Reinterpreting the French Revolution: A global-historical perspective (43 page)

shall chase from the Indies and from Bengal these ferocious English, so

insatiable for gold. . . . Soon, next spring I hope, we shall go to visit the

banks of the Thames.”33 Again, the Committee of Public Safety, in a letter

of January 1794 to one of its members “on mission,” alluded to France,

“which alone of all European states can and should be a power on both

30 Biro,
The German Policy of Revolutionary France
, pp. 196–97.

31 Ibid., p. 234.

32 Palmer,
Twelve Who Ruled
, pp. 277–78.

33 Ibid., pp. 211–12.

The “revolutionizing” of the Revolution

175

land and sea.” In doing so, and in pursuing its plan for an invasion of

England, the revolutionary government was but citing chapter and verse

from all French geopoliticians since the most auspicious years of the Sun

King.34 Even in the mundane details of French naval strategy in 1793–94, the

ambitions and fears and practical concerns of the Bourbons’ naval planners

seem to cry out once again. The decision to maintain a battle fleet at Brest in

hopes that it could one day engage Britain’s Channel fleet; designs for the

logistics of the envisioned descent upon the Anglo-Norman Islands and the

British mainland itself; the defense of the French coasts against London’s

privateers – these and other considerations, taken together, made up a naval

strategy that (one naval authority has noted) “was in large measure the

continuation of that of the Ancien Régime.”35 For the Terror’s zealots, war

abroad and (male) democracy at home may have been two sides of the same

republican coin; yet for most French leaders, even in 1793–94, making war

was first and foremost the way to preserve their country and, beyond that,

to reaffirm its prestige in the brutally competitive politics of Europe.

This is not to deny – and indeed, our argument presupposes – that

there were interactions between foreign and domestic affairs through-

out this most dangerous period of the Revolution. Still, the evolution of

French foreign policy during the years of intensifying revolution reflected

geostrategic dynamics and perceptions quite as much as it reflected domes-

tic political and socioeconomic forces. Having reiterated this point, we can

now proceed to reappraise some of the most important domestic policies of

the years 1791–94, and to weigh the specific considerations that lay behind

the enactment of those policies.

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

That the “revolutionizing of the Revolution” was closely tied up with

France’s competitive fortunes in the global arena becomes plain when we

review the domestic policies and factional struggles of the 1791–94 pe-

riod. On the actual politics of those years, more later. For the moment, we

may usefully focus upon how the Legislative Assembly and Convention

handled five pivotal issues: governmental powers and finance, the status

of émigrés and clergy, seigneurialism and the peasantry, the economic

and social welfare of the country’s urban masses, and recruitment into

(and promotion within) the armed forces. To reassess the legislators’ primary

accomplishments in these areas is to understand that, even at the high

34 Ibid., p. 218. Interestingly, Palmer cites the influential naval historian Lévy-Schneider as arguing that France’s determination to take the offensive at sea “was a main reason why the Committee of Public Safety, at the beginning of 1794, made its fateful decision not to mitigate the Terror.”

35 Hampson,
La Marine de l’An II
, pp. 91–92. My translation from the author’s (very literate) French.

176

Reinterpreting the French Revolution

tide of radical revolution, considerations of French state security cast a

long shadow over a landscape otherwise illuminated fitfully by hopes for

improvements in ordinary people’s lives.

It has long been a truism that the Terror of 1793–94 brought about an un-

precedented centralization of government functions and powers in France.

What remains to be emphasized is, first, the way in which developments

in this area followed the fortunes of war, and, second, how the war-related

process of
bureaucratization
underlay (and would survive) the temporary

accumulation of powers in the hands of Robespierre and his colleagues of

the Committee of Public Safety.

Even in the last weeks of the abbreviated Legislative Assembly,

Hampson has noted, a deterioration in the military situation brought home

to Parisians by the issuance of the Allies’ menacing Brunswick Manifesto

spurred the Council of Ministers and the Paris Commune to send out com-

missioners to coordinate local measures of national defense. It was during

these days, as well, that “the Government and the Assembly took the first

steps along the road to economic controls.” Efforts to requisition food and

transport for the army, ensure the provisioning of civilian markets, and

establish a census of grain supplies were no doubt premature at this time:

in the first months of the Convention the deputies repealed such measures,

“perhaps because of the improvement in the military situation.” Such

decrees, nonetheless, looked forward to the more drastic government

actions of a later day.36

Sure enough, the next major downturn in French geopolitical fortunes,

at the start of the campaigning season in the spring of 1793, produced

“a number of emergency measures aimed at reinforcing the power of the

Central Government and destroying the counter-revolutionaries within

France.” On 9 March, the Convention decided to dispatch eighty-two of

its members throughout the country to spur the recruitment of young

men into the armies. The very next day saw the creation of the soon-

to-be-notorious Revolutionary Tribunal “to judge political offenders and

forestall popular ‘justice.’” On 21 March, the deputies voted to establish

surveillance committees in the sections of the major towns and in all the

communes. Initially confined to keeping tabs on foreigners, these commit-

tees soon assumed another role as well: controlling issuance of the
certificats

de civisme
that allowed access to public jobs. On 6 April, the Convention

broke critical new ground by establishing a nine-member Committee of

Public Safety to oversee and coordinate all executive agencies of govern-

ment; and on 9 April, it voted to send deputies entrusted with wide powers

to serve as political commissars attached to the Republic’s field armies.37

36 Hampson,
A Social History of the French Revolution
, pp. 158–59.

37 Ibid., pp. 168–69.

The “revolutionizing” of the Revolution

177

In these and other ways, the lawmakers reacted to ominous international

developments – the addition of Britain, the United Provinces, and Spain to

the Coalition, the treason of Dumouriez in Belgium – by gathering more

and more authority unto themselves.

Then came the Revolution’s most perilous days, in the late summer and

autumn of 1793. It was then, it appears, that Austria felt most confident

about vanquishing the French; it was then that the British were handed

Toulon, the gateway to the southeastern French provinces, and seemed

on the verge of landing in the rebellious western hinterland as well. The

logical response at Paris was to invest new powers in the government.38

In September, the Committee of Public Safety assumed the role of ap-

pointing members of all the other executive committees, systematized the

detention of all political “suspects,” and moved to transform local surveil-

lance committees (“revolutionary committees”) into agencies of the central

government. On 10 October, the Convention endorsed a proposal from

the Committee of Public Safety that gave this committee control over the

ministers and all officially “constituted” authorities, all generals in the

armies, and all domestic “paramilitary” forces. The Convention also au-

thorized the committee to seize and reallocate foodstuffs and other essen-

tial commodities everywhere in the Republic, and formally declared the

“provisional government of France” to be “revolutionary until the peace.”

On 25 November, the legislature decreed that whenever its members were

functioning as “representatives on mission,” they must strictly obey all

mandates of the Committee of Public Safety. Finally came the law of

14 Frimaire (4 December) which was in effect the “constitution” of the

governmental Terror. Under its auspices, all officials were now subject to

the rigorous oversight of the Committee of Public Safety and the hardly

less powerful Committee of General Security. A myriad of locally elected

administrators, or those of them who survived the purge for which the new

law provided, became “national agents” who could be removed at the whim

of the Convention. In addition: local officials were warned not to sponsor

unauthorized assemblies;
comités de surveillance
were absorbed into

sanctioned governmental agencies; and all raising of troops and moneys

was to be authorized at Paris. Logically enough, all of these provisions

were to be enforced by the Committee of Public Safety.

The Spartan decree of 4 December 1793, we have already held, was the

“constitution” of the Terror. But some have viewed it as even more than

that: “Setting up a strong central power, providing channels for the quick

flow of authority from Paris to the remotest village, sweeping away all

38 On the following points, refer to Palmer,
Twelve Who Ruled
, esp. pp. 66–67, 74–75, and 124–27. See also Jacques Godechot, “The Internal History of France during the Wars,

1793–1814,” in
The New Cambridge Modern History, Vol. 9: War and Peace in an Age
of Upheaval, 1793–1830
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1965), pp. 275–306.

178

Reinterpreting the French Revolution

intermediate agencies that could obstruct or twist the policies of govern-

ment, it recalled the age-old efforts of kings and ministers to bring order

out of feudalism, and anticipated the means by which Napoleon organized

modern France.”39 To this we can only add, from our explanatory perspec-

tive, that the continuity binding the Revolution to both past and future, a

continuity that appeared so strikingly in the “law of 14 Frimaire,” fused the

most pressing international and domestic concerns of the historic French

state.

If the war emergency of 1792–94 led to a drastic if ephemeral con-

centration of government powers at Paris, it also forced the legislators to

weigh the possibilities for that natural financial device of so much mod-

ern governance: progressive taxation. On 18 March 1793, on the motion

of Ramel-Nogaret, the revolutionaries decreed that “in order to attain a

more accurate proportion in the distribution of the burden each citizen

has to bear according to his abilities, there shall be established a graduated

and progressive tax on luxury and both landed and transferable wealth.”40

True, the Convention paired this decree with another one, proposed by

Barère and Levasseur de La Sarthe, threatening with death anyone who

should advocate a division of lands or “any other measure subversive of

territorial, commercial and industrial property.” Even in the throes of a

military emergency, the French would exorcise the ghosts of “commu-

nism.” Furthermore, progressive taxation itself remained more of a threat

than a reality at this time: even the forced loan passed by the legislature

on 19 August–3 September was intended more to encourage “bourgeois”

investment in a voluntary loan than to tax affluent citizens at confiscatory

rates. A certain association between war and “social” taxation nonetheless

emerged, both at Paris and in the provinces. In arguing for progressive

taxation, Danton reminded the rich that keeping France’s enemies at bay

would safeguard their investments by securing their lands and other assets.

The deputies charged with working out the details of a “progressive

contribution” often referred to it as a “war subsidy.” And away from Paris,

“representatives on mission,” who were unhampered by legislative over-

sight, often took advantage of their freedom of maneuver to levy all manner

of imposts, in currency and in kind, upon moneyed citizens. Jean-Pierre

Gross has pertinently remarked that the “unprecedented taxes raised all

over France were only justified by . . . exceptional circumstances [and were

raised] in order to provide urgently needed funds in a time of war.” That

such imposts were frequently labeled “
taxes de guerre
” tells us something

39 Palmer,
Twelve Who Ruled
, p. 127.

40 Jean-Pierre Gross, “Progressive Taxation and Social Justice in Eighteenth-Century France,”
Past and Present
140 (1993): 79–126, for the paragraphs that follow. See also the more recent monograph by the same author:
Fair Shares for All: Jacobin Egalitarianism
in Practice
(New York: Cambridge University Press, 1997).

The “revolutionizing” of the Revolution