Revolutionary Ideas: An Intellectual History of the French Revolution From the Rights of Man to Robespierre (128 page)

Some hours later, the remaining 320 deputies of the Council of Five Hundred resumed their seats amid shouts of “Vive la République!” and continued with their proceedings. Only afterward did posters go up
around Paris explaining what had happened, denouncing royalist intrigues, and presenting documentary proof of Pichegru’s treason, posters approvingly read by republicans of all hues. Many believed the coup had indeed saved the Revolution, liberty, and the Rights of Man. If so, one thing was certain: the people had played no part in saving or perpetuating the Revolution. The coup d’état of 17 and 18 Fructidor (3 and 4 September 1797) of the Year V was the work of a clique and was followed by a major revolutionary purge, but one impelled wholly from above. Besides two directors and dozens of deputies of both chambers, numerous other officials and administrators were dismissed from the departmental and civic administrations and replaced. The 177 rightist deputies purged were afterward replaced, not by election but co-option. Sixty-five prominent conservatives were sentenced to deportation to Cayenne, though in the end only seventeen were actually sent. Of these, eight died there while several others, including Pichegru, escaped. Besides sentencing the guilty to deportation rather than execution—and then not deporting most of them—Fructidor further demonstrated its desire to avoid harshness and pointedly distance itself from the Terror by sentencing the deportees to deportation but not confiscation of their possessions, hence avoiding ruin for their families.
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Royalists lost no time in accusing the Fructidorians of emulating the sinister style and illegalities of the 31 May 1793 insurrection. What, constitutionally, is the difference between using populist mass insurrection to eliminate “Girondins” sitting in the legislature and using troops to remove royalists from the legislature? The Fructidorians were plain Montagnards and terroristes. The pro-Revolution press roundly rejected this as absurd. To republicans it seemed self-evident that genuine foes of the Revolution were being justifiably deported because they menaced the Revolution, whereas on 2 June 1793, and subsequently, innocent men were arbitrarily removed, imprisoned, or guillotined on the flimsiest grounds, or no grounds at all. In September 1797, the country faced a dire emergency. In the circumstances, it seemed vital to halt the audacious subversion in progress and “make
la philosophie
and enlightenment,” as the
Décade philosophique
expressed it, “which these men continually insult triumph,” curtailing their conservatism and “fanatisme” and consoling the “true friends of liberty, morality and principles,” whom royalists subsumed under the odious title of terroristes and brigands. What dishonesty and bad faith it betrays to compare 18 Fructidor with the 31 May 1793, to compare the present regime with the reign of Terror!
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Fructidor marked a considerable rupture with the France of the first Directoire, as it was a decisive repudiation of royalisme, Carnot-style pragmatism, and Robespierriste populism alike. The so-called second Directoire reorganized the government, the triumvirs filling the two vacant Directoire seats with committed republicans, the anticlerical François de Neufchâteau (1750–1821), a poet, voluminous writer, and tireless propagandist for agrarian reform,
³³
and the Montagnard jurist, Merlin de Douai (1754–1838).
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If the Thermidorian Republic of 1794–97 was an unstable attempt to steer between Jacobin egalitarianism and resurgent royalisme, the Republic of 1797–99 was of a definitely sturdier republican stamp but also more authoritarian in character.
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Its professed aim was to reimpose core republican values from above by firmly repressing both royalisme and populist authoritarianism. Punitive measures were reintroduced against the aristocratic émigrés, many of whom had returned with the reviving royalist expectations of spring 1797—and against the refractory clergy. Returned noble émigrés were given two weeks to depart and threatened with execution if they disobeyed. Over the next months 160 nobles were actually executed under this decree, or earlier laws against the émigrés, prompting the tag “Fructidorian Terror.” Reaffirmation of republican values in the France of 1797, however, turned out to be more a question of reassuming the war on Catholicism and the battle of symbols than restoring freedom of the press, the political clubs, the right to petition, or the integrity of the electoral process.
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It again became de rigueur at public meetings to address other speakers as “Citoyen,” not as “Monsieur.”

The Catholic revival had made steady progress since the first Directoire conceded it partial legitimacy in the spring of 1795, and with the royalist recovery of the Year V, many refractory priests in exile had returned. They had found congregations eager to receive them and provide livings, and everywhere vigorously rallied Catholic and royalist sentiment against republicans and republicanism. This process was now vigorously reversed. A decree passed the very day after the coup required a civic oath affirming outright rejection and detestation of royalty from all preachers. Under a law of 25 October 1797, refractory priests refusing the new oath were given two weeks to leave France or face imprisonment, deportation, or execution, and hundreds departed or were expelled over the coming months. Those failing to depart quickly were rounded up and faced with the choice of swearing the required oath or severe punishment.
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Crucifixes in the streets, crosses in cemeteries, and ringing church bells were again officially suppressed.

Around 1,400 such nonjurors were interned on the west coast islands of Ré and Oberon prior to deportation to Guiana, though only around 230 were actually deported there. Altogether, from Fructidor to the coup of Prairial (18 June 1799), the Directoire deported approximately 9,000 ecclesiastics, though the vast majority, some 7,500, were driven from Belgium rather than France.
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Those targeted were recalcitrant priests refusing to repudiate monarchy or swear allegiance to the Republic. On 29 September, the regime issued a long edict summarizing all previous restrictions on the churches and forbidding manifestations of religious cults in the streets, such as processions, the wearing of ecclesiastical dress, images, and crucifixes. Likewise forbidden was ringing church bells to summon the faithful, whether in town or country. Equally, the regime renewed Condorcet’s efforts to combat “superstition” in the classroom by insisting teachers use more explicitly republican and anti-Christian materials in teaching. An emphatic form of deism was everywhere preferred to atheism but this did not prevent republican teachers from being widely boycotted by parents in favor of private Catholic teachers readier to promote what the new regime called “les prejugés et la superstition.”

Reaffirming the Revolution’s essentially philosophique character, Fructidor revived its universalism and determination to reeducate everyone, representing a decisive rebuff for Montesquieu, the British model, and all forms of liberalism focusing solely on individual rights and freedoms without stressing the duty of legitimate governments to promote the common interest and guard the collective good against vested interests, elites, and religious authority, as well as monarchy. The second Directoire also acted promptly to bridle royalist journalists. At the same time, the new regime tried in various ways to revive the distinctly flagging revolutionary enthusiasm of the masses. Louis La Révellière-Lépeaux, prime mover of the coup, deeply fearful of moral and social anarchy, and a long-standing opponent of Robespierre and his “Cromwellisme,” placed a particular stress on reviving republican practices and festivals. Orders were issued for revolutionary songs to again be sung in all the theaters (though in some there was resistance to this). La Révellière-Lépeaux was especially keen on huge mass ceremonies featuring enormous choruses singing revolutionary hymns intended to renew the people’s emotional attachment to the Revolution.
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He also promoted Théophilanthropie, a new organized deist cult established in Paris earlier in April, though most kept their distance from this peculiar and short-lived new church.

Fructidor acclaimed and revived the Revolution and showed that it still overshadowed all Europe. Fructidorians, republicans, and the philosophique Left still faced a formidable double threat, though, which some conceived of as two parts of the same menace. Surely royalism and Robespierrisme were really twin evils, sharing a common basis! Do not religious fanaticism and
le fanatisme politique
, as the
Décade philosophique
expressed it, equally find both their appeal and their support among that class of the population devoid of education and hence “ignorant et crédule”? Reversing Catholic resurgence and populist authoritarianism, royalism and Montagnard principles, traditional notions of schooling and Rousseauist education was hence considered by democratic republicans as parts of the same process. Countering Robespierrisme and the Terror went together with fighting sansculottisme, ignorance, and religion. To defeat its enemies, the Revolution required a more systematic cultural and propaganda countermovement of which the hallmark was the campaign to firmly establish the écoles centrales, the large, secular, publicly supported secondary schools organized on uncompromisingly philosophique principles and set up in all the departmental capitals, which now gained a decisive impetus throughout France and also Belgium and the conquered Rhineland.

The vehemently anticlerical new minister of the interior, François de Neufchâteau, lost not a moment in sending out government instructions and questionnaires to all the departments and public schools, requiring details about the content of courses being taught, so that he could advise the Directoire on the general state of enlightenment, teaching, and social mores. Teachers were reminded of the need to use only approved textbooks, adhere to the revolutionary calendar, and celebrate republican festivals. The questionnaires sought simultaneously to gather information and goad teachers toward more explicitly Enlightenment, republican, and anti-Catholic attitudes. The school agenda, teachers were reminded, must include the recommended course on “morals and legislation” aimed at turning children into worthy citizens and teaching enlightened values, the Rights of Man, and republican legislation.
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Only through Enlightenment, by attacking ordinary men’s ignorance and lack of education, and men’s unfortunate upbringing amid prejudice and credulity, could the people be rescued from the two seemingly connected forms of fanaticism: reactionary Catholicism and Robespierrisme.

This was the ideology of Fructidor and the leading pro-Revolution journals of the late 1790s. Yet of the major new educational tools forged
by the Revolution—universal primary and secondary schools, the departmental écoles centrales for higher study, and the Institute—the écoles centrales, each of which was supposed to have thirteen professors and teach the whole range of requisite disciplines, were only just beginning to gain real momentum, and only the last, “the one that was perhaps least urgent,” stressed the
Décade philosophique
, approached being fully realized. In the department of the Seine, centering on Paris, only two of the projected five écoles centrales were functioning in the autumn of 1797, Sainte-Geneviève, next to the Panthéon, and that in the Quatre-Nations section.
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At both, Institute professors regularly assisted with the teaching. Most French communes still either had no public schools or else schools remaining in the hands of teachers deemed ignorant and antirepublican. The schools’ deficiencies could nearly all be blamed, it was assumed by republicans, on negligent officials, Catholics, and royalists.

Fructidor endeavored to tighten, energize, and accelerate the educational reforms initiated by the Daunou law of October 1795. Vetting what was taught, and eliminating the priesthood and Catholic doctrine from public education, accompanied resumed efforts to halt the ringing of church bells and the wearing of clerical dress in the streets. Ending the partial autonomy introduced by the law of October 1795, the Republic began to interfere extensively in the activities of the private schools, subjecting them to state supervision while insisting on the use of secularizing, anti-Catholic texts in public schools. Under a law of 5 February 1798, municipal councils were obliged to make regular surprise visits to private schools to ensure that teachers were employing secular and republican texts, and not religious texts, in their instruction and teaching children the Constitution. Where they were not, municipalities were supposed to shut them down. Sporadic and uneven though the pressure was, hundreds of recalcitrant teachers were dismissed and traditional Catholic teaching vigorously curtailed. Especially useful for unmasking concealed opponents of the Republic, it was judged, was the requirement that teachers accompany their pupils to the major public republican festivities.
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The reforms eventually led to the establishment of an executive council of public instruction charged with regulating publicly supported schools, an eight-member commission functioning for two years from late 1798 until October 1800, including Ginguené, Garat, and Destutt de Tracy.
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If the inevitable result was a heightening of tension between much of the urban and rural population and the republican authorities, and
further alienation of much of the population, the Fructidorians did not flinch from their course. Education and enlightenment, held Ginguené, Say, and the other journalists of the
Décade philosophique
, like Réal’s paper and Bonneville’s
Le Vieux Tribun,
were what would render the Revolution firm and republican values irreversible, just as printing had made the Enlightenment itself irreversible. These men considered the abusive denunciations of réfractaires
,
royalists, and counterrevolutionaries as “a title of glory,” and urged all lovers of Enlightenment and la philosophie to take heart. The Republic would survive and their enemies would be beaten.
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Where Robespierre made war on the Enlightenment, as the veteran republican Bonneville expressed it, the écoles centrales robustly defended the sciences and arts and would repel all superstition and
le vandalisme
, thereby strengthening the Republic.
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What was needed to direct and energize the schools was to impart more resolve from the top. One useful publicizing mechanism was the school prize-giving ceremonies, which in the écoles centrales were presided over by senior departmental officials and Institute professors, events accompanied by fanfare and much applause. In the Paris écoles centrales, school prizes were awarded in 1797 for mathematics, natural history, grammar, ancient languages, writing, and drawing, with first and second prizes followed by honorable mentions. A Directoire exhortation to the legislature on 24 October 1798 proposed to set teachers’ salaries and tighten further exclusion of priests from public schools, laying down that “
philosophique,
universal morality must be the exclusive basis of republican education” and that priests were “unfit” to educate youth in the principles of “purified virtue” and republican awareness.
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