IN 1860, A reviewer of Parke Godwin's History of France writing in the National Quarterly Review addressed directly the longstanding historiographical debate surrounding the impact of the Franks’ arrival on the native Gallo-Romans. Inclined to see this meeting of peoples as a peaceful amalgamation rather than a violent conquest, the reviewer concluded, “It is idle, then, to believe that Clovis and his ragged followers were able to subdue the Gauls. It is far more likely that the latter were desirous of a change; and that the establishment of the Frankish empire was just as much a Gallic revolution as that which made Napoleon Bonaparte First Consul, and subsequently Emperor.” That meaningful equivalencies might be found between the early Frankish regnum and recent revolutionary and imperial French politics was taken for granted by many Anglophone writers in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, who conceived of national histories as longue durée narratives in which individual participants came and went, but continuities and historical parallelism were perceptible. Samuel Goodrich, as noted above, in one of his many publications, informed his young readers that a contemporary equivalent to Charlemagne might be found in Napoleon, another “prince…seemed born for universal innovation.”

Such ostensibly analogous parallels between the French present and the Frankish past by no means appeared solely within the instructional frameworks of schoolbook narratives, nor were they always intended as flattering to either epoch: their purported significance was dictated in no small part by a writer's political orientation and attitude towards the revolutionary and later imperial regimes in France. While American sceptics of these regimes were more often associated with the Federalist party, and supporters with the (Democratic-)Republicans, attitudes did not neces-sarily break down consistently along party lines, especially as French radicalism and militancy became increasingly unpalatable to even previously sympathetic American observers. As historian Seth Cotlar has observed in regards to Thomas Jefferson's famous declaration in his inaugural address (1801) that “We are all Republicans, we are all Federalists,” implicit in this statement was the message that “while the new American leaders were now all Republicans and Federalists, they were adamantly not Jacobins.”