Revolutionary Ideas: An Intellectual History of the French Revolution From the Rights of Man to Robespierre (111 page)

The time was not far off, suggested Babeuf, when it would be an insult to say to anyone, “you are a Jacobin.”
³⁷
But who were “the Jacobins” after Thermidor? The real Jacobins had mostly been guillotined
or expelled. The club still included some “true patriots,” granted Fréron and Babeuf, but these secretly groaned under the continuing yoke of the tyranny imposed by a discredited leadership, consisting, according to Fréron, of only around fifteen unscrupulous men attempting the impossible task of prolonging the repression in a less overtly ruthless fashion than had Robespierre, while still upholding a threadbare ideology. Fréron voiced the feelings of many aggrieved by the limited scope of Thermidor, and yet his own record was far from unsullied. If he loathed Robespierre and “Barèrisme,” he still venerated Marat (who considered him his most cherished disciple).
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The difficulty with the wall the Thermidorians so assiduously erected between themselves and Robespierre’s tyranny was that it was completely fictitious. There was no clear dividing-line separating them from Robespierre’s despotism. Robespierre’s demise was thus followed by a crushing public discrediting of his character and what
La Décade philosophique
called the “perfides agents” he had everywhere introduced, vile, unscrupulous men deliberately employed “to corrupt republican principles.”
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But nothing more.

In fact, a whole new political mythology was being created. By ceaselessly vilifying Robespierre, Couthon, and Saint-Just, the myth that the Jacobins themselves were pure and upright but had been betrayed gained currency. The Paris Commune, armed forces, tribunals of justice, public opinion itself, had supposedly been directed by a single monstrously corrupt individual. That single tyrant had held every citizen’s life and death in his hand. Unquenchable egoism, suggested the
Décade philosophique
, the journal founded shortly before his death in April 1794 by Chamfort, together with Ginguené (shortly before he was imprisoned) and the young économiste, Jean-Baptiste Say (1767–1832), was Robespierre’s distinctive trait: with all his rhetoric of “virtue” and “patrie,” he considered only himself.
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In one way, the “Incorruptible” had not been at all corrupt: after his execution, little money and few valuables were found among his possessions. Politically, though, nobody could be more corrupt, cast-iron proof of this being his deliberately choosing as trusted agents only the basest, most ignorant, and immoral “satellites hors de toute instruction et de toute morale,” as the Dantonist doctor Baudot expressed it, and his employing only the most abominable types—such as Pache, Hanriot, Lebon, Fleuriot-Lescot, Héron, and Payan—which enabled the tyrant both to tyrannize over colleagues and eliminate subordinates whenever he chose.
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The transition from denouncing Robespierre’s personal dictatorship to acknowledging group dictatorship, to a serious analysis of a severely
blighted system, of those responsible for wrecking the Revolution and perpetrating tyranny beyond Thermidor, proved hard, long, and fraught. Amid the stream of denunciation and sensational press revelations, a pamphlet of particular impact,
La Queue de Robespierre
(Robespierre’s tail), punning on the word for tail (i.e., following), appeared a month after the dictator’s overthrow on 9 Fructidor (27 August 1794), with a vast print-run amounting to tens of thousands. Its author was Jean-Claude Méhée (1760–1826), an unscrupulous double agent and ally of Tallien, implicated in the 2 September massacres, who afterward became the Paris Commune’s deputy registrar. While Robespierre had been overthrown, insisted Méhée, his most callous subordinates had not. In particular, he denounced three of the leading Thermidorians—Collot d’Herbois, Billaud-Varenne, and Barère.
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Two days after his pamphlet appeared, and not coincidentally, Laurent Lecointre (1744–1805), a Versailles businessman and energetic adversary of the Jacobins, delivered a withering indictment, under twenty-six headings, of the agents of Terror in the Convention. He accused seven leading Jacobins—Collot d’Herbois, Billaud-Varenne, Barère, Amar, Vadier, Jean-Henri Voulland (1751–1801), and also David—of complicity with Robespierre and Saint-Just in the most appalling atrocities. They had liquidated or imprisoned tens of thousands, afflicting all France with fear and despair, and also deliberately hindered or slowed the subsequent release of captives and freeing the Convention and other government institutions from the Terror.
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For the moment, the attack was successfully deflected. If no one spoke in Robespierre’s defense, many championed the Montagne. Those Lecointre denounced accused him of casting the net irresponsibly widely, slurring the honest and dishonoring the Convention. The public interest, held Thuriot, required the Assembly to repudiate Lecointre’s charges unreservedly. As the debate developed, more than fifty speakers intervened, most pointing out that were Billaud-Varenne and Collot d’Herbois to fall, not just the executive committees but the entire Convention would stand charged with horrific crimes mixed with supine complicity in Robespierre’s villainy. “It is the Convention that is accused,” exclaimed one leading deputy, “it is against the French people that the action is brought, because they have acquiesced in the tyranny of the infamous Robespierre.”
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By a comfortable margin, the deputies rebuffed Lecointre’s denunciation as “false and slanderous.”
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Tallien, Fréron, and Lecointre were all expelled from the Jacobins, and Lecointre also from the Convention, but not otherwise molested.

Not everyone seeking to minimize Jacobin as distinct from terroriste responsibility was dishonest. Many, including Babeuf, Fréron, Varlet, Jullien, and Antonelle, remained convinced that the 31 May 1793 coup d’état was justified and that Robespierre had become a vengeful “Nero” only afterward, during the summer of 1793. There must be two different Robespierres, suggested the first issue of Babeuf’s
Journal de la Liberté de la Presse
, in September 1794. Until early 1793, Robespierre had been a true Jacobin, pure and upright, heroically defending the Revolution’s essential principles; the contemptible dictator emerged only later.
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In this way, Babeuf’s journal too contributed to manufacturing the myth that the “Old Jacobins” were true heroes of the people until early 1793, while the New Jacobins, from June 1793, were unmitigated culprits. The veritable Jacobins, claimed Babeuf, Fréron, and Antonelle, were “diametrically opposed” to the New Jacobins, the former upholding the Rights of Man as vigorously as the latter demolished them.
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New Jacobins betrayed the people; Old Jacobins promoted the truth. Babeuf deplored the Thermidorians’ unwillingness to purge all the terroristes: Robespierre had been dealt with, but genuine Jacobinism needed to be preserved intact. Yet, Babeuf, like Fréron, remained strangely blind to Marat’s vitiating influence, as well as Robespierre’s, already long before May 1793.

True republicans upholding the Rights of Man today, suggested Babeuf’s journal, are first expelled from the Jacobins, then imprisoned, then murdered. If press freedom was being gradually recouped, this was despite, not thanks to, the Thermidorians. Liberty was being clawed back by only a very few courageous opponents, like Fréron and himself.
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On 5 October, Fréron’s paper witheringly denounced Barère as someone who had first been a royalist, then a supporter of the Lameths, then a Feuillant, and finally among the most dishonest “terrorists.”
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Babeuf, who, like Jullien later, aspired to become a revolutionary leader like Desmoulins before him via the press, sought to set an example as a true “philosophe républicain.”
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Above all, more revolutionary backbone was needed! Genuine philosophical
démocratisme
could be revived through building on freedom of the press. But for the moment the Revolution remained an arena sharply divided between an oppositional bloc aiming to reestablish government based on the “eternal rights of man,” part old Jacobin and part Brissotin, and a corrupt remnant actually in power continuing Robespierre’s methods.
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Before long, the campaign to unseat the ex-Montagnards resumed. Those the
Orateur du peuple
termed “the ferocious beasts” were never
able fully to deflect the slowly growing outcry or stifle “the few courageous writers seeking to unmask their crimes.” Inexorably, if gradually, the trauma, horror, and indignation stemming from Robespierre’s dishonesty and despotism grew into loud calls for a genuine, broad-ranging analysis of what had gone wrong, for a full disclosure of Montagnard moral and ideological perversity.
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Many sansculottes, like Varlet, willingly confessed they had been appallingly misled. The rhetoric of the “people’s will,” it was now plain to all but the most obtuse, was all deception. Tallien, backed by Fréron and his
L’Orateur du peuple
, began demanding a definitive end to the Terror and restoration of probity. “Let us unmask all the traitors, all the rascals, all the conspirators, all of Robespierre’s emulators.” “Let us establish the empire of virtue”—but this time
la vertu véritable,
not Robespierre’s false virtue.
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Fréron, in his post-Thermidor articles, invoked Desmoulins as his chief inspiration, providing guidance still “from the next world.” Too much blame was being heaped on Robespierre personally. Was it not while Robespierre absented himself from the executive committees, in the summer of 1794, Fréron pointed out, that the guillotining of innocent victims reached its peak? Nothing could hide the complicity of Billaud-Varenne, Collot d’Herbois, Barère, Amar, and Vadier in the Terror’s worst excesses.
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During Robespierre’s forty-five-day absence from the Committee of Public Safety from 12 June to 27 July, 1,285 condemned were executed in Paris, estimated Fréron, as against 577 in the previous forty-five days.
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Here was indictment enough of the currently ruling clique.

Yet, the “voice of
patriotisme,
” lamented Fréron, in his paper
L’Orateur du peuple
in September, still remained muted and
la tyrannie
dominant. Throwing out the oppressors, eradicating
le Machiavelisme
,
Barèrisme,
and
le Néronisme
, and reinstating the eternal principles of justice and liberty, was proving no simple or easy undertaking. Only through an arduous, painful process could the Revolution find its way back to its true republican ideals—the Rights of Man, liberty, equality, freedom of expression, and a new order seeking the benefit of society as a whole. Fortunately, the current Montagnard leadership, observed Fréron, enjoyed no respect or popularity whatsoever, not even the minimal popularity “the modern Nero” enjoyed after six years of “diverting to his own account” the credit of those who really engineered the Revolution. Most of the new despots—he cited in particular Duhem, Levasseur, Audouin, and Amar—were complete mediocrities.
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(Payan had warned Robespierre of Amar’s incompetence in a secret report of June 1794.)
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Meanwhile, the entire country was deeply unsettled. Even if precariously, the New Jacobins still dominated the arena. Understandably, the sansculottes remained resentful and discontented. Deputations from various Paris sections denounced the “revolutionary committees” as tools of despotism.
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Twelve to fifteen Paris sections now sympathized with defenders of the Rights of Man against the New Jacobins, estimated Babeuf in September, but the rest stubbornly acquiesced in the New Jacobin ascendancy.
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The “aristocracy,” contended the regime’s spokesmen, aimed to exploit the instability and overthrow the Revolution by putting subversive talk in the mouths of patriotes. Throughout the autumn, the political initiative remained predominantly if not solidly in ex-Montagnard hands. Numerous warnings were uttered against relaxing
la justice révolutionnaire,
which alone, supposedly, could save France. Veteran Montagnards adamantly asserted the need to stick to the previous course and bolster the executive committees—or the Counter-Revolution would triumph.
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What Montagnards termed the “system of modérantisme and weakness” could only produce “terrible disturbances.”
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Brissotin deputies purged from the Convention in the summer of 1793, those still surviving numbering more than seventy deputies, among them Louvet, Garat, Paine, and Daunou, were prevented from being rehabilitated and from returning to the Assembly for as long as possible. Those who had survived in hiding or been released needed to watch their step. Roederer resumed writing but kept a low profile, using a pseudonym until late 1794.
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Volney, released in October, fled the capital, retreating to Marseille, where he had left belongings and manuscripts after returning from Corsica in February 1793, and then Nice. Paine, though eventually reinstated in December by a unanimous vote in the Convention, along with the other Brissotins proscribed in June 1793, and receiving some back pay, remained silent for months. His long imprisonment had left him ill and despondent, and he did not think it prudent to state his views openly as yet. Generally, he remained dejected about the Revolution’s prospects.
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Not until 8 July 1795 did he rise to speak in the Convention, encouraged by his ally, Lanthenas.
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Comte Louis-Philippe de Ségur (1753–1830), a liberal noble, writer, and historian, among the more talented of Louis XVI’s courtiers at Versailles, later one of Napoleon’s eulogists, having survived in hiding, did not think it safe to return to Paris with his family until spring 1795.
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