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Chapter 10: The End of a Beautiful Friendship: Americans in Paris and Public Diplomacy during the War Scare of 1798–1799
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223 Even by the standards of the early twenty-first century the year 1798 marked a low point in Franco-American relations.Diplomatic negotiations between the two republics broke down completely amidst mutual recriminations and were replaced by undeclared warfare on the high seas. Since the ratification of Jay’s Treaty and the recall of American minister to France James Monroe in 1796,hundreds of American ships had been captured by French privateers in the Caribbean or confiscated in French ports.The French executive body, the five-man Directory, had refused to receive Monroe’s successor, Charles Cotesworth Pinckney. At the same time, there were more Americans in Paris than ever before. In 1791 the American chargé d’affaires, William Short, had celebrated the Fourth of July with fewer than twenty Americans. The outbreak of war in Europe in 1792 had drawn increasing numbers of merchants, speculators, and adventurers to the French capital.In 1795 close to a hundred Americans attended an elaborate Independence Day fête hosted by James Monroe. By the end of 1797 the number of Americans had grown to more than 250.Most were merchants from New England who sought to take advantage of the food shortages in France and Saint-Domingue, demand redress for ships and cargoes impounded in French harbors or seized by French privateers, sell American lands, speculate in French currency, or buy real estate. While war among Europeans was good for American business, open conflict between the United States and France was not.Therefore, Americans in Paris witnessed the deterioration of Franco-American relations with great concern.There was hope for improvement in 1797,when the new president , John Adams, sent three commissioners to Paris to restore amicable relations while preserving American neutrality. The envoys, John Marshall, Elbridge Gerry, and Pinckney, arrived in Paris in October 1797, on the heels of a political upheaval. After the coup The End of a Beautiful Friendship Americans in Paris and Public Diplomacy during the War Scare of 1798–1799 philipp ziesche s Philipp Ziesche 224 d’état of September 4, 1797 (18 Fructidor on the French revolutionary calendar ), the Directory was even more committed to an aggressive foreign policy and even more dependent on the army to stay in power than before. Preoccupied with plans for an invasion of Britain, the French government was also in desperate need of money. Consequently, the agents of French Foreign Minister Charles Maurice de Talleyrand-Périgord informed the American envoys that a number of preconditions had to be met before any official negotiations could begin. The agents, Jean Hottinguer, Pierre Bellamy , and Lucien Hauteval, demanded that the U.S. government assume all private American claims against the French Republic, grant a loan of 32 million Dutch florins, offer an apology for President Adams’s belligerent speech to Congress of May 16, 1797, and pay a bribe of fifty thousand pounds to Talleyrand.The American envoys refused, not because they were outraged at the demand for bribes but because it was far from certain that they would receive anything in return. In March 1798 Marshall and Pinckney, who had fallen out with Gerry over how to proceed in the absence of official negotiations, left France. On April 3 Secretary of State Timothy Pickering presented Marshall’s dispatches from Paris to Congress, substituting the letters X, Y, and Z for the names of the French agents.Soon the full texts of the reports were available in pamphlets and newspapers to readers all across the United States. Even before the enormous publicity generated by the XYZ dispatches, a number of Americans in Paris had decided to intervene and reverse the decline of Franco-American friendship.After trying unsuccessfully to mediate between the American envoys and the French Foreign Ministry, they turned their attention to the political scene in America. In letters to friends and allies in the United States, spokesmen of the American community in Paris, such as the author Joel Barlow and Consul General Fulwar Skipwith, explained that France wanted to avoid war and was eager to renew diplomatic negotiations. At the same time, the prominent Jeffersonian George Logan traveled to Paris on his own initiative to persuade the Directory that reconciliation with America was possible and in France’s best interest. Historians have dismissed Americans in Paris as “a gang of hustlers” who, owing to their commercial interests, had “a selfish stake in peace.” I argue here that the reactions...