Vive L’Union

Soon after he arrived in Paris, in early October 1861, John Bigelow, the newly appointed American consul general to France, paid a visit to a quiet house on Rue Taitbout, about a mile north of the Louvre. The home belonged to the grandly named Édouard-René Lefèbvre de Laboulaye, a small, soft-spoken professor of history at the Collège de France, one of the country’s elite institutions of higher learning. Laboulaye was an expert on American history, and Bigelow was there to ask him for a small favor: to change the way the French thought about America’s civil war.

Bigelow was a veteran New York newspaper man and savvy Republican Party operative. Though nominally a diplomat, his real task in Paris was to counteract anti-Union sentiment; fellow agents had been sent to London, Rome and other European capitals. All were charged with giving “a right direction to public sentiment” by making themselves acquainted with the leading men of the national press. Today we would call this “public diplomacy,” though, of necessity, they operated largely in secret.

Upon arriving at Rue Taitbout, Bigelow was “conducted into … rooms crowded with books and numerous tables groaning under all the apparatus and teeming with the confusion of active and prolific authorship.” He gazed at the “curious and rare engravings” on the walls and dozens of books on American history and government. Soon Laboulaye entered the room. His thin hair was smoothed against his head framing the olive-complexion of his face. He wore a black frock coat buttoned close to the chin giving him, Bigelow thought, a “slightly clerical appearance.”

Laboulaye was the leading European expert of his day on American history and government. Though he never visited America, he admired it enormously. For Laboulaye the still-young country was a rare and successful example of self-government, one that France had much to learn from. As he often reminded his students, since 1789, when France experienced its Revolution and America ratified its Constitution, France had gone through 14 constitutions and 10 revolutionary changes of government.

Laboulaye won his professorship the year after the Revolution of 1848 and began immediately lecturing and writing on America and its Constitution as a model for France. Two years later Napoleon III engineered a “coup d’état,” proclaimed the Second Empire, and introduced a dark new era of political repression and intellectual censorship. Laboulaye watched as his liberal colleagues were dismissed from their professorships, and he decided to follow a safe course by teaching and writing on the legal history of Ancient Rome. His lectures were, by all accounts, pedantic and poorly attended, this probably to Laboulaye’s relief, for he was terrified of speaking before a large audience.

Now America’s civil war threatened to prove the entire experiment in self-government a failure. The crisis reawakened Laboulaye’s intellectual mission to educate France about America. By 1859 he resumed lecturing on American history and law. His classes soon filled with students and visitors, including foreigners, workers and political reformers, eventually so many they formed a line outside the lecture hall. “Until now I have lived and spoken in an honorable solitude, and for a small circle of devoted friends,” Laboulaye told his students that year. Now, France needed “ideas that constitute the grandeur of man,” and he felt great joy at being part of this “general reveille.” “La question américaine” suddenly created an arena within which liberals could safely talk about the central political issues of the day — by talking about America.

What had caught Bigelow’s eye was a lengthy article on “La guerre civille aux États-Unis” by Laboulaye in the “Journal des Débats,” one of the most influential journals in Europe. What impressed Bigelow about Laboulaye’s essay was not just the “spirit of cordial sympathy with the North” but also his “singularly correct appreciation of the matter at issue.” First, he made it clear that “the desire of perpetuating and propagating slavery and of making it the corner stone of a new public policy was the true cause of the revolt.” Second, secession was not a lawful constitutional process — this was a rebellion. Third, the commercial and geo-political interests of France depended on the success of the Union, not the South.

The piece particularly stood out because the journal’s editor for American affairs was Michel Chevalier, who used “Débats” as a platform for trumpeting the cause of the South. A strong pro-South bias had already been planted in the minds of French government officials and opinion leaders by the outgoing American diplomatic corps, most of whom were pro-southern Democrats. “Public sympathy … at court in the press in the clubs and in general society,” Bigelow noted, “was very largely with the insurgents.” Napoleon III seemed eager to grant recognition to the Confederacy, and it looked like he would find little opposition at home.

France wasn’t the only place where pro-Confederate sympathy was on the rise; indeed, the Union was not just losing the battle of public diplomacy in Europe, it wasn’t even showing up at the fight. When Bigelow visited London en route to Paris, he was appalled to learn Charles Francis Adams Jr., the Union minister in London, was not only unacquainted with the leading journalists of the city but indifferent toward those offering to lend their pen to the Union cause. William Dayton, the minister in Paris, was a New Jersey politician who seemed completely at sea in French court politics and social affairs. Dayton neither spoke nor read French and was making no effort to learn, depending on interpreters for even the most banal exchanges.

To his credit, it was Dayton who suggested appointing as consul someone familiar with the French and its press and made it possible for Bigelow to begin redirecting public opinion. Bigelow poured himself into all things French. Every day he read French newspapers, journals, histories and biographies. He worked diligently to improve his command of the language, and he reported with schoolboy pride to his diary how he was coming along, and scolded himself when his conversation sputtered. He wrote in French, attended lectures, plunged into conversations in French and made acquaintance with the leading intellectuals of the day, notably those liberals who opposed Napoleon III and began to use the Union cause as a proxy for their own liberal, republican ideals.

But Bigelow’s primary job was not so much to translate Union propaganda into French, as it was to animate native voices capable of interpreting the American cause to the French mind in its own idiom. That’s why he had come to Rue Taitbout. His meeting with Laboulaye was to discuss publishing and distributing a revised version of the review essay he had done for “Débats.”

Bigelow was overjoyed to find the professor in hearty agreement. “I am completely at your disposal,” Laboulaye responded. “I shall be charmed to serve a cause which is the cause of all the friends of liberty.” Though Bigelow had at his disposal a generous purse funded by the State Department to encourage authors and open the doors to editors, Laboulaye refused compensation, except for a few gifts of books on America.

Within days of their first meeting, he delivered a revised and greatly expanded essay running over 50 printed pages and including a reminder of Napoleon I’s words of 1803: “In ceding Louisiana I strengthen forever the power of the United States and give to England a rival upon the sea which sooner or later shall abase her pride.” It was an adroit reference to the first Napoleon that cleverly placed his nephew (“Napoléon le petit,” as his detractors called him behind his back) in an unfavorable light for not standing by America in its hour of need.

Bigelow saw to it that Laboulaye’s pamphlet was delivered to each member of the Institute of France, a prestigious group of academics; the entire Paris bar; every diplomat residing in Paris; prominent statesmen throughout Europe’ and the leading journals of Europe.

The publication was a hit. “The effect of it was far greater than I had ventured to anticipate,” Bigelow later mused. “Friends of the Union multiplied and those who had been discouraged and silent before were now emboldened to come forward and confess their sympathy and their hopes.” “Débats” immediately changed its editorial policy, reassigned Chevalier to economic topics and gave its columns on American affairs over to those who supported the North.

But Laboulaye wasn’t done. A stream of essays, pamphlets and books poured forth from his study on Rue Taitbout. The next August he produced a pair of brilliant essays in “Débats” in which he amplified his interpretation of the American war. Bigelow saw to it that these essays were immediately republished as a pamphlet, “Les États-Unis et la France,” which he then distributed to leading officials and intellectuals in France and Europe.

Laboulaye’s achievement was to translate the American conflict into something French readers could grasp, to depict it as part of a historic, international contest between slavery and liberty, democracy and despotism. The “old and glorious traditions of France,” he wrote, call upon it to defend the North and the cause of liberty and justice everywhere.

Much of his writing on the war found its way into English, thanks to the heroic exertions of Mary Louise Booth, a young writer in New York who tirelessly translated Laboulaye and several other leading French authors writing on the American war. Booth’s translations allowed Americans to see their war in a new light reflected in a distant international mirror. “Nothing better has been produced in Europe or America by the discussion of the war,” wrote Senator Charles Sumner to Laboulaye after reading his essays.

In this quiet academic, John Bigelow found a resonating French voice for the American cause of Union and liberty. And in “la question américaine,” Laboulaye and French liberals found a way of reawakening the debate over the future of democracy in France, America and the rest of the world.

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Sources: Walter D. Gray, “Interpreting American Democracy in France: the Career of Édouard Laboulaye, 1811-1883”; Serge Gavronsky, “French Liberals and the American Civil War,”; Lynn M. Case and Warren Spencer, “The United States and France: Civil War Diplomacy”; John Bigelow, “Retrospections of an Active Life, vol. 1; John Bigelow, “Diary,” Bigelow Papers, New York Public Library. Laboulaye’s publications in English include “Paris in America”; “The United States and France”; “Why the North Cannot Consent to Disunion,”; “Upon Whom Rests the Guilt of the War?”; “Why the North Cannot Accept of Separation,”; “Separation: War Without End,”; “Professor Laboulaye, the Great Friend of America, on the Presidential Election: The Election of the President of the United States,”; “Reply of Messrs. Agenor De Gasparin, Édouard Laboulaye, Henri Martin, Augustin Cochin, to the Loyal National League of New York.”

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Don H. Doyle is professor of history at the University of South Carolina and a fellow at the National Humanities Center. He is author of several books, including “Nations Divided: America, Italy, and the Southern Question” and “Secession as an International Phenomenon.” He is currently writing a book on the international context of the American Civil War.