Revolutionary Ideas: An Intellectual History of the French Revolution From the Rights of Man to Robespierre (31 page)

Another measure passed by the center in the early summer of 1791 was “Le Chapelier’s Law,” an enactment responding to a petition from the Paris master carpenters requesting changes in the way their craft was organized. It dissolved all craft organizations and corporations. Later, in the nineteenth century, Le Chapelier’s law became a notorious device of manufacturers for preventing the formation of craft unions. In 1791, by contrast, most supporters of the measure viewed it more as a way of ending the restrictive role of traditional craft corporations and of widening economic freedom.
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It was much less this than the irksome restrictions on petitioning and collective political expression that antagonized and outraged the Cordeliers and other Paris section assemblies at the time, and was broadly attacked by the capital’s pro-Revolution press.
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Outside Paris, vociferous support for the Cordeliers stemmed especially from the radical sections of Marseille, which on 5 May dispatched a fierce denunciation of the “scheming against liberty” by Lafayette and others.
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The right to gather and petition became a rallying cry of the Cercle, the Cordeliers, Robespierre, and the revolutionary press. Banning collective petitioning was wholly incompatible with the Declaration of Rights, held the democrats, and clear evidence of retreat from the principles of 1789. At a joint meeting of the Cercle and the Cordeliers on 20 May, there was thunderous applause for speeches attacking the Assembly’s restrictive measures. The Cordeliers disseminated a remarkable printed address to all the “sociétés patriotiques” of France, and “generally all men who profess and cherish liberty.” The Constitution and liberties achieved by the Revolution were being overthrown by “insolent satraps” who exploited the people’s ignorance and propagated arrogant, erroneous principles destructive of the true foundations of the “bonheur général.” Propagators of false principles, secret abettors of right-wing papers like
L’Ami du Roi
and the
Gazette de Paris
, were
publicly insulting patriotic societies like the Cordeliers. Where the clubs championed the Rights of Man, centrist tools of “abominable tyranny,” feigning patriotism, insidiously deceived “les citoyens simples et peu instruits” (simple and uneducated citizens). But all was not lost as these same citizens would eventually spot the deception and punish the “vile detractors of their true friends.” Even if the people’s recognition of the liberal monarchists as deceivers proved slow, the republicans “faithful to our principles and oaths … shall perish rather than bend the knee to the idol” and abandon the fight. “Join us, brothers and friends!” All of France’s
sociétés patriotiques
were urged to send delegates to forge a common pact.
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The proposition that any legislature unchecked by criticism and petitions from organized groups degenerates into rampant tyranny formed common ground between republicans and populists at this stage. A committee drawn from all the democratic clubs asked Bonneville to compose a general petition to the Assembly, demanding acknowledgment of the right of all to participate in the political process. Their petition also demanded abolition of financial qualifications for active citizenship. There were only 80,000 “active citizens” in Paris, noted Bonneville, a capital where, on 14 July 1789, more than 300,000 armed men rose to topple tyranny. “Compare and judge!”
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Ignored by the Assembly, the petition appeared in the
Bouche de fer
and resounded widely on walls and in the streets. Tension between the rival blocs intensified further when the Assembly, collaborating with the Paris city government, announced the closure of a network of public workshops providing employment for the redundant. This happened at a time of yet further economic deterioration in Paris’s poor quarters. The Cercle Social, through its branch, the Point Central des Arts et Métiers, had for some time argued that it was part of the government’s responsibility to support the unemployed and provide work. The Point Central (an initiative to help distressed laborers), and the Cercle, accordingly, now also organized a mass petition demanding the Assembly provide employment by commissioning canals, clearing marshes, improving navigability of rivers, and generally assisting the unemployed to dispense with charity from “rich aristocrats and hypocritical priests.” This petition urged outright confiscation of the property of aristocrats who had fled the country to oppose the Revolution, the proceeds to support the poor.
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To force the Assembly to abandon its “aristocratic” course, the clubs followed the Cercle Social in seeking to mobilize larger numbers of the
capital’s poor. They strove to generate a spreading political consciousness. Marxist scholars have often claimed Brissot stood for class interests allied to the bourgeoisie. Yet, in an article in the
Patriote français
on 15 June 1791 entitled “Whom shall we elect?,” afterward reprinted in Desmoulins’s paper and others, Brissot clearly specified the different social groups whose presence he thought chiefly desirable in politics and the National Assembly. Whether delegates were bourgeois or laborers, rural or urban, big property-owners or small property-owners, he contended, mattered less than their intellectual level and principles—and especially whether or not they were genuinely “enlightened.” In particular, he recommended more rural representatives and ordinary city dwellers to check the influence of the “capitalists, bankers,
commerçants
”—increasing rural representation requiring the propagation of enlightenment from the cities. If his circle upheld property rights, they also sought to remove extreme inequalities.
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In Brissot’s estimation, the Assembly’s best delegates were simply the best educated—mostly practitioners of medicine and law. Artisans, he agreed, loved liberty and sought to defend it but were unreliable because they lacked literacy, enlightenment, and independence of judgment. Despite being cosmopolitan in outlook and sometimes useful, big merchants should, however, be regarded with greater suspicion since they care only for their own interest and generally operate to society’s detriment. Worst of all were bankers, according to Brissot. These should be generally shunned and excluded from the legislature as an entirely antisocial group.
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Brissot, Condorcet, Pétion, Carra, and their allies were not the party of “the capitalists.” The evidence produced by scholars to show that they disdained the lower classes proves only that they disdained ignorance and superstition.
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Nevertheless, it is true that Marat’s populists were at greater pains than the republicans to pack the clubs and section assemblies with workingmen. The populists did so, moreover, worrying less about workers’ ignorance than applauding their ordinariness, simplicity, and “civic spirit.” This viewpoint was strongly affirmed by the former Capuchin monk François Chabot (1759–94), a vehement foe of Brissot and Condorcet. Among the Revolution’s foremost demagogues, for Chabot, the “popular” was always the true measure of revolutionary legitimacy. Adopting Marat’s use of unrestrained language, he subsequently edited the
Journal populaire
, or
Catéchisme des sansculottes
, propagating militant sansculotte views. He also favored purges and violent measures while, like Marat, abhorring intellectual pretensions.
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As it happened, Chabot later proved dishonest, self-seeking, dissolute, and
ambitious. Briefly, though, he was hugely successful and tireless in eulogizing ordinariness and Marat.

In the ideologically highly charged spring of 1791, a soon-notorious open letter from Raynal, rejecting the Revolution’s core principles, read to the Assembly on 31 May 1791, intensified the furor over the Revolution’s true credentials. A renowned exponent of “idées philosophiques” through the 1770s and 1780s, in 1789 Raynal had been urged to join Mirabeau in representing Marseille in the Estates-General.
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He was actually elected but resigned, pleading old age. During 1788–89, he was regularly extolled alongside Rousseau and Mably as one of the “pères de la Révolution,” as Manuel called him, and as a denouncer of absolutism and noble oppression.
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In a pamphlet of mid-1789 purporting to be a “conversation” between Raynal and Linguet, “Raynal” repeats phrases condemning monarchy, today known to have been penned by Diderot.
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The
Dictionary of Atheists
(1800), by the Jacobin
érudit
Maréchal, later attributed to Raynal the maxim “it is philosophy that should be the divinity on earth.”
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The
Parlement
of Paris’s various pre-1789 edicts suppressing the
Histoire philosophique des Deux Indes
were annulled on 15 August 1790 by the Assembly, who declared the ban “contrary to the inalienable rights of Man.” The king found himself obliged to rehabilitate Raynal—a philosophe under royal prohibition for nearly twenty years—and acknowledge him as an “active citizen.”

Raynal’s sensational 1791 missive repudiating “his old errors,” as Malouet put it, was preceded by two earlier such open letters, the first, of December 1789, according to Brissot a “diatribe perfide” against the people, read to the deputies on 5 January 1790 but ignored,
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and another, of September 1790. These, though disconcerting, received a muted response owing to doubts whether they really were by Raynal. There, as in his 1791 missive, Raynal endorses popular sovereignty, universal toleration, equal and proportional taxation, and equality before the criminal law, but rejects civil equality and democracy.
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But all doubt ended with Raynal’s unequivocal open letter to the Assembly of May 1791, encouraged by and composed in collusion with Malouet.
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Visiting Paris after a long absence, now nearing eighty, Raynal submitted it in person two days prior to publication. Asked whether they wished to hear it read, the deputies cried “yes, yes,” but the democrats, listening with keen expectation, were astounded by its contents. By 1790, Raynal had become estranged from the Revolution due to the country’s increasingly anarchic state, infractions of individual liberty, and the intrusive role of the clubs. The king, who was his people’s first
friend, was being insulted while real power accrued to the clubs “where ignorant and vulgar men expatiate on all political questions.” “I have long contemplated the ideas you are applying, but at a time when they were rejected by all authorities, groups and prejudices and represented only the allure of a consoling wish.” In the 1770s Raynal and his friends had not needed to consider the risks and dangers of applying philosophique principles the Assembly now confronted. Raynal refused all responsibility for the consequences of a false, recklessly democratic understanding of his principles. The “bold conceptions of
la philosophie
were not meant by us to be the measure of legislation.”
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Cheers from the Right mixed with dismay on the Left. “Bah! Malouet and his people say the same every day.” “Apparently, we are now restoring despotism,” protested some. At Raynal’s remark that the Declaration of Rights was acceptable apart from certain “metaphysical abstractions” apt for anarchy, a radical deputy interjected, “it is Malouet who wrote this letter”; another yelled, “this is a calumny against the Abbé Raynal who is incapable of writing anything like this, even at eighty.”
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The
Histoire philosophique
’s unparalleled impact since the 1770s ensured Raynal’s “shameful apostasy,” as Brissot called it, vast notoriety. It was promptly reprinted and condemned in Brissot’s
Patriote français
and elsewhere, and anatomized in the press for weeks. This octogenarian who accused the Left of irresponsibility was denounced for “hypocrisy,” betrayal of philosophy, and helping prepare “a new revolution serving the criminal designs of enemies of the
patrie
.” Robespierre dismissed it as calumny against the people. A Provençal deputy, André-Louis Esprit de Sinéty, acknowledged Raynal’s role in initiating the Revolution in Marseille but deplored his cold indifference during the twenty-five months since. Why did he not speak when his words would have counted? “Pourquoi a-t-il gardé jusqu’à ce jour le plus profond silence?”
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The Right countered by applauding Raynal’s epistle as the finest instrument available for discrediting republicanism among the reading public.
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Chénier and Cloots both published pieces denouncing Raynal’s epistle, the latter dismissing him in the
Chronique de Paris
as an impostor, turncoat, and mediocrity who stole the honors rightfully due to Diderot, d’Holbach, Naigeon, and Pechméja. He was without talent, a police spy. Everything valuable in the
Histoire philosophique
was really the work of “Pechméja, Diderot, Dubreuil, Naigeon, Selback, etc.”
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Such flagrant betrayal was unsurprising, held the anonymous
T.G. Raynal démasqué, ou lettres sur la vie et les ouvrages de cet écrivain
(1791), for it was not Raynal who wrote the
Histoire philosophique
but Diderot, Deleyre, Pechméja, Guibert, Kniphausen, d’Holbach, and Diderot’s classicist assistant, La Grange, the translator of Lucretius.
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Raynal must be senile. Others concentrated on vilifying the “perfidious” schemers who had captured a frail old man, aiming to bring him to his grave covered in opprobium. The public was being subjected to an infamous deception, organized by Malouet and his friends, of which Raynal was the first victim.
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An undated polemical print of 1791 depicts Maury, Royou, and Malouet lamenting that their ploy to detach Raynal from the Revolution had failed to trick the Marseille populace. A bust of Raynal is depicted being carried into the city’s madhouse with an attached banner reading: “admiration for the
Histoire des Deux Indes
, contempt for the
Letter to the Assembly
!”
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