Revolutionary Ideas: An Intellectual History of the French Revolution From the Rights of Man to Robespierre (16 page)

The abolition of “feudalism,” recorded Bailly, transpired in an instant. In hours, the Assembly accomplished more for the people than the wisest, most enlightened rulers had in centuries.
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It marked a stunning change. Centuries of law, tradition, and theology had proclaimed inequality of condition the mutual dependence of men, “a design marked out by Providence to which all men must submit,” as the antiphilosophe Chaudon, one of the chief Catholic apologists of the age, explained the matter. According to religious authority, it is only in spiritual status and matters of faith that men are equal, not worldly condition. Those who rejected this, challenging custom and aristocratic, ecclesiastical, and parlementaire “rights,” privilege, and social hegemony, were few and exclusively disciples of the philosophes.
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Nothing, remarked Brissot, better proves that government draws its power from public opinion than the Revolution’s dramatic course. Philosophy swayed the public and no one could arrest its course.
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Ending tithes without compensation, however, complicated matters for Sieyès. Condemning privilege more vehemently than anyone, he termed the ancien régime “l’empire de l’aristocratie,” “feudal” superstition that “still abuses most minds.”
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He was personally irreligious, like virtually all the major revolutionary leaders except Grégoire, Lamourette, and Fauchet, and wanted religious authority drastically curtailed. But he targeted the nobility without comparably denigrating ecclesiastical privilege, indeed opposed abolishing tithes without compensation,
considering this unjustified despoliation of property. This provoked criticism, some deputies construing his reluctance as that of a priest unwilling to set his own group’s special interest aside. He remained prominent, but, after August, this uncharismatic, unlovable, isolated figure never enjoyed quite the same profound respect in the Assembly as he had earlier.
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This only enhanced Mirabeau’s ascendancy as he further broadened the attack on privilege.

As a political leader, Mirabeau operated in a very different fashion from Sieyès. Where Sieyès worked mostly alone, Mirabeau headed a large and impressive team constituting the mostly egalitarian, republican core of the revolutionary leadership until April 1791 and, simultaneously, the regular headquarters of radical Enlightenment attitudes, ideology, journalism, and propaganda. Where Sieyès was largely unknown before the Revolution, by 1787 Mirabeau already possessed a wide-ranging international reputation, or rather two reputations—one enviable, the other less so. The latter was his fame as a rakish, disorderly, conspiratorial, renegade aristocrat, indebted and corrupt in life-style and habits, with an unscrupulous love of luxury and fine living. His positive reputation was as a veteran reformist publicist who had long been busy broadcasting his wide-ranging critique of existing society and institutions, even if many of his publications were collaborative enterprises written with the help—and often in large part by—those with whom he associated, a whole phalanx that since 1785 prominently included Brissot and Clavière.
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Mirabeau stood out among those publicly supporting Geneva exiles after 1782 and condemning the Anglo-Prussian suppression of the Dutch democratic movement in 1787. He maintained high-level contacts in Paris, Berlin, London, Geneva, Amsterdam, and Brussels all at the same time. Helped by several leading German enlighteners, he had published the best-known and most important critique of the Prussian monarchy of the age,
De la monarchie prussienne sous Frédéric le Grand
(6 vols., “Londres,” 1788). He had written memorably on Jewish emancipation, the French prison system, and infamous royal lettres de cachet, education, the American Revolution—warning against incipient tendencies toward informal “aristocracy” in the United States
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—and on a host of other topics. If the remarkable quantity of his publications impressed, equally striking was the consistency and comprehensiveness of his antimonarchical, antiaristocratic, enlightened stance.

In short, during the 1780s, Mirabeau had emerged not just in France but across Europe as the author who had, and was best known to have,
continually attacked absolutism, royal courts, aristocratic predominance and privilege, financial speculation, anti-Jewish prejudice, Prussian militarism, British imperialism, the British constitution, British law, the Dutch stadtholderate, and the conservative “aristocratic” tendency, led by John Adams and to a degree George Washington, in the American Revolution. He had attacked all these more incisively, effectively, and unsparingly than anyone else. He had done so by skillfully coordinating his team to amplify the effect, developing a versatile, well-oiled, political-ideological machine. Around him congregated a whole faction, partly in and partly outside the National Assembly, linked for a time to the Society of 1789 and noticeably more radical than the group around Lafayette. Strongly backed by key journalists like Brissot and Desmoulins, and supported by his paid assistants, the Genevan revolutionaries Étienne Dumont and Jacques-Antoine Duroveray, this was a bloc with which Sieyès and Talleyrand regularly associated, and which included, among others, Volney, Roederer, Cabanis, and Chamfort.
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Aided by his outstanding oratory and formidable coterie of philosophique advisers, Mirabeau’s continual seizure of the initiative in Assembly debates and effective propagation of radical ideas rendered him the nearest thing to the Revolution’s leading figure down to 1791. This confirms once again that little about the revolutionary leadership itself, down to early 1791, can be correctly understood without heavily stressing this confident and forceful intellectual background. The Assembly had settled accounts with “priestly aristocrats,” “judicial aristocrats,” and “noble aristocrats” but not yet with the sitting oligarchies controlling the city councils and dominating the towns, contended Mir abeau in a fiery speech on 13 August 1789. It was time to deal with “l’aristocratie municipale.” To eradicate “la corruption de l’aristocratie et du despotisme” from local government, held Mirabeau, city councils needed to be enlarged, made elective and accountable, and staffed with men of talent and experience. Comprehensive change here was as essential as extinguishing other forms of “aristocracy” from national politics and public life. The resulting decree fixed the same ratio of municipal officers to the population in all French towns, stipulating that all town council deputies must represent constituencies of equivalent size. Urban wards were allocated their own primary assemblies to sound out local opinion.
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Substituting elected mayors and officers representing the population’s wishes, on the model of Paris, for hereditary oligarchies that had long controlled town government assemblies was no simple matter.
How this should be accomplished even in Paris remained in dispute for months. During late August and September, efforts by the Right to recoup lost ground and lend the Revolution a more monarchical and hierarchical shape resumed. Brissot’s forty-eight-point plan was shelved by the Paris assembly. By ordering new elections to choose a fresh communal assembly charged with revising the city constitution, Bailly hoped to bend the new body in a more oligarchic direction, if not marginalize the democratic tendency altogether. Brissot and his allies, however, succeeded in ensuring that all men older than twenty-five who paid taxes were admitted to vote. Democratic elections followed, held through July, August, and September 1789, to Bailly’s consternation, resulting in Brissot, Condorcet, La Harpe, Beaumarchais, Bonneville, and Fauchet—all the most republican and democratic candidates and those most resistant to his constitutional royalist views—being reelected and presiding over the new communal council.
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Even more momentous than eliminating urban oligarchy was the Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen. Like other key edicts of 1789, it emerged from arduous debate among a small steering group of leading spokesmen, especially, but not only, the Assembly’s constitutional committee of eight (Mounier, Sieyès, Bergasse, Le Chapelier, Lally-Tollendal, Clermont-Tonnère, Talleyrand, and the archbishop of Bordeaux), the more radical figures vigorously backed by Prudhomme’s
Révolutions de Paris
, Mirabeau’s
Courrier,
and Brissot’s
Patriote français
. Saturated in the revolutionary terminology of the democratic Enlightenment, these organs proclaimed the Rights of Man to be established by la philosophie, not anyone’s laws or charters, or any religion, and hence, “éternels, inaliénables, imprescriptibles.”
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Lawyers, businessmen, and professionals, once again, played little or rather no part.
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The debate was led principally by Sieyès, Mounier, Lafayette, and Mirabeau, with Brissot—although outside the Assembly—called in by the committee to advise,
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and Rabaut, Volney, and Condorcet, now the Paris municipality’s envoy to the Versailles Assembly, also prominently participating.
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The revolutionary leadership proclaiming basic human rights did not derive the doctrine (as has been claimed) from the “natural right” theories of Grotius, Pufendorf, Barbeyrac, and their disciples. Rather, late seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century natural right theories, indeed the whole corpus of natural law, was scorned by them because natural lawyers from Grotius down to Barbeyrac understood natural law to derive from the divine will and divine Providence and thus
pronounced monarchy, aristocracy, and slavery all “natural” components of society. Carra had earlier dismissed the entire tradition of natural law theory in 1773 for its essential theological slant and failure to make equality the fundamental principle of natural right.
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In 1789, all the Assembly leaders of a philosophique disposition, that is, most of those who counted in this debate, eschewed traditional natural law theories.

Condorcet, having long advocated the need for a philosophical “declaration of the inalienable rights” of man, had had his own first draft printed back in February 1789.
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Soon other draft versions proliferated, generating what soon became a tangled, heated debate revolving around the question: What does it mean to declare men naturally free and equal? Many deputies were averse to all the philosophy, some greatly disliking the idea of enacting any such set of principles before the future constitution itself was agreed on and, even more, to inserting such a document in the preface to the constitution.
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Other critics wanted affirmations of the Decalogue, religion, and piety prominently placed in the preface. Volney early on scandalized the Assembly’s entire conservative majority by proposing an incisive and uncompromising formulation that averred a Declaration of Rights necessary because the people’s liberty, property, security, and fiscal contributions had, under French kings, been continually “violated” owing to ignorance and the executive power’s oppressive instincts.
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The committee labored long and hard, and faced major divisions within itself.

The Declaration slowly emerged, then, from prolonged debate amid serious disagreement between moderates and radicals, with numerous revisions hammered out in committee. The American Declaration of 1776 had set a crucial example, granted Mirabeau, but he also insisted on what he saw as crucial defects. Ignorance and “error” being the chief reasons why basic human rights had been trampled for so long, one needed to go beyond the American Declaration and secure a universal justification of human rights, a “declaration raisonée,” something more abstract and philosophical, invoking “plus hautement la raison.” The American Declaration had not, after all, issued from extensive public or legislative debate but instead been penned behind closed doors by a small committee. In an enlightened age, it befitted France to proceed further and more broadly, presenting humankind with a universal model, “un code de raison et sagesse” (a code of reason and wisdom), that would be admired and imitated by other nations.
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Condorcet was equally dissatisfied with the American Declaration and also formulated
objections to seven different American state constitutions, criticizing Virginia’s Declaration of Rights (1776) for enacting a public obligation to support religion and churches, which, he believed, no democratic republic should do.
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Sieyès, whose original draft met with some support but also fierce objections, initially led the campaign for human rights based on fundamental principles. Mirabeau expressly endorsed Sieyès’s political, theoretical principles. All public authority and powers without exception, maintained both theorists, are an “émanation de la volonté générale.”
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Their reasoning rested on the distinctly un-Hobbesian doctrine that men do not surrender their natural liberty and “rights” when establishing society, but rather secure them on an equal basis, protecting the weak from the strong and precluding all institutionalized subordination.
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Mirabeau objected only that the declaration needed to be shorter and more readily comprehensible.
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A people shaped by antisocial institutions cannot immediately adjust to “des principes philosophiques” in all their fullness.
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Claiming the law cannot be other than the “expression de la volonté générale,” expressed by representatives chosen for a “short time” by the citizenry,
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Sieyès’s draft proved theoretically acceptable likewise to Brissot and Prudhomme’s
Révolutions de Paris
, and for the most part to Rabaut, though they too judged it “trop métaphysique,” too much of a “thèse philosophique,” and beyond most people.
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Their criticism prompted Sieyès’s second, shorter version formulated at the beginning of August.
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The emphasis in Sieyès, Mirabeau, Brissot, and all the radical faction on “ignorance” as the main reason why the people had hitherto possessed no grasp of their rights derived broadly from the Radical Enlightenment standpoint, if also (but far more tangentially) from the physiocratic tradition.
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