Revolutionary Ideas: An Intellectual History of the French Revolution From the Rights of Man to Robespierre (24 page)

Elimination of rank was followed by that of court pensions and gratifications. In a long debate during the summer of 1790, the Assembly sought to separate the civil list, over which the king retained discretionary powers, from the main body of state pensions, to eliminate rank and royal favor as factors in determining pension levels. On 16 July, the chairman of the Comité de Pensions, Armand-Gaston Camus (1740–1804), librarian, archivist, and republican, proposed abolishing all existing pensions but leaving current, without interruption, small grants of 600 livres or less for nonofficer military veterans. Existing officers’ pensions would be reinstated only after claims and qualifications had been reexamined, titles discounted, pensions deemed invalid canceled, and those set too high lowered. Except for cases of severe injury or infirmity, no one in state civil or military service would henceforth be eligible for a royal pension, recommended the committee, until after thirty years of service or reaching fifty years of age, with a fixed general maximum of 6,000 livres yearly, no exceptions allowed.
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Happy to draw the “hatred of all the vampires of the court,” Camus expressed satisfaction at this outcome, though he felt concern at leaving some worthy retired army officers, previously enjoying higher pensions, penniless until these could be reviewed.

Numerous nobles were crossed off the list or had their pensions drastically curtailed. The Assembly proposed to replace social status with
merit and service. Another key principle governing the pension reform legislation was that the Assembly itself should henceforth be the sole authority assigning grants from the public purse, even if these were still paid in the king’s name. Less straighforward than military pensions was the question of distinguished scientists and savants. Among
pensionnaires
proposed for exemption from the mass of canceled court pensions was the great geometer Joseph-Louis Lagrange (1736–1813), founder of the Turin Academy of Sciences. Lagrange had later directed Frederick the Great’s Berlin Royal Academy for many years, contributing more than sixty mathematical and astronomical papers. Invited to Paris after Frederick’s death, he had been installed in the Louvre with a 6,000 livres pension. Impressed, the committee also presented a more general case for subsidizing scientists, writers, and artists. Some might challenge the principle that revolutionary France should subsidize the sciences and arts, commented the deist philosophe La Réveillère-Lépeaux, but the Assembly would surely not fail to acknowledge savants as “benefactors of the human race who through their efforts and genius increase the sum of enlightenment.” The Assembly agreed. Determined to suppress court pensions, the Assembly, in highly non-Rousseauiste mode, simultaneously endeavored to “protect in every way savants, artists and literary men and establishments that primarily serve the progress of the sciences and arts.”
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Eligible scientists, artists, and littérateurs were split into three classes to receive large, medium, and small pensions, levels determined by the importance of their work and length of service. Unlike military and administrative pensions, savants’ pensions were no longer payable automatically on a yearly basis, as this would encourage unnecessary prolongation of research, but in a staged fashion, only research or artworks actually accomplished being rewarded.
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Special attention was given to those traveling long distances, often at great risk to their health and finances, to enlighten men by studying nature, discovering new plants, finding products beneficial to humans, or perfecting the arts. Under the new rules, grumbled some deputies, senior army officers would “scarcely receive more than artists,” but dissent was muted. At least one deputy complained that the proposed pensions were inadequate, reflecting “a shameful parsimony”; he also criticized the procedure for applying for grants from the departmental councils as demeaning. “Picture to yourself the Abbé Mably, Raynal, Montesquieu, Pingré, Poivre, La Peyrousse, Buffon, Morveaux, Bailly, Lalande, Petit, Louis, Le Brun, Girardon, Pajoux, etc. etc. queuing up with their
mémoires
of expenses.”
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Instituting Equality

“The age of ignorance is over,” proclaimed the
Chronique de Paris
, assuring readers that it was to la philosophie that France owed the Revolution, and men generally owed their ability to discern with “sentiments plus doux et plus humains” than in the past.
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Yet nothing was clearer than that the Revolution’s core principles clashed fundamentally with many deputies’ preferences and the unequal suffrage. For those who most insistently attacked Sieyès’s doctrine of
droits actifs—
Brissot, Bonneville, Carra, and Fauchet, as well as Condorcet—this strand of the Constitution inadmissibly clashed with liberty and the Rights of Man. All men are “égaux en droits [equal in rights],” proclaimed Condorcet, leaving no room for financial status in defining citizenship rights. The Cordeliers group of republicans—Desmoulins, Robert, Mandar, and James Rutledge (1742–94), a Franco-Irish writer from Dunkirk—felt likewise.

Even if it were advantageous (which Condorcet denied) to restrict the vote to the financially independent and hence less liable to be corrupted, confining officeholding to those of a given educational level, the enactment still made no sense, as the thresholds were set too low to provide any such safeguard. A false principle that unjustly deprived many of their equal right to participate and hold office, it had to be overturned. Despite Bailly’s opposition, the Paris Commune led by Brissot and himself, announced Condorcet in an open letter in the democratic paper
La
Bouche de fer
, intended to present the National Assembly with weighty arguments against it.
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This democratic view permeated radical circles, especially the republican journalists, progressive Paris salons, Cordeliers Club, and the Cercle Social, or Amis de la Vérité. The last, founded in early 1790, but a political club only since October, was an organization originating in the continuing battle over democracy within the Paris city assembly. Established by Fauchet, Bonneville, Condorcet, Lanthenas, and other Paris Commune republican democrats as a tool for reeducating the public, the Cercle’s founders sought ways to bridge the gap between Commune and city sections, and especially to enlighten the people. Following publication of his republican journal,
Tribun du peuple
, Bonneville had emerged in 1789 as “president” of his Paris electoral district. Poet, littérateur, translator of Shakespeare, and specialist on Lessing and German theater, long steeped in la philosophie and initially allied with Sieyès, Bonneville was an unyielding republican stalwart who even before the
convening of the Estates-General had advocated a complete recasting of France’s political institutions and laws.

The Cercle, representing an essentially new democratic republican approach to propagating the Enlightenment and steering the Revolution, aimed to attach the Assembly more closely to the people, the provinces to Paris, and France to advanced philosophique circles at home and abroad. Enlightened ideas combined with “excellent works,” proclaimed this body, would “defeat hypocrisy, charlatanism, and tyranny for ever.”
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The Cercle Social’s unbending opposition to the liberal monarchist center, to Bailly, Sieyès, and those seeking to exclude the multitude from the political process, was, of course, viewed unfavorably by most Assembly deputies, as well as by the court.
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But the organization rapidly gained widespread support in Paris and beyond. Its bookstore, housed in the Cercle’s offices, advertised works by Condorcet, Brissot, Bonneville, Mercier, Athanase Auger, Tom Paine, and François Lanthenas (1739–1816). Lanthenas figured in the Cercle’s publicity among that select body of “upright men whose conduct accords marvelously with his principles” and who, through his writings and speeches, had rendered the Revolution signal services.
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A medical man close to Mme. Roland, who regularly contributed to Brissot’s
Patriote français
, yet another indefatigable theorist of democratic revolution, Lanthenas, like Condorcet, Brissot, and Bonneville, labored to bridge the gap between philosophique principles and the masses.
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Author of a text on the evils of primogeniture, he also published more generally on human rights and the “principles of universal morality.” In his text on press freedom,
De la liberté indéfinie de la presse
(1791), he emphasized the wide gap between Britain’s limited, controlled press freedom so admired by France’s constitutional monarchists and the radical, unrestricted press freedom now prevailing in France.
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Emancipating the people by reeducating them meant disseminating radical ideas, including social concepts that had little immediate connection with popular concerns and needs. In the view of the republican leadership, everything “de plus philosophique” concerning the origin of societies, kinds of government, laws, religion, and moral principles needed to become more familiar. To sustain the momentum, the main revolutionary journals regularly carried references to and extracts from philosophes “of the first order” like Mably, Condillac, Boulanger, Raynal, Diderot, Paine, and d’Holbach, besides Rousseau and Voltaire.
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Informed the Besançon civic guard had established a reading room at their own expense to help them better comprehend their
interests and duties as citizens, the
Chronique de Paris
called for this example to be universally emulated.
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Many key radical proposals—reform of the marriage laws, emancipating women legally and politically, dissolution of religious orders, integrating “free blacks” and Jews, abolishing slavery—lay so far beyond the bounds of received thinking that they met with incomprehension and a broadly unsympathetic response. Black emancipation was a cause Brissot, Condorcet, and Lanthenas had identified with well before 1789. Anacharsis Cloots was also fervent for black emancipation.
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They tried to mobilize mass support for the Amis des Noirs, the abolitionist association they presided over, as a way of defeating the opposition to equal rights for free blacks, and ending slavery.

Civil marriage and civil divorce, together with abolishing the dowry system, regular topics of public debate since the summer of 1789, were another particular sphere of Cercle Social effort. The Revolution would have “une grande influence” on the lives of women, announced the
Chronique de Paris
. Several of the Revolution’s most outstanding women, Sophie Condorcet (1758–1822; Condorcet’s wife), Olympe de Gouges (1748–93), and the Dutch exile Etta Palm d’Aelders (1743–99), participated prominently in the Cercle’s work. Through the Cercle’s efforts, civil marriage, divorce, equality within marriage, a national education system for girls, and legal majority at twenty-five became stock themes among the revolutionary vanguard. Sophie Condorcet, Adam Smith’s future translator, a strikingly beautiful woman nicknamed “la belle Grouchette” after her maiden name (Grouchy), became a prominent figure in her own right among the Revolution’s democratic leadership. She and Condorcet, for whom she became a true
collaboratrice
, had married, with Lafayette present, in December 1786. Their salon, which met in their apartments on the Quai Conti in the Hotel des Monnaies, became a principal gathering point in Paris for all the “troupe philosophique” subsequently leading the Revolution. Despite her aristocratic background and provincial convent education, twenty months since arriving in Paris in 1784 sufficed to convert her into a well-read, ardent republican, burning with zeal for la philosophie and revolutionary equality. With a keen interest in the United States as well as France, she exerted a powerful influence over the entire philosophique sect, including her husband, albeit contributing in a quieter, more modest way than Mme. Roland, and without seeking to upstage her husband. Like her close male associates, she was a convinced atheist. She was in some ways an even more philosophique presence than
her sister revolutionaries, Mesdames Roland, Palm d’Aelders, and Gouges.

Prior to 1789, Sophie’s salon had featured Adam Smith, Jefferson, Morellet, Suard, Beaumarchais, Lafayette, Ginguené, and David Williams (1738–1816), the former Unitarian turned deist, and briefly, during 1789–92, democratic radical. During the early Revolution, her salon was a regular focal point for the Revolution’s leading republicans: her husband, Brissot, Garat, Ginguené, Chamfort, Volney, Chénier, Paine, Cloots, the materialist Cabanis, who later married Sophie’s sister, Charlotte de Grouchy (1768–1844), and Claude Fauriel (1772–1844), professor of literature, critic, historian, and philosopher, the scholar who, after 1794, became her lover.
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She often urged Condorcet on to even more uncompromisingly democratic positions than he was inclined to anyway, and, along with Gouges and Palm, lent a major impulse to the birth of modern feminism.
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Since women have the same moral and intellectual capacities as men, anything but equality for women, argued Sophie Condorcet, is by definition incompatible with the Rights of Man and discriminatory. After the Terror, and Condorcet’s death, she remained steadfastly loyal to his philosophique legacy. Her salon resumed both in Paris and her summer residence, the suburban château of La Villette, where she continued defending the Revolution’s core principles. Her salon also remained a focus of philosophique criticism and quiet opposition after the death of Mme. Helvétius in 1800 and Napoleon’s consolidation of power.
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