Revolutionary Ideas: An Intellectual History of the French Revolution From the Rights of Man to Robespierre (56 page)

The Revolution was divided by a schism philosophical, moral, ideological, and personal, but contrary to what has often been claimed, the rift was in no way geographical. Superficially dominant, but by no means swaying the majority or uncontested in Paris, the Montagne’s great weakness was a general lack of support throughout provincial France, with the partial exceptions of Lyon, Strasbourg, and Marseille. Although there was also much opposition to the Montagne in Marseille, the Jacobin faction there, headed by Moise Bayle and Granet, had for the moment defeated Barbaroux’s followers.
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Broadly, the effect of the expulsions from the Paris Jacobins was to spread the growing ideological rift everywhere across France.

Mandar wrestled with the country’s predicament in his remarkable treatise on popular insurrection, completed under the shadow of the September massacres and published (with some hesitation) in January 1793. His sole concern, he claimed, was the well-being and
bonheur
of the people. All republicans agreed that sovereignty lies in the people and that the sole purpose of the state is the people’s welfare.
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No matter what titles the state and its representatives award themselves, where laws are not made for the people’s benefit, subjects remain “slaves.” It is via popular insurrections that tyranny is overthrown and a people frees itself to become great, happy, and powerful, “libre en un mot.” The Dutch and Swiss owed their splendid republican traditions to popular insurrection undertaken with courage and resolve. Admirable also was the Neapolitan revolt of 1647–48 led by Masaniello. But it was especially the American Revolution that had given the French a “great and instructive lesson,” for it demonstrated that while popular insurrection opens the way to liberty, it is also dangerous.
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Mandar peppered his text with quotes from Montesquieu, Rousseau, Helvétius, Gibbon, Paine, Rabaut, Cérutti, Mirabeau, Bonneville, Nedham, and the Dunkirk writer James Rutledge.
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Mandar’s most essential doctrine, though, was rooted in Diderot and the
Histoire philosophique
: his principal point was that revolutionary gains are prone to be rapidly negated by popular ignorance.
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Had not Cromwell ruined the English Revolution by exploiting the people’s naïveté? Had not Maurice of Nassau overthrown Oldenbarnevelt, wrecking the Dutch Republic by mobilizing Calvinist bigotry—that is, exploiting ordinary men’s ignorance? Were not the Dutch today, despite Johan de Witt’s efforts, again utterly abject under the House of Orange’s despotic sway, owing to ordinary prejudice and error? Mandar (like Diderot and Mirabeau before him) urged the Dutch to rise again, only this time with more awareness, discarding the old constitution, reversing the “odious revolution” that had chained them down for sixty months (i.e., since the Dutch democratic movement’s overthrow in 1787), expelling the Orangists, and breaking their stadtholder’s “slavish alliance” with Britain and Prussia.
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Popular insurrections are indispensable to the fight for freedom but are equally a menace driven by passion, “tempests” lurching all too readily to excess, undermining the very principles that drive them and the liberty that is their goal. Unfortunately, the French had not yet grasped this. All popular insurrection fights oppression but is readily diverted by vested interests and intruders to become an instrument of tyranny.
It was the people’s ignorance and strange submission to “superstition,” contended Mandar, that accustomed them to willingly allow the wealth accruing from their own labor to be appropriated by kings, nobles, and Church, and their young men to be recruited into armies wholly dedicated to the “superstition of royal ambition”!
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The July and October 1789 risings grounded the Revolution and its core values, but only because the Revolution’s course followed a mature system of revolutionary thought perfected by those “immortal geniuses”—“the prophetic Mably,” the “wise Condillac,” Boulanger, Raynal, Voltaire, Helvétius, and Diderot. These sages had generated “un atmosphere croissant de lumières et de sagesse,” solidly anchoring the Revolution in true enlightenment and dissipating the darkness of ignorance. The Revolution was the fruit of a sudden, general upsurge of understanding: “en un moment l’explosion a été général.” It occurred chiefly in France, but not only, and belonged to everyone everywhere, including England, where it was insistently proclaimed by “T. Paine, J. Courtenay” and “J. Priestley.”
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When organizing insurrection, revolutionary leaders must, of course, secure key targets—arsenals of weapons, the national treasury, prisons, guard-posts, and granaries. But these must be held by reliable soldier-citizens, “citoyens vertueux,” something impossible without first cultivating “good citizenship” by inculcating justice and understanding, and instituting checks to constrain the people’s natural fury and irrationality. Brutalized by tyranny, ignorant minds acquire a more elevated character only slowly, by degrees. Had not Rousseau shown, in the dedication of his discourse on inequality to the Genevan Republic, that a people long subjected to tyranny, and abject from ignominous labor, becomes “une stupide populace,” to be managed with wisdom, tact, and care if it is to breathe the air of liberty?
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But where Rousseau locates this higher character in virtue, nature, and proud courage, Mandar, like the Left republican leadership, emphasized rather Enlightenment and understanding. Only when the citizenry combines “vertus civiques” and an intrepid spirit in defense of liberty and humanity, justice, and obedience to the law, disdaining superstition, hatred, and vengeance, can despotism be overthrown securely and legitimately.
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Pétion, the former mayor of Paris (famous for his speeches urging black emancipation), in Mandar’s opinion provided an outstanding role model of such integrity and civic virtue (a judgment shared by Mme. Roland). The true criteria for evaluating officeholders, Mandar agreed with Pétion, are equality and justice, and pursuit of “le plus grand bonheur de tous et l’harmonie sociale.”
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Public education and information was an arena where republican Left and populist authoritarianism clashed unceasingly. Education is the source of everything good, held Pétion, and ignorance the source of everything bad. It was essential to instruct the artisan class and dispel the thickening cloud obscuring laboring men’s grasp of what was happening. When addressing the laboring classes, revolutionary leaders should never resort to authority or force but employ
la raison
and explain things. Teaching the people meant, above all, inculcating virtue and binding men to the public interest. To delay instructing the laboring class meant hindering the making of the Constitution, damaging its progress, and subjecting it to perpetual shocks. Failure here meant kindling the cruelest of all wars, civil war—“la guerre intestine.”
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On 29 October, Roland, whose reinstatement at the interior ministry had been widely applauded outside Paris, launched a tirade in the Convention, denouncing the Paris Commune’s illegal and insidious activities. He boldly challenged Robespierre directly, his ringing accusations leaving the latter momentarily taken aback. Danton leaped to Robespierre’s defense and, in one of his toweringly impressive speeches, reminded the Assembly of the danger of a festering, permanent split. Vague charges of wrongdoing damaged the Convention’s reputation. If anyone had concrete proof of misconduct, this needed examining. But let the Convention cease being a forum for unsubstantiated charges. Danton knew as well as any that Roland’s accusations were well-founded and was deeply distrustful of Robespierre himself. But he also knew that his own standing with the sansculottes and the Convention depended on maintaining unity within the now greatly narrowed Jacobins and Commune. He relied on his own supporters to keep Robespierre in check.
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Danton’s intervention prompted Louvet, editor of
La Sentinelle
, to rise. A hard-core republican and since August editor for Brissot, Guadet, and Condorcet of the
Journal des débats
, a paper whose circulation he tripled in a short time, aided by his clever, literary-minded mistress, Mme. Cholet, Louvet radiated in the thick of Paris’s extremely bitter local politics. An eager Jacobin for eighteen months, he idolized the Revolution and detested tyranny. With Danton challenging accusers to present concrete accusations, Louvet delivered a withering philippic, his so-called Robespierride seconded by Guadet, Roland, and Gensonné, and afterward backed also by Barbaroux, Buzot, and Lanjuinais. He pronounced Robespierre an aspiring “dictator,” not just complicit in the September massacres but exploiting every form of dishonesty known to
man, guilty of presiding over the shameless rigging of the recent elections in Paris while presenting himself as the most “virtuous” of citizens. He recounted how gangs of illiterate Parisians, specially recruited from the streets and directed by trusted agents, had been dragooned into cheering certain deputies and decrying authentic republicans. Acolytes drummed into the multitude that “Robespierre was the only virtuous man in France” and that the people’s destiny must be entrusted to him. Inordinately fond of flattery, Robespierre ceaselessly flattered the people, invoking popular sovereignty while never forgetting to add that he alone represented the people. It was the same contemptible ruse dictators from Caesar to Cromwell, and from Sulla to Machiavelli, always employed.
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Nothing on earth was so preposterous as Robespierre’s vaunted incorruptibility. “Robespierre,” he declaimed, “I accuse you of tyrannizing over the electoral assembly of Paris using every form of intrigue and intimidation.”
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Louvet’s speech had a stunning effect. Briefly, the Montagne was silent and the Assembly wavered. But Pétion, Vergniaud, and other key allies were reluctant to press home the attack. The Assembly gave Robespierre a week to reply, and on 5 November he responded, haranguing the Assembly for two hours with the public galleries packed with noisy supporters. Denying involvement in vote-rigging and the September killings, he derided Louvet’s charge that he practiced “low populist flattery” (
populacière flagornerie
). Where was the evidence? Crucially misled, the Convention allowed the charges to lapse on a point of order. Louvet afterward maintained that they could have broken the Montagne on the day of his impassioned speech had Brissot, Vergniaud, Condorcet, Gensonné, and Pétion not wrongly and fatally calculated that saving Robespierre—while supposedly leaving him too discredited to remain a threat—was a preferable course. The failure to break Robespierre while there remained some chance of doing so indeed proved a fatal miscalculation. The Montagne, of course, were outraged by the attempt to defame Robespierre. On 29 October, the names of Louvet, Roland, Lanthenas, and Girey-Dupré were added to the growing list of “enemies of the people” ritually expunged from the Jacobins’ membership rolls.
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Delay in bringing Louis XVI to trial greatly exacerbated a political arena near to total deadlock. A Convention majority, claimed the Brissotin journals, wanted the final outcome of Louis XVI’s trial to be determined by the people. The Montagne denied those advocating a popular referendum were “the majority.” The Convention seethed with
disagreement and this needed explaining to the nation. Among the first publications justifying the Montagne’s unyielding obstructionism nationally was Cloots’s
Ni Marat, ni Roland
, a pamphlet of November 1792. A deputy since September, Cloots despised Marat and was assuredly no friend of Robespierre, scorning both his crude Rousseauisme and his character. If Robespierre passed among the populace as “incorruptible,” “in my eyes,” remarks Cloots, in his
République universelle
(1793), he “is the most vicious and corrupt of bipeds; his
paralogismes
would lead us to ruin, anarchy and slavery.” In fact, contended Cloots, Robespierre was not a revolutionary at all but just a shrewd, aspiring dictator and dishonest conspirator.
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Why then did Cloots align with the Montagne? Until November 1792, Cloots frequented the Roland salon, but after dining there several times quarreled with the Rolands over their efforts to foment provincial indignation “against Paris” and the Jacobins. Cloots charged them with waging a vendetta against Paris and making political capital out of the September massacres, a “tragic necessity that had saved the Revolution.” He also rejected Condorcet’s incorporating elements of local autonomy into the new Constitution, instead preferring undeviating centralization. In his pamphlet, he urged Roland to read
The Federalist
, the American debate detailing the disadvantages of entrenched state rights from a republican standpoint. Discussed at the Jacobins on 18 November, his pamphlet met with mixed reaction due to its unflattering remarks about Marat, but, warming to Cloots’s denunciation of the Brissotins as pernicious “federalists,” the club voted to reprint and distribute it nationally.
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Cloots subordinated everything to his ideal of a
république universelle
under French tutelage.
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Where Brissot opposed territorial annexations, believing France should remain within her natural borders bounded by the Rhine, Alps, and Pyrenees, surrounding herself, through war, with “républiques fedératives,” Cloots urged annexation and a greater France. Cloots deemed Brissot, whom he had met only recently (at a dinner where Paine was also present), a shifty mediocrity, substantiating this by citing Brissot’s alleged twisting of Paine’s remarks on annexation. But it was Cloots, retorted Brissot in a printed reply, who misrepresented Paine (who spoke little French). Since Cloots possessed scant English, Brissot alone, as translator, could report the exchange accurately. Paine had agreed with Brissot that Cloots’s ideal was a chimera. Denying they were “federalists,” the Rolands replied to Cloots in a tract (anonymously penned by Mme. Roland) appearing in Brissot’s
Patriote français
, entitled “Mon mot aux gens de bien, sur Clootz,” afterward reprinted in the
Chronique de Paris
, a paper Cloots himself had formerly been a prime contributor to but was debarred from since siding with the Montagne. Cloots, complained the Rolands, was assisting crass demagogues and publicly justifying the killings of 2 and 3 September, a slaughter that was “la honte de l’humanité” (the shame of humanity), which Roland had done everything possible to stop.
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