Revolutionary Ideas: An Intellectual History of the French Revolution From the Rights of Man to Robespierre (42 page)

Virulent political-ideological rivalry inevitably also seeped into the theaters whenever they staged anything of a serious nature. Consequently, they met with pressure from the Left to do so, and from the center not to. One commentator, disgusted by this Feuillant stratagem, was the fervently Rousseauiste, antifeminist journalist Louise-Félicité Kéralio-Robert (1757–1821). She had already scornfully derided Feuillant notions of “liberté des théâtres” in an article in the
Mercure national
on 22 April 1791. When the Assembly proclaimed liberty of the theater, it had wanted to multiply France’s “schools of patriotism” and cultivate “virtue.” Yet, under the Feuillants, establishments dignified with the name of “theater” offered only light entertainment, comedies, and comic operas, spectacles crammed with frivolity and love affairs featuring “actresses utterly without shame.” It was not because the people were tired of public affairs that they imbibed mainly “immoral spectacles,” but because staging “such rubbish,” scheming theater managers expected, would deflect theatergoers from public affairs. According to Jean-Jacques, censorship belonged exclusively to the people. If the people were sovereign, they must direct the theater with a firm hand, mobilizing the patriotic press to eliminate insignificant and “immoral plays” and compelling the staging of patriotic dramas. The people must unflinchingly counter the “poisoned cup of corruption” their foes used to lure them into neglecting their most essential interests. Fervent Rousseauistes, like Mme. Kéralio-Robert, supported the sansculottiste drive for uncompromising popular censorship.
³⁸

Nevertheless, politicization of the theaters gradually advanced. In late July 1791, the director of the Paris Théâtre de Molière, following audience protests, promised to stage only “plays that fortify the public spirit and love of liberty.”
³⁹
Disturbances at Marseille in October 1791 obliged
comédiens,
supposedly infused with
incivisme,
not to perform plays “unworthy of a free people,” nor forget “what they owe to a Constitution that has lifted them from ignominy.”
⁴⁰
A riot at the Paris Théâtre du Vaudeville in late February 1792 revived the earlier furor surrounding Chénier’s
Charles IX
. A one-act farce entitled
L’Auteur d’un moment
, by François Léger, satirized Chénier under the name “Damis,”
represented as an untalented, inordinately vain author who won undeserved success by manipulating “the credulous public” by using “friends” and the journals.
⁴¹
The Parisian public, the play suggested, was undiscriminating and easily led by the nose. Set in a garden adorned with statues of Corneille, Racine, Voltaire, Montesquieu, and d’Alembert, the farce revolved around Damis imagining a bust of himself being installed beside these great figures. But he had made a ludicrous error. At the close, the bust carried onstage by four damsels dressed in white, accompanied by a choir chanting the author’s praises, is Rousseau.
⁴²
A Feuillant attempt to disabuse theatergoers of Chénier’s talent, it rebounded on the Vaudeville. On 24 February, the audience rioted, occupied the theater, and burned copies of the play, forcing the theater director to remove the piece from the repertoire.

France’s liberal monarchist Constitution, long ready in outline, was finalized only on 2 September 1791. Sponsored by the Feuillants and backed by Robespierre, the Constitution was vigorously criticized, not only by the republicans and ultraroyalist Right but also by the Assembly’s strict constitutionalists under Malouet and Maury. The legislature, objected Malouet, had solemnly promised on 9 July 1789 to frame the new constitution “in concert with the king.” Instead, they had excluded Louis from their deliberations, stripping France’s monarch of most of his authority, and now brutally confronted him with the simple, straight-forward choice of acceptance or rejection.
⁴³
The Assembly should opt for a genuine constitutional monarchism, not this emasculated, bogus monarchism. The center deputies and Left shouted Malouet down. To present the Constitution to the king, the Assembly sent an imposing delegation of sixty, headed by Barnave, Alexandre Lameth, Sieyès, Pétion, Rabaut, and four bishops.
⁴⁴
If there was much opposition, public enthusiasm, at any rate, seemed distinctly encouraging.

On 14 September, the king appeared in person to accept the Constitution, following a last angry exchange in the chamber with Malouet urging the whole legislature to stand during the king’s speech as a mark of deference to the monarch. Malouet could greet the king on his knees if he wished, retorted one deputy, but he would not. Louis entered and read his acceptance speech, standing at the podium, only belatedly noticing everyone else was seated. Stopping, covered in confusion, he then also sat to finish his speech. Royal assent was the signal for jubilant festivities throughout France. To a rousing chorus of “Vive le roi!,” the whole Assembly accompanied Louis triumphantly back to the Tuileries.
⁴⁵
Bells were rung throughout the capital. Public illuminations lit
up the Tuileries and Champs-Élysées.
⁴⁶
The Paris theaters put on special performances, some gratis, to celebrate the occasion. All the towns of France erupted in celebration. The people looked entirely reconciled to constitutional monarchy even if the Constitution’s festive inauguration itself subtly reflected the continuing tension between Feuillant strategy and authentic loyalism. When the news reached Rouen, reported Helen Maria Williams, lodging there at the time, “cannons were immediately fired, the bells of all the churches rung, and the people displayed their joy by crowding the streets with bonfires, at the distance of every eight or ten yards.” Strangers stopped and congratulated one another in the streets, which resounded with cries of exultation, among which the sounds of “Vive le Roi des François,” however, were almost lost amid those of “Vive la nation.” “C’est la nation qui triomphe. C’est la constitution qui triomphe.”
⁴⁷

The Constitution accepted, the democratic republican Left, despite their considerable reservations, promised to abide by it. “We have fought as long as possible,” declared the
Chronique de Paris
on 6 September, “to prevent certain features that have been included in the Constitution, but now it is finalized we should remember its deficiencies only when an opportunity arises to revise it. It is still a great achievement with freedoms based on the Rights of Man, a landmark in mankind’s history, ‘la plus belle constitution connue’ among those so far existing, that one would be happiest living under.”
⁴⁸
If radicals had hoped to minimize the “civil list” to prevent its functioning as an instrument of corruption (as in Britain) for manipulating legislature, ministries, judiciary, and military command, most people entertained few such worries. Much stress was laid, by Feuillants especially, on the need to forget former divisions and extend a general amnesty over past misdeeds. The word “royal” reappeared in numerous public place-names and on buildings from which it had been effaced in late June and July, including the Académie Royale de Musique and the royal lottery. As befitted modérantisme, though, in other instances, including the Jardin du Roi and the Bibliothèque du Roi, former usage lapsed, these remaining the Jardin National and the Bibliothèque Nationale.

Many ambiguities remained. What, for example, was the proper form for receiving the king in the Assembly? There could be no Assembly deliberation in the monarch’s presence, stipulated the Constitution, since he constituted a different category of “representative of the nation” than the deputies. Hitherto, the Assembly had adhered to ancien régime procedure, the king occupying the largest chair before
any deputy could sit. But the new rule, held the Left, should be that deputies seat themselves and don hats simultaneously with the king, the latter seated in a chair resembling that of the Assembly’s weekly “president,” to symbolize equality. Hérault des Séchelles, a notorious trimmer, so antirepublican (at this stage) that he even refused to dine with Lafayette, having abandoned the Jacobins, condemned this radical suggestion as unconstitutional and insulting to the monarch’s august status. Among the most opportunist, as well as learned, of the deputies, Hérault, assuming the Feuillants had won a solid ascendancy, clashed in the Assembly over this with the republicans and won the ensuing vote. On 7 October, the king was duly received following the old etiquette and seated in an oversized chair.
⁴⁹

The people’s jubilation was real. Hérault des Séchelles’s calculations looked realistic. Montesquieu had not yet been torn up by the roots after all. But the Feuillants lacked the means to consolidate a solid preponderance. They could offset neither the soon-reviving republican press onslaught to their Left nor Catholic fervor to their Right—nor manage the growing confusion and frustration of the people—except by means of an outright repression, which, under the newly proclaimed Constitution, now had to be lifted. Finalizing the Constitution did not remove either its basic contradictions or the swelling mass of republican literature pointing these out. If most Frenchmen preferred monarchy, monarchist support remained hopelessly divided between four distinct and incompatible blocs—Barnave liberal constitutionalists, Malouet strict constitutionalists wanting government by the monarch, ultraroyalists, and Robespierre authoritarian populists. Barnave, the Lameths, and Lafayette championed an authentically moderate monarchical constitutionalism but one lacking genuine royal and aristocratic elements, at war with the aristocracy and Church, backed by an unreliable Assembly majority and purely ephemeral wave of popular support. If helped by the vacillating, divided state of popular opinion initially, their Feuillant revolution became increasingly fraught and embattled, as angry scenes and demonstrations in streets, cafés, and theaters all over the country constantly reminded onlookers. Almost anything staged that seemed to allude to “democracy, the captivity of the king and the new revolutionary order” exacerbated the nation’s divisions. Theater crowds split, audiences partly yelling, “Vive le roi!,” partly chanting, “Vive la nation!”
⁵⁰

A harmonious system of mixed government based on no clear principles worked splendidly in Britain in the 1790s. But there, most people willingly deferred to the long-standing aristocratic and monarchical
norms of ancien régime society. Indeed, by 1791, British public opinion had worked itself into a veritable frenzy of loyalism and “king and Church” fervor, readily joining in the hounding of democrats and trials of radical reformers. English reformers and democrats were almost all supporters of the French Revolution, but by supporting democracy, they clashed directly with Parliament, found themselves ostracized by polite society, and fiercely denounced by nine-tenths of the people. In quantity, English conservative publications overwhelmingly outweighed radical literature.
⁵¹
Nothing like this kind of deference and ideological solidarity existed in France. Rather, ideological bankruptcy contributed both to the narrowness of Feuillant support and the Feuillants’ repeated but fumbling attempts to curtail freedom of the press, theater, and expression.

With the new Constitution operative, the emergency restrictions on expression and press liberty had to be lifted. If, during July and August, Brissot, Condorcet, Desmoulins, Paine, and the others found themselves relatively isolated in opposing restoration of the king’s powers, and constitutional monarchy,
⁵²
much of the Assembly, it turned out, was only briefly swayed by Barnave, the Lameths, and Lafayette. Fatally for modérantisme, during the autumn of 1791 the embattled space between the Left’s democratic republicanism and the Right’s ultraroyalism rapidly began to disintegrate.
⁵³
By abandoning “the Revolution” to align with the court, the Feuillants simply ensured that many prominent figures, initially siding with them but taking the Revolution’s core principles seriously, fairly soon entertained second thoughts. Roederer figured among those who joined the Feuillants briefly but quickly reverted to the Jacobins. The Cordeliers resumed their meetings and their attacks, and most of the newspapers that had suspended operations recommenced publication, disparaging the regime with redoubled energy.

The Cercle Social, however, never resumed, and its journal, the
Bouche de fer
, never reappeared. This was because by the autumn of 1791 the partly depleted but also now no longer centrist-dominated ranks of the Jacobin Club, with ties across the whole of France, alluringly beckoned. A club conveniently self-purged of monarchists and moderates by the Feuillant defection, and hence much closer than before to the
sociétés populaires
, especially after opening its regular meetings fully to the public in October 1791, the Jacobins offered a wider, more regular platform than the old Cercle for reaching the public, influencing proceedings in the Assembly and organizing beyond Paris.
⁵⁴
Filling the gap left by the departing Feuillants, from the late summer of
1791, however, loomed two rival impulses. On the one hand, Brissot, Carra, Cloots, Condorcet, and other key Cercle figures renewed their efforts to concert a broad, democratic counteroffensive; opposing them was the antirepublican, populist phalanx led by Robespierre and Marat, which was equally striving to fill the vacuum. While populist elements gained ground in both the Jacobin and Cordelier clubs, in his speeches during the summer of 1791, Robespierre continued to reiterate that the republican system was unsuitable for France.
⁵⁵