Revolutionary Ideas: An Intellectual History of the French Revolution From the Rights of Man to Robespierre (131 page)

In 1796, the young Swiss political thinker and commentator Benjamin Constant (1767–1830), settling in Paris after Thermidor, published his first major political pamphlet,
De la force du gouvernement actuel
. Sincere, committed republicans and democrats, he asserted, should and must support the Revolution’s core principles and vigorously rebut both the royalist resurgence then commencing in France and the militant egalitarianism of Babeuf, Buonarroti, and Maréchal seeking to overthrow the revolutionary republic in the name of a more rigorous economic equality (while simultaneously attempting to rehabilitate and eulogize “Robespierre”). The repression and stifling of basic freedoms instigated by the Montagne, and the horrors of the Terror, contended Constant, did not stem from the Revolution’s essential principles and values and were not a logical consequence of the efforts and groups that generated it. Not yet the “moderate” or liberal he became later, Constant argued that the catastrophe of Robespierre and the Terror sprang rather from the illiberal, anti-Enlightenment reaction permeating Montagnard Jacobinism. Much like Roederer in a pamphlet of 1796 on la philosophie moderne, Constant rightly considered Robespierre’s and Saint-Just’s rejection of the Revolution’s core values as the wrecking of the Revolution and a virulent form of Counter-Enlightenment and anti-intellectualism, hostile to freedom of thought, individual liberty, erudition, and the right to criticize. In terms of principles, Robespierre was the Revolution’s contradiction, the Enlightenment’s very antithesis.
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Constant’s denunciation of the Terror triggered a historical quarrel that has continued to this day. Where counterrevolutionary and Counter-Enlightenment writers like Antoine de Rivarol declared the Terror the fruit of la philosophie moderne, adamantly claiming Condorcet had been forced to take poison by “his brothers in philosophy,” Constant, Roederer, Creuze-Latouche, Say, Louvet, Naigeon, and many others proclaimed Robespierre “le chef ” of the Terror, contending that he was neither a republican nor an adept of la philosophie moderne but, on the contrary, the Enlightenment’s foremost enemy.
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If Rivarol scorned republicanism and remained loyal to the ancien régime throughout, by the mid-1790s many disillusioned revolutionaries, like La Harpe and Gorani, and some Catholic and Protestant apologists likewise preferred to view the Montagne as the quintessence of the revolutionary spirit and the Terror as both the Revolution’s and la philosophie’s logical culmination.

In effect, only commentators championing the Rights of Man, press freedom, universal education, and democracy, like Constant, Daunou, Louvet, Guyomar, Say, and Roederer, firmly denied that the Montagne was the Revolution’s climax and correctly identified the trajectory set by Sieyès, Mirabeau, Condorcet, Brissot, and Pétion as the Revolution’s veritable course. The valid conclusion to draw from Robespierre and the Terror, they maintained, was that a democratic republican revolution is impossible without first enlightening and preparing the population. Equally, these were the views of Tom Paine, Mary Wollstonecraft, Helen Maria Williams, Joel Barlow, Georg Forster, Gerrit Paape, Irhoven van Dam, Wedekind, and the great mass of foreign republicans and democrats of the time, besides the first great feminists, Sophie de Condorcet, Olympe de Gouges, Etta Palm, and other leaders of the revolutionary movement for women’s rights. By January 1794, even the prominent Swedish radical and Spinozist, Thomas Thorild, slowest and most reluctant of the leading foreign republican democrats to repudiate the Montagne, publicly proclaimed his previous misreading of the situation, designating the Terror a catastrophic betrayal and Robespierre himself “an all-consuming crocodile.”
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The Terror, averred Roederer in 1796, was a
véritable contre-revolution
, directly antagonistic to the Enlightenment.
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For Robespierre, in direct contrast, the radical philosophes, who he admitted had originally led the way in rejecting monarchy, aristocracy, and religious authority, were mere “charlatans ambitieux.” This fundamental disagreement continued after 1794. Precariously, the democratic republicans regained the upper hand after the Terror and again became the guiding force within the Revolution from early 1795 until the summer of 1799, while the Montagne’s and Robespierre’s legacy, if not entirely forgotten, was driven underground and marginalized. Even so, the wrangling over whether Robespierre and the Terror were or were not the outcome of la philosophie moderne, and hence were or were not inherent in the Revolution, came to overshadow not just the later 1790s but much of the nineteenth century. After Thermidor, constitutional monarchists, in the tradition of Necker, Mounier, Lally-Tollendal, Maury, and Malouet, revived the cause of moderation and rejected the democratic, republican libertarian path in the name of Montesquieu and the British model. But the liberal monarchists subsequently always remained vulnerable to the charge that they were concealed, or not-so-concealed, opponents of equality, democracy, universal education, and freedom of expression. Republican democrats, Idéologues, and neo-Brissotins
during the late 1790s maintained, like Constant earlier, that constitutional monarchists were in reality defending aristocracy, privilege, and religious authority, and were unjustifiably restricted in their goals.

Only Brissotins and the Danton-Desmoulins faction, argued Constant in 1796, were authentic democratic republicans, and these “republicans” had courageously resisted Robespierre, Saint-Just, repression, and the Terror in every way possible and were in fact the Terror’s primary victims. Because they promoted the Revolution’s core values, most democratic republican leaders and newspaper editors were annihilated by the Montagne between September 1793 and July 1794. The Terror began with the Brissotins’ defeat in June 1793, and matured, as Constant expressed it, “on their tombs.” He dismissed Robespierre’s ideology as a system attractive and useful to nobody except fanatical levelers seeking to resurrect Montagnard dictatorship or else royalist-Catholic conservatives rejecting and vilifying the Revolution so as to restore religious authority and the sway of theology. Apart from Montagnards, only monarchist and ecclesiastical (Protestant as well as Catholic) exponents of counterrevolution depicted the Jacobins, terrroristes, and “followers of Robespierre” as the “républicains véritables.” No error would be more catastrophic, held Constant, than to suppose modern society can coherently and justly be based on either militant, dogmatic egalitarianism or the primacy of religious authority and tradition. A society based specifically on economic equality is surely as utopian and impossible in the modern context as a society of social hierarchy and religious authority. No valid arguments but only ignorance, bigotry, and unawareness, maintained Constant, Roederer, and the rest, could inspire rejection and condemnation of the legacy of Condorcet, Brissot, and the democrats.
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Their democratic constitutionalism was the Revolution’s true motor and message to humanity, the only outcome of the Revolution offering a rational and just resolution of the dilemmas and predicaments of modern society.

Among those opposing Constant’s, Roederer’s, and Daunou’s standpoint was a young Counter-Enlightenment theorist, Joseph de Maistre (1751–1821), who retorted with his
Considérations sur la France
(1796), published in Switzerland. A Savoyard count and magistrate who had once venerated Voltaire but had turned against both Enlightenment and Revolution after the annexation of Savoy, Maistre became the leading intellectual foil to the Revolution’s reviving Left republicanism. The royalist and religious reaction which he believed most Frenchmen ardently longed for was not the misguided, bigoted, reactionary
obscurantism Constant depicted, and would, he insisted, by no means involve the bloody “contrary revolution” the republicans of 1796–97 warned against, but would be the peaceful, harmonious “opposite of revolution.”
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While Counter-Enlightenment ideology by this time already boasted a long and formidable tradition, reaching back to the 1750s, post-Thermidor Counter-Enlightenment like Maistre’s contained a new central feature: it highlighted Robespierre, the Terror, and Montagnard ideology justifying atrocities, depicting Robespierre’s legacy as the authentic, as well as horrific, outcome of the Revolution.
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In the Terror, the Montagne and Robespierrisme enemies of the Enlightenment recognized not the aberration, perversion, and betrayal Constant and Roederer identified but the philosophique core principles of 1789 and of post-Thermidor that the democratic republicans championed and that practically everyone agreed had engineered the Revolution from the outset.

Figure 21. Nicolas-Henri Jeaurat de Bertry (1728–1796), Allegory of the Revolution featuring a portrait of Rousseau, triangular monument to Equality, the tricolor, and a column of arms topped by a red Liberty cap, 1794, oil on canvas. Musée de la Ville de Paris, Musée Carnavalet, Paris, France / The Bridgeman Art Library.

Catholic-royalist reaction in France during the later 1790s, held the
Décade philosophique
, like Jullien’s and Réal’s journals, drew its nationwide, formidable vigor invariably from the most ignorant part of the population, the illiterate and semi-illiterate. In the eyes of the editors of the main post-1794 republican journals, the Counter-Revolution’s success stemmed precisely from the Counter-Enlightenment and the Enlightenment’s limitations. The appeal of reactionary loyalism, maintained democrats, fed on ignorance and credulity spiced with xenophobia, anti-intellectualism, and bigotry. If Catholic royalism proved an immensely powerful opponent to modern republican-democratic ideology, it was one they judged a simplistic as well as pernicious rival, blending religious authority and politics in ways that blinded its own adherents, whether artisans, peasants, or bourgeois, “to their true interests.” If today Constant, Réal, and Jullien, like Volney and Cabanis, can be seen to have been historically more accurate than Maistre and the Counter-Enlightenment in their evaluation of the Revolution and its ideology, and philosophically more discerning, Restoration conservatism and the Counter-Enlightenment succeeded in persuading most nineteenth- and twentieth-century readers and commentators that Robespierre and the Montagne were indeed the leading representatives and not the perversion and reversal of the Revolution.

This outcome seemingly contributed to the strange willingness of modern historians to view Robespierre’s role as a well-meaning and relatively positive and benign one, at least prior to June 1793,
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whereas at the time the democratic republican Left more correctly judged his role
nonrepublican, undemocratic, and insidious, even as early as the summer of 1791. In any case, conservative interpretations propagated by Maistre, Rivarol, Feller, La Harpe, and many others during the mid- and later 1790s, presenting Robespierre and the Montagne as the true face of the Revolution, not only proved more convincing for most readers and more lastingly influential but grew into a wider construction, vilifying both the Revolution and Enlightenment together. This became the common view but one that in its philosophical, cultural, and political implications and resonance is surely as unfortunate as it is questionable, and fragile as a historical interpretation.

The strange persistence of the view that Robespierre and the Terror marked the culmination of the Revolution, a view that utterly distorts our historical and philosophical understanding of the Revolution’s meaning as well as of the actual course of events, cannot hide the fact, in any case, that conflating Robespierre and the democratic Enlightenment was originally linked to a furious intellectual reaction against the Enlightenment, a reaction that began precisely in the mid-1790s. As Réal observed in his
Journal de l’Opposition
, Counter-Enlightenment thinking in France massively surged at that point (as it already had in Britain and Central Europe earlier) and subsequently spread even to the United States. It became “the fashion and the ordinary way of thinking,” as Réal put it, to scorn the very thinkers and inspirers of the Revolution, the philosophes, who ten years before had been generally considered the public’s teachers, “leurs oracles, leurs dieux.”
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Among the factors militating against democracy and the Revolution in the years 1795–99, then, and paving the way to Napoleon’s authoritarianism, was the public discrediting of la philosophie moderne, the principal ground of equality, human rights, and republican democracy. The irony was that the public turned against the Enlightenment because it was correctly identified by most commentators as the chief cause of the Revolution, which, thanks to the Montagne, had now acquired a universally bad name. The fact that radical thought had caused and shaped the Revolution seemed to a great many to be incontestable proof that the Enlightenment was the prime generator of Robespierre’s tyranny and the Terror. In this way, popular political culture, alleged Constant, Roederer, and Réal, became contaminated with a wholly erroneous interpretation of the Revolution, which became (and remains) a formidable political device in the conservative arsenal. Misuse and misappropriation of the fact that the Enlightenment
was
the major shaping cause of the Revolution thus helped open the gate wide to the prevailing
royalist-aristocratic-ecclesiastical reaction of the early nineteenth century and dismal catalog of Counter-Enlightenment ideologies plaguing and decrying modern democracy and republicanism ever since.