Bastille Day and American Polarization

Happy Bastille Day! Or, depending on your viewpoint, shiver at the excesses of the French Revolution. Some of the most polarizing events in American history take place far from our shores. It’s happening now. It has happened before.

On July 14, 1789, just weeks after Washington became U.S. president, the Bastille prison in Paris fell to a furious French mob. Chaos, violence, and European wars ensued. Responses among Americans heightened divisions in our young Republic. When Washington warned against factions and foreign entanglements, it was already too late. John Adams and his Federalists, who favored a strong central government, sympathized with British fear of radicalism so close to home. Thomas Jefferson and his Democratic-Republicans, advocates of decentralization and individual liberty, sided with the French.

By summer 1798, Adams was president and the Federalists held power. In the name of national security, they passed four Alien and Sedition Acts to clamp down on immigration (most new immigrants voted Democratic-Republican) and dissent:

1. Naturalization Act: Gaining citizenship would take fourteen years instead of five.
2. Alien Friends Act: The president could deport foreigners he deemed dangerous to peace and safety.
3. Alien Enemies Act: The president could arrest, imprison, and deport subjects of enemy nations.
4. Sedition Act: To oppose any law or presidential act, or to print anything negative about the president or Congress, was a crime.

Jefferson called the last of these “so palpably in the teeth of the Constitution as to show they mean to pay no respect to it.” The Supreme Court did not take up the case. Angry voters elected Jefferson as their third president. He pardoned everyone convicted under the Sedition Act, and Congress repaid their fines. All but the Alien Enemies Act (intended for wartime) expired or were repealed in 1802.

It feels like déjà vu all over again.

Image: The Storming of the Bastille. Anonymous. Museum of French History, Versailles.