Revolutionaries Traveling between Revolutions

In the decade after the American Revolution, Europeans anticipated revolution to ‘reclaim’ their liberty throughout the small sovereignties at the center of the continent, some independent, others not, and all overlooked by historians, even those writing about Atlantic Revolution. Genevan, Dutch, and Belgian revolutionaries traveled, contributing to the circulation of ideas during the tumultuous decade between the American and French revolutions. Borrowing and incorporating rhetoric, strategy, and political theory from their revolutionary neighbors, they recognized their place in a transnational revolutionary movement. Their revolutions, all short lived, functioned as veritable political laboratories, amalgamating historical liberties and enlightened ideals, before their leaders were chased into exile. There, these itinerant revolutionaries joined other political exiles. When the self-described human “book-factory,” Gerrit Paape fled Delft with just a sleep sack and two fake passports, he asked his wife what could be more exciting than the prospect of engaging in another revolution. He found a place in four before his travels ended.

My paper will look at the networks that functioned for these traveling revolutionaries as what Paape called “academies of higher education in revolution.” Many exiles were drawn to Paris after the spring of 1789, but other hubs brought together revolutionaries far from home, including the Joel and Ruth Barlow, Mary Wollstonecraft, and St. John de Crèvecoeur among others I have yet to identify in Altona. Traveling on to Sweden, Wollstonecraft chided her compatriots who stayed at home rather than risk their security on the revolutionary continent, that only in travel would they discover the need to challenge customs they assumed were permanent. The act of traveling transformed the ideals of these revolutionaries meeting, observing and writing, but rarely governing. Theirs was a truly alternate sphere of politics.