page_1184 < previous page page_1184 next page > Page 1184 X XYZ Affair The XYZ Affair is the name given to an incident that nearly brought the United States to war with France in 1798. America had signed a treaty with France in 1778, but relations had cooled thereafter. The Americans provided no assistance during the French revolutionary wars, and in 1793 the injudicious involvement in American politics by France's minister to the United States, Citizen Genet (Edmond Charles Genet), had further aggravated matters. The conclusion of Jay's Treaty between the United States and Great Britain in 1795 also angered the French, who found it biased in Britain's favor; they particularly objected to clauses that undid the American agreements with France. French privateers began seizing American ships, and in 1796 the French foreign minister, Charles Maurice Talleyrand, refused to receive Charles Pinckney, the new U.S. minister to France. President John Adams then appointed John Marshall and Elbridge Gerry to join Pinckney and negotiate a new treaty with France. On their arrival in Paris in October 1797, the commissioners were put off by Talleyrand and were then visited by three of his agents, who suggested that before a treaty could even be discussed, the United States must loan France $12 million and pay a bribe of $250,000 to Talleyrand. (The agents were designated in the American commissioners' dispatches as X, Y, and Z.) The commissioners refused these terms, and in March 1798, President Adams reported to Congress that the mission had failed. When the XYZ correspondence was released a month later, it inflamed public opinion, leading to calls for immediate war against France, a course that one faction within the president's Federalist party had long advocated. Two years of naval conflict between France and the United States followed, but the war remained undeclared. In 1800, Adams angered the prowar Federalists by negotiating the Treaty of Morfontaine, which restored peace between the two countries. See also France-U.S. Relations. Â < previous page page_1184 next page >