Edmond Genet was appointed French Minister to the United States. He landed
at Charleston, April 8, and at once began activities so authoritative as
to amount to an erection of French sovereignty in the United States. The
subsequent failure of his efforts and the abrupt ending of his diplomatic
career have so reacted upon his reputation that associations of boastful
arrogance and reckless incompetency cling to his name. This estimate holds
him too lightly and underrates the peril to which the United States was
then exposed. Genet was no casual rhetorician raised to important office
by caprice of events, but a trained diplomatist of hereditary aptitude and
of long experience. His father was chief of the bureau of correspondence
in the Department of Foreign Affairs for the French monarchy, and it was
as an interpreter attached to that bureau that the son began his career in
1775. While still a youth, he gained literary distinction by his
translations of historical works from Swedish into French. Genet was
successively attached to the French Embassies at Berlin and Vienna, and in
1781 he succeeded his father in the Department of Foreign Affairs. In
1788, he was Secretary of the French Embassy at St. Petersburg, where his
zeal for French Revolutionary principles so irritated the Empress
Catherine that she characterized him as "a furious demagogue," and in 1792
he was forced to leave Russia. In the same year he was named Ambassador to
Holland, and thence was soon transferred to the United States.

It is obvious that a man of such experience could not be ignorant of
diplomatic forms and of international proprieties of behavior. If he
pursued a course that has since seemed to be a marvel of truculence, the
explanation should be sought in the circumstances of his mission more than
in the nature of his personality. When the matter is considered from this
standpoint, not only does one find that Genet's proceedings become
consistent and intelligible, but one becomes deeply impressed with the
magnitude of the peril then confronting the United States. Nothing less