Revolutionary Ideas: An Intellectual History of the French Revolution From the Rights of Man to Robespierre (29 page)

Philosophique republicans like Pétion, Manuel, Brissot, and Condorcet were the backbone of the democratic, egalitarian Revolution but had so far all along remained a small minority in the legislature. Most National Assembly deputies remained convinced and resolute defenders of monarchy, and for the moment so did the Paris Commune. But this large majority was irretrievably divided between conservative monarchists anxious to defend king and Church, and (to a lesser degree) the parlements and “moderate” constitutionalists seeking to subject the court effectively to the legislature, weaken religious authority drastically, and pursue and marginalize the old aristocracy. The first category more or less openly opposed the Revolution’s essential principles while the second claimed to support them but were regarded by republicans (with considerable justification, it turned out) as “enemies secrets du bonheur public.” The rift dividing these two numerically dominant blocs was not just irreparable but extremely bitter. In December 1790, Barnave proposed a decree that ex-patriots failing to return within a month to reside under French laws, including the king’s relatives, should lose all pensions and gratifications received from the Crown. Maury and Cazalès furiously opposed this attempt to strip the fugitive princes and principal émigrés of their court sinecures and gratifications, pronouncing it an outrageous affront to royalty and aristocracy, and a blatant violation of the sacred right of property.

The liberal monarchist center led by Barnave and the Lameths aspired to capture the Revolution and dominate the legislature. Their tactical position was considerably strengthened in March 1790 when a faction including Lafayette (who earlier had assured republican allies that he too was a republican) and another leading deputy, Isaac René Le Chapelier (1754–94), from Rennes, prominent in the Estates-General of 1789 and later on the constitutional committee, moved rightward and joined them in combating the parti de philosophie.
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Yet, the center suffered several—in fact four—major structural weaknesses that rendered these men not just unlikely to succeed in their aims in the medium term, but actually the weakest of the major blocs vying for control of the country. First, the moderates (
modérés
) had most of the pro-Revolution press against them; second, they had less capacity to mobilize support in the streets than their rivals both of the Right and Left; third, there was never any true alliance or trust between them and the royal court; and finally, their vehement anticlericalism guaranteed unceasing strife with
the Church and hence with conservatism more generally. Speaking in the Assembly on 7 June 1790, Alexandre de Lameth (1760–1829), who like Lafayette had fought in the American War of Independence and had earlier claimed to be a republican, labeled the “so-called Catholics” of Nîmes “fanatics” guilty of treason, berating them especially for claiming the king, since his transfer to Paris, was no longer “a free agent.” The king, insisted Lameth, had come in person to ratify the Assembly’s main decisions. Louis had fully participated in the great enactments, and publicly proclaimed himself “le chef de la Révolution.”
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Besides changes to the Constitution, there were, of course, many other changes to institutions, society, and the laws the republicans aspired to bring about. But for most Frenchmen, the ancien régime had by no means disappeared beyond recall, and there was considerable nostalgia for it. The widely selling ultraroyalist press continually reminded Parisians that their capital had been more imposing, prosperous, pious, and orderly before the Revolution. Until 1788, Paris’s once-tidy public squares and gardens had never echoed to the cries of demonstrators or “audacious
colporteurs
” vending “infamous” brochures. The royal police had ensured there were no disturbances or disrespectful behavior toward nobles or churchmen. By contrast, churches were now daily violated and priests and friars openly derided in the streets and theaters. Since 1788, in the view of many, Paris had become depraved morally, politically, and socially. But this could be reversed. If the people would rise in arms to destroy philosophy and the revolutionaries, and restore monarchy and religion, better days would return and great benefits accrue.
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The counterrevolutionary ultraroyalism that seethed in late 1790, especially in once-preeminent regional and judicial centers, was everywhere stronger in society than liberal monarchism. The Assembly’s edict of 6 September 1790 suppressing the parlements, appropriating their buildings and archives, and quashing the old subsidiary law courts, intensified economic recession and émigré exodus alike. At Aix and Pau, the ceremonies of closure passed off without incident, with sullen crowds looking on silently. But the Parlement of Toulouse refused to give in quietly, issuing two edicts on 25 and 26 September 1790 vowing to withstand the onslaught on law and the monarchy, and calling on all loyal people to support them.
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Such defiance by “infames sycophantes” outraged both the radical and left center deputies, Mirabeau terming it a “crime manifeste.” Parlementaires signing these treasonable edicts were accused of
lèse-nation
, treason against the nation; the only
deputy who spoke in their defense, a lawyer, Madier, was soon obliged to flee the country.
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Suppression of the parlements was fully enforced but left the former judicial capitals awash with resentful ex-magistrates, advocates, and officials stripped of their former status, besides former domestics, coachmen, and artisans whose livelihoods depended on the conspicuous consumption of the elites of sword, robe, and host.

But the powerful upsurge of loyalist and pronoble sentiment in France during late 1790 was by no means confined to former regional capitals with parlements. Its impact was general and accompanied by a renewed wave of fear or “grand peur” from December 1790 to June 1791, causing pamphlets, newspapers, and the cries of the colporteurs alike to resound obsessively with talk of conspiracy, plots, and Counter-Revolution.
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Caen, where unrest was chronic and the booksellers’ boutiques supposedly overflowed with brochures decrying the Assembly’s deputies as madmen avid to “dethrone their king,” teemed, reports Gorsas, with nobles, gravitating from the surrounding region of Lower Normandy, who uttered “insolent declamations against the Constitution” and preached sedition and civil war.
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Dialogues between fictitious former “servants” exchanged claim and counterclaim. A republican pamphlet of late 1790 defending freedom of expression featured two former lackeys, one berating the “clique infernale” of Maury, Malhouet, and Duval d’Eprémesnil as malicious stalwarts inexplicably allowed by a supine Assembly to defame the Revolution and its legislation; his better-informed friend, “Bon-Coeur,” explaining that the Constitution obliges the Assembly to tolerate all opinions, since every Assembly deputy had an equal right to voice his views, good or bad.
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Lyon, though not the seat of a former parlement, was another major focus of royalist subversion. The main pillar of the city’s economy, the silk industry, was gripped by recession. Redundancy, misery, and high food prices converted the city into a turbulent hub of unrest. Rioting erupted in mid-July 1790 when workers demonstrated against the Assembly’s new sales taxes, ferment the republican press attributed chiefly to “incendiary writings” disseminated by royalists. Working people’s despair, anxieties, unawareness, and volatility became more and more evident. On 27 July, a major disturbance occurred when two thousand “workers” filled the Place Bellecour, marched on the town hall, mobbed the mayor, and seized the arsenal. The mayor mobilized the National Guard. Firing broke out in the city center, several workers were killed or wounded, and many were arrested before order was restored.
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The chief difficulty at Lyon, explained one deputy, was that the city’s mostly
illiterate textile workforce, though “naturally good,” were unfortunately gullible and “easily misled by those aiming to sow confusion and disorder.”
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Exploiting the collective panic were a group of nobles who met in one another’s houses—D’Escars, Quillengle de Poujelon, and Terasse. They mobilized working people’s disgruntlement by employing agents lower down the social scale to ply the city sections, disseminating Royou’s
L’Ami du Roi
,
La
nouvelle lanterne magique
, Durozoy’s
Gazette de Paris
, and printed circulars issued by bishops, all passionately denouncing the Revolution.
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Lyon reactionaries, suggested the republican press, finding it was easy to sway the faithful, unlettered masses, were planning a Saint Bartholomew’s Day massacre of Patriotes. “Brigands” had been smuggled into the city to lead the massacre and money distributed among the poor. Nearby, across the Piedmontese frontier at Chambéry, the princes of Artois and Condé were preparing to invade with their aristocratic armed bands the moment the people rose in their blind fury. Workingmen’s frustration had turned Lyon into the capital and arsenal of the Counter-Revolution. At length, however, in December 1790, the aristocratic conspiracy was unmasked, and D’Escars and his accomplices arrested.
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Another chronic trouble-spot, despite the lack of nobles and parlementaires, was the city of Toulon, where the elite mainly comprised merchants and officials. With its large, illiterate, and poorly paid force of dock laborers, Toulon, from late 1790, simultaneously became a focus of both panic and militant pro- and counterrevolutionary sentiment. Culminating in August 1791, its streets resounded to brutal clashes. With their simplistic rhetoric and intolerance of dissent, both proletarian currents—populist and royalist working-class reactionary—fed on the class rift, more sharply defined there than elsewhere, with the merchant class mostly backing Barnave’s liberal, constitutional monarchism. Untypical though it was, the Toulon ferment of 1790–91 mirrored the wider situation in France in one major respect: a powerfully resurgent ultraroyalist Right and pro-Revolution militancy pulverized the weak constitutional monarchist center.
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Aix-en-Provence, former provincial capital and seat of a parlement, provided a still more dramatic scenario. After the parlement ceased functioning, noted Gorsas in December 1790, Aix, where seemingly most people opposed the Revolution,
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positively seethed with unrest, stoked by “the
fanaticisme
of priests” who daily concerted with a horde of lawyers, parlementaires, and disaffected nobles, sowing discord among the
people. They allegedly saturated the town with the “hypocritical and incendiary productions of priests avid for blood.”
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Aix’s counterrevolutionary club, Des Amis du Roi, was headed by a lawyer named Pascalis, who was furious at how Mirabeau and his supporters had electrified Provence in January 1789 by assailing the parlementaires, nobles, and ecclesiastics. Pascalis championed privilege, nobility, and the “liberties” of Provence unreservedly.
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The club’s public activities—disseminating royalist papers, mocking the Assembly, exhorting citizens to sport the white cockade and exalt the king—were not (so far) illegal as such. By the autumn of 1790, despite National Guard contingents arriving from Marseille, Aix royalists felt sufficiently buoyant to gather in cafés and openly jeer tricolor-bearing passersby. Rioting ensued in December 1790 after a Jacobin deputation, passing some nobles lounging at a café, were taunted and attacked. The royalists were eventually routed but only with the aid of yet more volunteers from Marseille who provoked further violence: some four hundred men guarding the town prison were thrust aside, the prison gates smashed, and, in an excess of Patriot zeal, Pascalis and another counterrevolutionary, both recently locked up for provoking an earlier commotion, dragged out and lynched from nearby lampposts.
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Revolutionary violence of this sort was welcomed by Marat, who demanded more hangings of “traitors and scoundrels.” He construed the Assembly’s failure to crack down harshly at Aix as fresh evidence that the Assembly, apart from his favorite deputy, Robespierre, had “prostituted” itself to the court and betrayed the people. He accused Mirabeau of plotting contre-révolution in collusion with the Lameth brothers. In the Assembly, only Robespierre, he maintained, was worthy, reliable, upright, and irreproachable, a true paragon of revolutionary integrity and
civisme.
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By this time, Maximilien Robespierre (1758–94) had already won an outstanding reputation as a critic of ministers, denouncer of aristocratic intrigue, and censor of corrupt practices, as well as a stalwart opponent of the royal veto and the distinction between active and passive citizens. Having lost his mother at six and been left by his father (an Arras lawyer) in the care of a grandmother and aunts, he had been educated in Paris. Even at school, he had shown an adroitness and gift for clever rhetoric, which was to become his principal political tool. In 1789, as one of the leading lawyers of Arras, he had been elected an Estates-General deputy. Passionate devotee of Rousseau, he especially admired the great Genevan’s idealization of ordinary people. At this stage of the Revolution, Robespierre was also a leading advocate of
unlimited freedom of the press, stressing especially its value as a safeguard against corruption.
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He closely collaborated at this time with several deputies, notably Pétion and Buzot, later to be among his foremost enemies.