Revolutionary Ideas: An Intellectual History of the French Revolution From the Rights of Man to Robespierre (64 page)

Genevans “are all for a pure and absolute democracy,” wrote Gibbon to the Lady Sheffield on 1 January 1793, “but some wish to remain a small independent state, whilst others aspire to become a part of the republic of France; and as the latter, though less numerous, are more violent and absurd than their adversaries, it is highly probable that they will succeed.”
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“The new constitution of Geneva,” he added in early February 1793, is “slowly forming, without much noise or any bloodshed; and the patriots, who have stayed in hopes of guiding and restraining the multitude, flatter themselves that they shall be able at least to prevent their mad countrymen from giving themselves to the French, the only mischief that would be absolutely irretrievable. The revolution of Geneva is of less consequence to us [in Lausanne], however, than that of Savoy; but our fate will depend on the general event rather than on these particular causes.”
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By early February, Gibbon felt slightly calmer as “all spirit of opposition is quelled in the Canton of Berne” and the Helvetic Confederation’s neutrality (despite its refusal to recognize the French Republic) seemed more assured. Even so, it upset him that news of Louis XVI’s execution in January 1793 was “received [in Switzerland] with less horror than I could have wished.” So insecure were the French noble émigrés living in Lausanne that they “do not wear black, nor do even the Neckars [
sic
].” As a consequence, Gibbon too felt constrained from “going into mourning.”
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(In Mainz, Forster, Metternich, and Böhmer approved the execution unreservedly; other German Jacobins disapproved, some from a liberal monarchist
standpoint, others, including Cramer and Oelsner, from a Brissotin republican standpoint.)
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The French occupation of Nice and Savoy, and developments in Corsica, were suggestive of what the Revolution might signify for Italy. Corsica remained broadly untouched by the Revolution’s early stages. The former Genoese island brought under French rule in 1768 had been declared an integral part of France by the National Assembly on 29 September 1789, and, on the island, in an elaborate ceremony with local elites participating on 30 November. In the National Assembly, Corsica was represented by four deputies—a noble, a clergyman, and two Third Estate delegates. The 1791 Constitution was received calmly enough. But after the singing, artillery saluts,
Te Deums,
and declarations, little actually changed. Corsica’s ancien régime continued intact with the local aristocracy and clergy holding sway, aided by the peasantry’s poverty, illiteracy, and abased condition, and their knowing little French.
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Since the capital Bastia’s ten or twelve thousand inhabitants “lived from abuse,” as one observer put it, and derived their employment from serving the aristocracy and clergy, they felt little inclination to do other than support the existing order. To the inhabitants’ great joy, the hero of their revolt against Genoa, General Pascal Paoli, after twenty-one years of exile, returned to the island in glory on 17 July 1790. Everyone crowded into Bastia for a glimpse of him.

By late 1791, little had been done to end noble privilege, reform the legal system, eliminate the old entrenched town oligarchies of Bastia and Ajaccio, or take over church properties and revenues. Everything remained under “des ligues aristocatiques.” With originally five bishoprics, numerous clergy, and ten to twelve thousand nobles, magistrates, and officials, Corsica remained a heavily traditional society, dominated by men who had discreetly opposed the Revolution since its inception. National Assembly decrees were not even published on the island, let alone implemented. The military garrison habitually still wore the royalist white cockade instead of the tricolor.
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While the Corsican revolutionaries’ hopes focused on the towering figure of Paoli, most Corsicans, directed by the clergy, rural and urban, joined the nobles and Church in opposing the Revolution.
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Among the island’s few active agents of revolution were the Bonaparte family and Christophe Salicetti (1757–1809), a Bastia-born lawyer (much esteemed by Napoleon), one of Corsica’s Estates-General delegates instrumental in arranging Paoli’s return.

Among those sharing Condorcet’s and Brissot’s view that the Revolution’s core values must be exported and internationalized to be
consolidated was Volney, who was commissioned by the Assembly in late 1791 to be its envoy, working with local revolutionary elements to dismantle the Corsican ancien régime. Corsica struck Volney, on his arrival, as deplorably feudal and corrupt. He could see no way of countering the ignorance and “blindness” of the people and implementing the Revolution’s legislation since, to his bitter disappointment, there was not even a bookshop on the island, or any regular arrangement for receiving French journals propagating enlightened ideas. He tried to advance the Revolution in the only way practicable—proclaiming freedom of the press and helping establish the island’s first revolutionary journal, the
Giornale patriotico di Corsica
, which commenced publication on 3 April 1790 and was edited by a renegade Pisan noble, Philippe Buonarroti (1761–1837). It was the only revolutionary paper in Italian during the early 1790s.

The Corsican revolutionary faction led by Salicetti and Buonarroti faced obstacles of every kind. The first serious trouble followed the announcement that four of Corsica’s five bishoprics would be quashed and that there were plans for drastically reducing the size of the island’s senior and lower clergy. The entire ecclesiastical establishment was outraged, though popular opposition was constrained for the moment (until 1793) due to Paoli’s temporary loyalty to the Revolution.
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Paoli wanted the Corsican clergy to accept the constitutional oath, and most lower clergy did so. Paoli chose to work with Ignace François Guasco, the man elected (with Paoli’s aid) as the island’s sole constitutional bishop. The refractory friars and priests replied by engineering a furious riot in Bastia on 3 June 1791, with the crowd, mostly women, averring unswerving loyalty to their faith, storming the constitutional bishop’s palace and ransacking the two patriotic clubs, as well as the Freemasons lodge.
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Denounced as an “atheist,” Buonarroti was chased through the streets. Paoli cracked down hard, arresting sixteen friars and monks for sedition. But he also deported Buonarroti to Tuscany, where he was imprisoned for a time (before later returning to Corsica).

Volney’s political scheme, to revolutionize the island in alliance with Paoli, came to nothing, as Paoli increasingly proved he was interested only in extending his personal power and family’s influence, at bottom caring little for the Revolution.
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Volney’s economic plan to stimulate the production of coffee, cotton, sugar, and indigo, which would enable its inhabitants to prosper while Corsica’s cash crops compensated France for her losses in the Caribbean, especially on Saint-Domingue, equally foundered. By early 1793, a serious rift had developed, with
Paoli turning against the Revolution, publicly proclaiming his admiration for Britain. Led by the clergy, at least fourth-fifths of Corsicans, reports suggested, backed the growing counterrevolutionary movement, with Paoli soon seeking to detach Corsica permanently from France.
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By early 1793, the revolutionary party led by Buonarroti, the Convention’s
commissaire observateur
, had been driven from much of the island by a victorious Paoli leading the clergy, nobles, and common people.
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Volney’s local reputation was wrecked by Paoli’s denouncing him too as a “heretic.” In February 1794, Paoli signed a treaty converting Corsica into a protectorate of the British Empire while a British expeditionary force occupied the island’s main ports. For the moment, monarchy, aristocracy, and clergy had triumphed in Corsica.

The French military triumphs of late 1792 plunged all Germany into consternation while simultaneously exciting the country’s republicans and democrats. A liberty tree appeared one night in October, in the main square of the Westphalian town of Paderborn. At the court of Hanover, in November, an order was issued forbidding all officers to discuss politics.
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In Prussia, where in December, a member of the Berlin Royal Academy of Sciences, Professor Borelly, was expelled for publicly praising the Revolution and another professor thrown into irons at Magdeburg, there was an unremitting crackdown.
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The Prussian king became obsessively vigilant to suppress every sign of atheist-materialist philosophy and the egalitarian, pro-Revolution democratic fringe penetrating further, but undoubtedly it did, especially in several university towns and academic contexts.
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The chief organizer of the Deutsche Union, Carl Friedrich Bahrdt (1740–92), already in prison at Magdeburg for writing against the Prussian censorship, died behind bars in 1792. But Bahrdt’s disciples and sympathizers abounded, especially in the university world. Egalitarian secret societies, the Illuminati and the Deutsche Union, strongly infiltrated by the materialism of Helvétius, Raynal, d’Holbach, and Diderot, and surviving under repression since the 1770s, penetrated particularly among sections of the academic community and the publishing world.

Among the best documented examples of this subversion, curiously, was a Protestant seminary at Tübingen in Württemberg, where Hegel and Hölderlin were then students. The director himself remarked that most of his students were at this time sympathetic to the Revolution, while the duke complained the place had become “äusserst demokratisch.” In July 1793, Hölderlin communicated to his brother his deep sympathy for Brissot and joy at the assassination of the
“schändliche Tyrann” Marat.
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The young Hegel likewise passionately embraced the ideals of the Revolution. The tendency of both Hegel and Hölderlin to link the Revolution “with moral and spiritual renewal,” and a future era of beauty and freedom, derived partly from their simultaneous immersion during the early 1790s in Spinozism and the texts of the great German Spinoza controversy of the 1780s.
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Among the foremost participants defending Spinozism and Lessing in that controversy was the Leipzig professor Karl Heinrich Heydenreich (1764–1801), who was also, from 1788, among the leading Kryptodemokraten of the Deutsche Union in Leipzig.
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Almost without exception, the German pro-Revolution writers and intellectuals condemned Robespierre and Marat.
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German princely repression was sustained, systematic, and broadly effective, except in Schleswig-Holstein where the Danish Crown held sway and the press was freer than elsewhere. But if reactionary forces generally predominated, princely repression in Germany also exerted a strong cultural-psychological contrary effect, intensifying the deep estrangement of the “enlightened”’ reform-minded. Besides Dorsch, Cotta, Wedekind, Forster, and the Dautzenbergs, those most obviously under suspicion included the former Illuminati leader Adolph Freiherr Knigge (1752–96) and, at Kiel, a professor of Greek, the orientalist and translator of Tom Paine into German, Carl Friedrich Cramer (1752–1807).
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Knigge and his publisher were threatened with dire consequences if they did not cease threatening religion, morals, and the social order.
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Cramer’s efforts, especially publishing his German version of Paine’s
Rights of Man
and other subversive works in Copenhagen, and radicalizing students, were deeply resented, but with Kiel being under Danish jurisdiction, it was not until May 1794 that Prussian pressure secured his dismissal from his university chair. Another courageous rebel was a young professor at Jena, deeply preoccupied with Kant’s philosophy, Johann Gottlieb Fichte (1762–1814). Already a marked man for the Spinozistic tone of his
Kritik aller Offenbarung
(Critique of All Revelation; 1792), Fichte emerged in 1793 as a leading voice of pro-Revolution opinion. Although an early draft of his
Zurückforderung der Denkfreiheit von den Fürsten Europens
die sie bisher unterdrückten
(Reclaiming Freedom of Thought from Europe’s Princes which they have until now suppressed; 1793), originally penned in 1792, was distinctly conciliatory in tone, his final version was a vehement demand that “freedom of thought” be returned to the people. Powerfully renewing Bahrdt’s attack on the princes and their
censorship, Fichte deplored the entire German “system of patronage and tutelage.”
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Fichte’s
Zurückforderung
was followed by his refutation of the
Investigations on the French Revolution
(1793) by the Hanoverian conservative official, August Wilhelm Rehberg (1757–1836). This was entitled
Beitrag zur Berichtigung des Urtheile des Publikums über die französische Revolution
(Contribution to rectifying the Public’s Judgement of the French Revolution). For both the Humean Rehberg and Fichte, the crucial issue was how to assess the the Revolution’s basic significance for humanity and locate it correctly in the context of philosophy. The Revolution was valid and “important for all mankind,” contended Fichte in his two-hundred-page retort to Rehberg, its essential principles, especially the concept of volonté générale, which he claimed Rehberg had misrepresented, and its attack on privilege and elites being broadly justified. Every people has the right to change its constitution. Fichte dismissed Rehberg, and other prominent conservative ideologues like Schlötzer, as superficial Sophisten.
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Despite his visceral hatred of the Jews, Fichte at this stage combined his defense of the French Revolution with a general plea for universal toleration.