Revolutionary Ideas: An Intellectual History of the French Revolution From the Rights of Man to Robespierre (18 page)

Building a New Constitution

One of the Declaration’s goals was to set guidelines for the forthcoming French Constitution, ensuring that it derived from philosophique principles and not existing practices, laws, or charters. Nothing at all should survive of a society of orders. In reaction, the group most opposed to the republican vanguard, the “English bloc,” or
parti anglais
,
led by Mounier and Lally-Tollendal, advocated constitutional monarchy organized on bicameral lines with a royal veto over legislation and a monarch equipped with real powers, able to choose his ministers. Throughout September 1789, these two leaders remained in a strong position, the first “a serious dry politician” loathing “abstract propositions,” according to the great historian Edward Gibbon (who agreeably dined with both Mounier and Lally-Tollendal at Lausanne later that year, after they fled revolutionary France), the second, Lally-Tollendal, “an amiable man of the world and a poet.”
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Regularly invoking Montesquieu, the thinker most often criticized by Sieyès, this group wanted to retain as much monarchy and aristocracy as they could in the new constitution. Other “moderates” included Nicolas Bergasse (1750–1832), celebrated foe of la philosophie moderne, scorned by Cloots as an admirer of Mesmer and ardent Rousseauiste.
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The struggle between the parti anglais and the “party of philosophy,” as Roederer called it, culminated in clashes over the royal veto and bicameralism.

Bicameralism was urged by Mounier, Lally-Tollendal, and Bergasse, the last having advocated a two-chamber system since before the Estates-General’s convening, though he preferred a nonaristocratic upper chamber while Mounier wanted something like Britain’s House of Lords, which formally embodied aristocratic preeminence in society. Even if at first glance such a hereditary aristocratic chamber shocks “les notions philosophiques,” held Mounier, France should definitely emulate Britain.
⁶⁵
The Assembly deferred too much to the “impractical notions” of the philosophes, he insisted, and too little for the once immensely admired British model. A few decades before, everyone had admired Britain unreservedly: the French should revert to political wisdom based on experience.
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Unlike Brissot, Volney, and Mirabeau, Mounier also eulogized the American state constitutions. The sensible Americans, after all,
had
followed British practice—except in Pennsylvania, the only formally democratic state at that point in the United States, but one which then had a single-chamber legislature. Mounier scorned the Pennsylvania democratic model as based on “abstraites et métaphysiques” ideas.
⁶⁷

Continually stressing British superiority and American good sense and “experience,” Mounier aimed at mixed government—a balance of powers between executive, legislature, and judiciary.
⁶⁸
But he stood little chance of succeeding, as his ideas involved returning much status and authority, now already lost, to the Crown and nobility.
⁶⁹
Backed though he was by moderate Enlightenment opinion abroad, including
Schlözer at Göttingen and Gibbon at Lausanne, Mounier’s conservative monarchiens were thoroughly routed in the French Assembly.
⁷⁰
Adulation of Britain, Sieyès had repeatedly asserted in his tracts of 1788, was a crass state of mind appealing to an ignorant majority who liked waffling about “experience” and who disdained “la philosophie,” disdain that in reality served only the interests of a corrupt and rapacious nobility. The legislature alone should embody the will of the nation, the executive’s task being to carry out, not obstruct, the people’s will.
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Britain’s constitution, a product of contingency and circumstance, fell far short of the “véritable ordre politique.” Condorcet, on the other hand, did favor a bicameral arrangement, but only provided the upper house did not resemble the London House of Lords and consisted of “hommes éclairés” distinguished by their intellectual abilities and allowed only a limited veto over the main Assembly’s resolutions.
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On 10 September 1789, the Assembly followed Sieyès and Mirabeau by voting 849 to 89 to reject Mounier’s proposals and adopt only one chamber in the new legislature.
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As for the unlimited royal veto over legislation that monarchiens favored, this too stood little chance of succeeding. Where they wanted an absolute royal veto to entrench monarchy, radicals wanted either a diminished vetoing power or no veto at all. Lafayette, Barnave, and soon a majority of Assembly deputies, including Mirabeau, believed the only way to unite the Assembly and “give the king a due influence” was to opt for a “sanction limité” or suspensive—that is, temporary—veto. A temporary royal veto, urged Mirabeau, would not clash with la volonté générale but enhance and protect it. Those more republican than him disagreed and certainly won the publicity battle in Paris. On 15 September, the “suspensive veto” passed nevertheless by 673 votes to 352, with Sieyès and Rabaut among the considerable minority, around 143 deputies, wanting no veto.
⁷⁴
As the prolonged veto debate shows, all the philosophe-révolutionnaires were more or less solid republicans from the outset, insisting that the National Assembly possess all the power, authority, responsibility, and prestige of government. But Mirabeau and Sieyès were de facto not doctrinaire republicans, and both aimed to keep the monarch as a figurehead while rendering him virtually powerless in practice.
⁷⁵
The veto debate was the first “constitutional” controversy in which Paris actively intervened and tried to reverse the Assembly’s decision. Working with Brissot as leader of the Parisian republican faction and editor of the
Patriote français
, Sieyès continued to fight the temporary veto.
⁷⁶
The republicans, especially around the
Palais-Royal, mobilized some solid support. Brissot and his allies, Prudhomme’s
Révolutions de Paris
recounts, orchestrated public pressure against those championing the royal
veto suspensif
, especially Barnave and his faction, but also Mirabeau.
⁷⁷
Advancing the Revolution, held Brissot, Carra, Gorsas, Chénier, Villette, and other key publicists outside the Assembly, required wielding la philosophie like an external battering ram, and harnessing all the possibilities offered by liberty of thought, speech, the press, theater, clubs, and to gather, petition, and demonstrate.

“Progress of knowledge” working on
la raison publique
would eventually teach men what was lacking for the true good of society, and such enlightenment, held Condorcet, would become the “legislator of all men.” The philosophie moderne shaping the Revolution derived, he thought, from a cumulative inheritance generated by many Enlightenment writers, some deserving more recognition than they had received. Boulanger in his
Despotisme orientale
, had been “no less inspired” and provided just as many innovative insights as Voltaire, Rousseau, and other better-known philosophes.
⁷⁸
In the same issue of the
Chronique de Paris
of 22 September 1789, he also stressed the “necessity” of the forthcoming constitution being ratified by the citizenry, urging the need for representative bodies of rural communities to counterbalance the towns. Democracy must emancipate the rural population too, ensuring the voice of the whole country was heard. Legal safeguards must prevent the formation of a new oppressive landowning elite.
⁷⁹

The theme of an accumulated democratic Enlightenment featured again in the
Chronique de Paris
in October, in a review of a recently published two-volume collection of Mably and Condillac extracts. The overthrow of the Bastille and “our servitude,” of which “we have had the happiness to be the witnesses,” was the joint achievement of many heroic thinkers who consciously prepared the overthrow of oppression. “Gloire à ces écrivains immortels!” It was “essential their principles should become those of everyone” and their ideas circulate and form “l’esprit publique.” This applied both to France’s youth, who needed education, and to “those classes of society previously permitted to suffer but not to enlighten themselves.”
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In 1789–90, the Revolution’s democratic republican publicists judged legislation good or bad not on the basis of precedent, experience, interest, or religion but according to whether it was, as Carra liked to say, “vraiment philosophique.” Everyone had to adjust to this to an extent. Pro-Revolution clergy now openly proclaimed, like the Abbé Fauchet in his
Second Discours sur
la Liberté française
, delivered at the church of Sainte Marguerite, Faubourg Saint-Antoine, on 31 August 1789, that the sole true religion is religion “united” with la philosophie.
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But what if the people were persuaded to follow different leaders? Marat, with his bracing, widely read paper,
L’Ami du peuple
, which commenced in September 1789, sounded a shrill new note of illiberal extremism extraneous to the proceedings thus far. Denouncing the “criminal project” of “les classes privilégiés” with unparalleled vehemence, Marat demanded the elimination of the “aristocratic party” from the Assembly.
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Marat might be right, granted those opposing the
veto suspensif
, to assail the “corrupt faction” of monarchiens trying to mislead the Assembly, but he was mistaken in employing such violent and intemperate language. Foes of liberty should be denounced “avec modération.” This, retorted Marat, was like putting a soldier on trial for fighting his hardest against perfidious enemies.
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In his issue of 28 September 1789, he extended his assault to the bankers and financiers “who build their fortunes on the ruin of others.”
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Bailly figured among those he denounced for styling themselves “bons patriotes” while actually seeking influence and pensions at court.
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By labeling the current revolutionary leadership disloyal to their proclaimed egalitarian principles, Marat inaugurated what became the standard technique of populist authoritarians tarring their opponents.

Marat’s setting himself up as public censor—aggressive verbal assaults, rhetoric of secret intrigue, and incessant calls for unsparing punishment and purges—provoked angry demands for his journal to be shut down.
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These failed, thanks to the vigilance of Brissot and other stalwart defenders of freedom of the press. In the years 1789–92, as Mme. de Staël later observed, French society was “allowed, freely and unequivocally, the liberty of the press.”
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But the problem of how to check plebeian anger deliberately stirred by virulently divisive journalism, inciting the unruly against political rivals, proved irresolvable. Slowly, support grew for Marat’s contention that it is not philosophy but the people’s will, direct popular sovereignty, that constitutes the true criterion of legitimacy. “Public opinion alone … can make laws,” insisted sympathizers later prominent in the Jacobin Club.
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Marat’s tireless insistence on “morality,” “virtue,” and the ordinary man’s feelings created a powerful underlying tension that would eventually derail the Revolution of Reason.

Proclaiming an overriding popular sovereignty, Marat was the first systematic critic, from a populist standpoint, of the principle
of representation espoused by the “party of philosophy.” If his temperament and readership contributed to his dogmatism, militancy, and anti-intellectualism, so did his long-standing fervor for his compatriot, the “sublime Rousseau.”
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If scholars often note how far Sieyès and Mirabeau diverge from Rousseau on questions of representation and popular sovereignty, attention must also be fixed on the clash between what were soon the two main rival revolutionary factions over Rousseau’s critique of representative democracy.
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The people’s representatives must defer to the popular will, contended Marat, replacing “la philosophie” with unrelenting stress on popular sovereignty, ordinary men’s feelings, and “virtue,” like Danton and Robespierre later. With Marat’s
L’Ami du peuple
, intolerance of dissent and a harshly dictatorial tendency first emerged.
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The main Brissotin charges against Marat during the power struggles of 1792–93 were precisely the incitement to violence and urging the populace to take the law into their own hands.

Marat’s supporters professed to be more authentic egalitarians than the current leadership, most of whom—like Sieyès, Mirabeau, Brissot, Volney, Bailly, Barnave, Roederer, Carra, Gorsas, and Desmoulins—more or less openly disdained the multitude’s ignorance and addiction to “superstition.” It was Marat’s subordination of reason to popular will and the common man’s feelings that especially separated his and his allies’ Revolution of the Will from the Radical Enlightenment’s Revolution of Reason. The materialism of Helvétius, Diderot, d’Holbach, Condorcet, and Sieyès was wholly incompatible with Marat’s cult of “virtue” and the popular will; their philosophy prioritized science, knowledge, and understanding, while his stressed the common man’s instinct. For Marat, intellectual understanding counts for less than the ordinary man’s will; where reason remains fixed, the popular will remains free. His opponents’ materialism struck Marat as useless for explaining the passions, quest for “glory,” and power of sentiment. Helvétius, in his estimation, failed entirely to render the passions and reason contrary principles.
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