Conference Abstracts

This paper will examine how the French revolutions of 1830 and 1848 revived and reshaped the memory of the American Revolution in the US at a time when Americans were reflecting on the legacy of their founding values and the passing of the revolutionary generation. American observers often framed these events through a language of filiation, portraying their own revolution as the “mother” and the French uprisings as “daughter” movements. The figure of the Marquis de Lafayette, celebrated during his 1824–1825 tour of the United States as a living link to the revolutionary past, played a key role in shaping this commemorative framework. Drawing on newspapers, public celebrations, and diplomatic correspondence, this paper will show how memory structured American reactions: the 1830 revolution was praised for its moderation while the 1848 revolution prompted reflections on shared democratic ideals and renewed Franco-American friendship, highlighting the enduring, transgenerational struggle to preserve liberty.

This paper explores the emergence and evolution of anti-French sentiment in Revolutionary America, situating it within the broader political and religious cultures of the late eighteenth century. The Franco-American treaties of 1778 were initially hailed by patriot leaders as providential. Yet the news was met with outrage among American loyalists, who cast the pact as a betrayal of Protestant liberty in favor of Catholic tyranny. Loyalist writers seized on these prejudices, warning of inquisitions, linguistic suppression, and Bourbon domination. Patriot propagandists, in turn, faced the delicate task of neutralizing this “unnatural alliance.” This paper demonstrates how the Revolutionary alliance both inflamed and reshaped American perceptions of France. It argues that anti-French sentiment in this period reveals the fragility of revolutionary unity and the malleability of cultural stereotypes under the pressures of war.

In the US and France, manufacturing as a share of employment plunged from a peak of 25% in the 1960s to 10% today, particularly affecting the regions where it had flourished. But if deindustrialization struck the two countries with equal force, these sister republics called on different traditions of governance, social welfare, entrepreneurship, and left-wing activism to cope with it. This paper will compare how Pittsburgh and Lille struggled to recover from catastrophic manufacturing decline. Pittsburgh’s elected officials, planners, and architects, collaborating with local university and business leaders, eventually found a new anchor in “eds and meds” and high tech. Lille’s comeback came more from locals leveraging the “outside”--national pressure and international agreements to make the city a transportation hub linking Paris, London, and Brussels via the Chunnel and high-speed rail. But neither success story escaped the fate of deepening inequalities of class, race, and ethnicity.

French intervention in the American Revolution is often framed as motivated by a desire for “revenge” against Britain after France’s stinging defeat in the Seven Years’ War; ideologically driven by the liberal currents swirling through Paris in the 1770s; or, from a world-systems perspective, part of a longer struggle between France and Great Britain for global hegemony. While these interpretations aren’t wrong, they occlude the specific strategic considerations that led to French intervention. This paper will explore those considerations, particularly emphasizing the centrality of the Caribbean and stressing the importance of the commercial elements of the Franco-American Treaty of Amity and Commerce. Time permitting, it will briefly touch on the ways in which the French alliance unwittingly led to U.S. expansion into the Northwest.

In recent years, American historians have increasingly spotlighted Benjamin Constant and Alexis de Tocqueville as key figures for understanding liberalism’s past—and its present crisis. But this fascination with French liberals is not new. This article shows that the American habit of invoking French thinkers to diagnose liberalism’s ailments has roots in the mid-20th century, particularly in Louis Hartz’s The Liberal Tradition in America. Hartz cast Tocqueville as a bridge between American and European liberalism—a view that shaped a generation of scholars who worked with him at Harvard, including Sheldon Wolin, Larry Siedentop, George Armstrong Kelly, Melvin Richter, and Judith Shklar. Through Hartz, the idea took hold that American and French liberalism offer distinct conceptual resources. This dual-tradition view gained traction in the 1960s and 1970s. It was shaped by rising interest in Raymond Aron’s work and by the need to defend liberalism from critics on both the left and the right. From then on, French liberalism became a kind of philosophical counterweight—first to Lockean orthodoxy, then to communitarianism in the 1980s, and finally to neo-republicanism from the 1990s onward. Far from a passing trend, American scholars’ turn to French liberalism is a strategic intellectual move with deep roots—an effort to rethink and revitalize liberalism by recovering an alternative lineage long overshadowed by its Anglo-American counterpart.

My paper will draw on chapters of the book I am completing with E. J. Dionne, The Promise of Social Democracy: Fighting for Justice in American and European History (forthcoming from Princeton University Press in 2027). I will focus on two pairs of influential figures, first John Dewey and Jean Jaurès, then Franklin D. Roosevelt and Léon Blum. I will suggest how their ideas -- and the fate of their political programs -- reflect the intwined yet distinct intellectual and political traditions of the US and France. 

Following his famous American trip with Tocqueville, Gustave de Beaumont published in 1835 a novel entitled Marie ou l’esclavage aux États-Unis later hailed in France as a precursor to Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852).  But Marie is not really about slavery, it mostly concerns the American “one drop rule” for which Beaumont and many of his contemporaries expressed horror: how could alleged champions of equality in America discriminate against people who looked white?  My paper will explore nineteenth-century French attitudes towards racial mixing in contrast to the United States, and their (dubious) claim that their own revolution had abolished in their nation not only “aristocracy of blood” but “aristocracy of skin.”

Since the postwar reconstruction of Europe, foreign direct investment (FDI) has been a central yet ambivalent vector of Franco-American interdependence. U.S. capital played a foundational role in France's modernization during the 1950s and 1960s, but it also sparked recurrent anxieties about sovereignty, cultural autonomy, and "Americanization." This duality echoes longstanding debates in International Political Economy over whether economic interdependence dampens conflict or generates new political vulnerabilities,debates that contemporary work on weaponized interdependence and geoeconomics has sharpened without resolving. This paper uses the Franco-American relationship as a critical test case for adjudicating these competing claims. Tracing bilateral investment ties from the Marshall Plan to the present, it shows how FDI has alternately produced friction by provoking fears of domination, exposing strategic sectors, or politicizing high-profile takeovers, and provided stability by embedding firms, workers, and policymakers in thick networks of shared interest. We argue that FDI's political effects are determined neither by volume nor direction but by sector. Investment in strategically sensitive or symbolically salient sectors (such as energy infrastructure, defense industry, cinema, iconic national champions) reliably generates politicization, sovereignty anxieties, and diplomatic friction, while investment in services, consumer goods, and financial products embeds quietly, creating dispersed employment constituencies and functioning as a structural brake on escalation during diplomatic crises. This case thus contributes to theorizing how allied states manage the politics of interdependence amid strategic uncertainty, and how policymakers navigate the trade-offs between openness and sovereignty.

Ever since Hannah Arendt's influential if controversial Cold War tract On Revolution, it has become a commonplace to starkly contrast the American Revolution ("triumphantly successful") with the French Revolution ("ended in disaster").  Indeed, too much discussion of arguably two of the most important topics in French and American history continues to bear the impress of mid-20th century ideological struggle.  Our paper interrogates four of the most prominent theses of this Cold War inheritance concerning the nature of historical change, the proper forms of government, the hegemony of liberal constitutionalism, and the trajectory of modernity.  By holding some of this conventional wisdom at bay and by paying closer attention to what the American and French revolutionaries were actually "doing" (as opposed to what they were "saying"), this essay unearths some surprising commonalities in the conduct of these two revolutions, from the centrality of committees of safety to the creation of popular assemblies to the day-to-day administration of public and necessary governance.  Our revision thus attempts to return questions of law, statecraft, administration, and most importantly democracy to center stage in the interpretation of these historic modern revolutions.

I propose to present new research at the crossroads of intellectual history and the history of emotions to update the Tocquevillean account of how the American and French revolutionaries understood, experienced, and shaped in/equality. Having been long neglected in comparison to its counterpart, liberty, historians are finally giving equality its due, while key works in the growing subfield of the history of emotions have reframed how we think about the outbreak and course of the Age of Revolutions. I bring these areas of scholarship together in this comparative history of how a subset of American and French revolutionaries experienced equal and unequal treatment