"The Uses of Power: Lafayette and Brissot in 1792" Topic

"War! War! That is the wish of all French patriots, that is the wish of all friends of liberty spread out across the surface of Europe, who wait only for this happy diversion to attack and overthrow their tyrants.
. . . this war of expiation, which will renew the face of the world and plant the standard of liberty over the palaces of kings, the harems of Sultans, the chateaux of petty feudal tyrants, the temples of popes and muftis, . . . this holy war . . .[1]

In this way J. P. Brissot reported in his newspaper, Le Patriote Français, a speech by Anacharsis Cloots in December 1791 urging the Legislative Assembly to adopt war. Brissot's contributions as a writer, an Enlightenment thinker, and a supporter of equality for slaves have dominated recent works written about him, crowding out of consideration one of his major contributions to the history of France: his advocacy for war. Once proclaimed in the spring of 1792, war dominated Europe for almost twenty-five years. The development of the Terror is inconceivable without the background of war and the paranoia that came with it. Yet the motives of the man who from almost the first day of the Legislative Assembly pushed for war are not clearly understood.[2] Since the First World War, only one book-length work in French or English has been published on Brissot, except for works focusing on him as an Enlightenment thinker or as an anti-slavery activist.[3] How did the man who loved the peaceful Quakers in America, who declared that "republics ought to shun war," and who founded a society to emancipate slaves come to conduct a campaign to set France at war with all the monarchies of Europe?…"
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