U. S. politics in the 1790s presented an elaborate mosaic of geographical, social, and ideological interests. The clash of different world views played out at many levels in response to the French Revolution, including diplomacy (the question of U.S. neutrality in the French Revolutionary Wars, whether it should lean more favourably to the French or to the British), constitutional questions and rights (not least in the era of the Alien and Sedition Acts of 1798), economic questions such as manufacturing, trade and commerce (what kind and with whom?), the westward expansion of the United States and slavery and abolition. But it also played out in political culture.
This article focuses on one expression of that political culture: the uses and appropriation of urban space. My own work these days is on revolutionary Paris, namely how the revolutionaries appropriated the buildings and spaces left by the Ancien Régime, adapted them to accommodate the institutions of the new civic order and in the process embellished them to convey their political messages. As Henri Lefebvre, the doyen of spatial theory, argued, space can be appropriated in both material and symbolic ways. For Lefebvre, representations of space are how space is envisaged and ordered by planners, architects, and proprietors. Conversely, representational spaces involve the ways in which people take over the space in symbolic and material ways, subverting the original intentions behind the site’s construction. This appropriation can in turn be challenged: the conflicts arising from the uses of space are itself part of the process of revolution.
The French Revolution had a direct impact on how American political actors used and embellished American urban space. The broader importance of this point is that it suggests how responses to the Revolution in France inscribed itself in material and symbolic ways on the urban landscape in the United States, intersecting with American politics and historical memory. New York City is a particularly apt choice because it had been devastated by fire and was a loyalist hub while under British military occupation. Afterwards it was briefly the capital of the young Republic (1783-90). So, its people and cityscape had undergone a cycle of trauma and renewal. Meanwhile, as a maritime city, its social and political geography saw a close mixing of neighborhoods of varying character and purpose which made it an intricate social and political mosaic crammed into a compact area on the southern tip of Manhattan. All this almost certainly sharpened the bitter partisanship that shaped the response to the French Revolution.