The Franco-American Alliance: a Century After

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Published

2025-05-22

Issue

Vol. 49 (2025): The American Revolution of the Europeans

Section

Fondamenti

License

Creative Commons License

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The authors retain all rights to the original work without any restrictions.
The issues are distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution ShareAlike 4.0 International License (CC BY-SA 4.0) which allows re-distribution and re-use of a licensed work on the conditions that the creator is appropriately credited and that any derivative work is made available under “the same, similar or a compatible license”.

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.13138/gsc.v49i.4048

Authors

  • Ghislain Potriquet Université de Strasbourg

Keywords:

historiography, American Revolution, Franco-Prussian War, French Third Republic, George Bancroft

Abstract

The proclamation of the French Third Republic on September 4, 1870 ushered in an era of comprehensive reform. French higher education underwent a thorough transformation in order to measure up to German universities. History, as an academic discipline, experienced a parallel “methodical turn”. This paper discusses the works of French historians of the United States and assesses their progress towards methodical history and their implications for the transatlantic relationship. Works by Adolphe de Circourt and Henri Doniol will be examined. Both authors studied the American Revolution and the adoption of the 1787 Constitution, commemorating in distinct ways the centennial anniversaries of these foundational events.