Revolutionary Ideas: An Intellectual History of the French Revolution From the Rights of Man to Robespierre (15 page)

The
Charles IX
furor was a major cultural revolutionary episode with implications extending far beyond freedom of expression. At stake was the social function of culture itself. During the summer of 1789, those resisting
Charles IX
at the same time often accepted freedom of the press as such.
⁶¹
At issue was the right to stage material that was topical and indeed divisive—politically, religiously, and socially. In eighteenth-century England, the press was (partially) free, assuredly, but the theater remained rigidly controlled, and more tightly than ever since Walpole’s time.
⁶²
Freedom of the theater existed nowhere, and never had, but promised to be a major extension of liberty, opening up a vast new thought-world to innumerable city-dwellers not fully literate. Theater culture stands apart from the world of print by being experienced collectively in an atmosphere of heightened emotion in which the semiliterate fully participate. There can be no true freedom of expression, contended Chénier, where theater is aligned behind conventional thinking. Theater only reflects the people’s will where free from the strict conventions to which historically it has been subjected. Hence, the stage, held Chénier, La Harpe, and other stalwarts of the 1789 theater controversy, could be a more potent agent of change than even reading.
⁶³
Equally, the “antitheatricalism” of Chénier’s opponents played on the seemingly acute danger of unchaining previously restrained popular emotion.

The newly reformed municipality under Mayor Bailly had to intervene. Both sides in the public dispute accepted that society had entered a new era of freedom, and that the theater represented a potent agent of inspiration and reeducation. In terms of freedom of expression and the much-discussed but not-yet-proclaimed Declaration of the Rights of Man, Chénier might have seemed justified. But Bailly and the anti-republican opposition arguably held the more logical position. France was a monarchy, they pointed out, that had always proclaimed Catholicism the state church: any play purposely aiming to render monarchy and Catholicism odious was therefore contrary to public order and the public interest. Undeniably,
Charles IX
not only dramatized the undesirable consequences of “tyranny” and “fanaticism” but actually equated monarchy with tyranny, and Catholicism with fanaticism, declaring the Saint Bartholomew’s Day massacre a crime committed by king and court.
⁶⁴
Bailly opposed staging
Charles IX
, sharply distinguishing, like British ministers, between liberty of thought and the press and freedom
of theater, because in the theater people experience spectacles collectively and, as he put it, “s’électrisent” (mutually electrify each other), becoming potentially disruptive of public order and good morals.
⁶⁵
Several critics, like Quatremère de Quincy, agreed that the multitude was unpredictable and easily steered in the wrong direction by unpatriotic writers.
⁶⁶

Backed by the mayor, the actors briefly regained the initiative. But the republicans mobilized support in the Paris sections against Bailly, in part by buying up large quantities of tickets and packing performances with supporters.
⁶⁷
On 19 August 1789, demonstrators disrupted a performance at the Comédie-Française, calling out from the pit for
Charles IX
. There was no official permission for this, the actors protested, to which the demonstrators replied: “no more permissions!” As the republicans gained ground in Paris municipal politics, so did Chénier, La Harpe, and other republican theater men in the capital’s theater wars. Finally, on 4 November 1789, with the theater’s name officially changed from Comédie-Française to Théâtre de la Nation, the play was staged against the actors’ wishes. On opening night, both Danton, who had attended some rehearsals, and Mirabeau figured among the audience, endorsing the play’s message. As the curtain rose, Danton, despite his huge girth, leaped onto the stage to direct the applause. Staged for several months over the winter of 1789–90,
Charles IX
was indeed a landmark in theater history, inaugurating an era characterized (until Robespierre’s coup) by an entirely new close alignment of the stage with philosophy.
⁶⁸

The events of the summer of 1789 thus had a most remarkable outcome. Leadership of the Revolution had fallen into the hands of a small, unrepresentative clique. Those leading the Revolution inspired by la philosophie remained, moreover, remarkably confident that they knew where and how to lead. Officially, France remained a monarchy with Catholicism its public religion. But behind the scenes, the republican-minded Left among the leadership was already bent on eliminating every last vestige of genuine monarchy, allowing no aristocratic strand in the new constitution, and very drastically curtailing religious authority. Theoretically, Mirabeau and Sieyès were constitutional monarchists, but only minimally. A materialist philosophe since at least 1770, Sieyès was a hardened ideologue who wholly excluded faith, theology, metaphysics, spirituality, and miracles from his thought, which the curious but persistent notion of aligning him with Locke has tended to obscure.
⁶⁹
His notes on philosophy, the “Grand Cahier métaphysique” of the 1770s, explores Helvétius, Condillac, and Bonnet on evidence
and mental processes, and displays familiarity also with many other Enlightenment thinkers, including Leibniz and Wolff. Already in the 1770s, Sieyès was much preoccupied with the ideal of “le bonheur général” (the general happiness) of society, rejecting all social privilege outright.
⁷⁰

Sieyès’s central doctrine, linking him closely to Helvétius, d’Holbach, and Diderot, is that man’s principal goal and all his activity “carries him to seek his happiness.” “True social order” is where the individual’s interests are treated equally, and equality of the right to protection and assistance becomes the supreme interest and collective good of all.
⁷¹
Hobbes’s conception of sovereignty as transferable is altogether abjured by Sieyès. This, along with his undeviating rejection of Montesquieu’s relativism and respect for privilege, and Rousseau’s strictures against representation, shaped his political thought. Loathing nobility and privilege, Sieyès also refused to eulogize the unanimity of views and austere discipline venerated by the authoritarian populists, including the pristine “virtue” of ancient Sparta and Rome so lauded by Mably and Rousseau. To him, these were models entangled in slavery and irrelevant to the true revolutionary project. As has sometimes been noted, there are therefore striking affinities between his general approach and late seventeenth-century one-substance democratic thought, as is hardly surprising given his long immersion in radical ideas.
⁷²

A small, unrepresentative group of philosophes, journalists, librarians, and pamphleteers, with Sieyès and Mirabeau at their head, had stirringly taken the lead. Furthermore, it was already evident, as the great Welshman and Enlightenment political thinker Richard Price expressed it on 3 August 1789, writing to Jefferson, that “this was one of the most important revolutions that have ever taken place in the world. A Revolution that must astonish Europe; that shakes the foundations of despotic power; and that probably will be the commencement of a general reformation in the governments of the world which hitherto have been little better than usurpations on the rights of mankind, impediments to the progress of human improvement, and contrivances for enabling a few grandees to suppress and enslave the rest of mankind.”
⁷³

CHAPTER 4

The Rights of Man

S
UMMER AND
A
UTUMN
1789

From the Bastille to the King’s Return to Paris (July–October 1789)

Politically and psychologically, the king had lost much ground. After July 1789, he was never trusted again. Obliged to acquiesce in the Revolution, he could at the same time barely conceal his distaste for the unprecedented changes occurring around him. He abhorred the “meta-physical and philosophical government” with its slogans, symbols, and uniforms, along with the far-reaching constitutional proposals, so injurious to his prestige and authority, formulated by a bunch of ideologues he seemed powerless to check.
¹
Three crucial sets of decrees dominated developments during the late summer of 1789: the abolition of feudal privileges of 4 August, the 26 August Declaration of Rights, and curtailment of the royal veto in September.

Resounding initiatives, all proposed within a few weeks of the Bastille’s fall, these were plainly not the work of rioting peasants or hungry or unemployed artisans. But neither were they promoted in the slightest degree by business, finance, or lawyers. The parlements, the country’s chief repositories of legal expertise, were abhorred by all democratic revolutionary leaders due to their prominent role in the royal censorship and long campaign since the 1750s against the
Encyclopédie
and la philosophie, and hence purposely excluded from the revolutionary process altogether. That a small steering group of the Assembly could prod the rest into accepting that neither parlements nor any past or existing body, institution, charter, law, or precedent possessed any validity was something unparalleled in history and left foreign envoys aghast. Bad laws had corrupted society, affirmed Sieyès, among the “most resolutely philosophical of the major political actors of the French Revolution,” and continually conspired “contre la multitude.”
²
Morals and the laws
were all wrongly constituted, concurred Mirabeau, Roederer, and the pro-Revolution press. Yet it was one thing for Sieyès, Mirabeau, Brissot, Pétion, or Volney to pronounce every privilege by definition an affront to the rights of the “non-privilégiés” composing the majority, but quite another for the Assembly to agree that liquidating all privileges is required by reason and must ensue without delay.
³

A small fragment of the Assembly, the parti de philosophie achieved a temporary ascendancy over its proceedings by speeches, publications, forming committees, and dominating the debating clubs and reading societies both in Paris and provincial centers.
⁴
Most Frenchmen witnessed the Revolution in action, locally, observed Rabaut, in the primary assemblies, political clubs, politicized cafés, and reading circles, all divided into vying factions for or against the new ideas.
⁵
Paris abounded in “hommes instruits” who understood the new republican, egalitarian, and democratic concepts, and explained them to those for whom all this was new. These then, in turn, passed on the word to the great mass of the uninstructed. It was a strange, wholly unprecedented form of power wielded through speeches, pamphlets, the theater, and the press, a phenomenon that the royal government remained if not completely blind to, broadly unable to cope with. When not holding forth in the cafés and parks, the revolutionary leadership of 1789 was to be seen haranguing the Paris city government (Commune) and editing the revolutionary press.

The mounting rural and urban unrest was all wind in their sails. On 4 August 1789, an Assembly majority, including many nobles and clergy, thoroughly panicked by the attacks on aristocratic châteaus in the provinces, the wave of peasant violence known as “La Grande Peur” (20 July–11 August), agreed to abolish serfdom and feudal dues, and suppress all provincial privileges forever, albeit certain long-standing feudal “rights” in the countryside survived as money payments deemed a form of property that could only be liquidated by purchase. Among the privileges abolished outright were favored access to military, diplomatic and civil posts, hunting “rights,” and special status before the law. For the first time in recorded history, all citizens, without distinction of birth, became eligible for all posts, positions, and dignities. The entire system of status, exemptions, and special fiscal privileges, including ecclesiastical immunities, ended.

Sieyès’s overriding principle (drawn from Diderot), that all privileges are by nature “injustes, odieux, et contradictoires à la fin suprême de toute société politique” (unjust, odious, and contradicting the supreme
end of all political society),
⁶
infused every aspect of the early Revolution. In the next few days, it was further agreed to end venality of judicial offices, all vestiges of seigneurial jurisdiction, and to abolish the ecclesiastical tithe.
⁷
The ancient privileges of the guilds and guild masters were abrogated also. Taking advantage of the intimidated state of the more conservative representatives, the Assembly’s philosophique clique, headed by Mirabeau and those surrounding Barnave pushed these momentous edicts through.
⁸
Barnave, a brilliant orator from the Dauphiné, though later a confirmed constitutional monarchist and centrist, during 1789 spoke in the Assembly more like an “ardent friend of liberty,” as republicans put it, than an ally of the court. Rather farcically in the circumstances, the Assembly, prompted by Trophime-Gérard Lally-Tollendal (1751–1830), a royalist eager to salvage whatever possible from the wreck of monarchical authority, awarded Louis the title of “Restaurateur de la Liberté française,” while the archbishop of Paris ordered a special
Te Deum,
thanking the divinity for abolishing feudalism.
⁹