Revolutionary Ideas: An Intellectual History of the French Revolution From the Rights of Man to Robespierre (12 page)

Experience soon revealed the drawbacks of full freedom of expression. It was highly dangerous, concluded some, to permit unlimited freedom. For this enabled ill-wishers to continually denounce the best, most knowledgeable, and virtuous as “scoundrels” and “traitors” who conspired with
aristocratisme
and monarchism. Unrestricted press freedom, lamented Desmoulins (who later with Danton, in 1793–94, tried to curb the Terror),
⁸⁶
called into existence a new species of political deceiver,
le calomniateur
despot, who systematically defamed rivals, forging a new kind of tyranny—
le despotisme populacier—
built on organized ignorance. The “whole art of the vile rascals” blighting the Revolution by discrediting men of principle, he came to believe, lay in mimicking popular parlance and expression while disseminating views designed to cheat the multitude. It was certainly with barely camouflaged lies and distortion that populism eventually overpowered the Revolution, aborting the first modern democracy.

CHAPTER 3

From Estates-General to National Assembly

(A
PRIL
–J
UNE
1789)

In April and early May 1789, more than 1,000 delegates for the Estates-General, elected in local assemblies all across France—the number eventually rose to 1,200—converged on Versailles, bringing instructions from their particular localities. Only around 800 (about half representing the Third), had actually arrived, though, in time for the opening. The day before, on 4 May, a vast ceremonial procession headed by the king and queen, and the princes of blood, followed by around 800 delegates, had proceeded from the church of Notre-Dame to the church of Saint Louis. On 5 May, the elaborately choreographed inauguration ceremony itself passed off smoothly, except that when the king gave permission for the nobility to resume wearing their hats in his presence, some of the Third did so too, causing momentary confusion, consternation, and outcries. Otherwise, the occasion was resplendent and focused on the glittering figures of the king and queen. Never had the monarchy looked more imposing. The king delivered a solemn discourse outlining the financial predicament of the realm. Paris’s scheduled thirty-nine deputies, however, were among the many who missed it. The capital’s “primary assemblies” had convened in the city’s larger churches where 11,706 voters had elected 407 “electors.” But these assemblies had a great deal to discuss and had not yet finalized their delegate selection.
¹

Once begun, the Estates-General promptly stalled. The 400 or so members of the Third present, swayed by the antiaristocratic publicity of recent months, demanded a joint procedure that subjected delegates for the three orders to approval by all and refused to permit the higher orders to verify their deputies’ credentials separately. This procedural
revolt was tentative but resolute. As days and then weeks passed, the Third refused to budge. “The classes that live by abuse,” complained Volney, deputy for Angers, three days after the opening on 8 May, already impatient with most of his colleagues’ timidity, were “determined to permit no real change.” Self-interested calculation was the explanation for their unbending insistence on precedent. The obduracy of the
privilégiés
and hesitancy of the Third’s response filled “all Paris with false rumor and calumny.” Comprehensive change was required. All outmoded formulae should be discarded, formal minutes kept, more formality in speaking adopted, and less freedom to interrupt permitted. All “metaphysical” veneration for the past should be delegitimized. Nothing should deter their introducing political terms never employed before in the Estates-General, such as “constitution,” “chamber,” and “deputies.”
²

Even stronger than Volney’s and Mirabeau’s summons to the Estates was a detailed, full-length plan issued shortly before the Estates-General opened, published by a close observer outside the Estates, namely, Brissot. This was his
Plan de conduite pour les députés du peuple aux États-Généraux
of April 1789, a key text that uncompromisingly asserted the principle of equality and demanded that the deputies stand firm against all the privileged classes, not just the nobility and higher clergy but also the high judiciary and the haute bourgeoisie. Brissot insists here, more so, perhaps, than any writer had before, on France’s need to adopt an entirely new constitution, including a carefully formulated Declaration of the Rights of Man as the foundation of a “free constitution” based on equality. He even lists what he considered the seven foremost of these, one of which was that all Frenchmen are born equal and are equal in rights and cannot be subjected to any law not assented to by them “or by their representatives in the Estates-General.”
³
His text also cited the names of those deputies Brissot thought could be relied on to lead the legislature to unrestricted independence, control of the nation’s finances, and the legislature’s right to convene independently of the Crown every year and fight both Crown and privilégiés unremittingly. These key personages cited by him in April 1789, constituting the effective leadership of the Revolution, were Mirabeau, Volney, Sieyès, Bergasse, Rabaut de Saint-Étienne, Mounier, and Lafayette. Among writers most apt to second their efforts, he identified Condorcet, Cérutti, Target, and his own comrade, Clavière.
⁴
He praised but also disagreed with Sieyès, criticizing his exalting representative democracy without allowing for a measure of direct democracy to offset it.
⁵

By seeming too diffident, the Third meanwhile risked being accused of betraying the people’s trust. This feeling of urgency, spurred by a public expecting tangible progress, intensified through June, as did the Paris electoral assemblies’ impatience. Nor was it left only to radical tracts to prod the Third’s timid majority. Those prominent earlier in the Paris electoral districts (or sections), prolonged their active role by appropriating the right to serve as a political pressure-group petitioning the Estates-General on the capital’s behalf. Though supposed only to finalize the capital’s list of deputies, Paris’s general assembly of “electors” continued meeting while the main drama unfolded at Versailles, and where May’s hesitant noncooperation became open revolt in June. After weeks of disputing the verification of credentials, the obdurate Third were joined by contingents of clerical and noble defectors. Then, contrary to all precedent and quite illegally, on 17 June the resulting enlarged Third proclaimed itself the “National Assembly,” which prompted still more lower clergy and a third of the nobility’s delegates to come over. The latter joined the fifty-eight “nobles,” including Mirabeau and Volney, already elected to represent the Third Estate.
⁶
“We shall know I think within a day or two,” reported Jefferson, the American ambassador in Paris, to Madison the next day, “whether the government will risk a bankruptcy and civil war rather than see all distinction of orders done away with which is what the Commons will push for.”
⁷

This declaration of 17 June 1789, as has often been noted, took on-lookers by surprise and constituted a stunning revolutionary act in itself, signifying not just rejection of noble and ecclesiastical privilege but also France’s entire existing institutional structure. Most nobles and higher clergy simply refused to acknowledge the new body. Yet, the privileged orders, initially given no lead by the court, offered only passive resistance. Then, on 20 June 1789, royal troops did appear, and the Assembly deputies, on arriving at the meeting hall “as usual, found the doors shut and guarded,” reported Jefferson, “and a proclamation posted up for holding a
séance royale
, on the 22nd, and a suspension of their meetings until then.”
⁸
The Crown, seemingly, would now make a stand. Convening instead in the nearby royal tennis court and urged on by the astronomer Bailly, the deputies collectively took the famous Tennis Court Oath, immortalized later in a stirring painting by the Revolution’s greatest artist, Jacques-Louis David (1748–1825), vowing “never to separate” until the constitution was satisfactorily recast (
figure 1
).

Louis XVI, surrounded by nobles and ecclesiastics, offered a long, detailed, and, in traditional terms, perfectly reasonable compromise on 23 June, which he read out to the gathering in person. The Crown conceded many points outright—abolition of privileged fiscal immunities, ending arbitrary arrest under lettres de cachet, and abolishing rural forced labor on roads and bridges under the corvée.
⁹
The king also agreed to negotiate on other points, inviting “the Estates,” for example, to propose how to reconcile “liberty of the press with the respect due to religion, morality and the honor of citizens.”
¹⁰
But he rejected outright several of the Third’s key demands staunchly opposed by the Notables, in particular, refusing to abolish voting by orders in “the Estates-General” or to liquidate honorary privileges. The orders should remain separate entities with separate rights and, in part, separate functions. Thus, the “particular consent of the clergy would remain necessary for all resolutions concerning religion.” Louis also vigorously reaffirmed his sole sovereignty and control over police powers and the military.
¹¹

Figure 1. Jacques-Louis David (1748–1825),
The Tennis Court Oath, Versailles, 20th June 1789
, 1791 (pen washed with bistre with highlights of white on paper). Chateau de Versailles, France / The Bridgeman Art Library.

The Third, prompted by Mirabeau’s stirring oratory, seconded by Barnave, Pétion, Buzot, and Sieyès, rejected separate orders and insisted on their unilaterally declared title of “Assemblée Nationale,” refusing the royal compromise.
¹²
More clergy joined them. But still, most nobility and a majority of the First Estate, 132 churchmen, stubbornly resisted. Tension rose. Then, dramatically, on 27 June, the brewing storm
was dispelled, but with the court—not the Third—backing down. This was at least partly because, as Jefferson noted, the unrest was visibly spreading to the king’s French troops, some of whom “began to quit their barracks, to assemble in squads, to declare that they would defend the life of the king, but would not cut the throats of their fellow citizens,” leaving onlookers in “no doubt on which side they would be in case of a rupture.”
¹³
Hesitantly, Louis opted to acknowledge the new body, “inviting” the recalcitrant noblesse and rump of rejectionist clergy to rejoin the rest of what he too now designated the “National Assembly.”
¹⁴
With Bailly as “president,” this new body opened its first session on 30 June.
¹⁵
Sovereignty had been partially transferred to the people. The Revolution was truly under way.

Meanwhile, there was a considerable ferment in the Paris electoral districts. Having chosen Brissot as an “elector,” the district assembly of Des Filles Saint-Thomas section was persuaded by him, at a meeting on 21 April, of the need for a correspondence committee connecting the Paris electoral assemblies with their deputies at Versailles. This committee should function until the already discussed and projected future Declaration of Rights was obtained. Support for this strategy proved forthcoming also from other districts, notably Carme Déchaussés, where the recently elected president was Nicolas Bonneville (1760–1828), friend of Tom Paine and professional writer and translator. Bonneville vigorously supported Brissot’s proposal that the Paris assembly reconstitute itself as the mouthpiece of Paris to pressure the National Assembly.
¹⁶
The council of 407 Paris electors, meeting in the town hall, not only sifted the capital’s petitions and cahiers of grievances for their deputies to the Estates but resumed conferring as a general assembly of the capital’s electors in June, and on 12 July constituted a provisional city government, the forerunner of the revolutionary Commune.
¹⁷
It was in these circles that pressure for a constitution and a declaration of rights first gained momentum and that several foremost publicists of the 1788 pamphlet controversies, having failed to be elected as Estates-General deputies, reemerged as leaders of this assembly and of the Revolution more generally.