Revolutionary Ideas: An Intellectual History of the French Revolution From the Rights of Man to Robespierre (61 page)

The justice minister, Garat, a Condorcet disciple, reporting afterward to the Convention, blamed the March disturbances, quite rightly, not on the sansculottes or the poor but a mere twenty to thirty “dangerous men” belonging, like Fournier, the Polish agitator Lazowski, and Babeuf, to small extremist popular societies, especially the Cordeliers splinter group, the Défenseurs de la République. Among several personages afterward arrested in this connection was Jean-François Varlet (1764-1832), a fiery Enragé street orator, prominent in the 10 August uprising, who deemed the Paris Commune no less “infected with aristocracy” than the Brissotins, and who, like most revolutionary leaders of whatever stripe, had no high opinion of Robespierre. Also detained was Lazowski, a street leader earlier active in Bordeaux who had commanded the assailants’ artillery at the Tuileries on 10 August. Accused of breaking in to Gorsas’s print-shop, Lazowski was a great favorite of the sansculottes of the faubourgs (despite not being of plebeian origin and having only lately discarded his love of elegant dressing). He, however, proved much more palatable than Fournier to the Montagnard leadership. When Vergniaud demanded his imprisonment, later in March, Lazowski was defended in the Convention by Robespierre in person.
¹²⁸
When some weeks later Lazowski mysteriously died at home, seemingly from an illness, the Brissotins were promptly accused of poisoning him. Keen to profit politically from the death of this renowned sansculotte leader, the Commune bestowed on him a splendid, triumphal funeral to which the section assemblies were directed to send large contingents of mourners. Building on a wave of popular emotion, Robespierre extolled Lazowski as a “grand homme,” a hero of the people, and a model revolutionary, at the Jacobins, and warmly supported the Commune’s (apparently serious) suggestion that Lazowski be interred in the Panthéon.
¹²⁹

Subversive factions in Paris, Bordeaux, Lyon, and Marseille had demonstrated their capacity to launch targeted attacks on Brissotins and
their supporters. In the Convention, during the bitter recrimination following the March riots, Montagnards loudly demanded that the Comité de Sûreté Générale’s powers be strengthened. Pouring vituperation on Brissot, Gorsas, Guadet, and Gensonné, Montagnard populist deputies like Didier Thirion (1763–1816), a former priest and close ally of Marat, Jacques Garnier (1755–1818), a former small-town mayor and violent if incoherent loudmouth, Sylvain Lejeune (1758–1827), small-town lawyer and violent persecutor, Benoît Monestier (1745–1820), another ex-priest, and others loudly hailed the demonstrators and eulogized the sansculottes.
¹³⁰
But there was little sign the authoritarian populists enjoyed genuine mass support or had an effective mechanism in place for mobilizing large-scale mob frustration. Neither had they shown much capacity to shepherd the sansculottes effectively or even control the Jacobins’ provincial affiliate societies. If the Jacobins refused to back street initiatives departing from the agenda set by Marat and Robespierre, by no means all provincial Jacobin clubs supported the main Jacobin-concerted effort to undermine and overthrow the democratic republican regime. Some local societies, including Bayeux, Dieppe, and Amiens, vehemently condemned the “partisans of Robespierre and Marat,” calling for the arrest of Marat, Robespierre, and Danton as the way to stabilize France and the Revolution.
¹³¹
The confused March commotion subsided, to be followed by weeks of uneasy quiet, the cafés continually seething with talk of finishing with the traitors.

CHAPTER 12

The “General Revolution” from Valmy to the Fall of Mainz

(1792–93)

The French National Convention assembled on 20 September 1792. By this time revolutionary confidence was reviving, indeed bordered on euphoria following the great victory over the Prussians and lesser princes (accompanied by Goethe) at Valmy, a battle fought that very day with massed artillery salvoes in the Champagne-Ardennes hills northeast of Paris, in which the Prussians were badly mauled. Previously disdaining the French, the Prussian commanders—Goethe informed Herder in Weimar on 27 September—now took the enemy more seriously.
¹
Both Prussians and Austrians found themselves obliged ignominiously to retreat. On 29 September the Prussians evacuated Verdun. Enraged by Louis XVI’s dethronement and the proclamation of the Republic in September, the reactionary Prussian king, Friedrich Wilhelm, could only fulminate and vow unrelenting war on the Revolution until absolute monarchy and aristocracy
were
restored.

The Republic replied with a propaganda barrage culminating in its famous decree of Fraternity and Help for oppressed foreign peoples of 19 November (afterward rescinded by the Montagne) threatening all Europe’s rulers with the loss of their thrones. Left republican journalists jubilantly proclaimed their project of expanding the Revolution into a General Revolution transforming the world. None enthused over this prospect more than Anacharsis Cloots, a Prussian subject of Dutch background based in Paris where, since 1790, he had emerged among the leading journalists and ideologues. Cloots spoke repeatedly in the Assembly, demanding a democratic constitution also for Prussia since the “Bible of liberty,” the code of happiness, was meant for all nations.
Dubbed the “orator of the human race,” he thought nothing of publicly denouncing Prussia’s monarch, the Hapsburg emperor, Catherine the Great, and the Turkish sultan as worthless, villainous despots who crushed their subjects underfoot. Less loudly (for now), this dogmatic materialist also reviled revealed religion. In addition, during the autumn of 1792, he helped form a unit, the Légion Germanique, modeled on the existing Belgian and Dutch revolutionary legions fighting alongside the French: serving under German officers, often Prussian and Austrian deserters, this unit was sworn to promote the fight for republican liberty in Germany.
²
For more than five months, from September 1792, the democratic republican war of general liberation verged on success. The French overran Savoy in September, captured Nice on 29 September, Speyer on 30 September, and Worms on 4 October—the day Friedrich Karl’s court evacuated Mainz—and then Mainz itself on 21 October. Together with Dumouriez’s triumph in storming the Austrian lines at the battle of Jemappes, near Mons in Belgium, on 6 November, a victory forcing open the road to Brussels, these victories transformed the European situation and intoxicated all France. In full retreat in the Southern Netherlands, the Austrians abandoned Namur to the revolutionaries on 15 November, Ypres on the 18
^th
, and Antwerp on the 19th. On 19 November, France’s National Convention proclaimed “fraternity and assistance” to all peoples aspiring to achieve their liberty by hurling off the oppressive yoke of Europe’s princes. On 28 November, the revolutionary army entered Liège amid cheering crowds, the prince-bishop hastily evacuating just hours before.

The 1792 autumn offensive was marred, however, by the Austro-Prussian success in retaining Luxemburg, Trier, and Coblenz, a wedge of territory blocking all communication between the revolutionary armies under Dumouriez (in Belgium) and Custine (Rhineland).
³
The offensive also raised the thorny question of France’s future relationship to the “liberated” areas. Brissot and Condorcet opposed annexations in principle, clashing first with Cloots (president of the Convention’s diplomatic committee), Grégoire, and other committee members, over the desirability or otherwise of annexing the Savoy region of Piedmont, as France’s eighty-fourth department. This French-speaking region, contended Cloots in his address to the Savoyard people on 3 October 1792, and in the
Chronique de Paris
and his pamphlet
Ni Marat, ni Roland
(November 1792), was naturally part of France and had merely experienced a “long esclavage” from which Savoyards were now happily emerging.
⁴
In and around Savoy’s capital, Chambéry, there was indeed
extensive support for union with France. Brissot rapidly lost this argument. On 27 November, the Convention proclaimed Savoy’s annexation, renaming the duchy the department of Mont Blanc.

Key foreign exponents of the General Revolution, such as Cloots, Gorani, Paine, Barlow, Godwin, Proly, Dorsch, Wedekind, Cramer, Forster, Klopstock, Knigge, Hölderlin, and Fichte, were convinced that pen and press were no less vital than the sword for furthering the Revolution. These ideologues helped direct France’s political and propaganda offensives in the Low Countries, Germany, Italy, and Switzerland, generating an ardent revolutionary universalism and high hopes for a general transformation of society for the better.
⁵
As the war and political struggle within France intensified, all these figures became deeply embattled in the wider European conflict. The American revolutionary Barlow was asked to visit Savoy and help steer the Savoyards toward liberty and equality, a task he commenced at Chambéry in December by publishing an open
Lettre addressée aux habitants du Piémont
. Patriotic societies and primary assemblies were set up.
⁶
By March 1793, two deputies had been elected as Mont Blanc’s representatives and assumed their seats in the Paris Convention.

There was a pressing need for an “Anacharsis Cloots” in their city, the “brothers” at Geneva had assured the
Chronique de Paris
earlier in August 1791. The Geneva democrats wanted an “orateur du genre humain” like Cloots leading their fight against the oligarchy oppressing their republic, they explained, someone who would issue “briefs,” “bulls,” and “excommunications” “like the Pope from Rome” and denounce all the “Raynals” trafficking in the rhetoric of liberty, the hypocritcal oligarchs who scorned Rousseau and tyrannized over Geneva and its democrats, These
oppresseurs
had indeed violated every freedom, replied Cloots, but he disagreed with one aspect of the democrats’ “missive patriotique”: they overrated Rousseau, whose errors “are just as dangerous as his genius is sublime.” If Geneva’s democrats embraced Rousseau’s ideal of small, independent republics rather than Cloots’s “systeme régénerateur de la république unique”—a single, large republic based on Paris—the Genevan Revolution would be lost. Genevan democrats should acknowledge France’s National Convention as the “corps constituant du genre-humain” and Paris as headquarters of a new universal republic of which all free peoples formed “sections.”
⁷

The French would rescue the Genevans from patrician arrogance and, equally, promised Cloots, on 10 December 1792, in his
Anacharsis Cloots aux habitans des Bouches-du-Rhin
, the Belgians from Hapsburg
and the Dutch from Orangist and Anglo-Prussian “tyranny.” “La démocratie représentative” would soon replace the detestable “aristocratic” constitutions of the Austrian Netherlands (Belgium) and the United Provinces, and the liberated Belgians and Dutch, enlightened by the same flame of philosophy, would march in unison with the French.
⁸
It was a message greeted with some enthusiasm in the Dutch cities and Liège, but much less so in Brussels and Antwerp. In Belgium, France would eliminate Austrian imperial authority, the Convention’s executive council declared on 16 November, and open the Scheldt estuary to shipping of all nations, thus revoking the Scheldt restrictions enforced by the Dutch since 1572. This not only invoked revolutionary scorn for archaic legal provisions and historic treaties upholding privileges and special advantages of any kind, but offered concrete benefits to Antwerp (at the expense of Amsterdam’s position in maritime trade), and in other circumstances might have bolstered support in Belgium.

Despite considering most Belgians “abjectly subservient” to Catholicism, Cloots predicted (wrongly) that they would adopt “the religion of the Rights of Man” (
la religion des droits de l’homme
). Belgians would fight Britain and “other enemies of the human race” together with friends of “la liberté” and “universal equality” everywhere. Unfortunately, in the Rhineland too, the great majority opposed the Revolution. On occupying Mainz, a city of around twenty-five thousand, fiercely loyal to its archbishop-elector, the French troops encountered a conspicuously sullen reception.
⁹
Nevertheless, the French enjoyed some support. They were noticeably better received in and around Speyer and Worms on arriving in the autumn of 1792 than in much of Belgium.
¹⁰
In rural areas on the Left Bank of the Rhine, west and south of Mainz, there were definite pockets of support, as also in Heidelberg and Mannheim, where organized revolutionary clubs were established well before the French invasion. Even at Mainz, jubilation reigned among the small fringe of highly educated intellectuals and secularists attracted to republican ideals and abhorring ecclesiastical sway.