L'Amérique indépendante and other French Allegories of the United States

Following the Declaration of Independence, the United States gave itself a new personification: rejecting the image of the sleeping Indian Princess that had traditionally represented the American continent, the new nation adopted a standing Roman goddess as its symbol, whereby it distanced itself from the rest of the continent and claimed a privileged connection to Europe. While this iconographic shift has been the object of several scholarly studies, those have been limited to US-American and British representations. Yet, as this presentation argues, considering French images of the new nation, created after the signature of the Franco-American Alliance helps better understand how the formers colonies were elevated from savage others to civilized equals in the European imaginary. Taking on a corpus of prints and decorative objects created between 1778 and 1786, including an etching by Fragonard and an engraving by Borel, this paper explains how French artists, and the French nation, struggled to not only represent, but also imagine their new ally of which they knew so little. It shows how Benjamin Franklin, who was then in Paris, helped create a connection in the French imaginary between the moral virtue of the United States and Republican Rome. It then describes how, in a rare moment of self-reflexivity and symbolic creativity, artists realized the limits of the old colonial models and started experimenting freely with traditional allegorical representations and attributes. Doing so, it analyzes the process of adaptation and hybridization through which the Indian Princess met Liberty and became Columbia.