Description
Book SynopsisThe Citizenship Experiment explores the fate of citizenship ideals in the Age of Revolutions. While in the early 1790s citizenship ideals in the Atlantic world converged, the twin shocks of the Haitian Revolution and the French Revolutionary Terror led the American, French, and Dutch publics to abandon the notion of a shared, Atlantic, revolutionary vision of citizenship. Instead, they forged conceptions of citizenship that were limited to national contexts, restricted categories of voters, and ‘advanced’ stages of civilization. Weaving together the convergence and divergence of an Atlantic revolutionary discourse, debates on citizenship, and the intellectual repercussions of the Terror and the Haitian Revolution, Koekkoek offers a fresh perspective on the revolutionary 1790s as a turning point in the history of citizenship.
Trade Review"René Koekkoek has written one of the most important, and most provocative comparative studies of the late eighteenth-century Atlantic Revolutions since R.R. Palmer's The Age of the Democratic Revolution. Based on exhaustive research in original French, Dutch and American sources, and written in exceptionally lucid prose, The Citizen Experiment makes a bold argument about how the reaction to the violence and perceived excesses of the French "reign of Terror" and the Haitian Revolution led revolutionaries throughout the Atlantic world to embrace far more narrowly national and circumscribed ideas of citizenship than they had done at the start of their respective revolutions. All historians of the period will want to read, and engage with this book." - David A. Bell, Princeton University "The Citizenship Experiment presents a highly original study of the American, French and Dutch eighteenth-century revolutions. Instead of a traditional side-by-side comparison of the three revolutions, René Koekkoek demonstrates that political ideas on citizenship and equality circulated in an Atlantic political space and cannot be well understood in national frameworks. Koekkoek identifies a radical-democratic Atlantic historical moment in the early seventeen-nineties, followed by a conservative turn impacted by the Terror in France and the successful slave revolution in Haiti. His book is an inspiring example of intercrossing history, highlighting the entanglement of domestic and colonial politics in the making of citizenship in the Age of Revolutions." - Siep Stuurman, author of The Invention of Humanity: Equality and Cultural Difference in World History (Harvard, 2017)
Table of Contents Acknowledgments Cover Illustration Introduction 1Citizenship in the Age of Revolutions 2The Terror and the Haitian Revolution 3A Comparative Approach to the ‘Atlantic Thermidor’ 1‘The Kindred Spirit Tie of Congenial Principles’ 1Rights Declarations and the Constitutional Framework of Citizenship 2Converging Revolutionary Citizenship Ideals 3The French Revolution and the Heyday of a Transatlantic Ideal of Citizenship 4Regimes of Exclusion 2Saint-Domingue, Rights and Empire 1The Logic of Rights and the Realm of Empire 2The Nation’s Colonial Citizens 3Slavery and Civic Inequality in the US before Saint-Domingue 3The Civilizational Limits of Citizenship 1The Enlightenment Language of Civilization 2Unity and Hierarchy in the French Empire 3Levelling Principles and Remorseless Savages 4The Turn Away from French Universalism 1Citizenship and Inequality in the Dutch Republican Empire 2‘The vile machinations of men calling themselves philosophers’ 3The French Colonial Thermidor 5Uniting ‘good’ Citizens in Thermidorian France 1The Revolutionary Political Culture of Citizenship, 1792–1794 2Good Citizen / Bad Citizen 3Isolating the Citizen 4What is a Good Citizen? Redefining Civic Virtues 5Narrowing Down Political Citizenship 6The Post-Revolutionary Contestation and Nationalization of American Citizenship 1A Burgeoning Partisan Public Sphere 2‘Whether France is Saved or Ruined, is still Problematical’ 3Political Societies, Faction, and the Limits of Democratic Citizenship 4Anti-Jacobinism and the American Citizenship Model 7Forging the Batavian Citizen in a Post-Terror Revolution 1Portraying the Terror between Orangist Restoration and Batavian Revolution 2Limiting Power, Protecting Rights: The Terror and the Need for a Constitution 3Channelling the Participation of the People 4Nationalization 5The End of the Democratic-Republican Citizen Epilogue. The Age of Revolutions as a Turning Point in the History of Citizenship Bibliography Index
