Emilie Mitran, Gouverneur Morris, traducteur de la Révolution française (1789–1793)

Gouverneur Morris, the Founder with a wooden leg, was a multifaceted agent of the Revolutionary Age.In the French context, he is mainly known for his presence in France during the Terror.1 Still, there are no "Morris Papers," and only some of his letters have been published in editions of the extensive diary he wrote from March 1789 to January 1793.These collections have been a major source for French and American historians, especially since the publication of the Davenport edition in 1939 and of its digital update in 2006.2Their recent translation, published in French in three volumes and to which Emilie Mitran contributed, will certainly help diffuse the diary to an even greater extent in France.3Yet, no study of Morris' diary as a text has been made in French until now.Such an in-depth analysis can be found in Emilie Mitran's book, which is based on her PhD dissertation.She offers a meticulous exploration both of Morris and of the narrative strategies in his writing of and on himself.By relying on what distinguishes the diary from his other extant documents, Mitran highlights the heterogeneity of Morris' social, political and personal experiences and experiments in Paris.Morris initially travelled to France for business motives, but the economic dimension of the diary entries is not the focus here.Mitran chooses instead to deal with the literary and political aspects of the text.She contends in the first part that Morris wrote first and foremost his story and not history.However, there are passages in the diary when individual and collective stories meet and converge, as the second part shows.Although Morris was at first displeased with French aristocratic society, which he found decadent, he nonetheless quickly learned the codes of the circles in which he daily lived.How Morris adapted to the mores of the Parisian higher classes is a key topic, and Mitran rightly devotes many pages to it.Morris soon felt at ease with this aristocratic sociability, consisting of visits, dinners, salons, evenings at the theatre and intimate moments with Adle de Flahaut.Mitran stresses the role of women and the place of gender in the French aristocratic intellectual and political life he witnessed.Morris' viewpoint was

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