Sebastian Ottinger (CERGE-EI) 12.10.2023

It is our pleasure that Prof. Sebastian Ottinger (CERGE-EI) will present on Thursday, October 12, 2023, at 12:45 in room RB437 about his research on the topic “The American Origin of the French Revolution”.

Registration is not required and anyone who would like to attend is warmly invited.

ABSTRACT: France sent five thousand men to fight alongside George Washington’s army in the American Revolutionary War. We show that the French combatants’ exposure to the United States of America increased support for the French Revolution a decade later. French regions (départements) from which more American combatants originated had more revolutionary societies, volunteers for the revolutionary army, riots against feudal institutions, and emigrants from the Old Regime’s elite. To establish causality, we exploit two historical coincidences: i) originally, a French army of seven and a half thousand was ready to board ships but one third did not sail to America because of logistical problems; ii) among the regiments who fought in America against the British, some regiments were stationed for one year in New England before the main battle, and in Virginia afterwards, while others were stationed in the Caribbean colonies. We find that only the combatants who were exposed to the United States affected the French Revolution after their return.

BIO: He is an Assistant Professor (tenure-track) at  CERGE-EI in Prague (a joint workplace of Charles University and the Czech Academy of Sciences). He graduated from UCLA Anderson School of Management in 2021, was a  Postdoctoral Research Fellow at Northwestern University’s Center for Economic History from 2021 to 2022, and visited Harvard’s Department of Economics in Fall 2019.  Here is a link to my C.V.  for more details. He is an Applied Microeconomist with research projects in the fields of Urban Economics and Political Economy, all drawing on European or American Economic History. Drafts and a list of ongoing projects are  here.