Revolutionary Ideas: An Intellectual History of the French Revolution From the Rights of Man to Robespierre (71 page)

Billaud-Varenne’s social program diverged from that of Brissot, Condorcet, Daunou, and others seeking to incorporate into the Constitution the state’s duty to counteract excessive wealth inequality, and provide subsistence and reasonable bread prices, in ends as well as in method with his preoccupation with price-fixing and imposing forced loans. If his and Montgilbert’s insistence on including the “right to subsistence,” and considering this the most basic of all rights, was shared by much of the chamber,
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countering wealth inequality in Billaud-Varenne was infused with a strong preference for rural simplicity and agriculture over commerce and industry. For Billaud-Varenne, Jullien, and Chaumette, unlike Brissot or Daunou, condemning wealth inequality was tied also to a fierce tirade against luxury and “epicureanism” in favor of austerity and lifestyle equality. Both rival blocs identified
le capitaliste
as antisocial, selfish, and damaging, apt to subvert government in his own interest. Billaud-Varenne assailed
capitalistes
as “proud vampires” who exploited those they employed while scandalously pillaging the public purse. But Montagnards like Billaud-Varenne also thought in terms of imposing new egalitarian lifestyle norms through education and public instruction. The duty of the Revolution, in his eyes, was to bring men back to their supposed (by Rousseau) primordial, virtuous essence, to their essential “disposition irrésistible” to cultivate virtue.
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Virtue, not philosophisme, held Robespierre, Saint-Just, and Billaud-Varenne, must be society’s guide. A true republic based on equality and popular sovereignty stems not from enlightenment but from the struggle between virtue and selfishness. Cato the Censor Billaud-Varenne proclaimed mankind’s supreme role model. Appointed to the republic’s highest offices, he adhered to a simple lifestyle and manners. What most differentiated “true Jacobin” egalitarian ideology in its most cogent form, as expressed by Billaud-Varenne, from Brissotin philosophique principles was the idea that to create a viable republic, behavior—indeed, human nature itself—must be remade using a combination of coercive measures and rigorous education. To fortify French patriotisme and esprit public, “vast and majestic amphitheatres” should be built so that the people could appear en masse in national celebrations and festivities as a single body, elevating each other with displays of noble zeal for the public cause.
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Billaud-Varenne, like Rousseau, summoned women to return to the tasks proper to them: cultivating modesty above everything and assisting the return to simplicity, equality, and nature. Segregating the sexes, abjuring alluring fashions and the erotic, eulogizing only tender mothers and loyal wives would reinforce society’s march to simplicity.
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The French constitutional debate of 1792–93 proved the Revolution in its republican phase was a battleground between two passionately held and implacably opposed ideologies, at bottom so different and incompatible that no way existed to reconcile them. Exalting the Rights of Man, ostensibly common to all the Convention theorists of 1793, actually masked a vast cauldron of disagreement. The planned popular referendum, to ask the people to abjure monarchy “for ever,” should also urge the people, suggested Jean-Baptiste Harmand (1751–1816), to reject every form of government incompatible with popular sovereignty. Their
république démocratique
should be exclusively based on the Rights of Man, that is, espousing human rights, including satisfying men’s economic needs, on the ground of reason alone.
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Both the Constitution and the Revolution itself were directly threatened by this deadlock in the Convention and the country. Intense anger and exasperation accumulated on both sides. The constitutional quarrel could be resolved only when the deadlock was broken.

Once this happened, with the Montagne’s forcible seizure of power on 2 June 1793, the ensuing changes unsurprisingly proved fairly extensive both rhetorically and in substance, though a recognizable residue of Condorcet’s work still remained. The amended June Constitution was still recognizably Condorcet’s in numerous respects but adjusted to render it less democratic, less favorable to individual liberty, and fully equipped to curtail the roles of the electorate, primary assemblies, departmental councils, and legislature.
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Outlining the principles by which he had revised the Constitution, on 10 June the chairman of the new Montagnard committee of five (altogether excluding the Brissotins)—Hérault de Sechelles, Couthon, and Saint-Just, plus two little-known figures—Hérault explained that his committee’s goal was to achieve a volonté générale not fragmented, divided, or subject to dissent. He would have adopted Saint-Just’s proposal for a nonstaged, single, nationwide election of deputies to the legislature had this been practicable.

Where Condorcet’s constitution invokes reason alone, omitting all mention of any supernatural sanction, the amended Rights of Man affirms these in the “presence of the Supreme Being,”
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a notable concession to Rousseauist deism and to the Convention’s Christian egalitarians. The primary assemblies would still gather each year to select the electors for each departmental district to choose the Assembly deputies, judges, and bishops, but they lost most of their powers to debate, criticize, and petition. Where Condorcet’s constitution protected the people’s right to consider, criticize, and amend legislation, Hérault’s
revisions restricted the right to debate and criticize the legislature’s enactments from below. Public functionaries, explained Hérault, would now be elected indirectly by small bodies of chosen “electeurs” rather than the primary assemblies; everyone knew this was a device more amenable to management from above than Condorcet’s open voting in primary assemblies.
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Where Condorcet’s constitution lent a voice to the departmental councils, as well as the primary assemblies, this too was canceled. To weaken the legislature, the new executive council of twenty-four supervising the ministry would now not come under the control of the legislature but be chosen from nominations compiled by the primary assemblies’ benches of electors, a mechanism plainly devised, held Brissotin critics, by “brigands” depriving the legislature of direct oversight and power over ministers and their ministries.
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Robespierre, Marat, and Saint-Just sought to curtail scope for democratic expression from communities and districts from below while introducing an efficient mechanism for recalling individual deputies through the communes (that Condorcet had blocked) so as to weaken the legislature as well. Saint-Just had all along sought to ensure that when an Assembly member was accused by a commune, he must justify himself or resign, and wherever a deputy lost the confidence of most deputies, he must be tried. Hérault tried to limit the scope for infringing individual rights by the Assembly with his independent national grand jury, or constitutional court, erected to adjudicate possible violations of human rights. But deferring to Robespierre (and Chabot), the Convention removed this safeguard “destined to revenge the oppressed citizen for the vexations and wrongdoing caused either by the legislature or the cabinet of ministers,” reducing the grand jury instead into a means of surveillance of the legislature.
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Final revisions, following the Montagnard seizure of power on 2 June, were debated between 10 and 24 June when the Constitution was pronounced complete. The Assembly’s remaining Left republicans, led by Ducos and Boyer-Fonfrède, fought to render particular articles more democratic while Robespierre and his allies battled to render them less so.
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Several deputies, most vocally, Ducos, attempted to retrieve Condorcet’s provisions for the primary assemblies. The primary assemblies were to meet once a year automatically, on 1 May, to conduct elections. To convene an extraordinary session of a primary assembly, a petition from one fifth of the citizens with a right to vote was proposed; binding decisions would require half plus one of the active citizenry present at the meeting. It was Robespierre in person who scotched this,
claiming that Condorcet’s principle undermined government, establishing the kind of democracy that overthrows instead of defends the people’s rights. On 14 June, he criticized amended Article XII in Hérault’s draft, which stipulated (while diluting the equivalent provision in Condorcet’s draft) that the primary assemblies could still assemble for extraordinary meetings whenever a majority plus one of their voters composing it so desired. “This article is hardly at all
populaire
,” objected Robespierre, but rather an “excès de démocratie.” Declared foe of representative democracy, Robespierre turned out to be equally opposed to direct democracy, insistently depleting it in the name of virtue, the people, and Rousseau. If it gave any scope to the primary assemblies, the Constitution would create a wholly undesirable
démocratie pure.
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Besides reducing the influence of primary assemblies and departments over national decision making and powerfully strengthening the executive, another key difference between Condorcet’s draft and the amended Constitution adopted in June, was the Montagne’s canceling direct suffrage for higher offices in deference to a Montagnard “principle” Hérault could scarcely ignore. While deputies were still to be selected by democratic elections, ministers and executive committees would now be chosen only indirectly, by committees of the deputies.
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In this debate, Robespierre unreservedly backed the antidemocratic, populist reasoning of Chabot: if the executive council is to be fully subordinate to the people, then it must not be elected by the people. The Convention duly obeyed, voting for the executive not to be selected directly by the electorate but behind closed doors, indirectly, by a restricted committee of Assembly “électeurs.”
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Hérault appeared before the Convention for the final reading on 24 June. A majority of the Convention had decreed that this was definitely the last reading and that the new Constitution would be presented without delay to the people. A commotion occurred when a deputy named Guyet-Laprade, for Lot-et-Garonne, interjected that unresolved points remained. He was shouted down, several Montagnard voices adding that the protester should be locked up in the Abbaye. At this, a courageous band of protesting Brissotin deputies rose to their feet: “Let’s all go, all go to prison, the Convention no longer exists!”

In late June, the new regime presented the Constitution to the people, thereby adopting an elaborate moral fig leaf conferring legality and constitutionality on the coup of 2 June. This, more than anything, impressed the primary assemblies and communes to which the text of the new Constitution was sent. The primary assemblies were asked
to endorse the Constitution without comment and without having a chance to digest its contents, and especially without listening to the arguments of Brissotin objectors. It received a broadly positive reception. Many who opposed the coup d’état of 2 June, and arrests of the Brissotin leadership, understandably hesitated to join the armed rebellion against the usurping clique, as they were unwilling to provoke civil war amid the Revolution’s life-and-death struggle with Europe’s monarchies, and were tempted to assume such a drastic remedy was in any case unnecessary. For here, finally, was the so-greatly-longed-for Constitution, the new democratic machinery and affirmation of basic human rights, surely a sufficient antidote! They were to be bitterly disillusioned.

The Constitution was the new regime’s most effective weapon in winning sufficient support and legitimacy to govern. When a delegation from the société populaire of Soissons arrived on 25 June to endorse the 2 June coup, they applauded the “courage that you have shown in removing from the Constitution’s bosom those perfidious representatives of the people who by their clamour retarded your work.” Soissons wished to be a model of republican solidarity and “virtue fighting for liberty,” dissenting from the departmental administration of Aisne (supporting the Brissotin rebellion sanctioned by the Aisne deputies, Condorcet and Debry). Soissons, the delegation assured the Assembly, would oppose everyone attempting to march on Paris to reverse the coup, their town viewing with contempt the “liberticide writings of the Condorcets, Jean Debry, etc.”
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Yet, despite all this, the revised 1793 Constitution remained a remarkable achievement. Article 124 declared that the new Declaration of the Rights of Man, with its ringing first article proclaiming “the goal of society the common happiness” together with the entire text of the Constitution, should be inscribed on special tablets to be displayed in the Convention hall and in public places. Condorcet’s constitution, even though somewhat disfigured, nonetheless recognizably survived in a document of surpassing importance in world history, even though the text so long contested and finally adopted on 24 June was only legally in force for three months before being suspended indefinitely on 10 October 1793. It remained the first modern democratic constitution and the first constitution ever, as Condorcet had stressed, not imposed by an aristocracy on the basis of the myth of an existing particular constitution, like the Bill of Rights and English Constitution of 1689. It was the first ever constitution established by “reason” in the name of the people as a whole.
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Under its Article IV, “every man born and domiciled in
France” older than twenty-one and every foreigner older than twenty-one living and working in France for more than a year, or married to a Frenchwoman or who has adopted a French child or supports any elderly person, was admitted to the full rights of citizenship.
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