Revolutionary Ideas: An Intellectual History of the French Revolution From the Rights of Man to Robespierre (132 page)

Part of the historiographical obscurantism impeding a proper view of the Revolution has been the unfortunate consensus prevailing until today that early revolutionary France down to June 1791 was overwhelmingly monarchist and traditional. Historians have assumed this because the vast majority of society thought in traditional terms. But among the writers and reformers responsible for the most incisive and noticed revolutionary pamphlets of 1788–89, as well as for the leading pro-Revolution journals and papers, and the great enactments and political developments of 1789 (as opposed to the rural unrest), the dominant tendency consistently, from 1788 onward, was not monarchist but democratic republican. Officially, the Revolution became republican only in September 1792. But the political thought of the chief authors of the authentic Revolution of human rights, equality, and free expression—Brissot, Desmoulins, Condorcet, Cérutti, Pétion, Carra, Gorsas, Robert, Kersaint, Mercier, Bonneville, Prudhomme, Lanthenas, Roederer, Guyomar, Marie-Joseph Chénier, and Jean-Joseph Dusaulx, as well as, if less overtly, Mirabeau and Sieyès, those laying the foundations of democratic modernity, as distinct from Marat’s and Robespierre’s authoritarian populism—was uninterruptedly and uniformly republican throughout.

Democratic republicanism was, in turn, linked to secularism, rejection of religious authority, and the adoption of one-substance philosophy. Radical Enlightenment is indeed best defined as the linking of one-substance monism with democracy and sweeping egalitarian social reform. There had always existed a close connection between the anti-scripturalism,
tolérantisme
, and critique of ecclesiastical authority dominating radical freethinking in its pre-1750 stages, and the comprehensive egalitarianism, antimonarchism, and preoccupation with basic human rights of the post-1750 period. In early modern times, social hierarchy and monarchy, as well as church hegemony in education, censorship, and social theory, were predominantly justified in terms of revelation, divine creation, and divine ordering and governance of the world. Most people at all social levels in the late eighteenth-century transatlantic world accepted, as they had earlier, the legitimacy and rightness of the existing order. It was what they were used to and what was sanctioned by religion and the churches. Without overturning this trust in a divine Providence that had supposedly
fixed human society’s forms and norms as they ought to be, and without undermining the belief that traditional, conventionally accepted morality had been divinely revealed, it was impossible to champion the far-reaching reforms needed for a worldwide emancipation, secularization, and rationalization of society and culture. Despite the passionate but misplaced protestations of Fauchet and Grégoire, without first weakening faith in a knowing, benevolent divine governance of the world, and in religious authority generally, there existed no path to a revolutionary consciousness equipped to build a new moral order, to replace the ancien régime with reforms fundamentally redirecting the pursuit of happiness—individual and collective—and the essential goals of the state.

The radical philosophes viewed the societies of their time as inherently oppressive and corrupt. At the same time, they sought to discredit and delegitimize existing constitutions and legal systems on the ground that they depended on authority rooted in religion, tradition, received thinking, and aristocratic values. Radical enlighteners and democratic revolutionaries rejected the whole edifice of their society’s laws, precedents, charters, and institutionalized inequality unequivocally, and this inevitably involved rejecting all religious authority as well. By the 1780s, the kind of reform radical thinkers envisaged had become a potent, massive factor of disturbance and renewal in European politics, not just in France but also Holland, Switzerland, Italy, Ireland, Germany, and Britain. Their undertaking spread the doctrines of universal enlightenment, human rights, freedom of expression, and democracy everywhere, including the world beyond Europe and North America, vilifying the ancien régime colonial empires, seeking to emancipate the black, brown, and yellow peoples of the world, and changing the relationship between Europe and the rest fundamentally.

Paine’s exhortation, “lay then the axe to the root, and teach governments humanity,” implied a totalizing approach to reform, envisaging it as a universal need prevalent throughout the globe, something neither conceivable nor realizable without the arguments provided by radical Enlightenment thought.
¹¹
The chief tools for remaking human society, as befits the Enlightenment, were to be education and reeducation. What antidote can there be, asked d’Holbach in 1773, to the “dépravation générale des sociétés” where so many powerful interests conspire to perpetuate the prevailing oppression, corruption, disorder, and human misery? There is only one way to transform such an edifice of wrong notions, exploitation, and repression: abolish the whole corrupt system
of religious prejudice and superstition allied to rank, privilege, and nobility. Only thus could oppression and exploitation be replaced with a more equitable society, and “error” replaced with “the truth.” If ignorance and error are the exclusive origin of all the world’s corrupt laws, institutions, and political systems, if men are vicious, intolerant, oppressed, and poor only because they have wrong ideas about society and their “happiness,” held d’Holbach, then it is only by combating error, teaching men their true interests, and instilling “des idées saines” that society’s ills can be corrected.

As Desmoulins affirms in his
La France Libre
(1789), rejection of divine Providence and divine governance of the world was and is closely connected to the genesis of revolutionary democratic republicanism. The universe, replied Voltaire and Rousseau, is governed by divine Providence and God is just. But if God had really created the cosmos, objected Diderot, d’Holbach, and Helvétius, not only would the order of the universe be due to divine Providence but so would all the disorder, violence, and oppression, rendering all worldly existence precarious and frequently wretched and miserable.
¹²
If the order of the universe proves the omnipotence and intelligence of a divine Creator, then the disorder and the world’s ubiquitous tyrannical political systems prove that Creator’s inconstancy and unreasonableness. If Voltaire and Rousseau were right about the divinity, divine Providence, and Creation, then the fact that “human institutions are one mass of folly and contradiction,” as Rousseau expressed it in
Émile
in 1762,
¹³
and as Diderot’s veritable disciples all accepted, was a mystery as obscure as those of the theologians whose “mystères” the deists themselves constantly ridiculed. Deists, without saying so, make the “God” who is the foundation of their natural religion himself the greatest of mysteries. What are his powers and wherein resides his justice? How does he direct the world and rule over humanity?

The cruel, unjust way most people have been governed, held Diderot, d’Holbach, and Condorcet, proves that fear of divine punishment does not curb the perverse, either in social life or politics. Do not monsters like Tiberius, Caligula, and Nero demonstrate clearly enough the non-existence of a Providence “qui s’intéresse au sort de la race humaine”?
¹⁴
Rousseau and the radical philosophes disagreed about many things, but there were two basic political doctrines where they converged: first, the entire institutional structure of contemporary society was corrupt, reprehensible, and despotic, and needed replacing; second, transforming the entire structure of laws, institutions, and politics has the capacity
to make men happier and better. They were agreed also on the need of an educational revolution to change how men think as an essential element in the political revolution of which they dreamed. But the radical philosophes were much more insistent than Rousseau on the need for an educational revolution that transformed the people’s religious and moral ideas and sapped the power of religious authority. They deemed this necessary for a true democratic republicanism. They were also more insistent than Rousseau on the need for political revolution to engineer moral change: “c’est à la politique,” wrote d’Holbach, reversing Montesquieu (as the other radical philosophes also did), to form the outlook and attitudes of people, to inspire “les dispositions nécessaires à leur maintien, à leur sureté, à leur prosperité [the dispositions necessary for their maintenance, security and prosperity].”
¹⁵
Condorcet, Volney, and, in Egypt, also Napoleon all followed this principle.

Against this argument, it has been objected that “surviving members of d’Holbach’s salon, including figures such as the Abbé Raynal … opposed the French Revolution from its very outset.”
¹⁶
But this contention, though again widely subscribed to, also turns out to be part of the misleading historiography. Some of d’Holbach’s dining circle, including Raynal (albeit not before 1790), Grimm, Suard, Morellet, and Marmontel, did oppose the Revolution. But these men had long since abandoned key aspects of the social and political thought of Diderot, Helvétius, and d’Holbach. The estrangement of Grimm from Diderot, for example, began with their quarrel over whether or not Catherine the Great was an oppressive tyrant, already early in the 1780s. When turning against the Revolution in 1790–91, Raynal expressly declared in the National Assembly that he was now repudiating the very principles he had proclaimed together with Diderot in the 1770s and early 1780s, and he willingly acknowledged, as we have seen, that precisely an unyielding promotion of the principles expounded in the
Histoire philosophique
des Deux Indes
was what generated and molded the Revolution. Those more loyal to the legacy of Diderot, d’Holbach, and Helvétius, adhering to it through the 1780s and early 1790s, like Condorcet, Naigeon, Deleyre, the young Volney (who formed an attachment to d’Holbach in his last years), Garat, Say, Cabanis, and Mme. Helvétius, all ardently championed the Revolution of republicanism, equality, and democracy prior to and even (if in some cases more hesitantly) after the Terror.
¹⁷

Neither classical republicanism, then, nor Rousseau’s deism underpinned the democratic thrust behind the most comprehensively radical
and revolutionary writings of the late eighteenth century. The true underpinning was the confident secularism pronouncing philosophical reason the engine of universal human emancipation, deriving from the encyclopédistes and, earlier still, from the radical thinkers of the late seventeenth-century Enlightenment. The major textual sources that shaped this democratic republican political culture after 1750 were Diderot’s political articles and exposition of la volonté génerale in the
Encyclopédie
, Rousseau’s
Discourses
and
Contrat Social
(1762), the
Histoire philosophique
(1770), d’Holbach’s
La Politique naturelle
(1773), d’Holbach’s
Système social
(1773), Helvétius’s
De L’Homme
(1773), and Paine’s
Rights of Man
(1791) and
Age of Reason
(1793), along with Condorcet’s political writings and Volney’s
Les Ruines
(1791). The conviction that there is a true moral order and that that moral order is the creation of man and based on equality and reciprocity, and not on nature or God, drove the revolutionary impulse.

“The Enlightenment project failed,” it has been wrongly claimed, “because the radical empiricism of modern science, when applied to the history and sociology of morals, revealed no human consensus but instead an ultimate diversity of moral perspectives.”
¹⁸
This is the postmodernist cry. But in fact, radical Enlightenment critique provided logical, convincing grounds for discarding all religious and traditional perspectives and basing the claim to universal emancipation on a systematic monism and materialism that alone matched and fitted the criteria of the critique of existing politics, moral systems, and conditions. Mirabeau, Condorcet, Volney, Roederer, and the Brissotin revolutionaries followed Diderot, d’Holbach, and Helvétius in maintaining that true morality is one, cosmopolitan, and identical “pour tous les habitants de notre globe,” and should everywhere underpin the system of laws because there exists only one exclusive code of universal human rights and one logic treating everybody’s interests as equal.
¹⁹

Spreading genuine republicanism on all sides, creating only governments that sincerely promote the interests of the majority, the democratic republican revolutionaries maintained, also directs us on the path to universal peace. Their substituting a new moral code for that upheld by the theologians (and for the deism of Voltaire and Rousseau) was what made equality of the races, religions, and of men and women, as well as of individuals, and universal education, freedom of expression, and individual freedom, the philosophical foundation of democratic republicanism, the lynchpin of what d’Holbach dubbed the true
système social
.

For all these reasons, Radical Enlightenment was incontrovertibly the one “big” cause of the French Revolution. It was the sole fundamental cause because politically, philosophically, and logically it inspired and equipped the leadership of the authentic Revolution. It could do so because the Radical Enlightenment alone offered a package of values sufficiently universal, secular, and egalitarian to set in motion the forces of a broad, general emancipation based on reason, freedom of thought, and democracy.

Cast of Main Participants