Real and Imaginary Friends in Revolutionary France: Quakers, Political Culture, and the Atlantic World

In 1791 a group of French and American Quakers petitioned the French revolutionary government to grant the Protestant sect exemptions from taking up arms and swearing an oath to the nation. Their petition ultimately failed, but an analysis of this event reveals a simultaneous attraction to Quaker cosmopolitanism, egalitarianism, and friendship and rejection of religious privilege in pursuit of a limited citizenry. This article focuses on the political connotations and multivalent symbolism of Quakerism for a set of revolutionaries attempting to reorient the political realm’s relationship with the religious.