Revolutionary Ideas: An Intellectual History of the French Revolution From the Rights of Man to Robespierre (115 page)

During 1795, the Convention pursued ex-Montagnards but liberalized and especially democratized too hesitantly and slowly for many committed republicans. How could the Republic be stabilized, the Convention’s authority bolstered, and the principle of representative democracy restored? Constitutionally, as modified in 1795–96, the Republic by no means adjusted as conservatively as is usually claimed. Vacillating over whether to reinstate the 1793 Constitution or not, the Assembly voted on 18 April to establish an eleven-man commission—headed by Sieyès, Daunou, Boissy d’Anglas, the deist ideologue La Révellière-Lépeaux, and the Breton jurist Lanjuinais, who had only just resumed his seat in the Convention, having been one of the chief Brissotin detractors of the Montagne during the months preceding the 2 June 1793 coup. This Commission des Onze, replacing a prior, smaller Comité de Constitution, was charged with considering whether the 1793
Constitution (which in essence was not a “Jacobin” constitution at all but a Brissotin one modified) should be readopted, and, if so, preparing the ground. Between 3 April and 22 August 1795, the commission closely examined and debated the 1793 Constitution. But to resolve disagreements among themselves and counter the resurgent sansculottism of Germinal, the commission eventually opted to replace the 1793 text with a completely new constitution, a project easier once the unbending Sieyès withdrew from the process. The emerging consensus to replace the 1793 text, shaped by the growing impulse to curb sansculottism, further converted the June 1793 Constitution into the rallying cry of Jacobin opposition and sansculotte insurrection.
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The 1795 Constitution was hammered out against a background of escalating political and social turmoil. On 20 May, and especially 21 May 1795 (3 Prairial), after days of disturbances, the biggest popular outbreak in Paris of the entire Revolution since 1792 occurred. Erupting shortly after the Toulon insurrection, this upheaval completed the discrediting of direct democracy in the Convention’s eyes. Some rioters were swayed by an anonymous pamphlet,
Insurrection du peuple pour obtenir du pain et réconquerir ses droits
, that appeared a day or two before, which fused demand for bread and price controls with an exhortation to rise for the Rights of Man and the 1793 Constitution. The huge crowds that mobilized on 21 May for the march on the Convention following the sounding of the tocsin in the Faubourg Saint-Antoine, and other artisan eastern suburbs where the section assemblies had lately revived, yelled “Vive la Montagne!” and demanded bread and the 1793 Constitution. The slogan “Bread and the Constitution of 1793” was also worn by many pinned to or tucked into their hats. The Paris sections aimed to capture the government and the National Guard for the people. Some of the National Guard did defect and join the rioters.
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Once again, sansculottes surrounded and invaded the Convention. Space being limited, most of the multitude stayed outside in the Place du Carrousel. One of the younger neo-Brissotin deputies, Jean-Bertrand Ferraud (1764–95), attempting to stop the vanguard breaking down the doors, was shot and finished off with knives. Cries of “Cut off his head!” resulted in decapitation of his corpse. The Convention’s “president,” Boissy d’Anglas, detested by sansculottes as a Brissotin opponent of the Maximum (his nickname was Boissy-Famine), when threatened with pikes, on one of which was affixed the bloodied head of Ferraud, showed commendable sangfroid, calmly saluting the head but refusing to budge. The sansculottes yelled their demands; most of
the Assembly listened, unswayed. Several Montagnard deputies, headed by the mathematician Romme, Jean-Michel Duroy (1753–95), and Pierre Soubrany (1752–95)—a friend of Romme’s and a noble army officer and mayor of Riom whom some Prairial demonstrators wanted as their military leader—however, openly sided with the crowds. Regular troops and loyal National Guards massed nearby. A bloody conflict was avoided though, and, at length, after no less than eleven hours of nerve-wracking confrontation and, according to Louvet, frightening menaces, the demonstrators drifted away again with nothing concrete accomplished. There was in fact considerable sympathy in the Convention regarding deprivation and the bread price, but less and less for popular insurrection, direct democracy, and the 1793 Constitution.
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News of the Paris mass uprising thrilled militant egalitarians and Jacobins around the country, among them Antonelle, Jullien, and Babeuf, the last still in jail at Arras. When the armed rebellion revived the next day, announced by ringing the tocsin, immense crowds gathered and yet again converged on the Convention. Troops and gendarmes surrounding the Convention hall wavered, and then dispersed, many defecting to the insurgents. Crowds burst into the hall, once more intimidating the deputies and wresting resolutions and empty promises. Fortunately for the neo-Brissotin legislature, no populist leader emerged with the prestige and skill to channel and direct the popular pressure sufficiently to gain power. The mob was again eventually persuaded to depart with nothing tangible accomplished. By 23 May the Faubourg Saint-Antoine was ringed by troops and armed men from other sections. The concrete outcome of Prairial, as of Germinal, was a further forceful reaction against the menaces of Jacobin populism. Montagnard intransigence, combined with the unruliness of the sansculottes, had by now convinced most deputies that the common people were just too ignorant, unpredictable, and easily manipulated to receive the right to directly elect the National Assembly. The uprising reinforced the arguments of Daunou, Boissy d’Anglas, and the constitutional commission that the representative principle needed strengthening, the principle of universal suffrage qualifying, and “the people” prevented from directly intimidating the legislature.
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A vigorous crackdown followed. The sections were scoured for the “men of blood” who had supported Robespierre. At least three thousand agitators and suspects of one sort or another were detained in Paris over the next week, Antonelle among them, although most were released shortly afterward. By 10 Prairial, forty-seven insurgents had been
arrested in the Droits-de-l’Homme section alone. The specific grounds for their detention were usually less involvement in the Germinal and Prairial insurrections than a longer record of Jacobin activism in the sections under Robespierre’s ascendancy or else as
septembriseurs
implicated in the 1792 prison massacres.
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A special commission erected to deal with unrest in the capital tried the murderers of Ferraud, who were sent to the guillotine along with thirty-six others. At the same time, a further sixty-one Montagnard deputies were purged from the Assembly, eleven dubbed “agents of tyranny” and accused of condoning the insurrection in the hope of recovering power for the Jacobins. The ten most implicated were tried for treason during June; six, including Romme, were found guilty and sentenced to death. Romme, worthy egalitarian to the last (he had regularly donated part of his salary as a deputy to the poor), Soubrany, and two others eluded the guillotine by stabbing themselves beforehand in an act of final Montagnard defiance. With their deaths, a grand total of no less than eighty-six Convention deputies of all stripes had died violent deaths linked to the Revolution since the summer of 1793, by execution, assassination, or suicide.
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Prairial eliminated all prospect of a straightforward reversion to the 1793 Constitution.
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Painstakingly, over the summer of 1795, the commission compiled an exceptionally detailed new constitutional text, couched in 377 articles (as against 208 for the 1791 monarchist Constitution and 124 articles for that of June 1793).
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But though the strategy now was to replace the 1793 Constitution, this does not mean that Boissy d’Anglas, Daunou, Lanjuinais, Guyomar, and the other anti-Montagnards of Brissotin background now assuming the lead turned their back on democracy, or were abandoning revolutionary principles, or reverting to constitutional monarchy (as many in France desired). Theirs was not an unprincipled retreat. Rather, the revolutionary leadership of the summer of 1795 believed democracy had to be restrained and qualified due to the overwhelming need to check popular unruliness, counter the anarchistes’ abuse of the term “people,” stabilize the Revolution, and conserve its essential principles. Otherwise, they feared (with considerable justification) a descent either into a new Montagnard despotism or else a new monarchism violently reimposed by what they saw as the turbulent, unreasoning plebs. “If the people make bad choices,” as Boissy d’Anglas put it in a speech to the Convention on 23 June 1795, “and opt for monarchism,
terrorisme
or
fanaticisme
, the Republic will be lost!”
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A lively debate followed. Paine, backed by Lanthenas, joined in the July discussion about the new Constitution by attacking “aristocracy,” expounding what became his
Dissertation on First Principles of Government
. Paine termed the right of voting for representatives as “the primary right by which other rights are protected,” and therefore the basis of any true democratic republic. Though Pierre Guyomar and other democrats agreed, the Convention’s anti-Montagnard majority saw little real alternative but to refashion representative democracy, this time with the representative body’s supremacy carefully safeguarded and Rousseauiste direct democracy precluded.
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Montesquieu’s separation of powers, it was felt, should be adopted as an additional safeguard against populist intimidation and violent suborning of the legislature. No other course of action looked plausible after Germinal, especially following the demise of the ten-year-old Louis XVII on 6 June 1795, and the proclaiming among the émigré diaspora of Louis XVI’s younger brother, the count of Provence, as “Louis XVIII” king of France. The pretender’s announcement of his plans, issued from Austrian Verona, pledged to restore monarchy, ancien régime social hierarchy, and ecclesiastical authority as uncompromisingly as could be conceived. The Convention, consequently, felt equally menaced by revived sansculottism and resurgent royalism. The only way forward, it was agreed, was a fresh constitution designed to fortify the Revolution’s core values—representative democracy, republicanism, freedom of expression, minimal religious authority, legal equality, and human rights against both populism and royalism.

During the summer of 1795, the Convention moved to entrench constitutional checks and balances, and lessen the sway of direct democracy.
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The new Constitution was prefaced by a fresh Declaration of the Rights and Duties of Man and the Citizen, comprising this time twenty-two as against thirty-five articles in 1793. Where both the Condorcet draft of February 1793 and the Hérault constitution affirmed sovereignty to reside “in the whole people,” that of September 1795 avoided invoking “the people,”
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declaring that “the universality of French citizens is the sovereign.”
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Where all three earlier declarations of rights proclaimed la volonté générale without mentioning division of powers, the 1795 text redefined volonté générale as “the law as approved by the majority of citizens or their representatives,” while simultaneously embracing division of powers. Where the earlier constitutions provided for a single-chamber legislature, the new Constitution
provided for two chambers. Where the Condorcet declaration omits supernatural presence, that of August 1795, like the Hérault declaration of June 1793, invokes “the presence of the Supreme Being.” Critics of the new Constitution abounded; most republicans and democrats, though, rallied behind it.

After a three-week debate, with only one deputy, Diderot’s old comrade Alexandre Deleyre, holding out for a single chamber, the new Constitution was approved by the Convention on 22 August. As in the summer of 1793, approval by the legislature needed prompt, popular endorsement, and this soon followed (6 September 1795).
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A retreat from the democratic provisions of Condorcet or Hérault in some respects, the 1795 Constitution nevertheless remained unparalleled and impressively democratic compared with everything else then available in the world, including the then British or United States constitutions. As an embodiment of modern democratic and egalitarian principles, it assuredly had no rival at all outside France. Every male older than twenty-one who paid taxes was declared a citizen, together with every man who had fought for the Republic, whether paying taxes or not. Most adult males retained the right to vote in the first stage of elections for the legislature. The 1795 Constitution was less democratic than that of 1793 principally in that the legislature’s deputies were now appointed not directly, as under the 1793 Constitution by the electorate through the primary assemblies, but by assemblies of electeurs. The 1793 Constitution grouped the primary assemblies in batches of fifteen or sixteen so that each deputy was elected by securing a majority vote among roughly 7,500 adult male voters representing around 40,000 people.
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Now the voters chose only electeurs empowered to choose the deputies in each department, each elector representing 200 citizens. To qualify as an elector one needed to be older than twenty-five and possess property assessed at 200 days of work (or rent a house, or have income status at an equivalent level), property qualifications proposed by Boissy d’Anglas, Sieyès, and other leading figures. In communities of less than 6,000 inhabitants, property qualifications were adjusted one-quarter lower.
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