Reinterpreting the French Revolution: A global-historical perspective (42 page)

by enlarging the Republic’s fleet, might facilitate French incursions into

London’s overseas empire.21 The embers of French nationalism flamed

up again on 13 April 1793, when Danton convinced the Convention to

disown what most now regarded as its embarrassingly altruistic decree of

19 November 1792: “Above all,” cried out Danton, “we need to look to the

preservation of our own body politic and to lay the foundations of French

greatness.”22 Fluffy talk of international revolution thus gave way – we

suspect,
had
to give way – to the more reliable discourse of French

national interest.

19 Cited in ibid.

20 T. C. W. Blanning,
The French Revolution in Germany
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1983), pp. 68–69.

21 Blanning,
Origins of the French Revolutionary Wars
, pp. 153, 155.

22 Blanning,
The French Revolution in Germany
, pp. 70–71. See also, on Danton’s speech and the Convention’s reaction to it, Sydney S. Biro,
The German Policy of Revolutionary
France: A Study in French Diplomacy during the War of the First Coalition, 1792–1797
, 2 vols. (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1957), 1:156–58.

The “revolutionizing” of the Revolution

171

Of course, the “nationalizing” of the Republic’s war effort, like the

original decision to go to war, not only recalled a venerable French tradi-

tion; it also responded to the hardheaded calculations of the other Great

Powers. Certainly for Baron Thugut, Kaunitz’s successor as Austrian

foreign minister, warring in 1793 against revolutionary France meant coldly

pursuing Habsburg state interests. For Thugut just as surely as for his

predecessor, talk about “balance of power” politics meant dealing in the

currency of territorial borders, subject populations, and state resources

and revenues. The eighteenth century’s diplomatic wisdom still seemed to

apply: one state’s inordinately large acquisition of lands and/or resources

required that other major states be similarly compensated. Hence, Thugut’s

efforts, in prolonged talks with British diplomats, to “rectify” the imbal-

ance created by the Second Partition of Poland by designating territories

(in eastern France, just possibly, or, more likely, in Poland) that might go

to Austria in the event of victory in the west. And victory seemed def-

initely within Vienna’s grasp in 1793. On 7 August 1793, as a matter of

fact, Austria’s seasoned diplomatist Mercy-Argenteau indicated that, in his

opinion, the time had come for a final assault upon France, as the Republic’s

economy, government, and armies had recently been so gravely weakened.

In hindsight, Karl Roider has held, August 1793 was the month in which

“Austria was closer to defeating revolutionary France than it would ever

be again during Thugut’s tenure as foreign minister.”23

If true, this was in part because Vienna now was concerting its efforts

not only with Prussia but also with Britain. In August 1793 Toulon fell to

the British; and the British now were also threatening the Republic’s other

coasts. At London, as at Vienna, war was a policy grounded in hard-nosed

considerations of national interest. It is important to stress that it was the

decision at Paris to “revolutionize” the Low Countries, rather than the

overthrow of the monarchy or atrocities like the September Massacres,

that had moved Pitt’s government from a neutral stance to advocacy of

military intervention. The British regarded the Low Countries as the key

to their security, not only on the Continent but also on the sea routes to

India – for did the Dutch not have a foothold at the Cape of Good Hope

and in Ceylon?24 Yet one can also situate these issues in an even larger con-

text. The British obsession with Belgium and the United Provinces may

have been embedded in a more general fear – both rational and ideologi-

cal – of the dynamism of revolutionary France. A minister like Grenville

never tired of insisting that it was the
overall
thrust of French policy that was especially worrying. “The willingness of the French to sponsor or encourage discontent and sedition was not separable from this,” it has been

23 Roider,
Baron Thugut and Austria’s Response
, pp. 131–35.

24 Blanning,
Origins of the French Revolutionary Wars
, p. 138.

172

Reinterpreting the French Revolution

argued, “not a distraction from the vital question of the Low Countries,

but an indication both of the essential objectives of French policy and of

the means by which they sought to effect them.”25 Obviously, there is

more than one way to describe the French threat as viewed from London.

Yet, at the very least, it is clear that British intervention on the Continent

stemmed from a conviction that her national interests were in jeopardy.

It was perfectly natural, then, that France’s National Convention, no less

a champion of national interest, and seared by its brush with disaster in

1792–93, should have adopted in its second year of existence an ever more

blatantly nationalistic attitude toward the rest of Europe. Even a chastened

politician like Charles Jean-Marie Barbaroux, sympathizing with the de-

feated Girondists and vociferously critical of the Jacobins through much

of 1793, was enthralled by the vision of a French economy become, even-

tually, unchallengeable in a ferociously competitive Europe. In a letter of

18 June to constituents at Marseilles, Barbaroux roundly rejected any no-

tion of “federalist” insurrection precisely because of what it would do to

France’s power in Europe, in particular to its ability to compete in commer-

cial affairs with the hateful English.26 After the ultraleftist Parisian uprising

of 5 September, R. R. Palmer has written: “Negotiation with the enemy

was abandoned. Even diplomatic relations virtually ceased. Ministers and

ambassadors were recalled from their posts, except those in Switzerland

and the United States.” In other countries only chargés d’affaires were left

to handle unavoidable details, along with “secret agents to maintain con-

tact with the underground revolutionary societies of Europe.”27 Thus, the

French girded themselves for a war
à outrance
against all the powers of

Europe.

The French attitude hardened further in the wake of the revolutionary

victory at Hondschoote in September. In the Convention, Jeanbon

St.-André coolly ascribed the defeats sustained earlier in the year to an

excess of well-intended but misguided “philanthropy.” The Convention

endorsed this analysis and, ominously, decreed “that the generals com-

manding the forces of the Republic on land and sea, renouncing from

henceforth every philanthropic idea previously adopted by the French peo-

ple with the intention of making foreign nations appreciate the value and

benefits of liberty, will behave towards the enemies of France in just the

same way that the powers of the coalition have behaved towards them;

25 Jeremy Black,
British Foreign Policy in an Age of Revolutions, 1783–1793
(New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994), esp. pp. 461–63. Also, the “conflation of the threat posed by the traditional enemy with a sense that British society and religion were under challenge was potent” (ibid., p. 470).

26 Cited in William Scott,
Terror and Repression in Revolutionary Marseilles
, pp. 96–97.

27 R. R. Palmer,
Twelve Who Ruled: The Year of the Terror in the French Revolution
(Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1941), p. 59.

The “revolutionizing” of the Revolution

173

and they [i.e., the French generals] will exercise with regard to the coun-

tries and individuals conquered by their armies the customary rights of

war.”28 The “customary rights of war” – this, from a nation that, just three

years before, in the early bloom of revolutionary enthusiasm, had solemnly

renounced the iniquitous ways of the war-scarred ancien régime, and that,

just one year before, had offered fraternity to the oppressed peoples of

Europe! Alas, the Revolution was taking on more and more of the spirit of

the old France, and of the unredeemed Europe that was now threatening

the Republic with extinction.

It is instructive to see how, even during the Terror, when revolution-

ary “idealism” or “ideology” was supposedly at its peak in foreign as in

domestic affairs,
raison d’état
maintained its hold over politicians’ minds.

This was so even though Brissot’s “ideological” commitment to a crusade

against the crowned heads of Europe had in some respects been replaced

by Robespierre’s “ideological” adherence to a Rousseauist vision of civic

righteousness.

When it came to foreign policy, as to so much else, the Incorruptible

himself seems to have been a study in contradictions. On the one hand, there

can be little doubt that idealism helped to inform the Robespierrist vision

of the world beyond France. R. R. Palmer has observed that Robespierre’s

refusal to support Danton’s diplomatic overtures in the summer of 1793

was partially rooted in a reluctance to see the “prestige of a peacemaker”

go to a man he regarded as “a danger to the true republican ideal, a devotee

of pleasure, a mere tactician and compromiser, a man without steady prin-

ciples or real faith in liberty and equality.” Moreover, if Palmer is right,

Robespierre in spite of himself could not altogether reject the internation-

alist outlook so recently associated with his Brissotin enemies. While he

“did not exactly believe in an expansionist war,” he did view the peoples

of other countries as “groaning masses” and their rulers as “wicked men,”

and as such “could be easily brought, with a little impulsion, to favor

a general ideological crusade.”29

Perhaps. Yet the victories of French arms over the forces arrayed against

them, and the consequent shift of France from a defensive to an offensive

posture, inevitably affected Robespierre as it did all the other revolution-

aries. Addressing the deputies on behalf of his fellows of the Committee

of Public Safety on 17 November 1793, Robespierre “betrayed his adher-

ence to Soulavie’s expulsion-of-all-foreigners idea; he presented a picture

of France as the guarantor of the minor states and free cities of Germany

against the encroachments of Austria and Prussia; and he argued that since

events had proved the Republic to be unconquerable . . . common sense

28 Cited in Blanning,
The French Revolution in Germany
, p. 72.

29 Palmer,
Twelve Who Ruled
, p. 58.

174

Reinterpreting the French Revolution

dictated the end of attempts to conquer it.” These were the hallmarks of

Gallic nationalism and geostrategic calculation, not of perfervid revolu-

tionary cosmopolitanism. Moreover, Sydney Biro has pointed out, this

Jacobin protagonist explicitly renounced on this and subsequent occa-

sions “all desire to convert the world to revolutionary principles by force

of arms.”30 In addition, if Robespierre was not friendly to the notion of

conquests in the Rhineland, he did believe that Belgium desired unification

with France, and therefore accepted the argument that the “annexation of

Belgian territory would constitute no conquest” but instead would repre-

sent “a natural flowing together of elements that it would require violence

to hold apart.”31 Robespierre, it appears, was quite capable of endorsing

tangible strategic goals in 1793–94 whose pursuit could keep France at war

indefinitely with what was now the “First Coalition.”

And what was true for the Terror’s most notorious politician was, it

seems, even more the case for the Revolutionary Government as a whole:

ideology and pragmatism could coexist harmoniously enough – at least

in the domain of foreign relations. Granted, it is true, as more than one

historian of the Terror has noted, that the revolutionary regime of 1793–94

existed both for geopolitical
and
domestic-political purposes. And this led to a situation in which the waging of war, tightly joined with a Jacobin

drive toward (male) democracy and social reform, became the prerequi-

site for achieving those latter goals. For the Jacobins, prolonging the war

meant that factionalism, so dangerous to their Republic, might be kept

at bay; whereas peace, by removing the need for an emergency regime,

would scuttle all chances for realizing their (utopian?) dreams. Here, then,

was a huge paradox from which the Robespierrists could never escape:

the war, which many of them had fiercely opposed in 1792, had by 1794

become indispensable for the implementation of their visionary domestic

program!32

All of this rings true; it is undeniable
as far as it goes
. Yet there are signs aplenty that, at a deeper level, the French revolutionaries waging war against

virtually all of Europe were Frenchmen before they were revolutionaries.

At the Jacobin Club of Lorient, Prieur of the Marne castigated the English

in terms strikingly redolent of old times: “London must be destroyed, and

London shall be destroyed! Let us rid the globe of this new Carthage. . . . We