Revolutionary Ideas: An Intellectual History of the French Revolution From the Rights of Man to Robespierre (101 page)

But now, with France under a “popular” regime, everything had changed. The press would never again be permitted to diverge from the proper path or fail to “respect” the people. Anyone criticizing the Montagne would be severely dealt with. Had not the sansculotte crowds, the
former friar Chabot reminded the club, applauded the smashing of the printing presses of “Gorsas and the other counterrevolutionary journalists” in March? Everyone with correct ideas backed the smashing of dissident printing presses. “La liberté de la presse,” needed before, could be discarded now the nation’s press existed only for the “défense de la liberté; voilà ses limites.”
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Nor were unsubmissive journalists the only section of the intelligentsia specially targeted. The Montagne, observed François de Neufchâteau, later a leading revolutionary himself, set out to silence all criticism.
¹⁰⁰
Victims of the Terror in Lyon, Marseille, Toulon, Nantes, Bordeaux, and the Vendée alike were, in the great majority, ordinary people, often artisans and laborers suspected of opposing the Montagne. Among more prominent victims, though, the chief targets were undeviatingly the Left republican intellectuals, writers, and journalists who had forged the Revolution. The point of the Terror, noted Ysabeau at Bordeaux, was to eliminate Brissotins and the
beaux-esprits
,
orateurs,
and writers “with eloquent pens” who had misled the people. Robepierre and his colleagues,” one observer summed the matter up, “pursued the
gens de lettres
.”
¹⁰¹

One after the other, the Montagne liquidated its democratic republican critics and other resolute detractors. Adam Lux, perfectly calm, even embracing his executioners, was guillotined on 4 November. Two days later, it was the turn of Louis XVI’s ambitious cousin, Louis-Philippe, Duc d’Orléans, known since the declaration of the Republic as “Philippe Égalité.” Imprisoned since June, on 14 November Louis-Pierre Manuel, whose last book
Lettres sur la Révolution receuillies par un ami de la Constitution
had appeared the year before, faced the blade. Girey-Dupré, caught in Bordeaux and brought to Paris, appeared before the Tribunal Révolutionnaire, where he was denounced as Brissot’s helper and disciple. He replied by eulogizing his mentor as “a second Sidney,” a true republican and freedom fighter whose fate, he told an unsmiling court, he was content to share. Aged only twenty-four, he rapidly did so, conveyed through the streets on 20 November shouting, as he passed Robespierre’s lodgings, “À bas les tyrants et les dictateurs!”
¹⁰²
Also seized in November was France’s most celebrated scientist, a prominent and enthusiastic supporter of the Revolution throughout 1789–93, Antoine-Laurent Lavoisier (1743–94), arrested not as a leading académicien opposing suppression of the academies but among twenty-four former royal tax “farmers-general” deemed “oppressors of the people.”
¹⁰³

After hiding briefly in the now-abolished Académie des Sciences, Lavoisier gave himself up, being unwilling to endanger those who tried to save him. Scientific colleagues submitted petitions, explaining the signal importance of his research. But as he himself stressed in one of his last letters, even a record of outstanding contribution to the Revolution, major contributions to the arts, and surpassing scientific work put together could not save a critic from the Montagne.
¹⁰⁴
Before being guillotined, he languished for several months in the former Jansenist convent of Port-Royal where several other prominent intellectuals were also incarcerated, a dreaded place now renamed (with unintended irony) Port-Libre.

The Paris suburb of Auteuil, key redoubt of la philosophie, underwent repeated searches by revolutionary committees hunting especially for Condorcet. Garat, linked to the radical philosophes Diderot, Helvétius, and Condorcet since 1774, forced to resign his post as justice minister in favor of Gohier on 20 August, was denounced by Collot d’Herbois and imprisoned on 27 September (but survived). Antoine Destutt de Tracy, materialist philosophe, herald of black emancipation and among the first nobles to join the Third in 1789, earlier an officer under Lafayette, was arrested on 19 October after Hébertistes led by Ronsin surrounded his house at Auteuil. Subsequently released, he was rearrested and imprisoned on 2 November. He used the eleven months of his second incarceration for a close study of Locke’s and Condillac’s epistemology.
¹⁰⁵
The circle’s other foremost philosophe, Volney, was arrested on the Comité de Sûreté Générale’s orders, while emerging from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs on 16 November.
¹⁰⁶
Another of the Helvétius circle, La Roche, former confessor to the Comte d’Artois, was arrested over the town council’s protest for delaying removal of Mirabeau’s bust from the town hall, publicly denigrating Marat, and on suspicion of aiding Condorcet’s escape.
¹⁰⁷
Cabanis, guardian of the elderly Mme. Helvétius and her Auteuil villa, purged from the town council in November, remained indoors in Mme. Helvétius’s house, scarcely venturing out until after Thermidor.

Shortly before his seizure, Volney published his popularizing tract
La Loi naturelle, ou
Catéchisme du Citoyen français.
Like the
Bon-Sens
of d’Holbach, directed at the masses in simple terms, it was a vigorously argued plea for a philosophical transformation of all human values on the basis of freedom and individual fulfillment in diversity. Celebrated for large works, Volney, noted the
Moniteur
, had now published a slim but remarkable volume aimed at everyone, even the barely literate. An
overriding ethical law exists, irrespective of religion, constituting the common rule for all, guiding men whether they know it or not without distinction of sect or faith toward human happiness—the natural law deriving directly from God. This alone, observed the paper, sufficiently refuted rumors spread by Corsican counterrevolutionaries accusing Volney of “atheism.” (In reality, Volney, a full-blown exponent of radical ideas, was a d’Holbachian materialist who wholly rejected divine Providence.) Morality’s foundations, “good” and “bad,” contended Volney (like Diderot, d’Holbach, Helvétius, and Condorcet), are purely social values unconnected to revelations and theology. He defined “good” as whatever helps conserve and improve human society; “bad” is the opposite.

Morality, for Volney, was an immediate, universal, invariable, and evident science derived from the particular character and needs of men, a political discipline pivoting on the principles of equity, justice, charity, and toleration, entrusting all with the collective common fight against ignorance, superstition, and intolerance and demanding the most perfect indifference to all organized cults and priests. This
loi naturelle
, held Volney, stigmatized senseless violence and shedding of blood.
¹⁰⁸
Especially contrary to Robespierre’s ideology was Volney’s contention that ignorance is the worst of human failings because it damages and prejudices everyone and directly harms society, liberty, and the Republic.
¹⁰⁹
Rejecting Rousseau’s praise of the savage state,
La Loi naturelle
claims that man in
l’état sauvage
is brutish, ignorant, and ill-intentioned, and that universal “natural law” grounded on reason and experience not only intends man for life in a free society but is the only path to morality, order, and a decent life for all.
¹¹⁰
Volney had throughout been among the most eloquent and fervent advocates of the Revolution’s democratic principles: incarcerated at La Force, he remained confined for ten months.

Yet another literary-philosophical foe silenced was Chamfort. Appointed codirector of the Bibliothèque Nationale by Roland in 1792, by late 1793 he was principal director in practice. A convinced republican long before his Montagnard opponents, he created the first truly national European library open daily to the public, rather than a few specialists for a few hours weekly. He vastly expanded the library’s holdings, saving many works from destruction. After the 2 June coup, Pache ordered the slogan “Liberty, Equality, Fraternity or Death” inscribed on the front of the library; Chamfort’s suggesting this be replaced with “Be my Brother or I will kill you” and other sarcasms were hardly
appreciated. He was an obvious “suspect” who loathed Marat and venerated Charlotte Corday. Under pressure from Robespierre, he and the rest of the library’s staff had been sacked on 16 August and replaced by “patriots” of the approved variety. Arrested on the anniversary of the great prison atrocity, 2 September, Chamfort was released after publicly disavowing the Brissotins. But in mid-November, in a fit of despair on hearing he would be rearrested, he cut his throat with a razor and shot himself. Lying grievously wounded for weeks, he died early in 1794.
¹¹¹
Although his friend Ginguené, gathering up those of his aphorisms and anecdotes as he could find, many scrawled on scraps deposited in boxes scattered around his rooms, published these after Thermidor in four volumes, dated “L’An Trois de la République,” much of his literary legacy was permanently lost. For this partial literary rescue, Ginguené just had time before he too was arrested. He was incarcerated in Saint-Lazare (where the poet André Chénier also languished).

High priority for the regime was Condorcet’s liquidation. Sentenced to death as an outlaw on 2 October 1793, he asked his wife to divorce him to protect her and save his assets for their daughter. Despite repeated searches, he eluded his foes and during many months successfully hid with Cabanis’s help, alternately at Mme. Helvétius’s residence and Garat’s. Later he transferred to another hiding place in Paris’s southern fringe, remaining concealed until March 1794. Fending off their depression, Sophie—who according to Hébert had had an affair with Ducos—labored at translating Smith’s
Wealth of Nations
, Condorcet at his
Tableau historique des progrès de l’esprit humain
. As the Terror engulfed them in his last months, he refused to give up the courageous optimism infusing his efforts throughout the revolutionary years. If anyone persevered indomitably under Robespierre’s menace, it was Condorcet.

Shall we believe the opinion interpreting equality not as equal access to enlightenment, or equal development of moral sentiments purified and perfected by reason, but instead as equality of ignorance, corruption and ferocity, can permanently degrade a nation? Shall we believe these men [Marat and Robespierre] fostering this stupid opinion, whose ambitious and jealous mediocrity renders enlightenment odious and virtue suspect, can maintain a durable illusion? No, they can make humanity weep over the loss of some rare and precious men that are entirely worthy of her, they can make their country sigh over the irreparable injustices they wreak, but they will not prevent the Enlightenment’s advance, even if it is checked temporarily; it will resume and accelerate. Certainly it is possible to deceive peoples and mislead them—but not permanently brutalize and corrupt them.
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Such a valiant profession of faith required great inner resolve at a time when elimination of the intellectual bloc who forged the Revolution was unrelenting, and paralleled by stringent measures emasculating all political debate, the city sections, clubs, and departmental administrations. A Convention decree of 4 December 1793 abolished the departments’ general councils, presidents, and
procureurs-généraux
to ensure departments became wholly submissive political entities.
¹¹³
Every week, the oppression grew more and more terrible. Much of the surviving republican intelligensia sank into deep dejection. Yet Mary Wollstonecraft, however shocked and appalled, was another who refused to abandon hope. She trusted still in the Revolution’s ultimate promise. Resolving not to follow Helen Maria Williams’s advice and burn letters and manuscripts that could be deemed incriminating (Williams had burned everything she had from Mme. Roland), in February 1794, Wollstonecraft withdrew from Paris to Le Havre. “Though death and misery, in every shape of terrour” haunt France, she wrote on 10 March 1794, still she was glad “that I came to France, because I never could have had else a just opinion of the most extraordinary event [the Revolution] that has ever been recorded.”
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Depressed, closeted with Barlow and a few others, Paine fitfully composed
The Age of Reason
, seeking consolation in cognac and Spinoza.
¹¹⁵
On 25 December, reversing every republican revolutionary principle, including Brissotin commitment to cosmopolitanism, the Convention decreed that no foreigner could represent the French people in the legislature. Foreigners were henceforth excluded “from every public function during the war.”
¹¹⁶
The credentials of the two foreign deputies, Paine and Cloots, were canceled that very day. Cloots, after being harassed for weeks, was arrested three days later.
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The police seized Paine and his papers, invading his rooms at the Hotel de Philadelphie (where Barlow also lodged), and conducted him to the Luxembourg, though not before he managed to slip Barlow the still-unprinted sections of part 1 of
The Age of Reason
, a work leaning heavily on Spinoza’s Bible criticism, ready for Stone’s printing press.
¹¹⁸
Appeals for Paine’s release, signed by Barlow and seventeen other Americans in Paris, testifying that he had labored heroically for American liberty and that of France, were ignored, with the connivance of the United States ambassador,