Among those trying to place the French Revolution squarely in the American grain, perhaps none was more influential than Thomas Paine. In 1791 he published The Rights of Man as a response to Edmund Burke’s influential denunciation, Reflections on the Revolution in France. Burke had condemned the royal family’s mistreatment and prophesied bloodshed to come. Paine, in contrast, portrayed events in France as reprising the spirit of 1776 and called for a written constitution, with an elected assembly and chief executive. Paine, who could be both arrogant and presumptuous, dedicated his polemic to Washington without first seeking his permission and published his screed in London on February 22, 1791—Washington’s birthday. Drawing further parallels to the American Revolution, Paine informed Washington that he wanted to “make a cheap edition, just sufficient to bring in the price of the printing and paper, as I did by Common Sense.”²³

Thomas Jefferson helped to arrange for publication of The Rights of Man in Philadelphia, telling the printer that he was “extremely pleased to find it will be reprinted here and that something is at length to be publicly said against the political heresies which have sprung up among us.”²⁴ Jefferson professed amazement when the printer used this letter as a preface to Paine’s work. Since Jefferson’s reference to “political heresies” was widely construed as a swipe at the supposed crypto-monarchism of John Adams’s treatise Discourses on Davila, it created a brouhaha. The mortified Jefferson wrote a long, repentant letter to Washington, claiming that his letter had been used without permission and denying any intention to vilify the vice president. Washington’s failure to acknowledge Jefferson’s apology suggests his silent fury. Jefferson’s own letters to Paine reflect his fear of highly placed monarchists in Washington’s administration who were “preaching up and panting after an English constitution of king, lords, and commons and whose heads are itching for crowns, coronets, and mitres.”²⁵

Because of the controversy over Paine’s work, Washington responded to his letter with a blandly evasive reply. He pleaded the pressing duties of office and his imminent return to Mount Vernon as reasons why he couldn’t react in detail: “Let it suffice, therefore, at this time to say that I rejoice in the information of your personal prosperity and . . . that it is the first wish of my heart that the enlightened policy of the present age may diffuse to all men those blessings to which they are entitled and lay the foundation of happiness for future generations.”²⁶ Washington had a matchless talent for skirting unwanted controversies.

In June 1791 King Louis XVI and the royal family fled Paris in disguise—the king dressed as a valet, the queen as the children’s governess—only to be stopped and arrested by Lafayette’s National Guard at Varennes, northeast of Paris. Although Lafayette duly informed the king and queen that the National Assembly had placed them under a full-time guard, he was nonetheless denounced as a traitor on the Paris streets, and Danton accused him of engineering the royal family’s escape. The underground press in France went so far as to caricature Lafayette in pornographic poses with Marie-Antoinette. These events dimmed any hope for a constitutional monarchy. Jefferson delivered to Washington the stunning news from Paris. “I never saw him so much dejected by any event in my life,” Jefferson reported of his reaction.²⁷ A crestfallen Lafayette was dismayed by the behavior of the royal couple, lamenting that Marie-Antoinette was “more concerned about looking beautiful in the face of danger than about staving it off.”²⁸

In September 1792 the monarchy would be abolished. Beset by terrible premonitions, Washington was extremely concerned about Lafayette’s endangered position and, in a letter to him, identified a cardinal characteristic of the French Revolution that especially upset him: the urban mob. “The tumultuous populace of large cities are ever to be dreaded,” he wrote. “Their indiscriminate violence prostrates for the time all public authority, and its consequences are sometimes extensive and terrible.” ²⁹ In October 1791 Lafayette resigned from the National Guard and retreated to the rural serenity of his home, the Château Chavaniac. He sent Washington a letter that breathed contentment, as if his troubles had suddenly evaporated. “After fifteen years of revolution, I am profiting from a new and agreeable life of calm in the mountains where I was born.”³⁰ Given the turbulent events unfolding in Paris, this peaceful interlude was fated to be of short duration.

EVEN AS WASHINGTON worriedly tracked events in France, he had to deal with a brilliant, charming, but difficult Frenchman at home. Though historians often pin the label of military engineer or architect on Major Pierre-Charles L’Enfant, he had trained as a painter at the Royal Academy of Painting and Sculpture in Paris. At twenty-two, he joined the Continental Army with other French volunteers, forming part of the engineering corps, and sketched soldiers at Valley Forge. After the war he had turned New York’s City Hall into Federal Hall, establishing his credentials as a talented architect. As early as September 1789 he proposed himself to Washington as designer of the new federal capital. A peerless judge of talent, Washington soon grasped L’Enfant’s visionary powers, but their relationship was never smooth.

A portrait of L’Enfant shows a man with a coolly superior air. With an imagination shaped by the courts, palaces, and public works of Europe, L’Enfant would be hotheaded and autocratic in negotiating the intricacies of the new capital. Hypersensitive, with a touch of grandiosity, he was the perfect man to hatch a dream but not to implement it. It was characteristic of Washington that L’Enfant’s hauteur did not deter him; the president had faith in his ability to control even the most intractable personalities and extract the best from them. His checkered relationship with L’Enfant was a classic encounter between a consummate pragmatist and an uncompromising dreamer.

In early 1791 Washington asked L’Enfant to review the grounds selected for the new capital and identify the most promising sites for the chief government buildings. Local proprietors had already granted the president sweeping powers to shape the city. “The President shall have the sole power of directing the Federal City to be laid off in what manner he pleases,” they agreed. “He may retain any number of squares he may think proper for public improvements or other public uses.”³¹ On March 28, at the outset of his southern tour, Washington met with L’Enfant, who laid before him a rough pencil sketch of the new capital. He envisioned the seat of Congress on the brow of the highest wood, a steep spot called Jenkins Hill, which he praised as “a pedestal waiting for a superstructure.”³² This building would be the visual centerpiece of the city, with broad, diagonal thoroughfares radiating outward. Its centrality bore an unmistakable message about the primacy of the people’s branch of government. Rejecting a simple grid for the capital as “tiresome and insipid,” he argued that such a pattern made sense only for flat cities.³³ Not only would diagonal streets provide “contrast and variety,” but they would serve as express lanes, shortening the distance between places.³⁴ Town squares would be situated where diagonal avenues crossed. The kernel of the future Washington, D.C., lay in that conception. Striking a note of buoyant optimism that appealed to the president, L’Enfant wanted the city to be able to grow in size and beauty as “the wealth of the nation will permit it to pursue, at any period, however remote.”³⁵