My current research addresses the circulation of constitutional ideas in the late eighteenth-century Atlantic world, and introduces a number of novel ideas about the pathways of influence that linked the French and American revolutions. In 1795, after the fall of Robespierre and the suspension of the Terror, the French publicist Adrien Lezay wrote that the choice of constitutional forms could now be reduced to "a parallel between the republics of Massachusetts and Pennsylvania; that is to say, between two constitutions founded, either on the division or on the unity of the legislature." My first book project, Colossus: Constitutional theory in France and America, 1776-1799, vindicates this intuition, arguing that the major constitutional debates that divided French thinkers in the revolutionary era can be traced to an original fracture in American constitutional thought, between the popular constitution established by Benjamin Franklin in Pennsylvania, and the model of bicameralism and executive prerogative advocated most strongly by John Adams in Massachusetts. This basic antithesis oriented French constitutional thinking in the 1780s and structured the high-stakes debates over constitutional design that preoccupied the revolutionaries from 1789 forward. The American revolution, in an important sense, became the French revolution, just as the constitutional forms and ideas of the French revolution were exported back to America in the 1790s. And it was the dueling figures of Franklin and Adams who presided over this extended transatlantic dialogue.

In Colossus I register this process of intellectual exchange at three constitutional moments. First, I reframe the initial phase of the French revolution as a reception history of John Adams’s landmark Defence of the Constitutions of Government of the United States, published in 1787 and aimed at the influential French political economist Anne-Robert-Jacques Turgot. Second, I chart the startling prominence of Adams’s Defence in the Thermidorean Constitution of 1795, and its obvious imprint on the leading writers and thinkers of the Directory, above all Germaine de Staël, who seized on Adams's ideas to argue against the excessive democracy and untrammeled popular sovereignty of the Jacobins. The study ends with a third and final twist: the re-importation of French constitutional ideas into the American republic. Between 1792 and 1799 a constellation of radical writers based in Philadelphia began to press for a drastic reform of the 1787 US Constitution, pointing to the more egalitarian French model as their inspiration. It should not be surprising that the leading exponent of American constitutional reform was Benjamin Franklin’s grandson, and that its chief opponent was President John Adams.

This history makes three significant contributions to our understanding of the origins of modern constitutionalism. First, against a tradition that still insists on seeing the two revolutions as distinct historical events, my dissertation makes a case for their fundamental continuity, particularly at the level of their animating ideas. Second, this project restores the American state constitutions to their rightful place at the center of Atlantic political thought. While the Articles of Confederation, the Federal Constitution, and the Bill of Rights all attracted extensive commentary, it was above all the state constitutions that served as the models for imitation (and execration) in the revolutionary era. Finally, it asserts that the crucial American theorist of constitutionalism in the founding era was not James Madison or Thomas Jefferson, but rather John Adams, who provided the template for the 1787 constitution in his Massachusetts frame of 1780, and whose Defence of the same year exercised a vital influence on French debates in the decade that followed.

My second book project, under contract with Harvard University Press, will be a translation and critical edition of an unknown manuscript on the reign of terror in France by Thomas Paine, which I discovered in the National Archives last year. I will contribute a critical introduction of 50,000 words, exploring the provenance of the text and the reasons to accept Paine's authorship, as well as lingering reasons for doubt. I will also outline the most important ideas in the manuscript, from its harsh critique of emergency government to its intricate theory of sovereignty and legitimacy, asking how the text alters our perspective on Paine's political thought, and revises the assumptions of the current scholarship that Paine was a thoroughgoing radical and egalitarian.

After completing these projects I look forward to initiating my third book, which will also represent an intervention of some scale in the constitutional history of the eighteenth century. I plan to write a monograph titled Fraternité on the genesis of ideas of international government and human rights in the French revolution. It follows the extended network of "Girondins"—encompassing well-known figures like Condorcet and Paine, as well as comparatively obscure writers like Nicholas Bonneville—as they sought to give substance to the revolutionary ideal of a "universal republic." Part I will argue that these authors elaborated three critical ideas for the first time: (1) international government, in the form of plans for a global federation of peoples; (2) "human rights," applicable to all peoples and enforced by international law, as embodied by the Déclaration des droits des gens of the Abbé Grégoire in 1793; and (3) international criminal liability for human rights violators, expressed in plans to place the kings of Europe on trial for the newly-imagined crime of lèse-humanité. Part II will then chronicle the displacement of this cosmopolitan political theory by a more conservative alternative, which imagined only a minimalist international order, and was explicitly premised on French military hegemony.  The locus classicus of this new theory was Kant's essay "Toward Perpetual Peace," and I will trace the ways in which the reception of this work in France, spearheaded by the constitutional theorist Emmanuel Sieyès, narrowed the cosmopolitan horizons that Condorcet and his allies first opened.