Revolutionary Ideas: An Intellectual History of the French Revolution From the Rights of Man to Robespierre (44 page)

On 1 October 1791 the inaugural meeting of the new legislature, known as the Assemblée Législative, was attended by 434 deputies. When the rest arrived, of a total of 767, all newcomers to the legislature, only around 170 deputies (22%) aligned firmly with the Feuillants, affording a slight edge over the roughly 150 (20%) deputies designated “Jacobins,” the rest forming a floating, vacillating center with another hundred or so deputies favoring the Right. The 150 Jacobins included many now-prominent national figures renowned for their role in press battles, mass rallies, and Paris politics, including Condorcet, Vergniaud, Guadet, Chabot, Fauchet, Lamourette, and Brissot, the last elected for the department of Paris, winning his seat with a considerable majority over rivals.
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Money and court influence could doubtless lure some additional deputies into the Feuillant camp. By early 1792, the pro-Jacobin bloc had contracted somewhat, and Feuillant allegiance swelled to around a quarter. But Feuillant primacy remained conspicuously vulnerable to the frequent shifts of mood among the large floating “centre.”
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To secure legislation after October, the Feuillants could afford to ignore Marat and the populists but had to work with Brissot and the republican faction, which by late 1791 had consequently acquired a firm toehold on power.
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A major further success for the Brissotins and set-back for the Feuillants were the Paris municipal elections of November 1791. A triumph for the Left, a whole new set of civic officers replaced those previously espousing constitutional monarchism. Pétion replaced Bailly as mayor; Louis-Pierre Manuel became city procurator, and Roederer procureur-général of the department. Democratic republicanism, instead of being routed by a thumping majority, was daily winning new triumphs. These results enhanced the weight of the municipality and major clubs, rendering them, even more than the Assembly’s anti-Feuillant contingent, watchdogs of the democratic cause. So decisive a shift in Paris induced several key Assembly centrist deputies to abandon their previous ties with the Feuillants. A sure sign the Feuillants were losing their grip were the gyrations of trimmers like Hérault de Séchelles, who now abandoned monarchism and Montesquieu with no less alacrity than he had adopted them just weeks earlier. On 2 December 1791 he too secured readmission to the Jacobins.

In the French Revolution, Left republicanism predominated in the prorevolutionary press and key Paris cafés throughout. Now it dominated in the press, cafés, and (again) in the Paris municipality, and loomed strongly also in the legislature and the Jacobins. Democratic republicanism more than ever infused and defined the essential values, conscience, and principles of the Revolution. But could la philosophie moderne mobilize the people? Failing to control legislature, press, provincial clubs, or the Paris municipality, the only recourse left to the Feuillants in their efforts to renew their ascendancy was to try to emasculate the press and clubs. A measure proposed by Le Chapelier on 29 September 1791, which renewed aspects of the July restrictions, forbade the clubs to appear collectively in public ceremonies or to interfere with the work of government. Additional clauses designed to prevent the clubs from printing their debates and interacting so flagrantly contradicted the Constitution and the Rights of Man, and were so vehemently inveighed against by Brissot and the Jacobins that they had to be dropped.
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Le Chapelier became a particular hate figure among the Jacobins and Cordeliers, who responded by appealing to the public. From 14 October 1791, when the Jacobin Club held its first ordinary meeting fully open to the public, populists and the Left both disseminated their ideologies more widely. During late 1791 and early 1792, the Jacobins
provided a collective, joint platform for Brissot, Carra, Lanthenas, and others associated with the Cercle Social (now an offshoot of the regrouped Jacobins), and the Brissotin Paris Commune, as well as Danton, Marat, sansculottisme, and Robespierre.

With the new Constitution and legislature inaugurated, the door was opened wide to debate, republican criticism, and schemes for renewal. The
Chronique de Paris
issue for 18 September approvingly reviewed Volney’s chief work,
Les ruines, ou meditations sur les révolutions des empires
, a major text begun ten years before but only published in August 1791. A materialist meditation on the tendency of governments to prey on their own populations, in the tradition of Diderot, d’Holbach, and Raynal, the book stressed the
perversité de gouvernements
and analyzed the processes by which men are tyrannized over, misled, and abased. Volney also discussed how the dismal cycle of oppression and superstition might be broken and emancipation achieved, inaugurating “a century of astonishment for vulgar minds,” fright for tyrants, and hope for everyone.
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The Cercle, no longer a forum for meetings, continued as a publicity machine. It established yet another journal designed to promote the Left’s ideals nationally, the
Chronique du mois
, in November 1791, which appeared also in German translation. This journal’s goal was to demonstrate how human science and knowledge little by little, thanks to printing, could transform and ameliorate the human race “en général,” driving what Bonneville called Man’s “marche universelle à la perfection sociale.” Spreading democratic republican ideas abroad, explained Lanthenas, another of the editors, would enable the French to assist all peoples eager for liberty, eventually to realize that “perpetual and universal peace [la paix perpetuelle et universelle] so desired and yet so far off,” proclaimed by Raynal and for which so many illustrious men (Diderot, d’Holbach, etc.) had striven.
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Edited by Bonneville, Lanthenas, and a dozen others, including the Scots republican John Oswald (ca. 1760–93), in Germany this remarkable periodical was dubbed the “journal of the fourteen editors.” Son of an Edinburgh coffeehouse owner, Oswald, secretary to “the British Club” in Paris until its near dissolution in February 1793, was a former Indian army officer who had traveled widely among the Kurds and Turkomans, detested high-society cravats and wigs, and supported vegetarianism and Irish independence from Britain. A declared atheist, he believed people were becoming more enlightened, and the more enlightened they became, the more they would collaborate.
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While the sociétés populaires diffused a destabilizing “exaggeration of principles” derived from la philosophie, which underminded the Constitution, complained a Feuillant journalist in May 1792, hardly any papers defended the Constitution “in all its purity.”
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In fact, even the best Feuillant papers, such as the
Gazette universelle
, edited by Antoine-Marie Cerisier (1749–1828), who seemed to Brissot and Carra to have abandoned his own earlier radicalism (derived from the philosophes), failed to make much impact despite a huge ministry subsidy and artificially boosted print-run.
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Their media campaign faltering, the Feuillants again tried to overawe their detractors by muzzling liberty of the press. In May 1792 a prominent liberal monarchist, Comte Jacques-Claude Beugnot (d. 1835), urged suppression of Marat’s paper, a recent issue of which summoned the troops to massacre all their generals. He also urged the legislature to prohibit Prudhomme’s
Révolutions de Paris
, Fréron’s republican
Orateur du peuple
, and all “contemptible authors” attacking the Constitution, including those of the royalist
Gazette de Paris
,
Mercure politique
(Mallet du Pan), and
Journal Général de France
(Louis-Abel, Abbé de Fontenay). Right and Left, held the Feuillants, were all propagating the same “poison” under sundry ideological labels, instilling contempt for and inciting violence against the Constitution. Royalist and populist authors were accused of inciting civil war in collusion with provincial aristocratic papers like the
Mercure anglais
of Rouen, the
Journal de Lyon
edited by Carrier, and “all the papers that infect the south.”
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Over the winter of 1791–92, most Frenchmen were less concerned with the regime’s growing instability than more pressing problems. The disappointing harvest of 1791 caused a substantial rise in the bread price, which by September was already spreading alarm and distress.
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Equally, owing to clawing back of the August 1789 abolition of feudal rights encouraged by the Feuillants, the countryside remained plunged in endemic unrest. Action was urged to make state loans available to poor tenants to help buy out seigneurial dues still protected by the law and eliminate harvest obligations, the triage, and other seigneurial “rights.” On 27 October 1791, the Assembly appointed a fresh committee to examine landowners’ claims and charters, but until March 1792 this body simply continued its predecessor’s policy. Marat’s
L’Ami du peuple
and the populist press contrasted the growing hardship besetting the poor and low-paid with luridly depicted scenes of corruption and excess in high places. The royalist opposition also highlighted the growth of poverty. More than three-quarters of France’s inhabitants,
exclaimed Royou in February 1792, were sunk in deprivation, misery, and fatigue, most, in his opinion, regretting the Revolution and longing for the ancien régime to return. The dreadful “night” afflicting France for three years would soon end, he predicted, thanks to the mounting distress. Royalism would triumph with the aid of economic hardship: “thus will the reign of
philosophisme
pass [ainsi le règne du philosophisme va passer].”
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Adverse conditions in the countryside weakened the procourt, pro-landowner “moderation” espoused by the Feuillant leadership. Liquidating all remaining remnants of feudal dues was urged by both the populists and the Jacobin Brissotin philosophique faction. On 11 April 1792, an Assembly majority admitted that in 1789–90 the Revolution “had only cut off the branches of the feudal tree leaving its trunk intact.”
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Joining forces, democrats and populists finally overcame the obduracy and legalistic procedures encouraged earlier. The burden of providing documentary proof that dues were not property rights inherent in ancient grants of land was transferred from the tenant to the landowner, who now had to provide documentation proving “rights” were his property—a crucial shift. A further decree of 18 June 1792 comprehensively canceled seigneurial rights to collect dues on land sales.
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After the Brissotins finally gained full control of the Assembly in August, seigneurialism was finally eradicated. On 25 August 1792, all remaining dues and perquisites, water rights, dues on water mills, and rights of passage by waterways were abolished without compensation in perpetuity.
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With the Feuillants fatally weakened, the real question now was who would triumph in the three-cornered contest to inherit their mantle, the horde philosophique, the populists, or what Royou saw as France’s solid majority of all classes preferring order, tradition, and religion. Over the winter of 1791–92, populist authoritarianism did not yet appear to be in the running for control of the Revolution. To Royou, it seemed as certain that ultraroyalism and religion must triumph as that the democrats and already-receding Feuillants must fail.
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The horde philosophique would assuredly be beaten back. For decades, the philosophes had vaunted their wisdom, promising readers that with la philosophie on the throne, all people would be happy. In 1789, God had permitted la philosophie its brief triumph, surmised
L’Ami du Roi
, doubtless so as to undeceive mankind about this wretched dream, thereby ridding mankind permanently of an illicit, deceptive hope. Already the people were abundantly disillusioned, witnessing the effects of the flight of the
nobles and the rich. The only way to revive employment, wages, and fortunes was to repair the appalling injustice done to “the orders,” the nobility, clergy, and parlementaires. Catholics must rise and overwhelm the Revolution.
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Democratic republicans, of course, had every reason to dread the twin Counter-Enlightenment onslaughts of ultraroyalism and Maratiste authoritarianism. “We are far from having toppled the throne of prejudice,” lamented Lanthenas in April 1792. “With regard to emancipating peoples from error and lies, what has really been achieved since that memorable day, the 14 July? ‘L’instruction publique,’ which should be the first of our concerns, has been the last thing we have been occupied with.”
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Children’s education remained vital, but still more so, held Lanthenas, was that of the adult population. If men’s rights are to triumph, genuine Patriots must “unite, laboring in town and country at public instruction, something so necessary and so neglected.” Under the ancien régime, education sought to inculcate as little genuine knowledge as possible while fostering every error “with the aid of which aristocracy and despotism maintain themselves.” Britain, instead of perfecting her constitution, had lapsed back into the “mire of aristocracy” after 1688, for no other reason than that the English failed to become enlightened. Ethics and politics are vital spheres of awareness since the “universal regeneration of Man” involves creating a society “where the only cult is that of truth.” The Revolution’s true tool was the sociétés populaires, the sole instrument able to prevent “the aristocracy of the rich” from consolidating its grip.
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