as embodied by a prestigious maker of American history.

On the whole, Theodore Roosevelt’s historical writings are inseparable from his political ones inasmuch as they also deal with the themes that were-dearest to the statesman’s heart: expansion, preparedness, the advisability of a strong executive and its primacy over States’ rights. Though based on incomplete research and hastily written, Gouverneur Morris at the time enabled the rising politician to reflect in depth on the constitutional foundations of the United States and to develop a personal theory of government. Throughout the book, the biographer sees eye-to-eye with his hero on most issues: the benefits accruing from a strong federal executive, the dangers of mob rule, the need of a national spirit to save the thirteen states from disunion. Roosevelt unmistakably reveals his Federalist leanings and his dislike of Jeffersonians, whom he brands as doctrinaires and as closet philosophers. Gouverneur Morris’s shortcomings—notably his extreme elitism and distrust of the voters, or his anti-expansionist stands— invite forgiveness when weighed against his remarkable acumen and his hardheaded common sense.

Morris is better known for his activities as financier and ambassador in Europe at the close of the American Revolution. The young Republic entrusted him with the semi-official task of settling her debt with the Court of Louis XVI. Shortly after his arrival in February 1789, Morris saw a new revolution break out. For five years, he was to be both a privileged witness and a covert participant. Minister plenipotentiary of the United States from 1792 to 1794, this curiously royalist republican—a pet guest of the constitutional nobility and a bête noire for the Jacobins—turned out to be the only foreign diplomat to remain in Paris during the Terror. His unfailing devotion to the Crown even led him to take part in an escape plot to attempt to get the royal family away once more.

As evidenced by his Diary, Morris’s reflections on the French Revolution point to both sympathy and revulsion. His biographer’s comments closely parallel those views. Revulsion prevails, however, with a condemnation of legislative supremacy, mob rule, Jacobinism, and the conviction that only the American Revolution may be used as a universal model. Theodore Roosevelt’s and Gouverneur Morris’s analyses highlight the difference in nature between those two momentous upheavals of the late-eighteenth century: in British North America, a rebellion of middle-class property-holders, trained in the art of government, leading to a war for independence; in France, the overthrow of a feudal regime, the radicalization of the movement following the alliance of the bourgeoisie with the “breechless” populace, the necessarily bloody and erratic apprenticeship of democracy.