Revolutionary Ideas: An Intellectual History of the French Revolution From the Rights of Man to Robespierre (66 page)

Following elections (with a low turnout) in 270 communities on the Rhenish west bank from Landau to Bingen, a confirmed favorable result was declared in 130 of these. Despite the unfavorable circumstances, more than a hundred deputies were duly elected by the Rhenish municipalities and, on 17 March 1793, the day before the heavy defeat at Neer-winden, with the first sixty-five representatives present (rising to around a hundred by 22 March), the Nationalconvent der freien Deutschen, or Convention-nationale, as the French called it, the Rhenish-German National Convention, was inaugurated in Mainz, in the presence of Merlin de Thionville, who represented the French Convention. On 18 March
1793, this congress declared the Rhineland Republic an independent and indivisible state based on liberty, equality, and popular sovereignty, and issued a carefully crafted decree welded from drafts submitted by four of its formidable phalanx of professors—Dorsch, Wedekind, Metternich, and Forster. Proclaiming the Rhineland an independent republic free of princes and aristocracy, the assembly formally dispossessed the elector of Mainz and other Left Bank Rhenish princes, lords, and ecclesiastical authorities of their jurisdiction and lands within its boundaries, forbidding them to return to the new entity under pain of death.
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Sovereignty on the Rhenish Left Bank from Landau to Bingen, encompassing Mainz, Speyer, and Worms, resided in the people alone. The edict was printed in thirty thousand copies, the republic’s towns and communities being asked to adopt it amid public celebrations, and in Mainz, at least, they did. The turnout for the elections was dismally low but this did not prevent a considerable, jubilant crowd from attending the inauguration celebrations in Mainz’s market square. With the Rhineland Republic’s new tricolor flag flying and accompanied by the French garrison’s military band, an impressive crowd, standing before the liberty tree, joined in the singing of republican hymns, roaring out “Es lebe die Freiheit! Es lebe das Volk! Es lebe die Republik!”
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The Mainz Convention elected Andreas Joseph Hofmann (1753–1849), yet another professor, president, and Forster vice president. Delegates were divided, though, between Dorsch’s followers, the Dorschianer, who wanted the occupied Left Bank formally integrated into the French Republic, and a more popular grouping, Hofmann’s followers, two-thirds of the Rhenish Jacobins, who preferred a nominal French protectorate over an essentially independent daughter republic.
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Dorsch and Forster, whom Hofmann accused of being too close to the French, by this stage felt deeply estranged, owing to corrupt collusion between the raucous Hofmann, who was much implicated in the deportations of clergy and officeholders across the Rhine, and the French Montagnard commissioner, Antoine-Christophe Merlin de Thionville (1762–1833), a Metz lawyer and Jacobin allied to the even more corrupt populist deputies, Chabot and Bazire. “A Revolution that needs only scoundrels,” Forster wrote to his wife, “does not need me.”
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But with the Prussian and Austrian forces approaching, there was little time to argue the point. The Rhenish republican legislature held its last meeting on 30 March 1793. On 31 March, the Prussians occupied Worms, demolished the liberty tree, and dissolved the local Jacobin club; the houses of leading Klubisten were pillaged.
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In practice, no alternative remained but to propose union with France. A delegation of three—Forster, another academic, Adam Lux (1765–93), and a merchant—set off on 24 March for Paris to request annexation of the liberated Rhineland’s fast-diminishing remnant to the French Republic. Their request was submitted by Forster to the Convention the very day he arrived, 30 March, and accepted. But by then most of the “liberated” Rhineland had been overrun by Prussian forces. The surviving sliver enjoyed only a brief existence. Forster and Lux, their return cut off by the siege of Mainz, remained as the protectorate-republic’s representatives in Paris, where they were joined at the end of March by Dorsch.
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Wedekind fled to Strasbourg. In both Paris and Strasbourg, practically all the German expatriot colony, or Revolutionsfreunde, sided with the Brissotins against Robespierre from July 1793, with only Forster trying to stay more or less neutral; virtually all accepted the Brissotin, not the Montagnard, view of the September massacres.
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On 19 July, Forster again appeared in the name of the Rhenish Republic before the Convention, this time to endorse the French democratic Constitution of June 1793.
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The Revolution in Germany and the Low Countries (but not Switzerland) had collapsed, but something of the ideal survived, and the Austrians and Prussians were still defied by several centers of stubborn resistance. In particular, Mainz held out, though that could not disguise the fact that France stood on the verge of total defeat.

The Pitt government in Britain chose March 1793, the month of France’s military collapse, to commit all its power and resources to overthrowing the Revolution, entering into alliances with Spain, Sardinia, Portugal, Naples, and Russia, and intensifying the repression of radicals at home. British cash, diplomacy, influence, and naval power surrounded the Revolution on every side, backed in England by overwhelming popular and elite support. While some British writers and reformers still supported the Revolution, conservative, proaristocratic views heavily predominated at home. Edmund Burke could not understand anyone wanting anything less than an all-out drive to obliterate the Revolution and its enactments.
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Repression was the order of the day. This was reflected in Paine’s conviction for sedition in absentia, in December 1792, and the proceedings against the Unitarian William Frend, an ally of Priestley who was agitating for mild reforms in Cambridge and against the “ecclesiastical tyranny” practiced by the university. Frend’s pamphlet
Peace and Union
(February 1793), gently pleading for Britain’s withdrawal from the war against France, though
only mildly critical of the British establishment and the currently aggressively intolerant mood in England, struck a chord among progressive students, including the young Coleridge. “Frend for ever!” was chalked subversively on Cambridge college walls. The master and fellows of his college passed resolutions condemning Frend for “disturbing the harmony of society,” “prejudicing the clergy in the eyes of the laity,” and undermining the standing of the established Church.
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Ignominiously expelled from Jesus College, Frend’s books were thrown out into the street.

By April 1793, the democratic republican vision of a new European order lay in ruins, and reactionary opinion could confidently expect the immanent extinction of democratic constitutional systems. Europe appeared to be on the verge of a general reversion to absolutism, British mixed government, and restored ecclesiastical authority. The “wise elector of Saxony” seemed to be amply justified in designating the French Constitution of 1789 a
galimathias
(monstrosity), based on what conservatives viewed as “la déclaration anti-sociale” of the Rights of Man. Constitutional monarchy on the French model of 1791 was something altogether pernicious, argued Feller, since it rendered the king merely the
sanctionateur
of the legislature’s decrees. In truth, the 1791 Constitution was not really monarchical at all but republican, and by permitting all confessions equality of status “persecutes Christianity, requiring its office-holders to take iniquitous oaths that no officials or priests should embrace.” Dumouriez was perverse enough to want to build on France’s hideous “constitution monarchico-républicaine,” but Europeans generally should now eschew constitutionalism altogether and comprehensively espouse monarchy, nobility, and religion.
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In Paris, the mood was dismal. Those backing Brissot, Pétion, Paine, and Condorcet in the desperate struggle raging in Paris, including the foreign republicans, were thrown into deep consternation by the shattering reverses and their ruthless exploitation by Marat and Robespierre. Among those denounced for criminal negligence, incompetence, and suspected espionage on behalf of Britain was General Francisco de Miranda, a friend of Pétion through whose influence he had become a French revolutionary general.
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Democratic republican ideologues rallied to defend him during a heated public debate lasting five days, with Pétion, Guadet, Barlow, and Paine among those robustly defending his integrity.
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Yet, despite it all, Herder wrote to Klopstock from Weimar, commiserating with him over the setbacks in May 1793, neither Robespierre nor Marat could prevent the fight for what was valuable in the
Revolution, continuing: “Hoffnung bringt Geduld, und Geduld Hoffnung.”
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The disastrous defeats notwithstanding, the vision of a new democratic republican Europe precariously survived in Germany, the Low Countries, and Italy alike, defended by a tiny band of ideologues thrown back on Paris, all decried and reviled throughout Europe, as well as by most in France and in the French National Convention.

CHAPTER 13

The World’s First Democratic Constitution

(1793)

Following the journée of 10 August 1792, the National Assembly, shorn of its monarchist bloc, agreed that France should become a democratic republic based on universal male suffrage, and that the Constitution once drafted would be submitted to the people via a referendum. By late March 1793, besieged by Prussia, Austria, and Britain without and by royalists and zealous Catholics within, the Revolution appeared to be on the verge on collapse. Yet optimism had not altogether vanished. The democratic Constitution, complete in draft and under intensive discussion, was seen by many as a kind of savior. The new Constitution, republican and democratic, most of the Convention fervently believed, was “the true and only means,” as one deputy put it, “to end both the exterior struggle and France’s interior troubles.”
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The world’s first democratic republic based on equality, human rights, and freedom of expression could and would be established and stabilized.

Superficially, forging the new Constitution did not seem to involve any considerable disagreement about what democracy is and how to establish it.
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On the surface, the Convention’s constitutional committee, the Convention majority, and the pro-Revolution press were agreed regarding the main principles. The Constitution would combine elements of representative and direct democracy, and there would be no division of powers. According to Condorcet, the deputy assigned the principal role in drawing up the Constitution by the Convention, the people possess the right to elect and, under certain circumstances, dismiss their representatives, besides effect changes in the law through criticism, debate, and referenda. Seemingly, the entire republican camp concurred.
In their constitutional thinking, both Brissotins and the Montagne aimed to combine elements of direct and representative democracy. But the seeming convergence of principle was altogether superficial. Closer inspection of their rival political cultures reveals sharply antagonistic interpretations of the key concepts—representation, people, popular sovereignty, elections, rights, and volonté générale, disagreement sufficient to produce massively divergent outcomes.

The Convention appointed its committee to draft the Constitution on 11 October 1792 while the Brissotins still firmly presided over the legislature. Human rights, equality, and the sovereignty of the people would be its guiding principles. In the new Constiution there would be no religious or aristocratic component of any kind. Executive and judiciary, in sharp contrast to the United States Constitution, would remain wholly subordinate to the legislature. Given the importance and complexity of the task, few disputed that the Convention’s constitutional commission should consist of France’s best and most philosophique theorists. It comprised nine members, six of whom were Left republicans—Condorcet, Brissot, Paine, Pétion, Vergniaud, and Gensonné; the remainder consisted of Sieyès, the principal intellectual link with the discarded Constitution of 1791, and two Montagnards, Danton and Barère.
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Sieyès, for his part, advocated a strictly representative system without any admixture of direct democracy, as in 1791. This was unacceptable to Brissotins and Montagnards alike. Major theorist though he was, Sieyès consequently played little part in the Revolution’s culminating constitutional deliberations.
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During the great 1793 constitutional debate, he remained largely isolated, albeit his ardent constitutionalism and “respect for individual liberty” aligned him closer to the democratic Left than the Montagne.
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Bertrand Barère (1755–1841), a former advocate of the Parlement of Toulouse and deputy in the 1789 Estates-General, esteemed by and very helpful to Robespierre, was an able organizer, writer, and speaker, later a prime mover of the Terror. But he alone among the nine served Robespierre’s ambitions and preferences, and he had no way of promoting the Montagne’s authoritarian populism on the constitutional commission on his own.
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