Revolutionary Ideas: An Intellectual History of the French Revolution From the Rights of Man to Robespierre (113 page)

Because forming an anti-Montagnard alliance of Old Jacobins and Brissotins seemed distasteful, and illegitimate to many Montagnard veterans of the May 31 rising, once the Thermidorians faded during
1795–96, Dantonists and other Old Jacobins and Old Cordeliers confronted several decisive, unpalatable, and, for them, often excruciating choices. Since neo-Brissotin republicanism rapidly reemerged during early 1795 as the real backbone of enlightened, libertarian, democratic republicanism, and hence of the Revolution, the situation ultimately forced anti-Brissotin Old Jacobins to divide: either they embraced Daunou, Debry, Lanjuinais, Guyomar, Lanthenas, and Boissy d’Anglas or else became outright opponents of the legislature, swallowing their criticism of Thermidorians, Robespierre, and the Terror. Babeuf adopted the latter strategy: he dropped press freedom from among his major concerns, and by early 1796, his new paper,
Le Tribun du peuple,
was already making excuses for the Terror and even the September massacres. More press freedom, he realized, would merely aid the right-wing monarchist-Catholic revival, as well as the Brissotins, who, to him, were the “grave-diggers of democracy,” and thereby aggravate the Republic’s political instability. Shouldering what he saw as a genuinely revolutionary task, he aimed to restore Robespierre’s, the Terror’s, and even Joseph Lebon’s reputation, thus justifying the annihilation of the Hébertists and Dantonists.
¹²

The Thermidorians, meanwhile, clung to power tenaciously for as long as they could. Every possible ploy was utilized to shore up their sagging prestige. Minimizing their role in the Terror, they delayed Fouquier-Tinville’s trial for months. Trying to recoup sansculotte support, on 7 September 1794, they renewed the Law of the General Maximum on prices and wages for another year, signaling their intention to hold food prices steady. The measure was enforced, though in a hesitant, vacillating manner, without wielding the harsh penalties sporadically imposed before Thermidor until, on 23 December 1794, the Maximum lapsed altogether. In an effort to breathe new life into Montagnard ideology and values, they devised several grand publicity coups designed to impress the public: the Convention voted to deposit Marat’s remains in the Panthéon,
¹³
and finally install Rousseau there, while simultaneously removing Mirabeau. Robespierre had planned to alter the Panthéon’s character, aiming to dephilosophize the sanctuary and firmly associate it instead with populist cult figures like Lepeletier and Chalier, who meant more to ordinary folk. Briefly, the Thermidorians persisted with this policy. Amid great fanfares, Marat was entombed in the Panthéon on 21 September 1794.

However, pantheonizing Marat and negating the Panthéon’s philosophique character offended not only Brissotins but also libertarian
Rousseauistes, who refused to see Marat as a genuine standard-bearer of Rousseau. Mercier, who had joined the Convention protests against the 2 June 1793 coup and been imprisoned with other Brissotins in October 1793, and who believed that dismantling Montagnard authoritarianism was proceeding too slowly, fiercely condemned Marat’s pantheonization. A republican long before 1789, like Brissot, Bonneville, Guyomar, and Dusaulx, Mercier loathed Marat and Robespierre but nevertheless shared the latter’s aversion to interring Rousseau among philosophes. Like other Rousseauistes, he was less drawn to pantheonizing Rousseau than depantheonizing Voltaire. How can anyone reconcile Voltaire’s writings with republican maxims?
¹⁴
Mercier also scorned the Convention’s decree of 2 October 1793 (never implemented), envisioning the transfer of Descartes’s remains to the Panthéon. Whatever Descartes’s merits as a philosopher, he meant nothing to ordinary folk, a point Mercier loudly affirmed in a discourse to the Council of Five Hundred on 8 February 1796. Mercier, in fact, disliked the whole idea of the Panthéon.
¹⁵
The project had resulted in a sumptuous building full of magnificent decor costing vast sums better spent, in his view, on charitable institutions aiding the poor.

Still, the people’s hopes had to be kept alive. Installing Rousseau in the Panthéon on 20 Vendémiaire (11 October 1794), a beautiful day, counted among the outstanding commemorative events of that fraught and gloomy post-Thermidor autumn. The cortege was accompanied by the legislature, bands of musicians, and crowds of young people singing hymns, including one especially composed by Marie-Joseph Chénier for the occasion, beginning, “O Rousseau! modèle des sages,” benefactor of humanity, “accept the homage of a people proud and free, and from the depths of your tomb support equality!”
¹⁶
A rousing occasion staged by the Thermidorians and some Brissotins to restore the Republic’s wilting reputation, the event was designed to create a reassuring tableau of union, harmony, and reconciliation.

Montagnard recovery, however, was wholly out of the question. There was an insuperable contradiction in the Thermidorian logic. Once the Terror ceased and a partial freedom of expression returned, there was no way the people’s pent-up indignation and revulsion, or thirst for revenge, could be withstood. “They write now with great freedom and truth,” reported Mary Wollstonecraft from Paris on 24 September 1794, predicting even this partially revived liberty of the press and expression “will overthrow the Jacobins.”
¹⁷
She was right. Pressure to bring the terroristes and
vandalistes
(cultural vandals) to book
mounted, while provincial Jacobin clubs, long repressed, began to grasp that responsibility for the Terror, repression, vandalism, and Robespierre’s despotism extended far beyond Robespierre’s own immediate circle. When Robespierre betrayed the Revolution, asked one pamphlet expressing this deepening trauma, “what were you doing, mother?” The Paris Jacobins, answered this tract, had continually bolstered Robespierre’s image among the sansculottes. In fact, they were equally guilty, the “foyer of the conspiracy,” the true “arsenal” of “the subversion” that engineered the 2 June 1793 coup, wrecking the Revolution and the people’s hopes. Even now, in the autumn of 1794, Paris Jacobins still defended Collot d’Herbois, Billaud-Varenne, and Barère while harassing the shopkeepers.
¹⁸
“Oh mother, how perverse you are!” Ludicrous pretexts were being adduced to justify still keeping the proscribed Brissotin deputies behind bars. The ridiculous claim that they were really “royalists” just repeated the flagrant lies used by Collot d’Herbois on 31 May 1793 in mobilizing the poor faubourgs against Brissotin republican democrats accused of donning the white cockade.
¹⁹

There was no way the Thermidorians and New Jacobins could halt the erosion of their position. At the level of the provincial Jacobin clubs, the return of ousted Brissotins, and counterpurges reversing the Montagnard ideological purges of June 1793, proceeded through the autumn. At Caen, Cherbourg, Falaise, and Le Mans, the Brissotin sympathizers ejected fifteen months earlier were rehabilitated toward the end of October.
²⁰
By late October, anti-Jacobin revulsion seethed in the Paris streets, the resurgence of the Muscadins, or so-called Gilded Youth, featuring considerable numbers of rightists and sons of nobles. France grew more and more divided but with much of the populace boiling with fury against the terroristes, expessing a
revanchisme
rhetorical, political, and cultural. Elegantly clad Muscadins began attacking the wearers of typical Jacobin attire in the streets, drowning out the “Marseillaise” and smashing the symbols of the Marat cult. To soften this vindictive fury, the Convention felt driven to adopt more and more measures against those responsible for the Terror, distancing themselves increasingly from the now discredited Jacobins. Whatever the reservations of a Babeuf, Varlet, or Antonelle, in reality there was no alternative, if the Revolution was to be rescued, but to revert to a neo-Brissotin logic and strategy, repudiating not just Robespierre but also Marat and all the rest. On 9 November, a Muscadin mob stormed and ransacked the Jacobins’ meeting hall, smashing windows and beating up everyone present. The club, declared a source of serious public disorder by the
Convention, was closed on 11 November 1794, three and half months after Robespierre’s overthrow. This was a massive symbolic setback for populism and the Montagne, but an unavoidable, necessary symbolic step toward renewing the Revolution of 1788–93.

By December, the anti-Montagnard offensive had acquired unstoppable momentum. More traumatized survivors reemerged from the shadows and began asserting themselves, among them Louvet, who suddenly resurfaced and reminded the deputies that he had been the first to publicly defy Robespierre and denounce his tyranny and crimes. Robespierre, whom even the painter David now deemed “repulsive,”
²¹
had gone, but many of the vilest malefactors who had betrayed the Revolution had still not been disgraced and punished. If Hébert, Hanriot, Couthon, Saint-Just, and Fleuriot-Lescot had, happily for mankind, all been guillotined, why were Amar and Barère still sitting in the Convention? Louvet demanded his own readmittance to the legislature, specifically to confront these perpetrators of atrocities.
²²
Such voices could no longer be ignored. Carrier, responsible for shooting, guillotining, and drowning thousands, was now arrested and brought to trial. Guillotined to general applause on 15 December, his demise helped dampen the continuing endemic conflict in the Vendée and Brittany, where many former armed rebels laid down their arms under the provisional amnesty of September 1794 and the Republic’s general amnesty of January 1795.
²³

Little of this helped stabilize the Revolution, however, since chronic shortages and high food prices again rendered the winter of 1794–95 dreadfully harsh for the needy, helping revive sansculottism as a powerful destabilizing threat to the Convention and the Republic. Royalism gained ground. Lack of bread at affordable prices renewed the basis for violent protest and insurrection, enabling disgruntled, committed revolutionaries appealing to the sansculottes to again fuse dissatisfaction in the streets with orchestrated pressure for popular sovereignty, price controls, and renewed Jacobin control. Calls for implementation of the 1793 Constitution resounded in section assemblies and cafés. Protest posters appeared in the streets; subversive meetings convened in many places. Prominent among those inciting popular unrest against the vacillating Convention, and propagating talk of insurrection, were Babeuf and Antonelle. On 29 January 1795, the Convention ordered Babeuf’s arrest, the police tracking him down in February. He was imprisoned this time at Arras for seven months until amnestied in October 1795.

Among pamphlets maintaining that the 31 May and 2 June
insurrections were not the popular triumphs they had been projected as, but a charade perverting the Revolution and destroying those who had made it, was
De l’Interêt des Comités de la Convention Nationale
, by Roederer. Having survived in hiding, he only fully reemerged in January 1795, denouncing the Terror and Robespierre in the
Journal de Paris
and elsewhere, and demanding immediate rehabilitation of the seventy-one.
²⁴
Another powerful anti-Jacobin reproach was
Rappellez vos collègues
by Jean-Baptiste-Moise Jollivet (1753–1815), printed on Mme. Gorsas’s press. The Revolution would be saved, claimed Jollivet, congratulating the Convention on guillotining Carrier, only when the pernicious rift dividing “les républicains les plus sincères,” that is, the genuine Old Jacobins and the Brissotins, was healed. Restoring the Convention’s shattered integrity and saving the Revolution meant disavowing the wrong turn of 31 May and 2 June 1793. For this, the Convention must rehabilitate the imprisoned and other surviving Brissotin deputies illegally suspended from the Convention for a year and half. First to unmask Robespierre’s betrayal, they had been amply justified. One needed only to meet honest sansculottes from Paris’s poorest sections to know that they sincerely regretted having been duped by Robespierre’s lies and the scoundrels and hypocrites he had recruited: “as much as they were the dupes of these men eighteen months ago, they detest them now.”
²⁵

Another pamphlet proclaiming 31 May and 2 June a “great crime” that violated the people’s sovereignty was the work of the fervent Rousseauiste anti-enlightener Michel-Edme Petit. Petit deplored the systematic deceit plied by the insurgent leaders in Paris on 31 May and 2 June, and their constant abuse of language, the perversion of the terms “people” and “liberty” so characteristic of Robespierre, his employing the term “the people” exclusively to mean himself. The 1793 democratic Constitution, Petit reminded readers, was not the work of the Montagne but the democratic republicans whom they so basely supplanted. Among those Petit assailed was the pro-Montagne lawyer Robert Lindet (1746–1825), even if he was among the least compromised of the Committee of Public Safety under the Terror. Did Lindet not still maintain that the 2 June rising represented the people’s aspirations and that the 1792 September massacres were “the work of the people”?
²⁶

As the myth of Marat, the journée of 31 May, and Jacobin uprightness disintegrated, throughout France plaster busts of Marat, the false
L’Ami du peuple
, were smashed by the hundreds. On 8 February 1795, only five months after his entombment, Marat had to be ceremonially
dépanthéonisé
amid rapturous applause. It was an event truly signaling the resuscitation of the Revolution. Before long, it was usual to insult or stamp on images of Marat and Lepeletier in provincial towns. Indeed, early 1795 witnessed an overwhelming psychological and cultural reaction against Maratisme, Montagnard sansculottism, Terror, and intolerant egalitarianism, a generalized revulsion against Robespierre’s “tout populaire” that rapidly turned into a feverish craze, replacing Jacobin “virtue” with antiausterity, a blaze of finery, elegant fashion, fine food, and drink. Fashionable restaurants proliferated as never before. Women’s fashions, not least in official circles, changed dramatically. Overt elegance and frivolity with an erotic allure powerfully revived, as did prostitution.
²⁷