SOURCE: Tagg, James D. “The Limits of Republicanism: The Reverend Charles Nisbet, Benjamin Franklin Bache, and the French Revolution.” The Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography 112, no. 4 (October 1988): 503-43.

[In the excerpt that follows, Tagg considers Bache's early life, especially his relationship with his grandfather, and its effect on his views on the French Revolution, liberty, sovereignty, and other political ideas of the time.]

For more than two decades, a great transformation has been taking place in our understanding of the nature and evolution of late eighteenth-century American republicanism. Before the late 1960s, historians generally saw early Americans as natural republicans, pragmatically free of ideology. Insofar as philosophical ideas intruded on a republican ethos, they did so primarily through a common Lockean source. It was assumed that ideas were tangible, employed by individuals who consciously and deliberately embraced them in order to resolve real political issues and problems.¹

With the work of the republican revisionists—notably Bernard Bailyn, Gordon Wood, J.G.A. Pocock, Lance Banning, and Drew McCoy—the emphasis on things merely republican gave way to a more encompassing notion of an ideological essence of republicanism. At one level, these scholars substituted for the simplistic Lockean universe that formerly prevailed a complex causal link of republican ideas that ran from Aristotle to Machiavelli to Harrington to Montesquieu and Hume, with many stops in between and many permutations and combinations of ideas. Subsequently, there has been much disagreement at the primary level of essential philosophical roots, comparable disagreement at a secondary level over the influence of bodies of ideas interacting, and still further disagreement at the tertiary level over which holistic republican ideology best explains American society of the late eighteenth century. Most republican revisionists have adhered to classical republicanism, “country” oppositionist ideology formed in seventeenth-century England, or the even more recent ideological resurgence of eighteenth-century Scottish common sense philosophy.²

Equally important to a general growth in the concept of republican ideology has been the influence of modern scientific and anthropological concepts. Thomas Kuhn's concept of dominant ideological paradigms—bounded systems of accessible ways of thinking in any historical era—encouraged scholars to see American republicanism as a vortex engrossing all ideas and behavior.³ As Linda Kerber has noted, “‘Republicanism’ has become so all-embracing as to absorb comfortably its own contradictions.”⁴ Historians have been equally drawn under Clifford Geertz's broad anthropological umbrella. On a simple level of definition, Geertz explained ideology as something more than a mere coherent set of ideas, or as a vague collection of symptoms (such as reductionism), declaring that “formal ideologies tend first to emerge and take hold” when “a political system begins to free itself from the immediate governance of received tradition” (as in the American Revolutionary era).⁵ On a complex level, Geertz has dealt with how ideology worked culturally in face-to-face communities, where received ideas and their direct expression are only part of a larger integrated social process of language, symbols, and rituals. Coupled with Gordon Wood's observations about the dynamics of belief and the emotions of ideology, the Geertzian model of ideology has suggested the pervasiveness and inevitability of ideology in changing societies (which would seem to include all societies), where social inheritances and culturally conditioned collective and individual behavior supplanted rational choice and conscious ideas.⁶ In contrasting our earlier world of ideas with the new world of ideology, Joyce Appleby has noted: “Where the decision-making individual once stood at the center of our analysis of politics, ideology has pushed to the fore the social forces that presumably have shaped the consciousness of the individuals we study.”⁷

Appleby and others have recently attempted to crack the Kuhnian paradigm of the republican revisionists, while denying that Geertz's small communities are the same as the pluralistic early American republic and that socially molded ideas are beyond challenge or reshaping through assertive, ascriptive human thought. Thus, a competing set of ideas has been proposed (or reasserted) of Lockean liberalism, based on a vision of possessive individualism, economic liberalism, the primacy of private man, and the promise of “utilitarian liberty,” to oppose the republican revisionist insistence on culturally permeable classical republican ideas with their emphasis on the necessity of civic virtue, the danger of large republics, and the balancing of orders.⁸ Yet, the new theory of Lockean liberalism, when fully defined, appears as ideologically paradigmatic as classical republicanism. It too seems to engross and encompass all before it, leaving free individuals making rational choices out of some marketplace of ideas or other ideological systems a difficult thing to conceive. Some historians have further suggested that the two paradigms might work in tandem to explain early America.⁹

Thus, we now comprehend an intellectual and historiographic view of early American republicanism that suggests several axioms. First, Geertzian principles of cultural context and ideology have established the near inevitability that Americans would share republican ideological emotions and understandings at some primary, symbolic level, and that no matter where Americans acquired their republican ideas, the fermentation of those ideas into republicanism as a faith occurred through an exclusive, American cultural process. Second, paradigmatic thinking has encouraged us to conceive of republicanism as so inclusive and elastic that either the classical republican paradigm or the Lockean liberal paradigm would easily absorb even the most idiosyncratic of individual ideologues. In other words, the general sense is one of republican hegemony, of republican emotions irresistibly shared, of the centripetal forces of ethnocentric republicanism. While republican ideas might have their origin in England, Scotland, or Europe, republicanism as ideology was an all-embracing American faith that successfully focused the American public throughout the Revolutionary and early national periods.

For a few Americans, this bond of American republicanism came unglued, resulting in disenchantment, alienation, or rootlessness.¹⁰ Among the few who challenged this parochial bond of republican inclusiveness, albeit from opposite ends of the republican ideological spectrum, were the Reverend Charles Nisbet (1736-1806) and Benjamin Franklin Bache (1769-1798). Nisbet, recruited by Benjamin Rush to become principal of fledgling Dickinson College (1786-1806), was one of America's early promoters of higher education. His robust intellect, his wide reading and vast knowledge, and his compulsion to comprehend contemporary events in relation to timeless truths also made him one of the most relentless analysts of early American republicanism. Bache, grandson of Benjamin Franklin and editor of the Philadelphia General Advertiser and Aurora from 1790 until his early death in 1798, was one of Nisbet's ideological adversaries. Renowned less for his philosophical introspection than for his political activism, Bache nevertheless promoted a consistent radical ideology to an extensive readership. For some time after Nisbet emigrated to America in 1786, and after Bache returned with his grandfather in 1785, both men believed that an American republican ethic, agreeable to their respective ideological understandings, would be formed. But, in the 1790s, both men became nearly hysterical in what they saw as the growing bankruptcy of that ethic. In private correspondence, Nisbet occasionally identified Bache as culpable in that bankruptcy. Bache did not reciprocate, except in one early private encounter, but remained aware of the Carlisle Calvinist's opinions, and devoted his own career to attacking Nisbet's conservatism and identifying all that Nisbet stood for as the enemy of a new liberal order.

Nisbet and Bache challenged the prevailing central tendencies of the American ideological paradigms as we have come to define them. First, they staked out radical republican faiths on the extreme opposite ends of the republican spectrum in a manner that severely tests the idea of a hegemony of classical republicanism and Lockean liberalism. Second, both were transatlantic men who, while considering themselves Americans, were never fully socially acculturated. Instead, social alienation was their plight. Social alienation heightened ideological alienation thereby establishing a symbiotic cycle of rootlessness.¹¹ Third, unhappy with the weak character of the American republican ethic, they shifted their focuses away from American republicanism to the abstract ideological lessons of the French Revolution. Finally, having broken away from the indigenous republican ideological paradigms of their compatriots, Nisbet and Bache reapplied their republican beliefs—reduced and sharpened through their observations on French republicanism—to American events and America's future. …

As Nisbet privately railed against revolutionary change, he was not reluctant to single out villains who prompted the new age of liberty and equality, even attacking a young man thirty-three years his junior. In the late 1780s, Nisbet pointed his acerbic pen at an aged Franklin and a still adolescent Benjamin Franklin Bache, upon the latter's publication of two Latin and Greek readers. Nisbet apparently found fifty errors in Bache's publications without much effort, and wondered how the boy could hope to sell such literary incompetence to intellectually lazy Americans when his grandfather simultaneously chose to attack classical learning. Enraged, Bache apparently replied that he in fact had little real love of the classics and never planned to publish such works again, while defending Franklin's condemnation of the classics.¹² In subsequent letters to correspondents in the 1790s, Nisbet occasionally jibed at Bache's editorials and mocked Bache's shallow innocence. Publishing a newspaper subject to libel, Bache did not single Nisbet out during that decade, but he could not have been unaware of Nisbet's hostility and the fact that Nisbet represented the ideology he found anathema.¹³

Yet for Benjamin Bache, a contrasting process of personal alienation and the formation of equally hysterical and abstracted ideological beliefs was in the making. Born in 1769, Benjamin was the eldest son of Richard and Sarah Bache, and the grandson of Benjamin Franklin. Like his parents, Benjamin grew up as a willing captive in his famous grandfather's household. When Franklin died in 1790, the senior Baches inherited Franklin's properties and retired quietly, rarely surfacing as conspicuous members of society, never challenging the conventional conservatism that their “gentry” status accorded them. Young Benjamin, meanwhile, inherited Franklin's metaphysics and a passion to live to the political and moral standards he associated with his grandfather's example.¹⁴

Most of the reasons behind Benjamin Bache's later radical intensity had beginnings in his atypical childhood. To a large degree, all of young Benjamin's life, from childhood to young adulthood, involved a familial paradox—love, affection, and attention followed by estrangement, isolation, and depression. As a small boy, he was the center of the Franklin household's attention, doted over by proud parents and a loving grandmother. Even his absent grandfather revelled in the promotion of his grandson. Meanwhile, young Benjamin was undoubtedly coached to understand the importance of being adored by the celebrated and famous patriarch of the family. Then, comfort and security began to wash away for the first time. His grandmother died in 1774. Relatives of various sorts came and went. His grandfather arrived home in 1775, but the dislocating effects of the Revolution arrived as well.

Suddenly, in the fall of 1776, he was on board a fast ship for France with his older cousin Temple and his grandfather, not to see parents, brothers, sisters, and other relatives, nor to come to know his native land, for almost nine more years. Loved by his grandfather, but lost in the shuffle of Franklin's busy life at Passy, young Benjamin adapted to his new conditions by becoming dutiful and “a special good boy.”¹⁵ In early 1777, he was enrolled in Le Coeurs, an upper-middle-class boarding school in Paris, seeing Franklin on Sundays and holidays, and developing even then what would become a life-long pattern of trying to satisfy his grandfather. Franklin, distracted by other matters, became increasingly inattentive of his uncomplaining grandson, apparently unaware of, or unwilling to recognize, the implications of his central, all-commanding place in young Benjamin's universe.

Only occasionally was Franklin jolted into action. Troubled that his grandson spoke “French better than English,” Franklin packed the boy off to Geneva, noting, “as he is destined to live in a Protestant Country, and a Republic, I thought it best to finish his Education where the proper Principles prevail.”¹⁶ His mother worried vaguely about the “distance he is removed from you,” but Franklin's sister hit the nail more squarely on the head, asking, “how will he support the loss of you both [Franklin and his cousin Temple]?”¹⁷

Bache supported the loss in his Geneva years in natural ways for a ten-year-old boy. Alienated from Franklin's immediate affection, he turned to his guardian Philibert Cramer as a father figure. When Cramer died shortly after Bache's arrival in Geneva, Cramer's widow, Catherine, attempted to fill the emotional gap.¹⁸ But he only saw the Cramer family on weekends and holidays, and never discovered much warmth in his tutor, Gabriel de Marignac. In poignant schoolboy letters, he tried to impress on Franklin how hard he worked to win Franklin's and his parents' favor, while expressing the desire of reunion.¹⁹ Franklin's infrequent replies were admonitions to do well. “I shall always love you very much if you continue to be a good Boy [my emphasis],” he once declared, and on other occasions was blunt about how Benjamin had to live up to the virtues of his family and country.²⁰ Franklin then made estrangement even more painful by breaking his promise to visit Geneva. No one can be certain what the full consequences were. But the person closest to Benjamin, Catherine Cramer, while only concerned that he was shy and insecure in 1779, became more alarmed by his later tendency to become taciturn, indolent, and cold—displaying symptoms of disinterest that accompany depression.²¹

In 1783, alarmed at reports that Bache's pension had degenerated into a poverty-stricken institution more analogous to a prison than a school, Franklin recalled Benjamin to France. Although he initially tried to send the boy on to England to avoid the cultural degeneracy of Parisian society, young Benjamin literally won Franklin's affections anew and remained with his grandfather until their departure for America in 1785. Apparently these critical adolescent years of maturation put him more at ease.²² And, paradoxically, the Geneva years had strengthened him, making him more competent as an autonomous person. With Franklin at the height of his popularity in France, Bache basked in his grandfather's celebrity and generally came to identify Franklin (as the French had already) as the embodiment of American virtue and morality. In addition, Franklin directed him toward a useful trade—typefounding and printing—suggesting to the young man the equally powerful idea that he was to follow his grandfather's path. By all accounts, Bache's confident emergence into young adulthood proceeded in perfect synchronization with his continued bonding to Franklin from 1783 to 1790.²³

In 1785, Bache was instrumental in directing the packing that brought grandfather and grandson home to Philadelphia.²⁴ Young Benjamin believed it was a reunion and a homecoming, but all that was really familiar to him was Franklin and the warm reception Franklin received. In fact, Benjamin was to continue in even closer alliance with his grandfather for the next five years. At Franklin's insistence, he attended the University of Pennsylvania, although unhappy with the poor education he felt he received there.²⁵ With Franklin as his partner, he attempted to open an American type-founding business and finally failed. Also under Franklin's guidance he took up printing, distributing and selling books, with only slightly better success. It was Benjamin who acted as Franklin's secretary, and subsequently aided Franklin in resuming the writing of the Autobiography.²⁶ Through it all, Benjamin could not have been unaffected by Franklin's promotion of liberal views in regard to political science in general, the Pennsylvania Constitution of 1776, the U.S. Constitution of 1787, and the future of the American republic as a whole.

When Franklin died in 1790, Benjamin Bache, the European schoolboy, undoubtedly interpreted American society through the eyes of his patriot grandfather. Few persons are raised to adulthood so narrowly captive of one figure, and in Bache's case, that figure was of no mere single mortal, but a celebrity who was recognized by many as the symbol of American character, who stood as metaphor for much of what had been, and in some instances still was, American. For Bache, Franklin and America were coterminous.

The effect was more profound than Benjamin Bache's wholesale adoption of Franklin's philosophical views or political opinions. Federalist William Vans Murray hinted at one aspect of this effect upon Bache's death in 1798: “So it is to have had a philosopher for a grandfather, for that idea was the food of much of his extravagance of mind, and placed him in a state of pretence where he was obliged to act a part for which he had not talents.”²⁷ If evidence regarding modern radical youth has any application, Franklin represented a parental image of abstract values and morals which Bache not only felt he had to defend but had to promote, implement, and extend.²⁸ Alienation, therefore, only awaited Franklin's death and recognition that America's republican future was not destined to follow what Bache imagined was Franklin's liberal blueprint.

Bache's immediate response to Franklin's death was a repetition of the loneliness and depression he had felt when previously abandoned. The loss was “irreparable,” he claimed. He confided to his betrothed: “I have spent a Spring of great uneasiness. Fatigue, Anxiety, & Fear, Trouble & Grief.”²⁹ Benjamin would eventually claim some personal happiness through his marriage to Margaret Markoe and the everyday joys of family life. But at the level of attitude, belief, and commitment, responsibility to meet Franklin's standards now compelled him to discover appropriate responses to events around him without Franklin's aid and advice.

Material factors coalesced around his grief, enhancing his estranged condition and prompting him to seize upon some vocation. Without having secured a profitable trade, he was about to enter legal adulthood. Franklin's material legacy to Benjamin was the typefounding and printing equipment that had already failed to promise him a livelihood, and he seemed uncertain how this inheritance, “chiefly in tools that his Industry are to put in Motion assisted by his Fathers Aid,” would be employed. Even the lack of marriage conditions in Franklin's will was an unsecured benefit.³⁰ He had proposed to Margaret Markoe in early 1790, only to see her family whisk her off to faraway St. Croix for a long holiday; they were not married until November 17, 1791, a full year after Benjamin had established the General Advertiser.

Yet, when Benjamin turned his attention toward newspaper publishing in late 1790, he did so without a keen sense of political or ideological purpose. His great-aunt simply wished: “May he inherit all his grandfather's virtues, and then He will be likely to succeed to his honours.”³¹ Benjamin surely had a similar wish. He even briefly promoted a kind of cult of Franklin, in part to encourage his cousin Temple's edition of Franklin's works and to establish a market for a possible printing of the Autobiography.³² But he apparently recognized early that Franklin's principles, not his person, were the important object. For almost two and a half years, as Bache filled the columns of the General Advertiser with random expressions of an ideological creed, the promise of American republicanism also receded. It seemed tarnished by aristocratic vestiges and a lack of evangelical will to push toward logical consequences.

In a letter to his father, Benjamin revealed how events and his own philosophical and moral principles eventually made him a committed ideologue on behalf of the “spirit of republicanism.” Remembering that his mother had once remarked on attempts to “strike a line” between republican and anti-republican sentiment in America, and suggesting that true republican values were not yet secured, he pledged, “When it [the line] comes to be struck definitely [my emphasis] I hope I shall be found on the right side of it.”³³ For Bache, with Franklin gone and America betraying republican purity in a variety of ways, that ideological pledge fixed on the abstract promises of the French Revolution for its continued impetus and fulfillment. That commitment was so intense that even his parents, who shared Benjamin's hatred of Washington and were compelled by Franklin's will to aid Benjamin's paper financially, apparently abandoned their son entirely in the last days of his life, as the anti-French hysteria of 1798 reached its peak.³⁴

Because Benjamin Bache lived in France during his critical formative years, it has sometimes been assumed that he was nothing more nor less than an indiscriminate francophile. But, although he pretended to discover virtue in the French people as a whole (as he did in all people as a sovereign whole), he never expressed any love for the ancien régime he had lived in. Like Nisbet, Bache could claim to being a transatlantic man, having been raised and educated in France and Geneva. Yet, he subscribed to a visionary belief as far to the left as Nisbet's was to the right. A composite of radical Enlightenment views infused Bache's faith. These views not only denied any legitimacy or authority to monarchy and aristocracy, they also protested virtually any religious or institutional checks to man's self-fulfillment. For Bache, the future promised new social harmony and progress through the liberty of the individual on the one hand and the collective and immediate sovereignty of the people on the other. Bache's radical Enlightenment views, while clearly parroting Franklin's general philosophy and Jefferson's utopian communalism, reflected familiarity with Locke, attachment to Paine's Rights of Man, an appreciation for both Condorcet and Rousseau, and even some suggestions of influences from the Scottish common sense philosophers.³⁵

What produced Bache's magnetic attraction to France was the triangular marriage of his cultural and linguistic acquaintance with France; his immersion in Franklinian morals, political principles, and symbolism; and his devotion to an Enlightenment liturgy which had boyhood roots but flowered during his 1790s publishing years. When the French Revolution fused these three elements, Bache discovered an essential continuity between America and France. Personally, he would henceforward identify the American revolutionary past, which to him had been experienced only through Franklin's being, with an American, French, and even world revolutionary future. Bache's enemies were correct in calling him a consistent apologist for France in the 1790s.³⁶ But while the French Revolution passed through radically differing stages, Bache's vision of that revolution remained the same. He made events conform to image. The reason was clear, as he asked rhetorically: “Can you seriously suppose that the present struggle of that nation [France] is not the beginning of that universal reformation which is about to take place in the world for the general benefit of the human race, & which will unfold itself into successful reality?”³⁷ France represented the triumph of liberty over tyranny, and he believed that even American liberties ultimately rested on French success.³⁸ In his optimistic moments he predicted the sovereign people's liberation in Italy, Poland, India, Mexico, Canada, Ireland, and England.³⁹ Like Condorcet, whom he read and admired, his faith was built on the belief that the tenth epoch of man was at hand.⁴⁰

During the halcyon period, before the crisis of August 10, 1792, and the emergence of the French Republic, as most Americans passively anticipated good effects from the revolution, Bache blithely assumed that others joined him in recognizing the approach of liberty, equality, and progress. “Liberty is a plant of quick growth, takes deep root in a short time, and spreads rapidly,” the General Advertiser proclaimed confidently.⁴¹ Whereas factionalism and anarchy in France troubled others, Bache predicted the ultimate extinction of parties and the creation of unity,⁴² thereby establishing an ideological response which he would employ again and again. When the Girondists initiated a patriotic war against Europe as a means to rally revolutionary unity, Bache ignored motives and stretched credulity in regard to the Austrian threat to restore the ancien régime:

If it came to this, the French need only say to the German troops—Had you rather die all slaves than live all free men; and they will turn about and proceed towards Vienna, there to assist in framing a Constitution for themselves—taking a fundamental principle, the rights of men, rejecting the pretended rights of sovereigns when incompatible with the first, and teach Leopold, that Sovereignty is in the People, and Kings are only Kings as long as it is the interest of the People that they should be Kings.⁴³

The radical revolution, the rise of the Jacobins, and the fate of the king gave Bache some problems. The Jacobins did not represent Bache's sacrosanct majority, but he weakly excused their intrusion into the revolution on the basis that “a majority of the leading men in the nation belong to the society,” and they were “fundamentally republican.”⁴⁴ The demise of Louis XVI, who had received sympathetic treatment in the General Advertiser as America's benefactor, was justified as a necessary consequence of the evils of monarchy and the needs of republicanism, although Bache privately predicted that the king and queen might die as “martyrs in a bad cause.”⁴⁵ As Americans abandoned the French Revolution after 1793, Bache continued to warn his readers: “Upon the establishment or overthrow of liberty in France probably will depend the permanency of the Republic in the new world.”⁴⁶ Thus, the war in Europe had to be won by France at all costs. The Terror also was excused as the consequence of counter-revolutionaries and residual aristocratic influence. Danton, and after him, Robespierre, were first victims of anti-republicanism and later enemies of liberty themselves.⁴⁷

As had happened with Robespierre, Bache's vision of the “people” became more abstract. During Jacobin ascendancy he praised proposals in education and the arts, religious reform, and the new French calendar.⁴⁸ But even the Thermidorean Reaction and the Directory that followed did not strip Bache of the belief that a spirit of republicanism remained aglow in France underneath whatever immoderate government was in power. Robespierre's death, he noted, simply proved “that the French revolution or the liberties of any people do not rest on the existence of any man.”⁴⁹ Furthermore, after the Jay Treaty, emphasis shifted from French inconsistencies to the threat of British despotism. So, contrary to Nisbet, possible French occupation of Louisiana was not a threat, but of “utmost advantage” to Americans “as an exemplary warning against the growing spirit of Aristocracy among us … [and] as a safe and free asylum from tyranny in the event of the majority of our fellow citizens being betrayed into so diabolical an alliance as the tame surrender of Republican freedom at the feet of Aristocracy & Kingly pageantry.”⁵⁰ The pretense of Bache's politics and the twists and turns of Bache's rationalizations for France were more than Nisbet could bear. “Mr. Benjamin Franklin Bache has abandoned the Interest of the Convention,” he noted with amusement in 1795, “which may be followed by the entire defection of the whole Democratic Society of Pennsylvania.”⁵¹

Bache's ideological vision, defined in the French Revolution, was monotonously static. Although this ideology depended philosophically on Franklin's utilitarian democracy, Rousseau's general will, and Paine's Rights of Man,⁵² it was the French Revolution that gave practical application of progressive ideas real meaning. Intellectual profundity was not Bache's interest; universal applications of a simple, straightforward ideology was. Thus, men in a liberated state were fully reasonable and educable, easily capable of self-government, and made virtuous instantly through the broad distribution of property among them.⁵³ Secular salvation was condensed into a simple creed:

I believe that no authority can be legitimate but that which is delegated by the free voice of the people; and that the representative system, founded on frequent elections and universal suffrage, is the perfection of political wisdom.⁵⁴

Bache convinced himself that France promised to fulfill man's sovereign potential, but at home he found American impulses to secure the American Revolution and establish order short of full democracy both incomprehensible and anathema. The Constitution was pronounced good in 1791, but even that early he announced that, “should a majority of the people at any time think that they could enjoy greater political happiness by a change of government, the principles of the Constitution would not be looked upon as fixed principles.”⁵⁵ He gradually came to realize two things: that America's elite was not going to establish the complete sovereignty of the people, and that public servants, particularly Washington, were willing to ignore the popular majority and initiate policies which differentiated rather than united society. After the Jay Treaty, which he felt was an abject denial of France, Bache saw all hopes for America erode. Although he worked feverishly to prove the people's opposition, he found the administration betraying its trust, and America realigned with a despotic rather than a republican state.⁵⁶

Yet, it was the Whiskey Rebellion and the Sedition Act that really tested the consistency of Bache's adherence to liberty and popular sovereignty. In both cases, he passed that test. In the former, as both editor and a leading spokesman of the Democratic Society, he denounced the whiskey excise as oppressive and unjust, but consistently criticized violence and extra-legal opposition to the excise, attacked the government for employing heavy-handed tactics out of proportion to the threat, and defended all petitions, elections, and other democratic legal procedures undertaken during the crisis. When the Democratic Society almost disintegrated over a motion sharply chastizing the rebels for undermining liberty and the principle of sovereignty, Bache was not among those offended by the resolution, but assumed the chair for its further debate (it was later dropped as too inflammatory).⁵⁷

In regard to the Sedition Act, which had been adopted in part as a means to silence Bache's paper, it is often overlooked that Bache did not follow other Jeffersonians in condemning the act on the basis of jurisdictional rights of states versus federal powers, but on its violation of the principles of liberty and sovereignty, which could not stand its existence:

If the government is instituted for the benefit of the people, no law ought to be made to their injury. One of the first rights of a freeman is to speak or to publish his sentiments; if any government founded upon the will of the people passes any ordinance to abridge this right, it is as much a crime as if the people were, in an unconstitutional way, to curtail the government of one of the powers delegated to it.⁵⁸

By 1798, his campaign against a perceived despotic threat at home and abroad had reached its crescendo, and his fears about the maintenance of republicanism in France and America had become near hysterical. His remedy for saving France was the success of French arms, as much as it had been the defeat of them for Nisbet. His remedy for America was institutional, as he argued briefly in a pamphlet primarily written as a scathing attack on Washington. Deeply troubled by what he saw as a “usurpation” of power by the Washington administration in the Jay Treaty battle, he groped for an ultimate solution to executive responsibility, advocating treaty power checks and recommending greater contact between the people and the president. But being unable to convince himself that a single president could maintain a noble and virtuous bearing, he asked rhetorically, “what evil is in a plural directory, gradually renewed?”⁵⁹ Thus, “the executive government would no longer exhibit the fluctuating character of an individual, but approach nearer to the fixed abstract of the American nation.”⁶⁰ He obviously had in mind the French Directory and the Supreme Executive Council of Pennsylvania (of which Franklin had been a member). American senates were dismissed as corrupt vestiges of British colonialism. While not directly denying John Adams's separate branches of government, Bache radically amended Adams's intent by calling for all branches of government (be there two or three) to be plural, frequently elected, and popularly chosen. In concluding these gratuitously offered reforms, he returned again to the ideology that governed the entirety of his life, proclaiming that history's only lessons were “never to let those who govern have a separate interest from those who are governed; and the other never to trust too much power in the hands of a single man and especially not one of the public choice.”⁶¹

Nisbet and Bache died committed to beliefs that were diametrically opposed. Nisbet was absolute in his confidence that only through full subjugation to God and glorification of Him could man find peace and order, establish workable class relationships, seek education and enlightenment, and exercise the modicum of liberty of which sinful men were capable. Bache stood all of this on its head. Liberty was the fundamental solution, not a residual benefit. On it depended man's natural improvement. Artificial classes, orders, and divisions slowed and stymied education and progress. Lack of liberty denied man his natural birthright to participate as a part of the sovereign whole.

Both ideologies were naive. Nisbet predicated everything on a Burkean exercise of moral self-restraint, superhuman will and commitment, and the denial of avaricious behavior that perhaps Bache, but certainly no rigid Calvinist, could expect from man. Bache believed that liberty and freedom would lead man to make only the morally right choices that Nisbet demanded, that self-interest of the Lockean-Jeffersonian type would magically become merged with the collective interest, or at least peaceably acquiescent to it.

No wonder Nisbet died a gloomy pessimist, while Bache had corresponding doubts about his civil millennium. “This Century seems to Set in Blood,” Nisbet concluded in 1799.⁶² In a famous letter to Samuel Miller, he thoroughly condemned the eighteenth century for its “spirit of free inquiry” and “scepticism,” its “unrestrained liberty of thought, speech, publication and action,” its rationalism and materialist philosophy, and its denial of historical lessons.⁶³ While Nisbet hinted that a return to an ordered society and the promotion of education might ameliorate the bitter estrangement he felt toward the entire century, there was no eliminating the fundamental alienation inherent in his ideology. He was not advocating merely a Burkean resignation to the way things were; he was demanding wholesale attribution of will and being to an external God.

To the very end, Bache was also drawn to glib notions of education as the chief palliative for society's ills. His last act was to leave everything to his wife with the sole recommendation “that she will bestow on our dear Children a suitable and enlightened Education, such as shall be worthy of us, and advantageous to themselves, and render them virtuous, generous, and attached to the immutable principles of Civil Liberty.”⁶⁴ But as the columns of the Aurora attest, education only improved man in a limited way if all of society were not reformed. In his last letter, written during the yellow fever epidemic that would kill him, Bache seemed ready to step ahead into a kind of pre-Marxian understanding of society. “Is it not heart rending,” he observed, “that the labouring poor should almost exclusively be the victims of the disease [yellow fever] introduced by that commerce, which, in prosperous times, is a source of misery to them, by the inequality of wealth which it introduces?”⁶⁵ But Bache did not live to make it to another stage of ideological consciousness, if, indeed, he ever would have. Instead, he satisfied himself with glib generalities about liberty and sovereign people which were as much other-worldly abstractions as Nisbet's God, and just as alien from social reality.

Standing back to see Nisbet and Bache in full contrast, it is worth noting that at the primary level of the direct influence of specific political philosophical ideas on both men's lives, it is nearly impossible to discover clear-cut origins of their political philosophies. At the secondary level of ideas and influences in combination—of ideas more generally “in the air”—Nisbet obviously embraced an idiosyncratic Calvinist-Burkean focus, while Bache promoted a radical Franklinian-Enlightenment faith in progress. But the discovery of the sources of their ideas in isolation or combination is neither particularly interesting nor productive of significant explanation. What is significant is their processes of ideological evolution in the context of their world at the end of the eighteenth century. As Geertz contends, it is insufficient to consider “ideology as an entity in itself—as an ordered system of cultural symbols rather than in the discrimination of its social and psychological contexts.”⁶⁶

For Nisbet and Bache, the process of ideology was articulated through rejection, not acceptance, of many of the American social realities they saw before them, and their substitution of images of the French Revolution for more immediate American republican lessons. Both men stretched the very elastic paradigms of republican revisionism and Lockean liberalism to their breaking points. When they had reached the extreme limits of prevailing ideological sentiment, they could only satisfy their ideological visions by justifying them through lenses focused on the revolution in France. Only after verifying their beliefs through virtual reification of the French Revolution could they come to terms with what was wrong with the American republic.

To some degree, Nisbet and Bache may appear anomalous, and their ideological positions unique. Yet the evidence is clear that both men, even in the midst of their most intense moments of ideological despair, assumed they were addressing a larger audience that shared the main tenets of their beliefs—Bache through his cohort of political associates and his readership, Nisbet through his correspondents and students. So it may be that close examination of other Americans in the fluid and dynamic first three decades of the republic will reveal other ideologies that stretch or alter the centripetal pull of current thinking on American republicanism. Perhaps through discovery of those on the ideological peripheries we will learn more about the central conceptual ethos of the era.

Notes

1. America's non-ideological past is promoted most consistently in the various works of Daniel Boorstin, while Louis Hartz, The Liberal Tradition in America: An Interpretation of American Political Thought Since the Revolution (New York, 1955), argued that Americans were Lockean by default more than selection.

2. The use of the late 1960s as a dividing line is based, of course, on the publication of Bernard Bailyn's, The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution (Cambridge, 1967). Subsequently, Gordon S. Wood and J.G.A. Pocock, in various books and articles, broadened the republican revisionist focus. Lance Banning, The Jeffersonian Persuasion: Evolution of a Party Ideology (Ithaca, 1978), and Drew McCoy, The Elusive Republic: Political Economy in Jeffersonian America (Chapel Hill, 1980), further promoted this ideology by stressing its lingering influence into the 1790s and beyond. The literature on the origins of American republicanism is so vast that only limited references can be cited here. The best general surveys of the literature may be found by consulting Robert Shalhope's two articles: “Toward a Republican Synthesis: The Emergence of an Understanding of Republicanism in American Historiography,” William and Mary Quarterly 29 (1972), 49-80; and “Republicanism and Early American Historiography,” ibid., 39 (1982), 334-56. See also Donald S. Lutz, “The Relative Influence of European Writers on Late Eighteenth-Century American Political Thought,” American Political Science Review 68 (1984), 189-97; and, especially, Daniel Walker Howe, “European Sources of Political Ideas in Jeffersonian America,” Reviews in American History 10 (1982), 28-44. After Bailyn, Wood, and Pocock introduced a new richness to the sources and types of republican ideas available, more recent authors have either uncovered a further plethora of sources or have attempted to locate the proper recipe of combined ideas to explain the true essence of early republican America. Thus, Garry Wills has emerged as a champion of Hume and Scottish philosophy in the ideas of Jefferson, Hamilton, and Madison. See his Inventing America: Jefferson's Declaration of Independence (New York, 1978), and Explaining America: The Federalist (Garden City, 1981). John Patrick Diggins, The Lost Soul of American Politics: Virtue, Self-Interest, and the Foundations of Liberalism (New York, 1984), correspondingly denies the influence of classical republican ideas and Scottish moral philosophy in favor of a theory of self-interest and Calvinist morality as the vague motive forces in American ideas. Recently, Forrest McDonald, Novus Ordo Seclorum: The Intellectual Origins of the Constitution (Lawrence, 1985), 57-96, has rearranged the intellectual furniture again, offering a brilliant view of American political theory in which some republican thought was reduced to ideology and some was not. He argues that republican ideas which became ideological could be broadly labelled as either “puritan” (classical) or “agrarian” (modern), while he treats “country party” opposition thought as a separate ideology altogether.

   The difficulty in teasing out of this republican complex the individual elements or combined ideas behind republicanism has led some historians to take a more general, common sense view of the origins and nature of American republican ideas. For example, Howe, “European Sources,” 41, claims “that instead of country ideology constituting a consensus within which all Jeffersonian political debate occurred, it was one intellectual option among several. These options ranged from Burkeanism and the court party on the right through the country party and Smithian liberalism to Christian and secular radicalism on the left. All of these options made extensive use of Scottish ideas.” McDonald, Novus Ordo Seclorum, ix-x, also illustrates the futility of trying to locate specific ideational origins through the example of Jefferson's “pursuit of happiness” phraseology. The wide integration of ideas is further suggested in Lance Banning, “Jeffersonian Ideology Revisited: Liberal and Classical Ideas in the New American Republic,” William and Mary Quarterly 43 (1986), 3-19; Joyce Appleby, “Republicanism in Old and New Contexts,” ibid., 43 (1986), 20-34; Lutz, “Relative Influence of European Writers”; and Richard K. Mathews, The Radical Politics of Thomas Jefferson: A Revisionist View (Lawrence, 1984).

   This leads us to wonder, with Linda Kerber, “The Republican Ideology of the Revolutionary Generation,” American Quarterly 37 (1985), 474-96, just what is left of things “republican” as contrasted with the broader, more culturally bound, ethos of republicanism. We may be left with a Wittgensteinian concept of republicanism. As Wittgenstein argued in regard to a definition of games, we may see in republicanism, “a complicated network of similarities overlapping and criss-crossing: sometimes overall similarities, sometimes similarities of detail.” See Melvin Rader, ed., A Modern Book of Esthetics: An Anthology (3rd ed., New York, 1960), 196. One modern student of liberal democratic rhetoric already insists on the need for this general view in regard to democracy. See Russell L. Hanson, The Democratic Imagination in America: Conversations With Our Past (Princeton, 1985), 23.

3. Thomas Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (Chicago, 1962). For succinct and intelligent comment on scientific and anthropological influences on republicanism, see Appleby, “Republicanism in Old and New Contexts.”

4. Kerber, “Republican Ideology,” 480.

5. Clifford Geertz, “Ideology as a Cultural System,” in his The Interpretation of Cultures (New York, 1973), 219.

6. Ibid. On the dynamism of ideology, see Gordon Wood, “Rhetoric and Reality in the American Revolution,” William and Mary Quarterly 23 (1966), 3-32. No one illustrates the relationship of culture and social realities to ideology better than Eric Foner, Tom Paine and Revolutionary America (London and New York, 1976).

7. Joyce Appleby, “Republicanism and Ideology,” American Quarterly 39 (1985), 461-73.

8. This Lockean counter to classical republicanism is primarily the work of Joyce Appleby in “What's Still American in the Political Philosophy of Thomas Jefferson?” William and Mary Quarterly 39 (1982), 287-309; “Commercial Farming and the ‘Agrarian Myth’ in the Early Republic,” Journal of American History 68 (1982), 833-49; and Capitalism and a New Social Order: The Republican Vision of the 1790s (New York, 1984). See also, Isaac Kramnick, “Republican Revisionism Revisited,” American Historical Review 87 (1982), 629-64.

9. For example, Kerber, “Republican Ideology.” McDonald, Novus Ordo Seclorum, viii, defines the paradigmatic borders brilliantly in charging that ideological historians “have inadequately addressed the counterpart tensions between communitarian consensus and possessive individualism and those between the concepts of liberty to participate in the governing process and liberty from unlimited government.”

10. A few works do address the issue of those Americans who ultimately found themselves out-of-touch with the prevailing ideological tendencies of the times. For example, see Linda K. Kerber, Federalists in Dissent: Imagery and Ideology in Jeffersonian America (Ithaca, 1970). For an excellent work that looks most specifically at Charles Willson Peale, Hugh H. Brackenridge, William Dunlap, and Noah Webster, see Joseph Ellis, After the Revolution: Profiles of Early American Culture (New York, 1979). Lawrence J. Friedman, Inventors of the Promised Land (New York, 1975), traces the attempt of early advocates of “the rising glory of America” to fashion a patriotic ethic in the face of persistent localism and profound personal rootlessness.

11. Alienation as it is used here means a separation of someone (Nisbet and Bache) from something (American culture and society) and not a simple feeling of indifference or aversion. Alienation means estrangement from what they thought they understood. Its symptoms are abstraction and imagination—an other-worldly quality of perception and faith. Useful definitions of alienation, its symptoms and consequences, can be found in G. Petrovic, “Alienation,” in The Encyclopedia of Philosophy (New York, 1967), 1:76-81; Richard Schacht, Alienation (New York, 1970); and Frank Johnson, ed., Alienation: Concept, Term and Meanings (New York, 1973).

12. The Nisbet-Bache exchange is cited in Bernard Fay, The Two Franklins: Fathers of American Democracy (New York, 1933), 105-6. I have been unable to locate Nisbet's letter or Bache's reply, and believe them no longer extant.

13. For Nisbet's ridicule of Bache, see CN to Alexander Addison, Aug. 6, 1795; June 17, 1796; and Dec. 3, 1796, Addison Papers.

14. All biographical material on Franklin, the Baches, and Benjamin Bache contained herein, unless otherwise noted, is from Claude-Ann Lopez and Eugenia W. Herbert, The Private Franklin: The Man and His Family (New York, 1975); and/or James D. Tagg, “Benjamin Franklin Bache and the Philadelphia Aurora (Ph. D. diss., Wayne State University, 1973).

15. Benjamin Franklin (hereafter, BF) to Mary Hewson, Jan. 12, 1777, in Albert H. Smyth, ed., The Writings of Benjamin Franklin (10 vols., New York, 1905-1907), 7:10.

16. See, respectively, BF to Sarah Bache, June 3, 1779, ibid., 7:348; and BF to J.Q. Adams, April 21, 1779, ibid., 289.

17. Sarah Bache to BF, Sept. 14, 1779; and Jane Mecom to BF, Sept. 12, 1779, [William Temple Franklin], ed., Letters to Benjamin Franklin from His Family and Friends, 1751-1790 (New York, 1889), 105, 104.

18. The Cramer-Bache relationship is detailed in Lucien Cramer, Une Famille Genevoise, Les Cramers leurs relations avec Voltaire, Rousseau et Benjamin Franklin Bache (Geneva, Switzerland, 1952), 60-64.

    When can follow Benjamin Bache's childhood closely because he wrote several letters to his grandfather and others between 1779 and 1783, and left a diary of his activities at Geneva and Passy. See Benjamin F. Bache Diary, Aug. 1, 1782 to Sept. 14, 1785, Benjamin Franklin Bache Papers (American Philosophical Society).

19. See, for example, Benjamin F. Bache (hereafter, BFB) to BF, May 30, Dec. 21, 1779; March 25, May 6, 30, June 19, Sept. 26, 1780; June 30, 1781; Aug. 30, 1782, ibid. In 1783, Benjamin remarked that news of peace gave him “a great deal of pleasure, because that gives me hope of seeing you soon.” BFB to BF, Jan. 30, 1783, Franklin Papers (Historical Society of Pennsylvania).

20. BF to BFB, Aug. 14, 1779, Smyth, ed., Writings of Benjamin Franklin, 7:368-69. Franklin's expectations of the boy were often spelled out with cold precision. See BF to BFB, Jan. 25, 1782, ibid., 8:372-73; BF to BFB, Sept. 25, 1780, cited in Lopez and Herbert, Private Franklin, 228; and BF to BFB, April 16, 1781, Franklin-Bache Family Papers (American Philosophical Society).

21. For Mrs. Cramer's evaluation, see Cramer, Une Famille Genevoise, 61; and Lopez and Herbert, Private Franklin, 227-28.

22. BF to Mary Hewson, Sept. 7, 1783, Smyth, ed., Writings of Benjamin Franklin, 9:89. Mrs. Hewson politely discouraged Franklin from sending the boy to her but when later meeting Benjamin at Passy, remarked on the young man's “sensible and manly” manner, his “simplicity” of character, and his “amiable” attitude. Passy was home to Bache; anxieties and depressions disappeared as this appraisal and evidence in Benjamin's diary suggest. M[ary Stevenson] H[ewson] to [Barbara Hewson], Jan. 25, 1785, Miscellaneous Manuscripts Collections (American Philosophical Society).

23. On Franklin's guidance, see especially BF to Richard Bache, Nov. 11, 1784, Smyth, ed., Writings of Benjamin Franklin, 9:279. For Benjamin's diligence in following his grandfather's wishes, see B.F. Bache Diary, Oct. 8, 9, 11, 1784; and Jan. 21, March 19, April 5, May 14, 1785.

24. B.F. Bache Diary, May 14, 1785.

25. See, especially, BF to Mary Hewson, Oct. 30, 1785, Smyth, ed., Writings of Benjamin Franklin, 9:474; and BFB to Robert Alexander, Oct. 30, 1785; Oct. 16, 1786, B.F. Bache Papers.

26. Ibid.; Tagg, “Benjamin Franklin Bache and the Philadelphia Aurora,” 80-82; and Leonard Labaree, et al., eds., The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin (New Haven, 1964), 22-40.

27. William Vans Murray to J.Q. Adams, Nov. 27, 1798, in Worthington C. Ford, ed., “Letters of William Vans Murray to John Quincy Adams,” Annual Report of the American Historical Association for the Year 1912 (Washington, 1913), 489-90.

28. Socio-psychological studies of the 1960s, however much distorted by the events and “conventional wisdom” of the decade, suggest with at least some authority that radicals rather consistently became radical by trying to act out in exaggerated ways the humanistic values only rhetorically expressed by their parents. See Kenneth Keniston, Young Radicals: Notes on Committed Youth (New York, 1968), 44-77; and Richard Flacks, “The Liberated Generation: An Exploration of the Roots of Student Protest,” Journal of Social Issues 23 (1967), 52-75.

29. [B.F. Bache] to [Margaret H. Markoe], May 2, 10, 1790, B.F. Bache Papers.

30. Ibid.

31. Jane Mecom to Sarah Bache, Sept. 6, 1790, in Carl Van Doren, ed., The Letters of Benjamin Franklin & Jane Mecom (Princeton, 1950), 342.

32. Tagg, “Benjamin Franklin Bache and the Philadelphia Aurora,” 222-24; and [Philadelphia] General Advertiser, Oct. 2 [“Character of Dr. Franklin” from St. James Chronicle], 6, 11, 1790; June 7, Oct. 14, 1791. All that Bache finally published was William Smith, Eulogium on Benjamin Franklin … (Philadelphia, 1792).

33. BFB to Richard Bache, Feb. 3, 1793, transcript of a manuscript in the possession of Mrs. J. Manderson Castle, Wilmington, Del. (hereafter, Castle MSS).

34. The family's mutual hatred of Washington was noted by a Polish traveller in his journal on April 19, 1798. Julian Ursyn Niemcewicz, Under Their Vine and Fig Tree, Travels through America in 1797-1799, 1805, With Some Further Account of Life in New Jersey, trans. and ed. by Metchie J.E. Budka (Elizabeth, 1965), 61. Lopez and Herbert, Private Franklin, 312, claim Benjamin's ultimate estrangement from his parents. The fact that his wife's step-father was the executor of Benjamin's will and the rumored prop to the Aurora in late 1798 tends to substantiate the claim. See B.F. Bache's Will, Sept. 7, 1798, B.F. Bache Papers; and Porcupine's Gazette, July 8, 1799.

35. On Bache's political philosophy, see Tagg, “Benjamin Franklin Bache and the Philadelphia Aurora,” 139-219.

36. His enemies tended to trip over themselves in their accusation that he was in the pay of France and adhering to a radical political line for reasons of pecuniary advantage, while simultaneously claiming his business was failing and going bankrupt. Tagg, “Benjamin Franklin Bache and the Philadelphia Aurora,” 129-38 and passim. When events built in 1793 and 1798 toward an anti-French climax, Bache did not change his position for reasons of income and credibility.

37. General Advertiser, July 17, 1792. For other editorials on this theme, see ibid., Oct. 5, 30, 1790; Aug. 18, Oct. 26, 1792; Jan. 15, 29, March 26 (“Cato”), 1793; March 15 (“corres.”), 1798.

    A leader in developing newspaper editorials, Bache wrote many of the undesignated or unsigned editorials that appeared in his paper. But those offered as letters to the editor or those from “correspondents,” though written by others, began very early to take on the strict ideological line that Bache worked to maintain in the paper.

38. Ibid., June 22, 1792; Jan. 29, 1793.

39. See my survey in Tagg, “Benjamin Franklin Bache and the Philadelphia Aurora,” 199-200.

40. Ibid., 205-6. His admiration of Condorcet can be seen in BFB to Richard Bache, Jan. 10, 1793, Castle MSS.

41. General Advertiser, Oct. 5, 1790.

42. Ibid., Aug. 22, 1791.

43. Ibid., Oct. 21, 1791.

44. Ibid., June 21, 1792.

45. BFB to Richard Bache, Jan. 10, 1793, Castle MSS.

46. General Advertiser, July 26, 1793.

47. Tagg, “Benjamin Franklin Bache and the Philadelphia Aurora,” 362-69 covers some of these issues.

48. Aurora, April 7, June 5, July 3, Aug. 1, Sept. 8, 23 (“An American” from New World), 1795. Bache published a copy of the calendar in 1796. Calendrier republican pour l'an 5 (Philadelphia, 1796).

49. Aurora, Oct. 20, 1794.

50. Ibid., Dec. 29, 1796.

51. CN to Alexander Addison, Aug. 6, 1795, Addison Papers.

52. Bache's general ideas, as filtered through his paper, and the tenor and tone of their expression, suggest acquaintance with all four. Bache had access to all of Rousseau's writings, and may have owned them; his father prided himself on having introduced Paine to America in 1774 on Franklin's behalf. Benjamin was a major distributor and promoter of the Rights of Man.

53. See, for example, Aurora, July 7, Nov. 3, 1791; June 12, 1792; and, Oct. 27, 1797.

54. Ibid., Sept. 8, 1797. For a full analysis of Bache's thought, see Tagg, “Benjamin Franklin Bache and the Philadelphia Aurora,” 139-219.

55. General Advertiser, May 24, 1791.

56. On the turbulent issue of the Jay Treaty, see Tagg, “Benjamin Franklin Bache and the Philadelphia Aurora,” 430-502.

57. See “Minutes of the Democratic Society of Pennsylvania” (Historical Society of Pennsylvania). For the whole Whiskey Rebellion issue, see Tagg, “Benjamin Franklin Bache and the Philadelphia Aurora,” 375-407.

58. Aurora, July 16, 1798. Bache was indicted for federal common law seditious libel before the new act took effect.

59. [B.F. Bache], Remarks Occasioned by the Late Conduct of Mr. Washington … (Philadelphia, 1797), 35.

60. Ibid., 36.

61. Ibid., 40.

62. CN to William Marshall, Dec. 23, 1799, in “Letters to the Rev. William Marshall,” 101.

63. CN to Samuel Miller, Dec. 16, 1800, in Miller, Memoir, 268-73.

64. B.F. Bache Will, Sept. 7, 1798, B.F. Bache Papers.

65. BFB to Richard Bache, Sept. 2, 3, 1798, The Society Collection (Historical Society of Pennsylvania).

66. Geertz, “Ideology,” in Interpretation of Cultures, 196.