Reinterpreting the French Revolution: A global-historical perspective (40 page)

ing the official Terror, they were overthrown and executed in Thermidor,

Year II – that is, late July 1794. In effect, the Revolution’s most lethal days

were over.

f r o m n a t i o n a l d e f e n s e t o n a t i o n a l a g g r e s s i o n

As part of his attempt to situate French Revolutionary issues within a

“revisionist” framework of political and cultural change, Franc¸ois Furet

presented France’s declaration of war on Austria in April 1792 as largely

a consequence of domestic politics.2 There is something to be said for

this point of view; nevertheless, it underestimates the tenacious hold of

grandiose geopolitical tradition upon Frenchmen of
all
political factions in the revolutionary era, and moreover it underrates the actual threat posed to

French security in the early 1790s. The men who had somehow to govern

this country, as deputies to the Legislative Assembly in 1791–92 and then

as delegates to the Convention, found themselves shifting gradually from

a defensive to an offensive stance in international affairs, and did so in

the final analysis at the behest of diplomatic tradition and in response to

concrete challenges to France from the other European powers.

Admittedly, it would appear, superficially, that the drift of France to-

ward war with Austria (and eventually Prussia as well) during the first

six months of the Legislative Assembly resulted directly from that body’s

splintered and irresponsible politics. It has long been a commonplace of

French Revolutionary historiography that Duport, Barnave, Alexandre de

Lameth, and other Feuillants initially very influential in the new legislature

could not maintain their colleagues’ support for a “centrist” policy of

peaceable constitutional monarchism. However much such a policy was

sabotaged from the start by the equivocation of the king and queen, and by

the obstructionism of delegates on the Far Right in the Assembly, it was

also seriously weakened by splits among the Feuillants themselves. Most

notably, some of the Feuillant deputies were determined to follow the

flamboyant lead of Lafayette. There is little doubt that the “Hero of Two

Worlds” wanted to see Louis XVI’s authority maintained and, if possible,

2 Refer to Furet’s rejoinder to Isser Woloch and Donald Sutherland in “Franc¸ois Furet’s Interpretation of the French Revolution,”
French Historical Studies
16 (1990): 777–802.

The “revolutionizing” of the Revolution

163

reinforced. On the other hand, Lafayette appears also to have been casting

about for ways to augment his own political authority alongside that of

the king – and that, fatefully, involved jettisoning the Austrian alliance of

1756 and, indeed, going to war with Vienna.3

And so the Feuillants could not even reach a consensus among them-

selves, let alone garner support for pacific and conciliatory policies on the

Far Right. But perhaps the most dangerous threat to Feuillant moderation –

and hence to the maintenance of a peaceful foreign policy – emanated from

the partisans of Jacques-Pierre Brissot on the Left. The “Brissotin” deputies

at this point in the Revolution dominated a Jacobin parliamentary faction

already on the rebound from its lean days of the post-Varennes Constituent

Assembly. For Brissot and his cronies, consummating what they saw as an

incomplete revolution neatly involved their own assumption of power, and

achieving both of these goals required overthrowing the Feuillant minis-

ters by raising a national demand for war with Austria. And, in this, the

“Brissotins” and “Fayettistes” found some common grounds for a tactical

alliance.4 Hence, the foundation was already being laid for the strangely

assorted coalition of politicians – including, in the end, some of the crown’s

own misguided parliamentary adherents – that would stampede king and

Assembly into a declaration of war on Austria in April 1792.

In analyzing the reasons for the Brissotins’ stunning success in orches-

trating this campaign, one must concentrate upon substantive issues rather

than upon the oratorical prowess of Brissot himself, Isnard, Vergniaud,

Gensonné, Condorcet, and others. From the very start, the Brissotins based

their strategy on the well-founded suspicion that the king’s acceptance of

the new constitution was utterly insincere. To drive this point home, they

began quickly to challenge Louis XVI on issues which left him no room

for compromise. Hence, the increasingly acrimonious exchanges between

Assembly and sovereign on such questions as the political loyalties of

the king’s brothers, Provence and Artois, the status of the émigrés, and

the fate of the “refractory” clergy.5

But the very fact that Brissotin political calculations centered upon the

king’s growing hostility to the Revolution ensured a discussion of the

larger matter of French security – and greatness – in Europe. And it was

3 Blanning,
Origins of the French Revolutionary Wars
, p. 97.

4 Ibid., p. 98. Timothy Tackett has pointed out how markedly the ratio of Jacobins to Feuillants had shifted in favor of the former group since the last days of the Constituent Assembly. By October 1791, the two factions were about even in the Legislative Assembly.

(Tackett, “Conspiracy Obsession in a Time of Revolution,” p. 709.) See also, on the Feuillant dilemma in all this, Georges Michon,
Essai sur l’histoire du parti feuillant: Adrien Duport
(Paris: Payot, 1924); and Kennedy,
The Jacobin Clubs in the French Revolution: The First
Years
, chap. 15.

5 Blanning,
Origins of the French Revolutionary Wars
, pp. 98–99.

164

Reinterpreting the French Revolution

precisely their obsession with this geopolitical question that won for the

Brissotins their greatest plaudits in the Legislative Assembly. In his first ma-

jor speech on foreign affairs, delivered to his fellow deputies on 20 October

1791, Brissot denounced the “gigantic international conspiracy” suppos-

edly “designed to restore the old regime” and “then listed the repeated

snubs, slurs and insults inflicted on the Revolution by the other European

powers.” Tellingly, he went on to appeal to age-old sentiments of French

honor. “I tell you,” exclaimed Brissot, “that you must avenge your glory,

or condemn yourselves to eternal dishonor.” His confederates similarly

appealed to Gallic pride, as witness Isnard: “The French have become the

foremost people of the universe, so their conduct must correspond to their

new destiny. As slaves, they were bold and great; are they to be feeble

and timid now that they are free?”6 Speaker after speaker descanted upon

this congenial theme over the following weeks, all the while denouncing a

“plot” against French interests involving princes and émigrés abroad and

nobles and clerics at home.

Brissot and his allies took this compelling argument to the Parisian

Jacobin Society as well, where their invocations of traditional French great-

ness prevailed against the less inflammatory analyses of the situation of-

fered by Robespierre and several other members.7 The climactic debates

in the Assembly came in January 1792, when Brissot’s faction, abetted by

the Fayettistes (and, ironically, by some of the king’s supporters) utilized

a variety of arguments to secure passage of a decree that was virtually an

ultimatum threatening war against Vienna.

But while Brissotin oratory at this fateful juncture of the Revolution

touched upon a number of tangible and politically popular issues rang-

ing from the need to secure the credibility of the
assignats
to the need

to suppress counterrevolutionary strife in the provinces, this was not in

itself enough. The Brissotins had to arouse some deeper impulse in the

French psyche to allow emotion to reinforce calculation. And that im-

pulse, unsurprisingly, was the French citizenry’s undying Austrophobia

and its more positive side, French nationalism; hence, on the one hand, the

Brissotins’ indictment of the bellwether Franco-Austrian alliance. It was

this ill-begotten agreement, they claimed, which had hurled France from

its pedestal of greatness into the dust of nullity in European and global af-

fairs. It had resulted almost immediately in Versailles’s losing the majority

of its overseas colonies in the Seven Years’ War. It had frozen the French in

a position of impotence as their oldest confederates – Sweden, Poland, and

Turkey – were bullied into silence or actual partition. Clearly, Brissot and

6 Cited in ibid., pp. 99–101.

7 The debate between Brissot and Robespierre on this question at the Jacobins is

documented in Alphonse Aulard, ed.,
La Société des Jacobins
, 6 vols. (Paris: Jouaust, Cerf et al., 1889–1897), 3:292–303.

The “revolutionizing” of the Revolution

165

his friends charged, the Austrians had drawn every imaginable advantage

from the alliance of 1756, while the overly trusting French had been left

with nothing.

On the other hand, these deputies unfailingly conjured up the positive

force of French nationalism. Speaker after speaker dwelt upon the need

for a reassertion of traditional French greatness in the world’s affairs. They

expatiated lovingly upon the unique virtues of
la grande nation
, and they

insisted that the best way to restore respect for that “nation” was to go to

war against the Austrian authors of so much recent French humiliation. At

the same time, the Brissotins could also turn to their uses the revolutionary

discourse of national sovereignty – and in doing so, they were joined by

speakers across the political spectrum. French affairs could be handled

only by Frenchmen. Every time someone made this point, one historian

has commented, “he was rewarded by a storm of vocal approval from all

sides of the chamber.”8

What was most striking here, however, was the deadly effectiveness of

the leftist deputies’ invocation of the past. When one of them recalled on the

floor of the Assembly that “Louis XIV, with 400,000 slaves, knew how to

defy all the powers of Europe” – and when other Legislative Assemblymen

packed their speeches with uncritical invocations of the “golden age” of

the Sun King – it was dramatically obvious to what extent the Revolution

was merely old wine in the old bottle of French geopolitical pride. Indeed,

it is intriguing to see in how many ways the revolutionaries, in ponder-

ing issues of foreign policy, knowingly or unknowingly revealed their

kinship with their supposedly “benighted” past. When they complacently

underrated the war-making capabilities of Austria, Great Britain, and Spain,

they were unwittingly reviving the old miscalculations of Louis XIV, whom

they could not help but admire. When they talked naively of crafting

an alliance with the Prussia of Frederick William II, they were betray-

ing an equally candid admiration of Frederick the Great and acknowledg-

ing that to regain the sure footing of an alliance with Berlin would be to

resurrect the French preeminence that had been thrown away in 1756.9

And when the Brissotin candidate for the Ministry of Foreign Affars,

Charles-Franc¸ois Dumouriez, actually came to power in the spring of

1792, he found himself shedding his Enlightenment-revolutionary faith

in democratic, peaceful relations among states and embracing the unregen-

erate diplomatic ways of the old regime. As Patricia Chastain Howe has

remarked: “It is somewhat disconcerting that Dumouriez . . . conspired to

produce a war, persuaded the ministers and the diplomatic committee of

the Legislative Assembly to approve his plans, and instructed his agents in

8 Blanning,
Origins of the French Revolutionary Wars
, pp. 105–8.

9 On these points, refer again to ibid., pp. 108–11, 121.

166

Reinterpreting the French Revolution

the ministries and chancelleries of Europe to intrigue to procure pledges of

neutrality from other states in order to isolate the Hapsburg government

for the duration of the war.” The “democratic foreign policy” Dumouriez

had originally advocated “remained a dream”; the new foreign minister

and his allies in the legislature convinced their countrymen to return to the

realpolitik of the old regime.10

It is, of course, undeniable that genuine idealism helped motivate the

French to go to war in April 1792. Brissot and his cronies from early on

indulged in the fantasy, avidly promoted by the swarm of foreign refugees

in Paris, that the oppressed masses of Europe awaited their liberators from

revolutionary France; and they were not the only politicians in these heady

months who spoke of an imminent international revolutionary upheaval.

Again, the Brissotin argument for war served a variety of domestic so-

cial, economic, and political interests. Most patently, there was the primal

desire to acquire political power – which actuated both the Brissotin and

the Fayettiste factions – or to hang onto it – which moved the king and

his legislative adherents.11 Still, after all is said and done, it is clear that a