Revolutionary Ideas: An Intellectual History of the French Revolution From the Rights of Man to Robespierre (62 page)

Headed by Wedekind, Professor Dorsch, who returned in early November, and Georg Forster (1754–94), the Mainz University librarian, the Mainz Jacobins were a small but dedicated group originating in the local reading society.
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Briefly, they held the initiative with the tacit moral backing of the many quietly disgruntled under the elector, including the city’s substantial Jewish population, hitherto systematically discriminated against and squeezed into a small ghetto, but now emancipated by the Revolution. Wedekind, Dorsch, and Forster chiefly
vested their hopes of mobilizing more local support for Freiheit und Gleichheit and molding a new democratic rights-based society in the Rhineland, in freedom of press and expression. Organizing their supporters through the Jacobin Gesellschaft der Freunde der Freiheit und Gleichheit (Society of Friends of Liberty and Equality), set up by twenty founding members within days of the city’s falling to the French and following the founding of a similar organization in Worms, their first general meeting registered an attendance of around two hundred. Adopting the same club regulations that applied in Strasbourg, Mainz Jacobins began meeting regularly in a hall of the archepiscopal palace, ironically previously used for electing the German emperors, as if “purging that hall” of everything impure that despotism had deposited there.
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Backed by the French commander, the liberal monarchist Adam Philippe Custine (1740–93), and the latter’s German secretary, Georg Wilhelm Böhmer (1761–1839), a former professor at the Worms gymnasium, Wedekind, Dorsch, Forster, and yet another key radical professor, the mathematician Matthias Metternich (1747–1825), dominated the purged city government and regional administration. At the same time, they launched a tremendous propaganda barrage addressed to all Germany. During the ten-month span the area remained in republican hands (from October 1792 to July 1793), Mainz democrats published more than 120 pamphlets, speeches, and other pro-Revolution texts in German. Forster threw himself feverishly into the work of propagating Republikanismus and establishing a genuinely democratic republican movement in collaboration with the French, though he soon became deeply disillusioned with the prejudiced, unresponsive attitude of most Mainz burghers and Rhineland peasants who bent their ears, it seemed to him, mainly to the reactionary admonitions of the Catholic clergy.
¹³
One of Europe’s leading ethnologists and anthropologists, he was much struck by how the French officers and men sat together at meals and treated one another as comrades, something never witnessed in European armies before.

Local Jacobins had only a narrow base of support. But they remained convinced the Revolution resulted from mass enlightenment, that such enlightenment follows the printing press, and that their propaganda offensive could decisively mobilize opinion behind the General Revolution.
¹⁴
Several regular pro-Revolution journals, most notably the
Neue Mainzer Zeitung
and the weekly
Der Patriot
, commencing in November 1792, featured translations of speeches by prominent pro-Revolution cosmopolitans like Cloots, Proly, and Gorani, as well as material
contributed by editors Wedekind and Forster, indefatigably explaining the new doctrine of Human Rights. They strove to expound and win support for
representative Demokratie
and demonstrate to the Rhineland’s Protestant and Jewish religious minorities that the revolutionary ideal of freedom of thought and the press was a manifest improvement on the more grudging princely system of
Toleranz.
¹⁵
However, signs of support among Protestants and Jews only intensified the Catholic majority’s estrangement. For centuries, princes, nobles, and priests, held Forster, had exploited the people; now the people must learn to comprehend their circumstances and end the oppression that abased them. National hatreds, Mainz democrats concurred, would disappear with the advance of popular Aufklärung. The new Universal-Konstitution and the new Universal-Republik of the future would provide the basis for a collective good, a beneficent universalism nurturing a new and higher ideal of humanity.
¹⁶
Der Patriot
attributed revolutionary ideals exclusively to the Aufklärung, the march of reason, and the obvious reluctance of most German scholars to embrace democratic principles to the painful dilemma in which they found themselves—being stuck in the service of princely rulers. A majority of Mainz professors and students had fled over the Rhine following the archbishop-elector and his court, but only because, held Wedekind, few had the necessary means to offset the loss of their university or administrative positions and salaries, and hence be independent intellectually and politically.
¹⁷

The climax of the efforts to sway the Rhinelanders was a grand civic ceremony on 13 January 1793 at Mainz, a jamboree with brass bands, speeches by Forster and Custine, and the erection of a liberty tree adorned with a red liberty cap and the caption “Peace to the People, War to the Tyrants.” The crowds listened listlessly and noncommittally, but they listened. Forster explained their deference to Kaiser und Reich and their refusal to support the Revolution in terms of the limited horizons of the typical Mainz burgher. But their docility also facilitated rapid assimilation of the new order at a certain level, and a more-or-less general acquiescence in the new arrangements, slogans, and principles. There was scarcely any armed resistance. While Rhinelanders predominantly stayed loyal to prince and Church, outright opposition to the French presence and ideological offensive for liberty and equality in the occupied regions of Germany was rare. No doubt those joining the Mainz Jacobins did so often for reasons not especially high-minded. Nevertheless, at its peak the club boasted 492 members and unquestionably included a hard core of highly motivated reformers.
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Pro-Revolution propaganda emanating from Mainz, Liège, and other centers formed part of a wider appeal to Europe’s peoples launched by Condorcet, Cloots, Paine, Gorani, Barlow, Proly, and other renowned champions of the General Revolution. Germany was particularly in need of reform, but it was also necessary to democratize the existing constitutions of Britain and Sweden (as well as the 1791 French monarchical Constitution), these constitutional monarchies being highly defective, only
demi-libres
. Doubtless no worthwhile reforms could be expected from absolute rulers or courts, or for that matter, the ordinary people. But Condorcet confidently predicted, in his undated address
Aux Germains
, the “irresistible force of reason, the inevitable influence of Enlightenment progress triumphing equally over princely perfidy and the errors and feebleness [of understanding] of the multitude.” In Germany, he thought, especially Imperial Free Cities like Frankfurt, Hamburg, and Augsburg possessed “des hommes éclairés [enlightened men]. Will compatriots of Copernicus, Kepler, Bekker and Leibniz refuse to march with us under the banner of reason? Germans, the destiny of humanity is decided; but that of the present generation lies in your hands.” Toppling kings and princes would, he thought, prove relatively easy.
¹⁹

In his
Adresse aux Bataves
, Condorcet summoned the Dutch to remember that it was they and the English who had taken the lead, in advance of other peoples, in former centuries, not just in science and knowledge but also the quest for freedom. The Dutch began the great task of “enlightening your enslaved neighbors about the true interests and the sacred rights of humanity,”
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but they had stopped at a certain point and now needed a truly free constitution to perfect their enlightenment. “Those wanting men to remain superstitious, do not wish to see them free, and if freedom of thought necessarily leads to a free constitution, one can equally say a free constitution necessarily leads to liberty of thought.” In his address to the Spaniards, one finds the same appeal to Enlightenment values as the decisive factor as in his addresses to the Dutch and Germans. Spain had long been downtrodden by Hapsburgs and Bourbons. Since in Spain the Church was even more repressive than the Crown, Enlightenment’s task would prove harder than elsewhere. But Spaniards would eventually conquer both Crown and Church, helped by the French, and this would accelerate both their own and the general Enlightenment from which all humanity must benefit. Enlightenment overcomes received notions and generates revolution, and this is also the sole means to consolidate revolution. “A
revolution that advances beyond the people’s ideas risks being thrust backwards before long.” A handful can initiate a revolution but they must powerfully disseminate democratic Enlightenment: trying to end oppression without enlightening the people is fruitless and in vain.
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The unfolding struggle was a war against Austria, Prussia, Piedmont, and the Rhine electorates, but equally against Dutch Orangists, the papacy, and Genevan “aristocrats,” Belgian ecclesiastical and secular aristocracy, and, of course, British domination of Ireland, Holland, and India. The purpose of advancing on Holland, for Condorcet, Brissot, Cloots, Paine, Gorani, and other propagandists of the General Revolution, was to overthrow the stadtholderate and the country’s old constitution. Only by this means could Holland’s “slavish” subservience to Britain cease, and a democratic republic under the universal Rights of Man be instituted. But first the Revolution had to eject the Austrians from the Southern Netherlands, where there was a limited initial wave of support, and from the prince-bishopric of Liège. The revolutionary army advancing on Brussels in November 1792 included around twenty-five hundred armed Belgian exiles and democrats eager to liberate their homeland. As they entered Brussels in triumph, the people, erecting liberty trees in the city’s squares, yelled out in Dutch (Brussels was then Dutch-speaking): “Viva the French! Viva our Liberators!” On 16 November, a giant liberty tree was hauled up in Brussels’ Grande Place, opposite the town hall, to the crowd’s applause. A Jacobin Société des Amis de la Liberté et d’Égalité was founded, its first meeting gathering in the Hotel de Galles, with a “Citizen Balza,” fresh from establishing a similar society in Mons, elected “president.”
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However, when Dumouriez’s 15 and 17 December proclamations were read out, urging Belgians to exercise their rights, and especially when the crowds heard the sixth article, which required citizens to swear an oath to maintain “liberty and equality” and accept all basic constitutional laws proposed by the French National Convention, a vehement reaction began. The cry went up: “No equality! No new laws! We want our Estates, we want our old constitution and nothing else!” Fierce declarations acclaiming the Three Orders of Brabant and demanding Catholicism as the country’s sole faith resounded in the primary assemblies. All twenty-one Brussels sections refused the required oath. Mass rejection of the democratic program, echoing the rhetoric of H. J. Van der Hoop, a writer recently imprisoned by the French as an “aristocratic pamphleteer and agitator,” and the Catholic Counter-Enlightenment apologists Van Eupen and the Abbé Tongerloo, was all
the more striking, commented eyewitnesses, in that few nobles, magistrates, or high bourgeois attended section assemblies. It was the common people, artisans, laborers, and peasants who abjured the General Revolution. The Vandernotistes triumphed yet again.
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Most Belgians, retorted local Jacobin
clubbistes
, were simply blinded by error and prejudice, together with the self-interested propaganda of the Belgian Estates and lies of French émigrés, “traitors” serving the interests of their former sovereign. The existing Belgian constitution did not even remotely embody the “sovereignty of the people” but only that of the nobility, judicial elites, and higher clergy. It was manifestly a legal device supporting rank and privilege. It was not French occupation per se that Belgians abhorred, explained the antirevolutionary journals. Ordinary Belgians were as indifferent to the presence of the French as to the Austrians. What enraged them were the “principes démocratiques de la République françoise,” in particular, the Revolution’s disdain for clergy and religion.
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Brabanters remained deeply attached to their existing constitution, laws, and religion, noted Feller’s
Journal historique et littéraire
(now appearing just out of French reach at Maastricht). Many were appalled by French behavior. A petition from the Mechelen (Malines) cathedral chapter to Dumouriez in February reproached the general for impounding the cathedral archives, placing sentries inside as well as outside the cathedral, and seizing ritual objects, crosses, flagons, and silverware. In contrast to the Rhineland, street assaults on democrats and French soldiers regularly occurred by night and day.
²⁵

Rejected in Brabant, the Brissotin ideal of a democratic Belgian republic protected by France enjoyed some support, though, in Flanders and Belgian Limburg as well as Liège. Jacobin clubs sprang up in various places, and by December 1792, democratic principles were being expounded against the Vandernotistes, nobles, and clergy.
²⁶
Although Vonck himself died at Lille on 1 December 1792, Vonckisme, even if a distinctly minority movement, remained a force, especially at Ghent, where the reactionary summons of the Bruxellois and Montois was rejected and support for the French National Convention affirmed. In the Flemish cities, unlike Brussels, Mons, and Antwerp, crowds removed the insignia and coats of arms of the counts of Flanders and Austria. Whereas at Brussels by late December, the French “libérateurs” were being openly insulted and the occasional sentry murdered, in Ghent the mood remained predominantly pro-Revolution.