Reinterpreting the French Revolution: A global-historical perspective (44 page)

179

about the way the military campaign was associated with financial issues

in many Frenchmen’s minds.41

But to dwell exclusively on the administrative and financial excesses of

the Terror would be to miss the more fundamental fact that the intensi-

fication of the Revolution ensured the triumph of bureaucracy in France.

Clive Church has stressed the connections between the massive war mobi-

lization and the size, internal organization, and esprit de corps of the state

bureaucracy in 1792–94. On the issue of size: “Certainly there must have

been at least 13,000 officials and employees in Paris alone, and probably

more than 15,000.” Outside the capital, “there could have been 250,000

or perhaps even 300,000 if one includes elected officials, field, local, and

military employees.”42 Insofar as its internal organization was concerned,

the new bureaucracy observed rules of hierarchical distribution of power.

The Convention’s committees presided over state agencies situated in spe-

cific echelons of public authority. The machinery of state was also highly

centralized
, not only because of the political oversight of the Committee

of Public Safety but also because of the imposition of new administrative

controls on state services.43

Finally, there is the matter of the origins, experience, and esprit of these

new “bureaucrats.” On the one hand, the unremitting pressures under

which the youthful republic was attempting to work did not permit it to

inquire closely into the motivation and qualifications of those it hired: ex-

cessive delay in recruitment, after all, could adversely affect the war effort.

Ideologically motivated “patriots” were probably outnumbered greatly in

the new ranks of officialdom by opportunists driven into state service by

the economic and social dislocations of war. On the other hand, once in of-

fice, these apprenticed administrators were all laboring for the same master,

the state. “They all worked within much the same structural pattern of di-

visions and bureaux, and more importantly, they were part of bodies which

in the case of the commissions were very much an amalgam of varying ser-

vices and recruits.” They were salaried; they had to satisfy unprecedented

standards of discipline; and they had to work through written records as

never before. There can be little doubt that, by this time, bureaucratization

in wartime France was well under way. Henceforward, the main challenge

would be to consolidate the new administration.44

So what might be called the “constitutional” aspect of deepening

revolution up to 1794 – that is, the centralization and bureaucratization of

41 Gross, “Progressive Taxation and Social Justice,” p. 119. A good example of “representatives on mission” levying heavy taxation, in currency and in kind, on affluent
provinc¸iaux
is that of Saint-Just and Le Bas in Alsace. See again Palmer,
Twelve Who Ruled
, pp. 177–201.

42 Church,
Revolution and Red Tape
, pp. 94–95.

43 Ibid., p. 95.

44 Ibid., pp. 96–100.

180

Reinterpreting the French Revolution

governance – was inextricably associated with France’s deepening involve-

ment in European high politics. A similar conclusion would seem to hold

for the various “social” aspects of the radicalization process. This was,

for instance, true when it came to the deputies’ treatment of émigrés and

clergymen: once again, revolutionary behavior was, if not dictated, then

at least heavily influenced by revolutionary perceptions of the evolving

international situation.

As a number of historians have observed, this was a tendency adum-

brated in the early days of the Revolution. If, for example, fears of émigré

conspiracies against France were exercising many in the population by

1792, this was a circumstance reminiscent of recurrent anxieties in the

1789–91 period. At times, patriots had espied émigrés “under every bed”

and muttered about “imminent invasions by Swedes, Russians, and their

noble native allies.” When journals like the
Révolutions de Paris
and the

Gazette de Leyde
in 1789 spoke casually of huge numbers of émigrés se-

curing passports and fleeing the country, and when in October 1791 Marat

published a story alleging the presence of fifty thousand émigrés in Flanders

alone, patriotic Frenchmen could only darkly assume an unholy collusion

between errant nobles and the adversaries of France.45

Clergy, too, fell afoul of revolutionary xenophobia. Even in the days of

the Constituent Assembly, Jacobins – and some non-Jacobins as well – saw

non-juring priests as traitors to the Revolution. Moreover, the Assembly’s

own actions helped to place such a stigma even on clergy who had ac-

cepted the Civil Constitution. Insisting that clerical Assemblymen swear

the oath to the Civil Constitution in the highly politicized atmosphere

of Paris and decreeing that all lawsuits involving ecclesiastical reforms be

entrusted to the administrators in the municipalities, districts, and depart-

ments were strategies bound to politicize religious issues in the eyes of

citizens increasingly obsessed by the “political” possibility of invasion.

Even before Varennes, Parisians increasingly saw religious issues as jeop-

ardizing national unity, and in the wake of that crisis, with fears of domestic

counterrevolution and of an Austrian attack sweeping the country, some

local authorities interned “refractory” clergy as part of a campaign for

security.46

As a result, the ground was well prepared in public opinion for the

Girondists’ attempt – in their march toward war – to associate émigrés and

non-juring priests with France’s potential enemies. Brissot and his fire-

breathing confederates reaped a rich harvest in the Legislative Assembly.

45 Higonnet,
Class, Ideology, and the Rights of Nobles
, p. 96. Still very useful on the subject of the émigrés is Donald Greer,
The Incidence of the Emigration during the French
Revolution
(Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1951). On conspiracy fears in the early 1790s, refer again to Tackett, “Conspiracy Obsession in a Time of Revolution,”

esp. pp. 691–700.

46 McManners,
The French Revolution and the Church
, pp. 61–62.

The “revolutionizing” of the Revolution

181

They gleefully set upon émigrés, for instance, aiming to penalize them as

a group. They promulgated an act (which the king, predictably, vetoed)

sentencing to death all émigrés who did not return to France by 1 January

1792, as well as all errant nobles inside France advocating military desertion.

In December 1791, émigrés were denied the right to garner salaries abroad;

and as of February 1792, they once again needed passports for travel outside

of France. Over the next several months, the legislature also moved to

sequester émigré possessions. At this point, it is true, émigrés were neither

unconditionally “deprived of their civil rights nor excluded forever from

the bosom of the nation.” Nevertheless, in the furies of “patriotic” war

to come, things were likely to go hard for them. Some indication of this

came on 28–29 July 1792, when legislation forbidding the issuance of new

passports that would have allowed new emigrations justified doing so by

citing each citizen’s “sacred duty to march to the aid of the country.”47

A like fate befell “non-juring” clergy as France lurched into war – and

bid fair to engulf oath-taking churchmen as well. What was more, it be-

came harder to keep ecclesiastical issues separate in patriotic minds from

inflammatory suspicions regarding émigrés. “In so far as the wealthy had

invested in the spoils of the Church they tended to prefer the hazards of the

Revolution to the risk of expropriation by the victorious émigrés,” one spe-

cialist has aptly noted, “and for that . . . the war was responsible.”48 From

the very beginning, it has also been pointed out, the Legislative Assembly,

which would vote for war in April 1792, tended to assimilate religious

questions to larger civic matters, and of course the latter came increas-

ingly to be dominated by military and strategic concerns. Ominously, the

“religious schism” engendered by the Civil Constitution and its associated

oath “came to be spoken of in crudely political terms, ‘patriots’ on one

side, ‘aristocrats’ on the other.” Continued opposition to ecclesiastical re-

forms in the provinces led the Assembly to decree on 29 November 1791

that non-juring priests be considered “suspects,” and as such “liable to ex-

pulsion from communes where troubles occurred.” That the king chose to

veto this act along with decrees aimed at “treasonous” émigrés only cast

further “civic” discredit upon clerical doubts about revolutionary change

that were, however, deeply felt. It was all too predictable that, in the event

of war and its unavoidable reverses, the status of the clergy, like that of

the émigrés, would further deteriorate. As early as 26 May 1792, in fact,

with the specter of defeat already in the air, the legislature decreed that

every refractory priest denounced by twenty “active” citizens would be

deported. Meanwhile, local officials who had been satisfied simply with

interning some non-juring clerics the year before in the wake of Varennes

now acted more aggressively, arresting priests indiscriminately in some

47 Higonnet,
Class, Ideology, and the Rights of Nobles
, pp. 77–78.

48 Hampson,
A Social History of the French Revolution
, p. 145.

182

Reinterpreting the French Revolution

cases and restricting their domiciliary options and freedom of movement

in others.49

As the Revolution sank more deeply into the morass of total war, and

as part of the “social leveling” inherent in national mobilization for such a

struggle, émigrés and refractory clergy were treated with mounting sever-

ity. Emigré property, put under state control as early as April 1792, and

formally alienated from its noble possessors on 27 July, was subsequently

offered to prospective purchasers under terms that became increasingly

generous. In August 1792, the representatives, having been reminded that

“the sale of émigré property offers a means of binding the country people to

the Revolution,” decreed that buyers of such property were to have priority

over tenants and that local officials were to ensure that these holdings were

“divided as usefully as possible into small lots.”50 These provisions were

amended by a law of 3 June 1793, which reiterated that émigré lands were to

be divided up “as far as possible, without damaging each farm or estate,

into lots or portions” but also made special provision for landless farmers

in communes containing émigré lands but no partible common lands.

In such villages, rural proletarians were to rent plots of one
arpent
apiece directly from the state.51 Such initiatives were followed up during the

Terror by new laws that not only anathematized noble emigrants in lan-

guage by now become familiar but also hedged in the inheritance rights of

emigrants’ relatives still resident in the country.

For clerics, too, this was a time of tribulations. With the toppling of the

monarchy, and an “invasion panic” justified for Parisians by the threatening

terms of the Brunswick Manifesto, all stays were lifted on deportations of

non-juring clergy already ordered, and the number of denunciations by ac-

tive citizens required for new deportations was reduced from twenty to six.

(“This was tantamount,” John McManners has commented, “to a universal

proscription.”) Perhaps even more revealing of the revolutionary attitude

toward the clergy was the fact that
all
churchmen were now ordered

“on penalty of loss of place or pension” to take a new oath binding them to

all-out support of the embattled Republic. That 3 bishops and 220 priests

(on McManners’s reckoning) were killed in the September Massacres in

Paris serves as another dramatic indication of the clergy’s worsening sit-

uation. Anticlerical violence flared up in the provinces as well, and often

in such incidents the distinction between “juring” and “refractory” priests

was blurred.52 In the course of 1793, with the Republic combatting virtu-

ally all of Europe, the treatment of clerics and churchly interests became yet

harsher. After 23 March, for instance, deportations of non-jurors followed

49 McManners,
The French Revolution and the Church
, pp. 63–67.

50 Hampson,
A Social History of the French Revolution
, p. 149.

51 Jones,
The Peasantry in the French Revolution
, p. 155.

52 McManners,
The French Revolution and the Church
, pp. 63–67.

The “revolutionizing” of the Revolution

183

automatically upon their identification. And after 22 November, the

injunction to split up émigré estates wherever possible “was extended to

the remaining ecclesiastical property coming up for sale.”53

There were, admittedly, limits to the Revolution’s campaign against for-