Revolutionary Ideas: An Intellectual History of the French Revolution From the Rights of Man to Robespierre (116 page)

Under the Constitution endorsed by the Convention on 22 August 1795, elections replacing one-third of the Assembly’s deputies were to be held each year. The lower chamber, or Council of Five Hundred, remained the sole body empowered to initiate legislation. The upper chamber, or Conseil des Anciens, comprising 250 older legislators, was charged with scrutinizing, and approving or rejecting, legislative proposals. Executive power was invested in a Directoire of Five elected
by the Conseil des Anciens from a list compiled by the Five Hundred. One director would be replaced each year. The directors were not ministers entrusted with separate departments and spheres of activity, but supposed to act collectively, albeit each had his particular specialism. A widely appreciated feature was that the new Constitution guaranteed all accused individuals the right to unfettered defending counsel, as already prefigured in the trials of Barère, Collot d’Herbois, and Billaud-Varenne.

Devised to repel Jacobin populism and riotous pressuring of the legislature, as well as all forms of monarchism, aristocracy, and reviving religious authority, the new Constitution espoused representative democracy against popular, direct democracy. With most adult males possessing the vote, the Constitution possessed a more democratic character than has often been suggested and did command widespread respect. One proof of this was that France’s now huge and steadily expanding army operated efficiently under its control while remaining steadfastly subordinate to this newly reconstituted republican authority until 1799. “The best generals in Europe,” commented Madame de Staël later, “obeyed five directors, three of whom were only lawyers.” Love of country and freedom still sufficed to make the troops “grant more respect to the law than to their general, should he wish to place himself above it.”

Had Britain, Prussia, and Austria desired peace, the Revolution could in fact have stabilized on the basis of the 1795 semidemocratic Constitution, or so at any rate she believed.
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This seemed and was perhaps a conceivable outcome, though the 1795 Constitution did also dangerously split the republican Left committed to the Revolution. Militant egalitarians loyal to the legacy of Romme vocally resisted in the name of the 1793 Constitution, convinced (with reason) that the motive for displacing it with the new Constitution was to weaken the voice of—if not wholly disenfranchise—the poor. Babeuf pronounced the new Constitution “atrocious,” a travesty compared to its predecessor, a fresh set of chains.
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While the 1795 Constitution was rejected in militant neo-Jacobin populist circles and bracketed with the 1791 Constitution as an “aristocratic charter” intended to tighten the people’s fetters, that of 1793 continued to be venerated by some as a preferable framework and “a great step towards true equality.”
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Overall, there was indeed much to criticize in the new situation of the Republic. In theory, the 1795 Constitution guaranteed full freedom of expression and the press. If properly
respected, it would ensure legislative supremacy, genuinely free primary assemblies, and freedom to debate locally in clubs.
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But press freedom revived in 1795–96 only tentatively, remaining in practice more than half blocked. Force of circumstance and practical difficulties persuaded the legislature that restrictions adopted earlier could not be either quickly or easily dispensed with. There were numerous compromises, some rather unedifying. Marie-Joseph Chénier, now again an influential deputy backed by Louvet, defended restrictions aimed against royalism but plainly also against authoritarian populism, demanding exile for life for those publicly defaming Convention deputies in writing or at meetings. This measure passed on 1 May 1795 (12 Floreal, Year III).
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The Abbé Morellet, a veteran foe of the Revolution but nevertheless a fervent advocate of press freedom, accused Chénier in a pamphlet of dragging the press back under a
despotisme
like that of Robespierre. The number of pamphlets published in France dwindled further, from 601 in 1794 to 569 in 1795 and only 182 in 1796, though this was now predominently due to fatigue and disillusionment with revolutionary politics.
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Yet, despite these shortcomings, most democratic republican Left sentiment did rally behind the 1795 Constitution, intent on fighting the immediate twin challenges of revived Jacobin populism and resurgent monarchism, encouraged to adopt this stance by the continuing external pressure.

Britain and the European powers showed little inclination to moderate their insistence on restoring monarchism, aristocracy, and ecclesiastical authority. Except in recently conquered Holland, there was no official foreign approval or support whatsoever for the 1795 Constitution, or the Republic’s proclaimed goal of orderly representative democracy. The British remained in occupation of Corsica. In March 1795, an attempt planned by Napoleon to invade Corsica from Toulon was thwarted by the British navy.
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In late June 1795, the British landed a French royalist expeditionary force of 3,000 armed rebels, a mixture of émigrés and recruits levied from among captured French seamen and fishermen, at Quiberon Bay, in Brittany with the aim of rekindling major royalist-Catholic insurgency in the West. Their arrival indeed evoked great jubilation and fervor and some 10,000 Breton Chouans joyfully joined the invasion, unsettling a wide territory. They had only days, though, to celebrate the restoration of religion and the old order. On 3 July, the republican commander in Brittany, Louis-Lazare Hoche (1768–97), once an ordinary soldier in king’s army, routed the insurgent army, capturing 6,000 men. Under the draconian laws in force,
no less than 640 returning émigrés found in arms were shot by firing squads, along with 108 Chouans. The commander of the Whites in the Vendée, François Charette (1763–96), retaliated by shooting hundreds of republican prisoners. A second expedition, under the French pretender’s younger brother, the Comte d’Artois, embarked at Portsmouth for the Vendée in early September. This second émigré invasion captured an island off the coast, the Île d’Yeu, but Hoche lined the opposite coast in sufficient strength to prevent any linkup with Charette’s men, obliging the British, in mid-November, to ship the remnants back to England. In March 1796, Hoche captured and executed Charette, extinguishing organized counterrevolution in the West for the moment.

Radical Enlightenment Revived

The struggle within the Revolution, the fight for the Revolution’s soul during the period from Thermidor to the neo-Jacobin defeats of 1797, was a struggle for political control couched in an ideological struggle steeped in polemics and recrimination. Neo-Brissotins aimed to reconnect the Revolution to its radically enlightened roots, neo-Jacobins to the common people. The Terror was a repression of opinion, free expression, religion, and the individual. Opposition neo-Jacobins increasingly sought to justify this, stressing virtue and republican purity, as opposed to selfish individualism, echoing Rousseau; unlike those defending the 1795 Constitution and the conduct of the regime, they unstintingly eulogized the uprightness and purity of the masses.
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The nub of the quarrel between pro-regime republicans and opposition democrats during 1795–97 was over how far the 1795 Constitution secured the Revolution’s authentic goals and how far correcting the Revolution’s course and reinstating the “real” Revolution’s principles involved rehabilitating the Brissotins. The quarrel was heavily embedded in intellectual controversy throughout.

Only five weeks after Thermidor, the Abbé Grégoire delivered the first of several reports in the Convention highlighting the destruction caused by the antireligious and cultural vandalism of the Montagnard tyranny.
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Besides destruction of art, images, and churches, encompassed within the “vandalism” Grégoire passionately denounced was the anti-intellectualism, attack on libraries, and rejection of the Enlightenment itself. He expressly pointed to Robespierre’s frequently repeated and
insistent sallies against the men of learning and intellect. He directly linked this pervasive intellectual and cultural vandalism to the political oppression Robespierre and Robespierrisme had instigated. Aside from Babeuf, Antonelle, Maréchal, and Buonarroti, now already ceasing their earlier disparagement of the tyrant, practically everyone in France roundly denounced Robespierre’s crimes and betrayal of the Revolution. Like the Convention itself, during the years 1795–99, nearly all France’s pro-Revolution editors, publicists, and ideologues committed themselves to combating Jacobin appeals to the masses, unconstitutionality and populist authoritarianism, fed by sansculotte dissatisfaction.

If Babeuf’s ally, Buonarroti, had already begun what later became an unapologetic campaign to revive Robespierre’s prestige and reputation,
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it was clear to most that there could be no stabilization of the Republic or consolidation of republican freedoms without a sustained, nationally concerted effort—political, military, organizational, educational, cultural, and ideological—to disavow and discredit Montagnard authoritarianism comprehensively. Yet wholly extirpating Robespierre’s legacy while any vestiges of the Thermidorian regime persisted was impeded at every step. Rehabilitation of the Left republicans, pursued and decimated by Robespierre, ensued only sporadically over many months. Not until the spring of 1795 did full, unqualified rehabilitation of the values of Left republicans become even a plausible goal. Yet, without a Brissotin resurgence, no revival of the Revolution’s core values could attain logical cogency, sincerity, or much substance. Only with Maratisme and the Montagne, as well as Robespierre’s doctrines altogether rejected in practice and theory, could constitutionalism, human rights, religious toleration, and freedom of expression (albeit within limitations) be restored—and, equally, reaffirmation of Radical Enlightenment, the source of the Revolution’s ideology of human rights and democratic freedoms, again direct the main flow of official thought and culture.

Official rehabilitation of Condorcet, Helvétius, and the secte philosophique was hence a vital, indispensable step toward relaunching the Revolution of individual liberty, democracy, and freedom of thought. If Montesquieu’s separation of powers now also played a part, the prime intellectual inspiration remained that of the radical stream. Condorcet not only provided the “real Revolution,” reviving in 1795 with its best and most systematic philosophical defense, but afforded the reviving secte philosophique with their essential vision of education and the social sciences as their primary tools for furthering the quest for universal human happiness and the common welfare buttressed by individual
human rights.
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Radical ideas reemerged in 1795–97, fomented and encouraged not just by the new Constitution and legislature but also by partial restoration of freedom of the press, the resumption of orderly, properly grounded juridical procedures, and the Republic’s now rapidly expanding education system, as well as the revived culture of republican festivals and theater.

From early 1795, a whole new intellectual climate prevailed in France, characterized by la philosophie’s reversion to the special, privileged status it possessed in the Revolution’s formative years until June 1793. Several major new reforms introduced during Year III underlined the fact that, besides politics, public ceremonies, and education, daily life in the democratic Republic itself was being reorganized and rationalized on the basis of la philosophie. Among the most notable changes was the official, nationwide introduction of the metric system of weights and measurements adopted after five years of study and preparation on 7 April 1795, less than a week after the journée of 1 Germinal.
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This was not just a new standard for France but was intended, as it had been since the commencement of the research, in 1790 to constitute a unified, universal, and invariable decimal system, designed to replace the chaotically disparate existing European and global patchwork of measurement systems. The new metric system was one that Condorcet, Talleyrand, and others had conceived as being for all people and for all future time.

That a major text of Condorcet had survived him, an unfinished masterpiece, the
Tableau historique des progrès de l’esprit humain
, expounding the progress of the human spirit, was announced in December 1794. This work, first sketched in 1772, was greatly expanded while Condorcet was in hiding in 1793–94. On 2 April 1795, the Convention accepted Daunou’s proposal to publish Condorcet’s final book as an official text, at the Republic’s expense, in three thousand copies. Afterward, many more were printed, and Garat had large quantities of copies distributed free. For Daunou, this was merely part of his unremitting campaign to persuade the public that social and political wisdom stem from such philosophy and science and decidedly not from Robespierre’s cult of the ordinary and Rousseauism.
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Condorcet’s
Tableau
appeared in the spring of 1795, to be followed by five other editions down to 1798. Stendhal, then a radical young officer with Napoleon’s army of Italy, later recorded reading it through enthusiastically, two or three times. Editing this text and plans for a complete edition of Condorcet’s work, supervised by his widow, Sophie de Grouchy, were entrusted to a group of Condorcet’s disciples headed by Cabanis and Garat.
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Signs of the Radical Enlightenment’s rehabilitation proliferated during late 1794 and 1795. Among the most important was the renewed primary and secondary school plan presented to the Convention on behalf of the education committee on 3 Brumaire of the Year III (25 October 1794) by Lakanal. Approved a week later, it was adopted together with the commission’s major reform program for higher education. The plans to accord an automatic right of access to primary education free of charge, provided by teachers paid by the Republic, with a state primary school established for every thousand inhabitants throughout the country, and boys and girls studying the same curriculum, originally devised in 1792–93, were refurbished in their pre-Montagnard format.
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The Rousseauiste dimension to the educational changes introduced by the Montagne was discarded and the original philosophique inspiration restored at all levels, in the secondary schools with a typically materialist approach to philosophy and study of the human mind.
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