Revolutionary Ideas: An Intellectual History of the French Revolution From the Rights of Man to Robespierre (106 page)

At every level, arbitrariness and intolerance infused the Robespierriste dictatorship—dishonest, hypocritical, and Cromwelliste to the core. But even ruthless tyranny requires a seemingly coherent ideological and legal mask, providing ostensible justification for its acts. Experience showed, Desmoulins had remarked, the uneducated mass will believe anything, but even this “anything” cannot be too inconsistent with itelf. The regime directing the Terror had to reaffirm its ideology of virtue, the ordinary, and Rousseausime with greater insistence than ever. It was on 15 April 1794 that Saint-Just delivered the last major speech of his career, and perhaps the most astounding—a complete review of the “conspiracies” aiming to “destroy” the Revolution from the outset down to the crushing of the Brissotins, considered by him the Revolution’s climax. He discerned a recurring plot to utilize famine and high food prices to spread distress sufficiently to prevent liberty from consolidating itself. What the successive purges revealed was “the moral corruption” of the false révolutionnaires undermining virtue. The lesson for everyone was that the true révolutionnaire evinces the unbending severity of a Cato, is always inflexible and austere, “like Marat” detests all affectation, and never censures the Revolution but is merciless to its enemies. Gentle in his household, the true Jacobin, like the sublime J. J. Rousseau, is unforgiving toward all “traitors.” Like Rousseau, every true revolutionary venerates the ordinary and reflects the common view, adopting the common opinion unreservedly. The Revolution must be ruthless with “suspect persons,” especially anyone lamenting the liquidation of Hébert and Danton.
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The principal remaining danger,
contended Saint-Just, was that aristocracy was continually attempting to divide France by implying the revolutionary government was a “tyrannical dictatorship.” A new, sweepingly repressive law was needed to counter such subversion and finally bridle “the aristocracy.”

A resumed offensive against “the aristocracy” was indeed a central theme of the spring and summer of 1794. From late April, the proportion of nobles among those arrested and executed under the now rapidly escalating Terror rose steeply. “Former nobles” were, like foreigners, henceforth expressly excluded from the sociétés populaires and
comités de surveillance
, as well as section assemblies and town councils. No former noble or foreigner from any country with which the Republic was at war could reside in Paris or any fortress town. Any noble lacking a special pass issued by the authorities, found in fortress towns after ten days, would be declared an “outlaw.” Municipalites had to send the Committees of Public Security and Surêté Générale lists of all former nobles and foreigners, resident or staying within their jurisdictions. Couthon clarified on 29 April that under the rubric “nobles,” the executive included anyone who, though not a noble under ancien régime criteria, had obtained or fabricated false titles prior to 1792 to affect noble status.
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Also on 15 April 1794, and not coincidentally, a deputation appeared before the Convention from the republican society of the township of Saint-Denis (now renamed Franciade). Saint-Denis, site of the famous abbey where France’s kings and queens were buried, was an ancient focus of devotion that had been looted and ransacked in October 1793. The remains of monarchs had been removed and thrown into a common pit in a cemetery north of the church. This deputation, accompanied by Rousseau’s widow, pleaded for the remains of the author of
Émile
and the
Social Contract
at last to be transferred to the Panthéon. Who had a greater right to be buried there than this great apostle of equality and liberty? Replying, the Assembly president stressed how much Rousseau’s name meant to the Convention and how resonant his renown and glory were in the hall of their deliberations. Transfer to the Panthéon, it was agreed, should finally now take place.
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During the closing weeks of the Terror, the revolutionary cult of Rousseau reached its climax. Renewing the long-shelved decree to commission a statue of Rousseau for Paris, the Comité de Salut Public announced in April a new competition for a major public monument cast in bronze, to be erected on the Champs-Élysées. Designs were invited for 30 May from all wishing to compete.
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Models entered would be displayed for five
days in the Convention hall and then brought to the Louvre’s Salle de Laocoön where the jury des arts would pronounce judgment the following
décade
.
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An enterprising publisher, Defer de Maisonneuve, published several hundred sets of an octavo album of ten of the best engravings selected from illustrated editions of Rousseau’s political works published in recent years, including much-prized designs by Charles-Nicolas Cochin, François-André Vincent (an older contemporary and long-standing rival of David), Jean-Baptiste Regnault, and David’s follower, Nicolas-André Monsiau.
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The cult of Rousseau was surpassed only by the cult of the “common man” and the exaltation of “Nature.” On 28 April, the Convention was reminded by Joseph Lakanal (1762–1845), deputy for the Ariège, speaking for the Committee of Public Instruction, of its earlier decision to provide financial aid to citizens mutilated or wounded during 10 August 1792. Ancient Rome, declared Lakanal, inscribed signal services rendered to the patrie in marble, where the citizen reads better than in books his duties and the virtues on which republics rest. A column of marble would be erected in the Panthéon, the Convention duly decreed, on which would be carved in gold letters the names of those who perished “for equality” on 10 August. As with the other major art commissions, the Comité de Salut Public invited the Republic’s artists to compete for the commission, allowing three weeks (two
décades
) for submission of their designs, with an extra
décade
for those residing outside Paris. Models would be publicly displayed in the Convention’s debating hall for five days before being laid before the jury des arts for their decision.
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An interesting further manifestation of the deistic cult of nature in the Terror’s last phase was the project, again promoted by Lakanal, to establish a National Museum of Natural History, installed in the former Royal (renamed National) Botanical Gardens, today the Jardin des Plantes. Lakanal, fomerly a professor of philosophy, was the indefatigable enlightened educationalist who masterminded most of the major cultural projects of importance during the Robespierre dictatorship and was the foremost survivor in the Convention of the philosophique tendency of the pre-June 1793 Revolution. Although for the moment his revised version of Condorcet’s educational plans were blocked by Robespierre, he had several notable successes. At his suggestion, the Convention agreed to establish a national collection of physical, fossil, mineral, anatomical, and botanical specimens and rarities, bringing together cabinets previously dispersed around the country. It was declared
worthy of a great nation to organize its education system around Nature, creating a new kind of “temple” where everyone could come, to “consult nature” and be inspired by its riches.

Figure 17. “The Triumph of the Montagne.” Image courtesy Bibliothèque nationale de France.

Completing Robespierre’s Dictatorship

Only with the elimination of the Hébertistes and Dantonistes was the full maturing of Robespierre’s power and of his and Saint-Just’s ideology possible. The Jacobins were now drastically further purged and narrowed, the Cordeliers reduced to a state of intimidated impotence, the Paris Commune subservient, and the Convention more of a cipher than ever. Loudly denouncing ultra-révolutionnaire deviationism (Hébertistes) and modérantisme (Dantonistes), the dictatorship now launched its culminating assault on freedom of thought, philosophisme, and atheism. Virtue was now elevated to the level of a state cult, into a civil religion of Robespierre’s own devising. Shrewdly conceived, the new cult did appeal to some with its relentless attacks on materialism and philosophisme, insistence on belief in God, and immortality of the soul. Bizarre and wholly alien to the Revolution’s core values, Robespierre’s and Saint-Just’s obsession with nature and “the ordinary” became an all-crushing colossus. On 18 Floréal (7 May), following one of Robespierre’s longest and most important speeches to the legislature, explaining the new ideology and its relationship to previous thought and ideas, the Convention endorsed his new creed, ordering the main churches in all towns and villages of France to be rededicated to the Cult of the Supreme Being. The principal public festivals of the French Revolution were declared to be those of 14 July 1789, 10 August 1792, 21 January 1793 (the execution of Louis XVI), and 31 May 1793; these would in future be celebrated as part of the proclaimed state cult, continually reminding citizens of the dignity of the Supreme Being.
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Robespierre’s most extended speech on basic principles, explaining his ideology on behalf of the Comité de Salut Public, delivered to the Convention on 7 May (18 Floréal), was couched in astonishingly turgid, paranoid, and personal terms, and widely reprinted in the papers. Continually echoing Rousseau, including the lines about man being born free but everywhere in chains, Robespierre, as so often, especially emphasized the need to promote and cultivate virtue. Man’s “rights” are “written on his heart” and “his humiliation” in history. Sparta, nurturing the warlike, disciplined virtue, beloved by disciples of Rousseau
(and Mably), shone “like a star” amid the surrounding darkness, but alas, all too briefly. Despite progress in the arts and sciences, mankind had long remained sunk in darkness, especially regarding “la morale publique.” Thus far, men had practically always been corrupt. Only in the land now liberty’s special domain, among “this people proud and truly born for glory and virtue,” had men rediscovered their rights and duties. Astoundingly, Robespierre accused all the revolutionary legislatures of 1789–92 of betraying and trying to efface from men’s hearts “the eternal principles” they had outwardly professed. In its successive stages, the entire Revolution down to June 1793 was, in Robespierre’s eyes, a “conspiracy” disguised under the banner of perfidious modérantisme. Blighting virtue, it had led the French via an oblique path to renewed tyranny.
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During 1791–92, the Jacobins had thwarted the initial “betrayal” and successfully forged the true revolutionary ideal. But new methods of corrupting men’s hearts, new forms of modérantisme and perfidy, had arisen, enabling most ostensible revolutionary leaders to ply fresh “subversion,” stifling the Republic at birth, producing a show of democracy “pour le déshonorer” (to dishonor it). Monarchism and Brissotin “democrats” clashed superficially, but were really close allies. With public opinion polluted, national representation debased, and the common people marginalized, the Brissotin hypocrites emerged as the vilest of all the conspirateurs, invoking “sovereignty of the people” to save royalty and foment civil war.

Brissotins preached “equality” allegedly to render this principle hateful while actually arming “the rich” against the poor. “Liberty” to them was just license for crime, “the people” an instrument, the patrie prey. Brissotins denounced tyranny to serve “tyrants.” These destroyers of democracy had erected immorality “non seulement en système, mais en religion.”
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They appealed to popular sovereignty to abase the Convention, professing hatred of “superstition” only to foment strife and spread the “poison of atheism.” What was the true goal of these “fanatical missionaries of atheism” who in the midst of the political conspiracies engulfing France attacked every religious cult? Was it hatred of priests? Priests were their friends. Loathing of fanaticism? Fanaticism was what they cultivated. Zeal to accelerate Reason’s triumph? They aspired to relegate Reason to the temples, to banish it from the Republic. The conspirators aimed to deceive the French and destroy their liberty; the Convention’s task was to reunite the people and establish liberty sustained by virtue. What advantage do the corrupters of virtue see in persuading men that a blind force presides over their destiny and that
there is no supernatural being punishing crime and rewarding virtue? Will philosophique ideas inspire greater devotion to the patrie, boldness in defying tyranny, contempt for death and pleasure? Wretched sophistes! By what right do the philosophes seek to wrest the scepter of reason from innocence, to transfer it to crime, throwing a dark veil over Nature, reducing the wretched to despair, exalting vice, repressing virtue, degrading humanity?
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Robespierre did not question the virtue of particular philosophes—the personal qualities of Diderot, d’Holbach, and Helvétius. What he execrated was atheism and la philosophie as a political and moral culture, labeling these “immorality” linked to conspiracy against the Republic. Why should legislators concern themselves that certain philosophes (i.e., Diderot, d’Holbach, and Helvétius) embraced certain hypotheses to explain nature (i.e., materialism)? Free men, being neither metaphysicians nor theologians, should leave the philosophes to their eternal disputes: in the legislator’s eyes everything useful to society and good “dans la pratique est la vérité.” The idea of a Supreme Being ordaining the soul’s immortality is “sociale et républicaine.” Great legislators like Lycurgus and Solon always invoked oracles and mixed appropriate “fictions” with “truth” to impress ordinary people and better connect them to public institutions. True legislators seek not to enlighten but, as Rousseau maintained, by laws and institutions to call men back to “nature and truth.” The déchristianisateurs had nothing with which to replace the popular piety they pilloried. Instead of genuinely enlightening the people, déchristianisateurs strove to deprave.