Revolutionary Ideas: An Intellectual History of the French Revolution From the Rights of Man to Robespierre (45 page)

The election results of the autumn of 1791 blighted the prospects of all who had vested their hopes in “moderation” and liberal monarchism. Unable to provide either stability or economic normalcy, the Feuillants equally failed to secure genuine collaboration with the court due to their policies on émigrés and religion, while Brissot and Clavière seized the initiative in the Assembly by encouraging the king to go to war with Prussia and Austria. Once the outbreak of war looked certain toward the end of 1791, it was a foregone conclusion that the Brissotins would eventually enter the revolutionary government, sharing power with the Feuillants and the king’s advisers. Meanwhile, the divisions within the regime only widened. Brissot’s motion, put forward early in the new Assembly on 9 November 1791, stipulating that all émigrés holding offices or commands who failed to return to France by 1 January 1792 would be deemed “traitors” and their property would be subject to confiscation, markedly aggravated the feuding between Feuillants and the Right,
and also between the king and the Assembly. Brissot, who proposed the measure with precisely this objective in mind, advocated stringent action against émigré princes, aristocrats, army officers, priests, and other functionaries who had gone abroad purposely to fight the Revolution, and leniency for misled “simples citoyens” who fled without taking up arms against the Revolution.
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Condorcet seconded his call for firm measures against the émigrés, who represented a formidable political and military threat and were actively mobilizing opinion against the Revolution in Switzerland, Britain, and Italy, as well as on the Rhine, in the Low Countries, and at Vienna.

Brissotins benefited too from the fragmented, ramshackle revolutionary regime’s need to adopt tougher measures against the refractory clergy. The political oath of allegiance to be exacted from priests under the edict of 29 November 1791—blacklisting nonjurors, stripping them of their pensions, and where involved in active subversion, imprisoning them—was rebuffed by the king as well as the ultraroyalist and strict constitutionalist Right. Caught in a maze of contradiction, Louis vetoed the measure against émigrés on 12 November and nonjuring clergy on 19 December, while nevertheless increasingly depending on the Brissotins for his war policy. The Revolution had reached a critical juncture. In March 1792, three “Brissotin” figures, including Jean-Marie Roland (1754–93), an official from Lyon who exercised a considerable influence over the Brissotin faction through his wife’s famous salon, and now as interior minister, were brought into the royal ministry. But the long-standing royal vetoes eventually created complete deadlock, paralyzing the Assembly and leading to months of chronic political crisis through early 1792. So grave were the obstacles, by early 1792 the constitutional monarchy had for most intent and purposes ceased functioning. Blocked by the court’s lack of confidence in him and sidelined by Brissot’s maneuvers, Barnave, seeing the ruin of his schemes, retired from the active political scene in January 1792 and returned to the Dauphiné.

Barnave abandoned his political role and ambitions. He had rejected democracy throughout and, in his speeches, had come to reject philosophisme, continually calling for moderation, but as his writings of this period show, he retained an acute sense of the logic of revolutionary momentum and how economic and social forces combine with attitudes and philosophic awareness to reshape political institutions. No one understood better that it was the expansion of the towns and commerce that had undermined the old aristocracy of the land and created
a new political milieu. He wanted his constitutional monarchy to be based on “the new rich,” the men of commerce, banking, and industry. But he also understood that there is no such thing as an automatic logic of social forces, and that the final outcome depended on people’s ability to conceptualize and respond to their circumstances, needs, capacities, and rights. He and his faction, he knew, could not succeed without mobilizing stronger support and politically defeating the
parti républicain
, whose arguments he had failed to counter.
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Meanwhile, in spring 1792, rapprochement between Louis and the Brissotins proved, inevitably perhaps, unhappy, strained, and brief. Military defeat heightened popular suspicion of Louis and still more the queen and court. On 15 May, a Brissotin deputy, Maximin Isnard (d. 1830), revealed that France’s military plans had been betrayed to Vienna by individuals inside the Tuileries. Despite the loyalty of most of Paris’s population to “liberty and the Constitution,” declared Pétion, the new mayor, on 29 May, in a general report on the state of the capital, royalist intrigue and conspiracy were rife among dangerous insurgent elements and a mounting threat. Repeated clashes over the royal veto, and Louis’s obduracy in blocking the Assembly’s decrees relating to émigrés and nonjuring priests, were followed by reports that the royal guard at the Tuileries, a newly recruited force guaranteed by the Constitution and paid from the civil list, had been illegally composed and deliberately screened to exclude Patriots and include only royalists.
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In response, on 29 May, the Assembly ordered most of the several thousand men of the royal guard to be disbanded.

That a new major constitutional crisis was brewing, if obvious since November 1791, looked particularly threatening by late spring 1792 due to the military setbacks suffered during early 1792. However one looked at it, the 1791 Constitution was simply unworkable in the circumstances. Like his policy on émigrés and réfractoires, disbanding the palace guard perfectly fitted Brissot’s strategy of marginalizing court, aristocracy, and Church, and steering the country toward republicanism. But disbanding most of the guard also convinced the king that, far from accommodating and softening the Brissotins, as he had hoped, his ministry was sliding under Brissot’s thumb. As the military situation deteriorated further, yet another key measure was vetoed by Louis. This was the summoning of 20,000 National Guard militia, or
fedérés,
from the provinces to Paris, to facilitate dispatch of more regular troops to the frontier and secure the capital against reactionary elements plotting counterrevolution (including the disbanded royal guard). An
emergency measure passed by the legislature on 8 June, the summoning of these 20,000 National Guard militia or fédérés from the provinces to Paris was equally firmly opposed by Lafayette and Robespierre. In theory there was room for pragmatic cooperation between Feuillants, Brissotin Jacobins, and populists, against court and Crown, on fedérés, no less than émigrés and refractory priests. But in practice all cooperation was blocked by the intense jealousy souring relations between the factions and Robespierre’s suspicion that the fedérés would simply strengthen the Brissotin hand.

At Marseille, a key ally of Brissot, Charles-Jean-Marie Barbaroux (1767–94), successful lawyer and scholar from a wealthy family aligned with Vergniaud and Mme. Roland, persuaded the mayor, Jean-Raymond Mourraille, to immediately dispatch a column of six hundred armed men, under his command, to reinforce the democratic Revolution in the capital.
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On 10 June the Brissotin interior minister, Roland, urged on by his politically ambitious wife, Manon-Jeanne, Mme. Roland (1754–93), twenty years his junior, challenged the king with a remarkable fourteen-page letter composed together with (or largely by) her. Their missive stressed the seriousness of the months-long political deadlock since November 1791 and claimed it was caused by men wrecking the Constitution for the sake of misplaced notions of monarchy, religion, and nobility. Use of the royal veto to block the Assembly’s emergency measures was turning the “bons citoyens” against the king, and turning the Crown into the abettor of “conspirators against the people.” Blind to his real interests, Louis was being misled by malicious advisers and rendering France prey to populist
démagoguistes
. It might be hard to accept curtailment of the royal prerogatives, but the monarch must now make a fateful choice: either he assented to the vetoed edicts regarding nonjuring clergy and the féderés, making the sacrifices demanded by “la philosophie,” or else remain aligned with the selfish, vested interests oppressing the people.
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The king was furious to be faced with such an ultimatum. Under the 1791 Constitution, the ministers were responsible to the Crown rather than the legislature. Roland, an unusually honest minister (as even enemies acknowledged), and long a republican, was dismissed three days later, as were Clavière and the third republican minister, Servan, soon afterward (both likewise insisting on the summoning of the fédérés). They were replaced by Feuillants (but now without Barnave), who resumed their failed and hopeless bid to capture the Revolution. With this, Louis finally and irretrievably broke with the Revolution.
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CHAPTER 9

The “General Revolution” Begins

(1791–92)

The French Revolution represented an alarmingly disruptive force in international relations from the outset. Since the new French constitutional monarchy, from the summer of 1789, broadly repudiated the principles and precedents on which monarchical Europe based its alliances, treaties, and established procedures for resolving disputes, and professed to be guided in international relations, as in domestic affairs, by the principles of the Rights of Man, friction between revolutionary France and Europe’s monarchical courts was inevitably acute. Equally apt to generate friction, the far-reaching European reform programs of the 1770s and 1780s inspired by Enlightenment ideals were everywhere abandoned or reversed by princes and oligarchies from mid-1789, in Germany, Italy, Spain, and the Low Countries alike. This left a wide-spread legacy of bitterness among enlightened reformers everywhere, often jolting long-standing “moderates” into a defiant stance, which, in turn, translated into pro-French political subversion and support for extending the General Revolution.
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A vast European war over the Revolution’s principles, claims, and actions was thus always a probability before it actually commenced.

From 1789 onward, activists championing democracy and the Rights of Man in Germany, as in Switzerland, Italy, and the Low Countries, were automatic allies of the Revolution, declared enemies of the “Royalisten, Aristokraten und den Priviligierten,” as one of them, the Mainz elector’s former body physician and professor of medicine, Georg Wedekind (1761–1839), put it. “Defenders of freedom and equality” believing “justice permits me to do whatever does not harm my equal,” averred Wedekind, in his 1793 Kommentar on human rights, battled the forces of conservatism like “defenders of toleration” fought
intolerance.
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Prominent German conservatives, like the Hanover enlightened bureaucrat August Wilhelm Rehberg (1757–1836), warned princes that while the new French Constitution might claim to be “monarchical,” the radical group responsible for the egalitarian legislation of 1789 were actually ‘republicans’ wishing to wipe the slate of the political past entirely clean, four principal pamphleteers of 1788, Sieyès, Brissot, Pétion, and Kersaint, being entirely republican in orientation.
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Brissot, he noted, was obviously a democrat who sought to balance representative against direct democracy already in 1788.
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The armed conflict into which the international struggle between the Revolution and Europe’s princes descended in 1792, was therefore, generally perceived by the sharpest, best informed (surely rightly) as not just inescapable but fundamentally a conflict between monarchy, aristocracy, and religion versus republicanism, democracy, and philosophy.

If diplomatic relations with neighboring European powers steadily deteriorated, there was one foreign potentate the Revolution antagonized at every step—the papacy. For besides questions of church reform and human rights, the papacy was a territorial power in France, as well as central Italy, that possessed two neighboring principalities in the Midi—Avignon and the Comtat Venassin—which the Vatican had every intention of retaining. In the villages and main town of the Comtat, Carpentras, most people remained loyal to Church and pope. But serious strife erupted in Avignon, a city where pro-Revolution sentiment and desire for union with France had gained ground. In August 1790, a virtual miniature civil war broke out. Avignon also posed a thorny problem for relations with ancien régime Europe more generally. The Revolution proclaimed the Rights of Man, promising not to perpetrate unjustified aggression against any neighbor. What justification could there be for dispossessing the pope of a territory uninterruptedly held since the fourteenth century? But while conservative Catholics championed the pope’s historic rights, the Left refused to acknowledge them at all. Pétion initiated the campaign to annex Avignon in the Assembly, in November 1790, by claiming the “social contract” is not between ruler and ruled, as most supposed but, as Rousseau taught, between all individuals uniting together to create the social state. By vesting sovereignty in the people, the Revolution, by definition, subordinated the pope’s rights and those of rulers everywhere to the people. The
Journal de Paris
agreed, albeit correcting him on one point: it was not Rousseau or Locke (where this idea is not found) who invented this quintessentially modern idea but Hobbes. Hobbes had discovered this
pivotal doctrine so destructive of court culture but then failed to make any proper use of it.
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