Revolutionary Ideas: An Intellectual History of the French Revolution From the Rights of Man to Robespierre (48 page)

Brissot responded to his critics at the Jacobins yet again on 25 April 1792 by designating Robespierre one of those dangerous individuals who flatter the people “pour le subjuguer,” tyrannizing over opinion in the name of liberty, casting suspicion over virtue, and maligning opponents without justification. Where are your qualifications, he demanded, for “audaciously” assailing Condorcet? Have you, like him, launched courageous attacks over thirty years on fanaticism and “despotisme parlementaire et ministeriel,” allied to Voltaire, d’Alembert, and Diderot? What services have you rendered “à la patrie, à la liberté, à la philosophie?,” he asked the man who had undoubtedly played less part in the great revolutionary
journées
than any other major revolutionary leader.
⁵³
Interrupted by howls of protest from the Montagne, Brissot eulogized Condorcet as a philosophe, journalist, and Jacobin. Robespierre had savaged Condorcet, whose revolutionary career “has been nothing but a series of sacrifices for the people: a philosophe, he became a politician; an académicien, he became a journalist; a noble, he became a Jacobin.”
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The next day, Condorcet published an article in the
Chronique de Paris
accusing Robespierre and his friends of undermining the Revolution by deliberately agitating the people with continual attacks on “the true friends of liberty.” Guadet too publicly assailed Robespierre,
in particular, for encouraging Marat’s
L’Ami du peuple
, the paper that most praised him in repeatedly calling for a “dictator” and recommending that this supposedly urgently needed
dictateur
must be none other than the incomparable, “incorruptible” Robespierre.
⁵⁵
His pen was not rented out to anyone, retorted Marat, and he had hardly ever engaged in direct personal contact with Robespierre. Pétion was lambasted by Marat for siding with Brissot rather than Robespierre and joining their “ridiculous farce” of claiming la philosophie as prime agent of the Revolution. The Jacobins would never resolve their present quarrels, avowed Marat, until they had expelled the Brissot clique from their midst, ejecting the scoundrels casting aspersions on Robespierre, men aspiring to direct the Revolution while, under the mask of patriotism, insidiously betraying it, in league with the court.
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Robespierre further defended his position at the Jacobins on 27 April. Brissot and Condorcet absurdly assailed him for upholding Jean-Jacques’s finest principle that only the people are “good, just and magnanimous” and that “tyranny is the exclusive attribute of those who disdain them.” Had not Condorcet originally been groomed as a philosophe by Voltaire and d’Alembert, two of Rousseau’s greatest foes? If the academiciens and mathematicians Brissot eulogized combated the priesthood, they also courted kings (a charge true of Voltaire and d’Alembert, but not of Diderot and Condorcet). “Who is unaware,” demanded Robespierre, pointing to the bust of Rousseau nearby, “of the ferocity with which these men persecuted Jean-Jacques,” despising the “virtue and genius for liberty of he whose sacred image I see here?”
⁵⁷
The rift between Montagne and Brissotins ran so deep by April 1792 that it overshadowed the entire subsequent course of the French and General Revolution. “The divisions among the Jacobins are the subject of all conversation in the capital,” observed Marat, ridiculing Brissot’s efforts to cast Condorcet as a “grand homme” and Robespierre as an ambitious upstart who employed paid hacks to pack the Assembly’s galleries and rig elections.
⁵⁸

When Louis XVI abruptly changed course, dismissing Roland, Sevan, and Clavière in mid-June and reverting to the Feuillants, the switch further increased suspicion of royal intentions and how the war was being waged. Movements of troops became the focus of obsessive scrutiny. That Dumouriez, dismissed as a minister but retained as a general, now directed military operations in the north (while continually blaming France’s setbacks on the Jacobins) was a particular cause for anxiety in the Assembly and Jacobins. Robespierre and his allies
redoubled their accusations. Was there a hidden league to rally the army against the Revolution between the king, Feuillants, Dumouriez, and the once-republican Lafayette, an alliance encompassing also the Brissotins who had, after all, earlier helped make Dumouriez war minister?

In mid-July 1792, the Prussians and Austrians commenced their joint invasion of France. The lesser princes participated, the archbishop-elector of Mainz contributing two thousand troops to the invading army. Princes and émigrés, the entire European antirevolutionary coalition backed by Britain and the papacy, were on the march. Prussia brought redoubled pressure to bear on Germany’s small states to vilify and persecute writers like Campe, Klopstock, Cramer, and Mauvillon, who openly supported the Revolution.
⁵⁹
On 25 July, the allied commander, the Duke of Brunswick, issued a ferociously belligerent manifesto designed to spread panic in France, as it did. The Hapsburg emperor and Prussian king were jointly invading to end anarchy and restore throne and altar in France. The invaders intended to reverse the Revolution in every respect and stabilize politics throughout the Rhine Valley, the Low Countries, and Switzerland. Anyone resisting the Austro-Prussian forces or threatening the French royal family would receive the most exemplary punishment. In late August, the Prussians overran much of Lorraine. By 2 September the allied army had passed Verdun and directly threatened Paris.

CHAPTER 10

The Revolutionary Summer of 1792

The Journée of 10 August

On 10 June, the Rolands challenged the king with their remarkable fourteen-page letter, stressing the seriousness of the political deadlock. If the king was outraged, most of the legislature were appalled by his action in dismissing Roland and the two other Brissotin ministers and aligned with the democrats, ordering Roland’s letter to be printed and nationally distributed. Critics of royal policy turned to the forty-eight Paris sections, instigating renewed agitation against the court and especially Lafayette, whose arrest and impeachment republican deputies now vociferously demanded. On 19 June 1792, Brissot, the Rolands, the Cordeliers leaders, and others—but not Robespierre or the authoritarian populists—made preparations for a major demonstration the next day. At odds with the Brissotin Jacobins, Robespierre and his populist Jacobins subsequently pointedly disassociated themselves from this insurrection, claiming the Brissotins “provoked it solely to force Louis XVI to recall their ministers.”
¹

Massing on the pretext of commemorating the Tennis Court Oath anniversary, the 20 June demonstrators tried to intimidate Louis into canceling his vetoes and restoring the dismissed Brissotin ministers, hoping by this means to dislodge Lafayette and the remaining Feuillants and put the Brissotins in power. The Commune, under Pétion, cooperating with the plans, marches, and planting a liberty tree in the Tuileries gardens, made no objection to marchers carrying pikes, scythes, and other makeshift weapons. Brissot, Pétion, Desmoulins, Manuel, Danton, Vergniaud, and most other radical leaders were implicated in this business, as were Condorcet, Chamfort, and Ginguiné.
²
In principle, most of these men disliked such direct mass action and disapproved of using mass intimidation. But they had little alternative if they were adequately to counter Lafayette and “l’hypocrite Feullantisme.” Only through insurrection could they defeat the politics of the court,
refractory priests, generals, and counterrevolutionary nobles. Thus, “on 20 June 1792,” as one leading democratic journalist, the librarian, journalist, and divorce campaigner, Jean-Baptiste Louvet (1760–97), expressed it, “the men of ’89 reawakened.”

A large, orderly, and peaceful but resolute rising occurred. Crowds amounting to more than 10,000 (some claimed 50,000) sansculottes, including many women, some armed with clubs and pikes and carrying banners inscribed “Liberté, Egalité,” marched from the city’s poorer eastern quarters.
³
Congregating at the town hall, and afterward around the Assembly, they heard petitions read out. Then, chanting “Vivent les patriotes, vivent les sans-culottes, à bas le veto!,” they invaded the Tuileries gardens and palace, their vanguard holding up the Rights of Man inscribed on two tablets. In the lead was Louis Legendre (1752–97), an uneduated former sailor and butcher, now a Cordeliers leader among the sansculottes’ most vigorous orators, carrying a petition Danton helped compose. Lacking clear orders, the recently purged and reformed royal guard hesitated and fell back, allowing the entire palace to be inundated with noisy protesters.

The king found himself obliged to receive a vast crowd in his rooms, where he remained pinned to a corner for nearly four hours during which he affected a convincing enough show of bonhomie, nodding agreeably, donning a red liberty bonnet, drinking a toast to the nation’s health, listening to petitions exhorting him to abide by the Constitution, and studying the wording of the Rights of Man thrust under his nose.
⁴
The royalist, Durozoy, blamed the king’s humiliation on the inertia of the capital’s six or seven hundred thousand inhabitants who continually allowed themselves to be manipulated. How could the people tamely permit a relatively modest crowd of just seven or eight thousand people (according to his estimate), composed of the vilest element of all classes, to occupy the royal palace shepherded by the “sect of Pétionistes and Brissotins”? There could be no doubt as to who the “faction regicide” trying to intimidate the court into acting against the émigrés and refractory priests were. They were led by “republicans, Pétionistes, novateurs, Brissotins, philosophistes.” How could the Parisian majority permit what might yet degenerate into a Saint Bartholomew’s Day massacre of the
royalistes
?
⁵

The crowds were eventually persuaded to depart by the mayor, Pétion, among those with the most credit with the sansculottes. Dispersal took hours, though, as the demonstrators filled all the palace rooms, galleries, and gardens, and even occupied the roof. Not until ten in the
evening was Paris calm. The demonstrators dispersed willingly enough, however, supposing Louis had assented to their wishes. But the very next day, he reacted in a manner showing they had entirely misread his response. Far from yielding, a furious monarch demanded the Assembly take prompt measures to ensure the “inviolability and constitutional liberty of the hereditary representative of the nation” and royal family, and severely punish the insurrectionists. He confirmed his dismissal of the Brissotin ministers. Lafayette, then at the front, returned immediately to Paris. The Tuileries gardens were closed to the public, the royal guard was again considerably strengthened, and no one was allowed into the compound any longer without a special identity card. Eleven thousand of these were issued but only, noted Carra, to the king’s “faithful slaves.” Louis XVI took a huge gamble on 20 June 1793, staking his entire prestige and future, and that of the Bourbon dynasty and the monarchy itself, on the ability of the conservative forces around him to rally and overcome the philosophistes and their (temporary) sansculotte allies.

The 20 June rising showed for all to see that France’s constitutional monarchy had broken down. The king, Lafayette, and the moderates went all out to reverse the creeping Brissotin Revolution. Allied to the court and wildly applauded by the majority of the legislature, Lafayette, wearing his general’s uniform, harangued the Assembly on 28 June. He intended to restore order with an unyielding hand. He wanted the Assembly’s public galleries closed, the Jacobin Club suppressed, and the instigators of the 20 June rising severely punished. Mass petitions from Rouen, the Pas de Calais, and elsewhere were read out, hailing Lafayette as France’s savior and demanding dissolution of the sociétés populaires. Was the Revolution about to be captured by a different “dictator” than that which Marat had called for, by Lafayette, the hero of American liberation, the “nouveau Cromwell,” as the republican press called him, the man who formerly assured friends he was a “republican,” but now faced the democrats as commander of the Republic’s largest army, threatening to suppress them by force? Inevitably, Lafayette faced a hail of criticism from much of the Assembly. He himself had been a founder, he was reminded, of the very Jacobins he wanted closed. Had not Mirabeau dubbed the public galleries the “safeguard of public opinion”? Condorcet, like Paine, once a close friend, berated him for breaking with them and, worse, with the people.
⁶

Lafayette and the court were stridently denounced by the populists and Brissotins alike. Brissot openly advocated republicanism but
also urged the Assembly not to be precipitate in dethroning the king. Dethronement should follow only after mature reflection and consultation with the primary assemblies. Representative democratic republicanism, he contended, must be tempered by a measure of direct democracy. Should the Assembly depose Louis without first ensuring it truly spoke for the nation, it would afterward surely (and rightly) be blamed.
⁷
Pierre-Victurnien Vergniaud (1753–93), prominent in organizing the 20 June rising, ranked among the Assembly’s best orators and typified what Mme. Roland (who disliked him for his intellectual arrogance) called “the philosopher’s egotism.”
⁸
Prior to attending Assembly sessions, he routinely conferred with Brissot and Condorcet, determining political strategy over lunch at an apartment in the Place Vendôme, political lunches frequented also by Roederer, Gensonné, Guadet, and Brissot’s most long-standing and closest political ally, the Genevan republican economist Étienne Clavière.
⁹