Revolutionary Ideas: An Intellectual History of the French Revolution From the Rights of Man to Robespierre (35 page)

The most dramatic contrast offered by Voltaire’s pantheonization, however, was with the 14 July celebrations held three days later, on the second anniversary of the Bastille’s storming. Another huge procession wound its way from the Place de la Bastille through the Paris boulevards, this time to the Champ de Mars. But where the first anniversary in July 1790 had been a genuinely festive occasion presided over by Louis, Mirabeau, Talleyrand, and Lafayette, disturbed only by rain, the second anniversary was extremely tense and fraught, an event from which both king and queen were pointedly absent. The looming presence of Lafayette on his white charger, commanding the National Guard, failed to deter sporadic cries from a generally disgruntled crowd denouncing the king. At Bordeaux, ten thousand women citizens marched in ranks like soldiers on the Champ de Mars, wearing tricolor cockades and proclaiming undying allegiance to the Constitution. Yet the efforts to present monarch and monarchy as presiding harmoniously over France’s liberation from oppression, in contrast to the previous year, carried little conviction.
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The National Assembly’s constitutional committee, ignoring the proposal made three days before by Pétion and Robespierre that the decrees awarding Louis XVI the title of “restaurateur de la patrie” be rescinded, chose to announce its findings, absolving Louis XVI of any offense, precisely on 14 July with the Paris crowds absent on the Champ de Mars. Louis was absolved from all blame, but criminal proceedings would be initiated against Bouillé for attempting “to kidnap” the monarch. When rumors swept the city, around two in the afternoon on 14 July, that the Assembly was using the absence of most of the capital’s populace to exonerate the king, an irate, yelling crowd streamed back until halted by the guards.
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This was a crucial moment. For the first time the Assembly clashed openly with a considerable section of opinion in the streets.
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On 15 July, the political crisis intensified. Barnave stepped onto the podium and delivered a decisive speech, warmly applauded “by the great majority of the Assembly,” refuting Buzot, the young Norman deputy figuring prominently among the republicans who had just affirmed that all France had lost confidence in the king.
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Barnave did not attempt to justify Louis’s actions but instead vigorously defended the principle of monarchy, insisting a republic could not be viable in a large, thickly settled “old society” like France. Though he was as steeped in la philosophie as the republicans, and like Condorcet had developed an antiprovidentialist, materialist conception of history, he firmly rejected republicanism and democracy.
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Republicanism might work in the United States—where there was land for everyone, no foreign enemies nearby, and no external threats—but in France a republic would mean instability and chaos. Long an admirer of Montesquieu, he accepted that the Revolution and his own early role in it had been chiefly initiated by the philosophes. Revolutions are consolidated, though, not by “metaphysical principles” but by the people. What the common people cared about were tangible things, not principles, and if the Revolution was not concluded now, the next stage, unfortunately, would be a general assault on property.
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There were too many destitute and envious for any other outcome. It was time to end the Revolution, stop the disorder and affirm the “inviolability of the king” within constitutional limits.
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Barnave’s plea for stability, property, and monarchy proved effective. Inside the Assembly, he swayed a large majority. The “moderates” wanted monarchy and some of its trappings but remained unwilling to defend ecclesiastical authority. To the antiphilosophe Feller, the liberal monarchists seemed an illogical lot trapped in contradiction,
a “political sect tending equally to overthrow the old and the new order of things,” a shrewd enough description.
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The Constitution must be adhered to, affirmed Barnave, concluding the debate the next day with another powerful speech, and the Assembly must uphold its authority and France’s stability.
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Replying, the Cordeliers and Cercle convened another mass gathering that day, lasting for several hours. Encouraged by a raucous crowd, a string of republican orators, including the radical printer who published the
Journal du Club des Cordeliers
, Antoine-François Momoro (1756–94), one of the Cordeliers’s best speakers, demanded Louis’s dethronement and a republic. A direct challenge to the Assembly’s authority, the republican movement was bound to result in a major confrontation. The gathering adopted a mass petition demanding the king’s trial before a National Convention convened for the purpose. Crowds seethed in the streets around the Jacobins, the Palais-Royal, and the Tuileries. A crowd of reportedly four thousand invaded the Jacobins in an attempt to enlist support there.
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Posters acclaiming the king were torn down; the affiches posted up all demanded his trial.

The Jacobins, the only political club with mass support that also provided a regular platform for Assembly deputies, remained utterly divided. In fact, they split four ways. The dominant faction backed Barnave, the Lameths, and Lafayette, intent on upholding monarchy and retaining Louis XVI; a second group spoke of deposing Louis but retaining the monarchy, substituting for the present incumbent the self-proclaimed constitutional monarchist Louis-Philippe d’Orléans. A third group, the populist faction, nervous lest the Jacobins, Robespierre’s essential platform, disintegrate, sought a middle path; they deplored the king’s conduct and urged his trial but stopped short of calling for an end to monarchy. Finally, there were the democratic radicals, who urged a republic. Where the Jacobins could partially unite was by combining groups two to four, to censure the Assembly’s constitutional monarchist majority.
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Three Jacobin streams, headed by Brissot, Pétion, Danton, and Robespierre, in this way briefly converged to hammer out a compromise resolution demanding Louis’s trial and judgment before an elected National Convention. Nothing further should be done without consulting the people.

A large crowd of some twelve thousand citizens gathered on the Champ de Mars on 15 July and approved a petition calling for Louis’s trial. Many signed and joined the march toward the Assembly, delegated to present their text to those deputies—Pétion, Grégoire, and
Robespierre—who had delivered speeches in the legislature condemning the declaration of the king’s “inviolability.”
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Their petition inveighed against the king for perjuring himself, abandoning his post, and exposing France to “the horrors of civil war,” while accusing the Assembly of “proceeding without consulting the people.” The people’s “delegates cannot do anything,” held the petitioners, “except through and by us.” The people would reject the Assembly’s resolutions unless these conformed to their will. Should the deputies “who dared to advise such a thing” refuse to consult the eighty-three departments, the citizenry would disavow them as “traitres à la patrie.” Afterward even Pétion described this as a “shocking irregularity.”
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The marchers were halted by guards outside the Tuileries. Emerging from the Assembly hall, Robespierre and Pétion explained that the demonstrators were too late to prevent passage of the edict that had angered them; the vote was over.
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Charles Lameth, president of the Assembly, sent the delegation a formal reply, contradicting their assertion of direct democracy: the crowd represented only the will of a handful of individuals, not that of France. Under the Constitution, the Assembly alone represented the people’s will. The Assembly would not defer to theirs but act according to its own will. Petitioning collectively was illegal, their action insurrectionary. Worse, they were permitting a handful of schemers to manipulate them, turning Paris—a city of intrigue—into the foe of all France.
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No sooner was the exoneration decree published than the city became very tense. The theaters around the Palais-Royal were closed.
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The Lameths and Barnave were right that the crowds were defying the Assembly and violating the law and Constitution. The problem was that the Constitution itself was an unsustainable fudge, an undemocratic and oligarchic contradiction, not genuinely based on the Rights of Man or popular sovereignty.

Barnave had persuaded the Assembly to exonerate the king, using the fiction purporting that Louis had been “kidnapped” by conspirators. Now the Assembly needed to quell the noisy opposition in the streets. On 16 July, another mass rally convened on the Champ de Mars, where a Jacobin compromise resolution was read out by Danton. Its deliberate obscuring of the issue of whether or not a republic should be declared so exasperated the radicals and Cordeliers present, as well as Bonneville and the Cercle, however, that Danton had to return to the Jacobins and plead for some radicalizing of its content. A much tougher formulation, amended by Bonneville, appeared in the
Bouche de fer
, declaring that the Paris petitioners rejected Louis and any candidate for the throne
unless a majority of the nation first voted for monarchy to continue. Meanwhile, even the less radical joint stance of the three Jacobin anti-Barnave streams proved unacceptable to the liberal monarchist leadership. On the evening of 16 July, Barnave, Lafayette, the Lameths, Bailly, and their supporters stormed out of the Jacobins, seceding from the club. The defectors were joined by nearly every single Jacobin deputy in the Assembly except Robespierre and Pétion, numbering altogether more than two hundred deputies.

This finalized the break between the Assembly and the clubs. Infiltrated by suspect persons, the Jacobins had abandoned their original mission, declared Barnave and the Lameths: instead of championing the laws, they were now undermining them. The two hundred defectors transferred to the convent of the Feuillants where they established a rival club, the Amis de la Constitution, henceforth dubbed the “Feuillants.”
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The Jacobins, provincial clubs were informed, had been invaded by extraneous elements, including foreigners like Paine and Cloots, who were seeking to undermine the Constitution and the Assembly’s decrees. They were eroding freedom of expression by labeling everyone who disagreed with them as “traitors.” Affiliated societies were urged to switch their correspondence to the Feuillants, and many did.
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So massive and destabilizing was the defection that it briefly paralyzed both the Paris Jacobins and many provincial offshoots.
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Some Jacobins, Pétion acknowledged, had used intemperate language, but this did not justify mass defection. Far from motivated by authentic Jacobin principles, the Feuillant schism was “the fruit of intrigue”; those in power realized they had lost control of the club.
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The Jacobin schism of 16 July 1791 marked the start of a powerful moderate, liberal monarchist reaction against the Left
and
against the Revolution’s core values. Repudiating the Jacobins, and attempting to curtain freedom of expression, the Feuillants labeled everyone wanting Louis brought to trial as rebels against the Constitution and “republicans.” They moved swiftly to curb the demonstrations in the streets, reinforcing the Paris city government’s authority with new police powers to restrict crowd movements and repress disturbance. Over the next days several members of the Cordeliers were arrested, some for posting up petitions demanding an end to monarchy.
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The democratic press retaliated by accusing the Feuillants of adopting a divisive strategy that was bound to fail. The Jacobin rump, the three groups forming the “strict observance Jacobins,” justifying their opposition to royal “inviolability” and hailed by the pro-Revolution press for
resisting the “brigands,” issued a general circular urging affiliate clubs to defy the Feuillants. However, dominated by Robespierre’s populism, they still claimed not to be opposed to monarchy as such. Briefly, both chief stands of strict observance Jacobins—populists supporting Robespierre and Brissotin republicans—seemed to have become allies fighting the Feuillant “impostors” together. This rapidly proved a delusion.

CHAPTER 7

War with the Church

(1788–92)

“At the beginning of the Revolution, no apparent contradiction between the Revolution and religion” existed, it has been argued, and from the standpoint of popular culture and society overall this is broadly true.
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But this contention needs qualifying. From the perspective of the Revolution’s Left republican leadership, if not the populace, it was absolutely certain from the outset that the Revolution, given its priorities, would confront the Church as an authority, autonomous institution, value system, and set of doctrines.