Revolutionary Ideas: An Intellectual History of the French Revolution From the Rights of Man to Robespierre (26 page)

The Cercle tried to connect Enlightenment and popular attitudes by encouraging people to submit their views to the leadership via the
Bouche de fer
(the journal’s title alluded to the famous lion’s mouth, providing Venetian citizens a means to communicate anonymously with the republic’s ruling council). Appearing sporadically at first,
La Bouche de fer
came out regularly from October 1790 on, aspiring to be the staple vehicle of the “bons citoyens.” But from the outset, it found itself entangled with the militant demagogues of the poor faubourgs, especially Marat. In principle, the Cercle, like the Société de 89, acknowledged the people as “sovereign” and “soul” of the Assembly, and their representatives as heralds of the volonté générale. The Cercle’s goal,
urged Bonneville, was “to give the people’s voice its full force and scope to censure.”
⁸⁹
Yet while everyone had a right to discuss and help form public opinion, the Cercle assumed the people could not “by itself exercise either the legislative or the executive power.”
⁹⁰
The people’s views should be freely expressed but also channeled, refined, and guided by philosophes presiding over a free press and the now-transformed educational and political spheres.

Republicans defended freedom of speech even in the case of their staunchest enemies. An indictment of Marat for sedition, instigated in January 1790 by Bailly and others denouncing his violent tone, was backed by much of the Assembly. Month after month in his
L’Ami du peuple
, Marat vilified the regime and revolutionary leadership, urging the populace to rise, break open the arsenals, and arrest all royal ministers and their underlings, and thoroughly purge the city government and National Guard. Chopping off five or six hundred heads was the right way to prevent the “privileged orders” from reestablishing despotism. Malouet and especially Maury—who over many months found himself the target of a vitriolic press campaign originally inspired by Desmoulins, who derided him unrelentingly and accused him of vindictiveness, corruption, loving luxury, and continually consorting with prostitutes—responded by denouncing Desmoulins, Marat, and others for propagating calumnies and demanded that the
colporteurs
selling revolutionary papers and pamphlets in the streets be curbed.
⁹¹
A sixty-seven-page “project” composed by the Comité de Constitution, including Sieyès, submitted to the Assembly on 20 January, recommending limits on press freedom where abusers spread calumny and incited violence, and attaching appropriate penalties, met with a sharply divided response.
⁹²
Malouet exhorted the Assembly to proceed against “writers inciting the people to bloodshed and disobedience to the laws.” Applauded from the Right, his harangue was pilloried by Pétion and the Left. If Marat’s and Desmoulins’s papers needed suppressing, objected one deputy, then so did the
Gazette de Paris
,
Actes des apôtres
, and other royalist papers.
⁹³

The
Chronique de Paris
vehemently condemned Sieyès’s attempt to bridle Marat and Desmoulins, urging unrestricted press freedom and warning of “dire consequences” should this be compromised.
⁹⁴
When magistrates ordered Marat’s arrest for sedition in March 1790, and Lafayette was sent to arrest him, the Cercle came to the aid of the populists, as did Danton, Desmoulins, and the Cordeliers committee, all equally eager to champion the Rights of Man, and despite having their
own difficulties with Marat. The Cercle and Cordeliers encouraged the fugitive to go underground in their ward, obstruction that resulted in Danton too being arraigned for sedition. The Commune’s general council, a body where Brissot and Condorcet for the moment remained prominent, directly clashing with Bailly, thereupon sprang to Danton’s defense.

A Crypto-Republican Revolution

Understandably, the first anniversary of the Bastille’s fall, though lavishly celebrated with splendid illuminations and firework displays, was far from being the harmonious occasion many historians have claimed it to have been. Rather, despite the hype, it reflected deep and irresolvable splits that increasingly menaced the Republic and the Revolution’s future. The Bastille’s ruins, the Assembly decreed, should be surrounded by a grill and preserved as they were, without adornment, as a national monument, at the center of which would be erected an obelisk inscribed with the Rights of Man. Preceded by an unprecedented ferment in the theaters, the anniversary was accompanied by much sarcastic comment on its (patently false) message of admirably harmonious collaboration of monarch and a jubilant people. The main point of the pompous festivities arranged by Bailly and the
fripons
around him, suggested Marat, was to distract the citizenry from the tense political situation and the “universal misery” caused by the shortage of work and collapse of manufacturing, and long months of “famine” that was their lot.
⁹⁵

On 11 July 1790, three days before the anniversary of the Bastille’s fall, the Americans in Paris appeared in the Assembly, headed by John Paul Jones (1747–92), the United States’ heroic naval commander during the Revolutionary War, to pay homage to the Revolution and eulogize the much-acclaimed
patriotisme
of Louis XVI.
⁹⁶
On 14 July itself, the Assembly took the day off to attend the ceremonies marking the anniversary; the main parade, commencing at the Porte Saint-Antoine, took eight hours to wend its way across the city through the dense mass of humanity to the Champs de Mars. For the occasion, the Place de la Bastille was turned into an open-air stage festooned with garlands and revolutionary insignia. A large bust of Rousseau, bedecked with a civic crown, was carried in triumph several times around the ruins by the pupils of the Academy of Painting, escorted with quasi-religious solemnity by a National Guard contingent and crowds of citizens singing
a specially composed hymn summoning all to invoke the “holy name of Rousseau, this sublime name.”
⁹⁷
Rousseau may not have been the chief intellectual inspiration of Condorcet, Mirabeau, Sieyès, Cérutti, Volney, Brissot, or the revolutionary vanguard, but he was unquestionably the unrivaled chief teacher and prophet venerated by revolutionary popular culture.

The culminating ceremony, held in the presence of king, court, and the whole Assembly, with National Guard commander Lafayette assigning himself the central role, was watched by an immense crowd, the king, and various other dignitaries publicly swearing to uphold the Constitution to the accompaniment of salvos of ceremonial artillery. Afterward, there were “magnificent illuminations” and much partying and dancing.
⁹⁸
For showing the king exaggerated respect on this occasion, as well as hogging center stage for himself, Desmoulins’s paper heaped insults on Lafayette. Others, too, including Robespierre, derided Lafayette’s posturing. Immediately after the 14 July celebrations, Marat and Desmoulins were again formally charged by Malouet and the Club Monarchique with subverting the Constitution. Desmoulins was plainly trying to render royalty an object of contempt, styling Louis a king “with his hands tied behind his back, following [the 14 July triumphal parade] in humiliation.”
⁹⁹
Plainly, these men wanted no king or monarchical government and were depicting monarchists as foes of the people. Certain papers continually invoked the danger of counterrevolution. But was it not “counterrevolutionary” to try to overthrow king, Constitution, and the law? Malouet produced a fresh draft decree, pronouncing all who “in their writings incite the people to insurrection against the law, to bloodshed and the overthrow of the Constitution” guilty of a criminal offense. “Authors, printers and street-vendors of writings inciting such insurrection” must be punished.
¹⁰⁰
Again the Cercle and the Cordeliers sprang to Marat’s and Desmoulins’s defense.
¹⁰¹

The “truest friends of liberty,” as Lanthenas called them, responded by forming a defensive alliance, the Amis de la Liberté Indéfinie de la Presse. The priceless freedoms gained in 1789, contended republican democrats, were won essentially by press freedom, and this liberty was also the sole means to defend freedom generally.
¹⁰²
“Moderates” fighting to curtail press freedom cited British practice to justify the proposed restrictions. But the vagueness of their press freedom and strength of their libel laws, objected republicans, rendered the British approach “détestable” to any people aspiring to be free.
¹⁰³
Lanthenas
extolled unlimited freedom of the press as the guardian and sole infallible safeguard of the volonté générale. Volonté générale was the engine serving society’s true interests and object of all free and understanding “private wills,” but was genuinely expressed only where reason was the sole evaluating criterion.
¹⁰⁴

Lanthenas’s thesis relied wholly on reason’s power to subdue ignorance. Dispensing with libel laws left no other recourse than to shrug off malicious insults, calumny, and ill-grounded criticism. Let royalist journalists like Mallet du Pan, Royou, Rivarol, and so on “vomit their lies,
sophismes
and insults against the people” and against la philosophie. Let their presses and bookshops be respected and their infamous trade faithfully served by the national postal service. Let us take all measures to ensure the triumph of the
bons principes
supporting humanity’s rights and interests through a national campaign of public instruction.
¹⁰⁵
Full, unrestricted freedom of the press thus became inextricably linked to the task of reeducating the population and teaching children to develop an independent and sound critical judgment. Needed above all was free public schooling that inculcated knowledge of the Constitution, civics, and the rudiments of science, geography, and history, where
la morale universelle
and
la politique naturelle
(his employing d’Holbach’s book titles was no accident) infuse what is taught.
¹⁰⁶
Only education of this sort can enable the people to judge correctly.

Aside from the main festivities in Paris, smaller reenactments of the taking of the Bastille, using papier-mâché models of the fortress, were staged in the Paris outskirts by the best-known of the Bastille’s “conquerors,” Pierre-François Palloy, “the Patriot.” Such playacting set the pattern for open-air reenactments around the country, ritual commemorations in which a model Bastille was “stormed” and an old man symbolically laden with chains “liberated” to thunderous crowd applause.
¹⁰⁷
The papers, eager to enhance the image of the Revolution as a world event, also reported banquets marking the anniversary held in foreign metropolises. There was clearly real enthusiasm in certain circles in Britain, Germany, and Holland. In London and Amsterdam, in Stuttgart, at Schiller’s old school, the Hohe Karlsschule, students mounted a lively celebration, and also at Hamburg, where “worthy men participated in the happiness of twenty-five million humans who had recovered their liberty.”

At Hamburg, Georg Heinrich Sieveking organized a grand all-day festival and banquet for eighty guests on his property at nearby Harvestehude. Those present included Reimarus’s son, Johann Albert Heinrich
Reimarus (1729–1814); his famous unmarried sister, Lessing’s and Mendelssohn’s friend, Elise Reimarus (1735–1805); the poetess Caroline Rudolphi; the former leader of the Illuminati in Protestant Germany, Knigge, among the foremost supporters of the French Revolution outside France; and the poet Friedrich Gottlieb Klopstock (1724–1803). The banquet, accompanied by live music, a women’s choir, discharge of ceremonial cannon, and two revolutionary odes by Klopstock, lasted all day, the participants successively toasting the “happiness of France,” the glorious 14 July, the French National Assembly, Bailly, Lafayette, Mirabeau, and Klopstock. The men, sporting tricolor cockades, and the women, wearing white dresses with tricolor sashes and hats with tricolor cockades, drank also to “prompt consequences” and an end to princely
Despotismus
in Germany.
¹⁰⁸

The Paris theater world also stoked the fierce ideological furor of July 1790. As the first anniversary of the Bastille approached, the actors were besieged with demands for performances of Voltaire’s
Brutus
(1731) and
The
Death of Caesar
(1735); Antoine-Marin Lemierre’s
Guillaume Tell
(1766), a play revived with success, earlier, in 1786;
Barneveld
, also by Lemierre; and especially Chénier’s
Charles IX
. In recent months, all such requests had been rejected by royal ministers and theater directorates due to the overtly republican slant audiences would inevitably place on their content. Boycotting them all, the former Comédie-Française, since November 1789 renamed the Théâtre de la Nation, performed what La Harpe and another playwright, Palissot, called “the most insignificant pieces” they could find, all breathing the spirit of “servitude” and “adulation.”
¹⁰⁹
Comédie-Française actors, who despite the change in the name of the theater still styled themselves “Comediens français ordinaires du roi,” mostly, reports La Harpe, backed the
parti anti-révolutionnaire
. With a blatantly biased choice of plays, they tried to foment adulation of kings and nobles among the least sophisticated, “nothing being easier than to mislead ordinary folk and seduce their minds” by manipulating emotions in ways they fail to understand. Resistance collapsed, though, amid a growing commotion in the French theater world in July.