Revolutionary Ideas: An Intellectual History of the French Revolution From the Rights of Man to Robespierre (30 page)

Where Maury and Malouet defended royalist agitators in the disturbed regional centers on grounds of freedom of expression and assembly, dismissing talk of “conspiracy” as “imaginaire,” Barnave and the Lameths accused the Right, both the ultraloyalists and Maury’s strict constitutionalists (whose loyalty to the Constitution many doubted) of launching a concerted effort, linked to the émigrés encamped around France’s borders, to mobilize the people against the Revolution. By late 1790, the Revolution’s predicament was worsening and within the existing framework obviously irresolvable: there was no way the modérés could collaborate with the Catholic-royalist majority. The bloc with the largest number of votes in the Assembly formed a solidly liberal monarchist entity but one unsustainably fragile in terms of press resources and popular support, unable to cope with the multiple challenges from right and left. Wholly at odds with the republican tendency, it had no prospect of a rapprochement with Maury’s faction.

Far from compelling an early resolution, the chief effect of the Assembly’s irresolvable rifts was to reproduce these in cities all across France. The impressive growth in the number of local Jacobin societies affiliated with the parent society in Paris certainly reflected a rising interest in the issues of the day. But it also meant that the splits continually plaguing the Jacobins from late 1790 to September 1792 were replicated everywhere. The Jacobin Club at Toulouse, a city where nobles and parlementaires were numerous and highly disgruntled, was founded in May 1790. In February 1791, enthused
La Feuille villageoise
, it began holding meetings before mass audiences amid continual applause. This showed, claimed
La Feuille villageoise
, that “la philosophie, c’est à dire le bon sens mieux instruit,” was making rapid progress among Toulouse’s population of 68,000, who reportedly now blushed to think how they were formerly “abused” and submerged in ignorance and prejudice by clergy and nobles. Philosophical truth, “like the light,” was bringing a properly connected sequence of ideas into the minds of those who for so long failed to understand their own situation. But was it? Toulouse Jacobins, like those elsewhere, were hopelessly split between modérés and democrats. Jacobins were detested by conservatives, both Maury strict constitutionalists and the ultraroyalists; but everywhere their clubs strove to accommodate all three factions of the
center and Left, constitutional monarchists like Barnave and authoritarian populists who were not yet republicans like Marat and Robespierre, as well as republicans like Pétion, Manuel, Brissot, and Carra. Was this a feasible project?
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Divergent “Fathers of the Revolution”

For a democratic outcome, the first priority was to liquidate the distinction between “active” and “inactive” citizens. But constitutional monarchists, Sieyès among them, robustly defended the distinction. In an Assembly debate early in 1791, a bill restricting National Guard membership to “active citizens” was moved but vigorously opposed by Pétion, Robespierre, and Buzot, one of the few practicing lawyers among the radical leadership. The centrists had the votes to overrule objections, but this could not make any more palatable a principle disliked by many outside, as well as within, the legislature. Mme. Roland, who was present, was distressed to realize such a restriction meant thousands of textile workers in her native Lyon were automatically debarred from the militia. Soon to emerge among the Revolution’s foremost figures for her impressive personality, eloquence, and rare ability to gather around her the most serious, insightful, and highly motivated revolutionary spirits,
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through the spring of 1791, she, like Pétion, felt continually aggrieved and disillusioned by the undemocratic monarchical course onto which revolutionary “moderation,” presided over by Barnave, had unsteadily lurched.

Inevitably, much of the ensuing struggle revolved around conflicting claims as to who were the Revolution’s inspirers and what was their authentic message. On 2 April 1791 Mirabeau died. That evening, all the theaters of Paris closed in mourning.
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His death prompted immediate adoption of earlier proposals to formalize veneration of those who inspired the Revolution. A grandiose plan, presented by the Paris Commune, was accepted by the Assembly two days later: the still incomplete church of Sainte-Geneviève, among the capital’s largest buildings, now renamed the Panthéon, would be converted into a magnificent mausoleum to receive the remains of the Revolution’s principal authors and heroes and those earlier “great men” who laid the Revolution’s foundations, in particular Descartes, Voltaire, and Rousseau.
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The Enlightenment was invariably viewed by everyone, right, left, and center, as the Revolution’s chief foundation. The question was what precisely did this
designation mean? The Assembly alone, it was decreed, could confer the honor of entombment in the Panthéon, and no one could be designated for it until after their death.

Installing the first “great man” in the Panthéon was a truly historic event. Never before had so many attended any funeral. The obsequies of past kings hardly compared to such colossal solemnity. According to Fréron, more than 400,000 people joined the procession that filed for hours along the boulevards. Practically all 1,200 deputies of the Assembly (who had voted to appear collectively) walked with the coffin, with only Maury, Cazalès, and a few other hard-core royalists pointedly absent. All royal ministers joined the cortege except one (who was ill), followed by the presidents and committees of all forty-eight Parisian sections, 12,000 troops, and a deputation of 4,000 citizens dressed in special black gowns. Mirabeau was interred under the resounding inscription: “Aux grands hommes, la Patrie reconnaissante.”
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The funerary oration was delivered by Cérutti, who proclaimed Mirabeau’s greatness as a revolutionary and philosophique constitutionalist. Insurrections against tyranny in the past had mostly failed because people seeking to rebel remained steeped in credulity. A successful revolution without the people’s outlook being transformed is impossible. The men who prepared the people and fathered the Revolution were “Montesquieu, Voltaire, Mably, Rousseau, Fénelon, and the wise school of the
Encyclopédie,
” as well as the
économistes
and Necker. Mirabeau’s greatness consisted in his absorbing their thought and applying it. He fought despotism with his counsel, aristocracy with eloquence, anarchy with audacity, and superstition with la philosophie. The outraged royalist and foreign press could only protest that Mirabeau was in no way “great.”
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Mirabeau’s interment in the Panthéon resounded throughout France. Gorsas received more than thirty reports of ceremonies honoring Mirabeau at Toulouse, Lyon, Rennes, Nantes, Bayeux, and elsewhere.
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The event also initiated revolutionary street-name changing. Removing the plaque from the street where Mirabeau had lived, a crowd renamed it “Rue de Mirabeau.” Preoccupation with street names rapidly caught on.
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Villette shortly afterward effaced the sign “Quai de Théatins” on the corner of his opulent mansion (where Voltaire had died), on the Seine’s south bank, replacing it with Quai de Voltaire, the name it bears today. He also summoned the inhabitants of the Rue Platrière (where Rousseau had inhabited third-floor lodgings) to remove that “paltry name” and rename the street “Rue de Jean-Jacques Rousseau.”
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The
Commune approved the last change in May. Name-changing fervor so gripped the Café Procope at this point that its habitués publicized a startling proposal for renaming the city’s sewers and waste runoffs. It would be appropriate to designate the sewers after leading royalist writers, the Rue de Tournoi to be called Égout Mallet du Pan, those of Saint-André des Arts the Égout Abbé Royou, those of Ponceau the Égout Abbé Maury, of Montmartre the Égout de Monarchiens, and those under Pont Saint Michel the Égout Gautier.
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Voltaire, after his death on 30 May 1778, had not been given an honorific public burial. Crown and Church had not allowed it. To rectify this slight for the thirteenth anniversary of his demise on 30 May 1791, the Assembly, overruling those questioning whether Voltaire had actually been a “friend of the people,” voted entombment in the Panthéon with equivalent splendor to Mirabeau’s. Had not Voltaire assailed
le fanatisme
on every side, denounced the “idolatrous errors” of France’s ancient institutions, been the “libérateur de la pensée”? The whole nation, supposedly, had been “insulted” by the snub to his memory in 1778. Among chief promoters of the campaign to project Voltaire as a major progenitor of the Revolution was the vastly successful and affluent playwright Beaumarchais, who had spent a fortune since 1779 editing and printing the first comprehensive edition of Voltaire’s collected writings, complete sets being available since 1787 (the duodecimo version comprising sixty-seven volumes).
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Besides
panthéonisation
, a public statue of Voltaire should be erected, proposed an Assembly deputy who also protested at the dilatoriness of steps to erect Rousseau’s statue, commissioned earlier. At this, another deputy proposed Montesquieu’s remains should also grace the Panthéon while a third urged Mably.
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But no amount of hype surrounding Mirabeau, Voltaire, and Rousseau could paper over the cracks within the Revolution. In the Assembly, the minority of 150 or so radical deputies (called the “factious” opposition by the center) relied for their political clout on the Paris sections, press, and clubs. They had far fewer votes in the legislature than monarchy’s defenders but were resolved to deploy their strength in the press, Paris cafés, and streets. The war between the factions thus inevitably developed into a wider political struggle. The capital’s numerous local political clubs set up a
comité central
, meeting in the regular assembly hall of the Cordeliers, to coordinate efforts to steer the Revolution in a radical direction. A veritable war of placards began, not least in the Tuileries section, where the royal family resided and the Assembly met. By early 1791, democrats continually put up political
affiches
(posters), often daily news bulletins deriding the centrist leadership, while groups of men backing the center, frequently in National Guard uniform, toured the streets tearing them down, and confiscating “incendiary papers” from colporteurs, tearing these up on the spot. A meeting of the Tuileries section assembly, with more than a hundred in attendance (as required under the Constitution), denounced removal of posters as a violation of Articles V, VI, VIII, IX, X, and XI of the Declaration of Rights, and a clear sign that liberty of expression and the Constitution were being subverted. The section forbade anyone, even in uniform, to remove posters in their precinct, or to seize journals from street vendors without their authorization.
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The struggle between the “moderate” center and revolutionary Left steadily intensified. Through the spring of 1791, the air of Paris was replete with rumors that the king designed to flee the country. Privately, Louis had always abhorred the Revolution. But by early 1791 this had become obvious, due to his piety and attachment to the conservative clergy, which rendered his relationship to constitutional monarchism ever more fraught and placed his alignment with the Revolution, despite Barnave’s protestations, increasingly in doubt. A late-evening royal excursion, supposedly to Saint-Cloud, on 18 April, commonly deemed an attempt (which it may not have been) to abandon Paris, was prevented by suspicious crowds gathering around the palace entrances. After a tense two hours, Mayor Bailly arrived and smoothed things over, but with the royal family humiliatingly obliged to leave their carriages and return to the palace.
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Tension between the Assembly’s radical fraternity and the dominant centrist bloc under Barnave, the Lameths, Bailly, and Lafayette was aggravated by renewed efforts to curb liberty of the press and the Assembly’s constitutional committee’s decision to propose a ban on collective petitions from political clubs and organizations. On 10 May 1791, despite vigorous opposing speeches by Pétion and Robespierre, the liberal monarchists passed the law restricting petitioning.
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The measure, presented by Le Chapelier, confined the right to petition to individual “active citizens,” forbidding clubs and sections, as well as “inactive” citizens, from either petitioning or affixing posters in the streets. The measure was plainly designed to emasculate the clubs, especially in Paris, where there were now around thirty, according to Robert in a journal article on 9 May.
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Under the 1791 Constitution, the legislature was strictly representative, not mandated by the people, a principle dear to Sieyès and the center. Legally, the people had no right either
to criticize or petition through any organizations or local assemblies. But denial of the right to petition amounted to denial of the volonté générale, retorted republicans and populists. The ban affronted both the Rousseauistes’ popular sovereignty ideology and the Cercle Social’s representative democracy seeking to bridge the gap between people and Assembly.
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Given the financial qualifications for active citizenry, the ban meant that the poor were altogether excluded from expressing their views politically. The Lameths, Barnave, Lafayette, and Le Chapelier had begun a concerted campaign to exclude the wider public from the political process.