Revolutionary Ideas: An Intellectual History of the French Revolution From the Rights of Man to Robespierre (68 page)

Even if the people had the leisure and opportunity to make political judgments, they would still be too swayed by local and individual interests to reason adequately in relation to the whole. There was an absolute need for more layers and balance. “The works of Helvétius and the
Système de la nature
[d’Holbach] and the
Systeme social
[d’Holbach],” Williams (like Condorcet’s and Brissot’s circle generally) had no doubt, were “much more correct and masterly” than Rousseau’s. Had the “authors of these writings applied themselves to draw up a political constitution, they would have greatly abridged the work of our contemporaries.” But while endorsing the radical agenda partly, Williams simultaneously obscured matters in a way that sharply diminished his relevance. Unlike Condorcet and Gensonné, he did not consider “reason” the exclusive criterion for judging constitutions and deplored how little attention was being accorded to the past, seeing in particular a need to accommodate Anglo-Saxon notions of representation. The Convention should supplement its abstract ideas by studying Tacitus, Julius Caesar, Selden, Spelman, “the Saxon chronicle,” Hotman’s Franco-Gallia, and the Anglo-Saxon laws edited by David Wilkins.
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For Condorcet, Diderot, and d’Holbach, the central problem of politics was how to prevent the majority from being preyed upon by governments captured by vested interests. This remained the chief problem of politics throughout the Revolution. But in the context of early 1793, this preoccupation assumed a new form: how to prevent popular sovereignty and the doctrine of equality from becoming instruments of intimidation used to mobilize popular anger and prejudice behind dictatorship and tyranny.
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Paris was besieged by flatterers, false “friends,” and self-proclaimed
protecteurs
who enveloped themselves in the sovereignty of the nation while plunging the country into catastrophic political crisis, lamented Jean-Pierre Picqué (1750–1839), a deputy for the Hautes-Pyrénées, among the many expecting the Constitution to
become the means to save France. Consider, urged Picqué, how easily errors are made in so complex an undertaking as forging a constitution. Only recently had Montesquieu’s writings afforded some grasp of the moral and social factors governing the rise and decadence of states. How many Englishmen predicted “the rebels” who founded the United States and their new federal constitution would fail?
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Had not Mably misconstrued the politics of Sweden where government in recent years had gone from bad to worse? An independent, thoughtful observer who never spoke in the Convention, Picqué abhorred the Montagne. Ordinary people would eventually learn to spot the insidious “sophisms of the intriguers,” the “apostles of anarchy” now blighting all virtue and promoting vice. He was greatly encouraged by the Marseille popular rising against the Montagne in late May. Perhaps the “crazed demagogues” herding the public with paid hands, thugs, and dupes could be stopped after all.
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The answer to populist demagoguery and the “seducers” is to educate the people and advance the power of reason sufficiently to enable everyone to use philosophique arguments to defeat popular prejudices.
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Among the Convention minority attracted to the view that the sole legitimate kind of government is
gouvernement populaire
was François de Montgilbert (1747–ca. 1814), author of an unusually detailed set of Montagnard recommendations. The philosophes, in his opinion, exhibited excessive intellect, sophistication, and vanity. “Les philosophes ont trop d’esprit.” Their writings show that “while it is easy to discuss government,” one only gets to the heart of the matter through considering nature and the people’s solid common sense, the simplicity dictated by “nature.” The Convention should not “gather from [the philosophes’] works a few sparse notions, brilliant conjectures and comparisons to adorn our discourse.” Virtue, not talent or intellect, is the decisive quality in a democratic assembly’s deputies. A genuine republican constitution must forge one morality, pure and enlightened, rendering men happy by uniting them closely through the bonds of equality and fraternity. The best insights on government were indeed those of Rousseau, though he was not infallible, warned Montgilbert, just the best guide.
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He proposed a national legislature of five hundred deputies not checked by other arms of government, or regional or primary assemblies, but tightly subordinate to an abstract and uniform sovereignty designated “the people.” Leaders specially entrusted with the people’s confidence, should, with the people, carefully scrutinize the operations of government.
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Robespierristes aimed to maximize the people’s notional authority over their representatives, and this cornerstone of populist authoritarianism, in turn, relied on the idea that volonté générale cannot be represented, so that the legislature’s deputies must be rigidly mandated and readily recalled. For this reason, Rousseau’s thought was fundamental to the structure of Montagnard Jacobinism in a way that it never was for democratic republicanism. The challenge facing Condorcet was how to temper representation with direct democracy without surrendering to Montagnard rhetoric and dictatorship, or to Rousseau. Condorcet’s principle that the “law must conform to the actual will of the majority” meant that both mandating and revoking representatives needed to be complex electoral procedures carefully supervised.
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Accordingly, from September 1792 until June 1793, as long as the Left republicans shaped the Revolution’s course, one heard more criticism than praise of “the immortal Jean-Jacques,” repudiation not just of his claim that republics were for small, not large, nations, and views on censorship and religion, but equally of his ideas on representation and revocability. His detractors, and indeed some enthusiastic Rousseauists too, like Fauchet and Billaud-Varenne in his
Élements du républicanisme
, also rejected Rousseau’s emphatic insistence on natural man as an essentially solitary being freest when outside society.
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Considering the difficulties, Condorcet’s constitutional committee worked rapidly and efficiently. By early February 1793, the fruit of their endeavors was ready for presentation to the Convention. The draft submitted was signed by all nine members of the commission except Danton (who refused) and read over two sessions (15 and 16 February). Condorcet, speaking in the Comité de Constitution’s name, opened the proceedings on 15 February. Marat’s
L’Ami du peuple
that same day taunted Pétion for not having been seen for two weeks and Vergniaud, Guadet, Brissot, Gensonné, Barbaroux, and Salles for being little noticed either. “Where are they, then, these leaders of the infamous band of enemies of the people and supporters of royalisme? They lurked in obscure taverns,” he suggested, “conspiring against the patrie with emissaries of generals, corrupt ministers, declared foes of liberty and secret agents of hostile powers.”
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“The friend of the multitude is not always the friend of the people,” replied Brissot, in the
Chronique du mois
, and those like Marat and Robespierre, “stealing the name of the people,” were overawing the multitude to control society. If, formerly, popular superstition venerated kings, today it venerates certain individuals “who direct the opinion of the multitude.” “The
philosophes
are not any
less hated by these new tyrants than by the old ones, because they unmask them with the same courage as before. Nor is the multitude any less the foe of the
philosophes
today than they were before.”
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If the multitude, seduced by the court, denounced the philosophes before 1789, today, invested with the sovereignty that really belongs to all the people, the “multitude denounces the people’s true friends in the people’s name.” Until the multitude “s’éclaire” (becomes enlightened) or else this intrigue was defeated, the minority would tyrannize over the majority. The situation was dire because the
dénonciateurs
and the people’s flatterers were deliberately exploiting their poverty and inciting them against the rich, labeling the latter “aristocrates” and foes of the people. But the rich were at fault too, because they wanted the sea to become calm after a vast tempest without the necessary conditions being in place. The Republic could be rescued only by citizens willing to locate sovereignty “in the entire people” and “ascertain means to curb the influence of the rich.”
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Condorcet began with a general statement that democracy and a just society stem from the principles of equality and submission of the individual will to la volonté générale, and that Enlightenment alone had brought the people to correct ideas about society, liberty, and government.
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He rejected federalism outright, specifying what he believed were its deficiencies in the United States. He proposed a powerful single-chamber legislature balanced by public criticism and suggestions, expressed via vigorous primary assemblies in an orderly fashion through formal procedures of censure, approval, and petition.
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To scrutinize and adjudicate the legislature’s conduct, and channel opinion from the primary assemblies, there was also to be a constitutional court, a
conseil d’agents nationaux
.
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After Condorcet’s exposition of general principles, the newly revised Declaration of the Rights of Man in thirty-five articles was read out by Armand Gensonné (1758–93), a famously upright deputy from Bordeaux and the second-most active of the commission after Condorcet. It was a fuller version of the 1789 Declaration, many of the 1789 articles being retained with the wording only slightly altered. The additional articles were mainly intended to reinforce individual and collective liberty and build on the principle of equality.

The new Declaration significantly widened the framework provided by its predecessor. The 1789 Declaration does not expressly stipulate press and theater freedom, nor fully guarantee liberty of religious practice and belief. By contrast, the new Declaration’s Article IV reads: “Every man is free to manifest his thought and his opinions,” Article V
that “liberty of the press and all other means of publishing one’s ideas may not be interrupted, suspended or limited,” and Article VI that “every citizen is free in the exercise of his cult.” Article VIII declares not only are men equal before the law, but that the law must protect all, discipline society’s members, and respect their economic freedom equally. Article XVII incorporates Beccaria’s principle that the penal code must be both “proportionate” to the crimes it punishes “and useful to society.” Unlike any article in the 1789 version, Article XXVII explicitly affirms that sovereignty resides in the whole people with each citizen possessing an equal right to participate in its exercise.
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Where the new French Declaration diverged most markedly perhaps from 1789, and also from the United States Constitution, was in stressing and expanding the right to “surêté” (security). The 1789 Declaration merely cites “security” with liberty, property, and the right to resist oppression among the Rights of Man. The Condorcet draft explains “security” in Article X as the protection society affords every citizen in conserving his person, goods, and rights, and a minimum level of subsistence. Financial assistance to the needy, stipulated Article XXIV, is therefore “a sacred debt of society; it is for the law to determine its extent and application.” Otherwise, everyone is free to trade, labor, or hire out his labor, as he wishes, state Articles XIX and XX, except that no one can sell themselves—one’s person is not an alienable property.

Agreement about the new broader Rights of Man was swiftly attained in late April 1793, “happily suggesting a rapprochement between men of sharply differing opinions,” commented the
Journal de Perlet
. The consensus reached offered a “happy augury for the Constitution to follow that all Frenchmen await with such impatience.”
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The revised Declaration, though not faultless, reportedly manifested greater coherence and more “véritable philosophie” than the 1789 text. The subsequently amended Montagnard version of June 1793 altered some phrases and contained a few additional elements. In particular, it included a reference to being proclaimed “in the presence of the Supreme Being,” an interpolation over which Montagnards and Brissotins had clashed in April and was now added at Robespierre’s insistence, against the wishes of his intellectually more radical opponents.
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But twenty-three of the thirty-five articles remained essentially unchanged, as did Condorcet’s characteristic balancing of individual liberty and social harmony based on progressive taxation and compulsory elementary education.
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Gensonné then declaimed the actual articles of the draft constitution.
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With its elaborate provisions at local, departmental, and national
level for reporting, criticizing, and censuring the legislature and council of ministers, its assuring the right to protest and petition, and commitment to progressive taxation, the text embodied the democratic Revolution’s quintessence. All men older than twenty-one residing in France uninterruptedly for a year beforehand, unless medically certified as mad or stripped of citizen’s rights as a punishment (like some refractory clergy), received the vote. All male citizens older than twenty-five became eligible for office. Primary assemblies, the cornerstone, were to consist of more than 450 and no more than 900 local adult male residents for more than a year and have elected standing committees to supervise.
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Several draft articles provided checks clearly designed to discourage vote-rigging, intimidation, and vote-buying. A vital component of Condorcet’s direct democracy (afterward deleted by the Montagne from the new Constitution’s final version approved in June), was the choosing of the national executive council—seven ministers and a secretary comprising the government’s executive arm—not by the legislature but by the people directly through the primary assemblies.
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The seven ministers were designated for war, foreign affairs, naval affairs, treasury, agriculture, trade and manufactures, and most remarkably,
secours publics
(public assistance), including public works, organizations, and the arts.