Revolutionary Ideas: An Intellectual History of the French Revolution From the Rights of Man to Robespierre (10 page)

The French desired a constitution, affirmed Brissot at this time, that would be fully “l’expression de la volonté universelle.”
³³
How was it to be secured? Through liberty of the press. He had argued unceasingly
since the early 1780s that a free press alone would enable reading and debating clubs to organize and express la volonté générale. Only a publishing revolution could transform France from a backward monarchy into a representative democracy equipped to promote its citizenry’s best interests and protect their rights.
³⁴
From July 1789 Brissot turned his newly established newspaper into a major vehicle of revolutionary ferment.
³⁵
What an enormous distance the French had traversed since 1787, he commented in June 1789. Who would have guessed in 1787 that by 1789 the French would be vigorously demanding “une constitution libre”? But prior to the Bastille’s fall, it was only his particular small group—the philosophique vanguard of revolutionary publicists, orators, and spokesmen—who thought in terms of giving France a wholly new constitution, not anyone else, including the great majority of the deputies to the Estates-General.

Who had “enlightened” the French people sufficiently for this first crucial step to be taken, asked this quintessential representative of antireligious and antiaristocratic radical Enlightenment thought, and how had they done it? The Revolution’s first phase was indubitably achieved by the press—thus far, mainly books and pamphlets—and if these books “that so few are able to read” produced such an effect, averred Brissot, what will happen when the press is truly liberated, “when the papers, above all papers everyone reads, will be free”? Before the Revolution the Crown was much more vigilant, Tocqueville observed later, in censoring newspapers than it was books. In early 1789, royal licensing of newspapers was the last lingering part of the royal censorship still operative.
³⁶
But once this too was neutralized, “the light,” today concentrated among “la classe aisée” (the leisured class), will reach all men’s minds.
³⁷
In the
Journal de Paris
and other conservative organs, Brissot was rightly identified as a particularly dangerous and incendiary writer, an undisguised enemy of ecclesiastics and sovereign rulers, “un Apôtre du républicanisme.”
³⁸
By June 1789, the belief that France stood poised to embrace a new constitution based on natural rights and fundamentally change its laws permeated Brissot’s circle, an ambitious group of like-minded, would-be politicians who had failed to win election to the Estates, including Condorcet, the Genevan republican exile Clavière, and the physician Lanthenas. Among this avowed revolutionary clique, it was already customary to refer to
la Révolution
with a capital “R” and label the pre-1789 order “the
ancien régime
and to think of the imminent Revolution as universal in its significance.”
³⁹

Brissot and his circle joined the campaign headed by Mirabeau, Sieyès, Gorsas, Chénier, Chamfort, Cérutti, Mercier, Beaumarchais, and other pro-Revolution littérateurs pursuing a thoroughgoing revolution of the press, theater, and culture generally. Brissot aimed to become a revolutionary leader, realizing that he could through his writing. His newspaper would especially spread “les lumières” (enlightenment) among all classes of the population by utilizing his earlier research on the laws and constitutions of Britain and the United States, and the social effects of these, to benefit France. Both Britain and the United States supposedly already enjoyed the vast advantage of press liberty. But the Americans had improved on England’s press freedom, he thought, by preserving their gazettes from the heavy stamp duties the British press incurred.
⁴⁰
Briefly, in early 1789, French licensed papers with royal and parlementaire backing could still obstruct the unlicensed papers that were beginning to appear, for example, by obtaining a royal ban, in May 1789, after just one issue, on Brissot’s paper.
⁴¹
He resumed publishing
Le Patriote français
, soon among the foremost pro-Revolution papers, only on 28 July. His efforts as a journalist were aided by several future allies in revolutionary politics, notably Lanthenas and Clavière. From July 1789,
Le Patriote français
appeared regularly, figuring prominently throughout—until suppressed by Jacobin populists in June 1793. From July 1789, its declared mission was to “prepare a nation to receive a free constitution.”
⁴²

Royal press censorship in France disintegrated completely with the storming of the Bastille in July 1789.
⁴³
Although the first major pro-Revolution journals, Mirabeau’s
Courrier de Provence
and Brissot’s
Patriote français
, had begun tentatively slightly earlier, most revolutionary journals emerged following the Bastille’s fall, an occurrence that announces still bigger, “happy revolutions,” exclaimed Gorsas on 15 July, and so important that it would be remembered “for ever.”
⁴⁴
Among the principal papers was the
Révolutions de Paris
, commencing on 18 July, edited by Louis-Marie Prudhomme and perhaps the single most successful early Revolution paper, with the librarian philosophe Sylvain Maréchal contributing regularly from late 1790.
⁴⁵
The
Journal de Perlet
, edited by a Genevan, Charles Perlet (1766–1828), also penetrated widely (until suppressed after the coup of Fructidor in 1797), first appearing on 1 August 1789. It was followed by Louise Kéralio’s
Journal d’état et du citoyen
and many other remarkable papers. Gorsas’s journal, originally entitled
Le Courrier de Versailles à Paris
, though likewise
commencing earlier, only appeared regularly from July. Gorsas, eager to help perfect the happiness of the people from whose ranks he himself came, labeled all opposition to the Left republican literary vanguard “despotisme aristocratique.”

Gorsas reviled aristocracy. Yet, typical of this unrepresentative fringe, he also disdained what he considered the ignorance and prejudiced outlook of the ordinary man. Witness to many ugly street scenes, Gorsas unsparingly recorded firsthand the people’s unfortunate tendency to irrationality and brutal violence.
⁴⁶
After the spreading disorder of mid- and late July began to include anti-Semitic disturbances in early August in Alsace and Lorraine, during October his paper, among the most attentive to the confused flurry of events across France, vehemently deplored the unreasoning “hatred of the people,” the pillaging of Jewish homes in Lixheim, Lorraine, and nineteen villages in Alsace, and the potential threat this and the unrest more generally posed to the Revolution. Due to ingrained ignorance and credulity, he warned, urging the Assembly to take measures to protect them: “great danger surrounded in particular the Jews in Lorraine and Alsace.”
⁴⁷

The Revolution first considered the question of Jewish emancipation in the autumn of 1789, but it was by no means the Revolution itself that first introduced the idea of integrating Jews fully into society and allowing them to live free of restriction where they wanted. (Under ancien régime French law, Jewish residence was confined to Alsace-Lorraine, Avignon, Bordeaux, and Bayonne.) Rather, this idea was first developed and powerfully publicized during the years immediately before the Revolution, most vigorously by Mirabeau, Brissot, and another key revolutionary journalist, Anacharsis Cloots (1755–94), who all condemned Christian anti-Jewish prejudice before 1789. The idea was also promoted by a prize competition announced by the Société Royale des Sciences et des Arts of Metz in 1787 that asked whether it was possible to render the Jews “happier and more useful in France.” Three texts were “crowned” winners by the academy, all urging comprehensive Jewish emancipation and integration. These were by the Jewish savant Zalkind Hourwitz (1738–1812), a Polish Jew employed from 1789 on the staff of the Bibliothèque du Roi (from 1792 the Bibliothèque Nationale), the Abbé Grégoire, and Claude Thierry, an
avocat
of the parlement of Nancy.
⁴⁸

By 1787 the revolution in educated French minds regarding the Jews had already occurred, contended Thierry, and philosophy had effected it by scorning all theological arguments against the Jews. Though Mirabeau
was the philosophe to whom most credit was due for effecting this sea change in educated opinion, acknowledged Thierry, he claimed to have reached the same conclusions independently. Thierry stands out not just for urging Jewish emancipation unreservedly, but insisting, like Cloots, that the entire responsibility and guilt for the oppression of the Jews in Europe since the first Christian centuries lay with the churches and with the common people in their ignorance.
⁴⁹
His tone shows Thierry fully conscious of the revolutionary character of what he was saying and how difficult this was for the vast majority to accept. Continually attacking traditional prejudice, Thierry maintained that successful Jewish emancipation and integration required an end to separate Jewish education based on religious authority. It required the state to introduce a secular, universal education under which Christian and Jewish children, mingling together, would jointly overcome obstacles created by the prejudices of centuries and equally imbibe enlightenment, morality, and civic values.
⁵⁰

The July 1789 revolution in publishing and public debate not only generated a huge number of new journals of every complexion but also transformed the status and role of the publicist and journalist, the pro-Revolution press quickly and massively proliferating. From 25 August 1789 appeared one of the most influential and best edited revolutionary journals,
La Chronique de Paris
, to which Condorcet, Rabaut Saint-Étienne, and Jean-François Ducos (1765–93), philosophe and friend of Raynal, all regularly contributed. Shortly afterward, François-Jean Baudouin (1759–1838) established the
Journal des débats et des décrets
, and on 3 October 1789, Jean-Louis Carra (1743–93), librarian and
érudit
, steeped in radical philosophy since the early 1770s and a would-be philosophe himself,
⁵¹
initiated his widely selling
Annales patriotiques et littéraires
. Jean-Pierre Audouin began the
Journal universel
, destined to last five years, on 23 November.
⁵²
All these hailed freedom of the press as a basic human right and overriding principle. Hostile commentators, of whom there were many, complained already during the Estates-General’s opening days that the press had suddenly gained an excessive sway. In particular, Mirabeau’s
Courrier de Provence
and Gorsas’s
Courrier
were denounced for appropriating an undue influence with their detailed reporting and (according to some) slanting of what transpired at Versailles and their relaying this swiftly to the capital. Their commentary, assailing nobility, clergy, parlementaires, and court, Gorsas admitted in his paper, helped shape the way political news was understood and received in Paris.

With the Estates-General commencing in April 1789, a satirical pamphlet appeared that attacked the coterie of self-proclaimed “experts” who were advising the nation how to organize its affairs. The French, it complained, had been plunged into profoundly unsettling anxiety and alarm by la philosophie. The “incomparable geniuses” suddenly presiding over the Estates and all France appeared impressive to some but “were really just a batch of pretentious, babbling journalists.” Mirabeau, Gorsas, Beaumarchais (author of the
Marriage of Figaro
), and the librarian Carra, the last styled a “little lieutenant of Mirabeau,” were the “geniuses of France” derided here by name. These presumptuous upstarts, the people must realize, utilized their undeserved influence not just to make the press a powerful tool but also themselves unduly powerful political agents. The pamphlet proved more accurately prophetic than its author could possibly have imagined.
⁵³

Not only successful papers emerged during the opening weeks of revolutionary ferment, however, but also short-lived failures, which were, in fact, the majority. More than 515 papers appeared in Paris alone, it is estimated, between May 1789 and October 1791, 54 percent of which lasted less than a month. Nor did only prorevolutionary papers appear. There was an equally striking surge of right-wing, anti-Revolution journals that likewise figured prominently from then until 1793, like
L’Ami du Roi
of the Abbé Royou, the
Gazette de Paris
of Bernabé Durozoy (1745–92), the
Journal politique national des États-Généraux et de la Révolution de 1789
by the antiphilosophe Sabatier, and
Le Mercure de France
(1789–92) of Mallet du Pan, a prominent Swiss ideologue and later intermediary between Paris royalists and the émigrés abroad.
⁵⁴

The editors of several of these were also profoundly influenced by the Enlightenment—only in their case not the Radical Enlightenment. Despite being an unrelenting royalist, Durozoy, a mediocre poet, wrote favorably of Protestants, Jews, and divorce, and even recommended the marriage of priests. Mallet du Pan, whose
Mercure
achieved great popularity (its circulation during 1789 reached more than eleven thousand),
⁵⁵
was a deist detested by liberal monarchists and republicans alike who had known and admired Voltaire, and became a fervent disciple of Burke. Originating from a republic (Geneva) but scion of the antidemocratic patriciate, Mallet made his living by incessantly denouncing equality and democracy and seeking to mobilize popular sentiment against the Revolution.
⁵⁶
He expressly repudiated the thought of Helvétius, Raynal, and Diderot, and reviled Condorcet, his abhorrence
of democracy closely linked to his antiphilosophisme.
⁵⁷
More liberal monarchist in tone was
Le Journal de la Société de 1789,
edited by Pierre Samuel Dupont de Nemours (1739–1817), Claude-Emmanuel de Pastoret (1756–1840), an important figure in the Revolution, and André Chénier (1762–94), an eminent poet steeped in la philosophie, later executed in the Terror.