Revolutionary Ideas: An Intellectual History of the French Revolution From the Rights of Man to Robespierre (118 page)

A restrictive liberal tendency to discard Condorcet’s and Brissot’s concern for countering economic inequality undoubtedly flourished in the social science of several of these leading figures, notably Cabanis and Roederer, and in several cases involved a definite retreat from the goal of reducing economic inequality and Condorcet’s preoccupation with women’s equality. A particularly mean streak pervaded the thought of Cabanis, who certainly exemplified the Idéologues’ preoccupation, in the tradition of Diderot and d’Holbach, with materialist philosophy and their emphasis on the unity of nature, but reacted to the horrors of the Montagnard tyranny by heavily stressing the need for social stability and order and seeking to minimize public assistance to the poor, though he did not reject the principle of subsidizing the unemployed.
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Cabanis’s strong preoccupation with physiology, emotional states, and the sex drive became linked to a tendency to differentiate male and female intellect based on bodily functions and women’s role in childbirth and child-rearing. Especially remote from the stance of Condorcet was Cabanis’s conviction that while women have more sensitivity and awareness of emotions, the female mind was unsuited for “long and profound meditations” and ultimately subordinate to that of men intellectually and politically.
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Crypto-royalists viewed the Idéologues’ d’Holbachian refusal to conceive morality as something divinely installed in the human heart to be deeply damaging to the social order. But this endemic strife lingered mostly below the surface until after the triumph of Bonaparte’s authoritarianism in 1799–1800, a development that encouraged expression of more forthrightly antimaterialist and Christian positions. La Révellière-Lépeaux, though also promoting a new public morality, found himself in a category of his own as a militant Rousseauist, anti-Robespierriste, and ardent enthusiast for an organized public cult of deism. For his part, Mercier agreed with the Idéologues that Robespierre had declared war on both the Enlightenment and the Revolution, and that the Institut’s task was to obliterate every vestige of Montagnard thinking and ideology, and restore the (nonreligious) Enlightenment to its proper place as the veritable guide of a humanity bolstered by democracy, human rights, and the world revolution. But he nevertheless went his own way,
rejecting the irreligious radicalism, atheism, and d’Holbachian materialism of the Idéologues, still preferring Rousseau and the moderation of the new Kantian philosophy.

Institutions and government, held Condorcet, generally lag well behind “la marche de la philosophie,” the progress men make in their ideas. To a lesser extent, institutions also lag behind public opinion. “There exists at every instance a great distance between the point to which the philosophes have brought enlightenment” and the way of thinking generally accepted by educated opinion.
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This doctrine lay at the heart of the ideology motivating the Institut de France: by fostering the moral and political sciences, institutionalization of beneficial ideas can be accelerated especially when the most enlightened philosophes are placed at the head of the educational and public instruction system. Attendances at the combined public sessions of the three Institut classes were commonly impressive, as many as fifteen hundred listeners filling the Louvre’s Salle des Antiques. The Idéologues tried to integrate the exact sciences with social science and morality, employing the arts and literature as amplifiers and elucidators of social and moral reality. Idéologie, for its adherents, was the true science of ideas and institutions, a category standing in outright opposition to every variety of traditional thought and metaphysics, a philosophical methodology enabling men to establish social science and politics on a basis of moral truth, science, and indisputable facts.

Robespierre and the Montagne, they contended, had introduced a wholly false, despotic, and unenlightened conception of equality, wreaking untold havoc. Inequality, being a phenomenon of nature rooted in inequality of talents, diligence, and intelligence, cannot be erased altogether. Nevertheless, economic inequality perennially threatens justice and social well-being. Hence, the duty of a properly constituted government, that is, of republican representative democracy—other forms of government being by definition illicit and predatory—is to combat the three prime causes and factors of inequality. First, legislators must eradicate institutionalized inequality of status, every sort of privilege or hereditary, or caste distinction, producing inequality of power and influence being pernicious. Second, legislators must counteract inequality of wealth by using the fiscal system to enforce progressive taxation and regulations governing trade and industry designed to curb exploitation and maximize wealth dispersal, especially by fighting commercial engrossing and imposing rules on marriage settlements and inheritance to dismantle wealth consolidation.
Third, legitimate government combats inequality in education and access to skills. Democracy must assist the poor not with a view to fighting class wars or pillaging the rich but to even the balance, in conformity, as Destutt de Tracy put it, with reason and the “general interest.”
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Vendémiaire (October 1795): An Unstable Republic

Reaffirming the Revolution’s core principles and introducing a new Constitution, however, hardly sufficed either to realize the Idéologue program or stabilize the Republic. Generating more support and robust progams of sweeping reform were needed. To bolster the neo-Brissotins’ revived primacy, and ensure neither royalisme nor populism triumphed in the new elections, as well as afford continuity, on 30 August 1795 the Convention passed a highly controversial and soon bitterly contested “two-thirds law.” This stipulated that two-thirds, or 500, of the new legislature’s 750 deputies should be drawn from the existing Assembly.
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It was an arbitrary, unconstitutional decree opposed by several departments and most Paris sections, where rigorous purging of terroristes had transferred control in many instances into the hands of out-and-out conservatives. The decree undoubtedly was irregular and unconstitutional, but at the time it seemed an indispensable emergency safeguard to many. To democratic republicans, ensuring that royalism and authoritarian populism were kept at bay appeared more immediately vital than any niceties of democratic theory. Limiting the electorate’s choice beforehand appealed to most outgoing deputies and also many external observers alarmed by the mounting triple threat of reactionary monarchism, rebellious populism, and the population’s mounting fatigue with the Revolution’s endless travails and difficulties.

In Septmber 1795, the new Constitution was approved by a democratic national referendum in which more than a million people cast their votes, and more than 900,000 endorsed the Constitution, even though many people angrily denounced the two-thirds rule shoring up the republican majority in the new Assembly (which, apart from anything else, facilitated participation of former terroristes).
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Royalist reaction, supplemented by continuing sansculotte exasperation, generated a powerful resurgence of resentment against this unsteady republican, neo-Brissotin, and anti-Catholic regime, which nevertheless also
refused to combat terroristes unreservedly (indeed, had released many Jacobin suspects). Opposition and protest welled up in particular in Paris. The intensity of royalist-Catholic
revanchisme
became fully apparent only ten days after inauguration of the Constitution of the Year III, setting up the Directoire and the new two-chamber legislature on 25 September 1795. On 4 and 5 October 1795 (10 and 11 Vendémiaire), and especially on 6 October (13 Vendémiaire), three of the most traumatic days of the Revolution, erupted one of the Revolution’s largest, unruliest, most frightening, and most confused popular convulsions.

On 4 October 1795 (12 Vendémiaire), a formidable mass of royalists, Catholics, populists, and furious sansculottes, drawing support from around thirty of the capital’s sections, demanded revenge on terrorists, repudiation of the two-thirds law, and fresh elections. Seven sections, Lepeletier, Théâtre-Français, Place-Vendôme, and other both working- and middle-class districts, rose in mass armed revolt, mobilizing their units of the National Guard against the regime. Opposition to the republican regime was strongest in the Lepeletier section, where finance and investment were concentrated and where, in its primary assembly sessions of 7 and 12 September, counterrevolutionary sentiment boiled over. Despite being partly or predominantly royalist, this new insurrection strikingly embraced the rhetoric of direct sovereignty employed earlier by the sections under Robespierre and included a strong element of sansculotte protest, only now channeling popular hostility directly against representative democracy and the Convention.
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On 5 October, some 25,000 insurgents marched on the Convention from south of the river. Against them, republican activists, including many ex-Montagnards, Antonelle among them, calling themselves the “Patriotes de 1789,” formed up at the Tuileries. The “rebels” were also opposed by a small, hastily summoned military force of 4,000 men under Barras (accompanied by several army officers, most notably Napoleon, who seized the opportunity to restore their political reputations), sent to occupy the bridges. Despite a long standoff lasting most of the afternoon, negotiation failed and the Convention’s artillery opened fire on the mass of insurgents, amounting to some 7,000 armed sansculottes, precipitating a pitched battle on the Quai de Voltaire and neighboring streets during the night of 5/6 October that turned into one of the longest journées (lasting seven hours), and second bloodiest (after 10 August 1792), in Paris of the Revolution. The two armed forces, roughly equal in size, fought on the Seine’s banks, in the streets
and squares, and around the massive Baroque church of Saint-Roch, the battle intently followed not least in the prisons, where still-imprisoned Montagnards, Jullien among them, made ready to kill themselves rather than be slaughtered by royalist revenge seekers should the latter manage to overwhelm the republicans and reenact the September 1792 prison massacres in reverse. In the end, though, the government’s artillery, Napoleon’s military professionalism, and the resolve of the 1,500 armed Jacobins won the day.

When the battle ended, hundreds lay dead.
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Many besides royalists were appalled by the violence and the soldiery’s heavy-handed resort to force. Lanjuinais termed it a “massacre.”
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Afterward, the National Guard in the capital was disarmed; regular troops remained on hand; hundreds more suspects were arrested in the sections. But most of these, the Comité de Sûreté Générale wisely recognized, were merely “gens égarés,” “misled people” with little grasp of what was happening. Nearly everyone was released within a few days. Forty-nine populists were condemned to death by the courts but only two executions were actually carried out—those of two rebel section presidents, Lebond and Lebois. With the new Constitution only just introduced, the Convention wisely preferred to exhort reconciliation and constitutionality rather than impose a new round of severity and executions, risking the very stability the Directoire so desperately sought. Only nine days after the revolt’s suppression, on 4 Brumaire of the Year III (26 October 1795), the Convention—approaching its conclusion—voted to release all those earlier imprisoned as “Jacobins or Feuillants, terrorists or
modérés
,” a general political amnesty under which a whole army of Jacobins and militant dissidents, including Jullien, Babeuf, and Augustin Darthé (1769–97), besides the Marseille Jacobin leaders Bayle and Granet, were released.
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The way to stabilize the Revolution in the autumn of 1795, contended Marie-Joseph Chénier, was to liberate the press, rehabilitate the Brissotins, and definitively release most political prisoners while severely punishing the worst “revolutionary murderers.”
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At first, the Directoire followed precisely this course and, among other signs of republican rectitude, proved willing to ease restrictions on pro-Jacobin journalism, enabling Babeuf to establish his
Tribun du peuple
and Jullien his radical but progovernment
L’Orateur plébéien
. Hard-line egalitarians, for their part, found themselves in a quandary. Economic distress, plainly, was just as likely, or more likely, to propel the monarchist-Catholic Right to power as direct democracy and sansculottism. Plainly, there was simply
no such thing as a coherent sansculotte tendency or ideology; rather, the volatility and incoherence of populist sentiment, whether Enragé, Hébertiste, royalist, or Robespierriste, was indisputable. Not the least of the contradictions inherent in this chronic situation, as both Babeuf and Jullien acknowledged, was that the sansculottes had undeniably been economically better off under the ancien régime than they were in the Republic’s present context. “Royalism,” commented Babeuf, “lies in wait at the doors of this sanctuary.”
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He urged all democrats to consider what would happen should the royalists sway more of the poor and gain the upper hand: “throughout the length and breadth of France death and outlawry will be decreed for republicans.” Nothing whatever could be achieved, stressed his
Tribun du peuple
, unless the Revolution weaned “the masses from their royalist sympathies.”
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Appalled by the strength of populism, royalism, and reactionary Catholicism, on 10 October, the new legislature abolished the section assemblies altogether, along with sectional control of National Guard units, thereby demolishing, many hoped for good, the chief tools of direct sovereignty in the Revolution and fundamentally altering the Republic’s character. The new legislature boasted notably more Brissotins than its predecessor and shunned terrorists, populists, and royalists with equal fervor. Among its leading figures were Daunou, Boissy d’Anglas, Lanthenas, Lakanal, Debry, Lanjuinais, Guyomar, Marie-Joseph Chénier, and, until both died in 1797, Louvet and Diderot’s old companion, Deleyre. The Council of Five Hundred and Conseil des Anciens that convened with the inauguration of the Constitution and the Year III in late October strove to uphold the Constitution and the law. Sieyès was elected one of the five directors but refused to serve. The elected directors installed in office—Barras, Carnot, La Révellière-Lépeaux, Reubell, and Letourneur—were from the middle ground, all proven anti-Robespierristes professing to be committed republicans, equally vigilant against Robespierrisme and royalism. Lazare Carnot, credited with being the architect of the victory at Fleurus (26 June 1794) and a main contributor to Robespierre’s downfall, remained for the next three years at the forefront of the Revolution, dominating military affairs, with Barras policing Paris, La Révellière-Lépeaux supervising the interior, and Reubell foreign affairs.
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But thoroughly alarmed by populist monarchism, the Directoire consistently preferred rallying former Montagnards, and countering those involved in the October 1795 rising, than rooting out former terrorists. To begin with, the new regime also encouraged the reemergence of anti-Robespierre provincial
neo-Jacobin clubs, like those of Toulouse and Metz, where the Jacobins triumphed in the municipal elections of November 1795.
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