Revolutionary Ideas: An Intellectual History of the French Revolution From the Rights of Man to Robespierre (112 page)

At the heart of the quarrel in Assembly and country lay the question of how far to reestablish freedom of opinion and liberty of the
press. Fear of aiding the Brissotin recovery, as well as the royalist resurgence, doubtless explains why other committed Jacobins victimized by the Robespierre regime, like Robert and Antonelle, recently released from prison, preferred to remain silent under the Thermidorians rather than echo Fréron and Babeuf.
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And from their perspective, they had a point: How could press freedom and the “eternal principles of the Rights of Man be restored without handing back hegemony over the Revolution to the Brissotins whom Fréron, an ally of Desmoulins and Philippeaux, had always opposed?

A vigorous neo-Brissotin opposition was already emerging among the handful of deputies, who for one reason or another had survived the 1793 purges and remained in the Convention. Among them was Jean Debry (1760–1834), a friend of Roland whose daughter he had protected during the Terror,
⁶⁷
now a member of the Comité de Sûreté Générale and a vehement critic of the authoritarian populists’ “Néronisme.” Another was the anti-Catholic republican Jacques-Antoine Creuzé-Latouche (1750–1800), a supporter of the appel au public during Louis XVI’s trial, voted onto the Comité de Salut Public after Robespierre’s demise. Another was Paine’s translator, the physician Lanthenas, removed by Marat from the original list of the Twenty-Two as a “poor harmless fellow” (Lanthenas believed Marat to be mad). Also among them was François-Antoine de Boissy d’Anglas (1756–1828), an anticlerical of Protestant background who had backed the appel au public and denounced the arrests of the Brissotin leadership. As a stutterer, Boissy had subsequently been left a silent presence in the Convention; but now he also came onto the Comité de Salut Public. These men constituted a formidable bloc.

Although “liberty’s” defenders were already coming under mounting assault from Brissotin sympathizers, complained the Jacobin press, most prominent Brissotins who survived still remained in hiding or in prison. Behind demands to reinstate the seventy-four surviving, expelled “Girondin” deputies, the regime professed to detect a menacing horde of modérés and royalistes.
⁶⁸
But no call for a return to liberty, justice, and probity could be in any way genuine as long as the Left republicans remained proscribed. Pressure to free them gradually built up until, more than four months after Thermidor, they had to be reinstated as Convention deputies in mid-December 1794. The released Brissotins lost no time in denouncing the Thermidorians as “partisans of Robespierre,” an effective strategy since nothing could be more dangerous to ex-Montagnards in late 1794 than this accusation. The Montagne,
whether for or against Robespierre, were indiscriminately condemned together en bloc by disciples of Brissot, Gensonné, Barbaroux, and Louvet. The political arena heated up once again. Were the Brissotins, having failed to prosecute Marat and having been overthrown in June 1793, now about to topple the Montagne and win the struggle for the soul of the Revolution after all?
⁶⁹

CHAPTER 22

Post-Thermidor

(1795–97)

A Democratic Republic?

Slowly but surely power slipped from the hands of the Thermidorians. Given the circumstances, it could hardly have been otherwise. But could the Revolution’s reputation, integrity, and principles be restored? Among the Revolution’s originally ardent supporters, a great many had become so disillusioned under the Montagnard tyranny—and its perverse Thermidorian aftermath—they were scarcely disposed to think so. Diderot’s disciple, Naigeon, loathing the Montagne and the Terror with every fiber of his being, did not abandon his earlier revolutionary ideals to the extent La Harpe did but also now believed it would have been better to suffer “the abuses of the
ancien régime
” indefinitely rather “than experience all the evils” of Robespierre’s tyranny. The very word
révolutionnaire
had changed its meaning since June 1793, he lamented, from defender of human liberty and dignity to a political and moral “monster.” Was the Revolution worth such a price?
¹

Yet, society could not go back. All intelligent men of goodwill “who have reflected on the matter” at all deeply, added Naigeon, must rally to the Revolution’s true principles, acknowledging that the rights anyone has by nature are reciprocal and shared by all.
²
Other survivors of the libertarian, republican Revolution of 1789–93, however traumatized, wounded, and sullen, equally vowed to try to reverse the collapse of the “real Revolution” and rebuild a republicanism truly infused with Enlightenment, anti-Rousseauiste, and geared to enlightening and ameliorating society. Rescuing the Revolution, to them, meant above all comprehensively eradicating Montagnard despotism and the miscreants who had perverted the Republic and restoring the Revolution of democracy, equality, and human rights. To this end, surviving Brissotins
could, at least in theory, clasp hands with reemerging Old Jacobins and Vieux Cordeliers like Fréron, Babeuf, Jullien, Réal, and Antonelle, who cherished the legacy of Danton and Desmoulins and were seemingly equally eager to uncouple the Revolution from the likes of Robespierre, Saint-Just, and the Thermidorians. Pierre-François Réal (1757–1834) was a legal official who became a leading democratic republican journalist in 1795.
³
Opposing the Brissotins, he had nevertheless deplored the April 1794 purges and, after Danton’s arrest, been imprisoned in the Luxembourg. These distinct streams, Old Cordeliers, Old Jacobins, and ex-Brissotins, potentially reconcilable perhaps, were supplemented by a fresh influx of idealistic republicans from abroad, including Benjamin Constant (1767–1830), the “father of modern liberalism,” who at this time, however, was no “liberal” or “moderate” but a committed (he changed later) democratic republican.

Yet the perverse logic of the Montagne was far from altogether eclipsed. When the twelve proscribed deputies, arrested on 3 October 1793, still behind bars at Port-Libre, headed by Daunou and the classicist scholar Jean-Joseph Dusaulx (1728–99), collectively published a manifesto on 9 October 1794, appealing to the public, the response was a resumption of the old feuding. An eminent scholar and member of several academies, later in 1799 among the republican deputies sent to Rome to help organize the new revolutionary republic also there, Boulogne-born Pierre-Claude Daunou had been among the courageous deputies imprisoned in the summer of 1793 for contesting proscription of Brissot and his colleages. Like other republican intellectuals returning to the fray in 1795, he was an ardent disciple, in particular, of Condorcet. A member of the Commission of Eleven who drafted the Constitution, and of the Committee of Public Instruction, he was to figure among the legislature’s principal figures under the Directoire and became first “president” of the Council of Five Hundred.

Summoning their Convention colleagues to acknowledge their contribution to the 1793 Constitution and accept that the journées of 31 May and 2 June, though enacted by the people, were wrought by a people misled, they encountered stubborn resistance. The 2 June 1793 coup lacked all legitimacy. Why were they still in prison? “Fédéralisme was plainly a trumped up, nonsensical accusation.”
⁴
But the charge was not fictitious, answered the Old Jacobins and Dantonists, and the coup not illicit. Even if Robespierre’s suspending of the June 1793 Constitution
was
illicit, how could the Convention absolve the Twelve without rehabilitating all seventy-one surviving Brissotin deputies? And how
could the seventy-one be reinstated without admitting that 31 May and 2 June 1793 was a gross crime against both Revolution and nation, that the charge of fédéralisme was utterly absurd? Such a shift would mean conceding the Montagne were wrong all along, and the Brissotins in the right. Jacobins could not repudiate the journée of 2 June 1793. To do so would suggest the people had wrecked their own Revolution through ignorance, gullibility, and unawareness.

For Old Jacobins fédéralisme was neither fictitious nor irrelevant. How strange that even after Thermidor, remarked Babeuf’s paper, these Brissotins still exerted so great an influence over the Revolution! Revolutionaries like Babeuf, Fréron, and Antonelle, recoiling from granting moral victory to the Gironde, preferred to deride the tracts of Daunou, Roederer, Jollivet, and others that were urging the release of the seventy-one. Besides, there also remained concrete differences in principle that authentic Old Jacobins could highlight. Where they sympathized with sansculotte direct street action, Brissotins did not, or at least, after their recent experiences, did so no longer. Then there was the June 1793 Constitution. When alive, had not Gorsas joined Condorcet in “insolently” dismissing the June 1793 Constitution as grotesque, a “deformed carcass”? Remarking that several neo-Brissotin tracts were being printed on the widow Gorsas’s press, Babeuf sarcastically inquired whether Gorsas had now become a holy being remitting oracles to the people from Elyseum?
⁵

Gracchus Babeuf, revolutionary survivor and ardent advocate of social justice, active earlier at Amiens, where he had edited a noted local democratic journal,
Le Correspondant Picard
, had, like so many editors, been silenced during the Terror and spent many months in prison. It was through reading “philosophy,” he explained, that he had become an ardent republican, democrat, and advocate of “equality.” From late 1794, he emerged as the Revolution’s most uncompromising egalitarian and guardian of that strand of revolutionary tradition emphasizing equality. After Thermidor, in late 1794, he clamored loudly for press freedom and the Constitution of 1793. Denouncing the Terror, his
Journal de la liberté de la presse
, launched in September 1794, complained—like Fréron and Varlet—that “the monster” had gone, but too little was being done to extirpate Robespierrisme more broadly.
⁶
However, Babeuf loudly regretted the Terror’s excesses only briefly,
⁷
shifting his ground during 1795, realizing that the egalitarian crusade he had embarked on inevitably led him up against a legislature dominated by foes of the now-suppressed militant Jacobins, his only likely allies.

Babeuf’s brief rejection of the Terror and Robespierre in late 1794 did not prevent his viewing Brissotins with resentful hostility, much like his future ally and fellow egalitarian Pierre-Antoine, Marquis d’Antonelle (1747–1817). The first democratically elected mayor of Arles, Antonelle figured among the Revolution’s most remarkable personalities. Renouncing his aristocratic background, he had become a militant Jacobin. Appointed to the Montagnard Tribunal Révolutionnaire, he was directly complicit in the October 1793 show trials and condemnation of Brissot and his colleagues. Later, though, in March 1794, clashing with Fouquier-Tinville, he was arrested himself on the Comité de Salut Public’s orders and incarcerated in the Luxembourg. Released after Thermidor, Antonelle remained silent for a whole year before reemerging as a leading advocate of neo-Jacobin egalitarianism, especially in the influential
Journal des hommes libres
, on which he worked with the able young René Vatar (1773–1842), another key figure in providing an element of cohesion on an ideological level to France’s surviving, adapting, and reemerging neo-Jacobinism.
⁸

Antonelle and Vatar, like Babeuf, believed a revival of Brissotin fortunes would be disastrous for the Revolution by renewing old divisions and leaving the Jacobins and common people looking as if they had been systematically duped ever since August 1792.
⁹
To their minds, and they were right, there remained a real tension between militant egalitarianism and la philosophie, with its stress on intellect and knowledge, between Rousseausime and Enlightenment, between
principes populaires
and the secte philosophique. Likewise, the veteran Montagnard Marc-Antoine Baudot (1765–1837) abhorred Robespierre and despised Marat but also remained convinced the masses were the Revolution’s true motor, that the Terror had been necessary, and that the Girondins were an ambitious, power-hungry clique designing
une république oligarchique
.
¹⁰
The Revolution’s great men in Baudot’s opinion were not the philosophe-révolutionnaires of 1788–93 but Danton, Desmoulins, and Romme. Hence, one republican bloc aimed to restore the “real Revolution” and its true principles by reviving the Brissotin legacy and reinvigorating the Convention, its rivals by appealing to the Paris sections and reviving Jacobin esprit public. Brissotins, such men remained convinced, were not true “republicans” or “friends of liberty” and disdained the sansculottes.
¹¹