AUP’s Center for Critical Democracy Studies Hosts "A Quarter-Millennium of Franco-American Relations" conference

On May 28–29, 2026, The American University of Paris’s Center for Critical Democracy Studies (CCDS), in partnership with Princeton University and with the support of the Chambrun Lafayette Foundation, the U.S. Embassy in France, the Tocqueville Society, and the U.S. National Endowment for the Humanities, brought together scholars from both sides of the Atlantic to reflect on 250 years of Franco-American entanglement. Titled A Quarter-Millennium of Franco-American Relations and timed to coincide with the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, the conference took stock of one of the modern world’s most consequential bilateral relationships — one born in revolution, tested by ideology, trade, and war, and continually remade across shared and competing visions of democracy. 

A Reception at the Hôtel de Talleyrand 

The proceedings opened the evening of May 27 with a reception at the Hôtel de Talleyrand, hosted on behalf of the U.S. Embassy in France. Built in 1767 and serving today as the Embassy’s George C. Marshall Center at Place de la Concorde, it has been a site of Franco-American negotiation and hospitality for over two centuries — a fitting place to mark the relationship the conference would examine. Guests were welcomed by Deputy Chief of Mission Mario Mesquita, AUP President Sonya Stephens and Provost Hannah Westley, and conveners Stephen W. Sawyer and David A. Bell. 

Introductory remarks from the third convener, translator and scholar Art Goldhammer, set the tone for the rigorous, comparative, and genuinely transatlantic discussion that would follow. Over six panels and two plenary lectures, twenty-three scholars examined the relationship across an extraordinary span of time and themes — from the secret diplomacy that preceded Lafayette's arrival in America to the deindustrialization of Pittsburgh and Lille in the late twentieth century. 

Revolutions and Distorting Mirrors 

The first panel established the conference’s animating tension: the American and French revolutions are so often read together, yet so rarely on equal terms. Stephen Sawyer and William Novak’s talks challenged the Cold War habit of casting the American Revolution as a success and the French as a failure, recovering structural commonalities — committees of safety, popular assemblies — on both sides. Richard Bell traced the anti-French sentiment loyalist writers weaponized against the “unnatural alliance” of 1778. François Furstenberg and Gilles Montègre redirected attention to strategy and to the roles of Beaumarchais and Vergennes before Lafayette became the alliance's public face. 

The theme of mutual projection found its fullest expression in David Bell’s plenary lecture on France and the United States as “distorting mirrors” — two nations that have long defined themselves partly in relation to one another, each projecting onto the other anxieties and aspirations that say as much about the observer as the observed. 

Friction and Stability, Friendship and Transatlantic Legacy 

This panel examined the financial and commercial dimensions of the relationship: Nicolas Barreyre on France as an alternative economic model for the industrializing United States; Sophie Meunier and Laurent Warlouzet on foreign direct investment as both a source of friction and a structural stabilizer; and Teddy Paikin on how Tocqueville, Chevalier, and Say understood capitalism as it took shape in America. 

A third panel spanned from the Revolutionary era to 1949, when France sent a “Gratitude Train” of some 52,000 gifts to Americans — recovering, in Ludivine Broch’s account, a friendship built not only through diplomacy but through objects and sentiment. 

The second day turned to political theory and Tocqueville’s transatlantic legacy, with papers by Flora Champy, Arthur Ghins, Gili Kliger, and Devin Vartija. A panel on twentieth-century history brought the relationship into the modern political arena: Jim Kloppenberg on center-left traditions, Patrick Weil on Clemenceau as a bridge between the two republics, and Herrick Chapman and Lizabeth Cohen on the shared fate of deindustrialization. In the second plenary, Françoise Mélonio examined how Tocqueville read America au point de vue français. And a final panel returned to the nineteenth century, with Sarah Maza on the French horror at an “aristocracy of the skin,” Olivier Zunz asking whether Tocqueville was present at Gettysburg, and Yohanna Alimi-Levy on Lafayette as the connective tissue of a democratic inheritance. 

A Generative Tension 

Taken together, the papers offered ideas that resist any simple narrative of friendship or rivalry, similarity or difference — ideas essential for scholars and students at AUP alike to grasp. The conference demonstrated that two and a half centuries of entanglement have produced not a stable bond but a perpetually generative tension that continues to shape how each society imagines democracy, equality, and its own place in the modern world. 

A Quarter-Millennium of Franco-American Relations is one example of the Center’s and AUP’s liberal arts approach to the study of democracy in its historical, theoretical, and practical dimensions. It exemplifies the core commitment to bringing historical depth and comparative rigor to the most pressing questions in democratic societies – from a unique position at the crossroads of the two nations whose intertwined histories gave democracy so much of its modern shape. 

In addition to hosting conferences and events such as this one, the CCDS, founded in 2016, also publishes The Tocqueville Review / La Revue Tocqueville and its online platform Tocqueville21, sponsors scholars-in-residence, and develops pedagogical initiatives to further knowledge of the history, present, and future of democratic governance.