Revolutionary Ideas: An Intellectual History of the French Revolution From the Rights of Man to Robespierre (6 page)

What was Rousseau’s role in this revolution of the mind? On the one hand, he was the ubiquitous inspirer of the age. As one perceptive author put it, “every party of the Revolution made some claim on the heritage of Rousseau.”
⁴³
An immense variety of participants of varying stripes adored Rousseau, from the celebrated court portraitist Elisabeth Vigée Le Brun (who detested the Revolution) and Fauchet the Catholic revolutionary to Robespierre and Saint-Just, the men who wrecked
the Revolution of 1788–93. Rousseau was the surpassing hero simultaneously of the Left and Right, a status no other ideologue ever achieved. Nevertheless, major leaders of the Revolution prior to 1793 remained mostly rather guarded and critical in their assessments of his admittedly massive contribution and some, like Condorcet, barely referred to Rousseau at all. Shortly after the Bastille’s fall in July 1789, Mirabeau, who like most radical revolutionaries disparaged Montesquieu in his paper, the
Courrier de Provence,
exalted Rousseau for his central role in preparing the Revolution: never should one speak of liberty and the Revolution without paying homage to this immortal “vengeur de la nature humaine.”
⁴⁴
Among Rousseau’s “truths” pronounced truly philosophique by Mirabeau was his doctrine that the social system benefits men only if they all own something and no one possesses too much, a notion dear to Fauchet and many revolutionaries.
⁴⁵
Yet, there was also a continuous tension between the Rousseauist claim that men should be primarily guided by moral instinct and “feeling,” “le sens moral,” and the Radical Enlightenment’s allegiance to “reason” alone.
⁴⁶

Furthermore, the democratic republicans who made the Revolution of 1789–93, or as Mme. Roland expressed it, the “wise men” showing the people the way who “helped them recover their rights” until pushed aside by more ambitious characters who “flatter and delude the people and turn them against their true defenders,” objected to major strands of Rousseau’s political thought. It was impossible for the republican democrats to embrace Rousseau’s stern strictures regarding “representation,” his claim that “sovereignty cannot be represented,” and extremely difficult to accept his view that republics can be viable only in small countries, that popular piety should be respected (not attacked), and that a measure of book censorship is needed. Very many, like Brissot, disliked Rousseau’s aversion to cosmopolitanism, universalism, and the pursuit of universal peace, and like d’Holbach especially despised his veneration of the Spartan martial spirit and the narrow chauvinism his thought appeared to encourage.
⁴⁷

This friction between the cosmopolitanism of the parti de philosophie, later taken to its furthest extreme by ideologues like Gorani, Proly, and Cloots, and the narrow patriotism and xenophobia of Robespierre, Saint-Just, and their populist faction, lay at the root of the ceaseless battle waged unremittingly within the Jacobins and throughout the Revolution between the Revolution of Reason and the Revolution of the Will, a tension that needs to be emphasized more than it has been by historians. The uncompromising antilibertarianism, anti-intellectualism, and
chauvinism of Robespierre’s Revolution justified itself in large part by appealing to emotional, sentimental aspects of Rousseau, whereas opposing Robespierre’s ideology inevitably meant questioning much of Rousseau from the critical perspectives of Diderot, d’Holbach, Helvétius, Naigeon, and Condorcet.
⁴⁸
Hostility to the secte philosophique during Robespierre’s ascendancy intensified, together with rejection of atheism as unpatriotic and contrary to virtue and the ordinary.
⁴⁹
The institutionalized Rousseauism of the post-1793 (
Robespierriste
) Jacobins was the militant opposite of the Radical Enlightenment guardedness toward Rousseau of Mirabeau, Sieyès, Brissot, Cloots, Volney, Condorcet, and the revolutionary leadership of 1788–93 generally. Here was a clash between two antagonistic, ideological streams pervading the struggle for control of the Revolution’s course and direction.

Robespierre identified “atheism”as a defining feature of the radical ideology, republican and democratic, of the parti de philosophie that he overwhelmed. But why did the question of atheism play such a pivotal role in the fight between the Revolution of Reason and the Revolution of the Will, as well as in the battle between Revolution and Counter-Enlightenment? In 1789, after all, the vast majority everywhere in the Western world regarded atheism as “madness,” as Desmoulins expressed it, believing it obvious the cosmos was created by God. But what chiefly distinguished the democratic philosophique standpoint from how most men thought, explained Desmoulins, was not their questioning God’s existence as such, or the issue of whether or not God created the world, but rather the question of whether and how, if divine Providence exists, it governs the world. The real issue segregating most of society, including Robespierre, from the parti de philosophie that made the Revolution of 1788–93 was whether God is an authority to whom men can appeal. For God offers no sign. He does not show himself. It is in vain, held Desmoulins, that men ask which cult is the most pleasing to him; his natural power revealed in earthquakes, floods, and other calamities wrecks churches no less than mosques or synagogues. Since he manifests the most perfect indifference to which religion men choose and his providence does nothing for Christians or Muslims in preference to others, why not, asked Desmoulins, replace the “dismal” cult the French revered for so many centuries, a faith supportive of the Inquisition, kings, monks, and self-mortification, with a religion of joy, like that of the ancient Greeks, a cult friendly to pleasure, women, and liberty?
⁵⁰

Morally and politically, it was urgent that the French should make this substitution, for “the most devout of our kings were the worst.” Mirabeau and other philosophes, contended Desmoulins, had wholly disproved claims that monarchical government is the best form of government. Louis XIV was certainly venerated by a horde of flatterers, but in the “eyes of reason” he was a despot, contemptible egoist, bad parent, and abysmal friend and husband. Cruel and vindictive, this “Jesuit king” who loved war was an insane persecutor who used his dragoons forcibly to convert millions of “heretics.” To combat tyranny one must combat religious authority together with all conventional notions. If the nobility and clergy resisted the critiques and attacks on monarchy, faith, and hereditary privilege, the rest of society did too. The Revolution had to fight them all.
⁵¹

In 1789, Desmoulins justified imposing Revolution principles on a largely uncomprehending and partly unwilling people, and remaking France’s institutions and laws, repudiating all previously accepted laws, on the grounds of
la volonté générale
(the general will). This was a principle locating sovereignty in the people as a whole, defined by what best serves the majority according to “reason” and what people would want if prejudices did not prevent them from actually wanting it,
⁵²
a new principle in political thought devised by a specific group of philosophes beginning in France with Diderot and his circle in the 1740s. These were the thinkers who were rejecting modérantisme, relativism, traditionalism, and enthusiasm for the British model, taught by Montesquieu, Voltaire, and Hume. Society was not created for the misery of the majority or happiness of the few, typically asserts the tract
Vérités philosophiques et patriotiques
(late 1788) by the Norman lawyer Jacques Guillaume Thouret (1746–94); rather, everyone’s will is subject to the volonté générale
,
the common will working for each individual’s happiness subsumed within that of all in general.

Deriving from a complex interplay reaching back, underground, over many decades, volonté générale, originally introduced by Diderot, had been vigorously adopted in his sense by d’Holbach, Helvétius, Condorcet, and Volney but adapted to mean something rather different by Rousseau.
⁵³
Intimately entwined with the greatest innovation in political thought of the eighteenth century—the doctrine that sovereignty lies in the people—the term is mostly used in early Revolution debates in its more general, non-Rousseauist sense. Thus, the pending Estates-General, proclaimed Thouret (one of the few lawyers among the revolutionary
leadership), must be an assembly based on the volonté générale, meaning the needs and desires of the whole nation with every individual’s interest being treated equally. Neither God nor the Church nor any prophet or tradition decreed this. It is stipulated rather by that “eternal reason that regulates the universe,” an “eternal reason” that predicted the coming
révolution
.
⁵⁴
Sieyès, among the Revolution’s chief promoters of the doctrine of volonté générale, was especially unsympathetic to Rousseau’s inflexion of the concept, most obviously in his views on representation and direct democracy.
⁵⁵

Hence, the democratic republican publicists of 1788–93 were summarizers, not innovators. It was not his purpose to say anything new, explained Desmoulins in
La France libre.
An ardent disciple of Rousseau as a young man, Desmoulins, like most key revolutionary leaders, became more critical later. His aim was to expand on the useful things already demonstrated, fanning a fire “happily relit by the flame of philosophy.” And what exactly had la philosophie demonstrated? It had proved, averred Desmoulins, that the nobility are the worst of pests, that all the laws of every country needed rewriting, that the monarchical is not the best but the worst form of government, that monks are useless, and that religion is in need of fundamental reform.
⁵⁶
Kings had turned France into a land of despotism, but even the most downtrodden people produce a few republican-minded souls for whom love of liberty outweighs all existing institutions. Despite the ignorance and prejudice inculcated by religion, “the lies of orators and poets,” the eternal eulogies of kingship pronounced by priests, publicists, and “all our books,” by 1788 he himself burned with republican ardor impelling him toward liberty. What society needed was not just a republic but a democratic republic: “je me déclare donc hautement pour la démocratie.”
⁵⁷
By displaying ingenuity and constancy in his writings, agreed the long-standing republican Brissot in 1782, the philosophe can conquer “l’opinion publique,” and “l’opinion publique” would before long “prove stronger than kings and command the entire universe.” The true esprit philosophique, he asserted in 1782, “necessarily brings also
l’esprit républicain
.”
⁵⁸

Most Frenchmen during the early Revolution assuredly had little thought of rejecting monarchy or embracing revolution. But the “radical” wing of the revolutionary leadership—in sharp contrast to Robespierre and his allies—was already uncompromisingly republican by 1788. To Desmoulins, fighting “error” and “slavery” with philosophy meant replacing the existing legal framework with enlightened laws
and an Enlightenment morality, the true sources, as he saw it, of man’s future happiness and prosperity. In another early revolutionary democratic pamphlet,
Réflexions d’un philosophe Breton
, of 20 December 1788, by a minor noble and former mayor of Quimper, Augustin Le Goazre de Kervélégan (1748–1825), the “philosopher” summons the Bretons to recover “their rights” by shattering the “humiliating chains” of slavery, whereby nobility and clergy had always oppressed the Third Estate. These “rapacious” orders are here denounced by philosophy, not for overstepping precedent or infringing some privilege but for appropriating “all the advantages of society” for themselves.
⁵⁹

Such views explain the highly exceptional cultural and political character of the Revolution—its undeviating resolve to set aside all existing precedents and models. To the revolutionary leadership reorganizing the body politic and society more broadly, there were no grounds for consulting, much less emulating, any earlier or still existing model. “We shall surpass these English,” affirmed Kervélégan, “who are so proud of their constitution and so used to insulting our abasement.” In fact, the French would eradicate all hereditary nobility, venality of office, purchasing of noble titles for money, hereditary privilege, monopolies, arbitrary arrests, seigneurial jurisdiction, and illicit decrees. There would be no more Richelieus or Catherine de Medicis. The revolutionaries would establish liberty of commerce, liberty of conscience, liberty to write, liberty of expression. The Revolution would extinguish the parlements with their decrees, prohibitions, and lording it over the public. Once the Revolution gathered momentum, the parlementaire elite of France would perish, its influence and very name eradicated. France’s laws would henceforth be identical for everyone and the system of police spies and secret reports abolished.
⁶⁰
The Bastille will be raised to the ground, predicted Kervélégan, and a “National Assembly” put in its place, a “temple of liberty” subordinate to the nation and stripped of all hereditary trappings, that in the future would remain permanently in session and decide all questions of peace and war. Desmoulins, echoing Mirabeau, envisaged completely transforming the magistracy, priesthood, army, and state finances on principles national in character and destined solely for national purposes.
⁶¹
Moreover, this Revolution about to begin, admonished Desmoulins in 1789, would unquestionably succeed. “Sublime effet de la philosophie,” no power on earth, he predicted (wrongly), could resist the revolution that had won the minds of those, like himself, eager to lead the people. To him, la philosophie had accomplished its task. The most crucial part of the revolution was effectively
over. Even before anything had yet been formalized or accomplished, there was already a vital sense in which “la France est libre.”
⁶²