Revolutionary Ideas: An Intellectual History of the French Revolution From the Rights of Man to Robespierre (11 page)

Thomas-Marie Royou (1743–92), a Breton and, before the Revolution, teacher at the famous college Louis-le-Grand in Paris, had known Diderot but detested his legacy. Although his
L’Ami du Roi
, founded in May 1790, appeared for less than two years (1790–92), it too was widely read with substantial distribution also outside Paris, circulating in Provence, Bordeaux, and the Bourgogne, besides Brittany and the north, selling especially well to conservative-minded women, clergy, and army officers. The paper’s circulation figures climbed steadily to more than five thousand, placing it among the foremost journals of the early Revolution.
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Royou has been called the “Marat” of French royalism, but unlike Marat, he abjured violence, dreading civil war more than anything. He was an antidemocratic and antirepublican extremist only in principle, always relentlessly hostile to la philosophie. Politically, he stood closer to rightist constitutional
monarchiens
like Mounier than the ultraroyalists. His paper’s principal promoter was Anne-Françoise Fréron, Royou’s sister and widow of Élie Fréron (1718–76), sworn enemy of Diderot, the critic whose journal, the
Année Littéraire
, had for decades conducted a bitter crusade against the philosophes and
Encyclopédie
.
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In the autumn of 1790, rivalry between royalist editors briefly led to Paris actually having three dailies entitled
L’Ami du Roi
, all invoking Fréron’s Counter-Enlightenment. “Never had the king so many friends,” joked Royou’s publisher.
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The Revolution’s leaders, complained royalists, were just a minute, wholly unrepresentative group, embodying no established segment of society, just “des philosophes” and “démi-philosophes.” The authority and privileges of king, nobility, clergy, and parlements were being challenged by men uttering philosophique rhetoric, possessing no standing in ancien régime terms, who were rendered momentary masters of the country by a wave of vague, inarticulate discontent. Admittedly, there was also a rival, more moderate revolutionary creed that rejected la philosophie and urged France to emulate Britain and the United States. The constitutional monarchist Nicolas Bergasse (1750–1832), in his
Lettre de M. Bergasse sur les États-Generaux
of 12 February 1789, for example, implored readers to weigh the advantages of the British
parliamentary system and consider the United States “where the equality of men is the first of political dogmas” and the legislature in all states “composed of two chambers.” Bergasse considered two chambers indispensable for genuine mixed government, with an upper house mediating as an “independent voice” between monarch (or president) and Commons.
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But precisely this summons to forget philosophy and follow Britain, sublime to some, failed to predominate before the Estates-General met, or during its meetings, or later. All this amounted to an extraordinary, unheard-of situation. This strange, upstart revolutionary clique pushing for fundamental reforms would soon find that breaking all the bonds of the past, as they proposed, is impossible except in “un monde de philosophes.” These philosophes, admonished Sabatier, ignoring society’s need for dependence and subordination, and forgetting about envy, greed, duplicity, and villainy, would eventually discover that they could not possibly succeed.
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How exactly did the
philosophe-revolutionnaires
of 1789 achieve their ascendancy with substantial popular support, given that most ordinary folk did not read their books and would scarcely have understood had they tried?
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It was actually the ephemeral press, cheap tracts, and pamphlets—not books—that first powered philosophy’s breakthrough. Popular response to the events of 1789, noted Sabatier, Mounier, and other observers, was chiefly shaped by pamphlets, posters, and papers—short, cheap texts easily consumed by the public, presenting summaries and excerpts supplied by heirs of the philosophes. Such extracts the people “a fort bien saisis” (perfectly grasped).
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One pamphlet, of March 1789, urged Raynal to be more specific in providing political guidance “since it is certain you prophesied the great event we are witnessing. You showed the nation the justice of its rights, and by instilling hope of seeing these recovered, inspired the courage, force and means of a happy revolution that your work has prepared.”
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Sabatier cites a “disgusting” paraphrase of lines from Rousseau’s
Contrat Social
, featured in Carra’s tract
L’Orateur des États Généraux
of late April 1789, a brochure he notes that penetrated “incredibly among the common people,” swaying many who were completely incapable of reading the
Contrat Social
itself.
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It was via printed discourses and tracts, explained Desmoulins in
La France libre
, that the revolutionary leadership began liberating the nation, a task that was chiefly educative and involved repelling the “pastors” who had lorded it over the “vile troupes of slaves” the French had been hitherto. This 1788–89 campaign to spur the people against despotism was headed, averred Desmoulins, by “Raynal, Sieyès, Chapelier,
Target, Mounier, Rabaut, Barnave, Volney and Mirabeau,” the last someone who “has contributed more than anyone to emancipate us.”
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That a full-scale revolution was under way even before the Estates-General convened in late April 1789 was not obvious to most, but it was to Mirabeau, Gorsas, Brissot, Carra, and other publicists emerging as the Revolution’s opinion makers. Carra, ally of Brissot and Mirabeau, had, like them, published widely before 1788, since the 1770s adhered to radical ideas. He had expounded his prerevolutionary views in
La Raison, ou le prophète philosophe
, a book banned in 1773, then reissued at Bouillon in a revised version, and again suppressed in 1782. Its argument was the “système de la raison” rooted in a materialism drawn from d’Holbach’s
Système de la nature
(1770).
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Attracted to the idea that all living creatures emerged from inanimate matter and that humanity’s history is a slow evolution from brute animal sensibility toward clear consciousness and mastery of language driven by the progress of “universal reason,” he envisaged society as progressing via the advance of reason toward Man’s eventual emancipation from “ignorance and imposture.” Carra defines reason as the “harmony resulting from the convergence of images all the human senses communicate to our brains”; only vulgar minds construed “reason” as an attribute of an immortal spiritual entity (the soul) separate from the body.
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Though, like Brissot, he knew England, spoke English, and admired the American Revolution, Anglo-American influences remained marginal to Carra’s ideological makeup. His political message was unwaveringly blunt: as the sole function of existing laws was to oppress the weak on behalf of vested interests, the nation, not the king, must be acknowledged as “first and true sovereign” and royal ministers set aside as “apologistes” of “despotisme.” The principle of orders must be repudiated and the nation restored to “all its rights and functions.”
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Existing law being just an organized system of injustice, completely new laws, “simple, just and general” were required, conceived on the basis of equality of rights and obligations, framing the “universal society” of the future in accord with the “principles of universal reason.”
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Universal wretchedness for Carra, as for Diderot, D’Holbach, and the
Histoire philosophique
, stemmed directly from man’s inability to understand his situation; this, and popular deference for religious authority, enabled ruthless and rapacious men to set themselves up as kings, nobles, and priests who then exploited the rest like a herd of pack animals. Tyrants easily subjugate men steeped in superstition, especially with “ridiculous myths” about gods who reward and punish, and a
paradise where “this earth’s wretched souls will find peace and happiness after death.”
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Every people, held Carra, forms part of “la société universelle” and equally needs emancipation.
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With laws affecting everyone equally, society evens the balance between its members, preventing the strongest and cleverest from exploiting the less advantaged. The prime agent of human progress powering emancipation and revolution, and securing these “advantages” for everyone, is the advance of reason, or “la vraie philosophie.”
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“What caused the Revolution?,” asked Rabaut Saint-Étienne, a Protestant preacher now an Estates deputy. Its origin lay in ideas circulating beforehand containing “all the germs of the Revolution” expressed in the writings of those philosophes who most powerfully assailed the
préjugés
of the age, a school of “hommes supérieures” whose writings diffused “a mass of useful truths” on all sides. Voltaire started the process by fighting for liberty of expression. Those following him went further but were persecuted by king, Church, and parlements. Yet, through their efforts, “the truth” permeated every part of the kingdom, including “houses of all kinds,” until finally, by 1788, France’s “inquisition” of thought, worn out by its burgeoning task, ground to a halt. Widely circulated pamphlets, he rightly surmised, made possible by the de facto press liberty (except for newspapers) gained by 1788, were the first major step of the Revolution.
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These “heroes of thought” then generated a “multitude de disciples,” forming a new kind of reading public, a bench of critical opinion that finally assumed the role of a collective tribunal, judging kings and ministers and examining more general questions of government. Such a large, informed sector was unknown to the ancients because they lacked printing.
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The
Encyclopédie
especially laid the basis for public discussion of politics, economics, and state finances by bringing all sciences together in a single compilation. Rousseau exerted a huge impact. Raynal denounced all “les tyrannies,” unmasking every hypocrisy, the
Histoire philosophique
, the most widely read work of the later Enlightenment, making contemporaries share his “indignation contre les tyrans.”
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Finally, the great agitation of 1788 arose, shaped especially by the pamphlets of the philosophes’ disciples, the ideas of Mably, Rousseau, and Raynal pervading every debate. In 1788, claimed Rabaut, Paris became the “foyer” of Enlightenment discourse. Paris was indeed the Revolution’s foyer, agreed the constitutional monarchist Mounier, an active power obliging some revolutionary leaders like Barnave, Bailly, and Rabaut himself to step well beyond the limited
positions their instinctive moderation originally recommended to them.
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Diderot’s disciple Naigeon similarly highlighted this process of intellectual subversion before and during 1788. Ardent for the Revolution of reason and the Rights of Man,
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he later fiercely rejected the populism of Marat and Robespierre, which, in his view, perverted the Revolution’s core values. The ancien régime’s collapse, held Naigeon in 1790, resulted from a process irreversible once diffusion of new revolutionary ideas penetrated beyond a certain point, touching all social classes.
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Intellectually, by 1790, the “gothic building” of the ancien régime lay in ruins. But the Revolution would remain incomplete, he admonished, while freedom of thought, expression, and the press were not fully formalized and religious authority was not drastically curtailed. Laws needed changing so that it no longer mattered whether a man was a Christian, Jew, deist, or idolater, and the “true faithful” were simply the “good citizens.”
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Only by liquidating royal, ecclesiastical, and aristocratic power could government establish mankind’s rights on the basis of “justice envers tous,” without which no governmental authority can be truly legitimate.
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These dogged campaigners for press freedom spoke of basic human rights. In his memoir of June 1789 on press freedom to the Estates, Brissot proclaimed liberty of the press “un droit naturel à l’homme.”
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He also raised the issue of liberty from theater censorship, totally lacking even in Britain, he notes, where the stage was strictly licensed by the Crown. Theater freedom mattered more for renewing “liberty” than people think, since the theater exerts a great influence “sur l’esprit public,” a point he would develop further, he adds, were not a writer of energy and talent already doing so. He was speaking of the poet Chénier’s brother, the playwright Marie-Joseph Chénier (1762–1811), among the Revolution’s principal champions of free expression and free theater.
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By July 1789 the question was not whether or not France should possess freedom of expression and of the press but rather whether this freedom needed limits. Should there be “liberté illimité de la presse” without legal responsibility for calumny or inciting violence? This posed a dilemma, for aside from the principle itself, there lingered much anxiety concerning its real cultural effects. Many assumed that the campaign to bring philosophy to the people would fail. It was in the people’s name that press freedom and the other new rights were justified, and yet, not one-hundredth part of the people actually read, while only one-thousandth part read with sufficient discernment and knowledge,
admonished the writer, veteran republican and future deputy Louis-Sebastien Mercier (1740–1814), to separate truth from falsehood. The ordinary man, being ignorant, judges politicians’ reputations by ostensible probity and popular reputation rather than talent or knowledge—with predictably disastrous results.
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