Our program
In 2026, the United States of America will celebrate the 250th anniversary of their Declaration of Independence (4 July 1776). This event resonated loudly across the Atlantic world of the 18th century and is leading to commemorations and publications on a global scale. AMERICA 2026 (AMérique, Europe, Révolutions, Indépendance et Commémorations dans l’espace Atlantique) is a project seeking both to explore the impact of the American Revolution on European societies in the last third of the eighteenth century and beyond, and to study French and European historiographies of the event in a comparative perspective. The consortium has established close collaboration between French and European scholars and engages in a deep and sustained conversation with North and South American colleagues through a variety of cultural and scientific outputs. The 2026 moment is occasioning renewed critical assessments of the history of the American colonial rebellion, its global impact, and its resonance in the history of modernity and democracies. America2026 is the research group of scientific reference about the American Revolution and its legacies in France and in Europe.
America2026 brings together a wide variety of academic disciplines, such as civilization, history, literature, political science and philosophy. Members are French, European, American, and Japanese, with expertise covering Europe, North and South America, and the Caribbean.
They are committed to sustained and interdisciplinary collaboration across three main objectives:
To study the nature and the impact of the American Revolution in collaborative perspective. This program is based on a transdisciplinary conversation about the history, the historiography and the legacies of the American Revolution, connecting scholars across Europe and between Europe and the Americas. A series of international conferences that began in Aix-Marseille in 2020 take place each year at various locations across Europe and the United States, culminating in a major landmark conference in Paris (Campus Condorcet) October 14-17, 2026. European and American scholars meet to engage with the following themes: the writing traditions and material cultures surrounding the American Revolution in Europe and the Americas; understudied Atlantic actors of the Revolution ; European diplomacy in the Age of Revolution; the recent critical shifts in the interpretation of the revolutionary moment, through gender, race and empire ; and the long-term cultural and political legacies of the event and its significance in the present-day polarized United States.
To decenter the narratives of and the scholarship about the American Revolution with a focus on Europe. The consortium works collaboratively to build an unprecedented corpus of printed sources (texts, images and maps) about the American Revolution and its consequences published in continental Europe and their overseas colonies in the last decades of the 18th century, and to bring to light unknown European actors of the American Revolution and American actors present in Europe during the period. This new data (people, texts, images and maps) will be referenced and searchable as the EPSAR database, to foster comparative and collaborative approaches in the study of American Revolution from an Atlantic and hemispheric perspective.
To take the American Revolution beyond academic circles. The consortium is organizing an exhibition on “The French and the American Revolution” jointly curated with the Musée du Nouveau Monde in La Rochelle, scheduled for spring and summer 2026 with the publication of a catalogue. Members will also build upon WP1 and WP2 to produce educational material about the American Revolution and its heritage aimed at the general public as well as educators, teachers and professors, for whom no up-to-date European material about the event and its aftermath has been recently made available. Additionally, a printed critical companion to the American Revolution in French will be produced to inform and guide students, educators and non-specialist scholars through the major issues and turning points of the historiography of the American Revolution and its legacies.
