Revolutionary Ideas: An Intellectual History of the French Revolution From the Rights of Man to Robespierre (46 page)

Ideology pointed to a prolonged European war, and so did factional interests. By late 1791, most groups within the French political arena were actively angling for war between France and her monarchical neighbors. Some moderate royalists, Lafayette and Dumouriez, most of all, hoped that widening the revolutionary conflict would tilt the domestic struggle advantageously from their standpoint, and enhance their own roles as military leaders.
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Ultraroyalists and Louis XVI’s intimate advisers desired war, deeming this the likeliest way to release king, court, and themselves from the Revolution’s tightening grip. War allured all those hoping aristocracy, parlements, and Church would regain their privileges and hegemony over society. Nobody doubted that most aristocratic émigrés wanted war, seeing this as the only way to regain their lands and status. Equally, most Jacobins—though not Robespierre and his circle—saw advantages in launching a European war.
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After the Feuillant secession, although most Jacobins were not yet republicans, they
were
mostly convinced that war with Austria, Prussia, and the Rhenish states was inevitable or probable and should not be shied away from.
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France was surrounded by a wall of denunciation and threats. Prussia, Austria, and Britain, not to mention Holland, the Swiss oligarchies, and the Italian states, spared no effort to meddle in the volatile course of events in France.

From October 1791, Brissot publicly urged an ideological war of peoples against princes, or what the
Gazette de Paris
dubbed a “guerre universelle à tous les souverains,” partly as a way of undermining the Feuillants, partly to discredit the king, and partly to end France’s isolation and aid the republicans and democrats of Germany, Italy, Belgium, Holland, and Switzerland. Louis had vetoed Brissot’s measure against the émigrés.
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The king’s obstructionism must lapse once war loomed. But republican ambition stretched even further. According to the royalist writer Mallet du Pan, Brissot’s war policy was designed “to gain the opportunity at the first reverse, to accuse the king of collusion with the enemy and force him from the throne.”
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Admittedly, Robespierre and his supporters opposed the talk of war. But at this point they remained a small minority of the Jacobins and had great difficulty convincing others Europe’s rulers were not, in fact, planning war. Few believed that Europe’s rulers looked on “unmoved,” as Royou’s
L’Ami du Roi
sarcastically put it, at the “ ‘volcano’ vomiting its lava across France.”
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Danton was among those who expressly stated in the Jacobins that war was
inevitable. At the same time, for tactical reasons, he and Desmoulins adopted a calculating middle position between Brissot and Robespierre.
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In short, the vast international conflict commencing in 1792 was welcomed by most of the French factions for diverse and multiple reasons. The French Revolution, one must constantly bear in mind, was not primarily a “national” occurrence rooted in French society and culture but part of a wider democratic, egalitarian, and libertarian upsurge in all Western Europe, in no way separate from the revolutionary wave engulfing France’s immediate neighbors. During the spring and summer of 1790 both Flanders and Brabant, including Brussels, were deeply split between
aristocrates
and
démocrates,
with the latter increasingly adopting the rhetoric and attitudes of the French revolutionaries.
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In December 1790, as the Austrian forces advanced on Brussels,
La Feuille
villageoise
tried to explain the precipitate collapse of the Brabant Revolution to French villagers. Hendrik Van der Noot (1731–1827), the lawyer leading the conservative coalition dominating the Brabant Revolution, urged Belgians to accept the compromise Joseph II’s successor as emperor, Leopold, was offering. Belgians submitted to the emperor in exchange for Leopold’s agreeing unconditionally to restore the “constitution ancienne,” the old South Netherlands constitution of the fifteenth and sixteenth century that guaranteed the ascendancy of the nobility, clergy, and city magistracies.
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Since the Flemish-Brabantine ancien régime had always favored the “tyranny of the bishops and monks,” according to
La Feuille villageoise
, these groups readily jettisoned the Revolution on hearing that privilege, rank, and the old order would be restored.

Against the reactionaries, the Vonckists, “les démocrates” led by Jean-François Vonck (1743–92), tried to rescue the Belgian Revolution under the noses of the returning Austrians. The Vonckists fought to join France in ushering in an age of democratic freedom and equality, or what the antiphilosophe Feller termed “un anarchie parfait,” but were crushed by Van der Noot’s conservative counterrevolution. Most but not all Belgian popular sentiment came out against the Revolution. South Netherlanders, observed Feller, preferred religion, royalty, and aristocracy to democratic revolutionary values.
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How could this be explained to the French peasantry? “A revolution led by monks and nobles,” the
Feuille villageoise
assured the villages, must end in “slavery.” Yet, such “slavery” imposed by mobilizing “credulity and fanaticism” could not possibly last. With la philosophie and la liberté française powerfully entrenched on Belgium’s borders, “our good books will little by little chase out both superstition and the monks.”
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Whether ordinary folk support revolution or counterrevolution, argued
La Feuille villageoise
, is chiefly a matter of whether enlightenment or superstition predominates. Currently, enlightened reform was being abruptly reversed by princely governments and replaced with “credulity.” In July 1789, the elector of Mainz, Archbishop Friedrich Karl von Erthal, discarding his earlier scheme to project himself as an enlightened reformer, disavowed reform and repudiated the Enlightenment.
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The archbishop-electors of Cologne and Trier followed his example, denouncing Enlightenment and revolution and harboring thousands of aristocratic émigrés on their territory, close to France’s borders, permitting them to organize armed contingents and actively plan intervention. In December 1789, together with the electors of Cologne and Trier, Friedrich Karl issued a joint patent warning all subjects of the Rhenish electorates and German ecclesiastical states not to demand “rights and liberties” like the French.
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But there was no way they could prevent Mirabeau, in particular, from gaining an immense reputation in Germany.
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Throughout Western Europe beyond France, censorship grew much stricter from 1789 and soon amounted to a concerted repression of radical philosophisme in academic and general society. Rehberg warned the princes that it was the brochures and pamphlets of 1788 that had started the Revolution and first introduced the republicanism, the idea of a Declaration of Rights, and the democratic notions driving it.
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The democratic republicanism threatening to overturn the old order, he further observed, sprang directly from the surge of materialism, atheism, and “moralischen Egoismus” impelled by Diderot, Helvétius, and d’Holbach since the 1770s in Germany as well as France.
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Those states where enlightened reigning princes had left their subjects relatively free from censorship, like Brunswick-Wolfenbüttel, where the sole explicitly pro-Revolution journal in Germany, the
Braunschweigisches Journal philosophischen, philologischen und pädagogischen Inhalts
, was published, came under pressure to tighten up.
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To this the small principalities bowed, some quicker, others, like Brunswick, more reluctantly. The
Braunschweigisches Journal
was edited by Joachim Heinrich Campe, the best-known German sympathizer with the Revolution at the time, but an admirer of Sieyès, Mirabeau, and Lafayette, and a liberal monarchist, not a republican.
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Persecuting the enlightened constituency in the German secular and ecclesiastical states was effective up to a point, but came at a price. If the Aufklärung of the 1780s was still predominantly “moderate” and deferential to princes, it included a vigorous, radical undercurrent whose
intellectual leaders now faced fierce persecution and state-organized vilification. Even Aufklärer (enlighteners) previously committed to reform in collaboration with princely authority, perceiving the path to acceptance and reform blocked, became politically and psychologically more disposed to embrace radical ideas and strategies, and, consequently, the Revolution. In November 1791, Anton Dorsch (1758–1819), a Kantian philosophy professor and leader of the Mainz Illuminati, fled to Strasbourg where he was appointed a professor of philosophy, and, swearing allegiance to the French Constitution, became active among local Jacobins. Like the Swabian Jacobin journalist and law professor, Christoph Friedrich Cotta (1758–1838), expelled from Stuttgart a few weeks earlier, Dorsch plotted political sedition from Strasbourg in the Rhineland.
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Among other subversive activities, Cotta edited the Jacobin
Strasburgische Politische Journal
.
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Democratic sentiment represented a formidable threat to the existing order everywhere in the German-speaking world, as it did in Italy and the Low Countries.
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Radical thinkers and writers, including the poet Hölderlin, who had links with former Illuminati and wrote several hymns to Freedom in the autumn of 1791,
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regularly pilloried former “enlightened” German rulers and writers who had once supported “the cause of reason” against “superstition” but now opposed the Revolution in every way. Hamburg-Altona, Berlin, Kiel, Halle, Mainz, Stuttgart, and Aachen were all known foci of radical intellectual ferment. Such sentiment surged especially among the reading societies, student groups, professoriate, and former cells of the suppressed secret societies, the Deutsche Union and the Illuminati, before long all seething with sympathizers with the French republican Left. Some of these figures, including Wedekind, were certainly republican-minded, and some felt so strongly about the need to assist the progress of the Revolution across Western and Central Europe that when the French armies began their advance, they dispatched reports on the state of local defenses and strongholds to the French commanders.
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The fact that the backbone of German prorevolutionary sentiment consisted of professors, scholars, students, and writers contributed to the widely expressed contempt for such subversive thinking among the German courts and most of the population.

In December 1791, Volney, scornful of Catherine the Great’s rejection of Enlightenment reform, returned the honorific medal she had bestowed on him in January 1788. He addressed a sensational letter to her agent in Germany, the Baron Friedrich Melchior Grimm (1723–1807),
Diderot’s former friend who had, since the early 1780s, rejected the political part of Diderot’s radical legacy. Volney decried what he hoped would prove only a temporary alliance of the empress with the “rebels” (i.e., Louis XVI’s brothers and aunts, aristocratic émigrés, and exiled French bishops) and the Counter-Enlightenment courts opposing revolutionary France. His tirade against German and Russian court conservatism prompted a ferocious retort in an anonymous pamphlet that appeared shortly afterward at Coblenz, styling Volney and his friends a “lodge” of madmen and Mme. Helvétius, whose dead husband’s book had been a major inspiration to the German Illuminati, an “espèce de folle de la moderne démocratie.”
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Germany was suffused with ideological war, a struggle waged on every side, leaving the post-1789 Aufklärung dramatically polarized.

By December 1791, the much-contemplated outbreak of war seemed imminent. On one level, acting as the absolutist monarch he was at heart, Louis sent secret messages to Berlin and Vienna appealing for a general coalition of European powers to invade France and destroy the Revolution.
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In his capacity as a constitutional monarch, on the other hand, working with his official minsters, he issued stern warnings aimed at deterring the small Rhenish principalities from assisting the émigré military effort. The French Assembly’s ultimatum of November 1791, prompted by Brissot, demanding the electors expel the émigré princes’ armed contingents from their territories, was a logical reaction to the electors’ undisguised zeal for bolstering reactionary royalism, religion, and social hierarchy in France. But threatening the Rhenish ecclesiastical states with unpleasant consequences should they fail to expel all armed French émigrés by 15 January 1792 carried an obvious risk. A fresh French ultimatum in December 1791 obliged the archbishop-elector of Mainz to ask Louis-Joseph, Prince de Condé (1736–1818), commanding the main émigré force there, to depart forthwith. The elector of Trier, though furious about the ultimatum and that his diocesan rights and revenues in Alsace-Lorraine had been annulled, felt obliged to follow suit. But behind the ecclesiastical princes stood Prussia, Austria, and Britain, and these conservative powers were by no means willing to allow, and could not afford to see, the small states of Western Europe become submssive to the requirements of the French revolutionary state.