Revolutionary Ideas: An Intellectual History of the French Revolution From the Rights of Man to Robespierre (127 page)

As feared, the elections resulted in a crushing defeat for the Directoire, Republic, secularism, and the Revolution itself, greatly dismaying both the Left and authoritarian populists. One of the defeated republican candidates, the naturalized Swiss Benjamin Constant, described the outcome as “abominable.”
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The unpalatable but undeniable truth was that ordinary people were no longer interested in revolutionary politics and spurned democratic rhetoric; most wanted the return of the old order, monarchy and religion. No less than 182 of the 234 newly elected deputies were committed royalist-Catholics of one hue or another. This “disaster,” declared the
Décade philosophique
, was due to the corruption of public opinion through the “poison spread by a hundred venomous journals.” According to the
Décade philosophique
, a majority of the Five Hundred was now bent on abandoning revolutionary
principles, the lower legislature having become a sink of “prejudice, traditional notions, bigotry, royalism and Catholic fanaticism.”
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By July 1797, the now predominantly conservative Council of Five Hundred began debating a draft edict to recall réfractaires in exile on favorable terms, release those still being held, and restore to all refractory priests rights of citizenship and confiscated personal possessions. Boissy d’Anglas and the much-diminished band of republicans resisted as best they could, maintaining that such a decree would be a license for clergy to undermine “republican principles” in all hearts as much as they wished. But the new majority of the legislature was adamant and the lower chamber—albeit opposed by the upper chamber—passed the relevant motion by 210 to 204 votes. This outcome convinced at least some republicans that in a world of free elections, an upper chamber, as Montesquieu recommended, can (as Condorcet had also suggested) prove an invaluable check on the elected body. But the growing confrontation between the two chambers and between the lower chamber and some of the Directoire only heightened the sense of paralysis and drift in the country.

The Revolution’s prospects deteriorated further with the Dutch summer referendum to approve the Dutch Republic’s new constitution, a referendum orderly and well conducted but which ended in voters rejecting the proposed republican constitution. Orangists and supporters of monarchy everywhere were jubilant. Evidently, even under French occupation, the common people, if given a clear choice, would reliably refuse republics, equality, and democracy. Most people preferred tradition, dynasticism, and religion, and were encouraged in this by their clergy. This weariness with republican politics and estrangement from the Revolution was the most important result of the Terror and the continuing war. To anti-Robespierre Jacobins inspired by Desmoulins and la philosophie moderne, like Pierre-François Réal, now a leading newspaper editor, the Terror represented the supreme abomination, an “atrocious” blot, “unrestrained tyranny,” utterly ruinous to the Revolution’s image. To commentators like Réal, Bonneville, Jullien, and the
Décade philosophique
, in August 1797, the Terror was a catastrophe, contradicting everything the authentic Revolution stood for, paving the way for the royalist resurgence now triumphantly advancing in and outside of France, a resurgence continually citing the Terror to tar the Revolution as a whole.
¹⁶

Democratic republicanism stood seemingly on the verge of extinction. It was against this fraught and paradoxical background that the Babeuf hearings approached their conclusion. Facing a barrage of
denunciation of the Terror among the public and abroad, the Directoire took every care not to appear to be reverting to its methods. Justice, constitutionality, and legality were the order of the day. The scrupulous procedures of the trial formed a reassuring contrast, even Babeuf himself admitted, to the methods of the Robespierriste regime. The well-guarded court consisted of a presiding judge, four lesser judges, and a sixteen-man jury chosen by electoral assemblies in several departments. To remove the exceptionally large number of defendants from Paris so as to minimize risk of interference and disturbance, the directors arranged a specially constituted court to try them at Vendôme in the Loire valley. When the long-delayed, massively documented trial finally opened on 20 February 1797, no less than sixty-five defendants were formally indicted, eighteen of whom, including Lepeletier and Drouet (who had escaped to the Canaries), had eluded the authorities and were tried in absentia. Babeuf and his codefendants were charged with conspiracy against the Constitution and legislature, and with intent to massacre innocent citizens and organize “looting of private property.”
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Babeuf conducted his own defense, and his right to speak unhindered was scrupulously respected. “The aim of the Revolution,” he contended, “can only be to establish the happiness of the majority.” Legitimate government must express the “general will”: “No one may be permitted to monopolize society’s cultural resources or deprive others of the education needed for their well-being.” Education is a universal right, he insisted, alluding to the success of the écoles centrales benefiting a few and the relative failure of the plans for universal free primary education. He eulogized d’Holbach, Helvétius, and especially Diderot, while mistakenly assuming, as was widely thought at the time, that Diderot was the author of the
Code de la Nature
, actually by Morelly, and one of the main sources of his militant egalitarianism.
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Babeuf especially diverged from the Radical Enlightenment legacy in the crude dogmatism of his views on property and straightforward embrace of Mably’s and Morelly’s idea that abolishing property ensures everyone’s happiness and puts an end to crime. This and his seeming blindness to the unpredictability and xenophobia of the sansculottes, and to the nature of the alliance he had formed with men like Buonarroti, Darthé, Lindet, and Amar, undermined the logic of his position. Early nineteenth-century liberals, betraying the entire spirit of the republican Revolution of 1788–93, lost their social conscience while the Babouvistes erred equally by mistaking Spartan austerity for an uplifting morality and detaching the question of how to secure an adequate subsistence from philosophy and
understanding.
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Babeuf’s radical ideology was thus only coherent up to a point and, at his trial, tended to degenerate into fanatical tirades against the existing Constitution and private property. “All the evils of society,” he claimed, flow from private property so that society must organize a “communal regime that will suppress private property”; he failed to see the danger inherent in his trumpeted “people’s sacred, inalienable right to make the laws” or grasp the evident difficulty of declaring the “rich who refuse to give up their superfluous wealth for the benefit of the poor, enemies of the people.”

In France, insisted Maréchal, “fewer than a million persons dispose of wealth that rightfully belongs to twenty millions of their fellow men, their fellow citizens.”
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“We need not only the equality stipulated in the Declaration of the Rights of Man,” he continued, “we [also] need equality in life, in our very midst, in our homes. For the true and living equality we will give up everything.”
²¹
On Maréchal’s and Babeuf’s premises, “there must be an end to this outrage!” But did it follow that the people must establish the “republic of equality” by overthrowing established authority, that the common good was just a matter of imposing community of goods or that it would be easy “to end civil strife and the sufferings of the masses”?
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This was Maréchal’s and Babeuf’s delusion. In the Spartan egalitarianism of Mably’s, Morelly’s, Babeuf’s, and Maréchal’s communism, one could surely detect a philistinism rooted in unreality, a forbidding bleakness and austerity. Maréchal resembled Babeuf in being a product of radical thought with a dose of outright fanaticism added. “Maréchal’s manifesto includes the chilling sentence, “Equality or death: that is what we want. And that is what we shall have, no matter what the price to be paid.” To this he added, “Let the arts perish, if need be! But let us have real equality [Périssent, s’il le faut, tous les arts, pourvu qu’il nous reste l’égalité réelle!].”
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At the session on 30 Ventose, Babeuf became quite carried away, not only denouncing the 1795 Constitution as an abomination but labeling judges and jury as “
royalistes
, rascals and imbeciles.” After this, he was forbidden to add anything further that was not strictly relevant to his defense.
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But the Directoire faced a dilemma. The republican press showed considerable sympathy for the Babouvistes despite rejecting their call to overthrow the Constitution by insurrection, for royalism and revived Catholicism was what chiefly menaced republican France, not Babeuf. Moreover, Babeuf’s ties ramified so widely throughout the republican and democratic community that any suggestion of harsh sentences for those accused risked permanently fragmenting and
antagonizing prospective allies (against royalism) that the Directoire could ill afford to lose. Much to the satisfaction of the
Journal des hommes libres
and other republican papers, the judges finally opted for wide-ranging leniency—acquitting Maréchal, Antonelle, Amar, and most other defendents.
²⁵
Only a handful, including Babeuf and Darthé, were found guilty of conspiring to overthrow the government and reintroducing the 1793 Constitution by force. On 24 May, Babeuf and Darthé were condemned to death, Buonarroti and six others to deportation. The rest were freed.

Babeuf and Darthé went to the guillotine on 27 May 1797, but their legacy lived on. Maréchal’s manifesto is the first explicitly revolutionary communist manifesto of modern times and the legend forged by Babeuf, Buonarroti, and Maréchal was the only precursor of their own communism that was truly respected later by Marx and Engels. It was a legacy that directly fed into the birth of Marxism and the modern Communist movement in the 1840s, a transference of inspiration engineered, in particular, by Buonarroti, who was imprisoned after the trial but survived, emerging later as the historian of the movement he had helped forge. His
Histoire de la conspiration pour l’égalité, dite de Babeuf
, published in 1828, and subsequently reappearing in various editions and translations, had a lasting impact, tying memories of Babeuf to the birth of modern Communism.
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The Second Directoire

March 1797, with the Babeuf trial still unresolved, plunged the republican Left into defeat, dejection, and turmoil. Many deputies, journalists, and other leading figures in French society regarded the upsurge of rightist support in the Assembly during early 1797 not just with repugnance but acute apprehension; to them this was an immediate crisis, and they were ready to embrace a violent subversion of the Constitution to resolve it.

Fear of royalism, conservatism, and counterrevolution, confirmed Madame de Staël later, was at that moment far greater than any worries about Babeuf, sansculotte insurgency, the fate of liberty, or neo-Jacobins.
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Using the pretext that certain members of the two chambers had been meeting secretly at the Tuileries and elsewhere, illegally, forming a clandestine network of known “fanatiques et anti-républicains,” as the
Décade philosophique
put it,
²⁸
and conspiring with known foes of
the Directoire, the more emphatically republican element in the regime organized their counterstroke. When the republican coup of 18 Fructidor (4 September 1797) finally ensued, it was eagerly supported by nearly all France’s republicans, including most of the foreign theorists and journalists in France. Sieyès sided with the many, insisting that at this point desperate measures were unavoidable to prevent the triumph of royalism and ecclesiastical authority.
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The Idéologues Cabanis, Destutt de Tracy, and Say welcomed the coup, as did Benjamin Constant. The resurgence of royalism and Catholicism in society and the Council of Five Hundred was judged so dangerous by Constant and the editors of the
Décade philosophique
that without a violent coup to purge the legislature, the outcome in their opinion would almost certainly be civil war.
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Republicans viewed the coup as indispensable surgery, a momentary violation of the Constitution essential to save freedom and constitutionalism itself.

Unwilling to risk a popular insurrection aided by Jacobin militants, the three “triumvirs,” as the right-wing press called them, Barras, La Révellière-Lépeaux, and Reubell, chief organizers of the virtually bloodless coup, surreptitiously concentrated troops in the Paris area and then used them to seize strongpoints in the city, surround the legislature with bayonets and cannon, and invade the Assembly hall. The election results in forty-nine departments were annulled and 177 deputies declared purged. Arrested at bayonet point was one of the two directors who refused to support the coup, though the most important, Carnot, long somewhat to the right of most Montagnard deputies, eluded his pursuers, escaping to Switzerland where he remained until after the coup of 18 Brumaire. Fifty-three deputies were physically removed from the legislature by the grenadiers, including General Pichegru, who had evinced blatant royalist sympathies since late 1795, and placed himself at the head of the monarchist faction. Pichegru was actually chairing at the moment the troops burst in. Despite efforts of a few royalist deputies who slipped through the net to ignite a popular insurrection, initial reaction was confused, with no forceful demonstrations either for or against the republican coup. Once the republicans had the upper hand, panic on the right led to many of the royalist deputies who were still at large attempting to flee the capital.