Revolutionary Ideas: An Intellectual History of the French Revolution From the Rights of Man to Robespierre (8 page)

In April 1787, Louis replaced Calonne with another experienced man of state affairs, Étienne-Charles de Loménie de Brienne (1727–94), archbishop of Toulouse. Predictably, since nothing else suggested itself, the archbishop, altering a few details, reintroduced basically the same reform package as his predecessor. But judicial and aristocratic obstruction proved unrelenting. The regional parlements were highly experienced in such confrontations and readily mobilized support, not just among the nobility and clergy but also in the streets of regional capitals, as they had for centuries. Politically, the Crown was continually frustrated. At this point, nobility, clergy, and parlementaires, spurred by the Paris Parlement, urged a convening of the Estates-General (which had not met since 1614) as a way through the impasse. This body was expected to be dominated by the privileged orders, and to sanction the privileged elites’ capture of France’s fiscal machinery and administration.
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Revealingly, where the hierarchical traditions of the provincial estates, local parlements, and noble precedence persisted most (in provinces like Brittany, Béarn, Navarre, and the Dauphiné), popular opposition to the Crown was fiercest. But however useful for stiffening the elites’ demands, popular unrest remained perennially volatile, shifting, and readily manipulated. Since newspapers and pamphlets had in the past always been muzzled by royal censorship, few imagined the press might emerge as a powerful counterweight presenting an alternative agenda and principles.

At Rennes and Grenoble, the provincial capitals of Brittany and the Dauphiné, massive demonstrations erupted, in the latter case expressly championing privilege, the old constitution, and the parlements against royal authority. In the Dauphiné, government efforts at fiscal reform in 1787–88 had the effect of pitting the privileged—the nobility and parlementaires—together with the Third Estate against the Crown. On 7 June 1788 a particularly violent tumult occurred in Grenoble—the so-called Day of the Tiles. This commotion in support of the existing order, and of the parlement and provincial estates, was partly the work of angry peasants crowding into the city from nearby villages for the usual market day trading; it left several dead in the streets. Support for nobles and magistrates opposing royal initiatives also characterized the disturbances in Béarn, where peasants again figured prominently. The people spontaneously rebelled on hearing royal officials were attempting to intimidate parlementaires resisting royal demands.
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The united cry everywhere was no consent to new taxes or procedures prior to the convening of the Estates-General.

While resentment against seigneurial dues was also fairly widespread in parts of the French countryside, including the Dauphiné, Lorraine, Navarre, the Basque Country, and Normandy, little of this was either new or very virulent.
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Nevertheless, during the years 1787–88, there were several early warning signs potentially disturbing for both urban and rural elites. For one thing, town dwellers had come upon a new and independent way of learning about current affairs from the growing mass of topical and often stridently expressed pamphlets. The impact of these pamphlets, noticeable already in 1787—in which year 217 appeared—by late 1788 had grown in unprecedented fashion. In 1788, 819 were published, and in 1789 the equivalent figure was no less than 3,305.
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They were becoming the chief means of fomenting resistance to the Crown. Still more disturbing, even if confined to just a few regions, was the socially divisive effect of royal efforts at fiscal reform,
most obviously in Provence and in Brittany, where it pitted the Third Estate against the Crown
and
the privileged. Indications that friction between nobility and the Third could become acute were discernible also in Béarn, Navarre, and some other regions.
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The difficulties encountered on all sides left the king little option but to yield to the demands for convening the Estates-General. With both the privileged and the people demanding respect for precedent, existing laws, and parlements, in August the convening of the Estates-General was announced for 1 May 1789. For nine months, preparations for this great gathering dominated politics in Paris and the provinces alike. Initially, discussion of old precedents and charters predominated. But during the summer of 1788, the struggle between Crown and privileged elites changed into a battle between elites demanding the Estates-General’s traditional format, ensuring nobility and clergy together commanded twice the Third Estate’s voting power, and a group of wholly unrepresentative newcomers to the scene. The latter, mostly literary men and intellectuals, wanted privilege curbed and the Third Estate’s representation doubled to ensure formal parity of voting power with the privileged orders (which actually meant overall superiority as a minority of clergy and nobility backed the Third’s demands).

Here in embryo, in the drive to overturn nobility and privilege, a revolution was implied. All kinds of local clubs and reading societies that had flourished in recent years, sometimes decades (albeit until 1788 strictly nonpolitical),
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together with new ones set up at this time, joined the agitation for the “doubling” of Third Estate representation. Among the new associations was the Club of Thirty, established in Paris by Mirabeau, Sieyès, Clavière, Hérault de Séchelles, and Chamfort. Nicolas Chamfort (1741–94), the illegitimate but highly educated son of a grocer, was a brilliant aphorist and
littérateur
(intellectual) who featured prominently among those organizing contacts between provincial clubs and Paris. Accustomed to refined drawing rooms and literature, he now concentrated on the Paris streets, especially the Palais-Royal district, helping to stir opinion in the city center. Among those openly voicing republican ideas, and unrepresentative like the others of any economic interest, Chamfort was an intellectual prominent in calling for the Third to take the lead.
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The Palais-Royal, located on the north bank close to the Louvre, was to play a peculiarly formative role in ensuing developments, Mallet du Pan dubbing it the “vestibule” of the Revolution. Surrounded by arcades filled with cafés, such as the Café de Chartres, Café de Conti, and Grotte Flamande, bookshops, restaurants, and
entertainment locales attracting visitors of all types, the site was already Paris’s chief venue for political debate. Bequeathed in 1780 to the son of the Duc d’Orléans, the district was open to the public yet remained a private domain relatively free from police supervision. By 1788, it was notorious for lively café debate, prostitution, and the furtive vending of forbidden texts and obscene prints. It was the place, remarked Desmoulins, who developed into a skilled agitator here, where all of France digested the subversive brochures that “changed everybody—even soldiers—into
philosophes
.”
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But the chief opinion-shaping instrument wielded by the Third Estate’s aspiring leadership, even more than the cafés, clubs, and reading societies, was the press. The past promised nobility, clergy, and parlementaires an easy ascendancy. Bourgeoisie, peasants, and artisans seemingly offered no obstacle. But by late 1788, as preparations for the Estates-General progressed, the primacy of rank and tradition in shaping opinion no longer went unchallenged. Indeed, opinion suddenly became extremely difficult for the elites to control as others began directing gatherings and demonstrations. The demand for “doubling” the Third Estate’s representation rapidly caught on. As the struggle intensified, an unprecedented wave of militant antiaristocratic and anticlerical discourse, denouncing privilege, nobility, clerical influence, and the parlements, began affecting the course of events.

In 1788 a “revolution in political culture” occurred, especially in the language of politics, which proved decisive for shaping the Revolution.
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The political initiative was seized from the privileged elites by an extremely hostile, largely unrepresentative group lacking professional or economic ties. This occurred principally owing to the royal censorship’s progressive collapse and the press’s newfound capacity to shape opinion. At the same time, social disorder, especially endemic peasant violence, became more widespread, particularly in rural Provence.
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The Revolution commenced, explained Jean-Paul Rabaut Saint-Étienne (1743–93), a Protestant pastor from Nîmes and one of its early leaders, not with the meeting of the Estates-General in 1789, as most people later assumed, but during the months preceding its convening, when “a great number of writers” set to work influencing elements of the Third Estate, diffusing texts and reminding the people of their “rights.”
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The “new political culture” first invaded the large cities via speeches and pamphlets. In Marseille, the philosophe Guillaume-Thomas Raynal (1713–96) helped direct the initial uproar and spate of radical speeches in person; working with Honoré-Gabriel Riqueti, Comte de Mirabeau
(1749–91), one of the champions of press freedom, he “directed the first steps of the Marseillais in the astonishing Revolution” that followed.
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This escalating ideological assault on the ancien régime was concerted not by professionals or lawyers but by a handful of discontented nobles, littérateurs, renegade priests, and journalists, a group completely heterogeneous, socially and by education. What counted were neither numbers nor social background but rather their striking ideological cohesion and ability to sway their audience. They seized the urban public’s attention, deploying an entirely new revolutionary rhetoric of equality, democracy, and volonté générale.

This budding intellectual leadership was uniformly republican in tendency and eager to weaken the Church, even if, for the moment, little was said openly about republicanism or religion. The key subversive pamphlets expressed not political pragmatism deriving from experience, or anything drawn from precedent, charters, the law, parlements, or Jansenism (detested by all the philosophes), but a fully developed, elaborate ideology employing a wholly fresh terminology devised since the 1750s and widely propagated only since the censorship’s collapse. If the principal radical pamphleteers of 1788–89 were not all overt republicans and democrats, even the intellectual vanguard’s least militant voices were astoundingly ambitious, aiming for the root and branch transformation of society. Joseph (Giuseppe) Cérutti (1738–92) is especially interesting here, being less polemical and aggressive than Desmoulins, Volney, Chamfort, or Mirabeau. A Turin-born former Jesuit professor at Lyon who admired d’Holbach, Cérutti abhorred violence. Firmly among the revolutionary vanguard, in 1788 he refrained publicly from embracing democracy or republicanism (though he too was already privately a republican). Nevertheless, his
Mémoire pour le peuple françois
(1788) figured among the foremost subversive pamphlets assailing the privileged orders and traditional format of the Estates, doing so, though, while imploring the Third not to force “a revolution” that was realizing itself anyway. “
La Philosophie
has worked for you: don’t make her repent.” Violence had forged more chains than it had broken. The people should not combat the “old order” violently but instead patiently wait for enlightenment and the logic of events to transform everything, led by the soon-to-emerge representative legislature bound, he thought, shortly to supplant the Estates.
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Envisaging the complete overthrow of the existing order and its religious sanction in 1788–89 was not just implausible but altogether impossible without being, like Cérutti, saturated in the philosophical
writings of Helvétius, Mably, Price, Raynal, d’Holbach, Rousseau, and other such writers familiar only to a small minority. Where else in 1788 would one find the notion that “a revolution” was essential in order to fundamentally transform every single aspect of society, politics, and institutions, and that unbeknown to most this process had already begun? Everyone thinking in these uncompromising terms—Mirabeau, Sieyès, Brissot, Volney, Chamfort, Prudhomme, Mercier, Desmoulins, Pétion, Roederer, and Cérutti—belonged to this unrepresentative fringe category. Emmanuel Sieyès (1748–1836), son of a postal official (another renegade priest), possessed little worldly experience; in fact, he had spent his entire life immersed in books. The three resounding tracts he published between November 1788 and January 1789, before the Estates-General convened, nevertheless exerted a vast impact. Especially the first,
Essai sur les privilèges
, and last,
Qu’est-ce que le Tiers-État?
(January 1789), both partly products of group discussion at the Parisian Club of Thirty, vigorously propagated the phrases and philosophique terminology of the wider 1788 philosophique press campaign. They helped forge the rhetoric of the entire early Revolution and, like the other major tracts, were not broadly
Rousseauiste
in character, though he uses some of Rousseau’s phrases. The concepts Sieyès’s 1788–89 tracts were based on relied on a range of recent thinkers, a systematically materialist epistemology and metaphysics that he had continually refined since the early 1770s and turned into an instrument for attacking social hierarchy. As early as 1773, Sieyès avowed that his aim was to “seat
la philosophie
on the throne” by changing how the common people think. His materialism underpinned his guiding idea that “liberty in general” is what most favors the pursuit of individual happiness in society, the chief foes of liberty being the particular “liberties” of privilege, charters, and special rights, the status that existing society accorded nobles and clergy.
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