In 1876, the New England Historic Genealogical Society acquired a remarkable document, the travel journal of one James Price, merchant from Boston, along with his account notes, several letters, and a few miscellaneous items.Footnote ¹ Price's father, James Price Sr., was a wealthy merchant who had emigrated from Canada to the rebellious American colonies, subsequently not only working for the US Department of the Army, but even devoting a considerable part of his personal fortune to financing the patriot cause. He also appears to have been a friend of Lafayette and probably dined with the marquis in Paris, in 1784, presumably while on a business trip.Footnote ² Price Jr. was born in Montreal on 20 September 1766, and sent abroad to study, though probably not to the Parisian Ecole polytechnique, as family tradition had it. Engaging in commerce like his father, the draft of a letter in the diary suggests that he was in France in 1792 for business travel. Price died sometime in 1800, probably in Boston.Footnote ³

Price's account is historically relevant in several ways – first and foremost, as an eyewitness account of the journée of 10 August 1792, a major turning point of the French Revolution, dubbed by contemporaries and historians alike the “second revolution,” thereby underlining its significance for the internal periodization of the era.Footnote ⁴ With its high detail, lively description, and moderately republican tendency, the journal amply deserves to be added to the list of accounts discussed by Marcel Reinhard in the standard monograph on the journée. Second, while the majority of American travelers in France at this time were businessmen, relatively few left journals, and even fewer wrote on political matters, thus Price constitutes one of several exceptions.Footnote ⁵ Third, though the diary itself does not contain the usual commentary on travel, inns, postillions, and tourist attractions, the account notes do provide insight into how a young American businessman in late eighteenth-century France traveled.Footnote ⁶ Finally, while compared to the pronouncedly partisan rhetoric of other American witnesses of the Revolution, I propose to argue that his account stands out for its relative objectivity. Given this intrinsic interest, and the fact that the diary was already listed in Matthews's American Diaries in Manuscript, 1580–1954, it is surprising that the account escaped notice until I published a critical edition in 1992.Footnote ⁷

Compared to other contemporaries, Price traveled in what might be dubbed upper-middle-class comfort. While he did not possess an English custom-built carriage with glass windows, like Thomas Jefferson, neither did he have to take the popular diligence with middle-class hoi polloi, like Washington Irving.Footnote ⁸ Expenditures in his account notes show he preferred hiring a coach, as indicated by disbursements for the postilion, storage of the chaise, and the cost of two hundred livres for the trip from Le Havre to Paris. Hotel and meal expenditures are also comparable to those documented by other well-off Americans in France at that time. The daily rate of ten livres at the Hôtel de Genève in Paris clearly indicates that this was no second-rate establishment, while the same can be said of an anonymous Le Havre inn, where he paid 101 livres and five sous for six and a half days. Meal prices cited range from three to six livres and are in line with average to slightly above average prices quoted by contemporary Americans in France.Footnote ⁹ Recreational activities evident in the account notes include a few touristic visits en route to and from Paris. A reference to “depences a Paris pour amusements” at a quite hefty ten livres leaves the reader guessing. An entry dated 31 March 1791, from a previous trip through Saintonge (“for the whore at supper”), at twelve livres is more explicit. A somewhat ambiguous reference to “la fille” at six livres (much more than a chambermaid's tip) suggests that Price was probably availing himself of the services of local prostitutes.Footnote ¹⁰

The diary proper begins on 1 July 1792, with Price's departure from Boston. He landed in Le Havre on 31 July, where he remained for a week, then proceeding to Paris, where he arrived on 8 August. Price stayed in the capital until 23 August, when he set off for Le Havre, arriving two days later, presumably with the intention of leaving the country. His final journal entry is dated 26 August and provides a summary retrospective assessment of the state of France and the Revolution in the light of the dramatic events he had witnessed during the previous two weeks, most notably those of the Tenth.

Price entered Paris at 17:30 on 8 August and soon began reporting on the unfolding drama. At 23:00 the following evening he noted the sounding of the tocsin and armed patrols on vigil throughout the city. By 02:00 of the tenth, Price informs us, the “inhabitants of the faubour St. Antoine & St. Marceau began their march towards the Palais of the Thuillerie.” An hour later, preparations for the actual attack were under way, artillery being brought up in the various approaches to the palace; that is, the Place Carrousel (modern Cour Napoléon), Pont Royal and Place Louis XV (modern Place de la Concorde). Price himself did the rounds of the National Guard posts stationed in the area, noting their strong presence. Crowd violence was soon rife, and at 08:00 Price saw a head carried by on a pike, in the Palais Royal. Hearing the news that several members of the king's personal guard had been arrested and were to be beheaded shortly in the Place Vendôme, he rushed there with two companions, undeterred by the tumult on the streets. Arriving just in time to witness the execution, he described the scene as follows:

Like other American witnesses of the French Revolution, it is remarkable how Price took particular note of the active, indeed cutting-edge (no pun intended) role of women, as he would do on several occasions. His attention was also drawn to the fraternization of sans-culottes and National Guards, and the optimism of the crowd at the hoped-for democraticization of France.

Meanwhile, back at the Tuileries, the plot had thickened. By 09:30, Price tells us, the Swiss Guards were firing their field pieces at the oncoming fédérés Marseillais and sans-culottes attacking the palace from the Pont Royal. Undeterred by their initial losses, the citizens maintained their assault, soon bringing into play field pieces of their own, so that “the repeteations of the cannon were so rapid that it resembled the roaling of Thunder in a great Storme.” Here, Price's account, given the rapidity and confusion of events, is perhaps confused, for the historical record is not clear whether the Swiss had their own cannon, and whether the National Guard artillerymen had fraternized with the attackers early on. Perhaps Price heard the cannon of the Faubourg Saint-Antoine detachment or mistook the disciplined Swiss volleys for artillery. For a short time, however, the Swiss, after a successful counterattack following the arrival of the Marseillais in the Carrousel courtyard, did recapture the National Guard cannon.Footnote ¹¹

By 10:00, Price continues, the attackers had entered the palace, set fire to the outbuildings and begun their massacre of the Swiss Guards, while the king and his family made their escape through the Tuileries gardens to the National Assembly, where they were to be given safe haven prior to Louis's interrogation on suspicion of treason. Meanwhile, the Swiss were being cut down in earnest, and Price's vivid account indicates that he was probably still on the scene as a direct witness. In his own words:

Scholars, it should be noted, have not been able to establish the number of Swiss dead with any certainty, and estimates range from six hundred (Jean Tulard), to “hundreds” (Albert Soboul), to an improbably low “over fifty” (Denis Richet).Footnote ¹²

As Price continues his account of events, it becomes clear that the municipal authorities were hard put to establish some kind of control and order. A further group of some sixty Swiss made a sortie but were captured and taken to the Maison de Ville, where they begged to be taken to the prison of St. Germain rather than being given up to the rage of the crowd. On being led down the steps of the town hall, apparently with the intention of transferring them to St. Germain, they were intercepted by the populace on the Place de Grève, killed and stripped.

Like several other American contemporaries, Price also testified to the lynching of individuals who attracted suspicion solely on the basis of attire that appeared to mark them as people of rank or social status reminiscent of the old regime. On the tenth, he reports, not only were several Parisians killed by the Revolutionary crowd because they happened to be wearing red coats and white breeches – and therefore presumably mistaken for Swiss Guards, whose uniforms were similar – but also men of “genteal” dress assumed to be “aristocrats disguised.” Consequently, a new kind of revolutionary fashion was emerging and, as Price puts it, “every Gentleman here Dresses himself as mean as he can to appear like the Sans coulottes or the Jacobine Party in Short there is no kind of Distinction to be seen at Present.”Footnote ¹³

At 17:00 Price visited the Tuileries to assess the state of affairs after the battle had run its course, finding the crowd busy vandalizing the palace and drinking their fill from the store of wine casks discovered in the cellars. By this time the city authorities had succeeded in reestablishing a modicum of control – targeted primarily at the protection of property rights – for Price reports that an order against looting was being strictly enforced, some twenty to thirty looters being summarily executed. Meanwhile, citizens were already busy carrying off the dead, refilling empty fire engines, and making sure the fire still burning in the outbuildings did not spread to the rest of the city. As the day neared its end, order appeared to have been restored. Price's final entry reads, “11 o'clock P.M. the citizens is yet under arms & patroling the Streats with Double Guards.”

Price's account for the following day, the eleventh, begins with a report on the interrogation of the king in the National Assembly and his denial of having ordered the Swiss to fire on the people, of planning to set fire to Paris, of responsibility for his emigrant brothers' debts, and of his having supplied Austrian troops with French public monies.Footnote ¹⁴ Subsequently, the Assembly read out to the king captured documents, in his own handwriting, corroborating the above accusations, and indeed proving that he had planned his escape with the Swiss Guards, proceeding to Rouen and Le Havre, where further detachments of a total of 1,800 Swiss and 1,500 horse were waiting. Price finds the plan perfectly credible, writing that he had seen with his own eyes numbers of Swiss “quartered in Several Towns between Rouen & Paris which I meat on my way to this city.” And so the king was suspended by the Assembly and ordered to the Temple, along with the queen. (This already happened during the course of the Tenth, though Price appears not to have been aware of the fact until the eleventh).

In the course of the day, Price was again up and about the city, first describing the wrath of the crowd executing acts of damnatio memoriae against symbols of the old regime, notably singling out for destruction statues of previous kings, such as the bronze equestrian statue of Louis XV by Edme Bouchardon (smashed and its pieces sent to the foundry), and even the equestrian bronze of the otherwise highly venerated Henry IV by the Dutch-Italian sculptor Giovanni da Bologna. If possible, the rampaging citizens carried away relics of the statues as Revolutionary souvenirs. At 09:00, he again returned to the Tuileries “to see the Damage that the Citizens had Done,” finding two piles of dead Swiss not yet cleared away, and the royal apartments not much damaged but all the furniture carried off. Finishing his inspection of the palace, he made his way to the gardens, when a call to arms was given, because a detachment of Swiss had been discovered hiding in the palace's cellar and chimneys. Again the authorities attempted, in vain, to arrest and protect the captives from the populace, who made short work of killing them off. More individuals, Price reports – as on the Tenth – were “murder'd by the mob only for being Dressed genteally supposed to be aristocrats & Suisses Disguised.” Given this climate, “person[s] of reputation” chose to stay at home to avoid a confrontation with the crowd. Indeed, Baltimorean eyewitness Thomas Waters Griffith reported that a number of anxious aristocrats took refuge under the diplomatic roof of Gouverneur Morris, the American plenipotentiary.Footnote ¹⁵ The city being in turmoil, all shops were closed, no hacks or carriages were to be seen in the streets, and the citizens and National Guard were still under arms.

At 14:00, Price notes in his journal, “the mob” learned that another escaped 160 Swiss guards and their officers had sought refuge in the Assembly, whereupon the sans-culottes issued an ultimatum to that body, demanding the delivery of the Swiss within half an hour, otherwise they, the sans-culottes, would demolish the building. Pétion, mayor of Paris (and later first president of the Convention) was despatched by the Assembly to calm the crowd, which he succeeded in doing, gaining the Swiss safe conduct to the Abbey of St. Germain for later trial.

Price's entry for the twelfth is relatively brief, recounting the varying reported numbers of casualties circulating, himself agreeing with the more conservative estimate of some two thousand for both sides. At 16:00 he witnessed the king and his family being taken to the Temple, describing the suspended monarch's humiliation by the crowd as follows:

The cortège “went as Slow as possible,” he continues, the king being insulted the whole way, so that it took until almost 18:00 to reach the Temple.

Order having been restored by the evening of the following day – in Price's words, “The mob have all Dispersed Nothing but National Guards to be seen in the Streets to keep good order in the City” – the final pages of the Parisian part of his journal are primarily devoted to reporting the proceedings of the Assembly, as well as news and rumors filtering in from the armies on the frontiers. A Convention had been called for 20 September for the purpose of revising the constitution and trying the king (this decision had already been taken on the tenth), and commissaries were dispatched to the armies to inform the troops of the events of the tenth and the Assembly's “approbation” thereof. The “Jacobine Party” had now gained the upper hand and “a member of a contrary opinion dare not speak his Sentiments for his life would be in Danger.” Deputies who had spoken out in favor of Lafayette, charged in absentia with treason, were reportedly assaulted by the sans-culottes on leaving the Assembly and forced to leave Paris. Meanwhile, rumors abounded regarding the fate and whereabouts of “aristocrat” generals on the borders of France, such as that Lafayette had been arrested at Sedan by his own soldiers on 19 August (he had fled to Austrian lines); or that he had, on 22 August, gone to Holland while his wife and children had embarked at Le Havre, bound for England (she had remained in France and would be arrested on 10 September, by order of the Convention). It was also assumed that Lafayette would ultimately seek refuge in America. On 22 August, the day before his departure for Le Havre, Price noted that executions had begun, using the “Guyotine a machine for cuting of Heads,” with the prince de Poix – the comte de Noailles, father of the vicomte de Noailles, who had served with distinction in the American Revolution – and “Several other Noblemen” as its first victims. Thus ends Price's reporting on events.

In his final journal entry, written in Le Havre on 26 August, the young American merchant's assessment of the state of France emerges. It is largely optimistic and moderately republican. He is convinced that the King's suspension was justified, given Louis's treasonable activities, and that France was now “in a much more elligabl[e] Situation” for reform than before. Even if the king's plan of having the emigrants and their armies enter France had born fruit, Price believed that the French army, having rid itself of aristocratic and counterrevolutionary officers, would stand fast. As he put it, “the Soldiers are firm to the Constitution & to liberty & equality ... they would [have] been a check to their officers and attack the enemy with their Subalterns.” The people, he believed, now firmly had “the Staff in their own hand & are determined to make good use of it.” They had, as vox populi had it, “begun a Second revelution” and taken the sovereignty of the nation into their own hands. They were resolved to “take the good out of the old constitution & strike the bad out of the new,” in the process creating a “perfect constitution.” Price did not consider the monarchy as an institution necessarily doomed, for he thought a constitutional monarchy, in which the people had a say in choosing their king, himself bound to the constitution, was possible. He clearly states, however, that in his view, “the Bourbon family will never mount [the] throne again.” Paraphrasing an unnamed interlocutor, he writes (in French) that the peace and future of France could only be assured if the country rid itself of the the “old nobility,” described as “a poison infesting” the country. Price is keenly aware of the centrality of Paris as the epicenter of revolution, and of the sans-culottes as its new driving force, as he writes, “When Paris moves it resembles a Storm at Sea for the whole kingdom is in motion & Seen to approve all their proceedings they are a determined people that when they once get under way nothing Stands before them.” Regarding the power and potential of France as a country, and in particular its citizens – not least of whom, once again, the women – his final entry closes with the affirmation that

This assessment was right on the mark, as the exportation of the Revolution across Europe, and Napoleonic expansion, were to prove.

Price was, of course, not the only American traveling in France during the Revolution. I have calculated elsewhere that from 1780 to 1815 between eight thousand and ten thousand Americans made their way to the country, businessmen constituting the largest group (some two-thirds of the total). These are, however, somewhat underrepresented in the distribution of extant accounts, making up about one-half of all accounts I have located. The best-known commentators of this period (Jefferson had left in 1789) – though not veritable eyewitnesses of the assault on the Tuileries – include Gouverneur Morris (1752–1816), resident minister plenipotentiary, and John Trumbull (1756–1843), court painter of the American Revolution.Footnote ¹⁶ Their accounts are certainly notable, given the authors' intelligence and political interest, but they are also highly tendentious, politically.

Morris was born to an upper-class New York family which included a vice-admiralty court judge, a speaker of the New York Assembly and a governor of New Jersey.Footnote ¹⁷ Educated in law at King's College, New York, his political conservatism became manifest during the early days of the American Revolution, where his fear of possible mob rule initially drove him towards a conciliatory stand with England. Once the break became inevitable, however, he became a staunch patriot. During the early republic, Morris was directly involved in the drafting of both the New York state constitution and, more importantly, the US Constitution, where he emerged as a die-hard liberal and staunch Federalist, promoting a strong executive (unimpeachable President-for-life) and an elitist Senate (appointed for life) and House (elected with a restrictive census). Albeit unable to push through this vision, he loyally supported the Constitution as finally adopted. This political attitude was to have a significant impact on his assessment of the French Revolution. Arriving in France in early 1789, initially for business, he kept a remarkable diary for almost his complete stay, a historical record that ranks among the most prominent of the times and has been compared to that of Arthur Young. On 12 January 1792 George Washington appointed Morris ambassador to France, an appointment only narrowly confirmed by the Senate, precisely due to his “aristocratic” bias. Morris, observing events in France up close, was quite afraid that democratic forces would bring to power a demagogic dictator in a country unprepared by a political tradition of self-government like that of the US or England. Thus he openly favored a French monarchy, though with limited powers. Indeed, at the very moment of his confirmation hearings he was clandestinely plotting Louis XVI's escape from the Tuileries. In spite of his repugnance at the increasingly violent and mob-driven – as he saw it – Revolution, he was to be the only resident ambassador in Paris during the Terror, loyally serving his country until recalled, in 1794, on request of the French as a quid pro quo for the American rejection of Edmond Charles Genet as French ambassador to the United States. Morris's assessment of the French Revolution, unlike that of the majority of his compatriots, was characterized by a rather more moderate optimism during the early, liberal phase, which most Americans greeted with enthusiasm and liked to perceive as inspired by their own successful revolution. He witnessed several instances of what he considered rabid mob violence against persons and property, specifically during the weeks following the storming of the Bastille, such as the public executions of Foulon and Bertier, and expressed his horror:

Small wonder, then, that after the events of 10 August, which he did not personally witness, preferring to stay safely at home, his pessimism for the outcome was great:

With these words, Morris was embedding his assessment in the classic discourse of Republican virtue necessary to sustain a model polity such as that of the United States, following the Founding Fathers' implicit ideology of American exceptionalism.

Like Morris, Trumbull was a staunch Federalist and Anglophile. Son of the governor of Connecticut, he graduated from Harvard in 1773, had a short but successful military career during the American Revolution, and then embarked on his lifetime vocation as a painter. Business travel; a diplomatic appointment as secretary to John Jay during the negotiations leading to the Jay Treaty (1794); and a mission as diplomatic courier, in the service of Jay, to James Monroe, then American minister plenipotentiary in Paris, took Trumbull to France on several occasions in 1780, 1786–7, 1789, 1794–5, and 1797, providing him firsthand views of the French Revolution. Unlike Morris, Trumbull was as enthusiastic as his compatriots during the early days of the liberal Revolution. From London he reported, with great optimism, on the events of the preceding weeks, including the storming of the Bastille, as compiled from London newspapers and the accounts of two recent French émigrés, notable for its strong spirit of optimism and faith in the outcome:

During the second week of August, Trumbull was in Paris to see developments for himself. While there he made plans for a series of paintings commemorating the glory moments of the revolution, which, however, he never realized, clearly because of his disenchantment with its radicalization.Footnote ²¹ As he put it, the subsequent National Assembly

Indeed, with the regicide of 1793, the majority of American travelers in France except the most die-hard Republicans would find their enthusiasm for the Revolution rapidly waning. Price, for his part, though harboring sympathies for “the people” and clearly convinced of the monarch's wrongdoing and the pernicious influence of an unreconstructed nobility, frequently employs the term “mob” in describing violent crowd action, which, while not condoned in the apologetic fashion of a Thomas Jefferson or James Monroe, is neither denounced as the senseless barbarity of a rabble run amuck, à la Morris or Trumbull. It is, finally, striking that Price – unlike his compatriots, either Federalist or Republican – never invokes the highly idealized American Revolution as a point of reference for comparison with that of the French. Indeed, virtually all American commentators evoke their own revolutionary experience in a comparative discourse which typically ends in an expression of American exceptionalism and numerous references to its model character for France, except that the French had been incapable of following the cue of a “proper” revolution, meaning a revolution à l'américaine.