Revolutionary Ideas: An Intellectual History of the French Revolution From the Rights of Man to Robespierre (55 page)

Brissot replied with a pamphlet entitled
À tous les républicains de France, sur la Société des Jacobins de Paris
, dated 24 October 1792, publicly attributing his expulsion to “perfidious men” who were out to level all knowledge, virtue, and talent by applying the principle of equality in the crassest fashion. Lafayette, he admitted, had systematically tricked and deceived him. He had wrongly believed Lafayette’s assurances that he was a “republican,” but had since broken with him altogether. Despite Desmoulins’s role in rendering him a victim of conspiracy charges, it was Robespierre who led those designating Brissot as a traitor working with Lafayette. Yet, far from being a paragon of revolutionary virtue, Robespierre had not even been a republican either before July 1791 or after the king’s flight to Varennes, when Condorcet, Bonneville, and Brissot had prepared and directed the Revolution’s turn toward republicanism.
¹⁴
Robespierre, furthermore, had been absent on 20 June and 10 August 1792, and, indeed, was nowhere to be seen during any of the Revolution’s major journées.

Reaction to Brissot’s expulsion was everywhere mixed. Cherbourg, Périgueux, the Bordeaux Club of Recollects, and the “eastern club” of Angers backed Brissot, the last publishing a missive threatening to sever relations with the Paris Jacobins if Robespierre and Marat were
not sent packing. Brissot urged the provincial clubs to respect the Convention’s rulings but boycott directives from the Jacobins. Indeed, he urged provincial Jacobin clubs to disaffiliate. The whole principle of affiliation he now dismissed as an unhealthy device of subordination to the capital. Backed by Gorsas’s paper in particular, Brissot and his allies succeeded in persuading Chartres, Meaux, Nantes, Béziers, and eventually Caen and some other societies to break with the Paris Jacobins. But his expulsion also greatly weakened the voice of the remaining Leftist republicans who were fighting within the Jacobins. Before long, during October and November, Roland and Lanthenas were similarly expelled, as was Louvet, while Carra, earlier among the Jacobins’ most active members, also began boycotting the club.
¹⁵

At the Paris Jacobins, Robespierre now held sway unchallenged, and over the next months addressed the club more frequently than anyone else, partly denouncing the court and Lafayette but chiefly, observed Louvet, declaiming “without pause and without restraint” against la philosophie and the philosophes, against the genuine republicans, and all those “known for their virtues and talent.”
¹⁶
His speech at the Jacobins on 28 October 1792, shortly after the appearance of Brissot’s pamphlet, for example, was extremely clever in its way of depicting his Brissotin political rivals. “More criminal in their methods than all the factions that preceded them,” their hearts full of the poison of hatred and defiance, they had turned calumny into an art. No one was more skilled than the Girondins at defaming Paris and the true defenders of the Revolution. How do they dishonor liberty? They refer to the political clubs as a source of “anarchy,” revolutionary insurrections as “troubles” and “désordres,” opposition to tyrannical decrees aimed at reducing most of the people to the status of helots as “déclamations extravagantes.” In this way, Brissot and his friends refined the art of using odious words to disguise their ambition and “aristocratic” intrigues under the guise of honorable labels.
¹⁷

With his acolytes carefully distributed around the hall, Robespierre’s method of orchestrating debates was daily to pack the galleries with seven or eight hundred sansculottes, paid for the day, trained to cheer together, applaud, hiss, or stamp following given signals. Robespierre turned the club into a well-oiled machine attuned to his autocratic will.
¹⁸
The uninterrupted applause greeting his speeches was no longer applause in any ordinary sense but a ritual response, “un enthousiasme réligieux,” holy fury ready to rip apart any dissenter. If a non-Robespierriste deputy objected to his pronouncements at the Jacobins,
an infallible mechanism for wrecking every such attempt was now firmly in place. It began with gentle murmuring, worked up to loud interjections, and culminated in thunderous stamping, hissing, and denunciation. If a critic evinced only mild republican inclinations, he would be shouted down as a Feuillant; if he praised “the Left wing of the Assembly, he was an
intriguant
.” If he disputed the outrageous calumny heaped on the Left republicans, he was a traitor. If he implied the people should not idolize anyone, he was an enemy of the people.
¹⁹
By such methods were Condorcet, Brissot, Roland, Guadet, and Louvet hounded out. Robespierre professed to idolize only what was
tout
populaire
, but he alone classified what was
populaire
and how the views of ordinary man should be channeled. This step-by-step expulsion of Brissotins from the Jacobins eventually isolated the democratic republicans from the streets and section assemblies, turning the Revolution’s intellectual powerhouse, its circles of leading deputies, and the key salons—those of Mme. Roland, Sophie Condorcet, and Mme. de Helvéius—and finally even the Convention and press, into a segregated world beyond, rejected, besieged, and aloof.

Yet, for the moment, Louis XVI’s dethronement resounded as a triumph for both sansculottes and democratic republicans. The main question in the autumn of 1792 was how the irreparable rift polarizing the country’s politics could be prevented from becoming a paralyzing deadlock. The new Paris Commune had consolidated its grip too far for its ascendancy over many Paris sections and the Jacobin Club to be further contested. Tension in the capital indeed reached such a point that “certain deputies” now felt unsafe there, Barbaroux and Vergniaud being especially at risk, reported the press, owing to their forthright denunciations of Marat over the September massacres.
²⁰
Honest Montagnards like the surgeon René Levasseur (1747–1834), a deputy from Le Mans, genuinely regretted needing to fight such obviously sincere and gifted republican democrats as Barbaroux, Vergniaud, or Louvet. What lay behind this struggle? To Levasseur, the tragedy arose from Brissot’s and his colleagues’ selfish pursuit of personal feuds against the only two absolutely irreproachable and indispensable revolutionary leaders, Robespierre and Marat.
²¹
It was this robust egalitarian’s absolute, unquestioning trust in these leaders that fatally misled him and convinced him that the Brissotins had to be overcome.

Most aware commentators close at hand, like Mercier or Bishop Fauchet, viewed matters rather differently. The radical Christian bishop Fauchet of Calvados, having bitterly quarreled with both factions,
nevertheless entertained no doubt that the “Girondins” were more honest, as well as more eloquent and talented, than the Robespierristes. He opposed Brissot as well as Bonneville and Cloots, but insofar as Brissot “conspired,” it was only, he believed, to advance “la liberté, la raison et la philosophie.” The most essential difference between Brissotins and Montagnards, he maintained, was that the Brissotins were sincere republicans while the Robespierristes were predominantly ambitious hypocrites manipulating the most ignorant part of the population, albeit Marat, at least, was no hypocrite. Rather, he all too openly said what he meant: “cut off two hundred thousand heads” and impose “Robespierre’s dictatorship!”
²²

Of course, the Montagne were inspired by more than just appetite for power. There were two other powerful currents, one of which was Robespierre’s “theology” mixed with a debased form of philosophy. The Revolution began well, recounted Mercier years later, but in the summer of 1793, it was diverted by ambitious upstarts. Some of these were obvious rascals, but they were mixed with dangerously fanatical types like “Collot d’Herbois, Billaud-Varenne, Lequinio, Babeuf, [and] Antonelle,” who deemed themselves philosophes and, like the main bloc of the revolutionary leadership, extracted their ideas from books of “modern philosophy,” but more superficially and differently, perverting the core concepts into “émanations contagieuses.” “True republicans” were right to insist that ignorance is the basis of barbarism but forgot that “un demi-savoir,” half knowing, is even worse, producing instead of genuine philosophes a breed of intolerant “theologians,” usurpers emanating error, exaggeration, and extravagance, disastrously embraced as the truth by the ignorant.
²³

Equally integral to the clash that wrecked the Revolution was a powerful socioeconomic factor. This was emphasized, among others, by the older Marc-Antoine Jullien (1744–1821), “Jullien de la Drôme,” father of the Marc-Antoine Jullien (1775–1848) who was one of Robespierre’s most ardent acolytes. Elected a Convention deputy in September 1792, the older Jullien also backed Robespierre. In a letter of the following December, he warned his son against too obviously parading his zeal for equality. The “great vice of our social system,” something probably irresolvable, is “the monstrous inequality of fortunes.” The rich understand the resentment this causes but will not tolerate a genuinely democratic republic, knowing sooner or later this will deprive them of some of their wealth. “That is the rock on which the modern philosophy founders. It has indeed established equality of rights, but it wants to uphold that
prodigious inequality of fortunes, putting the poor at the mercy of the rich, and making the rich arbiters of the poor man’s rights, by with-holding the right to subsistence.”
²⁴
Yet, while la philosophie moderne as developed by Diderot, d’Holbach, Helvétius, and Condorcet certainly declined to promote wealth redistribution over everything else, and was accused by militant egalitarians of nurturing
principes anti-populaires
,
²⁵
neither did it sanction gross inequality of wealth. Rather, it undertook to counter inequality while also rejecting draconian recipes. The real stumbling block was that radical ideas placed political and legal reform, basic freedoms, human rights, education, and public instruction alongside reducing economic inequality, rejecting extralegal means, tyranny, and social violence as ways to achieve wealth redistribution. This created the possibility to mobilize sansculotte resentment against the Left republicans who forged and directed the Revolution. By promising more draconian recipes and giving greater priority, at least rhetorically, to economic leveling, the Montagne were able to wrest power from the democrats.

Yet, most Montagnards, stressed the older Jullien, unlike him and his son, were not strongly committed to the cause of economic equality. The career of Jean-Marie Collot d’Herbois (1750–96) well illustrates the paucity of most of the populist authoritarians’ political culture. A flamboyant comedy actor, after 1789 he abandoned the theater and became active in the Revolution. A long-standing Jacobin, in the autumn of 1792 he emerged, with the ex-Capuchin Chabot, as a leader of the campaign in Paris to denounce Brissot, whom he fiercely resented, following an earlier personal quarrel. Collot d’Herbois, the man who during the Terror put Lyon to the sack—and who in late 1793 directed the repression of the French theater world—perfectly illustrated the narrowness, intolerance, and brutality of the “Revolution of the Will” and its ability to sway the galleries with half-baked concepts ruthlessly applied.
²⁶

Many years afterward, an old Montagnard approached Mercier saying, “Hé! Philosophe, what should we have done?” The opposite,” retorted Mercier, “to what you did.”
²⁷
The philosophes always intended a revolution in “les moeurs”—men’s attitudes, habits, morality, and way of life. Most Montagnards, on the other hand, according to Mercier, characterized principally by ignorance and lack of enlightenment, desired (unlike the Julliens) only a revolution in government to concentrate power within their own hands, which they eventually achieved, though not until June 1793. Meanwhile, was there any way to resolve the crisis in such a manner as to preserve the Revolution’s core values?
While Danton’s group retained some standing with the Paris sansculottes and could act as a bridge to the Left republicans, the Revolution’s democratic freedoms could perhaps still be defended in the Paris sections, Commune, and Jacobins, and the budding dictatorship averted. Ideologically, Dantonistes, and Desmoulins especially, tended to side with the democrats committed to upholding freedom of expression. Desmoulins constantly invoked the Rights of Man and freedom of the press in his speeches and articles, inspired less by Rousseau (of whom he became increasingly critical at this time) than a range of radical republican thinkers.
²⁸

Republicanism is one thing, admonished Jean-Baptiste Louvet de Couvret (1760–97) in his affiche paper of 29 September 1792, the doctrine of the
tartuffes
and sycophants of the Montagne something entirely different. The Montagne was simply a new kind of despotism claiming to be backed by the common people. In fact, nobody spoke more of their devotion to the people and the “public happiness” than these “hypocrites,” whose bloodied hands propagated only strife, hatred, oppression, and death. Louvet, a former bookseller’s agent who, in April 1792, had campaigned for a law to fix authors’ rights over their writings to prevent “brigands” from producing pirated editions,
²⁹
now ranked among the most outspoken Left republicans fighting the Montagnard challenge in Paris. He labeled the perpetrators of the September horrors sycophants of “the decimvirs, Mariuses and Sullas” (i.e., Robespierre and Marat). The daggers had to be wrested from the hands of such
missionaires de despotisme
while there was yet time.
³⁰
To achieve this, Parisians must stand together against those usurping their name, and so must the philosophes: for the philosophes, the Montagne “have sworn an undying hatred; they wish to snuff out the light that they flee and fear.”
³¹