“Not of the Modern French School”Literary Conservatism and the Ancien Régime in Early American Periodicals

At the turn of the nineteenth century, after years of denouncing the French Revolution and the influence of French politics and philosophy on American culture, Federalist writers began to invoke Old Regime France as a symbol of the traditional values that they perceived to be under threat in Jeffersonian America. This essay explores the dialectical relationship between the ancien régime and “the modern French school” in Federalist periodical writing and argues that the concept of the ancien régime emerged in reaction to the embrace of an increasingly democratic, egalitarian political discourse by Jefferson’s supporters. Writers for the Philadelphia Gazette of the United States and Joseph Dennie’s Port Folio invoked an idealized image of France’s Old Regime to legitimize their own political and aesthetic values against the supposed democratization, or “leveling,” of American culture; to argue for the need for a “natural aristocracy” to govern the U.S. republic; and to establish proper taste in literature as one of the standards through which this elite class would distinguish itself. Tracing these uses of the ancien régime in Federalist periodical writing, this essay argues that the emergence of American conservatism as a self-conscious political and aesthetic project owes as much to engagements with French as with British conservatism.