Revolutionary Ideas: An Intellectual History of the French Revolution From the Rights of Man to Robespierre (130 page)

Refusing to give ground to the growing democratic republican opposition, the Directoire encouraged the filing of all manner of objections and complaints, finding pretexts to cancel the election results in nearly forty departments. Many initially successful democratic candidates, around eighty-six, were subsequently debarred from taking their seats. A special law, the Law of 22 Floreal (11 May 1798), a kind of supplementary coup, was introduced to further strengthen the authoritarian executive’s hand, though at the cost of further discrediting the electoral system and alienating the regime’s rapidly dwindling republican support. Many departmental and judicial officials and a total of 127 deputies, or more than a quarter, were purged. At this point, Neufchâteau retired and was replaced by Jean-Baptiste Treilhard, a member of the Comité de Salut Public from April to June 1793 and later an energetic Thermidorian who in 1794–95 had proven his willingness to participate in rigid, unprincipled government.

The elections of March 1799 (Germinal of the Year VII) were once more heavily rigged but again resulted in a substantial group of democrats being elected and the divisions within the Directoire becoming deeper. The clash between the democratic tendency, the principles of the Revolution, and the narrow, bureaucratic, authoritarian vision of the Directoire intensified. Despite the escalating military and ideological struggle in Italy, Germany, Egypt, and in fact everywhere between the Revolution and the monarchies, during June 1799 a full-blown political crisis ensued at home, culminating in what became known as the coup of Prairial. The Five Hundred, encouraged and partly concerted by Sieyès after his return as French envoy from Berlin, the figurehead who now replaced Reubell as one of the five directors, rebelled and confronted the executive, accusing it of corruption and incompetence. La Révellière-Lépeaux and Merlin were forced to resign and, on 30 Prairial of the Year VII (18 June 1799), were replaced with Ducos and a sympathetic military figure, General Moulin. A fresh purge of officials from the departmental and civic administrations began.

Prairial, a noteworthy landmark in revolutionary history, was the only time the legislature purged the Directoire rather than vice versa. It represented a fateful, rather tragic last chance. Momentarily, Prairial ushered in a republicanism characterized, for the first time since 1795, by the legislature ruling the executive.
⁶⁰
It marked the last point
at which the Revolution’s core values were loudly and powerfully reaffirmed. For a few months during 1799, the latest coup seemingly revived the failed promise of Fructidor. With between sixty and ninety democratic republicans in the Assembly affirming revolutionary principles, freedom of expression, and the Rights of Man, a last flurry of optimism arose. After being broadly suppressed for a year, freedom of the press was officially reinstated on 1 August 1799; democratic journals triumphantly reappeared during the summer of 1799, the most significant being
Le Démocrate
and the
Journal des hommes libres.
Though its circulation never recovered to the high levels of 1794, from June to September 1799, the
Journal des hommes libres
, now edited chiefly by Antonelle, enjoyed a vigorous revival and helped promote what turned out to be the Revolution’s last call for liberty, equality, and democracy.
⁶¹

The promise was undermined by Prairial’s inner contradictions. A new, openly neo-Jacobin club called the Manège Club was established in a hall in the heart of Paris, detailed reports of whose meetings were published in the
Journal des hommes libres
.
⁶²
Its inaugural ceremony on 6 July was attended by eight hundred enthusiastic supporters. Yet, the coup simultaneously reinforced the authoritarian, antidemocratic middle bloc around Sieyès and Barras who were attempting to steer a constitutional and anticlerical course under a strong executive, resisting democracy and legislative control. When the Manège Club’s original meeting hall was closed by the police in late July, it moved its premises to the Rue de Bac, where it continued disseminating democratic republican ideology, still claiming its views were in no way incompatible with the Constitution. The Directoire disagreed. On 13 August, the police closed its new premises, which ended its public role and forced the remaining rump to continue meeting clandestinely. The democratic papers were suppressed in September. The Revolution as a democratic tendency was driven underground.

Sieyès had accepted elevation to the Directoire as a means to an end. Long convinced that the democratic, republican tendency had to be countered by a stronger executive, he now also believed the Constitution in its present form was unworkable, mired by an inherent instability and dispersal of power. He now made his fateful decision to try to concert yet another coup to redirect the Revolution into a securer, more orderly course, betraying by doing so the very legislature and Directoire to which he had been elected and of which, on 18 June 1799, he became president. This late 1799 coup, orchestrated by Sieyès, effectively marks the Revolution’s end. This time the coup d’état was initiated neither by the legislature nor the Directoire but was the outcome rather of a conspiracy planned by a disaffected group of would-be political, legal, and constitutional reformers, the Brumairians, a clique led by Sieyès and backed by several liberal-minded, sophisticated men, including the best liberal theorists and journalists in the legislature and the Institute. Volney, Cabanis, Daunou, Marie-Joseph Chénier, Destutt de Tracy, Garat, and Constant (who greatly admired Sieyès), the
Décade philosophique
’s editors, all believed that if the Republic continued much longer on its present path of division, weakness, and instability, it must collapse into humiliation and ruin.
⁶³
They had a clear political-philosophical vision. They sought to establish their new order of liberty, human rights, freedom of expression, secularism, and representative constitutionalism.
They hoped to emasculate royalism, Catholicism, and Jacobin Terror for good by authoritarian and extralegal means, but their project failed.
⁶⁴

Figure 20. The unity and indivisibility of the Republic, 1793. Image courtesy Bibliothèque nationale de France.

Plotting his coup, Sieyès needed the assistance of a general to put the plan into effect. Bonaparte happened to return unexpectedly from Egypt in mid-October, receiving a hero’s welcome and apparently scarcely embarrassed at all by the question of why he had returned from Egypt without his army. It was then that Sieyès made his decisive error of enlisting his collaboration in overthrowing the legislature, Directoire, and Constitution. On 18 and 19 Brumaire, Bonaparte deployed his men: power was transferred from the legislature at bayonette point to a provisional consulate of three comprised of Sieyès, Ducos, and Bonaparte, albeit not without hours of outraged opposition. The usual brochures and posters appeared across Paris explaining what had transpired. Sieyès set to work as head of a commission of twelve, including Daunou, charged with drawing up a new constitution—however, with crucial alterations insisted on by Bonaparte. This Constitution of the Year VIII was promulgated toward the end of 1799. It did not take long for Bonaparte to succeed in wholly outmaneuvering Sieyès, Ducos, Daunou, and the constitutional commission: the consulate was formalized with Napoleon at its unchallenged head. Sieyès withdrew humiliated into permanent retirement.
⁶⁵

Insofar as anything did, the coup of Brumaire of the Year VIII (November 1799), and the new Constitution of 13 December 1799, ended the Revolution. There were now three chambers with the most senior and powerful—consisting of eighty nonelected, nonremovable members co-opted by the senators themselves from a short-list presented by the first consul—charged with overseeing the legality and constitutionality of the legislature’s actions. To round off the first consul’s overweening authority, Cambacérès and Lebrun, the second and third consuls, possessed only an advisory role, not only in initiating legislation but also in appointing ministers, generals, and ambassadors. The 1799 Constitution, in short, effectively suspended the Rights of Man, press freedom, and individual liberty, as well as democracy and the primacy of the legislature, wholly transferring power to initiate legislation from the legislature to the executive, that is, the consulate, making Bonaparte not just the central but the all-powerful figure in the government. The Declaration of the Rights of Man was removed from its
preambule
.

CHAPTER 25

Conclusion

T
HE
R
EVOLUTION AS THE
O
UTCOME OF THE
R
ADICAL
E
NLIGHTENMENT

The French Revolution, we may conclude was really three revolutions—a democratic republican revolution, a moderate Enlightenment constitutional monarchism invoking Montesquieu and the British model as its criteria of legitimacy, and an authoritarian populism prefiguring modern fascism. These distinct impulses proved entirely incompatible politically and culturally, as well as ideologically, and remained locked in often ferocious conflict throughout. It is true that two other social movements largely unconnected with these—the peasant risings and the by no means wholly inchoate sansculotte street movement preoccupied with subsistence—had a massive impact on society and the political scene in one way or another at nearly every stage of the Revolution. But however essential these elements in the picture they were not revolutionary movements in the sense that they attempted to transform the whole of society and its laws and institutions, they did not represent comprehensive plans for change in the same sense as the three main ideological tendencies.

In shaping the basic values of the Revolution and the Revolution’s legacy, the first, the democratic republican revolution, was from 1788 onward always the most important, the “real revolution,” despite its successive defeats. Obviously, the causes of the French Revolution are very numerous and include many economic, financial, and cultural as well as social and political factors. But all of these can fairly be said to be essentially secondary compared with the one major, overriding cause driving the democratic republican impulse—the Radical Enlightenment. This is the factor that needs to be placed at center stage.

By 1799, Napoleon was master of France; the Revolution was at an end. Yet, in a crucial sense, it did not end. The Idéologues primarily supported the coup of Brumaire, believing, like Sieyès, that a stronger executive had become necessary to saving the Republic. But at no stage did they want the authoritarian regime they got, and they never endorsed or condoned the onset of the Napoleonic dictatorship that was resisted by them and also by many other prominent committed republicans, including Sieyès, Daunou, Jullien, Guyomar, Sonthonax, Bonneville, Say, Constant, and Vatar. Eventually enforcing a whole series of basic compromises with the past—with the aristocracy, Church, colonial planters, and the principle of monarchy—Napoleon in effect used authoritarian methods to impose a more efficient version of the moderate Enlightenment. What the Idéologues sought was a healthy balance between a vigorous legislature, holding the initiative in forging legislation and free to criticize the executive, and an executive committed to maintaining the Revolution’s secular ideals, especially individual liberty, legal equality, universal education, and freedom of expression, criticism, and the press. They did not abandon these ideals, and from his authoritarian perspective, Napoleon had ample reason to always distrust Sieyès, the Idéologues, and all who shared in the making of the Revolution.
¹

The French Revolution was qualitatively different from all known previous revolutions and also remains more fundamental for us than subsequent revolutions thus far, more fundamental, for example, than the Russian Revolution. The reason consists in the Revolution’s special relationship to the Enlightenment, and especially to the Enlightenment’s republican, democratic, and secularizing radical wing. It was especially foundational in that it fed into all later revolutions in Europe, Latin America, and Asia, fixing both the contours and dilemmas of modern republicanism, constitutional monarchy, and democracy, and introducing the social and constitutional principles that defined the modern political world. The only democratic revolution thus far that conceived democracy as the pursuit of the majority’s welfare, assigning government the duty to promote the welfare of all as a society and combat economic inequality rather than just maintain order and defend property, it was the first sustained attempt to establish a secular, educated, welfare-orientated, human rights–based modernity. It sought maximization of “social freedom” combined with equal opportunities for all. All this affords the French Revolution a unique centrality in modern history and relevance to the challenges of our own time.