Revolutionary Ideas: An Intellectual History of the French Revolution From the Rights of Man to Robespierre (22 page)

The unresolved split could for a time be camouflaged with rhetoric and pomp. To celebrate the first anniversary of the Estates-General’s transformation into the Assemblée Nationale, on 17 June 1790—the day before the elimination of all noble titles—the Club de 1789
arranged a sumptuous banquet, attended by 190 club members. But fine dining to fanfares and marches played by sixty musicians could not remove the double conundrum that some members sought to liquidate, others to preserve—the influence of Crown, court, aristocracy, and Church. Some wished to halt the Revolution where it now stood, others to advance it further. Many of the club’s more distinguished members began drifting away once they realized that a genuine compromise between center and Left was impossible. This was the signal for the factions in the Assembly to regroup and for the liberal monarchist center to aspire to dominate the Revolution. By mid-1790, the National Assembly’s center began to look preponderant while the Left appeared to be fragmenting and growing weaker.

As the Club de 89 disintegrated, its “moderate” core sought to dominate the National Assembly, many joining the more conservative Club Monarchique, which adroitly circumvented the difficulties undermining the Club de 89 by repudiating Mirabeau and Sieyès and leaving the democrats out in the cold.
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Presided over by three prominent deputies—the Abbé Maury, Malouet, and Stanislas, Comte de Clermont-Tonnerre (1757–92), a cultivated army officer, among the chief noble movers of the abolition of feudal rights of 4 August 1789—the Club Monarchique allied the Assembly’s Right to remnants of the Société de 89 and of another expired, more conservative centrist group, the Club des Impartiaux, formed by a number of Assembly deputies under Malouet in October 1789.
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The Abbé Jean-Siffrein Maury (1746–1817), a bitingly ironic, brilliant Assembly orator, among the few able to withstand Mirabeau and who enjoyed humiliating less eloquent opponents, blended strict constitutional monarchism and veneration for royalty and aristocracy with a fierce zeal to uphold Catholicism as France’s public religion. Meanwhile, Mirabeau’s incomparable standing at home (among friends of the Revolution) and abroad also came under assault, from the spring of 1790 on, from Marat and other populists accusing him of treachery in collusion with the court and (with greater justification) profiting financially from his mediating role. Sieyès too found himself in a weakened position, increasingly isolated on the Assembly’s constitutional committee.

But if republicans and the liberal monarchists led by Barnave, Bailly, Lafayette, and the brothers Alexandre and Charles de Lameth failed to combine and establish a stable hegemony in 1790, before long it emerged that no alignment between Maury’s constitutional Right and the liberal monarchists could attain a stable ascendancy either. There
were some points where the Assembly’s Right and center could agree. Both opposed republicanism and democracy, and wanted a restricted electorate. Where republicans like Jérôme Pétion (1756–94), among the Assembly’s foremost democrats, dismissed Britain’s constitution as “toute vicieuse” and needing thoroughgoing reform itself, Maury shared Mounier’s and the liberal monarchists’ enthusiasm for Britain, Parliament, and British “good sense.”
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But Maury and Malouet expounded a monarchical constitutionalism far more genuinely monarchist, legitimist, and pro-Church than the positions of Barnave and the Lameths, let alone Mirabeau or Sieyès. It was the king who had sanctioned the National Assembly, insisted Maury, and the nation that “imperiously declared none of our decrees should be implemented without the free assent of the king.”
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Maury and his following refused to accept the overriding power of the Assembly. The Assembly could not unilaterally change the Constitution or detract from royal or ecclesiastical authority any more than Britain’s Parliament could. If they did, the deputies “would no longer be the guardians of the national rights but tyrants over your fellow citizens.” Rousseau in “his too famous
Contrat Social
,” Maury reminded his centrist as well as republican adversaries, argues that the “people’s deputies are not and cannot be its representatives being mere
commissaires
, unauthorized to conclude anything definitively.” His critics continually invoked Rousseau, complained Maury, but were not respecting his political theory at all. “Every law the people itself have not ratified is void, not a law.”
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The Club Monarchique’s membership cards, styling its members
Amis de la constitution monarchique
, and its journal, the
Journal monarchique
, looked respectable enough. Officially, this club’s membership, many of whom were nobles and prelates, championed a strict reading of the Constitution. Their political strategy pivoted on the hope that they could carry the people with them, not an unrealistic expectation, remarked Cérutti in August 1790, given that most Frenchmen, being politically naive, were perfectly content to extol royal ministers and submissively follow the Right despite its obvious aim of seeking the advantage of the Crown, aristocracy, Church, and the old judicial order rather than that of the majority of the nation. Believing that the ancien régime had been sufficiently revolutionized and transformed, and applauding the liberal monarchists’ assurances, the great majority failed to realize how the new arrangements in fact cheated the people. To complete the Revolution, a full-scale war on prejudice was required, waged by “a great nation enlightened with all the enlightenment of philosophy.”
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The Club Monarchique urged strict adherence to the Constitution. In doing so, according to Gorsas and Fréron, in December 1790, the club’s primary goal was actually to mobilize popular prejudice against “republicanism.” Both Maury’s conservatives and the liberal monarchists were right in claiming that republicanism largely lacked popular support. Nevertheless, republicans remained heavily preponderant among the most articulate and literate, especially the intellectual fringe that engineered the Rights of Man and controlled the prorevolutionary press and Paris cafés. To defeat the democratic objectives of the republican press, the Club Monarchique appealed to the traditional values of the people, aiming to divide the capital and sap the Revolution’s momentum.
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Two hard-hitting pamphlets,
Les secrets révélés par l’Anti-Carra-co-Gorsas
, and
Pourquoi Mesdames sont elles parties?
, issuing from the Club Monarchique in late 1790 (possibly by the same writer), highlighted the widening rift between the Assembly’s center and Right and the democratic republican Left. The “disgusting absurdities” propagated by about a dozen “republican” journalists, argued these tracts, were the evil principally responsible for subverting the Constitution, misleading the public, and blighting the economy. Republican journalists, of whom Gorsas and Carra were pronounced the worst, were shamelessly corrupting Paris and the entire social order.

In the last four months, contended these pamphlets, more than two hundred families possessing annual incomes surpassing 20,000 livres had emigrated.
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Society’s most select and wealthiest, all deluged in “revolting calumnies” concocted by these egalitarians, were leaving in droves, among them members of the royal family, including the monarch’s two unmarried aunts, Marie-Adelaide and Victoire-Louise, aged, respectively, fifty-eight and fifty-nine, who departed for Rome on 18 February 1791. (This was the event that first gave rise to popular rumors that the king himself was likely to depart soon.) In fact, less than 10 percent of France’s nobility, modern research shows, had become émigrés by 1791. Nevertheless, these included many of the richest aristocrats and courtiers, and even this modest proportion amounted to between 25,000 and 30,000 people, a total only slightly exceeded by the number of clergy fleeing abroad. The overall number of émigrés of all kinds, more than 150,000, or around half of 1 percent of France’s total population, undoubtedly did entail a damaging depletion of national capital.
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By late 1790, the three main impulses represented in the National Assembly and the Revolution more broadly—Maury’s, Cazalès’s, and
Malouet’s conservative constitutional monarchism, Barnave’s liberal centrist monarchism, and philosophique democratic republicanism—all firmly blocked one another. Despite the relative stability of 1790, the effort to convert the Rights of Man into reality and renew society on the basis of equality inevitably descended into bitter strife and political paralysis, the deep splits within the Revolution being far from the only divisive factor. The moderate monarchical Constitution’s vulnerability sprang partly from rifts within the Revolution, but equally from the fact that monarchism more generally, both inside France and even more in exile, was predominantly not constitutional monarchist but ultraroyalist. If most French monarchists, including the royalist press, rejected Barnave’s center outright, most émigrés and many within also looked with suspicion on Maury’s conservative bloc. Ultraroyalists despised the National Assembly and considered the king the Revolution’s prisoner, not its patron. Equally, ecclesiastical resistance to the Revolution from late 1789 veered largely toward nonconstitutional monarchism. The unbreakable deadlock in the country thus stemmed from the broad political and social support for each main rival faction within the National Assembly, compounded by the stubborn tenacity of extraconstitutional conservatism.

Despite official adherence of king and court to the Revolution, by early 1790 the
parti anti-révolutionnaire—
ultraroyalist and proaristocratic—had become widely active as an organized force throughout France and around her borders. Numerous small towns, the Montpellier city council reminded the Assembly on 31 July 1790, were now heavily infiltrated by counterrevolutionary agitators and propagandists, and required help from the main cities to curb disorder and stay under revolutionary control.
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Ultraroyalist repudiation of constitutional monarchy was underpinned by the claim that whatever Louis had agreed to was invalid, as he was really just the revolutionaries’ captive. Unable to compromise politically, Malouet constitutional monarchists and Barnave centrists and ultraroyalists were just as hopelessly divided over religion. Universal toleration and freedom of thought were strongly promoted by the center and (officially) acceptable to the constitutional Right but were overwhelmingly rejected by ultraroyalism.

Even without the economic malaise gripping the country, a constitution exalting equality while incorporating monarchy and a restricted suffrage made little sense. Widening the divisions still further, the “common interest” based on equality trumpeted by the republicans was intended to reshape the whole social economic and cultural context, not
just politics. Education illustrated the difficulty. Many Frenchmen were illiterate and most no more than semiliterate. Educating the people was in no way inherent in liberal monarchism and still less in the two divergent conservative royalist currents. But it was basic to the democratic republicanism of Brissot, Condorcet, Bonneville, Fauchet, Desmoulins, Vergniaud, Carra, Gorsas, Volney, Manuel, Lanthenas (translator of Paine’s
Rights of Man
into French), and other key ideologues dominating the Left, and hence central to the Revolution’s core values. Society needs an educational system suited to forming free men, as Condorcet put it in October 1791, to “advance the progress of reason, and perfect the human race,” without which democracy and human happiness are impossible. Only thus can the harmful effects of popular notions, privilege, and religious authority be remedied.
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Here was a doctrine deriving directly from the revolutionary ideology of Diderot, d’Holbach, Helvétius, Raynal, and other collaborators on the
Histoire philosophique
: “wise of the earth, philosophers of all the nations, it is for you alone to make the laws, by indicating to other citizens what is needed, by enlightening your brothers.”
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Sieyès went part of the way with this reasoning: “nothing is more appropriate for perfecting the human race in both the moral and physical spheres,” he concurred, “than a good system of public education and instruction.”
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But educating the people was an essentially republican concept. Such schemes could only intensify the Revolution’s central dilemma, since they clashed with tradition and religious authority, and most Assembly deputies disliked all such ideas. At the same time, while absolute equality of political rights for “active citizens” (the voting electorate) remained “un principe fondamental” for Mirabeau and Sieyès, and all privilege was ruled out as inadmissible, adult males were nonetheless divided by the Constitution into voters eligible for office and ineligible “passive citizens” lacking political rights. This implied to those who thought like Sieyès that there was no need to extend publicly supported education to the latter.

The unsustainability of the centrist monarchical Constitution, insoluble character of the divisions in the Assembly and widening rifts dividing French society in 1790, were highlighted by disagreement over the status of religious authority and the place of religion in the nation’s life. Undoubtedly, Catholic authority and overall preeminence in society and culture was perfectly acceptable to the vast majority of Frenchmen in town, country, and even, though here more tentatively, the National Assembly. The problem was that church authority on a traditional basis was entirely unacceptable to many centrists (and the Protestants), as well
as the entire republican clique forging the Revolution. Defeated in the Assembly in December 1789, pleas to salvage Catholic primacy were advanced again on 12 April 1790, amid a tense atmosphere, by a much-respected Catholic deputy, the mystic Carthusian Dom Christophe-Antoine Gerle (1736–ca. 1801), among the first ecclesiastics to merge with the Third in 1789. Supported by Maury, his motion was robustly opposed by Barnave besides Mirabeau, the republicans, and the entire pro-Revolution press, provoking the worst-tempered battle between the Right and the philosophique revolutionary tendency witnessed thus far. An impassioned two-day debate failed to obtain any privileged status for the Church whatsoever, the Catholic bloc losing the final vote by 400 to 495, with many deputies absent or abstaining.
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On leaving the Assembly afterward, Maury was yelled at by a furious crowd and chased through the streets. Notwithstanding the vote, insisted a minority printed protest on 19 April, signed by more than 300 indignant deputies (more sympathized but preferred not to sign), Catholicism remained France’s sole authorized religion. This protestation elicited an ominously powerful wave of sympathy around the country, with supportive letters pouring in from all over France.
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