Revolutionary Ideas: An Intellectual History of the French Revolution From the Rights of Man to Robespierre (57 page)

While Brissot, Condorcet, the Rolands, and Paine shared Cloots’s universalism up to a point, especially his idea that the spread of democratic republicanism was the path to
la paix universelle
, the “orateur du genre-humain” was, to them, dogmatic and unrealistic. Prudhomme, editor of the
Révolutions de Paris
, in an article entitled “D’un petit pamphlet qui fit grand bruit,” reproached Cloots for having further poisoned the political atmosphere. What was needed was calm and mature judgment.
⁵²
Unfortunately, Cloots, renowned throughout Europe as a champion of the Revolution, had descended from his pedestal as lofty legislator into a scandalously bellicose arena where there were already too many “political gladiators.” Prudhomme, an independent backing Brissot in the main, also criticized “le sage Roland,” though, for replying publicly to one violent diatribe with another equally seething with invective.
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In Paris, the battle between those championing the Revolution’s core values and those urging populist dictatorship raged deep within the sections. In January 1793, some disaffected provincial fedérés formally complained to the Assembly that a mere fifty or sixty “factious spirits,” claiming to represent “the will of the sovereign,” the people, had organized a vicious, informal “tyrannie” over
certain
inner Paris sections. One section controlled by this gang of “conspirators” openly called for a dictator, or “defender of the Republic,” as the Robespierristes called their leader, all the
ignorants
there being shepherded behind this slogan and demanding a “committee of surveillance” to compel unity and crush dissent.
⁵⁴
But the Robespierristes’ vote-rigging, foot stamping, shouting down, and paying hired bullies to intimidate opponents, however effective in some inner-city sections, did not yet stretch to all the city’s inner sections and still less to the more outlying ones. The populists also failed to secure Pétion’s successor as mayor, their candidate, the city’s public prosecutor, Lallier, gaining only 2,491 qualified votes. He was defeated by the physician Nicolas Chambon de Montaux (d. 1826) who won 3,630 votes, with another 4,132 going to other candidates.
⁵⁵

An incisive critic of the surveillance methods and
listes de proscription
used by the Robespierristes in the Paris inner sections was Voltaire’s
disciple Villette. Appealing “to his brothers the Parisians,” in the
Chronique de Paris
on 27 December 1792, he decried Robespierriste public vilification of dissenting club members and signatories of petitions. Most “bons Parisiens,” deterred from resisting by brutal intimidation, unfortunately remained inert before the looming menace of dictatorship. Given the prevalence of bullying and chicanery in the sections, it was hardly surprising that whole crowds stood by inactively during the atrocities of 2 and 3 September. Outraged by these observations, several sections denounced Villette to the Commune. Orders were issued for his arrest. But Left republicans still exerted enough clout during the winter of 1792–93 for revolutionary integrity in this case precariously to prevail. Villette’s detention was countermanded by officials declaring it a flagrant infringement of liberty of expression. Villette thereupon published an open letter, on 1 January 1793, to the mayor, complaining of being treated as a “bad citizen” by Panthéon section populist leaders for publicly deploring the Commune’s repression of dissent. Public proscription of “bad citizens” was a perfidious evil impressing only the most ignorant. “Who has given you the right,” he demanded, “to make your
compatriotes
targets for the fury and ignorance of those you mislead?” Section bosses denounced Villette as a modérantiste fomenting “civil war” between Paris and the provinces. But it was the Montagnard faction, Villette assured readers, not their detractors, who had introduced into popular parlance in the first place the ridiculously bogus notion that the Brissotins were “enemies of Paris.”
⁵⁶

On the last day of 1792, a Champs-Élysées section delegate decried “the principles” and behavior of some inner-city sections in the Convention, especially the practice of labeling residents “bad citizens” if they opposed the creeping tyranny. Intimidation bolstered by affiches and the populist press had compressed local power into unscrupulous hands manipulating the sections in a thoroughly Machiavellian manner.
⁵⁷
Other section deputations, including one from the poorest faubourgs, Saint-Antoine and Saint-Marceau, complained of being daily bombarded with the rhetoric of “conspiracy.”
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Most inner-city sections, if not the sansculotte masses as such, were by now thoroughly overawed by the Montagne. For the moment there seemed no way to halt the bullying. Whenever he cried “conspiracy,” Marat was thunderously applauded from the Convention galleries. In his speech of 31 December, he claimed to have infallible evidence that “the Roland faction” was persecuting “le patriote” Jean-Nicolas Pache (1746–1821), former deputy of Roland, a wealthy and notoriously dishonest Swiss
(and former antidemocratic reactionary) who had invested extensively in nationalized church property and who, after quarreling with the Brissotins, had become an acolyte of Marat and Robespierre. To advance their “criminal schemes” the Rolands, aided by Dumouriez, plotting on behalf of a claimant to the throne, Philippe d’Orléans, had sought to destroy the “honest” Pache. Alleging they were unsafe in Paris, the perfidious Rolands wanted to summon provincial volunteer units to overawe the capital. Every good patriot must support Pache, declared Marat, and all France should flock behind the “true
patriotes
” of Paris.
⁵⁹

A tremendous onslaught, led by Marat, Chabot, and Hébert (editor of the
Père Duchesne
), was unleashed in the popular press. Who would believe that Brissot, whose election to the Convention had been greeted with jubilation by the sansculottes, would so soon “trample on the people,” becoming their sworn enemy? Who would believe Manuel, formerly the sansculottes’ friend, would become a vile Brissotin? When Buzot battled Cazalès in the Assembly, he was splendid; who would think he was really “a wolf disguised in sheep’s clothing with the deceitful soul of a Barnave?” According to Marat, Buzot particularly declaimed against and insulted Paris.
⁶⁰
And what of Pétion, whom every true patriot had reckoned the “pearl of men,” who loved the people and was loved by them? If ordinary folk are betrayed even by Pétion, who could one trust? Brissotins were subverting the Republic, trying to disillusion the people sufficiently to get them to call for the return of the ancien régime. Not daring to proclaim themselves aristocrates and royalistes, they may have resembled Patriots on 10 August 1792, but these “corrupt
contre-révolutionnaires
” were really dissembling royalists. The people must show their mettle, counter their perfidy, and deal with the “traitors” once and for all.
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The delay in trying “the drunkard Capet” (Louis XVI) was part of a conspiracy, contended Hébert, to save Louis, something many readers were persuaded to believe. Brissotins wanted “Capet” exonerated and his son enthroned, as they aspired to rule as regents during the new king’s boyhood and thereby “fatten themselves on the blood of the people.”
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The monarchy is overthrown: “Shall we allow another ‘tyranny’ to rise in its place?” Today, Mme. Roland is the person who leads all France by the strings, manipulating men as dextrously as ever the Pompadour and Du Barry did at court.
⁶³
“Brissot is her equerry, Louvet her chamberlain, Buzot her grand chancellor, Fauchet her chaplain, Barbaroux her captain of the guards, Guadet her cupbearer, and Lanthenas her master of ceremonies.” Stretched on her sofa, surrounded by her
“beaux esprits,” this “new queen” presides over her salon, impudently pronouncing on politics and war while emulating the debauched lewdness of Marie Antoinette.
⁶⁴
This was the new “court,” disposing of everything in both Convention and departments. Thirsting for money and advantages for themselves, these “jean-foutres” should, in Hébert’s opinion, have all been liquidated on 10 August. It is not on the frontiers that Hébert exhorted his readers to seek the enemy: “it is among us.” A new revolution was needed. “The moment to strike will come.” The people must express their justified fury and end the chicaneries of these
coquins
. The new year, predicted
Le Père Duchesne
in January 1793, would be the last for these
jean-foutres
, Brissotins, and Rolandistes.
⁶⁵
The prediction proved accurate.

On 30 December, a delegation from the Paris section sansculottes condemned Manuel’s
patriotisme équivoque
before the Convention. Manuel’s actions outrageously contradicted his principles. A defender of press freedom, he had ordered pamphlet stalls and paper-vendors cleared from the Convention hall’s environs, chasing away “the people,” banishing publications whose “surveillance” of him and his Brissotin friends he disliked.
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An architect of the nation’s new cult of republican grandeur and “great men,” Manuel had persuaded the Convention to transfer the Tuileries and its gardens, together with the Place de la Révolution and the Champs-Élysées, from the Commune to the interior ministry as national assets, and rename the Tuileries palace and gardens the Château and Jardin National. This was resented by Paris sansculottes, as well as the Commune, because the boutiques and market stalls that had “transformed it into a kind of market” were compulsorily removed from the new “national garden.”
⁶⁷
At the Cordeliers on 2 January 1793, a unanimous vote expelled Manuel from the club.
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Under a hail of denunciation for disdaining the people, Manuel resigned his administrative functions and a few weeks later also left the Convention.

Over the winter of 1792–93, signs of crisis abounded in the streets, section assemblies, public places, cafés, and theaters. Numerous municipalities and local patriotic societies deplored the ceaseless feuding. An address from the
conseil général
of Finisterre (Western Brittany) was read in the Convention on 6 January: Finisterre demanded a republic united and indivisible, based on liberty, equality, and the people’s happiness, not harassed by “a vile faction” paid by some shadowy paymaster or foreign despots. France’s greatest foes were not the princes waging war on the country but those unsettling the Convention: “les Marat, les Robespierre, les Danton, les Chabot, les Bazire, les Merlin,” and
their accomplices. “Voilà, les anarchistes!” They were “the true counterrevolutionaries.” If the Convention believed it lacked the means to stop them, it should turn to the sovereign, appeal to France’s primary assemblies! Finisterre claimed to represent the majority view embodying the common good, expressing the hopes of provincial France, and those of “the major part of the Parisians whose voice is stifled at this time under the knife of a bunch of petty tyrants.” This scandalous “aristocratic piece,” retorted Marat, leaping to the podium, should be returned to Mme. Roland’s boudoir, whence it had undoubtedly come.
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As always, the theater was a particular focus of ideological struggle. A sensationally controversial play staged at the Théâtre-Français in January 1793 was
L’Ami des Lois
by Jean-Louis Laya, a Voltaire admirer and enthusiast for the Revolution, and author of
Voltaire aux Français sur leur constitution
(1789). Two other plays by Laya,
Le Danger des Opinions
and
Jean Calas
, both ridiculing religious intolerance, had previously been successfully staged. Laya’s new piece—according to
Le Père Duchesne,
a disgraceful travesty concocted in Mme. Roland’s boudoir but praised by the pro-Brissot
Gazette nationale
as excellent for enlightening Parisians about their “true interests”—actually dared put “Robespierre” onstage. This five-act satire, played by some of the best-known actors of the day, also featured “Marat” under the ludicrous name of “Duricrane.” From the day of its premiere, 2 January 1793, it caused a massive furor.
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Laya’s Robespierre and Marat were paragons of hypocrisy and villainy, building their tyranny through devious machinations designed to mobilize the most ignorant and gullible against the true revolutionaries. Among the latter was the play’s hero, Forlis, an enlightened aristocrat who loves his fellow citizens and always champions the Revolution’s true principles but is trapped by his unscrupulous demagogic foes. The hugely popular “true defenders of the people” villify Forlis while dishonestly claiming to have eclipsed everyone in braving Lafayette’s bayonets to defend liberty and equality. Robespierre appears under the name “Nomophage” (Eater of the Law) and is a complete “tartufe de civisme,” hypocrite, and egoistic impostor who continually flatters the crassest elements while spouting about virtue, though invoking it only for his own profit. Ordinary people are so uncomprehending, Duricrane persuades Nomophage, they can easily be persuaded to liquidate those who champion their true interests. Finally, though, the people prove to be less gullible than Nomophage supposes. In the denouement, he is thwarted and sent to prison.

On opening night, three weeks before the execution of Louis XVI (who read the play in his cell for diversion), tremendous excitement gripped the theater. The play should be performed everywhere, not just in Paris, recommended the
Gazette nationale.
Furiously denounced at the Jacobins and the Commune by Chaumette and Santerre, on 10 January, Montagnard deputies besieged the Convention, condemning the play as
contre-révolutionnaire
, a charge denied by Louis-Pierre Manuel, who invoked “la liberté de la presse,” and the Bordeaux deputy Jean-François Ducos, a follower of Diderot, Raynal, and the
encyclopédistes
. Two Paris sections, those of La Cité and Reunion, petitioned the Commune, denouncing the scandalous license of theater directors staging plays filled with blatant “incivisme” designed to corrupt the public spirit.
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Laya responded by asking the Convention to allow him to dedicate his play to the legislature. After its initial performances received thunderous applause, the Commune became more anxious than ever to suppress the play. A score of deputies “on the right,” as the Left republicans called the Montagne, led by the prominent deputy Claude-Antoine Prieur-Duvernois (called de la Côte d’Or; 1763–1832), denounced it as “aristocratic.” “Incendiary plays” were being staged in Paris, vile “manoeuvres de l’aristocracie,” complained a delegation of fédérés before the Paris Commune on 11 January. If the Convention refused to stop Laya’s piece, they would force it off the stage, “exercising their rights.”