Revolutionary Ideas: An Intellectual History of the French Revolution From the Rights of Man to Robespierre (21 page)

Outside Danton’s circle, and scorned by Danton, but central to the feuding between the primary assemblies and the Paris general council, an unavoidable local presence, was Marat. Fiery journalist and orator, Marat expressed the disgruntlement of the Paris poor more aggressively than Danton or indeed anyone else. His usual strategy was to accuse the Commune’s general council, Brissot’s assembly of three hundred, of aspiring to become a new civic aristocracy of “tyrants” oppressing the people. To curb the Commune’s power, the Théâtre-National section primary assembly, with Danton just elected section “president,” passed motions on 11 and 12 November 1789, imposing on their five representatives in the general council binding instructions not to be departed from even when a large majority of the governing council supported
a different point of view. In this way, the section leaders sought to discipline, or recall, their delegates whenever their section assembly saw fit.
¹³⁶

Here was a direct challenge to Brissot’s and Condorcet’s system of “representative democracy,” a challenge going to the heart of the revolutionary dispute concerning the true character of democracy. Sovereignty resides in the people, populists and Brissotins agreed. Every section had the right to comment on and approve or disapprove of Commune assembly decisions, as well as petition their representatives. The bone of contention concerned rather the limits of popular sovereignty and whether localities could justifiably impose binding decisions and principles on delegates to a representative assembly to obstruct majority votes. Hence, the quarrel concerned the nature of representation itself.

CHAPTER 5

Democratizing the Revolution

The Failure of Liberal Monarchism

Over the winter of 1789–90, the National Assembly’s constitutional committee, an impressive panel of political and legal theorists headed by Sieyès and Mirabeau, labored to complete a constitution combining the radicalism of the Rights of Man with strands of restraining “moderation.” By mid-1790, the Assembly’s constitutional committee had effectively completed its work. France was now a fully articulated constitutional monarchy comprising eighty-three departments with sovereignty theoretically vested in the people, but with the nation actually represented by both legislature and king. That France was and should remain a monarchy most did not question. However, the pathbreaking Constitution, with its eventually 195 articles, was not yet finalized, since the king withheld formal assent.

Mirabeau and Sieyès were grandly but justifiably designated by many the “pères de la constitution” (of 1791).
¹
They had created what the vast majority conceived of as a reformed monarchy but was in fact nearer to being a republic. Under the not yet formally completed but already operative Constitution, only the legislature could initiate legislation and appoint royal ministers. The Assembly controlled the purse strings, the king’s limited financial resources being allocated by the legislature via a civil list. A permanent body of 745 deputies, the projected legislature would wield virtually all the power, its mandate renewed by elections every two years. A royal veto existed but was confined to one sitting, hence, two years. Assembly deputies, unlike British MPs, could not become royal ministers directly but only three years after leaving the Assembly. Elections for the Assembly, along with local elections for mayors and judges, were to assume a uniform character across France. All officeholders were now elected by urban “sections” or rural electoral districts. The first municipal elections under the new system were held in the early summer of 1790. Paris henceforth comprised forty-eight
sections, Lyon and Marseille each thirty-two, Bordeaux twenty-eight, and Toulouse fifteen. Each section assembly was simultaneously a representative body for the locality, forum for debate, and key part of the electoral process.

For the first time in Europe’s history, a constitutional monarchy emerged that blended a minimum of royal authority with a powerful republican tendency and equality on the basis of the Rights of Man. But was not this, objected Necker, a gigantic contradiction gnawing at the Revolution’s very foundation? The Assembly proclaimed France “a monarchy” but repudiated all rank, hierarchy, and privilege. Yet, how can a monarchy promulgate equality, a fundamental democratic republican principle? How can a monarch preside over a “constitution démocratique”? Refusing all social gradations, the Revolution grafted monarchy onto democracy, blithely unaware that something so incoherent philosophically could work only by embracing mixed government based, like Britain’s, on an unchallenged domination of society by aristocracy and rank. Eliminating privilege undermined the entire edifice, held Necker, rendering popular favor, flattering the people, the sole route to power. The basest of all motives, winning influence through flattery, thus fused perversely with the Revolution’s core principles of equality and volonté générale.
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The catastrophe of France’s post-1789 instability, held Necker, commenced with the Rights of Man and became irreversible with the 19 June 1790 abolition of all remaining status, titles, and distinctions. Not realizing the danger, the people complacently acquiesced in the glaring contradiction between a monarchical constitution and the Revolution’s unyielding, officially stated egalitarian goals. Yet, there was little real need, he argued, to hazard what he rightly saw as an unsustainably destabilizing contradiction since very few desired to abolish titles, extinguish primogeniture, or deprive the Church of its special status. Tragically, he maintained, it was not popular sentiment that drove the Revolution but the views of an unrepresentative fringe, denying and suppressing rank and tradition altogether. The Club Monarchique was no less irritated by the marginal, unrepresentative character of republican opponents progressively subverting the emerging constitution and doing so with right seemingly on their side, owing to their ability to continually invoke equality and the Rights of Man as the Revolution’s core principles.

The edict of 18 June 1790 prohibited use of any title of nobility whether of prince, duke, count, marquis, baron, or any other designation of status, together with the public display of any coats of arms and
liveries in public documents, meetings, and reports. This ban on the use of noble titles, protested the outraged royalist press, ultra and constitutional, was incompatible with any kind of monarchy. No other people had ever attempted the like.
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Among its antiaristocratic provisions, the June 1790 decree ordered the demolition of all public monuments infringing the “liberty” of either the French or other peoples. If the night of 4 August 1789 eliminated “the prejudices and errors of ten centuries,” that of 19 June 1790 crowned the edifice, putting the seal on the revolutionary achievement. However, there was a clear difference between these two hugely memorable legislative landmarks. On 4 August 1789, everyone was either swept up in the frenzy or too scared to resist. On 19 June 1790, by contrast, suppressing hereditary titles and coats of arms, even if logically just the completion of what went before, provoked a famously long and furious quarrel at the end of which that solid “old oak” Montesquieu, as one observer put it, was “torn up by the roots.”
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During 1790, conservative sentiment indeed suffered one symbolic reverse after another. In an article published in episcopal Liège in January 1792, the antiphilosophe Feller explained this process as le philosophisme overreaching and consuming itself. A ceaseless, creeping subversion, constantly encroaching on Crown and Church, progressing since its slow, clandestine origins more than fifty years before, now finally descended unsparingly on its chief agent: high society. For it was via the aristocracy, especially
femmes de qualité
, that philosophisme had originally been diffused in France, and it was the nobility that philosophisme now assailed and overwhelmed.
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A few days after the June 1790 edict, with Montesquieu, the foremost philosophical champion of aristocracy, moderate Enlightenment conservatism, and British constitutional “moderation” metaphorically toppled, the celebrated bust of Rousseau by the sculptor Jean-Antoine Houdon (1746–1828) was installed in the Assembly hall. Rousseau was unquestionably worthy to stand alongside Washington and Franklin, onlookers were assured by the speakers during the impressive inaugural ceremony, but as the busts of the latter already graced the Left, or what republicans called the chamber’s “patriotic” side, leaving insufficient room for “Rousseau,” the bust of the man many considered Liberty’s foremost champion had to be placed on the conservative side, as if silently glowering on the “enemies of liberty and equality,” as republicans designated the Right.

The Revolution was threatened by challenges both within and without. The greatest challenge facing Mirabeau and Sieyès was that of how to organize political representation. Hostile to Montesquieu’s relativism
and suspicious of Rousseau, both “fathers of the constitution” were likewise incisive, long-standing critics of the British and American constitutions. They rejected division of powers, together with all notion of balancing the monarch or quasi-monarch (the American president) against the nobility and Commons. There exists just one volonté générale, they contended, and this requires a single legislature controlling a subordinate executive and dependent judiciary. If the legislature truly represents the sovereign, it must remain in permanent session, supervising the state finances and, broadly, all policy, controlling every branch of government. Elections were central to the functioning of the new representative system. But how should the electorate be constituted that elects the nation’s representatives?

In October 1789, an Assembly majority had defined those entitled to vote as the “active citizens”—adult males older than twenty-five who paid the equivalent of three days’ unskilled labor in taxes—a category proposed by Sieyès. But differentiating the adult male population into “active” and “inactive” citizens, distinguishing between those with a certain level of resources from the impoverished, seemed highly problematic to many. Since the new Constitution’s raison d’être was upholding equality and the Rights of Man, it was wholly unclear how restricting the suffrage to “active citizens” classified by financial status could be justified.
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Sieyès, compounding his anti-Rousseauism, attempted to distinguish between
droits passifs
, passive rights held by everyone, the benefits for which society exists, and “droits actifs,” active political rights attached to those who select the nation’s representatives. In Sieyès’s political philosophy everyone possessed the right to liberty and the security afforded by
droits passifs
, but only some men the right to participate in constituting representative public authority.
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Excluded from active rights under the new Constitution were, besides women, children, and foreigners, adult men lacking sufficient means to contribute to the costs of the public establishment.

The central doctrine of Sieyès’s
Préliminaire de la Constitution française
of July 1789, expounding his ideas for the emerging constitution, is entirely un-Rousseauist (and un-Hobbesian): man’s transfer from the state of nature to the social state, “far from diminishing individual liberty, extends it and guarantees its use”—a thesis plainly derived from the clandestine tradition of the radical philosophes. Hence, men enhance their moral and physical capabilities on entering the social state, transcending dangers to which they were previously exposed. Liberty flourishes solely in the social state, and even then only under carefully
prepared conditions. For if less menaced by intruders and marauders than in the state of nature, the individual is exposed now to abuse of power by vested interests and government. Correctly defining and guaranteeing human rights by means of a viable constitution is therefore indispensable, the sole means to preclude abuse and exploitation, ensuring government for the well-being of the majority and in the interest of all.
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In a properly constituted social order, the law can have no other object than the “intérêt commun.” In both Sieyès’s and Mirabeau’s minds, this encompassed all aspects of social life. Besides security and justice, the state must also acknowledge the “rights” of those citizens lacking the means to satisfy their basic needs, argued Sieyès on the constitutional committee, and hence play a socioeconomic support role. If the revolutionary leadership really intended to abolish privilege and reorganize society on the basis of equality, then it must devise a progressive tax system, taking more from the wealthy than in the past, to fund new systems of social welfare.

The National Assembly was split between monarchists and republicans, the former constituting the great majority in theory but divided and the latter holding the initiative politically but precariously, creating a rift the solution to which, most deputies supposed, was a spirit of moderation and less emphasis on equality and democracy. To bridge Left and Right and stabilize the country, Mirabeau, Sieyès, and other leading deputies resorted to the Club de 89, a society of prominent figures in and outside the Assembly sworn to uphold the Declaration of Rights and other great legislative acts of 1789 while also upholding limited monarchy and the Constitution. Formed by Mirabeau, Sieyès, Talleyrand, Chamfort, and Lafayette in April 1790, the Club or Société de 1789 had as its explicit goal to reconcile liberal monarchists with the Assembly’s small but active minority of democratic republicans so as to ensure a large and stable leading bloc dominating the Assembly. Besides Mirabeau and Sieyès, the club accommodated many on the Left, including Volney, Ginguené, and Marie-Joseph Chénier. But despite the obvious logic and good sense of trying to stabilize the Revolution by forging a strong center, the club’s plea for a merger of radical egalitarianism and political moderation proved unsustainable and encountered insuperable difficulties.