Revolutionary Ideas: An Intellectual History of the French Revolution From the Rights of Man to Robespierre (9 page)

The astounding press ferment of 1788 spread across France. In Brittany, the contest between the seven to eight hundred nobles controlling the provincial Estates and the Third’s spokesmen over whether the Breton delegations to the Estates-General should accept “equality in repartition of taxes,” and the cutting back of the noblesse de robe’s privileges, quickly turned vitriolic. Against the journalists, the Parlement de Rennes, “perhaps the most ignorant of the thirteen [judicial] senates of France,” according to one journal, lent the privileged orders unstinting support.
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At stake was the primacy of privilege, charters, ennobled magistracy, clergy, and tradition, the very principle of a society of ranks. Especially prominent in stirring opposition at Rennes was Volney’s five-pamphlet
series,
La Sentinelle du peuple
, commencing on 10 November 1788 with a blistering attack on the nobility’s self-interested scheming. At a time when friction between defenders of the old order and “young patriots” at Rennes was turning violent, causing ugly clashes in the streets, in late January 1789 Volney openly summoned the Third to reject all the claims of the
privilégiés
.
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Constantin-François Volney (1757–1820), son of an ennobled family of local notables from Mayenne, had, like Sieyès and most of the others, no experience in politics and was steeped only in books. An energetic young orientalist and zealous disciple of Helvétius and d’Holbach, a materialist and atheist belonging to the intellectual circle around Madame Helvétius (and disdainful of Rousseau), he propagated Radical Enlightenment in the most uncompromising terms. With newspapers as his tool, he helped fashion Breton dissatisfaction into an effective force. His very first issue denounced the Breton Estates as “des États illégales et abusives” and called for superfluous ecclesiastical properties to revert to the nation. In subsequent issues, Volney openly incited the Bretons to defy both nobility and clergy by refusing to permit voting by orders in the Estates-General. The “public interest” is that of the people, and Bretons must ensure they are not the last to move “in the Revolution now encompassing the whole of France.”
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Where “moderates” in the debates of 1788 typically invoked Montesquieu and eulogized the British constitution, by December 1788 Volney further manifested his radicalism by publicly mocking Britain, where a king supposedly held an entire people in the balance. He admonished his countrymen to ignore existing models since “tous les hommes naissent égaux.” He likened the Breton nobility to a sickly old aristocratic lady, needing much medicine and intensive nursing from underlings (the clergy and parlementaires) to prop her up, her imminent demise being sure to transform everything for the better.
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Another prominent non-Rousseauiste voice proclaiming and advocating revolution was that of Chamfort, a member of Mirabeau’s entourage, brooding, sour, and fiercely hostile to aristocracy. Envious of those possessing by birth what he lacked (but also scorning the people’s “ignorance”), he made no secret of the fact that were he and his friends to prevail, they would go “much further than any popular mandate entitled them to do.” Some candidates for the Estates-General, cuttingly remarked a literary acquaintance, Marmontel, seemed to have their own ideas about what needed changing. “Bon!” retorted Chamfort, “la nation sait-elle ce qu’elle veut?” A big flock seeking pasture, the people
could be led to want what they had never imagined. Shepherds with good dogs would herd them wherever they wished. “In tracing our new path we have every reason to want to make a clean sweep.”
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The people, as yet, knew nothing about it, but republicanism, eliminating nobility, and weakening religious authority were already entirely fundamental to the Revolution as it was evolving in his mind and those of his circle.

The revolutionary leadership’s emerging discourse was increasingly characterized by the totality of the rupture with the past that it demanded. Already in 1788, many key commentators refused to concede any legitimacy or constitutional standing to the Estates-General as historically defined, demanding sweeping reforms before acknowledging its legitimacy.
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Their platform was the electoral districts and assemblies authorized by the Crown throughout the country to organize the election of representatives. But what was voiced was not popular opinion. Numerous pamphlets of 1788 claimed to be “popular,” pamphleteers frequently posing as artisans, townsmen, “serfs,” or peasants. Strictly speaking, though, all this was bogus, as the pamphlets were invariably the work of highly educated polemicists.
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Little evidence survives as to how the uneducated common people really thought. Nonetheless, these pamphlets, deliberately addressing the lower orders, circulating in town and country, succeeded in some degree in arousing artisans and peasantry against both Crown and aristocratic policies, including in the Dauphiné and Brittany.
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In the capital, sixty electoral districts were formed over the winter and entrusted with choosing the “assembly of electors” that would then select Paris’s representatives to the Estates. In these district assemblies, popular opinion was allegedly the key, but who was shaping opinion? Historians have often claimed such pamphlets ultimately served the needs of the educated and affluent bourgeoisie.
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But key writers like Mirabeau, Sieyès, Carra, Cérutti, Pétion, and Desmoulins made no explicit appeal to any particular group and lacked ties with every major economic bloc.

The new electoral system was introduced by the Crown itself when the Assembly of Notables reconvened in November 1788, in preparation for the elections for the Estates-General. The Crown proposed “doubling” the Third Estate’s representation and making each delegate the representative of an equivalent number of voters, hoping thereby to counterbalance the formerly overweening influence of the privileged and play off the Third against the nobility and clergy. But ministers had no wish to end separate voting by orders or to weaken privilege as such. They desired France to remain a society of orders politically and socially,
with nobility and clergy able to overrule the Third. Over the next months the Crown pursued what royal ministers judged a responsible, even-handed strategy designed to minimize friction and enhance the Third’s status while retaining safeguards to ensure the continued ordering of society into ranks.

Delegates to the Estates-General in the past had been expressly mandated to support or oppose particular proposals, and in 1788–89 too, before the Estates convened, matters proceeded along traditional lines. Delegates were deemed to represent particular orders in specific localities, not individuals or citizens.
Cahiers de doléances
expressing local opinion in the parishes were drawn up in all localities to direct the delegates. This conformed to precedent and under more normal circumstances could only reinforce the elites’ predominance, as these gatherings were chaired and notarized by nobles, notables, and lawyers, with nobles and clergy also holding separate meetings. This time matters proceeded rather differently, though, due to the tide of oppositional rhetoric surging up from the clubs, literary societies, and increasingly unfettered press, backed by growing popular unrest following the disastrous grain harvest of 1788. In a number of places, highly articulate and literate “Patriot” committees, dominated by club members, editors, and literary men, supervised the elections for Third Estate representatives, ensuring the election of some delegates who were militantly antagonistic to the system of orders and the preeminence of “aristocrats” and priests. Infiltrating the electoral committees and selection of the Third’s representatives, radical thought for the first time penetrated the political arena.

The Revolution’s second phase commenced in late April 1789 when the Third’s newly elected six hundred deputies—half of the Estates-General’s total of 1,200 delegates—duly gathered at Versailles, refusing the royal agenda and procedural directions. Not only these twelve hundred gathered for the political drama—so did a sizable body of eager, unelected commentators, journalists, and independent observers, many ambitious but unsuccessful candidates in the elections, including Chamfort, Ginguené, Brissot, the mathematician Gilbert Romme (who had spent five years in Russia tutoring the sons of aristocrats), and a discharged schoolmaster soon to win renown, Antoine-Joseph Gorsas (1752–93).
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Chamfort, not elected but eager to participate nevertheless did so, like his Breton journalist friend Ginguené, by providing close support for Mirabeau. At this point, Sabatier noted, in both Estates-General and at court, a new and divisive discourse arose—adopted earlier
in the 1780s in Switzerland and Holland and now pushed hard by this tiny and unrepresentative but highly articulate, intellectualized, nonprofessional clique following Mirabeau and Sieyès—that labeled the two principal, opposed blocs in the Estates-General
aristocrates
and
démocrates
.
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The Third’s deputies, historians often note, included no peasants, artisans, or laborers. But while peasantry and workingmen
were
indeed missing, it is equally striking that the Third, as constituted at Versailles in 1789, included practically no businessmen, bankers, entrepreneurs, or other members of major occupation groups characteristic of “bourgeois” upper-middle-class life either. Edmund Burke, closely observing from London, was quite appalled by the Third’s composition. What horrified him was the striking lack of monied men, big landowners, and high-ranking churchmen. If the Third Estate was to emulate British practice and the House of Commons, then it must represent possession of land, money, and position, the very attributes the budding revolutionary leadership in Paris conspicuously lacked. Burke did notice the high proportion of lawyers in the Assembly, but, like most modern historians, failed to perceive the near absence of professionals and lawyers from among the leading cliques of orators, pamphleteers, and reformers.
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In terms of backgound, the revolutionary leadership represented no established social categories. It consisted predominantly of editors, journalists, writers, tutors, librarians, renegade priests, and renegade nobles turned littérateurs. Among the foremost were Mirabeau, Sieyès, Bailly, Volney, and Barnave—a renegade parlementaire from the Dauphiné, a spellbinding orator, and, like Rabaut, doubly unrepresentative in being a Protestant as well as an intellectual.
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Mirabeau was a philosophe, historian, and political commentator with numerous publications to his name; rejected by his own order, the nobility, he was elected at Aixen-Provence by the Third. These “philosophes du Tiers” as opponents derisively called them, representing no professions or social groups, confidently assumed the lead. They took the offensive from the start, adopting a deliberately provocative rhetoric, precluding all possibility of preserving privileges for the nobility and clergy, and repudiating the very title “Third Estate”—a designation, however well entrenched in constitutional law, scorned by them as redolent of “slaves,” “helots,” and “negroes.” In fact, they repudiated the entire abasing terminology of the past, prohibiting the term “orders” from their chamber’s deliberations. By redefining the nobility and clergy as “classes privilégiés” instead of
“higher orders,” they ruled out special status a priori for any and every social class.

Equally, they rejected curbs on press freedom. Among the “rights” constantly aired in early 1788–89 was freedom of thought and the notion that “every people has the inviolable right,” as Brissot put it, agreeing with “le sage Mably,” to pass its own laws and “is only great, virtuous, and happy when it does so.”
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Jacques-Pierre Brissot (1754–93), soon to emerge as a key revolutionary leader, was the son of a pious restaurant owner (who virtually disowned him on account of his impious views), a veteran writer, legal reformer, and antiestablishment polemicist briefly imprisoned in the Bastille in 1784 for subversive writings. In Brissot’s eyes, anyone preventing the man of the people enlightening himself, or a slave ridding himself of his chains, is an enemy of the human race. As “the American Revolution gave birth to ours,” he expected the new “revolution” to encompass all of Europe. Spain, Germany, and other countries would become conscious of the feudal chains weighing them down “en nous voyant libres and heureux.” Haughty Britain too would blush on seeing the nation she called her rival acquiring a better constitutional framework without the deficiencies of her “constitution défectueuse.”
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If one wished to instruct the people, one must not just permit but positively encourage the publication of political gazettes.
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Long aspiring to be a philosophe, Brissot knew all the philosophes and how to deploy their ideas as effective propaganda. His particular favorites early on were Rousseau and Montesquieu, but his debt to Rousseau has sometimes been rather exaggerated. Certainly, he admired Rousseau greatly, but he also disagreed with him on numerous points, especially representation, patriotism, and censorship. Liberty he called the first of basic rights because “liberty is nothing other than the right, in man, to develop his faculties for his well-being.” Writing and printing are the most apt means of perfecting humanity’s faculties. Every man possesses, by nature, the right to think, write, and print independently whatever he considers necessary for his welfare and that of others. Every human obstacle to freedom of expression “is therefore a violation of natural right, a crime.” No such restriction should mar any constitution “since every constitution should defend men’s natural rights and not infringe them.”
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