Revolutionary Ideas: An Intellectual History of the French Revolution From the Rights of Man to Robespierre (126 page)

But this was not the end of the Near Eastern adventure. To the revolutionaries, the French occupation of Egypt had an important purpose. It continued for another two years, until the army finally surrendered to the British on 27 September 1801. The philosophe and économiste Jean-Baptiste Say, an enthusiast for revolutionary festivals, Diderot, Helvétius’s utilitarianism, and (following Helvétius and Condorcet) advocate of social amelioration through progressive taxation forcing diffusion of wealth away from the richest,
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enthused in the
Décade philosophique
issue of October 1798 over the alluring prospect of once again turning Egypt into a fulcrum of commerce between Asia and Europe. That land would be for a second time “la patrie” of the sciences and the “séjour le plus délicieux de la terre.”
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The notion that Bonaparte came to liberate Egyptians, Syrians, Jews, and Palestinians sounded not just benevolent but like eminently good sense in 1798–1800. As the Idéologues understood it, the French sought to emancipate Egypt from her enslavement to tyranny, religion, ignorance, and the Turk, and improve the lives, economy, and society of the Egyptians and their neighbors; and this they resolutely strove to accomplish.
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CHAPTER 24

The Failed Revolution

(1797–99)

Unbridgeable Fissures

During 1795–96, support for the regime among the French electorate remained decidedly tepid. Republicans pointing to the mounting royalist threat had, since Thermidor, been continually denounced by conservative opponents as terroristes and anarchistes.
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Heavily burdened with war, requisitioning, and recruiting, the country was trapped in a ceaseless three-way internecine struggle between royalists, neo-Brissotin democrats often allied to Dantonistes, and Montagnards, in part allied to followers of Babeuf (Babouvistes). This ensured an unbreakable deadlock that continually fed the mounting fatigue, frustration, and sense of drift: everything was suffused with ideological struggle, daily life, religion, the press, and the theaters, while at the same time, the popular mood, volatile and unpredictable, lurched toward the right. A key part of this battle was the constant polemics over the question of the Terror, its real nature, and meaning.

To further add to the Republic’s predicament, the Directoire’s right-ward shift during 1796–97 eventually became obvious enough to seriously split the republican mainstream, disillusioning many principled supporters and causing some to be sucked into clandestine conspiracy against the Directoire. A major factor sapping support for the Republic was certainly the still furiously contested legacy of the Thermidorian regime. Numerous posts remained in the hands of supposedly reformed Montagnard ex-Jacobins often of highly dubious character; among the most detested were Barras, Joseph Fouché, and François-Louis Bourdon (1758–98), who “combines,” Robespierre once observed, “perfidy with fanaticism.”
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Quarreling with Robespierre and isolated in the Jacobins after having already been expelled from the Cordeliers in early 1794, Bourdon had emerged after Thermidor among the most implacable
pursuers of his former terroriste colleagues. Brutal, corrupt, and utterly unprincipled, such men kept assiduously to one particular principle: they must hang on to power, come what may, for if royalists once laid hands on them, they would indubitably be executed as regicides and terroristes.

Driven underground, Panthéonistes and the
Tribun
carried on a shadowy existence, meeting at private addresses in Paris. The movement was organized, from March 1796, by a secret directorate, including Maréchal, Buonarroti, Darthé, Babeuf, and Lepeletier, who plied subversion in cafés, prisons, and gardens, disseminated clandestinely printed tracts and posters, and formed cells in Arras, Cambrai, Rennes, Nantes, Reims, and Lyon.
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Establishing “revolutionary agents” in the capital’s poorer sections, gradually the “conspiracy for equality” matured its plans for another, and this time decisive, 21 May–style mass popular insurrection. As the conspiratorial underground movement grew, it was joined by many widely loathed veterans of the Terror, Amar, Vadier, and Pache among them, and amid the frequent debates in these subversive circles about philosophes and the great revolutionary personalities arose a movement to revive the reputation of Robespierre to which, according to Buonarroti, even Amar, one of the leading Thermidorians, adjusted (years afterward, Amar converted to Swedenborg’s mysticism). “Robespierre” was thus resurrected among this conspiratorial underground as a heroic champion of economic equality, Babeuf himself actively participating in this attempt to rehabilitate the lawyer from Arras and condemn the Thermidorians.

The conspirators saw their task as to achieve the overthrow of the Five Hundred and the Directoire by revolutionary action, to restore the 1793 Constitution, and ultimately to achieve a general equality (
l’égalité sans restrictions
), resuming the project supposedly shattered by 9 Thermidor.
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Tension between the ex-Montagnards and authentic Babouvists or egalitarian democrats, however, created an irresolvable tension within the body of the underground movement. In February 1796, the
Journal des hommes libres
of Vatar published statements by Babeuf—now an unabashed apologist for Robespierre—Lepeletier, Antonelle, and Buonarroti, denying that they had captured the Panthéon Club, or that they were calling for dictatorship.
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Yet the conspirators remained divided as to how to attain equality and democracy once the Directoire was overthrown by the destitute of Paris. Some of the leadership, notably Darthé, certainly urged the need for a dictator, arguing that a
dictature
was essential to forcibly imposing equality. Amar
and a second group wanted the previous Montagnard Convention recalled, albeit without firmly opposing dictatorship. Most of the conspiracy’s leadership, however, deterred both by the prospect of a new dictator and reservations about Amar and his friends, appear to have preferred a different approach: once the people of Paris triumphed, the secret leadership would convene the victorious people in the vast Place de la Révolution, explain their aims and strategy to the crowds—stressing the primacy of economic equality in their plans—and ask the people then and there to create an “autorité provisoire” to supervise the Revolution and govern France until the 1793 Constitution could be rendered operative.
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Before long, though, the Directoire infiltrated, and, in early May 1796, arrested the leadership. Babeuf and Buonarroti were seized on 10 May 1796, along with several sansculotte agitators and a cache of incriminating documents. Drouet, Lindet, Maréchal, Vatar, Darthé, and Antonelle were arrested soon afterward. Altogether more than fifty conspirators were detained; their imprisonment sent tremors through all the networks and clubs with ex-Jacobin sympathies around the country.
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The Babeuf conspiracy and the thinking it embodied with its summons to the French to found “the republic of equals,” was soon to attract a vast amount of attention. Like the republican bloc as a whole, its leadership consisted partly of intellectuals steeped in Radical Enlightenment philosophy who vehemently repudiated repression and tyranny. Yet these men aspired to make a different kind of revolution from that which France had achieved in 1789–93, rejecting not just the pragmatic, authoritarian format offered by the Directoire but also the more democratic, libertarian vision proclaimed by the neo-Brissotins and Idéologues. The author of the Babouvistes’ manifesto, Pierre-Sylvain Maréchal, former deputy librarian of the Collège Mazarin, had been an atheist and materialist philosophe long before 1789, and typically of those who forged the Revolution was a man steeped in radical philosophical literature. Before aligning with Babeuf, he had been a prominent revolutionary journalist collaborating with Prudhomme and Chaumette. While the Revolution had achieved equality before the law, argued his
Manifeste des égaux
, what the people really needed was genuine “equality,” a community of goods and property.

The French Revolution of 1788–93, contended Maréchal, like Babeuf, was merely the herald of another revolution “bien plus grande, bien plus solennelle” that will be the last revolution: “We declare that we can no longer accept that the great majority of men work solely at the
service and for the good pleasure of a small minority. For far too long less than a million individuals dispose of what belongs to more than twenty million of their fellow men, the possessions of their equals.”
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Maréchal’s Bavouiste ideology, unlike the populism of Robespierre and Saint-Just, or of Chabot or Hébert, was an authentic social reformism and a real offshoot of Radical Enlightenment and the Revolution, but, equally, and divergently, it was a militant protosocialism with strong dictatorial tendencies, albeit sometimes sharing the Ideologues’ preoccupation—here in sharp contrast to the royalists and the neo-Jacobins—with uncovering the real nature of the Terror and Montagnard repression. Even so, this philosophique element became fatally diluted by Babeuf’s neo-Robespierrisme and the alliance with hard-line militants like Darthé and Buonarroti, as well as thoroughly unprincipled types like Vadier and Amar.

Most Frenchmen and most voters, meanwhile, inclined more to the Catholic and royaliste side than to any sort of republicanism, whether democratic or Babouvist, and monarchist leaders, convening their followers at the Clichy Club, and the royalist press, sensed that among the
directeurs
Carnot too now supported them, indeed lent them virtually a free hand. Admittedly, the Right too remained hopelessly divided. Ultraroyalists detested constitutional monarchists while right constitutional monarchists admiring Mounier loathed the watered-down “moderation” of liberal monarchists adhering to the memory of Barnave and the Feuillants. Monarchists were then further divided between constitutional monarchists loyal to the rigidly conservative Louis XVIII, legitimate heir to the throne, and those aligning with the royal family’s junior but more liberal Orléanist branch. Louis XVIII further complicated matters for the Right by releasing a curtly blunt manifesto on 10 March 1797 in Germany, urging Frenchmen to reject constitutionalism and republicanism unreservedly. Louis seemed unwilling to make any concession to constitutionalism let alone embrace major reforms. Yet, despite these ultimately unbridgeable divisions, the country’s tenacious royalists and militant Catholics eagerly anticipated sweeping gains in the forthcoming elections of 1797. With most people seemingly won back for royalism and Catholicism, noted the
Journal de Perlet
in late March 1797, many were now openly predicting a new legislature that would be predominantly conservative. To republican stalwarts, France appeared to be on the verge of a new “explosion terrible.”
⁹

The
Journal des hommes libres
, earlier hostile to Babeuf’s neo-Jacobinism and apologetics for Robespierre, shifted its ground during
the course of 1796, becoming increasingly worried by the threat of royalism. The
contre-revolution
, warned the
Journal des hommes libres
in early February 1797, seemed already to have invaded most of the press and theaters. Much as republicans had subverted monarchy in 1789–92 by steadily infusing republican attitudes and ideas into society at every point, royalists were now repeating the procedure in reverse.
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In fact, the run-up to the national elections of the Year V in March and April 1797 generated hugely renewed tension throughout France. No less than 234 former members of the Convention were due to retire, and the results would, for the first time since 1792, decisively shape the legislature, executive, and future of the Revolution. Together with the democratic republican press, most of the Council of Five Hundred and the Directoire hoped for the return of a constitutional republican majority that rejected both royalism and
la tyrannie révolutionnaire
of the Montagne, choosing representatives committed to a stable, democratic outcome. Deputies like Daunou, Boissy d’Anglas, Lanjuinais, Camus, and Pierre Durand-Maillane (1729–1814), another former Brissotin returned to the forefront, aspired to win over the public and build a predominant bloc in the legislature.
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Jacques-Antoine Creuzé-Latouche (1749–1800), who had endorsed the appel au public and indictment of Marat, was another of this group now returned to prominence. But the democratic republican Left proved too lacking in popular support, and the public too apathetic and weary of revolutionary politics, as Bonneville’s new paper,
Le Vieux Tribun et sa Bouche de Fer,
sadly observed,
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for anything like the hoped-for breakthrough to transpire. During the run-up to the elections, the
assemblées primaires
were frequently manipulated and occasionally violently interrupted; vote-rigging flourished once again.
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