Revolutionary Ideas: An Intellectual History of the French Revolution From the Rights of Man to Robespierre (63 page)

The French were astonished by the virulence of the backlash in Brabant. On 29 December, the day fixed for the newly established Brussels
sections to choose their electors, there was uproar in the city. All the Brussels sections had unanimously rejected every French proposal, swearing unwavering allegiance to their “constitution, priests and estates” under the leadership of Van der Noot, Van Eupen, and Van der Hoop. The few courageous clubbistes speaking in favor of “democratic principles” were insulted, assaulted, and chased through the streets. Yet, even in Brussels, the Amis de la Liberté gained a few recruits, including artisans and laborers. At the meeting of the Brussels Amis de la Liberté on 5 January, the Brussels central market “fish boys” appeared. Having learned more about the Revolution, they explained, they had changed their minds, no longer wishing to be deceived “by priests and monks.” Having discovered the new order released them from the ancient grip of the master fish-vendors, whose guild now lost its hold over the fish market, and under the new dispensation the fish boys could sell fish themselves; they had decided to enter “with joy and confidence into the temple of liberty and stand with the defenders of the Rights of Man.”
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It was abundantly clear to the Belgian clubbistes that local “fanatisme aristo-théocratique” would not hesitate to take up arms in alliance with the Hapsburg Crown, Dutch Orangists, Britain, and the papacy against the Revolution.
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According to the French pro-Revolution press, money, promises, menaces, pamphlets, sermons, secret meetings, everything was brought to bear to inject error into the minds of
les simples.
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Uneducated and barely educated Belgians were fanatically averse to the clubs and the “friends of liberty.” But it scarcely worried the Feuillant monarchist Dumouriez that the clubs attracted scant support in Belgium. He preferred the 1791 French monarchical Constitution to republicanism and scorned the growing role the sociétés patriotiques had arrogated for themselves in France. The clubs, held the Brissotins, would provide a platform of opinion supporting the Revolution. Dumouriez, though, had no wish for the sociétés to play a political role in Belgium or France. The sole aim of the sociétés patriotiques, stated a proclamation he issued from Brussels on 11 March 1793, was to advance the “instruction des peuples” through propagating revolutionary principles. Such clubs become “dangerous,” he maintained, when tempted to meddle in political matters. Before long, he forbade the Belgian and Liège clubs to concern themselves with public affairs at all; a strict prohibition was posted up in Dutch and French in all the occupied towns that made club presidents and secretaries responsible for their good conduct.
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In the prince-bishopric of Liège, where the French émigré military leaders, the Comte de Provence, and the Comte d’Artois had recently established their headquarters, and which the (now-ousted) prince-bishop had converted into a Counter-Enlightenment bastion, democratic fervor predominated. Many people detested ecclesiastical sway. There was jubilation when the French émigrés pulled out. A liberty tree was erected before the town hall and arrangements made to establish sections, primary assemblies, and democratic elections.
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On 30 November, Liège’s Société des Amis de la Liberté et d’Égalité, suppressed early in 1791, reopened as a Jacobin affiliate club in the former Jesuit church amid lively applause. Evacuating Liège together, the Austrians and émigrés alike behaved despicably, wreaking vengeance on this rebellious populace, besides carrying off the finest church treasures “for safe-keeping.” If the French revolutionaries behaved only somewhat better, their priorities were different. For religion, they showed no respect whatsoever, protested Feller, profaning even the loveliest churches, pillaging and turning them into arsenals, stores for all kinds of supplies, “and stables full of dung.”
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In early February, the
Neue Mainzer Zeitung
reported that all eight sections of the city of Liège had voted in favor of merging the principality with the French Republic.
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The émigrés disbanded by Louis XVI’s brothers (whose financial resources were now depleted), and thoroughly demoralized, mostly scattered—some to Dutch territory, others to Düsseldorf or nearby Aachen—until the latter too was overrun by the French shortly afterward. The Paris Convention approved a financial indemnity to compensate both Liège and Aachen citizens pillaged by the enemy. At Aachen, a focus of political turbulence since 1786–87, and where a new republican and semidemocratic constitution had been drawn up in April 1790,
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a local Jacobin club, the Klub der Freiheit, Gleichheit, und Bruderliebe, was founded on 8 January 1793. Like French Jacobins (and other German Jakobiner), Aachen Jacobins were sharply divided, however, between a radical republican wing and a prevailing liberal monarchism more in tune with the empire’s traditions and the ethos of the princely courts.
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Where Campe, editor of the leading prorevolutionary paper in German, the
Schlewigsches Journal
, published at Al-tona, admired Sieyès and the 1791 Constitution, and, like Klopstock deemed the Revolution compatible with conventional religion (albeit thoroughly approving of the Civil Constitution of the Clergy),
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more radical German Jacobins like Forster, Wedekind, Dorsch, Metternich, Cramer, and brothers Johann and Franz Dautzenberg (the former
a professor, the latter editor of Aachen’s now openly prorevolutionary paper, the
Aachener Zuschauer
) rejected all princes—monarchy in principle—and advocated democratic republican values and the drastic curtailment of religious authority. Most Aachen citizens, observed Christian Wilhelm Dohm (1751–1820), the deist, republican, and enlightener chiefly responsible for the 1790 Constitution, a friend of Wedekind, and chief advocate of Jewish emancipation in Germany, resented seeing Protestants and Jews made equal to Catholics and refused to separate from the German Empire.
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At Aachen the crucial question was whether to keep the compromise, liberal 1790 Constitution, chiefly framed by the Prussian envoy Dohm, and remain part of the German Empire, retaining numerous religious and constitutional forms from the past, or opt for a complete break. By February 1793, the Aachen club had been taken over by the republicans, led by the Dautzenberg brothers, but this estranged the club from mainstream Aachen opinion.
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Dohm had assured the philosopher Jacobi, back in 1781, that he did not consider his “echt republikanischen Grundsätze” to conflict with his loyalty to the Prussian state, at least as it functioned in its reforming mode under Frederick the Great (r. 1740–86); rather, he believed Frederick’s Prussia represented the best kind of monarchy available.
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But the split between the two varieties of German Jacobins disunited and gravely weakened the pro-Revolution camp in Aachen, Jacobi—who disapproved of both Dohm’s
Deismus
and his republican preferences—reported to Goethe on 24 January, especially by embittering both the Catholics and Lutherans, the two largest religious communities.
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Aachen citizens felt affronted by the liberty caps placed on images of Catholic saints and the statue of Charlemagne in front of the town hall. Aachen’s Jakobiner soon came to be considered basically a club of foreigners, Calvinists, and Jews (several of whom joined).
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The French émigré princes withdrew to nearby Prussian territory, basing themselves at Hamm, where, with the Prussian king’s permission, they established their new headquarters and, in January 1793, received the news of Louis XVI’s execution. There they issued their proclamation recognizing Louis’s son, the boy prince imprisoned with his mother at the Temple in Paris, as Louis XVII,
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and named the Comte de Provence, Louis-Stanislas (1755–1824) regent (though only Catherine the Great officially recognized him as such) and acknowledged leader of the émigré diaspora fighting democracy together with Prussia, Austria, and Britain. Strikingly, the princes’ joint proclamation
made no concession to constitutionalism whatever. The future king Louis XVIII, Louis-Stanislas, promised only to mete out severe punishment to those responsible for dispossessing France’s royal family, nobles, parlementaires, and Church of their status and revenues, and to return to all these elites their privileges and lands and rebuild royal authority on the basis of absolutism. Until November 1793, Louis-Stanislas continued to preside over the émigrés’ counterrevolution from Prussian territory.

On 8 January 1793, provisional representatives of Brussels, Antwerp, Mechelen, Louvain, and Namur convened in the Belgian capital to draw up a manifesto rejecting the French decree proclaiming the Revolution’s universal principles and laws, and the Rights of Man, valid in Belgium. The people rejected equality, republicanism, and French interference. Dumouriez’s declaration of November 1792, they reminded the Paris legislature, promised no intervention in their affairs or constitution, provided Belgians “establish the sovereignty of the people.” These words had thoroughly enthused Belgians, a people always against tyranny, with optimism. Had they not welcomed the French as “de généreux libérateurs”? How great then was their disillusionment on hearing of the Convention’s 15 December edict imposing principles directly violating “la souverainété du peuple Belgique.”
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It was for Belgians to determine their civil and political institutions and shape their laws. The eyes of all Europe were fixed on Paris: a foreign authority violating “the sacred rights of a sovereign people,” declared the Brussels manifesto, the Republic would no longer be seen as a revolutionary power but
un pouvour tyrannique
.
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Catholic theologians took the lead in urging magistrates and office-holders to refuse oaths to uphold equality, liberty, and popular sovereignty. Such oaths were understood by the revolutionaries in a sense totally unacceptable to Church and princes alike. To uphold the “sovereignty of the nation” in the manner implied by the revolutionaries meant acknowledging that no individual or institution exercises authority not emanating from the nation. Such oaths were a conceptual dismantling of monarchy, nobility, custom, and “our Estates and ancient constitutions,” amounting to outright rebellion against throne and altar. The oaths subverted religious authority something wholly impermissible. Any magistrates acknowledging such principles would be endorsing heresy, apostasy, incredulity, and the emblems and principles of
impies
, libertines, “sworn enemies of Jesus Christ.”
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Embracing “equality” as defined by clubbiste revolutionaries made subjects equal to their king,
vassals to their lord, parishioners to their priest—abolishing all rank and religion.

Democratic zeal for the Revolution flourished most at Geneva, where, by November 1792, there was a real likelihood of a democratic uprising. More and more Swiss, observed Edward Gibbon (1737–94), among the most reactionary figures of the conservative Enlightenment, fearful he might soon have to flee his Lausanne home and abandon his beloved “library to the mercy of the democrats,” were becoming “infected with the French disease, the wild theories of equal and boundless freedom.” Democratic ideas had already “embittered and divided the society of Lausanne” and could easily overwhelm Geneva.
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The Genevan oligarchy were distinctly apprehensive, knowing how interested French republicans were in their republic and that Clavière, one of the democrat leaders expelled after the patrician triumph in 1782 was one of Brissot’s closest allies. To forestall the threat, the patriciate summoned three thousand auxiliary troops from the neighboring conservative oligarchy of Berne.

Because of the territory’s proximity to Geneva, the French seizure of Savoy particularly worried foes of the Revolution in Switzerland. There was scarcely any Savoyard resistance to the occupying French army encamped across Lake Geneva, noted a perturbed Gibbon, surveying the Savoyard coastline through his telescope. Unable to ascertain “whether the mass of the people” there was “pleased or displeased with the change,” it disturbed him that there was no discernible resistance to the annexation and that “my noble scenery is clouded by the democratical aspect of twelve leagues of the opposite coast, which every morning obtrude themselves on my view.” All reports suggested the revolutionary army encamped there, like that in the Rhineland, offered an unprecedented spectacle with “the officers (scarcely a gentleman among them) without servants, or horses, or baggage,” actually mixing “with the common men, yet maintaining a rough kind of discipline over them.”
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Widely predicted even before 1789, Geneva’s renewed democratic revolution erupted in December 1792, “sooner than I expected,” remarked Gibbon. Hardly had the French promised not to invade, causing the Bernese to withdraw their troops, than, on 28 December 1792, Geneva’s democrats, the Égaliseurs, rose, seized the city gates, disarmed the garrison, and overthrew the ruling oligarchy. “Citizens of the best families and fortunes” not imprisoned, Jacques Necker and his family among them, immediately fled with the many émigrés lodged in Geneva to neighboring Swiss cantons that were still under patrician
oligarchies. Sovereignty reverted to the people under a decree enacted by the Grand Conseil on 12 December. Privilege and oligarchy were abolished and citizenship assigned to the entire citizenry, or, as Gibbon noted, they gave “the rights of citizens to all the rabble of the town and country.”
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Three weeks sufficed to erase every trace of Geneva’s ancien régime. The democrats annulled all Geneva’s political edicts of the past century, including the ban on Rousseau and his books. To ensure an orderly transfer of power, on 28 December, the insurrectionists instituted a provisional Comité de Sûreté Générale (of thirteen leading citizens) that announced a complete revision of the republic’s laws and constitution by a “national assembly” of forty, shortly to be elected. “Theory always proceeds far in advance of practice,” reported one enthusiast to the Paris
Gazette nationale
: “les vrais principes sont dans les livres.” The French had implemented what the philosophes had conceived and “Geneva having received the lessons earlier, now finally followed the example.”
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