Is Dermer a Latter Day Genet?

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As the Netanyahu speech controversy has unfolded I’ve wondered about and a number of readers have asked me whether there are any obvious historical parallels to Ron Dermer, the Israeli ambassador. The truth is that there are so many unique or at least very uncommon factors overlapping together that it’s very hard to think of any other comparable case in recent history or perhaps ever. The Israel relationship is high stakes. It’s already increasingly partisanized. The Ambassador was an American citizen himself until not too long ago. And he has long standing political ties to the party that is the president’s opposition. There’s quite a lot going on. But there’s one case from history that at least offers some interesting parallels. The differences are illuminating as well. The year is 1793. And the man is “Citizen Genet”, Edmond-Charles Genet, Minister Plenipotentiary of the French Republic to the United States of America.

In other words, Ambassador.

The Genet episode is a fascinating and formative and often comical episode in the history of the early Republic. In 1793 the French Revolution was still in its more buoyant and optimistic phase prior to the outbreak of the Reign of Terror. The so-called Girondists are in power in France.

Here we pick up from our earlier discussion of Madison and Hamilton as formative leaders in the creation of the federal constitution. Madison is in House of Representatives. Hamilton is Secretary of the Treasury, the cabinet post which, as we noted in that last post, he saw as the fulcrum of federal and state power and future national greatness.

Already at this point, the quickening French Revolution was dividing the country and, more acutely, Washington’s Cabinet. Both ideologically and geopolitically, Hamilton was skeptical of the French Revolution and favored a British orientation. Thomas Jefferson had been in France as US Ambassador in the lead up to the Revolution and saw its opening acts in 1789. (Significantly, Jefferson had been out of the country during the entire Constitution writing process.) Like Hamilton but on the other side, Jefferson was pro-French, both ideologically and geopolitically. Washington, an elder figure to both, certainly a father figure to Hamilton, stood between them, skeptical of countries and keen to remain aloof from their conflicts.

Jefferson formally presents Genet to President Washington

The rub was the new war between France and Britain and each great power’s desire to embroil the American Republic in that war on its side.

It was Genet’s mission to do the embroiling.

On its face this was a mission Genet seemed well placed to fulfill. The French had essentially bankrolled the American Revolution – a fact which generated immense good will. And it was the French Navy which delivered the coup de grace that ended the Revolutionary War at Yorktown in 1781. Indeed, this funding of the American Revolution played an important role in creating the state bankruptcy that triggered the French Revolution.

An then there was the French Revolution itself which, at this early stage, remained wildly popular in the fledgling United States, both because it seemed to affirm the American Revolution and its principles but also because of lingering Anglophobia.

Genet landed in South Carolina in April 1793 and proceeded to make a triumphal progress north toward Philadelphia, then the federal capital. Genet was charismatic, more than a bit grandiose and from the start clearly had little sense that the United States was a wholly separate country, at least a notional equal in the family of nations. The American Revolution remained extremely popular in France. But the French saw it as a forerunner of the revolutionary movement of which France was now the embodiment and true leader. And with that view in mind he proceeded to hold rallies and stir up supporters as though he was a political player in his own right rather than the ambassador of a foreign power.

Genet encouraged the revival of the Democratic-Republican societies which would be a recurrent feature of American popular politics for a couple decades after the Revolution, he raised militias of some sort. Most concretely he freely issued so-called Letters of Marque, essentially licenses to commit state-sponsored piracy against British shipping.

From the start, it seems clear, Genet thought his role as emissary of Revolutionary France would allow him to get his way in the US. He also had some limited understanding of division within the federal government itself – one embodied in the conflict between Treasury Secretary Alexander Hamilton and Secretary of State Thomas Jefferson, a contest that played itself out in networks of activists each directed around the country and more concretely in a struggle to shape the thinking of President Washington.

Genet calls out Jefferson publicly in his battle with US government officials

So there was the battle over the United States’ geopolitical alignment and an ideological struggle over fidelity to the Revolution. Were the Hamiltonians trying to recreate the British system of authority and hierarchy (perhaps even monarchy, as some Jeffersonians believed) under American auspices or were the Jeffersonians – loosely overlapping with elements of the anti-Federalists – pushing for a more radical, anarchic state that would tear society apart.

The operative question, critical for a country only a few years old, was whether these ideological controversies would prove more powerful than national attachment. Jefferson and those who followed him were deeply suspicious of Hamilton and deeply attached to France and the French alliance. So there was more than a little for Genet to work with. But what worked against him was paradoxically what also worked in his favor, an outlandish, almost cartoonish affect which allowed him to gather crowds but also led him into numerous errors. First among these was his inability to grasp that while he might see Washington as a mere provincial figure, the most of the American public revered him. And the bulk of them, when pushed, supported his efforts to maintain neutrality.

Genet repeatedly ignored Washington’s warnings about outfitting privateers and taking British prizes (captured) and finally reneged on an agreement not to allow a new privateer to set sail from Philadelphia. Rebuffed by Washington at one point he tried to raise an army in Kentucky that would invade Spanish possessions to the west. As his standoff with Washington spun out of control, he finally threatened to take his case directly to the American people. In a way he was totally nuts. But far more so through the distorting prism of two centuries. At the time it was less than clear what sort of country the fledgling United States would be – the playground of great powers, a factional or ideological bedlam. Many things were possible.

This was all too much for Washington and his cabinet agreed unanimously to demand that France recall Genet.


Genet in mid-life, as a gentleman farmer in Upstate New York

The whole drama had a comic anti-climax. By the time Washington demanded Genet’s recall the Girondists who had sent him had fallen from power and been succeeded by the Jacobins who had already commenced their Reign of Terror. Genet, so recently strutting about and trying to stand down General Washington, requested and was granted asylum. He married into a prominent New York family and died after a life as a country gentleman in 1834.

The differences between Genet and Dermer are of course vast. But there are very, very few cases in American history in which a foreign ambassador has inserted himself so brazenly into the country’s domestic politics or really at all, particularly in partisan politics. So the comparison is unavoidable. What is notable is that Genet represented the country that was very much the senior partner in the Franco-American alliance. France had been and would shortly be again the greatest power of the age. The United States was a small and militarily weak country on the coast of North America. Genet’s behavior was more visible but not terribly different from the way US ambassadors have acted in weak states around the world. The Dermer situation is of course quite different. He is the spokesman for the country that is very much the junior partner in the US-Israeli alliance.

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