Revolutionary Ideas: An Intellectual History of the French Revolution From the Rights of Man to Robespierre (34 page)

In his
Annales patriotiques
, Carra lauded the calm, orderly attitude of the Paris populace and its open revulsion against the king’s behavior. At a massed rally on 24 June, a reported thirty thousand men, women, and children, including many members of the Cordeliers and republican Jacobins, gathered in Paris to endorse, and present to the Assembly, a petition composed by Brissot asserting that on particularly fundamental issues the people had the right to express their view and “direct” their delegates, in accordance with the volonté générale. The petition demanded that the Assembly make no decision concerning Louis’s fate until the country’s eighty-three departments had been consulted. A Cordeliers delegation, headed by Mandar, vice president of the Paris Temple section, presented this petition on 29 June. The Assembly angrily dismissed it. The Cordeliers had it printed and circulated among all the patriotic clubs and posted up on street corners around Paris, though many were soon torn down.
¹⁰⁹

Organized opposition to Assembly policy and the monarchy undoubtedly became a full-scale popular and plebeian movement at this
point, one orchestrated not by Robespierre or the populist leadership but the radical intellectuals who forged the Revolution.
¹¹⁰
Those gathering at the Cordeliers and Cercle refused to be “the dupes of charlatanisme” and the designs of Lafayette, Barnave, and the Lameths.
¹¹¹
A resounding speech at the Jacobins by Brissot on 10 July defended républicanisme and ridiculed majority Jacobin objections to republican ideas as self-contradictory prejudice and ignorance: by denying modern republican principles, deputies were rejecting the representative system at the heart of the Constitution, a constitution already virtually republican. The current battle was less a fight between monarchy and republicanism, the creed of all genuine patriots, he contended, than true friends of the Constitution and friends of royal influence, patronage, and pensions, cronies of the “civil list.”
¹¹²
The argument for the king’s inviolability, adduced by the reduced but still large centrist Jacobin majority, he termed “la monstruosité la plus révoltante” and directly contradictory to the Constitution. If the Rights of Man render all equal before the law, sovereignty of the nation acknowledges no citizen to be above the rest.

A temporary respite from the turmoil convulsing the Assembly, Paris Commune, and Jacobins was the long-planned triumphal procession of Voltaire’s remains through Paris to the Panthéon. On the same day as Brissot’s speech at the Jacobins, 10 July 1791, the papers announced the arrival of Voltaire’s coffin from Ferney and formal reception by the mayor. The magnificent planned ceremony would proceed the next day. Here was a rousing, unifying revolutionary event around which, exceptionally, center and Left could equally rally. Voltaire’s role in preparing the Revolution was everywhere unrelentingly proclaimed. Here, at least, the center could connect with the Revolution’s authentic origins and the public. Among the greatest writers of his age, Voltaire had begun the revolt against intolerance and prejudice, and introduced vast changes in thought and literature; in particular, remarked Fréron, he composed dramas like
Brutus
and
La Mort de Caesar,
powerfully contributing to the drive against despotism.
¹¹³

Voltaire’s portrait was on sale everywhere. Despite the “pious rage of enemies of
la philosophie,
” a performance entitled the
Arrivé de Voltaire à Romilly
was staged at the Théâtre de Molière shortly before the commemoration, while the equally anticlerical
Chevalier de la Barre
played at the Théâtre Italien. Outside the Théâtre de la Nation, columns were inscribed in gold with the titles of all Voltaire’s plays. Catholic outrage only enhanced the myth of revolutionary unity, of center and Left
united around Voltaire. A recent petition composed by devout Catholics, with multiple copies affixed to street corners, in public places, and cafés, had been gathering signatures. But by summoning the people to demonstrate their loathing of Voltaire, it helped solidify his status as an icon of revolutionary anticlericalism who no one on the Left any longer expressed reservations about. Brissot’s objection that Voltaire “was no friend of the people” was forgotten. Heaps of Catholic protest posters were smeared over with mud, torn to shreds, or burned. Every care was taken, reported Carra, to ensure “no foe of the human race, king or queen, aristocrat or fanatical priest, should disturb this historic public festivity.”
¹¹⁴

On 11 July, commencing at the Place de la Bastille, where Voltaire’s coffin, sufficiently well guarded to have fended off a night attack by unknown assailants, rested on a purple and white bed among the fortress ruins, his remains were conveyed amid astounding pomp, directed by the supreme revolutionary impresario, the artist David, to lie at Mirabeau’s side.
¹¹⁵
Despite the rain, it was a great event, the first time, apart from Mirabeau’s funeral, that anyone other than a monarch or saint had ever been publicly exalted on such a scale, let alone celebrated for writings, drama, and political achievements.
¹¹⁶
Preceded by a detachment of cavalry, the cortege was accompanied by trumpeters, followed by a battalion of military cadets, and then delegations from the clubs carrying banners styling Voltaire a true hero of liberty. A phalanx of women wearing antique costumes had to be abandoned due to the rain, but the cortege did include a deputation of actors and managers from the theaters, a float displaying copies of all Voltaire’s works (donated by Beaumarchais), and delegations from the academies followed by younger
gens de lettres
(writers) bearing busts of Voltaire, besides smaller medallions of Mirabeau, Rousseau, and Franklin. Next came two or three hundred “victors of the Bastille” carrying a model of the stronghold to highlight the main theme of the celebration—Voltaire, foe of despotisme
,
as well as flayer of “lying preachers,” as it was put in Chénier’s poem celebrating the event, the hero who “prepared the ruin of all forms of tyranny.” One device on a float read, “poete, philosophe, historien; il a fait prendre un gran essor à l’esprit humain” and prepared the French for freedom.
¹¹⁷
The sarcophagus itself was accompanied by twelve Assembly deputies, bands of musicians, and a Commune delegation, with yet more cavalry bringing up the rear.

No one could fail to notice that Voltaire’s triumph on 11 July contrasted dramatically with the furtive, forced return of the humiliated monarch three weeks before. As the procession proceeded through the most prestigious boulevards along the Seine, passing the Tuileries (where king and court took care not to appear), crossing the river via the Pont Royal, it paused before Villette’s residence where, from the balcony, Villette and Condorcet watched with members of the Calas family, then resumed along the newly renamed Quai de Voltaire past the Comédie Française, finally reaching the Panthéon where it lay in state for three days.
¹¹⁸
Many buildings the cortege passed, including the opera, were festooned with garlands. All Catholic Europe heard the news with stunned outrage. The mighty church of Saint-Geneviève in Paris has become the shrine of the “carcasses” of Mirabeau and Voltaire, scoffed Feller, the new “divinities” of the Parisian rabble daily manipulated by fanatical “débauchées,” that is, the “devôts de la philosophie.”
¹¹⁹

Figure 4. The transfer of Voltaire’s remains to the Panthéon, Paris, 10 July 1791. Image courtesy Bibliothèque nationale de France.

By July 1791, Mirabeau and Voltaire had been magnificently pantheonized, but Rousseau, then as now considered by most the Revolution’s foremost inspirer, had not. How could Rousseau be omitted from the great philosophique triumvirate? The artist Baudon, then preparing elaborate portrait engravings of all three titans—Mirabeau, Voltaire, and Rousseau—confidently expected these three to grace buildings and
offices throughout the eighty-three departments of France.
¹²⁰
However, Rousseau was not a unifier of center and Left to the same extent as Voltaire. In some respects, he was more divisive than a unifier.
¹²¹
A deputation of writers, artists, and others presented the Assembly with a formal petition demanding Rouseau’s
panthéonisation
on 27 August 1791, their petition bearing no less than 311 signatures, including those of Chamfort, Clavière, Lanthenas, Roland, Mercier, Gorsas, Duroveray, Perlet, and Fanny Beauharnais.
¹²²
If Voltaire had deservedly been installed for crushing fanaticism “under the feet of philosophy,” clearing away
débris
from where “you have raised the edifice of our liberty,” how could the Revolution fail to discharge its debt to Rousseau, “le premier fondateur de la constitution française”? First to establish “equality of rights among men” and “sovereignty of the people,” the “idées-mères” from which the Revolution arose, Rousseau accomplished this under the eyes of despotism itself. If some of his teaching did not conform to the Assembly’s monarchist principles, his thesis that republican forms suit only small states and hence was inappropriate for France surely did. Much of the Constitution stemmed from Rousseau’s ideas.
¹²³

The complaint that the Revolution had
panthéonised
Mirabeau and Voltaire but not Rousseau was composed by Chamfort’s friend, Pierre-Louis Ginguené (1748–1816), future member of the Convention’s committee of public instruction. Besides Rousseau’s
panthéonisation
, it demanded a state pension for his widow and implementation of the December 1790 decree authorizing a public statue for central Paris honoring the
Contrat Social
’s and
Émile
’s author under the rubric “La nation française libre, à J.J.Rousseau.”
¹²⁴
The difficulty, granted Ginguené, was that opinion about Rousseau’s contribution remained seriously divided. In Paris cafés, the habitués disagreed about Diderot’s claim that the inspiration of the
Discourse on Inequality
originally came from him: Had he lied or told the truth? Were the philosophes right to say Rousseau, over whom so many enthused, was an “homme à paradoxes” whose moral thought is a ridiculous distortion?
¹²⁵
There was no denying their century’s great debt to Diderot and the
Encyclopédie.
Yet, having closely studied the dispute between Rousseau and the philosophes, and reread all Voltaire’s works, Ginguené felt that responsibility for the unhappy rift lay mainly with the philosophes. Despite defending Calas and “all the oppressed,” Voltaire hardly compared with Jean-Jacques as a foe of oppression.
¹²⁶

Diderot and Voltaire had unjustly persecuted the man of “virtue,” as had the “good and honest M. d’Holbach, eulogized in December
1789 by Cérutti in the
Journal de Paris
,” a figure influential among many revolutionary leaders. Ginguené had known d’Holbach and his “intimate circle” personally. He agreed with “everything [d’Holbach’s] friends stated honorable to his memory.” Yet d’Holbach had a penchant for “banter, a tendency to jeer,” and the battle between Rousseau and the
coterie d’Holbachique
, as Cérutti’s eulogy admitted, involved much personal rancor.
¹²⁷
The feud had focused in part on the status of “the ordinary.” Rousseau’s “war” on the philosophes was retaliation against their “philosophie anti-Théresienne,” their scorning his humble companion, Thérèse.
¹²⁸
And precisely their “aristocratic disdain” for the ordinary rendered the philosophes inferior to Rousseau, who taught men to “penetrate behind the mask of false social convention, and see man as he truly is, fostering contempt for vain titles and illusions of grandeur, fomenting that preference for simple tastes, natural sentiment, virtue and liberty permeating all his publications and inspiring the Revolution.”
¹²⁹
Pantheonization, besides violating Rousseau’s last testament, answered Charles de Lameth, would infringe the property rights of the landowner on whose land he was presently entombed and who had sheltered him in his last days. In his last testament, Rousseau stipulated that he should not be buried in the city he loathed (Paris), preferring rural solitude. His resting-place, near Montmorency, corresponded to his wishes. A final decision was deferred.
¹³⁰
Rousseau’s pantheonization was again petitioned for, on 4 September, and again deferred.
¹³¹