Revolutionary Ideas: An Intellectual History of the French Revolution From the Rights of Man to Robespierre (58 page)

The Commune unilaterally voted to ban the play on 12 January. Pétion’s successor as mayor, Nicolas Chambon de Montaux, among the foremost physicians and experts on pregnancy of the era, appeared at the theater as the fifth performance was about to begin, escorted by police and populists yelling, “À bas
L’Ami des Lois!
”
⁷²
The mayor produced a city council order declaring the play banned as “inflammatory” and aimed at misleading the people by casting intolerable aspersions on citizens of known “patriotisme.” The “immense crowd” that had gathered was so determined to resist the municipal ban that they began shouting and stamping for the performance to proceed, obliging the police to retreat. Laya was at the Convention, Chambon was told, with an audience deputation requesting the overturning of the Commune’s ban. After four perfectly peaceful performances, the “false counterfeiters of patriotism,” as Laya termed them, were trying to suppress his patriotic play in open defiance of the Convention. Vergniaud, presiding at the Convention, had to deal with “violentes interruptions et murmures” as Prieur, Duhem, Delbret, and other Montagnards insisted the ban must be upheld, while Lehardy and other Left republicans deplored
the “cabale abominable” trying to suppress the play. Although the Montagne succeeded in preventing Laya from addressing the Convention—he planned to ask whether the deputies had forgotten that even the despicable “despots of Versailles” watched performances of
Brutus
,
Le Mort de Caesar,
and
Guillaulme Tell—
he obtained the president, Vergniaud’s confirmation that there was no law authorizing municipalities to ban plays, and that the performance could proceed.
⁷³

On the next two evenings, the play was again staged before enthusiastic audiences. Most people in Paris, Laya demonstrated, did not support the populist authoritarians controlling the Commune, a message potentially so damaging to Robespierre that the populist press now summoned “the people” to take matters into their own hands and enforce the ban. All the “people’s enemies, all the
coquins
in Paris,” wrote Hébert, were “gathering nightly to applaud the
Amis des Lois
.” The sansculottes should use force to prevent the theater from being used to “corrupt public opinion.”
⁷⁴
Only dramas like
Brutus
and the
Death of Caesar
, denouncing tyranny, should be staged. On 14 January, the Commune ordered all theaters to close that evening. The Convention, seeing no justification for closing the theaters, overturned this too. Theater managers were commanded by the Commune to ensure that plays apt to cause disturbance were
not
performed. Bancal de Issarts and Pétion then asked the Convention to countermand this order likewise, as the Commune “has no right to instruct theater directors which plays they should stage,” its intervention being a “flagrant violation of freedom of thought and writing.” Even forbidding plays that could cause disturbance infringes liberty, affirmed Pétion, “as one does not know how far to extend the prohibition.”
⁷⁵

The Commune had a problem. Municipal officials sent to stop
L’Ami des Lois
on 15 January were insulted by the crowds. General Santerre, commandant of the Paris National Guard, arriving with a militia force to enforce the ban, was also jeered. Santerre tried to address the audience but was drowned out with cries of “Down with the beggars [gueux] of 2 September!” “À bas les assassins!” Those in the audience were all “aristocrates,” retorted a furious Santerre. Hundreds of people, some armed with sticks, continued chanting and demanding the play, the incident triggering another furious row in the Convention. The commotion amply demonstrated the wisdom of the Commune’s ban on plays likely to cause disturbance, insisted populist deputies. No authority could be permitted to overstep the law, answered Guadet, Pétion, and Lehardy.
⁷⁶
When Voltaire first staged
Mahomet
and
Le Fanatisme
, observed
Lehardy, every bigot in France cried out in protest, but still these plays were performed. Now, the most abominable tartuffes of civisme howled in anger, the Convention must ensure nothing was done to protect the vanity of hypocrites aiming to suppress freedom of thought and subvert the law.
⁷⁷
Danton’s attempt to shrug the whole thing off by reminding the Convention they had more important matters to worry about than comedies was countered by Pétion assuring the Convention that it was not just a play that was involved but rather the issue of whether municipalities could suppress freedom of expression. It was by citing danger of public disturbance that the ancien régime had curtailed liberty.
⁷⁸

More trouble gripped the theater world soon afterward, in late January. A production of Suzannah and the Elders, entitled
La Chaste Suzanne
, appeared to allude to Robespierriste demands for a
comité de surveillance
to counter subversion. Marat and Robespierre were now so closely identified with surveillance of individuals’ private activities, conflating private and public life and enforcing a repressive sexual code, that the right to privacy and personal liberty appeared to be directly threatened. The spying Elders in this piece were ridiculed as immoral intruders ruthlessly using surveillance to accuse the virtuous Suzannah of adultery. Several evenings running, groups of populist rowdies forced their way into the Vaudeville theater, menacing the performers who were satirizing Robespierriste surveillance. Finally, furious populists climbed onto the stage, threatening to beat the actors mercilessly and turn the theater into a “bloody hospital” full of injured if the play was not stopped immediately. This time, ominously, the play remained banned as apt to corrupt “republican morals.”
⁷⁹

Hébert urged the poor of the faubourgs to descend on the Saint-Germain district and teach actors and audiences a lesson: “it is for you to censure their plays.” Admittedly, the workingmen his paper addressed did not attend theaters. They preferred to drink when their work was done; theaters, Hébert presumed, were mostly attended by idlers with time to kill. “However, my friends, be on your guard!” With a light farce one can cause more harm than one might think. The theater is a rallying-point for the people’s “enemies,” who are trying to damage the reputations of Marat and the “incorruptible Robespierre,” “our Revolution’s greatest hero, the man who never falters in defending the people’s rights.”
⁸⁰
Those planning Robespierre’s destruction accuse him of wanting to be “a dictator!” Robespierre—who never ceases to combat tyrants and rouse citizens to abase all seeking to elevate themselves
above the rest!
⁸¹
The Commune sought to muzzle the Paris theater, and despite renewed trouble on 4 February with crowds again demanding
L’Ami des Lois
, succeeded eventually in forcing both
Suzanne
and Laya’s
L’Ami des Lois
off the stage.

More ominous still, over the winter of 1792–93, were the Montagne’s repeated denunciations of the main Left republican papers, especially those of Brissot, Condorcet, Gorsas, Louvet, Perlet, and Carra. Brissotin publications allegedly propagated only “perversité,” encouraging antipathy to Paris in the provinces. Speaking at the Jacobins on 30 December 1792, Chabot, editor of the
Journal populaire, ou caté-chisme des sansculottes
, inveighed against Carra, since August 1792 a key ally of Brissot and Roland, designating him one of the worst of the “journalistes perfides” corrupting patriotism, morals, and proper civic spirit.
⁸²
Nominated director of the Bibliothèque Nationale—part of his “reward” for treachery, suggested Jacobin critics—Carra responded by plunging into an extremely vituperative public feud with Chabot, Marat, and Hébert, each side accusing the other of purveying lies and “perfidious commentaries.” Carra’s paper, along with Gorsas’s
Courrier
and the
Patriote français
, now edited by Girey-Dupré, heaped scorn on the Commune by questioning the republican credentials of the “true Jacobins” before the provincial clubs and city administrations.

It was far harder for populists to bully the press than the clubs or stage. Republican papers, noted Mercier in December,
⁸³
formed a largely solid front against Robespierre and Marat. Only the crassest newssheets backed Robespierre’s populism. The main pro-Revolution papers unreservedly condemned the Montagnards as foes of the Revolution’s core principles—sovereignty of the people, freedom of thought and expression, liberty of the press, and the principle of representative democracy. For a time, this assured the Brissotins a definite advantage, especially outside Paris. Roland was later accused by Desmoulins of being the first republican leader to massively infringe upon liberty of the press by abusing his position as minister of the interior to block the passage of Montagnard newssheets and reports to provincial centers, thereby ensuring that one-sided Brissotin accounts misinformed vast numbers, contributing to unnecessary strife, especially in southern France.
⁸⁴
The mayor of Montpellier, Durand, later assured the Convention that the “writings of the
parti Brissot
” were the only ones reaching Montpellier, so that all the journals people read there exalted the patriotism and principles exclusively of that bloc.
⁸⁵

Pro-Montagnard papers mostly avoided discussion of the Revolution’s core principles, preferring to summon the people to punish, coerce, boycott, and suppress. Clubs around the country backing the Montagne often opted to shun journals linked to the Brissotins. However, this was as yet hard to do effectively because there was no legal basis for sweeping repression, and because there was little at all intellectually respectable with which to replace Left republican papers.
⁸⁶
The virulence of Marat’s, Chabot’s, and Hébert’s denunciations worked admirably among the semiliterate but mostly proved counterproductive among the better educated, eliciting more revulsion than support. In May 1792, Robespierre had established his own paper, the
Défenseur de la Constitution
, to broadcast a more elevated antiphilosophique message, but this was distinctly uninspiring and little read. Except in a few large cities where the sansculottes held sway, notably Marseille, Lyon, and Strasbourg, in the provinces Brissotins mostly commanded more support than the Robespierristes and took the credit, in the autumn of 1792, for the fervently hoped-for turnaround in the fortunes of war.

Since late 1792, Robespierre had broken successively with Brissot, Buzot, Carra, and, finally, Mme. Roland and Pétion. To offset his growing preponderance in Paris, Brissot and Condorcet sporadically courted Danton, who remained popular in the poorer Paris sections and was likewise increasingly wary of Robespierre. Danton and Robespierre, recalled Louvet later, both secretly planned to supplant the other when circumstances were ripe.
⁸⁷
Danton might have helped prevent the tragic downward spiral into murderous strife and retrieve the Revolution’s core ideology from its debasement by Marat and Robespierre, as Desmoulins and his closest supporters hoped he would, even as late as the spring of 1794. Several times he offered to collaborate with Brissot, with whom he was on friendly terms. This never sufficiently materialized, partly due to the feud between Danton and Roland, and especially the latter’s wife (who loathed the Cordeliers leader, strongly suspecting him of complicity in the September massacres), but also due to Danton’s nervousness about jeopardizing his sansculotte base.
⁸⁸
Mme. Roland considered Danton to be another Marat, a demagogue inflaming the plebs for nefarious purposes. But her influence on relations between the Brissotins and Dantonistes proved as unfortunate as her lingering respect for Robespierre, whom she persisted in taking at face value, misled in part by their common ardor for Rousseau, though she did notice that in small-group discusssion, Robespierre’s behavior was “extraordinary”: “he spoke little, sneered a great deal, and threw out sarcastic
asides, but never gave a straight opinion.” She believed she was advising a sensible, trustworthy “friend” when telling him that although she agreed government is for the people, and the people are naturally good, he should be more conscious that in their ignorance, the people are easily misled by calculating opportunists.
⁸⁹

The Montagne did everything possible to block legislation they disliked, which meant everything proposed by Left republicans. The latter stood not just for individual emancipation and basic human rights but also for balancing representative democracy with a carefully adumbrated admixture of direct democracy. In principle, the new draft constitution, presented to the Convention by Condorcet and his constitutional committee in February 1793, was a remarkable breakthrough, for it assigned all adult men the right to vote for the first time. But the Brissotins’ February 1793 draft constitution was immediately rejected by the Montagnards as “antipopular” and weighted in favor of the better educated. It was voted down and a new constitutional committee was appointed to revise it. Nominally, Marat and Robespierre stood for Rousseauiste direct democracy but actually promoted a collective vision emphasizing conformity with “the people’s will,” which was envisaged as a monolithic entity fixed by the people’s leaders from which no dissent was permitted. Provincial Jacobin clubs supporting the Montagnards endorsed their rejection of the new constitution, Lyon suggesting that further discussion of its terms be put off until the country was at peace.