Revolutionary Ideas: An Intellectual History of the French Revolution From the Rights of Man to Robespierre (14 page)

On the evening of 15 July, another group of revolutionaries staged a remarkable piece of political theater. A crowd, led by Georges Danton (1759–94), wound its way to the Bastille. Of humble background from a small town in the Champagne, a hundred miles from Paris, and a recently qualified junior lawyer, Danton had emerged through the sheer force of his personality—hearty, hot-tempered, and boisterous—as leader of one of the liveliest of the capital’s circles of committed revolutionaries. Marching from the Cordeliers district, one of the precincts most stirred by Desmoulins and Mandar in recent days, starting from the Café Procope, where Danton and his comrades had spent the day conferring and drinking, the crowd sought to demonstrate that the royal fortress had come under the people’s sovereignty. The officer in charge, just installed by Lafayette, the head of the National Guard, was summoned and subjected to a citizen’s arrest. The procession then escorted this officer to the city hall where, however, Paris’s freshly appointed mayor, Bailly, frowning on Danton’s antics, released him and sent him back to his post.
⁴¹

The Cordeliers district, in the heart of Left Bank Paris, later to give its name to one of the foremost revolutionary clubs, was a particular hub of political ferment. A mixed, partly working-class district, skilled artisans supplied most of the club’s membership, infusing it with some vigorous social discontent. But what shaped the Cordeliers precinct as a revolutionary spearhead was less the local artisans and their grievances than its leading figures—Danton, Desmoulins, Fabre d’Églantine, Mandar, Maréchal, Manuel, Prudhomme, Marat, and Pierre-François Robert (1762–1826), a prominent revolutionary journalist and author of another principal republican tract of 1789,
Le Républicanisme adapté à la France
. Aside from Danton himself, a brilliant orator but no intellectual, these were all highly literate and accomplished writers, editors, or publishers. Above all, what lent the Cordeliers its republican stamp, remarks Desmoulins, was the intensely literary Café Procope, in 1789, as in past decades, a constant focus of ardent philosophical debate.
⁴²

Figure 2.
The Storming of the Bastille, Paris, 14 July 1789
. Image courtesy Bibliothèque nationale de France.

During the summer of 1789, after the Bastille’s fall, a tussle for power developed in Paris between three rival political factions. One was headed by the astronomer Bailly, Condorcet’s rival for primacy within the Academy of Sciences and secretary of the council of electors, who
was appointed mayor with the approval of the crowds on 15 July by the Paris electors’ assembly.
⁴³
A long-standing critic of the ancien régime, Bailly, unlike Desmoulins, Carra, Condorcet, Robert, Bonneville, Brissot, and Mandar, was no republican democrat, however, but a constitutional monarchist, if more liberal than Mounier.
⁴⁴
Son of the keeper of the king’s pictures, former protégé of the renowned biologist Buffon, he was an eminent scholar and the first academician since Fontenelle to belong simultaneously (from 1784) to all three principal royal academies—the Académie Française, the Académie des Inscriptions, and the Académie des Sciences. A well-meaning man, resented by Mesmer enthusiasts for his part in the Académie des Sciences’ condemnation of Mesmerism as “superstition,”
⁴⁵
Bailly enjoyed a splendid reputation as an Enlightenment leader, or at least did until Catherine the Great discovered that he had become a revolutionary. Incensed, having earlier approved bestowal on him of an honorific medal depicting herself as the glorious sponsor of the sciences, she canceled the award.

Bailly was backed by Lafayette as well as, initially, by Gorsas and several pro-Revolution papers. Opposition to his leadership emanated partly from the almost openly republican democratic faction in the municipality headed by Brissot, Condorcet, and Bonneville. But confronting both Bailly and the Brissot faction was a third bloc—those inner Paris districts, like the Cordeliers, loudly voicing claims of “popular sovereignty.” Everyone agreed that a new municipal constitution for Paris was required. Accordingly, Bailly convened a civic convention consisting of three representatives from each of the city’s sixty districts, hence, a council of 180. At its first meeting on 25 July 1789, this new communal assembly empowered a committee of sixteen to deliberate articles for the projected new Paris municipal constitution, asking Brissot to draw up the plan for the committee to review, since he had already published more on constitutions and legal reform than practically anyone and had firsthand knowledge of England and the United States.
⁴⁶

As a legal theorist and social reformer, Brissot was especially indebted to Beccaria, Helvétius, and Rousseau. Besides having (like Mirabeau) personally witnessed the Geneva revolution of 1782, he was prominent in the Franco-British-American antislavery movement and, again like Mirabeau, a long-standing spokesman for another special cause—Jewish emancipation. His
Plan de municipalité
proposed organizing the new city government on three levels: a broad-based general assembly comprising five representatives from each electoral district, hence, three hundred delegates; an executive city council comprising sixty delegates
chosen by the communal assembly; and, finally, the executive proper, consisting of the mayor and the National Guard commander, which carried out the executive council’s orders. Representative democracy, of which Brissot, Condorcet, and Bonneville were committed advocates, was combined here with a well-defined executive and policy-making machinery. To prevent excessive direct democracy and demagoguery, Brissot’s scheme denied the electoral districts the right to impose binding instructions mandating their representatives in the communal assembly. The city districts were declared to be the chief focus of the democratic process at specified election times but not otherwise.
⁴⁷
Brissot located final authority to make overriding decisions in the assembly of three hundred. It was a plan that affirmed representative democracy, but also included an element of direct democracy.

Clashing directly with this concept, several inner-city primary assemblies, notably the Cordeliers, opposed both the mayor and the communal council and urged the primacy of the districts. If Bailly was checked by Brissot’s constitutional commission, Brissot antagonized several inner precincts by trying to impose representative democracy on them.
⁴⁸
Brissot and his allies did not reject direct democracy, popular petitions, and representations as such. Like Carra, Brissot willingly accepted Rousseau’s doctrine that people’s assemblies, when properly constituted, override the authority of any representative.
⁴⁹
What he rejected was excessive subordination of the people’s representatives to local assemblies and an uncritical enthusiasm for Rousseau. Here, in a nutshell, was the germ of the later split between the Revolution’s three main factions: constitutional monarchism, core Revolution democratic republicanism, and unbending Rousseauist populism.

Within days, enthusiasts were recommending that 14 July should become a national festival.
⁵⁰
On 17 July, a thoroughly chastened and downcast king entered Paris in person with a small entourage of officers. In an extraordinary ceremony, interpreted by most as one of “contrition,” he participated in a deeply symbolic official consecration of the Bastille’s storming, representing the event as a liberation from “despotism.”
⁵¹
Inevitably, such a ceremony marked a considerable, decisive curtailment of royal prestige. Publicly reconciling himself to the Paris insurrection, the king approved replacement of royal troops with the new city militia and Bailly’s appointment as mayor, while the latter cheerfully welcomed and applauded the monarch as “the father of the Revolution” and the people’s liberation, and pinned a tricolor cockade to his hat. The crowds were euphoric. There was tremendous jubilation. Most revolutionaries nevertheless still deeply distrusted Louis.

Newspaper accounts of the Bastille’s fall circulated everywhere. Within days, cheap prints visually depicting the event were on sale in the streets.
⁵²
In Bordeaux, massive crowds, summoned by wall posters, gathered in the Jardin Publique to celebrate, hear speeches, and yell support, with large numbers donning tricolor emblems. In Bordeaux and other cities, municipal government was now dramatically broadened, taken over, as in Paris, by the assemblies of electors, with local branches of the National Guard being established.
⁵³
Disturbingly, though, in several provinces the Bastille’s fall was followed, from 20 July, by more than two weeks of chaotic rural unrest, attacks on noble châteaus, and, in places, extensive murder and pillage. In Brittany, more than forty châteaus were sacked and two burned down. Dozens more were attacked in Alsace and the Franche-Comté. By early August, according to the Venetian envoy, nearly fifty noble châteaus had been attacked in the Dauphiné, and several torched.
⁵⁴
The National Assembly repeatedly expressed outrage and dismay at the anarchic conditions. But having become the voice of the people, noted one observer, the Revolution had no means of controlling the people.
⁵⁵

Widespread peasant violence in turn precipitated a wave of emigration (the first of several) of nobles from the countryside. Some of the most illustrious families—the Condés, Contis, Polignac, and Bretuil—fled from the environs of Paris, vowing to organize armed repression to defeat the Revolution from without.
⁵⁶
This combination of rural savagery with the July unrest in Paris and Rouen, withdrawal of troops, and emergence of a more vigorous and confident revolutionary press all acted as levers operating a basic shift of social and political power from aristocracy and parlements to Third Estate opinion-formers and the dominant cliques in the Paris communal assembly and National Assembly. At the same time, urban employment and economic circumstances generally deteriorated, especially in Paris where conditions grew worse as the months passed due to the flight of hundreds of nobles and other wealthy families, and the consequent redundancy of thousands of domestics, cooks, coachmen, tailors, and servants. The luxury trades, servicing aristocratic households, the city’s chief industry, ground almost to a standstill. Distress, shortages, and high food prices in turn intensified the strange mix of euphoria and disgruntlement gripping the city.

Under the combined pressure of Revolution and shortages, many former practices and fixed boundaries crumbled away, losing all meaning. The psychological impact of the Bastille’s fall and its aftermath had, as is well known, a lasting influence on the course of the Revolution and cultural life of the nation. The entire press, literary, and cultural
scene split asunder. Five days after the storming of the Bastille, the Paris theater world erupted with its own revolutionary drama. The noted young playwright, Marie-Joseph Chénier, another republican zealot later loathed by Robespierre, appealed to the Comédie-Française’s actors to stage his newly completed antimonarchical and anti-Catholic play
Charles IX
. Designed to inspire hatred of “les préjugés, le fanaticisme et la tyrannie,” it represented a new kind of political drama recounting a “national tragedy,” the Saint Bartholomew’s Day massacres of 1572. The Revolution had invaded the world of the theater, but most actors, accustomed to aristocratic audiences and royal censorship rather than deferring to dissident playwrights, refused to represent a French monarch onstage as a despot, criminal, and perjurer. Chénier countered with a publicity campaign demanding his
Charles IX
be performed for the public good, even loudly interrupting an evening performance of another play at the Théâtre-Français.

As the furor escalated, the actors found themselves in a weak position because the republican papers, notably Prudhomme’s
Révolutions de Paris
and Brissot’s
Patriote français
, unstintingly backed Chénier. Chief among Chénier’s aims was the complete liquidation of the ancien régime censorship by eliminating its last effective strand—theater censorship.
⁵⁷
It was the philosophes who taught him and his generation to think, explained Chénier in his best-known pamphlet (already written but not released until late August), leading them, as if by the hand, toward the truth: “eux seuls ont préparé la Révolution qui commence” (they alone have prepared the Revolution now commencing).
⁵⁸
He lists philosophy’s principal heroes as “Voltaire, Montesquieu, Rousseau, d’Alembert, Diderot, Mably, Raynal and Helvétius.”
⁵⁹
They had served society during their lives and now “from the tomb” inspired the Revolution, including the upheaval transforming the theater. How, asks Chénier, did “la philosophie moderne” evolve before 1789 from the writings of the philosophes into a formidable force reordering all of society? Through their writings, their example, and society’s mounting persecution of them. He particularly stressed the unwitting contribution of the bishops, who for years fought from the pulpit, issuing pastoral circulars denouncing la philosophie and its “doctrine abominable” as the source of all misfortune. The episcopate’s campaign had been amply seconded by what he called the “tyrannie continuelle” of the parlements opposing philosophy in every way. If philosophy in recent decades had pervaded France, entered the royal council, and entrenched itself in aristocratic homes, and if men had finally become reasonable in many respects, the
Revolution and France’s citizens owed it all to those hounded before 1788, not just by the Crown but by all branches of authority.
⁶⁰