The Brissot Dossier

Although I welcome Frederick de Luna's rereading of Brissot's life and works, I cannot agree with his characterization of my own work as "sustained denigration." My purpose was not to declare Brissot guilty of spying for the police but rather to understand him and the milieu in which he wrote. Out of that attempt grew a general thesis about Grub Street as an ingredient in prerevolutionary France, which in turn fits into the larger effort to develop a social history of ideas. I would like to take de Luna's essay as an opportunity to discuss some of those larger issues. But first I had better return to the case of Brissot. I started to study Brissot's career in 1960, while doing research on The Gallo-American Society, a Bachelor of Philosophy thesis at Oxford, which I completed two years later. At that time, I saw Brissot very much as de Luna sees him now. The future leader of the Girondins seemed to be a disinterested idealist, who threw himself into the defense of slaves, the poor, Quakers, Genevans, Jews, Romanians, and all sorts of worthy causes, including the American variety of republicanism, for which he died on the guillotine. I still think there is much to be said for that view, which coincides with the picture Brissot painted of himself in his memoirs. But after first meeting Brissot in the company of people like Clarkson, Paine, and Jefferson, I began following his trail through archival material. I ran into him in many unexpected places: reports on libelous pamphleteering by British agents in London, letters about indigent writers by Parisian booksellers and Swiss publishers, accounts of stockjobbing on the Paris Bourse, and correspondence about speculation on the currency issued by the colonies during the American Revolution. What especially brought me up short was the reference to Brissot's spy-