Reinterpreting the French Revolution: A global-historical perspective (35 page)

the appointment.For promotion to higher ranks, seniority in grade re-

mained the sole criterion, except that, in peacetime, the executive power

could fill half of the most senior posts.Military scholars can justifiably

conclude that, at this relatively early point in the Revolution, the screen-

ing of talent was still in aristocratic hands.79 This arrangement may have

owed something to the fact that the “executive power,” (i.e., the king and his

advisers) had its own reasons for wishing to put a brake upon social change.

77 Bertaud,
The Army of the French Revolution
, pp.44–46.

78 Forrest,
The Soldiers of the French Revolution
, pp.42–45.

79 Bertaud,
The Army of the French Revolution
, pp.44–49.

The first attempt to stabilize the Revolution

141

Come the summer of 1791, and the advent of a new crisis with international

overtones, the conditions of recruitment into and advancement within mil-

itary ranks would perforce loosen up.Till then, however, the Constituent

Assembly’s definition of statist needs would favor aristocrats long in place

over noncoms, “officers of fortune,” and commoners in general.

This certainly does not signify a blanket indifference among France’s

new rulers to the needs of all those willing to serve under the colors.The

Assembly, rejecting Dubois-Crancé’s call for universal conscription, abol-

ished the hated militia and replaced it with 100,000 “auxiliaries” to be re-

cruited by voluntary enlistment.Those so enlisting would earn 3
sous
a day

in peacetime; in the event of war they would be incorporated into existing

units of the army.The Assembly also made some efforts to ameliorate the

living conditions of common soldiers, codify their legal status as “active

citizens,” guarantee their rights in criminal proceedings, abolish degrading

punishments, and provide pensions for widows of those who died in active

service.80 But despite such actions, what Samuel Scott has called “the single

greatest problem in the Royal Army, the alienation between soldiers and of-

ficers,” continued to fester.81 Indeed, incidents pitting officers against their

men occurred with a new frequency during the summer of 1790: in July and

August, mutinies broke out at Saint-Servan, Epinal, Stenay, Longwy, Metz,

Compiègne, Nancy, and elsewhere.Professional and social differences be-

tween officers and soldiers, Scott has noted, were coming to be defined in

political terms.“Aristocratic” officers and “patriotic” soldiers were start-

ing to come to blows over questions involving the exercise of power in

France, and this would have profound implications within the army’s own

ranks.In fact, in the spring of 1791, military insubordination reared its

head again, and the most striking features of the mutinies of the preceding

year – the bellicosity and politicization of the soldiery – were now even

more pronounced.82 The Assembly’s reluctance to abandon the principle

of aristocratic leadership in the army hence turned out to be problematic

and would soon be overtaken by events.

The initial stages of naval reform similarly betrayed the priority of the

revolutionaries’ statist concerns.Here, again, royal and ministerial control

gave way at a fairly early point to legislative oversight.Not that Castries’s

successor, César-Henri, comte de La Luzerne, spared any effort to pre-

pare French naval forces for a resumption of war upon the seas.During

his tenure, the quality of French ships – which, paradoxically, had long

been considered superior to those built on the other side of the Channel –

improved with the standardization and perfection of classes of warships.

80 Ibid.

81 Samuel F.Scott,
The Response of the Royal Army to the French Revolution
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979), p.82.

82 Ibid., pp. 82–98.

142

Reinterpreting the French Revolution

Ships of the line and frigates were built according to uniform designs,

and the naval architects made sure to adopt British technical innovations:

copper-sheathed hulls, which provided greater speed capabilities and pro-

tection from parasites, and carronades, weapons of short range but lethal

effect.83 Yet La Luzerne incurred the hostility of powerful legislators late in

1790.His resignation, on 23 October, meant that modernization of the navy

would henceforth proceed under the aegis of the Constituent Assembly’s

increasingly influential Marine Committee.84

Aristocratic spokesmen on that committee proved as successful as their

counterparts on the War Committee at blocking significant changes in re-

cruitment and promotion of personnel.Many of the deputies, as civilian

bourgeois, deferred to aristocratic opinions expressed on technical sub-

jects that they considered beyond their competence.Hence, it was fairly

easy to persuade them that the interests of the aristocratic corps of naval

officers did not diverge significantly from those of the nation, and that

the “new” navy’s organization did not have to differ radically from that

of the old regime’s fleet.As a result, the navy emerged in 1789–91 rela-

tively unchanged by the reformist statutes of the Constituent Assembly.85

In the face of constant warnings from aristocratic naval officers that merg-

ing their institution with the upstart and much despised merchant marine

would jeopardize French strength on the seas, the representatives decided

to maintain the navy and merchant marine as separate entities.True, the

navy was now able to recruit merchant officers directly via the rank of

enseigne
, and these men could hope eventually to rise to lieutenancies in the new fleet.Still, young men seeking a permanent naval career were counseled to begin as
aspirants
“and opt for the fighting service as quickly as

possible.”
Enseignes
serving aboard merchantmen constituted a reserve of

officers for time of war, but the navy would continue to rely primarily upon

full-time professionals.Furthermore, there was no purge of the aristocratic

Grand Corps at this point in the Revolution, and ironically the exclusion

of most (non-noble)
sous-lieutenants
from reappointment as lieutenants or

as
enseignes
on account of advanced age left the fleet for the time being

with a higher proportion of blue-blooded officers than it had had before!86

Thus, in overhauling the navy as in revamping the army, the members of

83 William S.Cormack,
Revolution andPolitical Conflict in the French Navy, 1789–1794

(New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995), pp.22–23.

84 Ibid., pp. 97–98. La Luzerne was, at the very least, “an honest administrator and a sincere proponent of opening the service to talent and diminishing the role of privilege.”

85 Norman Hampson, “The ‘Comité de Marine’ of the Constituent Assembly,”
The

Historical Journal
2 (1959): 148.

86 Cormack,
Revolution andPolitical Conflict
, pp.82–83 and 102–3.See also, on these issues, Norman Hampson,
La Marine de l’An II: Mobilisation de la Flotte de l’Océan, 1793–94

(Paris: Libraire Marcel Rivière et Cie., 1959).

The first attempt to stabilize the Revolution

143

the Constituent Assembly emphatically favored “pragmatic” and strategic

considerations over any specifically “bourgeois” or other class aspirations.

The foregoing analysis of seven especially pivotal kinds of reform

undertaken by the Constituent Assembly confirms the observation of

J.M.Thompson cited earlier.The revolutionaries in 1789–91 were indeed

quite capable of favoring the cause of “national regeneration” over their

sundry “class interests and enmities.” Many of the new arrangements

would, of course, open political and professional careers and make new pro-

prietary rights available to enterprising Frenchmen; but (as we have seen)

this was not uniformly true.It was, however, invariably true that the rep-

resentatives were determined to sweep away all “corporations,” all in-

terests intervening between the individual citizen and the state, and to

supply that state with updated institutions through which it could turn

the individual citizen’s wealth and energies to national purposes.In all of

this there was also a dynamic of domestic politics.The Assembly tended

over time to arrogate more and more of the king’s policy-making role to

itself.This propensity correlated generally with the Patriots’ growing dis-

trust of Louis XVI (and his elitist partisans) and thus marked a shift of

influence from the Right to the Left within the Assembly.Such a process

could only work to consolidate the reforms analyzed here and thereby to

provide a more revolutionary direction for the country as a whole.

t h e d y n a m i c o f r a d i c a l i z a t i o n : t o w a r d v a r e n n e s

Careful scholarship of recent years has enlightened us about the shift-

ing factional alignments within the Constituent Assembly and therefore

left us with a somewhat clearer sense of the overall evolution of politics

within that body.It is becoming easier for us to see that, even in this rel-

atively “moderate” and “peaceful” phase of the Revolution, the pressures

to which France continued to be subjected generated divisive issues and

polarized the deputies by forcing them to take sides on those issues.By late

1790 and early 1791, the conspicuous failure of many clerics and nobles

(both in and outside the Assembly) to accept the emerging new order,

and the even more crucial failure of Louis XVI to identify with what was

being wrought, sapped the efforts of “centrists” to control the legislature

and played directly into the hands of the Left.This process in many ways

culminated in the king’s fateful attempt, on 20 June 1791, to escape from

a country whose political and social changes he could no longer tolerate.

The so-called Flight to Varennes, by raising anew the fundamental question

of French security in Europe, foreshadowed the “revolutionizing of the

Revolution” that was so soon to follow.

The work of Timothy Tackett, Harriet Applewhite, and Norman

Hampson, among others, enables us to follow the general evolution of

144

Reinterpreting the French Revolution

factional politics and thus to speak of a gradual leftist tendency in France’s

legislature during 1789–91.87 Although the October Days did not auto-

matically put an end to the political influence of the deputies on the Right

in the National Assembly, they helped to shift the initiative on the Right

toward its most extreme partisans – and, over the long haul, this could

further legitimize the Left.Four of the “Monarchist” leaders abandoned

Versailles in October 1789; those of their persuasion who remained behind

participated with decreasing frequency in the debates (and, perhaps, the

committee labors?) of the Assembly as France moved into 1790.In these

same weeks and months, intransigent deputies on the Far Right took the

place of their more moderate colleagues and consequently became chief

spokesmen for the conservative wing of the Constituent Assembly down

to its last days.Deputies like abbé Maury, Cazalès, and Duval d’Eprémesnil,

associated from the start with inflexible resistance to sociopolitical reforms,

were now overshadowing Jean-Joseph Mounier’s successors on the right

side of the Assembly hall in the Tuileries Palace.As a result, opinions on

the Left could only harden, and the center of gravity in the legislature in

time would shift in that direction.88

Perhaps even more crucial to the recovery of the Left, however, was the

emergence late in 1789 of the Jacobin Club and its rapid development as a

tightly organized political faction.Some of the Jacobins had formerly been

members of the radical Breton Club, others had not; what they had in com-

mon was a determination to respond to the organizational and ideological

initiative of the Right and thus to recapture the direction of revolution-

ary events.“Organization” and “mobilization” were to be the key words

in the Jacobin political lexicon.In addition to holding public meetings in

the Dominican convent on the Right Bank from which their society de-

rived its name, the Jacobins invested a “central committee” with the main

responsibility to set the overall direction of the club and devised a more

efficient machinery for disciplining members’ voting in the legislature.Yet

the Jacobins went beyond even this – and sowed many of the seeds of their

future success – by acting to mobilize public opinion in favor of their poli-

cies.They did this in part by creating a correspondence committee to link

the Parisian club with affiliated clubs in the provinces.89

It is true that the Jacobins’ rise to power in the National Assembly was

not a smooth, untroubled process.The first half of 1790 witnessed a split in

Patriot ranks between those like Barnave and the Lameth brothers, Pétion,

87 See again Tackett, “Nobles and Third Estate in the Revolutionary Dynamic of the National Assembly,” and
Becoming a Revolutionary
; Harriet B.Applewhite,
Political Alignment
in the French National Assembly, 1789–1791
(Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1993); and Hampson,
Prelude to Terror
, passim.