Revolutionary Ideas: An Intellectual History of the French Revolution From the Rights of Man to Robespierre (20 page)

The constitutional monarchists found themselves obliged to regroup. After Mounier’s and Lally-Tollendal’s departure, there still remained in the Assembly a sizable centrist residue or party of modérantisme. Indeed, together with the recalcitrant, ultrarightist bloc, conservatives composed a firm majority potentially rallying behind Crown, aristocracy, and Church, but the disagreements between these blocs, as well as between the strict
constitutionnels
and the liberal monarchists backing Barnave, remained deep, bitter, and obdurate.
¹¹⁴
As the struggle on the Assembly floor resumed, the designations “Right” and “Left” came to be regularly employed to label the factions in the hall. Republicans and democrats gravitated to the left, monarchists and most clergy to the right. It was at this point that one of the deputies’ clubs repairing from Versailles, the Club Breton (so-called because it had originally consisted of delegates from that province), resumed in Paris in the former convent of the Jacobins. It became the debating home of a large part of the Assembly, some two hundred deputies, Barnave among them, initially mostly representing the center ground.
¹¹⁵

The National Assembly remained divided into the four main blocs, characterized by Jefferson on 19 September. First, as before, there were the aristocrats, comprising the nobility, high clergy, and parlementaires who wanted executive power vested in the Crown and not the representative body. Now led by Pierre-Victor Malouet (1740–1814), a former
intendant of Toulon, and the Abbé Maury, the legislature’s doughtiest monarchist during 1791–92, this group wanted a France run not by a National Assembly acknowledging a monarchical figurehead, such as Barnave proposed, but a reformed, more efficient, centralized monarchy with a weak representative body. Second, and very different, were the “moderate royalists who wished for a constitution nearly similar to that of England.” These men were oblivious to the complaints of British democrats, like Price and Priestley, that the English constitution was corrupt and undemocratic and that the British, as Price put it, “are duped by the forms of liberty.” Third was the flamboyantly liberal monarchist Orléanist faction. Last, there were the “republicans, who are willing to let their first magistracy [i.e., the Crown] be hereditary,” explained Jefferson, “but [intend] to make it very subordinate to the legislature, and to have that legislature consist of a single chamber.”
¹¹⁶

Despite consistently being a relatively small minority of deputies, the revolutionary Left dominated the Assembly’s proceedings and standing committees and undeviatingly pursued their course, thanks to sentiment in the streets, the liberal rhetoric and ambitions of the Orléanistes and Fayettistes, and the profound divisions debilitating the Right.
¹¹⁷
Among conservatives, the Paris mob were intensely resented for behaving like obedient “watchdogs” shepherded by the Assembly’s most radical faction—upstart publicists, journalists, and self-proclaimed shapers of opinion acting against Crown, Church, parlementaires, and nobles.
¹¹⁸
Their most robust support emanated from the cafés and journals. Outside the capital, this inevitably encouraged murmuring about “Paris” exerting undue influence. Such protests were dismissed by the prorevolutionary press as an insidious ploy to stir up jealousy against Paris in the provinces. Meanwhile, there was no slackening in the pace of fundamental change.

In late October, the Assembly decreed that no “distinction by orders” was permitted any longer in meetings of municipalities or other public gatherings anywhere in France, being wholly “contraire aux principes établis par l’Assemblée Nationale.”
¹¹⁹
During November, the Assembly moved on to examine schemes to abolish the particular privileges and procedures—as well as physical boundaries—of France’s historic provinces, such as Normandy, Brittany, Dauphiné, Languedoc, and Provence, as these were of very different sizes, traditions, and rank, and, hence, unsuitable for a new order rooted in philosophical reason. To replace them, the Assembly proposed “departments” of equivalent size and status, though initially there was disagreement as to whether these
should be equal in population or area. As with the other great revolutionary changes, this one had been projected long before, especially by Sieyès and Condorcet, borrowing partly from Turgot. Suppression of historic provincial identities and privileges, urged Mirabeau, Rabaut, Thouret, and Condorcet, would underpin the emerging new constitution by securing that “equality of influence that belongs essentially to every individual.”
¹²⁰

The final arrangement, aiming to ensure that elected “representatives” represented equal numbers of people, was a deft compromise devised by Barnave between the two principal criteria: population and territory. Henceforth, France would comprise more than eighty departments of roughly comparable geographical size, but to ensure that the number of representatives was fixed in proportion to population, each department was further divided into either three or four electoral districts.
¹²¹
The committee implementing this ingenious plan proceeded briskly. By 12 November, Rabaut announced the boundaries of the first forty new departments.
¹²²
More outlying regions took longer to delimit, but this too was accomplished within weeks. “This great and magnificent work,” commented the bookseller Nicolas Ruault in January 1790, was principally due to the Abbé Sieyès and Marquis de Condorcet, the latter having placed himself alongside the Patriots. Aristocrats deride this philosophe with a weak voice and quiet manner, he added, as “le mouton enragé” (the enraged sheep).
¹²³

Equally vital to the philosophique agenda was reforming France’s antiquated judicial machinery. Dispensing justice should no longer be the preserve of an entrenched elite. The Revolution and the people, averred the
Chronique de Paris
in December 1789, have no more committed or embittered enemy than the parlements.
¹²⁴
Eliminating the existing judicial elite, projected in August 1789, proceeded in stages until finalized in March 1790.
¹²⁵
At Bordeaux, the
palais
of the parlement was bolted and sealed by the municipality on 30 September. Paine’s ally, the American radical Barlow, later described France’s pre-1790 “judiciary nobility” as a “set of men who purchase the privilege of being the professional enemies of the people, of selling their decisions to the rich, and distributing individual oppression; hence the source of those draconian codes of criminal jurisprudence which enshrine the idol property in a bloody sanctuary, and teach the modern European, that his life is of less value than the shoes on his feet.”
¹²⁶
Among the Revolution’s finest achievements, concluded Naigeon later, was the complete extirpation of the regional high courts, or parlements, and with them of the so-called noblesse de robe.
¹²⁷

Defense of the parlements became a rallying point in the Assemblée Nationale for numerous deputies. As the dismantlement of France’s ancient institutional structure accelerated, several parlements—those of Rouen, Rennes, Toulouse, and Metz, along with the provincial estates of Languedoc, Dauphiné, and the Cambrésis—stubbornly contested the legality of the enactments destroying the parlements’ powers, citing numerous historic charters, constitutions, and privileges. In November, the Assembly replied by suspending the parlements’ functions indefinitely, and before long decided on their complete abolition. The Assemblée, protested the Right, was despoiling the parlementaires of their professional status and competence, in fact, their property, their families having purchased their elevation to the noblesse de robe. Previously, parlements had often succeeded in obstructing royal intentions whenever they objected to new laws and in mobilizing popular support for their obstructionism. But this time, when they strove to block the uprooting of France’s existing laws and institutions, few came to their assistance.
¹²⁸
The only Frenchmen supporting the parlements, the newssheets sent to the villages assured the peasantry, were the same officials who opposed dismantling feudal dues, church tithes, the corvée, and gabelle, namely, the magistrates, intendants, and officers of the
capitaineries
.
¹²⁹

These outmoded corporations, the parlements, commented republicans unsympathetically, endeavored to “perpetuate the abuses of the
ancien régime
.” The people deserted them. The contrast with neighboring Belgium was nothing less than astounding. Over the winter of 1789–90, the Belgian Revolution took what, to the French revolutionaries, was a highly perplexing turn. The Brabant urban and judicial elites, equivalents of the French urban oligarchies and parlementaires, successfully mobilized the people against the local democrats, called Vonckists after their leader, Jean-François Vonck (1743–92), allied to the Left republican leadership in Paris. The Belgian common man rallied behind the judicial elite and violently assailed the democrats. How could the Belgians, asked the pro-Revolution journals in Paris, allow themselves to be so outrageously misled? The answer was that Emperor Joseph II had tried to reform the Southern Netherlands’ judicial system and curtail church property, revenues, and privileges by imperial decree. This, to Condorcet and the
Chronique de Paris
editors, was putting the cart before the horse. Fundamental social and legal realities were not transformed by royal edicts, they held, but by la philosophie gradually shifting attitudes and preparing the people for great changes. Public opinion cannot be prematurely dragooned as Joseph sought to do. Being “faite
dans les idées” (made in ideas), the French Revolution would prove sturdier than the Belgian and also (one of the Revolution’s resoundingly incorrect predictions) less violent since France, unlike ignorant Belgium, embraced la philosophie and rejected traditional thinking.
¹³⁰
The French Revolution, the
Chronique
confidently assumed, would be “a gentle one,” unlike that in Flanders and Brabant, where developments were marred in November and December 1789 by widespread violence.

Along with the parlements, the entire ancien régime legal and administrative system, lettres de cachet, venality of office, the remaining feudal courts, and local juridical procedures specific to particular localities, often of great antiquity, were liquidated. On 14 November, the Assembly abolished the system of royal intendants, the pivot since Louis XIV’s time of French royal provincial administration.
¹³¹
This once-powerful administrative elite, now cashiered, was replaced as originally projected by the reforming minister Turgot in the 1770s, with a new standardized administration operating on an equivalent basis throughout France, consisting of departmental councils, municipalities, and rural districts. The new courts and their jurisdictions corresponded to the projected electoral districts like the jurisdictions of their presiding judges, functionaries henceforth elected by the “active citizens” of their districts. Standardizing French administration in this way rendered it easier to introduce equality of treatment in electoral and representative functions, fiscal matters, and judicial administration.

Meanwhile, the Parisian assembly’s republican vanguard simultaneously battled constitutional monarchists, and the populists of some crowded inner-city districts. On 2 November 1789, Condorcet was elected first president of the reorganized Paris general assembly. Populist opposition to Brissot’s circle was confined at this time to just a few sections and centered on the group controlling the Cordeliers district, now renamed the Théâtre-National section. This Left Bank constituency, the “principal foyer” of disaffection, as Bailly put it, extended from the Sorbonne to the Luxembourg Gardens, and with its numerous bookshops and printing works was an area where la philosophie rubbed shoulders with skilled artisans. The Théâtre-National was Marat’s headquarters and also that of the political machine headed by Danton and his group of locally based littérateurs and journalists.
¹³²
At this stage, Danton’s circle clearly dominated what later became known as the Cordeliers Club, soon the foremost political club in Paris after the Jacobins. In 1789–90, the leadership of this club—apart from Danton himself, an impressive and often inspiring speaker and a revolutionary
genius unique (like the Cordeliers itself) in stressing and exemplifying the need to unite the intellectuals and the masses—did not differ greatly in character from the wider phalanx of republican révolutionnaires heading the Revolution.
¹³³

Danton’s chief publicist, Desmoulins, the mordantly irreverent editor of the
Révolutions de France et de Brabant
and member of the Cercle Social forum, was an enthusiast for Latin classics, steeped in Cicero, Tacitus, and Livy, and an ardent exponent of a universalist democratic republicanism rooted in materialism and antiprovidential philosophy. Early in the Revolution he admired Mirabeau above all and, after March 1790, remained among the most reluctant of the democratic republicans to accept that Mirabeau had clawed back his earlier radicalism and been bought by the court.
¹³⁴
In addition, the club featured several other notable political theorists, such as Pierre-François Robert and the club’s secretary, Théophile Mandar (1754–1823), author of a 1788 tract on emancipation of the blacks. In 1790, Mandar, who knew English, published a translation of Marchamont Nedham’s republican tract
The Excellence of a Free State
(1656), replete with footnotes citing Rousseau, Montesquieu, Mably, Condillac, and Raynal. Thanks to the French, Mandar assured readers, their century of “enlightenment and philosophy” would ensure the “triumph of man over tyranny and despotism,” and secure liberty for future societies.
¹³⁵
To make it fit his purposes, Mandar was not above manipulating Nedham’s text to render it more democratic than it really was. Another key member of Danton’s circle was Philippe Fabre d’Églantine (1755–94), a dramatist from Carcassone who later helped compose the new revolutionary calendar. The success of his comedy
Philinthe
(1790) briefly placed him among the best-known stage writers of the revolutionary era.