Revolutionary Ideas: An Intellectual History of the French Revolution From the Rights of Man to Robespierre (32 page)

Diderot, several commentators reminded the public, figured among the Revolution’s foremost hidden hands. Naigeon, a zealous révolutionnaire during 1788–93,
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recalled that “mon intime ami” Diderot was the bravest of the philosophes and most resolute in combating “la superstition.” His own task in the Revolution was to complete Diderot’s labors by editing his papers.
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Everyone invoked Rousseau, Voltaire, Mably, Raynal, Montesquieu, and Helvétius as precursors of the Revolution, but in his
Philosophie ancienne et moderne
(Paris 1791), Naigeon lent Diderot (like La Harpe later) still greater prominence. Montesquieu, Helvétius, d’Alembert, and Buffon had mumbled, mincing their words through fear of the theologians. Now one could be open about Diderot’s achievement, the new revolutionary order “so desired and so unexpected,” identifying “la superstition” as the worst of human weaknesses, could, thanks to liberty of the press, at last overpower reason’s enemies.
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The public mostly remained unaware of Diderot’s crucial contribution because he had had to oppose authority chiefly through anonymous clandestine publications and multiauthored compilations like the
Encyclopédie
and the
Histoire philosophique
. But his ideas were basic to the Revolution’s core values and remained relevant for resolving political difficulties “auxquels la Révolution a donné lieu.”
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Rousseau’s influence needed opposing, argued Naigeon, and here was one area where Diderot remained especially useful. Citing a passage where Diderot contradicts Rousseau’s conception of popular sovereignty, Naigeon urged that a democratic executive must properly respect the citizenry’s demands but be able to withstand popular pressure where appropriate. He considered Diderot to have been the first to demonstrate the need to mix direct with representative democracy.
Under Diderot’s suggested rules, petitions signed by more than a specified number of citizens must be considered by the legislature; petitions failing to meet that threshhold could be ignored. The Revolution, held Naigeon, needed a genuine balance between an executive arm not permitted to become overly confident of its power and the dangerous caprices of a volatile people. It needed to steer judiciously between direct democracy and pure representative democracy without degenerating into crass demagoguery. Popular opinion may often prove shifting and ill-considered, Diderot had emphasized, yet it remains the opinion of the people: “quelque fou soit le peuple, il est toujours le maître.”
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But “the master” must be helped to preside in an orderly, controlled fashion.

Reflecting pro-Revolution opinion generally, the largest Parisian political club, the Jacobins, remained hopelessly divided throughout the spring of 1791, like the Assembly itself. The Jacobins were paralyzed by three main splits: between constitutional monarchists, the most influential of its streams for the moment; democratic radicals; and Marat’s authoritarian populists. The last were greatly buoyed by the emerging popular press. By early 1791, Marat was strongly backed by middle-class journalists like himself, such as Jacques-René Hébert (1757–94) and Jean-Charles Jumel (1751–1823), who likewise appealed to the illiterate and barely literate in the streets. Hébert was a well-educated and ambitious journalist from Alençon, from January 1791, a force in the Cordeliers, though not associated with either its Dantonist or republican wings. Like Marat, these men consistently declined to clearly take sides in the growing conflict between the liberal monarchists and “democrats,” preferring instead to build up their own excitable, panicky, illiterate, and volatile following by using sensation, theatrical exaggeration, and rumor-mongering as their chief instruments.
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In addition, there remained the split within the Cercle’s leadership between philosophique republicans who admitted the primacy of “reason” alone versus Christianizing Rousseauistes like Fauchet. This quarrel pitted Fauchet against Bonneville, Brissot, Cloots, Desmoulins, Villette, and Condorcet. The theology of the revolutionary priests—Fauchet, Grégoire, and Lamourette—though ardent and sincere, seemed a “dangerous” intellectual puzzle to the materialists and, amid the escalating struggle with the center and Right, threatened to become a further considerable complication. In the
Bouche de fer
issue for 1 April, Bonneville intensified the controversy by reviewing Desmoulins’s recent
Éloge non funèbre de Jésus et du Christianisme,
where the latter denied all possibility of
miracles, highlighting what he deemed Christianity’s abuse of man and thousands of “crimes” over the centuries. The same
Bouche de fer
issue also contained a discourse of Fauchet invoking divine Providence and Rousseau.

Where Bonneville praised Desmoulins’s critique of Christianity, albeit suggesting he had confused the abuses of “a disfigured religion with its true principles,” Fauchet assailed Desmoulins for blatant impiety. Afterward Fauchet got into an unfortunate quarrel about the same issues with Bonneville, Cloots, and Villette. Bringing the matter up at a Cercle gathering, he rebuked both “Brother Camille [Desmoulins] and Bonneville.”
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Fauchet seemed to have “forgotten” the Cercle’s rule, answered Bonneville in the
Bouche de fer
, that no “religious sect” should be “favored” in any of its speeches. It was official policy of the Cercle not to associate with Christianity. Cloots published an open letter to Fauchet, dated 4 April, accusing him of preaching that without religion society would consist only of “lying
philosophes
, aristocratic brigands, soulless peoples and endless crime.” Cloots rejected Fauchet’s claim that religion is indispensable to society and the basis of morality, holding that the true moral basis of the laws is the common interest, which has nothing to do with religion. Even if religion were the moral base, it would not follow that a civic cult and priesthood are society’s essential guides. The Constitution acknowledged only individual religion and freedom of conscience, not any state cult or superiority of one cult over another. Cloots had “de-baptised” himself to be logically consistent; he invited Fauchet to “de-baptize” too for the same reason.
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Fauchet’s impassioned religious inspiration, aggressive manner, and repeated attacks on philosophique atheism made a rupture inevitable, the ideological rift further intensifying the Cercle leadership’s emphasis on philosophique “reason.”
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In the Jacobins it was reported that the Cercle consisted of “dangerous men” resolved to redistribute wealth forcibly. Fauchet replied, likewise in the
Bouche de fer
, denying that he and his supporters were
incendiaires
avid to plunge the country into anarchy to redistribute land and wealth. Cloots and other Jacobins, he accused, misrepresented his views. The true basis of
la morale universelle
, those eager to reconstruct society on the principles of equity and justice agreed, was that it is “in nature itself that one finds the fundamental basis of all rights and duties.” But as God is the supreme spirit infusing nature, only a “misérable philosophie” believes it can “form a
patrie
without religion, and institute a nation without conscience.” Man has a deep religious instinct that “only the pride of false geniuses or baseness
of depraved souls can deny.”
⁷⁷
His Catholic Radical Enlightenment, believed Fauchet, was the true philosophy of the Revolution.

Fauchet’s mid-April harangue to the Cercle denounced those who denied that religion is the Revolution’s moral base as “the most dangerous adversaries of the public interest, who will ruin the Revolution by provoking a reaction against it among all those patriots who are religious.”
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Pronouncing la philosophie and Christianity entirely compatible, Fauchet resigned from the Cercle in high dudgeon, a serious blow since he was their best orator. Trapped between the warring factions and marginalized, he afterward set up his own journal, the
Journal des Amis
, dedicated to the proper “instruction of the people,” still convinced all humankind would one day be free with all thrones overthrown, that the “age of reason” was dawning, that “le bonheur naîtra de l’alliance des Lumières et de la vertu.” From here on, Fauchet remained irretrievably estranged from the republican Jacobins, as well as the moderates and Robespierrisme. Robespierre and the authoritarian populists, though, he considered infinitely worse than the republican materialists and atheists. Robespierre talked constantly about “the people,” but he and his followers, contended Fauchet, were just a bunch of “anarchistes,” foes of the people, and Robespierre’s principles the “last phase of night,” the last gasp of nonenlightenment.
⁷⁹

The rift between Catholic radical reform and philosophique republicanism proved as deep and permanent as the split between revolutionary left radicalism and the popular press. The
Bouche de fer
headed its 14 April issue with a quote from Fauchet’s own first discourse to the Cercle: “et si l’Évangile s’écarte de la raison, il faut y ramener l’Évangile” (if the Gospel departs from reason, it must be brought back to it).
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This schism, however, was not the reason for the Cercle Social’s abrupt disappearance as a mass movement following its last gathering on 21 July 1791, or the lapsing of the
Bouche de fer.
The Cercle ceased as a mass movement owing, rather, to the dramatic intensification of the political crisis in June, following the king’s flight to Varennes.
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The Flight to Varennes (June 1791)

The country was shaken to its foundations by the news of the king’s attempt, on 21 June 1791, to flee his realm. Until June, Louis XVI, characteristically, remained in two minds: loathing the Revolution privately while resisting pleas from advisors, family, and supporters to flee abroad
and lead an international counterrevolution backed by the papacy, to defeat the Revolution and extinguish its principles. It was Louis’s religious sensibilities, and sense of guilt for approving Church reforms the papacy condemned, that finally persuaded him to risk life, family, and all he possessed—indeed, the monarchy itself—by repudiating the 1791 Constitution and liberal monarchism, and seeking to join the émigrés.

Louis resorted to flight only after long hesitation. But his bid to escape hardly came as a surprise. Rumor and republican journalists had been predicting such an attempt for months.
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Nevertheless, the psychological shock, especially in small towns and the countryside, was considerable. Even in Paris, most had not suspected until now that, privately, the king wholly rejected the Revolution and its principles. Then, suddenly, the matter was beyond doubt. Louis left behind a manifesto at the Tuileries, dated 20 June, deploring the erosion of monarchy and breakdown of order, the discomfort of the Tuileries, persecution of those most attached to himself and the royal family, and the humiliating way he had been treated since July 1789. Another reason for his repudiating the Revolution was the continual appearance of seditious writings disparaging and defaming himself and his family. Since his palace was “a prison,” he abjured categorically the constitutional commitments he had entered into under duress.
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The flight to Varennes thus marked a total break. It was a disastrous setback for constitutional monarchism, though this did not prevent Marat, Hébert, and the populist press from accusing Bailly, Cazalès, and the others of the “black band of conspirators” of complicity in the plot.

News of the king’s flight generated great apprehension. Should it succeed, it signified inevitable foreign intervention and civil war. While the immediate threat eased with news of the royal family’s interception at Varennes, the country nevertheless faced a dire predicament, for Louis’s repudiation of the Constitution and Rights of Man was now public knowledge, plunging the National Assembly into turmoil. Constitutional monarchists found themselves tied to a sullen prisoner king and court who resented and opposed them secretly, abetted by much of the army’s officer corps and clergy. However one construed it, constitutional monarchism was severely wounded and ultraroyalism encouraged. The king’s attempt to flee transformed the entire French political situation by bringing the “moderate” Revolution’s and the Constitution’s underlying illogicality and incoherence fully to the surface. For the first time, Varennes also provoked a few elements of the public to swing behind the republican goals of the intellectual fringe leading the
revolutionary Left. Among the flight’s chief political and psychological effects was a growing realization that the cultural-ideological (and soon actual) war between France and Europe’s monarchies, a struggle in which the king’s brothers openly—and the king and court covertly—supported the coalition of France’s enemies striving to restore monarchy, aristocracy, and ecclesiastical authority, must divide the nation and all Europe.

The king’s “treason” outraged numerous citizens, causing many who had only the vaguest notion of what republicanism was to support the democrats. But equally important was the fresh impetus it imparted to the thus far broadly monarchist populists who decried the corruption and betrayal of the center. The only way to prevent the people from falling off a precipice, thundered Marat and others of Robespierre’s partisans, was to name a “dictateur suprême” to assume control of the country and liquidate the “traitors.” Like Marat, Hébert, and Jumel, the editors of the rival
Père Duchesne
papers, took advantage of the general atmosphere of panic, feverish rumor, and thirst for sensation, always presenting themselves as the guardians and sentinels of the
bons patriotes
, a simplistic revolutionary vision dividing everyone and everything between the forces of good and evil, between the good people and malign conspirators avid to betray and sacrifice the common folk to perfidious Counter-Revolution, aristocracy, and before long also royalty.
⁸⁴
Their title referred to a much-loved, popular, burlesque, pipe-smoking, iconographic figure, the gruffly outspoken “Father Duchesne,” who adored Marat and stoutly defended the bons patriotes, uttering only the most simplistic phrases, and continually swearing.