Revolutionary Ideas: An Intellectual History of the French Revolution From the Rights of Man to Robespierre (65 page)

The upheaval of the General Revolution, surging over Europe in late 1792 politically, militarily, and as a wave of emotion and propaganda, also touched Swedish shores. Sweden too became tense as the authorities forbade the newspapers to discuss the French Revolution and banned the Swedish translation of Paine’s
Rights of Man
that appeared in Stockholm that year. The radical poet and Spinozist, Thomas Thorild (1759–1808)—“Sweden’s Tom Paine” and “chief martyr for freedom,” as Cramer called him—caused a public scandal in Stockholm on 21 December 1792 with his tract
The Liberty of Reason presented to the Swedish Regent and Nation
, which assailed the monarchical Constitution, princely oppression, and the clergy.
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The people’s happiness, he declared, means rejecting monarchy and adopting republican and democratic government. By the point the authorities seized the remaining stock of this “incendiary text” and arrested its author, several thousand copies had been distributed. When Thorild appeared in court on 8 January, a noisy crowd forced their way in, demanding to witness the proceedings. “Every time the accused opened his mouth to defend himself,” the crowd cheered. When he was taken away, a near riot commenced, the crowd outside in the street shouting, “Long live Thorild! Long live Liberty!” Troops were deployed in inner Stockholm to silence the “badly intentioned.” The capital’s
military garrison was reinforced and guard patrols doubled. Inns and taverns were ordered to close at nine in the evening. Two manufacturers, accused of fomenting the Thorild demonstration, were imprisoned. Thorild was afterward deported to Germany. Condemning the sedition, the municipality and magistrates hastened to assure the Crown of their unshakable loyalty to monarchy, nobility, constitution, and religion.
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On 1 February 1793, after weeks of deteriorating relations between Britain and France, the French Convention declared war on Britain and the United Provinces. For months, Dumouriez had been preparing the “liberation” of the United Provinces, a liberation keenly desired by many in Amsterdam, Utrecht, and Rotterdam. A published manifesto was printed in large quantity, in French and Dutch, at Antwerp with the help of the Dutch Patriot Comité Revolutionair
,
which also raised loans, using their own credit, to expand Dumouriez’s limited cash resources.
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“Prussian tyranny,” declared Dumouriez, had dragged the Dutch back under the yoke of monarchical despotism in 1787, suppressing all hope of liberty and driving many Patriots abroad until the most astonishing revolution known to history (i.e., the French) changed the situation. The French were now invading as the “ally of the Dutch” and “irreconcilable enemies of the House of Orange.” Is not the Prince of Orange “at this moment surrendering your foremost colonies, the Cape of Good Hope, the island of Ceylon and all your commerce in the Indies to the only nation whose ceaseless rivalry you need fear [i.e., Britain]? I enter your homeland [surrounded] by the generous martyrs of the revolution of 1787. Their perseverance and sacrifices, and the revolutionary committee they have formed to direct the initial stages of your revolution entirely merit your confidence and mine.”
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As the manifesto indicated, Dumouriez deliberately surrounded himself with Dutch revolutionaries. Scorning Dumouriez’s manifesto as full of “absurdities,” Feller’s
Journal historique
predicted that the planned new Dutch Patriot rising of 1793 would not amount to much. Britain and Prussia exerted greater leverage in Holland than they had before 1787. The pastoral instructions issued by the papal nuncio and vicar apostolic of the United Provinces, Monseigneur Brancadoro, of 11 February, were very clear. Catholics formed a sizable, tolerated minority in the United Provinces, and Catholics had provided a major component of support for the Dutch Patriot movement during 1780–87. In towns with sizable Catholic minorities, like Utrecht and Amersfoort, there remained, Feller granted, some risk to conservatism from
a “coalition of
la secte philosophique
with Jansenism,” such as had disastrously occurred “with the forging of the [French] Civil Constitution of the Clergy.” But this peril was now considerably lessened: Dutch Catholics were being continually commanded by their clergy in the pope’s name to support the stadtholder, Britain, and Prussia, and combat “le fanatisme démocratique.”
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The Dutch Comité Revolutionair organized Dumouriez’s intelligence service and encouraged men to desert from the Prince of Orange’s army, issuing two pamphlets for this purpose. The committee clearly commanded a strong following in Holland, especially in Amsterdam, Haarlem, Dordrecht, and in Zeeland. Generally, Patriot support in the United Provinces was judged to outweigh support for Orangism.
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For its supporters, the invasion began promisingly. Dumouriez’s Venezuelan deputy, Francisco de Miranda (1750–1816), a friend of Brissot and Pétion (but abhorred by Cloots), accompanied by two members of the Dutch revolutionary committee (representing the sovereignty of the Dutch people), in early February captured Roermond, besieged Maastricht, and took several major forts between. Miranda directed only the military side, the political task of revolutionizing the captured Dutch areas being the responsibility of the revolutionary committee. The Batavian Revolution’s first liberty trees were erected in mid-February at Deurne, Eindhoven, and Helmond.

The main invasion, commanded by Dumouriez personally, commenced on 17 February, the French accompanied by the “Batavian legion” under Lieutenant Colonel Herman Willem Daendels (d. 1818), or three legions as it soon became, totaling fifteen hundred men, including many long-exiled Dutch refugees recruited in France and Belgium. These, Dumouriez later recalled, performed “excellent service.”
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The invasion received a notably warm welcome from the local population. Breda and Geertruidenberg were quickly taken, bringing much of the States of Brabant under revolutionary control. Oaths to uphold freedom and equality were exacted from magistrates and municipal office-holders. Coats of arms of the House of Orange and other symbols and insignia of the old order vanished from buildings, church pews, organs, and shop signs. The House of Orange’s largest and best-known coat of arms were removed from the great church of Breda and hacked to pieces in the town’s main square. At Breda, municipal elections were held and a new municipality installed under the Patriot leader Bernadus Blok (1756–1818), previously a prominent figure among the Dutch exiles in France.
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In February 1793, it was possible to believe all Western Europe was on the verge of being democratized, secularized, and emancipated. In the Rhineland, elections were planned for 24 February 1793, for local primary assemblies to choose new municipal governments in Mainz, Worms, Speyer, and smaller places, from which representatives would be selected to constitute the projected new Rheinisch-Deutsche Nationalkonvent (Rhineland National Convention) with the capital at Mainz. All adult male residents older than twenty-one (except servants and foreigners) were eligible to vote, but only after swearing an oath to Freedom and Equality and abjuring forever all special “liberties” and historic privileges.
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A deputation of five French National Convention representatives, headed by Grégoire and Merlin de Thionville, arrived to supervise. In the towns and countryside of the French-occupied Rhineland, local authorities all received directives from the clergy and the elector’s officials across the Rhine to boycott these elections. As in Belgium, the Catholic clergy directed magistrates and citizenry to refuse loyalty oaths and all other formulae implying repudiation of princely and ecclesiastical authority. In retaliation, many clergy, “privileged,” and officeholders were expelled by the French; others departed voluntarily.
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At Speyer, nearly everyone refused the oath and practically all the clergy fled.
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Those who remained were in no mood to cooperate. Altogether, only a few hundred voters turned out, though even this counted as a success after nearby Frankfurt’s capture by the Prussians on 2 December.

It was the military defeats of March 1793, a month of unmitigated disaster for the French, that aborted the resumed Dutch democratic revolution (for the moment) and ensured the prompt collapse of the Rheinisch-Deutsche Freistaat (German Rhenish Free State), as well as Jacobin Belgium. With powerful coalition forces deploying for a massive counteroffensive, the Austrian commander, the Archduke Charles, issued a ringing manifesto on 1 March condemning what the allies considered the Revolution’s perfidious principles. The German, Dutch, Belgian, and Swiss revolutionaries, no less than their French counter-parts, were a sect “equally the enemy of religion, morality and all social order.”
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On 2 March, Miranda was forced to abandon the siege of Maastricht to avoid being cut off by the Prussian advance farther south. Simultaneously, the French and local Patriots evacuated Liège. On 18 March, Dumouriez’s army was crushed in the Battle of Neer-winden and, a few days later, again at Aldenhoven. The revolutionaries’ and clubbistes’ retreat became a rout. Within days, the French, together
with the Dutch legionaries (many of whom now deserted), evacuated virtually all the territory they had occupied.

A strategic disaster, the sudden French military collapse was an even greater psychological, cultural, and ideological setback. Dumouriez blamed the Paris Convention for “oppressing” the Southern Netherlands, contrary to his promises of November 1792. Marat blamed Dumouriez and Brissot in a blistering attack published on 20 March that caused a considerable stir in the Assembly. Marat did not hesitate to label Dumouriez as one of the “faction Brissotine,” which, according to him, falsely styled themselves “Jacobins” and had deliberately installed Dumouriez alongside Roland and Clavière to betray the Revolution. Dumouriez’s ban on the Belgian sociétés populaires participating in political affairs, alleged Marat, proved him an “enemy of liberty,” as did his supposed sympathy for émigrés, his telling local nobles he was “their protector,” and wasting the lives of his troops. According to Marat, Dumouriez aspired to become “sovereign” of a united Belgium and Holland.
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The French were astounded by the immense crowds shouting, “Vive l’empereur! Vive l’archiduc Charles!” and thronging the streets to greet the victorious Austrians as they swept first into Antwerp and then Louvain and Brussels. The people definitely welcomed the Austrians with greater ardor than they had the revolutionaries the previous November. Following the departure of the last French troops on 24 March, the liberty tree on the Grande Place in Brussels was hauled down and burned and the houses of local sansculotte leaders pillaged. Officials implicated in the revolutionary regime mostly responded with alacrity to the emperor’s offer of amnesty and defected, disavowing every link to the Revolution. Those who refused hurriedly departed.
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Of the Belgian deputies elected to represent Belgium in the Paris Convention, only three or four remained loyal to the Revolution’s ideology. The departure of the French garrison from Mons on 26 March was likewise preceded by evacuation of the entire local Jacobin clubbiste set. Scarcely were they gone than the Mons liberty tree was seized from the towns’ central square, together with that in the clubbistes’ hall, and publicly burned, along with the hall’s liberty insignia, podium, and galleries.
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Omitted from the imperial amnesty due to the tenacity there of pro-Revolution sentiment, Liège incurred special retribution. Liègeois who had collaborated were proscribed, thousands being forced into exile or imprisoned. A special court was erected to try those chiefly implicated. Every law promulgated in the prince-bishopric since November 1792
was annulled, every official employed by the prince-bishop before 27 November 1792 reinstated.
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Outraged at being vilified by the Montagne, Dumouriez contemplated using the beaten remnants of his army to stage a coup and overthrow the Paris clubs. At Tournai on 28 March, he met with the Convention’s three commissaries to the army—citizens Pierre-Joseph Proly (1752–94), Pierre-Ulric Dubuisson (1748–94), playwright and author of a history of the American Revolution, and the Jewish merchant Pereyra, representatives involved with supplying the troops, besides supervising Dumouriez’s political activity. A Belgian baron and natural son of the Austrian minister Kaunitz, Proly edited the republican journal
Le Cosmopolite
, which aligned with the Left republicans in Paris, as well as the wider international pro-Revolution literary fraternity. In their secret talks, Dumouriez tried to persuade them of the need for “a moderate [i.e., monarchical] course” on the basis of the principles of 1789. All three commissaries rebuffed him, remaining loyal to the Revolution’s republican democratic principles.
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The French troops in the Rhineland stood their ground with reportedly hardly any desertions. Responding to a further surge of resistance fomented by clergy, Custine rounded up and deported more priests and “privileged” across the river. The property of those expelled was “put in the hand of the nation,” that is, confiscated. The traditionalism, piety, anti-Semitism, and notorious xenophobia of the Mainz burghers, and the likelihood Mainz would soon revert to the elector’s control, all depleted the Rhineland Revolution of popular backing and helped boost support for Kaiser und Reich. Reviled by the Catholic clergy, the club was increasingly monopolized by Protestants from elsewhere in Germany, such as Forster, Böhmer, Wedekind (from Göttingen), and Cotta. Meetings of the Mainz Jacobin club began to be beset with hissing, whistling, and stamping from unsympathetic listeners.