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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 04 February 2011
James Price, Massachusetts Yankee and successful Boston merchant, visited Paris in August 1792, just when the French Revolution was entering into a new and ominous phase. On a trip designed to combine business with pleasure, he ended up witnessing the famous Journée du Dix AoÛt (Tenth of August) – dubbed the “Second French Revolution” by contemporaries – when provincial militia and national guards assaulted the Tuileries palace, massacred the king's Swiss Guards, and toppled the Bourbon monarchy from its centuries-old throne. As a fairly unbiased and certainly perspicacious observer – though with moderate revolutionary sympathies – Price must be included in the list of more famous, and more highly partisan, American witnesses of revolution, notably Thomas Jefferson, John Trumbull, and Gouverneur Morris. Specific topics addressed by Price include women during the Revolution, the dynamic between crowd action and attempts of municipal authorities at control, and the development of a Revolutionary fashion. Price's fascinating diary is not only a running account of events surrounding the fateful Tenth, but also an evaluation and commentary of an outsider, combined with a lively eyewitness description of the Revolutionary street scene. Not included in Marcel Reinhard's standard study on the Journée du Dix, Price's hour-by-hour chronology provides a valuable corroboration of and supplement to Reinhard. His account notes also provide insight into the eighteenth-century Continental travel habits of Americans on the “Grand Tour” and on business.
1 Mss Cb 1053, James Price: A Voyage and a Visit to France in 1792.
2 See letter of Theodore A. Neal, Esq., to John Ward Dean, Esq., editor of the New England Genealogical and Historical Register, dated Boston, 29 Feb. 1876, inserted in the diary. Price Sr., born in 1740, might be the “revolutionary character” Major James Price, who died in Concord, Massachusetts in 1802 at the age of 63. See American Antiquarian Society, Index of Deaths in Massachusetts Centinel, 1784–1840 (Boston: n.p., 1952). Whilst not mentioned in state or Continental army lists, this is not necessarily conclusive, given his position of commissary.
3 In the case of the diarist, one must rely on Neal's letter and the diary itself for scarce biographical information. Price eludes detection via standard biographical reference works, and the Neal genealogy does not consider collateral branches. The Ecole polytechnique was founded in 1794, so if Price had indeed attended that academy, he would have been twenty-eight at its founding, a rather advanced age to begin university studies. Perhaps he studied in France before 1794, and Neal meant the Ecole des ponts et chaussées, founded in 1747.
4 Michel Vovelle, La chute de la monarchie 1787–1792 (Paris: Seuil, 1972) 239; also Marcel Reinhard, La chute de la royauté: 10 aoÛt 1792 (Paris: Gallimard, 1969) 410. Both historians were in line with Revolutionary contemporaries. In Price's words, “Speaking in the language of the people they say we have now begun a Second revelution” (entry for 25 Aug. 1792).
5 For an in-depth discussion of how American travelers perceived the French Revolution, see my “Aspects of the French Revolution as Viewed by American Travelers” in Jan Craeybeckx and Frans Scheelings, eds., La Révolution française et la Flandre (Brussels: VUB Press, 1990), 71–99; and “Yankees Visit the European Home of Liberty: Revolutionary Politics as Experienced by American Travelers, 1780–1815,” in Kyle O. Eidahl and Donald D. Horward, eds., The Consortium on Revolutionary Europe, 1750–1850. Selected Papers, 1998 (Tallahassee, FL: Florida State University Institute on Napoleon and the French Revolution, 1999), 53–70.
6 For a comparative discussion of the tourist agenda of Americans in France during the period, see my “From Romanticism to Realism: American Tourists in Revolutionary France,” in Donald D. Horward, Michael F. Pavkovic, and John K. Severn, eds., The Consortium on Revolutionary Europe, 1750–1850. Selected Papers, 2000 (Tallahassee, FL: Florida State University Institute on Napoleon and the French Revolution, 2002) 40–54.
7 William Matthews, American Diaries in Manuscript, 1580–1954 (Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 1974). William L. Chew III, A Bostonian Merchant Witnesses the Second French Revolution: James Price A Voyage and a Visit to France in 1792 (Brussels: Center for American Studies, 1992).
8 Jefferson's and Irving's experiences are discussed in my “Thomas Jefferson in France: An Imagological and ‘Comparative Cohort’ Approach,” in Frederick C. Schneid and Denise Z. Davidson, eds., Selected Papers of the 2006 Consortium on the Revolutionary Era, 1750–1850 (High Point, NC: High Point University Press, 2007), 32–42; and “Washington Irving in France: An Imagological and ‘Comparative Cohort’ Approach,” in Frederick C. Schneid and Jack R. Censer, eds., Selected Papers of the 2007 Consortium on the Revolutionary Era, 1750–1850 (High Point, NC: High Point University Press, 2008) 258–68.
9 For a survey of the material realities of contemporary travel in France see my “On the Road Again: The Material Realities of French Overland Travel in American Revolutionary and Napoleonic Travel Accounts,” in Conference Proceedings, Things That Move: The Material Worlds of Tourism and Travel, 19–23 July 2007, Centre for Tourism and Cultural Change, Leeds Metropolitan University, United Kingdom.
10 A recent survey of American “tourists” in Paris and their activities during this period is provided by my “Life before Fodor and Frommer? Yesteryear Americans in Paris from Jefferson to John Quincy Adams,” French History, 18 (March 2004), 25–49. For a discussion of American travelers and French gender issues, see my “‘Straight’ Sam Meets ‘Lewd’ Louis: American Perceptions of French Sexuality, 1775–1815,” in W. M. Verhoeven and Beth Dolan Kautz, eds., Revolutions & Watersheds: Transatlantic Dialogues, 1775–1815 (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1999) (DQR Studies in Literature 26), 61–86.
11 See Reinhard, 404, 407, and the testimony of a National Guard eyewitness, cited at 584. See also Evelyne Lever, Louis XVI (Paris: Fayard, 1985), 623.
12 Jean Tulard, J.-F. Fayard, and Alfred Fierro, Histoire et dictionnaire de la Révolution française, 1789–1799 (Paris: Laffont, 1987), 528; Albert Soboul, Dictionnaire historique de la Révolution française (Paris: Presse Universitaire de France, 1989), 363–64; François Furet and Mona Ozouf, eds., Dictionnaire critique de la Révolution française (Paris: Flammarion, 1988), 119.
13 In August 1797 John Trumbull made a close escape from lynching in Calais. He was wearing his favorite grey coat with black cape, deemed the “aristocratic” fashion, the so-called collet noir (black collar). See John Trumbull, The Autobiography of John Trumbull: Patriot, Artist, 1756–1843, ed. Theodore Sizer (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1953), 217–18. Harassment of Americans based on misunderstandings due to issues of attire or Revolutionary symbolism, as well as diplomatic problems caused by deteriorating Franco-American relationships, is discussed in my “Yankees Caught in the Crossfire: The Trials and Travails of Americans in Revolutionary and Napoleonic France,” Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture, 32 (2003), 297–322.
14 In fact, the king had sent a message ordering the Swiss to cease firing and hand over their weapons. Reinhard, 407.
15 Gouverneur Morris, A Diary of the French Revolution, by Gouverneur Morris, 1752–1816, ed. Beatrix Cary Davenport, 2 vols. (Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1939), 2, 519.
16 John Trumbull, “John Trumbull views of the French Revolution, an unpublished letter by the Patriot-Artist of the American Revolution”, ed. Irma Jaffe, B., Bulletin of Research in the Humanities, 82 (1979), 450–57Google Scholar; idem, The Autobiography: Patriot, Artist 1756–1843, ed. Theodore Sizer (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1953). The standard biography is Irma B. Jaffe, John Trumbull: Patriot-Artist of the American Revolution (Boston: New York Graphic Society, 1975).
17 The best recent general biography is William H. Adams, Gouverneur Morris: An Independent Life (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2003). The most recent monograph devoted to his French stay is Melanie R. Miller, Envoy to the Terror: Gouverneur Morris & the French Revolution (Washington, DC: Potomac Books, 2005).
18 Morris 1, 158–59. Diary, 22 July 1789.
19 To Thomas Pinckney, 3 Dec. 1792, Morris, 2, 581.
20 To Jonathan Trumbull, 21 July 1789, “John Trumbull views of the French Revolution,” 455.
21 Ibid., 457.
22 Trumbull, The Autobiography, 155.