Revolutionary Ideas: An Intellectual History of the French Revolution From the Rights of Man to Robespierre (7 page)

By 1788, emerging Third Estate leaders already proclaimed equality the overriding moral and legal principle in legitimately determining relations among men. To them, the Crown was irrelevant, the clergy’s authority usurped, and nobility illicit. Their plans were molded not by social class or experience, nor profession or economic interest, but a comprehensive, interlocking system of principles rooted in la philosophie
,
which, according to Mirabeau, Sieyès, Volney, Condorcet, and Brissot, was solidly anchored in empiricism and science.
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By 1788, this republican and near-republican core had long rejected the division of a future national assembly into three orders—nobility, clergy, and Third Estate—along with everything Montesquieu recommended concerning division of powers and emulating Britain. They were uniformly disdainful of “institutions aristocratiques.”
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Society would be reordered on the basis of equality. All men should enjoy the same “rights.” The law should be remade on the basis of philosophique principles because “reason” and equity are the sole criteria of moral and social legitimacy.

To them, equality was the key to establishing basic human rights and reconstituting politics, institutions, social relations, marriage, education, and the law on their proper basis. For the Revolution’s innumerable opponents, by contrast, whether Counter-Enlightenment ideologues or “moderate” enlighteners, equality was an artificial and illicit concept. Opponents viewed their doctrine as derived from a false philosophy rooted in irreligion, fanaticism, and Freemasonry, or, as Burke, Gibbon, and Portalis preferred, in unwisely adopted “abstract propositions.”
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What made it necessary to proclaim the Rights of Man, harnassing the power of the state to the principle of human rights, held Roederer, was inequality of means and wealth in society. Unless one accepts government by vested interests at the expense of the weak that oppresses the majority and enriches the strong, government must intervene to help the deprived, watch over the whole citizenry, and guarantee to all “le plenitude de leurs droits” (plenitude of their rights).
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Only in light of the “revolution that occurred before 1789”—the “revolution in concepts”—does it emerge clearly why the Revolution was not just a political but also a “financial, military, civil, moral and religious revolution.”
⁶⁷

The Paris librarian and bookbinder Louis-Marie Prudhomme (1752–1830) expressly set out with his illustrated Sunday paper, the
Révolutions de Paris
, launched in July 1789, to forge a new society based
on a “Declaration of the Rights of Man,” guided principally by “la philosophie.”
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While oppression was ubiquitous and the ultimate cause of all revolutions, nowhere had there been any real revolution prior to 1788, held Prudhomme. Such a revolution requires “les lumières de la raison,” la philosophie moderne, to forge the awareness, analysis, plans, media, knowledge, and conditions without which real revolution in the new sense, disseminated by the
philosophes-révolutionnaires
, is not possible. Doubtless, some peoples, like the Dutch and English, partially recovered “their rights” through revolt “before the reign of philosophy.” But this Prudhomme deemed sustainable only in a hesitant, vengeful, and incomplete manner, where not guided by “la pacifique opération de la philosophie.” The more philosophy guides, the less violent and more complete the revolution will be. It is earnestly to be hoped, he added, that la philosophie will overawe passion, hatred, and resentment during the revolution now commencing.
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Here, Prudhomme, Desmoulins, Kervélégan, La Harpe, and many others were to be gravely disappointed.

Authentic revolution of the kind these writers envisaged needs not only to be made but also consolidated. If philosophy alone enables men to understand the human condition sufficiently to accomplish genuine revolution, likewise philosophy alone can prevent men from immediately sliding back under slavery. Without philosophy mankind cannot devise adequate, well-designed constitutions or correctly formulate “les droits sacrés de l’humanité,” or counter the risk of rural disorder and “le despotisme du peuple.”
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There is no such thing as a successful fight against credulity and religious bigotry, contended Prudhomme, not directed by la philosophie. “O mes concitoyens!,” urged his journal, “do not forget that ignorance is the mother of error”; banish ignorance and your liberty is safe.
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Here was an ideology bound to convert the clash between la philosophie and its foes into a long and bitter struggle.

Those Roederer termed “les disciples de la philosophie moderne” in the end failed to consolidate the revolution they forged and, for a time, from the summer of 1793 to late 1794, were ousted by the Montagnards, the populist bloc derisively given this name originally because they sat on the highest benches, on the Left, in the Assembly. According to this faction, the people’s will and common man’s sentiments were the Revolution’s sole legitimate guide. This interruption, especially the ten-month Terror (September 1793–July 1794), followed a prolonged power struggle. It produced a complete reordering of the Revolution’s basic values, in fact, the undoing of the Revolution. During these months, democracy, freedom of thought and expression, and the Rights
of Man were jettisoned, freedom of the press aborted, individual liberty annulled, and terror exalted. But this catastrophic upset and trampling of human rights proved relatively brief and was then largely reversed again between 1795 and 1799.

Nevertheless, this bloody aberration, relatively short-lived though it was, posed (and still poses) a question that from 1795, in turn, became an ideological battlefield. Was the Terror inherent in the revolutionary principles of 1789 and hence also the outcome of la philosophie? This was the undeviating claim of all antiphilosophes, ultraroyalists, constitutional monarchists, and disillusioned former revolutionaries like La Harpe. These were all eager to link philosophisme, republicanism, materialism, and atheism to moral perversity. But were they right to attribute the Terror to the secte philosophique? A thorough sifting of the evidence suggests that they were wrong. Many of the philosophe-révolutionnaires responsible for the revolution of 1788–93 were ruthlessly guillotined by Robespierre. The survivors adamantly denied that the Revolution had immolated itself. They explained the doctrine of Robespierre and his allies as the outcome of a completely different and antagonistic ideology. If Marxist accounts of the Revolution as the outcome of class struggle today look flawed, François Furet’s widely respected thesis ascribing innate totalitarian leanings and an embedded latent illiberalism to the Revolution in its origins and basic principles needs rejecting just as comprehensively.

Among the strangest misconceptions plaguing accounts of the French Revolution nowadays is the still-predominant consensus that the “break between the Revolution and Christianity”—especially the Catholic Church—was “non-essential, contingent and explicable only in terms of the subsequent vicissitudes of the Revolution itself.” The break was supposedly not inherent in the context of 1789. In fact, all the evidence demonstrates the opposite. The impulse to (nonviolent) revolutionary de-Christianization was basic to the outlook of the philosophique leadership who made the Revolution before, as well as in, 1789.
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There are also other widely accepted, striking, and utterly unfounded myths. Among the revolutionary leadership “in the summer of 1789,” reaffirmed one leading scholar recently, “virtually no one challenged the principle of monarchy,” a statement for which he assumed it suffices to invoke the general consensus.
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There is, indeed, a wide consensus among historians about this. But no close observer took this view at the time—quite the contrary. When Jean-Louis Carra (1742–93), among the principal National Convention deputies, Jacobin activists,
and Parisian newspaper editors, remarked in a pamphlet of June 1793 that he was a “republican” who had roundly rejected monarchy in 1789 and who had done so also long before 1789, he was merely echoing a standpoint not just widespread but general among the French revolutionary vanguard (but not, of course, Robespierre and the populist faction).
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It would seem that historians’ prevailing consensus here once again rests on nothing more than the long-standing failure to give sufficient weight to the Revolution’s intellectual history and hence is likewise in urgent need of revision.

The Left revolutionary leadership in 1789 both rejected Christianity (whether from a deist or atheist-materialist standpoint)
and
as a bloc abjured the principle of monarchy, either wholly, like Carra, Brissot, and Desmoulins, or, as with Mirabeau and Sieyès, in the main. In 1789, Carra’s and Desmoulins’s republican stance was shared, we shall see, throughout the revolutionary democratic vanguard—by Condorcet, Kersaint, Dusaulx, Mandar, Lanthenas, Gorsas, Brissot, Pétion, Chamfort, Volney, Pierre-François Robert, Bonneville, Paine (who joined the French revolutionary leadership in the autumn of 1792), and the playwright Marie-Joseph Chénier. The philosophique revolutionary leadership as a group (unlike authoritarian populists such as Marat, Robespierre, Saint-Just, or Hébert) was overwhelmingly republican from the outset. In short, key general assumptions about the French Revolution, everywhere frequently repeated and long accepted by both philosophers and historians, turn out to be fundamentally incorrect, leaving us with an uncommonly urgent need for some very sweeping and drastic revision.

CHAPTER 2

Revolution of the Press

(1788–90)

By 1787, the French Crown was on the verge of collapse. Financially ruined by the ballooning of an immense state debt, the monarchy’s prestige lay shattered by defeat in Europe and vast colonial losses. France had lost Canada and nearly all her outposts in India. At this point the monarchy found itself without the resources to support the status it had consistently enjoyed for centuries in international, maritime, and colonial affairs. Worsted by Britain in the Americas, Asia, and Africa, since 1750, the French Crown had also been humiliated in European great power rivalry, most recently in the Dutch political crisis of 1787 when, “by virtue of the right of brigands,” as the Milanese radical philosophe, Giuseppe Gorani (1740–1819), expressed it, Prussia’s new king, spurred by the British prime minister Pitt, invaded the United Provinces. Crushing the Dutch democratic revolution (whose leaders were allied to France), Prussia had restored the House of Orange, a firm ally of Britain and Prussia. Most European rulers celebrated the defeat of democratic ideas in the United Provinces. But the triumph of Anglo-Prussian influence in the Netherlands represented a major international setback for France, implying unsuspected weakness.
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The Versailles court, paralyzed by spiraling debts and unable to finance the upkeep of its armies, fortresses, and navy, saw no solution to its difficulties other than to reorganize and rationalize the state in the only way apt to furnish new resources. This involved persuading the privileged elites, who owned most of the wealth, to surrender some of their immunities and exemptions and contribute more to state revenues. Discussion followed as to how the monarchy’s fiscal, legal, and administrative apparatus could be reformed, the process marking the commencement of the ancien régime’s breakdown. The elites proved willing
enough to exchange their privileges and immunities for an altered role in the monarchy, provided they remained privileged and shared more directly in the exercise of royal power. Indeed, by 1788, the weakened monarchy was distinctly at risk of being reconstituted as an aristocratic republic, with the king reduced to a mere figurehead. Initially, the three main elites—nobles, clergy, and parlementaires
—
seemed well placed to preside. France’s domestic situation was volatile. Bread prices were high and the urban and rural population restless. But this was nothing new. Popular disaffection, experience suggested, could mostly be shepherded wherever the elites wished. Superficially, little seemed to threaten France’s traditional elites or the complex, long-standing, but apparently mendable institutional framework some of them aspired to refashion.

In 1786, the royal Controller-General, Calonne, aired his plans for reorganizing the state finances, administration, and local government, and establishing new mechanisms of consultation between court and provinces. Opposition came principally from the Parlement de Paris, France’s chief regional high court, a body with a long record of obstructing royal fiscal and political initiatives. To outflank parlementaire opposition, Calonne advised the king to convene an Assembly of Notables representing all classes of society but dominated by the nobility and higher clergy. His scheme failed. Despite alarm at the vastness of the royal debt, estimated at 113 million livres, this assembly rejected Calonne’s plans. Confidently recalcitrant nobles, parlementaires, and clergy opposing the royal will received ample backing from below, as had often occurred in the past.