Revolutionary Ideas: An Intellectual History of the French Revolution From the Rights of Man to Robespierre (129 page)

The Revolution reaffirmed by Fructidor showed both important continuities and differences with the Left republicanism of the Brissotin era, both in terms of values and personalities. If the Republic’s commitment to secularism, universal education, and equality of opportunity remained unbending, the new anti-Montagnard republicanism was far less democratic than that of 1792–93, and also diverged from the early Revolution’s core ideals in refusing to continue even the restricted degree of freedom of the press prevailing in 1797. So scared was the second Directoire of resurgent royalism, Catholicism, and Robespierrisme, and apprehensive about militant egalitarianism, that it preferred to systematically suppress this whole dimension of basic rights. At least forty-two newspapers were aborted in the wake of Fructidor, with another twenty being closed down over the next two years. Around forty royalist journalists were proscribed and condemned to deportation,
including Jean-Baptiste Suard, a former member of d’Holbach’s dinner club who had consistently opposed the Revolution since 1789 and now fled abroad.
⁴⁷
Of remaining papers, several were co-opted by the regime while others were officially discouraged. Here, as in its policing activities and authoritarianism more generally, the Fructidorian Directoire was a clear precursor to the consulate of Brumaire and Napoleon’s authoritarianism.

The revolutionary government during 1797–98 was emphatically antiroyalist, anticlerical, and antiaristocratic. The two main public pillars of revived republican ideology in 1797–98, all the more vital to the regime given its blatant departure from freedom of expression, constitutionalism, and democracy, were a new emphasis on republican festivals and unyielding concern with imposing the republican calendar’s ten-day week—a point on which La Révellière-Lépeaux and Merlin de Douai, despite the latter’s private Catholic belief (and lack of genuine philosophique sympathies), were especially insistent.
⁴⁸
Government efforts to close churches on Sundays, and town and village markets on the
décadi
, developed into an arduous, rather unrewarding struggle driven by a Directoire that manifested uncompromising support for secularism, toleration of other religions, deism, universal education, and irreligion, along with the
culte théophilanthropique
.

The efforts to persuade the French to think more
philosophiquement
were aimed against royalism, Catholicism, and tradition, and no less against the cult of the populaire, Maratisme, sansculottism, and Robespierre’s authoritarian egalitariansim. To achieve its goals the Directoire also abandoned much of the early Revolution’s stress on equality, aiming instead to forge a new social elite trained by the state to occupy the professions, administration, and higher positions of society. This meant abandoning the blanket egalitarianism of 1793–94 and encouraging a new educational elitism. The families of boys sent to the écoles centrales paid fees, which hence became the path to securing social position and affluence. Nevertheless, the hardening, republican culture of the late 1790s still firmly advocated a comprehensively antiaristocratic, merit-based social elite that functioned on the basis of knowledge and training rather than inherited position, family ties, and privilege. Radical enlighteners like Helvétius, Condorcet, and Volney had always emphasized “experience” and knowledge rather than authority or Rousseauiste visions of nature as the basis of civic consciousness and morality. Besides teaching the principles of morality, human rights, and legislation, the interior ministry, like the 1798 school board, required a
new focus on history and classics as the path for understanding society, politics, and republican attitudes. If Robespierristes infused with Rousseauiste visions of nature and virtue scorned history as distinct from nature and feeling, radical enlighteners commanding the revolutionary educational apparatus in the late 1790s believed all true philosophy and understanding builds on science and a proper grasp of world history. “Philosophy” in their sense was the exclusive foundation for a broad understanding of society, politics, and the human condition.
⁴⁹
This involved rejecting all traditional philosophy and political science, as well as religion and Rousseauiste populism.

Besides promoting public festivals and reforming education, Fructidorians disseminated the writings of the radical philosophes. Neufchâteau, whose appointment to the Directoire was intended to stimulate republican “public instruction” in France, dispatched copies of d’Holbach’s
Contagion sacrée
to the departmental prefects to frighten them out of complacency regarding the social and political implications of the Catholic resurgence.
⁵⁰
Meanwhile, the pro-Revolution press, especially the
Décade philosophique
, warmly congratulated the teams of editors, including Naigeon (still busily sorting out Diderot’s papers), who were producing more complete, accurate, and better edited versions of the works of the radical philosophes who, more than ever, were acknowledged as having laid the Revolution’s foundations. Condorcet, Naigeon, and Cérutti had begun to promote D’Holbach’s reputation back in 1789–90 when Naigeon had published a résumé of
La Morale universelle
(1776), which was the first edition to appear under d’Holbach’s own name.

These efforts resumed in 1795. Among those active in this recovery and propagation of the Revolution’s radical philosophique foundations was the Abbé Martin Lefebvre de la Roche, whom Helvétius had sent to Holland prior to his death in December 1771 to arrange publication of
De l’Homme
(1773). Far surpassing the five-volume edition of Helvétius’s
Œuvres complèttes
[
sic
] that appeared in 1795, when complete, in the summer of 1797, La Roche’s fourteen-volume edition of Helvétius was definitive, including for the first time extensive unedited notes, correspondence, and Helvétius’s thus far unpublished
Réflexions
. Celebrated as “a great service to letters and to philosophy,” its publication prompted the
Décade philosophique
to remind readers that Helvétius figured among the Revolution’s foremost precursors. First to place moral philosophy on a fully materialist, utilitarian, self-interested basis, Helvétius dissipated vacuities that had long burdened moral philosophy
and hidden the true meaning of virtue.
⁵¹
“No one had better shown on what principles it is necessary to establish a government” and the “inconveniences of every political constitution where the advantages of a small minority are preferred to the happiness of the great number.” No one contributed more to the present advances in Western Europe (i.e., including Belgium, Holland, and Italy), “where it is for the happiness of the great number that the Constitution is made.”
⁵²

Texts by, or inspired by, the radical philosophes proliferated during 1796–97, among them the previously unpublished
Jacques le fataliste
,
The Nun
, and the
Supplement to Bougainville’s Voyage
, all by Diderot,
⁵³
and a subsequently published Institute public lecture by Jacques-Antoine Creuzé-Latouche (1749–1800), one of the chief framers of the 1795 Constitution. A deputy of the lower legislature, Creuzé-Latouche designed his
De l’intolérance philosophique et de l’intolérance religieuse
to combat the efforts of Catholic apologists to pin the charge of intolerance onto the Enlightenment. Originally leveled by the radical philosophes against the Catholic priesthood and Protestant ministry, Catholic apologists claimed it was the philosophes who were the real “fanatics,” that no fanaticism was worse than
fanatisme philosophique
. No one possessing any knowledge or intelligence could possibly take such an absurd calumny seriously, countered Creuzé-Latouche, expounding the philosophique doctrine of toleration and individual freedom of thought, and citing Marmontel’s powerful lines in his play
The Incas
, which depicted religious zealotry as an exterminating angel that believes itself in accord with God’s will while actually wreaking only death and destruction. Disastrously, this Catholic calumny, “repeated a hundred times from Nonnotte down to La Harpe,” lamented the
Décade philosophique
, derived some superficial plausibility precisely from the revolting excesses of the Terror.

Despicable characters like Hanriot and Chaumette
had
invoked la philosophie when persecuting Christians. But to claim la philosophie was therefore responsible for the 1793–94 persecution of the clergy was flagrant calumny. “La philosophie,” recalled Creuzé-Latouche, “was among the first targets of the fury propagated by Robespierre’s
gouvernement révolutionnaire
.” Reminding his audience of Robespierre’s trampling of Helvétius’s bust underfoot and the hounding of Malesherbes, Lavoisier, and Bailly, besides Condorcet, he recounted also the scandalous incident when Robespierre championed manipulation of the sans-culotte section deliberations in Paris to exclude “le célèbre Priestley”
from election to the Convention, on behalf of the loathsome Marat. Robespierre spoke directly against the philosophes on that occasion. The Jacobins had established a tyranny in which it was a mark of infamy to be labeled a savant, man of letters, or author.
⁵⁴

As part of its wider strategy, the Fructidorian Directoire actively promoted journals expounding radical philosophique views, especially the
Décade philosophique
,
Journal de Perlet
, and a new journal,
Le Conservateur
(1797–98), established by Garat, Daunou, and Chénier. The Directoire regularly took two thousand copies of the last journal to distribute among the revolutionary armies and the administration, its objective being to encourage that part of society deemed “friends of liberty, of la philosophie, and of letters,” willing to conserve and uphold the Revolution’s basic standpoint.
⁵⁵
The authentic principles of the Revolution, contended these journals, provided the best available basis for France’s future while also projecting a revolutionary universalism and cosmopolitanism that reached out to neighboring countries and strengthened their commitment to republican liberty, science, learning, and the Revolution. The Idéologues and republicans of 1795–99, consequently, were not therefore forerunners of nineteenth-century liberalism, primarily focused on individual rights and freedoms alone, men unconcerned with or actively opposed to molding society into a different shape and reinforcing the power of the state to protect, guide, and curb inequality.
⁵⁶
Rather, they consciously and unconstrainedly sought social amelioration across the board, but strictly within a framework of orderly republican government, semidemocracy, and human rights. Their project included fairer and better economic arrangements but refused to concede primacy to the goal of economic equality alone.

The second Directoire’s measures against the émigrés and refractory priests were applauded in both republican and democratic circles. After Fructidor, Jacobin and other republican clubs were temporarily permitted to reopen. But there remained a nagging contradiction at the heart of the Directoire’s stance: anxious to encourage a watered-down, tame republicanism and antiroyalism, as well as anticlericalism, the new leadership before long began to repress democratic pressures, such as those emanating from the Parisian left-bank Rue du Bac Club, which attempted to promote electoral reform with a view to widening the franchise and redemocratizing the political process. The Directoire made a fateful and, according to some, rather inept choice: it opted to oppose broadening the electorate and to base its authority on the
country’s propertied elite. Eventually, this meant losing the backing of the democratic wing, the Left republicans as well as the neo-Jacobins, and retrospectively lending some degree of rectitude and legitimacy to the clandestine movement of Babeuf, Maréchal, and Buonarroti.

The Directoire began to face opposition from the Left in the republican press, republican clubs, and also the legislature itself, not least owing to the fact that most deputies passively acquiesced in the executive’s increasingly heavy-handed control, permitting the Assembly’s supposed sovereignty to lapse to a largely theoretical status. What began promisingly as the Fructidorian regime became gradually more unresponsive, repressive, and antidemocratic in character. Democratic republican opposition was expressed through the semiclandestine democratic neo-Babouviste and neo-Jacobin press, most impressively, the
Journal des hommes libres
, edited by Félix Lepeletier, Antonelle, and Vatar. Like Babeuf, Antonelle was steeped in Mably, Diderot, Morelly, and Helvétius, and sought restoration of the democratic 1793 Constitution, but unlike Babeuf, he, like Jullien and Réal, refused to assign the drive for economic equality priority over the drive for civil equality and democracy.
⁵⁷
Vatar, a journalist from Rennes, was also a brave and resolute republican democrat (later deported to Cayenne by Napoleon from whence he escaped to the United States). But little by little their efforts to rekindle the ardor of 1789–93 were stifled. On 11 April 1798, the Directoire closed down the
Journal des hommes libres
, now the foremost democratic paper. Vatar kept the paper alive briefly in a reduced format, under different titles, but was finally reduced to silence.
⁵⁸

As the April 1798 elections approached, the Directoire revealed all too clearly that it was as anxious to curb the democratic tendency, and suppress the democratic clubs and Jacobin journals, as to prevent another royalist success at the polls.
⁵⁹
To most this seemed a blatant betrayal. Confronted by a growing royalist prevalence in many French regions among the propertied and the poor, and unable to widen its support base, the Directoire tried, disasterously, to resolve its central dilemma—how to impose its authority without the help of the democrats—by rigging the elections. With 437 seats, including those left vacant after Fructidor, needing to be filled, the executive interfered on a massive scale in the electoral process, albeit with more success in blocking royalism than Left republicanism. In many departments, the Directoire failed to prevent the clubs from overawing the primary assemblies and securing the election of republican democrats rather than government supporters. Directorial candidates triumphed in only forty-three
departments, barely over half. A remarkable 162 former members of the old Convention reappeared, including no less than seventy-one regicides.