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To: USA-FRANCE; All
USA-FRANCE wrote: Do I have to remind you that the American constitution was in large parts copied and pasted from French revolutionary values, practices and theories?

That is a Lie.

James Madison, the acknowledged Father of the Constitution, and Three of the Fifty Five authors of the Constitution had read of a very few valuable concepts of law from two French thinkers more than a decade before the US Constitution was written.

That minor essay input was the only French influence on the wording of the Constitution.

You deliberately misrepresent the facts to spread Horse Manure.

177 posted on 05/21/2024 10:38:11 AM PDT by Navy Patriot (Celebrate Decivilization)
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To: Navy Patriot

The Founding Fathers were impregnated by the French Enlightenment. It’s common knowledge. In parts it guided their political moves.

The French Enlightenment in America: Essays on the Times of the Founding Fathershttps://muse.jhu.edu/pub/164/oa_monograph/chapter/3022292

The eleven essays originally published in 1984 under the title The French Enlightenment in America: Essays on the Time of the Founding Fathers, here reprinted, are both compelling and enjoyable. Paul Merrill Spurlin’s general hypothesis is crystal clear: French philosophes had a large influence in America—especially from 1760 to 1800. The writings of Voltaire, Diderot, Raynal, d’Alembert, Helvétius, d’Holbach, Condorcet, Bayle, Fontenelle, and Rousseau were received enthusiastically by leaders in the colonies and the new nation.

But the “Founding Fathers” absorbed more than daring political principles and moral maxims, Spurlin argues. They were also enthralled by entirely new visions of the natural world. Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson, as chapter 5 shows, made Buffon’s Histoire naturelle (1749) very popular—including, of course, Buffon’s wacky notion that every living being in America is either smaller or weaker than its European counterpart.

French intellectuals exerted an influence on the colonists first, and the founders later. But this could only happen, as Spurlin also argues, because French and Americans already belonged in “the same general climate of ideas.” These long-gone people were members of an “Atlantic community,” he says, a rather exclusive club of elite men who understood each other, though they rarely spoke the same language. An example: Montesquieu’s tripartite separation of powers—“the sacred maxim of free government,” as James Madison called it—was “an important article” of American political thought “long before 1776” (98).


179 posted on 05/21/2024 11:47:01 AM PDT by USA-FRANCE (The only thing needed for Evil to succeed is for good men to do nothing.)
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