Revolutionary Ideas: An Intellectual History of the French Revolution From the Rights of Man to Robespierre (27 page)

Pressure to stage republican material eventually proved irresistible. The Théâtre de la Nation agreed to stage its first ever performance of
Barnevelt
, a drama about Oldenbarnevelt’s downfall in 1618. The premiere took place on 30 June 1790, its more obviously republican moments eliciting embarrassingly lively applause from the audience. A spectator, defiantly expressing monarchical indignation by hissing
loudly, was hounded from the theater.
¹¹⁰
Predictably,
Charles IX
, performed thirty-four times in the autumn of 1789, was loudly demanded and provoked a still greater furor. Like the rest of society, the actors were hopelessly split, most resisting the pressure to stage the play. A minority, led by the radical François-Joseph Talma (1763–1826), the most renowned tragic actor of the revolutionary era, and his leading lady, Mme. Vestris, wished to perform it. Requests flowed especially from volunteer soldiers (
fédérés
) from the provinces sent to participate in the 14 July marches and celebrations. Those from Marseille demanded the play with particular fervor and enlisted Mirabeau to help secure it. A disturbance calling for the play, openly encouraged by Talma, occurred at the theater on 22 July. Opposing efforts to enlist Bailly to ban the play and arrest Talma as an
incendiaire
failed. Chénier mobilized additional support in the Cordeliers section.
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Noting Mirabeau’s intervention, Danton’s interest, and the fédérés’ enthusiasm, Bailly wisely permitted the performance but took care to post armed guards around the theater. The play was finally staged on 23 July, with Danton present. Trouble ensued afterward when Talma, now publicly allied to Mirabeau, Danton, and Chénier, so antagonized fellow actors that they ejected him from the theater and permanently boycotted him.

The French theater world was plunged into ferment, one side adhering to a “moderate” course, the other proclaiming the theater “the modern school of liberty.” When Voltaire’s
Brutus
was repeated on 17 November, the audience, relating events onstage to events in the country, immediately split into opposed factions, one side yelling “Vive le roi!,” the other “Vive le roi, vive la Nation!” During a performance of
La Liberté conquise
at the Théâtre de la Nation, at the moment the Bastille’s assailants proclaim their oath to “conquer or die,” the audience rose to their feet as one, the men lifting their hats on the ends of their canes and shaking them in the air, the women holding aloft their hands and throwing up handkerchiefs, thoroughly stirring all present. During another performance of this play, “the brave Arné”—the grenadier who overpowered the Bastille’s governor and then clambered up the Bastille’s highest turret to raise his hat high into the air on his bayonet—was spotted. The audience spontaneously demanded he be crowned with a liberty cap. As Arné was “crowned,” enthusiastic market women sang an uplifting chorus in the hero’s honor.
¹¹²

The Paris Opera became equally polarized.
Iphigénie en Aulide
by Gluck, first performed at the Paris Opera in 1774, produced an unruly incident in December 1790, with
patriotes
occupying the parterre in
force, and monarchists predominating higher up, in the more expensive seats. When the aria “let us celebrate our queen” was sung, aristocrats in the boxes thunderously applauded while the parterre stamped, hissed, and jeered. In response, Antoinettistes hurled down apples, provoking
Patriotes
to try to climb up to the boxes with little “martinets” for whipping fine ladies sporting the white cockade, only to be repelled by the National Guard posted to keep order.
¹¹³

At a meeting on 27 September 1790, Théâtre de la Nation actors expressed resentment at being called “réfractaires” and “authors of counterrevolution” by hostile audiences. Unable either to secure court permission to perform
Charles IX
or persuade audiences the play was forbidden, the actors requested a civic directive requiring performances of
Charles IX
on specified days as a way of evading recrimination for staging “republican plays.”
¹¹⁴
When the autumn season of
Charles IX
eventually opened, Mirabeau was spotted among the audience and given a rousing ovation.
¹¹⁵
On 18 December 1790, with tension between Assembly and Church escalating, the Théâtre de la Nation premiered
Jean Calas
, based on Voltaire’s most famous public campaign against bigotry, by the Left republican playwright Jean-Louis Laya (1761–1833), a play reportedly “applauded universally,” in which the judges’ “fanaticism” and ecclesiastical intolerance were fiercely pilloried.
¹¹⁶

As the revolutionary leadership of 1789 split, especially over restricted suffrage, respecting the royal veto, and press freedom, the democratic republican Left appeared to be in danger of being politically marginalized, pinned to the defensive. The municipal elections of August 1790 were a particular setback: Bailly was reelected mayor, with 12,000 out of 14,000 votes, and a new communal assembly was chosen, composed overwhelmingly of moderates.
¹¹⁷
Brissot, Bonneville, Fauchet, and Garran-Coulon lost their prominent positions in the Commune, and from October 1790, Brissot no longer played a role there at all. But as the
Chronique de Paris
and other revolutionary journals pointed out, this outcome was principally due to the new financial qualifications for “active” citizenry, which had the effect of disadvantaging known republicans and democrats and securing their rejection by the more affluent. The results were not a reflection of sentiment more generally in Paris or the press. Republicans responded by redoubling their efforts to cultivate the Palais-Royal and the streets. From late 1790, the democratic Left took to opposing the Commune as well as the mayor by mobilizing support among the wider public outside the official political sphere.

This shift in revolutionary politics during late 1790 also reflected a regrouping of the political factions in the National Assembly with Sieyès, Barnave, Lafayette, and Bailly now leaning more and more toward the center, Mirabeau (in secret contact with the court since March 1790 and abandoning his earlier radicalism) becoming isolated, and those to the Left for the moment a reduced minority. Former allies parted company. Already in July, Desmoulins bitterly mocked and rebuked Sieyès in his paper for becoming too deferential toward the king, reminding him of the vast applause in early 1789 for his famous pamphlet
Qu’est-ce que le Tiers
and its huge impact on the Café Procope, the engine room of the Revolution. Was it possible that this same hero of 1789 now proposed penalties for those writing irreverently about kings?
¹¹⁸
The most outspoken opposition journalists (whether democrats or populists)—Desmoulins, Marat, and Fréron—increasingly had batches of their papers seized and saw the colporteurs peddling them molested.
¹¹⁹
In October, the Cercle Social converted its organ, the
Bouche de fer
, into a regular journal designed, under Bonneville’s and Cérutti’s editorship, to secure a wide readership. It was at this point that its directoire, now joined by Cloots and Lamourette, adopted the technique of holding mass debates at the Palais-Royal. The alliance between the presiding radical clique in the Cordeliers and the Cercle grew closer.

The first meeting of the Cercle’s new club, the Conféderation des Amis de la Vérité, took place on 13 October 1790 before an audience of more than four thousand crowded into a circus building adjoining the Palais-Royal.
¹²⁰
A second mass meeting on 22 October was attended by a still larger throng. The Cercle, the only Paris club organizing its membership on the basis of subscriptions to a journal, the
Bouche de fer
, steadily recruited more orators and journalists, including Desmoulins, Cloots, and Mercier. Its journal ensured the club both a huge membership and enviable national outreach. With a membership roll oscillating between three and six thousand, by a loose definition it was in fact the largest political club of the early Revolution. From the autumn of 1790, large, undogmatic, and broadly accommodating, the Cercle at this stage attacked neither monarchy nor religion explicitly. Outwardly compatible with a minimalized monarchism, a lively religious dimension was also provided, especially by Lamourette and Claude Fauchet, who strove, not without some success at first, to bridge the gap between Catholicism and radical thought, assuring listeners at every turn that Jesus was a lover of liberty, equality, and human rights, and a great foe of despotism and privilege.

The philosophique fringe now found themselves effectively in opposition to an expanded Assembly centrist bloc and moderate Paris Commune. They responded by equipping themselves to propel a radicalization of the Revolution from below. The Revolution, and all the people’s gains, had been achieved by la philosophie, a complete mystery to most; to explain this, the Cercle neglected no opportunity to trumpet philosophy as the Revolution’s guiding spirit. The demise of Benjamin Franklin—whose death on 17 April had been marked in Paris in July1790 with a grand commemoration, including a famous banquet at the Café Procope—signaled the start of a veritable cult of the great man. Several cafés and clubs in Paris dedicated hecatombs with funerary busts and solemn epitaphs commemorating the lofty American. The Cercle converted Franklin into a public symbol and perennial teacher of international republicanism—virtuous, austere, public-spirited, and wise. Franklin was the figure who enabled revolutionary orators to praise philosophy and its capacity to ameliorate the world without offending religion, as eulogizing Voltaire was bound to do. The high point of the July festivities was a speech by Fauchet before the Commune and twelve leading deputies, including Mirabeau, Sieyès, and Dr. Guillotin.
¹²¹
Fauchet hailed Franklin, “claimed by two worlds,” as a benefactor of the human race, one of those enlightened men who in recent decades had changed the world. At the same time, he fiercely denounced the “ridiculous etiquette” of monarchical courts, which for centuries had deemed only the demise of royalty and great aristocratic personages worthy of public mourning.
¹²²
Lavish public commemorations celebrating true benefactors of mankind, stripped of all courtly “hypocritical mournings” and posturing, would henceforth typify the new revolutionary era. The Revolution should in the future designate for public homage exclusively “les heroes de l’humanité [humanity’s heroes],” true benefactors of the human race, like Franklin.
¹²³

But the Franklin cult, like the wider philosophique message pervading the Cercle and Cordeliers leadership, was bound to look menacing to anyone opposing republican principles and deepened the Revolution’s divisions. Claiming that the Cercle and (authentic) Jacobins shared the same antiaristocratic and democratic doctrine, Desmoulins vigorously rebutted a speech attacking the Cercle, delivered in the (still predominantly “moderate”) Jacobin Club in December 1790 by the novelist and Rousseau admirer Pierre Choderlos de Laclos (1741–1803), a former army officer and fortifications expert who had emerged as a leader of the Orléanist faction.
¹²⁴
If Desmoulins had also befriended another
Rousseau admirer and stalwart defender of constitutional monarchy in the Jacobins, namely, Robespierre, intellectually he remained closer to Left republicans like Bonneville and Brissot.
¹²⁵

The involvement of both Commune and National Assembly in the Franklin commemoration owed much to Fauchet, who greatly valued the discretion of “ce grand homme,” utter religious skeptic though he was. Fauchet too was a republican and representative of Radical Enlightenment, an ardent reformer and foe of aristocracy. A thorough-going democrat, he was among the most prominent advocates of the principle of having bishops and priests elected by the whole people instead of chosen by the court. Fervent disciple of Rousseau (while disagreeing on certain political points), he viewed Rousseau’s books as the key to the reconciliation of religion and la philosophie he so tirelessly sought. As a member of the Cercle’s directorate and its
procureur-général
, he delivered a long series of public lectures in the Cercle’s name, invoking Rousseau as the society’s true guiding intellectual light. He believed his demand that the land should be apportioned in a more equal fashion among the peasantry was supported by both Scripture and Rousseau. But in a speech on October 1790, and thereafter increasingly, Fauchet also denounced the “atheism” and irreligion of the philosophes, dismissing Voltaire for his aristocratic connections, personal wealth, and alleged unoriginality, and, despite his eloquence and wit, a generally malign influence.

Christianity is
la liberté universelle
and the people’s true guide, held Fauchet, and any philosophe who denied this was not an authentic philosophe but rather, like Julian the Apostate, a ridiculous sophist.
¹²⁶
Among those annoyed by these sallies and his insistence that “true Christianity is the only veritable fount of liberty and
volonté générale
,” were Bonneville, Desmoulins, Cloots, and the antitheological social reformer Villette. A noble landowner wounded at the battle of Minden in 1759, Villette had often stayed at Voltaire’s mansion at Ferney. It was in Villette’s house in Paris that Voltaire had lodged during his last days in 1778, and died (and where his body was embalmed). Villette had no patience at all for Christian values. Since joining the Cercle’s directoire in October 1790, the declared atheist Anacharsis Cloots had also been disturbed by the “mystical” and Christian atmosphere infusing some Cercle meetings. To him, the Gospel and Koran, like the Zend Avesta and Hindu scriptures, were sources only of trouble, confusion, and error. In late March 1791, Cloots and Fauchet publicly quarreled in Cercle meetings over two vital points: Fauchet’s negative campaign
against irreligious philosophes and his supposedly demanding that wealth and the land be systematically and equally divided among the people, a proposition Cloots pronounced excessive and “dangerous.”