Citizen Genêt Affair

Citizen Genêt Affair, (1793), incident precipitated by the military adventurism of Citizen Edmond-Charles Genêt, a minister to the United States dispatched by the revolutionary Girondist regime of the new French Republic, which at the time was at war with Great Britain and Spain. His activities violated an American proclamation of neutrality in the European conflict and greatly embarrassed France’s supporters in the United States.

Arriving in Charleston, S.C., on April 8, Genêt immediately began commissioning privateers and making plans to use U.S. ports for a campaign against British commerce. He also began organizing American-based expeditions intended to attack Spanish and British territories. Heartened by the warm pro-French sentiment he encountered en route to Philadelphia, Genêt was shocked to learn that President George Washington considered his privateering plans and other proposed military activities an infringement of U.S. national sovereignty.

Genêt promised that the privateers he had commissioned would no longer send their prizes to U.S. ports and that they would leave American waters. When he broke his word by authorizing the arming and dispatching of the prize ship Little Sarah (refitted as La Petite Démocrate), Washington and his cabinet demanded Genêt’s recall. With the radical Jacobins newly in power in France, his arrest was ordered, and he faced possible death if he returned home. Washington declined to extradite him, and in 1794 Genêt married a daughter of Governor George Clinton of New York. He subsequently became a U.S. citizen.