Revolutionary Ideas: An Intellectual History of the French Revolution From the Rights of Man to Robespierre (54 page)

The National Convention comprised 750 deputies, ninety-six of whom had sat in the 1789 Assembly and 190 in that of 1791–92. Assembly seating arrangements underwent a notable shift. Until now, the left side had been associated with democratic, republican, and radical viewpoints. But with the developing quarrel about which faction truly represented the people’s interests, the Montagne occupied the Left while the Brissotins moved their seats to sit opposite and confront their opponents, enabling the Montagnards to label Brissot, Vergniaud, Buzot, and others who moved at this juncture “the Right.” As the struggle developed, though, the democratic faction (with more justification) reversed the perspective for viewing the hall, designating themselves “the Left,” which philosophically and constitutionally they were, being the more democratic and republican grouping. Hence, “the Left” in journals like Louvet’s
La Sentinelle
are the Brissotins while Marat’s and Robespierre’s populist faction, demanding undivided authority, became the new “Right,” replacing the Feuillants.
¹¹⁴
From the quarrel as to who genuinely represented the Left arose a confusion of terms that typified the ensuing struggle for the Revolution during 1792–93. Nearly all the real intellect and talent in the Assembly, Levasseur and honest Montagnards admitted, lay on what the Brissotins called “the Left” with the philosophistes.
¹¹⁵
Montagnards hoped to compensate for what they lacked in intellectual standing with solid zeal and unquestioning loyalty to their “glorious” leaders, Marat and Robespierre.

Democratically elected, the Convention possessed greater stature and authority than any previous legislature had enjoyed. The new Assembly congregated on 20 September amid extraordinary euphoria, coinciding as it did with the repulse of the Prussian invasion with the decisive victory at Valmy. The legislature’s first act, following a long celebratory opening session amid frantic applause, was to declare the
thirteen-hundred-year-old French monarchy at an end. Year I of the Republic, it decreed, would begin on 22 September. France thus became a formal republic in September 1792, adopting a stringently antimonarchical and antiaristocratic rhetoric and profile in visual imagery while simultaneously launching a barrage of political propaganda closely linked to the intensifying war with practically all of Europe. French officers, deserting at this point by the same token, privately declared war on the Republic, joining with the émigrés already abroad in waging a universal struggle of democracy versus rank, religion, and monarchy.

CHAPTER 11

Republicans Divided

(S
EPTEMBER
1792–M
ARCH
1793)

From August 1792 until June 1793, for the first time in world history, declared democratic republicans held the reins controlling government, albeit precariously. More firmly, they also dominated the pro-Revolution newspapers and public ceremonies shaping public opinion and debate. Until 1789, royalty, aristocracy, and the high clergy had alone shaped French society’s international and public image. Now, for a time, the core values of a republican Revolution determined the styles, emblems, and architectural facades, and fixed the forms and themes of the new society, determining policy in education, science, and the arts, and correctness in the renaming of buildings, streets, squares, palaces, law courts, naval vessels, barracks, and gardens.

From the summer of 1792 until Robespierre’s coup (June 1793), the Left republicans proclaimed democracy, universalism, and equality anchored in reason and Enlightenment—mankind’s new secular creed—and created France’s new public imagery of great men and worthy accomplishment. To help project this postmonarchical, postaristocratic, and postecclesiastical world, a vast quantity of busts, portraits, and fine engravings of France’s publicly acclaimed “grands hommes” was mass-produced to be exhibited in homes, offices, and public buildings, displayed in public ceremonies, and advertised in the papers. It was a gallery of the nation’s heroes, with all military commanders, aristocrats, and royalty duly purged. In the autumn of 1792, the main series of advertised engravings presenting the Republic’s grands hommes (until democratic values were discarded in the summer of 1793 and Marat had to be added) were Mirabeau, Voltaire, Rousseau, Mably, Montesquieu, Montaigne, Linnaeus, Buffon, Fénelon, Helvétius, Diderot, and Raynal, with the projected addition of Descartes. Never before had
science, literature, and philosophy exercised such hegemony over officially inspired representation of what is admirable, instructive, and worthy in human life and achievement, and what should be publicly celebrated.
¹

Cultural transformation began immediately. Furiously applauded, the Paris procurator, Louis-Pierre Manuel, informed the Commune’s general council meeting on 21 September 1792 that the National Convention had voted to abolish the monarchy and the royal succession forever. Just minutes later, as a subsequent point of business, the Commune accepted his proposal that a central Paris street, the Rue Sainte-Anne, should be renamed the Rue d’Helvétius, since Helvétius’s works were among those that had introduced “the Revolution” into men’s minds and because this “philosophe had consistently pleaded the cause of the people.” In this way, as La Harpe later noted disapprovingly, the Revolution consecrated Helvétius as
un sage révolutionnaire
, a revolutionary thinker.
²
The transformation in imagery and compulsive renaming accompanied a renewed surge of revolutionary enactments, a grandiose program of fundamental social and institutional reform intensively debated and cast into legislation during the autumn of 1792. The first and most crucial priority was the new Constitution, the world’s first modern democratic constitution. Fundamental new approaches to marriage, gender relations, taxation, pensions, education, organizing the armed forces, and regulating family law followed closely behind. Civil divorce and the right of immediate remarriage, thus far successfully resisted by clergy, king, and Feuillants, finally became law during the very last session of the old legislature on 20 September 1792. There was little opposition in the Assembly, but once promulgated, the world’s first modern divorce law provoked considerable disapproval in the country, not only among conservatives but with much of town and rural society deploring what was deemed its sanctioning of license and undue personal freedom for women.
³

The vital principle of steeply graduated taxation, creating tax bands to be imposed on surplus landed and inherited wealth, was established for the first time by an edict of March 1793.
⁴
No less essential, thorough reform of the country’s inheritance laws was promulgated under decrees of 25 October and 14 November 1792, and 4 January and 7 March 1793. Composed by a group led by a passionately anti-Montagnard legal expert from Montpellier, Jean-Jacques Régis de Cambacérès (1753–1824), these equalized the rights of male and female direct descendants, including the illegitimate; drastically curtailed the ability of the wealthy
to dispose of possessions unequally or according to preference through wills and codicils; and ended bequeathing of large estates intact (primogeniture) wherever more than one direct descendant existed.

But if the Revolution was to remain securely on track as an enlightened democratic republican revolutionary program, there was also an urgent need, stressed Lanthenas, to hold fast to and amplify its core principles, and this meant carefully distinguishing between genuinely instructing the people, indispensable if the Revolution was to succeed, and manipulating popular passions and prejudices in the style of Marat and Robespierre.
⁵
The latter, Lanthenas believed, were steadily perverting popular sentiment for political ends, a tendency exceedingly prejudicial, dangerous, and inimical to the Revolution. They were not just manipulating popular disgruntlement in the streets but channeling it to create a new kind of “theology.” Robespierre’s philosophique detractors, including Condorcet in the
Chronique de Paris
on 8 November, viewed him as literally a “chef de secte,” a preacher attended by his
dévots
.
⁶
Asked by colleagues at this point to draft an appeal to the nation reaffirming the principles of representative democracy, Condorcet wrote his
Adresse de l’Assemblée nationale aux français
, explaining what he too considered the greatest peril confronting the Revolution—the advance of prejudices and a new form of tyranny. But it was not easy to project this message widely and vigorously enough. In the upshot, it was Maratisme and the Robespierristes that persuaded some sansculottes and some of France’s activist illiterate and barely literate. This was the tragedy of the Revolution.

Despite awareness of the Montagne’s obvious complicity in the September massacres, and Brissotin control of the journals, the Left republicans inexorably if slowly lost ground. The “true republicans,” recounted Mercier later, toppled the Lameths and expelled the Feuillants from the Jacobins. But, subsequently, it was the turn of the “true republicans” to be ejected, as the club’s majority shifted behind Robespierre, Marat, and Hébert.
⁷
Opposition to Robespierre and Marat, observed Mercier, was led by men who acquired their revolutionary values through study, philosophy, and literary activities. Because their revolution was rooted in la philosophie, they established the tolerance, “inclinations paisibles,” and regard for the Rights of Man that eventually caused their own downfall. The Brissotins eventually lost the struggle for the Revolution and for France, he explained, because they did not believe you must “immolate human victims on the altar of liberty,” because they were less ruthless and dishonest than their rivals. Men’s misfortunes, they supposed,
stem more from error than depravity, but in this regard they were fatally mistaken.
⁸

So poisoned were relations between the factions by wrangling over the September prison massacres, there seemed to be no way to dissipate the bad feeling that powerfully erupted in a furious debate in the National Assembly, now split irretrievably along Brissotin-Montagnard lines, on 24 and 25 September. On that occasion, the veteran Breton naval official and foe of the Montagne, Kersaint, recently debarred from the Paris elections, stressed the danger posed by a certain powerful bloc extending its grip over Paris and urged the need to neutralize it by stationing a force of volunteer National Guard from other departments near the capital. Complete uproar ensued. Deputies aligned with the Paris Commune considered this a political declaration of war.
⁹

Revolutionary democratic republicanism was overwhelmed first, after a bitter fight, in the Paris Commune and the Jacobin Club. From the defection of the Feuillants in July 1791 until August 1792, as Mercier noted, the radical Left predominated at the Paris Jacobins. But from August 1792, their ascendancy eroded as Marat and Robespierre decisively gained ground. During the autumn, as the feuding between the rival blocs vying for control of the Republic was further embittered by the political and psychological aftermath of the September massacres, the coalition of Robespierre, Marat, Hébert, Billaud-Varenne, Chabot, Collot d’Herbois, Couthon, and Jean-Lambert Tallien, a notary’s clerk before the Revolution and now a key manager of the Lombards section, began widening its grip over inner Paris sections and consolidating its hold over the Commune and Jacobins.

The festering rift within the Jacobins had been obvious for months. But from September 1792 onward, revulsion over the ghastly slaughter widened the split both in the Convention and the Jacobins, fueling bitter recrimination and helping spread the feuding to sociétés populaires throughout France. This process led to the gradual forcing out of the Left democrats from the Paris club. There were signs of this already earlier. In March 1792, noted the astronomer Jérôme Lalande (1732–1807), Condorcet ceased attending the Jacobins “where Robespierre was preparing the ground for despotism.”
¹⁰
But after the September massacres, leading Brissotins were one by one virulently denounced and systematically excised from the Jacobins’ membership rolls. Continually exalting the
tout populaire
, and vilifying Brissot, Pétion, Guadet, Vergniaud, and Condorcet as “ambitious aristocrats,” Robespierre’s followers won over the galleries.
¹¹

Brissot’s expulsion followed several articles in his
Patriote français
of September 1792, berating the group of “anarchic, demagogic deputies” who now dominated the Commune and had caused the Convention to become hopelessly divided between opposing factions, his opponents controlling the Jacobins despite comprising under a third of the Assembly. This faction was playing a ruthless disruptive, counterproductive, and anarchic role, endangering the Revolution.
¹²
Chabot and Collot d’Herbois retaliated by accusing Brissot (and Roland) of conspiring to besmirch the reputations of Robespierre and Marat in the club and among the public. Accorded opportunities to appear in person to explain his press attacks on the Montagne’s leaders, Brissot declined. Following an official letter of warning, composed by Desmoulins, he was expelled from the Jacobins by majority vote on 12 October 1792. Members intending to speak in Brissot’s favor were prevented from doing so, a clear sign the era of genuine debate was over. Afterward, the Club circulated a letter of justification, dated 15 October, to provincial affiliate societies, repeating Desmoulins’s earlier charge that Brissot had colluded with Lafayette and defended him after the July 1791 Champ de Mars massacre, and advocated war without having adequately prepared the country.
¹³