Revolutionary Ideas: An Intellectual History of the French Revolution From the Rights of Man to Robespierre (119 page)

If the hunger riots in Paris in the spring of 1795 represented a dangerous “paroxysm” of sansculottism,
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Vendémiaire was the failed uprising of a still broader populism lurching violently to the right. But monarchist or republican, populists and populism of whatever variety were utterly unable to steer the Revolution as a system of general emancipation, democracy, freedom of expression, and enlightenment. Direct democracy was never less the motor of the Revolution’s democratic and libertarian impulses than during 1795–97. If stability was to be achieved and the Revolution consolidated, republican intellectuals saw little alternative but to steadfastly support the Constitution and Directoire. Among leading editors, publicists, and ideologues participating in the constitutional debate of 1795, most unreservedly endorsed the Constitution and supported the democratic Republic.

However, some did not, notably Babeuf, Antonelle, Maréchal, and Buonarroti (who, expelled from Corsica with Salicetti and Volney in early 1793, had now joined the Paris Jacobins while remaining among the Revolution’s chief publicists in Italian). Refusing to abandon direct democracy and the 1793 Constitution, and defending the Terror, September massacres, and Robespierre, these men persevered in trying to mobilize fresh popular insurrections. Jullien, who felt some sympathy for both sides in this unceasing contest, did not doubt that the latter, the militant democrats, were a smaller movement than the main republican bloc. His conclusion was that the republican Revolution’s survival depended on the larger entity, constitutional reform rather than revolutionary direct action, and hence required the defeat of the militant egalitarians. In contrast to Babeuf, Maréchal, and Buonarroti, Jullien saw no alternative but for all democrats, whether militant egalitarians, such as he had hitherto always been, Dantonistes, or neo-Brissotin republicans, to coalesce and work together.
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Given the fraught circumstances, there could be no return to unrestricted press freedom; urging restoration of the monarchy remained illegal. But a wide range of opinion was allowed and various important papers reappeared or were founded in these months.
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Even a partial return of freedom of expression, Mary Wollstonecraft had predicted, would reinvigorate politics, the arts, and theater, bring outstanding women back to the fore, and encourage vigorous intellectual salons and political clubs to reemerge. She was right. Among the liveliest salons
from summer 1795 were those of Juliette Récamier and Germaine de Staël, newly returned to Paris in May 1795 from Switzerland, where she had fled in September 1792. Staël, daughter of Necker and lover of Benjamin Constant (who accompanied her to Paris), was an intellectually outstanding thirty-year-old, and like her father, a convinced moderate distinctly wary of radical ideas, but she was also devoted to defending basic human rights and building true political freedom. Although her salon exuded more than a hint of aristocratic allure, she was more inclined than her father to endorse the 1795 Constitution and support the neo-Brissotin republicanism, purged of Robespierrisme, which shaped the surviving French Revolution of the later 1790s. She openly admired Boissy d’Anglas, Daunou, and Lanjuinais, and respected Louvet, “a sincere republican,” even if his experience of the Terror had left him too paranoid and suspicious. The neo-Brissotins, it seemed clear to her, had saved and redeemed the Revolution. Like the beautiful Mme. Récamier, she aimed to encourage broad debate, making a point of welcoming to her salon a varied spectrum of opinion—not just supporters of the Directoire, like Constant and herself, but also royalists of different hues and ex- and neo-Jacobins, together with some of the capital’s brash nouveaux riches.
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Distinctly less elegant was the club Réunion des Amis de la République, called “the Panthéon,” meeting from 16 November 1795 in a disused convent near the Panthéon. Endorsed by papers like the
Journal des hommes libres
and the
L’Orateur plébéien
, this club became the gathering place of republican democrats and ex-Montagnards such as Babeuf, Felix Lepeletier, Darthé, Drouet, Jullien, Buonarroti, and Antonelle.
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The Club de Panthéon’s talks and meetings apparently drew substantial crowds but, before long, inevitably, it too became an arena split between republicans acquiescing in the Constitution of the Year III and hard-line rejectionist militants.
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Through the pages of his Paris paper, the
Tribun du peuple
, published from November 1795, Babeuf figured among those who denounced the Directoire. He did so while plotting with sansculotte friends and veteran Montagnards sympathetic to direct democracy and sansculottism, including Vadier and Jean-Baptiste Drouet (1763–1824), the man who recognized Louis XVI, preventing his flight, in 1791, later among the most violent foes of the Brissotins. Drouet was now a deputy for the Marne. Another prominent conspirator was Felix Lepeletier (1767–1837), who had delivered the funerary eulogy over the body of his assassinated brother at the Panthéon.

By early 1796, the Directoire, and especially Carnot, the director responsible for interior security, had reverted to viewing neo-Jacobinism and the neo-Montagnard clubs as the chief threat to the regime. Carnot, the regime’s strong man, had initially been the most resolute of the directors in steering an evenhanded middle course, pursuing former terroristes (despite having been one himself), while holding royalism at bay. Respectful of constitutionality initially, later it became obvious that he cared much less for republican values than administering the army to consolidate his own authority. His opportunism rendered him a target for both former Montagnards and Louvet and the neo-Brissotins.
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Before long, Carnot saw the meetings at the Panthéon Club as especially menacing to stability and himself. On 27 February 1796, after a speech at the club in which Darthé read out incendiary remarks extracted from the
Tribun du peuple
denouncing the Directoire and the 1795 Constitution as “tyrannical,” the Directoire ordered the club closed, sending Bonaparte to expel its members and bar its doors.
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Four other clubs and a theater were likewise closed at this point. Several neo-Jacobin papers, including the
Tribun du peuple
, were proscribed. These measures shook the confidence of a wide variety of republicans loyal to the ideals of the Revolution, some of whom began asking themselves whether perhaps the likes of Babeuf, Darthé, and Buonarroti were right after all.

By early 1796, the positive, widely applauded early phase of post-Thermidor and the new Constitution was over. Driven underground, both Panthéonistes and the
Tribun
henceforth led a shadowy, clandestine existence. Their message, that those in power were hypocrites and false republicans and those who conspired against them were justified, came to be widely shared. It was at this point that Babeuf began actively to conspire. Before long, a secret directorate of the “conspiracy for equality,” a heterogeneous group organized by Lepeletier, Maréchal, and Buonarroti, meeting regularly in the home of Amar, clandestinely plotted, nurturing plans for another 21 May–style mass popular insurrection, hoping this time for more lasting and concrete results.
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Under a law of 27 Germinal Year IV (16 April 1796), freedom of expression was further restricted and the death penalty for summoning citizens to insurrection introduced. Inciting the people to dissolve the legislature or Directoire, reestablish monarchy, murder deputies, or reinstate the Constitutions of 1791 or 1793 were all declared capital crimes.
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The Babeuf movement’s agents appeared in cafés and taverns across Paris, affixing posters, distributing pamphlets, and propagating egalitarian anti-Directoire propaganda, especially the message that artisans
were being enslaved by the greed of the rich. During 1796, theirs grew into a full-scale nationwide conspiracy with cells in several provincial towns. The conspirators endeavored to win over several of the most committed republican journalists to their stance, notably Antonelle and Vatar, current editors of the
Journal des hommes libres
. Many of the movement’s proposals—land redistribution on a fairer basis, progressive taxation, and universal public education—were not as such incompatible with the goals of the former Cercle Social of Bonneville and Condorcet, and radical ideas more generally, but they were with the current Directoire. However, it was the plotters’ uncompromisingly leveling philosophy much indebted to Mably and Morelly, Babeuf’s and Buonarroti’s neo-Robespierrisme—and especially their tactics and methods, their reliance on violent mass insurrection, and plans to reestablish a neo-Montagnard dictatorship to push through their reforms
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—that set them firmly apart from the main republican bloc at a time when the Convention’s grip and the Revolution’s gains looked in every way unstable and precarious.

After the Terror and Vendémiaire, Left republicans generally, including militant democrats and egalitarians like Jullien and Antonelle, were principally concerned with reconquering individual liberties and freedom of expression while keeping the sansculottes at arm’s length. In explaining his concept of virtue in October 1795, Jullien expressly cited Helvétius and d’Holbach’s thesis in the
Système social
, holding that private virtue is formed and defined by the “esprit public” and depends on education inculcating a “habitual disposition to do what contributes to the happiness of the beings of our species.”
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Brissotins and former Old Jacobins rejecting Babeuf’s clandestine subversion agreed that the Revolution was not over, that the revolutionary regime had much still to accomplish in the economic as well as in the legislative, educational, cultural, and international spheres. They were far from blind to questions of social amelioration. But they did not agree that pursuit of greater economic equality possessed the urgency or degree of primacy Babeuf and Maréchal insisted on. Most rejected the proposition that the Republic’s existing Constitution and institutions needed to be overthrown by popular insurrection to clear the way for redistribution of wealth by force.
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By May 1796 France had descended further into instability and drift with widespread discontent evident, and even more inertia. The Directoire and Council of Five Hundred, besieged from right and left, simply lacked a sufficiently sturdy support base in society, and this in large part
due to the spring repression of basic freedoms. If mainstream republicans rejected Babeuf’s incitement to insurrection, they spurned the new repressive instincts of the Directoire no less. Of around fifty-four more-or-less national newspapers in France, by autumn 1796 most almost daily attacked the Directoire and, to a lesser degree, the legislature itself for inconsistency, timidity, hypocrisy, and failure to honestly uphold the Constitution.
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“Will we escape from the crisis we now face?,” demanded the
Journal des hommes libres
in October 1796. The resurgence of royalism and Catholicism was undeniable, as was the waning enthusiasm for the 1795 Constitution on the left.

The 1795 Constitution, there was every indication, was being disparaged and subverted by the press (and by royalisme) as mercilessly as had that of 1791 by the Brissotin press during 1791–92.
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Yet despite everything, so menacing for the Revolution’s values and future were the efforts of the Republic’s enemies, the
Journal des hommes libres
admonished its readers in late 1796, that there was really no viable alternative for true republicans and democrats but to work together and rally behind this disappointing and defective government. Republicans and democrats must help rescue the Directoire and legislature, because every available alternative would prove immeasurably worse.
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CHAPTER 23

The “General Revolution”

(1795–1800) H
OLLAND
, I
TALY, AND THE
L
EVANT

The Batavian Revolution

The General Revolution’s brief but dramatic foray into Western Europe in 1792–93 immensely alarmed Europe’s rulers, nobles, and churchmen. The Revolution totally denied their validity and wherever it broke through set furiously to work to break their power, abolish their authority, and confiscate their possessions. A particularly worrying feature of the situation for defenders of the old order was that the well-drilled and attired armies of Prussia and Austria showed unsuspected signs of weakness in confronting the ragged, poorly trained and supplied, and badly equipped revolutionary armies. If the French could win astounding victories under such disadvantages, hampered by a partly still noble officer class rife with disloyalty and betrayal, what would happen when their armies became larger, better trained, and better supplied? Princely and ecclesiastical anxiety was assuaged briefly from March 1793 until June 1794, a period when it was realistic to expect the Revolution to disintegrate under the strain of its internal splits and the Vendée revolt. During 1793–94, Europe’s rulers could relax in the hope that the Republic would falter from within.