15 - The Roman Republic and the French and American Revolutions

Summary

When George Washington gave his inaugural speech as the first president of the United States under the new federal constitution, he asserted that “the destiny of the republican model of government” was “deeply, perhaps... finally, staked on the experiment entrusted to the hands of the American People.” A new “Senate” would meet on the “Capitol” hill, overlooking the “Tiber” river (formerly “Goose Creek”), as in Rome, to restore “the sacred fire of liberty” to the Western world. The vocabulary of eighteenth-century revolution reverberated with purposeful echoes of republican Rome as political activists self-consciously assumed the Roman mantle. James Madison and Alexander Hamilton, the primary authors and advocates of the United States Constitution, wrote together pseudonymously as “Publius” to defend their creation, associating themselves with Publius Valerius Poplicola, founder and first consul of the Roman Republic. Camille Desmoulins attributed the French Revolution to Cicero's ideal of Roman politics, imbibed by children in the schools. At every opportunity, American and French revolutionaries proclaimed their desire to reestablish the “stupendous fabrics” of republican government that had fostered liberty at Rome.