Citizenship Experiment

René Koekkoek is Assistant Professor in Political History at Utrecht University. His research focuses on the history of political thought and culture in the early-modern Atlantic world. This is his first book.

• AcknowledgmentsCover IllustrationIntroduction1Citizenship in the Age of Revolutions2The Terror and the Haitian Revolution3A Comparative Approach to the ‘Atlantic Thermidor’1‘The Kindred Spirit Tie of Congenial Principles’1Rights Declarations and the Constitutional Framework of Citizenship2Converging Revolutionary Citizenship Ideals3The French Revolution and the Heyday of a Transatlantic Ideal of Citizenship4Regimes of Exclusion2Saint-Domingue, Rights and Empire1The Logic of Rights and the Realm of Empire2The Nation’s Colonial Citizens3Slavery and Civic Inequality in the US before Saint-Domingue3The Civilizational Limits of Citizenship1The Enlightenment Language of Civilization2Unity and Hierarchy in the French Empire3Levelling Principles and Remorseless Savages4The Turn Away from French Universalism1Citizenship and Inequality in the Dutch Republican Empire2‘The vile machinations of men calling themselves philosophers’3The French Colonial Thermidor5Uniting ‘good’ Citizens in Thermidorian France1The Revolutionary Political Culture of Citizenship, 1792–17942Good Citizen / Bad Citizen3Isolating the Citizen4What is a Good Citizen? Redefining Civic Virtues5Narrowing Down Political Citizenship6The Post-Revolutionary Contestation and Nationalization of American Citizenship1A Burgeoning Partisan Public Sphere2‘Whether France is Saved or Ruined, is still Problematical’3Political Societies, Faction, and the Limits of Democratic Citizenship4Anti-Jacobinism and the American Citizenship Model7Forging the Batavian Citizen in a Post-Terror Revolution1Portraying the Terror between Orangist Restoration and Batavian Revolution2Limiting Power, Protecting Rights: The Terror and the Need for a Constitution3Channelling the Participation of the People4Nationalization5The End of the Democratic-Republican CitizenEpilogue. The Age of Revolutions as a Turning Point in the History of CitizenshipBibliographyIndex

"René Koekkoek has written one of the most important, and most provocative comparative studies of the late eighteenth-century Atlantic Revolutions since R.R. Palmer's The Age of the Democratic Revolution. Based on exhaustive research in original French, Dutch and American sources, and written in exceptionally lucid prose, The Citizen Experiment makes a bold argument about how the reaction to the violence and perceived excesses of the French "reign of Terror" and the Haitian Revolution led revolutionaries throughout the Atlantic world to embrace far more narrowly national and circumscribed ideas of citizenship than they had done at the start of their respective revolutions. All historians of the period will want to read, and engage with this book." - David A. Bell, Princeton University"The Citizenship Experiment presents a highly original study of the American, French and Dutch eighteenth-century revolutions. Instead of a traditional side-by-side comparison of the three revolutions, René Koekkoek demonstrates that political ideas on citizenship and equality circulated in an Atlantic political space and cannot be well understood in national frameworks. Koekkoek identifies a radical-democratic Atlantic historical moment in the early seventeen-nineties, followed by a conservative turn impacted by the Terror in France and the successful slave revolution in Haiti. His book is an inspiring example of intercrossing history, highlighting the entanglement of domestic and colonial politics in the making of citizenship in the Age of Revolutions." - Siep Stuurman, author of The Invention of Humanity: Equality and Cultural Difference in World History (Harvard, 2017)