Revolutionary Ideas: An Intellectual History of the French Revolution From the Rights of Man to Robespierre (123 page)

Unlike their colleagues in Northern Italy, the Neapolitan Giacobini failed to achieve any real progress toward equality, individual liberty, or democracy. The Neapolitan population was simply too antagonistic, illiterate, and tradition-bound, and as it seemed to the Giacobini, too
tied to the Church and credulity. At Pagano’s insistence, the new draft Neapolitan constitution (that was never implemented) included both educational and financial qualifications for the right to vote. Pagano championed an undiluted, pure representative republicanism based on a selective franchise as the most appropriate for the Neapolitan context where it seemed impossible, at this stage, to accord the peasantry citizenship rights. Some of his colleagues, Russo and Cuoco, more taken with Rousseau and Mably, and in the latter case with the French democratic Constitution of 1793,
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felt Pagano should have moved significantly further toward democracy, especially direct democracy.

The supreme error of the Neapolitan revolutionaries in 1799, Cuoco argued later, was to imagine constitutions can be devised from purely abstract principles without regard to local history, customs, and tradition. Pagano’s edifice accommodated too little that was specifically Neapolitan. From an early stage, Cuoco expressed anxiety, as they all did, at the almost total lack of local support beyond a tiny intellectual fringe.
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In reality, the Parthenopean Republic was doomed. Already in February, agents sent from Sicily began mobilizing a rural peasant army of resistance in the southernmost provinces of the kingdom, men sworn to fight to the death for monarchy and faith. These
sanfedisti
, religious zealots vowing to obliterate the Jacobin Republic, incited what rapidly developed into a massive rising. Pro-French democrats and anticlericals caught in the countryside were simply butchered. Occurring at a time when French troop strength in Italy was much reduced, the Neapolitan rising set off a peninsula-wide general revolt against the Revolution that turned ferocious in many areas of Central and Northern, as well as Southern, Italy and deeply shocked the temporarily retreating French.
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Mostly a rural and small-town phenomenon, Italian counterrevolutionary revolt in 1796–99 was centered in the poorest, remotest, and most illiterate areas, like the Neapolitan interior and Tuscan Apennine valleys. According to both French and Patriots, hard-core rebels were illiterate peasants incited by clergy, landowners, and foreign agents. But in places, urban artisans joined in, responding to a range of economic pressures.
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In June 1799, a bloody battle erupted in the streets of Naples itself as enraged mobs of artisans, fishermen, and peasants drove the Giacobini back. The outcome was decided when Admiral Nelson and the British fleet sailed into the bay. The remaining revolutionary fighters besieged in Naples’s almost impregnable inner fortress were promised that they could leave with honors of war if they surrendered. They surrendered, but were then promptly all seized at Nelson’s insistence, and
dozens of them were afterward shot or hanged, those executed including most of the revolutionary leadership—Pagano, Russo, Fonseca Pimentel (who was hanged), and Cirillo.

Only Vincenzo Cuoco was imprisoned and later got away. In 1800, he composed his
Saggio storico sulla rivoluzione napoletana del 1799
, claiming “liberty is not established except by moulding free men.” Too much abstract thinking, he contended, had had ruinous consequences: “imagining a republican constitution is not the same thing as founding a republic.” The Revolution collapsed, he urged with hindsight, owing to its leaders’ overestimation of the power of reason and philosophy. The outcome was a tragedy that deeply affected the subsequent history of Italy, a tragedy caused, insisted Gioia, by the “the moral, political and religious prejudices that debase the Italian mind.”
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The revolutionary press in Milan defiantly replied to the royalist triumph in Naples in 1800 by republishing Pagano’s
Saggi politici
and the
Pensieri politici
(1799) of Vincenzio Russo.
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Greece and the “Enterprise of Egypt” (1797–1800)

In the Italian Peninsula, between 1796 and 1800, the Revolution’s impact was culturally, intellectually, and politically profound, and nowhere more so than in Venice. Besides losing her nobility and ancient constitution, and being despoiled of parts of the Veneto, Venice lost what remained of her empire in Greece. On 27 June 1797, a French fleet under the Corsican general, Enselm Gentili, arrived in Corfu and ended Venetian control there. Oligarchic, traditional, and Catholic government in the Ionian Islands abruptly ceased. During elaborate republican celebrations held in Corfu on 5 and 6 July, a liberty tree was erected in the main square, the old Corfu oligarchy dismissed, the Catholic Church stripped of its special privileges, and the Jews declared free citizens. The Venetian
Libro d’Oro
was ceremonially burned, along with a mass of aristocratic and ecclesiastical documents affirming feudal rights and lordship.

No other major enterprise of the Western Enlightenment came to be more inflated by overwrought expectations, excessive conjecture, arrogant presumption, and vivid imagination than the enterprise of the Levant, commencing with the conquest of Corfu and the Ionian Islands. Before 1789, the French had dominated Europe’s Levant trade for more than a century. In 1797, carried away by a revolutionary mirage, a
number of leading figures, Napoleon among them, came to believe they could conquer and fundamentally remold Egypt, Palestine, and Syria, as a prelude to liberating India from the British. Some French revolutionaries imagined they could preside over the Near East as they did the Low Countries and Italy. If the world’s peoples, wrote one French revolutionary propagandist, had every reason to dread an imperial power that knows only how to wreak vengeance and punish (i.e., Britain), the universe would surely admire a republic that purges the earth, like Hercules, and employs its “invincible arm to open up new sources of opulence accessible to all nations without imposing its yoke on any, appreciatively returning the sciences and arts to lands which transmitted them to us but where their flame is now extinguished [Egypt, Syria, and the Near East].”
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The reform-minded Ottoman sultan, Selim III (r. 1789–1807), intrigued by the Enlightenment but thus far knowing little of Jacobins and their activities, reportedly turned pale with shock on hearing, in January 1793, that Louis XVI’s own subjects proposed to behead him. He began to reconsider his previously positive assessment of the Enlightenment and the large French community resident in Ottoman and other Levantine ports. In January and February 1793, Europeans in Ottoman ports, including many French, felt the guillotined French monarch should be extravagantly mourned. So outraged by Louis’s execution were some French merchants that they then and there disavowed the Revolution, hurling down their tricolor cockades in protest before France’s ambassador to the Porte, the Comte de Choiseul-Gouffier (1752–1817). When the French occupied Corfu five years later in 1797, the Revolution had for various reasons, and especially its divisive effect on the European merchant colonies scattered throughout the Ottoman Empire and Egypt, become a substantial factor in the politics and culture of the Near East. Revolutionary politics had become a weapon in European rivalry for the Levant trade. Observing the intrusion of French forces, reforms, and ideas into Greece, the Ottoman authorities grew apprehensive.

Choiseul-Gouffier, active in Constantinople since 1784, was rather more than just an ambassador in the normal sense. A cultivated nobleman and enlightener who researched ancient Greek history and possessed an Ottoman firman, like Lord Elgin later, authorizing him to remove antiquities from Athens, he encouraged French
érudits
to come to Turkish lands and also supervised the French military mission established there earlier in 1774. This French military academy
included officers expert in artillery, fortifications, and naval construction who advised the Ottoman court on a range of projected military and naval reforms while surreptitiously, at times almost openly, extending French influence in the Levant, much as the Germans did a century later.
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Among other projects, Choiseul-Gouffier and his staff helped establish the first Turkish school of fortifications, the Muhendishane-i Barr-i Humayun, founded in October 1784. By February 1793, though, the count had become distinctly perplexed and embarrassed by the liberty tree gracing his courtyard in Constantinople. After the Montagne captured the Revolution, he fled to Saint Petersburg, where he became director of the Russian Imperial Public Library.
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With the French in the Eastern Mediterranean increasingly divided, a Jacobin popular society—with its membership strictly confined to Frenchmen—was established at Constantinople in August 1793. It secured formal affiliation with the Jacobin Club in Paris, for a time attaining a membership of around twenty. Its leadership took care that neither the big merchants (with one exception) nor the diplomats traditionally dominating the French Levantine community figured among its membership, which comprised small business people, jewelers, and intellectuals. The last included Brugières and Olivier, medical men and
naturalistes
sent out at the Republic’s expense by Roland and the Brissotin foreign minister, Lebrun, from whom they held commissions to research the region’s natural history. Another member was citizen Amic, brother-in-law of Olivier, likewise in Turkey at the Republic’s expense, sent to study oriental languages.
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From such beginnings, anchored in the minds of a few ambitious men in the embassy, military mission, and Constantinople Jacobin club, and also in Paris, did the Revolution’s philosophique leadership conceive, debate, and plan the
expedition d’Égypte
.

Contemporary Islamic society, held Diderot and the team that compiled the
Histoire philosophique
, was a world steeped in oppression, ignorance, and misery, due not to any innate deficiency of the Arab people or their religion but rather their institutions, laws, and structures of authority. It is governments and institutions, contended Diderot and Raynal, that shape moral dispositions and attitudes, a reversal of Montesquieu’s doctrine that moral and climactic contexts form the world’s different moral and legal codes. A crucial difference between Montesquieu’s doctrine and the opposite radical approach was that the latter set of relations was in principle reversible by men whereas the former
was fixed by the cosmos and irreversible. There was nothing innate for Volney and the radical philosophes about the current degradation of Arab lands: if ever Egypt emerged from the anarchy, argued Diderot, under an enlightened government where “la nouvelle constitution” is founded “sur des loix sages,” this region of the world would reemerge among the most flourishing, industrious, and fertile existing.
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Diderot’s argument about Egypt and Syria was powerfully restated by the
Décade philosophique
in April 1798, while Napoleon prepared his military expedition at Toulon.
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Diderot’s and d’Holbach’s ideas about the Islamic world, widely diffused by the
Histoire philosophique
, were reproduced in a more erudite, sophisticated form by Volney in his
Voyage en Syrie et en Égypte, pendant les années 1783, 1784, et 1785
(2 vols., Paris, 1787), a work also appearing in German at Jena in 1788.
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Political tyranny blights every society over which it gains control, contended Volney, like Diderot earlier, devastating its moral fiber and rendering men oppressed, exploited, ignorant, and poor. Egypt and Syria had been morally depleted centuries before by despotism and religious authority. However, according to Volney (like the Marquis d’Argens before him), only sedentary Muslims dwelling in cities or toiling in Egypt’s irrigated fields, the mass of town and village life, were trapped in this moral degradation forged by tyranny and religious authority. Outside this abject sphere flourished an autonomous fringe of nomadic groups, especially Bedouin and Kurds, but also Druze, Turkmen, and other nomads, who preserved their natural freedom and equality. These peoples formed a potentially vital counterweight that could be mobilized against oppression.
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Admirably free men, untroubled by seriously destructive disputes, the Bedouin, argued d’Argens already much earlier in his
Lettres Juives
(1738), dwelt so far beyond the yoke of the despotic system “disfiguring” sedentary Arab society that they wholly lacked disputes about religion, and hence possessed, as it is put in the English translation, “no wrangling doctors and divines.”
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By contrast, in sedentary Islamic society, everything had degenerated since the dynamic early period. Despotism flourished, the sciences and philosophy had withered, and religious authority and popular credulity had rendered “the Egyptians … even more superstitious than the Turks leaving the Spaniards scarce a match for them.” Moral and intellectual decay had debased Muslims to the point that they scorned science and philosophy and “do not much care for the Arabian doctors [i.e., Avicenna and Averroes], as the latter are enemies to miracles and superstition.”
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Volney followed d’Argens in insisting on a vital difference between sedentary Arabs and those of the desert. The first lived under the double yoke of political and religious despotism in agricultural villages even more wretched than the towns that were supposedly all dismally abject: “even in Cairo the newly arrived foreigner is struck by an ‘aspect général de ruine et de misère.’”
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Bedouin, Turkmen, and the Kurds, very differently, were entirely free men, forming a social context altogether superior to that of the Arab towns and villages.
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Though technically also Muslims, Kurds “ne s’occupent ni de dogmes ni de rites.”
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The same uprightness and autonomy characterized Marionites and the “Arabes de Daher.” “The moral outlook of peoples,” like that of individuals, concluded Volney, rebuking Montesquieu for his “errors,” “depends above all on the social state in which they live.”
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Neither climate nor natural context had caused Egypt’s misery and degradation. “Barbarism” prevailed in Syria and Egypt without either soil or climate being in the least responsible for the people’s abasement and poverty.
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Like Diderot and d’Holbach, Volney attributed the people’s misery exclusively to the social institutions “called government and religion.”
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He pronounced the common people of the Near East the prey of those wielding religious authority, the victims of the credulity and ignorance sustaining
la
barberie générale
in place of the philosophy and sciences that had once constituted the Levant’s greatness but had long since been trampled under and become “entièrement inconnues,” replaced by despotism and misery.
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