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Rachel Hammersley, Senior Lecturer in Intellectual History at the School of History, Classics and Archaeology of Newcastle University, has been arguing since 2004 for a new perspective on the transmission of republicanism from seventeenth-century England, especially from James Harrington’s version, to eighteenth-century France up to the Revolution in 1789 and the Constitution of 1795. Besides Harrington are presented Milton, Nedham and Sidney among those whose republican convictions are argued to have been transmitted to the French Enlightenment and the French revolutionary ideas and institutions. This review article chronologically re-orders and summaries Hammersley’s arguments that (a) Harrington should be seen as an early democrat, (b) that the English republicanism of the mid-seventeenth century, conveyed through the Commonwealthmen, exerted a huge influence on French republicanism in the eighteenth century, notably on the Huguenots, Montesquieu, Mably and chevalier d’Éon (c) and that the French revolutionaries, namely Mirabeau, Jean-Baptiste Salaville, Théophile Mandar, Jean-Jacques Rutledge, Théodore Le Sueur and Emmanuel Joseph Sieyès, read and appropriated the political thought of the English republicans in the respective contexts of the early Revolution in 1789, the radical politics of the Cordeliers Club and the debate on the Constitution de l’an III in 1795. This review article puts Hammersley’s arguments in the broad context of modern European republicanism and democracy as well as in the precise context of the French Revolution. It points out that while her work is undoubtedly a stimulating catalyst for fostering a transnational perspective in modern intellectual and revolutionary history it needs to be more attentive to the precise context in relation to which each source work was written, published and used. A slight cherry-picking can be discerned in the way she presents the ‘influence’ and ‘diffusion’ of the English republican ‘tradition’ in France. The Enlightenment and revolutionary writers’ more broad intentions were marginalised in her work in favour of the detection of ‘influence’. This article concludes by pondering over the ‘international turn’ of history that is now fast becoming a fashion in the field.
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Rachel Hammersley, French Revolution, English Commonwealthmen, Republicanism, James Harrington
