Revolutionary Ideas: An Intellectual History of the French Revolution From the Rights of Man to Robespierre (80 page)

Toussaint-Louverture’s post-1795 isolationism and policy of disengaging from conflict with Spain and Britain eventually slowed the impetus of black emancipation. The Haitian revolutionary leadership in the colony’s interior, keen to become independent, reassured the other colonial powers that Saint-Domingue’s freed slaves did not intend to export revolution to other colonies, and would discontinue their collaboration of 1794–95 with the French revolutionaries. Sonthonax, saved by Thermidor, returned to Saint-Domingue and, in the coastal regions still held by the French, continued attempting to restore the Republic’s grip, battling both Jacobins and white planters. Abandoned by Toussaint-Louverture, and with the area under French control steadily
shrinking, Sonthonax was again captured by white colonists and dispatched to France shortly after the March 1797 French elections, which enabled the royalists briefly to dominate the French lower legislature and contemplate dismantling the Revolution. Sonthonax, ironically, was remitted to France to be tried for ruining the colonies for a second time, now by conservative monarchists. But again fortunate in his timing, he arrived just after the 1797 royalist resurgence was crushed by the coup of Fructidor. With militant republicans back in power, abolition of slavery was again resoundingly affirmed.
⁵⁴

The insurrections convulsing the greater Caribbean area in the 1790s, with their peak in 1795, represent a level of insurgency far larger than anything seen before 1790, or indeed again after 1800. Interaction between island revolt and the South American mainland was also more evident in these years than previously, or after 1815. Since the 1770s, disaffected Spanish American Creoles educated in Europe and imbued with radical enlightenment literature, men following in the wake of Francisco de Miranda, an enthusiast for the
Histoire philosophique
since the early 1770s, diffused subversive, radical ideas against the Spanish Crown and colonial system through the length of Spanish America.
⁵⁵
In July 1797, Spanish authorities in Caracas uncovered a plot involving mulatto militiamen,
pardos
,
zambos
, poor whites, some regular soldiers, and also white officials and traders instigated by educated dissidents headed by a hacienda owner, Manuel Gual, a thirty-eight-year-old pardo barber of La Guaira, Narciso del Valle, and a veteran Spanish republican agitator and pamphleteer, Juan Bautista Picornell (1759–1825).
⁵⁶
Although strictly defined, a pardo was someone of mixed race combining white, black, and Amerindian, the term by this time was often loosely applied to mulattoes. The barbershop of Narciso del Valle, where mulatto, black, and pardo artisans and soldiers congregated, served for many months as a veritable school of republican and egalitarian ideas and a recruiting center for revolution.
⁵⁷

Picornell had studied at Salamanca and, like Miranda, had become drawn to philosophical literature, especially the encyclopédistes. Sentenced to life imprisonment for involvement in a conspiracy in Madrid in May 1795, in 1796 he was deported to the Venezuelan fortress at La Guaira, near Caracas, where more than a hundred French prisoners captured in Saint-Domingue were being held and with whom he interacted, forming a new conspiracy.
⁵⁸
Plotting revolution with discontented members of the garrison and residents of the nearby port, he held a series of clandestine meetings in his cell. Among the seditious
manuscript pamphlets Picornell circulated in Caracas was a dialogue between two blacks, one French, that expressly propagated the French revolutionary idea of racial equality.
⁵⁹
Gual, Picornell, and the Caracas conspirators aimed at creating a Venezuelan republic that included legal emancipation for the blacks.

If few blacks as yet were equipped to read revolutionary literature, Raimond, Toussaint-Louverture, and Belley were by no means the only ones who did. If black insurgents in the French colonies mostly preferred monarchism and Catholicism to revolution, some imbibed different views. General alarm at the overall situation in the Caribbean, prevalent among white planters and among the Dutch, Spanish, and British alike, reflected more than just alarmed, overwrought sensibility. Some Caribbean blacks espoused revolutionary ideas, and this plainly affected the character, frequency, and scale of the risings. In Curaçao, the presence of Guadeloupe privateers (with now predominantly black and mulatto crews), had a conspicuously destabilizing effect on the island’s nonwhite population in the months preceding the 1795 rebellion, aggravating the rift between Orangists and Democrats. Repeated fights occurred between French sailors and Orangist members of the Curaçao military garrison. Blacks and mulattoes, often sailors from French ships, frequented gatherings in the popular district of Otrobanda where, reportedly, provocative songs were sung.
⁶⁰
In all the islands, and on the mainland, existed a small fringe of literate blacks definitely susceptible to radical ideas. Charles Guillaume Castaing, like Belley and Raimond in Paris, assisted Sonthonax politically and ideologically. Other individual cases stood out. A defiant mulatto named Juan Bautista Olivares greatly perturbed the authorities and bishop of Caracas in 1795 by having reportedly read (and explained to another mulatto) a printed sermon discussing liberty and equality by a French constitutional priest. The bishop was horrified to learn that this black man possessed a whole library of books and knew all about the Rights of Man, which he was eager to expound to others. Arrested and sent to Spain, he was eventually released and returned to Caracas.
⁶¹

The circumstances of the emancipation movement in the Caribbean in the 1790s proves those primarily instigating and exporting revolution in the islands and nearby South American mainland were usually white French republicans supported by blacks from the smaller French islands as well as Haiti. In Haiti, their main ally during the conflict of 1794–1800 was less Toussaint-Louverture, who increasingly detached himself from the French after 1795, than the mulatto leader André
Rigaud (1761–1811), a literate goldsmith born of a white father and black mother. A competent commander, from 1794, he militarily controlled the southern part of Saint-Domingue from where he pursued a more explicitly republican and pro-French agenda than Toussaint-Louverture.
⁶²
The essential impulse behind revolutionary subversion in the Caribbean area in the 1790s, including Haiti, thus emanated from revolutionary France itself, as is demonstrated by the crucial roles of Sonthonax and Hugues. The principal agent of black emancipation in the Caribbean during the 1790s was unquestionably the philosophique tendency within the Revolution, that is, the Radical Enlightenment working through the Paris Amis des Noirs and the Brissotin faction.

CHAPTER 16

Robespierre’s Putsch

(J
UNE
1793)

Dumouriez had to abandon his Dutch offensive, he informed the Convention on 12 March 1793 from Louvain, to prevent catastrophe overtaking the army. Six days later, the army of the north was crushed at Neerwinden. His shattered force fell back in a chaotic, headlong retreat, abandoning all Belgium, bereft of supplies, losing its equipment, and with many desertions. The defenses of Lille and the northeast’s other key fortress towns were reportedly in a deplorable state. On 25 March, Britain and Russia signed their alliance against France. Over the next days, the Prussians overran most of the free Rhenish republic and, on 6 April, besieged Mainz. The Revolution stood on the verge of collapse.

Dumouriez chiefly blamed the war ministry’s ineptitude, and especially Jean-Nicolas Pache (1746–1823), an official decried by him (and many others) as “vicieux et criminel,” a scoundrel whose thieving and treachery aggravated the army’s chronic lack of supplies and forced a chaotic retreat from Aachen where, disastrously, much of the French artillery was lost. With few exceptions, the political commissaires and fiscal agents posted in Belgium by Pache proved “rapacious tyrants,” making every conceivable mistake and subjecting the local populace to vexations of every kind. Belgian religious feelings had been scandalously affronted, the country’s holy cult objects brutally pillaged. Heading the war ministry since June 1792, Pache had been ousted in February by the honest Roland for gross dereliction of his responsibilities but been taken under his wing by Marat. Shortly after his dismissal, this corrupt “mannequin,” so helpful to “Montagnard ambition,” was triumphantly elected mayor of Paris, owing to powerful support, noted Fauchet, from Robespierristes employing their bullying and vote-rigging to secure “their candidate.”
¹

With “our defeat,” complained Dumouriez, Belgium’s priesthood summoned the villagers “to take up arms against us,” exploiting the revolutionaries’ reputation for extortion earned by Pache. A war against aristocracy on behalf of the Belgian villager became a crusade of peasants allied to aristocrats to save religion. The Convention must halt the exactions and extirpate the rogues introduced by Pache. Dumouriez did not confine himself to berating opponents in Paris. The Convention’s rule, he assured Danton while the latter was on inspection tour in Belgium, at the present rate would soon shrink to just the area around Paris. He was still more indiscreet with the three commissaires—Proly, Pereyra, and Dubuisson—accompanying the army. Whatever the Convention’s 745 deputies called themselves, they were “regicides” and “tyrants”! Dumouriez alone could save France from their ineptitude. If the present performance continued, he would come to Paris and dissolve the Assembly, even if they called him “Caesar,” “Cromwell,” or “Monk.” When Dubuisson asked whether he rejected the Constitution too, he called the projected new democratic Constitution excessively “stupid”: Condorcet understood nothing.
²
Only restoring monarchy would save the Revolution, and he planned to use the army, he hinted, to restore the king.
³
Proly, Pereira, and Dubuisson were the first to warn the legislature of Dumouriez’s pending treason.
⁴
The Montagne, holding off while he was successful, now demanded the general’s arrest and trial as a covert royalist sacrificing “friendly peoples” to his vile ambition.
⁵

Around France’s borders and coasts, March and April 1793 were months of general humiliation and defeat aggravated by British naval action and blockade disrupting French shipping and seaborne supply routes. Provoked by mounting conscription and requisitioning, royalist-Catholic insurgency erupted on a massive scale during March in a largely rural region in the west, south of the Loire, the Vendée. Under local leaders, infuriated peasant bands fanned out in all directions, triumphantly decking themselves with crosses and white cockades, calling for the return of the clergy and monarchy. They stormed several small towns, the entire Vendée area quickly being lost to the Revolution. The so-called
armée catholique et royale
slaughtered numerous Patriots as they advanced. Farther north, again led by refractory clergy, much of rural Brittany also rose, fired up against taxes, requisitioning, and conscription.

Among prisoners taken by the revolutionary militias were several
réfractaire
priests, disguised as peasants, carrying metal boxes filled with hosts.
⁶
“Seditious” persons, actively fomenting resistance
by disseminating circulars denouncing conscription and the Revolution, abounded also around Caen and Saint-Malo. A force of five to six thousand troops, reported the Revolution’s commissaires from Rennes, would suffice to quell the Breton insurgency north of the Vendée if deployed quickly. The main revolt in Brittany
was
swiftly crushed but was followed by endemic guerilla war, the Chouannerie, which persisted in Brittany and coastal districts of western Normandy for years to come. Meanwhile, in addition to defeat in Belgium and the Rhineland, and the rebellions engulfing the Vendée, Brittany, and Normandy, much of Corsica also rose. On 2 April the Assembly ordered its commissaires to arrest Paoli for expressing “dangerous views,” but their order to seize him arrived too late.
⁷
Paoli defected, assuming command of Corsica’s counterrevolutionary insurgency and offering the island to Britain. French troops counterattacked. Paoli escaped to London. Later, in the summer of 1794, with British help, the Paolistes recovered most of Corsica, the island turning temporarily into a Catholic viceroyalty under the British Crown.
⁸

Aghast at the shattering defeats, the Convention tried to sink their chronic differences. Danton rose to the occasion, determined to play a unifying role. The “Revolution cannot succeed, cannot be consolidated,” he urged, in a furiously applauded speech on 27 March, “except through the people. The people are its instrument; it is for you to mobilize them en masse.” Demanding a curtain be drawn over the wrangling of recent months, he passed over most of the latest unpleasantness. Vigorous measures were needed. Despite Brissotin hesitation, a special revolutionary tribunal with emergency powers, based in Paris and with branches in the provinces, was agreed upon and already functioning by 29 March. In departments where insurrection had broken out, those inciting counterrevolution were declared “hors de la loi” (outside the law), and were to be executed without trial.
⁹
The Assembly appointed a supreme Comité de Défense Générale, comprising twenty-five prominent deputies of both factions, headed by Brissot, Robespierre, Pétion, Gensonné, Danton, Sieyès, Condorcet, Buzot, Desmoulins, Barbaroux, Vergniaud, and Fabre.
¹⁰
But unlike Danton, Robespierre redoubled rather than ceased his attacks.