Revolutionary Ideas: An Intellectual History of the French Revolution From the Rights of Man to Robespierre (3 page)

Toasted next were the heralds and champions of the Rights of Man
,
who, via their writings, formed the Revolution’s avant-garde, formulating and propagating its essential principles. These were listed as “Condorcet, Brissot, Sieyès, Carra, Kersaint, Louvet, Gorsas, Audouin,
etc….”
⁵
Condorcet, among the principal revolutionary leaders, was also one of the most radical philosophes and, like Sieyès and Brissot, a vigorous exponent of human rights, republican constitutional theory, black emancipation, women’s rights, and educational reform. The authentic Revolution, this ninth toast proclaimed, the revolution based on democracy and human rights, was principally the work of this mix of philosophes and radical-minded newspaper editors. To leaders of the British Club, the true revolution, that precious to all humanity, stood in stark contrast to the populist authoritarianism of Marat and Robespierre embodied in the Jacobin faction known as the Montagne, which (except for John Oswald) they rejected unreservedly. For opposing the Montagne, Brissot, Gorsas, Kersaint, and Carra, among the Revolution’s preeminent journalists and orators, were all guillotined during the Terror, while Condorcet was proscribed and hounded to death. Louvet, among the Montagne’s fiercest detractors, only narrowly survived.

The tenth toast was to the French revolutionary generals, the eleventh to the local democratic clubs active throughout France, and also in Belgium, Britain, the French-occupied Rhineland, and Ireland, and the twelfth, proposed by Hurford Stone (also imprisoned during the Terror), was to Tom Paine and “his novel method of making good books known to the public” via royal prohibitions and prosecution of authors, an allusion to the British government’s fierce suppression of Paine’s writings, especially his internationally famous
The Rights of Man
(1791). Toast thirteen was to all other “Patriots of England” who by their speeches and writings spread the principles of the French and “the General Revolution”—Priestley, Price, Sheridan, Barlow, Thomas Cooper (leader of the radical reform society of Manchester), Tooke, and Mackintosh. Number fourteen eagerly anticipated the “dissolution of the German empire” and its replacement with democratic republics that would enable Germany’s inhabitants to live in freedom. Toast fifteen, on a more humorous note, expressed the wish that the republican tunes of the Légion Germanique might soon become the favorite marching music of the British army.

Finally, on an unreservedly serious note, number sixteen was to
la paix universelle
(perpetual peace).
⁶
Although most outside observers, then as now, deemed the idea of perpetual peace among peoples a hopelessly utopian mirage, sheer nonsense, this concept had become a central theme of radical thought since the 1770s. Diderot, Raynal, d’Holbach, Cerisier, Paine, and others—and lately, with special emphasis, also Volney in his
Les Ruines
(1791)—argued that if the majority of people ever
ceased to be the prey of ruling elites and vested interests; if government was no longer controlled by kings, aristocrats, or narrow oligarchies but genuinely pursued the interest of society as a whole; if all nations became representative democracies; if (non-Rousseauist)
volonté générale
became actual and universal, then there would be no more wars. It was an appealing argument.
⁷

CHAPTER 1

Introduction

French Society in 1789

Historians working on the French Revolution have a problem. All of our attempts to find an explanation in terms of social groups or classes, or particular segments of society becoming powerfully activated, have fallen short. As one expert aptly expressed it: “the truth is we have no agreed general theory of why the French Revolution came about and what it was—and no prospect of one.”
¹
This gaping, causal void is certainly not due to lack of investigation into the Revolution’s background and origins. If class conflict in the Marxist sense has been jettisoned, other ways of attributing the Revolution to social change have been explored with unrelenting rigor. Of course, every historian agrees society was slowly changing and that along with the steady expansion of trade and the cities, and the apparatus of the state and armed forces, more (and more professional) lawyers, engineers, administrators, officers, medical staff, architects, and naval personnel were increasingly infusing and diversifying the existing order.
²
Yet, no major, new socioeconomic pressures of a kind apt to cause sudden, dramatic change have been identified. The result, even some keen revisionists admit, is a “somewhat painful void.”
³

Most historians today claim there was not one big cause but instead numerous small contributory impulses. One historian, stressing the absence of any identifiable overriding cause, likened the Revolution’s origins to a “multi-coloured tapestry of interwoven causal factors.”
⁴
Social and economic historians embracing the “new social interpretation” identify a variety of difficulties that might have rendered eighteenth-century French society, at least in some respects, more fraught and vulnerable than earlier. Yet these factors, all marginal when taken individually, hardly suffice to fill the explanatory gap left by the collapse of every general argument, such as the Marxist thesis of class struggle or the once widely held view that impoverishment and falling real wages
created a severe subsistence crisis with deteriorating living standards for most. The latter contention, if correct, would assuredly provide a concrete, compelling argumentation, a comprehensive explanation of why a generalized revolt occurred and possibly why so many major changes were subsequently introduced. There would be a clear logic to accepting that the Revolution was a response to misery and deprivation caused by receding living standards. But the evidence shows that no such crisis occurred. Per capita income in France actually grew over the eighteenth century as towns expanded, along with commerce and industry, shipping, and overseas trade. Agriculture prospered. What then moved the French urban affluent, and the urban poor and peasants, usually considered the main active agents of the Revolution?

“The Revolution,” affirms our present academic consensus, “had many origins.”
⁵
Losing all prospect of a compelling narrative in terms of social groups and mechanisms, social and economic historians have in recent years focused on the unbalanced character of the general expansion. France’s population grew from around twenty-one to twenty-eight million between 1700 and 1800, an increase of roughly one-third. But the accompanying growth in activity and prosperity in the towns outstripped that in the countryside, where 80 percent of the population dwelled. Consequently, agricultural output only just, and only erratically, kept pace. Narrow surpluses in some years alternated with mild or severe shortages in others. Lack of food and intermittent price surges were, of course, nothing new, but they were undoubtedly relevant to shaping the Revolution at crucial moments.
⁶

As elsewhere in Europe, the main French cities grew impressively during the eighteenth century, expanding by between a third and a half, with Bordeaux more than doubling to 111,000. Paris swelled by a third, reaching around 650,000.
⁷
Small towns often increased by more than half. Until 1789, the crafts flourished, especially those producing luxury goods for the wealthy and for export. Real wages rose overall. Nevertheless, most townsfolk remained poor and unskilled and, for many laborers and artisans, combined demographic pressure and uneven economic growth caused real wages to fluctuate during the 1770s and 1780s, with a downward tendency affecting some by perhaps around 10 or 12 percent. Expansion, as frequently happens, occasioned fresh collisions of interest with certain groups losing ground.
⁸
Some resentment may have been caused by the tax burden on the slowly expanding agricultural sector, taxes on land and food output growing somewhat as a proportion of the whole. The burden on the commerce and crafts generating most
of France’s growth correspondingly fell slightly. But the imbalance was marginal and developed against a background of prior heavy fiscal overemphasis on trade and towns so that this change could be viewed more as a corrective than a tangible grievance.
⁹
If agricultural output represented around two-thirds of the French economy in 1788, land and agriculture still accounted for only 56 percent of royal revenues.

What the “new social interpretation” plainly demonstrates is that there was no major crisis troubling late eighteenth-century French society of the kind apt to generate serious destabilizing discontent across society. Certainly, there was extensive poverty and misery but within an entirely familiar and traditional format. There was a growing affluent urban bourgeoisie, slowly expanding in size, wealth, and ambition, that entered into increasing competition with the privileged elites for government posts, prerogatives, and honors, but both the nobility and these upwardly mobile strands of the bourgeoisie remained politically, socially, culturally, religiously, and, in general outlook, intensely conservative.
¹⁰
For the rest, the “new social interpretation” yields only a few relatively minor tensions affecting particular groups. The economic gap between aristocratic bishops and parish curates widened. With the general economic expansion, demand for and ability to pay for ennoblement, dignities, and high office outstripped the rise in prosperity, causing the fortunes of poorer noble families to deteriorate relative to recently ennobled newcomers and possibly a degree of frustration and resentment among the uppermost strata of the mercantile and professional classes, although this is hard to document. In any case, the overall impact of such factors on the Revolution cannot have been great.
¹¹

The nobility, broadly defined, had long comprised five or six distinct elite strata all continually jostling for power, influence, and advantage. There were the court and higher military nobility, recently ennobled wealthy bourgeois (the
annoblis
), municipal oligarchies, the episcopate, the often quite poor rural gentry, and the noblesse de robe
,
or urban judicial aristocracy staffing the country’s regional high courts (
parlements
). But none of these fissures presented anything at all new. Claiming “multiple, overlapping origins of the French Revolution” may initially sound promising but proves inadequate when all the factors identified are too long-standing, slow-moving, marginal, and insufficiently specific to apply convincingly to the actual political clashes, crises, and debates driving the Revolution. In any case, how economic and other material factors could directly cause such a dramatic shift, as the
Revolution rapidly entailed, to democracy, freedom of thought, expression, and the press, human rights, secularism, sexual liberation, gender and racial emancipation, individual liberty, and equality before the law, no one can really say. “The prime defect of the revisionist accounts,” as one historian relevantly remarked, “has been their failure to offer a plausible alternative to the Marxist version.”
¹²

At most, the “new social explanation” authorizes us to claim that “what pushed the Revolution forward was the willingness of disenfranchised robe nobles, alienated parish priests, and ambitious professionals to challenge the old order.”
¹³
But such an explanation, even if possessing a considerable background validity as it does, cannot easily be applied to the revolutionary process itself since none of these groups figured prominently among the revolutionary leadership. By and large, as we shall see, the principal organizers, spokesmen, and publicists of the factions that forged the great changes of the Revolution in legislation, institutions, and practices prior to Robespierre’s coup d’état in June 1793 were not robe nobles, parish priests, or ambitious professionals. There was never a greater or more rapid transformation in the shape, values, and politics of any society. We can only know for sure that a given factor directly contributed to this vast vortex of change when the evidence of the primary sources proves particular grievances or tensions motivated, inspired, or induced key groups or individuals to initiate the actual transformation of institutions, laws, and culture constituting the Revolution.

Only one major, tangible, material factor directly linked causally to the revolutionary foreground can be pointed to: the royal financial crisis of 1787–89. In terms of timing, the political revolution unquestionably began with the French Crown’s chronic financial difficulties of the mid- and later 1780s and the ensuing attempts at fiscal reform. In 1787, faced by overwhelming deficits made worse by feverish speculation in French government bonds on the international market, Louis XVI was forced into political moves that eventually triggered the revolutionary process. From the Crown’s (and soon also the aristocracy’s) standpoint, matters spun out of control under the energetic reforming minister Charles-Alexandre de Calonne (1734–1802), a high official and robe noble of the
parlement
of Douai, who by trying to tackle the deficits destabilized first the monarchy and then the country. “O my dear Calonne!” mocked one of the most republican-minded of the young revolutionaries of the years 1788–89, Camille Desmoulins, later Danton’s
right-hand man.
¹⁴
But even fully allowing for the gravity of the financial crisis and Calonne’s errors, neither the subsequent breakdown of government nor, still less, the vast revolutionary process that followed are really explained by it.