Revolutionary Ideas: An Intellectual History of the French Revolution From the Rights of Man to Robespierre (47 page)

On 21 December 1791, the Viennese court threatened war in their turn, if the ultimatum to the Rhenish electorates was not promptly withdrawn. Given the hostility to the Revolution emanating from
Vienna, Berlin, The Hague, Rome, Turin, Naples, and Madrid, there was every reason to expect a broad anti-French coalition to rapidly coalesce. With the Feuillant leadership deeply split over the advisibility of war, and war seemingly immanent, Brissot’s strategy had already paid handsome dividends. Desiring war but blocked by the Feuillants, Louis XVI, spurred on by relatives and advisers, halfheartedly adopted an extremely risky strategy. On 10 March 1792, he dismissed his Feuillant ministers and, seeing little alternative, brought in the republicans Roland and Clavière, doubtless hoping republican Jacobins in office would discard their oppositional attitude (which they did not);
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Louis turned also to Dumouriez, a leading general likewise eager for war, whose military experience derived from the 1760s conflict in Corsica. With Austria refusing any guarantee of peaceful intentions and mobilizing her forces, Louis stuck to his ultimatum.

With both the French court and principal German courts refusing to back down, the revolutionary Left in Paris, assuming conflict could not be prevented anyhow, also believed it could be managed to their advantage. Condorcet afterward wrote that he hated war but voted for Brissot’s policy in this instance, convinced it was necessary to wage such a war to make the public see the truth about the French court’s nefarious designs and to consolidate the Revolution.
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His and Brissot’s republican campaign of June–July 1791 had failed dismally; an aggressive strategy toward the émigrés and a European war promised to be a more successful way of promoting the republican bloc’s fortunes and swinging most of the Jacobin Club behind them. While there was no majority for repudiating monarchy and the Constitution, there was a large majority favoring war, which was a sure means of turning the tables on the Feuillants and bound to split that faction wide open. Some Feuillants sought to avoid war at all costs, believing their plans for constitutional monarchy could work only in the context of peace, while Lafayette and Dumouriez unequivocally sought war.
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Second, not only would the struggle render Louis XVI’s duplicity and treachery as plain as daylight,
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it would shatter all trust between Feuillants and king and eradicate the aristocracy from their remaining positions of power, ultimately enabling the Assembly to democratize the army, National Guard, Constitution, and hence the entire country.

In addition, argued Brissot in a speech to the Convention on 29 December, Austria and Prussia faced so many internal difficulties they could not wage a sustained conflict effectively. Austria had already displayed both her weakness and her vulnerability to Belgian revolt during
the earlier strife in Belgium. France had all the potentates of Europe against her, but she had the people on her side. The Hungarians were restless. “Poland is now bound with a common interest with France” and would be a source of trouble to Russia, Prussia, and Austria alike.
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As for France’s domestic position, war would end uncertainty, compel waverers to take sides, unmask opponents as traitors, and finally discredit the domestic reputations of the émigrés and refractory clergy. It was logical to expect supporters of the 1791 Constitution to split away from a French court seeking émigré and foreign support to overthrow that Constitution on behalf of the old aristocratic order. Brissot’s policy was designed to prize Feuillant modérantisme away from conservative monarchism and discredit and defeat both. It was a means of preparing the way for republicanism.
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If always a gamble, war could also be expected to enhance the revolutionary élan and cohesion of the National Assembly. Since the Revolution every Frenchman had become a soldier, declared Brissot, which meant that there were six million of them.
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Equally important for Left republicans, war would reignite the half-suppressed revolutions of Geneva, Aachen, and Liège, and destabilize Zurich (where pervasive resentment against the ruling oligarchy was palpable),
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as well as the Rhineland and the Low Countries, spreading the “General Revolution” across monarchical, aristocratic Europe. Most Jacobins agreed. There were loud objections, however, from the Montagne—the Jacobin minority opposing Brissot, which acquired that name from their preference for sitting on the Assembly hall’s most elevated benches. Montagnards realized that whether such a war strengthened republicanism or weakened it to monarchy’s advantage, it would not work to their advantage. To Brissot and his colleagues, Marat’s and Robespierre’s priority seemed to be to build on the current instability within France to extend their own following and power.

The vehement public quarrel between Brissot and Robespierre over the advisability of war did not mark the start of their differences (as has often been claimed), for those reached back to the summer of 1791 and originated in the rift over republicanism of June and July 1791. But it was the issue over which Robespierre could most effectively and widely sow suspicion concerning Brissot’s motives, since the court also wanted war.
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In different circumstances, held Robespierre, in a well-judged, effective reply on 2 January 1792, he would wish, no less than Brissot, to assist Brabant, aid the Liègeois, and break the chains oppressing the Dutch. But the conflict was manifestly being planned and fomented
by the “domestic enemies of our liberty”—king, court, Dumouriez, and Lafayette. All the trumpets of the nobility, émigrés, ministers, and court intriguers plotted war, and the mere fact that they all wanted it was grounds enough not to get into it. A European war would assist court, nobles, modérés, and royal ministers, corrupt men ideally placed to lodge their own nominees in command of France’s armies. How could such a struggle serve the people, or liberty? Brissot admitted the modérés wanted an “aristocratic constitution” on the British model, and yet urged the Jacobins to embrace their projects! Why distract the public’s attention from their most formidable enemies, those within, to confront a less immediately urgent peril at such a dangerous time?
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With those Jacobins supporting Marat and Robespierre opposing war, in March and April 1792, Louis and the Left republicans briefly joined hands, each with a view less to helping than undermining the other. Unlike Louis, the Feuillants, or Robespierre, Brissotins viewed the coming struggle as an integral component of the fight against “tyrants” everywhere, against what Condorcet termed “l’hypocrisie des prêtres” and the foolish pride of the “noblesse héréditaire.”
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Armed conflict, prognosticated Brissot, would interrupt communication between the Revolution’s internal and external foes, and render it easier to crush internal enemies by unmasking them as traitors collaborating with the foreign enemy. But such a war, countered Robespierre, scorning Brissot’s arguments, and those Condorcet added in his speech in the legislature immediately following Brissot on 29 December 1791,
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would merely provide fresh opportunities for aristocratic subversion of public opinion aided by émigrés and foreign courts. Condorcet and Brissot sought to consolidate and internationalize the Revolution using the army as an instrument to bolster revolutionary ideology around France’s borders. Cordorcet claimed her ability to wage war on kings would show Europe that France was united with one national will by “l’amour de la liberté.” But it was likelier, insisted Robespierre, that the army, in its frontier camps, would become isolated from sources of libertarian principles, enabling officers to foment the old blind obedience, discipline, and ancien régime military ethic.
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The Feuillants remained badly split, deprived for the moment of their brief political ascendancy. Demonstrating treasonable conduct on the part of Louis XVI’s court and army officers would perhaps have enabled Brissot and his three ministerial colleagues—Roland, Servan, and Clavière—to wreck Feuillant hegemony permanently and replace the 1791 liberal monarchical constitution with a republican one. But
Robespierre, determined to block Brissot’s strategy, far preferred to retain the existing Constitution than see a full-fledged republic introduced.
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At this time, Robespierre regularly dismissed the label “republican” as chiefly useful to conspiring royalists who vilified Patriots in the eyes of a nation uneducated in the refinements of political thought, enabling them to label all Jacobins disloyal. Above all, Robespierre exploited Brissot’s principal difficulty, namely, that for the moment, he and Roland professed to have confidence in a court and generals that they actually vastly distrusted.

On 20 April 1792, the king appeared before a cheering, still predominantly moderate Assembly that mostly had no desire to change the monarchical Constitution but was entirely willing to confront France’s foes abroad. France, he announced, was now officially at war with Austria and her allies. With some justification, Louis’s relatives expected the armed conflict to strengthen monarchism irrespective of whether the fighting went well or badly. If the Austro-Prussian forces swept aside the ragged, half-disintegrated shambles of the French revolutionary army from which many noble officers were deserting, then the war would provide opportunities to persuade more to defect, and for conservative social forces finally to prevail and restore the old order. If the French military gamble went well, contrary to expectations, Louis’s standing as a constitutional monarch in France and within the Revolution would soar and Dumouriez, a declared constitutional monarchist, would help bring the army and national resources under royal control. Either way the Feuillants and republicans would lose, but the king would gain.

With war declared, the French launched a spring offensive into the Low Countries that ground to an immediate and humiliating halt, suffering reverses at Mons and Tournai. After proclaiming a universal ideological conflict with great fanfares in the press, the fiasco, much to the jubilation of the émigrés, seriously damaged the democratic republicans’ prestige in France and among the republicans of the Low Countries and Germany.
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The Belgian populace showed no inclination to rise. Much to Brissot’s discomfiture, Robespierre could now deride Brissotin Jacobins and monarch bracketed together. Over the ensuing months, the Jacobins remained deeply divided, while the Cordeliers sided with Robespierre. The feuding was not in essence a personality clash, though it was that too, but a profound ideological rift. One unfortunate casualty was Condorcet’s long-considered, carefully deliberated report on education reform, possibly his second-most important contribution to the Revolution (after the February 1793 democratic Constitution),
a report completed in April 1792, but then, owing to the war crisis, shelved indefinitely. By April and May 1792, the sparring between Robespierre and the Brissot circle in the Jacobins had evolved into a bitter, unedifying slanging match with Robespierre and Marat continually accusing Brissot of colluding secretly with Dumouriez, Lafayette, and other aristocratic intriguers, terming Dumouriez “l’instrument et le protecteur” of the Brissotins. (In fact, Dumouriez equally detested Montagnards and Brissot Jacobins.)
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The royalist Mallet du Pan, while deeming both Jacobin factions unscrupulous, noted that the Brissotins were “plus habiles” than the Montagnards but “moins féroces”;
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this was to prove their undoing.

Their ideological differences rent the Jacobins asunder. Their split had a polarizing effect, the Left republicans becoming more overtly cosmopolitan and the Montagnards more narrowly chauvinistic. The Cercle Social and fourteen
Chronique du mois
editors expounded a particularly ambitious theory of international relations and war, rooted in their philosophique perspective. Since all men possess the same rights, no one can deprive one people of these without violating the Rights of Man generally. Denying the natural rights of the French or Germans, for example, inevitably entails betraying whatever nation the oppressor belongs to. No agreement between two nations can deprive any part of either citizenry of the imprescriptible right to obey only laws freely embraced by themselves. Thus, the Holy Roman (i.e., German) Empire, being a land of princes and ecclesiastics, resting on dynastic inheritance and privileges, long recognized “by the troup of sophists aristocratic Machiavelisme has on its pay-roll,” merited prompt dissolution with French revolutionary help into a confederation of republics, or into a single united republic, with all the princes ejected. The National Assembly’s cause in its fight with the German princes was, to Condorcet and his colleagues, that of the German as much as the French nation. The German princes’ unjust war against France was equally an unjust war of oppression against the populace of their own states.
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Condorcet fully backed Brissot in these vicious polemics because he too was convinced of the looming danger that court subversion and aristocratic intrigue would otherwise swing a Feuillant-dominated Assembly against the Revolution.
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France’s Revolution might well collapse, like that of Brabant, under the heel of nobles and hostile clergy.
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Condorcet attributed the fact that the American Revolution had succeeded and helped foment a powerful democratic tendency in Europe, Britain, and Ireland in large part to the heroic effort and struggle against
the British Crown (and German princes) to gain American Independence. The fighting had steeled the American Revolution, transformed the Americans into a nation, and led Europeans to study and weigh the principles proclaimed by the American insurgents. The new war against tyranny would similarly mobilize opinion against monarchs and despotism everywhere.
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Brissot, Condorcet, Carra, Gorsas, Roederer, and their foreign associates Cloots, Gorani, and Paine, all believed the Revolution could ultimately succeed only by defeating the combined internal and external menace—French royalism
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the European powers linked by the armed émigrés. The Jacobin majority backing Brissot (for the moment) had a reliable ally in the thousands of prominent Dutch, Belgian, Swiss, Italian, and German Patriots who had fled to France since 1787 and formed an expatriot republican vanguard, mostly democrat. Even those several Dutch political refugees in France supporting French constitutional monarchism in preference to democracy, and preferring Feuillants to the Jacobins, like Assembly deputy Jean-Antoine d’Averhoudt (1756–92), still supported the war of liberation and demanded an “heureuse révolution” in Holland, closely linking the Belgian and Dutch refugees’ interests with those of France.
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