Revolutionary Ideas: An Intellectual History of the French Revolution From the Rights of Man to Robespierre (33 page)

Over the past year, this formula had transformed both Hébert’s and Jumel’s journals into two of the most read (and feared) in France. By March 1791, their rival
Père Duchesne
papers appeared daily and were on sale everywhere in Paris—in the streets, cheap taverns, and at market stalls.
⁸⁵
Prior to the flight to Varennes, Marat’s paper made no move to denigrate the king or monarchy as such, and (unlike Jumel) Hébert did not do so before April 1791. But these papers were less concerned with concepts like monarchism, republicanism, or democracy than building popular paranoia for mass collective action. Continually appealing to the least educated, Marat’s and Hébert’s creed was a polarizing populist chauvinism, a kind of protofascism, in Marat’s case continually calling for a dictatorship of the most uncompromising kind to rescue “the people.” What was needed, urged Marat, was a personal dictatorship, preferably Robespierre’s. In Robespierre, Marat recognized a
towering leader as steely, unbending, and uncompromisingly Manichaean as he himself, someone who divided all mankind into the good and the evil, oppressed and oppressors, ceaselessly attacking corruption in high places and eulogizing “the people.” Meanwhile, both Barnave and the democrats underestimated Robespierre, Marat, and the popular press, hardly recognizing as yet the challenge they would soon face.
⁸⁶

The impact of Louis’s flight was immense. On the day he fled, the Assembly closed the borders and declared itself in permanent session. The whole country was placed in a state of emergency. The National Guard stood at arms. The king was suspended from all his constitutional functions, the Assembly decreeing its decrees valid without royal approval.
⁸⁷
Three “commissioners,” including Barnave and Pétion, were dispatched to escort Louis back to Paris. Other than the royal family itself, everyone implicated in the royal flight was arrested. Loyalty oaths to defend liberty were exacted from military commanders and high functionaries; peasants spontaneously formed armed groups (sometimes again attacking local châteaus). Executive and military authority was transferred to a council of ministers meeting in rooms adjoining the Assembly. Once back in the Tuileries, the king and queen were guarded not by their own guards as previously but by the National Guard. While suspending Louis from his constitutional functions, the Assembly at the same time ignored the demands of the Cordeliers and Cercle, and a small minority of Jacobins, to depose the king.

Until 21 June, neither Cercle nor Cordeliers, while attacking the distinction between “active” and “inactive” citizens and denouncing the “English system” of mixed government and a restricted electorate,
⁸⁸
had ever called openly for abolition of the monarchy as such. This now abruptly changed, opening a wider gap than ever between republicans and the Assembly’s “moderate” leadership, which announced plans to restore all the forms of constitutional monarchy, after an interval, when safe to do so, reinstating Louis in his previous functions. Logically, it was easier to defend the principle of constitutional monarchy than Louis’s conduct. To justify outright reversion to the status quo ante, Barnave and his allies introduced the rather desperate fiction that Louis was entirely “innocent” of any attempt to flee, and had not in fact repudiated the Constitution. Officially, Louis had been “kidnapped” by the Marquis de Bouillé and other conspirators, although the entire Assembly knew this was untrue. To ease public acceptance of this flagrant falsehood, several “guilty” plotters were imprisoned in the Abbey Saint-Germain.
⁸⁹

Most of the Assembly backed the ploy, some swayed by fear of provoking Prussia, Austria, and Britain into war, others by fear of democracy or straightforward preference for constitutional monarchy. But nothing could mitigate the divisive effect. The collision between “moderation” and democratic republicanism became a public, open, and dangerous rift, bound to inflame and destabilize the country, armed forces, and National Guard. The princely courts of Europe were unhappy that Louis’s “evasion” had miscarried. The French royalist press briefly fell silent, then resumed publication.
⁹⁰
Among ultraroyalists, there was utter dismay over Louis’s being “dragged back” and the “inscrutability of divine providence,” as the
Gazette de Paris
put it, which precipitated a fresh wave of emigration of nobles and officers. On the night of 24 to 25 June, all the higher officers of the strategically key maritime border garrison of Dunkirk deserted to nearby Austrian territory.
⁹¹
But it was liberal, constitutional monarchism as a concept that was politically most damaged. The manifesto issued on 6 July at Verona in Italy by the new emperor, summoning Europe’s monarchies and all loyal Frenchmen to join in rescuing “his most Christian Majesty” and suppressing the Revolution, only highlighted the country’s besieged, deeply divided state. Psychologically, France was already at war with Europe.

Yet, what was most amazing, noted the Venetian ambassador, was the spirit of concord and resolve manifesting itself in Paris behind the Revolution.
⁹²
So electrified were the Cordeliers and Cercle by the king’s flight that they, too, over the next weeks, remained in “permanent session.” The struggle was on for the people’s support and the backing of the cafés and streets. If the center lost prestige through the flight, both Right and Left gained. The
Bouche de fer
began appearing as a daily paper, the very first issue publicizing a fact that astounded many readers: privately, every one of this journal’s editors had been a republican in principle since before 1789. Since 1789, the Cercle leadership had “respected” the monarchical Constitution while always hoping an eventual republican outcome would follow, owing to “the progress of enlightenment and
la philosophie
.”
⁹³
The Cordeliers began publishing their own popular antimonarchical newssheet, the
Journal du Club des Cordeliers
. On hearing of the king’s flight, Condorcet and Sophie Condorcet plunged into frenetic activity, convening a group they called the Société des Républicains, figuring Brissot, Bonneville, Lanthenas, and Tom Paine, likewise all convinced republicans since before 1789.

Louis was denounced for “desertion” and the Assembly for base collusion and permitting the king excessive power under the Constitution
and an excessive civil list.
⁹⁴
Cercle, Cordeliers, and some provincial Jacobin clubs also agitated for a popular referendum to pronounce on the monarchy’s future. As Pétion commented in the
Chronique de Paris
later in July, here was a national crisis on an unprecedented scale. Discussed in the clubs, streets, town squares, and gatherings, the people participated directly and emotions became heated.
⁹⁵
Yet, if it sharpened the split between between Left and Right, reenergizing revolutionary republicanism while discrediting constitutional monarchism, the flight to Varennes was disastrous for the deeply split Jacobins too. Far from leading the Revolution, this club became increasingly divided in ensuing weeks. Their dominant bloc remained loyal to the Assembly liberal monarchist leadership. Most Jacobins for the moment reaffirmed their “moderate” course, albeit agreeing with the Left republicans about the probability of war with Austria and Prussia.
⁹⁶
A vocal Jacobin republican minority leaned, however, toward the Cordeliers and Cercle. Carra, very active in the Jacobins at the time, figured prominently among opponents of exonerating the king. Keeping the crown on Louis’s head without submitting the matter to the nation in a referendum, through the primary assemblies, was considered an outrage by Carra. His paper proclaimed kings the idols of fools and scoundrels.
⁹⁷
On 11 July, Carra delivered a strongly republican speech at the Jacobins, openly calling for dethronement and suggesting there should be a transition stage prior to a fully republican constitution, with the Dauphin made temporary king in place of “Louis-le-faux.”
⁹⁸

Besides Jacobin moderates and republicans, there was a middle group under Robespierre critical of both king and Assembly that resolutely distanced itself from republicanism and firm constitutional commitments. Robespierre, Brissot, and Pétion had been conversing at Mme. Roland’s when news of the king’s interception at Varennes arrived. Disagreeing with the others and unwilling to renounce constitutional monarchy, a dismayed Robespierre at once grasped the precariousness of his populist-monarchist strategy.
⁹⁹
For the moment, his group found itself particularly awkwardly placed. He repudiated the preposterous talk of a “kidnap” but remained loyal nevertheless to the principle of monarchy, now openly scorned and repudiated by the Cercle, Cordeliers, some section assemblies, and the more radical element among the Jacobins. The Cercle’s and Cordeliers’s obvious aim, from which Robespierre pointedly disassociated himself, was to foment a popular republican movement on the streets. On 1 July, posting republican proclamations all over Paris clandestinely during the night, the Cercle’s leadership
publicly called for deposition of the king and a new republican order based on universal suffrage.
¹⁰⁰
The Société’s stated goal was to enlighten the public regarding the meaning of the term “republic,” focusing their critique on monarchy’s defects as such.

If there were still relatively few out-and-out republicans as yet in the Assembly, Paris Commune, or the Jacobins, many found it impossible any longer to view Barnave, the Lameths, and Assembly leadership as anything but a discredited power-hungry clique. Liberal monarchism, the party of the “aristocrats” as republicans called them, still possessed the advantage, though, of posing as the party of legality, constitutionality, and “patriotism” while remaining the king’s advisers. Aided by the widespread aversion to la philosophie moderne among lawyers, the commercially minded, and the public generally, modérantisme now launched an all-out intellectual campaign deploying Montesquieu, moderate Enlightenment, and the British model. Republicanism was impracticable, the people were assured, resembling a turbulent sea continually agitated by storms, easy prey to conquest by an aspiring Sulla, Cromwell, or other great scoundrel. With such rhetoric, observed Carra, Barnave rallied most Jacobins and all the ignorant and unaware.
¹⁰¹
Yet not everyone bowed to such arguments or embraced Robespierre’s populist monarchism. Carra, Brissot, and the republicans vigorously rebutted Alexandre and Charles de Lameth’s repeated invoking of Rousseau to try to persuade the public that the republican form was unsuited to large states like France.
¹⁰²
The rift paralyzing the Jacobins, meanwhile, became nationwide.

Calls for a republic were heard most loudly outside the Jacobins, in the main pro-Revolution papers. Brissot published his democratic republican profession of faith, calling for an end to the monarchy, as early as 5 July. If most provincial Jacobin clubs stood by the constitutional monarchists, or else Robespierre, rejecting republicanism, eighty-three at least demanded either suspension or dethronement of Louis personally, including Angers, Arras, Bordeaux, Le Mans, Lyon, Orléans, Rennes, and Toulouse. The Club National of Bordeaux’s declaration was circulated with considerable impact throughout the southwest.
¹⁰³
Moreover, full-fledged antimonarchism and republicanism now pervaded not only the Revolution’s Left intellectual leadership as before but was obviously winning recruits in cities all over France, including among mainstream Jacobins.
¹⁰⁴
At Dôle, in the night of 3 to 4 July, dissidents effaced the words “royal” and “king” from every public inscription and sign in the town, prompting outraged complaints from the
Assembly’s monarchiens. Some local Jacobin clubs not only broke ranks with the majority and with Robespierre, but actively joined the Cordeliers and the Cercle in demanding that monarchy be ended, calling for the establishment of a republic, including that at Noyon and the currently dominant bloc among the Jacobins at Marseille, where a leading spokesman, Moyse Bayle, published an openly republican tract on 2 August.
¹⁰⁵

Despite Robespierre’s distinctly more conservative stance,
¹⁰⁶
much of the populist bloc now abruptly abandoned constitutional monarchism, a trend that eventually forced Robespierre, however tentatively, to end his resistance to republican ideology. Thus, Georges Couthon (1753–94), coauthor of Clermont’s petition demanding dethronement, read to the Paris Jacobin Club on 24 June, lawyer and leading provincial Jacobin and later among Robespierre’s closest aides, though not previously attracted to republican ideas, felt so disgusted by the king’s defection he too now opted for republicanism.
¹⁰⁷
Of the populist papers, the crassest apart from Marat’s and most given to expletives was Hébert’s
Le Père Duchesne.
Unlike his sworn foe, Desmoulins, but like Robespierre, Hébert continually praised popular, ordinary notions, and hence, until April, also the mystique of kingship. The flight to Varennes, though, profoundly shocked his audience, leading him uninhibitedly to denounce the king: “What are we going to do with this fat pig,” he demanded, referring to “Louis le traitre” and Marie Antoinette “his whore.”
¹⁰⁸