The American Origins of the French Revolutionary War

Abstract

The most famous of all debates on the reasons for war or peace for a new order—one that could be described as revolutionary, as the creator of a more just and superior political model—must certainly be the one that took place between December 1791 and January 1792 at the Jacobin Club in Paris. On the one side stood Jacques Pierre Brissot, who believed in a war against the whole of Europe in the name of bringing liberty to other peoples; and on the other Maximilien de Robespierre, who feared that such hostility would give rise to a dramatic backlash against the precarious political equilibrium of revolutionary France.²

Translated from the Italian by Stuart Wilson.