Revolutionary Ideas: An Intellectual History of the French Revolution From the Rights of Man to Robespierre (67 page)

Condorcet’s task was to establish “a real institutional foundation for the general will.”
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Committed to the idea of volonté générale but differently from Rousseau, wanting it guided not by the unified will but the
raison collective
of the collective body of the citizenry, he refused to accept either that there is a single will or that society needs to be a
battlefield of conflicting interests but believed it possible to devise a system in which decisions are based on the real interest that unites people in a society.
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He and his colleagues, moreover, felt they were “not called to prepare a code of laws just for France,” but “the entire human race,” an intensely radical and un-Rousseauist doctrine redolent of the universalism of Diderot, d’Holbach, Helvétius, and the
Histoire philosophique
.
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With monarchy, the civil list, division of powers, and restricted suffrage all roundly rejected, and the 1791 Constitution dismissed as “monstrueuse,”
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the broad contours were clear. The Republic would be a democracy with
all
adult men, servants included, possessing the vote. Elections for both legislature and executive would occur via a two-stage electoral system with primary assemblies electing a preliminary list of candidates, all the winning candidates voted by the primary assemblies in each department, numbering three times the number of offices to be filled, then being collated and announced by the departmental authorities, after which the lists would be sent back to the primary assemblies where the voters would vote again, registering their preferences among this authenticated candidate list.
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The draft constitution presented to the Convention on 15 February 1793, based on Condorcet’s ideas, was by far the most democratic devised during the French Revolution or anywhere before the twentieth century, a great landmark in world history.
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Condorcet and his commission rejected not just the 1791 Constitution’s monarchical character and limited suffrage but also its allocating excessive power to representatives. To balance people and representatives, a truly democratic constitution must, they argued, provide for frequent and regular elections with carefully defined powers of recall. They strove to reconcile representation with “the general will” by ensuring that the law (and hence individual submission to the volonté générale) always and fully conserved all five ingredients indispensable to republican democracy as defined by Condorcet and his colleagues, namely, sovereignty of the people, equality of status, individual liberty, freedom of expression, and government for the common good, defined as what is best for society when everyone’s interests are treated equally under the criterion of “reason” alone. In Cordorcet’s and their vision, the national legislature controlled the executive and remained in permanent session, observed by galleries open to the public. Half its membership was to be renewed after a year, along with half the municipal and departmental administrations. Each deputy in the legislature would thus sit for a two-year term unless deselected after one, or reelected.

Rooted in an intellectual culture reaching back less to Rousseau than to Diderot, d’Holbach, Helvétius, Boulanger, Mably, and Raynal, the Constitution of February 1793 marked the culmination of the Radical Enlightenment tendency. French revolutionary republicanism at its peak expressly sought a judicious middle path between the Scylla of direct democracy and Charybdis of pure representative democracy. “We shall not have achieved anything in overthrowing the throne,” admonished Barthélémy Albouys (1750–95), an anti-Montagnard deputy for the department of Lot, proudly designating himself a “Jacobin,” “if we permit a band of fresh tyrants to usurp the people’s authority in the people’s name,” on the foundation of error. He deemed pure, direct democracy the closest thing to anarchy, but pure representative democracy seemed equally vicious, the nearest thing to despotism being “la pure représentation: évitons ces deux écueils.”
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A middle path was essential, as was a viable balance between center and regions. To achieve this, Condorcet intended to institutionalize local opinion. Primary assemblies in town and country, his commission proposed, should comprise roughly six hundred citizens, each locally resident for at least six months. These primary assemblies would not just organize the electoral process but channel debate and criticism, enabling those that collected sufficient votes to register protests and, when they wished, attempt to change opinion beyond their boundaries, potentially modifying laws. The primary assemblies were therefore empowered to debate the legislature’s proceedings and submit petitions, enabling the people to accept, refuse, or initiate legal changes.
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Those resisting the looming dictatorship of the Montagnard clique controlling the Paris inner sections fought the battle now under way on a theoretical level by further elaborating the principles of volonté générale and popular sovereignty. Condorcet’s and the democratic republicans’ general will was emphatically not Rousseau’s particularist general will but something universal, unalterable, and designed to safeguard all men’s basic rights and freedoms. Admittedly, not all opponents of the Montagne were as explicit about this as Department Du Nord deputy François Poultier Delmotte (1753–1826) or Jean Debry (1760–1844), another staunch adversary of Robespierre both before and after 2 June, who defined volonté générale as participation of all in the
force publique,
understood as a system of rights allowing the majority no right to mistreat, impoverish, or intimidate minorities.
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Poultier Delmotte wanted it in the Constitution “that the allegedly general will voted by the majority cannot bind the minority when it evidently violates the
Rights of Man. The minority always remains free to remind the majority of their true sovereign—
la raison universelle—
the sovereign that dictated those rights.”
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Poultier Delmotte, among the Convention’s most colorful personalities, once a priest and later a soldier, was too independent-minded to align with any faction. A revolutionary journalist and littérateur who had written one book on Condillac’s epistemology and another on the Polish partitions, he saw the history of revolutions as a story of how easily the people are deceived by impostors. Ambitious men directing “the sovereign’s will” in ways conducive to their own sway substitute their own private will for that of those they dupe. The majority’s will itself can involve unjustly subjecting the weakest to the strongest and hence become a gateway to a new tyranny. Volonté générale untreated, taken in its Rousseauiste sense, facilitates subjection to tyranny and oppression, blighting everyone’s rights. “Let us assert, then, that reason is the only veritable sovereign among men; and that to reason alone belongs the right to make laws. Laws not dictated by reason are never obligatory, even when sanctioned by the majority.” “Let us begin, then,” he urged his colleagues, “by recognizing this great truth: that among men there exists no other legitimate sovereign on earth than
la raison universelle
and that this truth constitutes the most fundamental principle on which we base the majestic edifice of our Constitution.”
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Here was the true language of encyclopedism, Diderot, d’Holbach, Raynal, and Radical Enlightenment.

The constitutional commission agreed at the outset (not all the Convention did) to immerse itself in the best enlightened political theory available internationally, discarding all existing models at every stage. Their broadly agreed principles meant the existing British constitutional model was altogether ruled out beforehand, as were the American federal and state constitutions. Besides failing to declare the well-being of the majority the goal of society, and government, the American constructions all suffered from what Condorcet and his colleagues considered the obvious defects of an excessively strong presidency reminiscent of monarchy, senates not democratically elected, and a largely independent legal authority in the Supreme Court supervising a body of law with British case law (thoroughly scorned by Brissot, Condorcet, Clavière, and most revolutionary commentators) as its foundation. To them, the American Constitution was not based on volonté générale at all but on guaranteeing property, inherited privilege, and informal aristocracy, roughly on the British model.

French constitutional drafts in 1793 mostly rendered both executive and judiciary constitutionally subordinate to a legislature empowered to elect and control the executive’s members. What strife-torn France needed, the Convention agreed, was not any foreign model but a means of preventing splits within the legislature producing legislative paralysis. The solution, some deputies believed, lay in investing in the people an overriding power, “une censure sevère,” revoking the mandate of representatives who lost their confidence.
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The commission aimed both to protect individual liberty and direct the improvement and well-being of society.
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Since Condorcet’s, Paine’s, and Brissot’s democracy pivots on the idea of the volonté générale seeking the well-being of all, the Constitution needed to be both democratic electorally while formally acknowledging society’s obligation to counter economic inequality, albeit pursuing this goal by lawful and equitable means, especially progressive taxation and government grants to bodies assisting impoverished invalids, abandoned children, and “every man whose work is insufficient to support his subsistence.”
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As the commission grappled with their text during late 1792 and early 1793, heaps of theoretical treatises and proposed draft articles, indeed entire suggested draft constitutions, were submitted and circulated among the committee, Convention, and sometimes the eighty-four departments. Most participants in the debate showed considerably more enthusiasm for Rousseau than did Condorcet. But Rousseauist political thought remained deeply problematic from a democratic standpoint, and few insisted on Rousseauism to the point of questioning the representative principle itself. Among those who did was Charles Lambert, representing Côte d’Or. “Rousseau who will always be, in legislation as in politics, our polar star,” he declared on 10 June 1793, shortly after Robespierre’s coup had brought the Montagne to power, during the debate’s last stage, proved a “véritable démocratie” must reject “representative government.”
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Whenever the people’s representatives “betray its confidence, when the people feel mistaken in their choice, or those chosen are corrupted, whenever the national representation endangers instead of safeguards, the people must save the public interest themselves with no other recourse than their own energy.” France’s difficulties could be solved by an explicit, readily mobilized “révocabilité des représentants du peuple soit individuellement soit collectivement.” Not only must the people be empowered to direct and, when desired, cashier its representative body, replacing it at any time, it must “sit in judgment on every representative suspected of having prevaricated in his
functions.” Rousseauism of this kind meant sanctioning lesser insurrections besides the great “insurrections générales,” such as 14 July 1789 or 10 August 1792. If all Convention members acknowledged the legitimacy of
insurrection générale
against oppression, the legitimacy of lesser insurrections remained questionable. It was precisely to avoid the perils of
insurrections partielles
, argued Robespierristes, that revocability of representatives wherever any suspicion arises is indispensable.
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Besides Rousseau, other sources of inspiration offered pathways to counter the radical republicanism of Condorcet, Brissot, and the democratic leadership. One recommendation, inspired by the seventeenth-century English republican James Harrington (1611–77), who advocated an elitest gentry republicanism, now brushed up and given a democratic gloss, was that of James Rutledge (1743–94), whose journal
Le Creuset
during 1791 had praised Robespierre while pouring vituperation on Bailly, aristocracy, and the Club Monarchique. This grandson of an Irish Jacobite and son of a Dunkirk banker had originally idolized the Cordeliers, dubbing it the
sentinelle
of the Revolution,
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but in November 1791, his circle had provoked a furor over a projected public territorial bank, attacking Brissot and Pétion so vehemently that he and around twenty supporters were ejected. (These included Chaumette who, however, later withdrew from the splinter group, complaining of its proneness to intrigue.) Rutledge’s political philosophy included a feature strongly appealing to some “true Jacobins.” Following Harrington, Rutledge advocated using lots to choose both legislative representatives and the electors who would appoint them and the magistrates. Their method would circumvent Condorcet’s and Brissot’s doctrine that the people’s representatives should be men of superior merit and education, rendering them representative in the sense of being selected from, and like, ordinary people—a crucial distinction. Harrington’s republicanism modified could be used to ensure the primacy of the ordinary, removing the emphasis on merit, knowledge, and experience.

A notable foreign commentary was presented on 29 April 1793 by Brissot’s friend David Williams, the British Unitarian who came to Paris after being chosen as an honorary French citizen in September 1792, hoping to assist the Comité de Constitution. He judged the doctrine of volonté générale as truly philosophique but only when applied with unremitting precision.
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Among other things, this should include the right of women to vote and be active citizens, to have equal access to education, and constitute half the members of juries dealing with cases involving both sexes. It was strange, he remarked, that in Britain the
concept of equality was generally rejected, while in France it possessed great weight but was so inconsistently applied. A Declaration of Rights, like that proposed, couched in the new language of republicanism would hardly be of much use among a population unused to hearing such language, he stressed, without a prior campaign of public education to render its ideas more familiar. Rousseau’s brilliant imagination had induced the French to waste much time and effort on illusory notions of volonté générale, providing too few bonds and platforms for debate at intermediate levels.