Revolutionary Ideas: An Intellectual History of the French Revolution From the Rights of Man to Robespierre (41 page)

Prussia and England, admonished Barnave, actively sought to destabilize the Revolution by distributing cash to troublemakers. Suspects accused of instigating “sedition” included a Prussian Jew named “Ephraim” who supposedly disbursed funds among the unruliest.
¹⁰
Several Cordeliers members were arrested. The police searched for Danton, Desmoulins, Robert, and his wife, Louise Kéralio, among others. Danton fled to England where he remained for several weeks. Desmoulins, rumored to be in Marseille, hid in Paris.
¹¹
Although the red flag of martial law was removed from before the Paris town hall on 7 August, repression continued for weeks after that. Additional suspects were arrested on 9 and 10 August, including Momoro and Etta Palm, the latter denounced by the
Gazette universelle
as the daughter of a Groningen innkeeper, very free with her favors, who pretended to fight for
la liberté démocratique
but who was actually a paid agent of the stadt-holder.
¹²
Posters proclaiming republicanism, most notably Condorcet’s and Paine’s newssheet
Le Républicain
, were everywhere ripped down. So grim was the atmosphere, the Cordeliers closed their doors. Both its public and committee meetings lapsed.

For a time, much of the republican revolutionary press ceased publication. Desmoulins’s journal vanished from the scene, as did that of Lanthenas.
Le Républicain
appeared for the last time on 23 July, six days after the “massacre.” The
Journal du Club des Cordeliers
, launched on 28 June, ended on 10 August, having appeared in only ten issues, its bitter penultimate issue on 25 July. On 28 July, the Cercle suspended the
Bouche de fer
.
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Especially dismaying to Desmoulins, Sophie Condorcet, and others was the seeming fickleness of the masses. Paris street
posters from which people had earlier garnered shreds of “bonne doctrine,” now shamelessly regurgitated the same ludicrous rigmarole about “subversion,” “foreign agents,” and “anarchy” emitted by the Feuillant press. From 17 July, the public backed the moderates, adopting their rhetoric so completely, complained Desmoulins, one would suppose counterrevolution had conquered every mind. He encountered a crowd near the Théâtre de la Nation yelling at passers-by “Vive le roi!”—presumably paid to do so. With this, the philosophical observer could recognize the common mass in the streets for what they were—“sans caractère, imbecile, inconstant comme l’onde,” unworthy of the courageous men braving a thousand perils to enlighten them.
¹⁴
“Pétion, Robespierre, Buzot, Brissot, Danton and all the writers previously deemed
Patriotes
,” the people passively accepted, had, like Palm, been “bribed” by foreign governments.
¹⁵
A fitting constitution, Desmoulins realized more than ever, can only emerge “in the light of la philosophie,” the sole means to rescue men from “the depths of slavery and incomprehension for which they seemed born.”
¹⁶

That the Revolution of the democratic republicans, the Rights of Man, and a free press faced virtual extinction appeared all too likely during late July and August 1791. The Feuillants seemed to have conquered the court, the Assembly, royal ministries, the Paris Commune, the National Guard, and the army.
¹⁷
There remained, estimated Desmoulins, only twelve to twenty stalwarts in the Assembly who publicly defended basic rights and democracy, leaving the moderates virtually a free hand to pervert the principles of 1789. Sieyès, totally isolated on the Assembly’s constitutional committee, remained stolidly silent throughout the summer.
¹⁸
Desmoulins could not fathom how the few remaining “upright deputies” did not resign in protest.
¹⁹
Barnave, Bailly, Lafayette, and the Lameths looked poised to fortify constitutional monarchy and marginalize the voice of the streets and the clubs, rendering the legislature as absolute as the British Parliament.

Yet, despite everything, Desmoulins could not believe the masses had definitively abandoned the ideals of 1789. “No, I cannot believe this frightful apathy, in which some vile schemers have plunged us, can last.” The Revolution cannot have been permanently reversed by modérantisme. The “torrents of light a free press has cast on society” cannot have been altogether expended “sans profit pour le genre humain.”
²⁰
He was right. Looking deeper, the Feuillant ascendancy, beset from Left and Right, was more fragile than appeared superficially. July’s repressive measures violated the Rights of Man, but they could not continue
indefinitely and dismayed dozens of provincial “Jacobin” clubs. This was reflected in the Feuillants’ failure to carry most provincial Jacobin clubs more than partially with them. They succeeded in causing wide-spread hesitation and some defection from the Jacobins in most French towns. Many provincial Jacobin clubs, or “Friends of the Constitution,” had sprung up during the past two years, and now not only divided but dropped drastically in membership for the remainder of 1791. Some were paralyzed for months by the Feuillant walkout. But a number resisted vociferously. A petition to the Assembly, signed by the Clermont-Ferrand Jacobins and read on 30 July, demanded the immediate lifting of the 15 July emergency restrictions and warned that their future compliance with the Assembly was strictly provisional. The
pétionnaires
praised those “courageous” leaders—Pétion, Robespierre, Grégoire, Buzot, and Camus—who, together with other deputies embracing the “unalterable principles of justice and liberty,” opposed the “liberticide” measures of the “moderates.”
²¹
Toward the end of the summer, the Feuillants lost momentum with a marked drift back to the Jacobins, replete with profuse apologies for having been “misled.” A missive from the Beaune Jacobins dated 31 August congratulated the Paris club on welcoming back all “true friends of the Constitution” into their midst: briefly “seduced” by the Feuillants, “a factious horde” everywhere causing damage, Beaune’s Patriots now rejoiced at being received back.
²²

Equally bad for them, the Feuillants failed to sway the Assembly’s Right. No less than 290 conservative Assembly deputies, according to Royou’s nephew, Stanislas Fréron (1765–1802), who edited the important
L’Orateur du peuple
, openly scorned the Constitution in favor of ultraroyalism and denied the principle of popular sovereignty and their own titles as “representatives of the people.” These “slaves of a perjurer and tyrant” detested the upstart Barnave and the Lameths.
²³
Monarchist papers, labeling the king’s attempted escape “a flight” and stressing Louis’s repudiation of the Constitution, challenged the Feuillants no less than philosophique republicanism or sansculotte populism. In recent months, claimed Carra,
L’Ami du Roi
had inundated France with “over 20,000 copies daily,” distributed free, particularly in small towns and the countryside where reactionaries thought it easiest to sway the uneducated.
²⁴
Royou also went into hiding. Raiding
L’Ami du Roi
’s offices, the National Guard seized its papers and interrupted publication for two weeks. Madame Fréron was detained for a week and intensively interrogated about links with émigrés and refractory clergy.
²⁵
Orders were issued for Suleau’s arrest and that of another leading royalist journalist.
²⁶

If the Feuillant center ground possessed a well-tried, formidable ideology in Montesquieu, moderation and veneration of the British and American models, this faction proved simply too narrow in its appeal, and too powerfully besieged from Right and Left, to succeed. While Right, Left, and center wrestled to steer the Revolution, within the clubs the fight between republicanism and populism raged with ever greater intensity. Condorcet, together with Brissot, Paine, and a younger editor, Achille du Chastellet, had brought out
Le Républicain
’s first issue in early July (before the “massacre”), claiming the king, by deserting his post, had effectively abdicated. The nation could never trust a man who violates his oath, fraudulently obtains a false passport, and disguises the monarch’s person under a domestic’s attire. Had Louis’s flight been directed by others? What did it matter whether he “is an imbecile or a hypocrite,” idiot or scoundrel, he was equally unworthy of the “fonctions de la royauté.”
²⁷
Very different from oligarchic republics like the United Provinces, Venice, and Genoa, Paine eulogized genuine republicanism as government by representatives based on popular sovereignty and the Rights of Man.
²⁸
Saving the thirty millions it cost annually to keep the king in splendor would provide means to reduce taxation and curb the political corruption threatening the Constitution. Their efforts to publicly promote republicanism were checked, though, by the sheer difficulty of disseminating the Revolution’s core values effectively and widely enough.

Condorcet later recalled (in particular to Joseph Lakanal) that his and Paine’s public “debate” with Sieyès in July in
Le Républicain
, over whether a republic or constitutional monarchy was preferable, was a bogus exchange, concocted between the three of them to create a public sensation. Sieyès had supposedly advanced arguments for constitutional monarchy in
Le Moniteur
in a deliberately halfhearted manner, which enabled Paine and Condorcet to demolish them for the public’s benefit. Certainly, Sieyès scorned Barnave’s thesis that the executive power needed reinforcement as a check to the legislature, a reversion to Montesquieu and the British (and United States) systems wholly contrary to his ideas.
²⁹
His was a virtual republicanism. Yet there remained some difference between his stance and the more forthright democratic republicanism of the Brissot faction. Wary of formal republics, Sieyès still preferred to retain a monarchical figurehead. Under monarchy, he argued, echoing Montesquieu, individual liberty flourishes more than in a republic.
³⁰

Opposing Barnave on one side and Robespierre on the other, Condorcet, Brissot, Carra, Cérutti, Paine, and the others strove to enlighten
men about républicanisme, stressing the vices, abuses, and structural deficiencies of royalty, which only “prejudice” and “ignorance” stubbornly defended. Had conventional thinking been eradicated earlier, contended the second issue of
Le Républicain
on 10 July, the king’s flight would have inspired general jubilation, not consternation, but reason had unfortunately not yet sufficiently penetrated. So much “superstition” surrounded the Estates-General’s opening in May 1789 that liberty’s “true friends” had virtually despaired of such a nation of “idolaters.” The republican-minded had persevered for more than two years “to open the nation’s eyes” sufficiently for them “to see that the monarch could conspire against the monarchy itself,” as finally had happened.
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Yet even now the majority remained deaf to the republican message. The people had reverted to “idolatry,” remarked the
Chronique de Paris
, describing the “adoration” of 6 September when crowds surrounded the Tuileries endlessly shouting “Vive le roi!” So limitless was popular “superstition” that to most people, Louis, with “his great virtues,” had made sufficient amends for “his flight.”
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Barnave responded vigorously to the republican challenge, attacking la philosophie and the republican journalists almost daily, noted the
Chronique de Paris
, publicly disdaining their “metaphysical ideas” and dismissing Brissot as a “philosophical bigot,” no better than the religious bigots.
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On the question of republicanism, furthermore, he received Robespierre’s tacit support, besides that of the Right. Malouet violently denounced
Le Républicain
as flagrant subversion of the Constitution (which it was). But if
Le Républicain
was unconstitutional, retorted Carra and the democrats, why did Malouet not condemn the
Mercure politique
, Royou’s
Ami du Roi,
and other “royalist poison”? These “infamous journals” continually vilified the Rights of Man, preaching subservience to king and pope instead of elected representatives. Deputies, supposedly sworn to uphold the Constitution, like Maury, Cazalès, and the ex-bishop of Clermont, noted Carra, regularly contributed to such anticonstitutional royalist papers.
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Insisting they alone correctly represented the Revolution’s principles, the Feuillants strove to consolidate their hegemony, plastering their foes with accusations of foreign plots and street protests arranged by paid “agents.” Paris seethed with reports of suspicious foreigners who perverted public opinion, Pétion and Brissot having supposedly sold their souls to foreign powers for cash.
³⁵
Such incessant “conspiracy” rhetoric, protested Brissot, was designed to mire everyone aiding the people against the true “enemies of the Constitution.”
³⁶
Exploiting every
popular prejudice, Feuillants also spent heavily, printing and posting up in the streets at night a daily newssheet,
Le Chant du Coq
, which poured vituperation on Brissot, Pétion, and other radical leaders, though Feuillant efforts to harnass Marat’s technique were blunted by undaunted democrats tearing the posters down or adding the letters “uin” in ink, altering its title to “Chant du Coquin.”
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