Revolutionary Ideas: An Intellectual History of the French Revolution From the Rights of Man to Robespierre (23 page)

Deepening the divisions further, both the constitutional and extra-constitutional Right fused their political and religious rejectionism with an economic ideology well tailored to sway the masses. Unemployment had risen dramatically, proclaimed the royalist press, and the ateliers and workshops of Paris had fallen silent. At Lyon, estimated the
Gazette de Paris
, the Revolution had left 40,000 workers without recourse or basic sustenance, while at Rennes the population had supposedly slumped from 71,000 in 1751 to only 33,000 by early 1791.
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The Revolution was a catastrophe for artisans and the poor no less than it was for the aristocracy, held the pamphlet
État actuel de la France
of January 1790, by Comte Antoine-François Ferrand (1751–1825), a former royal minister soon to join the émigrés on the Rhine. “The artisan cannot live without the resources the luxury trades furnish him”; possessing no land or rents he must live from his labor. The revolutionaries had mobilized the populace against society’s high-status consumers, but the people made their living from the consumption of the rich. By multiplying needs, luxury trades enhanced the incomes of those laboring to satisfy those needs. But now whole towns and cities had withered under the collapse of the luxury trades and flight of the émigrés.
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By supporting the Revolution, the laboring class had grievously erred, wrecking their own livelihoods, and worse would follow, admonished Ferrand, because the goal of the most subversive and ambitious element
in the Assembly, just as Mounier had warned, was undoubtedly to turn France into “a republic.” Admittedly, for the moment the Revolution’s leaders paid lip service to monarchy. But whatever they professed, they had been de facto “regicides” since at least October 1789. In reality, the revolutionary leadership were out-and-out “republicans,” imprisoning the king, stifling the royal veto, and banishing the aristocracy. The catastrophe facing France was thus a double one, in Ferrand’s view, economic and political (he said nothing about religion), the seeds of which he traced to Montesquieu’s
L’Esprit des Lois
, the work that had first seduced the nobility into curbing royal authority.
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Ferrand’s argument was broadly right, even though he ignored the effects of the Church’s loss of property, tithes, and other revenues, which in some places was no less devastating than the flight of the nobility. The municipality of Riez in the Basses-Alpes, for example, appealed to the Assembly in July 1790 regarding the loss of its bishopric, cathedral chapter, religious houses, and seminary, which together spelled the virtual destruction of the town’s trade; the town assembly pleaded for something, at least a district court, to alleviate the “despair of the people.”
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Though not Douai’s only industries, Church and parlement were so vital to the local economy that with its theology schools, high court, law college, medical college, monasteries, and ecclesiastical establishment all decimated by October 1791, the town reportedly resembled “a desert.”
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Open conflict between the now five main rival blocs vying for control of France—ultraroyalist, conservative constitutional royalist, liberal centrist, authoritarian populist, and democratic republican—erupted first in places traditionally plagued by religious strife, like Nîmes, Montauban, Uzès, and Strasbourg. In 1789 Nîmes was home to approximately 40,000 Catholics and 13,000 Reformed (Calvinists), though the latter were a much more prosperous community, long dominant in commerce and the professions. Unsurprisingly, the religious orders, on the point of being dissolved, the Capuchins especially, stirred local Catholic resentment as a way of resisting the Revolution. Nîmes Protestants opposed demands that their numbers on the new Commune council be proportionate to their numbers in the community, historical precedent giving them half the council seats and the right to choose the mayor. Despite being trounced in the municipal elections on 28 March 1790, when they won scarcely any seats, they still tried to dominate the local National Guard and, as at Montauban, preside over the revolutionary club, or Friends of the Constitution—organizations increasingly used by them as instruments of local political control.

Destruction of ecclesiastical privilege, and the Assembly’s refusal to acknowledge Catholicism as the state religion, rendered it easy to convince the illiterate that the Revolution was basically a Protestant, Jewish, and Masonic “conspiracy.” On 20 April 1790, a crowd of Nîmois, infuriated by the failure of Dom Gerle’s motion, gathered at the Church of the White Penitents to draw up a petition demanding Catholicism be acknowledged as the sole religion of the state. Exhorted by local theologians and the lawyer François Froment, chief spokesman of local ultraroyalism, they demanded a halt to church reforms and restoration of the king’s executive powers. Royalism, like religion, noted observers, prevails most strongly among the most ignorant. The petition gathered five thousand signatures and was published locally. White cockades appeared. The local revolutionary club responded by denouncing the Nîmes “fanatics” to the Paris Assembly. Attempts to remove white cockades provoked the first armed clashes on 2 and 3 May 1790, leaving one dead and several wounded. Later that month similar events followed also in Montauban and Uzès.
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A fraternal ceremony of reconciliation on 4 May in Nîmes’ main square, with National Guard of both faiths swearing oaths of eternal respect, sealed by a nightlong civic party, calmed passions fleetingly. But the very next day a fresh demonstration by women, furious that religion was not being respected, erupted at the Capuchins, where the order’s confiscated property was being inventoried. Pending municipal elections, scheduled for early June, contributed to the friction. Finally, on 13 June, a full-scale battle erupted in the streets, starting with stone-throwing at Protestant dragoons, leading to firing, and then general tumult. Martial law was declared. On 14 June, Protestant armed men from neighboring rural districts invaded the town, avid to support their coreligionists. The battle culminated in an assault, amid much firing, on the Capuchins, the slaughter of five monks, and pillaging of the monastery, followed by the storming of the locality held by Froment’s adherents, several of whom, including Froment, were killed.
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The clashes at Nîmes, Montauban, and Uzès shocked opinion throughout France. Reports that “Protestants” were slaughtering Catholics, sacking monasteries, and trampling the “holiest objects underfoot” circulated widely. Catholic troublemakers bent on tumult and murder, reported the prorevolutionary press, had declared the Assembly “suspect” in religion and outraged wearers of the revolutionary cockade. Some suggested the perpetrators’ rights as “active citizens” should be abrogated. A huge row erupted in the Assembly. Nîmes
Catholics, countered Malouet, had done nothing more than hold meetings, exercising their constitutional right to freedom of opinion and to submit petitions.
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A pamphlet, cast in the form of a dialogue between four worthy market women, reporting the exchanges between Right and Left in the Assembly at this point, described the conflict as a fight between the “good” and “bad angels.” The “good angels,” striving for everyone to be equal and “happy,” for the good of the nation, were Mirabeau, Barnave, Lafayette, Rabaut, Pétion, and Grégoire. France’s “bad angels,” royalist “evil oppressors” seeking to ensure “poor people should be always down-trodden,” were Maury, Malouet, Cazalès, Duval-d’Eprémesnil, and another antidemocrat, Count François-Henri Virieu-Pupetières (1754–93), a Dauphiné deputy and founder of the Club des Impartiaux.
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That the Left fought for “everyone to be equal and happy” certainly meant something to artisans and the rural peasantry. In August 1789, the Assembly had proclaimed the feudal regime at an end, a staggering change in a Europe dominated by nobility for centuries. But if the peasants rejoiced, their gains, it quickly transpired, were less than initially supposed. If the revolutionary press deemed feudal rights and perquisites “nothing but usurpations founded on violence,” in practice these remained a vast and perplexing legal tangle vitiating rural lives. The 4 August 1789 decree abolished outright, without compensation, all forms of
servitude personnelle
(vestiges of serfdom lingering mainly in Burgundy and the Franche-Comté), rights of
péage
for transport and moving flocks of sheep and herds of cattle along paths belonging to lords, dues on the sale of products and animals, on use of lords’ mills, olive oil and wine presses, “protection” rights, hunting rights on non-noble land, and all ancient claims to precedence in selling products at certain times of the year. However, other “rights” remained valid until the “owner” was bought out, at least in theory, as the peasants, in many areas, simply refused to pay them. The August 1789 decree recognized many rural dues as vested in land ownership, as property, including most heavier obligations like harvest dues (
champart
,
terrage
) and seigniorial dues on land sales (
lods
et
ventes
). These, peasants either had to continue to pay or purchase from the supposedly rightful owners, or resist.
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Ending such obligations without compensation, held the Assembly’s majority, would violate the “sacred right of property.”
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Justice having been administered for centuries by nobles, surviving charters frequently listed as property rights exactions that seemed to many wholly contrary “au droit naturel des hommes.”
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But since nearly all “documentary evidence”
supporting such obligations were thoroughly vague in origin, ample scope remained for lawyers massaging matters in the landowners’ favor. The Assembly’s principal lawyers, François-Denis Tronchet (1726–1806) and Philippe Auguste Merlin de Douai (1754–1838), presiding over the committees implementing the 4 August decrees, deliberately consolidated property rights where they could to minimize abolition without compensation. For a time, tenancy and sharecropping arrangements were construed as freely entered into and hence subsumed within ownership of particular farms. Shoring up the interests of aristocratic landowners became far harder, though, after the 25 February and 9 and 15 March 1790 edicts on land tenure ratified by the king soon afterward.
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Tackling points left unresolved in the 4 August 1789 decree, these measures slowed the recouping efforts on behalf of the nobility. More, but by no means all, vestiges of the “feudal regime” and forms of
péage
were abolished outright, and “toutes les distinctions honorifiques, de supériorité et puissance résultants du régime feudal” were definitively abolished. Additionally, despite tenacious resistance in the Assembly, rights of inheritance under primogeniture enabling large estates to be passed on intact, a pillar of the aristocratic system, was formally abolished.
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Right and Left unrelentingly attacked each other for betraying the Constitution, the nation, and the poor. Measured by loyalty to the Constitution, objected conservative and centrist royalist writers, crypto-republicans like Brissot, Gorsas, Carra, Pétion, Condorcet, Volney, and Cérutti, acted and spoke anticonstitutionally more flagrantly than the Assembly’s monarchists. Gorsas, in the twentieth issue of his
Courrier
, even had the impertinence to openly deride monarchy, calling the king an “imbecile.” However, it was not just ideological rhetoric that destabilized France in 1790 but also the real underlying incompatibility of the rival social and political blocs. According to supporters, the Club Monarchique heroically resisted the raging torrent of antiaristocratic and antimonarchical discourse. Far from fanatical priests and émigrés threatening France with civil war, as the “republicans” alleged—another example of their “insolence”—it was actually these anticonstitutional “vile pamphleteers” themselves who were poisoning society with their criminal democratic attitudes and practices. The only solution, held the author of
Pourquoi Mesdames
, was to mobilize the people and thoroughly crush democracy, “civisme jacobin,” and “philosophy.”
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Thus, a wide range of opinion on both the Right
and
Left rejected the liberal monarchist Constitution both in theory and in practice. From their oratory and activities, it was hard to know whether even the Club
Monarchique genuinely supported the Constitution. Behind the scenes many of its members undoubtedly aligned with the aristocratic extra-constitutional and counterrevolutionary Right. Accordingly, it increasingly failed to attract authentic moderates. By late 1790, the club was deeply embroiled in the Paris sections, implicated in riots and fights, as well as accused of distributing bread at below current prices in the shops to “seduce the people” into “the poison of aristocracy.”
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Several Paris sections, after legally convoking their assemblies with the required fifty “citoyens actifs” present, submitted petitions to the Assembly alleging that the Club Monarchique deliberately provoked disturbances, including a major street brawl in Paris, on 24 January 1791.
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For this reason, as well as the disagreement over religion, centrist constitutional monarchists, opposing ultraroyalism, turned increasingly against the club. Barnave, particularly angered by its opposition to ecclesiastical reform, delivered a scathing denunciation of the club (and the Right generally) in the Assembly on 25 January 1791, designating the Club Monarchique an organization wholly inimical to the public interest and subversive of the law.
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