By Janet Polasky

This post is a part of the 2026 Selected Papers of the Consortium on the Revolutionary Era, which were edited and compiled by members of the CRE’s board alongside editors at Age of Revolutions. This comment reflects on the contributions published by Rosemarie Zagarri, Lynn Hunt, and Julia Gaffield.

George Washington, Napoleon Bonaparte, and Jean-Jacques Dessalines each pursued a trajectory that allowed them to build on their military leadership to rise to leadership within the civilian governance of revolutionary nations. These powerful generals presided over the three states at the center of the Atlantic Revolution. Two centuries of myth making have sculpted them into distinctly different national founders who are rarely compared.

Customarily, over the last decades, Atlantic history has been written from the bottom up. Atlantic historians have found their prime actors who ignited the revolutions that upended centuries-old institutions in the alternative sphere of politics. These clandestine clubs networked and border-crossing revolutionaries spun webs that toppled the regimes of tyrants and brutes.[1]

The plenary panel for the Consortium on the Revolutionary Era focused on George Washington, Napoleon Bonaparte, and Jean Jacques Dessalines is different from the customary fare of an Atlantic Revolutions conference. These three leaders have been confined within the silos of national histories more tightly than any actors or movements from the revolutionary era. It might be equally surprising that they are the subjects taken up by these three historians. Rosemarie Zagarri is best known for her books and articles on Mercy Otis Warren and the morals and manners of women in the Early American Republic.[2] Lynn Hunt’s wide ranging work on the French Revolution includes the ground-breaking Family Romance of the French Revolution, a recent work on The Revolutionary Self, and often-assigned considerations of human rights.[3] Finally, Julia Gaffield helped the field rethink the Age of Revolutions in terms of the Caribbean with her prize-winning study of Haitian Connections in the Atlantic World.[4] However, all three historians have recently published or are about to publish reassessments of the three leaders.[5]

The historical record as reviewed by Rosemarie Zagarri, Lynn Hunt, and Julia Gaffield on this panel uncovers the strong affinities that united the seemingly disparate trio of men who accomplished the three foundational revolutions of the Atlantic world. Although their paths did not cross, their outsized reputations as national leaders ensured that they not only knew of each other but built their presidencies and empires in response to the others.

It made a difference to be first. George Washington as sketched by Rosemarie Zagarri created his model as a republican leader almost “from scratch.” His pride of invention conformed to the American revolutionaries’ view of their revolution as the first of the modern revolutions. For inspiration, Washington looked to classical Roman leaders. An admirer of Caesar and Alexander the Great for their tremendous military prowess, leadership, and world conquest, Washington displayed their busts at Mount Vernon. This choice foreshadowed Bonaparte’s use of Neoclassical art in keeping with the French emperor’s admiration of Augustus and Caesar. Washington came to identify Caesar with unchecked power, looking instead to Cato in his determination to defend liberty.

Was this model of a republican leader as invented by Washington one to be emulated by the revolutionary leaders who followed around the Atlantic? In 1799, Lynn Hunt’s Napoleon Bonaparte commemorated the American president’s death as he celebrated his own conquest of Egypt. Bonaparte saw himself as a crowned Washington. He would be “a true president of America,” just one with no checks and balance. His path was his own; as emperor, he expected to name his own successor.

The most significant difference distinguishing Bonaparte from Washington and Dessalines is that he reacted to the founding of the French revolutionary republic whereas Washington and Dessalines were the founders of theirs. Bonaparte promised to purge the new French nation of the inconveniences of popular rule. His ascension was possible only after the French Revolution revealed “the excesses of democracy and egalitarianism.” Then, the republic viewed the sacrifice of individual and political rights as a small price to pay for the return of order. Bonaparte, unlike Washington and Dessalines, did not oppose colonial power embodied in external rulers. His hybrid vision of the future that opened the possibilities of modern authoritarianism depended on recovering other elements of the past.

If the first French emperor used the tools of the republic to undermine democracy, Jean Jacques Dessalines’s relation to the people he ruled was equally complicated. The first head of state of Haiti, Dessalines was more legitimately a founding father than Washington. Dessalines was there at every major step including the writing of the 1805 national constitution, even if the French quickly forgot his “republican virtues.” Dessalines freed the people of the future Haiti, or in his words, the people were “artisans of their own freedom.” His enemies, however, framed the Haitian leader’s reputation as “ferocious and barbaric.” Julia Gaffield explains that as “father of my fellow citizens,” he did what was necessary to avenge them.

Even George Washington’s reputation as a populist suffered during his lifetime from his leadership in the Society of the Cincinnati with its hereditary membership limited to officers. In his aspiration to model republican leadership, Washington repeatedly relinquished power. He resigned as commander in chief, and after his term as president, chose not to remain in power as a dictator, creating what he envisioned as a template for a new kind of republican leader. Neither Bonaparte nor Dessalines walked away from power. Dessalines proclaimed: “I have done my duty. I know my worth: that is enough for me.”

In all three careers, military success and republican virtues entangled. George Washington, Napoleon Bonaparte, and Jean Jacques Dessalines were all extraordinarily effective military leaders. Their successes on the battlefield yielded the political power that catapulted them into national leadership. Their military prowess and reputation in turn oriented their political roles.

The American, French, and Haitian generals each saw themself as already removed from the level of the ordinary when they rose to political power. Washington portrayed himself as a reluctant civilian political leader. His republicanism depended on the performance of heroic actions and practice of martial bravery. Similarly, Bonaparte cast himself as simultaneously a “soldier of liberty,” and “a devoted citizen of the Republic.” Dessalines reiterated his conviction that a country at war needed a soldier to lead it. And Haiti was at war through 1804.

A continuous wartime footing was critical to the political success of Bonaparte and Dessalines, though not Washington Dessalines,” never put down the sword,” Julia Gaffield emphasizes. It was not a choice for him because other powers viewed his nation of formerly enslaved people as a threat. Under Dessalines, Haiti retained a military hierarchy.

Napoleon, for his part, created his own regimented hierarchy in France. He invented as he went, carving his own path. In his assumption of power after the French Revolution, Bonaparte explained, he had to contend “with dissolution inside and invasion from the outside.” At odds with all the many major powers that he had conquered on the battlefield, unlike Washington and Dessalines, Bonaparte cast former revolutionaries as internal enemies.

Even if his republic enjoyed relative peace, like the other founding fathers, Washington was aware of the vulnerability of the United States as the first people to break colonial ties. Washington saw the need for eternal vigilance because his self-governing republic was fragile.

Did any of the three live up to their model of a republican leader? Did their military experience make them less democratic as post-revolutionary republican leaders? As president, Washington, like Bonaparte and Dessalines came to favor a strong centralized government, with a powerful executive and standing army. He was definitely not alone.

These three generals left the imprint of their strong leadership on the nations they ruled. Sharing the sense of being embattled, they valued national unity over dissent. All three generals turned civilian leaders tended towards the concentration of power.

Were Washington’s shortcomings, as Rosemarie Zagarri enumerates them, just cracks in his armor? After all, his foibles were not his alone. Julia Gaffield suggests another way of assessing the three leaders. Not just a crack in their armor, she argues, racism was embedded in the enlightenment principles liberty and equality on which the American and French republics were founded. Haiti was founded as a counter example.

In keeping with classical republic thought, Rosemarie Zagarri explains that Washington gave little thought to the political status of enslaved Blacks and paid far more attention to free white males. His views changed over his lifetime with his growing awareness of the contradictions between slavery and freedom in a country dedicated to liberty. Julia Gaffield, however, asks us to consider that slavery corrupted the foundations of his nation dedicated to liberty.

The direct confrontation of French imperial forces and decrees and Caribbean abolition, makes this observation even more obvious, if less often discussed. After all, France was the only country to reinstate slavery in all its colonies after voting for its abolition. Bonaparte and Dessalines’ empires directly clashed in the Atlantic. In abolishing slavery, Jean Jacques Dessalines was defining a new path.

If, in Lynn Hunt’s words, Washington and Bonaparte’s trajectories were “unforeseen,” Jean Jacques Dessalines’s was unimaginable. Surrounded by imperial pro-slavery European powers and the United States eager to see him fail, he created “Haiti as a Black independent nation of formerly enslaved people.”

Finally, if the nation states erected by these military leaders at the end of the revolutionary era relied on forms of exclusion, what does that suggest about the foundations of modern democracy? Or, as Lynn Hunt suggests, their relation to modern authoritarianism? It is not coincidental that she used “France would be great again” to explain Bonaparte’s rise to power on the ruins of the French Revolution. Is modern authoritarianism the outright rejection of democracy, or a postlude to representative government, both erected on claims of popular support?

Was Bonaparte alone in using the tools of democracy to undo democratic practices, in concentrating power from popular revolutions in a supreme ruler, and in eschewing accountability as he claimed to restore social and political order? What does that say about the three revolutionary nations bordering the Atlantic? The response to that question explains why three women chose to discuss these three generals turned civilian founders of modern nation states at the Consortium.

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Janet Polasky is Presidential Professor of History Emerita at the University of New Hampshire. She is a historian of revolution, reform and refugees in Europe and the Atlantic world, and the author of six books. The most recent are Asylum between Nations: Refugees in a Revolutionary Era (Yale, 2023) and Revolutions without Borders: The Call to Liberty in the Atlantic World (Yale, 2015). She lives in Portsmouth, New Hampshire.

Title Image: The ‘Defence’ at the Battle of the First of June, 1794. Source: Wikimedia Commons.

Endnotes:

[1] British historian John Brewer debuted the phrase “an alternative structure of politics.” Brewer cited by Nicolaas C. Van Sas, “‘The Patriot Revolution: New Perspectives,” in The Dutch Republic in the Eighteenth Century: Decline, Enlightenment, and Revolution, ed. Margart C. Jacob,and Wijnand W. Mijnhardt (Cornell University Press, 1992), 115. See also: Sarah Knott, “Narrating the Age of Revolution,” The William and Mary Quarterly, 71,1 (January 2016), 3-16; and Janet Polasky, Revolutions without Borders. The Call to Liberty in the Atlantic World (Yale University Press, 2016).

[2] Rosemarie Zaggari, A Woman’s Dilemma: Mercy Otis Warren and the American Revolution, and Revolutionary Backlash (Harlan-Davidson, Inc., 1995 and Wiley: 2015); Women and Politics in the Early American Republic (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007); and “Morals, Manners, and the Republican Mother,” American Quarterly 44 (June 1992), 192-215. “The Rights of Man and Woman in Post-Revolutionary America,” William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd. ser., 60 (April 1998), 200-227. Her forthcoming book is Intimacies and Ambitions: Thomas Law in British India and the Early American Republic.

[3] Lynn Hunt, The Family Romance of the French Revolution (University of California Press, 1992); Inventing Human Rights (W.W. Norton, 2008); and The Revolutionary Self (W.W. Norton, 2025).

[4] Julia Gaffield, Haitian Connections in the Atlantic World: Recognition after Revolution, (The University of North Carolina Press, 2015); and Julia Gaffield, editor, The Haitian Declaration of Independence: Creation, Context, and Legacy, (The University of Virginia Press, 2016).

[5] Julia Gaffield, I Have Avenged America: Jean-Jacques Dessalines and Haiti’s Fight for 8 Freedom, (Yale University Press, 2025); Lynn Hunt, The Origins of Authoritarianism: What the Rise of Napoleon Bonaparte tells us about the Fundamental Problems of Modernity (Brandeis U Press); and Rosemarie Zagarri, David Humphreys’ ‘Life of General Washington’ with George Washington’s ‘Remarks’ (edited, with an introduction) (Athens, Ga.: The University of Georgia Press, 1991; paperback, 2006).